Lets Talk Leadership

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Shan Moorthi is Director, Center for Coaching & Mentoring, at Teamcoach International. He is a Professional Trainer, Facilitator and Coach. He is Vice-President of the International Association of Coaching (IAC) and Member of the IAC Board of Governors.

Shan has been in Learning and Development for the past 20 years. He has been inspiring leaders to seek their purpose in Leading, Coaching and Mentoring others. He is the author of ‘Coaching with R.E.S.P.E.C.T’ where he shares his own Coaching journey and shares his personal insights in coaching others.

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Leaders and Ethics

Leadership is at every level. First of all we need to lead ourselves and then lead others.

Emotional Intelligence

Knowing about Emotional Intelligence is not enough. We need “emotional excellence” – the heart motivation to practice emotional intelligence.

Emotional excellence is very important in this digital world. We can be as high tech as we want, but we need “high touch” and for Shan that is all about practising emotional excellence.

Drum Circle Facilitation

Trained as a Drum Circle Facilitor, Shan finds value in using it to empower groups, and related it to the Bruce Tuckman “Forming,  Storming, Norming, Performing” development stages.

The digital revolution

A big opportunity. Automation helps us save time so we have more time available for conversation and interaction.

What keeps leaders awake at night

The question, “How do I continuously serve my purpose, despite all the challenges?”

An Internationally Certified Trainer, Facilitator and Coach, over the past 20 years Shan has trained, facilitated and coached participants across the Asian region on various aspects of Leadership, Team Development, Emotional Excellence and Performance Coaching. His innovative, interactive and high impact approaches empower his participants to experience, reflect and act for self and organizational improvements.

Shan’s contact points: His LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shan-moorthi-aa21a42/ Web site: Teamcoach International

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Lieutenant-Colonel (retd) Fred Aubin, CD, MCGI, is Founder and CEO of Strategic Red Team Consulting, and is based in Ottawa, Canada.

A 34 year command-level combat veteran of the Canadian Forces, Fred leads a consultancy team with an extensive arsenal of expertise for what he calls, “The Corporate Battlefield”. Fred has commanded everything from specialized strategic advisory teams of 20 to large multi-disciplinary task forces of 600, both at home in Canada and abroad in harm’s way. He was a highly experienced strategic planner in the Canadian Department of National Defence and has designed, managed and coordinated business plans, transformational “change management” campaigns and corporate level strategies with values in the billions of dollars.

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Fred explained that on leaving the military several years before he had seen – in comparison with what he was used to in the military – a gap in business operations, in terms of planning and especially business simulations, including such things as decision support simulation, war gaming and red teaming. Hence the focus of his consulting to business and government in the intervening years.

Red Teaming is a branch of war gaming.

There are many books on war gaming for business. See below for Fred’s specially recommended ones and other sources of information on the subject. For a one page synopsis, see this page on Fred’s website.

There are three types of war gaming, with same basic elements, different outcomes:

A series of at least two, possibly more, sequential and comparable war games. Used in plan development stage to determine the most viable options in terms of the various factors to be considered, such as risk, execution and payoff.

When the course of action has been established, when you are getting ready to act, but “haven’t thrown the switch yet”. A rehearsal process, with all the key actors, prior to the plan’s execution. To “reduce risk by turning hindsight into foresight”.

Red team war gaming is not entry level. Where it happens it is a capstone exercise that follows course of action war gaming and rehearsal war gaming.

The Red Team exercise is similar to the Rehearsal war game, with the exception that ideally, the red team members are not drawn from the organization’s stakeholders. Each red team member is a subject specialist and is only given the amount of information about the organization that a normal competitor would have. Their task is to put the organization’s plan under “extreme competitive stress”.

In the conversation, Fred explains the ideal composition of the Red team in a Red Teaming exercise. He also provides an option for corporates wanting a more economical setup without prejudicing effectiveness (find this at or about 22 min 35 sec into the episode, just after the music-backed interlude).

Business War Games: How Large, Small, and New Companies Can Vastly Improve Their Strategies and Outmaneuver the Competition by Benjamin Gilad

Fred recommended looking for military publications, especially the Joint Operational Planning Process (“the JOPP”) by the military in various countries. I went looking online and quickly found various documents in the public domain, such as this in the US, this in Australia, and this in the UK.

A firm believer in the principle that “all strategic issues are leadership issues”, Fred has been used extensively in executive leadership consultancy and strategic planning capacity building portfolios at Head of State, Ministerial, Ambassadorial, CEO and Senior Executive levels in Canada, Africa and Afghanistan. He holds a Masters in Military Technology from the Royal Military College of Science in Shrivenham, a Baccalaureate of Arts in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Ottawa, and is a graduate of the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College Kingston, the UK’s Joint Command and Staff College and the Canadian Forces College in Toronto.

And as I’ve learnt from a number of extended conversations, Fred is a fund of information and wisdom about leadership.

If you think Fred and his team can help your company, organisation, government agency, get in touch with him, have a chat. If my experience is anything to go by, you will at least come away from a conversation with Fred knowing something new, or seeing something with a fresh perspective. Make contact with Fred through the website for Strategic Red Team Consulting at this link: http://stratredteam.com

And follow Fred on Twitter: @FM_Aubin

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From sunny California, via London and Paris, and with a formidable array of degrees ranging from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, through the Universities of Portsmouth, Sussex and Middelsex (DProf, Executive Coaching from the last-mentioned), to South Africa, Dr Sunny Stout-Rostron has a deep and wide understanding of leadership and the profession of coaching executive leaders. She is based in Cape Town and has an office in Johannesburg.

Sunny coaches at senior executive and board level, with a wide range of experience in leadership development and business strategy. With 25 years’ international experience as an executive coach, working with executive leaders and their teams, Sunny believes there’s a strong link between emotional intelligence and business results.

Leaders today need adaptability:

Between Millennials and Baby Boomers, basic assumptions are completely different, requiring a different type of leadership.

An experiment in democracy, “coming out of a very violent history, which had a soft landing…Mandela.”

What’s happened in the workplace is that the diversity is extraordinary. 11 official languages, 12-13 spoken.

And cultural differences.

“You have tribal culture, you have mixed race culture, you have Afrikaans culture, you have South African English culture.”

Then there is the difference between the metropolitan areas and the country areas.

Another key difference: individualistic culture (Western) and collective culture (African).

Religious tolerance: South Africa is a faith-based country and that comes into the workplace.

Very patriarchal society: gender diversity a particular challenge.

In the corporate world, there is a lot of team-based work and individuals, including quite talented ones and potential leaders, can get “lost”.

In smaller, entrepreneurial companies, there is more opportunity to provide scope for individual talent.

Mentoring is part of how things are done in the broader society, especially for males. The case still has to be made for coaching.

Sunny’s experience is that where there is no buy-in for coaching, that is where the top level is not being coached.

“It’s almost like you have to have success in order to prove it (the value of coaching), but you can’t get success if your senior leaders aren’t behind you. So it’s a bit of a Catch 22.”

Boomers, because of their own life/cultural experiences, are “beautifully place to work with Millennials”, wanting to do it their way (just as the Boomers wanted to do it their way).

Be open minded to who the people are.

I asked Sunny the “What keeps business leaders awake at night” question I regularly ask in these conversations.

There are some great observations and advice for leaders in her response. Especially about understanding and acting upon the fact that, to deal with conflict in the workplace, leaders need to be aware of and address the problem of lack of inclusivity.

“Diversity is all about inclusivity and exclusivity.”

You can contact Sunny via the website – http://www.ssra.biz

Or via her email – [email protected]

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Donna Karlin is a global leadership coach. She works with senior-level clients on six continents: N. America, S. America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. She is a coach and mentor to TED Fellows, a Founding Fellow at Harvard Institute of Coaching, McLean Medical School, creator of the Shadow Coaching® Methodology, an international speaker and award-winning author.

Donna wears several hats professionally, including those of Founder of the School of Shadow Coaching®, and Founder of the leadership coaching and consulting firm A Better Perspective®.

Donna was previously a guest on Let’s Talk Leadership back in late 2015. This time around we talked about Donna’s new venture, the No Ceiling, Just Sky® Institute, launching officially at the end of this month.

I have never ceased to be amazed at the depth and range of Donna’s work and the extent of her client group. In this conversation she shared a bit about how she keeps track of it all. I’m still amazed.

The Institute is about providing a “360° approach to human evolvement. Working with the intersection of human and organizational systems and their influencers“.

The Institute had its origins in:

The Institute enables Donna to bring together under one umbrella her various resources – the School of Shadow Coaching, A Better Perspective, and her R&D team – and draw on all those resources to meet the needs of her various and disparate clients.

I asked whether, in an age when so many people in business are urged to develop expertise in one niche, someone might ask if the scope of the Institute was too broad.

The response would be that it might be too broad for someone asking, but not for Donna.

Which led to these observations as food for thought for coaches:

Are we giving clients what they need, or what they think they could get?

And maybe it’s time that more coaches… worked with their clients to co-create an intervention that was not only powerful, but was true to them.

Which. said Donna, is “what this Institute is all about“.

Too many issues are seen as “either/or”, or “this or that”, when a better approach might be “why not both?”,

Or issues are approached from a perspective of scarcity rather than abundance.

Ideal clients and the pleasure of working with people who are eager to try things out, “dancing in realtime with potential change”.

The manifesto for the Institute, including “Dance with change”, “Embrace chaos”, and “Move”.

Marrying flexibility of decision-making and action with highly organised systems and protocols, as in – especially – the military, security services and such. Donna shared a fascinating example from her work with the military, with applicability in a broader range, beyond the military. NB for anyone interested in helping avoid leadership burnout. .

How she does it all. Yes, she has a team of people to call on, including the Strategic Red Team Consulting, of which Donna is an associate. A very flexible and adaptable team from the sound of it.

We need to bring more of the curiosity kind of conversation into boardroom meetings.

I really believe there is no ceiling, just sky.

Note: there are a couple of references in the interview to Thomas Leonard (or just “Thomas”), a legendary figure in our coaching world, who died suddenly in early 2003.

For more information about Donna and her various activities, and about the Institute, just go to her Donna Karlin website at http://donnakarlin.com. And her LinkedIn profile is at http://linkedin.com/in/donnakarlin.

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