Gifted Leaders

Take Your Team from Ordinary to Extraordinary

* Could your team use a boost in productivity and/or fun?
* Have you exhausted team building approaches and exhausted yourselves in the process?
* Would you like to look forward to spending time together rather than see team time as yet another thing “to do?”
* Are you ready to move from ordinary to extraordinary?
 
If you answered yes or even maybe to any of these questions, please read on ...
 
Kathleen Ryan and Geoff Bellman have collaborated on an approach to achieving greatness in groups that provides the road map to team performance that most of us have been looking for.  Their extensive research, including interviews with over 60 different groups, led to a deeper understanding of the factors that occur most often in self-described "Extraordinary Groups."  Based on these findings, they have developed an assessment that can help you and your team begin to examine where you are currently and what it would take to become a more high-performing and satisfied team.
 
In collaboration with best-selling author, Kathleen Ryan, we are looking for groups that want to make the bold move from ordinary to extraordinary.  We invite you to consider taking advantage of this exciting team development opportunity which includes:
 
- A pre-assessment of your team using the Extraordinary Team Inventory (ETI)
- An exclusive, full-day "Ordinary to Extraordinary" workshop with Kathleen Ryan and Gifted Leaders coaches designed to help you create your own roadmap for becoming an extraordinary team
- A follow-up team coaching call to continue the learning process
 
The next scheduled date for our "Ordinary to Extraordinary" interactive workshop experience is Monday, May 21st, in Phoenix, AZ (the specific workshop location is yet to be determined). Team registration fees are as follows:

Group/Team Size     Price
        4-9                $1,950
       10-16              $2,450
         17+               Call for pricing

In order to provide a highly personal and customized experience for each team, we will be limiting the number of teams that participate.  So please contact us as soon as possible to learn more or to register your team.

Sally Starbuck Stamp, BSN, MC, BCC
sally@giftedleaders.com
602-200-0048

Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC
jeff@giftedleaders.com
480-710-4347

Is Your Organization a Learning Organization?

In a learning organization, employees continually create, acquire, and transfer knowledge – helping their company adapt to the unpredictable faster than rivals can. The three building blocks required for creating learning organizations are:

1. A supportive environment,
2. Concrete learning processes, and
3. Leadership that reinforces learning.

By assessing how well your team, business, or company exhibits the defining characteristics for each building block, you can pinpoint areas needing improvement and develop additional capacity for learning. The resulting knowledge sharing and idea development, plus the ability to learn from mistakes and think holistically, will position you for greater success in today’s marketplace.

Read more ...

Dialogic Leadership

Examples of failed communication are all around us, both in the workplace and quite possibly in our personal lives as well.  Not infrequently, people fail to find a way to talk and think together effectively to resolve difficult issues.

Dialogic leadership, an approach based on the core principles of “dialogue,” can lead to the creation of environments that overcome fragmentation and bring out people’s collective wisdom. As people apply the principles of dialogic leadership, they learn to think better together and greatly increase the odds that they will build the expansive relationships required to build success in the new economy.

Read more ...

Fully Committed?

Do companies feel the pain of not having emotional commitment from their managers or employees? Ask any company at any time about its top ten chronic challenges. Manager and employee performance will almost always appear on the list - finding them, keeping them, paying them, training them, and motivating them.

What companies must learn is that managers and employees don’t necessarily want to work less. They just want it to mean more. A key question, then, is “What is needed to create the highest level of self-sustaining motivation and to gain the emotional commitment of a companies’ managers and employees?”

Read more ...

If You Love Your People, Set Them Free

“Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players. Management still revolves largely around supervision, if-then rewards, and other forms of control,” says Dan Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Management, as we traditionally think of it is a great way to get compliance. But it’s proved to be a terrible way to get engagement. So what really does motivate workers and create true employee engagement?

Winning back disengaged employees will require changing the nature of work itself.

Read more ...

Three Universal Human Needs – The 3 E’s

By exceptionality I mean that every human being is an exception to the rule - no one has ever been born quite like you and no one in the future will ever again be quite like you. We all have a basic human desire for essentiality, we want to be recognized as essential to any human group we belong to. Finally, I think all human beings in every group they are a part of feel some sense of equality, especially equality of voice. We all have a desire to share without censorship, our hopes and visions of the true, the good and the possible. - David Cooperrider

Here’s a bit more on the 3 E’s from the Thin Book Publishing web site:

Several management theorists have identified three human universal needs. We share David Cooperrider's view. He believes that each person has the need to:

1. Have a voice and be heard;
2. Be viewed as essential to a group; and
3. Be seen as unique and exceptional.

We've found when people in organizations become frustrated or cynical, it is always because the organization is not fully respectful of the three universal human needs. In our experience, most organizations will tell you they practice these principles, but in reality they do not. They are deceptively simple. You can make a difference by monitoring who you listen to and who you ignore and asking yourself why. What assumptions have you made about people or their positions that cause you to listen or tune out?

One person can begin to change the culture of his or her organization because honoring the three human universals begins with you. You can make a difference in creating a more constructive culture at your organization by:

• Being curious about how every other person sees the world;
  
• Respecting each person's perspective of the world as unique and essential to the group's success; and
  
• Making sure every person has a chance to speak and be heard.

Ultimately, if you ensure all three needs are met, you will be successful as a leader. If your organization works at meeting all three needs, your organization will be more successful.

Who’s Got Your Back? - Part II

“The more I work on my own life and help others on the path toward success the more I see the importance of loving relationships.” - Dan Miller

Here are several other quotes from Dan Miller's e-Newsletter on the importance of supportive relationships:

“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.” - Samuel Johnson

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” - Henri Nouwen

“Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.” - Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

What are you doing to keep your friendships/relationships “in constant repair?”

Who’s Got Your Back? - Part I

“Success cannot be achieved in isolation. It is the result of combined efforts – yours and that of many others around you. Look for ways to strengthen your relationships and your success will soar.” - Dan Miller

Dan Miller shared the following in his 48 days e-Newsletter on July 28 ...

Last Thursday my daughter and I drove down to Atlanta to attend author Keith Ferrazzi's presentation on his new book, Who's Got Your Back? 

Keith talked about the critical importance of having 3 deep personal relationships and said that if you have these 3 trusting relationships you are set up to experience a disproportionate level of success. In the research for the book he found that roughly 50% of Americans could not identify one person who has their back.

If you’re struggling, perhaps the next step in releasing your success is not another degree, a guaranteed salary, a bank loan, a secure patent or a winning lottery ticket – but rather a friend you can confide in.

Who's got your back?

Susan Scott Talks Fierce Leadership

“If you want to be a great leader, you must gain the capacity to connect with others at a deep level - or lower your aim.” - Susan Scott

In a video promoting her new book, Fierce Leadership, author Susan Scott contrasts the old adage that a leader should ensure growth at all costs with a growing recognition that human connectivity is the primary “means” to drive that growth. Watch the video on the Fierce Leadership web site ...

What's your capacity for connectivity?

Tips for Hiring Leaders

“Good leaders need to be able to connect to all of those around them. This is especially true because we have a very team-oriented culture. When I'm hiring leaders, I pay a lot of attention to what their peers and what people who report to them say about them. We want people who relate well with their peers and cooperate in an exchange of information rather than being overly competitive.” - John Mackey, CEO Whole Foods

In a feature last month on Inc.com, John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets shared his answer to the question, “What traits should I look for when hiring for a leadership position?”  I really think his response should apply to hiring anyone for any position.

In addition to looking for classic character virtues, Mackey also selects for people with a high degree of emotional intelligence. He says, “For leadership positions, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. People with emotional intelligence usually have lots of cognitive intelligence, but that’s not always true the other way around.”

What are you doing to select for and/or develop emotional intelligence in your leaders?  What are you doing to develop your own emotional intelligence?