Topic: Leading in the New Normal: A Guide for Managing Remote Teams, Mental Health, and Constant Change in a Chaotic World

Speaker: R. Michael Anderson, a leadership expert who’s founded and built three enterprise software companies, holds a masters degree in psychology, and now teaches leadership to organizations from the small to the very large. More on Michael's background is shown below.

Presentation:
One year ago, if someone had told you that in 12 months time, there would be far less traffic at airports and on the roads; everyone you saw outside your home would be wearing a protective mask to keep everyone safe from disease; many of you would be working from home; some of you would not be working at all; many of our schools would be temporarily shuttered with the students doing their learning online from home; over a quarter million of our countrymen would have died from this disease with another 13 million having gotten infected and survived it while another 80,000 would be currently in specialized hospital wards, unemployment rates would have shot up to their highest levels since the Great Depression and only partially recovered; and mental health-related problems would have risen dramatically, with many of those sufferers unable to cope at work or get the help they need -- if someone had told you all that, you might have legitimately asked them if they had been reading one too many dystopian novels, sending their imagination into overdrive.

As we all know, the above describes our current society today, not counting of course the continued flowering of entrepreneurship developing new inventions and solutions to problems, with vaccines and treatments now on the near horizon, but with nonetheless a still very uncertain future for our personal lives, our health, our jobs, our economy.

Right now in the U.S., up to 75% of employees are experiencing mental health issues, and 60% say they aren’t getting the support they need from their managers at work or from their company.

With this unprecedented level of change, leaders need to learn new tools and skills to support their employees, and their teams and themselves. They need to do this quickly like never before to enable themselves and their companies to thrive -- and even to survive -- in this new world.

In this talk, Michael Anderson will be giving us context and teaching us what we each need to know to be a successful leader in this “Next Normal”.

Michael has just completed an in-depth workplace study, the key findings of which will be appearing in his upcoming book, “Leading in the Next Normal: A Handbook for Managing Remote Teams, Mental Health, and Constant Change in a Chaotic World.” He will be presenting those key findings to us on Tuesday morning.

In this essential session for leaders and individual contributors at all levels, you will learn:

- How YOU need to shift your leadership approach and mindset in these turbulent times
- The difference between Introverts, Extroverts and Ambiverts, and how each needs to be supported
- The Five Pillars every team member needs to stay engaged and performing at a high level while not burning out
- The One Surprising Thing every successful leader, whose team is doing well right now, is doing to make that happen
- The Key Tips, Tricks and Tactics to facilitate successful online meetings

In these fast-moving times, it’s crucial that leaders keep upskilling -- for their team, for their career, and for their own personal health. In this session, we will learn how to do that. This will be a talk with active Q&A, lots of analytical insights and understanding of complex issues we all face, and possibly our first use of Zoom breakout groups in mid-discussion.

About our Speaker:
R. Michael Anderson is a leadership expert who has founded, scaled and exited multiple software companies in San Diego, one of them on the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies, also winning the award for Best Place to Work in San Diego, with Michael himself being nominated for Most Admired CEO, later also designated as Social Entrepreneur of the Year... now a leadership expert with a Masters degree in Psychology, married to a Brit whom he met in Croatia, living in London, whose own life followed a rather circuitous and twisting route to get to the healthy and soul-centered place in which he now lives.

What was that route? By the age of thirty-five, Michael had played professional basketball (yes, at 6'8" he's hard to miss), founded three international enterprise software companies (including Radiant Technologies, whose subsequent CEO spoke to the FENG several years ago on how to do a successful ERP implementation), and partied at the Playboy Mansion. But he simply wasn’t happy. Hard drugs, alcohol, a divorce and a nasty lawsuit brought him to a low point.

A quest for change and betterment included some hard work on himself, during which he earned a Master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica; did some additional graduate work at the intersection of spirituality, consciousness and health; and gained certification in soul-centered professional coaching. all on top of the MBA in international business he had earned much earlier in his career.

Michael for some years now has been teaching leadership to organizations such as Microsoft, PwC, Stanford University, Salesforce.com and Uber. Before leaving San Diego, he held the office of President of the Board of Directors for the SD chapter of Conscious Capitalism, an international organization dedicated to elevating humanity through business, and during which time he gave our SD FENG chapter an inspiring talk on the principles and substance of conscious capitalism. He has written two best-selling business leadership books, and contributes to Entrepreneur.com.

Michael's combination of education in business, psychology and neuroscience, together with his real-life business successes as well as failures, have given him a unique ability to connect to other leaders as a peer, and then to teach them evidence-based leadership skills that genuinely drive behavior and performance, enabling managers to transform into true leaders with high-performing teams in high-growth companies.

Through speaking, writing, radio shows and video blogs, he elevates competitive, driven people, teaching them to live happier, more authentic and fulfilled lives, and showing them how to reduce stress, overcome self-limiting beliefs and improve relationships. A gifted storyteller who shares his failures as much as his successes, the terms “vulnerable”, “authentic”, and “powerful” are often used to describe his presentations.

To Attend:
Meetings are for members, prospective members and invited guests only. For non-members, RSVP is required by writing to chapter chair, Dan Ruchman at [email protected]. Please include a one or two sentence description of who you are, and your interest in attending the meeting. Thank you.

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CPE Credits: Reminder for those members maintaining their professional certifications - we offer the documentation for Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits for our speaker presentations. For those members interested in this, you may complete the appropriate forms, which we'll have available at the meeting, for 1.0 hours of CPE credit

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