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Seeing Through Diverse Lenses
It is too easy to let your ideas and perspectives become limited by the milieu in which you live and work. Doing so constrains your thinking, which has an impact both on your work life and your personal life. Today, I’m taking account of all my defaults and committing to diversifying the lenses through which I’m taking in the world. I’d love to hear the spots where might want to search out new voices.
We are planning all wrong
Just because you’ve got fancy-schmancy planning software doesn’t mean the universe will fall in line. Planning for 100% capacity is a recipe for dissaster. Here’s what mathematicians tell us is the right amount of slack to leave in the system.
End Your Meetings Properly
Failing to close your meetings properly short-circuits alignment, reduces accountability, and threatens trust. Do these 4 quick steps to “stick the landing” in your next meeting.
Stop With the Generational Jokes Already
Generational jokes are a hit at the company conference but they’re doing us all a disservice. Here’s how to reframe what you’ve been calling generational differences and why it’s important that you make the change.
Prioritize Means Deprioritize
Is your team great a prioritizing? And by that, I mean adding more and more tasks to the list of priorities? How are you at de-prioritizing? Not so hot? Yeah, I know the problem. Here are a few tips on how to get just as good at taking things off your plate as you are at adding to it.
Too Many False Alarms
Does your team jump all over issues, eating up valuable meeting time and disempowering the layers below you? Leadership teams add more value when you focus on patterns, not points. Here’s a look at the cost of too many false alarms.
Design by Committee
Does your team try to design processes by consensus? You know the old saying, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee,” right? Delving into design as a team is usually a bad idea but forsaking your obligation to steer core processes is not the answer. The answer is to spend time envisioning. Here’s what that entails…
Stop Solving Problems
Does your leadership team love to roll up your sleeves and start solving problems? If so, you’re doing it wrong. Leadership teams are not well-positioned to solve the majority of problems. Attempting to do so wastes time, yields ineffective approaches, while simultaneously disempowering the people whose job it is to address the issue. Here’s what you can do instead.
How to Work with Someone You Don’t Trust
Have you ever had to depend on someone you don’t trust to get your work done? It’s a very vulnerable feeling. Depending on whether your lack of trust stems from a lack of connection, low capability or dependability, or proof that the person has little integrity, there are things you can do to reduce the likelihood you get burned and increase the likelihood that you get the job done.
A Different Take on Psychological Safety
There’s a lot of talk about psychological safety lately–with good reason. Without psychological safety, individuals tend to withhold contributions that could make their team more effective. But is every claim of an unsafe environment true? Is there any accountability for the individual to own their own thoughts and attributions? I hope so. Here’s my take.
To Foster Trust, Ask for Help
Your tendency when feeling excluded or not trusted by a teammate might be to withdraw to protect yourself. If you want to build a trusting relationship, you’re going to need to fight that urge. Instead, use this method of asking for help to create a connection with your colleague.
How to get things done when you aren’t motivated
Sometimes the motivation just isn’t there. How do you keep putting one foot in front of the other when you don’t feel like doing anything? I used my low-energy summer to try out some techniques that you might find helpful when you really should get something done.