8 Questions with Ken Milling

ID:   Tell us a bit about yourself.  How did you become involved in Leadership Development?

I have been owner/manager of a number of small businesses and have extensive experience as a martial arts practitioner and teacher with particular interest in the integration of mind, body and spirit. However, since 1996 my professional expertise has been in private practice in the psychological arena.

Five years ago I met Integral Development’s (ID) managing director, Dr Ron Cacioppe, and shortly after attended an ID coaching course, during which it became clear that my main areas of study and professional practice interfaced well with Integral Theory and that ID offered unique ways of developing leadership and management capabilities.

ID:   With the experience you’ve had, how do you see the Integral approach making a difference in Leadership Development?  Any specific success stories?

The Integral approach offers a comprehensive development model that can help facilitate the growth of individuals both professionally and personally, with the opportunity to develop increased levels of self awareness and to apply in pragmatic ways such as avoiding negative bias and negative self talk that potentially curtails the development of a potent sense of self agency.

I had a profound experience on a residential ID leadership and management retreat with City of Joondalup managers and executive and colleagues from ID.  We were all stretched to our full capacity and challenged by many difficult issues, but I came through with a sense of how the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts and of what can be achieved as a collective when we share values that essentially lead to more authentic ways of being both personally and professionally.

ID:  Where would you like to see Australian leadership in 5 years time?

I would like to see an emphasis on innovation and creativity within work environments that allows talented individuals to apply their full potential as leaders and managers.  I see this as an essential development if Australia is to do well in an increasingly competitive global market.

ID:  Name the top 4 or 5 Influencers in your personal development.

I am fortunate to have been in contact with many talented people who have inspired me so this question is a difficult one to answer, bit those who immediately spring to mind are:

C G Jung (Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytical Psychology)
Daisetz Suzuki (Zen master and scholar)
Shigeru Kimura (Karate master)
Dr Jean Knox (Psychiatrist, Analyst & author)
 
ID:  Who do you look up to, who REALLY inspires you?

There is no one person and I am often inspired by ‘ordinary’ individuals achieving the ‘extraordinary’. This is reflective of ID’s vision – ‘Developing leaders, teams and organisations to be their best for the world’.  The people I work with inspire me when they clearly demonstrate manifest courage, commitment and integrity in the face of very challenging situations.

ID:   If you could be anywhere, doing anything right now what would it be?

I would be here doing the work that I enjoy. I consider myself extremely fortunate to work with interesting individuals in circumstances that are challenging and often call for me to look at how I might further develop my professional and personal capabilities. I am essentially engaged in a lifelong learning process and this is what fuels my passion.

ID:   If you were stranded on a desert island, what’s the one thing you would have to have with you?  (no not your iPad!!) 

A helicopter to get back home!

ID:  If you could personally address the Prime Minister, what would you say?

I would suggest that the Australian government capitalise on our economic fortunes by securing future economic, social and environmental development by significant investment in education, research and innovation. Our future rests in the hands of the next generation of leaders and their ability to adapt in constructive ways to a fast paced and changing world, and to have a big picture perspective that considers the wellbeing of society as a whole.

ID:  Ken Milling specialises in Assertiveness for Women in Business and more details on his upcoming workshop in October can be found below:


Assertiveness for Women


Wednesday 19 October 2011 Cost: $660 inc GST
Date: Wednesday 19 October 2011
Time: 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Venue: Wollaston College

About the Workshop

Stating your opinions when others may disagree can be very confronting and uncomfortable, especially for women. Some may even see this as negative behaviour. So we need to take care not to confuse assertiveness with aggressiveness! Where do you most frequently fall on the following continuum? Are you timid (passive), rational (assertive) or the aggressor (aggressive)? If you find you are on the either the passive or aggressive side, then this workshop can give you an increased sense of self-confidence and assertiveness that will lead to better relationships and greater effectiveness in all areas of life.

Who Should Attend?

This is a dynamic course designed for women who would like to develop their self confidence, assertiveness and authenticity in both professional and personal areas of life.

Benefits of Attending

  • Evaluate your current level of self-confidence
  • Experience self-empowerment through experiential exercises
  • Integrate your inner energy into constructive action
  • Make creative use of stressful situations
  • Develop the ability to say “no” without feeling guilty
  • Explore the practice of living authentically
  • Develop an awareness of a deeper, enduring aspect of self
  • Learn how to use stressful situations creatively and for the benefit of all
  • Gain the ability to speak assertively in challenging situations
  • Gain self-confidence in dealing with difficult situations

Presenter

Ken Milling is an executive coach and presenter with Integral Development and an experienced analytic psychotherapist with a broad-ranging private practice.
In his spare time, Ken is a karate 4th Dan black belt and partners his wife Bev as a flamenco dancer. Ken delivers talks on a range of subjects relevant to psychological wellbeing and personal safety. Ken has over 15 years experience in developing the capacity of people, self-awareness and empowering individuals to embrace and facilitate change.


Wednesday 19 October 2011 Cost: $660 inc GST
Date: Wednesday 19 October 2011
Time: 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Venue: Wollaston College

What is your Organisational Purpose?

If our personal sense of purpose or vision matches the organisation within which we work, then it becomes the place of true empowerment.

Collins & Porras, in their now famous book "Built to Last" studied a range of the world's most successful organisations, success being determined by longevity as well as profitability. Their original theory was that powerful and charismatic leadership sat behind the success of every organisation, and particularly those companies that were "built to last". Their findings were to provide a very different scenario for sustainable success.

The compelling "sell" in the work of Collins & Porras is not that they studied and found an emergent pattern between highly successful companies alone. Their chosen point of comparison profoundly reinforced their findings. They did not compare the best to the worst - they compared the best to the nearly best. The differences were specific and far-reaching. In essence, their findings were quite simple.

Firstly, "built to last" organisations had a clearly articulated and commonly owned "core ideology". This core ideology comprised of a fundamental purpose that could not, in all reality, ever be completed, and a clear and well-recognised set of organisational values.

This core purpose and the values that sustained it were, according to Collins & Porras, known by all staff, were adhered to by all leaders and were used to benchmark things as diverse as recruitment policies, staff employment conditions, marketing messages and long range business plans.

The core ideology was founded on the importance of controlling and preserving the core - what the business "had yet to do" and what it stood for, its values. The second critical element that the authors uncovered was an entrenched philosophy that sought to achieve operational autonomy with a focus on stimulating progress.

This second component comprised of "visionary ambitions" or, in the language of Built to Last, Big Hairy Audacious Goals or BHAGS. These visionary goals were set by all of the Built to Last companies. They focused on ambitions that would stretch the organisational capacity, give people a sense of excitement, be a little more than most thought the business could achieve and would, on a continuous basis, move the organisation towards the achievement of core purpose.

These companies recognised that in order to find one thing that would substantially move the company forward they would need to try many things.

The encouraged a sense of fearlessness around pursuing new and innovative ideas, providing they supported the core purpose and sustained the values that were part of the core ideology. In another watershed publication, The Living Organisation by Arie de Gues, the author reviewed the experience of the Shell Scenario planners who identified a very similar set of capacities.

This group of people (and many of their subsequent successors) was responsible for postulating a whole range of possible scenarios for the Shell Group of Companies and then for analysing the various factors that would or wouldn't make such scenarios possible. In the course of their research, they uncovered a very small number of organisations (40 in all) who had existed for as long as, or longer than, Shell, ie. one hundred years or more. They came across such companies as the Swedish Stora which today is a major paper, pulp and chemical manufacturer.

Research revealed that it had had the character of a publicly owned company from its very early beginnings, more than 700 years ago, as a copper mine in central Sweden. They also looked at the Sumitomo Group which had its origins as a copper casting shop founded by Riemon Soga in the year 1590.

The conclusion of the scenario planners was that the evidence was sufficient to suggest that the 'natural lifespan' of an organisation could be as long as two or three centuries. Consider the life span of an organisation today.

A company is considered successful if it sees out fifty years or so. Over time, reflecting back on such research, de Gues came to the conclusion that there were four key components to longevity. They included:

  • Sensitivity to the environment (which) represents a company's ability to learn and adapt
  • Cohesion and identity (which represent) aspects of a company's innate ability to build a community and persona for itself
  • Tolerance and its corollary decentralisation (which represent) symptoms of a company's awareness of ecology; its ability to build constructive relationships with other entities, within and outside itself
  • Conservative financing (which represent) the ability to govern its own growth and evolution (by controlling the source of its own capital).
Again, independent research identified the power of internal cohesion and a clear sense of identity (Collins & Porras's Core Ideology) as distinguishing capabilities of sustainable organisations.

Conclusion

Visions, both personal and organisational, are critical to the wellness of individuals, organisations, communities and nations.

With a positive sense of the future, we become engaged in the act of creation. We enjoy a sense of personal "belonging", knowing, to greater or lesser extents, that our actions contribute to something more than we alone could achieve. Without a personal or organisational vision that we feel ownership over, are motivated by and have a sense of our power to contribute towards, the daily task of living can become an overwhelming, sometimes painful and often banal, mountain of largely meaningless trivia.

With a vision, and action to support it, we can change the world.


This article was reproduced with the kind permission of Dattner Grant Pty Ltd -     www.dattnergrant.com.au

Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement

"No man is an island" wrote 17th century English poet John Donne. This indelible phrase, which has flitted from mouth to mouth for too many years to count, is beautifully expressed in this TED presentation by entrepreneur Derek Sivers.

Sivers take us to a warm, sunny day where an uninhibited 'lone nut' rattles his body to the sound of music while a dazed crowd looks on. In less than three minutes Sivers explains how a movement is made and shows us the essence of Donne's wise words -- that it takes more than one to start something truly amazing.





Written and submitted by Jasmin Walker

A True Story of Vengeance and Survival


The Tiger: 
A True Story of Vengeance and Survival 
by John Vaillant

A Review by Ron Cacioppe

This book is both a compelling story about a tiger that hunts and kills people to seek revenge and an education about mankind abusing nature and causing its own demise.

It was a last minute decision to read this book.  We were leaving on a week’s holiday and I needed a novel to read.  I was in the Bodhi Tree and about to leave in 5 minutes.  I had plenty of books to take with me but they were about Zen, philosophy and having honest conversations and I wanted a novel, one that would be interesting, informative and entertaining.  This book fulfilled all three.

I found ‘The Tiger’ book on the bottom shelf of the novel section and its cover showed red blood on snow.  The words ‘vengeance’ and ‘survival’ didn’t seem to fit with the Kalbarri by-the-ocean vacation we were starting on but a strange force kept it in my hand when I went to the counter.  I found myself walking to the car with that feeling of adventure (a safe one) and mystery that comes with buying a new book and having time to read it.

The first page got me in.  It described a man going back to his secluded cabin in the Far East of Russian wilderness and he is attacked and killed, along with his hunting dog, by a tiger.  The rest of the book describes the story of this tiger that for some reason decided to stalk and kill this man and another person a week later.  The Tiger Inspection team lead by Yuri Trush has to track and kill this tiger.  The tiger attacks Trush and almost kills him but he is saved by the sharp thinking and shooting of his teammates.

The book is really two stories; The first is a story of how the Tiger Inspection team lead by Trush, tracks down and kills this tiger which attacks humans to wreak vengeance on them.  After examining the body of the tiger it is clear that he has been shot and wounded a number of times by humans and probably by the first man he attacked and killed.  The tiger hadn’t gone mad, it was just seeking revenge on the man who tried to kill to make money.  Man had overstepped its bounds with this animal and it got him to back off - permanently.

The second story in this book describes the magnificence and desolation of the Russian Far East and what has happened and is happening to nature and the humans who have lived there over the last thousands of years.  It is a story of the Russian, Chinese and Cossack history in the region and how the human economic systems of communism and pestroika have caused despair and carnage to humans and the environment alike.   The book captures the power and mystery of the tiger as well as its everyday living habits in a way that you come to know intimately the ‘umweld’, the inner world, of the tiger.

John Vaillant has a captivating writing style.  He brings to life the starkness and beauty of the forest, the bleakness of the cold (forty below zero is common) and the details of a harsh and difficult life for humans in the Russian wilderness (called the tiagra).  He also has a unique ability to describe a situation.  For example, he describes a tiger pouncing on a person as similar to having a piano drop on you from the second floor of a building.  But with a piano, that is the end of this experience, with the tiger it is the beginning.

This book provides the history of a region most Westerners know little about as well as an exciting true story of the relationship between a magnificent animal, the tiger, and a group of men.  Vaillant’s background and discussion of the environment and this true story, provide a powerful case for preservation of tigers and the wilderness they inhabit. Only 3,200 hundred tigers exist in the world today (down from 75.000 in the early 1900’s ) and approximately 450 are still alive in the Primorye, the Far East of Russia. The Chinese have a strong desire for the organs and body of the tiger for medicinal and potency purposes while hunters and poachers in the area need to kill animals in the region just to earn enough to live.  Add in logging, industrialization, Russian bureaucracy and corruption and the growing human population and it is a perfect formula for extinction of the largest of the cat species alive on this planet.

I recommend this book to anyone who likes to read novels based on true events, history of unknown parts of the world and a love of the environment.  This story is educational, sad, beautiful, intriguing and artfully written.

Here We Grow AGAIN!


Personal Assistant Required

  • Leading consulting firm – Osborne Park
  • Flexible work environment
  • Part-time role

Integral Development (ID) is one of Perth’s most unique and successful leadership and management consultancies. We are a niche consultancy who is dedicated to providing exceptional service, products and programs. Our clients include several high profile companies, government agencies and not for profit organisations.

An opportunity exists for an energetic and motivated person to join our team. To succeed in this role you will need to be highly organised, have outstanding interpersonal skills and the ability to work independently. You will also require sound editing, writing skills and exceptional administrative skills. This will be linked with strong interpersonal skills to effectively interact with our customers and team of professional consultants.

This opportunity will suit someone with previous administration experience and a high level of comfort with technology. We encourage you to apply if you are a self-starter and enjoy a challenge.

Key responsibilities of the role are to:

  • Proactively manage two of the Senior Consultant’s schedules, appointments and commitments
  • Finalise / edit / prepare high quality and timely materials for program presentations
  • Type and edit key documents for clients
  • Support the consultants in their role to ensure the clients receive fist class service
  • Provide administrative support in all areas of client relations
  • Ensure that the communication link with the customers is effectively managed

This position is a part-time or full-time position, five (5) days per week. Hours are flexible dependent on the individual and days of work will be negotiated with the right person. Starting salary will be dependent on experience, expertise and negotiated hours.

For further information regarding this position, please contact Barbara Gibson on 9242 8122.

Please visit our website www.integral.org.au

Please email your resume to: barbara@integral.org.au

12 Secrets of a Happy and Productive Workplace




The Gallup organisation has recently compiled results from questionnaires and interviews of more than one million employees over 25 years (Onsman, 1999). Using factor analysis, regression analysis and concurrent validity methods the researchers identified which factors would indicate whether employees were likely to be satisfied and stay with their employers.

 These 12 ‘core elements’ attract and retain productive employees and can be summarised by these questions:

  1.  Do I know what is expected of me?
  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  4. In the past seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission of my company make me feel like my work is important?
  9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do I have a best friend at work?
  11. In the past six months, have I talked to with someone about my progress?
  12. At work, have I had the opportunity to learn and grow?

According to the Gallop researchers, these questions are particularly important to productive, talented workers and less so for under-performing staff. As the results show, pay does not even get mentioned and most of the 12 involve the quality of workplace relationships – with colleagues, bosses and workplace friends.

Yet many managers today do no have the ‘soft’ skills or willingness to tackle interpersonal issues. Many managers are uncomfortable with the people side of management, preferring to focus on objectives and tangible tasks rather than the subtle areas of human emotions and motivation.

These twelve factors give leaders a clearer idea of what their employees need to experience job satisfaction and to be productive. To start, employees want to be told what is expected of them in clear and straight-forward terms (although 70% currently indicate they are not clear what their managers expect).

According to these results those leaders who help people have constructive and supportive relations at work will help that workplace become a great place to work.

Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate, and Inspire

Book Review by Ron Cacioppe, Managing Director, Integral Development


"Leadership Presence does identify one of those important things that do matter, the natural and obvious – but eerily overlooked – connection between leading and acting."
-Warren Bennis, Leadership Presence, pg. xiii
Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate, and Inspire
By Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar
Unlike most leadership authors Belle Linda Halpren and Kathy Lubar do not come from a strictly business school, military or academic background. The authors are highly skilled actresses and taught acting skills in Repertory Theater. Many of the students they had were various professionals including teachers, doctors, businesspeople and others. Because these individuals were able to use the theatre skills they acquired effectively in the workplace, the authors founded the Ariel Group in 1992. Since that time the Ariel Group has presented workshops to over 30,000 executives. This book is a result of that effort and the results achieved.

The main theme of Leadership Presence is simple yet profound. The authors define Leadership Presence as the “ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them to achieve a desired outcome”. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the word “authentic”. According to the authors, presence and authentically can be developed in leadership roles.

The book adds something very important to the literature on leadership. It explains clearly and simply what is "presence" and how to develop it in yourself. Whether you call it "stage presence," "command presence," "charisma," or one of the several other names we've give to the concept, it is a concept that has generally been difficult to convey to someone who doesn't already possess the talent. 

We know it when we see it. 

But how does a person become someone that is so intensely "there" that you can't miss them? What can you do to inspire attention and respect just by walking into a room? Doesn't every leader want his followers to believe him, trust him and do what he asks willingly and enthusiastically, just because it's him that is asking? 

Is there really a way to get that special something for ourselves? 

Almost every author on leadership tries to pin down the elusive nature of presence and hold it still long enough to observe how to build these skills into a package.

When you talk, you want others to listen, right? Whether it's a now-or-never event (making a key point in an oral argument, for instance) or one in a long stream of communications over time, getting your point across and making some sort of advance in what you're doing is probably at the top of your list every time you open your mouth.

How you present yourself, how you communicate, how you listen, how you connect, and how you respond to feedback you receive creates leadership presence. Think about stage presence, that indefinable something that makes magic as soon as an actor steps onto a stage. Leadership presence is the business version of stage presence.

This is not a book about motivating or manipulating others by using acting skills or pretence. It is a book that focuses on learning to authentically connect with the minds and hearts of others to effectively lead. Far too many business leaders conduct themselves in ways they think their executive roles require, rather than being themselves based on their heartfelt values. The result is that they come across as inauthentic and this breeds a lack of trust. 

Leadership presence can be cultivated. Halpern and Lubar outline the PRES model in the Leadership Presence, which includes these aspects:

P - Being Present. 
Being "present" means being fully focused on what's going on in the time and space you're occupying, so that you're able to respond to whatever happens, however unexpected it may be.

R - Reaching Out. 
Leaders must listen to others and build authentic relationships. Emotional intelligence plays a significant role in reaching out to others in a genuine and effective way.

E - Expressiveness. 
This involves using your words, your body language, and the tone and rate of your speech to express your message, and ensure that each of these routes for communication is congruent with the others. We've probably all seen someone who shakes his head in a "no" gesture while saying, "What a great idea," or a manager who stands in front of a group to announce an "exciting new initiative with lots of opportunities for us to do well," while her body is slumped and her voice is halting and quiet. Harness the power of communication and express your message clearly.

S - Self-knowing. 
The foundation, building block skills of Leadership Presence start with the concept of self-knowledge. Effective leaders tend to be self-aware, authentic regardless of situation or circumstance, and guided by core values and priorities. A leader who knows her True North (her calling) and acts accordingly will exhibit a stronger presence than one who shifts based on context.

The authors encourage the reader to practice using "PRES" when he or she interacts with other people over the next few days. Notice how you feel and how others respond to you. Notice where you feel comfortable and where perhaps you need additional practice. And notice, most importantly, the effect your presence has on your leadership.

Leadership Presence was written to teach techniques that will help leaders motivate, inspire and reach out to others. It will help the reader to enhance relationships, build collaboration and flexibly deal with challenging situations. The book is composed of nine chapters divided into four sections suitably called “Acts”. Act I discusses how one can learn to be completely in the moment. Act II analyses the skills available to build relationships. Act III examines the appropriate way to express emotions and feelings. Act IV focuses on being yourself and reflecting your values in your behaviour. Most chapters end with a section on exercises or practice guidelines to cement the information taught in the preceding chapter. Numerous personal stories and examples keep the material interesting and practical.

The authors of Leadership Presence make it easy to understand and utilize the ideas presented in this book. They strongly believe that leadership presence is key to effectively running a successful organization of any size or kind. Much of what they say isn't new. Even the idea of using actor's techniques has been used before. It's how they package their ideas makes it understandable to the average person.

Practical Relevance for Leaders and Organisations

Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar have been running workshops in leadership for over ten years, applying the principles and techniques they learned and developed in theatre arts to the realm of business. Reading their book is like participating in their workshops. The stories, examples, explanations and instructional material are presented in the same format they use in their seminars. The book also includes exercise pages for the self-development so many of the techniques can be learned without attending the workshop.

Each chapter of Leadership Presence  is completed by clear, effective and well-formatted practices and exercises.  This book can be of great help to those managers who want to explore interesting techniques to further develop their leadership skills.

This book makes tested strategies available to all readers, from high-profile CEOs to young professionals. It teaches: 

  • How to express yourself dynamically to motivate for results
  • How to build relationships to enhance collaboration and business development
  • How to handle tough situations with heightened confidence and flexibility
  • How to integrate personal values into leadership communication to inspire followers

This book applies the elements of acting and theatre to a business leadership context. This may initially seem unrelated, but the parallels are intriguing and well illustrated by the authors who call on the many skills and techniques that actors are trained to use to communicate with their audience. They demonstrate how these techniques can be developed by individuals in workplace leadership roles to increase the effectiveness of their communication, and inspiration of others.

We know presence can be developed because there exists a whole group of people who work diligently and successfully to develop it. That group of people is actors, and their success, even their livelihood, depends on presence. They must excite us when they step onstage, or they will fail. For the actor and performer, presence is not a happy accident of genetics or upbringing; it's the result of training and practice.

The authors also point out that great leaders, like great actors, must be confident, energetic, empathetic, inspirational, credible, and authentic. That leaders and actors share some skills and characteristics should come as no surprise. Actors and leaders face a common challenge. They must be prepared to play different roles, as the situation requires. They must be prepared to influence and move people every day.

Warren Bennis is one of the most recognised and wise authorities on leadership.  His forward to this book he talks about how American Presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Regan had an extraordinary presences as well as ability to play the role of ‘the President’  His quote at the beginning of this review shows how much he values the relation between acting and leadership. 

Limitations of this Book

I found the exercises, guidelines, and activities excellent but overpowering.  There were so many of them and so many good insights and things for me to do to develop my leadership presence that I didn’t know where to stop or start.  The book was so workshop oriented that I really wondered if I could get all of this by just reading the book and looking at or doing the exercises.  I felt I needed an acting coach or to attend a 3 day workshop with the authors to really experience some of the creative and emotionally challenging exercises.

Some managers might feel the acting world is too far for them. Certain Jungian/Myers Briggs Types like an ISTJ (Introverted-Sensing-Thinking-Judging) Type might find these exercises too personal, too creative and too feeling.  These types might need the skills and attributes more than any other type but this book may be a bit too ‘out there’ for them to read it. 

The authors do an excellent job referring to great artists and theatre to make their points and they have confidently expect the reader to be convinced.  The book doesn’t provide any research, studies or results other than personal examples about how effective the translation of acting ‘presence’ skills is to leadership.  University MBA programs may need some harder evidence before they introduce acting classes into their curriculum. 

A number of Australian managers will ask the question is the PRES another American biased approach to leadership.  The strong expressiveness and feeling skills that are held up as ideal for leaders may have a bias toward the American ideal of leadership which a number of studies has show is a cultural bias towards individuality, low power distance, achievement, and charisma which are not as highly rated by Australian and Asians as they are in the United States.    

Finally some managers might ask the question; How can we learn to be more authentic from people who lie professionally? After all, isn't that what acting is really about at the end of the day? Isn’t an actor faking a role he is playing?

Ultimately, however, acting is really an unrelenting search for the truth about the human condition, and therefore actually one of the most honest endeavours one can undertake.  Acting is the paradox that, in order to pretend, the actor must be real. That requires the actor to delve inside himself, because the only way an emotion can be authentic is if it comes from within the actor. Actors, consequently, are probably more aware of authenticity than anyone else, because they've studied it, and themselves, so carefully.

Conclusion

Now more than ever, we need our business leaders to be truly inspiring. In the 360 Leadership and Management Profiles that we conduct at Integral Development with over 5000 managers, the ability to inspire and bring out the best in others is one of their lowest rated skills.

This book can help managers become more inspiring—by applying the skills similar to professional actors. The book’s innovative approach brings the techniques of the stage into the boardroom and can give leaders the tools they need to connect authentically and dynamically with the hearts and minds of those they lead. Major corporations around the world, including General Electric, Mobil Oil, CapitalOne, and Deloitte & Touche have hired them to coach executives one-on-one and lead workshops, to give employees the advantage of Leadership Presence, to achieve success. 

Today managing is not enough. The stakes are higher, the competition fiercer and the pace faster. In an increasingly uncertain climate people are looking to leaders for more than just competence, they need to believe in the leader fully. Leaders need to demonstrate confidence and integrity in their every move. They need to authentically shift between leadership roles depending on the circumstance.

These times call for true leaders who live and work authenticity. People want leaders who are comfortable in their own skin, who don't forget where they came from and who lead based on profound self-knowledge. To inspire followership leaders must connect authentically and stir the emotions not just the intellect.

Whether the reader is new to the study of the leadership or has read a number of books, this book provides an innovative and useful perspective on leadership. Leadership Presence is one of those unique books that helps you to step back and look at the forest because it gets to the very heart of leadership…authentic behaviour and values.

If you want to develop and hone the skills that can make you valuable to your colleagues and your company, the lessons found in the Leadership Presence book are very worthwhile. 

Leadership involves keeping up-to-date with the latest ides and thinking throughout the world. The Integral Leadership Book Forum provides an opportunity for senior managers and leaders to learn new ideas in leadership and have lively discussions about current thinking in leadership and business.
The bi-monthly forum includes a brief discussion ona book with a small group of your peers, debating ideas and sharing insights on how leadership ideas can be practically applied to business leadership.
The forum offers:
  • Six insightful and relevant books on leadership
  • Exposure to a small group of senior leaders and managers who will discuss each books’ insights and applications
  • A light, organic breakfast

Presenter

Ron Cacioppe is managing director and founder of Integral Development. He is a leading expert in leadership and has more than 25 years’ experience in conducting leadership development programs in Australia, Southeast Asia and the United States. Ron holds a BSc, an MBA and a PhD and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Curtin University’s Australian Sustainable Development Institute.

Workshop Dates

(click to reserve a place on the desired date):
Sign up online!
Friday 7 October 2011