Flexibility – What We Can Learn From “The Elevator”
Excerpt from “9TH Floor Leadership:”
The Strategy Of The Elevator That Some Executives Overlook And
Why It Matters Most! Transformational Leadership, People and Change
As in leadership, elevators are constantly moving. They remain constant, moving up and down, to transport individuals and items floor to floor. The ride never ends. It goes on and on, up and down, side to side until another person on a different floor pushes the button to call for the elevator.
Flexibility & the “Elevator” are defined as:
Moving up is said to be a promotion, a rise in status or success; Moving down a loss and sideways a lateral move, status quo. The elevator seems to indicate that you are on the go. You exceed your own expectations when you make wise decisions out of pure determination.
To learn more about “The Elevator” and the concept of “9TH Floor Leadership,” please contact me via email at: damian@buildtheteams.net. You will receive a complimentary “9TH Floor Leadership” framework and paradigm overview to your email within 3-business days. You will not be disappointed.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Stateside Movie cast Skipper - IMDB
The film "Stateside" (2004) is a love story about two imperfect teenagers who find perfect love. The film follows the story of two teenagers from different worlds--Mark Deloach and Dori Lawrence--as their lives quickly spiral out of control. The rebellious but privileged Mark delves into dangerous antics resulting in a nearly fatal drunk driving accident, and Dori Lawrence, a wild actress and singer slowly loses touch with reality as she suffers from schizophrenia. Forced to straighten out their lives, Mark is sent to join the Marines and Dori is admitted into a mental hospital. In the midst of life's chaos, Mark and Dori are drawn to each other, recognizing their mutual desperation for love and understanding. Despite pressure from both their friends and family to keep their distance, they maintain their bond. While they fail to fix what's broken in each of their lives, they find comfort in each other's faults and have faith that their unconditional love will eventually heal their deep seeded wounds.
To learn more, visit http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339727/combined
To learn more, visit http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339727/combined
Monday, February 11, 2008
Enterprise People Solutions Suite
Bison Group's Relationship Management Platform
The team here at The Bison Group helps organizations manage their most important asset – their people. We provide the leading platform of scalable leadership and organizational behavior solutions for enterprise learning, collaboration, performance management, and talent management, as well as implementation, training, and consulting services.
Unified People Management
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite is a comprehensive relationship management platform designed to align people processes to organizational goals. Why Us? It is our mission to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! It’s that simple. We understand that leadership development and Organizational Behavior is a companywide responsibility, stretching across all departments and functions. With this in mind during development and research, the team stands firm on our EPS business suite that is aligned with the highest integrated HumanSigma solutions with breakthrough principles to transformational leadership. Our platform delivers the greatest number of enterprise-wide implementations for learning and performance:
Shared-Platform, One Unified Solution!
Bison’s common platform simplifies the development of a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution by providing:
• A seamless user experience
• Simplified performance management reporting (assessment instruments)
• A common repository of people information, business objectives, and competencies
A common foundation means
• Easier deployment
• Lower implementation costs
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite involves a rigorous certification process that is designed for anyone who is charged with developing talent, leading a team, or achieving growth – no matter what industry or discipline – integrating transformational leadership, HumanSigma & change, diversity education, team building maneuvers, strategic planning, project management, performance management assessment instruments, and Flawless Execution – and we’ll provide the lasting experience that grooms high potential leaders to blaze new trails into the future.
The LeaderShaping process improvement methods will help you focus value-based strategies to:
▪ Achieve personal-organizational mastery and rigor to win in competitive
environments
▪ Build your transformational resilience
▪ Improve customer satisfaction through effective coaching to your people
▪ Advance product and service quality
▪ Drive performance management for business results
▪ Develop environments of trust for improved command and control
▪ Reduce waste and costs
▪ Increase speed and efficiency
Our Enterprise People Solutions suite will also teach you to use execution methods from the United States Marine Corps in business, health, government and community relations, Not-for-Profit and faith-based organizations, and service-related industries to improve, redesign, and implement efficient, people-centric business processes. LeaderShaping strategic principles-based methods will change how you build relationships with your people and manage your business to sustain positive change into the future. Its structure drives how management will make reality-based decisions and requires a significant commitment from all levels within an organization, especially at the top. Take a look at the different suites.
1. The LeaderShaping Learning Suite
2. The LeaderShaping Performance Suite
3. The LeaderShaping Talent Management Suite
4. The LeaderShaping HumanSigma Suite
To learn more about our Relationship Management Platform, email us at:
Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
The team here at The Bison Group helps organizations manage their most important asset – their people. We provide the leading platform of scalable leadership and organizational behavior solutions for enterprise learning, collaboration, performance management, and talent management, as well as implementation, training, and consulting services.
Unified People Management
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite is a comprehensive relationship management platform designed to align people processes to organizational goals. Why Us? It is our mission to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! It’s that simple. We understand that leadership development and Organizational Behavior is a companywide responsibility, stretching across all departments and functions. With this in mind during development and research, the team stands firm on our EPS business suite that is aligned with the highest integrated HumanSigma solutions with breakthrough principles to transformational leadership. Our platform delivers the greatest number of enterprise-wide implementations for learning and performance:
Shared-Platform, One Unified Solution!
Bison’s common platform simplifies the development of a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution by providing:
• A seamless user experience
• Simplified performance management reporting (assessment instruments)
• A common repository of people information, business objectives, and competencies
A common foundation means
• Easier deployment
• Lower implementation costs
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite involves a rigorous certification process that is designed for anyone who is charged with developing talent, leading a team, or achieving growth – no matter what industry or discipline – integrating transformational leadership, HumanSigma & change, diversity education, team building maneuvers, strategic planning, project management, performance management assessment instruments, and Flawless Execution – and we’ll provide the lasting experience that grooms high potential leaders to blaze new trails into the future.
The LeaderShaping process improvement methods will help you focus value-based strategies to:
▪ Achieve personal-organizational mastery and rigor to win in competitive
environments
▪ Build your transformational resilience
▪ Improve customer satisfaction through effective coaching to your people
▪ Advance product and service quality
▪ Drive performance management for business results
▪ Develop environments of trust for improved command and control
▪ Reduce waste and costs
▪ Increase speed and efficiency
Our Enterprise People Solutions suite will also teach you to use execution methods from the United States Marine Corps in business, health, government and community relations, Not-for-Profit and faith-based organizations, and service-related industries to improve, redesign, and implement efficient, people-centric business processes. LeaderShaping strategic principles-based methods will change how you build relationships with your people and manage your business to sustain positive change into the future. Its structure drives how management will make reality-based decisions and requires a significant commitment from all levels within an organization, especially at the top. Take a look at the different suites.
1. The LeaderShaping Learning Suite
2. The LeaderShaping Performance Suite
3. The LeaderShaping Talent Management Suite
4. The LeaderShaping HumanSigma Suite
To learn more about our Relationship Management Platform, email us at:
Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change
This "abstract" from the white paper introduces an essential guide for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results as we start a new year. As we begin to make our year’s resolutions, it might be wise to include one for your valued and trusted associates who are responsible for keeping the pistons firing in the organizational engine that drives performance.
There seems to be, with some of us, an erroneous perspective about how we look and think about the topic of leadership. As times change, shouldn’t the way people who are chosen as leaders tend to influence change? The misconception is that leadership changes independent of the people chosen to lead it. It does experience transition, whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not and whether we actively participate within that transition or not. It does not change on its own. As the individual’s perspective in life and reality take on new challenges – transition in ideation, transformative thought, the technology changes that drive our perspective on getting things done, and the changing environments reflective through the constant design and development of our ideals, values, and beliefs – so does the way of leadership.
We are aware of these huge incessant issues such as the Iraq war and the sectarian struggles that are causing human life to be lost, the environment, education, employment, politics, economics and such like and we drown in a sea of information about them, as they migrate like locust in our lives, day-in and day-out. The erroneous perspective extends on this tide until these problems and challenges seem so disconnected from each other and so alien to our personal circumstances that we think we are disadvantaged and too unimportant to make any difference.
We become ambivalent and detached from them, desensitized in a way that we begin to believe that we are all unable to overcome the challenges and enormous gravity of the situation. Moreover, we think we have no responsibility for them. But it is just that: an erroneous perspective! We think that to change the organizations with which we work, we must change the organization that resides around us. Nothing else makes any difference. However, as the title of this text suggests, change comes from within, not without. It is powered by the minds of each of us. It is engineered by the words from your mouth and the actions of your behaviors. It is constructed by your hands, as we are all responsible for it and influenced by it, whether directly or indirectly. It is so very clear to me that to change our environments – business, personal, relationships, etc – we must begin by changing ourselves.
The challenges and problems that face us in life’s journey do not exist within the depths of our media; they lie within each of us. They are created by us and we must be prepared to accept the “truth” delivered by our own level of influence and the consequences of our actions – our behaviors and our means to deliver the expected performance within the environment that we are a part of. “Your actions carry a thought and shape a destiny!” Simply, there is a reciprocal relationship between environments and behaviors and to achieve a successful transformational change medium, people must remain on a continuum of being “LeaderShaped!” This leads me to an all too familiar statement within my executive team; many, most, and some: “Many have wanted it; most think they have it, and some will actually get it.” Despite our perceptions to the contrary, the three perspectives are either a result of our passive acceptance that we can do nothing about them or our active role in encouraging them, or we can acknowledge our current place and decide to make a change for the better.
So, we have a choice. You have a choice. Accept the reality that we have made for what it is and allow change to occur with you as a passive participant in it, or look at your life and begin wondering: It is what it is? Does it get any better? Is this the best my reality and the reality of the world can be? “LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change” is my way of answering these very pointed questions for my own existence. My answer is absolutely, and without any doubt, NO!
This text is the starting point for you to begin the path of change for you and the people influenced by you and within your environment of trust. To get a full copy of the white paper, "LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change," email us at Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
There seems to be, with some of us, an erroneous perspective about how we look and think about the topic of leadership. As times change, shouldn’t the way people who are chosen as leaders tend to influence change? The misconception is that leadership changes independent of the people chosen to lead it. It does experience transition, whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not and whether we actively participate within that transition or not. It does not change on its own. As the individual’s perspective in life and reality take on new challenges – transition in ideation, transformative thought, the technology changes that drive our perspective on getting things done, and the changing environments reflective through the constant design and development of our ideals, values, and beliefs – so does the way of leadership.
We are aware of these huge incessant issues such as the Iraq war and the sectarian struggles that are causing human life to be lost, the environment, education, employment, politics, economics and such like and we drown in a sea of information about them, as they migrate like locust in our lives, day-in and day-out. The erroneous perspective extends on this tide until these problems and challenges seem so disconnected from each other and so alien to our personal circumstances that we think we are disadvantaged and too unimportant to make any difference.
We become ambivalent and detached from them, desensitized in a way that we begin to believe that we are all unable to overcome the challenges and enormous gravity of the situation. Moreover, we think we have no responsibility for them. But it is just that: an erroneous perspective! We think that to change the organizations with which we work, we must change the organization that resides around us. Nothing else makes any difference. However, as the title of this text suggests, change comes from within, not without. It is powered by the minds of each of us. It is engineered by the words from your mouth and the actions of your behaviors. It is constructed by your hands, as we are all responsible for it and influenced by it, whether directly or indirectly. It is so very clear to me that to change our environments – business, personal, relationships, etc – we must begin by changing ourselves.
The challenges and problems that face us in life’s journey do not exist within the depths of our media; they lie within each of us. They are created by us and we must be prepared to accept the “truth” delivered by our own level of influence and the consequences of our actions – our behaviors and our means to deliver the expected performance within the environment that we are a part of. “Your actions carry a thought and shape a destiny!” Simply, there is a reciprocal relationship between environments and behaviors and to achieve a successful transformational change medium, people must remain on a continuum of being “LeaderShaped!” This leads me to an all too familiar statement within my executive team; many, most, and some: “Many have wanted it; most think they have it, and some will actually get it.” Despite our perceptions to the contrary, the three perspectives are either a result of our passive acceptance that we can do nothing about them or our active role in encouraging them, or we can acknowledge our current place and decide to make a change for the better.
So, we have a choice. You have a choice. Accept the reality that we have made for what it is and allow change to occur with you as a passive participant in it, or look at your life and begin wondering: It is what it is? Does it get any better? Is this the best my reality and the reality of the world can be? “LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change” is my way of answering these very pointed questions for my own existence. My answer is absolutely, and without any doubt, NO!
This text is the starting point for you to begin the path of change for you and the people influenced by you and within your environment of trust. To get a full copy of the white paper, "LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change," email us at Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Team Intelligence
Is there such a thing as team intelligence? If there was, it would revolutionize the study and the practice of business. Our research shows that there is such a thing, that we can identify, describe, measure and develop it and that this has measurable business outcomes in terms of enterprise profitability, growth, and development. This has major implications for leadership development and talent management, to mention just two areas.
Idiots Savants and PhDs?
Traditionally psychologists defined intelligence as IQ, the intelligence quotient notably popularized by Binet and others. These days it is recognized that IQ is but one measure of intelligence, broadly defined. The working theory is that there are multiple intelligences, each of which is separate and defines a different form of cognitive performance. Thus we can talk about emotional, artistic, and kinesthetic intelligence. But no-one has even identified an entity such as team intelligence? Yet if these others exist, why should not team intelligence?
Popular culture identifies and discusses capabilities that could well be seen as direct reflections of team intelligence. These include business acumen and a nose for driving people, process, profit, and profitability. We sometimes talk of people being a “leadership genius.” Thus the popular wisdom acknowledges something that would be like team intelligence. It’s just that the academics and psychologists haven’t caught up yet since they are usually not in a position to have direct, as distinct from indirect, experience of it in the field in a real business. Simply, team intelligence should be constructed as a significant discipline in our business schools and development programs.
Another IQ! But Why?
That is where the work of The Bison Group comes in – a team of United States Marines turned business professionals and industry specialists, providing business acumen assessment and development program that focuses on people, process, and the disciplines of transformational leadership and organizational behavior. Our research shows that we can identify specific team intelligence at the level of the individual, which encapsulates successful environments at the organizational level. We can formally model that intelligence, measure it, and show what its impacts are on the team performance aspect of the individual and organization they are a part. Some of this work is introduced in the release of our latest book, “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (BookSurge, 2008), see www.amazon.com and our essential guidebook for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results – HumanSigma.Net.
Rather than use the all too familiar term IQ, we approach this discipline with another term, LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change. With the current economic downturn and its impact on leadership development practices and programs, organizations must remain on task with developing their people and systems and there’s no better time than now to get it done. The book and white paper combined examines people and organizational leadership using business acumen and United States Marine Corps strategy and tactical-philosophy as a multi-dimensional approach to creating an environment with significant HumanSigma to effect proactive change. Together, they argue that while recessions typically bring discouragement and fear to the workplace at all levels, there are good reasons for it to be different this time, as long as HR and leadership development professionals take the initiative.
Essentially, they examine, explain, and introduce strategy-execution and team intelligence.
Our definition of team intelligence, however, is not just or even mainly about team building. It is really about value creation in people. We identify the criticality of an individual or team to create capital, and that means in any level of an organization and system. In its specific implementation currently it uses organizational behavior as the lead stimulus that seeks to understand, explain, and improve human behavior in organizations. Team Intelligence using organizational behavior identifies profit intelligence, the propensity to create human capital as measured in successful workplace behaviors and environments.
Leaders Today
Who is better to train future leaders than the leaders of today? The business world is quickly realizing potential leaders are a major asset – the drivers of systems, management, and business process. Taking that potential and developing it is highly desirable. Team Intelligence is the tool that must be integrated if to achieve the difference between winning or losing in competitive situations. Using it wisely and as a significant applicable resource, Team Intelligence becomes the stimulus to initiate and maintain the relationship necessary to create leaders from leaders. With dedication from both the mentor and the protégé, the discipline guides participants through various steps to ensure it follows the right path that will benefit all parties. Team Intelligence models a value-add and results-oriented perspective that will help the leaders of today develop the leaders of tomorrow.
Most organizations focus their efforts on improving two aspects of human behavior:
Job performance: the degree to which individuals perform the behaviors needed for the organization to achieve its goals; and
Organizational commitment: the degree to which employees remain loyal to the organization rather than withdrawing from their work.
Using Team Intelligence, you can learn how to guide the integration of an adaptable model that seeks to explain these two areas of organizational behavior. That model is shown below, and will serve as the organizing framework for integrating Team Intelligence into any existing system and/or organization.
Team Intelligence is measured using online assessment instruments. The instruments also measure the actual behavior of an individual and show how this differs from their values and workplace motivators. These show whether the individual or team is likely to under- or out-perform other people in terms of creating profitable environments to their organizations (and higher market value). Our instruments also measure the leadership signature or culture of an organization and reveal what the type of team culture means for the ultimate market value of the company.
Recessions and economic downturns normally see a reduction in transformational leadership and development program spending since companies typically do not have confidence that these programs can provide short-term solutions to the financial issues that must be addressed. This is a significant misnomer and can produce a detachment for employing creative and innovative ways of achieving significant growth.
However, companies have an unparalleled opportunity to transform both leadership development programs and the way that they introduce creative programs to modify the financial behavior of their organization, including business acumen programs. These have the potential for rapid financial impacts to help in the short and long-term and to position them better as they come out of the stalling economy.
LeaderShaping the Future
Our work comes up with some surprising and, for many, counter-intuitive conclusions. Being one of the best leader types does not correlate with having the best team intelligence; in fact the reverse is more likely to be the case. The possession of a higher degree or an MBA is not correlated with high team intelligence. In fact, business outcomes may be worse with an MBA because the holder incorrectly assumes that they have the right business acumen for the assigned task. This over-confidence leads to rash decisions based on a lack of real-world experience – a model that the U.S. Armed Forces learned the hard way during the Vietnam War.
Simply placing new officers in command of troops already in country caused discontent, disharmony, and loss of life. They quickly learned that creative methods and a non-traditional approach was necessary as a model within itself to overcome the challenges faced by following the traditions that worked in the past. Just as time changes, so should the ways in traditional thinking.
The concept of team intelligence has some revolutionary implications for business. If it is correct, we are routinely selecting the wrong types of people as leaders and managers, which is probably why we get recurrent business and organizational crises such as the current sub-prime crisis in our financial communities.
Secondly we have completely the wrong development regimes and programs for managers and emerging leaders, since we might be measuring and managing the wrong things.
Third, our business education both at university and in business is based on the wrong skills since we are confusing business literacy and business acumen, which are completely different things. We routinely select for business literacy, which is not the same thing as business acumen and therefore suffer the consequences when holders of these often-atmospheric qualifications, apparently unaccountably, fail to deliver the right P&L results. This is where we come in again. A great way to learn the discipline of team intelligence, individuals must employ our program, “LeaderShaping the Future – Organizational Behavior: Harness the Potential of Tomorrow’s Leaders Today!”
This is a 40-hour intense business program that introduces “The Five Paragraph Order” concept as a significant tool within team intelligence. The Five Paragraph Order, otherwise known by its short name and acronym “SMEAC,” follows a set of well disciplined campaign precepts to build the foundation for integrating team intelligence. If these campaign precepts are followed correctly (they are applicable to any situation in any industry), your chances of success will gain valuable resources to win in any environment.
Situation (Manage by mind, lead by heart),
Mission (See what all see; think what no other thinks),
Execution (Master transition; develop the discipline of managing the unexpected),
Administration/ Logistics (Link leadership to legacy! Exploit the dynamic within, develop it without), and
Command and Signal (Hunt for great behavior; become a teacher of dignified coaches – ensure progression of authority)
Counting on the Multiples
So what does this all mean for the theory of multiple intelligence? Well, our work supports and extends it even further. As outlined in our first book, “The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership” (Kendall Hunt Publishing Co, 2007) see www.amazon.com, team intelligence is aligned with the art of employing democracy in leadership. Team intelligence most importantly demonstrates an understanding of excellence thru performance management that realizes a state where people come into a single way of thinking, without losing their individuality, creating a “shared-vision” that achieves a predetermined objective.
It shows that glorious entity called the human psyche and how it is even more multi-faceted and powerful than we had imagined. In doing so, team intelligence deconstructs types of influence, stratagem, and execution that require a response to the demand contribution and persuasion on policy and practice. It eliminates opportunities of enlisting archaic perspectives, offering a body of knowledge that channels enthusiastic initiatives without stifling potential for greater human and operational endeavors. It offers a collective commitment for winning, using educational leadership as an everyday event; a state with “fluidity,” ongoing and always in motion and the “vitality” within a system through its vision (and common orientation point) that finds a “voice.”
Not only does it have some far reaching capabilities in the analytical, emotional, artistic and kinesthetic areas, but it also has unsuspected abilities in the strictly financial area that also differentiate us as beings and people. It emphasizes the criticality of strategic leadership, strategy formulation and implementation, technology management and innovation. It helps individuals to drive fundamental change, achieving communal commitment, and unified frameworks that employs an intense, custom learning experience for enabling team leaders and their associates to increase their leadership ability – personally and professionally. It is at that point that they are equipped to apply the knowledge paradigms and tools across team-centric environments to win. Team intelligence is definitely, “not” business as usual and once we harness the abilities comprehended in this newest form of intelligence, we can leverage people to improve as human beings – the journey from ordinary people to extraordinary individuals.
But first we must recognize the existence of this new set of capabilities. It is important that we do not pass it off as a fad that will come and go. It is critical that we do not ignore this intelligence, but recognize that we have identified yet another facet of human ingenuity and power and, moreover, that it is unlikely to be the last.
Transition: Your Paradigm of Choice must Influence Your Paradigm of Change – Leadership that Is
The theory of team intelligence has far-reaching implications for talent management, leadership development and HR in companies everywhere. For a start, it implies that in using traditional personality and competency assessments to improve business outcomes and results, they have been barking up the wrong tree.
Traditional personality and competency assessments are simply measuring the wrong things so they cannot help improve business outcomes from a strictly team-centric perspective that immediately impacts the workplace. That is not to say they might not improve other outcomes such as the quality of leadership and project functioning.
But we cannot confuse leadership with business outcome, as is usually the case right now in most leadership development and talent management programs. This implies that most leadership development programs are simply not using their money wisely, or at the very least, claiming wrongly that they lead to results that they simply are not capable of.
Recommendations
Using leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps, explore what it takes to become a great leader in the workplace.
Integrate business acumen and talent management protocol to overcome organizational and inter-office politics, outlining the six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
Demonstrates how ordinary women can move up in the corporate world by shaping their own attitudes about success, prejudice, oppression, equality, business and leadership.
Educate C-Level executives, management and project teams in the discipline of team intelligence.
Idiots Savants and PhDs?
Traditionally psychologists defined intelligence as IQ, the intelligence quotient notably popularized by Binet and others. These days it is recognized that IQ is but one measure of intelligence, broadly defined. The working theory is that there are multiple intelligences, each of which is separate and defines a different form of cognitive performance. Thus we can talk about emotional, artistic, and kinesthetic intelligence. But no-one has even identified an entity such as team intelligence? Yet if these others exist, why should not team intelligence?
Popular culture identifies and discusses capabilities that could well be seen as direct reflections of team intelligence. These include business acumen and a nose for driving people, process, profit, and profitability. We sometimes talk of people being a “leadership genius.” Thus the popular wisdom acknowledges something that would be like team intelligence. It’s just that the academics and psychologists haven’t caught up yet since they are usually not in a position to have direct, as distinct from indirect, experience of it in the field in a real business. Simply, team intelligence should be constructed as a significant discipline in our business schools and development programs.
Another IQ! But Why?
That is where the work of The Bison Group comes in – a team of United States Marines turned business professionals and industry specialists, providing business acumen assessment and development program that focuses on people, process, and the disciplines of transformational leadership and organizational behavior. Our research shows that we can identify specific team intelligence at the level of the individual, which encapsulates successful environments at the organizational level. We can formally model that intelligence, measure it, and show what its impacts are on the team performance aspect of the individual and organization they are a part. Some of this work is introduced in the release of our latest book, “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (BookSurge, 2008), see www.amazon.com and our essential guidebook for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results – HumanSigma.Net.
Rather than use the all too familiar term IQ, we approach this discipline with another term, LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change. With the current economic downturn and its impact on leadership development practices and programs, organizations must remain on task with developing their people and systems and there’s no better time than now to get it done. The book and white paper combined examines people and organizational leadership using business acumen and United States Marine Corps strategy and tactical-philosophy as a multi-dimensional approach to creating an environment with significant HumanSigma to effect proactive change. Together, they argue that while recessions typically bring discouragement and fear to the workplace at all levels, there are good reasons for it to be different this time, as long as HR and leadership development professionals take the initiative.
Essentially, they examine, explain, and introduce strategy-execution and team intelligence.
Our definition of team intelligence, however, is not just or even mainly about team building. It is really about value creation in people. We identify the criticality of an individual or team to create capital, and that means in any level of an organization and system. In its specific implementation currently it uses organizational behavior as the lead stimulus that seeks to understand, explain, and improve human behavior in organizations. Team Intelligence using organizational behavior identifies profit intelligence, the propensity to create human capital as measured in successful workplace behaviors and environments.
Leaders Today
Who is better to train future leaders than the leaders of today? The business world is quickly realizing potential leaders are a major asset – the drivers of systems, management, and business process. Taking that potential and developing it is highly desirable. Team Intelligence is the tool that must be integrated if to achieve the difference between winning or losing in competitive situations. Using it wisely and as a significant applicable resource, Team Intelligence becomes the stimulus to initiate and maintain the relationship necessary to create leaders from leaders. With dedication from both the mentor and the protégé, the discipline guides participants through various steps to ensure it follows the right path that will benefit all parties. Team Intelligence models a value-add and results-oriented perspective that will help the leaders of today develop the leaders of tomorrow.
Most organizations focus their efforts on improving two aspects of human behavior:
Job performance: the degree to which individuals perform the behaviors needed for the organization to achieve its goals; and
Organizational commitment: the degree to which employees remain loyal to the organization rather than withdrawing from their work.
Using Team Intelligence, you can learn how to guide the integration of an adaptable model that seeks to explain these two areas of organizational behavior. That model is shown below, and will serve as the organizing framework for integrating Team Intelligence into any existing system and/or organization.
Team Intelligence is measured using online assessment instruments. The instruments also measure the actual behavior of an individual and show how this differs from their values and workplace motivators. These show whether the individual or team is likely to under- or out-perform other people in terms of creating profitable environments to their organizations (and higher market value). Our instruments also measure the leadership signature or culture of an organization and reveal what the type of team culture means for the ultimate market value of the company.
Recessions and economic downturns normally see a reduction in transformational leadership and development program spending since companies typically do not have confidence that these programs can provide short-term solutions to the financial issues that must be addressed. This is a significant misnomer and can produce a detachment for employing creative and innovative ways of achieving significant growth.
However, companies have an unparalleled opportunity to transform both leadership development programs and the way that they introduce creative programs to modify the financial behavior of their organization, including business acumen programs. These have the potential for rapid financial impacts to help in the short and long-term and to position them better as they come out of the stalling economy.
LeaderShaping the Future
Our work comes up with some surprising and, for many, counter-intuitive conclusions. Being one of the best leader types does not correlate with having the best team intelligence; in fact the reverse is more likely to be the case. The possession of a higher degree or an MBA is not correlated with high team intelligence. In fact, business outcomes may be worse with an MBA because the holder incorrectly assumes that they have the right business acumen for the assigned task. This over-confidence leads to rash decisions based on a lack of real-world experience – a model that the U.S. Armed Forces learned the hard way during the Vietnam War.
Simply placing new officers in command of troops already in country caused discontent, disharmony, and loss of life. They quickly learned that creative methods and a non-traditional approach was necessary as a model within itself to overcome the challenges faced by following the traditions that worked in the past. Just as time changes, so should the ways in traditional thinking.
The concept of team intelligence has some revolutionary implications for business. If it is correct, we are routinely selecting the wrong types of people as leaders and managers, which is probably why we get recurrent business and organizational crises such as the current sub-prime crisis in our financial communities.
Secondly we have completely the wrong development regimes and programs for managers and emerging leaders, since we might be measuring and managing the wrong things.
Third, our business education both at university and in business is based on the wrong skills since we are confusing business literacy and business acumen, which are completely different things. We routinely select for business literacy, which is not the same thing as business acumen and therefore suffer the consequences when holders of these often-atmospheric qualifications, apparently unaccountably, fail to deliver the right P&L results. This is where we come in again. A great way to learn the discipline of team intelligence, individuals must employ our program, “LeaderShaping the Future – Organizational Behavior: Harness the Potential of Tomorrow’s Leaders Today!”
This is a 40-hour intense business program that introduces “The Five Paragraph Order” concept as a significant tool within team intelligence. The Five Paragraph Order, otherwise known by its short name and acronym “SMEAC,” follows a set of well disciplined campaign precepts to build the foundation for integrating team intelligence. If these campaign precepts are followed correctly (they are applicable to any situation in any industry), your chances of success will gain valuable resources to win in any environment.
Situation (Manage by mind, lead by heart),
Mission (See what all see; think what no other thinks),
Execution (Master transition; develop the discipline of managing the unexpected),
Administration/ Logistics (Link leadership to legacy! Exploit the dynamic within, develop it without), and
Command and Signal (Hunt for great behavior; become a teacher of dignified coaches – ensure progression of authority)
Counting on the Multiples
So what does this all mean for the theory of multiple intelligence? Well, our work supports and extends it even further. As outlined in our first book, “The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership” (Kendall Hunt Publishing Co, 2007) see www.amazon.com, team intelligence is aligned with the art of employing democracy in leadership. Team intelligence most importantly demonstrates an understanding of excellence thru performance management that realizes a state where people come into a single way of thinking, without losing their individuality, creating a “shared-vision” that achieves a predetermined objective.
It shows that glorious entity called the human psyche and how it is even more multi-faceted and powerful than we had imagined. In doing so, team intelligence deconstructs types of influence, stratagem, and execution that require a response to the demand contribution and persuasion on policy and practice. It eliminates opportunities of enlisting archaic perspectives, offering a body of knowledge that channels enthusiastic initiatives without stifling potential for greater human and operational endeavors. It offers a collective commitment for winning, using educational leadership as an everyday event; a state with “fluidity,” ongoing and always in motion and the “vitality” within a system through its vision (and common orientation point) that finds a “voice.”
Not only does it have some far reaching capabilities in the analytical, emotional, artistic and kinesthetic areas, but it also has unsuspected abilities in the strictly financial area that also differentiate us as beings and people. It emphasizes the criticality of strategic leadership, strategy formulation and implementation, technology management and innovation. It helps individuals to drive fundamental change, achieving communal commitment, and unified frameworks that employs an intense, custom learning experience for enabling team leaders and their associates to increase their leadership ability – personally and professionally. It is at that point that they are equipped to apply the knowledge paradigms and tools across team-centric environments to win. Team intelligence is definitely, “not” business as usual and once we harness the abilities comprehended in this newest form of intelligence, we can leverage people to improve as human beings – the journey from ordinary people to extraordinary individuals.
But first we must recognize the existence of this new set of capabilities. It is important that we do not pass it off as a fad that will come and go. It is critical that we do not ignore this intelligence, but recognize that we have identified yet another facet of human ingenuity and power and, moreover, that it is unlikely to be the last.
Transition: Your Paradigm of Choice must Influence Your Paradigm of Change – Leadership that Is
The theory of team intelligence has far-reaching implications for talent management, leadership development and HR in companies everywhere. For a start, it implies that in using traditional personality and competency assessments to improve business outcomes and results, they have been barking up the wrong tree.
Traditional personality and competency assessments are simply measuring the wrong things so they cannot help improve business outcomes from a strictly team-centric perspective that immediately impacts the workplace. That is not to say they might not improve other outcomes such as the quality of leadership and project functioning.
But we cannot confuse leadership with business outcome, as is usually the case right now in most leadership development and talent management programs. This implies that most leadership development programs are simply not using their money wisely, or at the very least, claiming wrongly that they lead to results that they simply are not capable of.
Recommendations
Using leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps, explore what it takes to become a great leader in the workplace.
Integrate business acumen and talent management protocol to overcome organizational and inter-office politics, outlining the six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
Demonstrates how ordinary women can move up in the corporate world by shaping their own attitudes about success, prejudice, oppression, equality, business and leadership.
Educate C-Level executives, management and project teams in the discipline of team intelligence.
Winning in business, the Marine Corps way
Former Marine-turned-businessman takes Corps principles corporate
PHILADELPHIA — United States Marines go through the toughest training of any of the armed forces, shaping some of the country’s most celebrated leaders. Since 1775, countless governors, senators, athletes, entertainers and business executives have served in this elite branch of the military. Many former Marines have realized that Marine-style leadership and teamwork are equally useful in civilian life, helping them advance in their personal and professional lives. Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts is one such former Marine.
Pitts, who served in the Marines, is the founder and CEO of The Bison Group, Inc., a national leadership development and consulting firm comprised of a team of U.S. Marines-turned-business professionals and industry leaders. Through his speaking engagements, training programs and consulting services, Pitts teaches others how to apply Marine Corps leadership principles and tactical philosophy to promote optimal performance in their daily lives.
His new book, The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership (Kendall Hunt Publishers, September 2007) uses leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps to help readers become great leaders in the workplace. Pitts also explores organizational and inter-office politics in Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics (Book Surge Publishers, December 2007), which outlines six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
“There is one thing worse than an overstressed organization or community; that is an overstressed and defeated feeling among the organization’s leaders,” says Pitts, who has gone by the nickname “Skipper” ever since his stint in the Marines. “The “I can’t—we can’t” approach among team members are responsible for tearing at the fabric of excellence. The leadership techniques displayed by the U.S. Marine Corps have proven themselves time and time again, and they can successfully be applied to the board room to help anyone excel in business.”
In an interview, Pitts can discuss topics such as:
- Tips for being a good team member in a high-stress environment
- How leaders can diffuse inter-office politics
- How to avoid office politics and succeed in today’s team-based workplace
- Why understanding organizational dynamics is the key to building better teams
- How leaders can build quality teams in unique work environments (virtual
workplace, etc.)
Pitts currently resides in Philadelphia, PA where he serves as President and CEO of The Bison Group. For more information, please visit www.BisonGroupsUS.com or send an email to: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
PHILADELPHIA — United States Marines go through the toughest training of any of the armed forces, shaping some of the country’s most celebrated leaders. Since 1775, countless governors, senators, athletes, entertainers and business executives have served in this elite branch of the military. Many former Marines have realized that Marine-style leadership and teamwork are equally useful in civilian life, helping them advance in their personal and professional lives. Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts is one such former Marine.
Pitts, who served in the Marines, is the founder and CEO of The Bison Group, Inc., a national leadership development and consulting firm comprised of a team of U.S. Marines-turned-business professionals and industry leaders. Through his speaking engagements, training programs and consulting services, Pitts teaches others how to apply Marine Corps leadership principles and tactical philosophy to promote optimal performance in their daily lives.
His new book, The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership (Kendall Hunt Publishers, September 2007) uses leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps to help readers become great leaders in the workplace. Pitts also explores organizational and inter-office politics in Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics (Book Surge Publishers, December 2007), which outlines six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
“There is one thing worse than an overstressed organization or community; that is an overstressed and defeated feeling among the organization’s leaders,” says Pitts, who has gone by the nickname “Skipper” ever since his stint in the Marines. “The “I can’t—we can’t” approach among team members are responsible for tearing at the fabric of excellence. The leadership techniques displayed by the U.S. Marine Corps have proven themselves time and time again, and they can successfully be applied to the board room to help anyone excel in business.”
In an interview, Pitts can discuss topics such as:
- Tips for being a good team member in a high-stress environment
- How leaders can diffuse inter-office politics
- How to avoid office politics and succeed in today’s team-based workplace
- Why understanding organizational dynamics is the key to building better teams
- How leaders can build quality teams in unique work environments (virtual
workplace, etc.)
Pitts currently resides in Philadelphia, PA where he serves as President and CEO of The Bison Group. For more information, please visit www.BisonGroupsUS.com or send an email to: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
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