Liberating Passion for Business Success by Omar Khan (9 mts)
Helps understand how to liberate the suppressed passion of your team members to unlock the real potential, energy, creativity, agility, leadership and team work.
Prime interview on “Business Success through Liberating Passion” on Channel News Asia
I hope this could be useful in providing online learning to your team during the current down time so that they would be kept positive, motivated and sharp so that all of you would be geared to perform with excellence during the crisis and after.
The following process can help you get good value from this video:
I could be the most delectable, the most delicious, the most wondrous peach in the world, and I could offer it to everybody. But there are people who are allergic to peaches. Then they may want me to be a banana.” And so often we become a banana for other people who want peaches. What a messy fruit salad. Isn’t it all right to say to them, “I am so sorry I cannot be a banana? I would love to be a banana if I could for you, but I’m a peach.” And you know what? If you wait long enough, you’ll find a peach lover. And then you can live your life as a peach, and you don’t have to live your life as a banana. All the lost energy it takes to be a banana, when you’re a peach!
This is a part of a poem I love, written by the author of ‘Love’ Leo Buscaglia. This poem, which I first heard from my teacher and now my business partner, Omar Khan about 20 years ago, has had an amazing impact on my life and the choices I make. This has helped me to continue to search for my God-given gift by asking the questions; what do I love to do? What am I good at? What is important to me? These reflections have led me to find a sense of my ‘purpose’ and I continue to ask myself questions to inquire if that is my purpose. Such inquiry has also changed the questions and I ask and the third question above has now changed to; for what or who am I in service of?
Compare the intent of your communication with the impact of your communication. If there is mismatch then surely there is conflict. Great communicators know how to synchronize the two and this requires us putting our heart and soul into communications. This is the powerful message delivered by Omar Khan at his learning event : ‘Heart & Soul of Real Communications’ on the 21st of January 2014.
So how do we start achieving this magical balance?
This requires us to be a students of impact of our own communication on other people and our intent of that communication. We need to use our ears to listen to the emotional impact created on the other person. We need to be empathetic. We need to see it from our soul, that is to know the positive energy it creates in the other person. Understanding of spiritual intelligence is key here.
Top Performance requires us to ensure that top teams are set up, developed, nurtured and rewarded appropriately. Most companies miss this important point. Here is a summary of the insights from the ‘Top Performance through Top Teams’ session by Omar Khan held on the 21st of January 2014.
Inappropriate strategy deployed by the organisations to measure/improve business performance is one of the key reasons that teams remain average teams delivering average performance.
They focus too much on individuals
They focus too much on how to work than how it works (excessively process driven)
They create and run ‘Vertical Organisations’ – Hierarchies are created to fix responsibilities, which in turn dilute the authority resulting in indecisiveness / delays/non fulfilment of commitments made to all stakeholders
When an organisation faces a problem, if they have mediocre team members, they will strongly believe in maintaining/defending status-quo.
The biggest untracked cost of such companies is commitments made and not followed up.
Therefore following are the appropriate strategy for the organisations to measure/improve business performance.
Ever had a situation where you had top talent in your team perhaps a great track record of performance supported by great processes and a super brand, but with no results to justify these inputs.
In our leadership consulting work we have found one of the key reasons for this. This happens when top leadership does not recognize the fact that the fastest way to improve organizational results is through the key teams that are accountable for delivering that performance.
Organizations need to be strengthened horizontally not vertically, and by ratcheting up the capabilities of top teams, we can increase the value of our organizational assets ten-fold, and every penny invested, will give a hard dramatic ROI as each of these teams are in charge of strategic business results!!
Driving up business performance through our key teams require; growing our leadership throughout the team as way to driving key results, aligning teams so they can execute and get past blocks and plateaus, having an expanded concept of individual and team accountability, improving the quality of decision-making in ways that shows up on our bottom-lines and tangibly improving ‘conversational capacity’ through the ability to have radical action conversations.
Recently I stumbled upon a TedX video of David Damberger titled: What happens when an NGO admits failure. It is a real eye opener for NGO’s who spends money in providing infrastructure such as tube wells. What they forget to do is investing some money on maintaining such infrastructure by employing people, training them and providing a source of funding and following up. David talks about how he saw this happening and making the same mistake himself. He sees how the tube wells provided were unusable a few years later due to this issue.
A success story in this aspect is the foundation for goodness run by Kushil Gunasekara in southern Sri Lanka. A village names ‘Seenigama’ he was fostering got completely wiped out due to the Tsunami on the 26th of December 2004. He got the support of various donors, well-wishers and those who were affected and re-built the village. He made it sustainable through various activities such as running 2 BPO’s and other industries and the village is a thriving one now. They have produced 6 national players for Sri Lanka in various sports among other achievements. It is a fascinating story and you can see their details at http://www.unconditionalcompassion.org/indexc.php.
I was saddened to see an email from my business partner, friend, brother and coach, Omar Khan this morning about the loss of his father. I feel for this loss personally as I love and respect Omar and I know Omar’s father had a special influence in making Omar the genius he is.
Unfortunately Omar could not be by his side before his death or attend the funeral as he was in the United States when his father passed away in Pakistan. There was not enough time for Omar and his wife Leslie to get back on time for the funeral as the Islamic traditions require burial within 24 hours.
I can imagine the pain Omar’s mum is going through after losing her sister twin 10 days ago and now her husband. It may also be tough for her not having Omar by her side. I can also imagine what Omar may be going through, not been able to bid good bye to his father and not been able to be there.
Ranjan De Silva 