February 9, 2010 – 1:00 am
I am a member of a LinkedIn leadership group that recently discussed the characteristics of admired leaders. This is a topic very near and dear to my heart. I’ve studied, worked to apply, written books, developed keynotes and workshops, and provided coaching and consulting on leadership for many decades.
There’s a lot of jargon and mumbo jumbo on leadership. Many people have overcomplicated the topic. I’ve tried to simplify and break leadership down to its core components. From this work, I’ve identified the “timeless leadership principles” that have endured through the ages and keep getting rediscovered and relabeled.
We’ve developed a “leadership wheel” to show these principles as circular with vision, values, and purpose at the hub or core:
Leaders take initiative and do what needs to be done rather than waiting for someone else to do something (they don’t often follow, and rarely wallow.)
Leaders are authentic and lead by visible example, fostering openness and continuous feedback.
Leaders are passionate and build strong commitment through involvement and ownership.
Leaders lead with heart, and rouse team or organizational spirit.
Leaders grow people through strong coaching and continuous development.
Leaders energize people by fostering two-way communication, inspiring, and serving.
Leadership is circular - there is no beginning or end. Each of the supporting leadership principles around the outside of the “leadership wheel” are interdependent and interconnected. If a person, team, or organization develops all the leadership skills, the wheel is well-rounded. If it is deficient in one or more of these skills, the ride may be a little bumpy!
CLICK HERE to review my leadership model and a description of how each of the Timeless Leadership Principles applies to Personal Leadership and to Leading Others.
Practical Leadership Development for Peak Performance webcast (No Charge to Join In)
February 12 – 2:00 – 3:00 (EST) -5:00 GMT
Take Advantage of this Rare Opportunity to Make this a Team Event!
Assemble supervisors, managers, or executives in a meeting room or broadcast this presentation to a large group to:
- Assess leadership strengths and improvement opportunities.
- Discover how to shift your team’s culture toward much stronger people leadership.
- Establish personal, team, or organization improvement plans.
- Develop common languages/approaches for building a more “leaderful” team or organization.
- Gain insights for coaching and developing others.
- Get practical approaches for dealing with change during turbulent times.
During my last webcast many locations used the session as a team event by gathering people in a conference or board room and projecting the presentation onto a screen. You may want to do the same with supervisors, managers, and executives for this session.
CLICK HERE to get more detailed information about the agenda and to register.
Integrating Succession Planning, Culture Change, and Executive Team Development – (Link Correction from Last Week’s Blog)
The effectiveness of Learning and Development, HR tools and technologies, competency models, engagement programs, performance management systems, or succession planning hinges on the organization’s culture. Partial and piecemeal programs bolted onto operational practices are dramatically less effective than processes integrated into “the way we do things around here.” That culture ripples out from individual and collective executive team behavior.
This was the focus of my one hour presentation on January 28 at the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) annual conference last month in Toronto. Anyone who may have tried to access my slides on LinkedIn last week may have had a problem. The new link on my web site is here.
New Coming Events Section on Our Web Site
Our business is almost exclusively customized internal sessions for specific Clients. I’ve typically done very few public events that have open attendance. However, over the next six months I do have a higher level of Canadian presentations and workshops CLICK HERE to access it.
February 3, 2010 – 1:58 am
One month gone already! Did you blink and miss it? Like me, you’re probably wondering what challenges and opportunities this year – and new decade – will bring to you and your organization. That’s very tough to predict. What’s predictable is that strong personal, team, and organizational leadership will be even more critical to overcoming and capitalizing on our continuing turbulence and constant change.
Most development professionals and organizational leaders agree the “soft” issues of leadership and culture are vital catalysts to peak performance. But knowing isn’t doing. Despite all the talk about leadership, what’s missing is practical and concrete steps that lead to peak performance.
Leadership, culture change, and peak performance will be critical to dealing with whatever lays ahead of us. That’s the focus of my second no-charge webcast on February 12th. It’s also the focus of my highly condensed one day Leading @ the Speed of Change workshop coming to Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, London, and Toronto.
Leading @ the Speed of Change is my most requested keynote presentation and workshop by a long shot. These themes have been central to my books and work over the last few decades. Dealing with change is dealing with life. Effectively changing is about continuous growth and renewal.
Here are a few thought provoking perspectives and research findings on leadership and change:
“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t actually living.”
- Gail Sheehy, American writer and speaker on our life cycles or “passages”
“The question that faces the strategic decision-maker is not what his organization should do tomorrow. It is: What do we have to do to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow.”
- Peter F. Drucker, author of 39 books and hundreds of articles on leadership, management, and organization effectiveness, widely considered to be the father of “modern management”
“It doesn’t matter what lens we look through - the lens of those that go from good to great, the lens of zero to great in exciting new industries, or the lens of those that prevail in adversity and last 100 years - one lesson stands out: Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, whether you make it onto the Fortune 500, and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”
- Jim Collins, Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last,” quoted in “The secret of enduring greatness,” Fortune magazine
“The Six Phases of Change: 1. Not me! 2. Why me? 3. Deal with me! 4. Oh me! 5. Now me! 6. It’s up to me!”
- Luke De Sadeleer & Joseph Sherren, Vitamin C for a Healthy Workplace
“Excellence is about change. We would not have said this in the 1980s or perhaps even in the 1990s. Today it almost goes without saying. Most organizations simply cannot sustain excellent performance unless they are capable of changing.”
- Lawler III, Edward E, and Worley, Christopher G., Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness
“Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient…To thrive in turbulent times, companies must become as efficient at renewal as they are at producing today’s products and services. Renewal must be the natural consequence of an organization’s innate resilience.”
- Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas, “The Quest for Resilience,” Harvard Business Review
“Unceasingly contemplate the generation of all things through change and accustom thyself to the thought that the nature of the universe delights above all in changing the things that exist and making new ones of the same pattern, for everything that exists is the seed of that which shall come out of it.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor
Practical Leadership Development for Peak Performance webcast (No Charge to Join In)
February 12th – 2:00 – 3:00 (EST) -5:00 GMT
For this 60 minute complimentary webcast, I’ve condensed the key elements of personal growth (leading from the inside out), leading and developing individuals and teams, navigating change, and building organizational flexibility into five main sections:
1. Change Challenges and Choices
2. Keys to Leading Change
3. The High Performance Balance: Managing Things and Leading People
4. Soft Skills, Hard Results: The Power of Emotional Intelligence
5. Timeless Leadership Principles for Enduring Team and Organizational Success
CLICK HERE to get more detailed information about the agenda and to register.
New Coming Events Section on Our Web Site
Our business is almost exclusively customized internal sessions for specific Clients. I’ve typically done very few public events that have open attendance. However, over the next six months I do have a higher level of Canadian presentations and workshops (and the Feb 12th webcast) with open attendance. So we’ve added a Coming Events section to our web site. CLICK HERE to access it.
January 28, 2010 – 2:00 am
Given the popularity of my Thriving in Turbulent Times webcast on December 3rd (over 550 sites tuned in), I am partnering with the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) to bring you another fast-paced hour of ideas, inspiration, and how-to applications on developing leadership skills on February 12th. In this unique and rare webcast, I have distilled my last 30 years of work in leadership and organization development helping thousands of people and hundreds of organizations boost their effectiveness.
For this 60 minute complimentary webcast, I’ve condensed the key elements of personal growth (leading from the inside out), leading and developing individuals and teams, navigating change, and building organizational flexibility into five main sections:
1. Change Challenges and Choices
2. Keys to Leading Change
3. The High Performance Balance: Managing Things and Leading People
4. Soft Skills, Hard Results: The Power of Emotional Intelligence
5. Timeless Leadership Principles for Enduring Team and Organizational Success
CLICK HERE to get more detailed information about the agenda and to register.
In December, many locations used the webcast as a team event by gathering people in a conference or board room and projecting the presentation onto a screen. You may want to do the same with supervisors, managers, and executives for this session.
REGISTER HERE for reminders about this event and the link to join in the webcast.
Is the rate of external change exceeding your team or organization’s rate of internal growth?
As we start a new year - and new decade - it’s impossible to predict where all the change swirling around us is heading. But one thing is certain - the pace of change is going to keep accelerating. To thrive in these turbulent times, teams and organizations must change perceptions and behaviors to change results. Now - more than ever - everyone at all levels must be a leader. Everyone must embrace leadership as an action not a position.
We have three ways to help grow teams or organizations @ the speed of change in 2010:
1. Use my new book, Growing @ the Speed of Change, as a powerful team or organizational change tool. Click here to find out why when everyone in your organization accepts, expects, and acknowledges the reality of constant change, you’ll see dramatically higher engagement, performance, and results.”
2. Arrange for Thriving in Turbulent Times webcasts customized to address specific team or organization issues and change goals. Click here for a closer look at this very cost effective way to get tailored messages and powerful approaches to personal leadership, change, and continuous growth.
3. Draw on my speaking and facilitation experience with customized practical leadership keynotes, workshops, or management retreats. Click here for a look at keynote and workshop topic areas. Click here for a look at options and approaches I’ve used to facilitate over 200 management retreats for highly effective strategic planning, leadership development, culture change, service/quality improvement, improving health & safety, or building high-performance teams. Click on my Client list for a look at the hundreds of organizations I’ve worked with and click on participant feedback for reviews of my customized sessions and their effectiveness.
Now more than ever, teams and organizations must rapidly adapt to constant change - or be changed. How flexible, change adaptive, and resilient is your team or organization? Call Heather at (519) 748-6561 or e-mail her at Heather@Clemmer.net to explore how we can help you grow your team or organization @ the speed of change.
Help Haiti While You Learn: Halifax, February 1
If you’re in Nova Scotia, you should check out the Speak Out For Haiti full day workshop. You can take in a day of some of the best professional and personal development available in the region and help the efforts in Haiti while you learn.
Ten of the top keynoters, trainers and facilitators in Atlantic Canada will be donating their time and resources to provide professional development opportunities like leadership and communication to personal development including stress management, personal leadership and living well.
This is a joint initiative by the Business Events industry in Atlantic Canada, represented by CAPS (Canadian Association of Professional Speakers) and MPI (Meeting Professionals International) Atlantic Canada Chapter, in association with the Canadian Red Cross and local industry partners. Go http://www.SpeakOutForHaiti.com for more details and to register.
January 26, 2010 – 2:00 am
Right around now, many people who resolved to make positive changes this year are floundering. It’s easy to get pulled down by a few slips off our intended path.
Pick up a cup of water or coffee and estimate how heavy it is. Now hold it straight out sideways at shoulder height. How much heavier does it feel? What if you hold it that way for five minutes? How about an hour? Imagine if you tried to hold it that way for a day. In the unlikely event you could, your arm and shoulder would need serious medical attention.
Focusing on our weaknesses causes us to hold on to past failures, and our shortcomings for far too long. The longer we hold on, the heavier those burdens become. As we hold on, we fantasize and magnify those weaknesses. We make the proverbial mountain out of a molehill. Dwelling on weaknesses and all that we’ve failed to accomplish is deadly to our health, happiness, relationships, performance, and just about everything else in our lives.
Some Steps for Playing to Our Strengths
Here‘s a menu of ideas to help you, compiled from my new book, Growing @ the Speed of Change: Your Inspir-actional How-To Guide for Leading Yourself and Others through Constant Change:
• Complete tests like VIA Character Strengths, the Kolbe Index, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Gallup’s Strength Finder Profile, Social Styles, and so on, to determine your personal style and how you can maximize your preferences and strengths while working effectively with varying styles among co-workers or team members.
• You can manually brainstorm a list of all of your strengths. Your list might also include Emotional Intelligence, technical aptitude, service orientation, training/teaching, speaking, writing, self-discipline, helping others, visionary or strategic thinker, or trustworthiness. List any quality or strength you feel you have to some degree. Now cluster similar strengths until you have three to five groups. Put a heading or title on each group. Cluster headings might include Persuasive Communications, Leading Others, Personal Growth, Achievement Drive, or Generosity. Write a sentence or short paragraph defining each cluster. These are your core strengths. They are your energy source.
• If you’re in a management position but your work isn’t energizing you so you can energize and lead others, you have four choices: (1) Do nothing and wish for your “fairy job mother” to appear, poof!, and straighten out your life; (2) Get out of a leadership role so you stop dragging others down to your low energy level; (3) Realign your work with your values and strengths; (4) Figure out what your ideal job is and go find or create it.
• Develop hobbies or special interests that play to your values, strengths, and passions.
• Don’t focus on your weaknesses unless they become “fatal flaws” that seriously hold you back. Instead, concentrate on your strengths and how to align all aspects of your life with them.
• If you’re a sumo wrestler, don’t waste time trying to be a ballerina. We can’t teach frogs to fly. Don’t allow others to “should” on you by making you feel guilty about your weaknesses (as long as they are not fatal flaws) and telling you what you should do. Do what aligns with your values, strengths, and purpose.
• Ensure that your day planner and calendar reflect your values and play to your strengths. Schedule personal and professional activities that are aligned to them. Don’t allow today’s pressures to crowd out what’s really important in your life.
• Analyze your calendar and meeting agendas for the past few months. Do they clearly reflect your top goals, priorities, and strengths?
• If your work needs realignment, talk with your boss about your values, strengths and what you’d like to change in order to be more effective.
• If you have tried your hardest to align your work to your strengths and haven’t been able to do that it may be time for you to find other opportunities. Life is too short to live in misalignment outside your strengths zone.
• Identify a complementary partner in your business, on your team, or in your personal life, whose strengths are your weaknesses. Work together to balance each other. This won’t always be easy or conflict-free. Practice give-and-take based on connections around your shared vision, values, and purpose.
• Develop and keep expanding your Blessings and Brag list. List every accomplishment, strength, and success you’ve ever had or thing you’re grateful for. Make it as long as possible and keep it growing. Review the list whenever you’re feeling down on yourself, anxious, or a little sour.
By admin
|
Posted in management
|
Tagged Canadian Society for Training and Development, Emotional Intelligence, Gallup's Strength Finder Profile, imagery, Kolbe Index, leadership, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, personal growth, persuasive communications, VIA Character Strengths, visioning
|
January 19, 2010 – 2:00 am
Last year we made a strategic decision to move my videos to YouTube in order to make them more widely available. As part of this process we then used a web site component to display and categorize these videos on the main JimClemmer.com web site. Without getting technical –because I am not much of a technie – the component broke down and the video indexing was scrambled while many videos became unusable.
I’m now happy to announce that our new video section has been rebuilt. It’s cleaner, faster and more intuitive. Now there are nearly 70 video clips available from live presentations or media interviews. Many are just a few minutes long. Some are ten to fifteen minutes in depth. And a few are even a bit deeper and longer.
Click here to visit our main video page where you can quickly overview and scroll through all the videos. If you put your curser over any video title, a short description of the clip will appear. Click on the title video screen shot for the YouTube clip to pop up for playing.
We’ve also sorted the videos into these categories:
• Media Interviews
• Personal Leadership
• Leading Change
• The Performance Balance (Technology, Management, and Leadership)
• Leadership Lessons from Emotional Intelligence
• Timeless Leadership Principles (seven core areas from Growing the Distance and The Leader’s Digest)
• Quality and Safety Leadership
• Transformation Pathways
• Keynote and Workshop Style
• Moose on the Table
You can use these clips on personal growth, inspiring your team, supplementing your development or coaching programs, fostering group action planning, or evaluating the fit of my style or topics with a meeting, retreat, or training program you have planned. Click here to contact Heather or me if you’d like to discuss any of this further.
Register for another Complimentary Webcast on February 12
Given the popularity of my Thriving in Turbulent Times webcast on December 3rd (over 550 sites tuned in), I am partnering with the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) to bring you another fast-paced hour of ideas, inspiration, and how-to applications on developing leadership skills on February 12th. In this unique and rare webcast, I have distilled my last 30 years of work in leadership and organization development helping thousands of people and hundreds of organizations boost their effectiveness.
For this 60 minute complimentary webcast I’ve condensed the key elements of personal growth (leading from the inside out), leading and developing individuals and teams, navigating change, and building organizational flexibility into five main sections:
1. Change Challenges and Choices
2. Keys to Leading Change
3. The High Performance Balance: Managing Things and Leading People
4. Soft Skills, Hard Results: The Power of Emotional Intelligence
5. Timeless Leadership Principles for Enduring Team and Organizational Success
Click here to get more detailed information about the agenda and to register.
January 14, 2010 – 2:00 am
A member of a group I belong to on LinkedIn sent me this request:
“I have a presentation to an executive team for a company that provides medical garments to outpatient facilities throughout the US. I will be helping the Organization Development manager make a business case for leadership and culture development. I’m going to reference Jim Collin’s work and some things by a former associate. I know you were very close to this type of thing in the days of Service/Quality and Firing on all Cylinders, the TARP data etc. Is there any particular resource that you could suggest?”
I have touched on this issue in many different ways. Here are some resources that might help:
• The classic study of this issue was published by John Kotter and James L. Heskett in their book Corporate Culture and Performance, The Free Press, New York, 1992. It’s based on extensive studies of high versus low performing organizations and their cultures.
• I referenced a few studies in the first chapter of my book, The Leader’s Digest. You can read that chapter online at http://www.jimclemmer.com/books/pdf/TLD_Chapter1.pdf.
• The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations has been researching the impact of leadership and “soft skills” for many years. One of their early studies on “the business case for IE” is on their web site at http://www.eiconsortium.org/reports/business_case_for_ei.html.
• I have a series of articles and book excerpts on Management versus Leadership at http://www.jimclemmer.com/management-versus-leadership.php and Culture Change at http://www.jimclemmer.com/culture-change.php.
Our SVP of Consulting and Training, Scott Schweyer, and his team have been doing a lot of work with our Clients around leadership and culture development. We’ll be pulling together our experiences and providing them to you throughout 2010. We’d appreciate if you can add to the list of studies and resources you recommend we look at. Please e-mail me at jim.clemmer@clemmer.net or post them in the Culture Change article section of our web site.
Integrating Succession Planning, Culture Change,
and Executive Team Development
The effectiveness of Learning and Development, HR tools and technologies, competency models, engagement programs, performance management systems, or succession planning hinges on the organization’s culture. Partial and piecemeal programs bolted onto operational practices are dramatically less effective than processes integrated into “the way we do things around here.” That culture ripples out from individual and collective executive team behavior.
This is the focus of my one hour presentation on January 28 at the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) annual conference this month in Toronto. Click here for details. If you’re attending the conference, drop by the bookstore earlier in the day to meet me and get a complimentary signed copy of Growing @ the Speed of Change. This is your inside scoop to learn that only a small number of copies are available on a first-come-first-served basis.
By admin
|
Posted in management
|
Tagged competency models, Corporate Culture and Performance, culture change, culture development, Emotional Intelligence, executive team development, HRPA, James Heskett, Jim Collin's, John Kotter, leadership, organization development, performance management systems, soft skills, succession planning, The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations
|
January 12, 2010 – 2:00 am
As you work on building or renewing your new success habits for the New Year you’re likely looking for ways to help your team members or co-workers stay out of the swamp of negativity, cynicism, and fear.
A viewer of my December Thriving in Turbulent Times webcast sent me very positive feedback about how inspirational and useful the messages were for her. She also posed this question:
“I’m genuinely a positive person and quite a high achiever. This comes at a price. My attitude and behaviors often bring ridicule from co-workers who are consistently wallowing in the “Us vs. Them” swamp. These co-workers are so tightly banded, how do I go about breaking through this?
Her question is an excellent one that often comes up in our workshops and retreats. How to deal with negative co-workers is highly situational with no one-size-fits-all answers.
If you’re in similar circumstances, a basic and key step is getting team members or co-workers to see their wallowing and its negative consequences. Everyone needs to recognize and acknowledge that when we’re faced with personal or workplace changes and setbacks we can lead, follow, or wallow.
It can be very powerful to re-establish group language with humor and terms like “pity city,” “bitter bus,” “taming the E-mail Beast,” “dealing with moose on the table,” “C.R.A.P. glasses,” “reframing,” or “scab picking,” to help reframe and change perspectives. Using naming and re-focusing approaches like “Do I hear the bitter bus pulling up outside,” “lets get out of pity city and move forward,” or “we’ve overcome problems like this before let’s figure out how to do it again” can help shift group norms from wallowing to leading.
This has successfully been done by:
• Circulating articles, blogs, webcast or video links, book excerpts, or books.
• Showing video, audio, or webinar clips at meetings or one-on-one and inviting comments on how to apply these to the team or workplace (“I saw this great piece the other day that I think applies to some of our problems with….”).
• Gently challenging and reframing wallowing conversations toward brainstorming ways out of the swamp.
• Individual recognition or group celebration of positive progress and results. Link those to how leading behaviors (rather than following our wallowing) made the difference.
• Encouraging healthy ways to vent frustrations and then move on (“let’s have a 10 minute pity party on how stupid this change is or what those idiots just did to us again…”).
• When a co-worker is doing a “grump dump” on you or the group, you might ask “are you just venting right now or are you looking for ideas on how to deal with that problem?”
A key issue and sometimes a big challenge is staying positive and leading by your own example. For your own ongoing development and to swing group momentum from wallowing to leading you might develop or join a network of colleagues interested in personal growth. This can be a powerful source of learning from others’ experiences. It’s also a great way for you to reflect on your own experiences and articulate your improvement plans. A group (even just two of you) that meets regularly is an excellent forum for making public declarations or even “contracts” of your personal improvement plans. This approach makes it much harder to back away from forming the tough new habits you know you need to develop.
Please post your experiences, observations, and suggestions below.
Let’s Connect With LinkedIn
I am steadily increasing my use of LinkedIn to reconnect with so many past Clients, workshop participants, or readers I’ve lost touch with over the years and tap into interesting group discussions on personal, team, and organizational leadership. I’ve been updating and adding to my LinkedIn profile and utilizing it’s growing number of features such as connecting to my blog and Tweeter feeds through my profile’s Status Update. I plan to add some of my presentation slides to SlideShare and use other features the site is now adding regularly.
As a blog and Leader Letter reader, I’d love to connect with you. My profile is at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jimclemmer. Click on “View Full Profile.” Please send me an invitation to add me to your network and reference that you’re a blog reader and/or subscriber to The Leader Letter.
January 7, 2010 – 2:00 am
A New Year’s resolution is too often a good intention that goes in one year and out the other. To change habits we often need inspiration and action – or “inspir-action.” Here are action steps to build habits that continually move us out of wallowing, beyond following, to leading:
• This is the perfect time of year to harness the magnetic power of imagery and visualization. Describe what your ideal life would look like if things were going extremely well three to five years from now. Outline your perfect job. Envision your ideal family life. See yourself helping to build whatever communities you’re now part of. Visualize a strong and secure financial situation. Imagine your preferred social circle. Feel an even stronger connection to your philosophical or spiritual beliefs. See your optimum health or physical condition. Include your spouse or “significant other” as a joint exercise; two visualizations are probably better than one.
• When faced with a crisis or very negative change, recall or even list times in the past when you overcame problems as bad as or worse than this one. What can you draw from those experiences? Can they at least help you keep this problem in perspective?
• Unless you’re trying to influence them, spend as little time as possible with pessimists who continually complain and dwell on all that’s wrong. Seek out optimistic people who focus on finding solutions and moving forward.
• Develop or join a network of colleagues interested in personal growth. This can be a powerful source of learning from others’ experiences. It’s also a great way for you to reflect on your own experiences and articulate your improvement plans.
• Find a personal coach or counselor to guide your personal development. He or she can be a sounding board, gather feedback from those you work with, prod you to reach your goals, provide advice, and encourage you.
• Catch and stop yourself from saying things like, “I am too old to change,” “That’s just the way I am,” or “There’s nothing I can do.” Identify those habits or characteristics you’d most like to change. Now develop a series of positive affirmations as if it’s already happening. For example, “I am ….,” “I love to …..,” or “I can …..” Post your affirmative statements built around your visualization where you’ll see them every day. You could use them as screensavers, or put Post-It-Notes in your work space, bathroom mirror, car, wallet, purse, briefcase, or day planner.
Do You See What I See: Nuances of Growing @ the Speed of Change Reviews
These “inspir-actional” steps are excerpted from Growing @ the Speed of Change. Besides feeding (and sometimes bruising) my ego, the reviews for Growing @ the Speed of Change are incredibly fascinating to me. After laboring over it for hundreds of hours, it’s extremely interesting to see what key points readers are taking from the book. Sometimes a reader will find some message or meaning from a passage I didn’t intend to put there. Other readers will completely skip, miss, or not care about what I intended to be the key point of a section or chapter.
Click here to review the reviews for Growing @ the Speed of Change. If you’ve read the book, please send me your thoughts on the key messages, ideas, or implementation tips and techniques that most stood out or were most helpful to you. My e-mail is Jim.Clemmer@Clemmer.net.
January 5, 2010 – 2:00 am
Happy New Year! It’s been said that an optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in and a pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. Given the economic difficulties of 2009 many people (both optimists and pessimists) are happy to wave the year a hearty good bye.
Now a fresh new year – and a whole new decade – is stretching out in front of us. It’s a wonderful time of endless possibilities. It’s a clean white canvass inviting us to paint the next big scenes in our lives.
Too often the New Year is a time for a new start on old habits. Here are six resolutions or personal growth goals to help you get a new start on new – or renewed – habits.
• Practice optimism and staying positive through set backs and constant change. Recognize and take early steps to avoid getting pulled down by uncertainty, organizational change, or negative stress and energy.
• Use technology as an enabling tool, don’t let it drive you. Don’t confuse information (such as e-mail) with communication (having conversations). Be aware of the differences and use the right approach for each situation.
• Align and play to your strengths. Explore and know your strengths to assure you’re in the right career/assignment/project to consistently bring out your best.
• Build connections, networks, and your personal brand. Make continual deposits in your relationship bank accounts to influence change, strengthen teamwork, and grow your support systems.
• Keep yourself growing through continuous personal improvement. Recognize the signs of career/personal stagnation and strengthening habits of personal growth.
Artists mix just three primary colors to paint their masterpieces filled with a vast array of hues, shapes, and details that evoke the full spectrum of human emotions. We too have three primary choices to mix, match, and shape each minute, hour, and day. Those choices evoke a range of emotions and responses in us and others.
Our basic choices are to lead, follow, or wallow. These choices are especially critical – and most difficult – when we experience setbacks, negative change, or crisis points in our personal and professional lives.
Lead
That means taking the initiative to make the best of the bad hand that’s been dealt. It’s living with ambiguity and paradox while exploring and creating a broad array of options. It’s facing tough times squarely and not sugarcoating things or fleeing from difficult situations or touchy conversations. To lead is to focus beyond what is to what could be. Leading involves gratitude and looking for opportunities to celebrate and recognize progress. When we’re leading we’re thinking “I am going to do something about this,” “How can I capitalize on this change?” or “I’ve overcome problems before and I can do it again.”
Follow
When faced with a setback, major change, or difficulty, many people sit in following mode. This often involves waiting to see what else might happen. Following means looking to others for direction. On the up side, following might mean analyzing the situation to understand what happened and what the options are in dealing with it. On the down side, following means feeling helpless and cynical. When we’re following we’re thinking “Somebody should do something about this,” “I am not sure what to do next,” or “I am just lying low, keeping my head down.”
Wallow
To wallow is to take a bad situation and make it worse. Wallowing often involves searching for someone to point the finger at. One sign of wallowing is to crave certainty and long for the “good old days.” Wallowing causes us to be overwhelmed by the problem and narrow our field of vision to few or no options. To wallow is to be a victim. There’s a feeling of helplessness and conspiracies with lots of “they” talk; “They are out to get us,” “They don’t understand” or “They never listen to us.”
Click here for a quick quiz on whether you tend to mostly lead, follow, or wallow.
Do You See What I See: Nuances of Growing @ the Speed of Change Reviews
The Lead, Follow, or Wallow model is a central framework of Growing @ the Speed of Change. Besides feeding (and sometimes bruising) my ego, the reviews for Growing @ the Speed of Change are incredibly fascinating to me. After laboring over it for hundreds of hours, it’s extremely interesting to see what key points readers are taking from the book. Sometimes a reader will find some message or meaning from a passage I didn’t intend to put there. Other readers will completely skip, miss, or not care about what I intended to be the key point of a section or chapter.
Click here to review the reviews for Growing @ the Speed of Change. If you’ve read the book, please send me your thoughts on the key messages, ideas, or implementation tips and techniques that most stood out or were most helpful to you. My e-mail is Jim.Clemmer@Clemmer.net.
December 29, 2009 – 2:00 am
I am enjoying some downtime around home with good friends and family this week. It’s also the time of year that Heather and I do our joint visioning for the coming years. It’s an annual tradition we started years ago that made an enormous difference in keeping ourselves focused and keeping our life and business partnership growing ever stronger.
If you’re in a reflective state of mind and looking ahead to the New Year (and new decade), click here to browse a collection of my articles on personal vision, values, and purpose.
Here are a few words of wisdom to inspire your possibility thinking during the Holidays:
“The future is simply infinite possibility waiting to happen. What it waits on is human imagination to crystallize its possibility.”
Leland Kaiser, American author and futurist
“Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 19th Century German philosopher
“One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world - making the most of one’s best.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick, 20th Century American clergyman
“When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” Albert Einstein, German-born American theoretical physicist
“…the mind of Man contains the greatest of all forces….Thought is one of the greatest manifestations of energy… not only is one’s body subject to the control of the mind, but that, also, one may change environment, ‘luck,’ circumstances…Man is rapidly growing into a new plane of consciousness…there is an Infinite Power in, and of, all things…. today we have the faintest idea of that Power, still we steadily grow to comprehend it more fully - will get in closer touch with it. Even now we have momentary glimpses of its existence - a momentary consciousness of Oneness with the Absolute.”
William Atkinson, editor of New Thought magazine, published in 1901 entitled “Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World”
“…nurturing a fantasy is the first step in the neural process of achieving success in the world. It begins with creative imagination, a process that takes places in the frontal lobe, the area in your brain that has the unrelenting capacity to dream up virtually anything. If you can’t imagine a specific goal, you won’t make it to second base, which is figuring out how to make your dream come true.”
Andrew Newberg, M.D. & Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes our Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
By admin
|
Posted in management
|
Tagged Andrew Newberg, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Harry Emerson Fosdick, leadership, Leland Kaiser, Mark Robert Waldman, New Thought, personal vision, possibility thinking, visioning, William Atkinson
|
|
<MMString:LoadString id="insertbar/linebreak" />
-
Would you like to add great leadership content to your web page?
With a few lines of code you can automatically embed Jim's most recent blog posting on virtually any page.
Find out more here
-
-
-
-
-
|
