Leadership Consulting Archives - Cortex Leadership Consulting

January 7, 2019 By Lynda Foster

Scot Thomas Chooses Cortex

Leadership Associate

Scot Thomas has chosen the Cortex Team to work with as a Leadership Associate.

Scot Thomas is certified in DISC and will be leading the continued expansion of Cortex organization in the New River Valley region while working with other consultants and coaches on the Cortex team to help organizations realize their leadership and team potential.

For 23 years Scot Thomas was the head softball coach at Virginia Tech. Scot was the chief architect for designing the program when it started in 1995 which pioneered more women’s sports at the University and fulfilled the school’s Title IX. He proudly led the Hokies softball program to 8 NCAA regional appearances, 8 conference tournament championship appearances and in 2008 to the Women’s College World Series. Under Scot’s leadership and coaching the Hokies would be considered a team of national prominence.

Scot was named the VA State Coach of the Year 6 times, NCAA Regional Coaching Staff of the Year 5 times and twice named Conference Coach of the Year in the Atlantic 10 and Atlantic Coast Conferences.

A veteran of the United States Naval Reserves, Scot has a passionate interest in community involvement working with the American Heart Association, Help Save the Next Girl, The Aware Foundation, hurricane and flood relief, and Hogs4Hokies. He has two kids, Andrew (21) and Liza (17), that are both musically inclined and often sing alongside their Dad who plays guitar and mandolin. He is an avid sports fan, loves to play golf, hunt, fish and is a proud Harley-Davidson enthusiast.

June 17, 2017 By Lynda Foster

Company Culture: Let them know what’s okay

I stumbled upon an article this weekend from a company called GDS that wanted to find a way to communicate their company culture, or “the way things are done around here”, to all their new hires. They discovered that the easiest way to let folks know how they wanted people to act and treat others was to create a poster entitled, “It’s ok”. Here’s what it says:

It’s ok to:

say “I don’t know”
ask for more clarity
stay at home when you feel ill
say you don’t understand
ask what acronyms stand for
ask why, and why not
forget things
introduce yourself
depend on the team
ask for help
not know everything
have quiet days
have loud days, to talk, joke and laugh
put your headphones on
say “No” when you’re too busy
make mistakes
sing
sigh
not check your email out of hours
not check your email constantly during hours
just Slack it
walk over and ask someone face-to-face
go somewhere else to concentrate
offer feedback on other people’s work
challenge things you’re not comfortable with
say yes when anyone does a coffee run
prefer tea
snack
have a messy desk
have a tidy desk
work how you like to work
ask the management to fix it
have off-days
have days off

Finding ways to reinforce your company culture and hold people accountable to it is key to maintaining the type of workplace that people want to show up to every day.

If you and your team created a poster to communicate your company culture to someone new on your team or joining your organization what would you list as “ok”? Sounds like a great way to spend a lunch with your team this week. Can’t wait to hear how it goes!

January 31, 2017 By Lynda Foster

Why get leadership training or use a leadership consultant or coach?

Becky Freemal, WFXR news, story on their 10pm newsbroadcast explains what the take-a-ways were from a couple of executives that have been in leadership training, been coached, and experienced facilitated group consulting in the last year.

During the past year, a Roanoke executive consulting group has graduated more than 100 leaders from its leadership course that teachers leaders how to be more than just a boss.

When businesses thrive, our economy thrives.

In this edition of Virginia at Work, we take a closer look at consulting firms, the affect executive coaching has on business and how it has evolved over the years.

“Consultants have been around, probably since the first businessman,” says Lynda McNutt Foster, CEO of Cortex Leadership Consulting.

Joan Craig, the CFO of CMG Leasing in Blacksburg says, “When we received training in the past, it was always on the executive level. It always stayed on the exec level. It stayed with us. It stayed with the managers maybe. It never got down to the level of the people who do the daily work, that are on the line, the staff. This work is totally different. This work goes all the way down.”

Craig adds that by incorporating professional coaching and consulting into her company’s culture, she watched as her newest C-O-O Emily Taylor, a graduate of the Cortex Leadership course. “Leading a Winning Team” grow as a leader and in turn had a direct impact on positive changes within the company.

Emily Taylor, COO of CMG Leasing says, “It is something that you reference and find for what’s applicable in certain phases. Without having that opportunity, I don’t know I would be able to specifically address or identify issues to use those tools with, so it’s made me much more aware, a better listener, an active listener as a result.”

Craig says, “The confidence is huge, because she has such great knowledge, great experience and now she’s able to show that in meetings planning and moving forward with a lot of initiatives,” and adds, “It’s just so much faster. When you’re trying to do a project or implement an idea with the team, a team that trusts each other. Our team has become incredibly effective.”

In order to build revenue, to move a company forward and to grow, executive coaches say you need to start with such basics as building relationships to empower employees.

“If your employees are engaged, they want to keep working for you. When people aren’t engaged, they don’t have innovation on a day to day basis and they leave your organization, which costs you a lot of money. So if you’re constantly churning employees and you’re not seeing innovation in the marketplace, you are going to lose money,” says Foster.

Taking the steps to be aware of your actions and their influence on those around you can go a long way in making a company successful.

Here’s the story on the WFXR website.

October 16, 2016 By Lynda Foster

Ego Might Be Your Enemy to Success

“It’s good to think big…we must learn to live small, though. Be action and education focused, ignoring validation and status in order to keep our ego in check.” Ryan Holiday is a highly successful millennial that learned some heavy duty lessons that resulted in his newest book, Ego is the Enemy. I can’t remember reading a book by a 29-year old that had as much depth of wisdom and understanding.

With statements like, “When you talk, make sure you have earned it first” makes you pause and sit up straight. At the heart of his work is not letting your confidence get ahead of your competence. This is the book that I grabbed the idea from that you don’t want to experience an expectation hangover.

To capture the 5 biggest concepts from the book, watch this short video (12:40) by Brian Johnson in his Philosopher’s Notes. Brian also did an interview (41:14) with the author that I found enlightening.

Here’s a short summary of the book that condenses each chapter into a few pages. Many leadership and other non-fiction books have these short summaries now available on Amazon.

Here are some notable conclusions he establishes just from the the first 3 chapters. This book is really worth reading.

True belief in yourself should be dependent on what you achieve and accomplish through hard work, discipline, and persistence. That kind of flies in the face of some other popular concepts, doesn’t it? The idea that we build belief, slowly, over time, may be radical to some.
An important skill for us is the ability to realistically evaluate our own abilities. It would be hard to realistically evaluate yourself without some measurement that can be verified in some way. To measure data points, when it comes to our abilities, is something athletes can easily. Leaders, on the other hand, would need to focus on deliverables that can be quantified and tracked over time to determine their skill level at engaging and inspiring a workplace to their maximum contribution level in their organizations and in the marketplace they serve.
Aim to focus on the long-term. With the necessity that leaders feel to create quarterly dividends for stockholders, immediate innovation to remain competitive, and the shifting workforce conditions when it comes to skilled workers, it would seem that it’s getting harder and harder for the focus to be 10 years from now. The entire book makes a strong case for why is vital to keep your eyes set on what can not yet be seen or realized.
Ego has the tendency to delete what actually matters and replace it with the irrelevant. This is why in Time Mastery we focus on setting in place non-negotiables on your calendar first. The urgent and important will always be more satisfying than the not urgent but really important. The feeling of checking something off a list that was on fire at work is much more immediately satisfying than slowing down to fully explain to a team member why a process works like it does so they can do it themselves next time.
There is no short-cut to an education; it takes persistence and hard work. Seeing yourself as a student of your work, of your industry, in your life, sets in motion a process of continual learning that allows you stay curious and remain focused on the long-term effects of your behaviors and the actions you take. “Being a student,” Ryan says, “allows you to accept that others are better than you and breaks down the illusions.”

“The ego will try and avoid negative feedback or criticism which prevents you from reaching your potential. Ego is disconnected from reality, giving us false feedback by making us believe we do not need to improve and blocking our progress”.

Coach Yourself This Week: Create time this week to spend a few minutes to ask your boss, a board member, your partner, or whoever helps hold you accountable at work, the following questions.

What one action can I stop or start doing that you think will improve my performance at work?

What is something I could be focused on learning that would help me improve a skill I need to improve?

August 14, 2016 By Lynda Foster

Leadership Behaviors That Make You Invaluable at Work

We can easily recognize poor leadership behaviors in others. Meetings that are led inefficiently and are ineffective. Performance management that is punitive rather than empowering. Transactional conversations that jeopardize trust rather than build it. Actions, like being late or not listening, that communicate to others that you don’t respect their time or point of view.

Oh yeah. Pointing the finger up the ladder and around to peers is simple and I would dare say – prepare yourself – lazy. What’s much harder is to look at are our own actions and determine what we can do to be better leaders. After all, the only thing you really have control over is you. Identifying who we need to be and what we need to do to get better outcomes is one thing, actually changing the behavior is a whole other ballgame.

I hate to break the news to you if you haven’t figured this out already, but you can’t fix everything about yourself. You can make big improvements over time, but a complete personal demolition and rebuild will take a lifetime and usually isn’t necessary. Small, incremental pivots in your behavior can net huge returns. No matter how hard you work at being the best leader you possibly can, no matter how much time and effort and money you put into it, you will fall short of perfection – not only in your own eyes but also in others.

Nope. The art and science of great leadership is a constant focus on small pivots that you maintain over time that will lead to consistently achieving better results. It’s what Carol Dweck in her book says is a growth mindset.

So what do you work on first? McKinsey and Company did some research that I thought was a big help to answering that question. Out of 20 behaviors that create solid results in leaders, there were 4 that they determined give a leader 89% of the positive outcomes they experience. That sure does help narrow things to focus on down a bit, right?

What was interesting in the research that we did at Cortex, regarding those 4 behaviors was that they tied in nicely to the DISC profiles of those that we coach. This knowledge can help you focus your efforts quickly on what will be noticed by others and get you solid results. If you are already someone who has spent a career focusing on one of the behaviors because that one comes naturally for you, then you can probably assume that the one that is opposite of that is the first behavior to start with.

I will warn you now, though, our research also indicated that if you are someone who is great at one of the behaviors already you probably will want to lean in and get better at that one. This is not like the philosophy of focusing on your strengths. Yes, you want to continue to do what you are naturally gifted at, but the McKinsey research states clearly that you need, as a leader, to focus on being strong in each of these 4 areas to reach the peak performance outcomes your organization wants from you and that will make you invaluable in the workplace.

Which one should you focus on first to become more valuable to your organization and others? If you’re willing to spend about an hour of your time taking a couple of self-assessments and reading a few pages of material, you can determine the answer to that question pretty quickly.

We are creating an opportunity for anyone who gets this newsletter, and those that watch our segments on WFXR to download the quick guide to better leadership, 4 Keys to More Effective Leadership Behaviors for FREE during the next month.

You can CLICK HERE for your free download.

Become more valuable by following these 3 steps:

1. Download the free ebook
2. Pick one of the behaviors, from the short book, that you can quickly identify as something that you need to focus on to get those peak performance results you want to achieve. For instance, if you want to be a better problem solver, you will need to learn the skill of strategic thinking that I discussed in last week’s article. If you want to be more supportive, you will need to build your active listening skills (we’ll talk about how to do that next week). Having the behavior of getting results is becoming better at setting goals and being tenacious at reaching them. Finally, if you aren’t skilled at seeking others perspectives you are going to need to take a hard look at who you trust for advice now and on what subjects. Do you have experts in key areas that you are working on that you have a strong enough relationship with to receive new perspectives on initiatives that are not moving forward on?
3. Pick ONE SIMPLE ACTION this week that will move you towards building that skill.