Last week Keith and I completed a 4 day Leadership Development Programme with one of our clients. It was delivered in the form of two 2-day blocks, split one month apart. The 4 days were divided up into:

• Leadership and THE world – global leadership trends changing the face of leadership currently
• Leadership and THIS world – how these trends interface with the leadership style and philosophy within the particular organisation
• Leadership and YOUR world -personal development in the context of effective leadership)
• Leadership and OUR world – taking your learnings and reflections back into your specific context)

Our final day was adjusted and added to slightly, when one of the delegates sent through a clip he’d watched on TED. It’s by Simon Sinek in 2009 – How great leaders inspire action? (imbedded below). A great clip, and well worth watching, especially if you’re struggling to get your head around the connection between what gets you out of bed in the morning and what you end up doing once you’re out of bed?

One of the bigger leadership lessons I’ve had comes from a friend, Neville Dunn, who recounted a process he’d gone though in his own business context. It was a 12 month long exercise of having to submit, once each month, a very simple video of him speaking his ‘vision’ to the video camera.  The idea behind the exercise was that if you can’t communicate what you’d like your team to do, then how on earth can you expect them to do it? We didn’t do the video camera bit, as we used a different group process, but a very worthwhile exercise it turned out to be for the group in our programme.

As the group prepared their “Why, How and What,” I spent some time writing down TomorrowToday’s. It was an interesting exercise for me, because it took me back to the beginning of TomorrowToday 10 years ago, and while we sometimes drift off course, I smiled realising that we’d kept pretty much to what we set out to do.

THE WHY
We started TomorrowToday because we believed there was a better/smarter way to do business. We’d seen all kinds of opportunities opening up with the arrival of a fresh thinking workforce, and technology that would support a different way of working. We wanted to work better because we wanted to live better. Because our work and personal lives have become so intertwined and integrated we knew that changing one would change the other.

THE HOW
If we’ve fallen off the bus in any area, from time to time, it’s been in the how we deliver on the why? The how has always been to walk our talk. We didn’t want to simply put conceptual thoughts out into the universe and hope people would listen. We wanted to integrate our discoveries into the way we worked. If we could get it right, then so could everybody else. That has been the most difficult.

THE WHAT
The ‘what’ is the easiest to define. Our website is full of it. No need to go into detail here.