High Performance Leadership

High Performance Leadership is the name of our blog and also the combination of our complete workshop series: Supervising for Success  - a great way to get supervisors off to a great start, or to adjust some rough areas. Communicating for Results  - a workshop dedicated to developing deeper conversations, more productive meetings, and more influential presentations. Building Your Team  - identifying the keys to your team's success and learning the tools that can help you collaborate on that success. Solving Problems  - Creating the collaborative space for success so that project teams, in-tact teams, and organizations can solve the problems that trouble them. Achieving your goals  - putting in place the processes, habits, and tools you need as a front line leader to achieve your goals. My strongest recommendation is to bring in these one-day workshops to your organization. All we need is a conference room and 5 to 15 of your front line supervisors. W...

What happens when someone convinces you to let go of your priorities? Do you find the time to reshuffle them? Do you realign your work so that you achieve your goals? Or do you find that your goals get tossed aside for something that seemed important at the time and kept someone quiet. It's not your job to keep anyone quiet. It's your job to achieve your goals. Other people may lose sight of that, but you can't afford to. No one will ever thank you for abandoning your priorities. Why not set them and keep them? -- Douglas Brent Smith Interested in learning ways to achieve your goals? Want to keep your priorities in order and galvanize a team of people to help you achieve them? Why not bring our workshop Achieving Your Goals to your location? Front Range Leadership Training Supervisors for Success

Is it all in your head? Can you perceive that there are no problems and experience a better life, a happier team, a more successful organization? I think you already know better than that.  I'm all for thinking positively. It helps to take a positive point of view and constantly seek to optimize our situation. But a problem is a problem and does not go away on its own. To say there are no problems but only solutions does not solve your problem. For that you've got to get the right people together and collaborate. -- Douglas Brent Smith Why not get the right people together soon and bring our Solving Problems workshop and facilitated problem solving session to your location? It's surprisingly affordable and will have great benefits. Contact me today: doug@frontrangeleadership.com

Do you want your team to be happy? Happy teams are more productive, most leaders would agree. But have you considered that productive teams are happier is also true? Think about a time when you worked on an inefficient team. How did it make you feel? What would you have given to get things under control and more productive? The people around you probably felt the same. As a centered, high performance leader part of your job is to build happy, productive teams. The good news that the two traits tend to go together. Create more productivity (and leaders have a huge impact on this in many ways, sometimes simply by eliminating the make-work activities that people are doing) and the team prospers. Help team members develop and grow, provide the training that they need, and treat them with respect and they act like happy team members. What can you do this week to improve the productivity on your team? -- Douglas Brent Smith Are you looking to build a more cohesive, powerful high ...

Have you been avoiding a tough conversation? It's easier said that done: tackle those tough conversations now. But it's also true. Tough conversations don't get any easier by delaying them. The sooner we create the communication we need the sooner we get the results that we're looking for. Deeper conversations aren't always the answer -- but ignoring the need for one never is. Who do you need to talk with today? When will you launch that conversation? -- Douglas Brent Smith For help in creating teams and cultures that tackle the tough conversations when they are needed, bring our workshop Communicating for Results to your location. We have special deals for groups in the Boulder, Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette area of Colorado.

Do you ever work with people who seem to be intentionally difficult to work with? No matter what you say, no matter how curious you stay, no matter how compassionately you approach them they persist in doing contrary things, passive aggressive actions, and outright interference? Maybe it's not the time for compassion. Maybe the time of understanding and empathy is over. When people are intentionally hard to work with they need to see your assertive courage more than your compassion. A bully will keep on pushing until the pushing is stopped. An intentionally difficult person needs to see and experience your boundaries and the consequences of breaking those boundaries. How do you know when they are being intentionally difficult? Ask. If their words don't tell you, their body language probably will. Put them on notice that you see the boundaries being broken and that it's not acceptable. Because in the end, intentional or not, strong supervisors -- even compassiona...

Can you take a quick promotion? I'm trying something new. Maybe it's just for today, or maybe it'll catch on. I'm calling it Shameless Promotion Saturday and it's dedicated to promoting our workshops, webinars, and high performance leadership resources. My hope is that on Saturday you'll have time to check these out and think about how they can help you develop high performance leadership . Today I'll focus on our workshops. There are two reasons why -- Supervisors rarely get the training they need, and we can help you with that. We'd like to offer some special deals in our home area - the front range region East of the Rocky Mountains (basically Boulder, Longmont, Denver, Colorado Springs -- from Wyoming to New Mexico, too). High Performance Leadership is the name of our blog and also the combination of our complete workshop series: Supervising for Success - a great way to get supervisors off to a great start, or to adjust some roug...

Does the truth interest you? I occasionally explore what truth means because it means so many things. We tend to believe our own truth versions often forgetting that's exactly what they are: versions. Talking about them goes a long way toward clarifying (and perhaps, exposing) them. The more truth scares us, the more we need it. Truth exposed. Truth interpreted. Truth discussed. Without the hidden agendas or confusion. What do you think? -- Douglas Brent Smith

It isn't easy, is it? Our reflexes, when we feel harm, is to harm in return. That's a formula for endless cycles of harm, and no end to our problems. What if we paused instead? What if we increased the compassion instead of the vengeance? Some problems simply require us to increase our compassion to find the solution. As hard as that sounds, it's easier in the long term. It's what centered, high performance leaders do. How can you increase your compassion toward that tough problem today? -- Douglas Brent Smith

Are you ever intentionally unclear? Maybe that's not a fair question. Maybe few of us would ever admit that we blurred lines or fuzzied up our boundaries. My guess is though that we all do. To become more centered, we need to get more clear. To reach our people and build better teams, we need to get more clear. To stop confusing people or deceiving them, we must seek more clarity. We seek more clarity by saying what we mean, and what we feel. We uncover our covered motivations. We listen with curiosity to discover how others are reacting (did they understand us? are we comfortable in their misunderstanding us?) Sometimes clarity comes from exploring the unclear places. It comes by asking honest and probing (and sometimes discomforting questions): - Did you understand what I said? - Did you mean to say that _____? - Are you saying that ______ ? - Does it sound to you that we agree or disagree on this? - Tell me what that means to you? - How do you feel about that? ...

Are you telling the truth? Don't you feel like asking that sometimes when the person you are talking to seems to be spinning the truth? Sometimes we are so close to our version of the truth that we fail to see it could be only our version of the truth. It might not be true at all -- certainly not for others. The best way around that is to stay curious. Stay curious about what other people say. Stay curious about what we say. Even stay curious about what we think. Every idea we clutch in our tight little hands comes to us filtered by factors we've forgotten about long ago: culture, ego, gender, parenting, schooling, experience, ethnicity...so many details strained thru lenses we don't even know are there. Let's work a little more to stay curious. Sometimes we're so good at spinning the truth that we don't even know it's not true anymore. That's not helpful or useful. It doesn't have to take long but it does take some serious mindful awaren...