March Abridged

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3/12

from the editor

Greetings and welcome, subscribers!

Well, youve been wondering when I wouldprovide some content, so Ive decided now isthe time. My article, 5 Steps to Becoming anEnlightened Leader, is the rst of a series thatwill take you through the steps we have uti-lized to transform managers (& others) intoleaders for 25 years.

This article o ers each subscriber a highly vali-dated assessment (for free!) to help in yourpersonal development. This is good for onemonth. Twenty minutes of your time will pro-vide a huge amount of value youll want toshare with your team members and family.

Were excited to start a new ongoing series byour friend, Dr. T.C. North, called Fearless Lead-ers. Youll like the quality and style of his writ-ing. This rst article is 9 Unusual High-Performance Traits.

Bill Bonnstetter is Founder and Chairman of TTIPerformance Systems, the worlds leadingsource for research-based coaching tools. Hehas a signi cant article based on his researchabout the Skills Every Leader Must Master. It isa TTI assessment were o ering subscribers.

Laura Stack is back with her popular column. This month she discusses Tightening YourFocus. Important and practical stu !

Mark Sanborns articles are always thought-provoking! In Doing Leadership: Part 4, hewrites about how Leaders Communicate.Communication is the word that comes upmost when discussing leaders challenges.

We also have a couple videos. One is only acouple minutes long, but provides valuablecontent in The Top 10 Characteristics of Leadership. The music is nice, too!

The other video is an interview with DanielGoleman, about the role of Emotional andSocial Intelligence for leaders. These are im-portant aspects of the self-awareness we will

discuss in 5 Steps... and our assessments.

Are you enjoying ENLIGHTENED LEADESHIP magazine? We would greatly appreci-ate your rating the magazine in iTunes andgiving us a testimonial! :-)

As always, do give us feedback. Nearly all ourchanges have come as a result of your sug-

gestions!

2012 Enlightened Leadership Solutions, Inc. All rights reserv

Ed OakleyExecutive EditorENLIGHTENED LEADERSHIP [email protected]

Go to EnlightenedLeadership.net to view our support and privacy policy.


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table of contents

5 Steps to BecomingAn Enlightened Leader by Ed Oakley

Doing Leadership

Top 10 Characteristics of a leader

Tightening your Focus

Enlightened Leadership

Part 4 | by Mark Sanborn

Video by Business Minder Videos

by Laura Stack

Chapters 1 and 2 | by Ed Oakley

Skills every leader must masterby Bill Bonnstetter

9 Unusual High-Performance traitsby T.C. North

Social intelligence and leadershipVideo by Harvard Business Review


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As our team has worked with people at all levels of organizations from 68 countries over the last 25years, weve developed a relatively sequential process for developing your own leadership abilities. Isay relatively because we live in such a complex, constantly changing world that very little is purelysequential.

We call this our Model for Developing Leaders and we represent it as a pyramid or triangle, where Step1 is the base. The top, or the capstone of the pyramid, which represents breakthrough performanceand enlightened leadership, is the goal of our process.

First - Awareness orConsciousness

The foundation of our model is reallybuilt upon two levels. First comesawareness or consciousness. It is aboutbecoming more and more conscious of all that is around us. It is about noticingthe little things how people areresponding, their attitudes, the realmeaning of what they are saying, no-ticing the subtleties. It is so easy to runon cruise control, on automatic, and becompletely oblivious to what is reallygoing on.

Did you ever notice something was alittle weird about a meeting, but you chose to ignore it. Well, Ive done that too and it almost alwayscreates a problem later.

When I rst became a manager at HP many years ago, consciousness was hardly in my vocabulary,much less really understanding it. If a team member nodded her head in response to my question, Iseveryone clear about what we need to do? I would assume they were in complete agreement andcommitted to take the appropriate action. I now realize their nods could very well have been an auto-

matic response that meant nothing! More than likely it meant, I hear what youre saying, but Im notmaking any kind of commitment.

5 Steps to becoming anby Ed OakleyEnlightened Leader


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Ive learned that I need to ask open-ended questions, then really listen to make sure I know wherethey stand. We have a lot fewer surprises when I do that, as well as more productive conversations.Also, when were aligned on what actions to take, we dont waste time guring out what went wrongat the end.

Next - Self-Awareness

The next level of consciousness adds the self to awareness. Self-awareness means being consciouslyaware of whats going on with us and how were showing up to the world outside us our team mem-bers, our friends, our family.

One key to self-awareness is understanding how we appear behaviorally to others. Are we highly

assertive or more laid-back? Are we quick or more slow to act? Do we tend to listen to our gut instinctsor are we more analytical in our processing? Are we more comfortable working with things or people?Would we rather work by ourself or with others?

Equally important is the ability to recognize thebehavioral preferences of others and to adaptour natural tendencies to better work withthose who are very di erent than us. Awarenessis the key to being able to make adjustments

from moment to moment and person to personto optimize the e ectiveness of the communi-cation.

Its not di cult but it requires staying consciousand aware. Thats the challenging part.

Have you ever judged someone as di cult whomay have simply had a di erent behavioral stylethan your own? I bet you have. I do this too, butthe more aware I become, the less I fall into thattrap.

To optimize our leadership abilities, it is valuableto be aware of our primary motivators and thoseof the people around us. As an example, perhaps you are driven to make sure you and the organiza-tion are getting a return-on-investment of your time, energy, and resources. But someone else mightbe more motivated to make a di erence than to make a pro t. To optimize your leadership ability, youmust rst be aware enough to recognize what motivates those around you and how consistent or

inconsistent that is with your own primary motivators.


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Once you have that awareness, you can have discussions with them about how your action plan helpsmeet their primary motivational needs. It simply takes awareness of what motivates them and yourwillingness to put some e ort into communicating with them in language that motivates them. Its just a di erent context from your own.

To help your education process around behaviors and motivators, Enlightened Leadership Solutions,our parent company, o ers one free Behaviors-Motivators combination assessment for each sub-scriber of this magazine ($155 value). Go to the following website to get your free assessment:

http://leadership.infusionsoft.com/app/form/free-tti-assessment-for-ipad-subscribers

Another Level of Self-Awareness

Be sure to watch the ten-minute video later in this issue of ENLIGHTENED LEADERSHIP magazineDaniel Goleman, who discusses Emotional and Social Intelligence. This is a deeper level of self-awareness that gets into how you recognize and manage your emotions how e ectively you dealwith your own emotional challenges, and how well you manage them in dealing with other people. Aserious student of leadership will want to delve into this topic further. Enlightened Leadership alsoo ers Emotional Intelligence assessments.

The rst level of our leadership development model is focused on being conscious and aware of our-selves and the people and events around us. As you can imagine, this is an ongoing process. Wecannot do this step and check it o . Awareness is a critical factor in leadership that will always be indemand.

Watch the April issue for the next level of the pyramid. Meanwhile, if youre interested in a solid leader-ship development process for you and your team, consider the Team-Based Learning o ering by In u-encing Institute. The heart of the process is the webcast system, In uencing With or Without Author-ity for Breakthrough Results below:


8/12

High-performing individuals, including world-class ath-letes and business leaders, are di erent from averageathletes and business leaders. High-performance organi-zations and workplaces are also di erent from averagebusinesses. What makes them so dissimilar? Here arenine di erentiators from high-performance psychology.

1. Willingness to fail. People are willing to fail in order tolearn and succeed, and this is encouraged throughoutthe organization. This characteristic is a great di erentia-tor both for high-performing individuals and organiza-tions. Greatness requires doing and/or being di erent(think Apple computers); risk is inherent in being di er-ent.

2. Motivation driven by excitement, not fear. Both indi-vidual and team motivation is driven by excitementversus fear. When you're in fear, you play not to lose. Youfocus on not making mistakes and spend a lot of energycovering you butt. This is a negative focus. However,when you're driven by the excitement of winning orachieving your goals, this is a positive focus. The focus ison what you want versus what you don't want.

3. Obsessive focus. Leaders are obsessively focused ontwo things: 1) creating a high-performance culture and 2)being known for one product, service, or something thatdi erentiates the company in its market. Average busi-nesses are often too many things to too many peopleand don't stand out. This is especially true for entrepre-neurs. To be a high-performing entrepreneur, you mustbe obsessively focused on these two things.

4. Respect. For all team members to be inspired by their

leaders and align with the vision and strategies, leadersmust be respected. They don't necessarily have to be

Unusual high-performance Traitsby T.C.NorthWhat does that company have t9

e by West Point Public A airs on Flickr.com


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respected for every part of their life, but they must at least be respected for their brilliance invision and strategy. Leaders who are also highly respected for their values and ethics can createan even stronger, values-driven, high-performance culture - the ideal culture.

5. Alignment. To create alignment, people must believe in the vision and in one another. Inaligned organizations, trust is extremely high in all interactions, and cover-your-butt, protect-your-turf and "siloing" activities are virtually nonexistent. There's alignment among the organiza-tion's vision, team goals and individual goals. This characteristic should be pretty obvious, but inreality it's di cult to nd. Basic laws of physics state that the greater the amount of energy youhave moving in one direction (toward your vision) and the less resistance you encounter, thefaster you progress.

6. Positive accountability. High performers love positive accountability; only masochists likefear-based accountability. Positive accountability occurs when mutually agreed-on goals areregularly discussed, successes are celebrated, and unattained goals are learned from and correc-tions are made. One interesting exception to this is a culture that combines both acknowledgingand celebrating successes with yelling and punishing those who make mistakes. This is the cul-ture of some, not all, high-performing college and professional sports teams. It works becausethere's a deep caring, even a love, between the players and coaches. Without this emotional con-nection, it wouldn't work.

7. Shared values. Values are shared among all team members and drive all interactions. Interest-

ingly, you can actually have a high-performance team with good values or bad values. If you'reon a team of thieves and you all share a love of conning, lying, and stealing, you can actually

Image by Smudge 9000 on Flickr.co


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By: T.C. NorthFor 25 years, Dr. TC North has been a high-performance executive coach and speakerwho accelerates individuals and organiza-tions in attaining their visions and dreams. Hehas also mentally coached a professionalsports team, Olympic teams and numerouselite, world-class athletes in the art of creating thoughts and emotions that maximize suc-cess.

Hes a professional speaker on the topics Fearless Leaders and Blast Through Fear. Dr.Norths work has been featured on TV and radio and in business and scienti c journals. Tolearn more, visit www.TCNorth.com, or contact Dr. North at 303-665-8920 or

[email protected].

create a high-performance culture with the shared values of thieves. (I'd like to discourage that,though!)

8. No whining, complaining or excuses. There's little to no whining, complaining, or excuses.People take full responsibility for deadlines as well as their goals and mistakes. This may be thegreatest di erentiator of all high-performance characteristics! From 2008 through 2010 (threereally tough years in the U.S. economy) high-performing CEOs and sales professionals took com-plete responsibility for their results. They didn't point ngers or blame the economy; they con-stantly pursued what they could do to thrive in the current situation. During those three years, Iknow three realtors who had their best years ever! These realtors never whined, complained, ormade excuses while others did; they put all of their energy into creating opportunities.

9. Meet or exceed. If you implement theabove psychological characteristics of high-performance organizations andteams, you're likely to meet or exceedyour critical goals. This is the ultimate measure of becominga high performing organization or work-place: you regularly meet or exceed whatyou commit to accomplish.


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Tightening Your

The modern leader's biggest problems rarely stem from a lack of commitment or work ethic. Most of us are quite willing to work hard and often for a distressing number of hours. And it's not as if we don'tunderstand time management; anyone who has made it to a signi cant leadership position has mas-tered the basics or they wouldn't occupy their current post.

The real problem is that many leaders haven't learned to expand and refocus their understanding of time management to take into account the realities of their new positionseven as they accrue moreand more power over the lives and livelihoods of more and more people.

As you climb the corporate ladder, your ability to focus on your strategic priorities becomes increas-ingly important. With every rung, your actions impact the company more than they ever have before.A high-level leader who can't keep her head in the game does much more damage than a distractedfront-line supervisor.

However, its a catch-22 becausethe higher you go, the more distrac-tions you have to deal with. As anindividual contributor, you haveenough trouble ltering out elec-tronic distractions, drop-ins, andnoisy neighbors. When you entermanagement, you suddenly havehordes of people who want a pieceof your time and many of themactually deserve one.

Like liberty, the price of advance-ment is eternal vigilance in your waragainst distraction. No matter howhard you work, if you can't maintain a tight focus on the key activities that directly a ect your organi-zation's success, you'll never perform up to parnor will your team, department, or organization. Atbest, you'll end up like Alice and the Red Queen in Wonderland, running as fast as you can just to stayin the same place. At worstwell, let's just say disaster looms, especially if you just give up and stopcaring.

When you ascend to a new position, start by closely examining the responsibilities that come with it,so you can determine precisely what's most important for your organization. Then trim away every-

by laura stack

Image by eveos on Flickr.c


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By: Laura Stack

Laura is Americas premier expert in productivity. TheProductivity Pro, Inc. provides time managmentworkshops around the globe that help attendees achieveMaximum Results in Minimum Time.

Laura has been featured on the CBS Early Show, CNN, USA Today, and the New York Times. Shes tbestselling author of many books, most recently, What to Do When Theres Too Much to DoConnect at TheProductivityPro.com; facebook.com/productivitypro; or twitter.com/laurastack.

2013 Laura Stack.

thing else. Everything! Among other things, the most e ective leaders do the following:

Make their meetings shorter and less frequent. Hire staff to help them organize and prioritize their responsibilities. Share their authority and distribute most responsibilities to key employees. Learn to say no and make it stick. Practice healthy life-habits to enhance personal performance.

What they don't do is micromanage or solve minor problems. They don't have the time! Focustightly on the things only you can do that bring in the maximum value for the organization. Dis-connect yourself from your electronic leashes (handhelds, email, social media, and the Internet),forcing them back to their original functions as tools. You own them; they don't own you. Use yoursta to monitor them for you.

Upper-level leaders don't have teams just so they can feel important; an executive sta exists tohandle all the distractions and minor tasks that might divert the executive from his or her realresponsibilities. A good sta can't keep you from wasting your time if you really want to, but theycan de nitely keep other people from bugging you whenyou should be focusing on more important things. Workingon budgets, new marketing schemes, strategic planning,and your department's priorities for the next scal yearalways trump anything less pro table.

So stop dealing with drama and putting out brush res-unless you happen to be a feature lm director or a re chief.Even then, you undoubtedly have personnel in place tohandle less important things for you, so let them.

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March Abridged