Good morning fellow leaders and influencers, I hope this note finds you well.
What a past few days! I’ve been co-facilitating an amazing conference in Saskatoon called CUNextGen 2013. About 65 young leaders (under 40) from credit unions and related organizations across Canada, from St. John’s to Victoria, gathered to explore leadership and strategic thinking, and to connect with each other. At the risk of sounding trite, I have great confidence in the next generation of leaders in this country; smart, engaged, reflective and filled with humour. I spent most of my time in awe of the brilliance in the room.
My co-facilitator was my friend and colleague Kim Andres http://www.andresconsulting.ca/ . One of the (re)learnings for me was once more the importance of questions in our work as leaders. Kim explained that the idea of a ‘servant leader’ was helpful whether working with your boss or with the people who report to you; asking them questions to clarify, to dig deeper, to engage, and in particular to support strategic thinking by asking the “right question?” By the end of the conference there were a great laughs when a participant would make a statement and one of his/her colleagues would call out from somewhere else in the room “why is that important to you?!”
One of my contributions to the conference was a session on “Signature Presence” and “Personal Branding” (see the work of http://www.mboexecutivecoaching.com/ and http://www.forbes.com/sites/glennllopis/2013/04/08/personal-branding-is-a-leadership-requirement-not-a-self-promotion-campaign/ and http://www.thecoachingproject.com/associates/carol/ ) The session really became a giant “group coaching” session, as my focus on how to build a signature presence and or a personal brand was actually to explore, you guessed it, questions! Here are just a few of the ones with we engaged:
• What is the one most common piece of positive feedback you’ve received over the past 2-3 years?
• Why do you think it is important to be good at that?
• What is the number one problem you were born to solve, or the number one question you were born to answer?
• What are you best at?
• What is your passion?
We found that by exploring these individually and then in consultation with someone else, sometimes, someone you know well, and others with someone who does not carry any baggage with you at all each of the participants got some clarity about who they were and what was important for them. I invite you to consider answering these questions yourself over the next few weeks.
May this week we find some great questions.