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Stedman Graham
Expert in Leadership Development
Stedman Graham
Expert in Leadership Development
Biography
Stedman Graham is Chairman and CEO of S. Graham & Associates (SGA), a management and marketing consulting company that specializes in the corporate and educational markets. His clients include Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, CNN, GlaxoSmithKline, YMCA, Harvard and Wharton business schools, and the US Department of Education.
As a businessman, educator, and speaker, he presents, consults, and conducts training with corporations, organizations, and nonprofits on the topics of maximizing leadership, achieving success, growing a business, embracing diversity, achieving optimal health, and personal and professional branding. His corporate seminars are driven by the proprietary Nine-Step Success Process. In addition, Graham educates individuals and industries on using Success Circles a work-life balance tool he developed to make information and experience relevant to personal, professional, and business growth.
Graham has authored ten books, including two New York Times bestsellers, You Can Make It Happen: A Nine-Step Plan for Success and Teens Can Make It Happen: Nine Steps to Success. Build Your Own Life Brand! explores the concept of personal and professional branding. Move Without the Ball is a collection of principles that teaches students that sports are a part of life, not life itself. Who Are You? A Success Process for Building Your Life’s Foundation focuses on success through self-discovery, and Diversity: Leaders Not Labels offers a unique approach to eliminate barriers to success. In early 2012, Graham will release his newest book, Identity: Passport to Freedom.
Actively involved in education, Graham is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he teaches a leadership course based on his Nine-Step Process. A former professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, he taught a management strategy course entitled “The Dynamics of Leadership.” He is also a distinguished visiting professor at several colleges and universities throughout the country. Graham offers the Identity Leadership Nine-Step Success Process for emerging management leaders and employees globally. Although the intention of the program is to facilitate a company’s ability to grow market share, it begins with maximizing individual performance. Identity Leadership principles help you to define, plan and prepare with intention and direction by building a framework for professional growth based on results, performance and excellence. The program teaches that progress begins with you.
A native of Whitesboro, NJ, Graham has shown a lifelong commitment to youth and community. In 1985, Graham founded AAD Education, Health and Sports (formerly, Athletes Against Drugs), a nonprofit organization with over 500 professional athletes and other civic leaders committed to developing leadership in underserved youth. AAD has served over 15,000 students and has awarded $1.5 million in scholarships. Graham serves on several boards, including the national board of Junior Achievement (JA) and the 7-Eleven Education Is Freedom Foundation, and is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago. He is also actively involved in leadership efforts and programs in South Africa and is Founder of Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro and Concerned Citizens of Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Hardin-Simmons University. He received a master’s degree in Education from Ball State University and an honorary doctorate in Humanities from Coker College, where he is also a distinguished visiting professor.
Speaker Videos
Leadership is Everything
Speech Topics
Developing Self-Awareness in the Corporate World
Effective leaders in the 21st century must operate with a strong sense of their own identity, because along with it comes purpose and integrity, willingness to take risks, the ability to understand the importance of change and to be ready for it. Leaders must be self-motivated to master the challenges of the leadership role and must possess an appreciation of learning and the wisdom to adopt new ways to learn.
The self-awareness training of Identity Leadership is often lacking in corporate leadership development. But without truly knowing who you are, how can you have the integrity to lead others in your organization? Professionals who build their identity and have a complete plan for success are in the minority of elite business leaders. They are the ones who make it happen.
Nine-Step Success Process
Identity Leadership is self-leadership. Identity Leadership principles help you define, plan and prepare with intention and direction by building a framework for professional growth based on results, performance and excellence. The program teaches that progress begins with you.
Stedman Graham offers the Identity Leadership Nine-Step Success Process for emerging management leaders and employees globally. Although the intention of the program is to facilitate a company’s ability to grow market share, it begins with maximizing individual performance.
The Identity Leadership Nine-Step Success Process is a proven methodology for personal and professional success. The message is based on the philosophy that individuals hold the key to their success or failure and cannot lead others until they can first lead themselves. Leadership or lack thereof determines the success or failure of an organization.
Leaders understand that identity is their greatest asset, and enduringly successful people know who they are and are clear about what matters to them. They have established powerful identities, becoming Identity Leaders who create wherever they go.
Further, Identity Leaders build a strong foundation from the core of who they are. They know what drives them and understand what choices they should make to overcome the obstacles or difficulties they may face along the way. They withstand the tests and challenges of time.
The Identity Leadership Nine-Step Success Process provides the tools and the groundwork for discovery and development in today’s world to become our best selves.
1. CHECK YOUR ID
Before deciding what to do in life, you must first understand who you are, what influences your life, and why you think and act the way you do.
2. CREATE YOUR VISION
Your vision is your life’s destination. A well-defined vision helps you find meaningful and achievable goals. Design a powerful future based on possibility rather than on circumstance.
3. DEVELOP YOUR TRAVEL PLAN
In order to fulfill your vision, you must create a plan of action. By working toward goals through a solid plan of action based on your identity, you learn to assert power over your life.
4. MASTER THE RULES OF THE ROAD
Guidelines keep you on track as you engage in the pursuit of betterment. Learn to use the positive power of honesty, hard work, determination and other solid values to guide you as you journey to your dreams.
5. STEP INTO THE OUTER LIMITS
To grow, you have to leave your comfort zone, confront fears and take risks. Learn how to overcome fear and step outside of what has become comfortable and familiar to you.
6. PILOT THE SEASONS OF CHANGE
If you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting the same results. Learn how to create change and, even more importantly, how to manage your responses to change.
7. BUILD YOUR DREAM TEAM
No one makes it alone. Learn how to build supportive relationships to help you work toward your goals. You learn the value of trust and the importance of being trustworthy.
8. WIN BY A DECISION
Who you are in this world is largely the result of the decisions you have made in the past. Learn how to make the right choices for your future to overcome one of life’s greatest and most worthy challenges.
9. COMMIT TO YOUR VISION
When you devote your time and energy on a consistent basis to the pursuit of your goals and your vision, you discover that commitment is something you live by, and you realize that you renew it each and every day.
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