Alex Dorr

Most leadership philosophies are grounded in two completely faulty assumptions — “change is hard” and “engagement drives results.” Those beliefs have inspired expensive attempts to keep change from being disruptive to employees. Rather than driving performance and creating efficiencies these programs fuel the Emotional Waste, Entitlement, and Drama that drags down organizations.

Over the past three years, Reality-Based Leadership, in partnership with the Futures Company, conducted proprietary research in our client organizations. The findings affirm what we’ve observed in our 20+ years of experience doing Reality-Based work in hundreds of organizations: when employees indulge in distracting drama, learned helplessness, low accountability, lack of self-awareness, and ego-driven behavior it comes at a significant cost to their organizations. We now know it can easily consume up to three months per year of each employee’s time — potentially billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone. That’s the Drama Quotient.

At Reality-Based Leadership, we propose a radically different approach to leadership. Changing the ways leaders think and the strategies they use in their work is a serious and critical economic issue. A leader’s role shouldn’t be — cannot be — to motivate employees. That is a choice employees make. Instead, a leader helps others develop the great mental processes they need to eliminate self-imposed suffering and choose to be accountable for driving results.

Key Takeaways
- Discover strategies for eradicating entitlement with easy to use tools that can change the energy of entire group meetings from “Why we can’t” to “How we could.”
- Develop highly effective mental processes in their teams that hold all team members accountable to quality and excellence
- Understand engagement from an entirely different perspective, one that is based upon listening to the highly accountable employees
- Uncover modern approaches to engagement and change management strategies.

Leadership Presentation
Based on Cy Wakeman’s Book!

Today’s challenging business environment is calling for a new type of leader. We need those willing and able to recreate mindsets (their own and that of others) and change an organization’s culture in order to lead in a bold new way.

The Reality Revolution begins with a few good leaders who are able to quickly see and radically accept the reality of the situation, conserve precious team energy, and use that energy instead to impact reality. A great Reality-Based Leader anticipates the upcoming changes and capitalizes on the opportunity inherent in the situation without drama or defense.

The principles of Reality-Based Leadership include:

- Refusing to argue with reality
- Valuing action over opinion
- Leading first, managing second
- Bulletproofing employees so that they can succeed, regardless of the circumstances
- Working to be happy rather than to be right

Personal Accountability & Workforce Accountability Presentation
Everyone talks about accountability, but few organizations are actually able to deliver it. This presentation breaks down the core competency of personal accountability and offers a plan for coaching and developing accountability at all levels.

Key Takeaways:
- Gain a true understanding of the four elements of the competency of accountability
- Adopt interviewing and hiring techniques that ensure accountability in new hires
- Gain skills in coaching current employees for accountability
- Become fluent in a new employee value metric that measures accountability
- Understand the relationship between accountability and engagement
- Gain key tools and strategies to “hardwire” accountability throughout the organization

Business Readiness – Ensuring Our Teams are Ready for What’s Next
Managing change and pursuing innovation is not a new topic, many in the leadership ranks have had numerous development opportunities on these topics and yet our teams are at times battle fatigued, remaining unaligned with overall strategic objectives and ill-prepared to deliver on organization goals of the near future. So, what’s next? How can leaders go beyond just ensuring that change is least disruptive to their people and instead deliver up ready, willing and able teams who can ensure that change is least disruptive to the business? How can leaders move their teams beyond surviving change and instead make the call to greatness so that their teams are thriving in changing times, fueling innovation and fully aligned with the re-inventive of their organizations?

In this high energy session, one of our Reality-Based speakers will help leaders understand their heightened responsibilities in delivering teams and talent that are ready for what’s next along with strategies to ensure that teams are able to quickly adapt to change and deliver on the needs of the organization to provide relevant, high-value, services in even mature markets. After all, change is only hard for the unready.


Session Objectives:

- Modernize the leadership philosophy to focus on business readiness rather than outdated, traditional theories of change management
- Provide strategies to ensure that leadership focus is on ensuring change is least disruptive to the business rather than attempting to make change least disruptive to the people
- Highlight the typical and common leadership behaviors that sabotage vital change efforts and innovative strategies
- Facilitate understanding of the causes and anecdotes to “change fatigue” and provide ways in which leaders can conserve team energy for highest possible ROI
- Provide techniques and tools for leaders to incorporate in their daily practices to align their teams with organizational direction

Based on Cy Wakeman’s New York Times Bestselling Reality-Based Rules Principles!

So much athlete development goes in to making athletes more efficient by eliminating waste from their games. Eliminate wasted movement to be quicker, eliminate wasted skills that don’t serve them well in competition or cutting down on wasted possessions, at-bats or putts.

But what many athletes are not taught are the great mental processes that allow athletes to eliminate mental & emotional waste – The one thing hurting athletic performance the most! That is what happens on an individual level for athletes in this session which then leads to better cohesion on the team level.

But this training doesn’t stop there!

Along with taking away the tools to ditch the drama from their game, athletes will discover how to determine their value to their team. They’ll get a ‘formula’ designed to calculate their current and future potential against their “emotional expense”— the toll their actions and attitudes take on their teammates around them. This clear direction cuts or reduces their emotional cost, and helps everyone become an invaluable member of the team. The result? Everyone, from your starters to your role players will not only buy-in and re-engage, but continue to passionately improve in their sport.

Five rules to boost your athletic impact and eliminate mental/emotional waste include:

1. Don’t hope to be lucky. Choose to get results and be happy in your sport.
2. Suffering and frustration is completely optional. Ditch the drama from your game.
3. Buy-in to your coaching or team is not optional. Your action, not opinion, adds impact.
4. Changes are opportunities in your sport.
5. You will always have extenuating circumstances – succeed anyway!