Driving profitable growth is at the top of every leader’s priority list. Yet, according to Bain and Company, only 10% succeed in achieving sustainable profitable growth.

While growth is the life-blood of every business, at some point, your company will experience the double edge sword of growth.

Either your company will grow faster than your internal capacity to handle it. Chaos, breakdowns and burnout are the result.

OR

Your company hits a wall and growth flattens. As a result, panic often sets in and leaders make rash decisions – either prolonging the stall or causing the company to spiral downward.

Unfortunately, there are no alarms to warn you of either impending challenge. Growth does not follow a linear path. It can be unpredictable and erratic. Growth walls often catch leaders by surprise.

Some companies don’t survive growth walls. They either go out of business or stay in “no man’s land.”

The focus of this article is to address the latter issue – ie., growth walls. While many leaders see growth walls as a revenues issue. The truth is that flat numbers are the byproduct — not the cause — of stalled growth.

The good news is that there are predictable pitfalls and signals that leaders need to heed to scale their companies. This article focuses on 7 of those growth pitfalls.

 7 Pitfalls That Stall Your Company Growth

1. Running After Growth in all the Wrong Places

Initially, growth is critical for survival. However, as your company scales, not all growth is healthy or good.

How, as a leader, do you distinguish between good and bad growth? Healthy vs. unhealthy growth? 

What % of your new business is coming from your core competencies? What % requires capabilities beyond your core?

Do all your new revenues provide healthy margins? If not, is it a market issue, a competitive issue, a behavioral issue or something else preventing you?

According to Bain, companies leave significant money on table because they are not fully leveraging their core.

Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) says it best …”At Apple we say ‘no’ to great ideas every day in order to do one or two things very well.”

How much of your new growth focuses on what you do best?

2. Success Blind Spots 

Companies that hit a wall have experienced past successful growth.  They are meeting or exceeding revenue goals. Their leaders and employees are proud and rightfully so.

However, success often creates cognitive or psychological leadership blind spots.  Below are 2 examples how.

• Blind Optimism

You make unconscious assumptions that company growth will continue on the same trajectory if you keep on the path you have been. However, markets change and so must your path to future growth.

• Over-Confidence

Past success can exaggerate your ability to control events. And you over-estimate your company’s capabilities.

When over-confident, leaders tend to take on risky opportunities, not ask for help and believe they can handle it all.

Whose unbiased perspective can you access to right-size your decisions and perceptions?

3. Crashing into the Leadership Glass Ceiling

In my extensive experience with growth companies, the number one reason why companies hit the wall is because their leadership team has hit a wall.

Organically grown leaders don’t know what they need to know to get to the next level. As a result, they keep on doing what they have always done – only working harder — expecting a different result. Yes … that’s called insanity :))!

As a company scales, leadership roles also scale and change dramatically at each growth level. To avoid the leadership ceiling, CEOs must ask themselves —

Are you willing to make a major investment in growing your leadership team to the next level?

Does it serve the greater good of your company to be loyal to long time leaders whose roles have outgrown their capabilities and capacities? 

Is it time to hire outside seasoned passionate leaders who have been there and can help you grow?

Both options – ie., cultivating your leaders from within or hiring from the outside – have their upsides and downsides.

If your leadership team has hit a ceiling, get outside help in evaluating the options. Doing nothing will keep your company stuck at the wall.

4. External Oblivion

As a company scales, significant focus is spent on building internal infrastructure. As a result, leaders lose sight of changes in their external environment.

A once fringe competitor may now emerge as a looming threat to your company. Your customers’ needs may have changed without you realizing it.   New disruptive technologies may displace your products/services as alternative solutions to your markets.

Successful growth leaders who break through the wall anticipate the unexpected and turn the unexpected into the profitable.

Are you overly focused on internal superiority that you are missing the cues of external changes?

How are you proactively anticipating and responding to external changes?

5. Hiring for current skills, not long term capabilities

As a company grows, the tendency is to hire employees with current needed skills by your organization.   When small, hiring for the short term is necessary as your resource needs are not always clear.

Once a company hits the $10 – $20 million milestone, hiring people with capabilities to grow your company in next 2 – 3 years is crucial.

What capabilities do you need to hire today to achieve your desired growth for next 3 years?

6. Culture Meltdown

When a company has less than 20 employees, rarely is culture a dominant issue. As the company scales in size, structure and complexity, culture becomes the heart and soul of its growth success.

What causes a culture meltdown as a company scales?

It’s not one thing. It’s multitude of factors that amplify with scale, such as …

• Not Scaling Culture

Some leaders will argue that company culture cannot scale. I both agree and disagree :)).

Your company culture cannot scale if you perceive culture as fixed, unchangeable and static. However, the culture your company needs at $20 million will be different than the culture you need at $50 – $100 million

As you add new people to your organization, as well as your markets evolve, so must your culture evolve.

How are you adapting your culture to the changing needs of your organization and those of your customers?

• Core Values Without Success Measures

While your company’s culture may seem intangible and elusive at times, you can make the intangible tangible and measurable.

The key is to define an abstract value into an operational, measurable success outcome.

I have one client with a core value of excellent customer service. Their measure of success is a customer excellence rating of 25:1. For every 25 customers that rate their service as excellent, only 1 or less customers will rate it as non-excellent.

How do you measure success for each value?

• Healthy Values Gone Bad

Every positive value also has a dark, unhealthy side. However, most leaders are not aware when their values have crossed that line.

A value of excellence, in the extreme, can become perfectionism. Acceptance, at its extreme, can become (unhealthy) tolerance. Customer service, to the extreme, can cost you significant profits.

It’s good to set the bar high. At the other end, know when your values become your Achilles heel, especially as you scale.

7. Mediocrity Sets In

The final danger as companies scale is backsliding into complacency or mediocrity.

Success is a lousy teacher. Complacency often sets in as your company loses its drive and hunger. Nothing will kill growth faster than losing your sense of urgency.

High growth companies should celebrate success. If your company has hit a wall, however, it’s time to take stock.

Has your success morphed into over-comfort and contentment? 

If it has, it’s time to raise your bar, set new sights and refuel your organization’s fire.   Commit to scaling not only in size. Commit also to scaling big WHY and purpose.

Getting Back on the Growth Track: Initial Steps

• Educate yourself about your company’s growth life cycle and the common pitfalls at different growth stages.

• Get your leaders out of day to day operations.

By the time you hit $15 – $20 million in revenues, your leaders should spend about 80% time leading – building teams, delegating, creating strong culture, focusing on long term goals/projects, etc. – and only 20% on daily operations.

To prepare for the transition, ask yourself:

Do your leaders know how to think strategically?

Are their brains wired for big picture, future-orientation, goals/results thinking?

Do they have strong delegation skills to get out of the weeds?

Remember … not all leaders will be able to make the leap to the next level.

• Invest in infrastructure and systems that provide built-in capacity for growth.

• Get outside perspectives

An advisory board or board of directors … visits to “friendly” competitors to see how they do things … hiring a consultant with experience in growth companies. These are all ways to get beyond your blind spots and tap into expertise that may be missing in your organization.

• Invest in scaling your company culture

Continuously communicate your company’s vision and purpose. Entrench your values and behavior norms at all levels of organization. Change your culture as needed.

• Download our complimentary handout — Developing Leaders of Growth: 5 Critical Factors for Driving Double/Triple Digit Growth

The post 7 Leadership Pitfalls That Sabotage Company Growth appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Today’s companies have it all backwards.  Leaders have a thirst and drive for answers to their biggest challenges.

Thousands of leadership books are published yearly to feed that thirst.  Buying those books to find the right answers for your company is where leaders make their biggest mistake.

 

Leadership is NOT about having the right answers.  It’s about asking the right questions.

If you’ve read my article “12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results,” you know why questions are so powerful and how they can change organizational results … overnight.  If you have not,  click here.

The Make-or-Break Question Critical to Your Business Future

There is one question though, above all others, that smart leaders ask … not just once, but everyday.  This one question has the power to:

• Create sustainable company growth and profitability
• Rise above your competition
• Make you an innovative leader in your marketplace
• Accelerate organizational and culture change
• Increase employee engagement and performance

This one question has equal relevance to both your external and internal environments.   What is that one question?

Where can we win?

Why This One Question?

How many times …

• have you spent great effort and resources on goals and strategies that were never worth your time to begin with?
• has your company pursued markets and customers that actually took you further from your goals, not closer?
• has your company spread itself thin with too many organizational changes, initiatives or diverse priorities?

The truth is …

“There are many battles in business not worth winning.   Worst still is to LOSE such a battle you should have never fought to begin with.”     Denise Corcoran

 Know which strategies and plans will lead you to your goals and which will not.  Distinguish those that create gain and those that create loss.  As the saying goes,

“Measure twice, cut once.”

The Secret to Winning in Your Marketplace

To succeed in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, it is critical for leaders to ask daily …

Where can we win?

And equally important …

Where can we not win?

Where you are winning today is not where you can win tomorrow.  To best answer these questions more deeply requires three steps.

Step 1:  Pause and take a REALITY check.  Challenge every assumption about your current goals and plans.

Take a look at your revenue and profit goals and ask yourself:

• Will your current customers (or desired customers) really get you to your goals?
• What makes you think your plan and expected outcomes are reasonable?
• Did you make up those outcomes and hope that you would reach them?

Remember …

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Step 2:  Dig deeper.  The real truth about where you can win is below the surface.

Even if you think your goals and plans are reasonable, dig deeper.  You will find real answers to your revenue or profit challenges below the surface. 

For example, do you tend to target customers based on their ability to pay your price?  While that is a good start, there are deeper questions you need to ask.  Such as …

• Are they willing to pay you your price?
• Are there competitors driving price resistance?  Are those competitors lowering customer demand for your products/services?
• How do you adapt your plans to this new reality?

If you have hit a ceiling in revenues and/or profits, you need to dig deeper to get the truth about your company’s reality.

Step 3:  Utilize the power of peripheral vision to detect early (often subtle) warning signs that your business needs to shift. 

In today’s rapidly changing world, smart leaders have systems to detect early warning signs that the positioning of their business may need to change. Even if realistic today, your strategies and plans may not be valid tomorrow.

What are examples of early warning signs that your company may need to re-position itself?

• Pressure on profit margins
• Decline in customer satisfaction
• Appearance of new competitors
• Loss of market share in key segments
• Surprises by outside high impact events in the last few years

The key to detecting early warning signs that your environment is shifting is to develop your leadership peripheral vision.

In a literal sense, peripheral vision is an expansion of your normal attention to what’s happening at the edges – the periphery – of your field of vision. You are often in peripheral vision, for example, when driving on a highway, assuming you are not engaging in any distractions.  Your vision expands to see cars in all directions in order to respond in a moment’s notice, if needed.

In the business world, leaders are mostly engaged in their foveal vision — critical for focus on goals and critical tasks of the organization.  However, foveal vision also creates serious tunnel vision to big picture strategic issues and the ever-changing environment in which it operates.

Leaders must train their minds to continually monitor the periphery or edges of their environment for subtle and early shifts. Here’s why.

Peripheral vision …

• Helps you detect emerging opportunities in your marketplace before your competitors
• Gives you early signals regarding outside threats to your growth – such as, new alternative substitutes that can satisfy your customers’ needs
• Helps you anticipate and respond to future unmet customer needs not even their radar screen today
• Slows down your negative internal dialogue that drives ineffective leadership decisions and actions 

NOTE:  To learn about how to develop your peripheral vision as a leader, fill out my contact form and I am happy to pass on resources.

Bottomline:  If your company has hit a growth ceiling … has been on a vicious profit rollercoaster ride … or in perpetual crisis mode, then STOP.

Pause and ask yourself the ONE question that determines the extent your company survives vs. thrive in the future.

Where can we win?

And, if you are feeling bold and confident,

Where will we win?

Ready to get off the profitability and/or revenue roller coaster ride?   Click here to sign up for our 90 minute, complimentary Leadership Edge Strategy Session to develop a leadership strategy to achieve your goals and desired breakthroughs.

Other Related Links

12 StrategicThinking Questions That Yield Big Results.  

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think. 

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post The ONE Question Every Leader Needs To Ask appeared first on The Empowered Business.

At the end of every year, I take a personal private retreat to clear my mind, take inventory of the past year and create a new vision for the new year.  Knowing the power of questions, at the start of each retreat, I ask myself …

What are the 10 most important questions to ask myself in this retreat to take my business (and life) to a more meaningful, impactful and prospering level in the new year?

For 3-4 days, I spend time by the ocean simply reflecting, letting go of any goals, plans or expectations.  I simply allow myself to just be.   To be a blank canvass upon which new insights, penetrating questions and inner promptings begin to emerge.

Every year I walk away with powerful questions that, simply by asking them, transform my thinking, direction and excitement for the future.

I share that with you for one reason only.  To embrace and utilize the power of questions within yourself and your organization on a daily basis.

“The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way.”   African Proverb

Why Focus on Questions, NOT Answers? 

Our greatest shifts and changes in business and in life come NOT from answers, rather from powerful provocative questions.  Questions have the power to:

• Transform
• Open up conversations
• Solve problems creatively
• Shake up your thinking
• Build critical thinking
• Shift your focus
• Inspire new direction
• Shatter your assumptions
• Unleash potential
• Keep you aligned with your sense of identity, purpose and vision

… and much more.

In keeping with this month’s theme of building your strategic thinking muscle, below are 12 provocative strategic questions to create a new future for you and your company.

12 Provocative Strategic Thinking Questions You Need to Be Asking

Vision, Goals and Strategies

• As you envision where you want your company to be in 10 years, what BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) do you see your company achieving?
• In order to achieve your BHAGs, what innovative ideas and strategies did you have to come up with?
• What “enemies” (external or internal) will you have to defeat along the way to achieve your BHAGs?

Markets, Competitors and Customers

• Imagine it’s 5 years from now.  What are your competitors envying the most about your company?
• What do your competitors respect the most about your company?
• What do you envision the future needs of our customers to be in 5– 10 years and how do you expect to meet them?
• What is your company the “best of” in your field or industry?
• When it comes to customers, how is your organization shifting from a “how many” to “who is our most profitable customer” focus?
• How are you staying on top of changing global, competitive, market, economic and technology trends to uncover hidden opportunities?

Changing the Inner Game 

• How are you breaking down big change in your organization into pieces too inconsequential to fail?
• How would you change if you HAD TO get 10x better/ bigger in the next 12 months?
• What do you have to do less of, to achieve more in your company?

Bonus Question

“For true success ask yourself these four questions:

Why?

Why not?

Why not me?

Why not now?”

James Allen

By no means are the above questions exhaustive.  In fact, they barely scratch the surface.

What provocative questions can you ask within your organization to build stronger strategic thinking capacity?

Share your own provocative strategic thinking questions and we will add them to this list with your name.

The post 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

As a leader, how often do you find yourself …

• 

  Thinking Behind Strategic Thinking

  Overwhelmed by an overload of demands, not knowing what to respond to first?

• Continually fighting for certainty, paralyzed by fear of the unknown?
• Blind sighted by unforseen events that jeopardize your company’s stability and bottomline?

I’m guessing what you really want is to stop your perpetual busyness.  You want to focus on the critical few.   You want to navigate your company, amidst constant change, to its ultimate destination.

In my decades of working with leaders, I have found that the above are symptoms that a leader lacks the capacity to think strategically.  Let’s look at how to turn those symptoms around.

The 3 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Strategic Thinking:  What It Is AND Is Not

1. Strategic thinking is an exercise of the brain muscle, not the wrist muscle.

Despite what many leaders believe, strategic thinking is NOT quantitative analysis – eg, generating sales forecasts – nor quantitative goals – eg,  $100 million in revenues.

While numbers are important in planning, true strategic thinking is qualitative.  It is about HOW you think as a leader, and less about the contents of your thinking.

 2. Strategic thinking is NOT the same thing as strategic planning.  In fact, many strategic plans have little strategic thinking behind them.

For most companies, strategic planning focuses on breaking down a goal into action steps and connecting those steps to resources, timelines and budgets.

While strategic planning is an important activity for implementation, a plan, without strategic thinking preceding it, has little chance of success.  While strategic planning defines the steps to move up the ladder, strategic thinking (in the words of Covey) defines whether your ladder is against the right wall.

 3. Strategic thinking is more about the structure of one’s thinking, NOT the content of one’s thinking.

While most strategy development efforts focus on content – or what one thinks, strategic thinking is driven by how one thinks – ie., the thinking behind the thinking.   We call this metacognition.

For example, assessing a competitor’s strengths focuses on content.    While the structure of your thinking may view competition at a higher elevation, such as the changing forces in one’s industry and impact on the competitive landscape.

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think:  The 6 Core Characteristics

Essentially, strategic thinking is a mindset.  It is the art of making the right decisions for attaining future success in a complex, uncertain world.   

Although there are many books about strategic thinking, my focus for this article is on the structure of strategic thinking … the Core 6 characteristics.

To uncover a leader’s strategic thinking capacity, I utilize a tool called the Inventory of Workplace Attitude and Motivations (IWAM) to assess a leader’s strength in the Core 6, as well as dominant mental patterns blocking a leader from thinking strategically.

Below are my Core 6 characteristics of strategic thinking.

Global (or Holistic) Thinking

Global or holistic thinking combines the cognitive abilities of:

• Big picture thinking (ie, seeing the overall landscape from a 10,000 foot level … such as your organization or industry. 
• Systems thinking (ie., ability to see the interrelationships between elements … such as, how decisions made in engineering impact other functions)
• Patterns recognition (ie., seeing cause and effect patterns within your environment, peoples’ behaviors and even within yourself  … such as “when I take 5 minutes to plan daily, I have a more productive, focused day.”)

The purpose of holistic thinking is not to accumulate knowledge, but to create new mental maps that unleash greater thinking possibilities for the future.

Example of Holistic Thinking:  Bill Gates and Paul Allen did not invent anything to start Microsoft. The personal computer revolution was started by putting together existing technologies in a way never done before. They could see from a 10,000 foot elevation how seemingly unrelated technology trends intersected, eventually disrupting the computer industry in a completely new direction.

Future Oriented

Strategic thinking leaders view their company’s past and present through the eyes of the future.  Strategic thinking requires strategic foresight and asking such questions as …

• What new emerging trends will shape our company’s future?
• What new possibilities may exist 10 years from now that don’t exist today?
• What unmet needs will our customers have in the future, not even visible on their radar screen today?

Strategic thinking requires a mindset that anticipates rather than reacts.  A strategic minded leader is seeking out opportunities through a “future” lens rather than merely responding to today’s problems and customer needs.

Example of Future-oriented Thinking:  According to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, management expert, the “principle of anticipation and innovation — driven by the producer, not the customer — is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

Henry Ford, a leader with great strategic foresight, understood that principle.  He said if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would’ve asked for a faster horse.

Options Thinking

Options thinking is nothing new.  Our whole lives consist of endless options –  what will we eat for dinner, where will we invest our money and so on. The same is true for organizations.

To achieve strategic success, leaders must develop their options thinking capabilities on two levels:

1. Defining multiple options for reaching goals and choosing the “best”;
2. Identifying a wide range of possible future states (aka environmental scenarios) to uncover and exploit emerging opportunities.

To understand why, imagine, if you picked a random path up a mountain – rather than finding the easiest among multiple alternatives.  Or that you did not consider various conditions in your climb – like snow, dangerous animals or equipment failure.  What would be your chances of success?

In a similar fashion, many strategic plans fail within organizations due to lack of options thinking.

Example of Options Thinking:  In 2006, Mike Jackson, CEO, AutoNation, challenged industry assumptions by asking “what if buyers replaced cars every 5 years, not 3 years?”  By looking at a low probability, high consequence event, AutoNation experienced profitability and positive cash flow, while many dealers went out of business.  That’s the advantage of options-thinking.

Differences–Oriented

When a leader is a high differences-thinking person, it tells me two things:

1.  His/her brain is wired to sort for differences. These leaders are innovators.  They love to change the rules of the game.  Think Steve Jobs as a “high differences-oriented” leader.
2. They thrive on change.  Not only can these individuals respond easily to change.  They can “see” possible changes in the future that others may dismiss or think impossible.

Such leaders have the ability to see and capitalize on hidden opportunities that others don’t have the thinking capacity to spot.

Example of Differences-Thinking:  Billy Beane, General Manager, Oakland A’s, shattered conventional baseball beliefs that big payrolls translate into big wins. His unconventional use of statistics in identifying undervalued players led the A’s — one of the worst teams in baseball with one of the lowest payrolls — to three American League West division titles.  This is hallmark of a differences-oriented thinker.

Achievement/Success Thinking

An achievement-thinking leader is an individual who is motivated by success and by being the best.  Achievement-thinking leaders choose strategies that exploit an advantage. Their only goal is to win.

To develop this thinking muscle, leaders must address fundamental achievement-oriented questions, such as …

• What defines success?
• What are the factors that drive success?
• How will we measure success?

Example of Achievement-Thinking:  Olympic athletes are the quintessence of achievement-oriented thinkers.  Their whole focus is on winning the gold medal.  For many, even a silver or bronze medal is considered failure.  They seek every possible strategy to get the advantage: the choice of a coach, equipment, mastering the fine points of technique, etc.

Proactive Balanced with Reflection

Most leaders by nature are highly proactive and take little time for reflecting.  Yet, to solve the increasing unfamiliar problems facing businesses today, a leader must learn to balance (proactive) action with reflection for new insights to problems with no precedence.

This balance requires leaders to take regular time for reflection and cultivate a sense of right timing for action guided by one’s own intuition.

True reflection is not about thinking hard, but rather a presence of mind.  A state of mind in which you view a situation from not knowing … a beginner’s mind.  (see Strategic Intuition, William Duggan)

Example of Proactive Balanced With Reflection:  Napolean was a master at strategic insight.  What he lacked in size of army, he made up in precision and reaction rate. Napoleon said it best: “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.”

Building your own strategic thinking muscle

A small amount of consistent time and practice is all it takes to build your own strategic thinking muscle.  For example …

1. Learn chess.  It is one of the best ways to develop the strategic thinking characteristics described above.
2. Subscribe to the Futurist magazine published by the World Future Society.
3. Track the BIG, new things the smartest people & organizations (regardless of industry) are doing.  Then adapt them in your company.

If that seems too much now, just remember …

Do less.  Reflect more.

Problems less.  Possibilities more.

“Play not to lose” less.  “Play to win” more.

The post How Great Strategic Thinking Leaders Think. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

“Leading From Guts” drives extraordinary organizations and a company’s distinctive edge in the marketplace.

The inspiration for this article was the movie “The Rosa Parks Story” – a story about a simple seamstress and civil rights activist with unwavering toughness of character that, in 1955, changed the course of history and segregation in the U.S.

Her unwillingness to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus to a white person set in motion a whole chain of catalyzing events – including imprisonment, a boycott of the Montgomery Bus, a new civil rights organization led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a repealing of the segregation law on buses in Montgomery.

This movie – and Rosa Park’s story in general — brought to light the power of “leading from guts,” regardless of one’s role or circumstances in business.

Leading From Guts:  The One Thing That Can Change Everything in Your Organization

For the purposes of this article, I deliberately chose the title Leading From Guts  (rather than Lead With Guts) for a reason.

Leading From Guts implies you already possess the traits and mindset of having guts.  Those traits and mindset make up the core of who you are and how you define yourself as a leader.

Leading With Guts implies that courage is secondary to your leadership role rather than the driving force of how you lead.  While it may sound like a subtle difference, to your employees who seek to follow gutsy leaders, it makes every difference.

Rosa Parks did not lead with guts, she led from guts.  Guts defined how she lived life.  Regardless of the threats on her life, loss of work resulting in lifelong hardship, the ongoing tensions in her marriage, etc., her unstoppable fight for civil rights defined her legacy and her leadership ability to create a movement that altered history.

While your cause may be different as a business leader, the underlying characteristics of leading from guts are the same.  Let’s take a look at those underlying characteristics.

Leaders Who Lead From  Guts …

1.     Are game-changers.  They thrive on doing the “seemingly” impossible.

Rosa Parks fought for a cause no one else thought possible. Even top civil rights activists (including Martin Luther King, Jr.) sought to achieve their goals the “safe” way … to play along with the established segregation rules in Montgomery at the time.  Rosa Parks was not willing to play that game.

Gutsy leaders in today’s business world embody the same spirit as Rosa Parks.  They provoke change by going against outdated norms that prevent them from playing a bigger game and realizing their cause.

• What small thinking in your company do you need to challenge to change the game in your organization?
• When was the last time you attempted to do something that seemed impossible?  
• How will doing so change the game you are playing?

2.     Are crusaders.  They are passionate about their cause and have the guts to act according to their convictions.

With all the injustices that Rosa Parks encountered due to her convictions, she never ran way from conflict, criticism nor condescension.  She stood her ground with composure, sensitivity and a fighting spirit to her cause of civil rights.  Her tenacity to lead from guts resulted in a history-altering movement.

Gutsy leaders know and commit to the driving “cause” of their organization.  For these leaders, their cause transcends goals and plans.  It is visceral.  Their cause becomes an unwavering heroic crusade.  What follows is a evangelistic movement within their organization.

• What’s the crusade your organization stands for?
• How do you help your employees see how their work as “heroic” and connected to your greater cause?

3.     Are fearless, despite being fearful. 

Fearless does not mean without fear (despite the dictionary’s definition). In fact, it’s impossible for any human being to be 100% without fear, as our brains are wired for fear for a reason.

Rosa Parks had fears, just as any other human being.  Yet, she transcended those fears because she was so committed to her cause.

Those leaders who lead from guts have the same scary moments and concerns as you do.  Yet they handle fear differently than other leaders.

They recognize that fear presents them with a choice.  Either they can step up to the opportunity or they can back down and let the fear run them.  As leaders choose the former, so will their employees.

• What gives you the guts as a leader to move beyond your fears?  A well-thought out plan?  Support?  Minimizing risks?
• If fear were not an option, what new bold actions would you take next?

4.     Are rule-breakers and challenge the status quo. 

Rosa Parks deliberately broke the law, despite knowing she would be arrested for not giving her seat to a white male.  Rosa challenged the status quo, not as an end in itself, but rather to make a statement – in her case, for justice.

In the business world, gutsy leaders are motivated to challenge “business as usual.”   They thrive on operating on the fringes and go against the tide because they know the edge is where breakthroughs reside.

As innovators of their industry, their courage and passion to try new things ignites the spark in others to think big and act boldly.  It takes GUTS and thick skin in a business world of followers to take the road less travelled.

• As a leader, what can you do to disrupt status quo thinking and encourage new ideas in your organization?  In your industry? 
• What rules in your organization are obsolete and holding you back?  
• How can you go against your own tide to breakthrough the barriers of what’s possible?

5.     Are movers and shakers.  They “stir up the pot” intentionally to create a revolution in thinking.

Just from one simple act of not giving her bus seat to a white person, Rosa Parks stirred up the pot in a complacent, compliant Afro-American community.  Her willingness to risk her life “stirred up the emotional pot” and one by one the community stood united in boycotting the Montgomery busses for an entire year.

Gutsy leaders agitate the thinking in their organizations and industries on purpose.  They know that complacency, routine and mediocrity are deadly to any company’s future growth and innovation.

They stir the pot to reinvigorate creative thinking, raise the bar and prime their organization for serious growth and market leadership.

• To what extent has complacency, routine and/or mediocrity stagnated the innovation and growth of your organization? 
• How can you intentionally stir up thinking by focusing on opportunity-driven change rather than merely putting out the fires?

6.     Are warriors.  They go the distance no matter what.

Despite her quiet voice and modest manners, Rosa Parks had the moral toughness and mental courage of a true warrior – a human rights warrior.  Her rebellious spirit and dissatisfaction with the Southern way of life sparked a movement for change in the U.S. and beyond.

Those who lead from guts have a will to win for the sake of their cause.  They don’t just want to win; they fight for it.  Yet they understand that change threatens those who value safety at all costs.

A leader’s warrior spirit must overcome the resistance and inertia amongst the troops within their organization – their employees.  Not by force, but through their own belief, passion and confidence backed by actions.

• As a leader, are you willing to fight for your convictions no matter what?
• What resistance must you overcome along the way within yourself?  Within your employees?
• What inner resources must you tap into, to strengthen your will to win?

7.     Are sure-fire decision-makers.  They put their stake in the ground and charge forward with confidence.

Rosa Parks made tough steadfast decisions, even when challenged by authority figures, friends/families and community leaders.  Yet it was her decisiveness that eventually won over others to her cause.

When it comes to decision making, gutsy leaders are a rare breed.  They have developed the chops to make real-time tough decisions with imperfect information and confidently move forward as though their decisions will prove to be correct.

Many business leaders falter in this area.  They fear putting their stake in the ground and keep waiting for more information, without realizing that delay is costly to their organization.

• In your own decision making, how much information is enough  to put your stake in the ground and move on?
• How do you sort for the most important data and filter out the rest to strengthen your decision making muscle?
• What lessons have you learned from past decisions to be better in the future?

Leading from guts starts with believing that you can make a difference, then having the guts to take action based on that conviction.

Even an ordinary individual, like Rosa Parks, demonstrated that courage, tenacity and conviction inspires others to boldly step up and become a part of your bigger cause.  Her life reminds us that a single person can make a profound difference of unimaginable magnitude and change the course of events forever.

What choice will you make?  Will you lead from guts or will you let fear lead you?

Other Related Links

How To Rise To the Top of Your Leadership Game Through Emotional Mastery

Be Rigorous About Your Fears … Otherwise They Will Drive Your Company into the Ground

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post Leading From Guts Builds Gutsy Organizations appeared first on The Empowered Business.

In July of this past year, I had the honor of meeting Mike Gustafsen, CEO, Virident Systems Technology with seasoned experience in growth driven companies/divsions at the C-level.  His story as part of a panel discussion at a networking event – The Path to the C-Level – left such a strong impression that I asked him for an interview to share his secrets.

In my view, Mike embodies the essence of a great leader – a visionary, strategist, big thinker, leader of leaders, great team and culture builder, global thinker yet down to earth, authentic and the list goes on.  Prior to his current CEO position, Mike has worked as SVP & General Manager, Hitachi; CEO, BlueArc; and other senior executive positions at McData and IBM.

Leadership Defining Moments, Pitfalls and Triumphs:  What you will learn in this 30 minute audio

In this content rich, 30 minute audio interview, you will learn:

• Common themes and threads of his leadership storyline – including pivotal and defining moments in his leadership journey

• His sense of personal mission as a leader and the BIG WHY of his company, Virident Systems

• His C-level experience and lessons learned, including the pitfalls, during rapid company growth and his recommendations to other leaders of growth driven companies

• As CEO, how he has developed the leadership capacity to drive and sustain company growth

• How he and his leadership team have built a strong company culture and the role of culture in driving company growth

Caveat:  For some unknown technological reason, there was background noise on my end in the original recording of this interview.  Much of that noise has been edited out, although not completely.  We will be working on the sound quality in the future.

P.S.  Be on the lookout for future interviews with CEOs who, in their own way, have changed the game of leadership, growth and culture as their path to leadership greatness.  While many CEO interviews scrutinize strategic successes and fumbles, I have chosen to focus on personal qualities, inner drives, greatest learnings and toughest decisions as a leader in creating extraordinary organizations and companies.

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post Leading the Way to Greatness and Growth appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Most leaders’ looming questions during this time are …

•    Where do we go from here?
•    What can we do to get to the next level?
•    What are we not being that we need to be?
•    What are we not doing that we need to do?

While there are many classic leadership books that are still relevant today – like Good to Great and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – and a flooded market of other business books, I wanted to share …. My Top 12 Favorite, Hidden Book Gems that are a “must read” for every leader for 2014.

Drum roll please …

LEADING YOURSELF … LEADING OTHERS

1.  Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

Synchronicity is an inspirational guide to developing the most essential leadership capacity: how we can collectively shape our future.  Through his own life story, Jaworski posits that a real leader sets the stage on which “predictable miracles, ” seemingly synchronistic in nature, can – and do – occur.

He speaks of proper timing — that situations unfold at their own pace that is impossible to rush. He shows that this capacity has more to do with our being and consciousness, than with what we do.

2.  Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work

I recommend this book for any leader who wants a better understanding of what makes himself/herself tick, as well as the same for their employees.

As David Rock points out, improving human performance involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way people think.

In this book, he outlines the 6 Steps to Transforming Performance by utilizing a discovery, question-based coaching approach in simple, yet powerful, 30 minute lessons to becoming a better leader.  A must read for leaders who want to take their coaching capabilities to the next level.

3.  The 60 Second Leader: Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites

I love this book!  Sometimes books make leadership so complex.  No wonder leaders feel overwhelmed with so many leadership approaches, philosophies and “how to’s.”

This book is the distillation of 30 essential elements of leadership into 60 second digestible chapters. There are also 30 true 60 Second Leader Tales in between the chapters to help bring the leader learning points to life.

Stuck with a challenge or want a leadership focus for the day?  Pick a lesson at random or do one lesson per day for a month.  This book makes growing as a leader an enjoyable process.

4.  100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

Another book gem comprised of 100 short, yet powerful leadership ideas for inspiring the best from others.

Sample of topics include:

•    Be the Cause, not the Effect (a core focus of my work)
•    Refuse to Buy their Limitations
•    Get some Coaching Yourself
•    Come from the Future

GROWING YOUR COMPANY

5.  No Man’s Land: Where Growing Companies Fail

If starting a company is difficult, leading a company once the business has caught fire is infinitely more so. It’s what I call “the double edge sword of growth.”

Thousands of emerging and mid-size companies each year approach the dangerous transition that Doug Tatum calls “No Man’s Land” … when they are too big too be considered small but still too small to be considered big.

Tatum discusses the 5 critical success factors for managing, driving and sustaining growth, along with case studies of companies that succeeded or failed during No Man’s Land.

6.  Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm

What are the underlying handful of fundamentals that haven’t changed for over a hundred years?  Harnish outlines eight practical actions you can take to grow your company and strengthen your culture, based on best practices adapted from best-run firms on the planet.

It’s an easy read.  Because there are so many valuable insights and best practices that have worked in other companies, this is a book you want to read over and over again.

7.  Guts!: Companies that Blow the Doors Off Business-As-Usual

Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s previous book, Nuts!: Southwest Airline’s Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, described the unconventional leadership that made Southwest an airline industry dynamo. In GUTS!, the Freibergs look at twenty-five extraordinarily successful businesses and introduce the chief executives who are creating a new corporate ethos that blows the doors off business-as-usual.

The leaders in the book share a common vision: They see business as a heroic cause and understand that good leadership isn’t a matter of position, but of influence. Unconventional wisdom for unconventional times.

EXECUTING YOUR PLAN & ACHIEVING RESULTS

8.  Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2011 edition)

A book that shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.

Larry Bossidy is an acclaimed CEO with few peers who have a track record for delivering results as he has. Ram Charan is an advisor to senior executives with insight into why some companies are successful and others not. Together they’ve pooled their knowledge and experience into one book on how to close the gap between results promised and results delivered that every business needs today.

9.  Ruthless Execution: What Business Leaders Do When Their Companies Hit the Wall

Success can be blind, even for the best companies. Such companies will eventually hit a performance wall … in some cases, many times.  To survive this phenomenon, today’s business leaders must know how to manage through adversity while preparing their companies for a new rebirth of success.

In Ruthless Execution, Amir Hartman identifies the central ingredients that help certain companies to get beyond the wall and thrive.

You will learn when and how to recalibrate the balance between performance and growth; how to define a coherent, tightly-drawn business philosophy that maps to specific actions; new ways to promote accountability and alignment; and how to use performance metrics without burying people in meaningless trivia.

ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE BY UNLEASHING THE POWER OF YOUR MIND

10.  E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality

Funny, uplifting and profound …

E-Squared is a “do it yourself” manual with simple experiments to prove once and for all that reality is malleable, that consciousness trumps matter, and that you shape your life with your mind. Rather than take it on faith, you get to prove for yourself, through nine short experiments, how the power of intention can change yourself, your world and your outcomes.  Yes, you read that right. It says prove.

A must read for anyone who wants to experience powerful breakthroughs in 2014 … with less effort and in less time.

11.  Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges

In this ground-breaking book, C. Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways.  What we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, is the key to what we create.

What often prevents us from ‘being present, ‘ is what Scharmer calls our blind spot, the inner place from which each of us operates. Becoming aware of our blind spot is critical to bringing forth the profound systemic changes so needed in business today.

By moving through the “U” process we learn to connect to our essential Self in the realm of ‘presencing’ – a term coined by Scharmer. When ‘presencing,’ we are able to see our own blind spot and pay attention in a way that allows us to experience the opening to new possibilities — and realizing them.

12.  Biology of Belief:  Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

Now you may be wondering … what the heck does a book written by a renowned cell biologist and former medical school professor have to do with leadership and business?

This is one of my favorite books about the science of how our thoughts control our life.  Bruce Lipton, through his own scientific experiments, shakes up conventional medical thinking with his findings that genes and our DNA do not determine our biology (or disposition to certain diseases).  Rather our DNA is controlled by signals outside the cell, including our positive and negative thoughts.

Through simple language, humor and everyday illustrations, his findings have revolutionized our understanding of the link between mind and matter and the profound implications to our lives.

The implications are equally important to organizations where the focus is primarily on the tangible, yet it is the intangible  (eg., our collective thoughts, emotions and beliefs) that drive your company’s outcomes.

Enjoy the holidays and happy reading!

P.S.  Share your favorite leadership and business books in our comments section!  We’d love to hear from you.

_______________________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post My 12 “Must Read” Best Leadership Books for 2014 appeared first on The Empowered Business.