This week's guest post is from Shirzad Chamine:

Daniel Goleman made a compelling and accurate case nearly two decades ago that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was more important to leadership effectiveness and performance than IQ. But most attempts at increasing EQ have resulted only in temporary improvements. The reason is that a more foundational and core intelligence has been ignored, which is a pre-cursor to high EQ. In my lectures at Stanford University, I define this as Positive Intelligence (PQ). Without a solid PQ foundation, many of our attempts at improvements fizzle due to self-sabotage.


Your mind is your best friend, but it is also your worst enemy, involved in self-sabotage. To illustrate, when your mind tells you that you should prepare for tomorrow’s important meeting, it is acting as your friend, causing positive action. When it wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. anxious about the meeting and warning you for the hundredth time about the many consequences of failing, it is acting as your enemy; it is simply exhausting your mental resources without any redeeming value. No friend would do that.

Your PQ is the percentage of time your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging you. For example, a PQ of 75 means that your mind is serving you 75 percent of the time and sabotaging you about 25 percent of the time. Compelling evidence from a synthesis of research in psychology, neuroscience, and organizational science shows that with higher PQ teams and professionals ranging from leaders to salespeople perform 30-35 percent better on average. What’s more, they report being far happier and less stressed.

3 Strategies to increase PQ

I have coached hundreds of CEOs and their senior executive teams on the tools of Positive Intelligence. I take them to the frontlines of the unceasing battle raging in their minds. On one side of this battlefield are the well-disguised Saboteurs, who wreck any attempt at increasing either happiness or performance. On the other side is the Sage, who has access to one’s wisdom, insights, and often untapped mental powers. The Saboteurs and Sage are fueled by different regions of the brain. We are literally of two minds and two brains. This suggests three strategies to increasing your PQ:

Strategy 1. Weaken your Saboteurs:
The Saboteurs are the internal enemies. They are a set of automatic and habitual mind patterns, each with its own voice, beliefs, and assumptions that work against your best interest. They come in ten varieties, with names like the Judge, Controller, Victim, Stickler, Pleaser, and Avoider.

Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon. The question is not whether you have them, but which ones you have, and how strong they are. Of the executives participating in my Stanford lectures, nearly 95% conclude that they do have Saboteurs that cause “significant harm” to them reaching their full potential for success or happiness.

The great news is that you can significantly reduce the power of these mental foes. The key to weakening your Saboteurs is to identify which one you have and expose its key hidden beliefs, patterns, thoughts, and emotions. This, in effect, allows you to create a “mug shot” of your internal enemy. It allows you to identify the Saboteur the moment it shows up in your head. At that point, what you do is to just label that thought as Saboteur thought and let it go rather than pursue it seriously. To be sure, it will keep coming back, which means you will keep labeling it, and letting it go. This simple act of observing, labeling, and letting go has profound impact.

For example, notice the difference between saying “I believe I can’t succeed” and “My Judge says I can’t succeed.” The moment you label a Saboteur thought as such, it loses much of it credibility and power over you.

(Discover your top Saboteur with free online assessment athttp://www.positiveintelligence.com/)

Strategy 2. Strengthen Your Sage:
Your Sage’s great wisdom and strength is rooted in its perspective:any problem you are facing is eitheralready a gift and opportunity or could be actively turned into one.Your Saboteurs mock that perspective and cause you instead to feel anxious, frustrated, disappointed, stressed, or guilty over “bad” outcomes. Both the Sage and the Saboteur perspectives are self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you follow the Sage perspective, you get greater access to its five vastly untapped mental powers which can meet absolutely any work or life challenge without being worked up about it. There are simple and fun “power games” you can play in the back of your mind to facilitate this process.

Strategy 3. Strengthen PQ Brain muscles:
The PQ Brain gives rise to the Sage perspective its powers. Its focus is on thriving rather than surviving, which is the Saboteurs’ focus. It consists of three components: the middle prefrontal cortex, portions of the right brain, and what I call the empathy circuitry. The PQ Brain “muscles” are activated and strengthened when you command your mind to stop its busy mind chatter and direct its attention to any of your five physical sensations. An example might be to feel the weight of your body on your seat, or feet on the floor, or sensations of your breathing.

This might appear simplistic, but it is backed by a massive amount of research. Every time you attempt such a shift of attention for about 10 seconds, you have performed a “PQ rep,” strengthening the muscles of your PQ Brain. The goal is to do 100 PQ reps per day to build up and maintain strong PQ Brain muscles. This can be done while sitting in a meeting, driving, walking the dog, or taking a shower. It doesn’t need to take any extra time from your busy day. These muscles build up really fast.

Without a strong foundation of Positive Intelligence, attempts at improving performance or personal fulfillment are analogous to planting elaborate new gardens while leaving voracious snails free to roam. The wise investment is to raise Positive Intelligence first. The results are often reported to be gamechanging for the team, and lifechanging for the individual.

Try this out. Discover your top Saboteurs and PQ score with the free online assessments athttp://www.positiveintelligence.com/

Bio:
Shirzad Chamine is author of New York Times bestsellerPositiveIntelligence. He is Chairman of CTI, the largest coach-training organization in the world. A preeminent C-suite advisor, Shirzad has coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams. His background includes PhD studies in neuroscience in addition to a BA in psychology, an MS in electrical engineering, and an MBA from Stanford, where he lectures.

Unless you are an heir to a throne, people usually don’t begin their careers leading a large organization. There’s a progression of passages, or at least there should be.

Charan, Drotter, and Noel wrote about six leadership passages in their classic bookThe LeadershipPipeline. However, they use the terms “leadership” and “management” interchangeably. There’s a big difference, right?

What if we took a simplified version of the Pipeline model, and mash it with a distinction between leadership and management?

We’ll call itThe Great Leadership& Management Passages Model(OK, so we need a catchier name):

Here are the six passages:

Passage #1: Managing Yourself
Managing yourself means learning how to show up to work on time and dressed appropriately, get along with your co-workers, manage your time and priorities, keep your boss happy, and follow basic workplace adequate, i.e., no microwaving fish in the break room. It also means learning how to solve problems, make decisions, use good judgment, and control your emotions.

Passage #2: Leading Yourself
Leading yourself involves figuring out what really inspires you and doing whatever it is you do with a sense of purpose and passion. It includes having a clear set of values and principles that guide your day-to-day behavior and decisions, a compelling vision, and goals. It requires the ability to handle ambiguity, paradox, and change.

Passage #3: Managing Others and Teams
Managing others and teams involves learning out to hire, train, establish performance measures, reward, and punish. It’s about figuring out what and how the work needs to be done, and lining up the right resources needed to get the work done.

Passage #4: Leading Others and Teams
In other to lead others and teams, you have to learn about and tap into each individuals values, goals, hopes, dreams, and fears. It involves getting to know each team member and learning how to inspire commitment, energize, and harness the individual and collective passion of the team. At the risk of stating the obvious – to lead others and teams requirestransformingyourself intoa leader.

Passage #5: Managing Organizations
Managing organizations involves optimizing a number of different functions in order to create a product or service and archive measurable organizational outcomes. It requires having a solid grasp of all aspects of the organization, including strategy, sales, marketing, human resources, manufacturing, research, legal, etc….
Goals need to be set at a high level and then cascaded throughout the organization with a performance management system in place to achieve those goals. Managing organizations also means being responsive to multiple stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, government, and the community.

Passage #6: Leading Organizations
Leading organizations requires learning how to establish a compelling vision and inspire large groups of people to act from afar. An organizational leader can no longer rely on the ability tap into each individual’s passion – they need to figure out how to managecultureandengagethe entire organization in order to mobilize shared commitment.
Leading organizations requires learning how to identify and develop other leaders, because no one leader can create and sustain extraordinary performance on their own.

I believe the passages are developmentally progressive and build upon each other. An individual can technically jump right into passages #5 and #6, Managing and Leading Organizations, they won’t be successful in the long run if they haven’t learned how to lead and manage themselves, other individuals, and teams I’ve seen this happen over and over – the brilliant, young entrepreneur or the star performer who is put in charge of an organization with undeveloped emotional intelligence and no actual experience managing others. Unfortunately, sometimes they never do learn – or even try to – and it ends up being their downfall.

I realize the model is way overly simplified – we couldn’t possibly describe everything it takes to lead and manage in less than 1000 words. But then again, when it comes to models, simple is good. If you can’t explain it to a 12-year old (or a CEO), then it’s too complicated.

So what do you think of the model? Make sense? What would you change? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

This guest post byDavid Grossmanwasn't meant as a response to Beth Armknecht Miller's recentThe Top 5 Mistakes Leaders Make - the timing was just coincidental. 
Someone tweeted in response to Beth's post: "I made all of these - does that make me a great leader?" I'd say it could help, as long as you learn by your mistakes. In that case, why not double down and make10 mistakes? (-:



In my experience, every large organization has at least one thing in common…

There isn’t a single senior management team that doesn’t spend days, weeks working tirelessly on their organization’s strategic plan. At the end of the process, everyone leaves excited about the plan and the path forward.

Yet too often the scenario that plays out is just an illusion, not true alignment. Getting the strategic plan in writing is only the beginning. The real challenge is in getting to the outcome of that strategic plan by activating the strategy inside your organization.

When it comes to bringing strategy to life, we’ve all made costly (and often the same) mistakes—mistakes that make the difference between good and great. Between confusion, skepticism and complacency… and engagement, efficiency and effectiveness.

Like any good investment, committing to organization-wide alignment around messaging and vision should pay for itself more than ten-fold—this year, and in the future.

Here are just a few of the mistakes that everyone makes, but everyone can avoid.

Mistake #1 – You don’t have a strategy that’s codified (it’s in your head or in a few leaders’ heads)
You might have the most compelling vision for your organization, but if you can’t get it out of your head and get others to see it and believe in it, it might as well not even exist.

It’s up to you to engage others so they have the same clear picture you do of your strategy and where the business is going. Lift the perspective out of your head and get it into others’ so they can own it and help you achieve it.

Mistake #2 – Elements of your strategy mean different things to different people
When it comes to strategy there are two rules. Rule #1: Have a strategy. Rule #2: Make sure everyone is literally on the same page in understanding the components of the strategy and how to implement it.

Take a cue from the trusted dictionary and literally define what each of the concepts means in your strategy. Share the definitions with your leaders and employees.

Mistake #3 – No data exists on the state of communication and what needs to be improved from employees’ perspective
Leaders are hungry for data to make business decisions on everything from new products and services to whether or not to enter a new market. Yet when it comes to organizational health and employee engagement, many fail to measure what’s working and what’s not.

Whether measuring your own business unit/function or the overall health of communications inside the organization, leaders (with the help of their communications experts) can make precise decisions about what communications to start, stop or continue to get employees engaged in the strategy and drive performance.

Mistake #4 – You don’t hold your leaders accountable to communicate your strategy
Leaders set the tone for how information flows inside an organization and how employees work and interact together, yet many aren’t judged on their performance in this critical discipline.

Accountability must be built in at multiple levels so leaders know what is expected of them, understand what “success” looks like, and can perform effectively to meet the stated expectations. When set up best, accountability for communication is part of the overall performance management system and is specifically tied to compensation.

Mistake #5 – You don’t arm leaders with the training and tools they need to communicate the strategy and make it relevant for their teams
Training ensures a leader builds the competence needed to customize and communicate critical information, and there’s no more critical piece of information than your business strategy. Since leadership communication is a learned skill, this is a critical element. When leaders know better, they do better.

Tools provide leaders with what they need to get their message across to various audiences. These often are compiled in a standard kit that leaders can pull from and customize for communicating in different settings and circumstances, whether it is bullet points for a casual lunch with employees or a presentation on the company’s key goals for a sales event or all-staff meeting.

Finally, leaders need to be assessed. How are they doing at meeting the expectations you’ve set for them?

I call it the Core Four: accountability, tools, training, and measurement. Miss one, and you’ve reduced your chances of moving leaders to action.

Communication is at the heart of your success
These are just a few of the critical mistakes everyone makes. The good news is they’re all avoidable through strong communication.

At its core, great leadership is all about giving direction, offering context, and ensuring that every person in the company—from the representative on the front lines of customer service to members of the senior leadership team—understands in ways that are relevant to him or her what the company strategy is, what it will take to accomplish its goals, and what the rewards are when you get there.

All that can only happen through communication.

Though communication does not always get the attention it deserves in C-suite planning, great leaders know it’s at the heart of their success—it’s the leavening that makes the strategic bread rise, the wheels that make the strategic car drive, the brush with which you paint your masterpiece.

It’s remarkable what you can accomplish when people know where you’re going and how to get there.

David Grossman, ABC, APR, Fellow PRSA, is one of America’s foremost authorities on communication and leadership, and a sought-after speaker and advisor to Fortune 500 leaders. A two-time author, David is CEO of The Grossman Group (http://www.yourthoughtpartner.com/), an award-winning Chicago-based strategic leadership development and internal communication consultancy; clients include: Accor, AOL, GlaxoSmithKline, HTC, and McDonald’s.