Which development topics are your top priorities today; communication, coaching, culture change, or leading change? Perhaps your answer is yes; all of them?

As I posted recently, I’ve been working on a book development project for the past 18 months. It started with eight development topic areas. After readers ranked ordered those, we ended up with those four topics. Readers then provided thoughtful and rich insights into each area. That input complemented my deep dive into decades of workshops/retreats, blogs, books, and my research database.

So, let’s make this a win/win. I’ll give you the key findings for each topic area. You can use these to guide your personal, team, or organization development. The “fee” I ask in return is you help me make up my mind; are these four separate books, two combined books, or one book? And what’s your ranked priority for these four topics?

Key Development Topics and Findings

Increasing Communication

Communications is a way too-broad term that’s a symptom carrier for many leadership and organizational issues. Technology is badly confusing information and communication.

• Trust makes or breaks leadership effectiveness.
• Courageous conversations are vital and often avoided.
• Transparency and openness are nurtured by facts and data.
• Leaders communicate loudest with behavior.
• Authentic leadership synchronizes the audio with the video.
• Faulty feedback loops lead to misunderstanding and communication breakdowns.
• Listening, understanding, and conflict resolution boosts communication effectiveness.
• Weak communication skills are a major cause of leadership ineffectiveness.

Coaching

Coaching is a core element of highly effective leadership. Strong coaching skills transform good managers into great leaders.

• Research clearly shows that coaching dramatically multiplies or minimizes results and growth.
• Leaders often fall into predictable and avoidable coaching traps.
• Crazy busy leaders “snoopervise” and own the issue rather than developing others.
• A strong coaching framework guides leaders to much higher effectiveness.
• Succession planning and career coaching are powerful combinations.
• Performance coaching discussions raise or reduce effectiveness.
• Feedback is highly destructive or extremely constructive depending on the delivery.
• Leveraging strengths can overshadow weaknesses and multiply effectiveness.

Culture Change

Culture is multi-layered. An organization has a macro-culture with many micro-cultures. Leaders can significantly shift their team or organization’s culture by applying leverage in the right places.

• Research shows that culture is the critical X factor that boosts or blocks results.
• 70% of culture change efforts fail. Using proven frameworks and practices drop failure rates.
• Culture ripples out from the leadership team.
• Central culture questions: Where are you going? What do you believe in? Why do you exit?
• Customer-centered cultures serve the servers.
• High-performing cultures don’t let the urgent crowd out the important.
• Measurement and feedback can be powerful development tools or dispiriting whacking sticks.
• Structures, processes, and systems limit or liberate performance.
• Learning and development are vital to a high-performance culture.
• An implementation map makes or breaks sustained culture development.

Leading Change

We need to develop leaders at all levels to increase their personal change and adaptability while they help others do the same.

• Leadership is an action, not a position. It’s what we do, not our role that makes us a leader.
• Changing mindsets and mental models is key to inspiring people to thrive on change.
• If the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, we’ll end up being changed.
• Critical choices are to lead, follow, or wallow when faced with difficult changes.
• The new science of positive psychology shows how to deal with challenging changes.
• Hardiness and resilience can be developed and strengthened.
• Strong leaders practice upward leadership to manage their manager.
• We can soar or sink on the winds of constant change depending on our approach.
• Teams and organizations built to change can quickly adjust when the shift hits the plan.

How are you, your team, or your organization doing on these key topics? Which ones are the most important to you?

I’d sure appreciate your advice on my new book project. How many books and what’s their ranked priority? Click here to read the outlines and answer whatever questions you have the time or inclination to answer.

You’re welcome and thank you!

The post I’d Love Your Input on my New Book appeared first on The Clemmer Group.