ZOOM LEADERSHIP

Zoom Leadership: Change Your Focus, Change Your Insights

Shifting Perspective is the Single Most Important Leadership Strategy

How Zooming Focus In or Out Empowers Leaders to Innovate and Unlock Solutions to Seemingly Insurmountable Challenges

Great leaders must be able to devote enough attention to problem solving and innovation. Yet with the sheer quantity of information at our fingertips and stimulus we face, attention has become our scarcest resource.

How, then, can leaders devote the attention it takes to solve challenging problems and create something new?

Zoom Leadership: Change Your Focus, Change Your Insights explains that the key is learning to quickly reframe, looking at a familiar situation from a fresh, more empowering and effective leadership point of view.

Through the Zoom Leadership coaching technique, leaders can explore their perspective and access flexible thinking and insightful options when they need it most. They can also improve their relationship skills, achieve greater self-awareness, develop a deeper understanding of values and discover a clearer alignment with their own intuitive wisdom.

How? Imagine you are viewing the world through a video camera that can zoom so far out you can see a critical leadership issue from a view way up in the clouds to create a distanced perspective. Then, once you’ve captured that image, you’re able to zoom in so close it’s as if you can inspect the problem under a powerful microscope.

This leadership coaching technique encourages leaders to reflect on what is happening in their own individual processes viewed through four lenses:

• Think: Cognitive activities such as strategizing, analyzing, comparing and researching.
• Act: Taking action, intentionally to produce results, or out of habit.
• Feel: This includes self-awareness and the all-important Emotional Intelligence.
• Witness: The practice of active listening that lets others think aloud and gain clarity.

Because at times a leader’s focus may simply be on the wrong issue, the book also explains a technique of “shining the light” in a new direction – that is, changing the object in focus.

Illustrated with a series of detailed case studies and leadership coaching conversations, Zoom Leadership gives leaders a unique glimpse inside the mind of other leaders making decisions.

Topics it explores include:

• Shifting your focus back and forth between the lenses of Thinking, Acting, Feeling and Witnessing.
• Recognizing when you are focusing on the wrong issue, and redirecting your focus to problem-solve instead.
• Developing active listening skills and when to use them.
• Interpreting anger’s message in the workplace, and leveraging it to grow and evolve.
• Interacting with colleagues to enhance success in performance and productivity.
• Understanding the pitfalls of being overfocused – and how to move past them.
• Recognizing the importance of doing things just for fun.

“Encouraging leaders to remain grounded in their current knowledge of how things get done while at the same time reframing their perspectives is enormously empowering. It provides an immediate visceral experience: an altering of the status quo.”

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