The Moments That Matter

You know the moments I mean.

The meeting where you weigh in, or stay quiet. The call you go along with, or push back on. The idea you hold back, and later hear in someone else’s voice. Titles change slowly. These moments come every day, and in them you build your influence or give it away, whether you notice or not.

And it is not only true of you. It is true of a team, and of a whole organization, built or diminished in the same small moments.

My work builds your awareness to recognize those moments, and your capacity to rise in them. What you discover in our work together becomes instinct as you apply it. So when the moment comes and you have thirty seconds to choose, you know what to do, and you act on it without waiting for anyone’s permission or approval.

Your Moments Can Go Another Way

You stop holding back in the moments that count. You speak up, step up, or stand up when it matters, and you do it on your own judgment instead of waiting for someone to tell you it was the right call. You begin to see what you could not see before, the moments you used to walk right past, and you now know what to do with them. You come to believe in your own value from the inside out, and you recognize it in the people around you.

Maybe that means you are finally recognized as the leader you already are, not just the one who can always be counted on to carry so much. Maybe it means you help shape the decisions you used to only carry out. Maybe it means you keep rising, without making yourself smaller to stay accepted. Maybe it means you leave a place that cannot see you, or you stay, and change how you are seen there. Whatever it looks like for you, something shifts. Because you now see the moments that matter, meet them, and make the difference only you can make.

How would it feel to see the moment you used to miss, and know exactly what to do with it?

How would it feel to say the thing you came in ready to say, and watch it change what happens next?

How would it feel to walk into your next meeting already sure you belong there, as the leader you are?

Whether you are leading on your own or leading a team, here is how I can help.

For Teams and Organizations

The same pattern lives in teams, in whole departments, and in whole companies.

I worked with one team over three years inside a Fortune 100 company that had been treated as back-office overhead, a cost to be managed. Together we changed that, not by adding more to their plates, but by changing how they saw their own value and how they led in the everyday moments that shape it. They became known across the company for the value they contribute directly to the bottom line, and the exemplar other business units looked to for how to be an effective internal partner.

What one leader can do in the everyday moments, a whole team can do together, and it spreads from there through an entire company.

Today my work with organizations takes three forms: leadership development built on the Leadership in Action System™, facilitation that turns meetings into real progress on the work that matters, and keynotes that leave audiences with specific actions they can take the next day.

Who I Am

I am the founder of Random Acts of Leadership™. For over 25 years I have worked with thousands of leaders and their organizations around the world, from Fortune 100 companies and the U.S. Department of Defense to global non-profits and small businesses, one leader at a time, with teams, and from the stage.

I did not come to this work from leadership. I came to it from systems, and I later trained in systems thinking with Peter Senge. That taught me to read the whole system, and the people at the center of it, and it is still how I work. It is part of why leaders in technical and STEM-heavy fields, the ones who think in systems, so often tell me they feel understood here for the first time.

Inc. Magazine named me a Top 100 Conference Speaker and a Top 50 Leadership Innovator. Trust Across America named me one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in trustworthy business behavior. I am a contributing author to four leadership books: Trust Inc., Energize Your Leadership, The Mentor That Matters, and The Character-Based Leader. Leading Made Simple™ began as my award-winning leadership blog and became my signature keynote and guide, with the full book coming next.

My clients’ results range from a coaching client landing a dream job or a hard-won promotion, to that Fortune 100 team. They include Prudential Financial, the U.S. Navy Department of Defense, AT&T, Ingram Micro, Bell Canada, the United Way, The WIT Network, Women in Energy, the National Association of Women’s Business Centers (AWBC), WEVenture at Florida Tech, the Morris School District, Avenues São Paulo, The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and small business leaders building companies from a soup shop to a robotics firm.

The Body of Work

Over more than two decades, I designed and built a connected system for leading that anyone can practice.

It begins with a philosophy, Random Acts of Leadership™: you don’t have to be THE leader to be a leader. Leadership is not a title, a position, or the spotlight. It is a choice anyone can make, at any level, to make a difference in the moments that matter. From there I built the methodology, Leading Made Simple™, which distills leadership into its three fundamental acts: speak up, step up, and stand up.

Then, from years of transforming cultures inside large organizations, I built the part leadership training so often skips: the bridge from theory to action. Too often a leader leaves a training inspired, with no idea what to actually do differently, and the inspiration fades. The Leadership in Action System™ is that bridge made real, three connected disciplines, Leading in Action™, Strategy in Action™, and Accountability in Action™, that turn what leadership is into what leadership does, for a person, a team, and a whole organization. Fire Up Your Leadership™, my flagship program, is where an individual leader puts it into practice, one moment at a time.

None of it started as theory. Every framework in it came from the work itself, from what I saw make the difference for real leaders, real teams, and in my own leadership. That is why people can put it to work the next day.

Where It All Began

My belief that leading really can be this simple started with a message my dad left for us after he passed.

In June of 2006, my dad, Jim Ernst, passed away. He left a newspaper clipping for us to find, called “To Remember Me,” by Robert Noel Test. Its last line reads:

If by chance you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all that I have asked, I will live forever.

He had given us the perfect way to remember him, so at his memorial service we asked people to commit an act of kindness in his memory. Over the next few months, I took up the practice myself. Then came the one on a plane.

It was a Friday out of New York. The weather was bad, we were already running late, and nobody on that plane was happy. The overhead bins were full. A man near the front was arguing with the flight attendant about checking his bag. He had expensive camera equipment in it and he was afraid it would get broken. Everyone was watching him and nobody was doing anything.

I understood why he would not let go of it. I had a bag in the bin with my suit in it, and I did not want to check it either. So I decided to remember my dad with an act of kindness. I stood up, took my own bag out of the bin, and handed it to the flight attendant. She put his bag in its place and checked mine.

When I sat back down, something happened that I did not expect. The mood on the plane had shifted. People started helping the flight attendants. They started helping each other. People were talking. There was laughing. Even my own grumpy mood had lifted.

Maybe we’ve made the idea of leadership way more complicated than it needs to be.

Could committing an act of leadership be as simple as committing an act of kindness?

So instead of asking “What is leadership?” I started asking, “What does leadership look like in action?” The idea of a random act of leadership takes leadership out of the realm of theory and puts it into the realm of the practical.

Kindness and leadership are not the same thing. The difference is your motivation. On that plane I only meant to be kind to one man. When your motivation is to make a difference beyond the moment you are in, that same act becomes an act of leadership.

That is also where courage comes in. Making a difference beyond the moment can mean challenging the status quo. Not courage on any grand scale. For some people, speaking up in front of five people around a table is an act of extraordinary courage. It is not about the magnitude of the act. It never was.

That question launched Random Acts of Leadership™, and my quest to make leadership that simple. It does not require a title or the spotlight. Anyone can practice it, one small, deliberate act at a time. It became the Leading Made Simple™ methodology, and everything I have built since.

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