Leadership Success Predictors: Do You Amplify Others?

Do you encourage others to become greater or do you speak and act in ways that actually discourage others? The key metric of a servant leader is: Has your influence helped others grow and develop themselves personally and professionally? Are people better off knowing and working with you? Are others accomplishing their goals, objectives and dreams by being associated with you?

Amplify is defined as making something become greater in scope and stronger. Pixar's Randy Nelson reveals the top four predictors that determine if you and your team amplify others. This ten minute video is worth your time.

After watching the video, here's a quick way to self-assess your ability to amplify others:

• Depth of Experience: What is something you have truly mastered? And, how does this mastery demonstrates your ability to achieve mastery in other things?
• Breadth of Knowledge and Experience: Are you more interested in other people and how things work or do you speak and act in ways to make yourself interesting to others?
• Quality of Communication: How well do others understand you? When you do speak, do others tell you they have a better understanding of a situation?
• Create a Collaborative Environment: Do you create an environment that promotes authentic collaboration versus people just doing the basics to cooperate with one another. Is the team creating new possibilities? 
• Bonus - Question to Statement Ratio: What is your question to statement ratio? Do you speak out your ideas more than you ask questions to understand others?

What's Your Lifetime Value Potential?

You can easily estimate how much money you will make over your lifetime. Have you ever pondered on your potential to create value for others over your lifetime?

Through my work with ZFactor Group, I get to see people make this simple shift in their mindset. Imagine the possibilities when you focus on creating value for others. My experience is when people do this, their lifetime earnings potential increases substantially.

This is why ZFactor publications focus on Revealing And Releasing Your Untapped Potential. When people choose to think, act and communicate differently, it's like they have finally found that essential key to success.

ZFactor books helps others find their key for success by providing a:

1. Simple map to plot where you are; 
2. Compass to determine the direction you want to go; and, 
3. Guide of defining characteristics to help you know what to do to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.

Through our various engagements with others - comments from readers, presentations, coaching sessions or workshops - we are continually amazed at how quickly people shift the way they think about their current situation as they recognize where they are and have a simple map. As people embrace thinking differently, they immediately find themselves in the midst of a personal transformation that propels them from me-focus to others-focus. 

There is no complicated formula or long drawn out training or session-after-session with a guru to figure out the meaning of life. It begins with stop focusing on yourself and focus on others. Sometimes, it can even be as simple as a good friend, Peter Strople, describes how one question can create Instant Change. 

It is in this transformation when people immediately become what we refer to as Value Creators. Instantly, their expertise, knowledge, talents and skills can be focused on moving their life forward and/or a new idea, concept, project, team or organization. The result - other people benefit as you increase their financial value and your lifetime financial value potential increases, as well. And, being others focused doesn't have to be about financial value.

So, what's your choice? Will you maintain a me-focus or will you ponder the question - "What's Your Lifetime Value Potential?" If you are ready for Instant Change in your life, you will choose to ponder the question, engage into thinking, acting and communicating differently and develop a deep understanding for making a difference and creating value for others. 

If you choose to ponder the question, I guarantee your life will change and you will experience all you have ever imagined possible and most likely experience the impossible, as well.

Happy pondering...

~ Alan Goldsberry, Author and CEO of ZFactor Group Publishing

ZFactor blog explores and discusses a variety of techniques, tools and discoveries by successful people that will assist others to achieve greater personal and professional success. ZFactor is a proprietary coaching methodology based upon the premise that successful people think and act differently. The ZFactor methodology is proven to accelerate a person's ability to think and act differently.

The genesis of this blog is based upon a current engagement by ZFactor Author, Cindy Goldsberry, who is in collaboration with Zilliant, who provides companies with data-driven guidance, enabling smarter pricing and sales decisions to help businesses increase profitable sales. Read Cindy's blog for more information. Learn how Zilliant is definitely a Value Creator for their clients. In fact, they can measure how much more financial financial they provide to their clients.

Other Important Links:

Instant Change (Friends of Peter)

Lifetime Earnings Calculator

Age of Radical Thinking With Heart And Soul

"I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences." ~Margaret J. Wheatley

We stand in the midst of radical social change because radical thinking servant leaders with the expertise and wisdom empowered with heart and soul are standing up, speaking out and leading others to learn and work together to create solutions only dreamed by prior generations.

A smart leader today is both a radical thinker and a servant. Because these are times when leaders are thinking like and learning from the likes of George Washington when he recognized that The People were declaring it was time for change.

Washington recognized the influence the pamphlet Common Sense by Thomas Paine was having on colonials, when he said, "I find Common Sense is working a powerful change in the minds of many men." And, John Adams wrote, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Smart leaders are tuned to the needs and will of the People and find the ways to harness that energy into a direction for doing good and making big things happen. These leaders create the opportunities for people who want to participate in creating a better life for themselves and their progeny. It is clear that today, through social media People are writing, blogging and commenting on how they want to be a part of making changes in their local schools, communities and government. Smart leaders are hearing and answering these calls. 

These radical thinking leaders are accomplished with a deep passion to make a difference. Most will tell you they have been 'called' into that of a serving leader. Their eyes have been opened to see a need, which has become glued to their hearts so deeply that each beat resounds deeply into their soul with a compelling desire to experience individuals, families, businesses, agencies and communities being transformed. Any leader who chooses to be less than radical about serving those who work with them will soon find they have few, if any, followers. 

Who are these radically thinking servant leaders? 

Character: Their character is the cornerstone of who they are. Only those leaders who have had their character tested by fire, no longer smell like smoke and have developed the capacity to deal with uncertainty and manage change will thrive in today's rapidly changing environment.

Valued Relationships: You will know these leaders by how they speak about, respect and revere each relationship. They value their relationships not for what others can do for them, but for how blessed they feel for being associated and knowing people who inspire these radically thinking leaders to become better servant leaders.

Wisdom: Radically thinking leaders demonstrate their wisdom in the midst of chaos and change. Their agenda becomes to authentically serve the People. They actively listen with the intent to not seek compromise in the squall of diversity, but look for how that diversity empowers the process to reveal and release an entirely new possibility that is both inspiring and compelling for all involved.

Influence: Influence is not something one can just do. It is bestowed upon the leader in that a leader's quality of influence is recognized by the people who associate with the leader. Influence is the capstone of leadership, which clearly signals the vibrancy, stability and sustainability of the leader's cornerstone of character. Their character is revealed in the answers to these questions.

• Who are they in the quiet of their homes?
• What will their family and best friends truthfully say about them to others?
• What truths will be revealed when the leader is gone? 

Radically Big Thinking is relative to a leader's location, level of accomplishment, desire to make a difference and willingness to serve. A radically big thinking leader may be the one who leads others to stop the bullies in the schoolyard and workplace or those who lead profit or nonprofit organizations. No matter the place, time or numbers, the true test of a radically thinking leader will be recognized by the impact on the people involved. 

• Are people growing and developing? 
• Do they have a better life from being served? 
• Are they doing as has been done for them - are they now serving others?

This infographic is like a roadmap to encourage you to find where you are in the context of being a radically thinking servant leader and empower you to focus on the attitudes, behaviors and skills that form the character of an authentic servant leader.

Choose to be a radically thinking leader and only follow radically thinking leaders with good hearts and souls,

~ Alan Goldsberry, Author and CEO of ZFactor Group Publishing

ZFactor blog explores and discusses a variety of techniques, tools and discoveries by successful people that will assist others to achieve greater personal and professional success. ZFactor is a proprietary coaching methodology based upon the premise that successful people think and act differently. The ZFactor methodology is proven to accelerate a person's ability to think and act differently.

Your Blog Can Predict Your Success Or Failure

How you write and the words you use can make a difference and predict your success or failure in achieving your goals. Do you really want to make a change in your life to achieve greater success? How about lose weight, make more money or check an item off your bucket list?

Blog about your personal goals. Not just listing your goals, but write and talk about how you feel whether or not you are achieving your goals.

Cindy K. Chung*, Dept of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, researched bloggers writing styles in reference to losing weight. The research found that bloggers who wrote about their attitudes, feelings and emotions were more successful at losing weight than bloggers who wrote about their food intake.

I know this sounds very counter intuitive, but consider this. Think about the success people have when they fully engage in a mastermind group, roundtable of like minded professionals or Plus Your Life, Google community.

Participants will initially set their goals and then begin discussing their practices, disciplines and emotions relative to the process of achieving those goals. Apparently, the research shows that people who do this in their blogs are more successful in achieving their goals.

If you are really serious about achieving your goals, stop making daily lists of what you are doing and start writing about your feelings and emotions about it. Better yet, write about it and talk about it with your friends. And, the more frequent you do it, the faster you achieve your desired results.

Funny story: My wife used to weigh herself every morning. The scale was next to the breakfast table where our youngest son, then age 5 (now 19), had observed his Mother doing this. One morning, he asks, "Mom, why do you weigh your feet every day?" After that, it became less important to weigh herself everyday and she moved the scale back to our bathroom.


* Cindy's research is based upon the research by James W. Pennebaker, PhD of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

• Cindy Chung research overview [pdf]
• James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns [website] [book]

Keep on blogging what you really think about achieving your goals, 

~ Alan Goldsberry, Author and CEO of ZFactor Group Publishing

ZFactor blog explores and discusses a variety of techniques, tools and discoveries by successful people that will assist others to achieve greater personal and professional success. ZFactor is a proprietary coaching methodology based upon the premise that successful people think and act differently. The ZFactor methodology is proven to accelerate a person's ability to think and act differently.

Entrepreneurial Leaders Do What Matters

"Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can." ~ John Wesley

These are times of rapid change, uncertainty and opportunity that call forth leaders with a deep desire to make a difference and leave a lasting legacy in business, community, church and government. People want to be part of something that matters. Yet, the challenges of getting others willing to confront the issues at hand and execute workable solutions require leaders who have the adaptive capacity to get others on the same page and moving in the same direction, at the same time. Leaders must have a deep understanding of what it takes to be highly effective and influential leaders. 

Leadership is no longer about declaring the vision or direction and then looking to see who is following and then focus on those who follow. This is a time for leaders to embrace the heart of a servant and spirit of the warrior. Authentic servant leaders observe all that exists around them and apply what they learn to develop a deep understanding of the art and science of leadership. Each must put forth the required time and effort to make themselves authentic servant leaders with a clear focus on others and set the course for things to come. Great leaders throughout history maintain a sense of providence as to who they are, where they are and what they are called to do. The opportunity, like no other time in history, is the possibility to create a world great leaders throughout history have desired to make reality.

Those who choose to pursue this leadership opportunity quickly realize the process to become an authentic servant leader involves reconciling immense personal and professional challenges. Change becomes a way of life. Leadership is a self-development process that requires daily attention as society requires leaders to have a servant-focus, be of solid character and maintain high standards in leadership practices and principles. Leaders are expected to continually learn and with a trusted mentor become a highly capable leader who knows themselves, cares about people and has a deep understanding of the business or organization they steward. 

For those leaders who answer this call into servant leadership, the Servant Leader Framework serves as a highly effective methodology for thinking and processing through all the situations, possibilities, challenges, changes and complexities of leadership.

This xy graph or ZMap becomes a ‘one page book’ for those who desire to know and understand who they are as an entrepreneur and servant leader. This simple xy graph provides clarity and focus on what to do to get to where you want to be. The challenge for entrepreneurs is reconciling their desires for success with doing good to make a difference. For those entrepreneurs who can stay focused on both success and doing good at the same time will know what it means to go from success to significance. It is possible to have it all. Just look at all the entrepreneurial leaders who have proven this is true. This is one of the ZMaps in my upcoming book The Servant Leader Framework.

~ Alan Goldsberry, Author and CEO of ZFactor Group Publishing

Authentic Legacy - Zig Ziglar

A few of my favorite +Zig Ziglar quotes in celebration of his life, legend and legacy.

• "Your attitude, not your aptitude will determine your altitude."
• "Every choice you make has an end result."
• "If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you'll never end up with a nag."
• "If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments."
• "It's not what you've got, it's what you use that makes a difference."

Prayers and blessings to the Ziglar family and to all Zig Fans. I am a better man, husband, father, businessman, salesman and leader because of Zig Ziglar and a few other book mentors I discovered early in life and at the beginning of my business career. Zig has joined Og Mandino, Dale Carnegie, W. Clement Stone, Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightengale for a major God Special Universe Tour.

Thank you, Mr. Ziglar (Zig) for the legacy you have created that will make a difference for generations to come. Thank you for showing us all the way.

"...it's what you use that makes a difference."

~ Alan Goldsberry, Author and CEO of ZFactor Group Publishing