Tag: Wellbeing

Gravity of Leadership Craig Johns

How Gravity Of Leadership Determines Your Impact

Posted on by Craig Johns in Article
Gravity of Leadership Craig Johns

Gravity of Leadership

By Craig Johns

Your Gravity of Leadership has the power to create or destroy, inspire or dishearten, empower or restrict, include or exclude, thrive or struggle, be present or distant, fight or flight, strengthen or weaken and grow or wither away.

I’m curious, how are you perceived as a leader? Good, average or bad?

I don’t believe people intentionally set out to become bad leaders who create toxic environments that negatively impacts their employees, team, community, friends or family members lives. 

In most cases people set out with the intention to be good leaders who make the right decisions, support their people and enhance their team, community or company they are involved in. 

However, we all know that the intention of being a good leader does not always match the reality of the situation. 

Whether it be the influence of environments leaders have worked in, childhood beliefs, a lack of leadership training or an unconscious lack of self or situational awareness, leaders can have quite a detrimental and negative impact even though they are trying their best to lead the people around them,

What I have found is that when you are conscious and intentional about your leadership, you can increase the chances of your Gravity of Leadership having a positive impact and influence on people, teams and companies.

When Delta Airlines plummeted from the skies

Let’s take a look at Delta Airlines, who were once famous for their customer service excellence. The leaders introduced cost-saving measures that slashed corporate training budgets and staff perks, led to an almost overnight collapse. 

Famously known for their smiles, Delta Airlines employees became grumpy and no longer motivated to care about their customers. As you can imagine, the result was customer voting with their feet and moving to competitor airlines who placed high value on customer services. 

Within 3 years, Delta Airlines went from being routinely voted by passengers as one of the top 3 airlines in America to filing for bankruptcy. They were rescued, but have never regained the trust and loyalty of passengers, even after rebuilding the old culture of hospitality and excellent services. 

One decision, by the leadership team, was all it took to create a seismic event that went off the Richter scale. Their Gravity of Leadership and a long lasting legacy effect that they are still paying for. 

What is the effect of your decisions, behaviours, attitudes, choices and opinions?

As a leader your impact either draws people together or pushes people away. The strength of your impact can vary from being barely noticeable to extremely dramatic and therefore determines how slow or fast you pull people towards each other or push them away. It’s like a combination of gravity that pulls people in and a magnet that either repels or attracts people. 

Gravity comes from the latin word gravitas that means ‘weight’, which is derived from its latin root of gravis meaning ‘heavy’. In regards to human beings, the greater your gravitas the heavier the weight your ideas, influence and authority have on people.  

But your gravity of leadership is much more than just gravitas. If we look at gravity, it is the universal force that attracts objects in space towards each other. On planet earth, gravity is the force that pulls objects towards the centre of the planet. In leadership, your Gravity Of Leadership is not only the strength of force on people, but also acts like a magnet where you can either pull people together or push them away.

How can you shift your Gravity of Leadership?

Your own Gravity of Leadership has the ability to create a culture that has a powerful feeling of inclusiveness, belonging and connectedness. The choices you take and the decisions you make can have a positive impact on the people you lead and serve.

How you lead can leave an influential lasting legacy beyond your lifetime. Your Gravity of Leadership is quite often silent and you may not be aware of the positive and negative impact you are creating.

Being conscious and intentional about how you lead others and yourself is an important start to shifting your gravity of leadership. How much impact are you prepared for and willing to create through your leadership? How do you want to be perceived as a leader?

Think about a critical mass of people moving and working towards something better would be like gravity – difficult to resist, difficult to fight, and if you do, you’ll be shot off into stratosphere all by yourself!

So what is it that creates an irresistible gravitational pull as a leader? 

Stay connected and find out more in the Gravity of Leadership Linkedin newsletter as each week we help you to discover the DNA of high performing leaders who create thriving teams.

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Walking The Talk

WALKING THE TALK

Posted on by nrg2perform in Article
Walking The Talk
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Walking the Talk

It is amazing at how often aspects of life come around in cycles. The walking meeting, which is now starting to make more traction in the business world, is no different.

In an Inspiring Great Leaders (previously active CEO) Podcast interview with former Sport Australia CEO, Kate Palmer, we talked about how she utilises walking meetings and the importance of encouraging her staff to do the same. Kate takes incorporating movement with meetings a step further by sitting on an exercise bike, which she recently placed in her office, and riding while on conference calls. She is also considering putting a second bike in her office, to encourage visitors to join her for a ride when having a face-to-face meeting.

Some of the world’s most influential people, such as Aristotle, Beethoven and Queen Elizabeth I, have used the tool to great effect. Now it is common for CEO’s and leaders of some of the world’s most high profile companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook to make walking meetings a daily habit.

Studies are demonstrating that exercise, including walking, alters our brain by stimulating the growth of new brain cells, improving its plasticity and even protecting the brain from cognitive impairment.

Your mind is no different to the muscles in your body. If you stress a muscle, it will become fatigued and therefore lead to a reduction in performance. You then rest or deploy recovery strategies, the muscle recovers and physiological processes occur which allow your performance to improve to a new level. The brain works in the same way when it is stimulated, with new brain cells forming and an increase in cognitive function occurring when you give it a rest, allowing you to think clearer and open up more creative ideas and solutions to come to fruition.

There are the health benefits of fresh air (depending on what location you are in), getting the body moving, and the mental relaxation that tends to occur when we are surrounded by nature and a change in scenery. Walking allows the brain to reduce lingering doubt and procrastination that tends to occur when remaining in a single location while completing work.

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Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

It has also been shown that positive influences on our mental function and cognitive ability occur when our bodies are moving. Going for a walk has been noted to release beneficial hormones such as endorphins so we feel better and more alert, while also encouraging creativity and inspiration.

A 2017 Stanford University study found that walking encouraged divergent thinking. The increase in divergent thinking occurred no matter whether the exercise occurred prior to or during thinking through a question, problem or puzzle they faced. The activity of walking or other exercise triggers greater creativity, and therefore patterns of ideas that come to mind.

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Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Anecdotal evidence has found that honest exchanges between people are more productive when walking than when people are sitting. It is believed that walking enables barriers are reduced between supervisors and subordinates, enhancing employee engagement. It is thought that walking side-by-side relates more to peer-to-peer, therefore removing some of the hierarchical barriers than can occur when sitting across from each other, when having discussions.

If you want to enhance the effectiveness of your walking meetings, try incorporating some fun and choosing a change in scenery, stick to small groups of two to four people, avoid going near cafes or food stands, and reduce the element of surprise by giving your colleagues some lead time on having a walking meeting.

RESOURCES:

Clayton, R., Thomas, C., & Smothers, J. (2015). How to do Walking Meetings Right. Harvard Business Review, August 2015. link

Malleret, T., Maxwell, C. (2018). Enhance Decision Making and Problem Solving by Walking. Wharton Business School, Sep 2018. link

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142-1152.

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Why Curiosity Is So Important

WHY CURIOSITY IS SO IMPORTANT

Posted on by nrg2perform in Article
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Why CURIOSITY IS SO IMPORTANT

By Craig Johns

Curiosity leads to breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions. So why do we see companies stifling curiosity in the workplace?

It is normal for humans to seek new information and experiences. By cultivating curiosity and the promotion of exploring novel possibilities throughout a company, employees will think deeper and more rationally about decisions.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. 

ALBERT EINSTEIN

If we step back in time, when we were a child, we had an insatiable need to explore and understand the world around us. We were not afraid to challenge the status quo by asking lots of questions, tasting things we probably shouldn’t or doing something for the first time, without the worry of whether we were wrong or offending anyone.

As we grew older we become more self-conscious, try to appear more confident and show that we know what we are doing. By the time we arrive as adults, our curiosity is quite suppressed as fear of being judged and not living up to other people’s expectations creeps in.

The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.”

UNKNOWN

Curiosity leads to creativity and innovation, which is important for you and your company to adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures. It creates an environment that inspires employees to improve their collaborative relationships, trust and more respect of their leader.

Leaders can fall into the trap of thinking that curiosity will increase risk and inefficiency. They stumble with the conundrum faced between the now and the future. How do we meet budget, sales targets, membership numbers and deadlines, when we know that we need to allow time where employees have the freedom to create new products, services, processes and business lines?

“Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive with those who are merely going through the motions. 

TOM ROBBINS

Finding the balance of exploration versus efficiency is an important component of a leader. Employees, who are under pressure to complete tasks quickly, tend to avoid asking questions about how they can improve their output and enhance the possible outcomes. When we question the status quo, we may not always produce useful information or solutions, but we also may prevent a decision being made that is catastrophic for your role and your company.

We perform better when we are curious because we view the tough situations more creatively. High performing employees, who are curious, seek more information from their colleagues, which helps improve the work that they do. They perform better because information is openly shared and they listen more carefully. New ideas are created, job satisfaction is improved, motivation increases and innovation flourishes as curiosity leads to a high performance environment.

“Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward opening up new doors and doing new things, because we are curious and curiosity leads us down new paths. 

WALT DISNEY

The power of solving problems together and looking at suitable alternatives, brings teams closer together. It allows employees to step into another employees shoes, look at it from another perspective and allows them to work together in a more effective manner.

How will you spark new ideas, rather than killing the flame, today?

DOWNLOAD

To learn more about proactively planning your recovery and scheduling your energy, please DOWNLOAD the Break the CEO Code Whitepaper

READ MORE ARTICLES

Beyond The Comfort Zone Link
High Performers Cultivate More Powerful Traits Link
Are You Living Link
People Are Our Greatest Assets Link
It’s All About Trust Link
Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
Are Leaders Born? Link

LEARN MORE

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active CEO CORPORATE
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Craig Johns SPEAKER
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