Welcome to the webinar. I'm Heidi Tennant, NAPWP's Senior Coordinator of Membership and Continuing Ed. For nearly 20 years, our presenter, Liev Olson, led human resources and people operations for mission-driven financial services organizations in Seattle. Today, she works with individuals and teams to discover calm, clarity, and greater impact in their work and in their lives. With a sharp focus on organizational culture, talent management, coaching, and effective communication capabilities, Liev has led major change and development initiatives while simultaneously sustaining rapid organizational growth. This holistic, people-centered professional background complements her passion for leadership, helping people and their teams access the path forward. Thank you, Liev, for joining us today. Thanks, Heidi. I appreciate that. It's great to be with you. It's great to be with you today. I'm in Seattle and really pleased to be talking about this exciting, fun, important topic of authentic leadership for modern leaders. As Heidi mentioned, we're going to be using an interactivity tool since this is a webinar format versus a facilitated workshop. You can use this QR code, this link, or go to just menti.com and enter the code at the bottom here. I'm going to remind you of these tools during the slides where we're doing this interactivity. You'll have lots of opportunities to click on this as we go through. The interactivity screen looks like this. If you've got your smartphone out or you've got your other browser open and you see a screen that looks like this, you are in the right place. The learning objectives for today are what does it really mean to lead from the inside out and how do I do this in an authentic way? How to both demonstrate and cultivate effective teams and then why inspiring a future vision is so important and how to do that. I'm speaking today to individuals who are interested in leadership as a general capacity regardless of named or positional title. It also applies to those in leadership positions that are more explicit like C-suite or directing larger teams. My goal for you today is to walk away with some information as well as some tools you can try. Here is our agenda for today. We'll walk through some context, then talk about leadership as the individual lens, then move toward team future vision, and then we'll do some Q&A at the end. Heidi did such a nice job teeing up some of what I'm about. I've been in financial services for 20 years, working within RA specifically, helping organizations create cultures where people are thriving both professionally and personally. Today, that's what I do as a coach for both leaders and their teams. Here's our first mentee section. Heidi is going to get your NASBA info periodically today into the chat for you. The first mentee question, and we've got four of them to get us kicked off, so we'd love to get your voices and perspectives in here. In your career, have you experienced someone you feel excels at effective leadership? Go ahead and click yes, no, or not sure. Good. A lot of people have seen this demonstrated well, so we're getting some votes for yes. It's really helpful when you can see what you're going for. It's really helpful to have role models. I'm going to add another question here and see where we go with this one. This is a word cloud format, so feel free to type in here what skill or skills, you can add more than one, made that person so effective as a leader. What comes to mind? Maybe they're a visionary. Maybe they're inspiring. Maybe they're someone who is really good at coaching people. Perhaps they're great at strategy. Okay. Not seeing any input here. Maybe the chat is a better place. Oh, hey, we got it. All right. There's a lag. Lag in technology. I'm glad you guys are out there. All right. Practices what they preach. Beautiful. Value everyone's opinion. Absolutely. I love this one. Being strategic. Strength in conviction. Clear communication. Trustworthiness. Vision. Charisma. Encouraging. They're a shepherd. Genuine. Inspiring. These are really terrific and really point to some of what we're going to be talking to today. So thank you for your input on this one. Two more. So obviously, like we saw in the last slide, there is quite a bit that goes into leadership. It's a vast topic. With these five sort of capacities in mind, which do you feel like is the most important? Presence, likeability, being a visionary, communication, or the teamwork and collaboration piece? Communication. Yeah. And there's no right answer here on this one. So this is just truly, you know, your opinion, what you've seen. We all have different role models that we've seen in action or have demonstrated our own type of leadership in different ways. Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. Communication, teamwork, collaboration. Okay. The last one for this section is, again, a word cloud. What is the purpose of leadership in your opinion? What do you feel like is really the key? Like, why do we spend, why are there thousands of books written about this? And feel free to just, yeah, pop whatever comes to mind into the Menti screen, and we'll get another word cloud coming eventually for us. Yeah. Okay. Encouragement. That's so great. Love that. I know the effective leadership I've experienced from my leaders included a lot of encouragement, progressing the team, progressing the org, meeting goals, empowering each other. Thanks for your participation on this. We're going to have a few opportunities to continue participating within this tool. So we'll move on in a second. Building and growing. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Okay. So as we mentioned and as we saw in our interactivity piece there in Menti, leadership is a really vast topic. Thousands of books have been written about it. And when folks come to me and they're looking to build this as a capacity or talk about it as a topic, it's almost just overwhelming. It's like saying, hey, I want to work on my wellness. It's like, okay, well, are you talking about nutrition or habits or relationship? Are you talking about stress management? Is it your mental wellness, social? There's so many things that pop into mind. And so it becomes an individualistic conversation. What are your goals? What's important to you? Where are you now? And it's really the same with leadership. There are so many aspects to this that it does become very individualized to what each person is looking for and what their context is relative to their career. How large is the organization? What are your goals? Where are you in your own career? Are you talking about visioning, building consensus, a number of different things. And I'm going to focus on a few areas that I believe are some of the most salient and critical aspects of leadership that apply across the board. So why is developing authentic leadership so important? I love this description that it enables you to create a more people-centered culture where your people see themselves and one another as humans rather than headcounts. This encompasses quite a bit here. So what's important about leadership is it's dependent on your own specific situation and context. And there are some common principles we can draw from. When I think about an effective leader, it's people who can really find connection and meaning in their work for other people, help people find connection and meaning in their work. So it unlocks their own potential. So generally today, we're going to be walking through these three lenses. The first is self, sort of leader is self, that inside out type of lens. The next is team. And then we'll look at inspiring a shared vision overall for the organization. So these three perspectives start with self to serve the greater whole, enable effective teams, and inspire an organizational shared vision. These I'm going to be walking through one after another, which might feel separate, but they're not separate. They are not boxed in separate sections. Really think of this more of like an ecosystem where everything is related to one another and each thing impacts the greater whole. We're going to be touching on some really powerful areas. And honestly, each slide or couple of slides could be their own, you know, half day or full day workshop. So we're going to really cover a lot. So start with self to serve the whole. Over the course of the pandemic, we've heard this analogy about putting your own oxygen mask on first, so you can then help the loved ones around you or your community. And that notion applies here. But rather than a survival methodology, we're thinking of this lens more in terms of a developmental capacity. So personal development is professional development. There really is no difference. As a leader, you can only offer others as deeply as you've gone yourself. So the key is to turn inward as you aim to impact outward. By becoming self-aware, you gain ownership of reality. In becoming real, you become the master of both inner and outer life. And this first theme here is really all about awareness and self-awareness. And it's really easy to think about what's easy to think about, but it's harder to think about what's right to think about in the moment. And that capacity in terms of leadership becomes really important. So the why of self-awareness can be talked about and looked at in the terms of that we're all icebergs. We all are walking through life showing to each other just such a small part of really who we are. We see in others and we demonstrate communication, behaviors, presence, we can see that in each other, but there's all this other stuff going on. We all have our own biases, beliefs, values, personal experiences from our whole life. We have the relationship that we have with ourself. We have our model or perception of all the other people around us that we work with both in our personal life, as well as our professional life. And this is really, you know, building the capability to identify thoughtfully and respond to your own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and actions. With the leadership lens, it's about having the nuanced awareness to know the right thing in the moment, in the moment. And increasing awareness, working on increasing our awareness around ourself helps us do that. This whole idea of why professional individual coaching has become so popular in corporate life is that we've done a good job recognizing that individuals are icebergs, so to speak, and that we can't just like kind of bring people through cohort and type of development learning and, you know, expect the same types of output on the other end. People need individualized development. So there are safe and adaptive ways for them to learn. I think almost half of Fortune 500 companies now are using external business coaches. So this notion has really caught a lot of steam. So the hows around self-awareness, I'm going to focus on three areas. These are all each, again, very large areas, so we'll touch on them. But first is emotional intelligence, building the capacity to respond versus instinctively react. Mental fitness, building the capacity to focus our attention. Where does my attention need to go in this moment, this month, this quarter, this year? And then the combination of both courage and vulnerability for the purposes of fostering trust, safety, and innovation. We all need to innovate, right? We all need to have creative solutions and innovation going forward, and that cannot happen without a culture and a team where people are feeling safe and that there's trust. Okay, so this is Daniel Goldman's emotional intelligence model, focusing on sort of the four circled quadrants here. The capacity to recognize and manage our own feelings and recognize and respond effectively to those of others. So that's sort of the emotional intelligence, very short one sentence description. And I have worked with this as a topic with folks in financial services for quite a number of years. And each time I get in a room with folks and look at this for the first time, maybe it's their first time seeing it, they really key in on the relationship management part. They really kind of go to that quadrant and say, yes, that is what I do with my clients. This is really important to me. This is how I build my business. I need to keep clients and get clients, and I've got these CUIs and leave. Yes, let's work on relationship management. I want to get even better at that. And I say, great, that's super that you're enthusiastic about that. That is really important. And though, when we start at the beginning with self-awareness, we know this is a build. These are capacities that build on one another. So if we start and work into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management in a sequence, in a building sequence, then when we get to the relationship management piece, we'll go a lot farther and we'll have a much bigger capacity for work in that area if we've done the other areas first. So you'll notice that the left side is relative to self. That's the dark blue. The lighter blue is relative to others. And if we put kind of an organizational lens on this and a leadership lens on this, the self-awareness part around our emotions, being emotionally aware, it puts you in charge, not your emotions. So it's separating yourself, getting some distance from what am I experiencing in terms of feelings and emotions and what's the right thing in the moment. To do this building of capacity, it takes practice to hone in on the acuity of how we are feeling. So using feeling words. And I'm going to give you guys a really awesome feelings chart that you can play with. But this is where kind of our self-confidence comes from. This also helps other people see that we have some self-awareness around this and we have an accurate way of self-assessing, like, what am I feeling in this moment? Moving on to self-management, being able to discern if the things that we're experiencing around us, the emails, the insights, the feedback, are these threats? Am I making assumptions about this? Can I separate fact from story? You know, someone showed up late to my meeting. I could make up a story about that, or I could just take it as a fact. So-and-so showed up late. I wonder what might be going on with them. So building emotional control looks like transparency. It looks like our achievement orientation. It looks like our optimism and our ability to be adaptive. In social awareness, this-that's my cat. This is Poppy. She's great. So social awareness, oftentimes you'll see this model, and rather than the word social awareness, you'll see the term empathy here. So this is all about empathy for others. So the ability to read a room, organizational awareness, the service orientation. And over these past two years, you know, we've all kind of been, to one degree or another, a little bit traumatized. And empathy is an incredibly valuable skill right now that's really highly needed. I think of relationship management as friendliness with purpose. So this is how we are influential. This is how we're inspiring others through our leadership. This is how we develop others, build bonds, and our collaboration and our teamwork. So moving on to mental fitness and focus. So this is-this is that capacity to focus on what's truly important in the moment. The truth is, studies show that we're distracted from what we're doing in the moment almost half the time, 47% of the time. And this was a study done by Matt Killingsworth and his colleague out of Harvard a little over 10 years ago, around-around 2010. And he found not only are we not paying attention in the moment to what we're doing, aka not focused or paying attention, or paying attention, but we're actually happier if we're paying attention to the thing we're doing in the moment, even if it's unpleasant, more than if we're imagining something pleasant. So if we're ironing a shirt and we're paying attention to ironing the shirt, we're happier than if we are ironing the shirt and thinking about a beach vacation. So, you know, more than or in addition to happiness, we all want to be a little bit happier. We find that the ability to be able to focus that muscle is what strategy is, is-is like key to being a strategic leader. And we know that strategy is knowing what to say no to, what to not focus on, what is noise, so that we can shift our attention to what's needed, whether that's emotional, organizational, or strategic intelligence. Our ability to pay attention has never been under such great assault. I mean, all the emails and the text messages and the noise of our society coming at us from all different directions. If-if leaders are to direct the attention of their employees towards strategy and innovation, then leaders really also need to be able to do this for their-for themselves. A study done out of the University of London found that all the constant emailing and text messages, it reduces our mental capacity by an average of 10 points in an IQ test. And men actually suffer more than the 10 points on the IQ tests and women a little bit less for some reason. And this effect is basically the same as missing an entire night's sleep. And if I've missed an entire night's sleep, I assure you, I cannot pay attention. There's a really distinct high correlation between the ability to focus and advancement in our careers. So when we think about this in terms of leadership, I wanna do another mentee poll with you and pop over here and ask you a question to see what are your thoughts on this? Let's see, we want this. I wanna make this go forward. Super. So there are many challenges for leaders to remain focused. Like which do you think is the biggest source of challenge around staying focused? Is it competing priorities, general distractions, workload, or the demands of other people? Great. Yeah, the study here done was pretty interesting. What they found is that it was the demands of other people that was the highest culprit here. It was 20, I think 6%. And then the close second at 25 or 24% was competing priorities. So this ability to be able to have the emotional intelligence, self-awareness, relational awareness becomes really important when we think about, hey, this is our biggest distraction. It's the attention and it involves other people as well. Okay. Courage and vulnerability. If anybody is following or has followed anywhere in their career so far, Brené Brown, this is much of what she has studied and talks about. Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection and connecting with people is such a big part of how we are effective in our leadership capabilities. And getting vulnerable can sometimes be hard to understand. And how do we do that? And it's this idea that we're taking off our armor and showing a little bit of emotional exposure here. Vulnerability is not self-disclosure. It's not sort of like just blathering out all of your insecurities and worries. It's about being human and letting it show. It's the feeling we get during times of uncertainty or risk, or like I said, emotional exposure. And it's truly how we build trust in relationships. And trust is so, so critical. We default generally so fiercely to protect how we believe we are being perceived by others. That's where their armor comes in. We wanna be perceived as this way or that way by the people around us, so we've got our armor on and we're gonna hold that armor to protect that perception. But the truth is, is when we let these defensives down, that's how we foster the trust and connection. And betting that pretty much everybody on this call can think of a time when someone shared something kind of vulnerable and had the courage to do that with you, that you felt connected with them and you wanted to share with them in their experience and maybe share some of your own experience too. So courage comes from the Latin root core, which means heart. And the original meaning was to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart. And courage and vulnerability together sounds a lot like doing these things, talking about how we feel, asking for what we need, being ourselves, learning to be both brave and afraid at the same time, and being kind to others, trying to be themselves as well. Here are some practices for this section, this self-awareness, self to serve the greater whole. Develop a mindfulness practice, okay? This could be breath, it also could be walking or washing your hands or using some sounds. There's many different types of mindfulness anchors that you can use. People love apps, you know, these are a couple of my favorites. Others are Calm or, you know, there's several that are popular. I like these two because they give you wonderful, really helpful content before any sort of a paywall. So you can get a lot for free out of these two. And as little as eight minutes a day, just three times a week, will make an enormous difference in terms of anxiety, worry, stress, and all of the things that we've talked about so far. Work on identifying your emotions and feelings. So this little asterisk here, I'm gonna give you each of these practices pages in a takeaway workbook or a kind of a takeaway handout. So there are three sections that have practices, and then each time you see a little star, that means there's a separate page that offers some additional resources for that piece. And, you know, say them out loud or write them down, talk with your friends or partner about it. I mean, you know, discuss what are the nuanced differences between like the feeling of hope or the feeling of optimism? How about the difference between what anxiety and worry feels like, or the difference between isolation and loneliness? You know, just continue to build your vocabulary around that and identifying how it's feeling in the moment. Allow for quiet insights to emerge. Truly, this is a leadership capacity, it really is. All sorts of experts talk about this. And, you know, when we get our big aha moments, it's really not when we're trying to like think into it and really effort into it, it's when we're brushing our teeth or washing our hair or petting the cat or, you know, grabbing, doing some raking this time of year. So finding ways to really get quiet so that those insights have space to be bubbling up into. Notice areas where you can be more vulnerable with others. Okay, so the team perspective here is a critical one. And I assert that the practice, the activity of how we team together, and we'll talk more about this term in a little bit, is really the new leadership. You know, people wanna feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. And we've temporarily lost a lot of this sense since the pandemic. And so, you know, teaming and collaboration, this has always been important, but we're sort of in a new season of why and how and what the solution looks like. New in a way that we can speak to and work into, and also new in a way that like, we've gotta innovate here. Like, how do we do this in a way that's serving all of us right now at this moment? Again, very kind of, you know, individualized to the team. You know, people wanna feel like a part of the team, even if they're an individual contributor type of role. I love this story, if any of you follow golf. So Jordan Spaeth is a PGA player. He won player of the year in 2015 and won the British Open in 2017. And around that 2017 time, he was in a conference and, you know, talking with reporters. And I think we can all agree that, you know, golf is squarely an individual sport. You know, it's just one person hitting the ball, advancing it down the fairway. There are not other people in an interdependent way, you know, doing this activity. I play golf, I play tennis, very much some individual sports here. But in that conference, when he was talking to the reporters, he used the term we, we 29 times. He would say things like, we've been improving every year. We are working next year toward this, that, the other thing. And he's referring to his swing coach, his caddie. He's referring to all the people that help him, his team, Team Spaeth. And so there's that, plus there's the notion that like, everybody on the team knows what they're responsible for and they own that. They have accountability around what they're responsible for. So you would never hear Jordan say something like, we missed the putt. You know, he knows that was his performance moment and he missed the putt. Okay, so the organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in the organization. You know, whatever team stuff is going on, when we step back and really just say, look, we're just, we're all here to learn. Like whatever outcome we're going for, the way we do that is to learn together. So, you know, teams today, it's the very foundation historically of our society and our communities. It's a highly undervalued construct that above all is really helped by the ability to learn and grow as a capability. This is what enables team success. So think about, I would love you to think about, you know, the teams you're a part of. Think about the teams that, think about the one team that has the most critical outcomes. This is the team that's responsible for the most critical outcomes in your life, your work, your organization. And then think about, you know, what level of interdependence is needed here? Is this the type of interdependence like a football team or like an advisory, you know, silo where, you know, everybody needs to be doing their part or those outcomes are not happening? Or is it a little bit lower on the interdependent scale where you might be like synchronized swimming or maybe it's just like, you know, a group of managers or a group of advisors doing the same role in parallel. You know, they can be, they can have camaraderie. There isn't really interdependence in terms of the output. So with that lens of where are we on the interdependent scale, what level of collaboration is needed? Is it high or is it low? Teams are really more than just boxes on an org chart if people have org charts. It's a unit of impact and it's where the value creation is spent. People metabolize their work through the experience of being on a team. It's how we get feedback from one another, whether that's verbal feedback or just visual feedback, energetic feedback. Like this person is smiling at me. This person is sitting on the same side of the table with me. This person laughed at my joke. I'm making eye contact with someone. So this is really key. And I think that, or I know that rather, if we're gonna put people on a team, then they have a right to share their views. You know, everybody's participating. So there's an unrealistic burden historically on leaders. If a team is struggling or dysfunctional in some way, we look to the existing leader or maybe we're bringing in a new leader who's gonna be the savior of all things and expect them to fix it. But leaders do not fix teams. Neither do HR professionals, neither do consultants or coaches. Teams fix teams. It's a shared responsibility of everyone around that table. Team has been a noun, I mean, it's still a noun, but, you know, team's a noun. We've done this, we're familiar with this notion of hiring or recruiting the people specifically for a certain skillset and put them through practice and training and drills within stable contexts. So that's kind of like the old way that we think about team. But really, you know, team, and this is where the word teaming comes from, it's a verb. Like how do we do the activities of teaming together? How are we coordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable context? Like since when have we ever had a stable context in the last three years? Things are constantly changing. Markets are changing. The economy is crazy, right? We've got viruses, mental health crisis, unrest. We have, you know, economic thing. I mean, the list goes on. You've heard them a million times. Are we hybrid? Are we not hybrid? Are we gonna try something? We've got a new leader. People are leaving, new people are coming. So the stable context thing is just not an expectation that we can have anymore. And so without the stability of those contexts, how do we do teaming on the fly? You know, how do we do teamwork in motion, like as we're changing? So to excel in this complex and uncertain business environment, people need to both work and learn together. This is what happens. We've got our individuals, right, with our icebergs. We're showing a little bit. We're trying to gain more awareness around what's under the waterline. And we've got a really big, important set of goals this year or this quarter, this month. And so we think, well, let's build a team to do the really big, important thing. And expect that to go well without a lot of help. So, you know, a lot of businesses are recognizing the limitations of traditional leadership programs in achieving business change because they can't, you know, go back and apply that in the real world. And so we're beginning to see more and more team development, team coaching to develop leaders together so that they can hold each other accountable for sustaining changed behavior in a real work situation. So more than ever, you know, teams are needing more support. There is no cookie cutter answer here. It's an individualized conversation because each team is wholly unique because they're all icebergs in different organizational contexts. And so when often we find that a team is feeling like they're struggling, they're dysfunctional in some way, you know, it's hard to decipher why. Or maybe there's a lot of whys and it's like overwhelming. Like, where do I even start? So there is a model that I'd love to show you today to kind of, you know, help a team point to what's going well and what's not going well and ultimately where to focus attention. To orient ourselves around what are the parts of how we be a team together. That's a very big, nebulous, potentially confusing or overwhelming concept. How are we a team together? Provide some architecture to begin looking at this, okay? So the model looks like this. Think of these as 16 elements of teaming. And they're broken up into four areas, quality of conversation, relationship, outcomes, and work. And we're going to look at these in more detail in a moment. But one of the very best ways to increase your team effectiveness is to just pick a couple, one or two aspects of how you're working together, and focus on just those. Start small. And again, it can kind of feel overwhelming when things aren't going well. So this is a way to kind of help focus our attention to just one or two things. Kind of back to that wellness analogy. It's like you can't do everything all at once. Just pick the one piece. I'm just going to walk around the block 20 minutes every three times a week. Start small and grow from there. And the reason why, it doesn't really matter where you start here, because everything's affecting. So if I'm working on clear responsibilities or problem solving, if I'm trying to focus in that red circle in terms of the work we're doing and how we're developing, in that work on those things, the other areas are also going to be affected. So let's look at these in more detail. So quality of conversation. This is my personal experience of our interactions as a team. This includes safety, trust, openness, and knowledge of team. When quality of conversation is strong, it sounds like a willingness to share differing opinions. People speak up. It promotes innovation. And when it's weak, it feels like there's maybe some lack of ideas. Problems fester. Problems go unaddressed. There might be gossip. And I want to focus on how important trust and safety is, kind of back to that courage and trust piece. Fostering psychological safety or the combination of safety and trust is a shared belief held by members of teams that it's safe for interpersonal risk taking. So when we feel psychologically safe, our brains can devote energy toward thoughtful action taking, social interaction, creative problem solving, and really high level of thinking. And conversely, in the absence of that, we become risk averse. And we just default to what we've always done, even if it's not particularly effective. Quality of relationship. These are the big things that connect us and create our team identity. They include norms, shared vision, mutual commitment, and conflict resolution. When it's strong, you've got lively meetings. There's positivity and optimism. Conflict is handled constructively. And when it's weak, there might be a sense of artificial harmony or boring meetings. Tough topics are ignored. And there's a failure to really access and tap the knowledge from everyone. Quality of work. This is the action we're taking together. Clear responsibilities, problem solving, decision making, and accountability. And then quality of outcome. Goal achievement, desired climate, external impacts, and also rewards. These are the tangible and intangible results of our efforts. So when this is strong, we're retaining achievement oriented employees. We're minimizing individualistic behavior and emphasizing team behavior. And when it's weak, we're easily distracted and we're stagnating oftentimes. I know we're a little low on time, so I know I need to speed up. But I think we'll skip this so we can get through the next section with enough time at the end here. When you think about these areas, I would offer some reflection to which of these areas would you say is a strength for your team that you've got in mind? And which of these areas would you say is a weakness or an opportunity? And my guess is that everybody is going to have a different answer. And that points to the true uniqueness of each team and that there aren't cookie cutter solutions. What's really important is that the team decides what piece they're going to work on first and just start there. So some practices to increase team effectiveness are clarify a shared understanding of each individual's roles and responsibilities within a team. So I have a team charter exercise I'm including in my packet for you guys. It's a fairly simple one, but it can be powerful. Like, do you all think that my job is the same thing that I think my job is? So that's sort of the nature of it. Develop and clarify a mission of the team. Do a what's your why session. You can use an external facilitator or you can just look up Simon Sinek's work and grab some of his templates and do this together. What is the mission of the team? This needs revisiting. If you've done some visioning work or submission work, every couple of years, it's important to make sure it's fresh. Foster and maintain psychological safety. So share common language for tough conversations. Invite all perspectives without judgment. Be trustworthy. Follow through. Walk your talk. Have integrity. Don't reschedule one-on-ones over and over again. And do not gossip. Stay away from triangulated conversation. It doesn't serve anyone. It fosters a sense of mistrust and lack of safety. So it can be terribly toxic. It's hard, but it's worth the effort. Increase positivity, gratitude, and recognition. So one idea is to start meetings with each person sharing something positive in appreciation of something else. OK, last section, inspire a shared vision. Love, this is my favorite quote today. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work. But rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. There's a little bit of an alphabet soup component to this inspire a shared vision piece because it is related to mission, vision, values, and some other organizational development components. Often, this is referred to as MBB. Do you have it? Do you not have it? So just in terms of orienting, this is how I often refer to the mission and your values piece. The mission, the purpose, the why of what we do is the overarching umbrella. And then the values are sometimes called principles or pillars. Hold that up. And then the behaviors and rituals and things we recognize each other for that support all this are at the bottom there. There are more complicated versions of this, but this will do for now. So then you're like, OK, we'll leave this as inspire a shared vision. Where's the vision part? If we really take a step back, what a vision is, it's like, what are we even building here? And where are we headed? What is the story of the future? And how can you as a leader bring inspiration to it? Studies show a very high correlation between leaders who are perceived as effective and their ability to speak with conviction about the future. And this goes organizationally as well as in your one-on-ones. When you're talking with an individual contributor or someone on your team, inspiring them to think about the vision for themselves, really critical. Think about this in terms of what's the musical theme? Or what's the message, the melody that you want to have reoccurring? Every leader needs a theme orienting people around how they can then organize an entire movement. What's the central message? What do you want people thinking about when they're envisioning the future here? So here are some examples. I think examples are really helpful here. Inspire a shared vision. So let's look at Ted. Everybody loves a good Ted Talk. Mission is spread ideas. I love the economy of words here. Vision, we believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately the world. So expansive. LinkedIn, mission, to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. Boom, makes sense. Got it. Vision, to create an economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Again, now we're thinking so expansively. Tesla, mission, to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Vision, to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world's transition to EVs. So these are really big. Practices to inspire a shared vision. Involve other people. And not a huge group, but get a diverse cross-section of folks. And this can be a really terrific session together. And think as big as possible. The term BHAG comes to mind. The Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And really kind of get out of the weeds for this type of exercise. So here's our summary and where we've been. I'd love to know what things you'd like to put into the action in the next week or two. Although, I think we might be low on time. So I'm resistant to do that. And in terms of sources and citations, these are some of the materials I've been working with in order to prepare for this. And this is how to find me. I do many different types of executive coaching, including teams. I do workshop design, consulting around organizational culture, and then off-sites as well. So I'm really happy to have spent some time with you today. And if there are questions, I'm happy to take those. Or you all can get on with your Thursday. And it's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Leigh. And I'm going to go ahead and put the third NASPA code in the chat. We do have a question for you. I appreciate everything you've shared with us today. Can you talk a little bit about resilience? These are strange times in the market, in the economy. Everyone is stressed. And it feels like a special challenge. Such an important one. I'm glad that this has been brought up. Whether it's clients or our internal team members maintaining a sense of resilience in this continued hard set of circumstances, it's tough. So when I think about this, I go back to, as leaders who care about their people, how can we make sure that people have the time and energy to focus on their own well-being? How are they taking a way to be generative? Is it a nap? Is it a yoga class? Is it journaling? Is it spending time together? Do you want to spend more time connecting? So that's a big piece of resilience. It's just kind of, I think, self-care is an overused word at this point. But it certainly describes, I think, well what I'm talking about. And demonstrating that you're doing the same thing as a leader. It's like, OK, this is stressful. This is hard. I've been on calls with clients all day. I am like sharing with your team. I am depleted. I am tired. I'm going to binge watch XYZ show. I'm going to take a walk out in nature and just not even take my phone. I'm going to breathe fresh air. So demonstrating that you're doing the same thing as a leader is a big piece of resilience. So demonstrate that, lead by example in that way. Encouraging people around this mindfulness. The mindfulness practices help the resilience so much. It's an astounding correlation in terms of mindfulness practice, stress and resilience. The brain chemistry is right there. And then the last part I would say is help people feel connected to the good that they're doing. I mean, there's a lot of hard conversations you guys are having. And when they get off the phone and come to you and kind of want to like, let me tell you what this client said or what these clients are asking or what happened today, empathizing with them, knowing, explaining, like I hear you. I validate how you're feeling. That is completely understandable. And help them connect to the good that they're offering and the value they're providing to people. So I hope that's helpful. I'm really sorry about my cat. She's being particularly active today. No problem. She's adorable. Sometimes leaders have to have the difficult conversations and may feel like they don't even have a common language with the person they have to have that conversation with. How do you build a common language? Yeah, so I have blended a couple of different frameworks. And I'm happy to talk anybody through kind of like one on one around a difficult conversation framework. But I think the main piece of this in a nutshell, like if I could only give you one thing, is to separate fact and story. And I alluded to this earlier today is when you're having a difficult conversation, emotions are going to be high. Stakes are probably high. And so to prepare in a way where for yourself going into it, I've really spent time reflecting on what are the facts of this situation. Like if somebody could record with a video camera what has happened and what's led to having to have this conversation. What are the facts, objective facts? And then what are the stories, worries, assumptions that I'm filling in? And getting really clear on those separate categories of things. I would say an added step in this case might be like think about where this other person might be coming from. Like what do you suspect they might be coming into this conversation? What's on their mind? Just trying to get some empathy going energetically for yourself around where this person might be coming from. And then step into it with as much authenticity and compassion as possible and curiosity. Sometimes, not all, it can be helpful to in the difficult conversation offer an inquiry and open an inquiry for the other person to step into. So get them talking first. Get them going and sharing in a way that maybe calms them down a little bit. It gives you insights into where they're coming from. And then using that as a springboard once they're calmed down, OK, here are the facts. Here are the assumptions, worries, stories I'm making up about the facts. Let's talk about this and invite a dialogue. Very helpful. Thank you. That wraps up the questions. Any final thoughts for us today? It's been so great to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity to spend time with you. And for those of you that are going to be in Denver, come find me. I'd love to meet you in person. Great. On behalf of NAPF, I'd like to thank you for the program today. Those of you who wish to earn the NASBA credit, please complete the post-exam in this course in the Learning Center that will be available in a few hours. Thanks again, Leif. Thanks for attending, everybody. And please do fill out the evaluation you'll receive as well. Take care now. Bye-bye.

authentic leadership

self-awareness

emotional intelligence

mental fitness

effective leaders

building effective teams

shared vision

team effectiveness

mindfulness practices