What Executives say about the experience and value of a Strategy Summit…
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Nov.19.2008 :: Consultant Journal, Innovation, Strategy :: No Comments »
If your passion is to help leaders realize their brilliance, consulting is a great profession. What’s the difference between a subject matter expert and a process expert? The first needs to impress the client with what they know. The second needs to help the client impress themselves with their own latent knowledge by helping the client access and realize it. The fun part of getting to do and be in the second role is that you get to work with brilliant people – the Olympic champions of their field. Imagine getting to sit in on Lance Armstrong’s bike or run in Usain Bolt’s shoes? I get to experience that kind of exhilaration.
We are currently collaborating with Matt Wagner, Director of Strategy and Planning for Hewlett-Packard and his team to evaluate plausible futures as the executive team determines optimal strategic investments options. The strategy team developed a new model to guide this process. Here is an insight provoked by the process:
The implementation of a new model – for evaluation of risk, for decision making or for anything else - needs to go through four stages.
First, it needs to make sense - we need to understand it.
Second, it needs to become credible - we need to believe it.
Third, it needs to be tried and played with – we need to engage in it.
Fourth, it needs to be applied – we need to put it to practice, to use it in real time and to have it guide our decisions and the way we do business
Through the process, the model is tested, refined, improved and optimized.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Nov.14.2008 :: Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
To the Toronto Blue Belt Top Talent participants of 2008 – Thank you for the opportunity to work together and be on this discovery journey with you. Here are my notes from our last mornings briefing:
1. You are the most important person in this world! The people you serve and work for, the people you support and help, the people to whom you bring a smile and who you make laugh, your loved ones – they can all only have the benefits of your time, energy, talent and wisdom because of who you are! Your good health, knowledge, experience and wisdom provides you with something to give. What you do and bring to them, the way you help, serve and give are extensions of what you are – of your being.
2. Always seek to be in your optimal zone! You are always better, more efficient and to the point when you come out of optimal energy. When you drop below your “90V” you are less effective and less productive. When you drop below “70V” you tend to be ineffective and produce negative results. Below “60V” you are susceptible to illness. (You can find more about how this works in our Emerald Keys.)
3. Practice learn-ability! Develop and practice the ability to learn from every situation and experience. Learn-ability is your top competency in times of rapid change. Debrief, harvest and apply your learning.
4. Develop communication and framing skills! Your second critical skill is the ability to frame ideas and the communication and influencing frameworks and skill-set we practiced at the Blue Belt. By practicing these regularly you get one percent better every day - the compounding result of which is getting 100% better in 70 days!
5. Separate “musts” from “wants”! Be clear about the difference between “Musts” and “Wants”. Do not confuse “I want this” for “I must have this”. Be clear about your priorities. Let top priorities guide your actions.
6. Align short and long terms! Work on your long-term aims and goals with a practical and pragmatic mindset by creating step by step progress. Bring to your short-term endeavors the energy and conviction of your long term intentionality.
7. Invest in your growth and development! Along with your career goals, set internal goals for yourself. Never work solely for an outer goal. Balance and complete the outer goal together with an internal goal. Your internal goals are not about what you will have or what you will do – they are about the person you are becoming and what you will be. Develop a “Being” goal for every “Having” and “Doing” one.
Examples for “Being” goals:
A. “I am becoming a more patient and understanding leader.”
B. “To be happy and grateful.”
C. “I am clear in mind and conscience.”
D. “I develop an energized presence.”
8. Be a tool maker! Go beyond problem solving and into tool making. Be the tool maker of progress, growth and innovation.
9. Be confident! Everything big started small. Do not be intimated by others however brilliant they may be. You are brilliant in your own way. Be sure and confident about the contribution you can make. Success is not about perfection, it is about always taking the next step forward. Take the next step confidently.
10. Find glory in the inglorious! Find the little noticed or ordinary places and attend to them with special care. Give yourself and those around you small moments of recognition when it’s least expected. Allow for quiet moments of peace inside a crowded life. Look to make something right even when no one else sees or knows what you did, simply for it to be right. Find glory in the inglorious!
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Oct.07.2008 :: Consultant Journal, Leadership, Personal Growth :: 1 Comment »
What is the subtle, at times invisible work of a transformational coach and consultant?
1. To learn from the client (the team) about their talent and potential. Especially to learn about the potential that the client is unaware of or is unable to access.
2. To hold for the client their best strengths.
3. To bring fresh perspective, a new question and a new way of looking at the problem.
4. To believe in the client’s capacity to grow, transform and evolve.
5. To help create ‘zero gravity’ inquiry and open ended exploration.
6. To promote an innovative process.
7. To intuit the next steps. Open the next door.
8. To bring a total urgency for the client to take the next step and, at the same time, contain it with absolute patience and detachment from outcome. (Only the very impatient can understand the power of patience).
9. To frame the question, the challenge, in the pursuit of which the client can discover their next brilliance.
10. To be fully present and engaged in your own growth while helping the client grow.
11. To remove blockages.
12. To follow the energy as it leads to the next breakthrough.
13. To help ‘channel’ the collective intelligence available in the room.
14. To stay intact, impartial, and unattached.
15. To delight in the clients success.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Sep.22.2008 :: Coaching, Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
If you are to make yourself attractive to new learning and insight you have to dare to step into unknown situations, and to do that you must:
1. be fascinated with life and living.
2. be comfortable in not knowing.
3. love learning, truth and growth more than you love your ego.
4. be excited about new possibilities more than you love your need for security.
5. be ready for learning and insight to come through anyone regardless of their position, seniority or age.
6. have a sense of humor.
7. be mentally agile and alert.
8. be intensely present and treat each conversation as though it’s the most important thing in the world.
9. trust your capacity to turn every setback into valuable learning.
10. have a sixth sense for the invisible dimensions of things.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Jun.17.2008 :: Consultant Journal, Entrepreneur :: No Comments »
You can hear a variety of voices that speak through people. Our Find Your Voice seminars provide opportunities to witness and learn more about this. The exciting part is when people begin to find their own voice. Every once in a while a discernable pattern shows up. When it does, it can be powerful and exhilarating to recognize it.
That is what happened in our seminar last week in Villa Rossa, a beautiful resort an hour away from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Participants explored and practiced a framework for effective communication – a template to Find Your Voice. The practice culminates with each creating a message they want to deliver. In most seminars about half the managers choose to focus their messages on their company, their team or on business issues. The other 50% of messages usually cover a range of topics including work-life balance, education, the environment and more personal messages too.
This week in Villa Rossa something quite unusual happened. The large majority of participants chose to focus their message on protecting planet Earth, preserving water, maintaining the environment and other related messages. At first, I thought it was just a coincidence. As the aggregated weight of these messages continued to build, it occurred to me that something else was going on. Earth was speaking through its people.
Brazil and its Amazon forests can be seen as the lungs of our struggling planet, and through the seminar, the Brazilians that I met are its guardians. In “Greendex 2008” - a recent National Geographic Society and GlobeScan survey, Brazil scored highest for overall consumer choices that are environmentally sustainable. Earth has a way of communicating through its keepers.
The exquisite power of the exercise was that as people began to find their own voice, the Earth’s voice found them and spoke through them.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: May.25.2008 :: Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
One of the best things about my work is that I meet with brilliant people. They are world class; they are smart and intelligent; the “Olympic Champions” of their field. Real champions love truth, learning, wisdom and growth more than they love their last success. If you show them a way to become even better they will take it any time, any day and without a delay. Champions are simply more passionate about continuing to improve than they are about their accomplishments to date. That’s how they became champions. Here are lessons I learned from working with brilliant people.
1. The knowledge we seek is almost always already present in the room.
2. The work is to discover it. To remove what blocks it. To frame a context in which it reveals its meaning.
3. We are always more ready to move forward and envision a future when we are anchored in our strengths.
4. Love is the power of the heart. Inquiry is the power of the mind. Asking a question that opens up a new possibility is powerful. Inquiry fueled with the love of growth and new possibilities is the high octane energy of development.
5. Strategy formulation begins with asking the right questions. It helps the team unlock and ‘channel’ its collective intelligence.
6. Data, knowledge, wisdom, insight and intelligence are each a distinct thing.
Data is a collection of facts.
Knowledge is the capacity to read and understand the data.
Wisdom is the ability to create context and to place specific knowledge inside a broader frame of reference and experience wherein it reveals its meaning.
Insight is deciphering the portent, potential and future implication of what has been discovered.
Intelligence is the metabolic speed of this process; how well and how fast you turn data into knowledge, wisdom and insight.
7. A powerful framework can increase the available intelligence. It helps you accelerate the transformation of data to knowledge, wisdom and insight.
8. Knowledge is connecting the dots in the data to form a picture. Wisdom is placing the picture inside a series of pictures, to see the flow of what created the picture you are looking at and to decipher it’s meaning in the greater scheme of things. Insight is seeing and recognizing the invisible dimension and portent of all this.
9. Insight is found when you place yourself on the verge of the unknown. If your entire mental faculty is engaged in and focused on what you know, no new insight can find you. “A bucket full of water is a bucket full of water.”
10. When a team creates a unified vision they believe in and they trust each other inside it – they are positioned to go ahead and actualize it and make it into a reality. It is then that they would have the ultimate competitive advantage.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Apr.08.2008 :: Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
Each seminar, each group, each strategy session brings forward lessons, insights and new articulation and power. This is the hallmark of transformational work. You are made anew in the process. You clarify your goals, connect with a sense of purpose and step into a more authentic place. If we are not blessed by this kind of energy it means we are failing to step into greater authenticity and are not transformational.
Summoning to authenticity the people you meet will give them permission to spread their wings to soar. It is then that they realize their power and ready themselves to join in and realize a greater universe of possibilities.
This week in Toronto I am with a group of insightful and energetic managers. On day two of this 4-day program we explored the power of Adaptive Leadership—adapting your management approach to the needs and the readiness you meet. Here are two essential values we focused on:
First, to be an Adaptive Leader you must be diagnostic about the people you work with, their needs and development path. You envision for them and with them their continued growth. You facilitate and enable their next realization and development. This means you care. You are genuinely interested. You work toward making a real difference for them, a sustainable difference. You champion their best. You create a legacy of breakthroughs.
Second, a classic “sin” of many managers is having a blind-spot about their top performers. Too often they forget that ‘Top Talents’ are a goldmine. It is too easy to take your top performers for granted. Yes, you want to empower them, to delegate to them. But assuming that their rare ability will always come through and deliver doesn’t give you permission to carelessly dump new pressures on them. Delegating is not dumping. Delegating is transferring responsibility and thereby entrusting another with power to enhance their capabilities and growth.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Apr.04.2008 :: Consultant Journal, Leadership :: No Comments »
What is the role of a transformational consultant and coach?
We help the client to transform and improve their condition. We design a process and create an experience that helps leaders grow and realize their vision.
What is the most important competency to do this work?
I believe it is the ability to learn – learn-ability. I learn so much from the people I work with that it’s thrilling. What can be better than to be paid good money to continually learn fascinating stuff?
Here are lessons captured in the field.
1. You cannot hide behind a framework. The people show up for the session to meet you, not your brilliant framework.
2. You have to earn their respect. Never assume people’s respect is a given. If you worked with a group last year and it was successful and they liked their experience they will come and give you the benefit of showing up and being ready and open. You will then need to earn their respect all over again. They need to find a new updated reason why they are giving you their money, time and attention.
3. You earn their respect when they see that you are making an effort and that you care. You earn their trust when your efforts and care help them improve.
How do your efforts and care make a difference?
4. First, the participants see you make the effort to understand their situation and the challenges they are facing and that you care enough to try to understand and appreciate their culture and beliefs.
5. Second, they feel your efforts to come from your own personal insights, your willingness to risk trusting them with your journey, with your thought process with its struggles and discoveries. To trust the process of a transformational change in themselves, they look to see that you are ready to share your own transformation.
6. They can feel your genuine effort both when you are making the journey to understand them (item 4) and when you make the journey into yourself with the excitement and passion as though it were newly discovered (item 5).
7. What do you do if it is lunch time and you have not yet “clicked”, you have not been able to connect with the group? Find the one person you feel you can connect with and have lunch with that person. Work into a meaningful conversation with this one person. Help that person to help you connect. They will lead you to get through to the rest of the group.
8. Projection is everything and at the same time the biggest blockage you face. You project what you hope the participants will discover, how they will feel, the benefits and value they will receive. You make projections about the program and how it will unfold. And then you turn up and you must be ready to put it all aside. You show up with the “table of plenty” you have prepared but you have to be free at the point to discover the need and the way of it and be flexible enough to adjust to what is needed.
9. You must find a fresh interest and enthusiasm for this seminar for yourself. You may have talked about this subject and done this particular format 40 times but the audience is hearing it for the first time. You must be freshly interested in it yourself. If you are bored they will be bored. Your own interest in what you are discovering in the process is the life blood, the vital plasma of the engagement.
10. This meeting, this seminar, this engagement happens only once. It will never happen again. You will never be exactly in the same place, with exactly the same people at exactly the same time. It’s a once-in-the-history-of-the-galaxy event. Make it count. Make it count for you. Make it count for them.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Feb.27.2008 :: Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
Most of my client engagements are intensive sessions of three to four days. We create strategy summits, leadership and talent development programs and business transformation retreats. The creative component is in the unique customized experience we create to address the needs of the particular management team.
Executives often think that three or four days is asking a lot, that they don’t have the time or can’t afford to be away for so long. They think it’s too much until they are in the session and discover that the benefits and output is not just stratospherically higher and greater but that we are able to get to so much that they can never unleash and attain in the ongoing pedal-to-the-metal drive in the office.
There is nothing more exciting than a management team discovering each other in a new way inside a greater vision and purpose. They are then ready to breakthrough into territories and possibilities that were not attainable before and come up with innovative solutions that thrill them into unified action. It’s a transformational experience.
I get to see and experience it and facilitate and enable the breakthrough and the discovery. And I get to put on many hats – the consultant hat, the teacher hat, the coach hat, the transformational enabler and the trusted confidant hat and more. I don’t need to know the client’s business better than they do. That is their job. What I do is help them remove the blockage between where they are and where their greater potential waits for them.
On the Art—Science continuum what I do is probably more on the art side but the truth is that it’s both. I suppose it’s a form of mastery. What’s exciting about this work? Enabling people to discover and unleash greatness? I don’t know anything more exciting!
Read Part Two here.
© Aviv Shahar
Aviv Shahar :: Feb.16.2008 :: Consultant Journal :: No Comments »
