Steve: Welcome to our podcast show today, wherever you might be in the world today. This is Steve Shallenberger, your host with Becoming Your Best Global Leadership. It is a delight to be together with you. Wish we had the chance to just sit down and be together and talk about how to become our best, how to increase our happiness and joy and fulfillment in both our own lives and the lives of all of those that we associate with. As you reflect upon the greatest achievements, events, and discoveries of humankind—words, knowledge, innovation, ideas, and behaviors have had an enormous impact on our human experience. I mean, just reflect and think about these together. They include individuals and nations, including Jesus Christ, Mohamed, Greek and Roman cultures—including the Pax Romana, which was 200 years of peace starting with the reign of Augustus. The discovery of the Will, including its many uses, which people continue to discover more uses of the Will. Gutenberg’s Press, the Declaration of Independence, and Human Rights advances, and literature—with Shakespeare and Cervantes. Art with Michelangelo. Music with Beethoven. I mean, there’s just a few that are representative of that time. Electricity. It’s not just the use of electricity—that it exists and that we can harness it, but then the inventions that have gone along with it, like the light bulb. Also, the discovery of engines, and cars, and flight, and the industrial revolution, medical discoveries, advances, computers, and devices, and landing man on the moon, the internet. Parenting, raising good children, and having good, solid homes. Advances in education, and collectively creating a sustainable economy that is lifting the world. Every one of these achievements, discoveries, or accomplishments are a result of individuals and groups of individual. In other words, these are cultures or organizations that learned to align themselves with certain principles that produced high-performance and excellence. Your success in life, your happiness, health, and prosperity, depend upon understanding the principles, behaviors, and habits that cause that success. In our world of leadership and management and prioritizing your time and high performance, we are always thinking about these types of things. The things that can produce high-performance among its people, and the culture, and the strategy. In short, things that produce high-performance organizations. This is what we have spent forty years of research—doing this. Unlocking what those principles, behaviors, and habits are that produce sustainable, high-performance. A great acronym for that is SHP. Among our findings, as many of you know, are the 12 principles of highly successful leaders. This discovery of the 12 principles of becoming your best literally help unlock the secrets that have contributed to the greatest achievements and accomplishments of humankind and of high-performance—the SHP: Sustainable High Performance. Yesterday, I was reading a magazine. The name of the magazine is The Training Magazine, where I came across a study entitled The X-Factor in Productivity. The RAIN Group conducted research named The Extreme Production Benchmark Report. In this study, they analyzed responses from 2,377 business professionals to better understand what drives productivity. Respondents were broken into productivity groups based on their answers to the following statement: I am extremely productive. The extremely productive (the XPs is what they call them—they’d be the equivalent to our Sustainable High Performers, the SHPs—rated themselves a 5/5 on this question. In other words, this is very much like me. The question is, “I am extremely productive.” The SHPs represented 14% of the respondents, these X-Producers, these XPs as they call them. Now, the merely productive rated themselves a 4/5. Mostly like me. The productive includes 48% of respondents. One of the most surprising findings from the research was just how different people in these two groups work, and the results that they’re able to achieve. So, if you examine the key drivers of productivity, and they have included a graph with their article that I will include in the transcript of the podcast. The XP are up to 3.5 times more likely to exhibit these behaviors, compared to the productive. Across the board, the gaps are significant, with the largest gaps being among the following: the XP are almost 2 times more likely to hold themselves accountable. The XP are 3.5 times more likely to recover quickly when derailed from being productive. The XPs are 3.3 times more likely to have productive habits overall. The XP are 2.7 times more likely to regularly sustain energy for long periods of time. The XPs are 2.7 times more likely to start their day with the great impact activity. Finally, the XP are 2.7 times more likely to not react to other people’s agendas, and to drive their own. The bottom line: if you want real results, set your and your employees’ sights on learning and making these types of habits that you find in Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles, and how they will drive your productivity. A good example of this is The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders, Principle 9: be accountable. Well, mastering this principle happens to be #1 on the list that makes the XP most effective. That was the #1 most rated, and we just go on and on in terms of going down the 12, and we can talk about that in a moment, but this is what we help our employees and ourselves do: set ourselves on learning and making these principles habits as the type of behavior that drives this kind of productivity. And, as a highly successful leader—whether it’s a CEO, team lead, or coach, parent, teacher, professional, salesperson, production person, admin, or a parent. So, what can you do to make these behaviors such a high priority in terms of making them a habit? Things that you can do in your organization that produces this sustainable, high performance over time. So, how can you do this/ How do you transform the people, the culture, and strategy to do the right things so that you produce the right results—these SHPs? I’d like to recommend two things. One, if you’re an individual, it’s pretty straightforward. You can do simple things, such as invest in the book Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders, and start going to work on mastering them. Anyone can do that. We’re not born with these things. Two more things that you can do is that you can benchmark how you are currently doing in terms of being able to execute on these 12 principles. So, we have a free assessment that you can take—a 12 principle assessment—and you can find that on support@becomingyourbest.com. We’ll come back to that. In other words, you can benchmark yourself. Another thing individually that you can do is to subscribe to the Weekly Principle A Week, where you just get a principle a week in the email of the 12 principles, and it has stories, examples, and action items of ways to make these, align your behavior with these type of things. The more you think about it, the more it becomes part of you. Now, that’s on an individual basis. What can you do as a leader? Well, one of the things that you can do—and the levers that you can pull, and one of the most significant things that unlock enormous potential and capacity in a team or an organization to produce these SHPs, Sustainable High Performance—is to empower your people with the knowledge of the principles of highly successful leaders. The development of the behaviors and habits that produces a permanent transformation that comes with this knowledge, the impact is enormous. As you invest in your people, which then impacts the culture and strategy and the overall value of your organization. When I say organization, that means your family, your relationships, a team, or an overall company. So, whether you are talking about yourself, your family, your team or organizations, you can leverage the research and discoveries that Becoming Your Best has made in leadership, management, and personal development, and provide it to your family or the people that you work with. So, what are some ways that you can do that? Well, you, like other highly successful leaders, can adopt a strategy and plan to not only learn yourself but also teach your key people the 12 principles of highly successful leaders by becoming a certified organization: a CO. This is where you actually take a license on all of the properties that we have at Becoming Your Best and the 12 principles of highly successful leaders, along with the tools and processes that you then are able to utilize in teaching others. I’ll just take a quick break from this and share the experience with Henry McGovern. Henry is the CEO of a company, and they have over 1,600 restaurants, primarily serving the European Union area. It’s quite a spectacular company. Since 2005, they have outperformed every other food service company by a significant margin. They’ve increased in value over 1,700%. They have 38,000 employees, and Henry McGovern stated, “We are far more a training company than we are a restaurant company.” In other words, he understands that what makes his people great is the fact that they master these kinds of principles that we’re talking about today. So, for a relatively modest investment and especially compared to the impact on your people and the culture and the strategy and value, the revenues, you can become a licensee—a certified organization. You can certify within your company, hand-picked trainers, and systematically train not only every key employee but really every employee and associate. This is a transformational process that creates sustainable high performance. It teaches people to do exactly what this study that I referred to before, and it helps them become XPs. So, on our podcast show, we frequently ask our guests—and when we are guests on other shows—what are tips that we have for our listeners. Well, this may sound a little biased today—which we rarely do [laughs], I might add—but I will say that as I have had the opportunity to go all over the world, there’s nothing like Becoming Your Best. As comprehensive as it is and the 12 principles, and the accompanying processes, and the impact that it has, we see this over and over. So, my tip today, our invitation to you: whether you are a leader within an organization, at any level. It might be the CEO, and you can have an impact on the whole organization, or perhaps you’re a division leader or a team leader. Maybe you are a parent. Well, this applies across the board. So, our invitation is to take action and learn about the Becoming Your Best Certified Organization (CO), which is completely unique in teaching you and your employees the right things to do and produce within them the knowledge, behaviors, and habits that lead to high performance. This decision and action will transform and maintain, over time, your people, your culture, your strategy into sustainable, long-term, high performance. Individually and as an organization. The very same holds true within a family. What a great way to teach your children! You can do the very same thing: become a certified family. To teach these and use all of the assets, all of the power points and clips that we use, to teach with your organization or your children. The result is the right set of behaviors that produce this outcome. To learn more about becoming a certified organization, or a certified family, simply contact us at support@becomingyourbest.com. We can provide you with the details. The process is simple. Understand that the impact of Becoming Your Best and the 12 Principles that it can have on your organization. That you can become licensed. You can send hand-picked individuals there. We have Becoming Your Best: Train the Trainer courses all around the country and world. You simply join us for a 2 ½ day conference—that’s how you get certified. Then, you roll out the training—one principle a week program—company-wide, deep, and broad, and then watch the transformation that it has. Turn your organization into a leadership university of high performance that’s rich in resource for your employees. The outcome is that your employees join the ranks of highly successful leaders that become SHPs—that become the XPs—and change the teams, the organizations, and your families, and the world for good. This will be one of the most important actions and investments in your career. Throughout the world, with highly successful organizations, we see this kind of an impact over and over. Your people and teams and organizations will be blessed by the extraordinary impact of your highly successful leadership. You’ll look back at the end of your career and say to yourself, “That was one of the most important things I did. That was one of the most important investments I made.” Well, I hope that this has stimulated some thoughts and ideas about what we can do as leaders to shift the needle, to make a difference, to make sure that our companies are not only in the top tier of performing organizations within our industries, but that they continue to be that way. This has been a delight to be together with you today, and I wish you the best as you make a difference every single day in the lives of others. This is Steve Shallenberger, wishing you a great day.