Preparing to facilitate a Leadership Development Process that will last 6 months with 13 leaders and going through my materials. I came across this great list from John Adair’s How to Grow Leaders  

How to grow leaders – a quick guide for orchard owners

1. Select good seed or stock.  Choose people with natural potential for the generic role of leader.

Look for tell-tale signs that the spark of leadership is within them.

2. Prepare the soil.  Check out your corporate culture. Does it grow or stunt leadership growth? Plough up yesterday’s paradigms and mindsets about management.

Are the  fields the right size? Have you got the structure right?

3. Enrich the earth by fertilizing and watering.  Make sure the sun of good values – integrity, honesty, justice, fairness, etc… has an unhindered path – cut out the jungle foliage that obscures the sun and the stars.

Invest in people – the better the people, the better the leaders will be.

4. Rotate the crops. Give leaders a variety of challenges and opportunities.

5. Let the fields lie fallow.  Not all trees bear fruit every year. Even the best fields need to lie fallow. Give leaders time to think, to reflect and to catch up with themselves.

6. Observe where the plants thrive.  A leader who struggles in one field or sector of it may be successful in another.

What is the leader’s ecological niche? Where will he thrive?

7. Prune the dead wood. Simplify, cut back to the trunk. Abandon the practices and ideas that don’t work. Go back to basics.

8.  Let the taproots go deep. The water of inspiration lies deep underground. The trees that grow and bear fruit year by year have deep taproots.

Which of these is your favorite?

In what ways do you grow leadership within organizations?

What ways is your company already making purposeful steps to grow leaders?

michael cardus is create-learning

photo by scrumpyboy

Organizations that wish to remain competitive in the business environment must develop their capacity to generate creative ideas and then use their talent well to transfer these ideas into innovative practices.

This leads to new processes and improved methods for the best use of existing resources, and increases the ability to solve problems and implement solutions that enhance the organization. In addition to broadening their personal capacity for creativity and innovation, leaders are better able to implement innovative ideas into their existing business model.

To discover and utilize the capacity of your team,

your leadership and you.

Creativity to Innovation Program

Leadership experts and me, share ideas, theory and pragmatic leadership stuff.

Visit the greatness.

After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it’s better to keep goals secret

This short talk, 3min 16sec, explore goal setting in an interesting way.

My definition of a goal is a what by when. As mentioned in the video just stating a goal out loud creates a false perception that it has already been accomplished – Because people forget the WHEN.

Derek shares that when speaking of goals it is important to keep a realistic idea and set a reminder of the what by when…or just keep your mouth shut!

michael cardus is create-learning

Facilitating experiential education I wander & wonder;

• Where am I?
• Where is the group, physically & mentally?
• Where is each person in reference to the location, program and me?

Are you your brain? Your body? Your team? Your organization? and how do any of these affect the outcome of training and time with me? 

Reading Daniel Dennett’s Where am I – causes me to reflect on facilitation and experience.

I thought to myself:  “Well, here I am sitting on a folding chair, staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain . . .  But wait,” I said to myself, “shouldn’t I have thought, ‘Here I am, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes’?”  I tried to think this latter thought.  I tried to project it into the tank, offering it hopefully to my brain, but I failed to carry off the exercise with any conviction.

-Daniel Dennett – Where am I?

When training, facilitating, speaking – do you find yourself “staring through the glass at your own brain”? or do you find yourself “suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by your own eyes”?

PS – if you haven’t read “Where am I”; you really must it is an amazing article of the challenge in trying to define where the self is found. If you want to talk about it contact me, and we can have coffee sometime.

michael cardus is create-learning

The program took place at Woodcliff Hotel & Spa

More information and content about the program is here…

To see all the images from the program click here

Discussions about DiSC profiles and application to the team.

Opening activity framed to explore what is happening inside your head and how when communicating, leading, listening and working with others; behaviors, prejudices, actions and past perceptions leak out without us being aware.

Data Discovery – content focus on developing criteria for measuring qualitative data into quantitative processes. Plus learning more about the team members.

1st sequence in Soft Middles; Hard Edges. Content focus of progressing from individual contributions to creating processes to work with teams to large organizations. Processing on the different skills and capacities for leadership development and promotion.

Continuation of Soft Middles; Hard Edges. Content focus of delegation, accountability & trust of people on the team.

The Simon School moved to High Performance and surpassing results!

Team Performance Model: Creating and Sustaining teams and trouble-shooting success and failure at each step.

The teams involved in active learning simulations to transfer the Team Performance Model into team-work. Working through the 7 steps; and processing each person’s experience into a shared Team Construct.

Group Photo.

Thank you Clark Dever Photography for taking the images.

michael cardus is create-learning