High Performance Leadership

Don't start another project. Launch it. Give that project the energy, the momentum, the power it needs to focus on the goal, work the plan, and create something both useful and memorable. Your project is worth it. Give that new start the focus it needs with a workshop that brings together all of the key constituents. Let your project team feel part of something special by celebrating before they even get started. Giving your project a collaborative workshop launch could be the most high impact thing you could do for it. What goes into a collaborate workshop launch? You decide. I have found it helpful and energizing to include these: A vision/mission for your team.  This could be your project goal, expressed in a way that drives some excitement into the project A team identify. Depending on the project (and your budget) that could be as simple as matching T-shirts and coffee mugs, or as elaborate as a team name theme song, and video Carefully prepared agenda. Make si...

Do you agree with Daniel Pink that everyone is in sales? I sure do. I used to resist it. I even resented it. I thought that my work was so much more noble than that. That will keep you feeling superior perhaps but it also keeps you from helping as many people as you could. Why not reach more people with what you do best? That's sales. So here's my sales pitch for today. Each Saturday for awhile now I've been trying this little thing I call Shameless Promotion Saturday. It's what I offer you today: I deliver high performance leadership training. The two primary ways I do that is with one-day workshops and with one-hour webinars. What's your attention span? (and what's your budget?) Either way, you will find the choices to be fast, affordable leadership training. I invite you to email me today here: doug@frontrangeleadership.com ...to find out how these interactive workshops can develop your talent fast and affordably. Supervising for Success  - ...

Have you asked yourself what your major accomplishment for today will be? I'm asking myself this question as much as anyone else. Days come and go and some are more memorable than others. We have our productive days and we have our wasted days. But what if we didn't waste any days? What if we truly made the best use of our time? Set a goal for today. Figure out what will make this day memorable. What will make this a day well lived? Maybe it's helping another person. Maybe it's getting that shed painted. Maybe it's leading your team on launching an exciting new project. What will it be for you? Have you asked yourself what do you want from this day? It's up to you. -- Douglas Brent Smith Are you interested in developing your high performance leadership skills and the leadership skills in your organization? Contact me today about bringing our one-day workshops to your location.

Does anyone else talk about YOUR life? Do you know anyone who seems to be operating so high in their efficiency and so strong in their influence that they seem to be living their ideal life? We admire people who create noteworthy lives. They accomplish things. They achieve their goals. They build lasting and profoundly deep relationships. Are you there? Are you moving in that direction? Create a life that's worthy of a documentary. Grow, learn, train, experience what you need to achieve your goals. Who knows -- you might just change the world... -- Douglas Brent Smith Learn how to achieve you goals by scheduling our webinar How To Achieve Your Goals for your team. Contact me now at: doug@frontrangeleadership.com Front Range Leadership: Training Supervising for Success

Does your team need an instant needs analysis? Contact us today about getting a quick leadership development needs analysis to uncover your leadership training needs. We offer fast, affordable training solutions to your leadership needs so please, check us out! Thanks! -- Douglas Brent Smith doug@frontrangeleadership.com High Performance Leadership Training Workshops Webinars

Do good intentions always lead to good outcomes? Unfortunately, the best intentions of people sometimes lead to exactly the opposite of what they wanted. Or, they lead to what they wanted but to resistance and conflict from other people. Most problems started with good intentions. When we are working to solve problems it can be helpful to discover those intentions. Analyze the situation clearly enough to uncover what people really want. Identify the goal behind the problem. It's much more positive to work to achieve a noble goal that we can agree on than try to throw countless solutions at symptoms. Talk about the intentions. Reach agreement on mutually beneficial outcomes. Then develop solutions. Leverage those good intentions into high performance leadership and optimize your results. It works. -- Douglas Brent Smith Interested in optimizing your results? Contact me today about bringing our workshop Solving Problems to your location.

How does your team manage conflict? One big challenge of high performance leadership is managing conflict within a team. Highly ambitious teams will generate more than their share of conflict. How you manage that as the leader, and how the team manages it collaboratively, will largely determine how innovative your results become. It's tempting in a conflict to fix the "other side" when it may be our side that needs unfixing. Our solution may be flawed. Our ideas may be incomplete. Our answers may be rooted in distortion. We may need to unfix what we think is fixed. Because if it truly is fixed, it could be stuck in place. Frozen. Not moving. That's no place to be to optimize your results. That's no place to be to grow. And that's no place to be to build your best team. Build a better team. Find the parts that seem fixed but need unfixing. You'll like the results. -- Douglas Brent Smith Contact me today about bringing in our one-day workshop B...

Have you taken the time to set reasonable, strong, noble, ambitious goals? If not, I invite you to take that time. High performance leaders grow through their goals. Centered leaders stay focused and flexible by keeping their vision on their goals. Successful supervisors achieve their goals. Once you have your goals in place you will experience some resistance. It's not really a maybe, it's a certainty. The more strong, noble, and ambitious your goals the more resistance you will encounter. That's just a way to test you. That's just a way to make you stronger. That's just a way to see if you're serious about your goals. And so, why not get serious about your goals? When life brings you trouble, go with your goals. -- Douglas Brent Smith Interested in developing your goals or your team's ability to stick to their performance goals? Contact me today about bringing Achieving Your Goals to your location. You could start with a one-hour webinar, How ...

How does your team solve problems? How does your team grow? Have you considered that your team can grow by solving its problems? It's easy for a team to get stuck. It's easy to shove a team's problems aside and hope that they solve themselves -- but they never do. By collaborating on solving your problems you get the double bonus of both solving problems and growing your team. Collaboration builds relationships, and it's through stronger relationships that your team can better please customers, innovate, and grow. Solving problems leads to unexpected growth in unrelated areas. Give it a try. Get your team more involved in solving problems. Find the amazing and useful connections between problem solving and team success. -- Douglas Brent Smith Interested in helping your team develop more problem solving skills and in creating the collaborative space for success? Contract me today about bringing our workshop Solving Problems to your location. doug@frontrang...

OK High performance leaders, here's a question for you: what's more important and comes first in your priorities -- customers or team members? I've worked with many organizations that always put customers first. A few teams would also focus on team member happiness (or at least say they do). Here's the problem. Unhappy team members create more unhappy customers. Here's another problem: really poorly behaving customers make it so rough for team members that they also become unhappy, spreading the unhappiness around. That's not the result we want. Conversely, nice customers recognize the hard work that team members do. Polite customer realize that they may not always BE the center of the universe. Smart and reasonable customers realize that you are not entitled to something just because you demand it and that demanding it progressively louder does not increase the merits of your case. Can't we all play well together? As a high performance leader, I e...

Do you have this leadership thing all figured out? Once I thought I did, until I learned later that it is a constant figuring out. It is a constant learning process. Even when I had a great team that was completely working together and achieving its goals, just when it seemed to be perfection I would make some mistake (hiring the wrong person, cutting short a performance evaluation, delaying an important piece of feedback, failing to recognize a big effort) that would set the energy back. Things wouldn't feel perfect anymore. But there are some things that have held up over and over. Some things that if we get right as leaders our jobs are SO much better, and our impact is deeper and longer lasting. These three things in particular touch almost everything that we do and, if done correctly (and often) can prevent us from having to let people go. Recruit right. Train right. Coach constantly. Each is a course-load in itself. Each could take a life-time to master. That's ...

Are you easily distracted? Many of us are blessed with the ability to shift our focus instantly. We can move our attention from the problem we're working on to a few items on our phone. We can forget what's pressing on us and drift into long periods of cat videos or project management cartoons. Centered leaders stay focused. Centered problem solving keeps us focused whether or not the problem is solved. The goal, to put it simply, is the goal. All the problem is doing is standing in the way of the goal. Are you a centered leader? What are you doing to continue in your leadership development? - Douglas Brent Smith Front Range Leadership offers fast, affordable leadership training through workshops and webinars .

As a leader, how much do you share with your team? When it comes to leveraging your success and keeping your team positive and performing, sharing is a powerful tool. Successful supervisors share what they know about the organization, including upcoming changes and strategic moves. They share their own personal goals. They share the resources needed for their team to achieve its goals. The list could be very long. The challenge to many leaders is that they don't share enough. Centered leaders know that by sharing the whole is made greater than the parts. By sharing, you do not diminish your excellence but rather increase it. I'm not talking about private, personal details about your life. Share those if you want to, but that's not what I mean here. Successful supervisors share generously the details of their work, their vision, their values, and their goals. Supervisors succeed by sharing knowledge, power, and responsibility.   How are you doing at sharing? What...

What are you learning this week? Are you working on some core skills? Are you brushing up on another language. Maybe you're learning a new code. Centered leaders keep learning. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes work gets in the way. Keep learning. If you're hungry enough to learn, you will find a way . If your employer supports learning, grab at it every chance you get. If your employer does NOT support learning, go ahead and sponsor it yourself. The most expensive education is the one you need and fail to get. Learn. Keep learning. You don't want to evolve, right? -- Douglas Brent Smith If you're interested in bringing more learning to your organization, book our leadership workshops . Not only do they help you develop core leadership skills, they are surprisingly affordable.

WHAT IF you could work with a small group of people who would help you to solve your most pressing problems? They wouldn't try to impress you. They wouldn't charge you money. They wouldn't hold back their best advice to keep you coming back for more. All they wanted from you was to help you to solve your problems and achieve your goals, in exchange for cooperation in solving their own problems and achieving their goals. What they would do is speak openly and honestly and with absolute clarity. They would support your goals and offer their expertise unselfishly and without reservation. They would pay careful attention to your problem solving needs and treat your shortcomings and challenges with compassion. They would cooperate. They would spark ideas together that they would probably not realize on their own, and they would have fun doing it. They would help you drop excuses and time wasters to focus instead with your full energy on what you really want. ...

Have you given it much thought lately? What are you doing to develop as a leader? Are you working on your skills? Are you building relationships? Have you found new ways to exercise, practice and develop your clarity, courage, creativity and compassion? The art of leadership requires constant development. Things you could do: - take a teleclass - sign up for a workshop - take on a new project - build an ad hoc team to solve a problem - get coaching to achieve your goals - mentor another leader - find a mentor - read more about leadership ... the list is filled with wonderful potential. What will you learn today? -- Douglas Brent Smith