Leider / Thompson Mastering Your Balance

A Guide To Leading And Living At Your Full Potential
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952233-44-9
Verlag: Indie Books International
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 179 Seiten

What would it take to raise an organization's level of performance from acceptable to exceptional? This book explores and provides solid answers to that fundamental question. Bill Leider and Jason Thompson, the managing partners of Axies Group, have decades of experience in successfully leading, consulting for, advising and coaching leaders and their organizations, from ambitious start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, across a wide range of industries. Taking the lessons learned from their experiences, they have developed a unique, highly effective model that creates the context within which any organization can reach a level of balance that will enable them to perform at their full potential and achieve unimagined goals-in growth, earnings and fulfillment. Mastering Your Balance takes you on the road to understanding and brilliantly executing the subtle elements of balance in ways that enable you to do what it would take to operate at your full potential. It illustrates the ways in which you can overcome your self-limiting beliefs and embrace new possibilities that are within your grasp as you come to realize that you are more than you think you are. By employing the right elements of balance, solid leadership approaches, and the proven findings of neuroscience and behavioral science, this book offers a powerful, achievable, unique path to mastery that can move you to a place you never before imagined.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leider, Bill

Thompson, Jason

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Why Balance Matters Now More Than Ever What is greatness? Greatness is a level of being. It is unmarred by changing circumstances. It says: We are always capable of being better today than yesterday, and we can be better tomorrow than we are today. Greatness is sustainable over time; it is not indelibly stamped by a single accomplishment. Greatness is a lifelong endeavor, born of commitment, fueled by passion, traveling along a road dotted with milestones of achievement, while avoiding detours of seductively appealing distractions that promise instant rewards but lead to dead ends of destruction. The milestones are not destinations; they are rest stops to help you rejoice, refuel, and resume your journey. Because the road to greatness has no end. What makes greatness seem achievable by only a few and seemingly impossible for everyone else? Is greatness preordained? Is it a winning-the-lottery kind of luck? Privilege? Or is it something else, and if so, what is that something? Perhaps you can achieve greatness by simply working harder and having more perseverance than everyone with whom you compete. Those qualities are needed, but they are not the entire answer. Many people and companies work hard and are still labeled as “average” or “okay but not great.” Can greatness be defined by the depth and scope of your subject matter expertise? Only in your own mind. Genius and greatness are two different qualities. Wait, what about a superior business model and a unique value proposition that stand you head and shoulders above everyone else’s? Surely that will label you as great. It will certainly take you part of the way, but only if another piece of the greatness puzzle is organically pervasive throughout your organization. If that mystery piece is working well, it is always present and barely noticed—at least not consciously. It’s not part of your product development process, your manufacturing systems, your hiring practices, your sales and marketing plans, or your high-level strategies. Yet it shapes all of those elements and more. Its presence will provide you with the context within which greatness lives. Its absence will assure that, no matter how good you are in all the other areas, greatness will always lie just beyond your reach. What is that missing piece? It is Mastering Your Balance. What is balance? A Mastering Balance Primer Balance is a state of aligned readiness. It is the kind of readiness that enables you to see and seize opportunities quickly and react to crises before they become costly. Mastering Your Balance is meant to define the actions you must take, the departures from your comfort zones you must make and the skills you must acquire and employ to reach that state of mastery that will define your organization as truly exceptional. Done well, you will experience an endless quest, because exceptionalism is only sustainable if you can continuously adapt to an ever-changing world. The purpose of this book is to show you how Mastering Your Balance will enable any organization (or individual) to live, learn, and grow more successfully than one that is out of balance—even slightly. An organization, and the people in it, that have mastered balance are able to operate at their full potential. They are higher performers. They adapt well to changes in all manner and magnitude and those that represent both challenges and opportunities. Masterfully balanced organizations are always better able to avoid seductive distractions and remain focused on what matters. These are the elements of balance: • Vision • Values • Values-driven leadership • Culture • Strategy • Greater purpose Mastering Your Balance requires continuous, conscious awareness. You must become highly proficient in establishing and living the elements of balance noted above. These elements, taken together, already exist pervasively throughout your company. They provide context for what you do—at every level. If any of the elements are out of alignment, they will cause your organization to perform dysfunctionally. If they are well aligned, they will help enable you to perform at your full potential. If you think of balance in the context of static equilibrium, please put that belief aside. Instead, embrace the concept of movement and growth in a world of continuous change. This book will help you develop a deeper understanding of the elements of balance, so you become more consciously aware of how they work together and what can happen when they don’t. You will gain a greater sense of the skills and disciplines you will need to achieve and sustain a high level of balance. You will become more adaptive—critically necessary individually, structurally, strategically, and culturally. You will see how your blind spots (we all have them) are hindering your ability to achieve your full potential—and how to uncover and deal with them. For many years, the media has periodically showered us with stories of the devastating results some iconic organizations had experienced when they suffered from poor management oversight, had inferior leadership, abandoned their integrity to achieve financial goals, or were driven by unbridled greed. Nice list, but it’s focused on symptoms. The root causes of their disasters have not been accurately framed. Instead, we have read and heard about people—leaders and followers alike—appropriately found guilty of terrible acts—with no understanding that all these misdeeds are signs of a deeper root cause. They lost their balance. This book will lay out the reasons why, and what they could/should have done instead. The processes are simple in their essence, and hard as hell to live by. But you will see that had they done those things, the problems could have been foreseen and dealt with before they inflicted untold damages and unimagined costs. Today, if you were to ask anyone in any of those organizations whether the commitment and work needed to maintain balance would have been worth it, the vast majority of the people would quickly say yes. Now, let me introduce you to how Mastering Your Balance works. How Mastering Balance Works The six elements of balance listed above are not new. They’ve been with us as long as formal organizations have existed. They all exist in every company in some fashion. They might be consciously known throughout the organization and formally documented, with top-of-mind awareness and accountability. Or they exist unconsciously, informally, orally, and implicitly—with inconsistent accountability. Inconsistent accountability is a breeding ground for multiple agendas. Some people apply various elements of balance situationally to pursue fatally seductive short-term objectives. The results of their actions become visible only when the shit of egregious activities hits the fan of public outrage. Some of you may believe all the elements of balance are working well throughout your organization. They have contributed to your success. Your plans are working well. You are a leader in your industry, outperforming your competitors. Your growth is impressive. Even if that is true, the best companies and the wisest leaders know there is always room for improvement. This book will address some of the nuances that will help guide you to that rare level above excellence. For the rest of us (the other 99 percent), deep down, you know on some level, you have much to learn about yourself and your organization. Learning those things will help you uncover a wealth of opportunities to raise your own performance bars, begin to transform your organization, and discover what it means to operate at your full potential. You will harness the power of the six elements of balance based on how and how well you make them seamlessly work together. Just as you don’t have to think about remembering to inhale and exhale to breathe, it is possible for you to have the elements of balance ingrained, aligned, and operating at an instinctive level. Developing a deeper understanding of how to go from where you are now to mastery is the journey you are about to take. To begin, we will first explore how people typically think and what they do that makes them function as an organization from inside the box. You will be given a magic tool you can use to explore how you can achieve seemingly impossible or implausible goals or uncomfortable changes from the status quo. As you read about all the elements of Mastering Your Balance, you will see how to use that tool repeatedly and how you can apply it in your organization. You will understand why a clear vision can give you a sense of clarity that will serve as your North Star. You will use it to guide your organization toward its long-term legacy. Vision can be your rock of wisdom. You will also see how a lack of a clear vision can infect your organization with a loss of clarity that, in turn, can blur the focus of your strategic goals and take you off course. That same lack of clarity can (and often does) open the doors of your culture to multiple agendas, and the behavioral dysfunctions that accompany them. That, in turn, reduces productivity. And it is all often insidious. It remains unfelt for so long that it becomes your “normal.” You will learn how your stated values, in the absence of measurable accountability for living them, become toothless suggestions....