3 Little Magic Words

Building for Success on the Back of Change

Usually when people think of 3 words that have a huge impact on your life they have more of a romantic connotation.

I suppose both phrases carry with them the idea of a change.

I wrote a post yesterday on LinkedIn related to my field of work. I have been in Logistics and Last Mile delivery for 15 years now. Needless to say, I’m pretty comfortable in my thinking and confident in my understanding.

I took a strong position against Ultrafast delivery and presented my case. The posted ended with me saying “Share your thoughts, change my mind”.

There was nothing cheeky about it. It was a true desire and an honest comment. This was a response someone made on that post:

Love this example of a strong belief weakly held, inviting real discussion and co-discovery. So rare.

It surprised me. I have been like this for as long as I can remember. It’s a fundamental pillar of my leadership style and I am not sure I could be different if I tried.

I absolutely love challenge and change. The best ideas come when people are able to put theirs out into the universe and have them smash and collide with others. I don’t believe that true progress happens in vacuum. Some person toiling away in the dark, alone, waiting to make that next leap in quantum theory isn’t how you change the world.

We do our best when we interact.

That’s why I write. That’s why I share how I see the world, a problem or an opportunity.

I speak confidently because I like to understand things. I’ll research, test, try … whatever. Isn’t the point to figure things out?

When did we start to get too afraid to share our ideas?

If you ever find yourself in a situation where the “leader” doesn’t let you share, doesn’t promote debate within the team. Run. That’s a bad situation and it’s making your worse each day you are there.

Leadership is about getting people to work together.

For people to work together at the highest levels of excellence, they have to be able to challenge each other. There has to be healthy conflict.

No matter what you are doing, you are always able to contribute to this kind of environment. Be the leader you expect others to be, even if you don’t have the title yet (it will come if this is how you are — people gravitate to true leadership).

No one is ever right all of the time, and no one wants to work with someone who thinks that they are always right. Improve your success by accepting that we are only right most of the time when we are working together without keeping score.

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