Out Of The Comfort Zone

There are so many forces shaping the future of your business. What are they? What’s unique today? How are they impacting you as a leader? What does it mean for how you interact with customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders and the larger community? Tune in to hear more.

Increasingly, headlines are noting the impact of the last year on mental health. Employees are quitting in record numbers. Every level within the organization seems to be experiencing higher stress than the year before. What is happening? What can you do about it as a leader? How do you build a culture that minimizes anxiety and supports mental health? Tune to hear more.

The current corporate trend is to articulate a purpose statement as a way to provide a sense of meaning and purpose for employees, to create pride in the company and to connect with customers. Having a sense of purpose does seem to be an important part of feeling connected to and having a sense of fulfillment from the work you do. From a comprehensive study, we can now identify 10 principles that are important for making work meaningful. I think you will be both surprised by the results and not surprised at the same time.

Whether you are a salesperson, a leader or an individual contributor, you are selling something all the time – a product/service, your capability, your idea or even your personality. And in these times, all of that “selling” is happening virtually. We have no option but to master how to convince people in a virtual setting. Tune in to hear how and learn the secrets from the experts?

Why is history so important today when you are leading a team? Given the social justice concerns, what do you need to know to be an effective ally and leader?

Inspiring and engaging your team, ultimately delivering great results, begins with having the people on your team believe you care about them as whole human beings. At our current pace, too many leaders say they have lost the time to have a meaningful conversation. How do we get compassion and caring back into the day-day fabric of our leadership without losing track of everything else? Tune in for simple ways to make a difference with your team.

Loyal customers generate greater returns and even more powerful word-of-mouth advertising. Loyal employees drive customer loyalty. Regardless what industry you are in, loyalty should be on your radar screen. How do you measure loyalty, why should you, and what can you do to foster it in your customers and in your employees, even in millennials? Tune in to hear this and more.

How much is your image and appearance holding back your career? As much as you may want your knowledge and expertise to drive your career, you may be limiting your impact. Human beings decide to listen, trust and perhaps believe based in part on the image of the presenter. Whether you identify as male or female, tune in to learn what matters most and what you can do about it.

The job of the leader is to lead change; otherwise the leader is managing the status quo. But leading change is not about running a change process, it’s about winning over hearts and minds. Tune in to hear how to do this as a leader as well as how to get more comfortable with changing yourself.

Being able to persuade others to buy your products and services as well as to buy you; meaning to trust you, back your idea or promote you has never been more important regardless what role you are in. So what do we often get wrong? Hear about the big mistakes and the best fixes.

During the pandemic, some leaders have excelled and changed what they do. Who are those leaders? What did they learn after reflection? What does it say for all of us leading teams and organizations? Tune in to hear more.

Obsessive personalities are those people who pursue excellence at all costs; sometimes to the detriment of relationships on the team and in the organization. When is this obesssiveness helpful and when is harmful? If you are working with or leading such a personality, how do you get the best of that person and avoid the worst?

There is no doubt that work has changed – the way we work, the actual work we do and the pace of work to name a few. Three significant trends should be in the foreground for everyone from employees to leaders. Those are humans working with machines in new ways, multiple models of what it means to be employed and the rise of the super-team. Those trends have significant implications for the capabilities each of us needs to thrive as well as for how leadership needs to shift and how the culture will change. Tune in to hear more.

What will be the future of our office work? Some miss the office and some don’t. Some have been more productive at home, some think they haven’t been as productive. Will we return to a central office and presentee-ism culture? If not, what will we do? What are the implications for work, location, hours and connections? Tune in for a lively debate.

During times of uncertainty, keeping ourselves and our teams motivated, healthy and less stressed is essential work for leaders. We talk a lot about mindfulness and sleep. But we miss the importance of our sense of identity – who we are, what value we bring to our work and why work matters. Most people are hungry for a better sense of meaning and identity. Why does this boost performance, why should you care as a leader, and what can you do about it? Tune in to see how to have a better sense of peace in yourself and your team ultimately drives performance.

Leaders need to be great coaches. What do the best sports coaches have to teach business leaders about coaching for performance, to win and to build a strong team? Tune in to hear what John Wooden believed and practiced as one of the all time best college basketball coaches.

As a leader you know that trust is essential. How do you lead from a basis of trust versus a basis of control? How do you increase trust? And how does trust tie to inspiration and a sense of purpose. Tune in to hear more.

Regardless of the type of business you are in or lead, you are probably finding that you interact more and more with technical people – engineers, programmers, data scientists, artificial intelligence experts. How well equipped are to ask the right questions, bridge the gaps in communication and have confidence in your understanding? And as a technical specialist, how effective are you in communicating key decisions to business leaders? Tune in for advice for both.

Having a team that performs consistently requires having people that are maximizing their performance every day – they achieve peak performance. Olympic class athletes are obsessed by sustaining peak performance. They measure it and they monitor what impacts it from sleep to food to mediation. But as leaders, we expect to perform like an Olympic class atheletes every day but we do nothing to assess our “peak” and to understand how to sustain it. Plus we spend little time assessing what our team members need to be at their peak performance every day. We can change that with science and methodology. Tune in to hear how.

Drawing on her military experience, her engineering projects and her broad leadership experience, Jenn shows what it takes to truly do great things. Three steps make all the difference: Getting to know the team, building trust, and taking it to the next level. Easy to say, tune in to hear how.