The continued increase in registrations for my blog posting notifications and the steady growth in complimentary subscriptions to The Leader Letter (a monthly compilation of my biweekly blogs) leads me to believe that many readers feel they are getting more than they’re paying for from my writing.

Because I am a “leadership nerd,” I quite enjoy the labor of love in researching and writing material (most of the time!) that we freely give away to whoever is interested in reading it. I’ve written about 60,000 words a year for the past seven years. 60,000 words is slightly longer than each of my last four books. So I’ve given away a book a year for the last seven years. If you’re a regular blog or The Leader Letter reader, you’ve read a book a year in weekly installments or monthly chapters.

Marketing Alert– today’s blog post is one of the rare advertising pieces we occasionally run to help pay the bills and keep me well fed enough to keep providing you with what I hope you find is decent quality personal, team, and organization development material week, month, and year in and out without any charge. This marketing post is not quite as discreet as Google’s Pay-per-Click revenue model, but our volume of readers and click-through revenues aren’t quite in their league either!

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Research consistently shows that 70% of efforts to improve customer service, quality, safety, productivity, employee engagement, restructure, or introduce new technologies fail. Leadership and organization culture are the critical X factors. “Soft” leadership and culture boosts or blocks strategy, structure, and change initiatives.

High performing organizations pull together the intangible leadership issues that define their unique character and rally people around a deeper sense of purpose. These powerful feelings are made tangible through the strong implementation of management processes and systems that translate ideals into action. It’s recognizing that vision without an action plan is just a dream. Action without a vision is drudgery.

The Conference Board of Canada has retained me to deliver a one hour webinar on Leadership and Culture Development for Peak Performance on December 16 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (UTC-05:00). I will cover:

“Soft” Leadership and Culture Produce Hard Results
We’ll start with defining leadership and culture and their powerful impact on team and organizational performance.

Culture Change Failure Factors
Unconscious underlying beliefs undermine many culture change and leadership development efforts. These beliefs often create Leadership Lip Service as management teams try “changing them without changing us.”

The Peak Performance Balance: Managing Things and Leading People
Highly successful cultures balance the discipline of systems, processes, and technology management on a base of effective people leadership. Periodic balance checks resets the focus to the “soft skills” that produce hard results.

Bolt-on Programs versus Built-in Process
To avoid the high failure rate, leadership and culture change efforts must move from partial and piecemeal plans and programs to integration and alignment up, down, and across the organization. This includes reducing priority overload and building stronger discipline with consistent trimming and pruning.

Five Key Steps to a High-Performance Culture
It all starts with the critical issue of aligning executive, manager, and supervisor leadership behaviors with management and operational processes and systems.

Bringing Alive Vision, Core Values, and Purpose/Mission
Most organizations have vision, values, or mission statements – but with a high “snicker factor.” These vision, core values, and purpose/missions must be actively lived to focus and energize leadership and culture development.

Leadership is an Action, Not a Position
Peak performing organizations build strong leadership behaviors at all levels. Constant change is the fuel for continuous personal, team, and organization improvement.

Getting (Re) Started
Key steps to beginning or re-energizing your leadership and culture development efforts.

My associates and I have spent decades helping thousands of managers in hundreds of organizations work at boosting leadership skills and culture development. Some have been incredibly successful. Other efforts have flamed out and gone nowhere. For this fast-paced hour I’ll jam as much of that experience as I can into an executive summary of pitfalls to avoid and best practices to learn from.

I also provide customized in-house webinars for Clients. CLICK HERE for an overview of topics I draw from in customizing webinars or on-site workshops. Send me an e-mail at Jim.Clemmer@Clemmergroup.com if you’d like to explore how I might put something together for your organization – and keep The CLEMMER Group in business for many more years to come!