Business Training DVDs Show 5 Critical Abilities of CEOs

There are five essential qualities that 70 CEOs reveal lead to ultimate success, based on the NYTs.
We’re detailing them in this article as well as contributing some good examples of CEOs or innovators that are featured within our leadership development training videos on-line:

1. Fervent Interest: Asking “why” questions unearths possibilities. Simply “because it’s usually done this way” doesn’t suggest there isn’t a better way to achieve it or perhaps a chance to innovate.

• On-line Leadership Video Lessons: Body Shop founder Anita Roddick,Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Intel’s Andy Grove are some of the great entrepreneurs on video who show how they actually considered innovation and opportunities.

2. Confidence from Adversity: This is that skill that only experience teaches. How does a leader or manager respond to a setback? Do they blame or take ownership of a setback? Perseverance is also a key trait to conquering adversity. Can the leader ‘fail quickly’ re-energize and tackle the next battle.

 

Business Training DVDs: Richard Branson, founding father of Virgin refers to this as failing quickly to ensure you become successful a lot quicker.

3. Team Intelligence: Leaders who sense the character of their employees. They can tell how people respond to each other, not only how they act. A lot of teams these days are random created around a task or goal. But, the true mark of a leader is in co-opting support from people who just want to work for you.

• Management Video Tutorials: Bill Bradley, former NBA basketball superstar, a specialist at team building, says excellent leadership and your own happiness is far more about “we” than “I” and ensuring that the full team wins.

4. A Straightforward Mind-Set:  the ability to get right to the “point” immediately. You’ve seen lengthy oral presentations or reports and how they’re designed to show how much someone has learned or has researched an issue. Anybody can acquire data on-line. The actual value is in synthesizing it and finding the opportunities through disparate information.

• Business training videos on-line: America online founder Steve Case explains how he intensely listens after asking a question and looks for patterns to the information.  Yes, and connecting the actual dots.

5. Fearlessness: Entrepreneurs possess this in piles. It’s that power to consider calculated risk and be uncomfortable. Ursula M. Burns, Leader of Xerox, says, “One of the things that I characterize as fearlessness is seeing a chance, despite the fact that the situation is actually broken.”

• On-line Intel co-founder Andy Grove is a great illustration of courageousness. He bet Intel’s future on micro-computer chips when Intel could have easily sat back reaping the monetary benefits of creating chips for mainframe computer systems.

What does it take to be a Leader?

…not a manager..but a leader.  The difference is that wide gap between execution and vision.  E-Myth considers the following to be the five core effective leadership skills. We’ve added examples of successful leaders who demonstrate these skills:

1.Vision This is the ability to formulate ideas about the business or parts of the business; to understand opportunities or the need for change; to create a mental picture of what the business will be in the future; and to articulate all of that clearly in words and images. At the highest level, it’s the creation of the entrepreneur’s dream.

Vision: Richard Branson or Anita Roddick

2.Discrimination being able to see what’s important, to understand the available choices, and to make sound, practical decisions. Discrimination is free-form decision making rather than rule-based decision making. It’s knowing what questions to ask, and being able to answer them in the absence of rules or previous experience.

Discrimination: Stephen Covey or Andy Grove(Intel), Steve Case (AOL)

3.Strategic Thinking The ability to see the big picture and devise an effective path — the right actions — that will lead to realizing the vision. Inventing “the rules of your game” (as Michael Gerber puts it) and creating your business philosophy and key policies.

Strategic Thinking: Andy Grove, Charles Schwab, Howard Schultz (Starbucks)

4.Commitment This is the determination and energy to follow through and make the vision a reality even in the face of obstacles, opposition, uncertainty, and risk. Without an underlying passion for your vision, commitment is difficult to maintain.

Commitment: Dennis Conner (4X America’s Cup Winner)

5.Inspirational Communication This is the skill of communicating vision and strategy, and being able to infuse the organization with enthusiasm, dedication, and some of your own spirit and passion.

Inspirational Communication: Jack Welch, Anita Roddick, Steve Case(founder of AOL)

One way to “learn” or adapt leadership skills is to see how “the pros” or successful leaders have done it. How have they faced adversity or challenges and brought their teams to success?  

Success Television has a large library of online videos of successful great leaders who share how they succeeded. They not only tell you how to do it but show you and your team good leadership skills.

Wisdom of Caring Leaders Elearning

Key Leadership Skills Videos/DVD

Corporate Training Videos End of Year Sale

If you’ve been procrastinating on adding videos to your corporate trainings for senior management or executive development, time has worked in your favor. Success Television is offering $100 off on select corporate training motivational DVDs until December 31st!  Then, procrastination will return its usual result, a missed opportunity as our prices will go back up.

Shipping on Success Television’s corporate training video/DVDs is free (when ordering, select “first class shipping”). We also offer streaming video on demand to those with access to the Internet.

• Diversity and Harassment Training Video End of Year Sale
• Video on Demand Leadership skills training
• Leadership Development Elearning Course 

Is Your Talent Sitting on the Bench?

by Marshall Goldsmith

Finding, retaining, and developing talent is one of the toughest business challenges executives face. It’s made even tougher because many of the practices executives use don’t work in today’s uncertain environment. With the absence of job security and the likelihood of lifetime employment with one company a thing of the past, the open labor market means you may be investing in talented people who will leave your firm for a competitor. I invited my friend Peter Cappelli, a Wharton professor, author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, and a recognized world authority on human capital, to discuss his new approach to talent management. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

MG: First, what is talent management?

PC: A simple definition is anticipating the needs for talent and setting out a plan to meet those needs. While most observers think of “talent” as referring to managerial jobs, actually, any positions that are hard to fill or crucial to the organization count as “talent.”

What’s wrong with the way we do talent management now?

Survey evidence suggests that most companies no longer do any talent management. A generation ago, 96% of large employers in the U.S. had dedicated departments to do workforce planning, according to a 1966 Conference Board study. Now, less than a third even attempt to forecast demand for talent. Some estimates suggest that less than one in five companies attempt to plan for internal succession. The companies that attempt to do talent management in a sophisticated way use old-fashioned models from the 1950s that assume we know with great certainty what the demands will be in the future.

These models require the ability to plan accurately well into the future. The estimates of demand fall apart because the business environment is so uncertain. Our internal “pipelines” of talent also prove misleading because of unpredictable attrition. The talent plans then turn out to be wrong, in that employers end up with more managers or other kinds of talent than they need, leading to layoffs; in other cases they end up with not enough of the skills they need, causing work to be turned away.

So, what do we do instead?

The problem for talent management is to deal with and manage that uncertainty. We do this by adapting techniques that are already well known from supply-chain management. To begin, we ask, what happens when our forecasts for demand turn out to be wrong, as they almost always will? What does it cost us? We can be wrong in two ways: Actual demand is greater than our forecast, and we have a shortage of talent; or actual demand is less than we thought, and we have a surplus of talent. What will it cost us in each case?

The idea of having a “deep bench” of talent costs us money. A deep bench is inventory. And human capital is the most expensive form of inventory … we have to keep paying while people are “sitting on the bench,” and the most ambitious ones are likely to leave, taking our investments in them.

Falling short on talent, on the other hand, can be offset in most cases by outside hiring, contracting, or temp workers. Once we know which cost is greater, then we plan accordingly. If our best guess is that we will need 100 additional middle managers, and we think the costs of going long are greater than the costs of going short, then we should try to develop fewer than 100 middle managers … say, 90. And if it turns out that we fall short, then we use outside hiring to make up the gap. This allows us to respond to the uncertainty in ways that don’t break the bank.

The biggest concern with development seems to be attrition … that we invest in employees and they leave.

The problem from the employer side is that they advance the investment and then hope for a return. But employees can take this investment and look for jobs elsewhere at higher wages. So the employers end up paying for this twice … first the investments, then higher wages. There are many ways to adapt to this problem, but perhaps the most creative is to find ways to get employees to share the costs of development.

Many companies have started doing this by asking for workers to volunteer for additional developmental assignments. But they have to keep doing their regular job in the process. So the development is essentially done on the employee’s dime.

What do the employees get out of this new approach?

The ability to quit and find a job elsewhere gives employees options that they didn’t have during the lifetime employment period. In order to keep employees from leaving, most employers give them more say about managing their careers.

Virtually every company now has electronic job boards that create something like an internal marketplace for talent. We’re moving toward [a system] where employees and their employers shop for talent. Balancing the interests of employees and their employers is the key, and a number of companies have arrangements to negotiate compromises.

This has been fascinating, Peter. Thank you! I love to point my readers to new approaches to the significant challenges they face today, such as talent management.

Readers, as always, I would love comments from you. Peter can be reached at Cappelli@Wharton.UPenn.edu

Life is good.

Marshall Goldsmith Effective Leadership Video Training

Marshall Goldsmith Speeches & Trainings

My newest book, MOJO, is a New York Times (advice), Wall Street Journal (business), USAToday (money) and Publisher’s Weekly (non-fiction) best seller. It is now available online and at major bookstores.

Top 7 Self-Mastery Skills

by Larry Lipman for Success Television

1. Be Real. If you’re not being real, people will know, and you compromise your integrity. Being genuine is a gift to yourself and others.

2. Be Totally Present. This is a learned skill. 

3. Work on Yourself. Listen to tapes, go to conferences, read empowering books, hang out with smart people.

4. Celebrate Your Successes.  Most people ask “What’s next?” and never stop to celebrate.  That’s sad.

5. What is your destiny?   Remembering your true motivation and passion behind your life will strengthen and energize you.

6. Remember the most powerful 4-letter word in the English language when it comes to handling rejection…..”NEXT.”

7. Be grateful.  There are always people worse off than we are.  It is impossible to be depressed and grateful at the same time.

• Video on Demand Leadership skills training
• Leadership Development Elearning Course 

Are You Hearing All Your Options?

Many of us act as though we all see the same reality, yet the truth is we don’t. Human Beings have cognitive biases or blind spots.

Blind spots are ways that our mind becomes blocked from seeing reality as it is – blinding us from seeing the real truth about ourselves in relation to others. Once we form a conclusion, we become blind to alternatives, even if they are right in front of their eyes.

Emily Pronin, a social psychologist, along with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, created the term “blind spots.”  The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot.

Passing the Ball

There is a classic experiment that demonstrates one level of blind spots that can be attributed to awareness and focused-attention. When people are instructed to count how many passes the people in white shirts make on the basketball court, they often get the number of passes correct, but fail to see the person in the black bear suit walking right in front of their eyes. Hard to believe but true!

Click the video to the right>> – take awareness test!

Blind Spots & Denial

However, the story of blind spots gets more interesting when we factor in our cognitive biases that come from our social needs to look good in the eyes of others.

When people operate with blind spots, coupled with a strong ego, they often refuse to adjust their course even in the face of opposition from trusted advisors,  or incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

Two well-known examples of blind spots are Henry Ford and A&P:

• Ford’s success with the Model-T blinded him to the desires of his customers. That gave the fledging General Motors an opportunity to capture a winning share of the automobile market with a broader range of models and options.
• A&P stuck with the grocery chain’s private label products even as their customers defected en masse to supermarkets that carried the national brands they saw advertised on TV.

Recovery

The good news is that companies can recover from denial; even when they seem permanently wedded to their histories, their philosophies, or their belief systems. IBM, which had been caught up in its own “bureau-pathology,” learned to conquer arrogance and overcome its history and culture, under the leadership of Louis Gerstner.

Intel, DuPont, and Coca-Cola, are more examples of corporations caught in denial traps when launching new products. They demonstrated that when corporate management has strong convictions, or worse yet, hubris about their points of view, they can become blind to their customer’s needs – needs that are right in front of their very eyes.

Seeing the real truth is an art and a science. When we get the balance right between what we think is true and what is really true – we are managing our blind spots with integrity, and wisdom.

Fortunately, these well-known brands did not live in denial very long. It was only a passing phase, and they recovered from it by revisiting reality with an open mind. Blind spots explain why the “smartest people in the room” (as Enron’s top executives were famously called) can sometimes be very dumb. They do not see the light – they are not open to changing their minds.

The Power of Coaching to Dissolve Blind Spots

Denial and Blind spots are one of the primary reasons why Executive Coaching is so vital for leaders, and why peer coaching is equally important for employees to practice. Coaching can effectively uncover and deal with blind spots and denial and give the decision-makers a fresh perspective on how to handle executive challenges.

Coaching can also help individuals gain a broader and more ‘realistic perspective’ about situations and themselves. Executive, Team and Organizational Coaching can help leaders calibrate with the world around them, giving them reality checkpoints that position them  to navigate the real world with wisdom and insight.

From time to time, we all need a wake-up call to be sure that we do not allow ourselves to confuse our denial maps with the actual territory.

Check Yourself

Here are 7 Common Blind spots:

1. Denial of Reality – Feeling so strong about our own beliefs that we deny the beliefs of others, or deny facts right in front of our eyes.
2. Control – Seeing ourselves as being more responsible for things than we actually are, or having more control over things and events than we truly do.
3. Made-Up Memories – Making decisions based on memories that did not happen. Often we confuse our imaginations, or our dreams, with reality.  
4. Reality Distortions – Distorting reality to conform to preconceptions.
5. Know it All – Thinking that we know more than what we really do. (We simply don’t know what we don’t know.)
6. Listening Only to Validate What We Know –  Failure to listen to others.
7. Undervaluing What We Do Know – Listening too much to others, and allowing others’ beliefs to talk us out of our beliefs; or in some cases cause us not to trust our instincts.

Neuro-tips: Removing Blind Spots 

Tip #1 – It Takes Thought to Learn
The brain does not always allow us to hear all the facts if they do not fit our prior understanding of a concept. To learn new facts, you must be actively open to accepting opposition.

Tip #2 – Effectively Working Together
Partners who were considered controlling were perceived as critical and rude, and their advice was generally rejected and not trusted. When the same partners showed appreciation, a feeling of rapport and trust developed, creating a deep ‘WE-centric’ bond.

Judith E. Glaser is the Author of two best selling business books: Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization – winner of the Bronze Award in the Leadership Category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, and The DNA of Leadership.

How to Boost Creativity

by SuccessTelevision.biz

Chic Thompson of What a Great Idea explains in this short video how to encourage and boost great ideas.

Success Television offers 3-5 minute videos clips for teachers and corporate trainers to show good leadership skills. Video of successful leaders back up and jazz up trainings on leadership development, effective communication and other softskills trainings

3 Examples of Great Leadership

I know a great CFO, who I used to work with and who is now very successful in his career.  I’m convinced he succeeded because he has the highest emotional intelligence of just about anyone I know and he’s a very caring person. Recently, he was asked by his company to write about leadership. This is well worth a five minute read:

“Maybe the best way to think about good leadership is to look at examples that have stood out for me over the course of my career. I’m sure all of you have some good and maybe not so good examples as well, but the following events stuck out in my mind as behaviors for me to learn from:

• I was walking to a client presentation with a top Partner at the firm I used to work for and we were late. I tend to walk fast, but this partner walks even faster. She was on a mission to sell services, something that she excelled at and I was keen at learning how to do as well.

As we crossed the street in busy downtown San Francisco, we saw a 3 year old boy crying and no one attending to him. To my amazement, (I was thinking surely someone else was around who could help; it need not be us), the Partner stopped and asked the little boy what was the matter. We learned that he could not find his mommy. We helped the little boy look for his mother and ultimately took him to a police station. We missed our sales pitch. In all the years I had worked for this slave-driving Partner, I had never seen this side of her until that moment. Leaders have to be real, caring people – we need them to be.

• I worked at a start up for awhile. It was fun raising money but it was no fun running out of money. I used my best CFO skills to try to make things go as far as possible. Ultimately, it was inevitable, we had to lay off half of our workforce (50 people) at a time when most of them would struggle finding new jobs. The layoff day was one of the worst days of my career. Our CEO also wretched the decision and personally gave the news and exit interview to every single employee that was let go. After it was over, he asked me to stop paying him a salary. He wasn’t particularly wealthy and had a family to support, but he knew it was the right thing to do and would maybe help keep the employees that were left. Leaders aren’t afraid to face bad news and make sacrifices (just like everyone else).

• I often think with my financial brain. I believe that all situations can be boiled down to the most salient point of dollars and cents. It’s what I do and it is logic that is difficult to ignore if presented properly. I have a good friend that runs sales for a medium sized company. We often have healthy debates about how to run companies smartly. I always think I have the best points, but he is quick to pull the “customer” card. Without customers, there is nothing. Leaders need followers and customers are the best kind of followers. Without them there is nothing to lead.”

• Develop your leaders with Success Television’s leadership training videos.

Are You a Good Listener?

by Marshall Goldsmith

You may think you’re a pretty good listener, but do the people around you disagree? Has anyone ever looked at you with a disappointed expression and said, “Are you listening?” My guess is the answer is yes.

Have you ever then replied to the person in an annoyed voice, “What do you mean, am I listening?” and then repeated what he or she said verbatim—to prove they were wrong? My guess is again, yes.

Did your annoyed response dramatically improve your relationship with that other human being?

Say You’re Sorry

My guess this time is no.

Even if you were listening, how much of an “I care about you” message were you sending to that other human being by taking a defensive posture? Zero. What that other person was really asking was, “Why don’t you care?” Was proving them wrong about listening really worth it? I don’t think so.

So, the next time someone looks at you and says, “You’re not listening,” apologize. Just reply, “I am sorry. I will try to better in the future.”

Look Like You Care

How do to better? Start looking like you care. As others speak to us, how do they know that we aren’t listening? They don’t. They only assume that we aren’t listening because we don’t look like we are. If we remember to look like we care, we will not only be reminding ourselves to listen better, we will also be reminding ourselves to communicate a sense of respect for the person who is speaking to us.

Here are several ideas to help you not only listen better, but to look like you are listening, and to demonstrate caring to the person who is speaking to you:

1. After having a dialogue with friends, colleagues, or family members, ask them to give you a 1-10 assessment of how much you looked like you cared about their remarks.
2. Find a partner and practice communication while recording it on video. Turn off the sound and just watch your nonverbal behavior. How much caring and respect are your communicating?
3. Try to eliminate all distractions when others are speaking to you. When you are doing other work, answering e-mails, or doing something on your computer while someone is speaking to you — you may not look like you care.
4. Ask questions that let the other person know you have heard what they have to say and would like to learn more. While this advice can be very important at work, it may be just as important at home.

Now that you’ve had a test-run, you’re ready to employ a few following listening tactics in more of your interpersonal encounters. Try these:

• Listen.
• Don’t interrupt.
• Don’t finish the other person’s sentences.
• Don’t say, “I knew that.”
• Don’t even agree with the other person, just listen!
• Don’t use the words “no,” “but,” and “however.”
• Eliminate any striving to impress the other person with how smart and funny you are. Your goal is to let the other person feel that.

If you can do these things while you’re in a conversation, you will inevitably find that the other person will think you are a great person! All because you listened. You’d feel the same if someone made you feel like the most important person around—all by just listening! If you want people to feel good in your presence, that’s all you have to do. Just listen.

Life is good.

Marshall Goldsmith Effective Leadership Video Training

Marshall Goldsmith Speeches & Trainings

Marshall My newest book, MOJO, is a New York Times (advice), Wall Street Journal (business), USAToday (money) and Publisher’s Weekly (non-fiction) best seller. It is now available online and at major bookstores.

The Short and Sweet Role of a Leader

by SuccessTelevision.biz

Mike Myatt, CEO coach and author of “Leadership Matters…The CEO Survival Manual” runs N2growth, a top leadership blog. He recently interviewed John Maxwell, best selling author and leadership expert.

 

Mike Myatt: What do you see as the primary role of a leader?
 
John Maxwell: Helping others succeed. If you take a trip up a mountain by yourself, you’re not a leader; you’re an achiever. A leader takes people somewhere. And they take the people not only where they want to go but also beyond where they believe they can go.

Call it vision, empathy, motivation, energy. It takes finally honed leadership skills to tap into all these resources within us to call us toward a goal or purpose.

There are many examples of these types of leaders ..Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, Sir Ernest Shackleton the polar explorer who led 28 men to survival after their ship wrecked in Antarctica and Andy Grove, the founder of Intel.  

Success Television offers video of these successful leaders  and many more to help teach and show employees and students what good leadership is.