Starting this week (if the next big snow storm doesn’t shut us down!), my leadership team and I will be embarking on a new adventure.  I’ve got a great team – a good mix of seasoned leaders and newly minted ones.  I love meeting with them to talk about success, results, and development.  I love watching them put ideas into practice and then growing.  

I am working on a project with them that I’m calling L.E.A.D. – Leadership Effectiveness and Development.  In this project, we will be meeting twice each month for an hour each session.  We will discuss a topic and break it down as follows:

Define it:  What does this topic mean?  How are others defining it?
Points to Ponder:  Fleshing the topic out to broaden our understanding.  Challenging our pre-conceived assumptions.  Learning new ideas that we can put into practice.
Discuss it:  We’ll take time and talk about the topic.  How have we been successful in this area?  Where have we failed?  What have we learned?  Why is this so important to a leader? How will this move me forward as a leader?  How will this topic move our company forward – impact on our results?  
My One Thing:  what will be our individual take-a-ways from this meeting.  We are not meeting for the sake of meeting (who has time for that?).  After reading, discussing, thinking, we need to ask ourselves as a group, “so what?”  What is the ONE THING I can apply to my leadership skills and understanding that will make me a better leader.  

I’ve started a list of topics and I’m hoping it grows.  We will start off with VISION and then grow from there to discuss (in no particular order):

Results
Accountability
Decision-Making
Confrontation
Passion
Ownership & Innovation
Communication
Coaching
Personal Development
Role Modeling

One of my goals is to post the project topics here on “Go, Leader, Grow” to share what we are discussing.  This will keep me accountable in keeping this project moving.  It will be a great platform by which I will save my work.  And, hopefully, it will be read by many other leaders who will help contribute their ideas, thoughts, and passion for this.  These posts will also be found on LinkedIn where more leaders will be able to read and participate.  

I’m excited about 2014.  I’ve told my L.E.A.D. team that this is the year of leadership.  I guess we can all say that about every year.  But us, in our industry (financial services), we need leaders to stand up and produce, model, and lead!  

Join us in this adventure.  Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!

JJ