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Leadership development

Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

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James Flaherty taught me how to coach, created the organization where I met my wife, and challenged me to grow myself as a person.

That’s quite an influence for one person, don’t you think?

In Episode 6 of The Amiel Show, I had the privilege to talk with James about some big stuff I’ve learned from him. We discussed:

  • 3:00 So much of our experience is an interpretation versus a fact “out there”
  • 8:20 Why self-observation is as important as 360 feedback
  • 13:30 Truly changing involves our bodies, social worlds, and language
  • 24:00 Excellence is evoked in relationship rather than something we create alone
  • 30:30 Aristotle’s notion of excellence, including all parts of ourselves
  • 35:45 What’s up with emotions in our culture
  • 43:00 Executive presence happens in the body
  • 51:50 What James is deliberately practicing to develop himself

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Episode 5: Vicki Halsey on “Woo ‘n’ Do” Learning, Email Quality, and Legendary Service [The Amiel Show]

Episode 5: Vicki Halsey on “Woo ‘n’ Do” Learning, Email Quality, and Legendary Service [The Amiel Show]

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In Episode 5 of The Amiel Show, I speak with Vicki Halsey. Vicki has long been one of the key players in The Ken Blanchard Companies and currently serves at VP of Applied Learning. Below is a photo of her with Ken Blanchard, with whom she coauthored the book Legendary Service. In this high-energy conversation, Vicki and I discuss:

  • How to improve the way managers learn by shifting from “Sit ‘n’ Get” to “Woo ‘n’ Do”
  • How to manage email before it manages you by sending fewer emails and increasing the quality of the ones that we do send
  • The difference between legendary service and the ordinary service most of us experience most of the time

Vicki Halsey

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Episode 4: Bill Torbert on power, framing, and action [The Amiel Show]

Episode 4: Bill Torbert on power, framing, and action [The Amiel Show]

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If I were to create a Leadership Development Hall of Fame, Bill Torbert would be in it. It was therefore an honor to interview him about ideas that have influenced how I live, learn, and coach.

In Episode 4 of The Amiel Show, I speak with Bill Torbert, who for decades has been a pioneer in helping managers improve their results by practicing a powerful approach that he calls “action inquiry.” We discuss:

  • How to make the next meeting better than the previous one by paying attention to four “territories of experience”
  • What it’s important to start staff meetings by developing a shared frame of what’s at stake
  • How conversations can go astray because of “dueling advocacy” or “naked inquiry”
  • An unsuccessful attempt to trim my son’s fingernails
  • The different forms of power we gain access to as we develop as adults—and how each can be valuable yet limits us when used in every situation
  • Why some managers get threatened by their direct reports
  • What we can learn about “transforming power” from former Czech President, Vaclav Havel

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Episode 3: Jennifer Garvey Berger on Leadership and Adult Development [The Amiel Show]

Episode 3: Jennifer Garvey Berger on Leadership and Adult Development [The Amiel Show]

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In the 21 years since I started developing leaders, I’ve come across a handful of truly game-changing ideas. One of these is adult development. It’s the notion that after our bodies reach maturity, our minds can develop through multiple stages. Each stage gives us the capacity to handle greater complexity, yet also involves a loss of something we hold dear—namely, the way of seeing the world that up until now felt like “me.”

In Episode 3 of The Amiel Show, I speak with Jennifer Garvey Berger, one of the foremost educators about adult development in leadership and organizations. We discuss:

  • The many ways we expect leaders to be both superhuman and supremely human
  • How awesome it is to have new capacities to look forward to as we get older
  • How learning about adult development makes us more compassionate and less judgmental toward others
  • The massive achievement of the Socialized Mind, when you first move beyond vast loneliness and self-centeredness and feel connected to others
  • How the Socialized Mind leaves you unprepared for many leadership situations
  • How much of emotional intelligence requires the Self-Authored Mind
  • The Self-Authored Mind, when you develop the code of your own life and realize that, no, people don’t “piss you off,” because you make your own emotions
  • How it can take decades for people to develop the Self-Authored Mind
  • The value of having a companion to help you deal with development’s uncertain gains and painful losses
  • The Self-Transforming Mind, when complexity and ambiguity become our natural playgrounds

Jennifer-Edited

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Episode 2: Michael Dolan on Relaxed Productivity and Removing “Stuff” from Your Psyche [The Amiel Show]

Episode 2: Michael Dolan on Relaxed Productivity and Removing “Stuff” from Your Psyche [The Amiel Show]

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In episode 2 of The Amiel Show, Michael Dolan of Truly Productive Leadership and I speak about:

  • How Michael learned the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach
  • The biggest barriers he sees to relaxed productivity
  • The importance of managing agreements with yourself
  • Why it is important to collect all of the stuff swimming around in your psyche and place it in a trusted system, a process that he compares to popping popcorn
  • The tremendous relief people experience after doing this
  • The value of understanding yourself better as a person so that, in addition to being productive, you also feel a deep sense of meaning

MichaelDolan

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Episode 1: Janet Crawford on Leaders’ Brains, Emotional Literacy, and Power [The Amiel Show]

Episode 1: Janet Crawford on Leaders’ Brains, Emotional Literacy, and Power [The Amiel Show]

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It all starts with those 3.3 pounds of living tissue called the brain. “It” means people’s behaviors, leadership in organizations…and The Amiel Show.

In episode 1 of this podcast, Janet Crawford and I speak about

  • Why neuroscience is the modern day equivalent of the decoder ring
  • How much of people’s behaviors comes from unconscious patterns
  • What it takes to become emotionally literate
  • How to produce more strategic thinking by keeping our prefrontal cortex online
  • The role of GABA Goo in calming down the amygdala
  • Unconscious bias in organizations and what this tells us about why some people become more powerful than others.

Janet-Crawford

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The Real Reason Your “Shoes Don’t Fit”

The Real Reason Your “Shoes Don’t Fit”

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Ray’s feet hurt like hell, and he didn’t know why.

“My right foot has gotten scraped so much, it’s starting to bleed,” he told me with a painful grimace on his face. I looked down at his running shoes. I didn’t see any blood stains.  Before I could ask Ray a question, his girlfriend stepped forward and said, “I feel so bad to see how much pain Ray is in. Can you help him?”

The managers I coach don’t often talk about their feet. If the topic comes up, I’m the one to initiate, and it’s not to make their feet feel better, but to point out that they’re not flat on the ground. “If you want better executive presence,” I say. “You have to be grounded and centered. How can you do that if you’re feet aren’t on the ground?”

Ray, however, wasn’t a coaching client. He was a customer at Nordstrom. And, instead of his coach, I was a temporary summer employee in the men’s shoe department. What happened next in this incident from many years ago is a good illustration of how important it is to understand why you are having a problem before you try to fix it.

Running shoes

The first thing you do at Nordstrom after greeting the customer and finding out what they’re looking for is measure their feet. Ray had very small feet—at least lengthwise. He measured out at size 8.

I looked down at his shoes. They looked much bigger than size 8. “Ray, what size shoes are you wearing?” [Read more…] about The Real Reason Your “Shoes Don’t Fit”