I have recently embarked on a new Leadership Learning Journey by enrolling in the Executive Leadership Coaching Program at Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario. I’ve done this to expand my Executive Leadership Coaching development as a coach and as a CEO to support my 5-member coaching team. I’ve just returned home from the first of three intensive learning weekends. One of my key takeaways is the power of “Self-Reflection” (to evaluate) to generate learning insights and action quickly.

I have come to understand that my relationship to learning has expanded by being more intentional about debriefing after a learning event. A learning event could be a conversation with a colleague, a meeting with your team, a learning workshop, a client meeting or a key project. At the end of the event, you pause and debrief the learning that occurred from the event, on your own, or with your colleagues. My self-reflection practice includes this Learning Loop – Design (a conversation), Execute (the conversation) and then Evaluate (the impact of the conversation). Remember, every meeting, event, and project is a series of conversations that you design – execute – evaluate.

My Learning Journey at Ivey Business School:

As I reflect upon my recent weekend at Ivey Business School, one experience comes to mind.

We were put into groups of 5 and challenged to create a Coaching App to support our clients. We were given 1 hour for idea generation as a team, then 15 minutes to create an engaging presentation to give to the class and then 30 minutes to evaluate our prototype.

As I self-reflect (evaluate) on this experience here are my key learnings:

1. Collaboration creates rich insights! Idea generation begins with each person generating their own ideas and sharing their ideas with the group. At that moment collaboration took us from a few ideas to many ideas as we built on each others’ ideas.
2. Being curious about other people’s visionary ideas was very profound. It took me out of my fixed mindset of how I thought the Coaching App should be built.
3. Quantity of ideas can lead to a few quality ideas which can generate viable solutions. Together, our class created a prototype Coaching App in one hour, we called our app “HeadCoach!”.

I have gained a lot of insight from applying the Learning Loop to this experience. The power of collaboration to create Possibility Thinking was AWESOME to be part of!

Bringing this learning into my business taught me that when you have an issue (operational, service, process, communication, sales or a team), don’t solve it alone! Gather your team together for an hour and challenge them to generate a prototype that will improve the situation that you can test as a solution. I have also committed to practicing daily self-reflection (to evaluate) to accelerate my Learning Journey to becoming a champion leader in my business and as a coach to my clients.

Leadership Challenge:

Take 15 minutes at the end of your day and Self-Reflect by evaluating what you learned from your day and see what new insights you gain about yourself.

Great Leaders are committed to being intentional about awakening every member of their team to their greatness. They recognize that getting to know their people and understanding what makes them tick is vital to empowering them to perform at their highest level.

Question: As a Leader, how deep is your Listening to Understand and Connect with your people?

Here are 11 key things that you can look for, identify and hear when listening to your people:

1. Do they speak using the Language of Accountability: I can, I will, I choose, or I am versus Language of Non-Accountability: I’ll try, I should, I guess, or I assume?
2. Are they speaking in a Future context versus a story that happened in and comes from their Past?
3. Are they Stuck vs in Action?
4. What are their Gifts of Greatness and how can they leverage these gifts and strengths?
5. Do they have a Fear of, example:
   • Looking incompetent?
   • Rejection?
   • Not being liked or accepted?
   • Imposing or being seen as demanding?
6. What are their Core Values and how do they guide the person in their life?
7. What do they Care about personally and professionally?
   • Personal examples: family, hobbies, and/or travel
   • Professional examples: career advancement, learning & development and/or security
8. What is their current Mindset?
   • Abundance i.e. what’s possible and what can be created
   • Scarcity i.e. not enough time, money or ideas
9. Do they speak to Fix and Rescue others or do they speak to Empower and Support others?
10. What are they Concerned about i.e. what are their frustrations, worries, problems, and roadblocks?
11. Are they Vague or Intentional when they speak?

As you focus on being intentional about growing your people, and you take the time to get to know, understand and connect with them through ‘Deep Listening’ practices, you will be able to empower your people to harness their ‘True Potential!’

Want to expand your Deep Listening skills?

Check out this article by Tony Zampella – “Commitment of Listening”

Your Weekly Learning Journey:

Pull out a piece of paper and a pen, and for 10 minutes this week write down how much you know about two members of your team based upon the ‘11 Deep Listening’ areas outlined above.

“Are You Reaching Out for Support?”

A common conversation our firm engages in with Executives deals with the intensity they are experiencing as they lead their organizations through escalating uncertainty and change.

21^st Century Executives are consumed by increasing complexity that is causing breakdowns everywhere in businesses today. With this new level of intensifying complexity, Executives are asking themselves how they can embrace this new “Unknown”. If we don’t manage change, we risk a higher degree of burnout, more work/life balance issues, more performance related issues, and less strategic thinking that can cause a company to miss competitive advantages in volatile markets.

So how do Executives manage the intensity?

A common response we get from Executives is, “I have never felt this level of overwhelming, isolation, uncertainty and heightened anxiety while striving to create clarity and answers for my staff and board.”

The truth is, most Executives are coping with this intensified complexity by doing more of what they already know; working long hours, putting out fires and fixing problems. Albert Einstein stated, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”  In times of significant change and disruption, we need to leverage each other for deep, creative thinking to persevere the economic challenges we now face.

The paradox we are noticing is that this kind of true innovation is at an all-time low. Many leaders are not asking for support because they are stuck trying to find the answers to the challenges they are facing on their own.

It’s time leaders’ step outside the day to day grind to ask themselves how innovative they really are and who they are reaching out to for support.  Without self-reflection, collaborating together and turning our focus to what’s possible, we stay stuck in habitual methods of operating our businesses and compromise possibilities for improving performance, work/life balance and corporate sustainability. We acknowledge that asking for help is easy to say and hard for many Executives to do because they believe vulnerability equals weakness!

Once our clients learn to see vulnerability as a strength, they are able and willing to see their fears which had them stuck in the first place. Here’s a short list of what we’ve discovered are many of our standard fears:

• Fear of looking incompetent – I should know what to do
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of imposing – everyone is busy
• Fear of not being accepted
• Fear of looking helpless

An excellent way to support our clients in shifting their mindset from fear to possibility is to have them leverage their peers for different perspectives.  Leveraging the gifts of our quality support network challenges our often hidden mindset of “I need to be right and I need to know what to do”. This gets us thinking outside the box, seeing new perspectives and considering different possibilities.

So, we leave you with the challenge: “Who is one person you will reach out to for support who will listen to you and put you into action to turn your unknown experience into future possibilities?”

What will it take to generate results when tomorrow’s economy is volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous (VUCA)?

There’s little doubt the Canadian economy has been impacted by the volatility of a changing global market.  Current market conditions have created skepticism to any promise of sustainable growth, leaving many Leaders in a heightened state of anxiety about the future of their business.

Such challenges require creative thinking to generate new possibilities.

The type of creative thinking we are suggesting is not improving on old methods of operating our business from a “Problem-solving Mindset”. Instead, we are pointing to our ability to stand in the unknown, using an “Inquiry/Insight Mindset” to acknowledge our capacity to consider clearly what tomorrow looks like so that we can embrace our VUCA world.

We see this way of creative thinking as something that we often avoid. Why? Because of the rise in emotions that will inevitably surface when we don’t know what we’re doing.

This common behaviour can reveal our relationship to problems. It may also hold the solution to how we might navigate turbulent waters.  At Awesome Journey, we assert that Leaders need to expand their agility to navigate problems.  Human behavioural patterns indicate that we believe problems shouldn’t exist.  Most people interpret or experience problems as something is wrong, resulting in a reactive state of fight or flight to survive the situation.  This default method of problem solving often works AND may have us only sticking with what we know, limiting access to possibility for innovation and creative thinking that will take organizations to new growth.

This critical challenge requires moving past or setting aside what is known to generate a possible future of creating new results out of nothing.

To truly generate the future, Leaders need to spend less time on execution and embrace more time on learning.  This means deepening the inquiry into what got them where they are, what actions can they take today, what else is possible, and coming back to ask – did the actions work, and how might we improve on them moving forward. Asking yourself and your team “What did we learn?” and “How did we learn that?” creates a culture of Learning by Doing – Living from an “Inquiry-Insight Mindset”.

Learning requires Leaders to come from an Inquiry-Insight Mindset.  We need fewer people trying to be right about everything and more who question everything.  This new way of growth and development will provoke enough thought that moves us from our old paradigms of thinking.  No longer will problems appear as obstacles but instead they become the pathway to innovation and possibility.

Here are some key distinctions to live in the “Inquiry-Insight Mindset”:

1. Introspection: Notice how your team reacts when problems occur. What emotions are present?  Does everyone think their answer is the solution?  Or does your team explore multiple possibilities that go beyond your current realm of expertise?
2. Shift the context from which you see things – reframe how a situation is occurring for you by asking an Empowering Question – What else can we do? What have we not done that we can do?  What is missing?  As a rule of thumb, remember that our ability to generate results comes in direct proportion to our ability to manage uncertainty.
3. Agreements – Be crystal clear on the actions and accountability that needs to occur for the results to come over time. Give room to fail, make sure to learn from mistakes and always innovate and improve.
4. Fail forward and Celebrate – Creating from nothing takes learning by doing, which essentially comes with failing. With a learner mindset, failing is okay and should also be celebrated for acknowledging new efforts with an intent to see results over time. 

Example: Blockbuster vs Netflix

For Blockbuster, they created their Strategic Growth Plan based upon a “Problem-Solving Mindset” by focusing on bringing the past to now. To grow their business, they focused on leasing retail space in growing neighborhoods – Duplicating their past success to grow the business. They also were making massive profits from charging their customers for late fees which clouded the executive team from seeing a different future.

On the other hand, Netflix approached their Strategic Growth Plan by applying an “Inquiry-Insight Mindset” by asking empowering questions – “What trends are emerging such that they could differentiate their business to support future growth?” One insight that continued to show up in Netflix conversations was people were asking when they could download movies like downloading music over the internet. The technology was two to three years out when Netflix’s started. So, they built their business from the future and when the technology was available Netflix was ready and Blockbuster was not. Today Netflix’s market cap is approx. $110 Billion, and Blockbuster is bankrupt.

Leadership Challenge:

Create a discussion with your team asking them the following two questions:

1. What are our biggest challenges as a team when we are presented with problems?
2. What could we do differently that we haven’t done before when we experience breakdowns?

Create an action plan from your dialogue and act.

As executive leadership coaches, we understand the power of language.

Language has the power to connect, co-create, and to generate real action. We typically see two types of communication with our clients: Descriptive and Generative.

What’s the Difference?

• Generative language puts people into action through intentionally designed conversations that create dialogues that lead to action by making clear requests, offers, and promises with others.
• Descriptive language explains, tells, creates one-way monologues, and describes situations and experiences; it does not create action.

Example: Descriptive vs Generative Communication

5 Key Distinctions of Generative Communication

1. Deep Listening
2. Make clear requests and real promises that create quality agreements
3. Able to enroll (commitment) vs convince/sell/persuade others
4. Design intentional conversations (purposeful) vs. vague conversations (automatic speaking)
5. Asking empowering questions

• Who needs to be in action with your issue?
• What is missing for action to occur?
• Is this a threat or opportunity?

Leadership Challenge:

Design one intentional conversation that leads to action.

My partner and I were recently conducting a two-day Strategic Planning session with an 8-member Executive Leadership team. The session was going very well; there was a great energy in the room.

Within two hours of the session, the CEO became emotionally triggered by some critical information that was shared and proceeded to engage in a very negative rant for two minutes.

You could visually see the high level of intense discomfort throughout the entire team. Body language turned inward, arms crossed, smiles faded, and heads nodded down.

There was a very noticeable shift in the room. Suddenly the atmosphere went from productive and friendly, to very unsafe, which caused everyone to shut down, stop being vulnerable, and everyone stopped speaking openly.

Seeing this discomfort, I asked the team to close their eyes and breathe deeply. While they were breathing I requested that they ask themselves one question to become grounded,

“Is this experience right now a threat or an opportunity?”

I asked everyone to open their eyes and I went around the room and asked them to respond to my question.

During the first round, everyone responded with, “it feels like a threat to my career right now.” I thanked everyone for being authentic and honest. Then I asked them to close their eyes again and asked them the same question,

“Is this experience right now a threat or an opportunity?”

Then I added one more insight for the team to ponder – “Is your CEO scared right now or is he a jerk?”

When I went around the room to get everyone’s insight, their answers were unanimous – Our CEO is scared right now and what he needs from me is my support not my judgement.

This example is a great illustration of the power of Ontological Coaching, which is the ability to shift another person’s “Way of Being”.

Your Way of Being is your reactions, behaviors, perceptions, and your mindset.

How you perceive a situation, leads to how you react to it, which leads to how another person receives and processes it.

The ability to reframe your communication is important because the way you communicate has a large impact on how your communication lands for another person.

The mindset shift that occurred above was asking the question – is this a threat or an opportunity and getting the team to look at the situation differently (reframing) and to perceive their CEO differently when he is expressing anger. The CEO’s anger was a reaction to fear but came out in a negative way and therefore triggered a negative reaction.

Leadership Challenge:

The next time you get triggered, ask yourself, “is this a threat or an opportunity” and see where the answer takes you.

Chris Anderson is all about “ideas worth spreading”.

He has a passion for the creation and distribution of great, innovative ideas that start or change the conversation.

TED started in Monterrey, California in 1984, and at the end of 2001, Chris’s foundation (Sapling Foundation) acquired TED. With a desire to grow the concept and take the conversations to the next level, Chris utilized the power of online platforms and expanded it’s focus from technology, entertainment, and design to include science, business, and key global issues. This expansion has led to the global phenomenon that is TED Talks.

In 2015, the organization posted its 2000^th talk online, and viewership had grown to approximately one billion views per year. In 2009, under a strategy of “Radical Openness”, Chris introduced the TEDx Initiative, allowing free licenses to local organizers. Over 8,000 events have been held, creating an archive of over 60,000 TEDx talks. (TED profile)

About Chris Anderson

I am a: Change Agent, Connector, Event Planner, Global Soul, Idea Generator, Journalist, Philanthropist, Employer, Producer, Social Entrepreneur, Curator

Personal Profile

“We don’t know what the final destination is, but we are guided by a philosophical and deep belief in the power of good thinking, the power of good ideas,” he said. “With TED, the end of the talk should not be the end of the idea, but just the beginning.” – Chris Anderson

Peter Diamandis is a Greek American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur. He has been featured in Fortune Magazine as one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders.

As the Founder & Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, he is a leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions whereby large cash incentive prizes are offered to inventors who can solve grand world challenges.  He is the Executive Founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level technological institution that counsels the world’s leaders on exponentially growing technologies.

Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital, and education. He is also co-Founder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies.

He earned degrees in Molecular Genetics and Aerospace Engineering from the MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Peter’s favorite saying is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself”

8 Exponential Technologies Converging: 

1. Computation
2. Internet of Things (Sensors & Networks)
3. Robotics and Drones
4. Artificial Intelligence
5. 3D Printing
6. Materials Science
7. Virtual/Augmented Reality
8. Synthetic Biology