Meet Us On Higher Ground

Higher Ground is the place to explore your unique edges, lean into who you are and understand new ways to bring out your magnificence.

Tomi Bryan and Judy Johnson of Leadership Worx are your trusted guides for this unique leadership experience, the first in a series, to take place on Thursday, April 18 in Greensboro, NC.

Learn more and register now.

Rob Kramer, AvoLead LLC Senior Consultant is the author of the new book, Stealth Coaching: Everyday Conversations for Extraordinary Results.

Rob writes, ”In this age of diverse, innovative, and knowledge-based workers, contemporary tools are needed to retain current talent and develop future leaders. Coaching has emerged as a primary instrument for this need. The challenge lies in how it is applied. Oftentimes traditional formalized coaching, used during performance reviews or as a means to give corrective feedback, is met with resistance by the very people it is intended to help.

When released from its conventional use, however, coaching becomes an easily accessible tool to catalyze individual and organizational performance. The framework outlined in Stealth Coaching provides an informal, everyday process to use in daily conversations where real work occurs: between meetings, when people drop by the office, during lunch, or in the hallway. Being stealthful transforms coaching into an effective method to use routinely with staff, peers, and even superiors. Leaders cannot afford not to add this important tool to their toolbox.”

Published just last month, the book is available on Amazon here.

Read more about Rob here.

As AvoLead LLC continues to grow, we are pleased to announce three new members of our senior consulting team. Each brings her own stellar combination of outstanding credentials and real-world experience to AvoLead and our clients.

Maggie W. Dunn serves AvoLead clients as an executive coach and team facilitator. Her areas of expertise include executive leader assessment and coaching, change leadership and building leadership teams. Read more about Maggie here.

Susan Hodgkinson is Principal of The Personal Brand Company^® which she founded in 1994. She serves AvoLead clients as leadership development expert, award-winning executive coach and professional speaker. Learn more about Susan here.

Julianne C. Wright serves clients as an organizational and leadership development consultant. Her areas of expertise include leadership training, facilitation, executive coaching and assessment. Meet Julianne here.

AvoLead is proud to welcome Maggie, Susan and Julianne. Their talents and those of the entire AvoLead team are instrumental in our mission of building hall of fame leadership.

In his post on the HBR Blog Network yesterday, Scott Anthony, managing director of Innosight, Asia-Pacific and author of The Little Black Book of Innovation, refers to his latest Harvard Business Review article, “The New Corporate Garage.” He argues that, “we’re transitioning into a new age where forward-thinking corporations that blend entrepreneurial behaviors with existing capabilities can have massive impact.”

Rather than seeing large companies as the problem, Anthony cites several case studies as evidence that, “although it might seem counterintuitive, large companies are where the innovation action will be.” He describes some of the advantages that giants like Syngenta, IBM, Unilever and Medtronic have over start-ups in championing innovation today. He also discusses the role of what he terms “corporate catalysts,” mission-driven leaders motivated by the desire to solve big — often global — problems.

Read Anthony’s thought provoking post and the complete article here.

What are your thoughts? Where do you see innovation taking place now and in the near future? And, how can we prepare leaders to become corporate catalysts?

Carl Nordgren took time to share an interesting post with us yesterday. The article, posted by Chris Horton in Social Media Today, chronicles a new IBM study called Leading through Connections. Read the complete post here.

IBM had face-to-face conversations with 1700 CEOs from 64 countries. The company wanted to gain insight into how CEOs are responding to the complexity of increasingly interconnected organizations, markets, societies and governments.

The key finding: CEOs must encourage their employees to act like children.

Carl, Friend of AvoLead, Duke Professor, Creative Populist and author of the book, Welcome to the Creative Populist Revolution, reminded us that one of the 4 behaviors creative populism urges us to practice is being playful. The recent IBM study validates that well. The study also revealed that today’s CEOs are thinking more like entrepreneurs. Learn more about Carl and Creative Populism here.

What are your thoughts? We’d like to hear from you.