Is this courage or what!

leadership research I’ve been doing over the last six months.

Have you heard of the Map of Consciousness? I doubt it. It’s not exactly mainstream, yet it is quite profound. And it has a huge impact on personal behaviors and performance. Therefore, it relates to a huge leadership issue and opportunity.

Dr. David Hawkins, MD, wrote Power vs Force: the Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior in 1995, and introduced the Map of Consciousness in it. I’ll call it MOC.

The MOC is a logarithmic scale 1 to 1,000 that defines levels of consciousness and the characteristics of each level. Depending upon your current level of consciousness, your behaviors and performance–both supportive and limiting–will follow.

FYI: your MOC number can be measured. How? We’ll discuss that in another post.

Do you remember our model of Personal DNA™? It stands for Decide, Notice, and Acknowledge. It is a model of self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we make a decision, we automatically look for indications it is true. When we spot evidence that supports the decision, we acknowledge our decision, and the decision is even more solidified.

So, if your decision is “limiting,” the natural process will work to prove your limiting decision is correct. If you say, for example, “I’m so forgetful,” the mind will support your decision by looking for and finding indications that your decision is true. And when it spots an indication, it points it out, and you say, “See there? I knew was forgetful.” This is a no-win game. You don’t even notice the times you DID remember, because that wasn’t your decision.

If you made a “supportive” decision instead, like “I have a good memory,” your mind will look for and find indications that is true. It will spot and point out an example of your memory being good and you’ll acknowledge, “See there? I knew my memory was good.” That supportive decision supports you in continuing to improve your memory.

Folks, this is very real. You can spiral downward with a limiting decision or spiral upward to develop your strengths with a supportive decision. I invite you to correct those decisions that you’ve made which are holding you back. Here is a video we did on Personal DNA.

Now, back to MOC. It’s amazing how Personal DNA and MOC align. There are supportive MOC levels and limiting MOC levels. If we want people to contribute more and disturb less, we need to look at this from a leadership perspective.

For this series of posts, I’m only going to look at the MOC between 0 and 600, because above 600 is Enlightenment, and not too many people I know will relate to that. To put it in perspective, Jesus Christ and Buddha calibrate at 1,000. Other historical spiritual/religious leaders calibrate between 600 and 1,000.

So, let’s look at the lower part of the scale:

“0″ on the scale represents Death. No human consciousness.

For today’s discussion, I’m going to focus up to the level of 250, which is defined as Neutral, the point above which consciousness shifts to supportive, reinforcing, positive, etc.

Below the Neutral band is negative, energy-draining, “what’s wrong”-oriented consciousness. This is exactly like a limiting decision in Personal DNA.

Above Neutral is positive, energy-adding, “what’s right”-oriented consciousness. This is exactly like a supportive decision in Personal DNA.

There’s good news and bad news.

The bad news first. According to Dr. Hawkins, the average person never changes their Map of Consciousness number by more than five points in a lifetime. That’s scary – unless you happened to be born with a high MOC level.

The good news. You CAN change your MOC # rather dramatically(e.g., 100 point improvement) by deciding to do so, then focusing attention on doing what it takes. I’ve personally seen this happen.

Now, before this post gets too long, let’s look at some of the levels below 250, the Neutral point of MOC – just to give you something to think about.

• Death – 0
• Shame – 20
• Guilt – 30
• Apathy – 50
• Grief – 75
• Fear – 100
• Desire – 125
• Anger – 150
• Pride – 175
• Courage – 200 (This is a crucial point. Neutral actually begins here and stays until level 250. When we reach the courage level, we’ve made a major shift for the better. There is also much more energy at this level than at the Anger level of 150.)
• Neutrality 250.  At 251, you’re in the supportive, positive territory!

Now, don’t panic when you see this list. You’ve been very angry, so you wonder if you’re at 150? Not likely. I, too, have been very angry, and when I was in that anger, I WAS at 150. But once through the anger and out the other side, I moved back to my “normal” consciousness level.

The thing I’m working on is how to spend less and less of my time at levels below 250, and certainly below 200! And, of course, spending more and more time at levels above these.

Ok, that’s enough for now. This will be a short series of posts if this is of interest. Would love to have comments from you about whether this is interesting or not?

Best wishes to the Enlightened Leader in you!

Ed

Yes, Enlightened Leadership: Getting to the Heart of Change, which has sold nearly 250,000 copies as a hard book, is now available instantly as an ebook. No shipping costs. Not another book needing space on a shelf!

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Remember the quote on the back of Enlightened Leadership by one of the greatest authors of all time, Og Mandino? He said, “To be a great leader in the years to come, one must learn and apply the powerful principles in this great book … or perish.”

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The quality of the program is excellent. I recommend it for any important goal you might have.

Check out the video to see if this might help you excel over the most important 100 days of the new year – the FIRST ones! It’s so important to get a great start. It defines the entire year!

If it sounds interesting to you, get more information by clicking here.

Either way, may your first 100 days of 2011 be an awesome start to your greatest year yet.

The Enlightened Leadership Team

So I took time over several sittings, using our Framework for Review and Planning, to do just that. The process was so inspiring and mind-clearing that I thought I should suggest it to you.

Now I realize that you’ve already done review and planning with your key team and this does not replace that. What this does is completes the past year in your own mind, in such a way that is encouraging and inspiring—regardless of how your year went. It also clarifies new year strategies and tactics in a way that clears your mind and readies you for specific action.

One more comment before sharing the process: you might want to do this separately for different parts of your life: business, personal, relational, etc.

So, here is the process:

1. Think about “What worked or is working” from this past year. I went back through my 2010 calendar to remind myself of some of the activities over the year. From those, I was reminded of successes, small and large, that I then captured onto my list. This list will be long and encouraging. Seldom do we give ourselves enough credit for our successes. I actually did this process over two days. Sleeping on my initial list allowed for some additional processing and insights overnight. I probably spent a total of an hour during this step.
2. As I captured each success, I often realized the next steps in order to take advantage of the initial success.  Then I would scroll down on the page (on the computer for editing ease), create a Step 5, which is “What can I do more, better, or differently to move closer to my objectives?” Whenever I had an insight about additional steps, I captured it right away. This is incredibly freeing for the mind, as I knew I wasn’t going to lose those insights. By time I finished my long list of successes, I had an accompanying long list of action steps—many of which were, “Plan how to utilize XYZ success.”
3. While I could have stopped the process right there and still received a great deal of value, I knew a bit more work would go a long way towards achieving my goals. So I went to Step 3: “What are my primary objectives for 2011?” Again, I already knew these objectives, but there is a special value in revisiting them from the standpoint of successes I had had over previous months. Sure enough, the creativity that was opened up by remembering a lot of successes in a short period of time gave me fresh insights about 2011 objectives. Those new insights were particularly inspiring.
4. Step 3 was so useful that I decided to spend a few additional minutes on Step 4, which is “What are the benefits to all stakeholders for accomplishing the objectives?” In my case, there was nothing earth-shaking here, but worth reflecting about.
5. That brings us again to Step 5, which is mostly complete. Nevertheless, I reflected again, based on new clarity of the objectives, “What can I do more, better or different to move closer to those objectives?” New action steps came up, several of which required some additional thought and planning. Even though the action list was long and a bit daunting, how freeing it was to get it down on paper, thus freeing my mind to enjoy my family time, knowing I was ready and excited to launch into the new year.

This didn’t feel like work to me. It was quite encouraging, inspiring, and energizing. I encourage you to give yourself this gift. It likely won’t take more than an hour or two over a couple of days. If it takes more time than that, it will be because you’re so engaged that you want to put more time into it! Enjoy the process.

We are so grateful for our subscribers and we wish you the most joy-filled and prosperous 2011.

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Ed Oakley & the Enlightened Leadership team

Today I led a webinar for over 400 people in one industry that was the first in a series of 5 called Turning Managers into Leaders(The client preferred that over our trademarked Making Managers into Leaders).

We started out the webinar in a way that I’ve never done before, and it was a big hit – very empowering. It was called “Seeing Yourself and Leadership Differently.”

It reminded me of just how powerful this particular learning segment is.

So, I got to thinking as we’re close to announcing our special offer for new memberships that you might really appreciate experiencing the content that was so well received. This content has been a huge impact for so many people, just like it was for me personally decades ago when Kurt Wright of Clear Purpose Management introduced it to me. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

We’ve pulled an audio segment of it right out of our Making Managers into Leaders paid membership files to share with you.

This process and concept can change your life and WILL be empowering. It will be worth far more than the 25 minute you’ll investment to listen to it. Our members can even download this and all our other content to their iPods or other mp3 players.

Take advantage of it now – while it’s here. No guarantee we’ll leave it up.

Listen to the audio now. Share it with your team members.

Helping you bring out the best in yourself,

Ed Oakley & the Enlightened Leadership team

ps: please share your comments below.

pps: we appreciate you!

This video addresses the importance of very deliberately focusing the team effort on what the greatest opportunity is – and how to determine that opportunity.

Please share your comments below!

Ed Oakley & the Enlightened Leadership team

Transcription
Hi, it’s Ed Oakley. In my last video, I discussed both the importance of developing and mastering your leadership skills – especially right now with all the changes and everything going on with the economy – and doing so as a team. If you haven’t seen that video, I encourage you to watch it – it might even be better if you watched that one first, as this video builds on the learnings of that first one. You’ll find the link just beneath the video.

Today, I want to talk about an important aspect of team-based learning that will make a big difference in your level of success. I want to talk about how to FOCUS your team-based learning to make sure it is practical and addressing your most important team issues and needs…

…not just short-term actions that might not contribute significantly to the long-term performance of the team and the real leadership skill development of the team members.

We know from experience that if a team works together on developing their team and it’s team members, with proper guidance, they can find effective solutions to whatever challenges they face. But what really are YOUR team’s 80-20 issues?

The Pareto principle says 80% of the impact will come from 20% of the effort, or said another way, 20% of your issues are causing 80% of your problems. But which ones are they?

By knowing those factors, including leadership factors, that are keeping your team from being a truly high-performing team, can you see how that knowledge would provide the perfect focus for learning and development, as well as building your team’s effectiveness.

Imagine the value to everyone if they were part of a team that TRANSFORMED from a mediocre team to a recognized high-performance team. Imagine the personal learning and development that would occur DURING the experience.

To develop your team and people, you need clear direction for your efforts, and just maybe, the best possible direction would be toward becoming a high-performance team.

Well, what would that look like, you might be asking yourself?

To really know OBJECTIVELY what that direction would look like, you need to be able to effectively and honestly assess your team for it’s strengths and limitations.

And wouldn’t it be enlightening and valuable to compare your team to recognized high performing teams, as well as to norms or averages or standards for hundreds of other teams?

This a very important aspect of team-based learning and development, so let me introduce an exciting new tool -

- our highly validated Team Excellence assessment that rates your team in 8 dimensions of excellence.

We are very excited about introducing this assessment into our team-based leadership and team development processes. Let me share some of its background.

My friend, Dr Carl Larson of the Univ of Denver, and Dr Frank LaFasto, identified 40 exceptional teams from all over the world and extensively interviewed all the team members.

Included on the list were a successful Mt Everest summit team, a famous Cardiac transplant team, a highly innovative product team, several championship women & men’s sports teams, extraordinary business teams, exceptional government teams, etc. – quite a variety – but ALL recognized as exceptionally performing teams.

In their extensive research, they determined 8 consistent dimensions of excellence that DISTINGUISHED those exceptional teams from other teams. These eight dimensions are:

Clear, Elevating Goal
Results-driven structure
Competent Team Members
Unified Commitment
Collaborative Climate
Standards of Excellence
External Support & Recognition
Effective Leadership

Bottom-line, if your team rates well above the mean in all these dimensions, you ARE a high-performing team!

The assessment itself has 46 questions and takes each team member  about 15 minutes to take. Our contribution to this was first obtaining rights to use it, but then putting the assessment ONLINE, so the individual inputs are completely confidential.

When it was done on paper, some people were a bit concerned about turning in their worksheet to someone in their own organization. We’ve solved that problem!

The research and validation work that Carl and Frank and their research team did was so extensive that they published two excellent books about it: first – TeamWork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong and 2nd – When Teams Work Best: 6,000 Team Members and Leaders Tell What It Takes to Succeed.

Those two books, expensive because they’re published by a textbook company, continue to be my all-time favorites for research-based, validated guidelines for building high-performing teams.

Do you see the value of knowing if your team rated itself average to high on most factors, but well below the mean on say Results-Driven Structure and Collaborative Climate.

You’d know exactly where to put your attention, wouldn’t  you – in fact where to put the TEAM’s attention. That would be your team’s 20% that would make the 80% difference.

Significant improvement in those two dimensions would make a major difference in your team’s overall performance. Along the way, your people, AND YOU, naturally grow and develop your leadership and team abilities through the experience of creating a high-performance team.

Here’s what happened with one of our clients:

A mid-sized manufacturing division of a huge company in the Pacific Northwest was losing money and facing an expiring union contract six months away. They were in a bit of trouble.

They were especially nervous about the union contract because negotiations had been so difficult for the last one.

By doing the Team Excellence assessment – back when it was a paper version, they were able to see their areas of strength, and the gaps that were most limiting their performance.

By focusing on the greatest opportunities for improvement through team-based learning, they became profitable again that same year and had the smoothest union contract negotiation in their 28-year history.

A key factor was their clarity of their strengths and their limiting factors in the eight dimensions of team excellence. It gave them clear focus goals for the learning and development work, which was totally team-based. It also gave them confidence that they already had a lot going for them.

So, as the team worked together to improve, using new leadership concepts, tools and perspectives to do so, they all experienced the value of the changes they were making as they were making them. Buy-in was high each step of the way, but never perfect – it never is.

Each one of those team members gained great clarity on how to solve performance issues, how to create a collaborative climate, how to create a results-driven structure, etc. In short, how to create and lead high-performing teams.

They not only learned it in our workshops, but experienced it in their work as a team. A lot of mastery was achieved in the process.

So, let’s summarize where we are so far.

In the first video about problems with leadership development approaches, we recognized the importance of developing your leadership skills – critical to your long-term success and security. Leaders are ALWAYS in demand- pretty much regardless of the economy.

We further realized that developing your leadership skills on your own is tough. Frankly, most people aren’t effective in doing it. You might learn a lot intellectually, book knowledge if you will, but making it real through implementation is quite challenging when we’re trying to do it solo.

However, developing your leadership skills and team effectiveness is much easier and even FUN if you work on it together as a whole team.

This approach completely changes the game, because you’re learning together, and have some common, unifying goals. In the process you’re taking advantage of a key truth: The Answers Are in the Room! – which happens to be the title of the second chapter in our latest book, Making Managers into Leaders: A Five-Step Framework for Breakthrough Results.

Your team does have the answers if you just know the right questions to ask. Ask the wrong questions, and you’ll make the situation worse.

Then we introduced the idea of assessing your team at the beginning of the learning process to provide valuable focus on your greatest areas of need. Focus on improving the greatest gaps and watch the team jump in it’s performance.

And it just occurs to me that you might want to have your team retake the Team Excellence assessment 12 months later to identify your specific successes and next steps in transforming your team and your people.

Let’s take a specific example of the Team Excellence assessment. Let’s pick Clear, Elevating Goal. That’s really important for a high-performing team, and you might have some questions like,…

“Yeah, but what if our goal is not really that elevating?”

Well, I want to address that, but first let’s look at the assessment questions around the Clear, Elevating Goal dimension.

Each of these questions is rated by team members as:

True
More true than false
More false than true
or False

The report then provides the average score for the team for each question on a scale of 1 to 4, as well as the mean score for hundreds of other teams who’ve taken the assessment.

Here are the questions for Clear, Elevating Goal:

1.  There is a clearly defined need – a goal to be achieved or a purpose to be served – which justifies the existence of our team.

2.  Our purpose is noble and worthwhile.

3.  Our goal represents an opportunity for an exceptional level of achievement.

4.  Our goal challenges individual limits and abilities.

5.  There are clear consequences connected with our team’s success or failure in achieving our goal.

6.  Our goal is compelling enough that I can derive a worthwhile sense of identity from it.

Now, aren’t those thought-provoking questions!

What do you think your team would say about them?

Just for kicks… let’s say you’re not so sure your team would say their purpose is particularly noble, or even worthwhile.

Then, I would say to you that you need to have your team change the goal or purpose so it IS noble and worthwhile.

For example, suppose your team is doing some relatively mundane work in an organization that keeps downsizing (excuse me – RIGHT-sizing) every few months.

Can you imagine that they might not be feeling that their work is all that important? I sure can.

So, what would be a clear, elevating goal for a team in that situation – that would be noble and worthwhile?

Well, how about a goal of being so measurably off-the-scale productive that you’re recognized as a high-performing team and the company would never imagine outsourcing or downsizing you!

Do you think that might be powerful in certain situations?

Here is the point I’m trying to make:

If you’re going to be a high-performing team, you must have a Clear, Elevating Goal. That’s one of the distinguishing factors of high-performing teams.

So, if that’s an issue for your team, it’s one of the 20-80 areas to address.

And can you even imagine the power of the process of your team coming up with what their REAL… Clear, Elevating Goal is? I mean one that they fully OWN? (and YES, we’ll teach you how to do that – it’s a key leadership skill).

What an opportunity — if and only if that happens to be a dimension where your team has a significant gap. It might not be that one. Your greatest gaps might be in some of the other 7 dimensions. But you need to have the information to make the greatest difference in your performance and your learning – both individually and team.

Now, I have a feeling that this is making pretty good sense to most of you watching this video (or reading the transcription). But I have to admit, I cheated a bit to figure that out.

See, we recently asked our subscribers to complete a survey about “What they would see as being the most important components of an outstanding team-based learning and development system?”

Well, 84.8% of the people said that it would be Important or Very Important to have QUOTE an online validated team assessment to identify your team’s strengths and gaps in 8 dimensions of team excellence. CLOSE QUOTE

Yeah, I did kinda cheat, but that was very validating for my own sense of the importance of the Team Excellence assessment.

So, you’ve probably figured out by now that if this Team Excellence assessment is so important to your team and leadership development, that it’s going to have to be part of any learning system with Enlightened Leadership’s name on it …

In summary, with the Team Excellence assessment, you’ll learn your team’s strengths and gaps based on the confidential input of all team members, including the team leader. The gaps are the opportunities to improve – to move closer and closer to a true high performance team. It provides the focus for the team, as well as individual learning and development.

So, we are moving closer and closer to a learning and development solution for enhancing the effectiveness of your whole team while developing the leadership skills of all team members in small chunks of time and for the investment of only one person’s training.

I think I’m starting to get nervous. That was a big statement. We better sharpen our pencils for the math.

Ok, that’s enough for now. In a few days we’ll release another video that adds one more important dimension to this whole discussion of what’s really important in effectively developing leadership skills and effective teams — and what’s missing in so many leadership development efforts.

Thanks for watching today, and feel free to share these videos with others.

So, how are you relating to all this? We appreciate your comments, and we WILL respond. Just find the comments section below.

You might also want to read the comments from the first video. Again, the link for the first video is below.

We’ll talk soon. Make it a great day!

It is also important that you begin to consider solutions for you and your organization. Feel free to share the video with your colleagues, and please leave your comments below:

Please share your perspectives below!

To the total health of you and your team,

Ed Oakley and the Enlightened Leadership team

TRANSCRIPTION
Hi it’s Ed Oakley. We’ve discovered some significant problems with leadership development that impact your ability to develop and grow leadership throughout your organization – something critical to your success. And, I’m excited to share with you over several brief videos the breakthroughs we’ve had in the process of dealing with those problems

You know that the soft skills side of your job, the people side, the leadership side, is very important to your success and your security in your career. You do know though that people who aren’t good at the people side are vulnerable. Their jobs are vulnerable. They are at risk in their roles.

The so-called “hard part of the job”, the “technical aspects,” the parts we’ve put most of our education and experience hours into, can more and more be outsourced. That’s bad news. The good news is that the leadership part can NOT be outsourced. And, it is in high demand. So the soft side, the leadership side is critical to ensuring your success in the future — more so than ever before. If you didn’t realize that, you probably wouldn’t be watching this video.

There’s a problem with that however. It is very challenging to learn and really implement leadership on your own. It’s difficult to read a book or go to a seminar or watch a webinar all on your own and be successful in actually implementing it.

Now, it’s not impossible. But it is challenging. Think about the many things you’ve learned intellectually, but have never actually implemented. There’s a lot you “KNOW,” but you haven’t actually mastered, because you haven’t done it. Knowing and doing are very different. Can you relate to that? A doctor who knows how to do a surgery, but has not actually done it yet, is not someone I want operating on me.

Let me share an interesting story around this. I was working with a major pharmaceutical company that had an internal two-week management development process. They sent quite a few people through this management development program, and I and EL was a key part of the training process.

They also sent a few select people to a $35,000 summer executive program at a major Eastern University. Once a number of executives had attended both the executive University program and the internal program where they learned together as teams, a facilitator went out and interviewed all the executives. He asked a question, “what has been the value of each of these two programs?”

The responses were very telling. Consistently, they said that the $35,000 University Summer executive program was a lot of fun, they met a lot of interesting people, and probably made some friends that will be lifetime friends. They also learned a lot about themselves. From a practical perspective, however, the internal team-oriented management development program was far more valuable and more effective. That was consistent. In those internal sessions, they learned a lot more about how to be more effective leaders, as well as team players.

See it is extremely challenging to go off on your own and learn to be a better leader. How many times have you taken something you’ve read about back to your team – because you thought it was a good idea — and the reception was like a deer in the headlights.

It is much easier, more effective, and far more fun to learn, develop and implement as a team. Because when you do it as a team, you’ve got the opportunity to focus on specific organizational objectives and goals. When you have everyone on the team aligned on accomplishing the same goals while they’re learning leadership abilities, and how to achieve those goals, it’s easy and fun to do. There’s a supportive group focused on the entire team’s success. And there’s far more accountability.

And that was the difference in the internal management development program. it was team-based.

Now having said this, if you can afford to bring us to your site and do a face-to-face seminar or workshop, then I suggest you stop watching this video, pick up the phone and call us, and make plans for doing that team and leadership development solution-oriented workshop.

However, if you’re resource limited, either time or money or both, keep watching because we have a solution for you that changes the game and makes our work — the work of enlightened leadership solutions — proven with some 50,000 people from 67 countries over the last 23 years, accessible to a whole new group of people, teams and organizations. We’re changing some old paradigms in the learning and development industry. Stay tuned!

Let me share an accidental example of this team-based learning in action. In this case, administrative management and executives of a major West Coast University were going through a year-long leadership development program led by our company. I personally facilitated one of the sessions on-site there at the University, and several people made comments that they were getting a lot of value out of the weekly videos that they were receiving from us as part of this year-long learning process. I was, of course, pleased, because I personally created a number of the videos. But I certainly wanted to know more. “How are you using the learning videos?” I asked.

Without exception, the people who went out of their way to acknowledge the value they were receiving from the weekly videos said it was because they were sharing the videos with their team and discussing the concepts in the video, including what made sense about it, how they could use it on their own teams, challenges, solutions, and especially how the ideas, concepts and tools could be useful in accomplishing their challenging goals.

Do you see what they were doing? They were creating their own team-based learning by taking advantage of our weekly video series , and it wasn’t part of the requirement of their learning process. The best managers just saw the opportunity and jumped all over it.

Think about what happens. When you focus on your own team goals and objectives, you’ve got the whole team working with you, and you hold each other accountable for accomplishing those objectives – while you’re all learning to be better leaders – and yes, leadership can and should come from anyone and everyone on the team – when it is appropriate for them to do so.

Now, when we talk about the idea of having your whole team involved in a learning and development environment, do you automatically think,”oh geez, the cost of learning just went up!” Did you think that? Well… you’d be wrong.

We, ELS, are completely changing the paradigm of pricing in learning and development – at a time when leadership development at all levels of organizations is so critical. Imagine developing your whole team and all it’s members for the price of training just one person. More on that in an upcoming video.

Ok, that’s enough for now. In the next video – coming in a few days – we don’t want to bombard you with too much – we’ll talk about another key aspect of developing your leadership skills that is very important for you to know and understand. I’m excited about the breakthrough this new piece represents.

Now, please do me a favor. Make any comments: positive comments, negative comments, or any questions, concerns, anything that’s on your mind about any of this, please make your comments below. I would love to see them.

We’ll talk again soon. Thanks for watching.

This morning’s The Denver Post came with a front-page article titled, “Thinking Like a Factory Helps Heal Hospital’s Bottom Line.” It was an excellent article about how the Denver Health Medical Center has saved many jobs and much money by asking the right questions, a critical leadership skill. They asked two questions:

What are the things that keep you from working efficiently?
Are there things you see happening to patients that shouldn’t?

These two excellent questions demonstrate “enlightened leadership” and address efficiency/effectiveness and patient safety/satisfaction. The answers were definitely “in the room,” as was indicated by some of the data. The overall process they were using is lean conversion, which respects people and their value, while using their talent to address process issues.

Peg Burnette, chief financial officer, said that since its Lean conversion (process started) in 2005, the city’s public health system has benefited to the tune of $54 million in increased revenue, money not spent, and expenses cut.

Our people DO have the solutions we need to deal with the challenges we face! Enlightened Leadership Solutions has lots of online tools to help you ask the right questions and deal with the challenges and perspectives of greatly enhancing the effectiveness of your organization.

Hats off to the DHMC leadership team! They are making a difference. And doing so in a tough environment.

The Enlightened Leadership Team

What they do is send out by email a weekly coupon for a service in the Denver, CO area. The deals are often very good. For example, I’ve paid $2 for a $12 car wash and $29 for a full-hour massage. I like it because I can quickly determine if I have any interest in their current offer. If I do, I next look at the location of the service to see if it is convenient for me. I waste very little time with the decision. I like that.

How did they distinguish themselves?

Here’s what happened. I bought six weeks of personal training for only $29. It was an amazing deal. I had a few months to cash it in, and guess what I did. I waited until the last minute. Anybody else ever do that?

But, finally I was ready to set my first appointment, so I called the number – twice, because I got a disconnected number message. Well, you guessed it. They had gone out of business.

Since I wasn’t sure, I contacted WeeklyPlus to see if they knew about the situation. They didn’t know it either, but agreed to look into it. They called back with confirmation that the company was out of business. They shocked me with what happened next!

They offered to return my money or give me credit! No hesitation whatsoever. They wanted me to be happy. That was a distinguishing decision, and you can bet that I am a happy customer who promotes their business. That was totally unexpected!

What are you doing to distinguish yourself and/or your business? It could make all the difference in the demand for your services.

Are you distinguishing yourself through leadership? It’s a great way for all of us as individuals.

Here’s to Distinguishing Yourself!

Ed Oakley