September 2014 Newsletter - Emotion and Leadership

How well do the leaders in your organization express their emotions? What about you? Do you appropriately articulate your feelings?

While research has demonstrated a strong link among excitement, commitment and business results, many leaders stumble at emotional expressiveness. They hesitate to express both positive and negative emotions in an effort to maintain credibility, authority and gravitas. Consequently, they’re losing one of the best tools for achieving impact.

Emotional Intelligence

"The role of emotional maturity in leadership is crucial." ~ Kathy Lubar and Belle Linda Halpern, Leadership Presence: Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate and Inspire (Penguin Group, USA, 2004)

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August 2014 Newsletter - Master Seven Essential Power Cues For Better Communication

Most communication is unconscious. You may think you’re delivering clear and consistent messages based on your words, but unconscious nonverbal behaviors are key to communicating with power.

Startling advances in brain science have made it possible for us to gather and test evidence as we uncover the unconscious mind’s amazing strengths. While our conscious brains can handle some 40 bits of information per second, the unconscious mind processes an astounding 11 million bits per second. Much of this activity occurs instantaneously, nonverbally and unconsciously.

Your unconscious mind is at work when:

• You quickly brake or swerve to avoid an object in the road.
• You physically shift position to mirror a colleague’s posture.
• You and a friend simultaneously blurt out the same phrase or idea.
• You have a gut feeling that the person speaking to you is concealing information.

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July 2014 Newsletter - How To Voice Your Values

It can be extremely difficult to express your personal values at work, especially when confronted with questions of right vs. wrong. Issues become thornier when you’re facing a choice between degrees of right vs. right.

While research reveals universal values across cultures, not everyone agrees on what makes a worthy business decision:

- Honest

- Respectful

- Responsible

- Fair

- Compassionate

Most of us want to bring our whole selves to work: our skills, ambitions and deeply held beliefs. We will inevitably encounter values conflicts during our careers, particularly when our goals and ideals clash with clients’, peers’, bosses’ and organizational expectations.

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June 2014 Newsletter - Leadership Advantage - Knowing What Makes People Tick

"Our understanding of leadership can be no better than our understanding of what makes humans, all humans, tick—what are the ultimate motivators of our behavior." ~ Warren Bennis

Leadership is about relationships with others. You cannot lead without understanding the innate drives that are essential to human development and survival.

Decades of research have given us numerous theories about drive and motivation, to include:

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization)
• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators (inner satisfaction and desires, external rewards and payoffs)
• The well-documented drives to achieve autonomy, mastery and purpose in our personal and professional lives.
• Economist Milton Friedman’s agency theory, which argues that rational self-interest motivates all human behavior — and that businesses’ sole purpose is to maximize shareholder returns. (Over time, behavioral economists have proved there’s much more to human behavior than rational self-interest.)

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May 2014 Newsletter - The Crucibles of Leadership

"Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him." ~ Aldous Huxley

The ability to extract wisdom from challenging experiences distinguishes successful leaders from their broken or burned-out peers.

Difficult and, in some cases, career- or life-threatening events are called leadership crucibles. They are trials and tests — points of deep self-reflection that force you to question who you are and what really matters. Characterized by a confluence of threatening intellectual, social, economic and/or political forces, crucibles test your patience, belief systems and core values.

When you're open to learning from mistakes, problems and failures, you become a stronger leader. You gain followers' trust, and they're eager to produce their best work.\

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April 2014 Newsletter - Conversational IQ

"Human beings are the most highly social species on this planet. When we succeed in connecting deeply with others—heart to heart and head to head—trust is at its all-time high, and people work in concert in extraordinary ways." ~ Judith E. Glaser

Conversations are more than a vehicle for sharing information. As social beings, our interactions involve words that trigger powerful physical and emotional responses. Our words can facilitate healthy, trusting conversations — or cause others to shut down with fear, caution and worry.

Bad conversations trigger our distrust network; good conversations trigger our trust network. This influences what we say, as well as how and why we say it. Our trust and distrust networks shape each conversation's outcome.

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March 2014 Newsletter - Overcoming Our Blind Spots

No matter how hard we try to be self-aware, everyone—including the best leaders—has unproductive behaviors that are invisible to us but glaring to everyone else.

Our behavioral blind spots create unintended consequences: They distort judgment, corrupt decision-making, reduce our awareness, create enemies and silos, destroy careers and sabotage business results.

A blind spot is a performance-hindering mindset or behavior of which you're unaware or have chosen to overlook. A recent Business Week article cites some important research:

• A Hay Group study shows that an organization's senior leaders are more likely to overrate themselves and develop blind spots that can hinder their effectiveness.
• A study by Development Dimensions International, Inc., found that 89 percent of front-line leaders have at least one skills-related blind spot.

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