The Lonely Leader
Bonus Episode. Celebrating The Fifth Anniversary of The Lonely Leader. Special Offer Inside.
BONUS EPISODE
Celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of The Lonely Leader. Special Offer Inside.
SUMMARY
To celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the founding of The Lonely Leader, James is offering five places on a unique and expanded version of The Leadership Accelerator Programme.
In this episode, he explains what the programme entails and the impact his coaching, training and mentoring can have on you.
He also reveals a discount of over 50% for the lucky five selected to participate.
To apply and be considered for place please use the link to the simple application form below and a member of The Lonely Leader Team will be in touch: https://lonely-leader.mykajabi.com/apply-leadership-accelerator
KEY TAKEAWAYS
This is the most popular programme at The Lonely Leader, delivered to high performing leaders around the world. It has condensed decades of insight and industry best practice into hours of delivery.
James considers it a privilege to be able to coach leaders in a diverse range of roles and sectors and access insights into best practice.
These insights combined with his own leadership experiences help shape cutting edge content to accelerate the growth and development of participants on The Leadership Accelerator.
The programme entails twenty three hours of one to one coaching, training and mentoring. The content will be tailored to your specific needs.
Operating on a bi weekly schedule that provides close to a full year of personal support to help drive and accelerate your performance to a whole new level.
ABOUT THE HOST
James is an experienced mentor, coach and thought leader who works with a range of clients from FTSE 100 companies, SME´s the NHS and wider public and not for profit sectors.
His twenty year career in elite sport initially as a professional rugby player but predominantly as a chief executive has given him an invaluable insight in managing the success, failures and pressures associated with leadership at the highest level.
As a high performance coach James specialises in enhancing resilience and leadership development. He is a passionate advocate of the notion that to find lasting fulfilment we need to take a holistic view of high performance and create it in both our professional roles and personal lives.
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CONNECT & CONTACT
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- Duration:
- 13m
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
I'm James Rule. Welcome to the Lonely Leader podcast, where we help existing and aspiring leaders find clarity, build resilience, drive performance and enhance fulfilment. The Lonely Leader is about to turn five years old. I'm hugely proud of that milestone. I'm sure you've probably heard the statistics before that nearly half of businesses failed to survive to their fifth birthday. So I wanted to do something special to commemorate that, and I'm offering five places on our most popular coaching, training, mentoring programme, the leadership accelerator, five places at over a 50% discount. So what is the leadership accelerator? Well, it's designed to work one-to-one with individuals and share my personal experiences and insights from my leadership journey, operating as a chief executive in two different professional sporting clubs. And equally importantly, the experiences and best practice that I see in clients that I've worked with over the last five years. One of the blessings of my job is you get to build very strong relationships. You get to see leaders operating, their wider teams operating, and naturally you're exposed to good practice and you're exposed to practice that doesn't work quite as well. And that enhances what I call my knowledge library and allows me to draw upon their experiences, their case studies, to support my coaching and to support my training. I'm a huge advocate of accelerated learning. You'll have heard me say this before, but I don't believe that very many of us ever set for on an untrodden path, whether we're looking at getting fit and healthy, whether we're trying to improve as a parent, whether we're trying to improve the quality of our relationships or with regard to our professional role, our professional competency, people have walked that path ahead of us. So to me, it makes absolute perfect sense. It almost feels like a necessity and to do otherwise would be negligent to find people who have walked that path ahead of you. Why would you want to spend time going down the proverbial dead ends, making mistakes, hitting stress points that other people have hit and wrestling with them when you could find people and learn from them to avoid those particular challenges, to find the shortcuts, the map, if you will, to help accelerate your learning and your progression in your career. And that's what the leadership accelerators all about. It's about decades of insight and experience for me, from all the people I've worked with and been privileged to spend time with and compacting that into hours of work so that you can take it and add it to your own leadership DNA and really enhance your professional performance. So there's four key areas that all of our work sits around. One is clarity. Taking the time and having the tools to be able to really understand where am I? Where am I trying to get to? And how am I going to get there? If we don't take the time to establish our destination, how can we ever build the roadmap to get there? So a key foundational element of the leadership accelerator is establishing clarity. Then we're looking to build resilience. I've spent time playing in the professional sporting arena. I've also spent most of my leadership journey working in the sporting sector. And that sector is the ultimate testing ground for resilience. You are in the proverbial goldfish ball. Every decision is exposed. Every performance is analyzed by a huge stakeholder group. So resilience is absolutely paramount. And I'm a huge believer that this notion of resilience is in ATV that got it or you haven't is completely wrong. Resilience is something that you can enhance. And the reality is we're all going to deal with adversity in both our professional and our personal life. We don't wish it upon anybody, but the harsh reality is we will have to deal with adversity at some point. So it's far better rather than fearing that to have the tools, the strategies, the skill set to enhance your resilience so you can walk towards and through those challenges as opposed to trying to avoid them and hoping that they don't go. So we build clarity. We enhance resilience. And then we get into the tactical strategic elements of how you really drive performance, because ultimately we're talking about both our professional role obviously, but also those roles we operate in away from work, whether we're a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife, a parent, a friend, we have to optimize performance in all those areas if we want to get fulfillment. And so we spend a lot of time getting into the nuts and bolts of performance. We get into communication. We get into to do lists, how we manage our time. We look at culture. We look at performance appraisal. How do you build a high performing team? How do you attract the best talent? How do you make people feel valued? All of these vast array of leadership essentials that we work through that you need, in my opinion, in your proverbial toolbox so that you can bring the best version of you to the fore so that you can lead with the maximum impact. And as I touched on earlier, the final area is fulfillment. You know, it sounds very cliched, but I used to have a fridge magnet that sat and I used to see it daily. Life is not a dress rehearsal. And you'll have heard that before, but how true it is. What are we waiting for? If we can accelerate our learning, if we can enhance our performance, if we can become more resilient, if we can laser in with absolute clarity of what we're trying to achieve and how we're going to do it, and we can live a more fulfilled life. Well, that to me is success. And that is where I take a huge amount of fulfillment, helping people, supporting them on their journey and making sure that they have everything within their power to really bring the best version of themselves to the fore. So the leadership accelerator is a combination of coaching. It's a combination of training and it's a combination of mentoring. So let me just expand on that briefly. The initial stages are very much training led me, pushing content towards you and arming you with tools and insights and strategy. The coaching is then working with you in that one-to-one capacity and having your input, your ideas. And the mentoring is the wraparound for me, where I am able to bring my own personal, real-life experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly from being in chief executive roles for such a long period of time, those experiences are all opportunities for learning. So as with every leader, I've dealt with my first share of adversity and their fertile learning grounds to be able to say, "This is what I did. This is the results. This worked. This didn't work." And that model repeats with every leader I've worked with. It's not about breaching confidentiality or sharing intimate details, but it's principles, habits, and practices that I am seeing other people deploy to bring real success. Who are the best communicators? Who's built the best culture? What did they do? It's not just about throwing money, resource, and headcount at things. There's much more subtlety and nuance to creating a high-performing culture. How do you bring that into your environment? How do you attract the best talent? How do you critically deal with performance? How do we get to the point where people can give and take constructive feedback without taking offense? How do we ensure the elephants not left in the room? These are all the key elements of communication, especially in Britain. We dance around the issues. We don't deal with the topics at hand. So there's a vast array of areas that we cover, but obviously it's tailored to your specific needs. This opportunity is for one-to-one work. And ordinarily, the leadership accelerator is an eight-session program. What I'm proposing to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the lonely leader is a 23-session program. This is the core element. The foundational element is the leadership accelerator program, and then it's that one-to-one executive coaching and mentoring, which can take us through a calendar year. That would equate to practically a session every two weeks for one whole year, to really ensure you've got that accountability, and you've got that safe space as well. I don't really like using that phrase, but one of the raison d'etres for branding the business the lonely leader is that far too often, I encounter individuals that are apprehensive, nervous, or completely resistant to show any sort of skills gap. They don't want to go up to their superiors for fear of highlighting that skills gap and compromising their perception by the people that have employed them. Equally, they don't want to go down into their leadership team or their staff and show any sort of skills gap for fear of breaking this deluded notion that, "Well, I'm the leader, I should have all the answers." So what happens? They internalize all the pressure, they don't seek any support, and that pressure becomes corrosive. It compromises their performance at best, but at worst, it can damage them physically or mentally with some form of burnout. And again, full disclosure, I've been there. I collapsed one morning mobile phone in hand with pneumonia, and I look back now and shake my head at some of the habits and some of the practices that got me to that point, but I learned from them. I changed how I operated as a leader, and now that is invaluable wisdom that I can share with other people. So a lot of people don't feel comfortable looking for support within their organization, and that's where me as an arms-length, independent individual can sometimes be of real value because it steps through that fear of showing a skills gap, that fear equally of showing vulnerability. There's nothing wrong with vulnerability, but again, many of us operate under that deluded notion, "I can't show vulnerability to my boss, I can't show vulnerability to my team." And actually, that just hampers your performance further. Another key reason for the lonely leader branding is so many leaders are operating from a very noble perspective, outward looking. What do my staff need? What do my stakeholders need? Away from work? What do my family need? What do my friends need? What do my extended family need? They're very much give, give, give, and they forget all about their own growth and development needs. It's that old adage of you've got to put your oxygen mask on first. If you continue to neglect your own growth and development, then you will never optimize your performance in your professional and personal roles, and that will ultimately compromise your fulfillment. So the leadership accelerator strikes at the heart of those areas. You have someone who can work with you completely confidentially, that can explore those skills gaps, that can help you to fill them, that can unpack some of those vulnerabilities, that can enhance your mindset, that can share tools and tactics that work, that are used by high performers around the world in a diverse range of roles and sectors. So if that sounds exciting, I would encourage you to complete the application form, which you can see in the associated links. And we will be in touch to make sure it's the right fit. For something as intensive as this, it's got to fit. There's no financial commitment by filling in an application form, because I will want to talk with you. My team will want to talk with you to make sure that this fits for you. If it doesn't fit, we'll tell you. But if it does fit, then we will put you into the draw for one of the five places to be part of this deep dive coaching, training and mentoring program that will take us through the rest of this year, if you wanted to operate super intensively, or for the best part of a calendar year, if you want to run it over sort of bi-weekly sessions. So I wish you the best of luck in the application process. As I said earlier, there were only five places for this. It is very, very labor intensive from my perspective, and I'm not going to be able to offer any more than five places. What I will say is it's more than a 50% discount, and just to make you aware of the price point before you apply it to celebrate the 50-year anniversary, it will be just £5,000 per person for this opportunity. So I look forward to meeting some of you as part of the application process rolls through, and I wish you the very best of luck in the draw of becoming part of this leadership accelerator opportunity. Thanks for listening to the Lonely Leader podcast. I'd be very grateful if you could share and follow if the content resonates, and if you're looking for additional free results to support your continued growth and development, then please do check out our social media and website details in the show notes. Remember, quality leadership on the outside must always start within. (gentle music)