The Era of Upheaval is a mighty inflection point in history. Of course there have been others. This moment in time is unique because the survival of humankind and, indeed, perhaps the planet itself is in flux. We are beginning our discussions on creating preferred futures on 2-2 at 11 am EST. Small groups of seasoned leaders will meet via Zoom to share ideas about aligning organizations to optimize the mind-heart-spirit of everyone in the group. We can no longer afford to incrementally change. We need to figure out the actions to take to ensure sustainability. Face it, what businesses do will have more impact on everyday lives than anything else. Let's get this right. All you need to bring is curiosity and an open mind to different points of view. You will leave with enormous value and, hopefully, new connections. We are the ones, the time is now. 

We are in what I have dubbed The Era of Upheaval. The omicron surge, climate crisis, great resignation...you name it. I fervently believe that as seasoned leaders we must get in front of this tangle and align our organizations to do what we do best - figure it out. Yes, I'm on a mission! A mission to help businesses and organizations create the future - not just react to the next crisis. To that end I have joined forces with folks probably the best in the world at transformational change - Dannemiller Tyson Associates (DTA) https://lnkd.in/dcFJpEMi.

We are beginning with small groups of leaders from a variety of organizations to share ideas, experiences and issues. Please let me know thompson@triist.com if want to be included in the invitation list.

One of the quotes that sustains me these days (source unknown) is "Fate whispers 'You cannot stand against the storm.' The warrior whispers back 'I am the storm!'" Let's summon our collective warriorship, be the storm and get this done!

If you want to be involved in creating preferred futures email me at thompson@triist.com along with your contact phone.

Linda

Lately I've beed pondering essential leadership. What is being an effective leader really about? I've come to mastering conversations. In the age of apps and social media, conversations are much broader than one-on-one or even one-to-group. Conversations take place with you as leader and hundreds or even millions of people (depending on your following, of course. ) Let's start with a quick overview of the most common types of conversations that can have a huge impact on your effectiveness as a leader.

Conversation with your team are huge in terms of the results the team can produce. Are you inspiring? Motivational? Transparent? You will need to be all of these things and more when mobilzing the collective energy of your team. At times you engage your team in problem-solving, at other times in brainstorming and often in simple information sharing. Be sure the team clearly understands the diffenreces between different componets of team inter-action and the outputs expected from each. Otherwise the team will try to problem-solve every idea that comes up and get nowhere fast.

Don't forget to set aside space to inspire your team and encourage the heart of the team. You can be more inspirational than  you think you can. Plus, it's OK to ask for help. Invite a speaker or someone you think is inspiring. I recall lbringing in a magician once to underline points about how we can make things happen.

Another big bucket of conversations is one-on-one. Develpment, feedback, coaching, performance management, casual hallway conversations etc. Remember you can never not lead. Unless you are alone in the bathroom with no mobile device, the possibility exists that someone will take away a message about what you as the leader thinks and how that thought affects them. There are a plethora of models and techniques about effective communbication. Most of them helpful. One caution - be careful of reading a book, article, blog (LOL) and thinking "OK - I've got that." Leadership is a performance art - it's what you do and say.

In my many years in leadership, coaching leaders and studying leadership one gurantee I can make. Listening is the most powerful leadership tool we have and we are all bad listeners unless we are making a very strong conscious effort to really hear others.

I've given you a few basic concepts to gnaw on here. There will be more. TRi I is launching a leadership series based on mastering expression and I have an article and book coming out on the same topics. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you'll be amazed at what happens if you put your BIG EARS on. Hear, paprphrase, ask questions only to clarify. Make sure your person or team know you have heard them. Then move to reaction. 

Till we talk again.

Linda

As much as I hate to confess I love following the news, I did take a page from a recent CNN broadcast regarding the Trump White House. The gist was that the President needed to press the reset button on his initial efforts to be presidential. I found myself musing on the notion of a Reset Button as kind of a metaphor. Over a weekend I decided to try an experiment. I was going to press my own "reset button" to refocus my thinking on business and life. The first discovery I made was I had to stay away from my usual entertainments and distractions. As soon as I started watching a movie or contemplated theatre tickets, my thoughts were in their usual mode - just the more relaxed, entertaining version. I also had to pull away from those mundane chores that have to be done to keep life moving forward -shopping, cleaning etc. Once I broke the mold of what I normally did and looked more at being than doing, I began to get new ideas and perspectives. Perhaps this falls into the category of "what's old is new again" since on some level most of us know we cannot get new ideas doing the same old things. I do think in the current climate of new businesses and technologies appearing constantly and the leadership vacuum created by retirees leaving the workforce, developing your leadership reset button is a critical skill to stay current, fresh and innovative. Thanks, CNN.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

Following the plot of the Jabberwocky poem, these immortal and inviting words inspire four fresh-faced young oysters to leave their native sea-bed and accompany the Walrus and the Carpenter on a walk down the beach. The oysters are treated to conversation and beach vistas before becoming a snack for the philosophers -Walrus and Carpenter. Our business and socio-political landscape is littered with the remains of broken promises, misguided intentions and half-baked truths that lead to nowhere. In this confusing morass the issues that emerge predominantly are Leadership and Alignment. 

I read a statistic recently that shocked me. "A third of the workforce retired last year - mostly in leadership positions." New York Times, Aug. 2016. I started reading and have concluded this trend of leaders achieving retirement status and choosing to exit the workforce is real. Couple that with the well-publicized divisiveness in this country as seen so dramatically during the recent presidential election and two vital themes emerge: Leadership and Alignment.

The caliber of leadership in the business world matters to the lives of far more people than anything that may or may not happen in Washington. Anyone who has ever had a job or will have a job is impacted by the relationship with their immediate boss as well as all other leaders in the organization. The larger the organization, the greater the spheres of influence  most leaders have. In the lives of average Americans and by extension the international community, the events of their jobs, their work, how they grow a career and make a livelihood determines the quality of life, the likelihood their children will attend college, how secure they and their family will be in the face of aging and geo-politics.

With the loss of leadership expertise through attrition and a severely divided society, leadership and alignment are the challenges of today. Masterful leadership and the ability to align individuals and organizations are not only the keys to individual success but the critical imperatives of our time. With this information as a backdrop, we at Tri I are re-focusing our energies and offerings toward developing skills, tools, techniques in leadership ad alignment. Exciting new adventures are in the pipeline including a new location to invite our clients and colleagues to experience. We look forward to increased dialog this year and beyond.

We've been talking about the power of choice in the form of a decision. A decision by definition is an active agent. Out of endless ripples of possibility surrounding us in a moment, a decision brings some potentials into actualization and leaves others in unformed possibilities. We exert our will in the act of deciding . Think about an ambiguous situation you are handling. Be still. Think about what you want to see happen - not all the combinations of what could happen, not even what you may think most likely to happen. Think about what you really want to see happen. Notice how you feel as you let the images of your preferred outcome flow through your mind. More confident? More relaxed? Hold that image. 

Realistically, I am not saying that just see your desired tomorrow in great detail and "poof!" it will magically happen. I am saying that by being clear on what you want to happen may just sharpen your thinking and align your being enough to pull it off. If not, at least you know the gap between what you wanted and what happened. Now get busy filling that gap and bring your tomorrow into today!

As you pause to reflect a moment on the passage of time and your life, do you ever wonder how you got where you are and if you are really spending your days the way you want in your inner most self? If you haven't had a moment of "OMG! Life really flying and I haven't done a thing I set out to do!" don't worry, your time's coming. 

I don't know about you, but I like to keep up with the news as best I can during the day. I'll check headlines in a spare moment or follow a story while I stop to sip water. This week strikes me as being about information flow. From Hilary's emails to when the National Security Director learned two of his guys ploughed the White House to when will something finally be done about the Ferguson police, the key stories of the day hinge on timing the flow of information. So the 11:35 tweet didn't make the email thing go away. I doubt anyone thought it would. Maybe the timing of the tweet created some imagined sense of urgency or ...whatever. The woman works hard, young tweeters stay up late and that was probably the first chance she had. I think we have far bigger problems than another tempest in a teapot political shenanigans.the two sloshed Secret Service guys are classic - wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Covering it up for awhile from their boss is puzzling just in terms of how they pulled it off. block all social media and television for 48 hours going to that one person? Nah...?????? Think what they can block from the rest of us. Ferguson represents an issue that's been around since I was a kid and I think I'm now older than dirt. I am concerned about Ferguson but also how this translates into a national dialog. Pundits seem surprised and talk about how race relations have gotten worse un President Obama. Please!!!!! Racism hasn't gotten worse! Having an African-American president has probably legitimized and made more obvious the issues of race still plaguing us which must be resolved for America to flourish. We can no longer sweep this ugly stain under the national rug. Bring all the remnants of a dead and shameful chapter in history out into the open for cleansing. The old adage "timing is everything" struck me this week with ne force realizing that these stories I've heard all week were still after the fact. Reports are delayed despite the "Breaking News" banner that causes listeners to salivate. New reports are telescoped and often facts change over time. In fact, all three of these stories may reflect issues resolved months ago, we just didn't hear about them them in the programmed news cycle. Hmmm...I wonder...???

As a consultant for many years, I come into daily contact with people in businesses large and small, Fortune 500 and "mom and pop." The one factor I can say is universally common is that the Great Recession, as we now call it, changed everyone's way of thinking and doing business in profound ways. The number one common change is clinging desperately to their "processes." Once American business flourished on the idea of entrapreneurship -- acting entrepreneurial in the context of an established organization. Now we have re-engineered our processes, re-designed our talent needs for the glorious new processes. Yet in the wake of crippling financial conditions during the recession and continuing for many the process of how  we do business has become more important than doing business. Granted the significance of process re-design was crucial to success from the late nineties through 2006 and 2007. American businesses were strangled with workaround plans and processes because companies' core business systems were groaning with antiquity, too expensive to change and yet did not work anyway. We cleaned that up fairly well. In doing so we created our current roadblock to doing what America does best -- getting in there with hands proudly dirty and getting the job done. The current roadblock is our own fascination with our shiny new peocesses that work so well -- or do they? I see an odd psychological paradigm shift here. Simply put -- in our desperate need to keep some constancy in the slipping, topsy turvy world of the recession, we hung on to business processes themselves as a constant that would pull us from the precipice of financial collapse. Granted we had to hang on to something in order to deal with the confusion and irrationality of the world. Now the emphasis on process instead of result has created a false safety much like eating pepperoni piazza as comfort food during distress--over-processed, no nutrients and only an expanding waistline left once the temporary comfort has passed. We need to revitalize businesses by keeping processes simple and where they belong -- as support to the mental and emotional briallance of American business people. We do not serve the process. The process helps us get done what we so clearly see needs to happen. If the process is not helping us to that one simple outcome -- use your good mind, make a decision, get the support you need from partners and get the job done. 

Hi there. My name is Zoe and my best buddy (guy pic below) is Spiderwart. We thought we'd drop in to discuss a couple of simple things--how to fix the global economy other than the Federal reserve bailing out the world and bankrupting everyone in America and the critical need for everyone to own beautiful jewelry if any form of human civilization is to survive. Now I know what you're thinking--who are these people and how can such disparate elements as the Federal Reserve, global economy, name brand designers like Gucci , Baume Mercier and Tiffany and entrepreneurship possible relate? Ah, ye of little faith. Read on and be amazed. Spiderwart, you want to chime in? Sure, Zoe.