About This Course
Transform your leadership and the teams they Lead
I have a keen interest in developing and specifically TRANSFORMING people and organizations through changing the way they are led. As I mentioned, it is a particular passion of mine that is rooted in my past experience as a teacher to middle schoolers and high schoolers and a University Professor to graduate students in an MBA program but it is a practice of mine having been in senior business leadership roles over the last twenty years. I saw my role then as a teacher and now as business leader specifically to facilitate development in the student and employee on many levels, and to do that effectively, I had to engage their minds and hearts in order to boost their performance. More importantly I was trying to get them to see themselves as more than they saw themselves. Consequently, I see my role as a leader in business organization leading teams much like I saw my purpose in the classroom. I need to similarly engage my team members as I did the students when I was a teacher to help them realize their greater potential. I believe that is the role of every leader. I believe that is your role.
In this course, it is my aim that you ultimately see people and teams as THE KEY component to your business and/or your organization. I believe the people are your fundamental responsibility -more so than profits - and I will show you how that will ultimately drive engagement and grow the business! People are naturally prone to develop exponentially under the right conditions AND a leader who is willing to humbly lead will help drive such outcomes. If you learn how to implement and teach your teams to think up and think out of the nominal more traditional structure into the model I propose, you will create an innovative, natural, and sustainable environment of learning that will both drive and transform your teams. And this ultimately translates to exponential GROWTH - not only in your teams but in the business. Relationships between the leader and the team will develop naturally if you implement this learning paradigm correctly. You will gradually see and feel the people's desire to learn, grow, and contribute.
The traditional classroom like the traditional leadership model of top-down purely hierarchical structures stifles this desire of the individual. Performance all around the globe from Fortune 500 companies to small "mom & pop" shops is desperately waning. The employee like the student won't own or develop learning until you disrupt traditional patterns and present something (structure) and someone (leader) authentic and intimately more human. By changing the more stayed and controlled rhythms of equilibrium in the historic model, you can literally prod both internal and then corporate development. But you MUST learn how and understand WHY you need to create and build the right conditions and environment for this shift.
As I've transitioned into business, I see the classroom much like I see the organization. Employees, like students need to be engaged in their work for the company and the employees to GROW, and leadership - like teachers - need to learn new ways to engage their people. As the traditional classroom has lost its effectiveness, the traditional model of leadership is anemic. The people and the organization are suffering. Engagement is at an all time low globally and both the organization and more importantly the people are suffering. Performance personally and corporately has become terminal.
In this course, I will have written lecture, video vignettes of me talking/lecturing, youtube links of real life disruptors sharing their successful experiments/organizations, relevant article links to substantiate the science, research and thinking, testimonials, and some of the latest and most relevant shifts in leadership models across multiple industries. Finally, I will connect this to the metaphor of surfing that connects to a methodology and framework I developed and successfully practiced across multiple and very different industries and different people in domestic and global markets. This course will show you the current, historic, antiquated leadership paradigm and WHY it must change and HOW to actually implement the change that will draw a new paradigm to transform your teams and your organization.
In order to bring this home and make it accessible, I designed most of the lectures with a Principle summarizing the section followed by an Application that either suggests an example of how to implement it or an example of how it was implemented in one of my businesses or a comparative example from another leader. This course will show you how and why you need to lead your teams and organization into the 21st century. And to do that end I will teach you why every leader should metaphorically "learn to surf."