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  • LEAP Leadership Development
    • For Companies
    • New LEAP Groups Starting Soon
    • LEAP Success Stories
  • Become a LEAP Coach
    • About the LEAP® Certified Affiliate Program
    • Apply to Become Certified
    • Benefits of Adding LEAP®
    • LEAP Cohort Recruitment - Sales and Marketing Materials
  • About the Alliance
    • Meet our Certified Coaches
  • Learning Opportunities
    • Live Briefings
    • Executive Briefings for Your Team
    • Leadership Matters Blog
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About the Alliance

Leadership Matters Blog

LEAD. GROW. INSPIRE.

Need to create high performance teams?

4/14/2016

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Building teams is easy to talk about and difficult to accomplish.  But there is a process to accelerate the learning curve for building team skills and collaboration.  Teams do not just happen naturally. Teams are –  in the truest sense – a volunteer organization. You can’t force someone to cooperate – you can’t mandate teamwork. A high level of cooperation is a product of choice.  One step to predictable and enhanced team performance is understanding the common characteristics of teams that achieve exceptional results.
 
What do you think could happen if the individuals in your organization stopped dysfunctional behaviors and worked together cohesively?
 
LEAP® the Leadership Acceleration Program can help you (or someone you know) become more effective at creating and sustaining high performance teams. Our multi-dimensional approach includes the assessments, skill-building, peer-networking, and 1:1 coaching that is proven to help managers and leaders, learn and apply these critical learnings in their actual work environment:
  • Identify and articulate the common purpose and shared mission.
  • Know the difference between compliance and commitment and how commitment creates a high-performing organization or team.
  • Create clearly defined roles with broadly defined jobs.
  • Facilitate meaningful participation in discussions.
  • Build and maintain effective relationships.
 
Join us for an upcoming webinar to learn more about LEAP and how it can help your organization thrive.
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Learn more about Creating High Performance Teams
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3 Challenges of Creating a Thriving Consulting Business

4/14/2016

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Three challenges of running a coaching business, and how to grow without taking on too much.

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"Having a packaged leadership development offering that targets high-potential non-executives, also helps me with these three business challenges."
If you own a consulting/coaching business, chances are, your business is you. And there’s only so much one person can do! Even though I’ve been running a successful consulting business since 1999, I still have peaks and valleys. And, I work with a lot of really impressive coaches and I see them struggling with the same challenges. After some reflection, I’ve boiled it down to three main struggles:
  1. Credibility. When you first leave your job and you’re hanging your shingle, establishing credibility is tough. Engagements can be long and it takes a while to have reference accounts and build a referral engine filled with clients ready to sing your praises. In a business that is so reliant on trust, the credibility factor is critical.
  2. Feast or famine. Once you have business, your time is devoted to doing the work. And let’s face it, doing sales and marketing isn’t really that fun for most, so we tend to throw ourselves into the work we have and let business development fall off the table. But then, contracts end, work gets completed, and suddenly…we have to ramp back up on the sales front.
  3. Scalability. When you’re good, clients want more of you, but you can only stretch yourself so far before things start falling apart. You’re nostalgic for the days when every day of life wasn’t packed to the brim. You’d like to bring on help, but your clients want you. If only there was a way to generate more revenue that didn’t require cloning.
How can we grow our business from surviving to thriving when there’s only so much of us to go around?
When I created LEAP® the Leadership Acceleration Program it was to fill a gap in leadership development offerings. What I didn’t realize was that having a packaged leadership development offering that targeted high-potential non-executives, also helped me with these three business challenges.
  1. Credibility. With a branded, trademarked, systematic program that included more than 30 modules of content and measurable metrics for tracking change, I gained a lot of credibility. I suddenly had a lot more stories and insights to share about what mid-level managers were dealing with—which ended up providing valuable insight to what executives wanted to understand—helping me further build credibility. Having so much valuable content to put my logo on made me look polished and established.
  2. Feast without famine. Running two LEAP cohorts per year put me on a consistent schedule for marketing and business development AND steadied my revenue. I always have a healthy monthly income base that I get from paying myself to facilitate LEAP. I’m on a regular marketing schedule for promoting LEAP, and I have a leadership development program to plug people into whenever the subject comes up with my executive clients. This added a steadiness to my business that trickled into all areas of my work.
  3. Scalability. LEAP is cohort based and there is a lot of value in the peer-to-peer sharing and problem solving that happens. While it includes 1:1 coaching, the bulk of the program is with the cohort (1:many). As one person I can only do so many 1:1 engagements—balancing my workload with group facilitation and team coaching really helped me grow and take on more without taking on too much. And, each LEAP cohort I add I know exactly what I’m getting into in terms of time commitment—it’s a service offering that I can count on and plan around. Additionally, I have 30+ modules and workbooks in my toolkit that I can tap into for any of my engagements—topics like Creating High Performance Teams, Delegating Effectively, Setting Goals for Higher Performance. This makes me a lot more efficient and probably more effective because I’m not re-creating a new wheel every time.
If you’ve been looking for something to help you grow but retain your sanity, LEAP might be the perfect program. We recently added 5 additional LEAP Certified Coaches in Washington (now we’re at 12) and we’re looking to expand the reach of LEAP in new markets outside of the Pacific Northwest. I would love to talk with you!

Our LEAP Coach Certifications happen 2-3 times per year. Learn more about the business model that makes this such an attractive program for coaches and consultants.
Our next webinar about growing your business with LEAP is coming up soon.
Can't wait for the webinar? Schedule a 1:1 call with Lynda Silsbee, Founder of the ALA and Creator of LEAP.
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SCHEDULE
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Developing Emotional Intelligence: 3 Step Strategy to Practice Self Control

4/6/2016

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1.    STOP – When you sense you’re being ‘triggered’ or know what your triggers are and want to interrupt the pattern so you’re not sucked into an emotional or ineffective response.
  • Count to 10
  • Take a drink of Water
  • Relax your shoulders
  • Place feet flat on floor
  • Do the ABC’s backwards
  • Write notes about anything
  • Draft an email BUT Don’t send!
  • Count backwards
  • Take a walk – clear your mind before coming back to it
2.    FOCUS on breathing.  Get oxygen to the brain in order to function most effectively. 
  • Get oxygen to the brain in order to function most effectively. 
  • Consciously slow down your breathing and breathe deeply
3.    REFRAME the assumptions and REGAIN perspective.  Work to suspend judgment and keep from jumping to conclusions.  Be curious and move away from “right/wrong” thinking. Questions such as these will help:
  • Is this threat real or imagined?
  • Do I have all the information or did I assume things?
  • What are the good intentions of this person?  
  • Will this matter a year from now?
  • Is this reaction helping me?
  • What information am I missing?
  • What assumptions should I check?  
  • What is the impact I want to have?

Know someone who needs to beef up their emotional intelligence muscle? With LEAP, the Leadership Acceleration Program, we work with managers/leaders to do just that.
Register for an upcoming webinar to learn more about how LEAP grows leaders
REGISTER
Submit your application to find out if LEAP is right for you.
APPLY
Do your leaders need to develop more in the EI/EQ department?
ASSESS
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Assumptions We Make – Developing Stronger Emotional Intelligence

4/2/2016

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Remember that you think and therefore you feel.  There are many choices when thinking about any given situation.  By changing how you describe the event to yourself, you can alter how you feel.  Use the scenarios below as a guide to identifying what's happening in a given situation and then practice changing your thinking about events.  It will take work and practice before some of these skills begin to become more automatic.  Challenging and examining thoughts can lead to increased emotional contentment and happiness.
Perceiving the world as black and white:  Not everything in the world is right or wrong, or black or white.  There are many grays and many choices.  Some are partly right or a better, if not perfect, choice.

Perfectionism:  Everyone makes mistakes.  Only through failure can we learn.  Edison tried many filaments to create the light bulb.  It may have taken you many tries to learn to ride a bicycle.

Pleasing others:  It is pleasant when others are pleased; however, it is not possible to please everyone.  Not everyone is going to like you no matter what you do.  The most important thing is to like YOU.

Catastrophising: It would be nice if everything were to go well, however, it often doesn’t.  If negative things happen, it is very unfortunate and even sad, but it is not usually a catastrophe.

Dependency:  Everyone can learn the skills necessary to be independent unless they have suffered a major stroke or other debilitating illness.  Learning new things takes time and practice; however, the effort pays off in feeling more positive about oneself.

Collecting Blame: It is not possible to control other people’s behavior and decisions nor is it possible to resolve emotional issues for them.  The only one you can change is yourself.  It is possible to support others emotionally, to care about others, and to offer some assistance.  It is not helpful to anyone if you become overly responsible or emotionally consumed by others.

Dwelling on the dangerous events in the world:  Constantly thinking about the negative produces anxiety.  Worry ahead is not helpful.

Labeling:  Calling others names (you jerk) may be momentarily satisfying; however, this process maintains anger and depression.  Describe the event rather than label.  (He dropped the ice cream on the floor.)

Life Must Be Fair:  It would be nice if things went our way.  However, life is filled with unfairness and unfortunate events.  The more important focus is how to cope with life when it isn’t what we want.

Know someone who needs to beef up their emotional intelligence muscle? With LEAP, the Leadership Acceleration Program, we work with managers/leaders on these very things.
Register for an upcoming webinar to learn more about how LEAP grows leaders
REGISTER
Submit your application to find out if LEAP is right for you.
Do your leaders need to develop more in the EI/EQ department?
APPLY
ASSESS
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    Author

    Lynda Silsbee is Founder and President of the Alliance for Leadership Acceleration. She has spent more than 30 years creating and leading high performance teams. Along with the other LEAP Certified Coaches, she reports that helping managers make the LEAP to leader is one of the most fulfilling aspects of her work.
    Learn more about Lynda Silsbee.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

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