The most important skill you will ever develop as a leader is the ability to elicit empowering emotional states in other people, and then link those states to the behaviours you wish them to engage in. You do that; you will become a force to be reckoned with.

After ten years of special operations and working with some of the highest performing people [in their field] in the world, I am convinced of one thing ….. you will never reach your potential in this regard unless you first have mastery over your own thinking and emotional states; no way. Why? Because self mastery precedes mastery of others; the ability to consciously direct your own focus and alter and shift your own emotional states is the foundation for consciously and consistently achieve the same with others.

How do you actually achieve that?

Click here to read more.

Did you read the March 2010, Australian Financial Review’s Boss Magazine which focused on REINVENTING LEADERSHIP ?  The magazine published an amazing article which was an excerpt of the speech Don Argus delivered at a Leadership Victoria dinner in December 2009.

His key comments around leadership were these:

“In my experience, success goes to those enterprises whose leaders mobilize their people and unleash their competence, creativity and commitment.”

“Those people who are to expand their enterprises were the ones who understood human nature and how to tap the best in people – they understood that the bottom line is ultimately the result of human endeavour.”

“The skill to make things happen comes directly from blending two sides of the leader’s personality: the tough, competitive side that demands winning performance and loves to win; and the softer, compassionate side that is caring and understanding of others.”

In reference to Marius Kloppers, the CEO of BHP BIlliton, he made the following statement:

“Marius quickly realised many organisations smother the potential of their employees under layer upon layer of control and bureaucracy. As a result, their human assets are painfully underused ….

What is really being underused is what might be called “peoples’ discretionary effort”, that is, performance above and beyond the expected minimum. It is their initiative, creativity, motivation and loyalty. This discretionary effort is the part of a person’s performance that is liberated or shutdown by the way their leaders treat them and the quality of their work environment.”

So what is the real message we should take away from this?

Exceptional leadership education, relevant to the needs of the modern business world, must focus on the behavioural elements of an organisation.  It must educate business leaders in new and more effective ways to:

1. Unleash competence, not manage behaviour – soft skills are critical in this pursuit;
2. Enhance individual performance, at home and work, as a foundation to realising bottom line potential – we must acknowledge the inter-dependence between employees personal and professional lives; and
3. Simplify the way leaders execute their business plans and manage their organisations.

Are you ready to step up and make the shift ?

Here’s something that might absolutely astound you … it has been predicted that there will be a leadership shortage in the very near future. A study by Egon Zehnder International predicts a 36 percent shortfall in the number of managers ready for leadership roles by 2015.

Teleo Research also found that the most successful leadership development programs (a) recognised the type of leadership style needed for a company’s culture and (b) aligned leadership development with corporate strategy.

Its amazing that these concepts are now emerging quite strongly in the corporate world, because at Soarent Vision, we have been working on addressing this for almost a decade now. Through Soarent Vision’s Academy of Business Leadership the shift to more influential and persuasive leadership can be addressed as this is the style of leadership the shifting demographics of business is demanding today.

The only question that remains is are we ready to fill the void?

As a shareholder, I sit here and shake my head as one of the companies in my share portfolio informs the investment community of their new cost cutting initiative. Cost cutting is a genuine strategy for making the numbers in a company, there’s no doubts about that. But so many companies destroy themselves in the long run by focusing entirely on costs, and never recognising the real problem that exists within the organisation.

Cost cutting in business can be likened to liposuction in the health industry.

My extremely overweight friend Mark wants to lose about 20 kilograms as fast as he can. So he follows the advice of his doctor and undergoes liposuction treatment. Does he lose weight, you bet he does, and faster than anything else he’s ever tried.

The same thing occurs in business. Cost cutting rapidly removes the fat and the numbers shift closer to the desired outcome. Shareholders are happy, CEO is happy, but the employees hate every moment of it.

Here’s the problem.

Mark loses his weight and gets the goal, but he never changed his thinking, beliefs or the behaviours that created the problem in the first place. Gradually he goes back to his old weight and wonders why he can’t maintain it.

In the business scenario, the thinking that created the financial problems in the first place remain.

If the thinking and paradigm behind the problem does not change, there is no way you can create a different situation and sustain it over the long term.

On top of that the process is usually so painful, employees hate it and they quickly develop a strong negative association with company wide ‘improvement initiatives’. Now change becomes a challenge because of the perceptions that permeate the organisation.

We tried business improvement but it failed!

I’ve had many business leader’s tell me they tried business improvement as a proactive initiative to get the business on track but it didn’t work or it didn’t produce the numbers they expected.

My observation has been that most organisations today are rolling out initiatives such as Lean and Six Sigma with a 1980s mentality, and making the same mistakes that killed TQM. Most try to reinvent the wheel, few understand how to integrate it into an operating system of work, few get it right and they erroneously blame the initiative or the methodology as the cause.

This is exactly what the company I have invested in has done, so I know it’s time to sell my shares and get out for they will never be remarkable in any sustainable way.

Here’s the situation we want for a company to be truly remarkable.

1. All employees are engaged to a level of willing participation in cost minimisation – they recognise the value in hitting the numbers for all stakeholders

2. Employees are totally motivated to constantly improve themselves and their work, not just go to work and get through the day

3. Change is positive, necessary, and something everybody can contribute to – employees do it to themselves, it does not get done to them (there is a big difference)

4. Time is expanded, not compressed, and everybody works at the most appropriate level in the organisation

5. Less bureaucracy, greater trust, higher levels of accountability and lower levels of decision making

To standout in business today as a leader, you must learn more about these topics, particularly in regards to the shifts in paradigms necessary to thrive in business today.

Until the next time we catch up, take care, engage your people fully, and enjoy life to the fullest. I’m off to find a company that is truly remarkable to buy shares in.

George Lee Sye

One of the greatest personal challenges for us as leaders today is to change the way we think.

George Lee Sye

Here’s the reality. If we are going to move our lives and our companies to the next level, obviously we can only do it through a change in the way we see the world; in other words our paradigms. The reason it can be so difficult to do is because our paradigms are simply mental patterns that run at an unconscious level. And the problem with that is we will argue black and blue that the way we think is RIGHT because we simply do not know what we don’t know.

Thinking About Thinking

Traditional leadership models tend towards organisation structures or personal characteristics or leader behaviours. While they may fill the pages of management text to the point of overflow and line the corridors of corporations intent on growth, models don’t get results. Models create a framework for having meaningful discussion and help embed an idea in visual form in one’s mind. However, when it comes to the crunch you can teach as many models as you want but results may never eventuate. So let’s forget about models for a bit and think about thinking.

Flexibility in Leader Thinking

Effective leaders today must have flexibility in the way they think, flexibility in their paradigm or the framework through which they view the world in different contexts. For example, a leader can’t be so fixed on cost that cost becomes the only paradigm for decision making. When a consultant comes to them and offers to do work for say $50,000 per week, the response should not be “That’s way too much, what’s your best price.” That leader must also be able to shift to a value paradigm when needed and in this case a more appropriate response might be “What return will you deliver to me for that outlay?” If that consultant returns a bottom line impact of $70,000 per week, it is a clear value adding investment. The only thing that would have prevented them from making that investment was a cost mentality.

With the cost paradigm, as with all others, it was learnt, quite correctly I might add, in a specific context (e.g. when budgeting, when the economic situation was tight, or purchasing something that doesn’t generate revenue etc). However, it is inadvertently utilised in other situations some of which are not appropriate (e.g. when undertaking revenue generating purchases).

I am convinced that the most common shifts in thinking [with respect to specific contexts leaders operate within] leaders must be able to engage in consciously include these.

Making the shift when relevant between …

• Cost (how much you pay) and Value (what it returns to you)
• Behaviour Control (you controlling them) and Employee Release (letting them explore their own talent and potential)
• Authority (they do it because you are the boss) and Influence (they do it willingly)
• Answers (content knowledge) and Questions (extracting answers)
• Actions (what to do) and Results (what to produce as an outcome)
• Fixing (in reaction) and Improving (before things break)
• Solutions (the how to improve now) and Scenarios (what we might have to improve for)

Flexibility of Time Span

Not only is flexibility a necessity from a paradigm perspective, it’s vital that leaders understand the shifts they must make from a time span perspective.

One of the most significant barriers in business thinking can be observed in the meetings held at various levels in the company. ‘Replication of Time Span’ is so common I now expect to see it when I visit a company. Permit me to give you an example of what I mean. The business leadership team meets and their discussion is focused on what happened last week and what has to happen in the coming week. The content is regurgitated at the department level meeting – last week and next week is the focus of discussion. And so on ……. each level of meeting replicating the span of time that dominated the previous conversation.

I know it doesn’t make sense, but this is practiced widely.

The strategy of ‘cascading objectives downward’ into a company is understood in principle, but the mental inflexibility embedded through this type of time span replication limits the ability to actually make the strategy come to life.

Time Spans of Relevance for Leaders in Business Today …

• 1 to 5 year horizon (the big picture about where you would like to be in the future)
• 1 year (the specific business objectives you have to hit to make the numbers)
• Quarterly (the milestones you must achieve in order to move closer to the 1 year objectives)
• Weekly (the results you must get in order to move closer to the quarterly milestones)
• Daily (right down to the specific activities that must be undertaken to get the specified weekly results)

Different levels of leadership must not only think at different levels of detail, they must also have the mental dexterity to shift focus to different time spans relevant to their level in the organisation. But ….. how many business leaders would be comfortable with only talking about progress towards some milestone a quarter out, and not worrying about what’s happening next week? Only those who are able to trust AND hold people accountable for results.

I hope I have stimulated your thinking with this topic. I realise that I probably raised more questions than answers with this, so if you would like to know more, why not attend one of my 3-hour Changing Paradigms of Leadership events in Australia and New Zealand.

I’d love to share more of this topic with you. Until next time, take care.

George Lee Sye

George Lee Sye

You may or may not be aware of this – more has been discovered in the last 10 years about performance and human achievement psychology than in the previous 100 years.

You may or may not be aware of this – more has been discovered in the last 10 years about performance and human achievement psychology than in the previous 100 years.

Albert Einstein, Milton Erickson, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were way before their time. They paved a way for us to explore this intriguing topic. They knew something that few realised at the time – most of what happens in our life is driven by our UNCONSCIOUS MINDS.

Who’s driving your car most of the time?

It’s a fact that more than 95 percent of the ‘neural’ activity in your brain is controlled by the unconscious component of your mind. Yep, you got it … that really means LESS than 5 percent is controlled by the conscious mind.  I’m serious!

You don’t have to think about breathing, balancing yourself while walking, moving all of the muscles required to clean your teeth or catch a ball in the air. You don’t even have to think about driving the car. ‘Mmmmm, I don’t remember driving that last 5 kilometres … ooops, my conscious mind must have been elsewhere.’

THINK ABOUT IT – when the unconscious mind does it’s job, the conscious mind is left to focus on important issues at hand at any given moment; issues such as a conversation, typing a sentence, playing a piece of music, answering the phone or coming up with some plan or course of action. But …. this most amazing process can also cause problems for us.

Out of rapport with ourselves – is it possible?

The truth is we struggle to achieve our goals when our unconscious mind is NOT IN RAPPORT with our conscious mind. When you want something, but your beliefs are out of alignment with that, you get what you believe, not that which you consciously want. For example you might WANT to sink that putt on the golf course, but unconsciously you EXPECT to miss it. The expectation is usually met.

How does this related to business or business leadership?

The challenge for leaders today might be viewed in this way. There are so many negative influences in the western environment, the unconscious mind is being conditioned in a way that disempowers or limits most people. People are generally so busy and so focused on engaging in activities driven by demand and deadlines, they inadvertently condition an unconscious pattern of reaction. The result – proaction becomes difficult to do.

Think about this – when do most people do something about their health or their wealth? That’s right, when it’s broken. You’ve only got to look at health and wealth statistics to see that I’m right when I say most people have in many ways conditioned an unconscious pattern of reaction to the demands of work and daily life.

You as a leader are focused on driving improvement and creating growth in your company or part of the business, but your aspirations beyond some average result are proving difficult to achieve.

Why?

My experience is that the weakness of your organisation is the collective limitations of the people in it. Unless the unconscious limitations, or unconscious patterns of thinking of your staff are changed, your aspirations will never be in rapport with the psychology of the people who are there to help you bring those dreams to life.

So what do you do about it?

In one word – education. You have to find out what is taking place right now when it comes to performance enhancement. And if you pursue one course of learning in the next year, choose to LEARN MORE ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND, particularly how it behaves and how neural patterns are created and replaced. This information IS AVAILABLE to you, and it is the domain of the most remarkable leaders this century will produce.

Learn this and your effectiveness as a leader will be massively increased, of that I am certain!

Why not join me for a 3-hour session where we discuss this type of content in much more detail – you can view information about that event here.

Don’t have time to go to a course … hmmmm, it’s going to be very hard for you to keep up if that’s the case.

Here’s to your future success.

George Lee Sye

George Lee Sye

I guess all of you have been closely watching and feeling your way through the economic situation as 2010 unfolds.

There is no doubt in my mind that the ripple effects of the events of 2009 will test our abilities to succeed in business today and maintain the quality of life we expect to have. With the tightening of credit controls and slowing down of markets, the approach most companies will take is to slash costs within the business.  Is this a sound strategy? Of course it is because in the short term there is significant pressure on revenue and credit so the obvious approach is to work on the cost side of the financial equation.

Does that mean you should reduce the level of energy you give to the ‘business improvement’ strategy you have underway?

Let me answer this question in this way.

YES, you should drop your business improvement strategy if existing efforts are not producing results of an economic nature and you have no desire to continue doing business.

NO, you should not if you are going to continue doing business, regardless of whether or not your existing BI efforts are producing results.

Not Getting Results

Most companies I have researched over the past decade in Australia are not getting the results they want with their BI strategies. They can significantly alter that outcome if they are prepared to rapidly change how they think and what they are doing. However, my experience is that the required change won’t take place until some point of desperation is reached. I guess those times are coming for many. I believe many leaders are now realizing that company profitability has allowed inadequate BI strategies to exist in their company.

The question we must ask ourselves today is are we prepared to do something different, are we prepared to challenge our own beliefs and change our paradigms?  If you would like to get better results, take a minute or two to read on.

(A) Value Generation Strategies for Today’s Successful BI Groups:

• COLLABORATE with other companies to deliver lower cost, high quality business improvement education – there is no need to go it alone today and bear all costs.
• Rigourously TRACK THE VALUE each trained individual adds to the business as a result of applying BI methodology after training – every trained person should know their financial value.
• Be very clear and very confident about the ECONOMIC VALUE the BI Strategy has brought to the business. If you are not clear about the numbers, you are probably not adding value of a financial nature in my opinion.

(B) Business Execution Strategies for Value Today:

• Have a simple yet robust IMPROVEMENT PROJECT SELECTION process that is (a) supported by Value Stream Analysis and (b) driven by department or unit leaders
• Maintain the FOCUS of project team leaders on HIGH VALUE PROJECTS – this means giving them time and resources to do the work rapidly
• Lock in less singularly substantial benefits more QUICKLY and more FREQUENTLY
• Simplify your EXECUTION MODEL so the focus is consistently on progressively moving performance for key variables
• Change your leadership MEETING STRUCTURE so there is minimum replication of ‘time span of focus’ and ‘level of detail’ at the different levels of meetings – the effect of this will be profound.

If you would like to know more about any of these items, particularly those relating to business execution and meeting structures, drop me a line and I will get in contact with you.

Good fortune to you in these interesting times my friend

George Lee Sye