Amy Norton

Purpose-Driven Leadership – Amy Norton

Amy Norton is the Co-founder of GiANT Southeast, a company empowering professionals to lead themselves through coaching, teaching, and consulting. She works with individuals and businesses in industries including financial services, multifamily housing, military, technology, construction, and nonprofits. Before GiANT Southeast, Amy was a key leader in a startup online media outlet and worked for a 150-year-old educational institute.

Here's a Glimpse of What You'll Learn

[1:08] How Amy Norton began empowering people to lead themselves
[6:48] Amy’s introduction to EO and how it’s shaped her leadership
[11:42] Amy talks about her decision to launch a business with partners
[15:45] Implementing leadership structures to overcome common roadblocks
[19:18] The business support Amy has received from her EO forum
[27:25] Advice for emerging EO members

In This Episode

Business partners can help you identify and execute a grand vision for your company. However, a lack of alignment and miscommunication can prevent effective leadership structures. How can you develop your leadership skills to create a purposeful business?

Leadership coach Amy Norton realized she couldn’t launch a business without help from her partners and chose people who complemented her strengths and gave her unique perspectives. While initially struggling to identify a vision for their company, they implemented leadership systems and assumed roles based on their skills. Amy maintains that exceptional leadership helps people expand and achieve their potential and recommends honing your leadership capabilities by participating in EO forums and events.

Tune in to this episode of The Decision as Robert Hartline and Eric Jackson talk with Amy Norton, the Co-founder of GiANT Southeast, about her leadership development journey. Amy shares how EO has shaped her leadership style, the support she has received from her EO forum over the years, and how to maximize your EO participation.

Quotable Moments:

“I create quickly an environment where people trust me with really important information, and I am able to have direct conversations without getting defensive responses.”
“Leadership is about influence and helping people achieve and expand their capacity and potential, not just making things happen.”
“Visioning by yourself is hard; it’s the discovery process with others that helps shape where you want to go.”
“A lack of alignment is huge; if we’re pulling in opposite directions in the same boat, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
“Being surrounded by people who are taking risks gives me some risk tolerance that I didn’t have a few years ago.”

Action Steps:

Embrace vulnerability and presence: Actively practice being present in conversations and embrace vulnerability in your interactions. This approach fosters trust and authentic connections, helping leaders unlock potential within themselves and their teams.
Seek collaborative visioning: Involve trusted colleagues or partners in developing your company’s vision. Amy Norton highlights the challenge of creating a vision alone and the effectiveness of collaborative input in painting a clearer picture of the future.
Utilize a structured framework: Implement frameworks like EOS to clarify roles and streamline operations. These systems help align team efforts and reduce complexity.
Cultivate a supportive network: Engage with entrepreneurial communities like EO to share experiences and gain insights from others facing similar challenges. This can help alleviate the isolation of entrepreneurship and encourage risk-taking.
Prioritize leadership development: Invest time in developing leadership skills, whether through formal training or by seeking mentorship and coaching. This addresses the typical gap in leadership preparedness among entrepreneurs, enhancing their ability to influence and inspire others.