![6 Inspiring Books to Read in Honor of Women’s History Month]()
Leadership
Women’s History Month gives us an opportunity to explore some of the latest books written by women, about women, and for women. Here are 6 new titles that will inspire you to become more self-aware, break social expectations, and participate in healthy conflict to reach the greater good.
1. The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir by Steffanie Strathdee
What it’s about: A fascinating and terrifying account of one woman’s extraordinary effort to save her husband’s life – and the discovery of a forgotten cure that has the potential to save millions more.
Why pick it up: A real-life against all odds thriller that proves when science, medicine, and love align, the impossible becomes possible.
2. Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World by Melissa A. Schilling
What it’s about: Melissa Schilling, one of the world’s leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people – Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs – to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.
Why pick it up: It’s a reminder that when it comes to understanding the extraordinary, outliers and exceptions are invaluable teachers.
3. Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think by Tasha Eurich
What it’s about: Organizational psychologist, Tasha Eurich, reveals that self-awareness — knowing who we are and how others see us — is the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t see themselves quite as clearly as they could.
Why pick it up: Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, Eurich shows us what it really takes to better understand ourselves on the inside — and how to get others to tell us the honest truth about how we come across.
4. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
What it’s about: Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, and if there was still a way home.
Why pick it up: Beautiful and propulsive, the questions Westover’s book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?
5. Fully Human: 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership, and Life by Susan Packard
What it’s about: HGTV cofounder, Susan Packard, tackles unconventional topics, like how workaholism keeps us emotionally adolescent, and how forgiveness belongs in the workplace too. Packard shares her EQ Fit-catalyzed success at HGTV and teaches an ‘inside out’ practice of self-discovery, which helps you uncover and dispel unproductive emotions.
Why pick it up: No matter where you are in your career, success is an inside job. Packard lays out how to develop interdependent work relationships, and for leaders, how to build healthy company cultures.
6. First: Sandra Day O’Connor by Evan Thomas
What it’s about: The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives — by the New York Times bestselling author Evan Thomas.
Why pick it up: As the author recounts with delicious particulars, time and again, Justice O’Connor prevailed in “getting to five” on complex cases by avoiding emotional flare-ups and no-win fights, balancing realism and idealism, refusing to retaliate, and compromising after recognizing that her perceived best result was not going to be possible.
Question: What titles would you add in honor of Women’s History Month?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![6 Inspiring Books to Read in Honor of Women’s History Month]()
Leadership
In 2012, American lawyer and politician Reshma Saujani started a nonprofit called Girls Who Code. “Coding,” explains Saujani in her 2016 TED Talk, is “an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure.
Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you’re trying to build comes to life.
It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection. We immediately see in our program our girls’ fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect.
Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she’ll say, ‘I don’t know what code to write.’ The teacher will look at her screen, and she’ll see a blank text editor. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen.
But if she presses undo a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn’t get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she’d rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust.”
If you are a woman born in the 20th century, you can probably relate to the phrase – perfection or bust. Three years ago, I was asked to participate in the inaugural year of SUE Talks. These TED-like talks were designed to inspire women to embrace their inner SUE by sharing stories of how they were Successful, Unstoppable, and Empowering. Since the launch in 2015, dozens of women have shared their SUE Talk on stage. Several of those talks, like two of the examples below, are examples from women who struggled for years to break the code that was written about how women leaders should behave. The third is from a woman who defied social stereotypes at an early age, and took code-breaking risks that paid off.
1. Surfing for Business, by Cheryl Goodman. In the summer of 2012, Cheryl Goodman nearly drowned. But in the moments after a set of rogue waves separated Goodman from her surfboard and threw her repeatedly to the ocean floor, her fear was not of dying – but of embarrassment.
2. There Once Was a Good Little Girl, by Michelle Bergquist. In this warm and witty recount, Bergquist shares her struggle to outgrow the childhood poem that shaped her self-image, even as her young husband recovered from a severe stroke.
3. Shooting for the Moon, by Kathy David. One month before her 16th birthday, Kathy David had a nervous breakdown. After a 3-week hospital recovery, she went home and demanded emancipation. David changed the trajectory of her life starting with a risky interview for a banking job for which she had no experience.
As we prepare the next generations of women to become our future leaders, what codes are we writing for them about what it means to be a woman, and which must they break in order to make progress?
Question: What self-limiting barriers have you had to break to become the best version of yourself?
Leadership
If you ask a third grader what she knows about President Lincoln, she might draw you a picture of a tall, lanky, bearded man wearing a black suit and a stove top hat. If you ask a ninth grader the same question, he’ll likely recall that Lincoln was America’s president during the Civil War. When pressed, he may add that the Civil War was fought between the north and the south over the issue of slavery.
But, if you turn back the pages of American history, you’ll find that President Lincoln saw the Civil War in a much larger context. Not only was America wrestling with the question of slavery. Lincoln felt the burden of the Civil War was nothing short of a test of whether a country was capable of governing itself. The world was watching and waiting for the sovereignty experiment to crumble. The republic set forth by the founding fathers was on the brink of failure – an asterisk in history of an 80-plus year rebellion that would inevitably revert to rule by monarchy.
Lincoln knew that preserving the union could only happen by tapping into the power of diversity. Here are three lessons in diversity that today’s leaders can take from Lincoln’s playbook:
1. Assemble a Team of Rivals. In her book, Team of Rivals, author Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how Lincoln brilliantly assembled a cabinet from his Republican opponents to preserve the Union and win the Civil War. None of these men had high regard for Lincoln. But, Lincoln did not want a group of “yes” men to agree with his every decision. He wanted a cabinet of passionate advisers who could shed light on the complex issues facing the country, were free to question his authority, and who were unafraid to argue with him. Surround yourself with smart people and encourage them to challenge your ideas. Relying on people who think just like you can lead to group think and rubber stamp leadership. Neither you nor your organization will benefit.
2. Allow Your Ideas to Evolve. Lincoln was unsure what to do if slavery ended. For most of his career, he saw slaves as a group of people who had been uprooted from their own society and unjustly brought to America. He saw no way for freed slaves to live peaceably among white Americans. Instead, Lincoln advocated for colonization – sending a majority of the African-American population to settle in Africa or Central America. In the last two years of his life though, he began to see the possibility of diversity. Freed slaves were joining the Union Army and serving in the Navy by the thousands. Black leaders argued that African-American were as much natives of the country as whites. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, all mention of colonization was eliminated. When you take a leadership position, you become privy to information that you did not have before. Don’t let your bias keep you from holding onto outdated opinions when presented with new facts from diverse sources.
3. Listen Intently, Then Be Decisive. Lincoln’s cabinet often debated slavery late into the night. Finally, he made up his mind. He brought the cabinet together and told them he no longer needed their thoughts on the main issue, but he would listen to their suggestions about how best to implement his decision and its timing. Some members still did not support Lincoln’s decision, but they felt they’d been heard. If you wait to make a decision until you have perfect information, it’s no longer a decision, it’s a foregone conclusion.
The most successful leaders know how to leverage the power of diversity. They seek out diverse perspectives, evolve their opinions as they get new information, and know when to stop collecting input and be decisive.
Question: Which of these lessons in diversity can improve your leadership journey?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
We’ve all come across them. Those leaders who people naturally gravitate toward. Though it seems counterintuitive, the magnetic effect these leaders have on people is not because of how people feel about the leader. It’s because of how the leader makes people feel about themselves.
These leaders have mastered the embodiment of two basic facts about people:
Fact 1: Every person matters.
Fact 2: Every person wants to feel valued.
By keeping these facts in mind, you can master the skills necessary to achieve leadership excellence. Here are three skills that will have the highest impact:
1. Help People Connect the Dots. In my post, “A Pharaoh Walks Into a Bar,” I illustrate why team members need to understand how their daily jobs fit into the big picture. It is your responsibility as a leader to help your team connect the dots. You may use formal tools like strategy maps, or pull up to your nearest whiteboard. Regardless of your delivery method, take the time to sit with your team members to help them visualize their role in the success of the organization.
2. Help People Grow. I know a CEO who likes to joke that, “The only thing worse than training your people and then they leave is not training your people and they stay!” All joking aside, one of the main reasons people give for leaving companies is that they stop growing. Growth brings energy, vitality, life, and challenge. Without growth, we’re just going through the motions. Create a culture of learning and growth to maximize the collective talent of your team.
3. Give People Sincere Appreciation. People who don’t feel appreciated are often the first to burn out or jump ship. It only takes a minute to recognize a team member for making a positive contribution. But, doing it right requires more than the occasional “Attagirl!” Give timely and specific praise to show your team members how you value their contribution. Here’s a quick demo to show you how.
One final secret to mastering leadership excellence – you can’t fake it. Leaders who genuinely care about their team members will invest the time to help each one feel valued. Be committed to helping them connect the dots, helping them grow, and giving them sincere appreciation. Every day is an opportunity to help people see the best in themselves and achieve their highest potential.
Question: What is one thing you can do today to help someone else feel valued?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
It’s easy to understand the logic of investing in enterprise-wide technologies. Senior leaders recognize that it is better for multiple users to have access to data do things like track sales, manage projects, and share files. Yet, when it comes to leadership development, most executives ignore the enterprise-wide model. They implicitly view their organization as an aggregation of individuals.
Successful companies of the 21st century create a robust, repeatable process for talent development. They do more than offer leadership training as a loose series of stand-alone programs. Instead, they develop a holistic model that couples training with practice and coaching in an environment that includes three critical features: context, practice and reinforcement.
Context is king
In the earliest stages of planning a leadership development initiative, senior leaders should ask themselves a simple question: What, precisely, is this program for and how will we measure results? If the answer is to support a scaled organic growth strategy, for example, the company will need leaders brimming with ideas and capable of devising winning strategies for new customer acquisition while reinforcing relationships with key customers to reduce attrition.
Putting principles into practice
When it comes to planning a leadership development program, companies face a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, there is value in classroom-style programs that offer participants time to step back and learn new skills as a cohort. On the other hand, even after very basic training session, adults typically retain just 5% of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly 75% when they practice classroom training with real world experience.
Reinforcement by course correction
Adult learners, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful classroom experiences into changed behavior. Not only do they not have enough opportunities to put theory into practice, but they also lack critical insight about how their behavior impacts results. Becoming a more effective leader means adjusting one’s underlying mindset to address the root causes of behavior. A diagnostic tool to assess competencies, assumptions, and personality style, coupled with coaching, accelerates the participant’s ability to identify what is going on, why it is happening, and how to change.
Reinforcement by air cover
Research published in the Harvard Business Review shows that leadership training gains the most traction within highly visible development efforts championed by senior leaders. That’s because recognition by senior leaders motivate people to learn and change, create the conditions for them to apply what they’ve studied, and foster immediate improvements in individual and organizational effectiveness.
If you’re not including context, practice, and reinforcement in your leadership development initiatives, you’re probably overspending and getting underwhelming results.
Question: Is your leadership development program actually developing leaders?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
Last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90. While it is customary to look to our elders for sage advice, King knew that he was walking a path of imminent danger, but that his words could not be silenced by a bullet. Before his assassination at age 39, King reached deep within himself to find messages that would ring as clear and true today as they did during the turbulent times in which he was called to lead.
Here are 12 quotes from 1960 (at age 31) to 1969 (the night before he was killed eight years later) that are part of Dr. King’s enduring legacy.
1. In the final analysis, the question will be, “What did you do for others?” (Three Dimensions of a Complete Life, Sermon delivered in Pasadena, CA, February 28, 1960.)
2. I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. (Lecture given at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa, October 15, 1962.)
3. History has proven that social systems have a great last-minute breathing power, and the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive. (Ibid.)
4. We often end up with the high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. (Ibid.)
5. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written while in solitary confinement after being arrested on charges of violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations, April 16, 1963.)
6. Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. (I Have A Dream, Address given at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.)
7. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. (Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech in Oslo, Norway, December 11, 1964.)
8. We must learn to live together as brothers — or perish together as fools. (Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, Commencement Address for Oberlin College, June 1965.)
9. A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus. (Domestic Impact of the War, Speech before National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, November 1967.)
10. I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear. (Where Do We Go From Here?, Address delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, August 1967.)
11. Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. (The Drum Major Instinct, Sermon given at Ebenezer Baptist Church, February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination.)
12. Either we go up together, or we go down together. (I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, Speech given at the Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968, the night before his death.)
The last words of King’s speech at the Mason Temple were borrowed from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” At his funeral, his wife, Coretta, completed the stanza that King had been too overcome by emotion to add, “His truth is marching on.”
Question: Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Is it time to break your silence about something that matters?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
6. First: Sandra Day O’Connor by Evan Thomas