True North Groups: A Powerful Path to Personal and Leadership Development - Softcover

George, Bill; Baker, Doug

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609940075 ISBN 13: 9781609940072

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

The challenges we face these days are so great that we cannot rely entirely on ourselves, our communities, or our organizations to support us and help us stay on track. We need a small group of people with whom we can have in-depth discussions and share intimately about the most important things in our lives—our happiness and sadness, our hopes and fears, our beliefs and convictions. For the past thirty-five years, Bill George and Doug Baker have found the answer in what they call True North Groups.

“At various times,” George and Baker write, “a True North Group will function as a nurturer, a grounding rod, a truth teller, and a mirror. At other times the group functions as a challenger or an inspirer. When people are wracked with self-doubts, it helps build their courage and ability to cope.”

Drawing on recent research in psychology and sociology, George and Baker explain why True North Groups are so critical to helping us develop the self-awareness, compassion, emotional intelligence, and authenticity required to be inspired human beings and inspiring leaders. They cover every detail from choosing members, establishing norms, and dealing with conflicts to evaluating progress and deciding when it’s time to restructure. True North Groups provides a wealth of practical resources, including suggested topics for the first twelve meetings, advice on facilitating groups, techniques to evaluate group satisfaction, and much more.

For the millions of people who are searching for greater meaning and intimacy in their lives, this book will help them to grow as leaders and as people—and to stay on course to their True North.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill George is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic Inc. He is the author of Authentic Leadership, True North, Finding Your True North, and 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis.
Doug Baker is president of the True North Groups Institute and former senior vice president for Human Resources of American Express Financial Advisors.

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Finding Depth and Intimacy in Your Life

WE YEARN TO SHARE THE STORIES OF OUR LIVES AND to have honest conversations with people we trust. Have you ever felt alone in a crowd? Were you eager to abandon the superficial conversations and share your authentic self and your feelings without fear of being judged?

We need people around us to whom we can look for support and advice, who can help us develop as human beings. We need them to help us become better leaders in our work, our communities, and our families. We want to be open and vulnerable, but who can we rely on to have our best interests at heart and maintain our confidentiality? Where can we find this kind of depth, intimacy, and support in our lives? Who do we talk to when we have great joy or sorrow in our lives or are facing difficult decisions?

The challenges we face these days are so great that we cannot rely entirely on ourselves, our communities, or our organizations to support us and help us stay on track. We need a small group of people with whom we can have in-depth discussions and share intimately about the most important things in our lives — our happiness and sadness, our hopes and fears, our beliefs and convictions.

We call these groups True North Groups because they help us follow our True North. As Bill wrote in his book by that name, True North represents what is most important to us in life: our beliefs, our most cherished values, our passions and motivations, and the sources of satisfaction in our lives. True North is the orienting point that keeps us on track as human beings and as leaders. It represents who we are at our deepest level.

Most of us know what our True North is, but we are constantly pressured by external forces to deviate from it. Or we are seduced by extrinsic rewards like money, power, and recognition that cause us to detour from our True North.

We created True North Groups to address our need for a support team to enable us to get through challenging times and to be there for us in good times and bad. By bridging the gap between our individual lives and the organizations and communities we engage every day, True North Groups can help us find joy and fulfillment in our lives. They can help us develop as authentic leaders who can make a difference in our world.

Before digging into what a True North Group is and why you would want to join one, we would like to share our stories of how we got interested in small groups.

BILL’S STORY

All my life I have been passionate about leadership. From observing leaders at a young age to leading business organizations and working with leaders committed to making a difference, I’ve always wanted to be engaged with leaders and with leading.

In my early years, I was never asked to lead anything, as I was too eager to get ahead. In high school and college, I was devastated as I lost seven consecutive elections, until some older friends helped me get on track. After that, I had many opportunities to lead organizations in college and graduate school before plunging into the world of business. There I spent ten years each at Litton Industries, launching the consumer microwave oven business, and at Honeywell, in a variety of executive leadership roles. It wasn’t until 1989 that I arrived at Medtronic’s doorstep, where I spent the best thirteen years of my professional career.

Following a weekend retreat in 1975, Doug Baker and I formed a True North Group. We didn’t call it that in those days; instead, it was our “renewal group” that enabled us to renew ourselves each week. In 1983, we also formed a couples group of eight that includes our spouses and two other couples who are close friends.

In addition to my wife, Penny’s, love and counsel, the people in these two groups have done more to help me develop as a whole human being and an authentic leader than anything else in my life. They have helped increase my self-awareness, sensitivity to others, and self-acceptance.

In the early years, they helped me recognize I was trying so hard to get ahead that I was behaving very differently in my work and community than at home and in my personal life. That led me to “decompartmentalize” my life by attempting to be the same person at home, at work, and in the community — with less facade and more authenticity.

When I hit the wall in my Honeywell career — something most of us have to confront at some point — our men’s group helped me acknowledge that I was striving too hard to become CEO and was in danger of losing sight of my True North. Back in 1988, I was on the fast track to the top of Honeywell. Elected executive vice president in 1983, I took over a large organization where I discovered lots of problems as I dug deeply into each of the businesses.

Just as we were getting these businesses in shape, I was asked to take over a new set of businesses and get them turned around. In late 1987, I was given responsibility for the third major turnaround, where we uncovered nearly $500 million in cost overruns on fixed-price government contracts that had to be written off.

One day in 1988, I was driving home on a beautiful fall day when I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I was deeply unhappy. In that instant flash in the mirror, I recognized that I was losing sight of my True North. I was striving so hard to get to the top that I was moving away from being an inspirational, growth-oriented leader. When I told Penny what I was feeling, she said, “Bill, I have been trying to tell you that for the past year, but you didn’t want to listen.” Often it is the people closest to us who see us as we are and can recognize our blind spots.

The next morning I shared my feelings with our group. They were helpful in confirming the changes they had seen in me and sharing their perceptions about my growing unhappiness. They suggested I rethink the opportunity to join Medtronic that I had turned down the previous summer. Later that week, I called Medtronic back, which opened up the best move of my career — one that I couldn’t see without the help of my wife and my men’s group.

In 1996, Penny was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ll never forget our couples group sitting together beneath the surgical room at Abbott Northwestern Hospital while she was having her mastectomy. Even with that support, I struggled to face the risks Penny faced and to share her fears. My men’s group pointed out that I seemed to be in denial about the uncertainty of her health, probably due to losing both my mother and my first fiancée to cancer early in life. That allowed me to stop trying to “fix it” and to just be a support person for Penny, an entirely new role for me.

Ten years ago, I concluded my business career and went on a wilderness journey to contemplate what lay ahead. Whatever I explored — from health care to international relations, corporate governance, government service, and education — my thoughts always came back to leadership.

Thanks to the trauma associated with the fall of Enron and dozens of companies whose executives got them into trouble, I found a new calling in helping others become more authentic leaders — from my MBA students to CEOs. Through this experience, I learned I could have greater impact in helping others lead effectively than I could in leading myself. As I wrote Authentic Leadership, True North, and two other books on leadership, I realized that my thesis is always the same: we need a new generation of authentic leaders to become values-centered leaders guiding great organizations.

After retiring from Medtronic and spending two years teaching in Switzerland and at Yale School of Management, I joined...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609940075
• ISBN 13: 9781609940072
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Berrett-Koehler; https://www.dc.com/tv; ; 1333 Broadway Suite P-100; Oakland; CA; 94612; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar