Our reader poll today asks: When you have a team member who is underperforming and avoiding contact with you, what do you do?
I keep reaching out and hoping they’ll respond 46.97%
I leave pointed messages about their need to engage 45.96%
I threaten consequences if they don’t engage 5.56%
I ignore the issue and hope they’ll come around 1.51%
Making the conversation happen. Virtually everyone in the survey this week responded that they don’t let it slide when they have an underperforming team member avoiding a feedback conversation. Instead they actively reach out (and sometimes very pointedly) to discuss performance and hopefully improve the situation. If you’re in the 1.5% of respondents who avoid the situation, take a hint from the other 98.5% of leaders in this poll and make the conversation happen. If someone isn’t performing well and they’re avoiding contact, they’re not going to suddenly come around and ask to discuss their performance. You’re doing them a disservice by not getting to the root of the performance issue as quickly as possible so things can be turned around before more damage is done.
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Thinking critically about the way your business runs can help you generate new ideas to run things better.
When you go to generate new ideas to run things better, you need to think critically about the way your business runs. I like to look at three things: a business model blowup, a revenue blowup, and a cost blowup.
On the business model blowup, fundamentally rethink about how you go to market, even rethink what your market actually is. You’re going to challenge the entire business model for the way you deliver products and services. On the revenue blowup side, how do you dramatically expand the products, your pricing, the geography, the reach of your business? And on the cost blowup, how do you fundamentally eliminate drag from the business, to become much more efficient?
One company I hold up as an example of one that fundamentally blew up the business, blew up the cost, blew up the revenues is Skybus Airlines. If you think back several years ago, the way the airline industry functioned, everybody was the same. Tickets were all bundled. They had a similar operational model, and prices were pretty predictable. Along came Skybus and they said, “We’re going to blow up the way all of this works. From now on, all meals were going to be paid for it individually.” And people were going to stop subsidizing the meals of other passengers by paying for a bundled ticket. They said, “Don’t call us. We’re not going to have a call center.” Call centers are very expensive to run. Skybus said, “We’re going to do everything online.” It’s a different customer service model. They said tickets aren’t refundable. It costs a lot of money to rebook passengers. They said, “Once you buy it, it’s done.” The impact of all these changes Skybus made because they thought critically about the business model, was pretty tremendous. They were able to sell tickets for $10 or $20 each way. Sure, some of the tickets on the plane cost $200 as you got closer to the flight time, but their pricing model by unbundling everything, and by reducing their overall cost structure, allowed them to compete differently.
I personally benefited. I took my entire family to California from Ohio for $200 total, each way. In the past, those tickets would have cost me thousands. Now, these changes that Skybus made were very radical and they were risky, and these risks won’t always play out well for you. One day, I was teaching a class on how innovative Skybus was and I was talking about how great their business model was. When I got home that night, and I went to book some new tickets on Skybus, I was greeted by a splash screen that said they were out of business. Now, even though Skybus wasn’t successful in the long-term, their critical thinking and looking at the business differently, altered the landscape. I’m sure if you fly today, you’ve noticed that pricing is unbundled. So, that critical thinking led to massive changes in a huge industry.
As you think about applying some of these critical thinking tools, let me offer you some questions you can ask. On the business model blowup, ask yourself, if we had to do over, what will we do differently? If we’re starting this business again today, what would we change? How would you double the size of whatever metric you care the most about is, in two years? That’s a huge goal. Doubling something? But it’s going to challenge you to look at your business differently. On the revenue blowup side, ask, who could create more value with our customers than we can? Who does it better? That’ll get you to look outside of your own walls at different ways of doing things. How would you triple your revenues or your profits within five years? Again, that big provocative number to get you to remove some of the constraints that you currently face. For the cost blowup, how would you run this business with 2/3 fewer people? Wow, new processes, new technologies, new ways of doing things. By making a massive cut, it’s going to force you to look at your business differently.
I love this one question. How would you eliminate your job? That’s pretty unnerving to say I want to put myself out of a role, but by asking that question, it forces you to think critically about the work that you do. What work should you stop doing? What work should you delegate to other members of your team? What work can you automate? And my last favorite question is, what’s the most wasteful thing we do as an organization? And what’s stopping us from stopping that? Look at your business. We all know where some of the waste is. Understanding what the waste is, and what the barriers are to eliminating it, can create new solutions for making your business more efficient and more effective.
So, as you look at your organization, ask yourself, how can you blow up the business model? How can you blow up the revenue side? How can you blow up the cost side? And those answers to those critical questions will help you identify new opportunities that can make your business much more competitive and much more effective.
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250409-Two-People-Looking-at-Graphs.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2025-04-09 06:32:262025-04-09 02:10:43Do You Challenge How Your Business Operates?
In the early 2000s, Tom Lee, a Harvard and Stanford-trained primary care physician, was frustrated by outdated, impersonal, and inefficient primary care delivery. Instead of accepting things as they were, he kept asking a deceptively simple question: “Why?”
Why do patients have to call to make an appointment?
Why can’t patients regularly get same-day or next-day appointments?
Why do patients wait in a waiting room and an exam room?
Why are doctor’s offices so bland?
Why do appointments feel rushed?
Why do doctors feel burned out?
And why does the system seem broken?
That persistent curiosity led Dr. Lee to build One Medical, a disruptive healthcare brand that blends hospitality, technology, and personalized care. The company grew from one office in San Francisco to over 200 across the U.S., ultimately attracting Amazon’s attention and culminating in a $4 billion purchase. All this happened because one leader kept asking why and refused to accept “we’ve always done it that way” as an answer.
Great leaders never stop asking why. Their insatiable curiosity is at the heart of every innovation, cultural shift, and lasting business transformation. I’ve studied and written about the importance of leadership and value creation in thirteen business books about companies like The Ritz-Carlton, Starbucks, and Mercedes-Benz.
In my new book, All Business is Personal, I explore how transformational leaders consistently elevate personal experiences for customers and employees. At One Medical, this starts with understanding everyday challenges faced by team members and patients and then designing processes and technologies that resolve those pain points. Visionary leaders challenge the status quo as they seek to make both iterative improvements and industry-changing, customer-centric breakthroughs.
Here are three takeaways from Dr. Tom Lee’s story and the broader story told in All Business is Personal—lessons any leader can apply immediately:
Ask Why—But Ask With Purpose
Leaders like Tom Lee ask why as a springboard to improved human experiences. The question opens the door to uncovering root causes and unleashing creativity and positive disruption. Whether you’re in healthcare, retail, finance, or manufacturing, build the habit of asking:
Why do we do it this way?
Why does our process create friction for customers or employees?
Why are past attempts to address this issue not creating a lasting solution?
Asking with curiosity—not criticism—builds trust and inspires innovation. The best ideas often come from frontline team members, and our job as leaders is to create an environment where team members can and will offer ideas that lead to better human experiences.
Design with Empathy for Efficiency
Tom Lee’s redesign of the primary care experience didn’t begin with technology or cost-saving goals. It began with empathy. He adopted the perspective of patients and healthcare providers. In essence, he asked,
What would make a primary care visit more humane, respectful, and accessible?
With a foundation in empathy, many of One Medical’s breakthroughs have been technological (e.g., a proprietary medical record, a highly used patient app). These technologies allow patients to self-serve efficiently while offering team members more time to engage patients personally.
From a leadership standpoint, empathetic design leverages customer and employee feedback to develop customer-centric improvements in people, products, processes, and technology.
Lead Change by Modeling Curiosity
Culture flows from the top. If your team sees you asking questions, listening to feedback, and adapting based on what you learn, they’ll act accordingly. If you provide all the answers, interrupt, and seek quick fixes – so will they.
Whether you lead five people or five thousand, your lasting leadership impact will likely be shaped more by the questions you bravely ask instead of the answers you quickly give.
The One Medical story, one I’ve been blessed to be a part of as a customer experience and leadership consultant, shows that balancing cutting-edge technology with human service creates personal and loyalty-building relationships with team members and customers. That successful and innovative balance starts with a single question:
Why?
If you ask “why” often and listen well, your customers and employees will respond with loyalty, trust, and four billion reasons to keep asking.
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Our reader poll today asks: How do you handle it when external parties (family, friends) influence your team members in unproductive ways?
I focus on their performance and ignore those external influencers 28.68%
I offer my concerns that those parties are having unproductive influence 27.97%
I tell them to stop listening to those parties and explain there will be consequences 4.19%
I seek to understand those parties’ concerns and alleviate them 39.16%
Understand External Influences. As much as people like to keep work as work and home as home, it’s impossible to keep home from impacting work and vice versa. If you’re dealing with a team member who clearly has personal relationships impacting their work, the vast majority of you seek to understand what’s going on (39%) or go even further and express concerns about the impact those other people are having on the team member’s work (28%). Simply sticking your head in the sand and avoiding the conversation seems imprudent for the 29% of you who ignore those situations. Take some time to understand what’s going on in their lives. Find out who’s impacting them in negative ways and why it’s happening. You might not be able to do anything about those negative influences but you may at least be able to alleviate concerns and minimize their impact on your team members’ performance.
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Understanding the real cause of your problem and considering the consequences of potential solutions can help you make better decisions.
The final thing you should think about as you’re trying to define your problem is causality. I’ve mentioned thinking about causes and consequences. That applies to thinking through how you’re going to define the problem in the first place. You should understand, are some elements of the problem you’re trying to solve derived from other problems or other related elements? How does this problem tie to other issues in your organization? What’s the real root cause of the problem? Remember, we don’t want to solve symptoms; this is about solving the right problem the first time around. Does solving this really mean solving that much deeper or proceeding problem? The more you can get to the root, the more effective you’re going to be in preventing future problems in the organization.
Once you’ve solved it and you come up with that recommendation, think forward about these consequences. Are there organizational, customer, competitor repercussions to anticipate? If you make this change, how will everybody else behave? Are you really clear about chronology and what causes what causes what? Laying out that path that says, if I do this, then this might happen, then this might happen is going to help you predict some of the outcomes that you could face. And if those might be bad outcomes, it can impact the type of recommendation you make in the first place to be able to avoid those issues down the road. Understanding those causes, and then the effects of your recommendation is going to help you solve the real problem and avoid unintended consequences.
Tying to my example when we were changing agency commissions as a collections organization, we understood that the real issue was incentives weren’t aligned. We had two teams working on this issue. One team was my team and we were trying to drive overall collections performance. The other team that was involved was the agency management team. What that team was trying to drive was a very different set of metrics in terms of reducing the amount of money that we were spending with those particular agencies. Those goals were in conflict. So a way that we got past that was we created one single team with one clear objective that would help both of our organizations succeed.
Now, our recommendation was to change the commissions we were going to pay these agencies. By paying them more money, we were going to get them to focus more on our work versus our competitor’s work that they were also being outsourced. Now, this would be great in the short term. Those agencies would change their performance, dedicate more of their efforts to our work, and a side benefit was they would ignore our competitor’s.
But let’s think about the repercussions. And we said, if we make that change, well, I’m pretty sure our competitors are going to make similar changes as soon as they find out what we’ve done. And then it really became a race to the bottom on pricing. So if we raise the commissions, our competitors would raise the commissions, and we’d have to raise them and they’d raise them. So we needed to make sure whatever solution we came up with we’d be able to avoid those types of consequences. This critical thinking time helped us come up with a better recommendation that met the needs of all the stakeholders involved and helped us avoid some downstream negative consequences.
For a problem you’re solving, spend that time thinking about causality. What’s the real cause of the issue? What are the consequences you might face? And then document those thoughts in your problem statement so you keep them top of mind as you’re coming up with your recommendations.
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Our reader poll today asks: What is the biggest challenge you face when delivering difficult feedback?
I get emotional too easily 5.98%
I have a hard time separating the behavior from the person 18.91%
I struggle to offer concrete behavior change suggestions 10.94%
I soften the message too much and the feedback doesn’t “land” 47.76%
Something else 16.41%
Don’t Soft-Peddle Feedback. A large percentage of you report softening your feedback messages too much and they’re not received correctly. This comes from a desire to be liked. We believe if we offer critical feedback that the recipient won’t like us therefore we soften the message to stay liked. Unfortunately you’re doing them (and yourself) a disservice. They’re not hearing input that is designed to improve their performance which means they’ll continue making the same mistakes or demonstrating unproductive behaviors. For you, you’ll have to continue dealing with the issue instead of correcting it. There are feedback models that focus on the behavior and not the person (which will also help the 19% of you who said you have trouble with that aspect of feedback). If you can remember to focus on the behavior and not the person and recognize you’re providing them useful input that they’ll appreciate if it’s delivered well, you’ll be able to offer more effective feedback.
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Looking at a problem from different angles may help you uncover a solution you never would have seen before.
Another set of critical thinking tools for defining your problem is looking at the problem through new lenses. Can you change the point of view? Can you change context? And can you change reality? Let’s look at what those mean.
Changing point of view. How is the problem defined from the perspective of the CEO, of the frontline staff, of customers, of adjacent groups? They’re all going to look at the problem in different ways, and they’ll define it differently depending upon their point of view. The problem will look very different from 10,000 feet versus 50 feet.
In terms of changing context, can you reimagine the problem in new ways? We tend to come at the problem from our own functional perspective. If I work in finance, well, it’s going to be a finance problem. If somebody works in IT, they’ll look at the same thing and say, “No, it’s an IT problem.” So, can you change the context in terms of how you’re defining the problem?
And can you change reality? Ask yourself, “What if? What if I removed some of these constraints? What if I had some of these resources? What if I was able to do this instead of that?” By changing reality, you may find a different way to define the problem that enables you to pursue different opportunities. By looking at the problem in new ways, you’re going to get a clear sense of direction around what the real issue is, such that you can generate some innovative and insightful solutions.
Let me tie back to a collections example, where we were solving the problem and we saw it as an agency management issue. It was about relationship management with our collections agencies, and that’s how we were going to improve their performance. Other people saw it as a strategy problem. Should we be outsourcing or insourcing those activities? Other people saw the performance issue as a commission or pricing problem. Were the commissions and incentives we were giving these agencies correct? Or should we change them to improve performance? Other people saw it as a training issue in terms of the frontline staff. Were we giving them the tools and techniques and training that was required for them to perform effectively? So, looking at the problem from very different points of view led us to other possible solutions.
So, I want you to take a problem you’re looking at and ask, “Can I change my point of view?” And if you struggle with this, if you’re so tied into your functional area, go find somebody from another group. Explain the problem to them, ask them how they would define the problem. Use their perspective to generate that different point of view.
Spending this critical thought around looking at the problem from different angles and understanding what aspects of it can change may help you uncover that one really big solution that you never would have seen with your very limited scope. So, spend the time in this critical thought, stepping back from the problem, and really asking, “Is there a different way to define it?”
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Maintaining your cool and being in a state of equilibrium is a huge asset in a negotiation. When the other party loses it, you benefit by staying calm instead.
Today’s post is by Corey Kupfer, author of Authentic Negotiating
Most negotiating articles, books, training programs and other resources focus on techniques, tactics and counter-tactics. These, however, are often ineffective, manipulative and inauthentic and, even when good, are not the key to true negotiating success. Authentic negotiating is the secret to true negotiating success and there are three keys to authentic negotiating:
Clarity: Authentic negotiators know what will and won’t work for them on every significant term, and what their true bottom line is – from a place of clarity, not ego.
Detachment: Authentic negotiators can walk away from a negotiation with no hesitation – not from a place of anger or upset, but from a place of detachment with no judgment or hard feelings.
Equilibrium: Authentic negotiators don’t let emotions dictate their actions. Instead, they maintain equilibrium during the heat of tough negotiation to stay present and preserve their clarity and detachment.
Although each of the components of this CDE core framework are important, in this post, I am going to focus power of equilibrium – the third key to true negotiating success.
Several years ago, I received a telephone call from an attorney, Henry, who was representing clients on the other side of an unhappy split of a business partnership between three guys. I represented one of the three partners, and he represented the other two. Henry called me up, yelling and screaming and threatening my client with all sorts of dire consequences. My client happened to be a lawyer, although the business he was in with the other two was not related to the law. This bullying attorney was saying, “He’s going to lose his law license” and “He’s unethical,” neither of which was true. Henry was emotionally involved. He had lost his equilibrium.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/20250325-Balanced-Rocks.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2025-03-25 08:02:452025-03-25 03:52:53Why Equilibrium is the Key to Achieving True Negotiating Success
Our reader poll today asks: How is your organization handling remote work these days?
Everyone is free to work fully remote as they desire 10.77%
People are free to work remotely with explicit permission 19.24%
Only select people can work remotely because of their job responsibilities 24.61%
Everyone is encouraged to work from the office 22.05%
Everyone is required to work from the office 23.33%
Back to the Office. The majority of you report that most employees are encouraged or required to work from office with few exceptions (69% of total fall in these categories). If you’re back in the office, make the most of it. Don’t hide out at your desk. Deliberately make an effort to meet with others, network, and collaborate. While I’m not advocating meetings for the sake of meeting, I am encouraging you to work with others when the occasion calls for it. Resist the urge to fall into remote behaviors when you’re somewhere in person. You can forge stronger interpersonal connections, reduce the possibility of misunderstandings that can occur via video/email/text, and feel more connected to your work. For those of you still working remotely, consider going into the office occasionally for these collaborative reasons. If the majority of your organization is in person, you risk being left out, forgotten, or left behind if no one ever sees you in person. Again, connect in person deliberately and for specific reasons but do make the effort to connect.
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Asking and answering these focusing questions can help you think of better solutions to your problems.
As you define your problem, you should ask and answer some focusing questions to help you bound the solution space. You should ask things like, “What’s the real question?” Specify the objectives and timing that that stakeholder has asked of you. Ask, “Who are the stakeholders or influencers who are involved in the decision? Who can support it and who can derail it?”
You should articulate how you’re going to measure success. Lay out what the quantitative and qualitative measures are going to be so you know on the backend if you’ve really solved the problem. Ask the specific scope. What is or is not included in the space you’re looking at? And lastly, understand the constraints that you face. By answering all of these questions and spending this time in critical thought, you’re going to have a much more clearly bounded problem space.
Let me offer an example of how I use these focusing questions to help bound a problem space. In my past, I worked for a credit card company and I was responsible for some of our collections. The way we collected our money back from consumers who owed us was we outsourced these activities to external agencies. The problem we were asked to solve was to improve the performance of those agencies.
So first, we looked at the objectives. We wanted to reduce costs, increase our collections, and make those changes by the end of the year. So we bounded the space in terms of what success looked like. We then had to think through the influencers and stakeholders. We looked at IT and finance because anything we did was going to require technology changes and any changes in the commissions that we paid was going to impact finance. We then looked at the cost per dollar collected, the commission rate, and we also looked at some qualitative metrics of success.
In terms of bounding the solution space, we looked at specific lines of business. We had 10 business units. For this initial solution, we were going to only focus on two of them. And we had to understand the constraints to that space. There were legal and regulatory issues that we had to consider. We had time constraints, remember, end of year, and we also had some budget constraints. We would only be able to spend this much money on IT and this much on commissions.
By asking and answering these focusing questions, we had a better sense of what that box around our problem looked like. So when we found a solution, there was a higher likelihood that we would solve within that box which would then meet our stakeholders’ needs.
Take a look a problem you’re trying to solve. Ask and answer these focusing questions. The time you spend in the critical thinking required to come up with these answers will help ensure that the solution you come up with is going to meet your stakeholders’ needs.
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Writing a book is the best thing a thought leader can do to raise their authority in their field. Here is a step-by-step guide to making your book a reality.
Today’s post is by Zach Obront, co-founder of Scribe Media.
Melissa Gonzalez was frustrated.
As an expert in the field of pop-up retail, she worked with companies like Marc Jacobs, Chanel, and Google to create incredible short-term retail experiences.
Those in the industry — including the companies she worked with, her competitors, and her colleagues — knew she was the the person in the field. She was the industry expert.
But when the media was looking for someone to interview on the growing pop-up retail trend, Melissa was rarely the one they called on. In fact, it wasn’t even her top competitor who would be quoted in the media.
It was the people who had written books on the topic.
Melissa decided she needed to write a book. She had the knowledge and the wisdom, but she had one problem: she didn’t have the time.
This is a challenge many thought leaders face. As the experts in their fields, staying on the cutting edge by living in the trenches every day, they don’t have time to write and publish their work.
I worked with Melissa to help her take her ideas and turn them into a book in less time. I’d like to share the process we used with you, in hopes that you use it to take action and create a great book.
Step 1: Positioning
The first step in writing a book, and the most often neglected is to get as clear as possible on your book’s positioning.
Too many authors decide to write a book, and their first action is to sit down and start writing. This is totally wrong, and is a major factor that leads to hundreds of hours of edits and revision.
Instead, before you put pen to paper, spend some time answering these questions:
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/20250318-Library-Books.jpg?fit=1920%2C1278&ssl=112781920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2025-03-18 08:02:422025-03-18 01:03:41How Writing a Book Builds Your Credibility as a Thought Leader
Our reader poll today asks: When you take vacation, upon your return, what situation do you typically face?
My colleagues have covered for me when I was gone and I only have a few pending tasks 21.59%
Some work was covered but much of it is left for me to do 48.02%
No one did anything for me and I returned to a mountain of work 30.39%
Cover me. 22% of you have colleagues who pick up the slack when you’re out on vacation and you come back to a nice clean desk. That’s a wonderful situation – just make sure you do the same for them when they take time off. For those of you who return to a big pile of work, ask yourself – did you ask colleagues to cover for you and did you give them the information they’d need to get the work done? Did you provide system access? Forwarding instructions on your out of office message? Did you ask them if they’d be willing and able to cover specific tasks while you were gone? Simply taking off for your trip and hoping someone will step up and take on your work is a recipe for disappointment. If you want them to handle your work while you’re gone, be explicit, give them the information and access they need, and get their agreement before packing your bags.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/20140203-EKG-Pulse-Graph-with-Glowing-Blue-Line-Narrow.jpg?fit=833%2C258&ssl=1258833Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2025-03-13 13:00:422025-03-10 21:24:10When you take vacation, upon your return, what situation do you typically face?
