Key Elements of Leadership, Coaching, and Culture DevelopmentCondensing four decades of lessons learned into a 45 minute webcast is proving to be an invigorating challenge. A few months ago I stepped back for a long and broad look at hundreds of keynotes, workshops, and retreats we’ve delivered across a full range of industries and organizations in many countries. This led to a complete overhaul and update of the Custom Keynotes & Workshops and Leadership Team Retreats sections of our website.

Now I am finalizing my presentation for our Essential Building Blocks for Leadership, Coaching, and Culture Development Webinar on January 26. The webinar is structured around three core elements emerging from our work in leadership, coaching, and culture development:

From Inspiration to Application: Essential Building Blocks

Foundational frameworks, models, and definitions provide a strong base for development work. These are proving to be especially useful:

  • Leadership is an action, not a position. We need strong leadership behaviors at all levels.
  • Lead, follow, or wallow: critical choices to change or be changed
  • High-performance teams balance the discipline of systems, processes, and technology management on a base of effective people leadership.
  • Three concentric rings of customer service build from the central requirements/standards of core services, to satisfying service support expectations, to delighting customers with enhanced service levels.

Elevating Leadership and Coaching Strengths

Research shows that helping leaders build strengths is up to 3 times more effective than focusing on weaknesses or closing skill gaps. We’ve believed that for years but lacked an evidence-based methodology to map out exactly how to leverage leadership strengths. Using The Extraordinary Leader Development System over the past three years we’ve learned a powerful new approach that challenges conventional wisdom.

Many coaching models we’ve used or developed prior to working with Zenger Folkman are based on sports coaching approaches and designed to provide training, give advice, mentor, solve problems, and set action plans. A core difference of The Extraordinary Coach approach is moving leaders from telling, directing, and giving advice to asking non-leading and open-ended questions that guide the conversation so both coach and coachee learn, arrive at a better solution, and ultimately the coachee owns the outcome.

Strengthening People and Processes through Culture Development

We’ve found this simple formula is key to lasting and effective leadership and organization development; B = P x C. That is, Behavior is a factor of Personal development multiplied by the organization’s Culture. Core models and approaches that have proven most useful are:

  • Compass model: Six Core Components for a Peak Performance Culture
  • Five Steps to Our Desired Culture
  • The Five Stage Commitment Continuum
  • Bringing Alive Vision, Core Values, and Purpose/Mission

I’ll give a fast-paced 45 minute overview of these three core elements followed by 15 minutes of questions and discussion. If you’re a senior HR, OD, L & D professional or senior operating executive concerned about these vital development issues click here for more information and registration.