Leadership Coaching,Leadership Training,Team Coaching Programs USA» Edge

The Absence of Leadership

Bea Fields — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:03 +0000

The Absence of leadership is often felt by a company, but not recognized. I was recently talking with a friend in a high up position with a national non-profit and she is stuck in an environment that is demotivating, where everyone is playing in their own sandbox and not interested in helping out the team unless it advances their own career or reputation. We started discussing the absence of leadership and how, often, the players in the system mostly recognize the symptoms of a pained structure, as opposed to the core issue, which is that bad leadership acts like a cancer that slowly deteriorates and eventually destroys the organism.

Not understanding the root of the problem, people set out to put band-aids on all of the wounds, hoping that a bit of neosporin and a bandage will stop the bleeding. This kind of environment is a dangerous one, where often the remedies attempted can sicken the structure, worsen the disease, and kill the body more quickly.

This is where intentional followership is as important as strong leadership. Followers who are intending to be leaders need to step up to the plate and challenge the leadership. Often times the leader is … Read the rest of the post

Teleclass for Monday, July 14 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern: EDGE: A Leadership Story: The Future of Business From the Minds of Ten Top Professionals

Bea Fields — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:02 +0000

Teleclass: EDGE: A Leadership Story: The Future of Business From the Minds of Ten Top Professionals

Date: Monday, July 14

Time: 7:00 P.M. Eastern

What happens when you get ten top professionals on a call together to discuss the future of business and leadership? You walk away inspired to change the way you think, live and operate in business. Join Bea Fields as she shares this open call with her partners from EDGE: A Leadership Story for a call you donâ€™t want to miss. Fields will be joined by Michael Gerber, Michael Port, Corey Blake, Dave Buck, Carol Dickson-Carr, Eva Silva-Travers, Kimberly George, and Roger Dewitt. Each professional will be asked a question they have never been asked before about the future of business, and you donâ€™t want to miss their answers. This is BIG!

Register Here Today

Listed with Conference Call University

About the Presenters:

Bea Fields, Co-Author: EDGE! A Leadership Story

Bea Fields is the President of Bea Fields Companies, Inc. and the Founder of Five Star Leader Coaching and Training, a leadership consulting firm currently serving over 800 clients world-wide.

Her latest book, co-authored with Scott Wilder, Jim Bunch and Rob Newbold, Millennial Leaders: Success Stories … Read the rest of the post

Leadership is calling a spade a spade

Bea Fields — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:02 +0000

The buck stops with the leader. Ultimately, they are accountable for the performance of the entire system.Â When something is not working, people often make excuses orÂ avoid taking responsibility and just try to push through, typically leading to further delays in productivity and to results. This is not a luxury the leader has. So to maintain the integrity of the system, a leader often has to point out the company’s standards that are not being met and enforce a solution, or at least motivate another leader within the system to generate a solution and be accountable to the results. When a system is in overwhelm, standards often tend to decline rather quickly as people rush through their processes, and it is imperative that the leader step in, assist with solving the overwhelm and then reset the standards and a new course of action. Recognizing that standards are dropping and engaging staff in the conversation about solutions happens from the top down.

Where do you set your standards?

How do you hold your team accountable?

Do you step in when you see standards not being upheld?

What is your process to resolve such an issue?

Are You Praising

… Read the rest of the post

Leadership is seeing the better solution

Bea Fields — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:02 +0000

You’ll see from a few posts ago that we were having major issues with our online shopping cart. Our design division director was working hard to learn what he needed to learn to create a working shopping cart that enforced our brand. Try as he did, programming is not his focus by profession. He is a good programmer, but his heart lies in design. Persistent and wanting to get it right, he continued to bang his head against the wall, going round and round to solve problems that kept popping up. When it began affecting our clients, we had to stop playing around and resolve the issue. A little bit of investigating opened our eyes to the variety of shopping cart software available on the market. We solved all of our problems in one fell swoop and even added several features we had not considered. And, to boot, it was highly cost effective. Here we were so blinded by trying to get it right, that we failed to just raise our heads high enough to look around and realize that there were other companies out there completely devoted to solving our problem. How funny that we were being stubborn and … Read the rest of the post

Ten Critical Questions to Answer to Drive Innovation

Bea Fields — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:07:02 +0000

Radical innovation is going to be a critical component in a leaderâ€™s toolkit in the future, and this does not mean that you â€œtry to innovateâ€ over a week-end brainstorming retreat. True innovation happens by disrupting the current environment, challenging old assumptions and even turning the culture upside down so that you can take a creative idea, turn it into a product or service and successfully move it to the marketplace.Each day I meet business leaders, and one of the first questions I ask is â€œOn a scale of 1-10, with 10 being super sticky, how stuck are you?â€ Most people laugh, and they usually respond by saying â€œIâ€™m a 20 or a 25!â€ So, when you are stuck, you have to break up the pattern . . . turn a table upside down and figure out a way to still use the table as an eating surface, roll out of bed on the other side, shave with the hand you donâ€™t normally use . . . do something to be disruptive. This is the same for companies. What would happen if you do the opposite of what youâ€™ve always done? What would you do if you totally destroyed your … Read the rest of the post