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Leadership Resilience

Crucial Characteristic In Today’s Complex Marketplace.

I was in correspondence with a C-Suite Executive last week. This is a leader who I hold in high regard for his breadth of knowledge and vast experience running a multinational organization recognized as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies.

We were discussing leadership challenges. One in particular incorporated a significant legal component. Through the discussion, we spoke of our different experiences, the importance of resilience and standing firm on our values.

He made a positive comment on my demonstrated level of resilience and it motivated me to share with you this topic today.

  • Are you a resilient leader?
  • What does resilience mean to you?
  • Do you acknowledge obstacles as they arise, seek clarity and input from different perspectives before dealing with the situation?
  • If you are under attack or challenged by individuals, are you able to remain emotionally composed?
  • Are you able to shift an obstacle into a possibility for change?

Leadership resilience is not something that is normally corporately prioritized, however, is crucial to leadership success. Global thought-leaders on the topic acknowledge that leaders and organizations need to be more agile and adaptive than ever before. In order to be successful, it is imperative to rebound after a setback.

A group of middle managers recently asked me how they could develop their professional resilience.

They did not quite understand how professional resilience could be nurtured and were really struggling with why it was an important attribute for success. I explained that in my experience, resilient leaders are often referred to as “tough”. However, they are more often than not, focused, engaged, have a strong value base and exceptional work ethic. When they encounter obstacles, they show resilience and grit in moving forward in a purposeful way.

They are transparent, seek input and clarification with the goal of solving the problem. Resilient leaders understand and appreciate that seeking and hearing different perspectives assists them in making informed decisions. The process that a resilient leader goes through when faced with a challenge is one that can be broken down and learned.

Individuals who lead by title alone, perceived personal authority or superiority by the level of degrees they hold, do not win in the long term. They deplete others’ confidence in their leadership ability, lose power and ultimately respect.

Sound resilience advice from the seasoned, C-Suite leader:  “Adversity is a Wonderful Gift”.

I embrace the adverse leadership situations I have been in over the last 25 years and encourage you to do the same. The most challenging professional situations that I have dealt with are those that involve opposing values. Working with others who have polar opposite values, and/or those that did not align with the corporate mission were exceptionally difficult.

I am proud to be a resilient leader. I have continuously reflected, improved and built upon my leadership style. I know what works and most importantly, what doesn’t work.  Leadership development is a journey. Effective leadership requires a lifelong commitment to continual practice and progress.

Supporting and guiding leaders in their challenges, development, growth, and transformation, is something that I am very passionate about. On July 1, 2018, I am launching the LEADERS CIRCLE membership for experienced leaders who want to revitalize their leadership style, boost personal performance and attain productivity levels for themselves and their team that they have not had in the past.

Are you interested in developing your resilience and leadership capabilities?

I am interested!
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One Step At A Time

Are you struggling to stay on task?

Do you feel so overwhelmed, that it is difficult to stay focused or be productive?

Is your desk a mirror image of how you feel your life is at the moment – cluttered and disorganized?

Do you feel like every day is a continuous stream of meetings, emails, text messages, voicemails, calls, and your ‘real’ workday starts at 5:30pm?

Is your family or social life suffering as you have become unreliable and not present even when you do turn up to an event?

We all feel this way at some time in our professional career, let’s work together to get back on track. To accomplish more, you simply have to remember to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Think back on a time when you attained extraordinary results, remember being in the zone? Remember your level of concentration and how you felt when you had attained those results? Don’t you love that energy, focus and flow?  Being in the zone normally occurs when you are fully immersed in one task that is a step towards a defined, meaningful goal. Let’s get you back to that extraordinary feeling on a daily basis.

One of my favorite books, The One Thing – the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan, is a refreshing take on how to get back to the basics. Define what your most important goal is, break it down into task chunks and work on one thing at a time until you get it done. Your productivity and results will exponentially improve by sticking to this one rule. Keller’s simple philosophy is to concentrate on one thing at a time, and ask yourself “What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” Keller’s advice works on any goal that you are working towards.

When I recommend to clients to work in focused time blocks on their most important daily task that will bring the most return, I generally receive a lot of push-back. I am often told that it is simply not possible and they could not afford to do so. I am told in great detail the amount they have to get done in a day.

The items covered are normally the same in conversations and include constant meeting attendance, emails and phone calls, staffing issues, project milestone priorities and other demands that they feel they have to attend to in a day.

My challenge is then to test this method with them, 100% of the time I have been able to change their way of thinking and improve their productivity and increase desired results. We dissect their day, and it becomes apparent by concentrating in block-periods of time, meaning doing only the #1 thing on their schedule for a given time period, they attain better results faster.

Running on the hamster wheel, doing multiple tasks (but none very well) comes with unintended consequences like missed project deadlines, increased levels of stress, diminished relationships and physical health. This type of ‘busyness’ does not get you the results you want in the long-term.

Simply concentrate on one thing at a time, do it well, then block off associated focused time to work on the next task essential to attain your goal. When possible, try to block your day in two ways, morning  for #1 identified task and afternoon  for managerial or administrative responsibilities meaning everything else. I appreciate that this is a very challenging ask, and for some simply not possible. However, when you schedule your week in this way, and compare your result achievement to your previous hamster-wheel schedule you will be pleasantly surprised.

Of the numerous quotes that Keller used in his book, two in particular really struck a chord with me:

“The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.” – Bob Hawke, Australian Prime Minister 1983-1991

and

“Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.” – Steve Uzzell, Photographer, Speaker and Author

In closing, I would like to leave you with three pointers to increase your productivity and attain greater results:

  1. Set stretch goals – think big and break it down into actionable, smaller, sequential tasks. Work on the tasks in order, during focused time blocks until they are finished. You will attain your results faster and more efficiently. Remember, always start with doing your most important thing first.
  2. Stop multitasking and focusing on how busy you are! Evaluate your mindset, make the positive shift to focused attention. Concentrate on the #1 thing that you really need to concentrate on, finish it, and then move forward.
  3. Practice saying ‘no’ to non-important items and commitments. Let someone else do it, delegate or give someone else the opportunity to step up and take it on. And recognize, some things simply aren’t worth doing.

If you would like to download the associated worksheet for this blog post, please click on the button below.

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To schedule a free 30-minute strategy session with Jenny  to work on your stretch goals for 2018, or learn more about High-Performance Coaching, please click on the button below.

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Time IS on your side! Own your schedule; don’t let it own you!

Do you start your day reaching for your phone from bed and scrolling through emails before your feet hit the ground? So many of us do! Resist, don’t let your email hijack your day before it even starts.

At one stage in my career, I allowed my email to run my life. Colleagues, accustomed to receiving responses from me between 5:00-7am and 11pm-1: 30 am, viewed me as an effective, firefighter. Too bad I wasn’t a firefighter! I have worked in environments where senior management established email response as a competitive sport — volley, volley, volley — the one who lets the ball drop, or fails to respond immediately, loses.   My email performance, determined by my superiors based upon availability and response time was not good enough; the expectation  of response time was immediate  -24/7. I still clearly recall arriving to the office at 7am for a 7:30am meeting, and my colleague asking in a condescending tone ‘Did you not read my email already? I sent it to you at 6:30am’.

If you want your team members to come to work energized and ready to perform – they need sleep. Avoid pursuing the game of volley by sending emails at all times of the night and simply schedule your responses to go at a reasonable time, just prior to start of regular business hours, the next day.

If you are responding to client emails at 2 am, and their requests are not urgent — which they are not unless you are emergency personnel — you are establishing a working relationship designed to deliver sub-optimal performance by limiting your sleep. You have to establish your reasonable working hours from the onset.

Leaders need to walk the talk and role-model best practices for productivity and performance. And the easiest way to start is by regaining your control over your email. I guarantee you, your productivity will increase substantially in one week by at least by 25 percent if you take control of your schedule by starting with email. Think of the additional time you will have to focus and concentrate on what you know are the most important actions for you, rather than what is most important to someone else’s agenda.

After your morning routine of getting ready for the day, resist looking at your email or social media feed for the first hour. You will get more out of your day if you are in action mode rather than reaction mode. By that I mean, think and strategize first on what projects you are working on of high gain (your top 20 percent that will give you the most professional and personal return on your time investment) and simply START.

By taking 50-minute, uninterrupted sprints on a prioritized task, you can make considerable traction and move forward quickly on attaining your goal. Use the next 50-minutes to think about people you have to connect with during the day in person, by phone or email. These connections again are the most important in moving you towards the completion of your top priorities. Thirdly, review any due responses (requests that you have delegated for completion) that have been pre-scheduled; you can email a check-in if what you need is not in your inbox.

Research shows that short periods of uninterrupted concentration and clear focus lead to optimum performance.  I strongly encourage you to schedule at least three sprint runs of 40-50 minutes each to focus on your top three projects daily. The key is that you know your optimal focus time, schedule it and resist all distractions during this time.

Between lesser-priority projects or meetings, try to insert a ten minute “break time” to do something completely different. Stand and read, go and get a glass of water, do a brief stretch, walk around the block — step away from your computer and stand up; – use the ten minutes as a transition period for your brain and alleviate eye-strain, and it will help you remain energized and enable you to concentrate and focus more intently when you start again.

Email volleyball, marathon days of consecutive meeting after meeting, answering calls in the midst of meeting or walking to an elevator all sabotage your peak performance. Take back your time and you will advance your performance to the next level.

To schedule a free 30-minute coaching consultation with Jenny to work on your scheduling challenges, or learn more about 90-day High-Performance Coaching please click on the email below.

Schedule a Session
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Reflection Time: Imperative for Sustained High Performance

High-performers are conscious of all areas in their life from their professional performance to their health and fitness. By evaluating all areas, rather than solely concentrating on the daily grind, life is simply more satisfying and performance is higher over the long run. I encourage you to evaluate yourself on a weekly basis in the following categories on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest level of satisfaction):

  • Personal productivity and performance
  • Leadership impact
  • Overall work satisfaction
  • Physical health and fitness
  • Relationships, and
  • Peace of mind and emotional stability

This exercise takes less than five minutes, identifies your gaps whereby you could improve, and enables you to think about what changes you could make to raise the bar. The consistent, weekly check-in keeps you on track to attain your overriding personal and professional goals.

Your personal rankings will provide you with a baseline and help you define an area of concentration that you would like to improve for the upcoming week.  This is not a one-off exercise, it is something that you need to schedule as a quick overview on a weekly basis and take action to optimize categories before they deteriorate. This will help you maintain focus and a high-performance mindset.

If you are not feeling that your personal productivity and performance is where it should be, then it is time to review your habits and schedule. Review your annual plan, quarterly goals, weekly tasks list and evaluate what needs to shift, be updated or simply deleted as it is not working. Be flexible and kind to yourself. Look at the facts around your performance and productivity deficits and implement realistic changes that can help you move to a higher level. High-performance maintenance and longevity requires thought, planning and flexibility in that you have to be prepared to change practices if they are not working. And last, but most importantly, it requires commitment to your goals and to yourself, because you are worth it.

During certain periods in our professional lives, it may feel that work requires near 100% of our attention and we tend to forget or diminish the importance of other areas. Fitness and health are areas that, personally, I must admit I did not prioritize for years until I received a huge wake-up call — a near heart-attack, at work, in front of my staff.

I thought there was plenty of time in the future to concentrate on my health and fitness, my focus was solely on my career and raising my two children. This wake-up call forced me to realize the importance of health — without it, I have no professional career and am unable to care for my children. Suddenly this goal ascended the list to a top priority. Fitness is essential to high-performance, by improving your energy levels, improving your lifestyle and health, ensuring simple measures like increased fluid (water — not coffee or wine!) intake, daily exercise and sleep, you will have significantly more energy every day. Even if you are the CEO of the company, you can find 30 minutes in your day to dedicate to your own fitness and health. Again, you are worth it!

How many individuals do you know who have been through a divorce? Suffered a health scare? Have rocky relationships with their children or family members? Are seen as combative at work or not easy to get along with?  And how many have lost passion for innovation and creativity?

Every area in your life can be improved with prioritization, attention and action; all can be turned around with focus and motivation to do so. The consistency of attention in each of the categories of personal productivity and performance, leadership impact, overall work satisfaction, physical health and fitness, relationships, and peace of mind and emotional stability is essential to maintaining your high-performance.

To schedule a free 30-minute coaching consultation to discuss your baselines with Jenny, or learn more about 90-day High-Performance Coaching  packages available, please click on the button below.

 

Schedule a Session
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6 Characteristics of High-Performers

High-performing leaders inspire. Can you name/list a few? Think big like…Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, Hillary Clinton, Romeo Dallaire, Oprah Winfrey, Chris Hatfield, Penny Wong…

Think of at least three high-performing leaders that you have come across in your professional career. List the top-of-mind characteristics that they demonstrated, that impressed and inspired you.

From the characteristics that you listed were any of the following characteristics of high performers also demonstrated?

  1. Switched on – wired and ready to ‘GO’: High-performers seek the next challenge with energy and are on top of current and new developments in their field, even anticipating what may come next. They generate and demonstrate positivity, and exude great enthusiasm and excitement.
  2. Open and interested: High performers encourage and embrace new ideas from others. They passionately learn how work could be done more effectively and efficiently. And they are recognized for their stakeholder — both staff and customer — focus. They care about others, take the time to understand issues, and demonstrate kindness in their approach.
  3. Honest and capable: High-performing leaders gain the trust of their colleagues through honesty and transparency; are competent and knowledgeable, these experts excel in their fields.
  4. Confident: High performers exude confidence. However, they are not egocentric (there is a huge difference!); they are deserving of their success and express humbleness and a continual desire to improve and learn.
  5. Perseverance: High performers demonstrate patience and perseverance in achieving a goal, no matter what obstacles are faced. They continue to push forward, focus and show a trajectory of success. Perseverance and tact, enable high performers to take on the relationship of role model and mentor.
  6. Gratitude: High performers recognize and express gratitude. They show appreciation and thanks for effort, accomplishments, success and goal achievement.

Now think of leaders that you crossed paths with in the last 12 months that did not demonstrate or possess the characteristics of a high performer – how did they fare? Who would you prefer to be?

To download the associated worksheet for this blog post, please click on the button below.

Download Worksheet

To schedule a free 30-minute strategy session with Jenny to discuss strategies for improving your high-performance characteristics,  or learn more about 90-day High-Performance Coaching packages available, please click on the button below.

Schedule a Session

 

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