A Strategic Approach for Getting the Feedback You Need for Continued Growth and Success.

It’s a common challenge—the higher we rise as leaders, the less feedback we receive, and what we do here is more filtered. We tend to miss our previous “sounding boards”— the mentor dedicated to advancing our career, the boss who proactively cultivated our potential, peers to commiserate with, and the “common enemy” to rally against. Our days can become a revolving door of problems to be solved.

This “lonely at the top” experience arrives sooner than expected. We realize our organization has grown to a scale that requires us to lead beyond direct line-of-sight. We’re no longer clear what impacts we are having as a leader—for better or for worse —or what “blind spots” are creeping in to limit our effectiveness. A part of us longs to hear “the truth” yet our own behavior might be the very reason we’re not receiving it.

The good news is that we’re in the best position to take change this....

Increase the impact of the time you invest in team development.

As your team and business grow, high-leverage investments of your time and energy become essential. You have a business to run, people to manage, customers to serve, results to deliver, fires to put out, strategic objectives to track and a list of things you could spend time on that grows by the day. What if you could get three benefits — a “three-fer” — from the time you invest in team development?

Think of it as a “team flywheel.” Similar to stationary bikes in spin classes, it takes more energy to get the flywheel going than to keep it moving. Momentum builds and it spins faster with less effort and doesn’t come to a grinding halt the moment we stop.

One example of the flywheel effect is represented by the Orrin Woodward quote, “Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.”

Here are three ways to get your “Team Flywheel” m...

True authenticity is rarely easy, comfortable, or guaranteed to be effective. But it is essential to our ability to sustain long-term success--on our own terms.

This is where the concept for "Be Essential" came from. We continued to hear leaders expressing the desire to remain "authentic", have a "bigger impact", and continue growing and scaling to "make the most of" their potential. Yes, yes and yes! And yet, we often found at least one of these self-limiting beliefs was stalling their progress... and adding great frustration along the way. 

The first related to a lack of clarity regarding what "authentic" meant for them. The second related to a lack of clarity regarding what "impacts" they were already having--whether intentional or not, and whether beneficial or not. The third involved how to engage and balance these dimensions to build and sustain their progress over time. We call this the Essential Flywheel™ (represented by our logo), for the combination creates a dynamic, virtu...