Socially Conscious Leadership Forum (SOCOL)
A company performs better over the long haul with more highly evolved leaders. That means men and women who have grown and developed across the whole spectrum of life experience.
They work comfortably with, and provide inspiring leadership for, the people on their teams. They’ve looked inward, so they feel more at home in their own skin. They’re committed to rebuilding the ecosphere, they’re interested in carrying capitalism to its next stage, on and on. You get the idea.
In short, companies benefit greatly from socially conscious leadership. And that’s the goal of the Socially Conscious Leadership Forum, or SOCOL.
Develop deep and enduring relationships with other current and future socially conscious leaders. In this close-knit, confidential forum, you can ask for help without fear of retribution or looking weak, and nurture a deep sense of authority that springs from sincere exploration and development.
SOCOL’s aspirants are promising, upwardly mobile middle managers who are committed to developing their own personal leadership style and involvement with life as a whole. You may be seeking personal growth or societal change, and you may be looking for greater responsibility and effectiveness in your career. Our hope is that you will find all of it.
Your training and skill set specialty don’t really matter. There is no set of attributes that is a prerequisite for leading, or that even signals an aptitude for leadership excellence. You can be shy or outgoing, imaginative or a crank-turner… it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that you have a steadfast commitment to becoming a compassionate and effective leader, and to contributing meaningfully to our global community.
Expectations
In our group environment, it is important that you be open, honest and compassionate about your strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of others. We are going to be diving into our own frailties, and we will be sharing challenging situations that are active in our workplaces, so we have to establish and maintain trust through deep honesty and willingness to share. Your SOCOL forum partners are likely to become lifelong co-mentors and friends.
SOCOL recognizes that leadership is the intelligent and compassionate application of influence for the benefit of yourself, your company, employees, investors and customers, as well as our natural environment and global economy. Effective leadership comes from establishing a bank account of trust that you can spend to positively influence and benefit people. It arises from establishing a compelling presence based on hard work, experience, compassion and perseverance.
SOCOL works by bringing you together with other aspiring leaders, plus facilitators who offer a broad set of experiences and tools to nurture your development as a leader. Participants freely share challenges with their peers, who relate their experiences in similar situations. Ideas for solutions will flow from the combined alchemy of your peers and the facilitators.
The Socially Conscious Leadership Forum is an experience that’s both transactional and transformative. Transactional because you will learn a variety of management and leadership skills and be given tools that you can utilize in your daily work. More importantly, SOCOL is transformative. You will learn to operate on a plane that’s deeper than skill mastery, to meld genuine insight with a more mature and inclusive value structure, and to acknowledge with humility the role that luck has played in your success.
Excellence. You will be encouraged to continually pursue excellence and to inspire the same in your reports and partners. Ideally excellence becomes second nature.- Values. You will cultivate the value of team success and collective well-being over purely egotistical gratification. A deeper inner joy springs from living that way.
- Drive. You will develop a sense of purpose, a North Star, that guides and informs your daily decisions, and energizes and sustains you when life’s storms thrash your personal shores.
- Patience. You’ll learn to balance drive with the recognition that people are human and that most things don’t happen overnight. Some projects take years. A real leader is capable of the long view.
- Extroversion. Leaders need to look outward, to notice what other people are doing and what motivates them. You will learn to cultivate the positive aspects of your personality, like active listening and compassion, while simultaneously learning to throttle back the more harmful aspects, like narcissism and self-reference, that can drag you down.
- Introversion. In addition, you will turn the spotlight inward, understand your own interior motivations, look at your own reactivity, and observe how it might compromise your overall effectiveness and satisfaction with life. This kind of healthy introspection is the root of understanding other people and a key foundation of leadership and contribution.
- Failure. Ideally you will learn to understand the role of failure in your career and life; that successful people experience failures early and often. They bounce back with resilience. They learn and persevere onward.
- Empathy. You will learn to feel another’s pain, to reach out to people who are suffering, and render the help that comes from meeting that other person as an equal. That’s where empathetic communication begins, the kind of communication that’s fundamental to genuine leadership.
- Integrity. The idea of integrity is often given lip service. In SOCOL you will be challenged to maintain a high level of integrity and be held accountable by your peers and your facilitators.
Your SOCOL facilitators are senior consultants with decades of hands-on experience.
For over 30 years, Steve Rice has advised owners, CEOs, and CMOs on making and implementing wise marketing and technology decisions around people, systems and processes that result in sustained growth and profitability. His ability to absorb information about brands, strategies, technologies and results, then impart their context and opportunities in simple language, has proved invaluable to executives. His consulting specialties include leadership development and decision-making, paid marketing architectures and strategies, and acting as a personal and confidential advisor.
John Lamy was a Silicon Valley manager for 25+ years, and has been a consultant since 1995. His consulting specialties include R&D, strategy, and getting results. Both Steve and John have developed trusted advisor relationships with their CEO and C-Suite clients.