You’ve heard it, you’ve seen it, you experience it – life is a runaway train. Our personal and professional lives barrel forward at sometimes unbearable speeds, and like me, we have a hard enough time tying our shoes before we walk out the door. The runaway train is a 24-7-365 world. I know, I despise that double clichéd label as much as anyone, but it’s unfortunately painfully true. For company leaders, managing self, teams and the organization efficiently and effectively – being 100% present in every task and activity is a bitch.
Just keeping it real.
Back in January I blogged about being a mindful leader and leadership development firm The Glowan Consulting Group. During the past two months I’ve been fortunate enough to experience the L3 leadership model first hand; I took the DISC assessment, I received 360-degree feedback from my firm, and then attended their two-day workshop last week (the coaching comes next).
Glowan’s model is right up my leadership alley:
The L3 model of Leadership explores three critical attributes of effective leaders while leading with authenticity, integrity and balance. These three attributes are:
L1 Leading Self: Total Life Leadership. Achieving personal mastery and work/life integration.
L2 Leading With Others: Creating and sustaining Collaborative Advantage.
L3 Leading Others: Cultivating the Best Place to work: culture of high engagement, retention, performance and productivity.
I’m all about getting my house in order first – being personally responsibility for my actions and reactions, my choices and my life – being 100% present in each and every task and activity – and then applying it to managing teams and leading the firm.
But what I really want to talk about is the 10-minute-brainstorm-peer-coaching-leading experiment.
The wha?
This exercise encapsulated everything I learned about leading during the workshop. We broke up into teams of three – myself, an operations manager for a Bay Area power plant company and an IT data center manager from Oracle.
The task was this: each of us had to present an organizational problem to the group (3 minutes), brainstorm solutions (5 minutes), and then select the best solutions to share with the workshop (2 minutes).
None of us knew much if anything of the other’s industry, and yet in 10 minutes each of us had a list of viable solutions for our organizational problems.
I can’t overstate how powerful this exercise was. I mean, we’ve all done brainstorming and problem solving exercises with internal and external teams, but how fruitful were there? How organized? How much time did we spend? How present was everyone?
How present were you?
Take a 10-minute timeout to be present and lead yourself, your team and your company. It’s transforming.
Labels: 360-degree feedback, DISC assessment, Glowan Consulting, leadership development