When it comes to stepping up our leadership capacity, consider the below recommendation.   

This recommendation comes from what the members of our forums have taught us as well as various guest speakers and / or workshop leaders presented by Elevate Performance. 

Please consider this knowing the author of these materials is flawed and while sharing this with you, we are also encouraging ourselves.  We know it is a journey and none of us will achieve mastery of leadership as it is hardly possible. We can constantly improve our leadership effectiveness and below are some of the best ways to do this.    

• Performance expert Stan Beecham encourages, we want to "access our best more often."  As we put together a string of these days and weeks and months, it can do a lot for how much more we can enjoy our career time and the people with whom we work.  It also gives our team members a greater opportunity to appreciate us.   

• We all have flaws and we are human and not perfect.  That is why Elevate speaker Stan says it the way he says it: to pursue "accessing our best more often."

• How is that done?  A lot of it is forgiving ourselves and our people sooner than in the past.  It is bringing more heart and gratitude to the party.  It is recognizing that anything in the past is in the wake of the boat.  It is back there. It has no power.  What matters is what I do today; how can I access my best more often?

• If emotional intelligence is twice as important in getting what we want in our career, even our lives, than IQ, there is significant upside for every one of us by going deeper around understanding and practicing emotional intelligence.  Empathy, heart, and self-assessment are at the top of this list.  

No doubt, we have to have business acumen, industry expertise, a sense of strategic thinking/acting and common sense to be a great CEO.  Our competitors often are high on these traits as well.  We will be pretty equal around these traits.  It is in executing the EQ where we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors and is likely the area where we can find the greatest gain in our own performance.