1. Management Myth – A widespread misunderstanding is that leading and managing are one and the same.
2. Entrepreneurship Myth – People believe that all entrepreneurs are leaders.
3. Knowledge Myth – Those who possess knowledge and intelligence are leaders.
4. Pioneer Myth – Anyone who is out in front of the crowd is a leader.
5. Position Myth – The position can make a leader.

So why do some people emerge as leaders while other can’t? One of the best leaders is I have come to know is a client who works for one of the largest insurance agencies in the world. Let’s call him Jim. You know he is a leader because people follow him. They give him 100% effort every day, and he does not need to ask for it. His team members are proud to say they are on his team. Jim’s influence mainly has to do with 4 key factors:

1. Character – Who he is inside is more important than his title.  When I think of Jim, I think of someone who regularly gives 100 percent to his people and community. He cares deeply about the success of his people and does all he can to show it. What I admire most about Jim is how he represents respect and integrity in his daily actions.
2. Relationships – Jim has built his career on developing deep relationships. It is rare to find a prominent local business person that has not interacted with Jim through the years.  More importantly they will all you tell you how significantly the relationship with Jim influenced their success.  As a result, Jim has many human resources from which to draw to get things done.
3. Intuition – I have come to admire his instincts about people and business. He has the ability to deal with the many intangibles such as energy, morale, timing and momentum. While he understands that knowledge and data are critical to decision-making, it is his intuition that sets him apart from the pack and is one talent that cannot be taught.
4. Experience – We are all a collection of our experiences. Leaders that know how to draw upon their experience to make decisions for the future cause others to want to follow.

If you are interested in strengthening your leadership ability and that of your team, we recommend that you learn from and institute the habits of highly effective leaders. The perfect place to start is in Jacksonville, Florida on April 4^th (Four Decisions Workshop) where you will learn how to:

• Help you learn how to create and implement a specific roadmap to success
• Align your incentives with strategic objectives
• Increase focus in your organization around the activities that will have the biggest positive impact on its success
• Communicate your goals and objectives to everyone in the organization

The post Law of Influence appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

I have spoken with three CEO’s in the last week that I am confident are causing a lid on their organization. All were reasonably successful and suffering from a clear case of “what got you here will not get you there.” We have found that the leaders that are able to take their companies to great heights are committed to identifying and addressing the changes necessary to take the business up a notch. They realize that those changes begin with changing themselves and permeating that change throughout. As a general rule, the lid is a byproduct of employee expansion and reflects a leader’s ability to gain follower-ship among a greater number of employees. The first major lid happens from between 50 and 60 employees, and the second lid we find around 150 employees.

It is important to note, that if you have no one following you, you are not a leader. To get more people to follow you (because they want to) you have to become a greater leader. And, the more people you have, the more easily one can see leadership effectiveness. It is all too easy for successful people to get full of themselves and believe they have arrived. In business and success you never arrive. It is an evolution of growth.

Only one of those three leaders mentioned above has positioned themselves to break through their current lid. The biggest difference was her desire to break her personal lid.  She has strong self-awareness, self-grounding, and foresight to hire a third party to help with her transition. This person deserves a lot of credit as she runs one of the most profitable companies in her industry sector. She realized that her company was not growing as it should over the last few years, despite  having a better strategy than the competitors. In initial meetings with her coach, she has recognized that she is going to have to learn how to work through an extra layer of management, communicate more proactively and clearly, and to shift her role from top producer to head coach.

If you are interested in strengthening your leadership ability and that of your team, we recommend that you learn from and install the habits of highly effective leaders. The perfect place to start is in Jacksonville, Florida on April 4^th (Four Decisions Workshop) where you will learn how to:

• Help your learn how to create and implement a specific roadmap to success
• Align your incentives with strategic objectives
• Increase focus in the organization around the activities that will have the biggest positive impact
• Communicate your goals and objectives to everyone in the organization

The post Law of the Lid appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

As you know, I am proud to be a Gazelles Certified Coach and Verne Harnish, our thought leader, has produced an article that has been the crux of a lot of the concerns our clients have been dealing with.  It is important that we have processes in places to help address issues in a manner that balances employee and owner needs.  This is a great example of engaging the hearts, minds, and spirit of you entire team.

When Gabe Fasolino was hired as a plant manager at a $7 million manufacturing company, he heard rumors that there were problems with drug and alcohol use among the workers.

Clearly, this was a sensitive situation. A heavy handed approach to cracking down on the abuse could easily put Fasolino into an adversarial relationship with his employees. Wisely recognizing this, he turned to the company’s safety team, made up of hourly production workers, for ideas. They came up with what he describes as “the fairest, simplest, easiest-to-administer substance policy I have ever seen.”

That experience took place in the late 1990s, but it taught Fasolino, now a business consultant in the Portland, Ore. area, an important lesson: Engaged employees are a powerful asset. He’s since turned to workers for ideas on everything from pay scales to profit-sharing plans. “In every case, turnover dropped, while profits and morale soared,” he says. At a $10 million manufacturing firm that had lost $2.4 million over three years, Fasolino tapped employees’ ideas and generated a 25% sales increase in nine months.

Offering employees a say in the decisions that affect them is one of the best tools for engaging their hearts, minds and souls so they are motivated to give their all—and to make better choices as a company. However, many business leaders have let employee engagement fall by the wayside while trying to navigate the post-recession economy—and inadvertently made it harder to achieve the results they want.

A Towers Watson survey of 32,000 employees around the world in 2012 found that only one-third are highly engaged—excited about company goals, energized while they’re at the office and free of obstacles to getting their work done.  Another global survey by the consultancy AON Hewitt in 2010 found that engagement was at an all-time low, with employees fatigued by prolonged uncertainty, stress and confusion.

HIGH ENGAGEMENT = HIGH OPERATING MARGINS

When employees are disengaged, performance drops. Towers Watson found that among companies with low engagement, the average operating margin was 9.9%. Those with high “traditional” engagement—where employees were mainly motivated with rewards like a bump in pay—averaged 14.3%. Those with high “sustainable” engagement fared the best, with an average operating margin of 27.4%. This group of companies focused on building a great culture by promoting employees’ well being, treating them with respect, coaching them to improve performance, maintaining honesty and integrity, building a strong reputation and other practices that made employees feel great about coming to work.

22% GREATER RETURNS, ON AVERAGE

These findings were not an anomaly. AON Hewitt also discovered a connection between employee engagement and performance. It found that organizations with high levels of engagement outperformed the stock market and posted returns 22% greater than average in 2010. Those with disengaged employees posted returns 28% lower than average. The survey found that the top three drivers of engagement were career opportunities, recognition at work and brand alignment.

BETTER DECISIONS

Including employees in decision making doesn’t just make them feel better about work—it leads to smoother operations. In Fasolino’s case, his team created a policy in which any workers who showed three signs of substance abuse from a government checklist would have to take a drug and alcohol test. If they failed once, they’d have to go to rehab before returning to work and would be subject to a random drug test during the 12 months after that. If they failed again, they’d be fired. When one employee failed twice, he told Fasolino, “You should fire me.” He and all of the other employees knew that was the only fair course—thanks to the policy they crafted.

UNLEARNING THE LESSONS OF BUSINESS SCHOOL

How can leaders foster greater engagement? The first step is ditching the mindset that many executives learned in business school. “They feel they can get results by telling people what to do,” says Fasolino. This stale thinking is often reinforced by their peers. A boss who complains to other execs about problems with an employee is likely to hear: “You need to fire the guy,” says Fasolino. “They’re not going to say he doesn’t have enough freedom, autonomy and purpose in his job.”

Employees want rules and boundaries, but, at the same time, need to be heard. They want to work toward a mission that’s bigger than earning a paycheck. If your employees are unmotivated and your company is underperforming, now is the time to look within—and turn things around!

If you are interested in strengthening your culture by installing the habits of highly effective organizations, bring your Executive to our workshop in Jacksonville, Florida on April 4^th (Four Decisions Workshop) where you will learn how to:

• Help your team members create a specific roadmap to success
• Align your incentives with strategic objectives
• Increase focus in the organization around the activities that will have the biggest positive impact
• Communicate your goals and objectives to everyone in the organization
• Ensure that there is not more than one person accountable to any initiative, process, and desired outcome

The post Profit from Employee Ideas appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

By and large, accountability processes and systems exist and are not working properly, and we find several of them lacking in depth.  In many cases, leadership does not enforce policy related to tools that were designed to hold others responsible. For example, the most effective way to hold salespeople accountable is to measure the daily activities that lead to sales. Many companies have experienced tremendous difficulty in enforcing adequate usage of the CRM. In our experience, when it is mandatory, salespeople provide the data, and management monitors and takes appropriate action as a result of the information. Failure to do so is causing most companies to miss a lot of opportunities as a result.

Success comes from executing the right plans, not from the planning process itself. This is a main reason why the most successful business leaders have found it useful to hire a third-party to help hold them accountable. It is not unusual the CEO to experience the most discomfort during this process.  After all, most of them achieved their positions as a result of their self-motivation, drive and confidence. These same traits work against them as they typically fail to focus on anything long enough to reach their stated goals. As a result, their team members fail to achieve desired outcomes. They are too busy trying to address the many conflicting messages.  Case in point, recently I did an organizational survey with a company’s top 10 executives in preparation for their annual planning retreat. We found that the CEO commonly provided this team with 25 new initiatives every week, even when the last 25 were barely addressed.

The above situations are not uncommon, and we typically find the following additional issues:

• The CEO was good at understanding what needed to be done but failed to recognize and/or commit the resources required to do it.
• The CEO was failing to prioritize and was making everything appear equally important.
• While the CEO may be a master at time management, his leadership approach was having a negative impact on a subordinate’s ability to manage time well.
• Too often responsibility and accountability are given without authority to accomplish the work.
• There is not an appropriate dashboard of key metrics to isolate progress in the essential areas of the business.

If you are interested in strengthening your culture by installing the right processes and systems please bring your Executive to our workshop in Jacksonville, Florida on April 4^th (Four Decisions Workshop) where you will learn how to:

• Help your team members create a specific roadmap to success
• Align your incentives with strategic objectives
• Increase focus in the organization around the activities that will have the biggest positive impact
• Communicate your goals and objectives to everyone in the organization
• Ensure that there is not more than one person accountable to any initiative, process, and desired outcome

The post Increase Accountability appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

Let’s start with the definition of each. 

– An expert in a specific process, system, subject, and/or industry who is hired to close the knowledge gap in their area of expertise. Examples include: management consultants, process experts, specialist attorneys, advertising agencies, and industry gurus.

Mentor – A person that is experienced in matters that pertain to issues that an executive or team may be facing. Examples of mentorship organizations include Vistage, Young Presidents Organization, Entrepreneurs Organization and Inner Circle where CEO forums are created to share experience. Also, it is common term for someone that has achieved a certain level of success in a particular area.

Trainer – An expert at teaching specific processes, procedures or systems and brings a specific method to help the client accelerate maximum success in applying those processes, procedures, or systems. Examples include training people to use new software, implement of a consistent sales process, or apply proven methods of leadership.

Coach – An expert at helping others reach a higher level of their potential success. Using the Socratic Method, a coach has the talent of asking the right questions.

Choosing among catalysts first starts with understanding what you really need. Here are some of the questions one must answer to determine what is needed:

• Do we have an experience gap?
• Do we have enough resources internally to reach the goal in the desired time-frame?
• Does the existing team have all the knowledge necessary to take the right actions?
• Does the existing team have enough context to address the issues we will encounter?
• Are we trying to create consistency or better outcomes in certain processes, systems or procedures?
• Do we know whether consistency in process will achieve better outcomes? In other words, are consistency and better outcomes mutually exclusive or interdependent?
• Does your organization have the right process for extracting the knowledge and experience in way that attains maximum benefits?
• Do any members of our team need to make any behavioral changes that would cause better results?
• Do any of our team members need to expand their perspective when decision-making?

Too often we find that these questions have not been adequately considered. As a result, we spend much of our initial dialog helping executives determine the answers. In many cases, the answer may be “we do not know for sure.” In these cases, I recommend having an independent analysis to help determine the answer.

Howard Shore is an executive leadership coach and founder of Activate Group Inc., based in Miami, Florida. His firm works with companies to deliver transformational management and business coaching to executive leadership. To learn more about executive leadership coaching through AGI, please visit www.activategroupinc.com , contact Howard at (305) 722-7216 or email him

The post Choice Among Coaches, Mentors, Trainers and Consultants appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

Spend a day with a senior certified coach and you will GAIN:

• An overview of the Four Decisions^TM (People, Strategy, Execution, Cash) you must get right to grow.
• Simple actionable executive tools to improve your business results right away.
• An executive, quarterly plan for the next quarter and the balance of 2013, built with your team.
• A considerable start on your 2013 One-Page Strategic Plan^TM, to focus and align your team.
• The Rockefeller Habits checklist to strengthen your ability to execute and accelerate your growth.
• An aligned, accountable and enthusiastic leadership team, ready to hit the ground running for a profitable 2013.

All participants will receive a free copy of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits book.

Register Today!

Sponsored By:  Axia Public Relations 

Guest Speakers: Howard Shore and Rick Noland

When: April 4th, 2013

Where: Radisson Hotel
               4700 Salisbury Road
              Jacksonville, FL 32256

Time: 7:30-5:00

Learn More Here!

The post Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: Four DecisionsTM Executive Workshop appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

Your team is probably fired up about grabbing more market share this year. But if you want to achieve that goal, it’s time to look at your operation through a fresh lens. There are some great ideas brewing in the global community that will help you outdistance your competitors.

One of the most important business concepts of the century is “return on luck” (ROL) . As Jim Collins explains in Great by Choice, all business leaders are being bombarded with both great luck and bad breaks. The smartest CEOs learn not to squander sudden opportunities and figure out how to turn dismal news to their advantage—multiplying the benefits of whatever hand they’re dealt.

Maximizing your “ROL” should be top of your list, every day. But your ROL is just part of the picture. Here are some vital ideas that will help you achieve great results in 2013 and beyond.

Big data

There’s no excuse anymore for not having the latest information about your market at your fingertips. For the first time, even tiny companies can search the vast information on the web that corporate giants use to uncover brand-new opportunities, using inexpensive cloud-based technology.

To feel the power of what big data can do immediately for your business, try SizeUp. Within seconds, this free site will tell you how many competitors exist in a specific locale, how your revenues stack up against theirs, and where to hunt for new business.

Reverse innovation

It’s time to forget the days when innovation flowed one way—from rich nations to poor ones. There’s a lot we can all learn from entrepreneurs and organizations working with scarce resources, says Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan. He points to a hospital in India that specializes in heart surgeries, achieving better outcomes with its $2,000 procedures than U.S. hospitals that charge $20,000 or more.

How does the hospital get such amazing results? By specializing in a niche, it runs more efficiently. For instance, while a general hospital typically needs to buy a vast array of equipment to perform every operation under the sun, this hospital needs equipment only for cardiac operations. And it gets a great return on its investment in the equipment it does buy, because it puts these tools into service all day long.

Expect to see this idea coming soon to the shores of the U.S. Meanwhile, we all need to comb the globe for other ideas from the world’s most resourceful innovators in our industries.

Newsjacking

In today’s teeming marketplaces, you need a savvy approach to public relations to stand out from the crowd. As marketer David Meerman Scott points out in his book Newsjacking, you don’t have to bankroll a massive PR campaign to propel your company into big news stories.

By offering journalists a fresh, interesting perspective on big developments in your industry, you may be able to “hijack” media reports that are in progress and turn their focus to your company. For instance, a reporter who is looking for a colorful way to illustrate a particular trend might welcome an anecdote about your company to put in the lead of his story.

Of course, you’ve got to know what stories reporters are covering at any given moment to do this. To connect with journalists about stories they’ve working on, sign up for Help a Reporter Out (helpareporter.com), a free crowdsourcing tool. Reporters from major publications send out alerts each day seeking sources for their stories. I recommend that you monitor HARO daily to see if there are any stories where you can lend your perspective—and get your name into the headlines.

Robots per capita

I’m fascinated by the ability of this simple metric to predict the prosperity of a country (and a company). It’s a great indicator of a nation’s economic efficiency and potential future growth. Thus, it didn’t surprise me to learn recently from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that Germany, with its thriving economy, has double the robots per capita of the U.S. — Germany has 163 robots for every 10,000 workers, while the U.S. has only 86, just above Spain.

However, I was surprised that Japan, which has suffered a slow economy for decades, has double the robots per capita of every other country. This may indicate that the country is likely to experience a resurgence.  And countries like Singapore and South Korea are showing sustained economic growth from their already high robot per capita ratios.

It’s a key performance indicator worth considering when looking at your own company.  Are you leading the rest of the competition in dramatically automating your business? 

The post 5 Big Ideas: Powering Your Business appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

Read The Full Article Here

The post Do you have the guts to tear up your priority list? appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

As an owner of three businesses, I can appreciate the challenge. There are so many things that must be done in order to be successful in business. As a result, it can be hard to see what is crucial. The natural entrepreneur has the “shiny object” syndrome. We are interested in pursuing the “shiny object”, which distracts us from concentrating on the matter at hand.

Business executives mainly fail to focus because of the way in which the human mind works. We operate more on a subconscious versus a conscious level. We tend to learn by repeated behaviors and allow those repeated behaviors to take precedence over conscious learning. In other words, our brains have us operating on auto-pilot. We may know consciously that the way we have behaved in the past is not working, but our subconscious knowledge still drives future behavior.

According to the Bain report, “… 80% of CEOs expect high levels of complexity over the next five years. Far fewer feel prepared to cope with it. A truly focused company, one that has cut complexity to the minimum, does not invest to win in every element of its business. It invests primarily in its core, the business in which it can outperform everybody else. A focused company does not try to appeal to every potential customer. It concentrates on the most profitable customers, those who it can serve better than any competitor can.”

As many of my readers know, I am a certified Gazelles Coach. As such, we take our clients through a process known as the “Four Decisions,” which was derived from a well-read book, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish. The power of the “Four Decisions” process is not producing the “one-page business plan.” While that is the output of the process, the true value derives from the discovery that occurs by going through the process.

We recently worked with a multinational public company that operates with several billion in revenue and has little-to-no profit to show for it. By working with their coaches, they found that the secret to achieving greater growth and profitability is predicated upon how well they are able to focus. The leadership team was stunned to realize that they had grown to several billion in revenue, and they were struggling because of their failure to have a focused strategy. Our client discovered that their focus had been on how much supply of product they had versus possible customer requirements. If you wanted to analyze their customer base and go-to-market strategy — there was none. As a result, they had no customer loyalty and were more susceptible to market pricing than if they had focused on a core customer and mastered those variables in their business that were important to the core customer.

Now that this has been discovered, it will be important that their coach continues to help them focus products and services in a way that best addresses the needs of the customers that they believe have the highest profit potential and will stay loyal as a result of addressing these needs. We concluded that, if they do this well, they will be able to use up 100% of their manufacturing capacity by serving much fewer customers well. Rather than being supply-driven they will become customer-driven. To accomplish this, it will be important to design the organization in a way that supports making critical decisions rather than supporting existing processes. Also, by being customer-driven rather than process-driven will result in integrated process efficiency rather than functional efficiency.

In the end, companies must attack complexity in their business. Focus is a never-ending journey.  Business must focus the majority of organizational emphasis on a very few key areas that are costing too much or causing some type delay in order to best serve core customers. We also recommend that businesses should focus their activity by quarter, treating each quarter as a 13-week race.  Race to improve one major area of your business. What you will find is that fixing one area will reveal sizable opportunities for simplification elsewhere for the next quarter.

Howard Shore is an executive leadership coach and founder of Activate Group Inc., based in Miami, Florida. His firm works with companies to deliver transformational management and business coaching to executive leadership. To learn more about executive leadership coaching through AGI, please visit www.activategroupinc.com , contact Howard at (305) 722-7216 or email him

The post Focusing on the Core appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.

Success comes from executing the right plans, not from the planning process itself. This is a main reason why the most successful business leaders have found it useful to hire a third-party to help hold them accountable.  It is not unusual the CEO to have the most discomfort during this process.  After all, most of them are in this position as a result of their self-motivation, drive and confidence. These same traits work against them as the typical fail to focus on anything long enough. As a result, their team members fail to achieve desired outcomes. They are too busy trying to address the many conflicting messages.  Case in point, recently I did an organizational survey with the top 10 executives in preparation for their annual planning retreat. We found that the CEO commonly provided this team with 25 new initiatives every week, even when the last 25 were barely addressed.

The above situation is not uncommon and we typically find the following additional issues:

• That the CEO was good at understanding what need to be done but failed to recognize the resources required to do it.
• The CEO was failing to prioritize and was making everything appear important.
• While the CEO may be a master at time management, his leadership approach was having a negative impact on a subordinate’s ability to manage their time well.
• Too often responsibility and accountability are given without authority to accomplish the work.
• There is not an appropriate dashboard of key metrics to isolate progress in the essential areas of the business.

In order to improve business execution of strategy, we recommend the following:

• Help your team members create a specific roadmap to success.
• Remember that a poor strategy, well executed, provides poor results.
• Align your incentives with strategic objectives.
• Give leaders, clear, measurable, specific, and with target date.
• Leaders need to get their hands dirty and be willing to be in the trenches with everyone else.
• Ensure that there is not more than one person accountable to any initiative, process, and desired outcome.

Howard Shore is an executive leadership coach and founder of Activate Group Inc., based in Miami, Florida. His firm works with companies to deliver transformational management and business coaching to executive leadership. To learn more about executive leadership coaching through AGI, please visit www.activategroupinc.com , contact Howard at (305) 722-7216 or email him

The post Improving Business Execution appeared first on Activate Group, Inc.