Speaker 1: Welcome to this overview of the Extraordinary Leader. This is, in our opinion, the most impactful workshop that a leader can take. I've done leadership development for over 30 years, and we've taken that experience and designed a leadership development experience that can really change people's lives. Now, as people walk into a training room, the first thing you need to do is to show them some evidence that there's some impact from the training that they receive. The idea behind the Extraordinary Leader is that leadership makes a difference, that the better you are at leadership skills, the better the results for the organization are going to be. And what we've demonstrated here, tried to demonstrate at the beginning of the workshop, is there is a relationship between leadership skills and success factors in the organization. So let me show you some data. We start the organization by demonstrating the impact of leadership. This first graph shows you leadership effectiveness and intention to lead the organization. These are results from a financial services company. Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever worked for a really bad boss? Well, most of us have. Did you want to quit? Well, most of us did. As you look at this data here, the horizontal scale shows you leadership effectiveness from the worst leader, first to the 10th percentile, to the best leader, 91st to the 100th percentile. Now, what you see in the bars is the percentage of people that think about quitting. Worst leaders have about over 80% of their people that think about quitting. Best leaders, only about 5%. There's a correlation between a leader's abilities and the capability of a person to keep great talent. We're all in a game here in organizations. The organization that wins is the organization with the best talent. And one of the things that is key to keeping great talent is having great leaders. And so you can see that difference between poor leadership, good leadership, and great leadership. This next chart shows you the effect of leadership on net income. So a lot of people, especially executives, want the show me the money slide. And this is the show me the money slide. What it shows you is a study we did with mortgage banks where we looked at the worst leaders and found out they were actually losing money. Good leaders were making money, but great leaders doubled it. They doubled the net income. This next slide shows us sales. And again, we're looking at sales in millions of dollars. The worst leaders have less than $100 million in sales. The best leaders generated over $600 million in sales in their group. What we're showing you here is the effect of leadership effectiveness and employee engagement or satisfaction. What you're seeing here is leadership effectiveness broken into 20 different groups, every fifth percentile. And this particular study was done with 66,000 global leaders. So it's a huge global study done across the world. Have you ever worked for a poor leader? Has there been a time in your life when you worked for a really bad leader? Well, most people have. When I asked them what it was like, they say, I was dissatisfied, I was frustrated, I was angry, I was upset. Poor leaders create dissatisfaction. Now, as you see there, the worst leaders, those are the fifth percentile, the engagement of their employees is about the 20th percentile. But if we replace the poor leader, same organization, same compensation, same everything, with a good leader, what we find is engagement automatically goes up to the 50th percentile. The number one factor affecting the engagement of employees is who's your boss. And then if we replace the good leader with a great leader, one at the 100th percentile, what we get is engagement going up past the 80th percentile. We know that engagement is connected to outcomes. We know that in retail sales and in stores like, or organizations like Starbucks or Best Buy, that there's a direct connection between the engagement of employees, the level of customer satisfaction, and the level of profitability. Hospitals have even found that cure rates go up when employees are engaged. Every organization wants high engagement in their organization, and the number one factor to create that is employee engagement, is leadership effectiveness. Let me show you some studies across different organizations. This is the same study, but the first line you'll see here is for oil companies, and you can see it looks very similar. And then broadcaster, and then banking, and then software, and global pharma. All those lines, while there's differences in where they go, and how far they go up, what's true is the better the leader, the higher the engagement. Well, then I got an interesting group, rocket scientists. Now, if you want to be a rocket scientist, there's not a lot of options about where you can go. I mean, you probably go to school, and you probably get a degree, and this is the dream of your life. This is your life's work, right? And finally, you get a job as a rocket scientist. You're doing that work. But what happens if you're doing your life's work, your dream job, and you work for a poor leader? Well, your engagement is about the fifth percentile. Your dream is dead. Who ruined your dream? That supervisor did. You see, even though you're doing your life's work and your dream job, that supervisor has a profound effect about how you feel about it. But if you happen to work with that leader in the top 10%, your engagement is just about at the 90th percentile, right? And the dream is alive. The effectiveness of a leader has a profound effect over all kinds of outcomes, such as leadership effect, such as customer satisfaction, such as turnover. We've found studies with profitability, and we've found all kinds of studies with safety and other things. We've studied this over and over again, and we know that the skills of a leader are directly connected to good things that happen, success factors in the organization. Now, one of the interesting things we found in these studies is there's a difference between being good and being great. For many organizations, they're trying to take leaders to good. And what we found is it makes more sense to take leaders and set that precedent that we want great leaders. Now, usually when I show these studies to people, someone always asks a question. And I go, what's your question? And they say, how did you measure leadership effectiveness? How did you determine the poor leaders, the good leaders, and the great leaders? Well, in every one of these studies, the measurement of leadership effectiveness is always the same. It is this 360 data. We'd use the aggregate, and we don't use one rater, but we use 10 or 15 raters. And from that aggregate score of how people were rated by others, we can actually determine the effectiveness of that leader, and that correlates to the outcomes. You see, that's the evidence that people need. We created a competency model. We created some items that measured those competencies. And then, based on that feedback from others, we correlated that to outcomes. That's the holy grail. If you can show people there's a connection between their skills as a leader and outcomes in the organization that people want, that's the holy grail. And so the question that most people need to ask themselves when they're going through this leadership development experience is, where am I at in terms of that leadership scale? Am I a poor leader? Am I a good leader? Or am I a great leader? Well, that's what we're going to give them in this extraordinary leader experience. Now, the second question people start to ask themselves is, well, how do I become a great leader? What does it take for a person to move from good to great? When we get that 360 assessment, we find that some leaders have an issue that's very negative. Now, how many here think they might have a weakness? Everybody does. But this isn't a weakness. This is what we call a fatal flaw. We actually find that about 20%, 25% of our leaders have something we call a fatal flaw. A fatal flaw has a significant negative impact on a person's effectiveness. In fact, people with fatal flaws, their average effectiveness score is the 18th percentile. So people with fatal flaws, we help them identify those flaws, and we encourage them to change it. We give them some tools to change it. Now, not everyone has a fatal flaw. Some people have a profile that looks more like this. I mean, they have some positive items. They have some negative items. But where do you think intuitively most people start to focus on? Well, they focus on the low areas. Why do they do that? Well, we've really been told that all our lives. We've been given that drill in school, and we tend to think about development as accepting what we're good at, but then working on and improving what we're not good at, focusing on our weaknesses. In fact, if you ask people what development or performance improvement means, it always means fixing weaknesses. Now, true, in 20 to 25 percent of the cases, people need to focus on that weakness. They have a fatal flaw. But in 75 percent or 80 percent of the cases, they don't have a fatal flaw. And in that situation, we'd say quit focusing on your weaknesses. We think there's a better way. What is that better way? Well, we looked at data from thousands of leaders, and we looked at the impact of strengths. Now, if people didn't have any strengths, their average effectiveness was just at the 34th percentile. What would happen if people did one thing well, if people had one strength? Well, we know that it would go up. We measured people on 16 competencies. How much? Well, maybe one-sixteenth. That's only three or four or five percentiles. But when we looked at the data, people with one strength, their average effectiveness went up to the 64th percentile. It almost doubled. If people did one thing well, they went from the bottom third of the distribution to the top third of the distribution. And if people did three things well, if you were good at three things, your average effectiveness was at the 81st percentile. You see, we discovered that what makes leaders great is not the absence of weakness, but it's the presence of strength. It was that people did something well. And the good news here is you don't need to be perfect. Great leaders have weaknesses. They don't have fatal flaws, but they have weaknesses. They don't need to be perfect. But the question is, could you be good at three things? That's the challenge we give to people in this course. Being good, being great at three things can make a difference. Now, again, what were messages in our training is, can you be a great leader? And the secret formula for how to be in the top 20 percent is find three skills you could be great at. Well, after we introduce these two concepts, then we give people feedback. And the feedback helps people determine how they're doing. Now, if you want to understand your strengths and weaknesses, you'd think that you're the best judge. In reality, we've found that when we look at self ratings and we look at a person's ability to predict their strengths and weaknesses, guess who's the worst at predicting your strengths and weaknesses? You're right. It's you. You're the worst judge of your strengths and weaknesses. Others are twice as accurate in predicting your strengths and weaknesses. And so we give people feedback. We do this in two different ways or using two different vehicles. Half of our clients use our standard Extraordinary Leader 360. We have 16 differentiating competencies we've researched. We know that these are the key behaviors that drive high performance and leadership. Another half of our clients either have an existing competency model, and we adapt to that competency model and create an Extraordinary Leader 360 for them, or they ask us to come in and research and use the same techniques we used to find the 16 competencies, a unique competency model for that organization. Either way, it works very well. Whether you have a custom 360 or a standard 360, but in the training program, we give people enough time to really diagnose and understand their feedback. What's the funny thing with training programs at work is sometimes people just hand out that 360 and give it to people, and people will take a few minutes to look at it, but then they'll put it in their drawer. They'll never look at it again. That's a waste of money. And so giving people the time and having the coaches there to support them in that development process is really critical. Once people understand or get a chance to look at their feedback, you'll see that the feedback report is really simple, but there's some unique things about it that make it different. When I first started giving people feedback, I showed them how their performance was compared to the average. What I found is that people were often really satisfied with being just a little bit above average, and that's the wrong message. You see, we found that great leaders made a great difference, and so what we started to do was show people their performance compared to the 75th and the 90th percentile on all these competencies. Our feedback report is straightforward. It's simple. It also gives people feedback on what's important and also what their employee engagement is, and those things go together to really help people understand the impact they're having on others. Once people understand their feedback, the next thing they need to do is select an issue for development. I always ask groups when I'm working with them, how many things do you think we want you to work on? Five things? Four things? Three things? You know, everybody in that audience is overwhelmed. They're incredibly busy, and what we're going to ask them to work on is one thing. Find one competency. You notice the difference from going from zero strengths to one strength, 34th to the 64th percentile. What we find is that we can have a substantial improvement in the organization by having people focusing on one issue, and so we give them a model to help them do that. We call it the CPO model. We look at three elements. First is competence. What's your strengths? What are you good at? The 360 report gives them the most accurate assessment of their competence that could ever be developed. They know where they're at as a leader, but the second thing they need to look at is what the organization needs. Now, the organization is important, and doing a good job is important because that's what gets you promoted, so the second element is the organization needs. The third element that's critical is your passion. What do you love? What do you care about? It's really hard to develop a profound strength on something you don't really like, so we connect those three things. We find a leadership sweet spot for people, and we help people identify that one competency to work on. The last thing we need to talk about is how to build strengths. People, they know how to fix weaknesses. Now, let me give you an example. Let's say that you got very poor scores on honesty and integrity. Would it be difficult to figure out how to improve? I don't think so. You could do things like stop lying and quit cheating and walk your talk. I mean, those things would help you move from bad to good, right? But let's suppose that you got good scores on honesty and integrity and wanted that to be a profound strength. Well, what would you do to move from good to great? Well, I've asked people this, and they come up with things like, well, be really honest or be really, really honest or be honest harder. Those are nice things to try, but they don't really work. You see, the process of going from bad to good is straightforward. It's linear. It's those, you know, those basic things you need to do. But the process of moving from good to great is nonlinear. It's different. We discovered this when we started to suggest that people develop strengths. They didn't know what to do, and we didn't know how to help them until we did the research. We looked at thousands of leaders on every competency, and what we looked for was leaders that had a profound strength, and then we looked for something we called companion behaviors. The companion behaviors are the levers that help people build a strength. So what we found is that people that were really good at honesty and integrity tended to be more assertive. Now, that's a very different behavior than honesty and integrity. That's the extent to which you're willing to speak up. Do you have to be assertive to be honest? No. You probably know people who are honest but unassertive. But what assertiveness does is it separates the good from the great. Those people that were willing to speak up, those people that were willing to say, that's not okay, those were the people that were great at honesty. Those that weren't willing to say that sat back and were sort of questioning their honesty. You see, for every competency, there's between 8 and 14 companion behaviors, and what we provide is a competency companion development guide. This is, I think, the most important contribution we've made to the field. It gives people a way to really take a plan and put some meat in it. Because before we had this, people would come to a training program, and I'd say, what are you working on? And they'd say, communicating. And I'd say, well, what's your plan? And they'd say, to communicate more. And I'd say, could you be more specific? And they'd say, communicate more with enthusiasm. You see, everything was linear. But what we found is that with our companion behaviors, people were able to connect the behavior they wanted to improve, like technical professional expertise, with companion behaviors that really leveraged that capability. Expertise is great. Having knowledge is great. But being able to solve problems takes you from good to great. Expertise is great. But communicating powerfully really helps you to demonstrate and help others understand that expertise that you have. These behaviors are the key to building strengths and building profound strengths. With this approach, we found that leaders can really change. And we've got the evidence. We know from our tests that in this one example here, leaders in a pre-test were at the 57th percentile. In the post-test, they moved to the 65th percentile. We know that most of those leaders made a significant positive gain, both those with fatal flaws and those with strengths that built them. So I hope this overview has been helpful for you in understanding a little bit more about the Extraordinary Leader. We know that if you bring this program into your company, it's going to make a huge difference, and you're going to raise the bar on leadership effectiveness. Now, my opinion about the cost of leadership effectiveness is it's free. When you think about the outcomes that you deliver, increased engagement, reduced turnover, increased customer satisfaction, increased profitability, it doesn't cost anything. Great leaders make a difference. Can you be a great leader? Can you help your organization develop great leaders? Thank you.