Leadership Series: Learning Agility

Mac Van Wielingen and Julian Barling explore learning agility in this video.  How open are you to learning?  How do you bring what you have learnt to life, bridging the knowing and doing gap?   Please share your thoughts and feelings with us.

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Nature and the Enneagram

Featured below is an excerpt from a recent blog by BluEra’s Catherine Bell on the Enneagram in Business website. In the blog, Catherine highlights the link between nature, the concept of being being present and the Enneagram. In the full blog (available here) Ginger Lapid-Bogda goes on to explain how each of the 9 Enneagram types views conservationism.

Recently, I got to spend time with Brian and Dee Keating discussing a travel bucket list. Brian is a nature conservationist (click here for information, and some amazing videos). During our discussion, I posed the following questions of them:

Question | What is the most important issue facing our planet? 
Brian and Dee | The most important issue facing the planet (is) our need for clean water, and the fact (that) the majority of (the world’s) water is unusable to us. Roughly 1% of the world’s water is potable.

Catherine | To me, water represents going with the flow of life and the source of life! We are mainly composed of water. It is vital for our existence. As well, water moves in the path of least resistance, and has the ability to wear stones out. Water can also take the form of liquid, solid, to a vapour, which speaks to me of metamorphosis and recycling. How can we grow and change, and recycle more naturally?

Question | What can we learn from nature?
Dee and Brian felt that our ability to be in the here and now, not in the busy-ness of our lives, is a key learning from nature. They commented how we often run around without really being present to the nature around us, whether it be a sparrow, a squirrel, or a blade of grass. I found this profound. How many things do we not really experience that are really amazing?

Here are some questions for all of us to consider:
How can we take this knowledge into business?
How can we be more like water and nature?
How can we apply this to the Enneagram?

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Stillness Breaks at BluEra

At BluEra, before we begin our sharing, we take a minute of silence and stillness just to be with each other.   The stillness re-centres our team on what is most important and allows for more fluidity for ourselves, our relationships, our clients, and our community. Consider taking a minute of stillness and notice what emerges.

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Leadership vs. Followership

Leadership has long been (and continues to be) a key attribute BluEra assesses when placing candidates. When you engage BluEra in a coaching relationship, we also work on leadership, in order to focus on accelerating your own development. Recently, Dr. Julian Barling from Queens University held a Webinar titled “Enough about Leadership, let’s talk about Followership”. To learn more about the webinar, click here. 

He spoke about his research of the connotations of the term “follower” and the label of being called a “follower” vs a “leader”. One particular finding he noted was that the results of being called a follower vs leader was immediate and dramatic. Being called a follower resulted in lower intrinsic motivation than when individuals were called a leader.

If this is true, should we question the labeling of certain roles as followers? Are we subconsciously producing more followers in organizations by this labeling? If leaders are seen as more adaptive and flexible and followers as more passive, loyal, dependable does calling someone a follower (or subordinate, assistant, aide, underling) create this role profile?

It seems we need both Followers and Leaders in organizations. As Julian notes, as leaders we want to be aware of how our personality and behaviours interact with follower characteristics, how they impact them. What impact do you want to have on your team? Can Followers influence Leader behaviour? When do you need to be a leader and when do you need to be a follower?

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Leadership Series: Present Moment Leadership

In this video, Dr. Barling and Mac Van Wielingen examine presence (that is, present moment awareness) and leadership.  Is the present moment a means to an end in leadership or an end in and of itself?  What do you think and feel?

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

BluEra keeping fit

This week, BluEra decided to take our weekly bootcamp outside to Olympic Plaza in order to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather. While there we were photographed by Gavin John, photographer for the Calgary Sun. The pictures will appear in this weekend’s edition of the Sun but below is a sneak peak.

Tara McCarney using the TRX in Olympic Plaza. Photo by Gavin John/Calgary Sun

Personal trainer Tyler McRae puts Joelle MacDonald (left) and Kim Smith (centre) through their paces during a fitness bootcamp at Olympic Plaza on Tuesday, April 2, 2013. Photo by Gavin John/Calgary Sun

BluEra’s weekly bootcamp is provided by Tyler McRae, BHkin of Kin-etics Personal Training. If you are interested in organizing a bootcamp for your workplace then we highly recommend Tyler. His work-out routines are always varied and challenging.

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Our Community: Jim Kinnear Gala

Rick (pictured far left), attending the Jim Kinnear Gala. Photo courtesy of Avenue Magazine

BluEra’s Rick Lancaster was pictured in last months issue of Avenue Magazine while attending the Jim Kinnear Gala.  The Gala was arranged to support the Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation at the Banff Centre. Click here to see the complete issue (Rick is pictured on page 44.)

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

BluEra Leadership Series: What is Leadership?

Julian Barling and Mac Van Wielingen stencil a powerful definition of leadership in the this, the next video in our series on leadership.  What is emerging for us, as we interact with leaders daily, is that there are different layers to leadership and different types of leadership that is required for different situations – sometimes transactional leadership is needed, other times transformational, and at other times simply being authentic to yourself is the best course of action.

 

How do you define leadership?

 

 

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Unfolding your own Definition of Authentic Leadership

Here is the latest in the series of blog posts from Catherine Bell, written for the Enneagram in Business Network. In this blog, Catherine questions the meaning of “authentic” leadership and presents her own definition. In the full blog (available here), Dr. Bogda goes on to describe what an authentic leader might look like in each of the 9 Enneagram types.

Ever since I was little, I have had a fascination with leadership – what makes a good leader, what makes a bad leader, and what is a leader really? Perhaps it is simply authenticity or authentic living and that in and of itself is authentic leadership. Or, is authentic leadership simply trust, transparency, openness, responsibility, commitment, and truthfulness? Is authentic leadership feeling, thinking, and acting from a place of authenticity with wisdom from the past, not reactivity from the past? My team at work recently spent time with leadership guru Dr. Julian Barling, and he describes transformational leadership in these terms:

• Charisma – idealized influence and inspirational motivation
• Intellectual stimulation
• Idealized influence

He also discussed that transformation leadership is the embodiment of an ideal and the ability to construct yourself as the embodiment of that ideal. He also spoke of how Nelson Mandela “walked his talk” in prison, just as he did when he was free. Julian’s wisdom, combined with a discussion with a profound leader, Mac Van Wielingen (who mentions love of truth, and the ability for a leader to have a vision of the future), led me to my own definition of leadership. Here it is:

Authentic leadership is the current “now” embodiment of a future desired end state (which represents a universal truth), which may or may not be actually attainable in this lifetime.

I asked Karen Radford of People and Partners at Enbridge Inc. what leadership means to her and also about the feminine role in leadership:

“At a young age a wise man sent me out to the ‘field’ to lead a team of technicians. I was 23. I was thrown into my first leadership test. The man whose job I was filling was Jimmy Nelson. He’d been with the company for 40 years and had never had a sick day. I chased him for weeks to try and get him to tell me what I was supposed to do in my new role. When I did finally pin him down, he gave me the best authentic leadership advice I’ve ever received in my life. He said, ‘Try to be me and I guarantee you will fail. Learn to be yourself and I guarantee you will succeed.’ Everyday I work to remember my purpose, what fulfills me, and how I bring my full self to my team, our customers and the business.”

What are some of your favorite definitions of authentic leadership?

What is leadership to you?

How can you embody the feminine and the masculine in leadership?

How is Enneagram type related to how you lead?

To what extent do you “walk the talk” of leadership?

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.

Enneagram in Business

How are you getting creative in hiring?  Catherine Bell is part of the Enneagram in Business Network, and Dr. Bodga’s system of hiring has recently been rated as the top by SmartRecruiters.com.

Dr. Bodga has long  been “adamant about not using the Enneagram as the way (or one of the ways) to hire candidates for jobs.” She presents the reasons for this rational in her blog here. However, Dr. Bodga has managed to find a way to apply the Enneagram to a hiring process without compromising its integrity. Read her blog on how the Enneagram was used by Salesforce.com in their “Build Your Own Dream-Team” event.

Recently the “Build Your Own Dream-Team” event was recently named by SmartRecruiters.com as the number one in a list of the top ten interview processes – showing the ability the Enneagram posses to allow us all to rethink traditional processes, such as interviewing.

BluEra builds evolved and awakened teams through executive search, team transformation, and coaching practices.