We live in a world where a majority of what we know has been discovered in the last 15 years. This information explosion impacts every organization’s ability to effectively do business in today’s and tomorrow’s marketplace.

There is no company – large or small – that can ignore the fact that you can’t continue to do what you’re doing and expect a different result.

To thrive in tomorrow’s marketplace, organizations must become effective in reinventing themselves – over and over again.

I have found five key strategies that must be operationalized for organizations to accomplish this. They are:

1. Defining corporate destiny

2. Clarifying organizational values, vision, mission and goals

3. Leading with authenticity and purpose

4. Effectively managing the change process

5. Balancing priorities

Let me highlight key aspects of these briefly.

1. Defining Corporate Destiny – To be successful, organizations must utilize a proactive rather than reactive approach to creating a preferred future. To accomplish this, organizational leaders must assess future trends and then develop alternative scenarios, and adopt one that best reflects where the organization wants to see itself in ten plus years.

To accomplish this, leaders must ask and answer two key questions:

a. What is going to happen to our organization and our environment in the next 25 years?

b. What do we as an organization want to make happen over this same time period?

2. Clarifying the Organization’s Values, Vision, Mission and Goals – To effectively move to a preferred future, organizations must capably address two key organizational components – the intellectual and the emotional. Most organizations are effective in addressing the former, but dismal in addressing the latter. To do so requires organizational alignment and transparency. This alignment must be supported by employees.

3. Leading with Authenticity and Passion – Key to moving the organization is leadership. To be an effective leader requires followers. People won’t follow unless they believe their leaders: believe in what they are doing; know where they are going; are committed to doing what it takes to get there; and most important of all – understand the need to support followers along the way.

4. Effectively Managing the Change Process – Moving any organization from the old to a new paradigm is hard work. It doesn’t happen without having a roadmap – identifying the steps that need to be taken to guarantee success. Although there are a number of models out there that an organization can pick from, the one I use is one based on the work of John Kotter, a Harvard professor, who has spent his professional career studying organizations that have successfully adapted.

One element that holds true across all models is that a change model – to be effective – must incorporate elements that address both aspects of change: the intellectual (head) and the emotional (heart).

5. Balancing Priorities – Of the five strategies, this is probably the most important, yet often overlooked. As noted earlier, leaders are at the center of moving the organization forward. If the leaders “burn out,” there is a good probability that the change process will flame out.

As David Chinsky has pointed out, leaders must be fit before they can be effective. To assist leaders in becoming fit, David has created an excellent program addressing the four aspects of his model of leadership fitness: clarity, confidence, effectiveness, and vitality.

Bottom Line: Leaders cannot take care of others unless they take care of themselves.

As you continue to focus on realizing your organizational goals, remember there are resources and tools out there that can help you make it happen!

This guest post was written by Dr. Pamela Shaheen, President of the Delta Collaborative (a firm specializing in change management), and an Associate with David Chinsky & Associates.

Spend time on any Internet search engine these days, or peruse the business or personal development shelves of any local bookstore or library, and you likely will find numerous titles and references pointing to the significance of “the next 90-day period”.

A quick glance through just the first page of a recent Internet search on the terms “next 90 days” uncovered the following results:

· Surviving the Next 90 Days

· The 90-Day Health Challenge

· Make $100,000 in the Next 90 Days

· Your First 90 Days on the Job

· 90 Days to a New Life Direction

· Making an Impact in the First 90 Days

While one might argue with how magical the proverbial 90-day period really is, the important point for most of us is that adopting some meaningful framework or perspective can help us plan for the future results we desire.

What we put in motion today surely will have an effect on where we end up in the future. What specific actions are you willing to commit to making in the next 90 days?

My good friend and colleague Alan Headbloom (www.headbloom.com) specializes in helping foriegn-born professionals communicate with more comfort and accuracy. Every month or two, Alan sends me thought-provoking articles that always cause me to stretch my thinking. This month, one of Alan’s articles included 5 riddles for sharpening our thinking skills. See if you can solve these riddles before looking at the answers.

1. A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms. The first is full of raging fires, the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven’t eaten in 3 years. Which room is safest for him?

2. A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him. Five minutes later, they go out and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?

3. What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away ?

4. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday?

5. This is an unusual paragraph. I’m curious as to just how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so ordinary and plain that you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is highly unusual though. Study it and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out. Try to do so without any coaching!

The answers to all five riddles are below.

1. The third room. Lions that haven’t eaten in three years are dead.

2. The woman was a photographer. She shot a picture of her husband, developed it, and hung it up to dry.

3. Charcoal.

4. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. (Also: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day)

5. The letter e, the most common letter in the English language, does not appear once in the paragraph.

How many of these riddles did you get?  Know that the process of working through them, even if you weren’t able to solve all of them, serves to maintain your mental acuity and alertness.  Be on the lookout for other ways to stretch and strengthen your overall clarity and ability to think out of the box.

One of the most common reasons I hear from employees on their way out of organizations is they don’t see opportunities for growth. While certainly dependent upon where one happens to be in his or her career, most employees are interested in growing their income, their responsibilities and/or their impact. When these employees no longer see growth in their future, they often begin to question whether the timing is right to look elsewhere.

I have found that in many of these situations the lack of growth opportunities is based more upon perception than upon reality. Often, there are multiple opportunities for any given individual within an organization. Unfortunately, these potential career paths are not always clear or communicated. As a result, many good people leave organizations prematurely because they see leaving as the only way to realize their professional objectives.

Leaders can help their employees “see” growth ladders by engaging them in regular career discussions. Only by understanding where an employee’s professional interests lie can a leader help guide the employee to ways of achieving their career goals. Some organizations have documented and illustrated both traditional and non-traditional career paths for their employees on company intranets so employees can more easily play with alternate scenarios.

Leaders can help avoid employee attrition due to perceived “career dead-ends” by participating in the development of career plans with their employees. Effective professional development is an ongoing process requiring the engagement of leaders. While ownership of professional development planning ultimately must rest with the employee, leaders can do much to enable and encourage this planning process.

By talking regularly with employees about their career aspirations, leaders can identify books, articles and training opportunities consistent with employee development goals. With this knowledge, leaders also can be looking for rotational or promotional opportunities within the organization that will further develop their employees.

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the International Coach Federation. Resisting the temptation to attend one more left-brained session chock full of information, I decided instead to move outside of my comfort zone and experience “laughter yoga”.

I was sitting with over 100 other coaches, apprehensively waiting to see what this session was all about, when Sophie Terrasse (born in France, living in Ottawa, Canada) suddenly broke out in laughter. Within seconds, the entire room was laughing uproariously. Sophie, a certified laughter coach, knows how to laugh. She soon shared that she was laughing “for no reason at all”.

For the next two hours, we laughed, sang, danced and engaged in yoga postures and breathing. We learned that laughter yoga is a new revolution in body-mind medicine that combines simple laughter exercises and gentle yoga breathing to enhance health and happiness. Most of us left this session feeling renewed and more balanced than when we came in.

Right after the session, I stopped in the hall to chat with a fellow coach and she immediately noticed that I was radiating happiness and joy and started quizzing me on what had just happened. I simply told her that ‘7 days without laughter makes one weak!!!!

When it comes to communicating, fit leaders learn early that individuals on their teams seem to thrive on certain types of communication, while with other types of communication employee engagement and trust wane. In asking hundreds of seminar particpants what kind of communication they want and expect from their leaders, we hear the following on a consistent basis. Employees seek communication that is:

Straightforward and direct
Comprehensive
Clear and concise
Positive
Constructive
Timely and specific
Frequent
Face-to-face when appropriate
Professional
Big picture
Two-way
Up front

When we ask employees want they don’t want, we hear the following:

Unwanted and extra information
Rambling
Non-actionable feedback
Company gossip
Interruptions that are unjustified
Non-constructive criticism
Condescension
Micromanagement
Negative attitudes
Constant changes in direction
Lack of support or commitment
Vagueness
Finger pointing
Passing the buck
Conflicting goals and priorities

Most leaders can point to examples where we have communicated in ways that are both uplifting for our people and in ways that may have sapped the energy of our teams and taken their focus off of what is most important. The opportunity for all of us is to spend more time on the first list of communication wants above and to avoid as many of the items on the second list as possible.

As we approach the year 2010, there is much that I am grateful for.

I am grateful for the opportunities we’ve had this year to make a difference in the world.

I am grateful for the continued trust and confidence placed in us by our clients as we partner to ensure their success.

I am grateful for all of the relationships we’ve nurtured this year and for all of the new associations and friendships we’ve built with people from around the world.

I am grateful for my Associate Network, without whom we would not have grown as much as we have during the last couple of years.

I am grateful for the success of our Institute for Leadership Fitness™ which has enrolled almost 100 leaders in the past 18 months.

I am grateful for my family and my friends who support me greatly in my life’s passion.

I am grateful for you, the reader of this blog, and for the opportunity to be here for you when you need us.

What are you grateful for?

This week I am in Prague attending the 11th Annual Conference of the International Leadership Association. Tomorrow, I have the privilege of speaking to conference attendees on the subject transformation in leadership.

At today’s opening ceremony, conference organizers reminded the gathering that this week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia. We heard from Vaclav Havel who was instrumental in leading the non-violent transition to a free Czech society and who went on to become President of the country.

Many Czech citizens who were alive in the 1950’s – 1970’s remember what life was like before the Velvet Revolution. Vaclav Havel, himself a noted playwright before he became a dissident, could not perform his own plays in public. People were restricted from going to the cinema or owning a business.

Many of the rights we take for granted today in the U.S. simply weren’t available to many in Eastern Europe before the pivotal events of the late 1980’s. In talking with leaders from this side of the Atlantic at this week’s conference, I can feel the powerful emotions shared by many who still remember what it was like before the turn of events that took place only 20 years ago.

Recently, I spent a couple of days with an executive management team facilitating their annual strategic planning process. This was my second year in a row working with this team and I was struck with how confidently each executive worked with his or her colleagues. The level of trust was high, evident by each team member’s willingness and comfort in questioning one another’s ideas and looking at issues from the perspective of the entire company and not just their respective division.

As we wrapped up our two days together, having helped them complete their ambitious 2010 strategic plan, I asked the team to identify and name their strengths, both individually and collectively. These strengths, listed below, will continue to feed the confidence of this executive team as they take on the many challenges and opportunities of 2010.

Team Strengths

Deep knowledge of our market and customers
Empathy
Consistent in our communication
Make decisions rapidly
Hard working
Aligned
Execution focus
Fun loving
Detailed-oriented
Willing to share resources
Open to change
Committed to success
None of us are self-serving
Good leadership skills
Good problem solving skills
Sense of humor

These strengths will continue to motivate and support the actions of my client as they move into 2010. What strengths feed the confidence of your team?

Conversations are at the heart of our relationships with others, be they colleagues, friends or family. Our ability to build masterful relationships with others, especially in the workplace, is linked to our ability to have conversations that are meaningful. Meaningful conversations have depth. They are conversations that connect individuals around common goals and values.

The problem for many of us today is that our conversations tend to be shallow, infrequent, rushed and increasingly of an electronic nature. Most of us in the workplace find ourselves overscheduled, double-booked and running from meeting to meeting. When we do have a break, we tend to go immediately to our BlackBerry, or other PDA of choice, to catch up on emails and voice mails.

This frenzied atmosphere on the job works against our ability to focus on building and sustaining one-on-one personal relationships. Some of us have even begun to see talking with one another as wasteful. Who among us has not sent the occasional email to someone right down the hall from us? Increasingly, we favor taking action and producing results over building meaningful staff relationships through meaningful connections and conversations.

So, how do leaders and managers promote meaningful conversations? Here are seven specific strategies available to leaders as they seek more meaningful conversations with colleagues, customers and others in their lives.

Create an environment of trust and mutual respect where all ideas are valued.

It is important to set and manage expectations regarding the types of behaviors you desire in your organization. Your employees naturally look to you as a model of what is tolerated and what is not when it comes to interacting with others in the workplace. When employees are allowed to violate values such as trust and respect, without consequence, a memorable message is sent that indicates your acceptance of such nonproductive behaviors. It also discourages others from speaking up when they experience the negative impacts of these bad behaviors. Leaders are in a unique position to give others permission to hold everyone accountable for treating others with trust and mutual respect. It is in this type of environment that meaningful conversations can thrive. Absent this environment, conversations will tend to be more reserved, tentative and shallow.

Model the use of open-ended questions.

Meaningful conversations occur when we invite others to really think about the questions we ask them. If our goal is to invite others to share their deepest thoughts, ideas and reflections with us, we must pay attention to the structure of our questions. Meaningful conversations are thwarted by the use of closed-ended questions, or questions that can be answered simply by a “Yes” or “No”. When we seek well-thought out responses, our questions need to begin with a “What” or a “How”. These open-ended questions require others to really think about their answers and not simply give us a one-word response. It takes practice to replace our closed-ended questions with more powerful open-ended questions, and it is worth the effort. The quality of our conversations will increase dramatically with this one transformation in how we converse with others.

Provide opportunities for all members of the team to share their unique perspectives.

Everyone has a unique perspective to share. At the same time, some of us are more comfortable than others joining a conversation and contributing our thoughts and ideas. We all know the one or two team members that can be expected to “dominate” a conversation. Conversely, we often can predict which members of our team are least likely to jump in with their ideas. It’s important to note that when some individuals choose not to speak up it is not necessarily an indication that they have nothing to add. For some, it is just more difficult to engage in public conversations given their communication style and preferences. As a result, it is incumbent on leaders to reach out to everyone in the room, using creative facilitation techniques, to ensure 1) that no one or two individuals dominates the discussion and 2) that everyone is asked for their opinion on the matter.

Build time into your schedule for meaningful conversations.

Given our full calendars and rushed days, if we don’t proactively set aside time for having meaningful conversations with others, there is a high likelihood that we will go days, weeks and even months without taking the time to really reach out and understand what is going on with other people on our team or in our organization. One way to ensure we spend sufficient time in meaningful conversations is to actually commit to a set amount of time each week to “walking around” or “rounding”. These times need to be sacred as they often are the first to go when the next urgent demand arrives at our doorstep. We can build powerful relationships with others by just stopping by and being willing to go wherever our people need us to go in the moment.

Slow down enough to really listen to what others are saying they need from you.

To piggyback on the last point made above, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a meaningful conversation with someone if we are not “present”. It takes concentration to stay focused on what the other person is really saying to us. Too often, our minds wander to other conversations we need to have or to other deliverables we’ve promised, and we catch only a portion of what someone who is sitting or standing directly across from us is saying. In many cases, instead of truly listening to others, we are busy preparing our retort or our next response. This is sometimes called “reloading”, the practice of putting together our next response instead of listening to what is actually being said. This accounts for the sometimes awkward experience of saying something to someone only to be met with a blank or questioning stare since our statement bears no relevance to what they just said. Had we been tuned in to them, instead of our own need to prepare our next response, we would find it much easier to simply engage in a dialogue and maintain the flow of back and forth that a meaningful conversation represents.

Manage your use of electronic devices.

One of the signs of our time is the ubiquity of personal digital assistants, be they BlackBerry’s, Treo’s or other electronic PDAs. How many of us have been in meetings where participants, instead of listening to what is being said, are busy reading and/or answering emails or surfing the web? Out of respect for others, and in service to promoting more meaningful conversations, PDA etiquette would require that PDAs be kept in their holsters during meetings and one-on-one conversations. While electronic devices have boosted productivity in many important ways, they also can create a barrier to quality conversations with others.

Anchor your conversations around values.

If you want to change the culture, change the language. How we use language matters because very little gets done without it – whether in face-to-face conversation, over the phone, by email or memo. Our values are beliefs that are important to us. Our true values are words that we use to describe what gives meaning to our lives. If a meaningful conversation is the goal, then anchoring your conversations around values will make a difference.

If your organization has core values, ask your employees how they see those values in their own lives. How committed are they to those ideals? How do they see those values demonstrated in behaviors? If we are committed, we care. But, commitment to values like honesty, respect, or teamwork may not “look” the same to every individual in terms of daily behaviors. If “teamwork” is a value – ask your employees: “Is teamwork a value we share?” “What does teamwork ‘look’ like to you?” “What would we be doing if we had more teamwork in our department?”

Building masterful relationships, one conversation at a time, will create value for your employees, your customers and your entire organization. I invite you to create more space and time for meaningful conversations by committing to one or more of the seven strategies listed above.