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Award-Winning Leadership Speaker, Executive Coach & New York Times Best-Selling Author

Phil Gallagher

Avnet CEO says: Prioritize your tasks in alignment with your values.

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If football taught Phil Gallagher anything, it was that each of us responds to different kinds of motivation and a leader’s job is to find the key that unlocks each member of his or her team. When Phil was a freshman in high school, his coach told him he was too small to ever play varsity football. Phil responded by working his tail off in the weight room, ultimately captaining the varsity team in his senior year before playing college ball at Westchester University in Pennsylvania.

Years later, as a volunteer high school coach, Phil realized that the kind of tough love his old coach laid on him wasn’t effective for everybody. “Some kids need a kick in the butt all the time,” he said. “Others need you to throw your arm around their shoulders and nurture them a bit, and suddenly they’re a whole new person. It’s the same in the business world when you work with a diverse staff.”

Football taught Phil that emotional intelligence is a better guide for leadership than IQ and he has made it the hallmark of his leadership style as the CEO of Avnet, a Fortune 500 technology distributor and solutions provider. Now in his 40th year with the company, Phil leads more than 15,000 employees across 140 countries and enjoys a remarkable 91 percent CEO approval rating from his employees on Glassdoor.

Phil doesn’t believe in quick fixes and argues that integrity, the first among core values, has to be developed in the way we behave in the here and now—and over time. “There’s an old saying,” says Phil, “that people build trust penny by penny and spend it like a buck. You have to prioritize standing by your word.”


You will learn:

  •  9:00   Why substituting the word “we” in place of “I” immediately builds trust.
  • 11:30  What makes a great teammate.
  • 15:30  The steps to a successful merger or acquisition.
  • 16:30  How to prioritize your tasks in alignment with your values.
  • 20:00  Why you need to walk into the office with good news, and run in with bad news.


You will learn:

  •  6:00   How easy it is to cut corners in practice and why you’ll suffer as a result.
  •  8:00   How to emphasize the power or “we” on your team.
  • 11:00  How living and working in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster taught Lane that caring was the universal language of respected leaders.
  • 15:00  The level of employee interaction required to achieve success.
  • 18:30  The difference between being accountable and responsible.
  • 27:00  How to identify a meaningful friend or mentor.

Resources:


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Home Depot Board Director

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Global Vice Chair of Public Policy for Ernst & Young

“The ability for athletes to get hired is carried on through you because you are putting out the message that lessons learned from sports are important in life. It is embedded in this podcast, what you’re doing is significant.”

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NASCAR Hall of Famer, Owner of Hendrick Motorsports & Chairman of the Hendrick Automotive Group

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Bill George

Longtime Medtronic CEO, Harvard Professor

“Many of the leaders I have worked with were excellent athletes, and I think there is a direct correlation. You’re one of the few people that really has pursued this study, Don. Keep up the great work. What you are doing really makes a difference.”

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Jon Rousseau

Design/Development

Francisco Nunez

Editor

Brett Rutherford

Editor

Special thanks to Dave Moore, Lauren Hafner, Samantha Clark, and the Florida State University Internship Program for consistently supporting our research team.

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