The Future of Work

Building a Loyalist Team for High-Performance

The future-proof workplace requires high-performing teams. In nearly every organization large or small – business, government, non-profit, sports – work gets done by teams, and each team breaks down or succeeds in specific, identifiable and replicable ways. This week, we will discuss what it means to be a Loyalist team. This kind of team has members who ensure each other’s success as they work to ensure their own, operate with absolute candor, and value loyalty and authenticity to deliver results, create a healthy work environment, and help companies succeed.

Join us as we interview Abby Curnow-Chavez and Rebecca Teasdale, two of the four authors of the book The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor, and Authenticity Create Great Organizations. This book was written by the principles of The Trispective Group – Linda Adams, Abby Curnow-Chavez, Audrey Epstein, Rebecca Teasdale (with Jody Berger) introduce tools that allow anyone to get to the heart of why teams break down, identify the weaknesses in their own team, and build a Loyalist Team. The four authors have led the human resources, talent management, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness functions of multiple Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Company, PepsiCo, Newmont Mining and Level 3 Communications.

Resilience Leadership in Times of Turmoil

Resilience is a hallmark of great leaders today. In the turbulent times that we live in, leaders must be able to lead through change. They must have self-reliance to deal with chaos, make sense out of confusion, and create clarity of purpose for the path forward. This show will help you learn the keys to create a powerful future for yourself. We will be discussing how to overcome challenges by strengthening resilience. Our guests, Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos, are leading experts in developing powerful leaders around the world and are co-hosts of The Leadership Podcast. Join us for this what will be a powerful discussion to sharpen your leadership skills!

Jan Rutherford has over 25 years of business experience and has held executive roles in business development, marketing, sales, training, product management, and as a CEO. In 2011, Jan founded Self-Reliant Leadership, LLC – a leadership development firm focused on helping leaders and teams develop self-reliance to grow their business through advising, facilitating, coaching, and wilderness expeditions.

Jim Vaselopulos is a C-level business advisor with a proven record as a leader, strategist, rainmaker and new business development expert. Jim has been a consultant to many companies across nearly every industry.  As the founder of Rafti Advisors, Inc., Jim helps early stage companies get off on the right foot, growth stage companies push through plateaus and mature companies with strategic shifts and complex challenges.

Disruption and the Digital Revolution

The digital revolution is upon us opening up new possibilities and careers that didn’t exist only decades ago, and it is disrupting traditional businesses. Half of Fortune 500 organizations have been wiped out since 2000. If it wasn’t already obvious, we’re all in the technology business, resistance is futile.

A recent headline stated, “In an age of robots, we are teaching our children to be obsolete.” Our approach to education has barely changed in millennia. However teaching from the lectern, rote learning is not keeping pace with the rapid change in business and the workplace.

Join us as we talk with Marquess Lewis from Unicon, a leading provider of technology consulting, services, and support for the education industry. Marquess Lewis is currently CTO with Unicon, Inc. with involvement in learning systems architecture for various clients, operations, architecture, and IT Security and as a member of the Unicon executive team.  Mr. Lewis has over 25 years of experience in complex systems development and operations, delivering SaaS platforms and services supporting millions of customers.  A majority of this experience is in Education, Higher Ed and K12 in the US and in global markets as well.

Asking the More Beautiful Question

Part of learning to be a problem solver is being able to ask questions. As Peter Drucker famously said, “The leader of the past knew how to tell. The leader of the future will know how to ask.“ But just asking questions can be misleading because some questions can be controlling and leading others to the answers that the asker wants, and really not used for inquiry. We have found that there is a great link between open non-judgmental questioning and innovation. Our guest this week is Warren Berger, best-selling author, speaker and innovator, who takes questioning to a new level.  We will talk about how the power of questioning can ignite change in our companies, careers, and daily lives.  This is a must listen show!

Turning Blue Sky Thinking into Green Pasture Action

“Blue sky” thinking is an essential part of innovation and necessary for every organization and leader if they are to stay ahead of trends. But turning that thinking to “green pasture action” can often be a challenge. Helping to align others around the “green pasture actions” requires a great deal of communication and personal commitment on the part of leaders. Leaders need to communicate regularly and consistently to help others see the possibilities and progress. In our experience coaching leaders, they often under-communicate and realize it when it is too late and the rumor mill has set in making it hard to get everyone back on the right track. Leaders don’t recognize how much communicating they need to do to make “green pasture actions” reality.

We are excited to have Liz Guthridge, author of Lean Communication, speaker, and an experienced change consultant and expert in communications who has been mentored by the leading thinkers in the field. Liz is also deeply steeped in neuroscience and has applied these techniques to the communication process. We will be discussing specifics about how to implement brain-friendly change communication strategies. She will share how to leverage cutting edge software to build collaboration and aid decision-making.  We look forward to having you join a lively and important discussion.

21st Century Leadership

It’s estimated that across the globe companies invest more than $50 billion a year teaching leaders how to lead. Deloitte’s 2016 Human Capital Study reports that almost a third of organizations have week or very weak leadership pipelines, with 90% of organizations seeing this as a strategic business challenge.

The 20th Century models of leadership need to adapt to support the realities of a 21st workforce. How we teach and prepare for leadership at all levels in organizations is key.

Join us this Thursday at 5pm ET as we talk with global leadership development expert, and New York Times bestselling author, Courtney Lynch. With more than a decade of experience working with talented leaders within Fortune 500 companies, small and mid-sized businesses, Courtney and the Lead Star team have partnered with organizations to cultivate the leader in all of us.

 

Changing how we Approach Change

Change is afoot with 96% of organizations reported to be in some phase of transformation. Yet the inconvenient truth is that many of these transformation efforts fail to deliver (all) the anticipated benefits. It’s time to change how we approach change! Leaders and organizations alike need to adapt or risk becoming obsolete.

Join us as we talk with Jesse Jacoby, founder of Emergent Consultants, as we discuss the common pitfalls of change efforts, the critical role of leaders in the change process, and how change practices can become more agile and responsive.

Jesse Jacoby is a sought-after management consultant specializing in business transformation and strategic change management. He and his team at Emergent partner with Fortune 500 and mid-market companies to deliver successful people and change strategies across a range of initiatives including technology deployments, cost-cutting, corporate restructuring, and process improvements. Jesse is also the developer of online organizational tools, including Change Accelerator.

What Men Need to Know to Champion Women into Leadership Roles

Women make up less than 5 percent of the CEOs at S&P 500 companies. Yet, virtually every financial study conducted since the 1980’s on the financial performance of companies that have women on their boards and on their executive teams, have shown that sharing leadership with women produces superior financial performance in organizations. There are few, if any, thought leaders who have written specifically to men on how they become more gender-intelligent and what they can and should do to advance women into leadership roles. Join us in our interview of best-selling author Richard Nesbitt to learn the latest steps you can take to advance diversity in the workplace. This is not just for men!

 Richard Nesbitt is president and CEO of Global Risk Institute. He is also adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto and chair of the advisory board to its Mind Brain Behaviour Hive.

Leading from the Center

This week we welcome Dr. Tony O’Driscoll, Global Head of DukeCE Labs and Lecture Fellow at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. This dual-role affords Tony the opportunity to operate at the intersection of cutting-edge academic research in business and the design of groundbreaking development interventions that get leadership ready for what’s next.

Join us as we talk with Dr. Tony O’Driscoll about the changing model of leadership from the center, how to cultivate a leadership system that is agile, and how leadership development must shift. The world around us is drastically changing, and everyone is feeling it at just about every level of their lives. It just makes sense that in this VUCA world, that the old leadership models just simply don’t work anymore. Leaders need to lead from the center. They have to straddle a world that is both complicated and complex, where old ways of thinking about strategy no longer apply. Leaders must know how to navigate the polarities of the work place, and this can only be done from the center – not sitting on the top of a hierarchy that is cumbersome, slow and inefficient.

Creating a Championship Culture

This week's guest is Lee MJ Elias, the award-winning author of WIN: What Every Team Needs to Know to Create a Championship Culture and Think Like a Fan: Invest in Your Fans So They Invest in You.

Teamwork is the time-honored ingredient for success in just about any endeavor, unless you work alone and under a rock. We don’t know many people that do though. This show will explore the techniques used in sports by Lee MJ Elias and how they relate to building any team for greatness, no matter where they are and how dispersed they are. We will talk about a step by step approach to building a team to be champions. At the heart of all successful teams is a great culture, but great cultures can quickly be destroyed by favoritism, neglect, lack of respect, and injustice. Organizations and leaders must avoid these elements at all costs to thrive in the 21st Century.