While Promoting Nothing but Fear  The dream of previous generations was to find a good job, settle in, work hard, get promoted and retire. People were happy to be in one place, and for many of them, one place provided them everything they needed. The world has change. Business has changed. People have changed. I recently read the book Jump by Kim Perell. It's not exactly a business book, definitely geared towards taking big leaps - more framed for life in general. The core ideas are great. Nothing dramatically different than a lot of what you will find in other books in the self-help genre, however the presentation is on point and well structured. Kim sets up the three main buckets for why people need to take big leaps (or jumps) in their life. You have no choice (i.e. something has happened to you) You see an opportunity You're feeling stuck The book did connect for me on a personal level, however I found a lot of parallels for my professional life as well. I've spent the ...

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...

  The Best Decision Isn’t Always as Obvious as It Seems Your success at work is correlated to the quality of your relationships. Easy right? It’s common sense. You might even be wondering who doesn’t already know this. The challenge isn’t about attitude though. You’re right, nobody likes the as%ho^e — Don’t be that person. The challenge comes when you have to choose between being right or making the right choice. The Problem My team and I had been working on a large project that had been pushed back multiple times over the years. The market finally got to a point where the problem in the field had to be addressed. We dusted off our files and started looking at the information we had built 3 years prior. We made our plans for what needed to be refreshed and how we would go about it. We cut through the project quickly. The team had matured a lot in that time and those roadblocks from the past were mere pebbles on the road this time around. Cue the problem. The fundamental assumptions...

 How Managing Towards Perfection Makes You Excellent I’m walking up the steps to a set of glass doors situated at the corner of a small production plant. The stairs are much bigger than they should be. Wider. They create a sense of grandeur that doesn’t match the rest of the building. I open the doors and walk into the lobby. It wasn’t a lobby. It was a man trap — an unmanned man trap. There’s a phone with a contact list. I look through my phone and confirm the spelling of the last name of the person I am coming to meet. I call in and let them know I’ve arrived. Two people come out to greet me at the door. One is a coworker and the other is my new boss. I have taken a job as a distribution supervisor for a company in the food industry. Managing day-to-day delivery operations. You can imagine the type of fit this was for someone who graduated with a law and anthropology degree. This was a whole new world and I had no idea how any of it worked. The One Thing That My Career Success Is...

 Why Diversity Is As Important As Intelligence It was 2005. I had graduated university and was six months into one of the most entertaining jobs that I have ever had. I worked retail, like a lot of people in my situation. Working part time (or full time) while going through school was not uncommon. From 2000–2004 I worked at Staples. The store was fine. Pretty much what you see today when you walk into a Staples. A little bit less flashy, a lot more grey. Their bread and butter was business clients after all. I worked in the computer department. I'm sure that it had a special name, but I've long since forgotten that internal acronym. This was the start of the computer craze. The internet was drawing everyone's attention, every month there was a newer and faster computer released. Keep in mind, it was only in 1995 that Java was first announced; and by 1999 AMD was releasing the a 750mghz processor.  Impressive. With so much activity in the market, you can imagine customers s...

  People hate to fail. We drive ourselves crazy trying to avoid it. The irony however, is that we are natural experimenters. Our ancestors started roaming the planet about 6 million years ago, modern form humans back 300,000 or so, with civilization starting about 6,000 years ago. The constant through all of that has been trying out new ideas, methods or activities. Do you know what happens when we experiment? We get things wrong. If We’re Built for Experimentation, Why Do We Hate It? While failure comes with experimentation, it has an unfortunate connection to our fundamental needs. Originally developed in the 1940s, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us identify and rank core human requirements. Level one being were most of our trouble resides when thinking of failure. Biological and physiological needs — air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc. Our earliest memories set the stage for our future. We go to pre-school to succeed in kindergarten. From there we move through...

Dealing With the Discomfort of Decisions  T he inability to make a decision in the face of uncertainty is the greatest barrier that holds people back. We have created a world of judgement. We are afraid of how others will react and how they will view us. So we abstain. There’s nothing to judge if you follow with everyone else. I have been leading teams for over 15 years now. The most common developmental area that I have worked on with my teams is decision making. It’s easy to come up with reasons why you can’t make the call. Not enough information. Don’t have enough experience. Don’t have the authority. Do you know what the real reason is? Fear. It’s almost always fear. They just don’t want to make a mistake. That’s normal. We reward success and discipline mistakes. I have never chastised anyone on my team for making a decision, even if it was “wrong”. Making the decision is more important than them making the same choice I might have, or what the expectation would be. As long as ...

 Unlock the Benefit of Genuine Collaboration Technical capability is rarely why a team doesn’t succeed. Yet, technical capability is what a lot of managers focus on. The team isn’t performing well, so we look at the people. We review their skill-sets and compare them to one another. “If only I had another Bob — all of my problems would be solved.” Sometimes another Bob is the answer. Most of the time it’s not. Technical capability is easy enough to teach. You identify gaps in someone’s understanding, you work with them or use a training mechanism to get them more exposure and experience. Most things aren’t that complicated, and the internet is amazing for someone who wants to learn. Even with all the talent the Miami Heat had with the famous “big three”, they lost 50% of the time (4 consecutive finals — won 2, lost 2). Why Does Team Development Matter Teams are everywhere. It’s estimated that 90 percent of what we do at work happens through the collaboration of teams. The scary par...

 Why You Need to Rethink Your Understanding Most people don't understand leadership. They relate it to a title or position. Leadership is not about power. You are not superior to others when you lead. Leadership is about people. I write a lot about leadership. It turns some people off. It is one of those areas that has been over-marketed. Every day you see people posting platitudes about it. It can get annoying. Who wants to learn leadership from someone unless they have done something great? The paradox is this. A lot of incredibly success people are terrible leaders. Some of the most amazing leaders are people that you will never hear of. Being a successful leader is not about arbitrary results. What one person considers successful, another will think it fell short. Real leadership comes down to how you shape other people. What is Leadership? This is the best way you should think about leadership: A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of o...

 The Biggest Dichotomy of Leadership You can never know everything. There's no point pretending that you do. Leadership is about trust. It is your responsibility to guide your team to achieve the goals that have been set. To draw out the strengths of each person, supporting each other to win. This is one of my favourite quotes. It comes from the book "The Dichotomy of Leadership" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. 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. It's empowering when people feel heard. Knowing that they can share their idea or perspective and that the person in charge is listening.  What's equally enabling is for them to know that you are supporting them. That you trust them to make decisions. ...

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 ...

 How Sales Techniques Make You More Effective at Any Job Do you ever get frustrated trying to get your point across? Struggle with great ideas stuck in your head? Answered yes to one of those?  Start learning about copywriting. Copywriting is the strategy of creating persuasive content for Marketing and Sales with the goal of generating conversions and sales. How does learning about marketing and sales techniques make you better at your job? We are all selling. All the time. Sales isn’t just transacting a product or service for money. In the simplest form, sales is the transfer of belief. You believe that you have the right answer, know how to fix something, have a better tool for the job. You want to get others to buy in —  re-framed, you want them to believe what you believe. People struggle in their lives, both professionally and personally because they don’t accept that we are always selling. Accepting this idea and using it to shape your interactions increases y...

 How Transferring Ownership Will Make You and Your Team Stronger I've found that the ideal span of control is 5 to 8 direct reports. This allows you enough time to have at least one deep conversation once week with each member of your team. Anything higher than this is hard for people to manage effectively when the stress rises and events go off plan. High performing teams are those where there is trust going up, down and across the structure. This also means that as the leader, you need to be able to step back, let go and disappear. Before that happens however, you need to set the stage. Leadership is not about sitting on the sidelines and barking orders. Real leadership is action and getting your hands dirty. Two things to always keep in mind: Never ask your team to do anything that you wouldn't do People aren't working for you, they are working with you Your job as a leader is simple. You create the example, you provide the guidance. You support the team as they support ...