Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
The task of building a business from the ground up is enormously challenging.
There are many elements at play--but when building for growth is imperative, the most important and often least understood is the personality of the builder or founder. It shapes everything from the team and product to the overall business strategy and it is the one resource that founders can directly control.
In "BUILT FOR GROWTH", Chris Kuenne and John Danner decode the interplay between builder personality and new business growth. They demonstrate that who you are shapes how you build.
The particular combination of beliefs and preferences that drive their motivation, decision making, and leadership style can select the right team, early customers and financial sponsors for maximum impact.
Using a patented analytic methodology Kuenne and Danner discovered there is no single type of highly successful business builder, but rather four distinct Builder Personalities, each of whom build businesses of significant scale in markedly different ways.
The Driver: Relentless, Commercially Focused, and Highly Confident
The Explorer: Curious, Systems-Centric, and Dispassionate
The Crusader: Audacious, Mission-Inspired, and Compassionate
The Captain: Pragmatic, Team-Enabling, and Direct
"BUILD FOR GROWTH" blends quantitative research findings, personal interviews, and experienced analysis to illustrate how each type handles the five dynamic challenges of building businesses of enduring value: converting ideas into products, galvanizing individual talent for collective impact, transforming buyers to partners, aligning financial and other support and scaling the business.
Managing people is the most challenging part of any leader's job. And that job's not getting any easier.
Experienced human resource professionals and consultants, Barbara Mitchell and Cornelia Gamlem, share their 30+ years of first-hand experience in their completely revised and expanded,"THE BIG BOOK OF HR".
This reference guide provides any business owner, manager, or HR professional with the most current information to get the most from their talent...from strategic HR-related issues to the smallest tactical detail of managing people.
A workplace conflict is a condition between or among workers whose jobs are interdependent, who are angry or frustrated, who perceive the other(s) as being at fault, and who act in ways that cause a business problem. Constant changes in today's workplace can fuel workplace conflict.
Less hierarchical structures and a focus on teams require a more collaborative environment but provide a greater opportunity for differences.
Conflict is not always negative. Conflict is often growth that is trying to happen. Distinguishing the differences between negative and positive conflict is the first step in moving to collaboration. In good conflict, relationships and the resolution process are valued. The resolution process involves three steps: Acknowledge it, assess it, and address it.
In many cases, the skills that get leaders to the top of their organizations are not sufficient to do the work at that level. The higher one goes in a company, the more success is measured in winning hearts and minds rather than in the mastery of some technical skill.
It isn't that their core disciplines don't matter---they do. But they're table stakes. They're what's minimally necessary to get the job. But they're not enough to hold on the job.
Leaders need to be good at interpersonal verbal engagement--one-on-one and large group, in person and at a distance. A leader is judged based on three fundamental public leadership attributes:
The leader's bearing: how the leader carries himself or herself.
The manner in which the leader engages with others.
The words the leader uses to engage others.
Being effective in engaging audiences requires one additional element: an understanding of what audiences are capable of, and ways to break through the barriers and connect powerfully with an audience.
The body speaks long before the mouth ever opens. Before the speaker even opens his or her mouth, the audience is making judgments. And once the speaker begins, the visual drives an audience's attention. Does the speaker look confident? At ease? Distracted? Scared? Angry? Mean? These visual cues are nonverbal, but powerful.
Nonverbal cues sabotage a speaker and immediately diminish the speaker's effectiveness. Audiences need the executive to gesture. Recent research into cognitive psychology and neuroscience points to a connection between seeing someone gesture and hearing that person speak.
Audiences retain more when the speaker gestures. Because they are accustomed to seeing speakers in ordinary circumstances gesture while speaking, audiences are habituated to viewing the entire package--voice, gesture and content--when they listen. And the gesture helps facilitate understanding. Audiences particularly pay attention when voice, gesture and content are aligned.
The more a speaker gestures, the more robust the connections between the gesture and word choice become. So the speaker is better able to remember a memorized speech, or the content for which bullet point summaries are reminders. A speaker who habitually gestures is able to speak extemporaneously far more effectively than the speaker who doesn't. Invariably, this makes them better able to remember what to say and how to say it.
As soon as an audience is paying attention, the speaker must exhibit confidence. That includes walking to the front of the room or onto the stage, or while sitting in a meeting while others are speaking. A leader is "on" whenever he or she is being watched by an audience, even when not speaking.
To 'sell' your idea, product or service, as the leader, you must pass your audience's ACID test:
A. Gain favorable Attention
C. Inspire Confidence
I. Build Interest
D. Allow Desire to surface.
When 'desire' surfaces, the others take the lead in the conversation while you provide the evidence necessary to justify the concept you are selling.
Today's workforce, especially Millennials, want to be intellectually stimulated and emotionally engaged.
As the authors reveal in"Leading with Vision"to explore corporate vision as a key leadership principle, this requires a new approach to leadership.
Leading with Vision draws on data and insights from the authors' biennial "Trends in Executive Development" survey--the industry's leading survey of over 400 companies--to provide an in-depth framework designed to help leaders set the future path for their organizations, departments, teams, or initiatives and to actively engage employees in establishing a work environment in which employees bring their very best to work.
Leading with Vision is a 6-step process for creating a compelling vision that will motivate, rally and inspire employees to be proactive enablers of the vision and company strategy. A compelling vision will work for a large, well-known company like Microsoft, and it will also work for the small start-up email security company. The question remains, can it work for organizations that are in industries not typically considered exciting, such as banks, manufacturers, and government agencies?
How it works:
The leadership of the business, the employees, and the customers were all connected to the organization through one unifying and personally compelling concept. The employees felt like they were making a difference, like they were an important character in the organization's story, and they were like the adage by Maya Angelou:
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Everyone has potential to grow, but not every person has the potential to lead a large, complex organization in the near and distant future.
It's now clear that businesses might need to be transformed more than once in a leader's tenure, and today's leaders must be prepared for that. They should exhibit three characteristics that the previous generation of leaders did not always need:
They imagine on a large scale. For example, Alphabet has a whole population of people who are working to solve the world's biggest problems.
They seek what they need to make it happen. They don't stay within the hierarchy.
They understand the concept of the ecosystem. They must understand the complex web of participants, from the makers of parts to the delivers of products.
Today's new leader must have the ability to see the total picture, to conjure a mental image of the web of inter-relationships, and to think imaginatively about how to redesign products and/or services.
A new book, "THE HIGH-POTENTIAL LEADER," can help you develop the requisite skills and interests necessary to engage in the strategic thinking necessary to lead today's organizations.
