Getting to The Summit Together

On May 24, 2001, Erik Weihenmayer with 18 team members reached the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest. At that time, more members of this team reached the summit than any other expedition in history. On that day, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind man to climb Mount Everest.

According to Weihenmayer, “There will always be people who think you’re crazy. And then they're also going to be those who share your vision.” You can listen to his Today Show interview here.

Leaders in every organization have experienced ongoing disruptions in the past 20 months as a result of the COVID pandemic. One of the ongoing challenges that they have encountered is how to maintain high employee engagement towards achieving strategic objectives aligned with the vision and mission of the organization.

Some of this can be a result of turnover which has required those within an organization to take on additional duties and responsibilities to meet the needs of the organization’s customers. While some of it is a result of team members not having a clear sense of the value they add to their organization so they aren’t able to connect the dots to WHY its important for them to show up as their best self, day in and day out and deliver high-performance results even though their paycheck depends on it.

What does it take for a team to be so inspired by a vision that their actions become a reflection of how much they value their organization and their contributions towards the achievement of its strategic objectives?

Answer: Leaders who understand that TRUST is essential to building a great place to work. A leader’s credibility determines his or her ability to influence others and the level of impact they will have on each team member’s beliefs, emotions and behavior.

Without a change in behavior, a leader and his or her team’s ability to reach the next summit of an organization’s success will not be possible.

The days when a command-and-control leadership style worked in workplaces are becoming obsolete. More and more people are recognizing their power and their autonomy to choose if a workplace environment supports their mental, emotional, physical, and financial well-being.

The days of people working just for a paycheck without concern for their total well-being is being challenged by the fact that more and more young people are deciding to become self-employed rather than settle for a workplace environment that does not support or value their need for autonomy as an adult in order for them to do their best work.

Fortunately, there are proven best practices that can help you and your team build a great workplace to work which in turn can help you identify training and development needs that will help expand the capacity of leaders and teams within your organization to unify and collaborate to reach the next summit of your organization’s success.

Outstanding Business Results, During Difficult Times

Recently, The Great Workplace to Work organization announced the top 25 companies that are great workplaces to work based on survey results of employees around the globe.

Leaders in these organizations demonstrated the following traits:

1. They listened and learned what their employees needed more of and less of.
2. They placed the physical and mental well-being of employees as a top priority.
3. They were able to create a community within their organization where employees felt seen, heard, and valued. They were able to do this within offices around the world.
4. They managed their reactions to the challenges they were facing while adapting and adjusting how they responded to challenges.
5. They prioritize open communication by establishing safe ways to communicate.
6. They recognized their equity, diversity, and inclusion practices were driving better business results.
7. They recognized the importance of creating and maintaining the trust and psychological safety necessary for team members to bring their whole selves to work.
8. They were willing to reinvent their path forward with suggestions from team members within all departments.
9. They understood that by taking care of their people first, they were simultaneously taking care of their customers.

Based on employee survey results of these companies from a minimum of ten countries, employees identified the following business and leadership practices that led them to feel their company was a great place to work.

1. Management keeps me informed about important issues and changes.
2. People are encouraged to balance their work-life and personal life.
3. Management makes expectations clear.
4. Management shows sincere interest in me as a person, not just an employee.
5. Management has a clear view of where the organization is going and how to get there.
6. They felt they had special and unique benefits offered working for their organization.
7. People look forward to coming to work here.
8. People here are willing to give extra to get the job done.
9. They feel their contributions are making a difference.

10.?Their work has a special meaning it is not “just a job.”

11.?Customers of their organization would rate the service delivered by their organization as “excellent.”

12.?They feel their workplace is a psychologically and emotionally healthy place to work.

13.?Everyone has an opportunity to get special recognition.

14.?They feel proud to work for their organization and tell others where they work.

15.?They became brand ambassadors of their organization as they saw it as a great place to work.

16.?They feel they are paid fairly for the work they do.

17.?They are offered training and development to advance professionally.

18.?They receive a fair share of the profits made by their organization.

Now, these best practices reflect a collection of the common themes identified by the Great Place to Work as key indicators of how the 25 Great Workplaces to Work for 2021 achieved amazing business results during a difficult year. You can watch the video revealing these companies here.

Building A High-Performance Team

In my new book The Go Be Great Blueprint? I write, “Leaders who create the workplace culture of the future are individuals that celebrate and cherish differences, embrace disruption, and foster a speak-up culture according to the Center for Talent Innovation. These inclusive leadership practices encourage employees at all levels within an organization to share their opinions, suggest unorthodox approaches to problems and opportunities that fly in the face of established norms.”

In addition, “Leaders who create inclusive workplace cultures are more apt to engage the head, hearts, and hands of their workforce towards the achievement of strategic objectives crucial to their organization's success. They understand the value of leveraging the collective experience, insights, and talent of a diverse team. This leadership best practice helps team members feel welcomed and included, feel free to express their views and opinions, and feel heard and validated. These are essential elements to creating a culture of trust that produces serial innovation."

One of the parables I share in my book that challenges readers to consider how their familiar stories and perceptions about others can hinder them from building and developing relationships that can support their well-being and success. The parable is referred to as The Blind Men and the Elephant. It reads:

“There is a parable about a group of blind men and an elephant. Each man had access to a different part of the elephant. One had the tail and said it felt like a rope. One had the leg and said it resembled a pillar. While another man had the belly and said, it felt like a wall. Lastly, the final man had the tusk and claimed it felt like a solid pipe. Later, a man that could see came along and explained that they were all correct. Each man's reality of the elephant was based upon the perception created by where his hand was positioned on the animal."

This parable illustrates the power of our perception and how it is defined by our standing in life. Be mindful of how your positions in life influence the harmony in your relationships with people from different cultures who have diverse perceptions about life and work than you.

Each of us has different beliefs and perceptions about the people we interact with because of our diverse experiences, assumptions, and cultural conditioning. Just like the blind men in the parable, our beliefs and perceptions about one another often reflect partial truths. Without the courage to seek first to understand each other, we run the risk of living our lives and navigating our careers believing half-truths about one another.

It is difficult for any leader, no matter how good she or he is at delivering results be able to sustain their success for years and decades without building and sustaining trust with those they serve and lead.

Building Trust Is Key to A Team’s Performance

One of the most effective practices I use to build trust in relationships during my corporate career was scheduling authentic and courageous 1:1 conversations with team members on a consistent basis. These conversations were effective because of my willingness to invite team members into a conversation with me where they are given a safe space to speak their truth to me about specific situations. They felt seen, heard, and valued. And once they provided me with the feedback I needed, I began to act on many of their suggestions. This included my willingness to change my behavior and approach to them to be the leader they needed to inspire the best in them.

Over time, these conversations helped me to establish and maintain the trust that is necessary to inspire people to bring their best game to the field of play in which they work. Key factors to building trust include:

1.?????Credibility

2.?????Respect

3.?????Pride

4.?????Camaraderie

5.?????Fairness

Early in my management career, I made it clear to those I was serving as a leader that I saw each of them as leaders. I was able to get them to buy into this identity because of my personal story of rising up within the ranks by leading myself as an hourly employee. I saw myself as a leader on my very first job as a bus girl at the Carolina Inn as a teenager. I’ve believed that I was destined to be a leader who would make a difference in the lives of others ever since I listened to snippets of Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech “I Have A Dream.”

My efforts towards enlarging the self-image of those on my first team as a manager by using monthly meetings to share what I was learning in my leadership training with them and helping them to understand our team’s responsibility for delivering results that impacted the profit & loss of our department and the hotel were pivotal actions I took to secure buy-in for the goals our department needed to accomplish. I wasn’t just saying that I saw them as leaders because I wanted them to do more work. I wanted them to know that I was committed to their growth and development. For those who were interested in progressing into leadership positions, I mentored and coached them on how to prepare and position themselves to secure supervisory and next-level leadership positions.

I didn’t have a playbook. Most of my actions were inspired by my experience of different leadership styles and the learning and development that I was undergoing. I recognized what kind of leader I wanted to be and what kind of leader I wouldn’t be. I was clear about what I stood for as a leader. It mattered to me that I pay it forward because I had managers and leaders who invested in me years before I received my first management promotion. My servant leadership attitude helped me to maintain a confident humility that resonated with the people that I served. It was key to me being able to develop several high-performance teams during my corporate career.

If you are a leader or aspiring to be one, the question you need to ask yourself is, “Am I showing up to serve those I lead in a consistent manner that is credible, respectful, inspiring a sense of pride in the minds of others about themselves, encouraging community within my team or workgroup that builds camaraderie while being fair to all?

The fastest way to know to get feedback about whether you are or not is by scheduling authentic and courageous conversations with those on your team. Be sure you ask diverse people, not just those who know, like and trust you already. These traits are keystone practices for building trust in your relationships whether you are a leader with or without a title.

?Building and Maintaining Team Coherence

One of the key intentions of my book The Go Be Great Blueprint ? is to help individuals develop inner coherence with their goals. Neuroscience and heart science have proven that the more coherence we are able to maintain between our thoughts, emotions, and actions, the more aligned our energetic vibration is with our goals. Inner coherence is how we magnetize our energetic vibe and BE what we seek in order to attract the people, opportunities, and circumstances that will support us on our path to experiencing what we desire.

As I have stated, expanding the identity of team members was key to helping them to see themselves with a more empowering perspective. Our identity influences what we think about ourselves. What we think about ourselves influences what we feel about ourselves. What we feel about ourselves and our experiences influence what we do. And what we do has a direct influence on the quality of the results we experience in our life. I believe the most important role a leader has is to help those they serve to discover the greatness within themselves and leverage it to make unique contributions to their team and workplace.

When a leader with or without a title is able to help those around them tap into a greater measure of their potential and realize they are capable of being more, doing more and having more success it activates the indispensable intrinsic motivation within individuals to show up as their best self.

When a leader is able to do this and communicate a vision of purpose that takes into account the contributions necessary from everyone on a team in order to succeed at accomplishing this vision, the leader increases their capacity to maximize the smarts and talents of team members and build processes and methods that help their team succeed “on repeat.”

It Starts With You

You have to be willing to disrupt thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are not helping you be your best self. If you want your team or workgroup to deliver better results, you need to be willing to model the behavior necessary to build trust and get buy-in for your ideas. Small changes executed over time with clarity, courage, conviction, and consistency will level up your life, career, and business.

My book The Go Be Great Blueprint? outlines a proven step-by-step self-leadership success system that will empower you to walk in the energy of your best self to create experiences now and in the future that will help you thrive.

The five core habits of mind that serve as the framework for the self-leadership habits, skills, and strategies outlined in my new book are:

1.?????Disrupt Your Assumptions

2.?????Reframe Your Perspective

3.?????Initiate Purpose Driven Actions

4.?????Value Enriching Experiences

5.?????Enlist the Help of Others

Learning how to use these five habits of mind to develop strategies aligned with accomplishing your organization's strategic objectives will not only help you develop your capacity to build inner coherence, but it will also empower you to help your team build inner coherence.

Through the exercises, assignments, and self-inquiry process and the Live Your Greatness Now plan of action in my book, your ability to get grounded in your authentic voice and power will help you develop the ability to help those you serve do the same.

You know what it feels like to be seen, heard, and valued for who you are. The more your team members feel seen, heard, and valued, the more they will think and believe it’s okay to bring their whole self to the workplace because they will be respected.

When people feel they have to pretend to get along to continue getting a paycheck, they will be less inclined to show up in the fullness of the greatness within them. This is often the case when leaders in an organization have not made it a priority to create a psychologically safe work environment for employees. These organizations tend to lose a lot of money on hiring new employees because they aren’t willing to disrupt familiar patterns even when it’s costing them in employee turnover and continuously having to hire new employees.

Be A Catalyst for Unleashing Greatness In Your Organization

You can become a catalyst for greatness in your workplace environment by embracing your authentic power and voice and a more mindful way to build influence, create positive impact, and accelerate your authentic success. Learn how by ordering The Go Be Great Blueprint? today for you and key members of your inner circle.

?If you are a leader who is interested in providing your team and leaders with proven self-leadership tools that will support their efforts to become their best selves and deliver high-performance results, contact me today about my Go Be Great package for organizations. This package includes an 18x24 laminated poster of the core habits of mind plus self-inquiry questions that has served as my coaching framework for years. Leaders have placed this poster in their employee breakrooms with the expectation that when an employee is faced with a challenge/opportunity, they can use this self-coaching tool to help them identify a smart approach to navigate it for greater well-being and success. In addition, the purchase of the poster includes one copy of The Go Be Great Blueprint? book. This package includes a virtual training session for groups of 10 – 50 people.

The poster and the book can be purchased separately from the Go Be Great package which includes the training. You can schedule a free consultation with me to discuss how these resources will help you and your team summit to the next level of success here.

One of the most transformational experiences I had during my corporate career came about when the majority of the employees at the Fairfield Inn hotel rated me the least effective GM in the Mid-Atlantic area for my first six months.

It was transformational because a few months prior to them completing the bi-annual employee survey of me as a GM, I had experienced the unexpected loss of my teenage son Blease.

After seriously contemplating whether or not I needed to return back to my hometown of Columbia, SC to be around the people who loved and supported me as my daughter Dee and I navigate our grief, I listened to my heart's intuitive intelligence and decided to stay and become the GM that I knew I was capable of becoming.

After scheduling 1:1 conversations with each employee, my focus shifted to providing all team members with various training & development that I believe would help us grow and evolve into a more cohesive and successful team. Because of my success in building high-performance teams as a manager in Marriott's Courtyard division, I was confident in my ability to build winning teams.

My focus on developing leaders with or without titles inspired numerous employee development strategies that helped us deliver new customer service initiatives increased the hotel's revenues, profits, and occupancy rates year over year while I managed the hotel. One of the highlights that came with my decision to remain and become the leader that could inspire the best from this group of employees was when our team when was recognized by the company for winning four #1 awards for customer service KPI's out of 364 Fairfield Inn Hotels.

This experience was one of the inspirations for accepting the management role of working with two YUM restaurant franchise groups to turn around low-performing restaurants. I had learned a lot and evolved as a leader and I was eager to use the wisdom and processes to expand my impact in new organizations.

Today, a lot of my work as a trainer and mastermind facilitator involves helping teams and leaders at various stages in their career and start-up businesses sharpen their self-leadership skills in order to see challenges from a hero's mentality so they become energized and engaged to overcome them and summit to the next level with a proven self-leadership success system.

In Conclusion

On May 24, 2001, Erik Weihenmayer and 18 team members defied the doubters when they reached the top of Mount Everest. If you looked at the video, you know that this accomplishment only inspired him to disrupt people’s preconceived ideas of what was physically possible for him because he is blind. He has not only continued to live beyond his limitations and those of others, but he is also paying it forward by training blind children to do the same!

?Can you recall the date in your life when you achieved a dream that many people doubted you were capable of achieving? Can you remember how achieving this goal inspired a greater measure of courage in you to pursue your next big goal? It doesn’t matter what the goal was. What matters is that you were willing to grow and evolve into the next-level version of yourself to achieve it. Isn’t it amazing what you are able to accomplish when you are inspired from within and take on your days with clarity, conviction, courage, and consistency?

Imagine how much more your life and career would change if you learned a proven self-leadership success system that empowers you to build on your progress and success, year after year, as you grow and evolve to slay your greatness in bigger ways??What would happen in the lives of those on your team or workgroup if they were equipped with tools that empowered them to grow and evolve into the next-level version of themselves? How much more would you be able to accomplish together if you were all in sync with a clear vision and the goals to achieve it?

The one thing that many of us have become mindful of is the preciousness of our time and life during the Covid pandemic. As I have gotten wiser, I have learned that it is a tendency to take time for granted that creates most of our regrets in life. I wrote my latest book with the intention to fire up readers by enlarging their perspective of themselves and what they are capable of accomplishing in life. By introducing readers to the process of mindsets, habits, and skills that gave me a competitive advantage and helped me to achieve award-winning success, I am continuing the work that I was put on earth to do.

I wrote this article inspired by the life of Erik Weihenmayer, and the words of Amanda Gorman, “There is always light if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it.” I believe you and I were born for such a time as this in order for us to be brave enough to shine our light and be great in service to others. Each of us in our own way can reach our personal and collective summits with a kindred spirit knowing that we are doing our part to make our world better, together!

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