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

Providing Resources to Reach Goals

March 29, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

If you don’t give your teams the resources they need, they’re not going to hit their goals.

Once your goals are set, you have a responsibility to provide the team the resources it needs to achieve those goals. These resources should be identified during the goal-setting process. Include those resources in budgets and project plans. Failure to conduct resource planning and allocation is going to frustrate your teams. They won’t have what they need to achieve their goals.

At the business unit level of goal setting, resource allocation can be easier in some respects, and more difficult in others. The ways it can be easier are first, you have more control over your business unit’s resources. You can shift those resources more easily. There are also known processes like budgeting that can be linked to your goal-setting process. This ensures that the resources are available for the goals you’ve set.

Now it can be more difficult, too. Getting additional resources outside your business unit can be a challenge. Those resources have to come from higher levels, or you have to negotiate with other business units to get resources allocated to you. It’s not often they’ll give those resources up. If you don’t allocate resources during the budgeting process, you either have to either wait to shift resources or reprioritize all your other efforts due to this new goal.

Review goals that are falling short in your organization. Make sure they’ve got the right resources. If they don’t, shift them appropriately. Ensure your goal setting, budgeting, talent management, and staffing processes have explicit links to one another.

If you don’t give your teams the resources they need, they’re not going to hit their goals. Conversely, if you really think through the goals you’re trying to hit and make sure they’re appropriately resourced, your teams are going to drive the success that you expect.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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How Organizations Get Employee Engagement Wrong

March 27, 2023/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Employees now expect more. Employee engagement is key to success for most organizations. If we understand the typical and recurring mistakes made in this field, we can predict and prevent them happening to us.

Today’s guest post is by Frank Devine, author of RAPID MASS ENGAGEMENT: Driving Continuous Improvement Through Employee Culture Creation (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

The Roll-out Assumption

During a visit to one of the sites where my Rapid Mass Engagement (RME) process had been implemented, a group of senior visitors toured the site guided by a shop-floor employee who outlined the new high-performance culture. The visitors could see and feel the culture and were impressed by the ‘Behavioral Standards’ – behaviorally specific standards designed to make accountability both easy and transparent developed from employee data and created by employees. One of the visitors informed the guide that they were going to take these away and ‘roll them out’ in the visitors’ own organization.

The employee guide looked deflated and when asked why, explained:

“If you think you can roll these out, I have not explained properly how they were created … and who owns them.”

This roll-out assumption is common. In one site the employees added the following to the organization’s Behavioral Standards:

“Warning: attempts to apply these standards without the process that created them will only disappoint.”

Ownership matters and creates discretionary effort and engagement, and anything rolled-out, by definition, is not owned by those on the receiving end.

Engagement without Enablement

Imagine you do what it takes to create a highly engaged workforce, but employees then crash into overcautious and inflexible legacy systems. Our HR and Quality policies, how we recruit and promote, how early we involve end-users in the design of equipment and software can all be designed to maximize enablement, but frequently suffer from producer capture.

Failing to quickly and systematically align systems to your nascent emerging culture, will mean you have highly engaged employees, but working for another organization.

Squashing Ownership, Solution Space and Discretionary Effort with Unnecessary Standardization

Western universities and organizations dominate thinking and research in areas such as leadership and engagement. In addition, our understanding of improvement science (Lean/Six Sigma, etc., however described) means we first create standards before attempting to improve them.

Why is this a problem? I have seen many examples of corporate functions specifying the color, the size, even the font to be used in visual management.

Why do we think corporate knows best? Why carelessly disregard the mountain of goodwill, ownership and discretionary effort available by letting a thousand flowers bloom, by encouraging local people to create their own?

If you have multiple locations worldwide, allow each to design their own approaches to visual management or, as in the example above, how they codify and articulate their high-performance culture. Give them the maximum solution space and they will fill it with locally resonant and authentic words owned by the employees concerned.

Naïve Engagement

I often hear comments such as “no-one comes to work to do a bad job.” The danger is when this is followed by a logical leap such as “all we have to do is empower our teams and they will do a great job.”

In corporate life, I designed the training for CarnaudMetalbox’s Self-Directed Work Teams (called ‘Autonomous Manufacturing Teams’ in French); the key was ensuring clearly defined scope and responsibilities.

If we create a power vacuum the only thing that is certain is that the power vacuum will be filled. The hope is that a highly motivated self-directed work team will always fill this vacuum, but that cannot be relied upon. It some cases this naïve assumption led to systematic restriction of output, bullying and abuse of vulnerable employees.

Random outcomes are the opposite of high performance. Some of my work comes from helping readdress the damage caused by such policy failures which ignore everything we have learned from FMEA and Human Factors in other contexts.

Timid Engagement: Wishing the Ends without Willing the Means

An executive from a global organization who had visited a RME site contacted me.

He told me he was very impressed by the culture he had experienced on the site and the impact on quality, customer service and productivity and he wanted that for his organization.

We discussed what was involved in creating such a high-performance culture and his enthusiasm declined rapidly. This is common.

This was one of many examples of people willing the ends without the will to enact the means necessary to achieve those ends.

In the senior team diagnostic workshops that are the 1^st stage of RME, it is common for at least some of the senior team to imagine that transformational outputs can be achieved with conventional ‘safe’ inputs; they can’t.

Shiny and New

I have worked with tens of thousands of employees in highly participative workshops where, in the early stages of culture change, cynicism about ‘management’ is common. Employees often tell me of an interesting coping mechanism. Having experienced a high turnover of senior leaders and initiatives they advise their peers to smile at the new leaders and make encouraging noises. They go on to say “this initiative won’t last very long and then another shiny and new initiative will be launched that we can give superficial commitment to! It seems to make them happy.”

Why exhaust yourself launching and re-launching initiatives top-down when it is possible to gain employee ownership of change and culture from the bottom-up. This will maintain the humor but also create and sustain meaningful change!

Frank Devine, author of RAPID MASS ENGAGEMENT: Driving Continuous Improvement Through Employee Culture Creation, founder of Accelerated Improvement, Ltd., specializes in creating a High Performance continuous improvement culture from the bottom-up.

For more information please visit https://www.acceleratedimprovement.co.uk/

What would your team members say is your greatest strength?

March 23, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: What would your team members say is your greatest strength?

Your inspirational leadership 9.73%
Your ability to develop their skills 9.73%
Your strategic vision and ability to innovate 12.98%
Your decisiveness 9.19%
Your caring, empathy and compassion 43.25%
Your ability to influence others 9.72%
Something else 5.40%

Caring counts. While many of these leadership traits had some decent representation, far and away was the importance of caring, empathy, and compassion. People want to work for people who care about them. They’re willing to forgive mistakes when it comes to decisions, strategy, and influence if they know you genuinely care about them. When was the last time you sat down with your team members and expressed genuine concern for them? How often do you take time to listen to them and empathize with the challenges they face? A caring leader is one they’re willing to confide in and work hard for. Make the investment in demonstrating you truly care about them.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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Communicating Goals to Your Organization

March 22, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities.

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. People in your department need to understand how their own goals, as well as the goals of their colleagues, tie to the broader organization goals. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities. Sometimes you’ll find people are working at cross purposes. When communicating goals, provide broader strategic context for why goals were chosen and how they tie to the broader organization success.

I worked with one client that was really focused on changing their business performance. They wanted to improve their gross margins. So they got everybody together and made sure they understood how everybody’s goals tied to this higher-level gross margin goal. The supply chain team was given goals around making their top products more profitable. The marketing team was given a goal of emphasizing the most profitable products in the portfolio. Product teams were given SKU rationalization goals to thin the portfolio and remove less profitable products. The sales team was given the goal of selling the more profitable products.

Everyone in the division knew what everybody else was doing. It prevented arguments, like sales reps demanding low margin products or sales reps yelling at product teams for removing a SKU. All goals were communicated by the business unit president at an all-hands meeting. They all heard the same message at the same time.

For your organization, get your business unit and partner organizations together. Compare goals. Figure out how you’ll communicate it to your entire organization at the same time, so everyone knows and understands the context. Having this clarity at the highest level and making sure that all the goals are aligned is going to reduce conflict in the organization and improve the likelihood that you hit your numbers.

How effective is your manager at creating a meeting environment where everyone is comfortable participating?

March 16, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How effective is your manager at creating a meeting environment where everyone is comfortable participating?

They’re great at it. They create space for everyone to participate comfortably 27.52%
They’re good at it. They create some space but tend to drive the discussion 24.84%
They’re OK at it. They drive most of the discussion and get some input 18.12%
They’re not good at it. They drive the discussion and don’t solicit much input 16.77%
They’re bad at it. They dominate the discussion and no one feels comfortable joining in 12.75%

Create the space. 48% of you report that your manager doesn’t do a great job of creating space for discussion. They just drive the conversation to get to their own chosen endpoint. That likely feels frustrating and unfulfilling for their team members. Now the real question – how would your team members answer this question about you? Seeing how easy it is for your managers to miss the mark on this one, it’s not a stretch to think that you might demonstrate some of the same behaviors. Be honest with yourself. Keep track of how much you talk during a meeting and how much others participate. Look at the balance of what you say. Do you make more statements or ask more questions? That’s a good indicator of how inviting your environment is. Get input from others. You hired them because they’re smart. They stay because they feel like they contribute and have an impact. Create that space for them to do so.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Reality Checking Your Goals

March 15, 2023/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. Watch out for conflicting goals.

It’s important to reality check your goals. Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. You’ll need to evaluate how department goals impact one another. If you set a goal for revenue growth, and another goal for cost cutting, you may have created an impossible situation for the team. They can’t spend money to drive revenue because they’re so focused on cost cutting. It’s this kind of reality checking that leads to more reasonable and achievable results.

What I’d suggest is get all your organization’s goals together on a whiteboard. Start with the high-level corporate goals, then lay out your business unit’s or department’s goals. Lay out adjacent business units or functions. Look for dependencies. Look for supporting goals and look for conflicting goals. Go through the same exercise for the teams in your organization.

For supporting goals, make sure there’s no overlap. You don’t want people working on redundant things or getting double credit for going after the same work. For places where there are dependencies of goals, make sure the first goal is properly resourced so the follow-on goal can be met. Also lay out for that second goal the risk in hitting it if the first one isn’t achieved.

In situations where you have conflicting goals, try to get them aligned. You can eliminate one of the goals or carve out the impact of one goal on another. For example, if you have a cost-reduction goal, lower the revenue goal since you can’t market as much since you’ve decided you’re not going to spend. It’s this kind of reality checking, where you take a step back and look at the overall goals and the behaviors that are driven, that’s going to increase the likelihood you hit your most important goals and don’t cause frustration for your team.

This reality check is something that I see people miss all the time. They lay out their goals, their goals are smart, they’re focused, and they understand the behaviors they need to drive, but they never take that extra minute to say, “How do these goals impact one another?” If you do that kind of integrative thinking and look across all your goals, you’re going to spot the trouble spots and understand what you need to change before you launch your team out on its work.

What if the future of our businesses depends upon our ability to be un-business-like?

March 13, 2023/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Why are memorial services celebrating the life of a loved one who has passed always convened around candlelight, music, and poetry and not around bright lights, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets?

Today’s guest post is by Dr. Robert H. Lengel, author of A Place For T: Giving Voice To The Tortoise In Our Hare-Brained World (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Why are memorial services celebrating the life of a loved one who has passed or that bring communities of diverse people together after a tragedy like a human-caused tragedy or natural disaster always convened around candlelight, music, and poetry and not around bright lights, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets? Memorial services are meetings around the most significant emotional and spiritual events in our lives – not about budgets or cost overruns that seem insignificant in comparison. They serve to help people who might or might not know each other find a sense of presence with change and hold hands to risk moving forward. Change always involves grieving the death of something old and mustering the courage to accept the birth of something new. I think it’s time to shed some new light on how we meet to achieve change.

Nothing would be more un-business-like than convening a business meeting in candlelight with music and poetry and nothing would be less human-like than convening a memorial service in bright lights with agendas, charts, and graphs. We need to recognize that not all meetings are the same. I think there is a practical business lesson here – at times our task requires us to be impractical and un-business-like. Those times are turning points in the life of an organization when change, creativity, and innovation become a survival necessity and people need to support each other as human beings in changing themselves.

The lesson is simple. Organizations exist at two levels of reality. The most obvious surface level represents the brightly lit performance stage on which human beings act out their defined roles. It consists of structures, organization charts, systems, goals, regulations, policies, plans, and job descriptions. These elements are visible and difficult to ignore in our day-to-day work. There is a deeper underlying level of reality, however, that is only visible in candlelight. That fragile flame reflects the spirit of loving, compassionate, forgiving, respectful, and collaborative human beings conscious of their common mortality and their insignificance in the face of the night sky. Any change strategy is more likely to be effective if we could work with these human beings and not the entrenched role players who have a stake in the status quo.

We look more like each other in candlelight than we do in the roles we play under the bright stage lights in the conference room. In this light, people are more open to change and ready to support each other in risking it. Issues like trust, poor communications, broken relationships, lack of employee engagement and buy-in, and leadership development are barriers to change that are amplified in bright light and defused in candlelight. These barriers are surface-level issues that can only be addressed at the deeper level of organizational reality. To prepare people to transcend these barriers and achieve real and sustainable change, it is necessary to reveal them as human beings beneath their business suits. Shouldn’t our meetings about change topics be more like memorial services that invite emotional and spiritual presence than agenda-controlled and facilitated meetings that intentionally deny that presence?

We need to better appreciate the effect of how we illuminate our meeting places. For decades I have been experimenting with ways to bring the spirit of candlelight into meetings where it makes sense to do so. I have just published a book entitled A Place for T: Giving Voice to the Tortoise in Our Hare-Brained World where I share my learnings. My book launch events communicate my message with a simple experience. I begin my presentation in a brightly lit room with shuttered windows. On a table in front of the room, I have lit candles. After a short PowerPoint introduction, I shut down my computer, turn out the room lights, play reflective music, and let my audience sit in silence before I continue. Now those flickering flames become the focus of attention. Then I ask them to share what they experienced with the change in lighting. They naturally get it and awaken to the deeper level of reality without me lecturing to them.

Our human consciousness is mirrored in those candle flames. They awaken the human being within us. People who sometimes feel lost, unappreciated, and alone in the roles they play, sense a call home to what they really care about. Now I can talk to an audience that is prepared to be intimately connected to what I have to say and prepared to engage in meaningful dialogue. Isn’t this what organizational leaders really want – to have employees who are intimately connected to what they have to say and fully engaged? But I fear these leaders are a bit afraid of the darkness and don’t trust what might emerge.

Lack of trust might be the biggest barrier to change. If you want trust, then trust. Creating candle lit meeting places challenges leaders to let go of the need to control and trust the natural capacities of employees to do what is right and good for the organization. As I look back on my experiences, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the potential inherent in the natural emergence of change as a product of learning and for the natural emergence of leaders as needed. In their busy lives, employees might have forgotten how to talk to each other, what conditions they need to learn together, and how to lead in their own way. But if the lighting is not blinding them to the fragile candle flame, they will help each other naturally remember that they already know these things. I have seen this emergence happen too often to ignore it. We just need to create the meeting conditions, a meeting place, that invites the conversations we need to have, not the ones we assume we should have. The most critical condition might be how the ‘place’ is illuminated. I think senior leaders need to muster the courage to occasionally turn down the house lights and risk being un-business-like in candlelight. We all look better in candlelight.

Dr. Robert H. Lengel is Associate Professor emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio, president of the consulting firm LeaderWork Inc., and author of the new book A Place For T: Giving Voice To The Tortoise In Our Hare-Brained World. He holds a BS and MS in aerospace engineering, an MBA, and a PhD that blended oceanography, environmental management, leadership and organizational dynamics in business. For more information, please visit www.APlaceForT.com

In team meetings, how good are you at creating an environment where everyone is comfortable participating?

March 9, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: In team meetings, how good are you at creating an environment where everyone is comfortable participating?

I’m great at it. Everyone offers their thoughts and I just guide the discussion: 17.95%
I’m good at it. Most people offer thoughts and I drive some of the discussion: 58.98%
I’m OK at it. I drive a lot of the discussion and offer some time for input: 17.44%
I’m not good at it. I have to actively remind myself to create space and not dominate the discussion: 5.12%
I’m poor at it. I dominate the discussion and no one feels comfortable joining in: 0.51%

Know your role. Most of you self-report that you’re pretty good at creating an environment where people feel comfortable participating in your meetings. Recognize that you might feel this way but they might not. A key to running collaborative meetings is clearly defining your role in leading it. If you want to create that collaborative environment, designate yourself as a facilitator. Challenge yourself to only ask questions or hold yourself to asking at least one question before you offer your own thoughts or opinions on a topic. Try defining meeting success as the participants generating and owning the outcome rather than trying to steer participants toward what you believe the outcome should be. This means releasing your own agenda, setting aside your ideas, and being open to different ways of doing things. This will be uncomfortable for many of you but the benefits are a more engaged team that’s more committed to executing the outcome they defined.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Setting Commit and Stretch Goals

March 8, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

A commit goal gives your team a clear target to aim for, while a stretch goal gives your team an incentive to go above and beyond.

A goal setting technique designed to provide predictability and generate excitement and upside potential is setting commit and stretch goals. The commit goal is a promise of what will be delivered. It’s non-negotiable. Missing it has big consequences. The stretch goal is something for the team to aspire to. If they reach it, the rewards can be really large.

Let me walk through an example of what this can look like. Let’s say we have a corporate profit target of $150 million. Each business unit is given a portion of that target. And when you add those up, it’s $155 million because we want to have a hedge in this situation. Those are commit numbers. One business unit has a $40 million commit and a $45 million stretch. Let’s say at the end of the year they come in at $41 million. Well, they get 20% of the extra bonus that’s available because they got one million of the five million possible.

Let’s say another business unit had a goal of $50 million as their commit. They come in at 45 million. It’s a bad year. No bonuses and poor reviews are going to follow in the performance management process. Another business unit has a $27 million commit and a $30 million stretch. They come in at $32 million through some really good luck and a lot of hard work. That team should get 166% of the possible bonus if it’s an uncapped bonus structure.

The final business unit has a commit of $38 million and a stretch of 45 million. They come in at 40 million and they get a 28% of the available bonus. The corporate result of this entire goal-setting structure is coming in at $158 million on a corporate commit of 155 from this business unit.

When you look at setting these commits and these stretches, it’s pretty clear that the team knows what they have to hit with the commit. They understand what the consequences are. Having the stretch gives them that incentive to work even harder and deliver above and beyond.

One thing I invite you to do is to create a commit and a stretch for all major metrics for your organization. Ensure there are consequences for missing the commit. Make sure there are rewards commensurate with hitting the stretch. By laying out these goals and letting people know broadly across the organization what the commit and stretch are, as well as the consequences and rewards, you can drive exactly the behaviors you want to hit your higher level goals.

Four Powerful Mindset Shifts To Help You Conquer Love, Overcome Death, And Succeed In Business

March 6, 2023/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

These four mindset shifts can help you create winning strategies in both your business life and your personal life.

Today’s guest post is by Alex Brueckmann, author of Secrets of Next-Level Entrepreneurs (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Sitting on the balcony of our apartment in New Westminster, Canada, I hold my baby boy and reflect on the past few months. After everything that happened, I’m amazed that I made it through without breaking down mentally. I recall founding a new business while my girlfriend navigated a challenging pregnancy, and my father fought terminal cancer.

My emotions were erratic, and I felt pulled in different directions, trying to be present for my girlfriend, dad, mom, and clients all at the same time. Things spiraled downward, and my father passed away shortly before the birth of my son. I was overcome by a mix of grief and joy, and at the same time, we relocated from Germany to Canada amidst the start of a global pandemic.

This was in the Spring of 2020, and I realized that a few mindset shifts helped me navigate these challenging months. Adjusting your mindset allows you to focus on thinking smarter, more complex, with more ingenuity, and finding multiple paths to success. Let’s explore four mindset shifts that will help you succeed.

Embrace JOMO, because YOLO

The first shift is from FOMO to JOMO. The fear of missing out is that feeling when everyone around you is raving about a new artist, and you feel like the only one who hasn’t heard of them. But you buy tickets, just in case, because everyone else is doing it, and you don’t want to miss out.

If we allow fear to drive our decisions, we waste our biggest asset, our attention, on things that don’t matter. In business, this can lead to poor job performance, lack of career advancement, or even job loss. On a corporate level, FOMO can lead to “me-too” strategies, with companies copying whatever their competition does first. However, success comes from clarity, direction, and differentiation, not copying others.

To shift from FOMO to JOMO, the joy of missing out, we need to define our priorities in life and business. Writing them down helps us crystallize our thinking, understand what matters to us, and how we can achieve our goals. This becomes our go-to resource for decision-making, as we evaluate opportunities based on whether they help us reach our goals.

Overcoming Perfectionism with Speed and Agility

The second mindset shift is moving away from perfectionism and towards speed and agility. As a strategy facilitator, my role is to assist businesses in achieving their future goals. When clients ask me how long it takes to create the perfect business strategy, I tell them the truth: it’s impossible to achieve perfection. We can align a business around an 80 percent strategy and leave the remaining 20 percent for uncertainty. This gives us enough direction to get started and make progress.

In business and personal situations, we must be able to adapt quickly when unexpected events occur. When COVID-19 first hit, we had to decide: wait it out, or pull our relocation to Canada forward, and move within days. Our perfectly planned relocation had to make space for a new reality: we acted swiftly and learned as we navigated the uncertainty of moving to a new continent under lockdown conditions. Prioritizing speed and agility over perfectionism will help you move forward, learn from mistakes, and succeed over time.

From Scarcity to Abundance Thinking

The third mindset shift is from scarcity to abundance. In business, an abundance mindset is crucial for creating a winning strategy. It’s about exploring possibilities, curiosity, and daring to dream. It’s about creating hope. Allowing ourselves to be in an abundance mindset will bring about new perspectives, thoughts, and discussions that were previously unclear to us because we listen deeply and build on each other’s creativity.

Abundance also helped me deal with the emotional rollercoaster in 2020. While I traditionally dealt with my emotions by myself, I wanted to seek out additional resources this time. It might sound obvious, but my next move was a sign that I was starting to embrace an abundance mindset. I reached out to a psychologist. As an additional resource in my life, she helped me sort the emotions and embrace both joy of being a dad, while still mourning the loss of my own father.

From Fixed to Growth Mindset

The last shift is from a fixed to a growth mindset. Instead of thinking in limited terms and absolutes, a growth mindset allows us to see mistakes as learning opportunities. Instead of thinking “I failed” or “I’ll never make it,” we can find new ways of doing things and try something different without giving up. When I was younger, I had a fixed mindset, and I struggled with understanding many things. However, I realized I could do something about it and became an avid reader and embraced learning to overcome my fixed mindset.

Instead of making statements and trying to fit things into what we already know, we should ask questions like “What am I missing?” or “How could I use this negative experience and turn it into something positive?” In a growth mindset, we understand that nothing is too hard. By adding perspective and time, we can figure things out, even if we don’t know how at first.

Making Mindset Shifts Happen

How can we implement these mindset shifts in our lives and where would they be most useful? Adam Grant, a leading organizational psychologist, suggests two concepts: challenge networks and confident humility.

A challenge network is a group of people around us who can disagree with us in a constructive way, providing honest feedback without being aggressive. They help us question our assumptions, identify blind spots, and counterbalance potential weaknesses in our thinking. By building a reliable challenge network, we can tackle speed and agility in execution and learning.

Confident humility is having faith in our capabilities while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or may not be addressing the right problem. It involves having enough doubt to re-examine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

Implementing these mindset shifts can have a significant impact on our lives. Embracing JOMO helped me avoid distractions in business and prioritize what mattered, resulting in more quality time with my family. Adopting an abundance mindset allowed me to see options that would have otherwise been invisible when starting a new business. A growth mindset helped me rise to the challenge of being a first-time dad in my mid-40s. Finally, speed and agility helped us avoid overthinking and instead move to Canada, even under the most challenging circumstances.

To implement these mindset shifts, we need to have faith in our capabilities while being open to new insights. By doing so, we can transform hopes and dreams into reality and create winning strategies in both business and our personal lives.

Alex Brueckmann is the founder and CEO of Brueckmann Executive Consulting, and the author of “Secrets of Next-Level Entrepreneurs” and “The Strategy Legacy” (Fall 2023). He is a keynote speaker at the intersection of business strategy, leadership, and empowerment. Brueckmann is an alumnus of EBS European Business School (Germany), and holds certificates in change management, leadership, finance, organizational development, and strategy from INSEAD (France), and Harvard Business School (USA).

For more information please visit www.AlexBrueckmann.com

When you have to deliver a tough message, what best describes your approach?

March 2, 2023/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: When you have to deliver a tough message, what best describes your approach?

I deliver it directly and without apology or cushioning: 32.15%
I strike a balance between tough news and positive news: 62.15%
I soft-pedal the message and risk it not being received: 4.28%
I avoid delivering the message and hope they’ll figure it out on their own: 1.42%

Beware the “But” Sandwich. 62% of you report delivering tough news but trying to balance it with positive news. Another 6% soft-pedal the feedback message or don’t deliver it at all. That’s not fair to the person who needs to get the message. For the 6%, you’ve deprived them of an opportunity to improve. They are likely unaware of the issue (which is why it’s happening) and would probably like to rectify it if they know about it. For those who are balancing a tough message with a positive one, it probably sounds like “You’re great, but… here’s some tough news… but, here’s why you’re great.” The risk is they hear everything before the first but and everything after the second but and the part in the middle that’s the tough message gets minimized or missed. While this approach might make you feel better and make it easier to deliver the tough message, you’re risking them not getting the message and the behavior recurring. Step up. Deliver the tough message and instead of soft-pedaling, talk about how you’ll help them correct the behavior and improve their performance.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Do You Set Supporting Goals?

March 1, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to your department’s larger goals.

It’s easy to focus on big departmental goals, but not everyone on the team can directly affect those numbers. Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to that broader departmental goal.

To do this, it requires you to break those big goals down into component parts. Assess which supporting activities make that big goal possible. With those activities identified, you can proceed to set goals for those supporting groups. That will help them drive departmental alignment around that bigger goal.

For example, I know one organization that was trying to reduce their costs by $100 million over a two-year period. Now, not everyone in the organization owned a budget, and they were asking, “How can I contribute to hitting that big number?” Everyone in the organization had to contribute something. They looked at those supporting functions and tried to understand what activities does that function do that drives that higher-level cost number?

The supply chain group understood that if they increased their inventory turns and improved their truck fill rate, it would make their operation more efficient, which would then allow the broader organization to take some costs out. The manufacturing team looked at their processes, and they understood that if they cut the line changeover time, it would make their process more efficient, again, contributing to reducing costs. The real estate team even chipped in. They looked at space utilization, and they deferred some new expenses to future years. Every group had a smart goal that linked their work to that higher-level $100 million cost reduction goal.

Something I encourage you to do is to take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal. Build out a process map and understand how the support teams’ work impacts that big number. Then be sure that their individual and team goals are tied to those drivers of hitting your larger goal.

When you pull everybody together and understand how they contribute, then make it clear to them how their goals drive that business unit goal, you’re going to get more alignment and excitement around the work they do and hopefully help you hit that goal more easily.

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