Leading is not empowering
You don’t empower people: employees, customers, trainees, interns… To empower them implies you can dis-empower them. That you can take any power, agency or determination they have from them. And that’s not in your control —at all. What you can do is help them feel empowered. You can foster their sense of agency, responsibility, decision-making, and more. Empowerment comes from within. Like an elephant that doesn’t move from the ridiculous small chain because they were taught they didn’t…
Leading is language
Not only whether you say please or not. It’s about how you frame (and reframe) the situations, the context, problems and even solutions. [Framing and reframing —NOT gaslighting.] It’s about the lens you have to see things. About the words you use not to drive a decision in X or Y direction. Here’s a little thing I learned: Instead of asking “Are you sure?” to know whether the others are feeling confident or not on what they think/consider, ask “How sure are you?” This question will bring a…
Accountability
If leadership is not 100% accountable, it’s not leadership. It can be anything else but. It takes you to own the flaws, mistakes, failures and successes. Not only to yourself though, but with the people you work with (employees, partners, customers, etc.). “Leadership is about how to create more leaders; not attract more followers.” —David Marquet.
Procrastination is productive.
Friend-of-the-list and fellow daily writer, Shweta send this message about “Not all days can be equally productive, and that’s OK.” Some thoughts about this are that also, doing nothing is doing. Because stop time is productive. That’s why pauses are needed. We’re not machines —and even them, they need repairs, stop times, preventive maintenance and so on. Otherwise you’d burnout. Sometimes being “unproductive” is highly productive. Procrastination is productive. And here’s Rory Sutherland to…
Stages of risk acceptance
In short: when you have nothing, you try, fail and do whatever it takes to get things moving. That takes you to a place where things in the environment are the status quo and you break it. However, when you get to the first results, you want predictability. So you try and fail less and embrace the status quo. You get afraid of things failing now. You have more at stake. And that can hold you back. What Blair Enns calls the The Innoficiency Problem.
Weekends
As an entrepreneur, business owner, solo consultant… do you work on the weekends?
Working on the weekends
If you want, you can. But here’s the thing, you need to understand this is your choice. If you can’t say no to work, or you need to be working all the time, because any reason, ponder this question: Is this a pattern? When it becomes a pattern, you get “obsessed” with work, it’s not a choice anymore. And you’re in your business because you wanted to make the right choices for you. Disconnect. To-ta-lly. from work. Here are 2 benefits you’ll find: You won’t burn out. You’ll leave your brain to…
Cringe
What are words / things in your industry that make you cringe? Number 1 for me this month: Storytelling. Let me know yours?
Focus on Speed + Good Enough
This way you’ll get quickly to the goal. HOWEVER… Getting quick and good enough to the wrong goal is worse than slow towards the right thing. Like the player here ???? The player here did score, with efficiency, mastery and intent. Just at the wrong thing. It’s not about speed, good enough delivery or “avoiding perfect”. It’s about seeing where to go and choosing the right direction. That beats efficiency for the sake of efficiency. Because you’ve seen times over and over wrong things executed…
Slow in the weeds
Collaboration is about getting into the weeds, about messiness. While speed and efficiencies do help, getting faster to the wrong goal or executing flawlessly the wrong thing won’t move the needle. Discussions, sometimes, feel like they get you stuck in the weeds. That it brings friction. And we try to avoid friction. Here’s the thing, though. Without discussions, there are no compromises and it becomes an easy way out when things are meh. It becomes easier to point fingers at. It becomes a…
