Sheila Murray Bethel, PhD [ full bio ]

Best Selling Author, Global Leadership Expert, Hall of Fame Speaker, CEO Bethel Leadership Institute

Dr. Sheila Murray Bethel has helped organizations, leaders and people around the world answer these questions and she will do the same for you:

• Are you using the powerful leadership tools that motivate and inspire followers towards common goals and shared values?
• How can you build and develop a deep reservoir of future leaders in your organization?
• How can you improve and update your team building skills to meet the changing demographics of a diverse work force?
• Is your leadership style as vibrant and effective as it can be to lead in a truly global world?

Together you will take a fresh look at your tried and true concepts, put them through a new filter, then update and align them with your current challenges and opportunities. Her messages are timely, relevant, and grounded in current realities – real world content for real world results.

You'll explore the changes necessary to revitalize your leadership model so you can guide your followers into a sustainable, successful future. Sheila helps you clarify and identify the best leadership qualities for a sense of community, creating engaged teams of committed people who rally around a set of common values and goals. She presents an inspiring and refreshing approach to 21st century leadership, team building, customer service and change.

Dr. Bethel is the best-selling author of five books: three on leadership and change and two on personal development. She has dedicated twenty-five years of research, critical thinking, and discovery to these topics. Her expertise in how and why adults learn, grow, and excel springs from her groundbreaking work in designing a training model to recover brain function in developmentally handicapped children. With humor, warmth, and a blend of immediately usable ideas and concepts, she challenges audiences to strive to be their best at their work and in life. She translates her experience into fundamental elements that help others transform information and knowledge into skills that influence their organization in positive ways and that add meaning to their life.

With a PhD in Philosophy and a major in Communications, Sheila has traveled the world, benefiting enterprises and people at every level of society through her clear perspective and common sense approach. Her client list includes, Major Trade Associations and Fortune 500 companies, such as General Electric, AT&T, American Express, Microsoft, Aetna, and Kraft Foods. She has been featured in and written for numerous hard copy and on-line publications: USA Today, The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, Investors Daily, Dallas Morning News, Newsweek Australia, The Sydney Sunday Telegraph, Leadership Excellence, Successful Meetings Magazine, and Incentive Magazine, to name a few.[ more ... ]

Sheila Murray Bethel's Expertise:

Her presentations immediately engage your audience with an entertaining, authoritative and inviting style that encourages learning and growth. She lays out clear guidelines and essential tools needed to be an effective leader, change master, customer service team and a person who can withstand tough times. She helps people discover their strengths and improve their weaknesses. A master storyteller, Sheila weaves real life examples into each learning point. Audiences quickly grasp the important elements of how to define what works for their organization and for themselves personally. Her focus is on how to develop and enhance your individual and organization's leaders; how to attract, retain, engage good people and inspire them to excel and find meaning in both work and life; how to build engaged dynamic teams in an era of unprecedented transformation.

Presentations:

• Inspirational Leadership Makes The Difference!

Have you ever wondered why people will walk through fire for some leaders or follow them anywhere just to see where the heck they are going? What sets these leaders apart? What gives them that special competitive edge? The answer is that they have developed the ability to inspire others to do and be their best. It is about the insight and wisdom to connect with your people in ways that turn a team into a community, accountability into trust, and language into people bridges. It's about giving followers the tools and skills they need to fulfill their inborn desire for achievement and contribution.

Dr. Bethel helps clarify and identify the essential 21st century leadership qualities of competence, accountability, openness, language, values, perspective, power and humility. These qualities are a fixed beacon giving direction and purpose to every member of your organization. When you inspire others by leading with these qualities, they are more engaged, productive and committed which, in turn, grows your business, benefits your customers and strengthens your brand. There has never been a time when inspired leaders have been needed more. Leadership is not something conferred upon only the highly educated, the rich or the powerful. You can be an inspired leader who makes a difference.[ more ... ]

• Leadership Team Building In A Diverse
Workforce

Is your organization using all the team-building tools available to chart a course for the future you want? More than any other leadership quality, the art of team building encompasses all of your other talents. It is the catalyst to all you want to accomplish. Times have changed and so has the concept of team building. In a world where people feel increasingly disconnected and isolated, collaboration, trust and camaraderie become more valuable every day. Technology gives us excellent tools as aids for team building. However, in the process of using these tools, we have become technologically excellent and humanly challenged. We must make sure that we continually make those human connections, no matter how far flung we are, across the office or across the world. We all want to be a part of something larger than we are, to feel that we can make a difference.

How do you create an environment where teams are born and thrive? The payoffs for great team building are enormous. To build and sustain your team you must concentrate on the five basics of servant-leader team building: directing, motivating, training, delegating and reward and recognition. People want to be led, not managed. As leader, you control the environment where teams are born, nurtured and thrive. Dr. Bethel expands thinking, stirs imaginations and opens minds about being a team builder in our ever expanding diverse workforces.[ more ... ]

• Unforgettable Customer Service Begins With
Great Leadership

What can you learn by examining the shared values and practices of world-class service organizations. Dr. Sheila Murray Bethel has given keynote presentations and conducted seminars for some of the finest service organizations in the world. She carefully explores the compelling evidence of their clear understanding of their reasons for being and their belief in a people-first leadership style. These organizations walk their talk and live an ethic that says "we care as much about our employees as our customers." They understand that excellent customer service is always trickle down – leader to employee to customer. Sheila challenges commonly held myths about who you think your competition is and why a new perspective is so important. You'll explore the three steps to move from customer service to the enduring quality of value-added customer focus:

Customer Servicing, the operations part, doing the task well.
Customer Relations, the human part, those one-on-one interactions.
Customer Development, the sales and retention part that brings
true satisfaction to every transaction.

Dr. Bethel ties these three concepts together as links in a circular chain that has a single purpose: a satisfied, happy, loyal, referral-generating customer. Sheila offers powerful and practical ideas to help you convert customers into "ambassadors of good will" whose referrals cement your reputation, support your brand and set you apart from your competitors. These three strategic tools open the way for you to join the realm of customer service giants and become a trendsetter, not a follower. Unforgettable customer service always begins with an investment in great servant leadership.[ more ... ]

Books by Dr. Bethel

Dr. Bethel's latest book A New Breed of Leader, 8 Leadership Qualities that Matter Most in the Real world, What Works, What Doesn't and Why, (Putnam/Berkley) is praised for its timeliness, "... uniquely in tune with our era of change ... right book, right time." It draws on fifteen years of research and work with her global corporate clients, governments and education systems. She defines the eight qualities leaders need to implement to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. This indispensible book is your roadmap to becoming the best leader you can be for yourself and your organization. Publication in China is September 2010.

Making A Difference, 12 Qualities that Make You A Leader (Putnam/Berkley), a national best seller, has been translated into eight languages and was the basis for two acclaimed public television specials by the same title. Sheila teaches and motivates through her own inspiring personal leadership journey and that of countless others who have used their leadership ability to help improve both businesses and personal lives.[ more ... ]

Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K. Greenleaf's Theory of Servant Leadership Influenced Today's Top Management Thinkers (Wyle) is a collaboration with Peter Senge, M. Scott Peck, Max DePree, Ron Zemke and other leadership experts. An in-depth look at the results of the seminal work of Robert Greenleaf, the father of modern leadership. Edited by Larry Spears all profits are donated to the Greenleaf foundation.[ more ... ]