242 episodes
The Look & Sound of Leadership Essential Communications - Tom Henschel
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- Business
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4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
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An ongoing series of Executive Coaching Tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.
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Leading with Political Savvy – Part 2
Tired of losing to more savvy players, a leader seeks to decode the secrets of playing politics, focusing particularly on company culture.
Download our free Political Style Chart here.
“The Secret Handshake” is a great tool for mastering workplace politics.
Looking for a transcript of the show? Read it here.
More tools are in our podcast library. This episode is in three categories:
For Women
Perception – how you perceive others
Relationship Building
Here are five episodes to help develop your political savvy:
188 - Boundaries
210 - How to grow your self-management
67 - “I hate politics”
142 - The Mindful Executive
121 - Your Goodwill Bank Account
Our monthly Essential News email provides links to even more resources. Sign up here.
Let us know how we can support you.
Happy, healthy, safe new year. I look forward to being with you all in 2024.
From Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, Happy New Year! And thanks! -
Leading with Political Savvy – Part 1
A leader feels stuck. She sees others winning resources she felt should have been hers, but she hates playing politics. What to do?
Download our free Political Style Chart here.
“The Secret Handshake” is a great tool for mastering workplace politics.
Many more tools are in our podcast library. This episode is in three categories:
Self-Talk
Leadership
For Women
Here are five episodes to help develop your political savvy:
187 - Agreeable Disagreement
215 - How to Stay Calm Under Fire
192 - Pursuing a Promotion
207 - Tough Conversations
67 - “I Hate Politics”
Our monthly Essential News email provides links to even more resources. Sign up here.
JAPAN!
Email me with your suggestions for what we should not miss in Japan this December! tom@essentialcomm.com
Let us know how we can support you.
Be kind to yourself. Things are rough out there! From Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be well! And thanks!
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Building Consensus – Savvy or Sin?
A leader, surrounded by people she knows and trusts, can’t seem to get traction with them. In conversation with her coach, she discovers an unexpected cause.
Tools for teams abound in this episode.
The four tools Tom suggests as first steps for helping your team openly discuss ideas are:
Say ‘thank you’ when people offer an idea;Be curious; don’t dismiss ideas or people;Don’t take differences personally; it’s not about you;Develop your comfort with disagreement.
The Gradients of Agreement tool supports the ideas in this episode. Download it for free from our Essential Tools bin along with other communication tools like Sorting & Labeling.
Additional tools for team growth mentioned in this episode are the classic Crucial Conversations and Tom’s conversation on The cATalyzing Podcast.
This episode is in our podcast library in three categories:
Communication Skills
Leading Teams
Management Skills
Specific episodes that will help you develop your team are:
Facilitating Open Dialogue
How Teams Fight
Leadership Behavior in Meetings
Power Tools for Teams: Plus/Delta
Questions as Leadership
Taming Meetings
Our monthly Essential News email provides links to even more resources. You can sign up here.
To those of you who post reviews, thank you so much for supporting the show.
Let us know how we can support you.
Until next month, from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be well! And thanks!
#podcast #TeamDecisionMaking #Teamwork #Leadership #ConsensusBuilding #EffectiveTeams #TeamCommunication #TeamLeadership -
The Conflict Resolution Wheel
A co-founder, at odds with his partner (also his best friend!), reaches out to his coach for help saving the business and the friendship.
The episode introduces The Conflict Resolution Wheel. Download it for free from our Essential Tools bin along with other communication tools like the Feeling Words Grid.
The Wheel is based on a tool in the Couple Communication course, a program to help you understand and connect with your partner better.
The course’s workbook, Talking and Listening Together, is meant for self-study. It’s available for purchase online.
Another book Tom references in this episode is the classic Crucial Conversations.
This episode is in our podcast library in three categories:
Communication Skills
Managing Yourself
Relationship Building
Five episodes that will help you continue to develop your conflict resolution skills are:
Conflict
The Conflict Conversation
Creating Safety for Hard Talks
A Difficult Conversation
Resolving Conflict
Every month our Essential News email provides links to even more resources. You can sign up here.
Thank you thank you thank you to those of you who post reviews. You make such a difference to us. Thanks for supporting the show!
Let us know how we can support you.
Until next month, from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be well! And thanks!
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Essential Skills that Shaped a Leader
A senior leader, having risen through the ranks, ends her coaching engagement by comparing notes with her coach about the skills that have helped her most.
This episode identified seven essential leadership skills:
Conquer catastrophic thinking;Use fewer words;Value relationships as highly as results;Don’t take anything personally;Commitment to Development;Reflection;Speak for Yourself.Resources to develop those last three:
Commitment to Development
The Executive Executive – an episode with a different list of essential skillsFour Factors Executives Need to be Successful – another list of essential skills thenschel@essentialcomm.com – my email address if you want help thinking about your own developmentThe Ability to Reflect
Mindfulness ResourcesBuilding Self-AwarenessSpeak for Yourself
The Four Agreements – Agreement #1: “Be Impeccable with Your Word”
Episodes to build assertion:
Showing TeethThe Voice of AuthorityAssertion v Aggression This month’s episode lives in our podcast library in these three categories:
Executive Presence
Leadership
Self-Talk
Five episodes to help you with different skills are:
Building Empathy
“Don’t Take Anything Personally”
The Executive Executive
Personal Connections
Short Sounds Confident
Our monthly email has links to more resources. You can sign up here.
All our infographics are available to you for free in the Essential Tools bin.
Let us know how we can support you.
Until next month, be well!
From Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, thanks! -
Taming the Defensiveness Dragon
At the end of her rope, a leader asks her coach for help managing a direct report who, she says, is the most defensive person she’s ever met.
This episode was packed with tools. We’ve put them into an easy-to-understand infographic. Download it for free here.
Kim Scott, the best-selling author of the electric book Radical Candor, wrote a short, friendly guide with tools for handling defensive employees. Find it here.
Harvard Business Review’s Amy Gallo talked with Dave Stachowiak on this episode of the Coaching for Leaders podcast. As with every episode of Dave’s, this is indispensable.
To work on “deserving” dive into The Four Agreements.
To dig deeper into tools for taming defensiveness, search our podcast library in these three categories:
Communication SkillsManagement Skills Relationship Building
Five specific episodes on this topic you could listen to are:
7 Steps to Stop Emotional HijacksBe Impeccable with Your Word Handling Defensive BehaviorsManaging Bad BehaviorManaging Disruptive Executives
Sign up to get our monthly email with links to resources that support each episode.
Calling all COACHES! Come join our Executive Coaching special interest group (SIG) sponsored by the Los Angeles Chapter of ICF. Check out our SIG and all the others here.
Or shoot me an email with your questions. I’m at tom@essentialcomm.com.
All our free infographics are in the Essential Tools bin.
Your reviews supporting the show help us continue as an ad-free podcast.
Let us know how we can support you.
Until next month, be well!
Thanks from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership.
Customer Reviews
Bite Size Wisdom
I first heard of Tom through “Coaching for Leaders”, I’m in the lower levels of Management looking to move up, and becoming a better leader is a big part of that. Many leadership podcasts deal in vagueness and executive level information. While Tom’s advice is definitely applicable to higher echelons it’s the practical application of his advice to any level. We all manage expectations. We all oversee productivity. It’s that personal connection and self reflection that separates leaders and managers. Also as an aside, as someone who listens to many many podcasts, Toms voice is just delightful. Update: still the best leadership coaching podcast. I’ve decided to start listening from the beginning and there’s like 15 years of episodes wow Update: I’d like to update my review to 1/5 based on the fact that if Tom hadn’t taught me Sorting and labeling, I wouldn’t have been angry at our guest speaker for talking for an hour with literally no structure. I probably wouldn’t have noticed how bad it was without knowing this information. So Thanks Tom :)
Update: Shoutout to Todd
Masters class in communication that helps you show up as your authentic self.
When I found Tom’s podcast I was looking for a resource that could help me improve my story telling as a leader. What I found was a masters class on the art and science of being your best self. I worked through the entire archive of his work over a period of about a month!
So glad I found your Podcast
I wanted to say thank you for investing your time with such a thoughtful and creative way to teach. I really appreciate the story/ fable format, as I can picture and hear the conversations. Plus, you bless us with tools to learn and implement! I have my executive team listening and then discuss. Thank you, it’s a pleasure to see a new episode come up in my playlist.