Meaningful Meetings With Eric Boles Breaking Down Emotional Barriers in Business and More
The Impact of a Head-Spinning Career in Football
Imposter Syndrome is Prevalent in Management, Too
Click here for links to information about EEA sponsors; here to subscribe to ESM weekly; here for an ESM media kit.
Click here to watch or listen to the show.
.png)
Many executives with exceptional talent get promoted without commensurate confidence. Not only do many businesses fail to engage all their stakeholders in a common purpose, goals, objectives, and values, but routinely let simmering conflicts among management and other team members stifle performance and goodwill. Well-planned purposeful meetings, Eric Boles believes, can help organizations achieve new heights by strategically addressing these issues and more related to an organization’s purpose, goals, objectives, and values.These are some of the insights contained in the Feb. 20 show now streaming on the Engagement Alliance Purpose Leadership and Stakeholder Management YouTube channel. These 30-minute interviews, hosted by Bruce Bolger, Founder of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance and Jaki Baskow, Founder and CEO of Baskow Talent, highlight what people can learn and how at live events from the life experiences of successful people in all walks of business and life. The hosts ask each guest about what they have learned from their journeys both good and bad and how they bring these insights to life for organizations at live or hybrid events.
Boles, a frequent public speaker and facilitator, is Founder of The Gamechangers Inc., a coaching and advisory firm focused on leadership and change management. His expertise on leadership, culture change, team dynamics, and peak performance has been shared with clients such as Lululemon, Meta Facebook, USAA, US Air Force, Bridgestone, FedEx, Harris Teeter, GlaxoSmithKline, Lockheed Martin, Mayo Clinic, and Bank of America, along with a wide variety of education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services organizations and associations, he says.
The Impact of a Head-Spinning Career in Football
Boles’ says his journey from a small-town dreamer to an NFL player taught him the importance of self-belief and mental strength. Despite having the necessary physical capabilities, he says he often felt like a fraud and struggled with his identity. Coming from a small town, with no mentors with experience to guide him through his relatively meteoric rise, he went through this extraordinary period with no clear inner rudder. He explains that it took the short rush of his experience in the NFL to the pain of getting released to learn that he was more than his job description and that his worth was not defined by others' opinions.
He says that this realization only came after he left the NFL and faced the harsh reality of his departure from football, which ultimately helped him discover his true self and build his confidence from within. Having to retire early from the game helped Boles, with the support of a mentor, recognize that he had allowed his career in football and what people thought of him to define who he was. Going from relative stardom to anonymity, he says, was the turning point that forced him to look inside to define his own North Star, which, with support from his wife, led to the creation of his corporate coaching and speaking practice.
Imposter Syndrome is Prevalent in Management, Too
Insights from corporate coaching. Through his decades of corporate coaching work, Boles has found that many leaders are promoted beyond their confidence levels. Many talented leaders often struggle with a lack of self-confidence, he says, which can lead to dysfunction and unintended conflict. Confidence, he says, comes from finding self-worth from within, rather than seeking it through approval from others. That self-worth can come from faith, a mission, family, or whatever one endeavors to do what is consistent with their own values rather than on what others think about them. Lack of self-confidence in leadership, he believes, can lead to the siloes and unspoken workarounds organizations create to avoid butting heads with certain executives.
Effective management means engaging all stakeholders. Based on his experience both on and off the competitive field, Boles emphasizes the importance of aligning an organization's values and purpose to create a unified and engaged team, including all stakeholders—from the people who clean the locker rooms to the stars, from the front office to the fans, from the neighboring communities to the owners. Great athletes aren’t motivated by making their owners rich, but by the purpose, goals, objectives, and values of the team based on winning.
He believes that communication and courageous conversations are crucial for effective leadership and team alignment at all levels. Boles highlights the need for leaders to make everyone feel valued and connected, regardless of their role inside or outside of the organization.
Effective meeting formats. Boles believes that many organizations miss an important opportunity in their meetings to address fundamental issues related to establishing the organizational purpose, goals, objectives values; fostering alignment across the enterprise to break down siloes; driving innovation; addressing internal or external challenges. In addition to significantly reducing the time devoted to keynote sessions, he believes that organizations should use meetings as opportunities to solve real real-time business problems and address human issues within the organization. Every meeting should set its own clear purpose, goals, and objectives, ensuring that all stakeholders are engaged and their voices heard, and include an agenda related to the key goals and objectives for the year ahead.
The best meetings, he asserts, energize and engage people by giving them a direct voice in problem solving and innovating, rather than doing exercises irrelevant to the purpose, goals, and objectives of the event. Ideally, every employee or team leaves with an action plan directly related to a critical issue related to their jobs or teams and a means for following up.
Entertainment and free time. Don’t try to mix business with pleasure, he advises. Let people absorb their day by selecting music or other entertainment most likely to take their minds off business and better get to know one another as people through a common experience as they do when going to concerts, comedy acts, theater, etc.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 15th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:
1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
