Can Transformational Leadership Play A Part In Solving The Human Crisis?
You may have noticed the world is having some challenges with us humans at the moment. She is getting a bit hot under the collar, and probably wouldn’t think too much about wiping us off her face, like she did with the dinosaurs. Considering that the dinosaurs lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and some still live today, I would consider them pretty adaptable. Humans seem to be having some big challenges with changing these days, and yet we have the arrogance to mock the dinosaurs.
So what is it going to take for human beings to start working together on a global level, when we have such deep challenges working together in our own lives? Let alone that, but even with ourselves we have deep issues that we find hard to address, let alone speak about. We hide from the truth like it will kill us, and miss the opportunity to free ourselves and others in the process. Yes, some part of us may die (our ego), but then again, was it not what was causing the problem anyway?
Our current global, business, political and social leaders are starting to get the message, and there is movement to a greater awakening to the seriousness of our current situation. But is it going to work? Are we addressing the core issues, or have we missed something in our attempt to fix the situation? Are we missing an enormous opportunity to transform what it means to be human? A chance to see into the future for 1000’s of years, and see our species make a powerful contribution to the way life evolves?
We live in a time that is fundamentally different from any other that humanity has encountered before. We are more technologically advanced that we have ever been, and at the same time we have almost completely lost our ancient, sacred, natural wisdom that has guided our ancestors in living in harmony on this planet.
We have become arrogant in our ways of taking from the world around us, with little regard for the impacts that we have on others, sometimes half way around the world. As an example, in past generations, if a local group polluted a river, then the whole group suffered as a result. Today if a industrial process pollutes a river, the people around suffer, but not the ones that are doing the damage.
Our purchasing decisions that bring us our fast, convenient, packaged food, affect the conditions of life and living systems around the globe, yet we cannot see it. What will it take for us to wake up? What will it take for us to start leading ourselves and others in a way that has the potential to transform the way we are behaving?
Is Transformational Leadership something that will contribute to the evolution of humankind? If it is, how can we get it out there more effectively? How can we get it into the hearts and minds of the people around us? How can we live the principles and ideals that stand for transformation and leadership in our world, be it on a micro or macro level?
I don’t believe that it is the only solution, but I do believe that if we started treating and leading each other the way Transformational Leadership suggests, it could make a significant impact on the way we create our future.
http://www.transformationalleadership.net is dedicated to unlocking your transformation and leadership potential. Developing Tomorrow’s Transformational Leaders Today.
Business Coaching That Counts
It seems as though the title changes but the support remains similar. It was the rage to have a mentor; but this was usually perceived as free support. So the business coach was born. Coaches felt free to charge a fee for what support they offered.
The problem for a business operator is deciding which individual coach can give them the best support. But should they put all their eggs in one basket? Rather than one mentor or one business coach, it would be preferable to have a team that can provide a strong mix of skills to make your business life easier and growth more sustainable.
Business coaching has become an overpopulated industry where anyone and everyone who has some knowledge in business is trying to capture the market. Once we used to say if you were a consultant that meant that you were retrenched and were trying to make a living by hiring your services out. Now it is the same with business coaches. They are a dime a dozen and any network meeting you attend is likely to have a predominance of this industry. And there is a great deal of evidence suggesting that many do not have the skills or experience needed.
Does this mean that it is not advisable to have a business coach? Definitely not. A good business coach is worth their weight in gold. They will guide you, provide a strong network of skilled professionals to assist you; give you confidence; help you to think outside the square and will generally act as a sounding board for you.
The trick is to find one that is highly skilled with a ton of actual business experience that suits your needs. I am amazed at how many coaches offer their services when they have never run a business; let alone a successful business!
A business coach suitable for the corporate sector will probably not be suitable for a home based business. There are three major areas that you need specific skilled personnel to help you (and you are unlikely to find all three in one person) IT, Marketing and Finance require very different skills, so your coach must have support experts within their network so that you can draw on their experiences.
The solutions is to ask as many questions as possible:-
1) Do they have an Industry Accreditation?
The answer will let you know how seriously they take their professional standing in the community.
2) Can they assist you to receive an accreditation?
If they understand your business they should be encouraging you to increase your kudos by also becoming accredited.
3) Have they ever won an award?
Being prepared to have a third party assess their business is a sign of confidence and ability.
4) Have their clients ever won awards?
If they understand the importance of Awards as a marketing tool, they would have encouraged clients to enter awards.
5) What is the area that they have the most experience in?
You need to know if their strength is in Marketing, IT or Finance
6) What size businesses do they specialise in helping?
This is an important area of consideration; too big and they will not have an understanding of the specific problems and needs of Micro/HBB
7) What type of businesses do they have as clients?
If their business was as an artist; I would not recommend using them if you are an artist as you need a wider scope of skills for a business coach. But if they specialise is assisting artists; then I would use them.
8) Do they have meetings and phone and email support?
You need to be quite clear as to what they offer in the way of communication and ensure that it suits your needs.
9) Do they have some working templates that you can use to help organise your procedures and measure outcomes?
A business coach who has lots of tools to give you to make your lot easier, is a great advantage.
10) What Network organisations do they belong to?
If they do not belong to a networking organisation where they can develop relationships, then it is going to be difficult for them to give you good tips and introductions.
11) What Industry associations do they belong to?
All businesses should belong to at least one Industry Association and I would be very wary of any business coach who did not.
Once you think you have found the right person to be your business coach; then go for it! Just remember to measure the outcomes; you need to know just what specific support and results you have received for your capital outlay.
Barbara Gabogrecan is a renowned presenter, artist and author, winning many awards. http://www.mbnsolutions.com.au
The 24-Day Leadership Lesson
Leadership is not logical. It’s deceiving to regard leadership as a straightforward skill with a set of sure-fire steps. Sure, you can find books extolling traits of a good leader and attend seminars that teach leadership principles and best practices. Merely learning and applying these practices will leave you flatfooted when it comes time to lead… unless you have something else, too.
We need leaders whom groups of people will follow from idea all the way to goal attainment, even if that takes months or years. Sadly, that rarely happens. Organizations want every employee engaged with their work, but surveys show that number to be as low as 59%.
Even that low number may be deteriorating as we all become busier and busier. We’re expected to multitask, diluting enthusiasm for a single goal. If goals are reached at all, they’re often late and over budget. Instead of focus, perseverance, and enthusiasm, teams experience feelings of confusion and hopelessness.
Leaders facing potential failure often revert to “command and control” mode and create a forced march toward their objective. Unless, that is, they’ve learned the 24 day leadership lesson that’s repeated every year.
Imagine That
Let’s hallucinate for a moment and imagine you celebrate Christmas. The goal is to have everything ready by December 25th to create the Christmas Day experience. We can learn much about leadership in the 24 days that come before. Actually, it starts with retailers back in September and October.
Through their store displays, they are already reminding us about how much we’re going to enjoy the experience of Christmas Day. They create environments that help us remember past family gatherings, fond memories from childhood, and those special toys that brought us hours and hours of happiness. Retailers are eager to help us plan and prepare to have everything just right by December 25th so that Christmas Day can be all the wonderful things we imagine.
Goals for the Gut
As a leader, do you make the goals you define and communicate as exciting and compelling as Christmas Day? Help each member of your group sensually internalize the goal and all that it means. Help them make it as real, vivid and attractive for them as Christmas Day, right down to the sights, sounds, and smells.
When I conduct strategic planning workshops for clients, I ask each participant to write an essay about what they’ll experience when a goal is achieved. By converting the goal from a list of logical benefits into a vivid visceral experience, participants are excited and eager to engage.
It’s time to stop ignoring the emotions associated with our logical goals. Help your team imagine the goal from the gut.
This System is Backwards
As you look forward to a particular goal, you may find you have only 24 days to get everything done, or you may have a much longer period of time. The challenge will be to remain focused over the long haul.
Retrospective Planning begins by taking your far-off goal and making it real as if it were the present reality, using various techniques like essay writing. Then it works backward to the present day to define the appropriate resources and actions.
To create the vivid Christmas Day experience we want, we know that cookies need to be baked, shopping needs to be done, cards need to be mailed, and so on. We can setup a checklist with milestones to make best use of the 24 days that December gives us before Christmas Day. We feel a rush when we accomplish our short-term milestones and know that we are systematically and steadily closing in on the Big Day.
The Journey Worth Celebrating
Preparation for any big goal can often seem overwhelming. Are we busy? Yes! Are we stressed? Yes! Does that mean we’re too busy to party? No way!
You’ll find more parties in December than any other month of the year. Celebrations are part of the preparation leading to December 25th. These mini-celebrations remind us that every day we’re getting closer to the ecstasy of the Big Day.
As leaders, do we celebrate the journey, or just the goal? Sometimes leaders think they need have a logical reason for a celebration. Not true! People rarely need a reason to justify having a good time. Especially when your people are pooped, invite them as GUESTS to a party.
Play the Leadership Game
The 24 days before Christmas show us that the logical value of an accomplishment is not so motivating as the feeling of accomplishment. Go beyond the logic of leadership, and give yourself and your team permission to talk about your goal with child-like anticipation.
*** Make sure everyone can feel the goal in their gut.
*** Keep a countdown calendar that gives reasons to be excited every day.
*** Make it a game instead of a grind.
You don’t have to wait until December to apply the 24-day leadership lesson and start enjoying the focus, perseverance, and enthusiasm that virtually guarantees you’ll get to your goal.
Copyright 2007 Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson the Trouble Breaker works with organizations to convert leadership trouble into double and triple digit performance breakthroughs. Discover breakthrough performance improvement concepts at http://ShortcutsToResults.com.
Breakthroughs Are Available If You Hold the Right Contest to Get Help from Outside Your Organization
An emergency room (ER) nurse kept hearing complaints from patients who had been waiting for hours to see a doctor. After learning about creating breakthrough solutions, she began to keep track of how long it took various kinds of patients to get the attention they needed.
She was shocked to find that those who were too sick or injured to explain their problems but who appeared to be okay sometimes waited for more than 10 hours — even if they needed immediate treatment. This nurse shared her concerns with the other ER nurses and physicians. They discussed possible solutions and decided to train the guards at the door to spot people who couldn’t explain about themselves and bring a triage nurse immediately to check the patient. Waiting time for these vulnerable, hard-to-diagnose patients dropped to less than 10 minutes. Although her colleagues didn’t know it, they had just put in place a breakthrough solution.
How much improvement is possible? We’ve all seen breakthroughs, but often don’t think about them. Yet those breakthroughs can help us appreciate other potential breakthroughs.
For instance, a slow reader takes a course in better reading methods. Reading speed increases from 100 words to 1,100 words a minute while comprehension of what is read doubles. The reading speed increase is a 10-fold improvement, [(1,100 - 100)/100 = 10], and the doubling of comprehension allows twice as much to be comprehended in whatever reading time is involved. When you multiply reading 10 times faster by double the comprehension, you have a 2,000 percent increase in reading comprehension per minute from the same time and effort.
What brought breakthrough solutions to my attention? I was attracted to this subject because my family depended on a small business when I was growing up, and breakthrough solutions made an enormous difference in this operation and in my life. I hope this concept will do the same for you, your family, and your business or nonprofit organization, whether you lead it or simply work there.
Let’s look at some more examples to help you grasp what a breakthrough solution is. Technology often helps us speed results without increasing resources. For example, you can send material halfway around the world now in an e-mail for a tiny fraction of the cost and time of sending an air courier package. E-mail is also a breakthrough compared to the best method commonly available 20 years ago: sending a facsimile.
Thinking more clearly about the implications of what needs to be done can have a similar effect without waiting for technology to advance.
For instance, many electronic products are now designed to have many fewer parts than the products they replace. Consequently, repairing products with fewer parts takes much less time and reduces costs. For more expensive products, the parts are often monitored electronically to note when they are about to fail. The message that failure is imminent is sent to the repair person before the failure. The part is replaced, and the customer never experiences a problem. Repeat sales and profits improve as a result. For less expensive products, online resources allow customers to diagnose their problems, implement the proper solutions, and receive faster results at much less cost than providing hands-on repairs.
Sharing information throughout organizations has had similar effects. Many organizations now use business intelligence software that allows everyone to know what performance is in the activities each person influences. As a result, fewer problems occur and the solutions come faster and less expensively.
What is you don’t have any ideas for breakthroughs? Recently, organizations have learned to access better ideas inexpensively by involving large numbers of experts through online contests. Goldcorp was a pioneer in this effort when it sponsored the Goldcorp Challenge in March 2000. Hundreds of the world’s best geologists looked at Goldcorp’s exploratory drilling results online and produced a number of excellent suggestions. By spending a few hundred thousand dollars for a Web site and prizes, Goldcorp located new gold reserves worth hundreds of millions.
Topping that success, Larry Huston, vice president of R&D, Innovation, and Knowledge for Procter & Gamble (P&G), reported in October 2005 that P&G had run more than 200 versions of the Goldcorp Challenge since 2000. These contests had yielded innovations with a success rate of over 80 percent, increased the company’s R&D productivity by 45 percent, and provided 35 percent of all of P&G’s successful innovations in recent years.
From these examples, you can see that breakthroughs are possible by running contests to locate breakthrough solutions to the most important organizational tasks. By considering these examples, I hope you’ll be able to see possible variations on their themes to establish breakthroughs for important tasks where no one yet dreams of such improvements.
Donald Mitchell is coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook. You can read about his work on creating 2,000 percent solutions by registering for free at
http://www.2000percentsolution.com .