ProVia event helps attendees navigate business today

ProVia event helps attendees navigate business today
Dave Mast

Founder and CEO of Focus 3, Tim Kight challenged those in attendance at the ProVia leadership symposium to avoid leading by blaming and defending their actions.

                        

The Symposium: A Community of Leaders was hosted by ProVia at Kent State Tuscarawas on Wednesday, Feb. 12, and for the fourth-straight year, it continued to grow in connecting with leaders to inspire and provoke new thinking in terms of the role leadership plays in the business world.

The symposium featured Tim Kight, Steve McClatchey, Dr. Caroline Leaf and John C. Maxwell as speakers. Interviews took place with Merry Prather, vice president of sales at RightNow Media, and it featured a leadership discussion with local leaders: Carla Birney, superintendent of Dover City Schools; Larry Kaufman, pastor of Grace Church; and Orvis Campbell, Tuscarawas County sheriff.

Local artist David Warther also was recognized as a local leader who has done some great work. The event was hosted by former symposium speaker Dan Owolabi, executive director at Branches Worldwide.

Kight is the founder and CEO of Focus 3, a company that helps businesses worldwide develop leadership, culture and better results.

A New York Times best-selling author, McClatchey has spoken at forums worldwide while working with global companies like Disney, NBC Universal, Google and Under Armour, to name a few.

Leaf is a communication pathologist, cognitive neuroscientist and author who has done in-depth research on what makes the brain tick.

Maxwell is well-known globally as a leadership expert, author and coach. He is a New York Times best-selling author who has sold more than 30 million books in 50 languages. His accomplishments include earning the Mother Theresa Prize for Global Peace and Leadership, among others.

The symposium has found its legs quickly, and this year’s theme of “Navigation” continues the trend toward developing servant leaders.

“What is incredible to me is how rapidly this event has gained ground in only four years,” ProVia President and CEO Brian Miller said. “At our first we had a couple-hundred people at ProVia. Then we moved it to the PAC, and it has been so well received by people. Without the community support and input and attendance, it wouldn’t be what it is today, and that tells me we live in a pretty special community where people want to learn and grow.”

That ProVia is able to bring nationally renowned speakers like Maxwell, McClatchey, Kight and Leaf is in itself impressive, but the message in each of the past four events has been a journey toward creating insight and building relationships among people within the area businesses and between those businesses.

Miller said when the ProVia symposium committee begins to put together a concept each year, it begins by focusing on the one keynote speaker: in this case Maxwell. While the other speakers don’t necessarily have to adhere to the focus of that speaker, they have worked hard to tie together their messages with the theme.

Miller said the committee takes a hard look at each speakers’ current work and the messages they are portraying, and they try to fit it all together to inspire attendees in a particular direction.

“It is a national search for speakers who share our values and who we believe will provide great insight toward each theme,” Miller said. “What’s fun to watch is that even though these speakers are national, they often know each other, and that leads into the following year’s speakers.”

That was the case this year, where Maxwell’s connections led directly to committing to the keynote speaker next year. That speaker will be Craig Roeschel, pastor at Life-Church, global inspirational speaker and author.

“We have been so blessed because we have seen doors open that we never dreamed would open, and speakers who we never would have thought would speak are coming and providing some incredible insight and wisdom,” Miller said. “Things like that energize our ProVia staff, and it is their hard work that makes this event possible because they all want to bring a great event to the community.”

McClatchey brought his message of the five levels of maturity to the symposium, where he returned for the second-straight year.

McClatchey went through a lot of work and plenty of years developing his original ideas about how maturity plays a massive role in the success of people’s lives, whether it is family or work. He said part of the joy of doing symposiums like this is he gets to share original material with people that has come from countless hours, months and years of research.

“Leadership is never clear,” McClatchey said. “Everyone’s definition differs. My definition is improvement. It isn’t a position. It’s not a title. It isn’t where you rank in the hierarchy. It is how you produce. If that is the case, I look at three areas where we need to improve: how we lead our own lives, improving relationships and how we lead our businesses through times of change, which every business experiences.”

McClatchey said how people lead their own personal lives and their relationships at work is a message he feels strongly about sharing, and in returning to this symposium, he can further expand on the idea of creating faith and self-assurance in oneself that then grows into the workplace as a leader.

“As leaders we need to build confidence in people so they can take that confidence and meet the world,” McClatchey said. “I pride myself on trying to create an entirely different and new concept on leadership that people haven’t heard. I want to inspire people to react and take action because they are hearing something unique and informative. What I share takes deep introspection, awareness and insight and thinking differently to create something new.”

To deliver that message with great wit is something McClatchey excels at.

So too does Kight, who spoke about the concept of E+R=O (Event plus Response equals Outcome).

Success isn’t about the E; it’s about the R,” Kight said. “The choices we make as leaders determine our responses, which create the outcome. If you’re not getting the O, get better at the R. Don’t blame the E; improve your R.”

Kight, who has worked with top professional athletes, said people can get any outcome they desire if they are willing to do the work, noting there are three levels of Event including helpful, neutral and painful. He said the painful experiences are the ones that make people grow and reveal their true character.

“Default people live by BCD — blame, complain and defend,” Kight said. “Default responses are simply a lack of discipline. The opposite of BCD is resilience. We get to an edge, and we have to choose to build skills we don’t have talent for. Talent is a gift. Elite is a choice, and it’s all about the work. Good leaders learn to work the process, invest the time and solve the problem. They embrace discomfort, use mistakes as feedback and defeat fear.”

Messages like these inspired those in attendance and challenged them to venture into unknown areas to try, fail, learn and grow.

“It’s about getting on the right path and getting fulfilled by your work,” said Phil Wengerd, ProVia vice president of market strategies. “We have to learn to serve, to live from the heart, where true servant leadership begins.”


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