Susan Annunzio is the president and CEO of the Center for High Performance and an international strategic advisor to senior leadership teams. Her powerful messages about team leadership, managing success, and creating ethical corporate cultures resonate with executives and managers across the country. Late last year, Susan wrote a compelling article for Chief Executive maagazine. Below are some excerpts from that article:

During more than 20 years of working with top leaders at a wide range of companies, I have observed that what goes on in the C-suite sends shock waves throughout the organization. Behaviors that originate with the CEO and his direct reports filter down, where they are repeated and magnified. And just as business failures can be traced back to the conduct of the leadership team, so can business success. High-performing leadership teams breed high-performance companies . . .

The best leadership teams naturally and often unconsciously learn from one another. In their 2008 book, Senior Leadership Teams, authors Ruth Wage man, Debra Nunes, James Burrus and J. Richard Hackman reported on their research into what is required for leadership teams to perform superbly. Based on data from120 teams around the world, the authors found, "The best teams are continually being coached-and are coaching themselves -to evolve, learn and grow. They learn from their leader, each other, and their experiences."

Hard times are a fertile breeding ground for fear-based behavior. During such times, leaders often obsess about what they have to lose, rather than think rationally about what steps they need to take to win. In contrast, high-performing leadership teams commit to proactive, fact-based decision-making rather than reactive, emotion-driven decision- making. They balance the needs of the short and the long term.

As reporters continue to dissect what went wrong with the world's financial system, publishing books such as Street Fighters: The Last 72 hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street; Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P.Morgan was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe and Dumb Money: How our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, readers will learn a great deal about the confluence of greed, hubris, lax regulation and bad luck that led to the global financial meltdown. But readers would do well to learn another lesson: The outcome might have been different had the senior leadership teams of the felled companies welcomed dissent and debate, upheld values such as honesty and decency, and paid attention to the people within their own companies who saw the dangers ahead.

Call Jane at 703.243.1620 if you'd like to have Susan address your organization on high-performance leadership.