Thomas Lee
Thomas J. Lee brings decades of experience and expertise to employee engagement for breakthrough change and performance in business. An authority on leadership influence and impact, he draws on an extraordinary command of best practices to drive your strategy, support your initiatives, and change your culture.
A dynamic speaker with international experience, Tom has spoken at professional conferences and corporate venues throughout the United States and across Canada, as well as in Europe, South America, and Africa. Audiences from London to Buenos Aires, from Warsaw to San Francisco, from Johannesburg to Calgary, and from Amsterdam to Bogotá have applauded his affirming message of opportunity, growth, and actionable priorities and of the nobility of servant leadership.
As a speaker, Tom shares colorful, real-life stories that illustrate extraordinary leadership and performance--especially leaders as servant of the led. As a trainer, he teaches a simple, easy process of leadership communication to thousands of managers at some of America’s biggest and best companies. As a consultant, he brings clarity and creativity to strategic vision, direction, and goals. As a coach, he helps managers become energetic, inspiring leaders who truly connect with people to sink the roots of change deep in a culture and make the change last. His blog (at www.MindingGaps.com) is must reading for anyone responsible for cultural change, strategic execution, or corporate communication.
Over the last 15 years, Tom has culled best practices in engagement, leadership, and organizational communication from major, pace-setting corporations. Once he identified and documented what really works, he created a powerful process with proven strategies and practical tools that build workforce engagement and help managers learn to work as leaders. That clears a path for change and barrier-breaking business performance.
Tom believes that anyone in any position of authority in any organization must exercise credible and compelling leadership. That most certainly includes front-line managers and supervisors, typically overlooked and undervalued. He recognizes clear communication as the very energy of leadership. Without it, leaders are unable to lead, for they cannot connect with people.
That connection is everything. It must be mutually engaging, mutually productive, and mutually sustained. Otherwise, leaders won’t be able to lead. They will only manage.
A former journalist who interviewed four U.S. presidents, and a speechwriter for Fortune 100 CEOs, Tom is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, where he has served as a mentor to graduate students since 1999, and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His clients have included Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Royal Dutch Shell, Lockheed Martin, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amgen, Northwestern Mutual, FMC, Chick-fil-A, among others. In addition, over the course of twenty years, he has visited such top-tier companies as Nordstrom, 3M, Starbucks, Federal Express, duPont, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and many others searching for best-of-the-best practices in leadership and communication.
On the personal side, Tom enjoys high-elevation alpine hiking, wilderness canoeing and kayaking, music from jazz to opera, long-distance bicycling, theater, discussing books and politics, and cooking for friends.
A native of Wisconsin and a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, he actually owns one of those yellow foam cheeseheads, and he keeps an ice-cold piece of Lambeau Field turf in his kitchen freezer. He lives now in north suburban Chicago (and travels from O'Hare). He is the father of a grown daughter, who is a recent graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law.
Thomas J. Lee brings decades of experience and expertise to employee engagement for breakthrough change and performance in business. An authority on leadership influence and impact, he draws on an extraordinary command of best practices to drive your strategy, support your initiatives, and change your culture.
A dynamic speaker with international experience, Tom has spoken at professional conferences and corporate venues throughout the United States and across Canada, as well as in Europe, South America, and Africa. Audiences from London to Buenos Aires, from Warsaw to San Francisco, from Johannesburg to Calgary, and from Amsterdam to Bogotá have applauded his affirming message of opportunity, growth, and actionable priorities and of the nobility of servant leadership.
As a speaker, Tom shares colorful, real-life stories that illustrate extraordinary leadership and performance--especially leaders as servant of the led. As a trainer, he teaches a simple, easy process of leadership communication to thousands of managers at some of America’s biggest and best companies. As a consultant, he brings clarity and creativity to strategic vision, direction, and goals. As a coach, he helps managers become energetic, inspiring leaders who truly connect with people to sink the roots of change deep in a culture and make the change last. His blog (at www.MindingGaps.com) is must reading for anyone responsible for cultural change, strategic execution, or corporate communication.
Over the last 15 years, Tom has culled best practices in engagement, leadership, and organizational communication from major, pace-setting corporations. Once he identified and documented what really works, he created a powerful process with proven strategies and practical tools that build workforce engagement and help managers learn to work as leaders. That clears a path for change and barrier-breaking business performance.
Tom believes that anyone in any position of authority in any organization must exercise credible and compelling leadership. That most certainly includes front-line managers and supervisors, typically overlooked and undervalued. He recognizes clear communication as the very energy of leadership. Without it, leaders are unable to lead, for they cannot connect with people.
That connection is everything. It must be mutually engaging, mutually productive, and mutually sustained. Otherwise, leaders won’t be able to lead. They will only manage.
A former journalist who interviewed four U.S. presidents, and a speechwriter for Fortune 100 CEOs, Tom is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, where he has served as a mentor to graduate students since 1999, and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His clients have included Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Royal Dutch Shell, Lockheed Martin, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amgen, Northwestern Mutual, FMC, Chick-fil-A, among others. In addition, over the course of twenty years, he has visited such top-tier companies as Nordstrom, 3M, Starbucks, Federal Express, duPont, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and many others searching for best-of-the-best practices in leadership and communication.
On the personal side, Tom enjoys high-elevation alpine hiking, wilderness canoeing and kayaking, music from jazz to opera, long-distance bicycling, theater, discussing books and politics, and cooking for friends.
A native of Wisconsin and a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, he actually owns one of those yellow foam cheeseheads, and he keeps an ice-cold piece of Lambeau Field turf in his kitchen freezer. He lives now in north suburban Chicago (and travels from O'Hare). He is the father of a grown daughter, who is a recent graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law.
They're Pleading For Leading
Leading and managing are actually both hard work, but they are fundamentally different kinds of work. Moreover, in both substance and style, different kinds of communication drive the two things. Finally, and this is key, the work of leadership must extend far into the ranks of any company that wants to grow and prosper.
Think of managing as the hard work of ensuring compliance with predetermined expectations: deadlines, budgets, standards, laws, quotas. In contrast, think of...
The ABCs of People Engagement
Actually, the title of this presentation should be the C-B-A's of people engagement.
We present five tiers of engagement: creative engagement (the best, what you experience at Nordstrom or Ritz-Carlton); active engagement (very good, what you see and feel at a Target or a Starbucks); passive engagement (just okay, what your typical post office or bank offers); passive disengagement (not good enough, but common in airlines and government bureaucracies); and active disengagement (the...
Ask Not What Your People Can Do For You
The concept of servant leadership has been around for more than a generation now, but too few businesspeople understand and embrace it. That's a shame.
I like to think of servant leadership as the secret sauce that accounts for the towering differences between shopping at Macy's and shopping at Nordstrom, between flying on United and flying on Southwest, between having lunch at McDonald's and having lunch at Chick-fil-A.
Nordstrom, Southwest, and Chick-fil-A have...
