StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 20b – An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 2 of 2

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 20b – An Interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, part 2 of 2 explores how leaders can enhance their organization’s alignment and accountability through question-based leadership. During our discussion, Gary Cohen, Partner and co-Founder of CO2 Partners and author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions shares his insights regarding:

  • a process for determining what questions to ask for a given situation
  • attributes of good questions
  • impacts of asking too many or too few questions and how to identify when that point is reached
  • how to incorporate questions into one’s leadership style

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights Gary shares in Just Ask Leadership and this special edition podcast are the additional resources accessible from his Just Ask Leadership website (www.JustAskLeadership.com) and the CO2 Partners website (www.CO2Partners.com). The values assessment discussed during the podcast can be accessed at www.CEOTest.com. Gary’s book, Just Ask Leadership, can be purchased by clicking here.

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About the Author

Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, is Partner and co-Founder of CO2 Partners, a Minneapolis based executive coaching and consulting firm. Gary is renowned for his work as the President and co-Founder of ACI Telecentrics, a company he took from 2 to 2,200 employees and a peak of $32 million in annual revenues. Under his leadership, ACI grew at an average compounded rate of over 50 percent for almost 13 years and was recognized as one of Venture Magazine’s Top 10 Best Performance Businesses and Business Journal’s 25 Fastest Growth Small Public Companies. Gary is frequently interviewed on leadership issues by many of today’s leading publications including USA Today, the Washington Post, and Business Week. To read Gary’s full biography, click here.

The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm Is Dead: How a New Breed of Sales Professionals Can Change the Game

Sales leaders are realizing that the single-handed gunslinger approach no longer wins in today’s sales world. Today’s economy demands that you leverage all of your available sales talent by helping your sales reps both farm and hunt productively. Register to Attend this Webinar.

You will learn how to:

  • Elevate your team’s performance by moving beyond the Hunter/Farmer model
  • Create a well-documented, effective sales process to be used by everyone in every sales call
  • Provide training focused on the specific sales skills that have the most impact on sales performance
  • Immediately and permanently transfer newly taught skills into consistent field success

Day: Thursday, September 24
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT


About the Webinar Leader
 
Duane Sparks, author of Sales Strategy From The Inside Out, is Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based strategic sales training company that has trained and certified more than 350,000 salespeople in more than 3,000 groups in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has written five sales books, personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions and continues to engage in the business and art of the strategic sales process. To read Duanes’s full biography, click here.

Are You Serious About Getting Your People Saying “Thank God It’s Monday” AND Growing with Profits Again?


It’s crippling. One out of every three payroll dollars is lost due to disengaged employees–and that makes it not fun or easy for managers and leaders who are held accountable to make a profit.

Just how many people are no longer having fun at their job and have instead become disinterested and passive workers? A startling 71 percent of people under the age of 30 plan on looking for a new job after the recession, and more than 60 percent of everyone else plans to do the same. Whoa!

Bad news for job lookers–it’s not better out there! In other words, you better figure out how to make it work where you are.

So enough already! This year has been too crazy and hard and, to add insult to injury, most businesses didn’t make any money. All work and no profits is NOT what you signed up for.

Let’s put the fun back in the workplace. Now I’m not talking about ice cream socials and clown noses. I’m talking about a results rule workplace where people know they rock. Now THAT is fun!

In fact, the research shows it’s not goofy things that make people happy. People are happiest at work when they are kicking butt and taking names–winning at what they do.

So clearly, this recession has made it not so very fun for many people.

What if you could find a system–a proven system that has taken hundreds of organizations from struggling to success and can replace the fun in the workplace that the recession took away?

What if this system created an environment so that people would “get to” come to work instead of “have to”? What if it worked for companies in the top five percent of their industry as well as those struggling? What if both could grow and profit and get their people moving in the right direction? And, what if you could meet your numbers using this system EVEN if the economy continues to stir up trouble?

Well you can… mark your calendar for October 6-7, 2009 to participate in the Lead The Transformation™ Seminar. To find out if this is right for you or to reserve space for your team call, 1-800-236-5885 or email [email protected].

When: October 6-7, 2009
Where: Minneapolis, MN
Who: Not just your executive team, but also your movers and shakers who get things accomplished, so you can go back to your organization and get major results happening now.

Find out how you can attend this event for FREE! … a $997 value! Click here to get the details now!

StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Best Practice Article

Management Observation Program Best Practice 5 – Observation Training, Grading, and Quality Assessments

StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Best Practice ArticleManagement observations profoundly influence the behaviors of those observed. Done well, this tool positively reinforces desired behaviors. Performed poorly, this tool will undermine the management team’s credibility and fosters cynicism towards managers and their performance standards requirements. Therefore, it is critical that those performing these observations do so in a consistent, high quality manner.


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Leadership Inspirations – The Difference Between Might and Right

“Might does not make right! Right makes right!”

T.H. White (1906 – 1964)
English author best known for his Arthurian novels including The Once and Future King

“Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.”

Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)
English poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

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