Goodness to Greatness Leadership-Seven Steps

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Goodness to Greatness Leadership – Seven Steps from ME to WE
By Irene Becker, Chief Success Officer, Just Coach It, www.justcoachit.com


Are YOU ready to lead from goodness to greatness? Are you ready to build the architecture of business, personal and inter-personal leadership?  Or, will you lead or will you follow the Pied Piper of discouragement and fear that leads the breaking news we ingest on a daily basis?

It is a challenge, but it’s a challenge that is worth our greatest effort.  And, amazingly when we have the courage to lead with our strengths, the courage to learn how to transform the changes and even crises we face into a positive catalyst for our true power and potential we become not only change agents, but change leaders. In so doing we inspire others to lead rather than follow, to move past fear and step into their greatest courage and power.

A challenge that requires seven steps, seven commitments. Business leadership, personal leadership and inter-personal leadership are all built upon an architecture that is simple but powerful.  Here are the seven steps, the seven pillars, that create the architecture of leadership in a world, workplace and marketplace of intense volatility, change and crisis.

1.  The commitment to lead and not follow.  Creating the architecture of what I call Q3™ power.  Developing enhanced IQ, EQ, SQ. Great leaders have always recognized and developed their intellectual capital, emotional capital and spiritual capital, because they recognized that being smart was not enough, being heart centered  was not enough, and being values driven was not enough.  Leadership evolves; leadership grows by developing and engaging all three Q’s. Part of developing Q3™   power is learning, but the most critical part is working with someone to actively use one’s strengths and transform changes and crises to increase one’s intellectual capital, emotional capital and spiritual capital.

2.   The commitment to the empowerment of self and others:  Creating a social or human architecture that will gather the commitment of others who want to lead collaboratively, because leadership and success today are achieved through servant or collaborative leadership.  The era of command and control leadership is dying its last death.  We need leaders who can stand at the head of the class not simply to articulate the vision, but to inspire and guide others who will in turn also lead. Getting empowered starts when we decide to build a fence around our integrity, hope, faith, potential and ability to make a difference and inspire others to do the same.  It cannot and will not come from looking at what is wrong, but rather from starting to recognize our individual strengths, our power and celebrating them from a place that is not ego driven, but rather driven by our desire to do our best work, build our best relationships, enable our best leadership, live better and happier lives.

3. The commitment to purpose and vision:  Creating a moral architecture, common purpose, a goal that speaks to something meaningful, purposeful that will engage others and is the common ground, the common goal that will be shared and cherished. The moral architecture, the vision keeps organizations competitive because it is only through creating and sustaining value for others that success is built and sustained.  It is only by creating value for employees, shareholders, clients, stakeholders and communities that success continues.  And, on a personal and inter-personal level, it is the moral architecture, or ability to stay in alignment with the core values we cherish, the goals that matter most to us that create success in our lives and relationships.

4. The commitment to communicating the vision:  Creating architecture of meaning that is conveyed not only by words but by actions — by the determination and the passion the leader has for the vision and by his/her ability to communicate this vision.  Developing the high emotional intelligence that drives masterful communication is critical.  Articulating and living the values creating the words, using symbols that paint a brilliant picture that engages others and helps them work collaboratively to the accomplishment of shared goals, i.e. the vision is what communicating the vision is all about.

 5. The commitment to courage:  Creating architecture of hope.  Developing an outlook that drives and sustains courage at the front lines, courage in the face of challenges and ignites the hope and the faith that drives our greatest thoughts and actions — the hope and faith that inspires our self and others.  Commitment to courage that cannot be achieved without building our spiritual quotient, without creating an alignment of our heads, hearts and souls that allows us to tap into the power within at the very worst of times.

6. The commitment to integrity.  Creating architecture of trust.  Nothing is built and sustained without trust.  Leadership of self and leadership of others starts with the inspiration to lead rather than follow the Q3™ strength (intellectual, emotional and spiritual capital to sustain leadership) and the spiritual capital to live and lead with the integrity that drives and sustains trust.   Trust is something we learn to build in ourselves, and we also can learn to build it in others.  Trust is the anchor for our spiritual quotient and it is also the catalyst which allows us to build and sustain the relationships that are critical to leadership, success and happiness.

7.  The commitment to action-ability.  Creating architecture of action-ability.  The greatest thoughts, best laid plans, or strategies are useless until they are made action-able.  Developing action-ability at the front lines of a business, economic, personal or inter-personal battle demands Q3™ power, and leadership is not leadership without action-ability.  The greatest ideas, the best strategies, the most inspiring words are lovely but impotent without action.  Leadership demands an architecture of action-ability.  When a leader learns to optimize strengths while using changes even crises to build IQ-EQ-SQ and develop tools, strategies that drive action-ability of self and others, power is engaged, leadership evolves and grows.

Nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without determination, or without courage.  Today, the determination and courage to build business, personal and inter-personal leadership is not important — it is critical.  Engaging and actualizing this determination requires a bit of pixie dust.  Pixie dust born of hope, of that intangible but critical desire to contribute by not losing touch with our true power to effective positive change, to collaborate together to build and sustain a better human, personal and business bottom line.  The determination to aspire to our greatest good in our relationships, the greatest good in our work, the greatest strength in moving away from fear and discouragement by finding that pixie dust, tapping into the hope that we can make a difference and will.  That spark that is the soul of leadership, and one that we can chose to re-ignite if we are ready to take the road less travelled.  With great leadership comes great responsibility to stand at the front lines of battle with the conviction to win the war, and the greatest war we fight is from inside out.  The greatest battle we face is to inspire, engage and lead the best in ourselves by building our Q3™ strengths so that we can in turn inspire, engage and lead others who in turn lead vertically and horizontally in their lives and organizations.

Leadership is a choice, and it is one of the most difficult choices one can make because it clearly means taking the road less traveled, and it means developing courage when others have lost theirs, determination when few have it because it is far easier to manage than to lead.  It is far easier to become complacent or discouraged by the multiplicity of challenges and crises we face on an individual and collective basis.  But, easier is not necessarily better, and the easy path is not the one that can help us fill our pocketbooks and our souls.

More on Leadership:    YES!  Just search leadership or leadership blogroll on the search prompt in the right hand corner of this blog.

More Goodness to Greatness?   Is Goodness Good for Business? From Goodness to Greatness and The Thriving Organization 

©Irene Becker, www.justcoachit.com
Helping smart people and smart organizations move forward smarter, faster, happier

The Truth About Success Coaching-Book Excerpt

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Free Excerpt from the book Exploring Coaching | Chapter 19-Success Coaching
by Irene Becker, Chief Success Officer, Just Coach It www.justcoachit.com

Success Coaching
History teaches us that the secret to success is a passion and purpose that transcends difficulty and obstacles.  Literature gives us mythical heroes who have painted vivid pictures of success journeys that are fraught with purpose, obstacles and challenge.  What can we learn about success from history, from life experience and from myth?  We can learn that success lies in our ability to access our personal talent, energy and to attain satisfaction and happiness.   Success requires the courage and the honesty to unleash the awesome power of our natural talents and to illuminate the purpose that we were meant to fulfill.  If you want to attain true success, you need, in Joseph Campbell’s words “to follow your bliss”.

While the orthodox definitions of success have changed as our society has evolved from agrarian, to industrial, to knowledge based, the heart of true success is a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment that is nourished and grows with purpose, vision and action.

What is Success Coaching Like?
Success coaching is a courageous adventure, a magical synergy between client and coach.  It is a labor of love and acceptance that takes coach and client into a special place of purpose, passion and action.  Excellent success coaching is far more than moving a client along a path of personal and professional strategies and accomplishment of goals. It is a co-collaboration of client and coach, an ongoing dialogue of non-judgment, acceptance and freedom which illuminates the client’s true brilliance and true purpose.

Success coaching is engaging, passionate purposeful work that allows you to see clients grow and gain in many different areas of their lives and careers.  It touches all aspects of work and existence. It is a journey of courage, excitement and challenge that is full of twists and turns, of known and unknown. It is a reflection and expression of all that our client truly wants and needs to be.  As clients begin to flex their success muscles, to stretch out of the comfort zone, they move into a place that speaks loudly to who they truly are and what they truly want… magic happens.  The magic starts when they begin to speak to translating their knowledge and truth into passion, vision and action.  It requires that each part of our life, each dimension of our value system work in combination to great a successful, satisfactory whole.

What you need to be a Success Coach
Excellent success coaching requires the right combination of education and life experience that has given the success coach a broad experience with personal success and also failure.  You need to have achieved success and to have experienced failure in order to help a client reach his/her apex of personal and professional excellence and satisfaction.  It requires individuals who are not only trained in coaching,  but work with mind and heart aligned to excavate the true seedbed of a client’s success through a journey of trial, error and accomplishment. 

Excellent success coaching requires that the coach remove his or her perspective of success in order to truly understand the perspective of the client.   The success coach has to totally let go of his/her personal understanding of success in order to understand what success truly means to the client.  It is only through honest, confidential, safe communication that we can move clients to a place of illumination, personal growth and potential that will allow them to fulfill their destiny of choice.  To do so, coaches must understand that there is a special place where we let go of intellect and fuse with the special purpose of our client, to illuminate their personal and professional best, their success path.  It is a dance of appreciation; a tango of acceptance and service that necessitates being able to change the tune, change the steps to meet the best purpose and passion of the client. Success for our clients and for ourselves as success coaches is based on honestly accessing what gives and has meaning, relevance, passion and purpose for the client and in so doing to work hand in had to develop a greater personal understanding of purpose and passion and ways to translate them into effective, ongoing action and motivation.

The Path to Positive Transformation
Success coaching requires a particular ability to facilitate the client’s courage for self awareness, and his/her willingness to move past the intellectual in order to combine mind, body and soul in a path of positive transformation.  Sometimes a client’s personal definition of success changes through coaching, other times clients may find that success was clearer and nearer to what they were doing than they anticipated. Some coaching sessions bring great revelation, others acceptance of the realization of patterns and actions that sabotage success. Success coaching sessions are always alive with new possibilities and can evoke the best and the worst in clients as they move past their self imposed limitations and the expectations of others to a place of true passion, purpose and action.  It requires the courage, commitment, confidentiality and mutual respect to move out of the comfort zone of the known in order to explore values, vision and mission.  It is the juncture of honest communication, awareness, passion and purpose.  It is a place where the success coach can reach beyond the intellectual and the tangible to excavate and access the client’s power and purpose in order to develop new strategies and perspectives of full engagement, satisfaction and success.

The Market for Success Coaching
Success coaching is an investment in personal awareness and accomplishment that a client must have the financial latitude and the personal commitment to engage in. The market for success coaching is enormous, and will continue to expand as we face the reality of a rapidly changing work and personal world.  I have little doubt that in due course success coaching will in turn spawn off specific niches of success coaching that recognize different areas of focus.   Reality tells us that we will all continue to grapple with personal, professional and societal change, and that the forward motion, the velocity of change will challenge our ability to truly reach an honest point of self awareness in order to determine what we need want and must do to attain success can best be accomplished by the co-collaborative, co-creative energy that success coaching brings to the table.  The greatest most important business that any of us have is the business of our life, the realization of personal success and satisfaction.

© Irene Becker, www.justcoachit.com

The Secret to Success>>Failing Forward-Mastering A Critical Life & Leadership Skill

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The Secret to Success>> Failing Forward
5  Ways to Master a Critical Life & Leadership Skill


Irene Becker | www.justcoachit.com | 3Q Leadership™ Blog
Helping smart people and organizations communicate and lead forward
smarter, faster and happier is what I do best

 

1.  Understand Why Failing Forward is Critical to 21st Century Life and Leadership

If YOU want to succeed you need to learn how to fail forward; and of equal importance you must model and incorporate this skill in the culture of your organization. Whether your objective is building a successful small business, professional practice, team or enterprise that art of failing forward is more than the art of the start, it is the art that will drive sustainability, the art that will teach empowerment, engagement and resiliency>>>Learning to Fail Forward it is the linchpin for 21st Century Life and Leadership.

2.  Recognize Your True Power & Use It
Failure brings us face of face with our true power and purpose; OR it leads us down a dark path of ignoring, denying or running away from that which could help us lead forward by optimizing our potential and the potential of others.

 

3.  Take Your Ego Out of the Equation-It is Energy Going Out (In the Wrong Way)
Our greatest fear is not that we will fail or succeed.  Rather, it is the fear that something will touch that human chord that tells us that we are not good enough, that we are lesser than we can be.  It is the pain of invalidation, the pain of feeling that we are not worthy of success.  Ego, as defined for the purposes of this article as the need to seek validation from external sources is

Most healthy, human beings fear invalidation.  It is the most one of the most difficult and gut wrenching parts of our human journey. Some people run and hide from the pain of invalidation by trying to command, control and dominate.  Others become the commanded, controlled and dominated.  And then, there are those who just stay safe and avoid the prospect of invalidation by doing a good job but never engage their full potential.

For all the differences between us, our desire to survive and to contribute, to feel purposeful are real.  When fear enters our minds, all human beings automatically go into a fight of flight response.  The caveat is that learning to circumvent this fight or flight response is the coachable moment, it can be coached, we can retrain our brains and reset default mechanisms/behaviours so  that those who lead and those who aspire to greater leadership can change the way they deal with challenges, crises in a way that optimizes their potential.

 

4.  Do Something Counter-Intuitive>See Failure With New Eyes-Build Constructive Discontent and Optimize Potential by Using Problems as a Positive Catalyst for Solutions
There is a power in failure that has nothing to do with the act of failure and everything to do with our ability to re-engage the moral courage that it takes to develop our greatest ability and our greatest hope; our ability to use the very challenges we face, to transform the gaps, the problems with different eyes, eyes that guide us to new solutions and ways of communicating that drive engagement, empowerment and positive results.

I believe that the ability to fail forward, the power to use our mistakes, our challenges and even the crucibles to live better, lead better, communicate better and succeed better is critical to our individual and collective success.  And, it  means building what I call constructive discontent.  What is constructive discontent? Psychologists would describe constructive discontent as the ability to stay grounded during an argument or conflict. But, to me it is much more.  I call constructive discontent our ability to feel an emotion that is not comfortable and still continue forward by not losing the ability to tap into our potential and also remain focused on our objectives.  It is an ability that once developed is a formidable tool in human relations and leadership, and it is also a pivotal skill that we can use in learning to accept our weaknesses and use our failures to build and grow our power rather than eroding the potential, imagination and purpose we need to build a better life and a better career.

 

5.  Move Forward. Get Coached>Master the Art of Failing Forward and Make a Powerful Cultural Change in Your Organization, Your Business, Your Professional Practice and YOUR Life
The power, the freedom and the breakthrough results realized by learning to use failures as catalysts for personal growth, achievement, empowerment and success by learning to build constructive discontent cannot be minimized.  The velocity of change, challenges and opportunities we face will continue to surpass anything we have experienced.  Best practices can become stale or useless in the face of change, what worked in the past can become largely irrelevant; however, the ability to see problems, challenges differently is the new linchpin for leadership, success and well-being in the age of innovation and change.

What Can WE Accomplish By Failing Forward?
Guest Post, Seapoint Center>  Rising to the Challenge Before Us-Leading Forward

How did I become an expert in Failing Forward?

Extraordinary Women Interview-Leading in the Face of Challenges

My Story-Against All Odds


About Irene Becker, Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Writer
Chief Success Officer, Just Coach It -The 3Q Edge™

First woman CEO of a steel company in Canada, Irene Becker has a track record of trailblazing accomplishments in business and in the community at large. An insightful and inspiring executive coach, mentor, speaker and writer, Irene helps clients achieve breakthrough results in their communication, leadership and lives. Passionate about the integrity of her work and its ability to help change-makers LEAD change, Irene helps smart people and organizations develop 3Q Leadership™ and effective verbal, written and social communication that builds reach, resonance and results. Irene welcomes your emails at irene@justcoachit.com and tweets at @justcoachit