Challenges & Solutions

The Challenges

1) In today's uber-competitive, rapidly morphing markets, leaders have many and varied responsibilities, but there is one that trumps all the others: it is to protect the organization's "primary earning assets" that walk out of the building every night.  It is the leaders' job to have those people enthusiastically walk back in the next morning.

Research by Gallup shows that employees don't leave organizations, they leave bosses!  When the employees are counting down to Friday, they are disengaged.  Their research indicates that today over 60% of the employees are Disengaged and another 15% are totally Unengaged.

This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing Senior Leaders today is "how do we develop leaders who create cultures populated with engaged employees who enthusiastically walk into the building each morning?"

2)  In our practice as Executive Leadership Coaches, we consistently encounter a common organizational distress that transcends the size of the organization or its markets or its industry.  This distress appears to be universal in response to three imperatives imposed by the 21st Century Global Economy.  To prosper, a business must 1) Evolve at the velocity of change, which is continuing to accelerate, 2) Consistently exceed the client's expectations for off-the-shelf delivery of customized products or services, and 3) Create enduring relationships across companies, countries and cultures.

The executives leading these teams want more creativity, innovation and productivity for the team and less chaos, stress and overwhelm among the team's members.  Each leadership team desires their version of the same goal:

"An Agile, High Performance Team flourishing in a low-stress environment where everyone enjoys a fulfilling live adventure of their own design".

Our conventional wisdom regards high stress executive leadership as indigenous to a high performance organization.  This belief is understandable when witnessing the ever accelerating rate of change brought on by the game changing disruptive technologies arising throughout the world.  However, this is, literally, a destructive, unhealthy myth.

Stress is a large factor in all of the preventable, "lifestyle," diseases such as obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and the more popular forms of cancer (breast, prostate and colon).  Economically and morally, it makes no sense to tolerate a high stress working environment.  Everyone deserves a "low stress, fulfilling life adventure of our own design".  It is a birthright for everyone to create a life that is truly their own and then own it.


The Solutions

Authentic Leadership is consciously and intentionally designed -- and evolving -- to meet these two specific challenges.  "An Agile, High Performance Team flourishing in a low-stress environment" is a proven concept; it exists!  The Authentic Leadership Principles making it possible evolved over the last 30 years.  It has been the focus of my life's work.

The Authentic Leadership Model is currently documented in a large collection of Coaching Handouts (one to three pages) used to deepen the learning and advance the action in relevant coaching conversations.  The coaching agenda is controlled by the client, so the sequence in which specific Coaching Handout becomes the focus of discussion depends on what is important to the client at that moment.

In practice, each Coaching Handout becomes the focus of intense, provocative coaching discussions.  The clients are at choice as to what part of each concept to embrace or discard.  The "Authentic" in Authentic Leadership refers to the fact that all Authentic Leaders have their own unique style and are guided by their unique constellation of values, vision, purpose and priorities. 


We embrace the wisdom of R. Buckminster Fuller to shift management's obsolete models:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete".

Today's successful organization is not the "well-oiled machine," of the past.  It is a "living, breathing evolving organism!"  Today's successful organization is a healthy organism with sensitive feedback circuits that make it aware of changes in its environment, or more precisely, its "Ecosystem".  The organizational organism must adapt to its changing Ecosystem or perish.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change". – Charles Darwin