Why Opening Up Helps You and Your Team Soar Vulnerability is a great leader’s superpower. It ties together elements of risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure — personally I lean more towards the idea of just exposure, and the requirement of being open. Why is vulnerability so important for a leader? Being vulnerable allows you to make real and solid connections with the people around you. Success comes when people WANT to work with you, that they choose to be part of what you are doing. If you want someone to lower their guard and take their armour off, you have to take yours off first. You cannot expect someone from your team to come to you with a problem, with something they are struggling with and lay it all out on the table for to “manage” them and have a one way conversation. This doesn’t work. It’s not effective. And what ends up happening is that you don’t make the right connection and will most likely not actually get to the root of the problem — let alone really solving it. ...

 Is It Really Always Best to “Be Yourself”? You’ve been in this room before. Maybe hundreds of times. It’s used whenever a presentation is being made. It’s a simple room. Exactly what you would expect of a basic conference room. A long rectangular shape with walls painted a neutral colour. The decor is is nothing special. Awards, posters and memorabilia from the organization’s history. It’s supposed to make you feel like your part of the team. And it does. Until you don’t agree with what’s being said. Now you feel like a a big red dot on a bright white canvas. Just be yourself is some of the most popular advice people will give you these days. Everyone is encouraging you to be authentic and bring you whole self to work. Depending on who you are speaking with or what you happen to be reading, there is more that can be added in. They’ll tell you that being authentic doesn’t mean that you always have to be exactly the same. That there is a time and a place for different versions of yo...

 Promoting Value is Exactly Why No One Is Listening We live in a world of innovation. Every day something new is created. So why is it then that so many great ideas die? Sell the features. Sell the benefits. Sell the value. The right way to sell is to show how good your service, product or idea is. Wrong. Those things are necessary, but they are not what is essential for new ideas or innovation to catch on. Changing The Frame I have spent the majority of my career making things better. Continuous improvement, network design, process re-engineering — it has many different labels. It’s all the same. Make changes to what is being done to generate better results. The single biggest key to my success in implementing new ideas? Lower the barrier for entry. We like to believe we are organic computers. Rational to the end. That given the right information and the correct inputs, people will produce the best output. To get someone to actually change, give up on that idea immediately. In the...

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 ab...

 How your ability to hold both positions sets you apart as a leader Nobody wants to follow an asshole.  Leadership is not about your authority, it’s not about telling people what to do. Your position doesn’t make you better than anyone else. You’re probably thinking, how they hell can you be “unyielding” as a leader while still being open minded … these are not the same. Unyielding — adjective unable to bend or be penetrated under pressure; hard: trees so unyielding that they broke in the harsh north winds. not apt to give way under pressure; inflexible; firm: her unyielding faith. People follow those who take charge. Who are confident. Who default to action and make decisions. When leading a team, they expect you to be able to provide this structure, to provide them the context and the guidelines that they need to operate. How then can you mix these two ideas to be a kick ass leader while delivering results? It’s all in where you apply each idea. You have to be unyi...

 Are you living your own life or following someone else's compass? Here are three questions for you: What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? If you’re like most people, it was probably easy to answer two of those three questions. We all know our name, and a simple Google search can give us the other answer—twenty-four miles per hour. I saw that today and it spoke to me. There has never been more pressure to "get life right". From what we have been taught, to a culture that is focused on keeping up and the onslaught of social media - most people don't understand how they don't have it together while so many other people do. There are so many people in the world telling us what to do, who we should be and what is the right path it's easy to start living by someone else's rules. The challenge that I have seen and experienced with this is that most people come to the realization that they are living by other ...

  There is such a shift happening with new world thinking. How we approach problems and where we need to apply focus and effort. Provoke is a great read that helps push your strategic thinking. What you will see from this book is the major differentiator that separates start-ups from established brands, and why some brands are able to adapt while others seem to fall off the cliff. Provoke is all about how you as a leader, need to embrace taking action versus the slow burn that is so prevalent in our organizations as leadership is focused on year over year results and protecting the bonus. Here are some key takeaways for me that will help you and your team have more success. Accepting a Trend and Properly Understanding How Mature it is Evaluate the trend that you are seeing and label as "if" or "when". Leaders often miss an opportunity because they either miss it, deny it, over analyze it or respond poorly A correctly labelled "if" vs "when" trend...

    I'm writing today inspired by a post I saw by Chris Walker - on LinkedIn . It resonated with me personally and professionally. There is a dichotomy between having a vision and seeing what others don't while also needing their approval and trying fit in. We are often asked to solve problems and come up with new and innovating solutions to what we see in front of us. Rarely are you asked to implement a dated and by the book strategy, everyone wants to be on the cutting edge. Oddly enough, the more your ideas or approach differ from the status quo, from what the people within the organization has succeeded on, the harder it gets to take those new roads. It feels like most of time, people want you to take the same path and miraculously see something that no one else before you saw, hang a right and boom ... you are at your perfect oasis. Ridiculous.   Here's a fun list for you: Apple Tesla AirBnB FedEx KFC Evernote Blogger Amazon   Wondering what the list is about? A...

  A thought popped into my head the other day, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.  Why is modern philosophy so weak? That sounds full of judgement, clearly there are many modern day (and impactful) philosophers. A quick Google search this morning easily gave me a list of the top 50 living philosophers. Being able to generate a list of 50 people in 2 seconds seems to blow up my comment rather quickly. What is philosophy then? Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind and language. The questions are often posed as problems to be studied and resolved. With academic philosophy healthy and strong, I started to wonder where my feeling and original question came from. I am now considering that it is not modern philosophy that is weak, the reality is it handles more complexity and nuance in the topics it explores than every before, rather it is the general importance and interest it has with the g...

  I'm sure seeing the title made some people cringe. Are these not some of the biggest buzzwords over the last 5 years? On one hand, I am sure a lot of people are frustrated with the avalanche of "self-improvement advice", I am sure that there are feelings of aren't I already enough? Am I not already good enough. You are 100% enough. That is not the point of this post. My hope in writing this is that it may help you appreciate how often we are our own barriers for the success that we want. Most of us have grown up and come through systems that promote the status quo. Most people will rationalize the status quo (even when it is in conflict with their own interests) as legitimate in order to fit in and be accepted. A popular frame for this is that it is done out of fear. That we fear the unknown, it lacks certainty so we do what we can to avoid it. The truth is you cannot fear something that you know nothing about. Your fear is coming from your perception of the unknown...

  2022 is upon us and I have decided to pick back up with my writing ... resolutions, gotta love them. The quote above is overly dramatic, however this post was inspired by Dr. West. One of the biggest success factors in my career has been asking questions. That may sound simple, however you will see as you progress through your career the amount of people that don't ask questions. They would rather guess, figure everything out on their own, or hope that they correctly understood from the start (rarely happens when you aren't able to ask good questions). In the opening of his Master Class, Cornel West frames a philosopher in the following context. I've been blessed to teach philosophy for 44 years. And in each one of my classes, I tell my students, you have come in this class to learn how to die. And they say, oh, Professor West, I thought I was just here to get a grade and try to get my degree. No, no. That's just the professional, formal dimension of it, because dying...

I have been working a lot of different projects lately in various levels of maturity in their lifecycle. Some are more straight forward and are more about coordination, however others are more impactful and bring with them major change. We often talk about communication in Project Management, the need to get and keep everyone aligned and informed. From here you would help, follow up and sort out any issues that the team is being up. An important thing to remember however is that silence, the team not saying anything, is an answer too. While the saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", this is usually not true of silence in a project. People who are silent, who are not contributing anything more than being aware of the project around them is usually not good. This behaviour is showing you that they may not understand, may not have bought in or are completely checked out and uninteresting by what is going on. So always remember to make sure you are lis...

  We spend so much of our time focused on results and outcomes. Did we win? Did we lose? Was it a success or a failure? How do we measure it? Track it? Compare it? Everyone wants to "succeed" because that is what we feel is the right answer. That is what gets praise from those all around us. It makes us feel valued and safe as it makes us feel like we have earned our place (at work or within our community). Does every step forward have to have the same outcome? At what point is the growth and learning just as (or even more?) valuable than some expected outcome? Our world is changing so quickly these days, more quickly than it probably ever has in the past. We have access to so much information, to so many more people and communities, we are constantly trying to "measure up" to everything around us. We are experiential creatures. Every experience that we have contributes to our knowledge and understanding our our-self and the world we are a part of and influences the...

In a world built on relationships, meetings matter. They are important and really help bring people together to achieve common goals. Since meetings are important, it's critical that you know how to run one, properly. First and foremost. Make sure you know what the meeting is for: • Discussion / Exploration • Decision • Information sharing Next, make sure that you actually have the right people at the meeting based on your intention, and more importantly, make sure THEY know why they have been asked to participate. Third and most important, respect people's TIME. Everyone is busy, has a lot on the go and attending meetings takes away time from other things they could / should be working on. To respect people's time, manage your meeting. Start on time, end on time and make sure that you drive the meeting in such a way that you will cover what needs to be covered during the stated time. Don't allow the meeting to go off the rails and then simply think that you can book an...

Coming from an operations world, you are always on the go. While you might work 8 or 10 hours a day, the other parts of your business and/or your responsibility are usually going 24 hours a day. This is one of the most challenging things for people to manage as they get into an operations world. At first you simply believe that you will do more hours, get ahead of the curve and then you will be able to slow down and relax. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The more you get accomplished, the more 'opportunities' you seem to have. Added to this, you start to deal with the matrix above more often then you realize. The biggest trap that people fall into with their work and responsibilities is not taking the time to understand where each task / problem / responsibility fits. The other major challenge is that we often take on what 'seems' to be urgent and important ... for other people and not necessarily ourselves. With so many people working from home right now, I...

Today's post was inspired by the following quote from the book "The Dichotomy of Leadership": "Every leader must be willing and able to lead, but just as important is a leader’s ability to follow. A leader must be willing to lean on the expertise and ideas of others for the good of the team. Leaders must be willing to listen and follow others, regardless of whether they are junior or less experienced." One of the best ways a leader can truly lead the team is to also follow them. It is extremely empowering for your team to know that you not only listen, but trust them to make important decisions and that you are going to have their back and let them take charge. Some people think that being the leader means you make all the of the decisions all of the time, and if you think your idea is best, to just pull rank and make it happen. Like everything in life, it is better when people CHOOSE.  The autonomy and flow it provides your team is extremely importa...

I posted a video this morning on LinkedIn that was focused on credibility and how important that is for a leader. Credibility is that ability for others to trust and believe in you, and what you say you will do. How does that play with creating a culture? True culture is a tribe. It is a group of people that know each other, trust each other, work for each other ... they feel safe together. A lot of people seem to think that just by joining an organization, by putting a company logo on our shirt and caring you laptop from meeting to meeting that it creates a bond among the employees; maybe, but usually not. We are human, whether in our professional or personal lives, there are just certain things we need. People need to feel safe. We are social animals who learned and developed understanding that our ability to survive, to succeed dramatically increased when we work with others not only for own benefit, but for theirs as well. As we have become so competitive a...