JuntoBlog

I was inspired to write this post after reading an article yesterday by Gallup called "The No. 1 Employee Benefit That No One's Talking About." Here's an excerpt that summarizes the piece:

On Monday morning, Taylor McPartland, our Managing Director in Los Angeles, received the following email from one of the Apprentices in our JuntoLA program.

Our latest cohort of growth-stage companies recently graduated from our Apprenticeship program, a nine-month experience during which they improved their leadership skills, emotional intelligence, decision-making, and team alignment. They did that by attending a variety of individual and team sessions over nine months:

• Leadership Forums
• Leadership & Functional Classes
• Mentor Meetings, and
• Tutoring Roundtables.

Imagine you're invited to someone's home for an evening. You're a special guest, meet everyone in the family (whether two or ten), get a personal tour of the home, have a pleasant dinner with everyone at the table, retreat to the family room for lively conversation, and leave after 4-5 hours.

For the past six months, a common theme I've been discussing is that of value creation and value delivery, what I have learned to be the two core elements of any business.

The first JuntoClass of each cohort is called Hiring, Managing & Firing. This is intentional because the focus of our Apprenticeship program is on leadership, people, and culture, and this class is the ideal starting point. By setting this tone, the companies in the program are then comfortable bringing up the topic in their Mentor Team sessions, Tutoring Roundtables, and Forum sessions (not to mention that it comes up organically in other classes).

Last Friday we held the latest JuntoDay learning event, a mini-conference on leadership for growth-stage companies, featuring three accomplished CEOs:

• Chris Considine - President of Onward Advising and Former CEO of Wilson Sporting Goods
• Tom Gimbel - Founder/CEO of LaSalle Network
• Adam Robinson - Co-founder/CEO of Hireology

All three shared the leadership philosophies, experiences, and practices that helped shape them as effective leaders who have built profitable companies recognized for workplace excellence. The following are three key lessons from each presenter's talk.

One of the first classes in the initial cohort of The Junto Institute's Apprenticeship program changed the way I will forever think about managing performance and leading people.

One of the pillars of the Junto program is emotional intelligence. It is a focal point of the JuntoForum, the subject of four JuntoClasses, and a topic of conversation at happy hours, in one-on-one meetings, and among the companies' employees.

My late friend, Mike, was a photographer by trade but also a world traveler, voracious reader, amateur musician, moderate liberal, and pop-culture philosopher. He was creative. For him, one plus one equaled two...maybe.