Leadership Intelligence Beyond the Basics: Solutions for Maximizing Your Brilliance as a Leader

How do successful leaders sustain their competitive advantage in the high-stakes, fast-paced work environments of today? They stay committed to stretching their knowledge and skills Beyond the Basics.

This is our new context: a fast-paced global economy in which industry norms are constantly in flux and dependent on a variety of factors—from rapidly changing technology, to an increasingly diverse global workforce, to complex workplace dynamics and a much smaller guarantee of job stability. These conditions require today’s leaders to expand beyond the status quo.

Leadership Intelligence Beyond the Basics will teach you how to stretch outside of the traditional approach to leadership and design your own unique and effective brand as a leader. In this way, you’ll maximize your brilliance, make yourself indispensable, and lead your team and organization to solutions that go way Beyond the Basics.

We know our time-honored models of leadership are outdated, but it can be overwhelming to come up with new paradigms to replace them. Leadership Intelligence Beyond the Basics provides those paradigms. The book includes ready-to-use tools, assessments, tips, and techniques to help you widen your sphere of influence; foster a culture of engagement, collaboration, and excellence; and create an engaged, productive work environment for all your team members. This straightforward guide to designing an effective personal leadership brand in the ever-changing circumstances of today will ensure that “an ordinary day at work can become an extraordinary day at work™”—for you and everyone touched by your leadership.

Business leader, strategist, international speaker, trainer, coach and educator, Dr Valerie D. W. James is a leadership practitioner and consultant. Her advice is highly sought by human resources, current and future frontline leaders, as well as C-level executives. Valerie has been studying, assessing, and researching organizational management and leadership practices since 1994. She has spent over two decades leading business teams using every aspect of her talent as a Beyond the Basics leader in healthcare, communications, and finance. She has also served as president of a national human resources organization. In 1998, Valerie founded VisionSpot Consulting LLC, a leadership and organizational development consulting firm with a national reach.

Valerie has partnered with thousands of leaders across the globe. Successfully implementing sustainable solutions that transform the way leaders, individuals, and organizations work to improve retention, engage employees, and achieve productivity results.

As a result, in 2009 Valerie founded the SMB School of Leadership BOOST CAMP®, it is a traveling institution that is dedicated to delivering evidence based leadership development Solutions that Maximize Brilliance (SMB) among leaders and their teams. She also broadened the firms brand and widened the firm’s portfolio of services to include process improvement and project management strategies to increase operational efficiency in the workplace. She has received numerous leadership and service awards and accolades for streamlining processes, building continuity between leaders and their teams, and increasing customer and employee retention levels into the 80th percentile. These achievements have enabled her company to maintain and develop a company portfolio that consistently meets and exceeds clients’ expectations.

Valerie earned a doctorate in Education and Organizational Leadership from Pepperdine University. She also holds a masters degree in Organizational Management and studied leadership at Harvard University Kennedy School, the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and abroad. Valerie is Six Sigma Green Belt Certified and the author of two additional works: POWER Your Potential BOOST CAMP®: 7 Days to Professional Success and Satisfaction and Leadership Behavior Practice Patterns’ Relationship to Employee Work Engagement in a Nonprofit. Her name is synonymous with leadership, motivation and success.