John Hersey Leadership Blog

Leaders need to know what makes everyone tick, starting with themselves

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein

Just recently, John and I critically looked at our strengths (trying to keep our egos at bay) because we needed to see how we could be more effective and productive in our business which is morphing very quickly. We were excited but both of us were feeling ‘overwhelmed’. We know that when that ‘overwhelmed’ feeling occurs that we were probably out of sync with our strengths.

As a result of a very candid and slightly uncomfortable conversation we realized that with the shift in our business to new lines of distribution, launching social networking and internet visibility campaigns and telephonic product development, we had to reorganized who was doing what. We needed to update our thinking and value to the organization to successfully take on our new opportunities and challenges.

John wrote about the power of focusing on people’s strengths in his book Creating Contagious Leadership.
Red Auerbach, once the head coach for the Boston Celtics, had an amazing talent for assembling groups of individual players and winning championships. During his tenure Auerbach lead the Celtics to eight consecutive NBA Championship seasons and nine championships in all. He seemed to do this by focusing on the strengths of each player and allowing them to be the best they could be by looking to their greatness. The Celtics had a few stars like Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and Sam Jones, but most of the players were role players. They were all good players, just not stars. Some of them had played for other teams with average results. But when they came together as members of the Boston Celtics, they became champions. All because Red Auerbach was willing to understand each player’s strengths, and then relentlessly focused on those strengths.

So what are your strengths? Here’s a simple question that can have you thinking for hours. What three adjectives describe you? Putting it another way, who are you being in the world? When we answer this question, our lives are successful, productive and fun.

RESOURCE:

Find out what three adjectives describe John and Bev and how to engineer your own I Am statement on our next complimentary Teleseminar. You can register by going to:

http://www.johnhersey.com/strengths.htm

It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s effective. Join us for the first ever Maximizing Your Success Jigsaw challenge teleseminar This call will introduce a tool which is one of the most revealing and effective ways we have ever developed to help you get to know how to be your best!

DATE:Thursday, January 22, 2009

TIME: 4PM Arizona, 3PM Pacific,, 6PM Central, 7PM Eastern

Once you register we’ll email you the dial in number and passcode.

See you on the call,

Bev

Bonus resource: read more from Chapter 5 of Creating Contagious Leadership at:

http://www.johnhersey.com/PDF/ccl_chapter5.pdf

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:50 am and is filed under Leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.