Today, we're going to talk about courageous leadership and I want to share with you three
powerful techniques to take your leadership to the next level.
But before we get into it, let's take a second and talk about the concept of leadership.
You know, a title does not make you a leader, it just makes you a placeholder in an organization,
maybe on an org chart.
But if you want to define leadership at its foundation, one might say it's how you intentionally
manage your influence.
A person who is intentionally managing their influence is a leader.
And by that definition, we're all leaders because we all lead our own contribution.
You know, sometimes people say, well, I don't lead anything in the organization, meaning
I don't have any direct reports.
I don't have a team that report to me.
But that still makes you a leader because you're managing your own contribution to the
organization and you're leading customers, you're leading vendors.
You are leading, you're actively managing your influence in that context.
And so in that sense, we're all becoming a team of leaders.
And you know, I think in the older days, you know, back, we used to have this idea that
leadership really happens at the higher echelons of the organization, maybe the C-suite.
And so leadership development was really for those inspiring managers or executives who
were stepping into the next level.
But nowadays, we're seeing leadership development happen throughout the organization.
It's one of the big global trends we're seeing that is really transforming productivity.
Because when people feel that they lead their own contribution, you have a higher sense
of ownership, higher sense of innovation and even a higher sense of loyalty.
We add meaning to their lives.
We're going to get into a little bit about why then does leadership matter?
Well leadership matters because, look, with growth comes complexity.
With increasing growth comes increasing complexity.
And complexity is the enemy of clarity.
And without clarity, you cannot drive speed.
You know, Jack Welch once famously talked about the three S's.
You know, self-confidence leads to simplicity, which drives speed.
Now instead of self-confidence, maybe we would call it courageous leadership.
It takes a lot of courage to be simple.
The saying we have around here is that, you know, if you're dealing with complexity, you're
still the student.
When you're dealing with simplicity, you've now become the master.
Because we all know that if everything's important, nothing's important.
So somebody has to be saying what's important.
And when we get past that point, you know, where the chaos in our own heads is removed
and we get some clarity, suddenly it's like everything kicks into gear.
We suddenly find clarity and momentum and we're off to the races.
You know, there's a great saying that says the mist in your mind becomes the fog in the
organization.
And for many leaders, you know, there's a lot of mist.
They're not clear about what's their priorities here.
What are we doing?
Every two or three months, there's a new vision and a new this and a new that.
And the team doesn't know what to execute on because they don't know what's important.
It feels like, you know, we just bounce around.
When you've got that feeling in your organization, you really do have a fog in the organization
which came from the mist in your mind as the leader.
So a leader can really substantially change and transform a team by creating clarity.
So I want to talk about three powerful techniques to seriously up-level your leadership as an
individual.
Now, we're talking about leadership throughout the organization, but I also want to talk
a little bit about the key, you know, the person who's leading the leaders because that
takes a different level of skill.
So let's talk about three powerful techniques that will help you.
The first we call flip the coin.
What do we mean by flipping the coin?
Well, one might say that the first job of a leader is to define reality as it actually
is and not as we hope it to be.
So what we find out is that, you know, reality, also the exact situation we're in, the context
we find ourselves in, has very distinct facts.
And if we can state those facts bluntly and clearly, then what happens, quite surprisingly,
is it opens up new possibilities.
It's like two sides of the coin.
On the one side, we turn it and we say, here is the one side of the coin.
This is the problem.
And when we state those in the clearest possible way, no sugarcoating, then when we flip the
coin to the possibility of what this opens up, well, both the possibility.
and the reality of the situation are both equally real.
The facts and the possibility are equally real.
So I found as a leader that the reason why we struggle sometimes to
define reality is we don't
entirely know what the reality in our organization is.
Now in a smaller company,
we tend to have a better sense.
But even there, even in a small company of 10 people,
perhaps there can still be what I would refer to
as depth perception in the organization.
As an organization grows,
so grows the complexity.
And it's harder and harder to see
deeply into the organization to see what's real.
Now this doesn't mean that as the leader,
you have to know everything about everything.
But it does mean that you have a very clear sense
of reality that your business is in.
And I say that because when you ask most leaders,
they would feel they do have a sense of that reality.
Well, here's one thing that I have found.
So I call this the one thing feedback.
This one thing feedback technique is
a very powerful way where you can ask
different people in your organization.
These three questions.
By the way, don't just ask your direct reports.
Ask various people in the organization
whom you think will give you an honest answer.
So three questions to ask.
The one thing feedback.
Question number one, what one thing do I do uniquely?
This gives your team a chance to compliment you,
to show what value you bring to the organization.
But it will surprise you sometimes
the things people bring up
that you may not have quite thought of.
And realizing that what's that one thing you uniquely bring
is actually very much unique to you.
Second question is, what one thing do I need to stop doing?
I once asked, I used to ask these questions
and I think it's great to ask this every, say,
six months or so, is ask various people.
I ask these questions and people said,
well, you always bring clarity.
That's always the thing people tend to bring up for me.
And then the one thing they said is,
what thing do I need to stop doing?
One person said, you need to stop doing the books.
Well, at that point, we were running four operating entities
and I was doing all the books
because in my mind I thought,
well, if I'm there involved in that level of detail,
I'm tracking the expenses and revenue
and I got my finger on the detail.
And what it turned out to be is that
this was not only a complete waste of my time,
but it wasn't providing me the depth perception
that I thought it was providing.
And so I got involved with asking people,
why do we spend this?
Why do we spend that?
What's going on here?
That type of thing.
And I could have easily handed that off to a good bookkeeper
so that I did that.
The third question is, what one thing can I do better?
This is like giving a blank check.
Now, the first time you ask these questions,
you may not get a lot of feedback
because a lot of people in the team
don't know what the consequences are
to answering you honestly.
But over time, they get to trust you and get to know
you really do wanna know the foundation
and the answer to these questions.
So as you do this, as you're flipping the coin,
drive your depth perception
by sampling different people in the organization
and know exactly what the answers are.
Second big powerful technique,
so first is flip the coin.
Second is build mental strength through powerful questions.
You know, big questions like,
is this idea part of our future?
You know, you'll be watching out for quick fixes
that tend to get alive and now you have to live with that
and then it becomes a lot more expensive.
And so what started off as a quick fix
ended up as something you have to support
at greater cost later on.
But it's really about coming up with the best questions
and I think most leaders intuitively know that.
And so leaders sometimes say to me,
I don't know how to always ask the best question.
Here's a simple technique.
Gather your team together and say,
what's the best question we can ask right now?
Then brainstorm them, put them on a board
and then decide which is the best question to ask.
You know, research that was done
at a Northeastern university
studied the most successful people
in different areas of society.
You know, academics, business people,
technologists, medical people,
educational people and so on.
And what they found is they all had
this unique thing in common.
That very successful people are very good
at rapid firing questions to themselves
and then ordering those questions
in order of the most important,
even if that question seems super simple.
Heads up, the simplest questions
are often the most powerful
because they go right to the heart of the matter.
A complex question is hard for a team
to immediately ascertain, well, how relevant is,
how do we answer that?
But a simple, straightforward question that is.
is really clear is the most helpful.
Because here's the bottom line,
things do not automatically improve.
Elon Musk made the point that for SpaceX,
there are now 50 years since we put someone on the moon,
but that technology was foundationally forgotten.
Knowing how to put someone on the moon
was forgotten along the way.
And now we're slowly getting back to the plan
of hopefully before the end of the 2020s or before 2030,
seeing somebody on the moon again.
I mean, that's incredible that it's taken that long.
So maybe there's a 60 year gap.
I say that to say, things do not automatically improve.
Technology doesn't automatically improve,
systems, culture in your business
doesn't automatically improve.
You have to constantly make the adjustment
and it takes courageous leadership
to ask tough questions, penetrating questions,
and to constantly build that mental strength
in each of your team members.
Make them thinkers and teach them
how to think critically and creatively.
Number three, continually challenge your assumptions.
Let me ask this, great question.
Ask your team this.
If we stopped existing as an organization, would it matter?
We all need to understand the core reason we exist.
This is the foundation clarity
on which you're gonna build a high performance team.
You cannot have clarity
when you don't know the core reason you exist.
And you don't know how to execute on that
if you don't know why it's important.
So that's the question to ask your team.
What's the core reason we exist?
And once we know that, that clarity means,
okay, now we know how to execute on it.
It's amazing that as organizations grow,
sometimes the core reason we exist gets forgotten
or gets diluted along the way.
So hitting the pause button regularly
and driving it to that core reason we exist.
You know, I remember a story of a consultant
who arrived at a corporation
and before he started working with them,
he walked around and just asked people, excuse me,
asked people, hey, you know, tell me what you're doing.
And they would tell him, and then he would ask,
why does it matter?
And they'd say, what do you mean?
I'm a programmer, I'm writing code.
Yeah, but how does your writing code
contribute to the overall company?
And they were like, well, you know,
I just do what my boss says,
and then we want this new feature
and the customers ask for it, so I give it to them.
And he said, okay, I get that.
So why does your business exist?
And he said, well, you know, we sell software.
He said, no, no, I'm not asking what you sell.
I'm asking why do you exist and why does it matter?
And he didn't know.
And then there's the second story
of somebody who arrived, the same consultant actually,
arrived at another client,
and he decided this time to go to the loading dock.
And he went to the loading dock
and he said to the person doing the loading,
you know, what do you do?
He says, well, I load all the equipment
that we go and install at the big box stores.
And, you know, they provided, you know,
various telecommunications equipment to big box stores.
So, you know, like Walmart and so on.
So he said, well, what do you do?
He said, well, I load the, you know,
the equipment up and then for delivery.
And so he said, well, you know, why does it matter?
You know, how does this contribute?
And so the docking person says,
well, I've been out, I've watched them install
and I realized that if I pack it wrongly,
it takes so long to get to the key things
that it really slows down the time of installation.
And installation time is what's one of the key drivers
of costs in our business model.
So I repack the equipment in a certain order
so it comes out logically as the installer needs it.
And so we've, you know,
we've cut the installation time down by 40%.
And that's really helped the bottom line.
There was the docking bay.
Listen, your people need to know
that what they do matters and how it contributes overall.
And you can only get there through clarity.
Always challenge your constraints.
You can't say, well, it always takes an hour
to install this thing.
What if it doesn't?
What if there's a way that we can make it shorter?
And here's the thing, almost all constraints are wrong.
It's amazing to me how when we lead organizations,
over time, we develop assumptions
that we made two or three years ago,
which were really valid at the time,
but they're no longer valid now.
They're just a constraint that we've accepted
as part of our thinking.
So great leaders constantly challenging
those underlying assumptions and constraints.
And, you know, it is true.
that when we're trying to optimize something,
one of the core things to ask is,
should we even be optimizing this?
It's amazing how many times we spend energy, time,
and effort optimizing something that shouldn't even exist.
This process or this product shouldn't even exist,
but we spend all the time optimizing
and then realizing we don't need it,
and then we get rid of it.
And when we do that,
we've wasted a tremendous amount of resources,
but more dangerous is that we didn't have the clarity
to know that that thing should not exist.
So there's a healthy destructiveness
to constantly challenging old assumptions.
And I've heard leaders push back on this and say,
well, if I challenge such deep assumptions
in the organizations, the very foundations,
won't it kind of shake the foundations of the organization?
And I say it will,
but you'll be surprised at how healthy that actually is.
In one particular case,
I had a situation where I had to call reality as it is.
And so I went around and asked my three questions,
you know, my one thing feedback system,
and I got a good sense of what was going on.
Then I asked the team and I said, look, here's reality.
The hard facts are we're 90 days away from bankruptcy.
We know that Apple went through that.
It's not just small companies.
And then what's the possibility?
And so what we did is we really built mental strength
through powerful questions.
What possibility could we go after?
And we decided that what's the best question we can ask?
Once we knew that, and we had a simple reason,
why do we exist?
And why is it important that we continue existing?
And what it did is it produced such a deep sense of clarity
on what we were doing.
We decided we were gonna run a big event,
and that big event we were gonna go all in,
which rescued the business.
And so people say, well, if I were that blunt with my team,
I don't wanna lose good people.
I would put it to you that in most cases,
my experience is that you will not only keep
the good people, but you'll make them really confident
because they'll trust you.
They'll trust your honesty.
They'll trust that you have their best intentions.
You didn't just walk in and one day and fire them all.
So I'm sorry, we out of money.
You have no job next week.
I think when people learn that you're willing
to call reality, then they also believe your possibility.
So I hope you love and enjoy up leveling
and using these powerful three techniques
to take your leadership to the next level.