Supportive Accountability: Empowering Success | One of the subjects that many of you have asked to talk about is that of Supportive Accountability. How do we use accountability not as a hammer but as a way of supporting people's success?

Everyone seemed to agree that Alex Gournares' presentation on AI was great...even if mind blowing. This month we think it will be valuable to talk about how we are going to put some of the learnings from Alex into action

Exciting News: Special Guest Alex Gounares on AI Advancements and Organizational Implications | We are very excited to be hosting a special guest, who is an expert on AI. Alex Gounares is a friend of Gene Boes, one of our members and will be joining us at 10 am (EDT) to give us all a brief on how AI is advancing and what the implications are for anyone leading an organization.

Leadership Evolution: From Task-Driven to Growth-Centric Succession Planning | Creating a culture of personal growth where everyone from frontline leaders all the way up to the CEO see their primary job as developing their people not only nurtures effective succession, it also makes for a more effective organization where employees appreciate the commitment to their growth and career success

Talk about the ultimate act of Leadership! Independence Day is an absolute miracle if you really stop and think about it. The founding fathers of the United States, the greatest nation on earth, summoned the courage to declare independence from the king of Britain so that they could create a wholly different future by creating an independent nation, build on freedom; something the world had never seen before. God bless them!

Embracing Artificial Intelligence: Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities. This month we're taking a decidedly different direction for our interchange session. We're going to delve into the question of artificial intelligence and the importance of beginning to experiment and adopt it right away….

The subject for next week's interchange session is one that is near and dear to our hearts: Creating a Coaching Culture.

April’s session of the interchange is go back to the subject discussed in both January and February

This is the Overview of our book!  It lays out a different way of looking at Engagement that we think (hope) you will find thought provoking and useful.  It is only 3 pages, so a quick read.

As an extension of the discussion we began last month about engagement and energy, the topic of this month is a deeper dive into the subject.  It is an opportunity to or explore your own personal habits and how you're doing at producing energy. Attached is a new tool we've created: The Engaged Life Inventory. This is a beta version of what we will put online shortly.

Your primary job as a CEO is to engage with your team, to ensure every employee is personally committed to serving their customers. This defines engagement. Having people on your team who lack that commitment is like a professional football team with players that don’t like football…but hang around for the paycheck.

In our last Interchange session, we asked what future subjects you'd be interested in and we got six separate answers; five of which were all about developing future leaders and developing staff. So that's the subject we're going to discuss this month.

Below are two articles; both from Harvard Business Review, that outlines sort of the Ying and the Yang of a dilemma of management. One about micromanaging, and the other about under managing. You'll see that I have included HBR's executive summary with my bold italics added for emphasis.

This month we want to continue in that vein, thinking about your workforce issues. How do you retain and keep your staff healthy? How do you lead through all the burnout that people are feeling? This will serve as a good follow up conversation to the article on our blog

Below is a link to a really interesting article from McKinsey on attracting people to work in your organization.  In it they treat the attraction of employees like a private sector company who are designing a marketing and sales strategy to attract customer.  This, is a very productive, and I think necessary, point of view for the foreseeable future. 

Key performance indicators, when not linked to the organizations purpose, can lead to perverse incentives and unintended consequences as a result of people not understanding the real purpose behind the measures or working to manipulate the specific measurements at the expense of the actual quality or value of their work. In other words, Leadership must precede Management.

The subject of our July Session is Coaching.  More specifically, transformational coaching.  We will used the Elevate System Workbook that you completed previously as both: an article to prepare for the session and as a coaching tool during the session. Please read, for comprehension, the material in your Elevate System Workbook.

There are many definitions of leadership. One that we've used in the past is “generating a view of the future that others see as their future”. This points us to the fact that leaders need to generate some future state that others see as valuable and attractive.