Webinar on Demand - New Leadership and Coaching Approaches

Last week, I delivered a 45-minute webinar on Powerful New Approaches to Leadership and Coaching Development. This webinar condensed the key research and approaches from The Extraordinary Leader and The Extraordinary Coach workshops. An 11-minute Q & A session followed the webinar presentation. I was able to answer just seven questions and couldn’t get to many others. Click here to access the archived webinar and Q &A session (starts at 45:15).

Here are a few of the questions and summarized answers with links for you to drill deeper into the topic:

When dealing with a workplace focused on weaknesses, what would you suggest a person do to introduce strength-based development?

The evidence from research papers on Developing Strengths or Weaknesses or An Overview of Key Insights from “The Extraordinary Leader” persuades some people. Others find stories/examples more convincing such as Are You Focused on What’s Wrong to Make Things Right? An exercise I described in the webinar is outlined in a 3-minute interview clip at Towering Strengths Overshadow Weaknesses. It draws from participant’s personal experiences with the best and worst leaders they’ve ever known. This turns lights on for some leaders.

Peruse our focusing on strengths for more articles, blogs, webinars, videos, whitepapers, and case studies.

In selecting companion competencies for development, should we choose to focus on areas that are already strengths?

 If the competency companion isn’t already a profound strength (90th percentile), then leveraging that strength by developing it further is often a good choice. Other times it might be selecting a companion or behavior that’s most visible or likely to have the fastest/highest impact.

If I am strong in a number of competencies, what how do I leverage those strengths?

Leadership Lift: Significantly Boost Effectiveness by Raising Strength Clusters addresses some of your question. You’ll find resources on leveraging strengths at Cross-Training and Competency Companions.

There are times where people may be missing a competency or skill to move to the next level. How do “fatal flaws” feed into a personal development plan?

 Joe Folkman’s guest blog, When to Work on Weaknesses, addresses some of this. As I mentioned on the webinar, we have lots of research like – Motivating Leaders to Implement Individual Development Plans and Building Leadership Strengths 2 – 3 Times More Effective Than Fixing Weaknesses — showing the power of working on strengths to turbocharge personal development plans.

Can strategic thinking be learned?

 The competency we call “Develops Strategic Perspective” is a skill that can be learned – in most cases. Some leaders really struggle with this competency because they’re so caught up in details or find long term visioning very difficult.

Zenger Folkman’s correlation research on the “competency companions” for Strategic Perspective studied the behaviors or competencies most frequently found in leaders who scored at the 90th percentile. Customer focus, innovation, analytical skills, and communication were among the 8 most frequently found in high strategic leaders.

How can you handle your CEO when he is not understanding your point of view or critique?

Upward Leadership and dealing with a boss or senior management is one of the most popular topics and questions I am regularly asked. I’ve written quite a bit about this. Click on Upward Leadership for a selection of articles and blogs.

Given the vast number of webinars now available, we were delighted to have hundreds of sites register and join us. And we got the truest feedback of all — they stayed until the very end!