I like people of good character. Who doesn’t? The answer may surprise you. More people than you would probably imagine are indifferent to the state of his or her character or the character of anyone else. Would you ever trust a person like that? Trust and character share the same stage. —RLN
The UlThule™ Approach
Improving Executive and Team Performance
UlThule™ - The Highest Level of Performance Attainable
Echoing the ancient Roman commanders as they encouraged the ultimate in performance, "Ultima Thule" - achieve the highest level attainable, Systems Management Institute works with clients to build an atmosphere of exciting noble and in-depth vision. Focusing on business innovation and growth, we work with executives, managers, and their teams as they transform their noble visions into well managed "Ultima Thule," or Ulthule™, enterprises. Working at the cutting edge of 21st Century competition, we lead clients to enhance innovation, decision-making, communications, and management soft-skills to become the tough-minded executives who establish the best practices that others follow.
Since the Ulthule™ approach to performance demands personal skills that form the unique bases of competence, we have designed this special workshop to facilitate the attainment of professional and personal goals by elaborating the uniquely empowering vision contained in the Ulthule™ Approach. We hope you enjoy our Ulthule™ Program and actively apply in your professional life the principles learned here during this unique three day learning experience.
“These are exciting times for innovative executives as they forge the new opportunities for success offered by the challenges of 21st Century competition. Systems Systems Management Institute discovering the opportunities hidden in these challenges. Moreover, we receive great satisfaction from sharing the wealth of our experience, knowledge, and insights with our clients as they leverage their challenges to capture the emerging opportunities for success.”
UlThule™ Leadership Objectives
Each follower receives the highest attainable quality of Leadership.
Every follower receives the same quality of Leadership, even though not every follower shares the same aptitudes and talents.
All results will be proportionally equal according to the individual measure of each person’s capacity for achievement.
Distinct Features of the UlThule™ Team Leadership Approach
UlThule™ Leadership is concerned with the entire life of the Leader, not just the Leader’s business life or personal life. We see the Leader as living one life in which both professional and private personal concerns are dynamically connected.
UlThule™ Leadership sets the same Leadership objectives for all, a life of success and mastery.
UlThule™ Leadership recognizes the pluralistic nature of the business environment and does not present a single specified program to be uniformly adopted throughout the organization. Rather I present a Leadership framework in which a variety of issues and challenges can be resolved in a way appropriate to the different needs of each client.
UlThule™ Leadership seeks to establish a Leadership program that ensures that general Leadership education should be available to every person.
UlThule™ Leadership program must be designed to include all three kinds of learning and teaching and be thoroughly integrated with each other.
UlThule™ Leadership makes compensatory efforts to adjust to the environmental backgrounds of each team member.
Each UlThule™ Leader is an authentic Leadership Mastery Specialist who works with their teams to enable leaders to resolve the targeted issue.
The What, Why, & How of the UlThule™ Leadership Approach
What:
Kinds of knowledge to be acquired * Skills to be developed * Understanding and insights to be achieved.
Why:
Earning a living * Being a good professional * Living a full life.
How:
Didactic teaching via lectures or textbooks * Coaching to form the good habits and skills * Socratic teaching via questioning and discussions.
Key Success Skills Gained Through UlThule™ Leadership
Development of intellectual and emotional skills * Skills of learning * Skills of problem solving * Exercising critical judgment
Principles Guiding the Learning Environment of the UlThule™ Leadership Mastery Approach
The UlThule™ Leadership approach occurs within three dimensions of teaching and learning:
Coaching * Consulting * Virtual Learning Courses
UlThule™ High-Performance Leadership
What is the path to Great Leadership Performance? Is it experience? With experience, performance can stay the same. With experience, performance can decrease. We see these alternatives quite often. Is Great Performance simply a gift that some people have and other people don’t? However, the natural, innate gifts we think people have are often not the ones they have. General abilities we think people have for great Leadership performance are not the ones they actually have. Well then, it must be Deliberate Practice (DP). Right? But DP hurts. DP is also difficult and exhausting.. Perhaps this is why it is rare. Strangely, it seems the case that the more D.P. the better the performance. In fact, a lot of DP equals great performance.
So we can ask again: What are the Principles of Great Performance? Whatever they are, they seem to be crucial to Great Performance. Unfortunately, many, if not most, organizations are terrible at applying these Principles. In fact, many organizations discourage the application of these Principles. But what are they? They are no more or less than the Principles that Govern Deliberate Practice. And they are no more and no less than those principles that are associated with the Standards of Performance (SOP).
The Standards of Performance are increasing at an increasing rate and, thanks to advances in High Technology, will continue rising more relentlessly than ever before. The increase in SOP is a competitive concern for businesses and for individuals, and especially for Leaders. This is so because the scarcest resource for every company today is human ability. This makes Human Development a core requirement of organization and business and Leadership success. While the demand for Human Development in the modern organization is continually increasing, the limits of this are unknown. But we know for sure that the rise of Globalization pressures us all to emphasize self-development more consistently. The forces of world commerce pressures Leaders and managers to finally recognize how and from what Great Leaders hip Performance emerges. What we now know is simple. Forget the myths, the stories, and the wishful thinking:
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble.
It’s the things we know that ain’t so.” Josh Billings
UlThule™ Leadership
Understanding the Roots of Great Leadership Performance
The Role of Focus in Becoming a Great Leader and Performer
The UlThule™ Way Beyond Peak Performance
Attaining Leadership and Mentoring Success
Mastering the Leadership and Mentoring Environment
Understanding Emotions
Emotional Intelligence Requires Emotional Understanding
Self-Awareness through Emotional Intelligence
Building the Knowledge for Understanding insight
A Decision-Making Model for Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery
Similar to Transaction Analysis and Redecision Therapy (Eric Berne,1961), Ulthule™ Leadership is both an art and skill. Luck has little to do with it. Ulthule™ Leadership emerges from:
Experience * Hard Work * Reflection * Continuous Learning *
Care for Others * Long List of Virtues * integrity * Emotional Maturity.
While some Leadrs are well-versed in perhaps one or two Leadership approaches, an Ulthule™ practitioner is comfortable engaging in five or more kinds of work. Learning to make potent decision is a complex challenge. When the Leadere is successful, the follower can expect to enjoy outstanding results. To this end, Ulthule™ Leaders are capable of working with followers and others in diverse roles such as:
Short or long term contractors
Members of employee development teams
External experts who can assist followers with clarifying frustrating situations that have fragmented team members
Leadership Mastery Specialists who can more rapidly assist followers with clarifying, neutralizing, restructuring and otherwise simplifying complex situations
Leadership Mastery Specialists who can assist followers with revisiting old decisions that are creating roadblocks to success and update or otherwise make new decisions that remove all roadblocks or potential roadblocks to success
Leadership Mastery Specialists who work with followers to make new and stronger decisions that get beyond the damaging results experienced from previous decision-making experiences
Leaders who can assist followers with employing and reinforcing the new decisions
Leadership Mastery Coaching Specialists who work with Executive Teams to build internal social skills that enable them to deliver strategic goals.
UlThule™ Leadership Mastery and the Decision Making Human Activity Systems (HAS)
—Moving from Passive Observer to Active Participant —
Introduction
A Human Activity Systems (HAS) is a system in which the components are human beings. Simple, right? The human beings engage a series of processes, or operations understood as input, transformation, output, and feedback and adjustment. Inputs, consisting of Matter, Energy, and Information are transformed into sometimes surprising outputs that were previously unanticipated. For an HAS, this process of Input Transformation transforms the HAS. For example, this could occur by taking in raw data from the environment and transforming it into powerful information that increases the collective intelligence of the HAS. Now we might ask ourselves: How does this Transformation process apply to Leadership. The simple answer is this: The Leader and the follower working together form a HAS. The inputs are the previous decisions to be changed. In this sense then, the output represents the new transformed decision to forget the previous decision and commits oneself to the new decision to think and live differently.
In Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery, Leaders focus followers on the very personal task of building their personal power, moral strength, and mature responsibility to act as the situation requires for oneself, the team, and the wider organization. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery is a follower-centered approach that puts the follower “front and center” in the follower’s situation by clarifying the followers’ role and place in the situation. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery is a Human Systems approach that takes guidance from several organizing principles.
People Engage in Leadership to:
Bring out the best in oneself and other people.
Establish a safe environment that encourages other people to shine.
Adopt and model behaviors that other people can model.
Learn how to more appropriately engage their personal power to the extent they are self-responsible.
Enhance their personal performance and the performance of other people.
Enhance and clarify their active capacities for change through the application of an informed self-responsibility.
Clarify and own their projections.
Focus on the present situation.
Establish more appropriate ways to defend oneself.
Empower followers through the language of questions.
Use power-based language more often than weak language.
Acknowledge the positive situations and characteristics of followers.
Affirm team’s good news but not permitting negative behaviors directed toward Leader or followers.
Recognize the reported positive compliments Leader has reportedly received from friends, colleagues or other people
React with empathy against injustices throughout life.
The Positive Behaviors of a Leader
Present a positive disposition.
Show excitement about Leading.
Give followers their complete attention.
Indicate acceptance of the follower.
Pay attention to any progress made by team.
Remain in control of the Leadership process.
Seek truth at all times and validate everything by avoiding manipulation.
Affirm the self-sufficiency of the follower.
Question personal dogmas held by follower.
Affirm the importance of feeling realistically good and positive.
Affirm emotional independence. The follower’s happiness depends on the follower’s decisions and judgments.
Affirm that now is now and the past is the past in memory only.
Unmask the follower’s games of control.
Remain sensitive to the follower’s painful situations from the past.
Tools & Techniques Useful in Leading
Question the things that do not fit.
Track the verbal versus non-verbal behavior.
Define and clarify the meaning behind the follower’s use of generalities.
Listen to what the follower says and clarify.
Clarify what the follower feels, thinks, and does.
Confront life-long contracts with parents.
Analyze the games followers plays.
Engage in Two-Chair work s necessary to make a point.
Encourage a breaking with the past to get on with today.
Explore follower fantasies about the situation.
Engage in interview scenarios with a range of players such as teams, colleagues, friends, bosses, and so forth.
Confront statements with kindness.
Correct empty statements such as “you get it”
Verify Intuition by uncovering hunches.
Declare tings that are natural or common.
Rules & Standards of UlThule™ Leadership Mastery
Attend every session on time.
Gossiping is never permitted in a Leader session.
Follow the schedule.
Keep the Leadership environment comfortable and safe.
Never make threats of violence or permit the same.
Keep everything confidential by developing and delivering and signing a Cooperative Contract with every follower.
Maintain professional boundaries.
Maintain a clear agenda for Leadership progress.
The Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery Perspective
Important Questions for the Leader
About Quality:
What do I know about the follower personally?
What do I know about the follower’s professional and personal histories?
Can we forge a Leadership alliance that enables me to be an effective Leader for the teammember, the follower?
Is the follower acceptable to me?
Can we develop a process that works?
Presenting Problem:
What does the client want to change?
What decisions does the client want to revisit and change or re-decide?
The Contract:
What kind of contract does the follower expect?
Has the follower worked with a Leader before?
If so, what was the outcome?
If so what did the follower like and dislike about the entire process?
Estimate the potential follower’s authenticity here.
Why does the follower want a Leader?
Is the follower authentic about working with me or is there another hidden agenda?
Do I need to confront the follower about anything not said or said dishonestly.
How has the early contact transpired: Any Racket? Any Game?
Personal Impressions:
What is my early 360 deep impression?
Can we succeed working together?
Are there any drivers to the process?
Are there any injunctions to the process?
What is my first opinions about working together; yea or nay?
Identify the potential problems and the associated decision about working together.
If the Contract is agreed to:
Explore the better decision.
Anchor the new decision.
Develop a realistic plan to implement and live by the desired decision as an adult.
Encourage and support plan activation and the new behaviors called for.
Design a multi-level support system.
Heights of UlThule™ Leadership Mastery
We spend an incredibly large amount of time and effort on mastering the skills related to the management and use of technology. This may be good but it is insufficient to achieve the heights of UlThule™ Performance. Great Performance requires us to see reality differently. The Soft-stuff of life is where we live. Our concepts, attitudes, ideas, & views matter. The Ultimate idea: People are more important than ideas. Great Performance requires people to escape the limits of their past thinking. You have to become interested enough in yourself to engage in Deliberate Practice; and you do the work to determine where you want to go by determining what you want to do. Knowing, not guessing, is essential so that you can intelligently commit yourself completely to what you want to do.
Dr. Newkirk suggests the following Plan of Action: Frist, design a personal system of Deliberate Practice. Take care of the essentials in the beginning while preparing oneself for the self-direction necessary to prepare oneself for the advanced stages of self-development.
Next, seek a Leader as a mentor. As you enter the advanced stages of development, you will need some very qualified person to assist you. This means that you recruit an experienced person in your area of interest who can advise you on the skills and abilities you need to attain the next stage of self-development. This is not so easy because you will need a person who can assist you with knowledge attainment, skills building, and also deliver feedback so you can correct your path.
As part of your Deliberate Practice program, seek the opinions of other people about what you should be improving and how well you are proceeding along the path to UlThule™ Leadership Mastery. If you can find one, a qualified Leader can assist you. Then engage in Deliberate Practice as much as you can stand it. Practice directly using some kind of model to guide you. Perhaps you can use a Music Model, a Chess or Case Study Model, a Sports Mode to test your skills in different situations. Continually practice work-based Self-Regulation. Before the work, you might decide to establish process goals for reaching the outcome. While doing this, adjust attitudes and beliefs to achieve self-efficacy. It is a good idea to engage in self-observation while doing the necessary work.
Another good idea is to activate metacognition to think about your thinking, to know what you know as you know it, and especially to listen to your feelings. This means that you take time out for reflection. Learn to listen to what your feelings are telling you? Then you can ask the right self-regulation questions. Follow this with a bit of self-evaluation. Learn to be specific and employ standards that stretch your performance. Learn to become continually more effective. You can do this by adapting your performance by making changes in the performance process and then applying techniques to become ever more effective. It is a cycle that you can and should repeat. This means that as you go along, you learn to deepen you Domain Knowledge. You might want to build a mental model of your domain as a functional system. You can do this by building a framework for your knowledge and by distinguishing the relevant from irrelevant information. Use you metal model to project what will happen next.
If you want to attain the Heights of UlThule™ Leadership Mastery in your organization, remember that people will grow and stretch themselves as they work in the organization. In this way, they learn to develop leaders within their jobs. You can assist in this process by encouraging leaders to be active in their communities. Moreover, you can also demonstrate your appreciation for the critical roles of your informal teachers in your organization by delivering the right kind of feedback that identifies your top performers early. Whatever you do, consistently appreciate the rules of people development to inspire your organization through appreciation and respect rather than authority. Continually invest in developing your people and establish the commitment to organization-wide leadership development as a cultural necessity.
If you wish to attain the Heights of UlThule™ Leadership Mastery in your teams, develop teams collectively as teams, not as individuals. This means that you have picked the right team members. Next you develop trust and eliminate mistrust. Next integrate agendas, resolve conflicts, and master the art of facing the real issues. Naturally, the success of such actions requires you to install a social architecture so your people can more easily engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning. Skill in this is not measured by I.Q. scores.
“The differences between expert performers and normal adults
reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance
in a specific domain.” Ericsson et al.
UlThule™ Performance Legend:
leads to Competence, C
to arrive at = Effectiveness, E
masters .Performance, P
using < Four Challenges of Business Success
is derived from 4Action Leadership
ensures :Human Capital Development, HCD
builds ]Leadership Self-Renewal
energizes Passion, PA
function of ƒ UlThule™, U™
is more than $Σ
UlThule™ Leadership Performance Legend 2
UlThule™ Leadership Performance Legend: = Performance at the highest level attainable.
Leadership Self-Renewal Set = passion + meaningfulness + purpose.
Human Capital Development Set = educating + coaching + mentoring + training +consulting + counseling + guiding + performance improvement through heightened competence.
Action Leadership Set = team achievement + action oriented relationships + team-based execution + effective execution.
Four Challenges of Business Success Set = complex challenges of increased global competition + need for continually higher profits + demand of consumers for improved value in products in services + psychological quality of life contract between workers and managers.
Performance Set = the desired result of behavior + effectiveness + efficiency + knowledge + tools + competence + group dynamics + systems thinking + self-systems psychology + group dynamics + perspective of leadership effectiveness.
Effectiveness Set = maintenance of core systems + goals achievement + maintenance of systems processes + knowledge + attitude + motivation + cohesiveness + leadership + political acumen in directly responding to the conflicting differences in interests enjoyed by groups and individuals within the organization + ability + structure + roles + norms + environment + technology + strategic choices + structure + processes + culture + optimal relationship among production + efficiency + satisfaction + adaptiveness + development + task specific + sum of the contribution of group members + more than the sum of individual & group effectiveness + status + skill + environmental adaptation
Competence Set = intellectual competence + emotional competence + managing self + mobilizing innovation and change +communicating well + managing tasks and others + leader ethical behavior + follower freedom to consent or not + experience + knowledge + oneself capabilities + skills necessary to lead + ability to use these attributes consistently and correctly + reality.
Epistemology: From the Greek word episteme@ meaning knowledge. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy which studies the Epistemological problem@ - does humanity know anything, if so, what does it know, and how does it know it? This brach of Philosophy studies the pre-suppositions of human knowledge and attempts to validate the laws of logic and define their range of human reason.
Transphenomenality: From the two Greek words, trans and Pheanoeumeanous, meaning across things. It is a term applied to the existential analysis of the world in view of people, things, and events. The concept of Transphenomenality describes that in which everything has its being, in which everything exists. We exist in something and this something is our total world limited only by subjective experience. Hence, the Transphenomenality of the self is responsible for humanity=s ultimate, individual Weltanschuaang, meaning, total world view.
The role of AIS™ is to integrate the applications and solutions
of self-directed learning with a competence-based, intuitive learning architecture
as a foundation to build the core abilities of knowledge analysis,
synthesis, application, judgment and valuation through intellectual
and personal development to improve performance.
THE TREE OF NEWKIRK
The Epistemology of Learning -
The Road to an Architecture of Learning.
The Transphenomenality of Education and the Antithesis of Indoctrinated De-Education
ENABLED BY APPLIED KNOWLEDGE EMPOWERED BY COMMITMENT
A secure personality leads to: Wisdom in action.
Intellectual maturity leads to: Secure personality.
Mature wisdom leads to: Intellectual maturity.
Critical judgment and not criticism leads to: Mature wisdom.
(critical judgment is participative - how to think).
Authentic self-esteem and not the Public Relations Personality Syndrome leads to: Critical judgment.
Personal humility leads to: Authentic self-esteem.
Reflective self-awareness leads to: Personal humility (You are no more or no less than what you really are.
The theologian would say that we are no less nor no more than what God knows we are. Socrates urged: Gnothi Seauton, Know Thyself).
Informed opinion leads to: Reflective self-awareness.
Educated opinion leads to: Informed opinion.
Simple opinion leads to: Educated opinion (Simple opinion is reactive; it is derived from being taught only what to think rather than how to think).
Personal opinion leads to either: Personal growth, intellectuality, and the path to simple opinion or Invincible ignorance, the path to collective and personal prejudice.
PATH OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE & PATH OF HUMAN GROWTH
Applied Intuitive Solutions™ Leadership Mastery Program Descriptions
Self-Systems Development
Eventually decisions catch up to reality. Somewhere along the way, from senior executives to operational managers and their teams, people become a hindrance or a boost to enterprise success. People impact everything because the world is all about people, their needs, and their gifts and vices. Fundamentally, people can be rational but, truth be told, human beings are more often than not irrational. Philosophers remind us that the gift of reason makes us human. More precisely, I have come to see that it is the gift of living virtuously that makes us human. We can choose to do good rather than bad. We can choose to be potent human beings. We can choose to take the path less travelled. We can choose to become people of the light. It is the capacity and the potential to choose to live a virtue informed life that sets us apart from the other life forms on earth. Nevertheless, irrational behavior is very common, especially in organizations and their teams. Understanding this, we can see that much of the common wisdom about hiring, developing, and directing employees is flat out deficient.
In Systems Science, we can see that a person never walks into the same team twice because change is the one constant in organization life. As managers begin to recognize this, they finally begin to see that the “perennial problem of aligning Professional Skills and organizations” is counterintuitive. They consistently pick the wrong skills to align with the organization. As such, this perennial problem risks significant disruption. The solution to this risk is to consider other factors such as the personal characteristics of employees. Professional Skills alone are insufficient to deliver success. Coaching can enable managers to identify these alternative characteristics and factors and leverage them to achieve and maintain increasing levels of success. In this way, UlThule™ Coaching benefits managers and employees, executives and Board Members. In Performance Management everyone matters. In response to the counterintuitive nature of the situation Ray Newkirk delivers several Coaching Tracks including:
Executive Coaching
Strategic Management Coaching
Personal Coaching
Skills Development Coaching
Ulthule™ High-Performance Coaching
Action Coaching
Executive Leadership
Leadership here addresses the specific problems that challenge executives from day one as they become members of the Executive Leadership Team and then as they navigate their way through the tarpits and pitfalls of life in the executive ranks. An interesting observation about executive life is that many of the people who work for them cannot say with any clarity what their top executive actually does, except in some general non-specific kind of way. Inspiring, right? Our Executive Leadership Mastery approach focuses on problem-solving across the expanse of executive life, personal and professional. Our Leadership goal is to identify, design, implement, and support Solution Plans that resolve the defined problem. Personal and Professional Growth is the goal. Effectiveness in decision-making is the response. Common challenges faced by Executives include:
Cognitive, Personality, and Management Bias
Strategic Complexities
Lack of Foresight
Missed Opportunities
Ineffective Habits and Customs
Strategic Management Leadership
Strategic Management means complexity. Success here requires connectivity with your Wider Environment of Interest (WEOI) and mastery of your Narrow Environment of Interest (NEOI). Successful organizations are well managed and led. They have control of their NEOI and deeply understand their WEOI. This is a very complex model governed by many layers of complexity. Moreover, the relationship between the NEOI and the WEOI changes often and sometimes very quickly. Seasoned Leaders and managers who are tuned in to the push and pull contingencies of their world respond rapidly to the shifting tides of a fickle environment. One word says it all and defines the environment of Strategic Management Leadership. The word is “Challenge”. It is an equal opportunity challenge and for those who fulfill the prerequisites, Strategic Management Leadership becomes an equal opportunity process.
Whether practiced in start-ups, rapidly growing companies, or mature organizations, Strategic Management Leadership delivers potent insights that enable leaders and their teams to seize the opportunities that emerge through the design and adoption of new strategies. This, of course, requires the organization-wide commitment of specific teams and positive support throughout the enterprise. Strategic Management Leadership unlocks a universe of solutions not commonly available through less strategic forms of coaching.
Personal Leadership Mastery
It is fair to say that Leadership Mastery is all about problem-solving. No one is surprised when they hear that Human Beings are superb at generating a wide range of problems. If organizations paid employees to generate problems, they would easily get their money’s worth. There would be no slacking off here. Fortunately, an adequately articulated Leadership Mastery Plan, that is LMP, can turn this mess around quite rapidly. As a specialist in Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery, I view Personal Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery as the framework for forming teams and organizations that deliver performance beyond the range of what people commonly refer to as Peak Performance.
Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery is broad and deep. It employs the following:
Scenario-Building * Social-Skills Analysis * Decision Effectiveness Analysis
* Adoption of Effectiveness Development Processes * Evidence-Based Solution Generation
* Development and Execution of a Wide Range of Personal and Interpersonal Action Plans
* Multi-Perspective Exercises that Built New Insights and Strategies for Growth.
Skills Development Leadership
While your skills do not land you a job, it’s really attitude, they, nevertheless, form a fundamental part of your career success. Highly talented individuals are the people who most often progress the most. They are the people who seem to get all the breaks. They are the talented contributors among us, and the high-level mangers recognize them. However, in order to fulfill their potential and move to positions of even higher opportunity, employees do well to assess the factors that reduce their potential to contribute to the organization in a more worthwhile manner. It seems that successful people know how best to:
Leverage the potential they already possess, and
Align their talents, interests, and behaviors with the needs of their organization.
Skills Development Leadership (SDL) assists managers and employees who want to excel. Through SDL, Leaders conduct careful and in-depth assessments of their strengths and weaknesses that are associated with job and career success. They simultaneously learn how to expand their potential for continuous growth as they work to uncover their blind spots, reduce their career constraining issues, and build their strengths. SDL initiates several activities including the following:
Track changes in cognitive, personality, and management preferences
Create and initiate skills development action plans
Participate in support assignments while the action plans are implemented
A Beautiful Autumn Day
Several years ago, I was enjoying a peaceful walk on a fine autumn morning in Pleasant Hill, California when I passed a gentleman who seemed to be consumed in anguish. The expression on his face said it all. I could not help but feel compassion for the person and share some human, heat-felt empathy. I am sure everyone one of you has met someone at some time in your life who appeared to be on his last leg. You could not help but feel for the person, could you? I believe it goes something like, “but for the grace of God, there go I”.
As I greeted him and asked how he was doing, he did not hesitate to tell me how technology had changed his profession, complicated his work environment, and had demoralized his otherwise great team. When I naively asked him what he meant, he related that being an MBA , CPA, and Department Head in his company, a large Fortune 100, was not what it used to be. In the old days, he said, he could simply focus on his duties as an executive in Finance. But today, everything is different. He now had to spend an inordinate amount of time every year in technical training merely to use the new technologies which “empower” and liberate his organization to achieve ever greater performance. Not only does he have to be a very good CPA, he sadly informed me, but he also has to be a very good workplace technologist. He remarked that he was sick and tired of the schooling and the additional burden it placed on him and his team - and it never seems to end. “When was all this going to end,” he asked me.
I assure you, he did not appreciate my answer. But he compelled me to wonder about the number of others out there in corporations and organizations who, like himself, suffer from technology overload and lack the leadership and management skills necessary to solve this mounting problem. And even more, his situation compelled me to wonder what we, the Systems Management Institute, could do about it? Since I too must face this situation, I took an aggressive home run approach. I decided to attack all the bases by examining the problem dynamically, humanely, managerially, and ethically. What I found was indeed worth knowing. It is no exaggeration to suggest that this problem deserves the attention of every executive and manager. For this reason, I developed my Ulthule™ Approach to Leadership and Group Work. Intimately, I love the challenge of solving the human problems of technically enabled organizations whenever and wherever I encounter them.
As a result of this accidental meeting, I began intensive investigation into the challenges of Group Work performance in modern organizations and the problem of leadership. In time, I developed my Ulthule™ Approach to Leadership which enables clients to achieve the highest level of performance attainable, an approach that does considerably more than merely echo the leadership and business thinking of past commentators on the business scene. Life today is a paradox. While innovation and technology have improved the standard of living and offered new opportunities for a more enriching and better quality of life, many people find that they have less time to enjoy the new world of the 21st Century or to gain satisfaction from their jobs.
It may be true that people are challenged in the workplace today like never before, but so too are their leaders. As the new technologies have offered hope for a better quality of life at home and on the job, the expectations for ever improved Group Work performance have likewise increased the competitive pressures resulting from the introduction of the new technologies. We now realize that the drive to provide ever more convenient technologies correspondently increases the demands on workplace and personal life. The result is obvious: as ever more people become disgruntled, and overwhelmed with their situations, they have begun to develop a new set of issues that inhibit Group Work performance. What a mess!
The results are paradoxical - chaos and a reduced quality of life are the results both at work and at home from the new technologies intended to improve the quality of life at work and at home. These are challenges of leadership, management practice, and social justice. As a Coach, I enjoy working with client to transform these challenges into powerful pathways of personal and business success. We have been meeting these challenges since the 1980s and along the way have built a record of outstanding success.
Today, we offer a range of transformative Coaching & Consulting services designed to improve performance in technology driven organizations. We offer programs in Ulthule™ Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, and Group Work. We deliver a range of Coaching, Consulting and Learning capabilities for all levels of Human Capital Development.
We are a unique company with a very interesting history of achievement. Although we are small in size, consisting of a small number of consultants and executives, we have made significant contributions to the largest of global organizations on departmental projects and enterprise-wide, global programs using our staff wisely, forming alliances as needed, and using expert contractors occasionally. We are a small company that carries a very big stick.
I hope that you take the time to tour our web site and learn more about the Systems Management Institute and what makes our company so attractive to clients. And oh yes, I almost forgot, our pricing is probably the best in the industry for the quality of services and high caliber of programs we offer. The one complaint that I consistently hear about Systems Management Institute is that we are very, very good but inexpensive when compared to our “Big" competitors. Somehow we can live with this.
I feel certain that our Performance Coaching integrated with our technical and business consulting capabilities are second to none. I am honored to say that I have not found better people or programs anywhere else, here or aboard. I really mean this! If I found them, I would have joined them myself. Please take some time to enjoy the SMI experience for yourself and discover why the larger consulting firms are really not always better. It’s all in the brain-power, earnest desire to make a positive difference, and record of success. We have an abundance of all three.
Ray Newkirk, Psy.D., Ph.D., Ph.D.
Founder, CEO & Coaching Practice Leader
Cultivating Potent Leadership Mastery
Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery
Personal Leadership Mastery
It is fair to say that Personal Leadership Mastery is all about problem-solving. No one is surprised when they hear that Human Beings are superb at generating a wide range of problems. If organization Leaders possessed the insights to pay employees to generate problems, they would easily get their money’s worth. There would be no slacking off here. Fortunately, an adequately articulated Personal Leadership Mastery Plan, that is the PLMP, can turn this mess around quite rapidly. As a specialist in Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery, Dr. Newkirk views Personal Leadership Mastery as the framework for forming teams and organizations that deliver performance beyond the range of what people commonly refer to as Peak Performance.
Personal Leadership Mastery employs scenario-building, social-skills analysis, Decision Effectiveness analysis, adoption of effectiveness development processes, Evidence-Based Solution Generation, development and execution of a wide range of personal and interpersonal Action Plans, and multi-perspective exercises that built new insights and strategies for growth.
Personal Impressions:
What is my early 360 deep impression about being a Leader?
Can I succeed as a Leader working with people I do not like?
Are there any emotional drivers that can improve to the process?
Are there any injunctions that may hinder the Leadership process?
What is my first opinion about working together with the team, yes or no?
Identify the potential problems and the associated decisions for each problem about being a Leader.
If a Leadership Contract exists, explore the better decision.
Anchor every Leadership decision with relevant data that justified the decision.
As a Leader, develop a realistic implementation plan and live by the desired decision as an adult.
As a Leader, encourage and support the initiation of the Leadership plan and the expected behavior such a plan demands.
Design a multi-level Leadership Support System.
Execute the Plan for Leadership Mastery Success.
Skills Development Leadership Mastery
While your skills do not land you a job, it’s really attitude, they, nevertheless, form a fundamental part of your career success. Highly talented individuals are the people who most often progress the most. They are the people who seem to get all the breaks. They are the talented contributors among us whom the high-level mangers recognize them.
However, in order to fulfill their potential and move to positions of even higher opportunity, employees do well to assess the factors that reduce their potential to contribute to the organization in a more worthwhile manner. It seems that successful Leaders know how best to:
Leverage the potential they already possess, and
Align their talents, interests, and behaviors with the needs of their organization.
Skills Development Leadership Mastery (SDLM) assists Leaders, managers and employees who want to excel. Through SDLM, Leaders conduct careful and in-depth assessments of their strengths and weaknesses that are associated with job and career success. They simultaneously learn how to expand their potential for continuous growth as they work to uncover their blind spots, reduce their career constraining issues, and build their strengths. SDLM initiates several activities including the following:
Track changes in cognitive, personality, and Leadership preferences
Create and initiate skills development action plans
UlThule™ Leadership for Potent Problem Solving
—Leadership Mastery for Performance Beyond Peak Performance—
Rapid Problem Solving is the new gift of the UlThule™ Leadership Mastery Approach.
All Leadership, whatever approach, is about problem-solving. Engage Dr. Newkirk to enhance your experiential, evidence-based, transformative, and Rapid Real-Time Problem-Solving capability. More than 55 years in development, the Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery approach is the most effective Rapid Problem-Solving approach for leaders available today. I have assisted leaders and their teams during the most stressful projects imaginable that have changed entire industries. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery prepares leaders to move beyond the boundaries of Peak Performance in Rapid Real Time by delivering results previously unimagined.
As your Leadership Mastery Specialist, I will assist you, or your team, from the very first session with rapidly solving a wide range of soft-skills problems spanning a large number of complex topics. I can assist you with more rapidly removing the obstacles that impede your path to personal and Leadership success by rapidly attaining problem-solving mastery. I can further assist you with advancing through the four levels of UlThule™ Leadership Certification if you wish to fully immerse yourself in this potent Leadership Development approach.
It is a common practice today to hire an Executive Coach. It is another to work with a Leadership Mastery Specialist to learn how to rapidly solve a range of problems with solutions derived from successful global experience. Since 1982, I have assisted executives and leaders from a diverse range of global organizations in government, defense, and industry with mastering their Leadership relationships within and outside the workplace. The goal here, of course, is to assist leaders with building their self-systems potency by deepening their Leadership Mastery wherever they may be. As a Ulthule™ Specialist, I assists leaders, and aspiring leaders, with deriving the potent solutions that enable them to achieve performance at levels beyond the ordinary. This is performance that is beyond Peak Performance.
I see Leadership Mastery as a process that assists leaders with gaining the insights necessary to master specific situations as they are emerge. This is beyond traditional Leadership Training & Development. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery assists leaders with attaining behavioral, contextual, and technical solutions that are relevant to a specific problem type that each leader seeks to resolve rapidly. In this respect then, by mastering each solution, leaders continually engage in personal transformation by acquiring new insights and capabilities previously unrealized. This, then, is successful UlThule™ Leadership Mastery. I invite you to join me in embarking on this interesting, inspiring, and empowering adventure.Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.
UlThule™ Leadership for Potent Problem Solving
—Leadership Mastery for Performance Beyond Peak Performance—
Rapid Problem Solving is the new gift of the UlThule™ Leadership Mastery Approach.
All Leadership, whatever approach, is about problem-solving. Engage Dr. Newkirk to enhance your experiential, evidence-based, transformative, and Rapid Real-Time Problem-Solving capability. More than 55 years in development, the Ulthule™ Leadership Mastery approach is the most effective Rapid Problem-Solving approach for leaders available today. I have assisted leaders and their teams during the most stressful projects imaginable that have changed entire industries. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery prepares leaders to move beyond the boundaries of Peak Performance in Rapid Real Time by delivering results previously unimagined.
As your Leadership Mastery Specialist, I will assist you, or your team, from the very first session with rapidly solving a wide range of soft-skills problems spanning a large number of complex topics. I can assist you with more rapidly removing the obstacles that impede your path to personal and Leadership success by rapidly attaining problem-solving mastery. I can further assist you with advancing through the four levels of UlThule™ Leadership Certification if you wish to fully immerse yourself in this potent Leadership Development approach.
It is a common practice today to hire an Executive Coach. It is another to work with a Leadership Mastery Specialist to learn how to rapidly solve a range of problems with solutions derived from successful global experience. Since 1982, I have assisted executives and leaders from a diverse range of global organizations in government, defense, and industry with mastering their Leadership relationships within and outside the workplace. The goal here, of course, is to assist leaders with building their self-systems potency by deepening their Leadership Mastery wherever they may be. As a Ulthule™ Specialist, I assists leaders, and aspiring leaders, with deriving the potent solutions that enable them to achieve performance at levels beyond the ordinary. This is performance that is beyond Peak Performance.
I see Leadership Mastery as a process that assists leaders with gaining the insights necessary to master specific situations as they are emerge. This is beyond traditional Leadership Training & Development. UlThule™ Leadership Mastery assists leaders with attaining behavioral, contextual, and technical solutions that are relevant to a specific problem type that each leader seeks to resolve rapidly. In this respect then, by mastering each solution, leaders continually engage in personal transformation by acquiring new insights and capabilities previously unrealized. This, then, is successful UlThule™ Leadership Mastery. I invite you to join me in embarking on this interesting, inspiring, and empowering adventure.Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.