Entrepreneur – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Miracle Minded Entrepreneur: How to Move Past Fear and Start Your Own Business

February 17, 2020/0 Comments/in Books, Career, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Ryan Shaw

Fear keeps us from doing a lot of things in our life, but if you can move past that fear and get out of your head, the possibilities become massive.

Today’s post is by John Murphy, author of Agent of Change (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

It was 1988 and I was suddenly unemployed. My position was being eliminated due to an acquisition. I was 28 years old and the sole breadwinner for my growing family. My wife was pregnant with our second child and we had very little savings. What should I do?

Logic suggested I polish up my resume and start interviewing for a similar job, head of human resources. Surely, with my credentials I could find something decent. I was also given a reasonable severance package, so I had a few months to figure things out. No need to panic.

That’s when creativity and innovation kicked in. Questions like What if, Why, and Why not started rolling around in my head, pushing logic aside. What if I do something different? What if I start my own consulting company? What if I figure out a way to be my own boss? Why do this? And, why not do it? Little did I know that these questions would spark a new, life-changing career for me.

Of course, fear kicked in too. I now think of these fears and doubts as the “Yeah, buts.” Yeah, but you don’t have any money to get started. Yeah, but you have a family to take care of. Yeah, but you don’t know anything about consulting. Yeah, but you don’t have any advanced degrees or credibility. Yeah, but you’re only 28 years old. Who is going to take you seriously as a consultant?

I gave these “Yeah, buts” a lot of thought. On the one hand, they seemed negative and restrictive. On the other hand, they served a useful purpose in identifying and mitigating risk. So, I used the “Yeah, buts” to come up with a business plan. Who knows? Maybe writing a business plan, with thorough research and analysis, will talk me out of my idea.

Developing Your Team Members

November 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

It’s never a great idea to work in a silo, but you also have make sure you’re working with a strong team. Learn about how you can strengthen your team and your leadership.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Personalizing Your Leadership Approach

Do you feel like you’re investing a ton of time in your people and not getting the results you expect? Do you have team members who are performing well, but you just can’t get them to improve? Are some of your team members disengaged and you worry about them leaving your organization?

I’ve dealt with all of these situations, and I’ve taught countless leaders how to overcome these challenges. As a result, I developed a framework called the Leadership Matrix to help deal with these issues. I’ve also written a book that explains this matrix in depth.

Here, I’ll cover how to assess how you’re spending your time and energy. How to reward and inspire your high performers. How to get results out of team members who aren’t contributing. How to train and motivate your low performers. And how to reclaim your time from team members who tend to waste it. By using this approach, you can generate better results by being more efficient in how you lead your team members.

Components of High-Performing Cultures

October 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership /by Ryan Shaw

Driving a strong business starts with the people who work for your business and those people align on the business through the company culture. How are you shaping yours?

A high performing culture is one where people drive performance because of the right behaviors. They’ve embedded these behaviors in their everyday life. People in high performing cultures require less supervision. They’re empowered to achieve goals that are consistent with the organization’s direction.

As a leader, you need to understand how to build a high performing culture and your responsibilities for making it happen. I found that there are six components to building a high performing culture.

First, you have to define the culture. What is a high performance? What are the desired behaviors? How will you know when you’ve achieved a high performing culture?

Second, set direction. What’s the vision for the organization? What’s the organization’s purpose? You have to be able to articulate this to the team. Third is communicating the culture. What are the communication vehicles and techniques you’re going to use to reinforce culture ever day?

The Basics of a Cross-Functional Team

October 16, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Almost all industries are segmented, but sometimes big changes require creating a team with representation from all sides of the business. Here are the basics of working with cross-functional teams.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Imagine an orchestra made up of nothing but trumpets. Imagine a baseball team of all catchers. Imagine a medical team that’s nothing but radiologists. Those aren’t good situations.

A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. It can include people from finance, marketing, operations and HR, and other key functional areas.

Employees from different levels usually participate on a cross-functional team. The team might include frontline operators, managers and directors, you may have analysts and project managers on the team. There may be other job families involved. These teams can also include people from outside the organization like suppliers, customers, or consultants. The important thing to note about a cross-functional team is you’re bringing together people with different experiences, different perspectives, and different skill sets to jointly solve a problem or implement an initiative.

Different perspectives and skills are designed to give you a higher chance of success since you’re involving relevant experts from relevant areas. If you get the opportunity to lead a cross-functional team, I encourage you to jump at that chance. You’re going to learn so much about different functions that you may never have experienced before and you’re going to see the power of bringing together those diverse perspectives and experiences and pointing them toward a common objective.

Leadership Capital and Keys to Leading Effectively

September 18, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Leadership isn’t an unlimited resource, because time isn’t an unlimited resource. Learn how to be a more effective and efficient leader.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Do you work a 40 hour week or are you working 24/7? How much effort are you putting into your work? How much stress do you experience from the energy you’re putting in? Your time and energy are finite resources. You can squeeze more time out by taking away from other activities in your life but you can’t do that forever. That time isn’t unlimited.

If you squeeze out too much, bad things can happen. I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve had two heart attacks because I was spending too much time and energy with my work. Something needs to change. To reduce the time you spend at work, reduce stress, and improve performance, you need to approach how you spend your time and energy differently.

Leadership capital is the time and energy you invest in leading your team. It needs to be invested carefully like any other scarce resource. When’s the last time you assessed where you’re spending your time and energy? Who are you spending it with? How are you spending it? Are you getting the results you want from those investments? These are all questions I want you to consider as you assess how you’re spending the valuable resource of your leadership capital.

Conveying Your Idea in the Right Way

July 31, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Getting your point or idea across to important stakeholders in a concise and simple way is the difference between getting approval and not.

What makes a presentation unsuccessful?

When you have a recommendation you’re trying to get approved within your organization, there are going to be a lot of stakeholders you have to get your idea in front of. You’ll have to put it in front of your manager, maybe their boss, a director, some vice presidents. Some of your ideas may even go all they up to the C-suite, and there’s something I like to call Figliuolo’s Law which states, an individual’s annual compensation is inversely proportional to the number of slides to look at before they have a stroke.

I’ve worked with a CEO who said, “If it has a staple, I won’t read it.” I worked closely with another CEO and we went in to present. The other team went to present first. He picked up their presentation, he felt it for heft, and it was only about 25 pages long, he threw it across the room and said, “Talk to me, what do you want? I’m busy.” Now, we knew better, we had presented to him before. Our presentation was three slides long. Effective communications is one of the most critical skills out there, but so many times we’re just flat-bad at it.

This isn’t about PowerPoint. This isn’t about presentations. This is all about the thinking that happens before you start writing that presentation. So let’s look at how we typically do things today.

First, we’ll start by doing a bunch of analysis because we have the data. We can slice it, we can dice it, we can create graphs and pivot tables. And once we get done with our analysis, we look for an insight. The graph went up and I thought it would go down. There must be an insight there. We then write a thick, incomprehensible, 80 page long presentation because we want to show everybody how rigorous we’ve been and how hard we’ve been working. We then go to share that presentation in a two-hour meeting, and people are watching the clock go round and round and round. And about 20 minutes in, you’ve lost them. People are falling asleep, people are on their phones. You don’t get your point across.

The negative impacts of this approach are huge. First, poor communication is inefficient. Most of that analysis you’ve done will not see the light of day. Most of the slides you put together for a presentation will never be shown. And after that meeting people walk out scratching their head and saying, “I don’t know what we just decided.” Well, you have to have another meeting. It’s a complete waste of time. It’s also ineffective. Your ideas don’t get approved if you’re not thoughtful about how you’re going to communicate, and what information you’re trying to get across, as well as what information you’re not going to share. The method is broken. We have to get better at communications. So what I’d like to offer is a very different process for thinking through how you’re going to construct and ultimately share your recommendations.

The structured thought process Read more