What do
you want
to do?
As you plan for this year and beyond…
Develop your Leaders
Self-understanding is the place to start
How do you build a leadership development program for the challenges of today and tomorrow?
You have many choices for subject matter, skills and competency models. It is overwhelming. What is the best strategy for your design?
With so much to accomplish and so much to impart, where is the best place to start?
Choose development work for leaders that is fundamental to every discipline from strategy to resilience; from authenticity to empathy.
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It’s the leader’s level of self-awareness that makes the difference. Only when they understand who they are, can they bring out the best in themselves and others.
Self-awareness is the super-power for leaders that cuts across all disciplines. It’s the foundation for all other knowledge and skill development.
Make self-awareness a fundamental building block of the resilient, authentic, intuitive and influential leaders your organization needs to thrive in the present and flourish in the future.
To “future proof” your leadership development program…curate a collection of components assembled for the needs of right now that can be re-configured as business strategies and world circumstances change.
Choose best-of-breed program components to ensure maximum flexibility and relevance. Select self-awareness components that help the leader gain the most and maximize their results.
coach your executives
the way for your best leaders to be at their best
Learning plus coaching equals application and impact.
Development that turns into action is the result of incorporating coaching into your leadership program.
Why prolong the learning curve by making your leaders have to figure it all out by themselves?
Whether you provide individual or group coaching to your executives, you’ll help your senior leaders close the “knowing-doing gap” faster and turn learning into results more quickly.
Today’s “power skills” are people and relationship oriented. You cannot develop them in a vacuum without interaction with others and someone to challenge your perspectives. Coaching provides that perfect environment for pushing beyond your leaders’ limitations.
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All of your leaders have “blind spots” where they don’t know what they don’t know (despite some over-confidence to the contrary). Help them see a realistic view of their present ability and their future potential. Aid them in making the developmental stretches with the helping support of a coach.
Coaching is an investment that you make in your best leaders and team members. They are the super-powered assets who deliver for you. Fine-tuning each leader with coaching helps them fulfill their potential to levels they did not know were possible.
It’s easy to fall into the remedial coaching trap. Instead of “we have to get our under-performers doing better – let’s get them coaches,” a better approach is, “our high performers have the best chance at driving greater performance, let’s coach them.”
Invest where the payoff is the greatest.
Coaching adds that special ingredient that moves your leadership program from the mundane to the exceptional.
Align and energize teams
getting results comes from getting to the same page
There are few results that organizations get accomplished these days without the combined efforts of a team of dedicated staff or external partners who get it done.
Project teams and intact teams work tirelessly to deliver products and services, plan and implement programs and processes, make decisions, and complete the tasks to keep the results moving.
In the rush to “get it done,” few leaders actually take the time to lay the groundwork for the team to get up and running efficiently or include the needed “maintenance” work to sustain the team at peak levels.
Without this attention to the team’s function, the “wheels can start to come off the bus.”
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Most teams experience some gaps in communication, sluggish responsiveness at times, and errors due to cross-purposes or even siloed behavior. Some teams come to actually take “two steps backward” for every step forward.
Thus, the biggest issue for teams is making sure they stay aligned to their purpose, objectives, and plans as they deliver the work streams that make the organization function.
What is the best way to help a leader get their teams aligned in order to perform?
Think of the team as a system where all the parts have to mesh to help the machine hum. There are all the surface things like goals, choice, options and actions. But there are also some underground factors like perceptions, beliefs, expectations and assumptions that people on the team possess that either make or break a team’s performance.
Bringing these underlying, invisible aspects to the surface quickly and addressing those that knock the team off-kilter helps teams get on track and stay there.
Preventative maintenance keeps complex, high-performing equipment working in a sustainable way. Isn’t it the same for a high-performing group of people working to function as a team?
Make the investment to keep your organization’s teams moving forward in an outstanding, effective way.
Develop managers as coaches
Empower Managers to be the Single-Point-of-Success
It is more than a truism that “employees don’t leave organizations, they leave managers.” The relationship between manager and employee is the key one that holds things together.
When asked in poll after poll, employees want to be seen and acknowledged by their managers. They crave feedback and want help keeping their career on track as well. Do your managers know how to do this?
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Among the recommendations research firms like Gallup have made is that to succeed for the future, organizations must move from a culture of employee satisfaction to a culture of coaching.
Do your managers understand the difference between giving direction and coaching?
Many have the model of an athletic coach in their heads who gives pointers and encouraging, motivational speeches.
Yet, to affect real change and growth, that’s not what employees need.
They do need direction to help them perform better. But to provide the development that employees seek and to help them stretch, grow and do the hard work it takes to change and improve, different skills are needed.
Managers need some of the skills of trained, professional coaches to ensure employees have the willingness, ability and motivation to put in the work to get the prize.
In organizations where managers know how to be great coaches for their employees, great things happen. Will your organization be one of them?
create career engagement
Your People Want an Engaging and Fulfilling Career
You read it everywhere in the talent development universe – getting and retaining the right talent is what the game is all-about in organizations. How can you power growth without the people that can make it happen?
If you aren’t giving them help with their career, you are setting yourself up to lose them to someone who does.
Your employees want the opportunity to be engaged, to do good work and to have a sense that there are possibilities for growth and advancement in their future.
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So many companies invest in providing training for their employees and call it “career development.” Or, they subscribe to an enterprise online platform that purports to help employees design a career path and manage it.
Developmental learning and access to online career resources are good things, but they don’t help if the employee doesn’t understand what makes themselves tick. How do you know what to choose when availing yourself of these resources?
So many people waste time in their work and life pursuing what they have been told is right for them or copying what others have done. Without a sense of exactly who you are and what makes the difference for you, you make blind, ineffective and unsatifying choices.
Getting in touch with what uniquely inspires, energizes, and fulfills you makes your choices for your career easier and more attuned to what will be right for you in your work (not to mention your relationships and other aspects of your life).
The Gallup Q12 and other tools let you know how engaged employees feel. But what actions do you take to increase that engagement? It’s not in adding programs and benefits that don’t drive real satisfaction. That’s a broad brush that isn’t tailored to hit the mark.
Treat each employee as an individual with a unique set of needs and open opportunities for them to get those needs met through their work. Give them the tools to equip their manager with how to get the best from them.
Set the foundation for a fulfilling career for each and every employee. Keep your employees engaged and contributing by helping them know what motivates and drives them to be happy, satisfied and fulfilled in their work.
This is the “magic bullet” that drives real career engagement for your employees.