Have you ever experienced in a meeting where a seasoned leader listened intently and then, with exquisite timing, asked one question that shifted the direction, focus and thinking of the entire team?

That is the magic and power of questions!

To move the needle in your organization in 2016, the first place to start is by asking thought-provoking questions.   The 7 questions below are by no means exhaustive. They serve as a starting point to stimulate your own questions.

These (or comparable) questions can make the difference between a successful 2016 and a disappointing one.

Let’s dig in!

7 Leadership Questions That Will Move The Needle in 2016

QUESTION 1: What is your BHAG?

BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a concept introduced by Jim Collins in his book, “Built to Last.” It is one of the characteristics that distinguishes great companies from mediocre ones.

The best definition that I seen is that a BHAG is a statement of strategic intent. A bigger, bolder, more powerful outcome than goals with a target timeframe of 10 – 30 years from now. It’s your ambitious Mount Everest that you want to climb.

Example …

Starbuck’s BHAG is to overtake Coke as the world’s leading brand.

While asking yourself the question … What is our BHAG? … may sound simple, it’s not always easy to answer.

To learn how to develop and test your BHAG, refer to Collin’s book, Built to Last.

QUESTION 2: For what purpose ….?

When I work with leaders, one of the first things I want to know is the underlying motivation for a particular goal, decision, behavior or even emotion.

This question can help uncover those motivations in 3 powerful ways:

• It forces you to chunk up, get out of the weeds and see your situation with a wider lens from a higher elevation.
• It can uncover your unconscious beliefs about cause and effect relationships which may or may not be true.
• It can uncover whether the underlying reasons for your goals/decisions are for healthy or unhealthy reasons.

With each 2016 goal, ask yourself … For what purpose do you want to achieve that goal?  With each response, ask … for what purpose? … again.   It will help shed light on the following.

• Are you choosing right goals for right reasons?
• If they are the right goals, are they for healthy or unhealthy reasons?
• Are there better goals for better reasons?

Oftentimes when companies decide on new goals, strategies or initiatives, they ASSUME they are the right ones. Challenge that with this question.

QUESTION 3: Is your ladder against the right wall?

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”      Stephen Covey

This is one of my favorite questions to ask at least once a year to make sure my goals, decisions and actions are always aligned with my greater purpose.

How do you know if your leadership ladder is against the right or wrong wall?

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Here’s some questions to ask:

• Do you wake up in the morning excited about your 2016 goals?

• Are your leadership and organizational goals primarily focused on moving up the ladder or do they also serve a greater good?

• What comes first when making leadership decisions – profits or purpose?

• What difference do you want to make in your role? Are you realizing that difference?

If you or your company are experiencing success without a sense of significance, it’s time to put your ladder against a different wall.

QUESTION 4: What’s at stake?

Defining your leadership or company goals is the easy part. Sustainable focus and drive to achieve them – no matter the challenges – is the hard part.

Goal success (or failure) depends predominantly on one thing:

Motivation

By continually asking the question — what’s at stake? – you will..

• Refuel your motivation when the going gets tough
• Create urgency for you and your employees
• Uncover what potentially can be at risk if you do achieve your goals

Below are specific variations of this powerful question to get you started.

What’s at stake …

• … to your company if you don’t achieve your goal this year?

• … to other stakeholders if you don’t achieve your goal?
  • Customers?
  • Employees?
  • Investors?
  • Yourself?
  • The world at large 

• … to your company culture/values if you do achieve your goal?
  • Will your culture possibly be compromised?
  • Will your goals compromise other company priorities?

QUESTION 5: Are you solving the right problem?

A problem well defined is half solved.        Charles Kettering

As a leader, you probably spend considerable time solving problems. Perhaps to the point where you get nothing else done.

Because leaders are action-oriented, the tendency is to jump right to a solution, ASSUMING you are solving the right problem. Yet doing so could cost your company significant resources, time and money. Plus you most likely have not solved the real problem.

I learned this invaluable lesson when I was an executive at US Sprint in the early 1980’s. The company was growing 200% for 5 consecutive years. I got a monthly report of all the key problem areas across the company.

One of the key metrics — # of customer complaints – was sharply increasing. The customer service department wanted to hire more customer service reps.

Yet after digging deeper and asking the question – what’s the real problem, it became clear that engineering’s challenge to install enough transmission capacity to meet the dramatic growth in demand was the real problem.

Next time a problem arises within your organization, take 5 minutes and ask …

Am I solving the right problem?

QUESTION 6: Is your timing correct?

Timing is EVERYTHING in business.

Timing can be the difference between success and failure. It can make or break a product launch, change initiative, new technology or even growing your company.

Yet, for even the best leaders, timing is often an afterthought.   I see it happen often.

Be honest with yourself. For this year’s projects, goals, decisions or initiatives, have you asked yourself … Is this the right timing?

• What will happen if you waited 6 months or a year?
• What opportunity will you miss if you don’t implement now?
• Might you be too early or too late?

If you want to learn more about how to discern right business timing, I recommend William Duggan’s book Strategic Intuition and Sun Tzu’s book, The Are of War. Both should be in every executive’s bookcase!

QUESTION 7: What are your blind spots? What are you missing?

Every one of us has blind spots. Our brains filter out over 99% of outside information because of its limited processing capacity. Such brain limitations create distortions in your thinking and perceptions.

At a leadership and company level, blind spots are costly and sometimes catastrophic. Even the best leaders are challenged by unconscious persistent blind spots.

Below are common blind spots from my work with leaders and organizations. Check how many of these blind spots are or could be true for you. Remember: You may have a blind spot about your blind spots :)).

Leadership (self) blind spots: beliefs and behaviors

• Not seeing your impact on others
• Unaware of your negative beliefs and how they are driving your decisions and behaviors
• Not learning from your past failures and recreating those mistakes over and over
• Assuming that your communications to another is interpreted as you intended

Team & organizational blind spots

• Believing your “once healthy” company culture is still healthy when in fact it is eroding as you scale
• Tolerating (and rationalizing away) mediocre or poor performance
• Avoiding conflicts and tough conversations
• Unconscious, unchallenged (and often erroneous) assumptions driving your goals and strategic plan
• Being overly optimistic

Environmental/external blind spots

• Missing emerging market trends and opportunities
• Assuming you know why your customers buy from you when they actually buy for different reasons
• Perceiving smaller competitors as a non-threat
• Not adjusting your company’s strategies to changing conditions in your industry or environment

BONUS QUESTION: What is YOUR overarching question for the new year?

Now it’s your turn.

What one question – if you asked daily — will help YOU move the needle in a key area within yourself and/or your organization?

For example, if you want to increase your personal productivity, perhaps the question is …

What do I need to stop doing?

Or if you want to increase company revenues, you may ask …

What values drive our customers’ buying decisions?

How can we craft our products/services to those values, thus creating repeat customers?

Questions are the ultimate leadership tool for moving the needle, regardless of the goal or challenge. Now it’s your turn to develop your own list of powerful questions.

Drop me an email if you have questions about how to develop powerful questions :)).

For other articles relating to the power of questions :

• The One Question Every Leader Needs to Ask
• 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results

The post 7 Leadership Questions That Will Move Your Needle in 2016 appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I learned growing up, however, that not lying is NOT the same thing as admitting and telling the truth.  The former prevents us from making false statements; the latter has the generative power to change individuals and organizations.

In my decades of working with business leaders, I have found that there is one trait — above all others – that transforms mediocre leaders to extraordinary ones.   That one trait is …

Rigorous truth-telling

Real leaders have backbone.  They admit the uncomfortable truth that others are not willing to even see.  They have a passion to want the truth and confront reality head-on.

It’s not just the responsibility of a leader to see and tell the truth.  It is part of their soul, their moral fiber.  Any compromise destroys trust, respect and credibility with themselves and from others.

The most important person to tell the truth is to Yourself.

We often think about the importance for leaders to tell the truth to others within their organizations.  Yet the most important, yet hardest, aspect of leadership truth telling is being rigorously honest with yourself.

Why?

It takes guts, personal awareness and humility to tell the truth about yourself to yourself.

When I work with leaders, my first goal is to help them get rigorously honest with themselves.  I have found that when leaders are willing to look at how they they avoid or deny the truth, that mirror of truth will liberate them to become the authentic, powerful leader they are meant to be.

Not sure how to uncover your truth as a leader?   Take inventory of the following 7 truths to get real about the present and to fuel your leadership changes in the future.

7 Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders

Truth 1:  Either you are fighting for reasons or fighting for results. 

As a leader, there is no middle ground in what you stand for. You can stand for reasons or you can stand for results.  You CAN”T stand for both.

Real leaders fight for the results they want.  They are bold, committed and persistent about their desired outcomes.

Mediocre leaders fight for reasons why they don’t achieve them. When they say “yes” to reasons, they are essentially saying “no” to results.

Which are you fighting for right now?

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are you tolerating under-performance?
• When you lead a meeting, to what extent do team members give reasons why they did not keep their commitments or reach their goals?
• Have you created an organizational culture of strong accountability?

Truth 2:  Either you are creating your future or reacting to it. 

Real leaders are masters at creating their future because they are internally driven and decisive about what they want.   They take responsibility for all their outcomes and see themselves as the doers of the world.

Mediocre leaders are externally driven and at the effects of their environment.  They believe that they have little control over their outcomes and that things happen to them.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Does your organization find itself in perpetual crises?
• When a negative event happens – like loss of a major customer, do you find yourself in panic or do you seek new options to achieve your goals?
• Does your organization have a clear vision in which every employee knows how he/she contributes?

Truth 3:  Either you are playing to win or playing not to lose.

Underlying this truth, there is a pivotal assumption that realleaders get and mediocre leaders don’t.

What is that pivotal assumption?

It is that you have a clear understanding of what winning is.  Mediocre leaders never even ask themselves questions like … where do we want to win?  Where can we win?  What does winning look like?  

Once you have a clear concept of winning, how do you know if you are playing to win vs. playing not to lose?

The answer is: your identity.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you see yourself as a winner even when you fail?
• Does the thought of risking to win trigger fear in you?
• Do you have a winning strategy to reach your company’s goals?

Truth 4:  Either you are growing or you are stagnating.

For your company to grow, you must grow as a leader.  When you stagnate, so will your company.  It’s that simple.

Real leaders do the things that others think they cannot do.   They continuously “push the envelope” in what is possible.

Mediocre leaders avoid discomfort.  I mean really avoid it.  Discomfort for them triggers fear and threatens their sense of safety and survival.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you push yourself out of your comfort zone daily?
• Are you comfortable with discomfort?
• Do you thrive on challenges or shrink from them?

Truth 5:  Either you embrace conflict or you avoid it.

Conflict has become a dirty word in the business world.

Mediocre leaders avoid conflict at all costs.  It’s viewed as painful, scary and a win/lose situation at best.  As a result, their organizations become homogenous and filled with “yes” people.

As Jim Collins, author, Good to Great, concluded from his extensive research, the #1 difference between good and great companies is that the leaders of great companies fostered healthy conflict to set direction and create innovative solutions for the future.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do your employees ever disagree with your decisions or viewpoints?
• Is there pseudo-harmony within your team?
• Do you tend to placate others whose viewpoints are different than yours?

Truth 6:  Either your actions are moving you “toward” or “away from” your goals. 

All behavior is self-motivated.  Your actions are motivated either to move toward something positive or away from something negative/painful.

Real leaders are “toward” motivated.  There is always the next horizon to reach.  Mediocre leaders tend to be “away from” motivated, driven by negative beliefs or secondary gains.  Their primary focus is on what they don’t want, rather than on what they want.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are your actions mainly focused on reaching your goals or eliminating problems?
• Are any of your actions (such as, checking emails, going to certain meetings, etc.) really a distraction and taking you off-course?
• Are you focused more on what you want or what you don’t want?

Truth 7:  Either you are truly leading or merely following.

Real leaders understand that leadership is a way of thinking and a way of engaging with others.  They take bold steps into the future and hold themselves and others to high standards.    They see themselves as a leader of leaders and their job is to develop other leaders.

Mediocre leaders seek recognition from their team over respect, decide through consensus and deflect responsibility for results and problems to others.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you tend to focus on solutions or problems?
• To what extent are your employees “rowing the boat in the same direction?”
• Is most of your day spent on completing tasks or growing your people?
  

The Greatest Truth of All

The greatest truth of all … is that,

Truth is power.

I know that admitting the truth about yourself can sting in the moment.  And avoiding the truth may seem like the easier route.

In reality, hiding from the truth is like having a 10,000 lb. weight on your shoulders that drags you down.  It holds you and your organization back.  It keeps you in stress and struggle.

Are you ready to dump the baggage?

Start by using the above 7 truths to get honest with yourself:

Are you …

• fighting for results?
• focused on creating the future?
• playing to win?
• growing and getting out of your comfort zone?
• leveraging conflict to create innovative solutions?
• taking actions that move you “toward” our goals?
• truly leading?

Only when you admit reality can you seize your true leadership power and take charge of yours/your organization’s fate.

Which of these leadership truths is holding you back the most?  What support do you need to have a breakthrough?

The post Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I know this statement may sound harsh at first.  I ask you to hold your judgment until after you’ve finished the article to understand why.

For example, when a company is stuck or has plateaued, I often hear reasons like …

• Our company did not grow because of the economy.
• We need more knowledge or technology to beat our competition.
• We have to seize every revenue opportunity as it comes our way or we won’t survive.
• The marketplace is an unfriendly place.

Do any of these sound familiar in your company?

The GRAND illusion is … those outside factors are NEVER the reason.   As soon as you justify outside factors for lack of growth, profitability and/or performance, you are lying to yourself.  You are buying into your own story.

That is not to dismiss the importance of knowledge, systems, the timing of opportunities and other factors that leaders believe with all their hearts are the reasons for their success or failure.

The Real Problem Is Your Leadership “Map.”

I don’t mean the kind of map you stick in the glove box of your car or get from your GPS system.  I am talking about a different kind of map.

In the 1930’s, Alford Korzybski, in his book “Science and Sanity,” made a profound statement about human nature.  A statement still widely used in many contexts, including management.  That is …

The map is not the territory.

This statement says it all … how and why your mind plays “dirty” tricks on you.  That is, your perception of reality is never reality itself.  Rather it is your version or internal representation of reality (or mental map).

100% of your experience of the world is being generated by your mind, not outside events.

Due to your brain’s limited processing capabilities, your mental maps filter out over 99% of external information coming from your five senses.  Your mind attempts to fill in the massive information gap with its own “spin,” story or interpretation about what it perceives.

Not only is your conscious awareness limited.  You also filter every experience through your own learned behaviors, experiences, beliefs, values, interests and states.  As a result, this filtering process distorts, deletes and generalizes your sense of reality.

How Can Your Mental Maps Cause BIG Trouble to Your Organization?

The distortion in thinking and perceptions –based on mental maps – creates over 80% of the problems at a leadership and organizational level.  While your leadership mental maps can actually create many problems in your organization, let’s look at 2 common examples.

Mind Trick #1:  You rationalize away outside circumstances (or your perceptions of those circumstances) as the reason for your organizational failures or lack of results.

Projecting outside circumstances (eg., the economy) as the cause for companies’ lack of results is so rampant in today’s business world.  Yet this one mistake alone is costing companies billions in lost revenues, profits and new opportunities … and leaders don’t even realize it!

The truth is … you either fight for reasons OR you fight for results.  Your brain is not capable of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time.

You can’t fight for growth and fight for the reasons for lack of growth at the same time.  When you focus on the latter, you are reinforcing in your brain why you can’t have growth.

Doing so has a domino effect.  On your attitudes, you become a victim.  On your beliefs, you convince yourself again that “outside circumstances drive your fate.”  On your behaviors, you focus your actions on survival, and ultimately, all this drives results or more lack of growth

Do you see how your perceptions of reality (your mental maps) determine your outcomes?

How is it that at times you become prisoner to your own reasons (and don’t realize it)?  What are the telltale signs?

Level of believability:  Your reasons seem plausible. 

So much so, you perceive your reasons or beliefs as true … as facts.  Those reasons then drive your focus and preclude you from seeing other possibilities.

Because blaming the economy for company failures or lack of results is a common rationalization, let’s use that as an example. 

You speak that rationalization, think it, believe it, feel it, and act consistently with it and then have evidence to back it up that it’s true. You are so identified with your mental map or mind that to you it is not your mind at all, it is the unvarnished truth.  In this case, you believe that the economy is the reason.

Consensus:  Your team, industry peers, the media, etc. all validate your reason. 

They buy into the same reason.  “Of course, the economy is to blame.”   Consensus grows and resignation becomes contagious within your company and industry.  This meme  …. aka thought virus … becomes the norm and goes viral.  Your thinking is infected and you can’t see causes within your control or other possibilities for a different outcome.

That one thought (or mental map) is the real cause for lack of results, not the economy.

That’s not to negate that economic downturns exist and can impact how a company operates and grows.   Your response to a down economy is completely within your control however.

It’s within your control to look for market segments or industries still in a growth mode.  It’s within your control to identify new strategies for seizing opportunities. It’s within your control to focus on your most profitable offerings during downturns.

You get to choose.  Are you going to fight for reasons or fight for results?

Mind Trick  #2:  You believe/assume that your plans and strategies, as long as followed,  (“the map”) will take your company to its desired destination (“the territory”).

Developing strategies and plans is a healthy practice for leaders to do.

However …. and this is a BIG “however” … it is often assumed that if you follow your strategies and plans (“the map”), you will successfully navigate the path (“the territory”) to get to your company’s destination.

There’s something to be said about staying the course and sticking to your strategies.  Yet your strategies often create blind spots that underestimate the impact of external changes on your business.

The issue is not about the content of your strategies and plans.  The issue is the unconscious belief or assumption that you have the right roadmap.  That one belief will cause you to filter critical external information and cues that may be signaling you have the wrong roadmap or you need to change it.

Example: A common blind spot is to overestimate your company’s strengths and capabilities.  If you perceive customer service as a strength, you are apt to assume that “strength” as the basis of your strategy and your differentiator.  That blind spot, however, may cause you to miss other emerging competitors who are better able to service your customers and are threatening your business.

• Where are you missing critical external cues that your strategies (maps) need to be changed?  
• Where are you over-estimating your business capabilities and strengths?  
• To what extent are you attached to your own strategies as being correct that you cannot perceive better ways of reaching your destination?

The above are 2 manifestations of the grand leadership illusion that can sink organizations and performance.  Your mental maps are driving your outcomes, not external circumstances.  The more you understand as a leader how your mind works, the less trapped you will be by your own thoughts and mental paradigms.

Changing Your Leadership “Maps” Can Change Your Results & Performance … At Lightning Speed.

Let’s take a moment to summarize what you need to remember from this article.

Key Points Summary

• The map is not the territory.
• Your mental maps of reality are NOT 100% accurate.  Your mental maps distort reality through your brain processing and filtering systems.
• We react to our own mental maps, not reality. Our maps are affected by our own interpretation about what is happening.  Your negative interpretation of the same event can be another person’s optimism.
• Your territory is constantly changing, so don’t overlay today’s experiences with what happened yesterday. After all, the surroundings were different.  Just because sales slowed or profit margins declined last month does not mean your growth or profitability can’t be stellar this month.
• No two maps are the same. Everyone creates their own maps, each is unique and no two are the same. (Your map is not the same as other leaders on your team.  In fact your maps may be opposite of each other.)

The good news is … your mental maps can be changed.  New mental maps can catalyze your company to its next level of success, just as much as the old ones can keep you stuck in molasses.

The first step to change is to question everything.  Challenge every thought, assumption, belief (disguised as fact) and point of view with which you currently identify.  Especially the ones you believe are right :)).

In future articles, I will be addressing the concept of constrictive minds and their impact on your leadership and organizational performance.  To be notified of those and other articles, sign up for our monthly newsletter and free report at Wired to Win BIG.

The post The One GRAND Leadership Illusion That Sinks Organizations 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.

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.

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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.