By: Craig Mackay, FCMC
Scott Clancy, RCAF Major General (ret), our What’s Up Wednesday guest speaker in October, provided us with examples of how to deliver Coaching and Leadership Development in stressful, live, military situations. Applying these techniques to private sector situations turns out to be quite relevant.
His six tips for fostering creativity, once trust is set, can be readily adapted to a private sector or public sector consulting or coaching gig. For example:
1. Set the stage as the leader, by establishing a big, bold, and inspirational vision.
The vision or inspirational topics have to include elements that each team member can relate to. This emanates from getting to know the team members and the areas you have built trust with them on.
2. Use keywords from narrative/vision and open ended questions.
Take an outcome or benefit of the change to be implemented and turn it into a question for them to think about and answer.
3. Seek team collaboration, inside and outside of the team boundaries.
Bring other teams in for a one on one discussion related to their touch points.
4. Enable/devolve responsibility.
Delegate a sub-component of the project to a team member and give them full responsibility to bring it to completion, or manage it.
5. Schedule updates with no specific agendas.
This could be similar to walking around and talking to team members, but, it could also be a regular meeting once a month or once a week for a quick update on what’s urgent and what’s not, and “how’s life?”
6. Champion their success
Any setbacks are merely learning opportunities. Responsibility for setbacks rests with you as the leader entirely.
Scott’s Stress Mastery points provided below are also relevant to everyone:
1. Sleep
2. Exercise hard daily
3. Be mindful of what you eat and drink (enjoy it!)
4. Develop self-awareness habits (journaling, meditation, reading)
5. Have and spend time on hobbies (other creative activities)
6. Spend time socializing, especially with spouse/partner
7. Program space – deliberately set intentions for meetings and how much you can do in your calendar (Be mindful regarding your schedule - always be prepared for every meeting, prioritize and cut out what is not essential).
As part of stress mastery and living longer Scott referred to a book by Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer, could be worth checking out. In the book Dan shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep blue zone people spry.
During the show, Scott gave away two free copies of his new book, Developing Coaching Leaders. Congratulations to our winners we hope you will experience Scott’s energy leaping off the pages.
Check out the full recording of the show at the CMC-Canada's YouTube Channel.
What's Next:
Join us for the next What's Up Wednesday, November 8: Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. Learn more
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About the Author – Craig Mackay, FCMC
Craig Mackay is Past President of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Ontario and Vice President of Nortak Software, responsible for Information Solutions.
Craig is host of What’s Up Wednesday the digital series presented by CMC-Ontario, he is also a Management Advisory Service (MAS) consultant recognized by the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) and the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC-Canada).
Craig is a Solutions Architect and a Senior IT Project Manager, a VOIP Engineer, and is ITIL certified. As a Senior VP at Nortak Craig also handles sales and the SR&ED program. Craig takes a customer centric approach to designing and implementing useable and sustainable IT solutions. Nortak Software is an AWS partner with trained Cloud migration and support technicians. Let us put your business in the Clouds. Mr. Mackay created the CallBase CRM solution which is now available for Software as a Service (SaaS) on the Cloud.
