Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Monday Morning Enthusiasts

According to reports, 70 percent of the nation's workforce hate their jobs.  Learning firsthand how to inspire and lead people can directly impact the people in charge.

"Fusion Leadership" combines the powerful stories of eight prominent leaders to create a motivated workforce committed to ignite a common passion that provides individuals with self-fulfillment.

This new book touches on a variety of challenges leaders face every day. 

Among the topics covered: techniques to provide support to front line workers, modeling appropriate behavior and conversations in meetings, addressing fair pay issues, putting aside ego to effectively lead a team, and demonstrating mutual respect toward lower level employees and helping them connect their job to the larger vision.

"When leaders reward the collective ego at the same level, they attend to their selfish egos, their organizations not only make greater progress, but they fulfill the universal human desire to find meaning in work, author Dudley Slater reveals.

Source:  Dudley R. Slater: Fusion Leadership: Unleashing the Movement of Monday Morning Enthusiasts

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National Museum of the American Indian

I wish everyone would see, "Americans," at the National Museum of the Americans, in Washington, D.C.  It is keyed to the ubiquity of Native Americans in popular culture.  Spectacularly installed, in a grand hall, are hundreds of Indian-themed artifacts.

Sections unpack the of Pocahontas, the first Thanksgiving, the Trail of tears, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn--stories that every body knows, at least hazily.

A collection of, "Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong" (2009) does indeed make you feel smart, abruptly wised up to ramifications of a modern "embrace of love and hate and narcissism" between post-1492 latecomers to the continent and inhabitants  who only came Indians once the armed struggle was over in 1890.  Before then we were Shoshone or Mohawk or Crow.

Today, there are about three million people who identify as members of more than five hundred tribes.

The show tells the tale of Pochontas, who, in 1617 died in England, at the age of twenty-two or so, after having a son with the early Jamestown settler John Rolfe, in terms of her strange posthumous prestige for aristocratic and, of course, slave-holding Virginia families.

Absent any correct attitude or even argument on offer, viewers will be thrown back on their own assumptions, if they think about them--and I expect that many will.  The show's disarming sweetness and its bracing challenge come down to the same thing.

Source: ALL AMERICAN, By Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker, January 29, 2018

The words of editor Ralph Dixey of Tevope in Fort Hall, Idaho published in 1939; "Friends, we are all Indians no matter how white or dark you are. It does not make any difference where you are, what you are doing, or how much money you are making. We are all Indians..."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-all-indians-john-g-agno/

 

Resolutions

You've made new resolutions for 2018 and the first one is not to make resolutions.  Instead, you're going to "set goals."

Goals will help by keeping you organized and allowing you to share your progress on social media, a little gloating does wonders for self-motivation.  Once your goals are in place, it might be smart to design a methodology that will encourage you to accomplish them.

But soon enough February comes, mind winter doldrums will set in, and you'll start to slide.

Self-help advice tends to reflect the beliefs and priorities of the era that spawns it.  People dream big, and, in a day of easy money, find that their dreams could come true.  In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization.

It's no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind.  We must now chart our progress.  Where success can be measured with increasing accuracy, so too, can failure: the other side of self-improvement.

The desire to achieve and to demonstrate perfection is not simply stressful; it can also be fatal.

Finally, there's the economy in the hyper-competitive, globalized economy, where workers have fewer protections and are more disposable that ever, requires that we try to become faster, smarter, and more creative.

If the ideal of the optimized self isn't simply a fad, or even a preference, but an economic necessity, how can any of us choose to live otherwise?

Source: "RESOLUTIONS" by Alexandra Schwatz in THE NEW YORKER, January 15, 2018.

Violent Leadership

Be a force for change, disrupt, innovate, energize.

Ferocious competition.  Technological advances.  Generational differences.  Cultural diversity.  Political policies and mandates.  Economic uncertainty.  Constant change. 

These are the facts of business today.  Whether at the helm of a digital startup, a management consultancy, a dental group, or an insurance agency, no business leader can afford to remain complacent or, worse, passive.

"Achievement takes planning, action, risk....and a zealously disruptive pursuit of goals,"  says Wesley Middleton, a strategic adviser and maverick leader in a traditional industry: accounting.

In VIOLENT LEADERSHIP, Middleton shares his aggressive leadership style for our turbulent times.  Despite its abrasive ring, the term "Violent Leadership" has nothing to do with inciting conflict or sanctioning brutality.  "It refers to a distinctive type of leadership that is passionate, innovative, and takes things by force," Middleton explains.  "It is a positive and energetic pursuit of purpose and success."

Starting with the internal core of attitude and drive, Violent Leadership stresses the importance of being willing to listen, fail, and change, and being able to be a change agent.

Source:   Wesley Middleton: Violent Leadership: Be A Force For Change: Disrupt. Innovate. Energize.

 

Words of the Year

"Youthquake" is the verbal concoction recently declared Word of the Year (the year being 2017) by the experts at Oxford Dictionaries.  They define it as "significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people."

Actually, "youthquake" dates from 1965, when it was coined by the fashion industry.  But Oxford says that the incidence of "youthquake" spiked around the time of the British elections last June.

According to Merriam-Webster's, "feminism" was the most searched-for word in its online dictionary, up seventy per cent from 2016.  But who in 2017 needed to be told what "feminism" means?

On the whole, 2017 was not a great year for the English language.  Reality is running ahead of our vocabulary.  For one thing, no good terms have emerged to describe the current state of political affairs. 

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean," Humpty Dumpty says to Alice.  Later on, of course, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.  Something to look forward to in 2018.

Source: Louis Menand in the January 8, 2018, THE NEW YORKER

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Create Resilient Teams

The human brain is wired to seek reward and avoid pain and conflict--and change is associated with fear of an unknown future. 

POWER YOUR TRIBE delves deeply into the emotional undertow that often accompanies growth and change, so leaders can learn how to remove change resistance.

Emotional agility is about choosing how one wants to feel, and helping others choose how they feel.  With the right tools and the right training, this form of agility can be built into the muscle memory of any organization.

In a world of rapid and relentless change, leaders need simple and powerful ways to connect with their teams across geographies, time zones, and cultures. 

In POWER YOUR TRIBE, leadership coach Christine Comaford shows how to build emotional agility, for leaders and their teams, in order to overcome resistance to change, and the stress that accompanies it.  

"Christine is super-high bandwidth." --Bill Gates   

"Navigating change is hard, and people often get emotionally hijacked in the process," says Comaford.  "Leaders need potent, easy to learn, highly effective brain-based tools to navigate the emotions connected with growth and change--and get and keep their teams on track."

Client case studies illustrate how to apply a specific mix of tools in a variety of scenarios, such as leadership abusing power, competitors crushing sales, merger and acquisition stresses, and family business and board dysfunction.  The book includes a diagnostic chart that summarizes all 28 tools, showing how and when to deploy them.

POWER YOUR TRIBE is based on the STI methodology created over the past 30-plus years of helping leaders get the results they want in organizations ranging from startups through Fortune 10 multinationals.  The blend of mapping diverse neuroscience research to practical tools and techniques has generated the many results clients rave about.

Source:   Christine Comaford: Power Your Tribe: Create Resilient Teams in Turbulent Times

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The Unstoppable Organization

Most companies today believe they are focused on their people above all else.  And for some, this is true.  But in reality, it's often not the case.

"In essence, we have our priorities wrong," argues author Shawn Casemore.  "We are putting our proverbial wallets behind it and then often wondering why our organizations, and specifically the people within them, aren't performing to the extent we'd like."

Whether you are a CEO, executive, or entrepreneur, in THE UNSTOPPABLE ORGANIZATION, Casemore will show you how to master for unsurpassed performance as he shares insights, examples, and proven practices.

We have to think of our organizations as living, breathing entities that contain perceptions, norms, and ideals that ultimately influence the success or failure of the organization.  These come from the people who work within it and the customers that it serves.

Put differently, you can train employees on new processes, add new technology, or bring in highly skilled people, but in the end it's the employees' own experiences, ideals, and enthusiasm that will determine how well we attract, service, and retain our customers.

Source:  Shawn Casemore: The Unstoppable Organization: Empower Your People, Engage Your Customers, and Grow Your Revenue

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Harnessing your team's competitive advantage

Most of us avoid conflict like crazy.

But what if harnessing conflict was our best chance to build championship teams that produce greatness?

However, there is a problem: Most people weren't trained in doing this nor were we provided good models growing up.

The truth is, most people think conflict can only be painful and an impediment to work.  Yet, "The Beauty of Conflict" delivers tools on how to embrace conflict to help teams get more out of each other.

Here's the truth: When leaders and teams avoid, manage or defuse conflict, they wind up mired in politics, gossip, and back-channel maneuvering.

Sound familiar?

If it does, you are not alone.  In a 2014 Gallup survey of employee engagement, only 31.5% of employees were "engaged" and 51% of employees were disengaged, and 17.5% were actively disengaged. 

The new book, "The Beauty of Conflict" believes there is a direct correlation between employee engagement and the degree to which people embrace and use conflict.

Source:   CrisMarie Campbell: The Beauty of Conflict: Harnessing Your Team’s Competitive Advantage