I’m very excited about my upcoming book, Great Leaders Grow: Becoming a Leader for Life, coauthored by Mark Miller from Chick-fil-A and published by our good friends at Berrett-Koehler. It will be available to everyone this Tuesday, February 7. Like many of my books, Great Leaders Grow is an easy-to-read parable, but its message is significant:  Our capacity to grow determines our capacity to lead.  In today’s economy, this is more important than ever before. Will you be a leader who is always ready to face the next challenge? Or will you be a leader who tries to apply yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems? Mark and I are convinced that the path to increased influence, impact, and leadership effectiveness is paved with personal growth. Growth is at the heart of what creates and sustains great leaders. And the lack of personal growth sabotages the careers of more leaders than anything else. Case in point:  A leader mentioned in the book was terminated after fourteen years with the same company. Because he wasn’t learning and growing, he had basically repeated his first year of service fourteen times. The world is moving too fast to rely on past success and past knowledge alone. Leaders must continue to grow. We believe that great leaders make a choice to GROW in four areas. In a nutshell, to be a great leader, you must: Gain Knowledge Reach Out to Others Open Your World Walk toward Wisdom In the next few blogs, I’ll expand on each of these ideas. In the meantime, in both your professional and personal life, think about whether you are growing in these four areas. And remember:  Continuing to learn and grow leads not only to professional success, but also to personal fulfillment.

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" is the last segment of the famous opening line to the Star Trek television series. Although we are not exploring the expanses of space, this line rings resoundingly true in simulated training efforts around the world. Boundaries are being pushed in a simulated setting and new […]

In our just-released book Great Leaders Grow, Mark Miller and I explore how great leaders make the conscious choice of continuous personal growth. As we say in the book’s introduction:  Growing for a leader is like oxygen to a deep-sea diver: without it, you die. Not a physical death, of course—but if you stop growing, your influence will surely erode and, ultimately, you may lose the opportunity to lead at all.  One way great leaders can grow is to gain knowledge. Gaining knowledge doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a long-term commitment you must make and then put into practice year after year. Gaining knowledge generally comprises four elements. The first is self-knowledge. This is a matter of looking in the mirror and being aware of your own strengths and weaknesses as well as how your temperament and personality mesh with your environment.  Great leaders have a high degree of self awareness. Assessment tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the DiSC Profile, or Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 can help you understand what makes you tick as well as how to better relate to those around you. Equally important is gaining knowledge of others. Spend time getting to know the folks around you at work. When you work on building relationships, you can go beyond the superficial to learn how people like to be recognized, how they prefer to communicate, who their families are, and what really matters to them. The more you know about your colleagues at every level, the more effective you can be in working with them to attain common goals. Gaining knowledge includes learning about your industry.  Read up on the history of your industry and do some research on what’s happening today. What’s true now that may not be true in the future? Also, take a closer look at your chief competitors. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Finally, gain knowledge about the field of leadership. Explore the profusion of books, blogs, and other information available about leadership to discover trends and best practices. Take a look at your current skill set and see what skills other leaders have that you might need to work on. So, what will you do this week to grow through gaining knowledge?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Simulation, serious game, virtual reality, and immersive are just a few of the terms used to describe the nature of military training today. There are supporters for this new training paradigm who praise the efficacy of training efforts and are excited by the cost savings which simulations supply. Others need a bit more convincing but, […]

In my last couple of blogs I’ve been focusing on my new book, Great Leaders Grow, which I wrote with Mark Miller. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a leader, this book can make a difference in your life—because everyone is a potential leader. Any time you seek to influence the thinking, behavior, or development of people, either personally or professionally, you are taking on the role of a leader. All of us can be leaders, whether it’s at work or in our homes or communities. And continuous personal growth is part of what makes a great leader. In addition to Gaining Knowledge, which I talked about last time, another important move toward becoming a leader for life is to Reach Out to Others—the R in our GROW model.  One of the best ways to reinforce your own learning is to help others grow by teaching them what you have learned. This doesn’t need to be a formal situation where you facilitate a seminar or teach in a classroom. It can be as informal and friendly as a lunchtime conversation. In fact, storytelling is one of the best ways to share what you know with someone else in a memorable way. Look for "teachable moments"—opportunities to challenge others to grow. For instance, I reach out every day by sending a voicemail to everyone in our company. My morning message usually includes something I learned while working with a client, something I read in a book, or maybe just an interesting observation that I felt like passing along.  I believe these daily messages reinforce our organizational values and also strengthen our close sense of community with each other, even though we now have team members all over the world. If you pay attention, you might just encounter a teachable moment while you are driving your daughter to soccer practice, having a phone conversation with a colleague across the country, or grabbing a cup of coffee with some co-workers in the break room. When we share what we learn, we model self-leadership as well as personal growth. It gives us credibility to challenge others to grow. What is something you recently learned that you could reach out and share with people in your organization?  How will you do it?

Last week, we discussed how serious games within simulations like Virtual Battlespace 2TM (VBS2TM) are great at engaging soldiers during training. Another component that increases the quality of simulated training, one that we focus on at Discovery Machine, is behavior modeling — the modeling of how humans make decisions under various circumstances. While behavior modeling […]

If you are a regular reader of my blogs, you’ll know that I’m highlighting the four major areas where great leaders need to grow continuously, taken from my new book with Mark Miller called Great Leaders Grow.  I’ve already covered the first two parts of our GROW model—Gain Knowledge and Reach Out to Others. The third aspect of growth we’re going to focus on is to Open Your World. It’s so easy to get into a rut, both in our work life and our home life, and just stay there. One of the greatest ways to ensure your own continual growth is to expand your mind and your life through new experiences—both at work and outside of work—that light a spark within you. Mark Miller likes to use the analogy of an artist with a palette. When an artist puts paint on the palette, he can then use that paint to create a masterpiece. As we open our world, we’re putting different colors of paint on our palette. We won’t be able to use all the colors immediately, but they are now at our disposal because we’ve had that experience or we’ve established that relationship. What are some ways for you to open your world—and open yourself to growth—at work? I love the idea of having lunch with different people periodically. I have lunch with different groups or departments at our company every so often. I’m always surprised at how learning a few new things about someone can give me a whole new perspective on that person. And then I have a better connection with that person. Try it! Take advantage of the opportunity to lead any kind of group at work you can, whether it’s a cross-functional team working on a new company initiative or a weekly book club. Any time you lead, you learn more about being a leader. Shadow someone from another department or team. If you are in Finance, learn more about Marketing. If you are in Marketing, spend an hour with a person in Shipping. If you are in Shipping, hang out with someone from Human Resources. It can be eye-opening to see the view from a different side of the organization. It’s just as important to open your world outside the workplace. A balance between interesting professional work experiences and exciting personal life experiences is essential if you are going to keep growing. This still counts as paint on your palette, because all of these experiences impact you and fuel your point of view. Here are some ideas to open your world outside work: Take a class at a local community college. Learn a new language or become proficient with a new type of computer software—this will add something to your resume that wasn’t there last year. Volunteer at church, a local Boys and Girls Club, or an animal shelter. Volunteering not only expands your mind, it can make your problems seem less important. Travel. It doesn’t matter where you go. Whether you take a day trip to a nearby town or plan a three-week European vacation, growth and learning can happen anywhere. Expose yourself to the arts. Get out of your comfort zone if you have to.  Listen to a classical music CD, attend a local play, go to an art museum, or take guitar lessons. Remember, leaders are learners. Every time you open your world, you grow a little. Whether it be meeting with a new colleague, helping at a food bank, organizing the company picnic, or whitewater rafting with friends—you’ll be a more well-rounded person, a more interesting conversationalist, a more critical thinker, and a more confident leader. Take advantage of every opportunity to open your world and you will continue to grow as a leader for life.

As I continue on with the lessons from Great Leaders Grow, my latest book written with Mark Miller, you may notice that all three of the previously mentioned areas in which leaders must grow—gaining knowledge, reaching out to others, and opening your world—are lifelong pursuits. Our fourth way to assure growth as a leader, Walk Toward Wisdom, is no different. The pursuit of wisdom never ends for those who aspire to leadership. Wisdom can be defined as the application of accumulated knowledge and experience. Contrary to what you might think, wisdom really has nothing to do with age. We all have known younger people who might be described as "wise beyond their years," and many of us probably can say we know a few "old fools." The truth is, wisdom is attained, bit by bit, throughout our lifetime. It’s always within our reach, but it must be pursued. The walk toward wisdom should include these elements: Self Evaluation - First, slow down, look in the mirror, and be truthful with yourself. What’s working and what’s not working? What are your strengths and how can you better leverage them? What are your weaknesses and how can you minimize them? How are you adding value to your life, your organization, the world? Self evaluation isn’t easy, but it is a necessary starting point for pursuing wisdom. We all have blind spots and things we don’t know but need to learn about ourselves. Socrates said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." And even Shakespeare referred to self evaluation when he wrote, "To thine own self be true." Honest Feedback - Feedback helps us learn from our past. No matter how candid you try to be during your self evaluation, you’ll never be able to overcome your own bias and perspective, so you must ask others for feedback. This can be done either formally or informally. My associate Rich Case always used to say that feedback is the breakfast of champions—I love that!  So ask your colleagues at every level for honest feedback on how you have been doing. Encourage them to be frank. Ask them what you should start doing, what you should keep doing, and what you should stop doing. A word to the wise:  Typically, even folks who are honest with their feedback will tell you only about 90 percent. Yes, they tell you the truth, but don’t always give you that last 10 percent. Both Mark Miller and I have always had a few people who care enough to tell us the whole truth by giving us that last 10 percent. It’s important to have at least a handful of these "truth tellers" in your life to keep you in check. Whether you are successful at getting people to give you honest feedback has a lot to do with how you react when feedback is given. One of the ways you can tell the difference between great leaders and self-serving leaders is the way they respond to feedback. Self-serving people get very protective and defensive, because they think they already know the truth, and will often "kill the messenger." But you can always tell when someone wants to learn from feedback, because when you give that person feedback the first thing he or she will say is, "Thank you. That’s really helpful. Is there anything else I should know?" or simply, "Tell me more." Great leaders will actually encourage the other person to give that extra 10 percent of feedback. They want to be sure they are getting everything out of that person. Self-serving leaders don’t want to hear feedback at all. Next week I’ll talk about the last aspect of walking toward wisdom and have some final words about Great Leaders Grow.  In the meantime, I’d love it if you would leave a comment and share how you are choosing to grow as a leader, either in the workplace or at home.

I was reading something by Karl Kapp, a former professor of mine at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert in the field of instructional gaming or what he likes to refer to as "The Gamification of Learning and Instruction". The article I was reading was called "Creating a Natural, Engaging Conversation in Your […]

When’s the last time you went to the movies? Chances are, your visit involved buying your movie ticket, silencing your phone, and maybe even splurging on a box of overpriced popcorn. I’m able to say this with some confidence because many of our day-to-day activities, like going to the movies, are governed by a group […]