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Take less than 10 mins to watch this hugely insightful video that could help you radically change your culture.

Most business leaders want to change/improve their culture, but they don’t know how. The simple message in this video tells us to stop ordering, instead give control to your staff and create great leaders.

Our job as leaders and managers is to coach others to be great leaders and managers. This is the only way we will move ‘one rung up the ladder’ (as I call it). Imagine everyone in your business was to move one rung up the ladder? you as the business leader could then (to use what is now a cliche) start to work ‘ON’ your business more than ‘IN’ your business. You can begin to get your business working for you as opposed to you working for your business. Surely this is your goal!

Key messages in this video:

* Stop Ordering, Give Control – Create Leaders
* It’s all about Intent. Build Physiological Ownership
* The Two Key Pillars are Competence & Organisational Clarity
* Build a business where people are Thinking, Active, Passionate, Creative, Proactive and Taking Initiative
* Move authority to where the Information is
* It starts with YOU. It’s not easy but it is worth it!

I gave a workshop to NUIG Executive MBA’ers last week called Powerful Conversations.

Obviously I did some research in advance which included an article from Harvard Business Review called ‘Leadership Is A Conversation‘ by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind. Here are a few of the nuggets from the article:

What Groysberg and Slind didn’t emphasise is what I believe to be the KEY to powerful conversations – A Powerful Question.

So what makes a question powerful?

How we word the question is critical. Here’s a hierarchy of the first word you might use:

How could we have the conversation we are not having?

What might DNA look like in 3D format?

What could a good school also be?

How might our staff be enthusiastically engaged in our strategic programmes?

How do we have better conversations?

Intimacy, Interactivity, Inclusion, and Intentionality + a Powerful Question
= Powerful Conversations

What Powerful Conversation do you need to have, and what’s your question?

Contact me if you need some help.

Many of us are taking our holidays around now. It’s always an ongoing debate as to whether you should forget about work or not. It might be a time while lying on the beach or taking a long walk to take some time to reflect on yourself as a leader. If that tickles your fancy then here’s a few questions that might be useful.

1. How would I rate my own leadership out of 10?
2. Where will I be a year from now on this scale?
3. Strategically what are the three things I could do to close the gap?
4. What’s my next action?

Jot these questions and answers down on a piece of paper. Take a photo with your phone. Put that next action in your diary, and forget about it. Kick back on your sun lounge or enjoy the rest of your walk, enjoy your family and be thrilled that you have a reflected on the most important asset in your business and now have a strategic vision, focus for development and a next action. Sounds worthy of a celebratory drink. Why not buy a round!

Take 10 mins and no more (at least for this draft) to work out your business purpose. A critical step in developing CLARITY on your winning business strategy for a successful and sustainable business that matters. Feel free to send me your first draft for feedback? Click on image and print if this helps.

So you want to be a better leader. At leading what? where? when? and why? These are the questions I started asking clients when I established the People Development Co. nine years ago. I quickly realised that in order to develop leaders and managers they needed a roadmap defining why they were in business (Purpose), where they were going (Vision), what principles would guide them (Values), etc. essentially a strategic roadmap. This roadmap would be a reference for the business but also for me and my client for their leadership development.

My approach with SMEs is to develop the leadership and management culture through the execution of the business strategy. The win win here is that the business gets the focus it needs and the management team are consciously developing their capability in the process. The end goal for me is for the business to prosper and for the people to develop the capability to continue developing the business without support from people like me.

Consider the following example: George is struggling in his business. It seems to have outgrown him. It’s not the business he started five years ago where he was in control of everything. Now he has a management team of five. Good people, but. His sales & marketing manager (Mark) doesn’t give the attention to detail that George did when he looked after sales. The financial controller (Mary) doesn’t have the commercial acumen George needs to support him on critical commercial decisions. “She doesn’t seem to show much interest in developing this skill either” according to George, “I just can’t understand it” he says.

And so the story goes on, we could tell similar tales about Una who manages operations and Derek and Gavin who manage procurement and design respectively.

So what’s the problem George? “well there are many problems, we don’t sing off the same song sheet for one, communication within the team and the wider business is bad, teamwork is poor to say the least, AND, the business is facing serious challenges that I don’t think some of the team appreciate the severity of”. “And what’s more, I’m stressed to the nines”.

-> -> Fast forward eight weeks -> ->

George decides to book himself and his family a weekend away in a really nice hotel in Galway on the west coast of Ireland! “George, we can’t afford this” says his wife Beatrice. “Yes we can” says George. ”The team and I have worked really well over the past two months. We’ve learnt more about our business over the past two months than we have in the past three years.

We’ve now have a really clear purpose; we know why we need to continue to work so hard, we are aligned on the vision for the next three years. We have a really exciting strategy to get there that will leave the competition in awe. We’ve all agreed a set of values that will align our behaviours and way of doing things. Plus, we have a set of clear tangible goals that can be measured so that we know what progress we’ll be making. It’s also clear who is responsible and accountable for what. My business coach calls this CLARITY for the business. I now also have CLARITY for my leadership as I know what I need to do and be as leader to make all this happen. The team also has clarity both individually (like me) but also as a team in terms of what we need to do and be in order to make this plan a reality”. “Beatrice, for the first time in a long time I have peace of mind going away for a weekend with you and the kids knowing that I’m on top of my business and not the other way around”.

As you can see George sounds upbeat. He hadn’t been away with the family like this for three years since he celebrated winning a major contract with a global customer. The sad reality is that he only realised a fraction of the value he could have with that customer, mainly because he and his team didn’t have the type of CLARITY described above.

These days we are all facing a lot of noise, there is so much information coming at us, a lot of complexity. We need CLARITY for ourselves as business owners/leaders, for our business and for our teams that are managing the business.

This is what I do. Help develop CLARITY for YOU, Your Business and Your Team. Call me to discuss how I can help you get peace of mind knowing you’re on top of your business….

Three FREE Strategic Health Checks This Month Only.

The Strategy Health Check involves a review of the direction you are currently taking with respect to market conditions prevailing, competitors, and customer needs. We assess your capability in terms of talent, resources, finances, facilities, etc and how these measure up to the needs of your business and what you want to achieve.

Request your FREE Health Check now. Best three requests as to why you need a Health Check will win.