Leadership Breakthrough: Walk the Talk of Change

Optimal performance begins on the inside, in leaders’ ability to manage their mind and emotions. Challenge, stress, conflict, complexity, and the hectic pace of today’s marketplace triggers sub-optimal reactions in people. Leaders must learn to manage those reactions.

Leadership Breakthrough increases leaders’ self-awareness so they can see their own mindsets in action. It teaches them how to identify – and then manage – their self-limiting mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns so they can perform at their best. Like an Olympic athlete, they learn how to maintain focus, calm and confidence under the most stressful situations. This enables them to bring their best – Breakthrough Self – to your organization’s greatest challenges.

Culture change cannot occur without leaders modeling the new way, and this takes self-awareness and mastery. Often, and certainly when under stress, leaders fall into old command and control, top-down behaviors, with communication styles and patterns that inadvertently stifle culture change.

Leadership Breakthrough enables your leaders to “walk the talk” of your organization’s desired culture. They become able to consistently model the empowerment, collaboration, engagement, cross boundary support, and trust you seek in your culture because they learn how to change those parts of themselves that limit that modeling. Then, as others see those changes, they too become more open to change in themselves. It’s a positive snowball effect that accelerates your culture change.

Research shows that less than 20% of leaders have the level of “vertical development” required to see from the broader perspectives required to solve today’s challenges.

Leaders always have a perspective. The problem is that they often unconsciously hold their perspective as the right one. Their ideas become hard to challenge or modify. They unconsciously make conclusions without adequately checking out assumptions. They make decisions inside current paradigms without ever questioning those underlying worldviews. Because they are the leader, this limits the inquiry and dialogue that leads to innovation and breakthrough in leaders and teams.

As Einstein said, “We cannot solve today’s problems from the same level of consciousness that created them.” New perspectives and mindsets are required. We have to see things differently.

Leadership Breakthrough empowers your leaders to solve your most complex challenges by helping them expand their perspective, take on new worldviews, see connections and inter-dependencies, perceive possibilities for integration, and identify distant inputs and impacts. Literally, like climbing a ladder to get a better perspective, your leaders begin to see breakthrough solutions they would otherwise miss.

Working together, across hierarchical, functional or customer-supplier boundaries, is the key to generating breakthrough. This requires a willingness to seek and understand each other’s perspectives and ideas, and a high level of trust and mutual support. People always ask us, “How do you create such alignment in teams so quickly?”

Leadership Breakthrough generates incredible cross-boundary support and collaboration by working from within – by helping leaders discover the parts of themselves that always want to be in control and right, that keep them from seeking other’s perspectives and really listening to be influenced, that cause them to focus on their own silo rather than the enterprise. As these normal, human ways of being fall away, collaboration, trust and co-creation become natural and automatic, the new normal. It is a sight to behold!

While communication is the grease that makes things run smoothly, engagement is the power that unleashes an organization’s potential. Without both, your organization under-performs.

Leadership Breakthrough teaches your leaders how to communicate for impact. They learn how to speak authentically and directly, listen fully, and communicate in ways that catalyze in others deeper commitment, greater collaboration and trust, and better team problem-solving. They learn how to engage people to bring out their best so collectively your organization can achieve the breakthroughs you seek.

Leadership requires understanding people – their mindsets, motivations, fears, perspectives, emotions, and values. But most leaders focus only on what people do, and are ill-equipped to address the human dynamics that promote – or inhibit – organizational success.

Leadership Breakthrough reveals the internal human dynamics of optimal performance, so leaders can better support your people to develop, from the inside out. They learn how to relate to others in ways that reduces resistance and builds commitment, and supports people to stretch outside their comfort zones to unleash their greatness so they can add more value to your organization.

Organization breakthrough and sustained marketplace success becomes highly probable when leaders and teams collaborate across boundaries in support of what is best for the larger enterprise and customers. Such collaboration and enterprise focus cannot occur when leaders compete internally and put the success of their own silo first.

Leadership Breakthrough calls leaders into a larger perspective, where they realize that their first allegiance is to the organization and its customers. They discover that by supporting each other across boundaries, they strengthen the organization’s ability to win in the marketplace. The energy that used to be wasted on internal competition becomes available for innovation and organizational breakthrough. This catalyzes your organization to a whole new level of success.