XBO Experience

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) refers to the ability to perceive, understand, express, and regulate one’s own emotions, as well as those of others. It is a characteristic every leader should possess and can be developed further regardless of your intelligence or personality. Those who possess a high level of EQ are not as affected by stress, which can contribute to effectiveness in job performance, team functionality, relationship development, and more. Understanding emotional intelligence and learning how to develop it is an important factor for personal leadership and growth.  

Key Talking Points:

• Learning from failure, embrace the not knowing
• Being open to change
• Adapting quickly to rapidly changing situations
• Holding yourself accountable when faced with stressful situations
• Ethics, integrity, and honesty with ourselves and others
• Fear of making mistakes

Everyone has heard the saying, “you know what happens when you assume,” and this applies directly when a workplace is lacking in effective communication. Just as everyone contributes different skills and strength to their job or company, everyone has different ways in which they communicate. Understanding and accepting those differences, especially in working relationships, is key to functioning effectively as a team. You must be open to those differences as a leader and be willing to change the way you communicate to fit the needs of your team. By keeping an open mindset and adapting to this change, you open the door for overall success. 

Key talking points:

• Communicating solutions for complicated problems to a non-technical client
• How we interact with technical and non-technical team members
• Customer facing communication best practices
• Asking the right (not the most) questions and active listening

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable and will happen eventually to everyone at some point in their life. Experiencing a conflict does not mean someone is a bad employee – far from it. Just as it is important to understand and adapt to different communication styles, it is also as important, if not more, to understand how to address difficult situations when they arise. Avoiding even the smallest of conflict can drastically affect relationships and have lasting consequences. Most people will always avoid the conflict with the hope it will disappear on its own, simply because they have never been taught how to approach difficult conversations.

Key talking points:

• Situational awareness, assertiveness and difficult conversations 
• Conflict resolutions and unproductive exchanges
• Dealing with a difficult coworker or supervisor
• Spotting and avoiding disruptive behaviors and situations

Key talking points:

• Understand and appreciated different cultures among their teams
• How to be assertive leaders
• DEI
• Understand and appreciate differences among their teams

Key talking points:

• Dysfunctions of a team and how to correct/ redirect them
• Vulnerability based trust discussions on apprehension to be assertive
• Using our strengths and personality to gain trust and respect
• The actions and words that build or destroy reputations
• Issues and fears on overstepping your authority

Organizational Behavior essentially looks at how individuals interact with each other, and how those interactions affect the overall performance of the organization. 

Key talking points:

• Amplify your company’s brand through confidence in your solutions

Learning how to constructively suggest and implement change/make a decision as a new leader can be a challenge. You want to ensure these changes will be the best for your team AND the company, but you don’t want to make changes that are too big or go too fast and cause more harm than good. The best way to encourage others to embrace suggesting change, is to provide proof as to how the change will benefit everyone.  

Key talking points:

• Short vs. long term success as a leader and as a team (How to measure)
• Data-driven decision making (importance of research based)
• Theory of Constraints: How to identify weaknesses and better processes.
• Defining our variables and controllable decisions, document steps, etc.
• Problem solving methods and documentation best practices

Moving into a leadership or management role means additional tasks and responsibilities will be added to your daily schedule, many of which will have a large impact on the company overall. A common strategy is delegating some of their workload to the employees they manage. But delegation isn’t just about assigning tasks and it should not be done quickly. As a manager, you need to be prepared for your team to learn new processes, make mistakes, learn and grow from those mistakes, and get to a point where you trust they can do things on their own. New perspectives can be beneficial, and you must be open to the potential for change. While you have been successful doing things a certain way, a different perspective may find an alternative route to the same solution, potentially eliminating unnecessary steps and streamlining a process even further. 

Key talking points:

• Mechanics of delegation
• Focus on culture, people and numbers while delegating the rest
• Moving from peer to manager
• Project management for multiple job tasks and activities 
• The value of documented workflows and processes
• Identifying constraints and bottlenecks in general/workflow processes

Just like in your personal life, understanding finances in your career is a huge contribution to success. Being financially literate is one piece of the puzzle when it comes to being business savvy, and understanding how your decisions will affect your team and the company as a whole. Having the ability to project the financial impact your daily choices will make allows leaders to make fully informed decisions, and have evidence to back up their reasoning.

Key talking points:

• Calculating essential business KPI’s
• Transforming big ideas into smaller executable steps and results

The first step to being a leader is deciding that you truly want to be one. Leadership does not correlate directly to a person’s job title or their rank. It has everything to do with mindset. When we put others before ourselves, we have the mindset of a leader, and this can trickle down into a desire to change things for the better, inspire others, and improve yourself. Leadership is also not something which can be measured by metrics alone. It is also difficult to determine the success of a leader over a short time. The way to look at whether someone is a successful leader is based upon the investment provided to others, and the output those individuals produce, which may not be visible right away. 

Key talking points:

• Focus shift from compliance to intention
• Building accountability
• Mental leap in deciding to become a leader
• Tactics and strategies of being a great leader
• Adding value in every action taken
• Impatience or reluctance to move ahead
• Building personal relevance through continual self-improvement 
• Preparation for new client experiences and expectations