Bold Leader Flow Triggers
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013 | BOLD Leader Flow Triggers

Have you ever been “in the zone,” where projects felt almost effortless? If you’ve ever experienced this, you were in a state of Flow. This term was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow triggers can be a powerful ally for anyone in leadership.

“You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.” —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

McKinsey Consulting conducted a 10-year research study where they found that top executives reported being five times more productive when in a state of Flow. If we could increase the time we spend in Flow by 15-20% (by increasing Flow triggers), overall productivity in the workplace would almost double, researchers found. Read more →

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Successful Performance Tracking System
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012 | Tracking Leadership Performance

Welcome back to the Lucrative Leadership Conversation podcast. In season 1 of the podcast, we have covered the “6 Bold Steps” Gene Morton has developed that allow organizations to become both profitable and sustainable. Today, we discuss how to implement a successful performance tracking system and how it is worth your time and energy.

The 6 Bold Steps provide a strategic pathway for leadership teams to achieve clarity, focus, accountability, and commitment within their organizations.

Here’s a recap of each step along with links to the related episodes:

  • In step 1, leaders agree to their own personal responsibilities to ensure decisions protect the organization’s best interest.  
  • In step 2, they craft a common language, which we call “outcomes, that expresses the core competencies synergistic with the strategic vision.  
  • In step 3, they negotiate who, on the leadership team, will have the primary accountability for designing and executing each outcome.  
  • In step 4, Working together, the leaders begin an intuitive process to collaborate and design a structure they are able to support and explain to others. Leaders decide their roles for each outcome and agree how and when communications occur that define future and past actions and decisions.  They create the first drafts of the reporting structure.
  • In step 5, leaders finish designing a strategic reporting structure. Engaging the entire organization in ongoing discussions improves the design. Conversations serve to clarify and reinforce the meaning of the outcomes that make the organization sustainable.

Most  performance management systems focuses conversations on past results.  

Failure is a part of the learning and improving process.  

You cannot hold people accountable for what they cannot control. Don’t waste energy holding them accountable. It’s too late. Correct the situation and work on determining those accountabilities up front and know who is in charge of what.

The goal of tracking performance is to discover the best practices for the delivery of each outcome to the customer. So, creating a successful performance tracking system (step 6) ties all the way back to defining the organization’s critical outcomes (step 2). Read more →

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leadership reporting structure and reorganization
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011 | Reporting Structure Roll Out

In the last episode of the Lucrative Leadership Conversations podcast (you can listen here), Gene and I discussed how leaders undergo a creative process to design a new reporting structure design.  

This is Step 5 in Gene’s Leaders First Process, an innovative organizational design that creates the foundation for a learning organization, adding clarity and focus based on negotiated accountability.   Read more →

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Designing an organizational leadership reporting structure
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010 | Designing the Leadership Reporting Structure

We have been moving through Gene Morton’s “6 Bold Steps” leaders can incorporate to improve collaboration, alignment and trust within their organizations. This week, Gene and I discuss Step 5: Designing the Leadership team reporting structure around the defined outcomes explained in previous episodes.  (You can listen here and here and here.)

Traditional Reporting structures typically show the individual titles held by the leadership team members.  As a result, this default model, in effect, inhibits collaboration and reinforces “silo” based decisions, behaviors and results.
Read more →

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Leadership Roles: Practicing the Art of Role Integration
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009 | Practicing the Art of Leadership Role Integration

For organizational structure to operate effectively, it is key for each of the leadership roles to be integrated seamlessly with the other members of the leadership team. The negotiation process helps leaders to delegate parts of the leadership role to others, in advance, before there is a crisis and while they have time to talk through and think through the consequences. This captures so well the dilemma we all have about being too busy on one hand but still reluctant to delegate parts of our role to someone else. Read more →

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Role Clarity: Integrating clear & effective roles throughout your organization
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008 | Implementing Role Clarity Throughout the Organization

Oops, a audio technical meltdown ruined Gene and my recording.  We made a promise to provide our listeners with a weekly show so I was sweating earlier this week.  Coincidentally, I was a guest on LODGING LEADERS Podcast, hosted by Jonathan Albano, recently.  Jon saved the day for me, suggesting I share it.  Great idea.  I get to share his podcast and solutions with you also.  

In addition to building a successful podcast show, Jonathan is a SAAS entrepreneur and systemic thinker.  He helped me design the infrastructure for the production and distribution platform for LUCRATIVE LEADERSHIP CONVERSATIONS podcast.  Producing great content is worthless if it’s not shared, right.  It’s a production that requires a lot of integration to effectively distribute to you, our subscriber.  You are a subscriber, right? Read more →

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Organizational Alignment
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007 | How to Achieve Leadership Alignment Within Your Organization

In business today, siloed decisions can create a major gap between strategy and execution. This gap causes a lack of clarity and focus across the organization, and can greatly affect the bottom line and sustainability. Success depends on the entire senior leadership team to address both their individual or divisional responsibilities and their collective responsibility for the company as a whole. In short, gaining organizational alignment is critical in today’s complex business landscape. Read more →

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Creating Leadership Accountability for Your Business
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006 | Creating Leadership Accountability for Your Business

Do a quick search for “business failure” and in less than half a second, Google will return more than 10 million results. You read that right. Ten million. Failure in business is a major concern. Putting in the hard work of creating and sustaining leadership accountability is a priority every company must achieve to survive.

Why do so many organizations fail? According to Gene Morton and his Leaders First process, it is because leaders: 1) Do not set critical outcomes for the organization, and 2) Do not communicate who is accountable and give the power to ensure the outcome is delivered. Read more →

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Foundational Business Outcomes for Leadership
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005 | Foundational Business Outcomes for Leadership

Welcome back to the Lucrative Leadership Conversations podcast! Over the past two episodes, we have discussed how leaders can master change by leveraging their conversations to impact others within the organization. Today, we look at one of the most critical decisions of effective leadership: Creating foundational business outcomes.

My co-host, Gene Morton, has developed the Leaders First Process, which includes “6 Bold Steps” leaders can take to sustain performance and create a collaborative structure that aligns with your vision. In episode 4, we introduced the 6 Bold Steps with Step #1: Leaders agree to commit to personal responsibility. Today, we introduce and unpack Step #2: Defining critical business outcomes. Gene and I discuss what these critical outcomes are, what they are not, and how they act like a compass pointing toward profitability. Developing critical business outcomes will allow leaders to greatly improve Clarity and Focus within their organization. Read more →

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