Dr. Relly Nadler: What we have been doing as of late is focusing on what top performers do in the moment to be a top performer. We are zeroing in on the title of our new book, Emotional Brilliance. A lot of what we are focusing on with our top performers here is what kind of emotions do top performers experience? How do you gear yourself up for top performance? How to do you get a better understanding of your emotions? What is an emotional brilliance performance? What emotions are most challenging? How do you manage emotions?
Our goal here is to help you expand, improve, and select the best emotional competencies and strengths to master the moment for you. We know many of you are leaders of teams and leaders of organizations, so how do you make the most of those moments?
Today our guest is Stan Silverman. He is a speaker and advisor and a weekly, national, syndicated columnist in 43 business journals and publications across the US. Stan shares his insights and helps businesses and organizations achieve success.
Stan spent decades as a CEO and board member of Global Corporations which has given him a unique perspective on leadership in the C Suite, and expertise on how to set just the right tone at the top, establish the right culture and achieve results.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: I’m so happy to have friends on the show who are literally colleagues and thought leaders in their own right, but who I have had the pleasure of knowing and meeting, and in some cases, working with.
Today, Stan is going to be with us to talk about his brand new book, Be Different: The Key to Business and Career Success. If anybody can teach others about how to do that, it’s Stan Silverman.
We are going get right into a great conversation with Stan. He’s going to bring you lots of tips and tools based on his many years of experience and as a leader and executive in a very, very prominent organization and in many other organizations where he has lent his skills, his talent, his leadership, to universities, other organizations, and certainly as a mentor and coach to thousands of young minds through university affiliations.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Stan, tell us a little bit about your background and focus on leadership these days and then we’ll move into more about your book.
Stan Silverman: Sure, Relly, thank you. My book really starts my fourth career. I spent many, many years climbing the organization of PQ Corporation which is a global company in the chemical and engineering materials business, went through 11 jobs and eventually became the CEO of the company. When the company was sold 15 years ago, I stepped down and served on numerous boards, three public company boards, private, private equity, non-profits.
About 5 ½ years ago I started to write on leadership, entrepreneurship, and corporate governance for the Philadelphia Business Journal and 42 of their sister publications across the US. I still do that. About a year ago I decided that I would write a book based upon approximately 85 of the articles that I had written on this subject. That’s the genesis of the book.
One of the lessons I think we want to learn is you never know where the future will take you. I would never have believed I would be doing this today, even ten years ago, let alone 15 or 30 years ago.
You never know where the future is going to take you and you have got to take advantage of opportunities and get out there and just do it.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: I couldn’t say it any better, Stan. For those of you who are listening, Stan and I met many, many years ago when I was with a large international consulting firm known as Computer Sciences Corporation and Stan was the CEO of the company. Again, what Stan said is so true. Neither of us, and Relly I’m sure you could say the same, would have ever thought that we would be necessarily focused on the science of leadership, and here we are.
In your vast, vast, experience as a manager, a leader, and now as an executive who helps and develops current and future leaders, what are the most common emotions that you see in your experience and in your career for leaders today?
Stan Silverman: Well there’s a number of emotions that I think really run the gamut. I read a lot about leaders who run companies where the ton at the top isn’t where it should be, where the culture is not where it should be, where the people underneath them and their direct reports aren’t the best people in the world, as far as leadership goes. The folks below them suffer stress, they suffer anxiety, they suffer fear, they suffer frustration. I just hear it almost every week where people just complain about the leadership within their company and it’s just not where it should be.
Listen to the entire interview above.
