Executive SOS: 7 Easy Steps to a Proven Strategic Operating System
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About this ebook
Every intelligent, successful, regular Senior Executive has the latent capacity to operate as a strategic inspiring leader. It's just obsolete organizational operating processes and practices that are holding you back. Executive SOS shows you how you can transcend conventional operating norms to unlock your creativity, double your productivity, empower your people, engage your stakeholders, lift your profile and achieve breakthrough results!
I first engineered and piloted the Executive Strategic Operating System while I was leading an organizational transformation for a business with 1000 people. It was highly successful. People Engagement lifted by 30% within 6 months and performance improvement followed. Since then I developed the system while coaching 50+ Senior Executives in Strategic Leadership over the course of 2-3 years. Based on the common challenges and aspirations of my clients, the 7 Steps were distilled and fine-tuned.
Implementing these 7 Steps will enable you to articulate your Vision, live your Values and release your Voice to the world. You will be able to make the quantum shift to becoming a strategic inspiring leader by transcending the chaos and rising above the noise. You will find out how to realize your highest aspirations and leave a legacy that you can be rightfully proud of and humbled by.
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Book preview
Executive SOS - Antoinette Braks
Become an Inspiring and Strategic Leader
7 Easy Steps to a Proven
Strategic Operating System
Antoinette Braks
Copyright 2015 Antoinette Braks
All rights reserved
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my parents with my wholehearted gratitude for their lifelong commitment, care and encouragement supporting me to realize my highest aspirations.
Preface
My Perspective
As a corporate gypsy who has traveled much of the world leading People and Culture in large and medium sized organizations, and coaching and consulting to Senior Executives in Strategic Leadership, Organizational and Leadership Development, I have found that our amazing potential to create and realize a vastly improved future is inhibited by the way our organizations operate.
Rather than releasing our capacity to achieve significantly improved outcomes and create a better world, they inhibit, constrain and limit us. Red tape, bureaucratic approval processes and a prevailing focus on risk management reduces our effectiveness and suspends our development. They rob us of our power to create.
Conventional organizational processes are the legacy of previous leaders who have reacted to the unethical behaviour of a few by seeking to limit decision-making as much as possible. While technology continues to enable us to streamline and automate work processes, our opportunity to realize our human potential is stifled.
This inhibits our evolution! It constitutes an urgent SOS call for help!!!
We were born to evolve, to develop our capacity to lead fulfilling, exciting lives and support and encourage all members of our community to do the same. We did not start out on our careers to live a humdrum existence in order to secure a pay check at the end of each week or month, notwithstanding how big that pay check is.
My Purpose
It has been my purpose in my life and career to enable people to realize their potential and organizations, their aspirations. As a result of this commitment, I have observed, participated in and learned how organizations operate. I have also studied human potential in terms of action orientation, emotional awareness, cognitive agility, spiritual intelligence and neuroscience in relation to the development of our leadership capacity.
As a result I have experimented with new approaches to organizational transformation that have been remarkably successful albeit sometimes confronting to conventional managers. I then learned how to bring my colleagues and other stakeholders with me so that we could transform the organization as a whole. Through action learning I discovered how to transcend conventional operating systems with a more strategic operating system that enables us to tap into our unrealized potential.
In recent years I have taken my innovative approaches into my coaching conversations with more than 50 Senior Executive clients mostly leading divisions and organizations of between 100 and 1000 people. They were highly intelligent, capable and successful executives who wanted to become more strategic, inspiring leaders.
A Proven Solution
Through the course of multiple collaborative coaching sessions, I distilled the Seven Steps to establishing a Strategic Operating System. They all serve to unlock our creativity, can more than double our productivity, empower our employees to make aligned decisions, engage multiple stakeholders to become active participants, lift our profile and aspirational voice in our community and generate breakthrough results.
These outcomes have manifested time and again with my executive clients. In my special research study calibrating their leadership capacity before and after a 12-month coaching period, every single client shifted a full stage in leadership development. Most moved from Achiever to Catalyst, and two to Strategist.
For me this not only proves the phenomenal value of the Strategic Operating System to uplift our lives and those of the people we lead and serve, but also the intransigence of current organizational practices that hold us back. We already have the latent leadership capacity to live into a much higher version of ourselves; we just need to operate more strategically to live into that potential.
Your Personal Journey
This book is for every Senior Executive who wants to advance and accelerate their career, set and realize higher aspirational outcomes and lead a more fulfilling life. The Seven Steps to establishing your own Strategic Operating System will enable you to break free of obsolete management practices and realize breakthrough results to create a better world.
Welcome! You will thoroughly enjoy your personal journey in self-evolution and the transformation of the organization you lead! While there will be challenges and concerns, new insights and opportunities will also emerge in at least equal number. And as you persist, you will be amazed by what transpires in your life. You will once again be excited as each new day dawns and you will also get balance and wellbeing back into your life.
In the following chapters you will find case studies of a selection of my clients who have lifted their careers to a higher octave in leadership alongside the accomplishment of transformational business outcomes. You will also discover and appreciate the shifts in paradigms, principles and practices that will increase your self-awareness of how you can elevate and expand your leadership capacity so you can realize your true potential and the aspirations you hold for your organization.
All the very best,
Antoinette Braks
For more information on Stage Leadership Development, go to www.antoinettebraks/stages
To register for the Executive SOS Free Video Training Series, go to www.antoinettebraks/sos
Table Of Contents
Preface
Chapter One - Run the SCHEDULE
VISION
Chapter Two - Define the SCOPE
Chapter Three - Set the SCENE
VALUES
Chapter Four - Create the STYLE
Chapter Five - Know the SCORE
VOICE
Chapter Six - Step Up On STAGE
Chapter Seven - Leverage SCALE
Chapter Eight - Next Steps
Chapter Nine - Acknowledgements
Chapter Ten - About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Run the SCHEDULE
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Mastery of Time
Time is seen as one of the few limited resources we have in today’s world. After all we cannot make more time than the 24 hours we have in each day. Yet most of us do not proactively manage our time so that it is aligned with our strategic goals. Instead of consciously choosing how best to invest our time, we allow meetings to invade our time. As a result we lose our strategic focus to operational issues, our boss’s priorities and external concerns that appear to require our urgent and immediate attention. We’re largely reactive.
Setting aside time for strategic work with all stakeholders is the primary key to discovering how to operate as an extraordinary leader on a strategic level. It is the first step to becoming a Strategist and joining the top 5% of Executive Leaders. When our calendar of events demands that we give attention to important strategic matters, we are pulled to make this critical first shift to becoming an inspiring, strategic leader.
By seeing your calendar or diary as a channel through which strategic work flows rather than as a limited resource that you must fit everything into, you will find that you have all the time in the world to realize your Strategic Agenda. You will stop trying to do everything that comes your way and instead empower and engage others proactively and collaboratively. Your time horizon will shift in your mind and you will soon find yourself making decisions based on your longer-term view of strategic priorities.
Jane’s Story
Jane started out as a teacher, completed a Masters in Education and was first made a Head Teacher at the very young age of 27. She is a petite woman who dresses impeccably in colorful feminine-power suits, has a big heart, trusts her intuition and demonstrates conviction in her passions and purpose. You wouldn’t mess with Jane! She has that matriarchal quality of highly respected school principals who do not tolerate foolish pursuits! Jane is a straight shooter without subterfuge.
She had just been appointed as the Executive Director in charge of Leadership and Learning for Public Schools. She was responsible for the contributions of over 1,000 people employed in her Division. Jane was committed to making the role her own and keen to take giant strides forward. She had firm views on moving out of the 1950’s based schools system focused largely on academic achievement criteria and shifting to student-centric learning outcomes for the whole person based on their individual talents.
Her Division had a very high workload relative to her peers. They