LeadershipTraction®

What Track Are You On?

Leaders hold a unique position of authority in business. When they’re on the right track, they have the ability to make things significantly better. But when not, they can make things infinitely worse.

Consider:

When leaders can’t effectively manage complex tasks and information, that negatively affects:

• Project and Program Management Success
• Accountability Discussions and The Shaping Others’ Behaviors
• Effectively Managing Up, Down, and Across The Organization
• Collaboration
• Executive Intelligence

When leaders avoid conflict or difficult or challenging conversations, that significantly dilutes:

• Employee Performance Feedback
• Preparing for Big Meetings
• Evaluating Key Metrics
• Managing Conflict
• Clarity of Communications

When leaders don’t consistently think, feel, and behave in ways that actively motivate, impress, and inspire others, that actively inhibits:

• Team and Team Member Performance
• Thought Leadership and Vision
• Priority Management and Follow-through
• Change Management
• Inspiring Others to Demonstrate Greater Urgency, Thoroughness, and Consistency in What THEY Do

When leaders let unanticipated shifts in plans, priorities, and responsibilities destabilize employee effectiveness, that necessarily undermines:

• Organizational Flexibility and Agility
• Intelligent Conversation
• Working Through Ambiguity
• Mood Management
• How Others Achieve

When leaders get overwhelmed by stress, strain, and worry, that undeniably weakens:

• Organizational Capacity-Building
• Leveraging Employee Strengths And Mitigating Their Weaknesses
• Control, Challenge, and Commitment
• Grit, Resolve, and Resilience
• Work/Life Balance
• Delivering Key Business Deliverables

Wrong Track, Wrong Outcomes

Is it any surprise, then, that when you or your leaders are NOT on the right track, the ‘easy’ becomes difficult, and the ‘difficult’ or challenging becomes near-impossible?!

But with the proper guidance and perspective – the proper coaching and mentoring – leaders can not only avoid these likely pitfalls, they can engage those in their sphere-of-influence in significantly more powerful and productive ways.

They key, of course, is recognizing that to change what you achieve you have to start by changing how you think.

That’s where LeadershipTraction comes in.

Changing How You Think Changes What You Do

When leaders shift how they think – about leadership, in general, and how they approach their specific roles and responsibilities, in particular – good things start to happen sooner.

But how? In what ways?

Here are some shifts that clients have found most relevant to their success to test your own thinking against:

Every conversation you have as a leader has two distinct, yet related, purposes:

• To address the work at hand
• To build and sustain the relationships (and organizational capacity) needed to successfully complete all future work

Conflict Management is an essential part of everything a leader does:

• Asserting priorities always involves the potential for conflict
• Knowing how to effectively navigate through conflict (and helping others do so, as well)  is a fundamental leadership competency

Just doing your job is not doing your job:

• That may get you an ‘average’ performance review
• If you and those in your charge can’t consistently demonstrate a meaningful, timely, and visible business impact, however, you’ll rarely be recognized as essential contributors

Better commitment-management activates greater employee accountability:

• In terms of holding others responsible for their performance and engagement
• In terms of holding yourself responsible for your performance and engagement

Transitioning from middle-manager to executive requires strategic intent and focused attention:

• To solidify your leadership voice, vision, style, and executive presence
• To expand your consensus-building, courageousness, and ability to navigate and expedite complex change

Seeking perspective is NOT a sign of weakness:

• Pretending you know is irresponsible and unsustainable, and sends the absolute wrong message as the role model you already are
• Properly focusing your learning (and the learning of others) not only reduces fear, stress, and strain, but naturally encourages everyone – including yourself – to perform at increasingly higher levels

These are all good places for any leadership development effort to start, but they’re especially good if you’re finding that you or yours are not achieving what you hope – what you need.

Trusted Coaching and Mentoring

During the last twenty years, LeadershipTraction has become a consistently reliable resource for organizations, leaders, leaders of leaders, and HR/OD professionals, alike, to engage with, stay with, and reengage with, over time.

Why? Because of one simple, irrevocable truth:

That’s why LeadershipTraction specializes in engaging leaders in deeply-meaningful and personally-relevant conversations about how they think, and how best to span the gap between the outcomes they want to have happen, and the outcomes likely to happen, if nothing changes.

In doing so, the chances of actually achieving what matters most – to you, the people you work with, and the people you serve – can dramatically improve.

Changing How You Think Changes What You Achieve

But does it work? Does engaging with LeadershipTraction actually have the impact it intends?

Here are some ‘flash stats’ on how clients have benefited from working with LeadershipTraction that might help you decide:

+99% – the percent reported ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the personalized coaching, mentoring, and support they received.‌⁣

~95% – the percent of clients who’ve renewed their engagements beyond the initially agreed-upon duration.

23-45% – the average improvements cited across more than 10 essential leadership development competencies directly related to improving their impact, influence, strategic thinking, and TRACTION.‌

+25% – the percent of ‘completed’ clients so satisfied that they re-engaged, anew, several months, if not years, later.

~4x – the multiplier of value received for every $1 spent, that is, the average ROI (return on investment) that clients calculated having received.‌

One – the number of conversations it typically takes for real, relevant, and irrefutable traction to start kicking in.

Client Endorsements

❝Barry speaks to the human element that we all deal with in business which underlies many of our interactions on a daily basis at work. He was completely engaged in the conversation and attaining some results from it. He helped me get to another level of communication in my new position which has greatly helped, not only me, but the entire office. He was flexible and gave me ideas that made sense for each conversation. I didn’t feel like his ideas were a pre-programmed ‘canned’ process.❞

Vice President | Client Services/Banking, Minneapolis, MN

❝Barry’s instincts were ‘spot-on’ in identifying roadblocks to professional growth and his ideas for resolution were workable and reasonable. He intuitively understood our limits of endurance on sensitive issues and could safely walk us through them to careful and thoughtful results. I would highly recommend his services to anyone interested in engaging a professional coach.❞

Director | Administration/Financial Services, Chicago, IL

❝Barry has a unique gift of listening and asking the right questions to drill down to the key points and identifying patterns. I found myself looking forward to each next coaching session with great anticipation. Barry made me think about and question my long-standing, self-limiting, assumptions and thoughts and then gave me ways to overcome them. I liked the way he never told me what to do. Instead, he helped me tell myself what to do. Thanks for helping me enjoy life (all aspects) much more.❞

Director | Human Resources/Government, Louisville, KY

❝I am truly grateful for the opportunity to work with Barry Zweibel. Barry brings relevant business knowledge and profound insight to coaching that encourages life changing development in business and personal endeavors.❞

Executive Vice President, Sales/Manufacturing, Atlanta, GA

And there are plenty more client testimonials and endorsements, too, for your review.

Next Steps for You and Yours

The whole point of any leadership development initiative is to help leaders learn to think more clearly, collaborate more freely, take full responsibility for all of their decisions, and create more positive and lasting outcomes – more quickly and easily than they might, otherwise.

If you think an exploratory conversation about your leadership development needs – or those of others in your organization – could be useful, call or contact LeadershipTraction to coordinate calendars.

Best, too, to do so sooner, rather than later, though – before you get distracted by the very concerns that brought you here in the first place.