If there were a business-life stress meter you could plug into, how would you score? Based on some classic research on stress and its effects, I’m offering a quick business-life stress test in this post. What’s your score and what can you do about it? Read on for answers.
Since writing the first edition of The Next Level in 2006, I’ve coached, spoken with, and observed thousands of leaders
Last night, Diane and I were watching the U.S. women’s gymnastics team compete in the opening round of competition in
If you’re in a leadership role of almost any type, the odds are high that you have to do some sort of public speaking on a semi-regular basis. Do you enjoy it or dread it? As someone who delivers 40 or 50 speeches and presentations to clients every year, it’s a good thing that I actually enjoy speaking. There are three things in particular that I’ve learned to focus on when speaking. They’re simple but powerful ideas. In the hopes that they’ll help you too, here they are:
We are all familiar with the phrase, “You must be present to win.” Here’s a story from one of my clients, Jessica, about how that idea can play out in real life. Jessica is one of around 30 participants in a Developing Leadership Presence program I’m doing for rising leaders at a well known Fortune 500 company. Like a lot of professionals, she’s working in an environment of constant change that can quickly consume all of a person’s time, attention and energy. They’ve all been working on practical ways to build their leadership presence.
One of the elements I love the most about our leadership development programs like Next Level Leadership® group coaching and Developing Leadership Presence is the peer coaching. In both of those programs, the participants are expected to pair up with a peer colleague and spend 20 minutes a week coaching each other. That might sound complicated, but it’s not. What I want them to do is to take ten minutes each to ask their partner questions that get them off the dance floor and onto the balcony. One of my favorite ways for them to do that is ask each other three questions:
Earlier today I was presenting a Leading Next Level Teams workshop to about 70 senior leaders in a global financial services company. It was a fun session made even more so by the use of a cool interactive technology called SpotMe where everyone could use special iPads to answer a few questions I was interested in. One of the early questions was “Which is harder, picking up new skills and behaviors or letting go of old skills and behaviors that used to work for you but likely no longer do?”
Where or when do you get your best ideas? I ask that question to a lot of clients and executives attending my presentations and seminars. The answers I often hear are things like “In the shower,” “Walking the dog,” “Working out,” “On my commute,” “Taking care of the yard,” or “Cleaning the house.” But do you know what answer I never hear?
The title of this post is a question I was asked yesterday during an interview for the book summary service Get Abstract. (Audio excerpts from the interview will be available in a few months.) While I guess I’ve thought about the difference between executive and leadership presence over the years (I wrote a book on the latter after all), I have never had the question put to me that directly.
It’s common for leaders who want to make a bigger impact to work on building their executive presence. It’s so common, in fact, that my company offers a seven month group coaching program for high potential leaders slated for executive roles. Our goal in that program is to make the often discussed but rarely clearly defined topic of executive presence a tangible and actionable thing to develop.
We try to move away from the “I know it when I see it,” definition of executive presence by focusing on specific behaviors and tactics related to factors like showing up with an appropriate amount of confidence, tailored communications, building great teams and working with colleagues to get bigger things done. Along with all of that, we focus on the idea that it’s possible to have too much executive presence.
What do Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Spanx founder Sara Blakely and Under Armour founder Kevin Plank all have in common? Amy Wilkinson has done the research and knows the answer. She shares it in her new book, “The Creator’s Code”. (Audio)
As I wrote here a few months ago, the biggest development opportunity for many of the rising leaders I work with as an executive coach is to play a bigger game. Once a leader achieves a level of mastery in leading his or her functional team, the next step is to play a bigger leadership role (informal, formal or both) in the broader organization. This dynamic has come up in a couple of coaching conversations I’ve had lately which prompts me to share these ten tips for how you or the rising leaders you work with can step up and lead bigger.
