Live2Lead is an extremely informative leadership event that provides its attendees with an array of new perspectives on how to lead your team toward the growth and development of a successful business. Live2Lead Ottawa certainly lived up to its intentions. Mark Nesbitt opened the event with confidence and pride. As a John Maxwell Certified Coach, Trainer, and Speaker, Mark Nesbitt did an outstanding job of capturing the attention of his audience, inspiring us all with with the belief that great success is possible with the right leadership.

 

The event then led forth with its simulcast of world-class leadership experts: John C. Maxwell, Simon Sinek, Liz Wiseman, and Dan Cathy. These 4 motivational speakers spoke brilliantly and, as such, brought forth a sense of confidence in us all:

 

Simon Sinek, Optimist and Author in Leadership Authority, opened the Live2Lead Ottawa simulcast with his session on Leaders Eat Last. With his words on having empathy while leading, Sinek broke down this specific leadership approach by relating it to such terms and millennial factors that we are all too familiar with: parenting, technology, impatience, and our environment(s). He noted that empathy leads to perspective, and that the game of business is only a matter of competition vs. longevity. In other words, while some businesses play to win in order to grow, others will play a game that is infinite – one that sees no competition other than the competition that exists within and among itself.

 

Growth was certainly a common topic of conversation among most leadership experts, including New York Times best-selling author, coach, and speaker John C. Maxwell who spoke highly of Personal Development and Growth. He referred to the concept of growth as having nothing to do with age, and everything to do with learning. Growth, of course, means change, and realistically, there are only a handful of us who are comfortable with such. However, as Maxwell conscientiously portrayed, we mustn’t “rely on yesterday to get through today”. Instead, we must become growth conscious rather that goal conscious in order to learn and persevere.

 

Liz Wiseman, Researcher, Executive Advisor, Speaker, and President of the Wiseman Group, believes that “the highest quality of thinking cannot emerge without learning” and that “learning can’t happen without mistakes”. Her belief in successful leadership stems from her belief and work entitled Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. In her session, The Multiplier Effect, Wiseman compared multipliers to diminishers and that, in order to be a successful multiplier, one must ask more questions, look for the genius within someone (recognizing what their genius attribute is) and multiply our teams by moving upward, rather than diminishing our team’s individuals by pushing them downward. Looking up is to seek success.

 

Similarly, the concept of motivating your team in an upward-moving direction is something that Dan Cathy, Chairman, President, and CEO of Chick-fil-A is a strong believer in. In fact, Cathy is the type of leader that spends the majority of his time at his restaurant chains in order to convey his “servant spirit to the company’s 70,000-plus employees. His main fil-osophy: to impact as many people as possible. Chick-fil-A is one of North America’s largest family-owned businesses with arguably one of the largest customer loyalty lists. How? By running a business that is completely dependent on its customers, of course. In fact, the core of his business is reliant on we space more than it is me space, which allows for his team to work closely together as a unit upward and onward in order to continue to serve its customers.

 

Live2Lead provided its Ottawa audience with many practical tools and key takeaways. In the words of John Maxwell, it left us wanting to “think different and think forward”.