The TriNet Extreme Leadership Series: Taking a Small Leap, Ending Up With Big Results

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Janet Kluczynski in Best Practices, Entrepreneurs, Leadership

Does the old adage, “actions speak louder than words,” resonate with you? It does for leadership expert, bestselling author, and TriNet Extreme Leadership Video Series host Steve Farber. In Leap Into Action, the seventh program in the series, Farber travels back in time to briefly review the LEAP (Love—Energy—Audacity—Proof) Roadmap. He then plunges forward to demonstrate how actions emanating from the LEAP framework can provide a tremendous individual, team, and organizational foundation to move forward.

A personal experience recently conveyed to Farber by an Extreme Leadership Video Series viewer substantiates the dynamic power of LEAP. It also serves as a touchstone on how others can ignite the full team-building potential of Farber’s system.

As the executive director of a small, non-profit organization, the viewer sent Farber an email requesting his advice on how to increase the engagement and passion that the employees working in the non-profit’s office and volunteers supporting the organization felt about their daily contributions. As Farber observes, “She had watched a couple of the videos and had gotten just enough information for her to begin to experience and feel the gap between where she’d like to be with her small company, and where she actually was.” Ironically, in between the time she wrote the email and the point that Farber got back to her, she had read his book The Radical Leap Re-Energized which enabled her to answer her own question.

And what was the answer? The simple answer is that this executive took action. The more revealing answer is that she initiated a simple, yet—in the end quite powerful—team-building event. “Specifically here’s what she did,” says Farber: “She brought her team together on a retreat and sat down with them. Instead of­­ dictating what the retreat would look like, she opened it up to them said, ‘let’s do this together. Let’s figure out who we are as an organization. What we stand for. Let’s identify what our core values are.’ ”

And so, working in tandem as a team, the group sat together with laptops in hand and, as Farber tells it, “…they came up with a process that I can only call values by Google.” The group searched Google for definitions of words like: core values, team, integrity, and proof. Finally, at the end of the day they had successfully created an impressive document and viola! They had a set of core values that perfectly aligned with their organization’s mission.

“Now what’s cool about that,” says Farber is that “everybody in that room, everybody that was employed in that organization, was a part of creating those values. It wasn’t something that was given to them—It was something that they created together. So, they all had ownership in these values and they all believed in them because they were in their own words.”

All of the videos in the TriNet Extreme Leadership Series—an exclusive program for TriNet client companies—can be accessed through our online portal, HR Passport^®. Trinet.com visitors are welcome to get a sampling of the program or to contact us for additional information.