Out Of The Comfort Zone

The ability to spot and shrink capacity gaps is an urgent responsibility for all leaders. What’s your capacity at work? Can you take on more or are you at or beyond your limits of effectiveness? Do you even recognize when you have reached the peak of your capacity? More importantly, what can you do about it for yourself and for your team? Join us to for tips on how manage capacity.

It seems that there is no end to the feedback we get – especially at work. While some of it may be constructive and well delivered, a lot of feedback isn’t that useful. Yet, being seen as someone to “takes feedback well” is important. And of course, without feedback, we don’t grow enough. How can you best receive feedback, get the best from the message even if the deliverer isn’t so skilled? How can you better hear, respond to, act on, and dismiss feedback? How can you take it “less personally”?

As leaders, most of our time is spent in conversation – some of it highly effective and some of it less so. Yet, the most admired and productive leaders show greater Conversational Intelligence. What is this secret skill? How can you improve your conversational intelligence?

Peter Drucker says: 'The leader of the past may have been a person who knew how to tell, but certainly the leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.' Asking great questions may well be the secret to inspiring, motivating and engaging people. What are the questions great leaders ask? If you want to learn the secret using great questions or you want to expand your repertoire of questions, tune in.

Have you ever wondered why some leaders just manage to consistently out-perform everyone in their field? They out-produce, they transform industries and they develop great teams. Have you ever noticed that these leaders have a huge fan base of people who have worked for him/her? What makes this group of leaders so special – what do they do that the rest of us don’t do? Tune in to find out

Discomfort isn’t always pleasant but it can be a good thing if you know how to manage it. Expert leaders in particular get used to being right, having the facts at hand, knowing the work is accurate because you did it or you could verify it – in effect, being in their comfort zone. But to grow and to expand your responsibility, leaders have to lean in to discomfort. That means changing some practices like not using time as an excuse for telling versus leading, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and learning to nudge your employees into discomfort also without pushing them over the edge. Tune in to hear the tactics and advice for yourself and for leading your team.

These are turbulent times – with uncertainty, volatility, instant access to information and chaos just to name a few driving forces for leaders today. Most of this is outside of your control. How then should you think about leading through such times? What are the key skills that will get you through the turbulence and to the other side? Our guest calls these skills “artful leadership.” Join us to learn that that means and how to develop your capability.

What do you need to do to be sure you land that dream job – whether it’s inside your current company or in a different company? The interview is scheduled, you are excited, how do you make sure you are prepared and will leave a great impression? How do you negotiating the offer (including salary)? And, how do you make sure you avoid the biggest mistakes people make?

Mentoring, advocacy, sponsorship – so much has been discussed about the importance of these key relationships. How do you build a strong mentoring relationship? What is the natural cycle of a mentoring relationship? As a mentor, are you doing the best for your mentees? As a mentee, what can you do to get the best out of your mentor relationship? Join us to learn more.

Managers who coach their people get better performance, greater loyalty, higher engagement and stronger brands – to name just a few of the benefits. The great news is that coaching can be done is 10 minutes or less and anyone can do it. What to know how? Tune in to hear the five best questions to ask in any situation and more.

Millenials, the group of workers just now entering the workplace, are the largest cohort ever in history and they will change by virtue of their size all of our workplaces. Yet for all the conversation, there is a lot of hype, some mythology and limited advice on what really works. We have topics for the show: First, what is myth versus what’s reality and what does it mean? Second, what should we do on our teams and as managers that’s productive? Third, how can we meet in the middle? What’s to be gained – on both sides – from including millennials and managing them well?

Three very important and connected ideas… How do you get things done when you are not in charge? How do you inspire people to do what you have in mind without telling them what to do, especially when you don’t have the authority to do so? It turns out, that building trust is one of the keys. How do you build trust in your team and their trust in you? All this takes time – more of our precious, highly constrained time. Actually, it’s not really about time, it’s about how we choose to spend that time. How can we focus more on what really matters and manage our selves to get the results we want?

Millenials, the group of workers just now entering the workplace, are the largest cohort ever in history and they will change by virtue of their size all of our workplaces. Yet for all the conversation, there is a lot of hype, some mythology and limited advice on what really works. We have topics for the show: brFirst, what is myth versus what’s reality and what does it mean? Second, what should we do on our teams and as managers that’s productive? Third, how can we meet in the middle? What’s to be gained – on both sides – from including millennials and managing them well?

If there is no discomfort you are not growing, not getting out of your comfort zone. Organizations expect leaders to have the right answer, to do the right thing and to be nice to everyone. Yet, if you don’t challenge people with discomfort, they don’t grow. How do you lean into discomfort? How can you find the courage to do things that are hard, awkward or just plain different? As a leader, how do you push your team into the discomfort zone to achieve even better results? How can you find the right balance between being too confidence and too wishy-washy? Tune in to find out.

Coaches and mentors are the key to an engaged workplace, to retention, to career satisfaction. Find someone who is being coached or mentored effectively, and you will find a positive, inspired, committed person. Take those away and performance declines. How do you mentor or coach someone? What skills do you need? How do you get the best out of the relationship as a mentee or coachee? Tune in to hear the advice.

Have you been told that what is holding you back is your visibility … that you need to promote yourself? Want to know how to self-promote in ways that actually build credibility? Tune in to find out why self-promotion matters, how to create your unique value-proposition and what you use the proposition to build credibility?

Have you ever wondered how to understand your purpose at work or how to find purpose and meaning in your work? As a leader, do you aspire to lead so that others find meaning and purpose in what they do? If so, this show is for you. It’s easy to use the words but not so easy to understand what to do – until you hear from Arthur Woods, this week’s guest.

Is your organization going through massive change? Is the pace of that change difficult to manage? Are you or your team struggling to make sense of the resulting chaos? Do you need tactics for managing increasing levels of uncertainty? Do you prefer clarity and certainty rather than thriving in the midst of ambiguity? If so, join us to learn how to manage uncertainty and chaos. Learn the habits that undermine our ability to cope with uncertainty.

My guest this week says that work-life balance is dead …. But we have to live well anyway. So how can we do just that given all the competing demands on our time and attention? Part of living well is the ability to be able to confront people and situations. What’s the formula for supportive confrontation? And, finally, what can we do to cope with stress?

Have you been told that what is holding you back is your visibility … that you need to promote yourself? Want to know how to self-promote in ways that actually build credibility? Tune in to find out why self-promotion matters, how to create your unique value-proposition and what you use the proposition to build credibility?