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 ...

 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...

 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. ...

 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 ...

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...

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...

   Ego is one of the hardest things to deal with as a new manager. You are in a new situation, you are most likely leading people for the first time, you are probably a bit younger ... and you just feel like you HAVE to prove yourself. This kinda makes sense right? You were obviously promoted because you knew your stuff and were really good at your old job, so now it MUST be your job to make sure everyone knows how good you are. WRONG! This is the number one mistake most new managers make. I totally get why, we have created this hierarchy in our corporate structures that makes people believe a good supervisor = a good manager = a good director = a good VP. This. Is. Completely. Untrue. The reality is that it takes different skills to be a good leader; and excellence at one level does not automatically mean excellence at the next. To be a good leader, you have to always be trying to check your ego. Yes you are smart, you probably have good ide...