Bob Dixon interviews Chris Kolenda, a U.S. Army veteran, strategic leadership consultant, and founder of the Strategic Leaders Academy. Chris shares his insights on how leaders can bridge the gap between their performance and potential by focusing on practical strategies drawn from ancient wisdom, history, and personal experience. This episode explores the critical components of high-performing organizations and offers actionable advice for leaders looking to improve their teams and themselves.
Key Takeaways:
Supportive criticism focuses on noting the performance, its impact, and how to improve, emphasizing the leader’s support.
Leaders need to ensure clarity of common goals, create buy-in where team members voluntarily advance those goals, and foster accountability to ensure consistent improvement.
Feed Forward focuses on future action, encouraging a forward-thinking approach to accountability.
Specificity matters when giving feedback to reinforce specific behaviors.
Chris helps leaders and organizations close the gap between their performance and potential. His clients have grown by over $100m and counting. He also writes life-changing books and bicycles for great causes, like the 1700-mile Fallen Hero Honor Ride.
Chris is a warrior-diplomat, combining assertiveness, statesmanship, and practical wisdom to help his clients gain dramatic wins. A West Point graduate, internationally renowned combat leader, and retired Army colonel, Chris led an 800-paratrooper task force in eastern Afghanistan, motivating a large insurgent group to stop fighting and switch sides.
A trusted adviser to three 4-star generals and two Secretaries of Defense, Chris became the first American to have both fought the Taliban as a commander in combat and negotiated successfully with them in peace talks.
His unique warrior-diplomacy has been featured in the New York Times bestselling books, including The Outpost by Jake Tapper. He’s been featured and interviewed in the world’s leading newspapers and broadcast channels.
His books include Leadership: The Warrior's Art, and INDIES #1 War & Military book of 2021 Zero-Sum Victory: What We’re Getting Wrong About War.
Quotes from Chris Kolenda this episode:
"Closing the gap between your performance and your potential...is by accumulating using all of the, you know, couple 1000 years of wisdom from ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, history, practical experience, and studies... in a way that becomes a practical scaffolding, if you will, a practical bridge to help people get from the performance that they currently have to the potential that you know, that they have."
"What you have to do accountability-wise is focus on the middle because that's where most of your opportunity is and also we have an unlimited amount of tools to shape behavior because that's ultimately that's what accountability is all about shaping behavior that improves future performance.".
"If you want a high performing organization, people need to understand your... mission and vision, your goals, your values and standards. That's your common good. 2nd, they need to, they need to advance that common good voluntarily. So that's buy-in. And 3rd is you want to, you want to continuously improve. And that's that's the accountability and you got to have all 3.".
Resources Mentioned:
Chris Kolenda Website: chriskolenda.com/
LinkedIn: Bob Dixon
Email: bidxon@fiveeaglesleadership.com