Jim Clemmer

Leadership is critical to personal, team, and organization success. And for nearly 30 years, Jim Clemmer has been inspiring action and achieving results around the world with his keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats.

Applying the improvement and effectiveness principles he teaches, Jim co-founded The Achieve Group in 1981, becoming Canada's largest training and consulting company. In 1991, Achieve was purchased by Times Mirror and merged with Zenger Miller, Learning International, and Kaset, to form AchieveGlobal.

Jim has delivered over two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats, as well as coached executive teams at hundreds of major companies from public sector and healthcare organizations to family businesses and manufacturing. This experience makes Jim a uniquely qualified speaker for audiences and organizations striving for peak personal, team, and organization performance.

Jim is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), recognized through the Global Speakers Federation. This designation is awarded to less than 3% of the estimated 15,000 speakers in the world. Jim is also a Practitioner in Residence for the masters (MASc) and doctoral (PhD) students in the University of Waterloo's Industrial/Organizational Psychology program.

Jim is the author of a number of international bestsellers including, Growing at the Speed of Change, Moose on the Table, The Leader's Digest, Growing the Distance, Pathways to Performance, Firing on All Cylinders, and The VIP Strategy.

• L. Moose-on-the-Table: How to Have Courageous Conversations Addressing Barriers to Teamwork and High Performance

  Imagine a team meeting around a conference room table. They are reviewing operations and making plans. Standing in the middle of the conference room table is a great big moose. No one says a word about the moose. Everyone carries on as if this situation is normal. When people aren't having courageous conversations that identify and address the Moose-on-the-Table, the results can be quite serious. Customers are lost, quality deteriorates, productivity slips, innovative ideas are smothered, and companies go bankrupt because people don't openly talk about and address barriers and issues.
  
  
  

• K. Navigating Change and Adversity: Thriving in Turbulent Times

  Sailing through life is easy when our seas are calm. It's much tougher when clouds and darkness engulf us, vicious storms hit, and we lose sight of land. How we respond — as Navigators, Survivors, or Victims — determines our health and happiness. It's an inside job. Modern research and ancient wisdom shows that our inner lives determine our outer circumstances. Navigating our storms within — our "dark nights of the soul" — is critical to steering a successful course through life's turbulent times.

• H. Growing @ the Speed of Life: Achieving Enduring Personal, Career, and Family Success

  At home or in the workplace, how we respond to change determines our personal and professional growth. A central theme of this presentation is that leadership is an action not a position. We all need to be leaders regardless of our formal title or role. Drawing from his best-selling book, Growing the Distance (over 100,000 sold), Jim outlines the key elements of successful and sustained leadership, personal growth, and change. Like his book, Jim's powerful presentation weaves together humorous quips, light hearted stories, personal examples, and ageless fables with "growing points" that "drive you to thinking."

• G. HR Leadership @ the Speed of Change: From Administrators to Strategic Change Partners

  A department, region, division, or entire organization's performance ripples out from the management team leading it. HR professionals often recognize the need for management team development because they can get caught in the bind of accountability to implement initiatives aimed at culture change, leadership development, customer service improvement, and the like with a management group that is not an effective leadership team. Strong HR leaders facilitate both the management team's development and the building of a robust implementation plan.

• F. Lean Leadership: Energizing Lean, Six Sigma, and Other Quality/Productivity Improvement Initiatives

  These powerful tools and techniques often fail because they are "bolted on" rather than "built in" to the way the organization is operated. Improvement professionals and staff support groups are given mandates to provide "sheep dip" training or use project teams to drive up quality, productivity, and service levels. In the absence of strong and congruent leadership, one-half to two-thirds of these efforts will fail. Leadership levels either increase "the snicker factor" and make people more cynical about what they see as jumping on the latest fads, or the effort becomes a pivot point to transform performance.

• E. Courageous Leadership for Health and Safety: Improving Safety and Building Healthier Workplaces

  There are very few strictly "safety problems." But there are many leadership and organization effectiveness problems that show up in accidents, sickness, and poor performance. Like incompetent doctors, ineffective managers often make people sicker. Research shows that staff members involved in accidents or with higher levels of sickness have lower levels of job and organizational involvement and input. Strong leadership rippling throughout an organization leads to dramatically higher health, safety, and performance.

• D. Leading High-Performance Teams: Harnessing the Power of Collaboration and Teamwork

  Despite all the team talk calling a group of people a team doesn't make it one. Most groups are usually just a collection of individuals who meet periodically. Many groups aren't teams because they lack focus, confuse team building and team development, mistake busy-ness for progress, are undisciplined at setting priorities, have poor processes, or suffer from a victim mentality. Strong teams excel in a few core leadership skills and use approaches that galvanize collaboration and get everyone pulling together.

• C. Leading a Magnet Organization: Attracting and Retaining Top Talent for Strategic Advantage

  Demographic projections clearly show that getting and keeping good people will become the defining organizational issue. Intense competition for the best people has just begun. The most successful organizations will be those "magnet organizations" with a strong management reputation or "leadership brand." Organizations with low emotional engagement and commitment will pay an ever higher price in turnover, absenteeism, morale, and failure to attract top performers.

• B. Leadership That Lives the Brand

  A company's external brand is ultimately only as strong as the organization's internal cultural leadership. And customer experience is where brand is built, not in the marketing budget. High performing organizations pull together the intangible leadership issues that define their unique character and rally people around the brand's promise. These powerful feelings are made tangible through the strong implementation of management processes and systems that translate ideals into action.

• A. Leading @ the Speed of Change: Aligning People, Processes, and Personal Effectiveness for Continuous Success

  Anyone can lead when things are smooth. It's when the going gets tough that our leadership is truly tested — and most needed. How we respond — as Navigators, Survivors, or Victims — determines our personal and organizational effectiveness. Strong leaders navigate toward high performing teams and organizations by balancing the discipline of systems, processes, and technical skills on a foundation of effective people leadership. That foundation is built by effective application of the seven Timeless Leadership Principles.

• J. Leading a High-Performance Culture: Fostering an Energizing Environment That Inspires Peak Performance

  Two decades of research shows that an organization's culture is the key factor in its performance. Now, more than ever, organizations need the bonding glue of a strong culture to hold everything and everyone together. High performing organizations pull together the intangible leadership issues that define their unique character and rally people around a deeper sense of purpose and core values. These powerful emotions are made tangible through the strong implementation of processes and systems that translate ideals into action.

• I. Leading a Customer-Centered Organization: Building a Service/Quality System for Exceptional Results

  Customer satisfaction levels have been steadily dropping across North America and Europe. Most attempts to improve customer service are too superficial or overly reliant on technology. Fifty to seventy percent of these "bolt-on" efforts fail because they don't "build in" the organizational culture and core processes needed to increase service/quality. Drawing from his 25 years of research, writing, and experience helping thousands of managers, Jim outlines the organizational keys and practical leadership steps for higher customer satisfaction.

• Jim's dynamic platform presence and thorough understanding of his subject combine for a truly effective presentation. Those individuals looking for a high impact and results oriented presentation will not be disappointed.
  The Royal Bank of Canada
• Jim has been a speaker for a Staubach Company meeting and has conducted consulting sessions with some of our divisions. He is the expert on service and quality for successful business in the nineties. His presentation can result in immediate benefits for any group or corporation.
  Roger Staubach, The Staubach Company
• In these times of uncertainty and change, you have helped us reflect on our role as leaders and how we can positively influence the mindset.
  Export Development Corporation
• Thank you so much for being part of our Canadian Conference for Credit Union Executives - Whistler, BC. Given the feedback we have received to date, it appears that the event was - by all accounts - a tremendous success. In particular, your session was given a general overall rating of 'very good to excellent', with several people commenting that it was 'the highlight of the conference'.
  Credit Union Central of Canada
• On behalf of the LEADER course participants, I thank you for inspiring and touching the heads and hearts of police leaders in the province. Your words, stories and timeless principles continue to contribute to police leadership development.
  Ontario Police College
• You are to be commended for reaching staff, board, and service volunteers from all walks of life and all parts of the country with your comments, and for setting a most positive tone for our meeting. Everyone came away feeling inspired and energized... subsequent presentations were made even more meaningful by your keynote address.
  Victorian Order of Nurses

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  September 2009

  Growing the Distance

   

  Today everyone has to live with, and find motivation in, a world of constant change. We can't always control what happens to us, but we can control how we react. Jim Clemmer's latest book, Growing @ the Speed of Change: Your Inspir-actional How-To Guide for Leading Yourself & Others through Constant Change is required reading for anyone dealing with the pressures brought about by constant change and uncertainty. This practical guide, uses the tools of personal growth and development to help readers find balance and thrive in a world where the accelerating pace of change is the new normal.

  
  
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  September 2009

  Growing at the Speed of Change

  Growing @ the Speed of Change builds upon many of the personal growth and self-leadership concepts Jim Clemmer introduced in Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success. As with Growing the Distance, he's added inspirational stories, personal and Client examples, fables, and humor to enliven and simplify what can be dry research or complex concepts. But what's especially exciting and different about Growing @ the Speed of Change are the hundreds of practical action ideas that make this book

  
  
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  March 2008

  Moose on the Table: A Novel Approach to Communications @ Work

  Moose on the Table is one manager's story of finding and overcoming fear -- one tiny step at a time. Come along as troubled character Pete Leonard learns to face the moose threatening the communications and effectiveness of his department, organization -- and even his life. In this

  
  
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  January 2003

  The Leader's Digest

   

  Unique magazine style format of humorous quips, stories, current research, and insightful commentary. Uses fables, quotations, illustrations, and examples to illustrate leadership essentials.

  
  
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  January 1999

  Pathways to Performance : A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization

  Jim outlines an array of practical ideas, steps, and routes that will inspire and instruct your transformation efforts. You'll see why you can't build a team or organization that's different from you. You'll learn how to pull together personal effectiveness, leadership development, and organizational improvement. Pathways to Performance is loaded with hundreds of practical how-to points ("Pathways and Pitfalls") in two parallel paths — strategies for team or organization improvement along with their complementary techniques for personal transformation.

  
  
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  January 1992

  Firing on All Cylinders: The Service/Quality System for High-Powered Corporate Performance

  Firing on All Cylinders is based on the experiences of hundreds of public sector and business organizations improving their service/quality to master a rapidly changing world. This book brings together three organizational performance fields that have, until now, been distinct and separate.