Intellectual knowledge helps, but leaderships skills come from experience and deliberate practice.  To help you cultivate a broad range of leadership skills and keep you growing and developing over time, GreenLead provides a daily Leadership Workout of the Day, also known as an "LWOD" for short.

What’s a LWOD?

Defined: LEADERSHIP WORKOUT OF THE DAY (LWOD) (noun) -  Daily leadership development practice that takes less than five minutes. These practices will keep you learning and growing, even if you live and work in a fast-paced, constantly changing environment where carving out time for focused career development seems impossible.

How to get started:

1) Read the rest of this page. We know it's long, but it will give you an overview of how to make best use of what you'll find here.

2) Try out the Leadership Workout of the Day. Each LWOD is designed to last about 5 minutes. We recommend doing it first thing in the morning when you get to work.

3) Supplement your LWODs with consistent daily practices, such as good sleep hygiene, proper nutrition, exercise, meditation, and a gratitude journal.

4) Get in touch with us and tell us how it's going!

How the LWOD approach works

Success as a leader in the modern world requires incredible agility and a large repertoire of skills - vision, courage, inspiring and motivating others, execution, developing others, self-awareness, leadership presence, emotional intelligence, learning agility, decisiveness, strategic agility, creativity. . .and more.

The daily leadership workout of the day will help you continually stretch and grow yourself. These LWODs keep you fresh and continually learning. They cultivate leadership agility across a broad range of situations in a way that static, repeated practice cannot match. We want to demystify the art of leadership development and make cutting edge tools available to those who want to bring positive change to the world.

For Leadership in a World of Whitewater

Now, if you're wondering if this has been influenced by CrossFit. . .yes, absolutely!  We have seen the powerful effects of training for general physical preparedness (GPP) using a range of physical modalities. But what about mental and emotional leadership modalities? And your ability to actually perform different leadership skills in the “permanent whitewater” of day-to-day leadership?

The LWODs will you develop leadership skills amidst the fray. You can obviously complement these with more specific practices to target the development of specific leadership skills.

The LWODS use a variety of exercises across the skills mentioned above:

Meditation & Guided Visualization:

These practices quiet the mind and body and allow creativity and insight to emerge. New advances in neuroscience have revealed the efficacy of meditation in re-wiring the brain for greater focus, mental control, and outcome achievement. In fact, just thinking a thought wires the neural pathway in the same way performing an action would (although of course to a lesser degree). Meditation and guided visualization are commonly used by world-class athletes and executives to pave the way for high performance.

Reflection:

The process of reflection underlies most personal development approaches, including traditional psychology, coaching, and the entire field of adult learning. By reflecting on your own experience, you pave the way for new insights, new paradigms, and new ways of seeing the world. You help relate your learning to your daily, lived experience and thereby encode it more effectively in your memory.

Feedback:

Understanding the impact our actions have in the world - particularly on other people - allows us to become more effective in the world. LWODs employ a variety of methods to gather feedback on your strengths, weaknesses, blind-spots, and opportunities.

Mental Models:

Knowledge resides in your brain as networks of connected cells. When you change your mental models and change the connections between your brain cells, you see and process the world differently. These "paradigm shifts" and new ways of seeing pave the way for development because when you see differently, you have a new range of options for action available to you.

Relationships:

Relationships are the "crowning jewel" of life according to Aristotle, but they're also useful for getting anything done. Relationships hold the key both to satisfaction and efficacy. The more skilled you bring to managing relationships, the more fulfilled and effective you will be.

Action:

"You haven't learned it until it's in the muscle," as the New Guinean saying goes. These action practices help you get out there and do it. The more you perform an action, the stronger the neural hardwiring becomes for that action. Practice makes permanent. The two-fold upside of taking action is that you build the skill AND you get real-world results. These practices are specifically designed to help you get both.

LWOD Origins

We draw from a variety practices used with coaching clients over the years to create the LWODs. These practices come from a variety of disciplines. We mix and match them to provide broader stimulus that provokes a broader adaptational response. The disciplines we draw from include:

• Traditional psychology

• Positive psychology

• Adult learning and development

• Leadership development

• Bowen Family Systems Theory

• Organization development

• Business and economics

• Entrepreneurship studies

• Somatics

• Athletics

• Neuroscience

• Political science

• Eastern/western religion

• Eastern/Western philosophy

• Literature

• Political science

• Martial arts

• Experience with hundreds of clients and in my own life

After designing and delivering leadership development courses for 10+ years, we have observed that clients progress the most when they take action on new insights. INSIGHT + ACTION = RESULTS. The LWODs are designed to stimulate both insights and actions.

What's next? If you've finished this page, then jump in to the LWODs. Please be sure to click the “Contact” button in the upper right-hand corner to send us a note and let us know how it's going!