the possibilities to become

Jesus believed in his followers, not alone for what they were, but for what they had the possibilities to become. While others would have seen Peter as a fisherman, Jesus could see him as a powerful religious leader—courageous, strong—who would leave his mark upon much of mankind. In loving others, we can help them to grow by making reasonable but real demands of them. Jesus gave people truths and tasks that were matched to their capacity. He did not overwhelm them with more than they could manage, but gave them enough to stretch their souls. Jesus was concerned with basics in human nature and in bringing about lasting changes, not simply cosmetic changes.

Spencer W. Kimball

"Jesus, The Perfect Leader" January 15, 1977. From an address delivered to the Young Presidents organization, Sun Valley, Idaho. 

they are the owners of the processes

Most important, the leader of the business and his or her leadership team are deeply engaged in all three [picking other leaders, setting the strategic direction, and conducting operations].  They are the owners of the processes - not the strategic planners or the human resources (HR) or finance staffs. 

Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan 

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 23,24

prosecute with rigor, intensity, and depth

Businesses that execute... prosecute with rigor, intensity, and depth. Which people will do the job, and how will they be judged and held accountable? What human, technical, production, and financial resources are needed to execute the strategy? Will the organization have the ones it needs two years out, when the strategy goes to the next level? Does the strategy deliver the earnings required for success? Can it be broken down into doable initiatives? People engaged in the processes argue these questions, search out reality, and reach specific and practical conclusions. Everybody agrees about their responsibilities for getting things done, and everybody commits to those responsibilities.

Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan 

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 23

you are the architect of fear

You are the architect of fear. It's coming from you, and your blind insistence that you should somehow not be fearful only reinforces that fear. 

Gary John Bishop

Unfu*k Yourself 2023 Day-to-Day Calendar: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life. October 13

show up big

If love is missing? Be that. If connection is absent? Be that. If it's understanding, friendship, or acceptance that's needed, it's time for you to show up big.

Gary John Bishop

Unfu*k Yourself 2023 Day-to-Day Calendar: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life. September 21

expanded self-awareness

Expanded self-awareness... is one of the most important outcomes of any feedback process. People with little self-awareness are often puzzled by the behavior of others toward them. They might wonder, “Why do people not include me in their casual conversations?” “Why do I end up in heated arguments?” “Why was I not chosen to lead this project? I know more than the person they selected.” When a 360-assessment is carried out as described above, the leader is able to compare their self-ratings to the ratings from others. Having ratings from multiple people (we recommend at least a dozen) provides greater evidence that this is much more than just one person’s opinion. Combined with accountability, this evidence serves as a strong impetus to change.

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

"What Makes a 360-Degree Review Successful?" Harvard Business Review. December 23, 2020

couldn’t say in the meeting

A final way I tightened up meetings was to discourage people from coming to my office afterward to tell me what they “couldn’t say in the meeting” on account of who was in the room. What kind of leader would I be if I suddenly changed my opinion based on statements from the last person with whom I spoke? When people did come to me after meetings, I explained that because they lacked the guts to speak up, we had just wasted an hour of everyone’s time and would now have to reconvene so that everyone could hear this new input. I only had to do that a couple of times before this baloney stopped. 

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 27

post-game meeting

Confirm key decisions and next steps. Recap what was decided in the meeting, who is accountable for following through, when implementation will occur, and how it will be communicated. You want every attendee to leave the meeting with the same understanding of what was agreed, so there’s little chance of anyone reopening the issues later…

Develop communication points. If a colleague not at the meeting asks an attendee “What happened?” he or she should know what to say. So before you wrap up, put the question to the group. “What are the most important things we accomplished in our time here together?” As the group responds, capture the key points on a flip chart or whiteboard and briefly summarize them. Once you have alignment on what should be communicated to others ask everyone if there are any parts of the discussion that they wouldn’t want to be shared. Some information might be confidential; perhaps some ideas aren’t quite ready for dissemination. Be as specific as possible here so everyone clearly understands what is off limits. Then, as soon as possible after the meeting, send your agreed-upon talking points to everyone in an email. The goal of this exercise is not to give people a script to read from. It’s to provide guidance on the key messages they should convey, and what they should keep to themselves, if asked, so the rest of the organization gets a consistent picture of what went on. After a recent strategy meeting of the top 30 executives at a major technology company, for example, the group decided on these communication points:

• This was not a one-time event, but the beginning of this group coming together as a senior leadership team.
• We talked about our strategy, which is to build a collection of great businesses in strong categories.
• We agreed that each business should focus on driving its own growth, but, where it makes sense, units and functions should leverage each other’s best practices and capabilities. We captured some ideas for how to start doing this and talked about opportunities for leaders to grow and take on new boundary-spanning roles.

 

Bob Frisch and Cary Greene

“Don’t End a Meeting Without Doing These 3 Things,” Harvard Business Review. April 26, 2016 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

master your mind

A collection of quotes from David Goggins:

Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.

Tell yourself the truth! That you’ve wasted enough time, and that you have other dreams that will take courage to realize, so you don’t die a @#!$% %$@!*&.

Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance, and beautiful silence.

When you think that you are done, you're only 40% in to what your body's capable of doing. That's just the limits that we put on ourselves. 

Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

Be more than motivated, be more than driven, become literally obsessed to the point where people think you're !$#@% nuts.

Only you can master your mind, which is what it takes to live a bold life filled with accomplishments most people consider beyond their capability.

David Goggins

Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds - Clean Edition. Lioncrest. 2020. 

people resist in response to something

Organizational change expert Rick Maurer explains, “There [aren’t] ‘resisters’ out there just waiting to ruin our otherwise perfect intervention. People resist in response to something. The people resisting probably don’t see it as resistance; they see it as survival.” Critical voices are important and ultimately essential in breaking through superficiality and developing the thinking needed to wrestle with trade-offs successfully. Many times, in side conversations, people have told us stories about speaking up out of a sense of accountability, realism, or integrity.

Maya Townsend and Elizabeth Doty

"The road to successful change is lined with trade-offs," strategy+business. November 2, 2020.

response-ability

Accountability breeds response-ability. Commitment and involvement produce change. In training executives, we use a step-by-step, natural, progressive, sequential approach to change. In fact, we encourage executives to set goals and make commitments up front; teach and apply the material regularly; and report their progress to each other. 

If you want to overcome the pull of the past - those powerful restraining forces of habit, custom, and culture - to bring about desired change, count the costs and rally the necessary resources. In the space program, we see that tremendous thrust is needed to clear the powerful pull of the earth's gravity. So it is with breaking old habits.

Breaking deeply embedded habits - such as procrastinating, criticizing, overeating, or oversleeping - involves more than a little wishing and willpower. Often our own resolve is not enough. We need reinforcing relationships - people and programs that hold us accountable and responsible. 

Remember: Response-ability is the ability to choose our response to any circumstance or condition. When we are response-able, our commitment becomes more powerful than our moods or circumstances, and we keep the promises and resolutions we make. 

Stephen R. Covey

Principle-Centered Leadership. 2009/ RosettaBooks. 

performance / health

Performance is what an enterprise does to deliver improved results for its stakeholders in financial and operational terms. It's evaluated through measures such as net operating profit, return on capital employed, total returns to shareholders, net operating costs, and stock turn (and the relevant analogs to these in not-for-profit and service industries)... A more memorable way to think about this is through the lens of a manufacturing company in which performance-oriented actions are those that improve how the organization buys raw materials, makes them into products, and sells them into the market to drive financial and operational results. 

Health is how effectively an organization works together in pursuit of a common goal. It is evaluated in levels of accountability, motivation, innovation, coordination, external orientation, and so on. A more memorable way to think about health-related actions is that they are those that improve how an organization internally aligns itself, executes with excellence, and renews itself to sustainably achieve performance aspirations in its ever-changing external environment. 

Make no mistake, leaders have a choice when it comes to where they put their time and energy in making change happen. The big idea in delivering successful change at scale is that leaders should put equal emphasis on performance and health-related efforts....

Short-term gains can be made without tending to health, but they are unlikely to last.

Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger

Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2019

 

clear, effective and engaging

"Communication is one of the most important skills that a leader and, frankly, most employees now need to excel on the job."

According to [John] Chambers, one or two decades ago a leader could get by without being an exceptional communicator and still be considered great. Today it’s a different world. “You’ve got to deal with social media, you've got to deal with a dramatically different speed of events, you've got to be able to talk to your shareholders, your employees, your customers, and your partners. If you don't have communication skills, you're not going to be an effective leader.”

Measuring and elevating communication skills. Since Chambers believes the ability to communicate with diverse audiences is a critical skill, he always held his leaders to a very high standard. Cisco executives—including Chambers— were rated on their customer presentations using a scale of one to five. After every customer meeting, the speakers were scored in two areas: delivery and content. The speakers had to be clear, effective and engaging while their content had to be useful, relevant and timely.

Carmine Gallo

"In This Candid Conversation, Legendary CEO John Chambers Reveals The Critical Skill Leaders Need Now" Forbes. Dec. 4, 2018

therefore trust

One of a leader’s most important jobs is to drive employee trust. Without it, you cannot drive change and accountability. When I was CEO at Investopedia, we drove trust by always sharing the “bad and ugly” not just the “good”. If we were missing our goals, we let everyone know the challenge, the reason behind it and what we were doing to fix it.

I required every member of my executive team to send a weekly all-employee email we called the “3x3” with three positive updates and three challenges. We forced the sharing of the bad so that everyone would know the challenges each department was facing. We forced it to ensure no one would be surprised. We forced it because it enabled 150 individuals to provide solutions so we could fix things faster.

But most importantly, we shared the bad because it is precisely through the transparent sharing of the bad that trust is built. Psychologists will tell you that trust is most engendered when individuals can be vulnerable around each other. “Sharing the bad” demonstrates a leader’s potential failings and vulnerability, and therefore trust.

David Siegel

"Opinion: A CEO explains why you should stop lying to your employees." Marketwatch. Sept. 15, 2018

complaining is not a strategy

One of the first rules of business is complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

Jeff Bezos
"Jeff Bezos has advice for the news business: 'Ask people to pay. They will pay'". CNBC.  June 21, 2017. 

8 executive habits for safety leadership

1. Executives must lead by example in the area of safety as well as every other aspect of ethical business. This includes, for example, the correct wearing of appropriate PPE in the workplace. One minor lapse observed by persons two levels down in the organization will undo untold other positive efforts to achieve excellence in workplace safety.

2. Executives must verbally communicate about safety in meetings with other managers. While what people do is sometimes more telling than what they say, it is the rare executive who can effectively lead without verbal articulation of his position on the matter. What executives say to each other one-on-one about safety while safety staff or other support staff is not present speaks volumes and has the greatest effect on crucial aspects of company culture.

3. Executives must put their money where their mouths are and fund safety adequately. This does not mean employing arbitrarily large staffs of SH&E professionals. Instead, it means in all business decisions that executives seek to treat the safety of all employees as the ethical right thing to do, a prudent act use of corporate funds and of corporate governance, and an intangible factor of business relationships that is almost always also a good investment.

4. Executives must hold their subordinates accountable for managing safety and must require that subordinates report on safety matters. Make sure that the roles and responsibilities for safety and health are defined (in writing and in practice). Doing so is part of treating safety just like any other important part of the business. Safety should be simply part of an overall performance measurement process.

5. Executives must provide appropriate feedback regarding safety performance. Monitor the results of management system audits and provide feedback. Personally praise exceptional performance, ignore average performance and confront substandard performance on the part of subordinate operations managers/supervisors. Realize that human exposure to injury risk has an element of randomness and may not be well described by current statistical analysis methods such as the frequency rate of recordable, reportable or lost-time injuries. Therefore, acknowledge and appropriately reward efforts in risk-reduction even if short-term injury results are poor.

6. Executives must make sure that the risk profile of the organization is continuously improved. New hazards and potential risks to the business (not just safety or health) are introduced continuously, and large corporations that are good managers of risk will be successful in the long term. When something bad happens—and it will—get to the root cause and try to systemically build in whatever must be feasibly done to ensure that it won’t happen again.

7. Executives of organizations that use potentially toxic materials must ensure that there is long-term support for the anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control of industrial hygiene in the organization. The past actions or inactions of corporations in the developed world are judged today by a society with extremely high expectations as compared to even the recent past. One can safely assume that societal norms for a safe and healthy work environment will continue to increase in the future in all countries of the world.

8. Executives must ensure that safety and health processes are being fully integrated into the primary management system processes of the business. Safety and health cannot be effectively managed long-term separate from the management of the routine affairs of the business. In today’s companies, this includes the deep integration of safety and health matters into systems such as the enterprisewide management software and process control systems.

Dan Petersen and Kyle Dotson

"Eight Executive Habits for Safety Leadership" Professional Safety. Nov. 2006.

objectives and key results

LinkedIn manages its teams using a task-tracking system called ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ abbreviated as “OKRs.” First developed by Andy Grove at Intel, the strategy was popularized by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. Today, this shorthand is all over Silicon Valley. But it’s easy to dismiss a corporate-sounding acronym as just another leadership trick for distilling people’s work. Nothing about OKRs sounds inspiring. It’s how LinkedIn used them that helped employees connect more to the company’s collective mission.

In Grove’s famous manual “High Output Management,” he introduces OKRs by answering two simple questions: (1) Where do I want to go? (2) How will I know I’m getting there? In essence, what are my objectives, and what key results do I need to keep tabs on to make sure I’m making progress? When you think about it, these questions are very personal, speaking to the core of how people spend their days. It makes sense that everyone within an organization should have their own OKRs every quarter. The important thing is tying these individual OKRs to team OKRs and, ultimately, organizational OKRs. This alignment packs power and efficiency.

Understanding the personal nature and motivating potential of OKRs, Weiner defines them more broadly. They should be about “something you want to accomplish over a specific period of time that leans toward a stretch goal rather than a stated plan. It’s something where you want to create greater urgency, greater mindshare.” For all these reasons, OKRs should become more important the more senior an employee becomes. When you’re in a leadership position, “You are sending the signal to the rest of the organization that ‘this matters,’” Weiner says.

OKRs should definitely not be is easily achievable. Low expectations may seem to yield glowing results, but they eventually stall people, teams and companies in the long run. OKRs shouldn’t be too malleable either. They’re supposed to be quarterly beacons, not shifting from week to week. Along these lines, Weiner prefers that his team members set three to five OKRs for themselves in any given quarter. Anything more than that has the potential to distract from what really needs to get done.

Interview with Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO

"The Management Framework that Propelled LinkedIn to a $20 Billion Company" First Round Review. 8/2/2013

effective safety leadership

Five critical components must be present in order to implement effective safety leadership.

1. Your company must first establish a field presence. The best way to measure your company’s safety culture and its effectiveness is for managers to obtain feedback from their workforce. This not only shows your workers that you care about their well-being, but also establishes the importance of demonstrating safety leadership.

2. Effective safety leadership requires effective communication skills. Failure of management to effectively communicate with workers after an incident, allows false and misleading information to spread—which can be detrimental to your organization’s safety culture. The most opportune way to effectively communicate safety expectations and gain the trust and respect of your workforce is to utilize newsletters, as well as toolbox meetings to get the word out.

3. Establishing a feedback mechanism opens up a direct avenue of communication between your workforce and management. Creating a safety committee that includes representatives from the workforce can contribute to a better understanding of your organization’s safety culture. Additionally, routinely scheduling field walks is a good way to solicit direct feedback on workplace health and safety perceptions and issues.

4. A lack of accountability for the organization’s safety program can result in silent rebellion, especially if it is a phenomenon of “does as I say and not as I do”. Therefore, all members of your organization, regardless of job title and role should follow safety rules at all times. Everyone must be held accountable for his or her actions, starting with Management.

5. Finally, benchmarking with your competitors or joining industry groups that openly share the best-known methods, is one of the best ways to assess the contents of your organization’s safety program, as well as its overall performance. Thus, continuous improvement is the key to a successful organizational culture of safety.

Kurina Baksh

"Why Safety Leadership Matters" Huffington Post. 4/4/2016

issue an S.O.S.

Today, most assume that Xbox was somehow destined to be a winner, but having been Microsoft’s chief Xbox officer, I am here to report that its early years were much more like a ship on the rocks than a sloop cutting through the waves.... As I reflect on surviving the near-death Xbox experience, which we turned around using a strategy process called the 3P Framework to create Xbox 360... I would humbly suggest the following...

Issue an S.O.S. We are all taught that self-reliance is key for accountability and leadership, but I’ve learned that the reverse is often true. When things are going badly, the height of leadership is knowing who to ask for help. This is not an invitation to hire a bunch of consultants but rather a suggestion that you find people uniquely qualified to provide new ideas and approaches. My boss treated my resignation letter as a request for help, which he gladly answered by rejecting the letter and working with me to change my leadership style. That was the end of the beginning for me, and it enabled me to rebuild the team and create a set of new opportunities for the business.

Robbie Bach

"The Big Leadership Lessons I Learned Almost Failing To Create Xbox For Microsoft" Forbes. 11/5/2015

ask for commitments

Real leaders don’t “give assignments”—they ask for commitments. They understand that the initial conversation is a chance to frame the entire subsequent experience. When people make a commitment—a choice—they feel a far deeper connection to their work. When it is assigned to them—or others sell them on it—a subtle and insidious agreement is made: that the leader is responsible for their motivation. The worker is consenting to this work as a favor to the leader.

Joseph Grenny

"Leadership Lessons from Ex-Cons" Crucial Skills. 9/15/2015