Our daily Field Notes email is just the kind of jumpstart you need. A fast read. Maybe less than a minute. Because sometimes it just takes one insight to change the trajectory of the day.
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Fight Bureaucracy Wherever You Find It
Centralizing power in the workplace in order to minimize risk and enhance consistency comes at a price. Bureaucracy thrives whenever organizations create too many processes and checkpoints to elevate decision-making to ensure uniformity from those on the field of action.
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Creating Extraordinary Followership
When combined with the quality of producing extraordinary results through others, leaders with followership skills become deeply admired and exert a tremendous influence on those around them. Developing the behaviors and routines that produce followership is something every leader can and should work on. The result might be relationally spectacular.
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Does the Candidate Fit?
When selecting talent to join the team, the quality that carries the most weight for leaders is whether the candidate fits the organization and team. More than skill, judgment, track record or experience, fit is often the defining assessment that determines if a job offer is made. To learn months later that a new colleague doesn’t fit…
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The Power of the Reset Button
Recovering from the issues raised during a relationship conflict can be difficult. The weight of it tends to linger and invade the thoughts and feelings of both parties.
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Meet People Where They Are
Coaching others to success demands leaders accept the current reality. This means the reality of others, not the leader’s sense of things. Understanding what people know and are ready to hear and learn is the key. The best leaders accept where others are first and start the race from there.
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When Making Excuses Becomes a Problem
Excuses rob people of personal growth. Leaders make excuse-making uncomfortable for those who offer them incessantly. When people refrain from making excuses, they learn to deliver.
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Play With Energy Not Emotion
Watching athletes and stage performers play at their best, it is easy to conclude that emotion during performance is an asset. To the casual observer, top performers motivate themselves with emotion, allowing anger, frustration, and even self-contempt to light a fire and push them to new heights. If you have reached that same conclusion, you…
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Use Checklists to Ask Team Members to Grade Themselves
Leaders would inspire higher performance if they would spend less time evaluating others and more time crafting the checklists that identify the ingredients or steps necessary for performance success.
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Sometimes Leaders Get Tossed From the Game on Purpose
Knowing a leader has your back and is willing to stand by you in difficult moments means the world to team members. We develop deep and loyal bonds with leaders who advocate strongly on our behalf and won’t let others speak poorly of us when we are not present to fight back.
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My Criticism Is the Highest Compliment I Can Pay You
Every leader, parent, and coach needs to make their good intentions known and not leave their desire to help others improve be left to interpretation.