The Great Conversation

We are all on the journey of becoming. And we hope and pray, that at the end of the journey we are whole. For all of us that means being loved for who we are. And to get there, we need to establish trust in ourselves and in others.

Trust. Could it be the foundation of everything we touch? Are we not all builders? And if so, wouldn’t we want to build all the relationships we have in this life on top of a platform of trust? And wouldn’t it make sense if that same platform that builds those relationships would be the fuel that drives innovation and change within the organizations we live and work in every day?

This is a great conversation that holds nothing back. This is not an easy fix; especially if you do not have a roadmap. This conversation is about that roadmap that will create the scaffolding that will help you build a beautiful business and a beautiful world.

Words are an attempt to articulate reality. The reality that was yesterday. The reality that is today. And the reality that is tomorrow.

Words can be a weapon. They can bully, demonize, and destroy.

Words can embrace, energize, and elevate.

If these bookends are true, then what is the area in-between that seems to be moved by one or the other?

I have a great conversation with Chris Westfall, author of Leadership Language where we attempt to uncover the nuances of language that describe our internal journey as well as our impact on others. We learn that words matter. And our conscious use of them can help raise others up and moving in a positive direction. In the end, the observation and measurement of leadership is about how you show up and constructively influence those around you.

Chris urges us not to see leadership as conceptual. It is not an information exchange. It is not technique. It is about an understanding of oneself. And then authentically showing up for and with others.

The book is fast paced, pithy, and real. This great conversation may change what conversations you will have with yourself and others.

Enjoy.

Lives of quiet desperation. We have been pulling on the quote from Thoreau for awhile in our great conversations. Our great conversation on the Future of Work with this dynamic and inspirational leader may provide you the nudge to seize this moment to recognize your impact on others and help create an engaged culture of impact and purpose with your team.

Whenever you attempt to capture knowledge it is useful to understand that it is a snapshot in time. Very little of what we learn will survive as true given the unique nature of change. However, it is a platform for growth as long as you have access to the real time experiences of change that are occurring. We explore this idea in this great conversation with a security consultant attempting to create a bridge between the rear view mirror and the road ahead. The conversation applies to any market anywhere. Enjoy the conversation. 

Imagine being tasked to develop a first class talent and organizational management platform for one of the most respected companies in the Fortune 100. A company with a vision, mission, values, and goals that is highly respected in the industry, with a CEO who looked to his leaders to articulate those things in a very specific way.

And now you have been with this company for 20 years. You have worked for 4 different CEOs and 5 different Human Resources executives. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. You still have a rapidly growing need for the best people, in the right seats, doing the right things.

It took a very special person to take on this challenge. One that had an academic background in Organizational Psychology, a consulting background in strategic change management, and a practical background as a global corporate executive.

The man is Allan Church, Ph.D. who is currently the Founder and Managing Partner of Maestro Consulting. I sat down with him and had a great conversation about the nature of leadership, talent management, and organizational change.

I was able to hear about the Great5, a program that was in response to his CEOs admonition that people remembered compelling slogans. It stood for the core dimensions used throughout all the work the company does when assessing and developing future leaders. The dimensions are imbedded in the Great5 competency framework articulating the top five competencies needed to go from being a good leader to a great leader. They are:

Growth reflects a person's curiosity and ability to learn from novel situations by constantly pushing outside their comfort zone and helping others to learn and develop.

Relationships involves building and maintaining trusting relationships across organizational boundaries by modeling integrity, transparency, and authenticity and being respectful and inclusive of others.

Execution is the energy, enthusiasm, and inspiration an individual brings to motivate others to action and to accomplish ambitious goals, and it is simplifying complexity to drive quality results.

Agility involves adapting a person's style and approach to an ever-changing business environment, managing pressure, and embracing and championing change to drive transformation.

Thinking reflects how an employee brings in and uses external insights (business, customer or consumer, industry, global), thinks creatively, and takes a long-term and holistic perspective to make informed decisions.

And this was just one of the many innovations Allan was able to cultivate and lead.

We also had a great conversation around the measures that matter to the CEO and the executive team. One of the most compelling examples of this, is the incredible journeys of the leaders that went through the program resulting in 16 former executives becoming Fortune 500 CEOs.

What does it look like to create a path to value? What does that really mean?

I have been having great conversations for over 20 years that have informed my physical leadership events and my podcasts. I have pursued people who have ideas that might change their market and perhaps change their world. I have taken the position of learner within these conversations. I don’t interview, I consume.

It has been an incredible journey. The physical leadership events would average 150-350 attendees and, before the pandemic, were taking place across the United States. Then we pivoted to the podcast and have been recognized as being in one of the top 1% of podcasts today.

But I have never had someone ask about my role as founder of The Sage Group and author of our value transformation methodology called “The Path to Value”.

In this great conversation, I turn over the learning to Dr. Daniel Hallak, who connects human capital with strategy and execution to create organizational value. Daniel is one of my recent interviewees and based on his expertise, is highly interested in how The Sage Group extracts insights from our research to create a highly differentiated and strategic business plan that creates value for the owner and the stakeholders.

I must admit, I was a little bit nervous. My clients know I like to stay behind the scenes helping them create the strategy as well as execute it with and through their people.

Since we take a whole company approach, I shed light on the efforts to improve a company’s silos of excellence through subject matter experts without such a strategy. For those of you who focus primarily on those silos, this is not to dismiss you. It is simply that your subject matter expertise is best leveraged with an overall strategy in place.

For those who specialize in selling companies. This is not to dismiss you. You have your place and your value. But for my clients, by the time they get to such an event, the value has already been expressed, and the identification of the future buyer has been understood. We stay focused on the value that is realized and how it can be sustained through our people, processes, and tools within the new acquirer’s organization. People are too important to allow them to become mere expressions on a spreadsheet.

I urge you to hear me: This is my path. There are many paths to the mountaintop. This is the one I have chosen, and now am expressing through this great conversation.

Your path to value and your expression of success is one of the most important journeys you will ever be on. I am honored I have been able to walk your path to value with so many of you.

I would quickly describe “burn out” as exhaustion. But that is too simple. How did you become exhausted? It seems that there is this incredible stage we go through while heading toward exhaustion and part of it is being actively disengaged from our purpose and settling for a frantic and numbing execution of droll work.

Then what would be “Burn In”? It can mean a lot of things, but in this context I might leverage one: Burn-in can imply a lasting or permanent impression on someone or something. What could we “burn in” to prevent “burn out”?

There are some people who hit their bottom in life and rise out of it with a new-found perspective and purpose. Such was Sally Clarke, author, speaker, researcher, and, what she calls “Human Leader”.

Her two books, Protect Your Spark: How to Prevent Burnout and Live Authentically and Relight Your Spark: How to Heal and Evolve after Burnout, were inspired by her own journey.

When you speak with her you realize it all bubbles up to teaching people how to flourish, thereby making “burnout” redundant.

I walked away with a sense that work is a true blessing, and the art of work involves trust, purpose, and belonging.

Enjoy this Great Conversation as we connect between Seattle and Amsterdam on this podcast.

I was visiting a prospective client the other day. We went out to lunch at one of their favorite restaurants. The waitress came up to the table and, as always, I asked what her name was. She replied and I shared mine. I thanked her and asked about her day and then we continued the ritual of ordering our drinks and our meal. I did the same for the person who kept replenishing my water.

The prospective client later shared with my partner that the exchange felt “odd” to him and implied I might have been putting on some form of act for his benefit.

Isn’t that interesting?

I know what it feels like to be invisible. Do you? And do you strive to ensure you do your part to acknowledge those who cross your path if just for a moment? More importantly, those who interact with you, or serve you, or are in a professional relationship such as your co-workers and your employees?

This Great Conversation is about another form of being invisible. It touches many different people usually because of their skin color, their attire, their sexual orientation, their lifestyle…It is insidious because it is deeply rooted in how we were socialized from birth through our cultural stewards like educators, media, and ideological leaders.

The Invisible Generals, written by Doug Melville, is purportedly a story of rediscovering his family’s legacy. And that is true. It is an extraordinary story of his ancestors journey through a "Forest Gumpian" encounter with some of this nations most pivotal moments; from the Civil War, through WWI and WWII. We see his great, great, grandfather Louis, becoming the trusted servant of one of the Civil War’s most trustworthy generals who happens to be friends with Ulysses Grant and then find him holding Grant’s son on his lap as he heads to the White House. We see Louis’ son Ben Sr. (aka Ollie) being recommended to enter West Point, and being stalled by a later president buckling to the politics of the day. But, because of his performance and service with the Buffalo Soldiers, a term used by the native Indians who fought the segregated black soldiers in the American Indian Wars, the same president made him a commissioned officer.

We then hear about Ben Jr.’s path to West Point, and the grueling isolation of his time there. Later he would establish himself honorably in WWII. You might have heard of his exploits with the Tuskegee Airmen. The Airmen's success in escorting bombers during World War II – having one of the lowest loss records of all the escort fighter groups, and being in constant demand for their services by the allied bomber units.- is a record unmatched by any other fighter group.

Along the way we learn about a unique mindset that refused to be a victim of their circumstance. Refused to become an invisible statistic. We will “infuse the system to diffuse the system” was their motto. They saw themselves as free, independent people who wanted to live up to the American dream, rather then play down to the role of victim. Their actions became their testimony.

This Great Conversation inspired me. And because Doug Melville chose to share his lessons learned for all of us at the end of the book, it can become a primer for your own pursuit of resilience in the face of insurmountable odds, and the inevitable recognition that life can be very unfair. But for Doug and his ancestors, they are mere stones guiding you on your path to value.

Love it or hate it, the term “Holy Grail” is often used in life and business to describe something that has always been unobtainable. The pursuit of the “unobtainable” takes patience and indomitable faith.

The pursuit of a leadership development program that can crack the code of an organization’s people, lifting them to a new level of engagement with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose, feels unobtainable, especially given the millions of dollars invested and the meager measurable return on investment it has produced.

This Great Conversation with Dr. Daniel Hallak of WiLD Leaders, gave me hope in this “impossible” dream. Perhaps it will for you too.

Who am I?

We answer this question through different stages of our lives. And much of our life is in the business world. It is natural, therefore, that a great deal of our quest becomes learning a craft. And this is where many of us remain the rest of our working lives. This is not a bad thing. The best in us dive deep into this pool of knowledge and are found to be valuable in life and business as a result.

Some of us make a turn. We become leaders of the craftspeople. If we are good at this craft, we learn to go deep into each of our craftspeople leveraging them to create organizational outcomes that matter. We become, over time, maestros.

If we have a long tenure as an organizational leader, we might find ourselves in a third turn. One that leverages all our gifts, our wisdom and our ability to opportunistically see the future, before the future throws us a curveball.

These three turns become the subject of a Great Conversation with Dr. Mark L. Vincent. Mark has spent a large part of his career as an Executive Advisor and Process Consultant walking alongside accomplished executives in the third turn of their careers,

Mark has founded Maestro-level leaders, Design Group International, and the Society for Process Consulting, authored numerous books, including the most recent, Listening Helping Learning, and contributes original content through a variety of channels. Most recently he was involved in the launch of Mygrow North America, an application for growing emotional intelligence in individuals and organizations.

His white paper called: The Three Turns of an Executive Leader was what prompted me to call him to have a great conversation. He is working on turning the invaluable content in this paper into a book.

Whatever turn you are currently in, you will find Mark’s ideas compelling and useful as you become a hero in your own journey.