Radio Show Guest Highlights: Kevin Eikenberry, Chief Potential Officer

Kevin Eikenberry, best-selling author of Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential and Chief Potential Officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group works with clients to realize with them that every person and every organization has extraordinary potential. Kevin also is the creator and content developer of The Remarkable Leadership Learning System, a continual leadership development process focused on developing the 13 competencies of remarkable leaders with virtually delivered content to leaders worldwide. He spoke with me recently about remarkable leadership, its challenges and opportunities for organizations and how helps individuals and organizations reach their potential as remarkable leader.

You can listen in streaming on-demand at this link.

Can you share with us a recent remarkable story of a company who found a remarkable leader with your help and what that did for the organization?

We have been working with this client for about five-six years and we have been working on changing and redesigning their organizational culture. I started with conversations with the CEO and led to creation of a description of that culture by engaging the organization in that conversation so it wasn’t the CEO’s culture but became the organization's vision. We continue to build this culture and help them live it. We work with everyone in the company.

The bottom line is that every company has a culture, but it just isn’t about the CEO. It has to be created by the entire organization. The CEO’s role is to support it.

What was the particular outcome to this change?

They wanted a better place where people wanted to come to work, did not want retention issues, wanted to create quality work and higher levels of customer and employee satisfaction.

It was about safety, customer service, and enhanced moral. It was to help everyone see what the culture could be.

Are there symptoms that organizations display that show they are ready to bust out with remarkable leaders?

It starts with beliefs and values, whether it is HR, a key person, or a CEO. The belief system starts with:

1. Leaders can be made. In other words it isn’t something we were granted at birth.
2. We believe the people on our team can be those people.

They want to nvest time and energy to help others get on a conscious path to more effective leadership.

How long has Kevin Eikenberry Group existed?

We are 16 years old one week from tomorrow.

Our friend, Erika Andersen, wrote Being Strategic. She coined a term that's remained a favorite of mine:reasonable aspiration or hoped-for goal. When you started your business, back in the day, 15 yrs and 51 weeks ago...what was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for goal?

Reasonable aspiration or hoped for goal. The first name of my company was “Performance Partners” and my goal was to create partnerships with clients to help them create partnerships that they wanted within organizations. From the beginning it has been our goal and aspiration to create long-term partnerships with clients to help them reach their goals through learning. 

There is a little more focus on leadership now than when we first began because:

1. Leaders have the biggest impact in organizations no matter what their job title is so there is greater leverage for us to help.
2. I am a firm believer that the skills of leadership are the skills of being a human being. As we become better leaders, we become better human beings.

From a passion perspective, the leadership focus has become more true, but the piece that has always been true is our focus on customers and partnering with them and that our business is really all about learning. We want others to see us as their leadership help button when they have a challenge.

(Laughing...) Where did you get this focus on customers? It sounds facetious. But, it’s so refreshing to hear.

I grew up on a family farm and my father taught me that your business is only as good as your relationship with your customers. What I tell people now is that it is our customers that write our paychecks. They play an integral part in our business. We can not lose this focus! It is just a part of who I am.

Have you reached your reasonable aspiration?

No. Not yet. We have a long way to go- we set the bar high and this keeps us focused on our purpose. We continue to move forwards.

In your best-selling book, Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time, you list 13 core competencies of a remarkable leader. What are they?

Thirteen Competencies:

1. Remarkable leaders learn continually
2. Champions of change
3. Communicate powerfully
4. Develops others
5. Builds relationships
6. Focuses on customers
7. Influences with impact
8. Thinks innovatively
9. Values collaboration and teamwork
10. Solves problems and makes decisions
11. Takes responsibility and accountability
12. Manages projects and processes successfully
13. Sets goals and supports goal setting

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You said learning continually is the most important. Why?

1. It is not generally what people think about.
2. It is foundational to a leader's success.

If you believe leadership is something we can learn and it is complex, then we can identify great strengths and weaknesses in them. You won’t just arrive at being a great leader. It is not possible to be a perfect leader. As something that is complex and learnable, as we get better at it we can become truly successful. Being on a path of learning as a leader is quite important. Secondarily, leaders know that their team needs to continue to improve and there is no better way to show that, than to model that behavior.

Which one of these thirteen competencies has proved the most difficult to bring to your clients?

There are some of the skills that people always want to improve and one of those is Championing of Change. Change is tough. The skills to be good at championing change are difficult to acquire. But change is imperative. It is necessary to do things to improve the likelihood of success.

The leadership of change is at least 3 fold. We need to:

1.Manage change
2. Lead change
3.Champion change

Generally speaking, organizations can manage change, but leading something is different than managing, but where it is really lacking is championing change. It is such a focus.

The other competency that offers the biggest challenge for remarkable leaders is regarding setting goals and goal achievement. The key is that we do a pretty good job organizationally of setting goals, but do a poor job of making sure we are giving people time, resources, energy, encouragement and support to get those goals.

What point in a perspective leader’s development does a client approach you? Is there a standard minimum?

People come to us at various levels and roles in their career. There isn’t a specific pattern. People are attracted to us when they have made a decision that they really want to be effective. We are most successful with those who have the desire and willingness to learn, regardless of their place within the company or their leadership experience.

How do you tell that they are willing to get in there and do the change?

We go on the assumption that they are ready, but we don’t truly know until we get going, applying the skills, doing the work, getting on our conference calls and being part of the coaching process. These things will show us that they are serious. It is the actions, not the words.

You created a learning system to go along with your book, Remarkable Leadership Learning System. It is a continual leadership development process that focuses on developing the 13 core competencies of remarkable leaders. How does this process work? How does it help your leaders find their missing competencies or add to their existing ones?

The process is focused on two very simple ideas:

1. Training is an event.
2. learning is a process. The process is designed to help people integrate leadership skills into their already busy schedules by focusing on one skill at a time, one month at a time.

Of our 13 competencies, if you remove the learning one, as that is what we continually do, there are 12 other competencies for 12 months. We help our members integrate that new skill into what they are already doing at work.

We encourage people to take on a monthly project to apply the skills they are learning and we give them specific ideas to work on. We created an all encompassing tool to help people work on their skills.

If all of the leaders got better 1% per day that compounds to 21% in a month this can have a tremendous impact in companies on an overall yearly basis. 1% better can be doing just one thing better every day. It is a huge improvement.

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We just created what we call the most remarkable free leadership gift ever and we’d love to have people sample that program for two months, there are hundreds of dollars of free webcasts and tools. Just go to Most Remarkable Free Leadership Gift Ever.

What has been the most inspiring story for you where someone got what you are talking about and you saw the results over time?

We get a lot of satisfaction from folks in a variety of methods. We can hear from them even years later when they are in decision-making roles. Being a leader is about making a difference in the world and when we hear back from those in our program, we know we have helped one more person and achieved our goal.

What impact has this turbulent economy had on your business? Are there more people interested in investing in their human assets? Or are they cutting costs?

There are people doing both. We made a choice a year ago that we would not use the word recession – we were going to work harder and a little differently. Do new things so our business would not be affected. The economic changes for us have been minimally.I think we are seeing a turn and that many organizations think the end is in sight.

What are three steps our listeners can take now to begin to improve 1% per day?

1. Make a list of the 3 things that you are best at as a leader
2.Identify 2-3 things that you are not so good at.
3. Identify one step you can take each day on one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses.

In a recent interview at Get Motivation you shared your ingredients for success. You said they’d include:

• Love
• Gratitude
• Desire to be a lifelong learner
• Ability/willingness to collaborate
• Self knowledge
• Ability to focus and prioritize
• Purpose
• Optimism
• Bias towards action
• Ability to communicate

How long have you had this list of ingredients for success?

If we want to be successful, we need to be “other” focused. When we are other focused, rather than on ourselves, more things will come back to us. When I think of success, it is more than just money. You need a sense of purpose, a clear why and a feeling of abundance.

49:19

Remember the pledge of allegiance? We pledge allegiance to those values most dear to us. Are our actions showing our pledge of allegiance to our values and allowing us to be a role model for those values in our businesses?

What if we pledged our allegiance daily to these values, as well, as our leaders, as our organization’s leaders? Would that make us a better human? Better leader equals better human; better human makes us a better leader. Be clear on our values and lead from them. This is a challenge we can all think about everyday.

I remember reading many great inspiration quotes in your tweets. Can you share one with us now?

1. Remarkable leadership starts with the belief that leadership skills are learnable and learned.
2. Leadership is an opportunity and a responsibility. The best leaders possess both realities.

You can follow Kevin Eikenberry online at his

* Kevin Eikenberry Group, website
* Kevin Eikenberry Group, blog
* Twitter: KevinEikenberry

2 Free Gift Reminders:

1. Free Chapter Download with his Latest Best-Seller: Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time

2.Most Remarkable Free Leadership Gift Ever. <

Thanks, Kevin!