My passion for leadership and team development began early in my career after being introduced to Ken Blanchard's books and programs. Over the years, I learned as much as I could about leaders in business, sports, politics, and even on the battlefield. Learning lessons from people like Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell, John Wooden, and others was important because they demonstrated leadership in the field.
My favorite leader is Nelson Mandela. He was an optimist with a vision for replacing apartheid with democracy in South America. He was also an innovative leader who saw the value of sport to leverage peoples' emotions, demonstrating a collaborative mind-set in winning people to his cause.
Throughout my career I often found myself in situations where I was trying to persuade people to move from win-lose scenarios to win-win scenarios. At some point in my journey I decided to improve my tactics for generating win-win solutions and started writing...marrying my passion for leadership/team development with my passion for soccer. This led to my first book, The Collaborator (see below). The rest is history as we all like to say.
Winsor is a graduate of Cornell University (BS - Industrial & Labor Relations), the University of Idaho (MBA), and the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His coaching certifications include the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and Systemic Team Coaching. He is certified in several world class leadership development programs and assessment tools, including Situational Leadership, MBTI, and Polaris Competency Model.
Winsor grew up in the Rochester, NY area (Spencerport). He played, coached, and refereed soccer. He currently lives in Meridian, Idaho.
Winsor is a United States Air Force Veteran.
In 2007, Winsor wrote, THE COLLABORATOR: Discover Soccer as a Metaphor for Global Business Leadership, where he married his passion for leadership development with his passion for the sport of soccer. Written in the form of an business allegory, readers are introduced to an innovative, yet practical framework for developing team leaders who effectively collaborate. His book won the 2009 AXIOM Business Book Award, Bronze Medal Winner - International Business!
In 2014, he left the corporate world and started his consulting business with a focus on collaborative leadership development and coaching. This led to co-developing THE COLLABORATION GAME, in 2016, designed to help people accelerate their development of a collaborative mind-set and skill set to effectively collaborate..
In 2018, he was asked by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) to serve as one of five contributing authors. He wrote Chapter Three, Collaboration, for their book, FOCUS ON THEM: Become the Manager Your People Need You to Be. Note, through ATD's management research, the ACCEL Model was developed identifying Collaboration as one of five key skills for front-line managers to learn for today's changing workplace.
In 2021, he published his latest book, GAME OF TEAMS: Discover How to Become a Collaborative Leader, which is a sequel to his first book. In this book, he promotes the importance of coaching to support collaborative leadership and team development. Written as a business allegory, readers follow the exploits of a newly promoted manager who learns, with the help of an external team coach, how to kick-start her journey to become a collaborative leader.
Prior to that, Winsor wrote articles for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America's magazine, Soccer Journal, in 1997 -1998 and The Journal of the Human Resources Planning Society (2005).
As a team development advocate and soccer enthusiast, he continues to write blog posts on collaborative leadership and team development.
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