Adam Fairhead
If your team was a stock, would you buy it?
Everyone can invest. And when we do, we evaluate whether or not an asset is likely to give us an ROI. To continue the metaphor, what makes a good investment?
Adam Fairhead
When an orchestra begins to play, is the conductor nervous?
It’s not his/her job to be nervous: it’s every musician’s job to be nervous about their own performance.
So what’s the conductor’s job?
That leaves the musicians with one job: to get the notes right.
After all, the...
Adam Fairhead
If this piece of music doesn’t give you goosebumps, I don’t know what will.
We’ve talked about why the peg counts, and about strategies to get results, and faster. Today let’s talk about how it’s all yours.
Every musician in the video above has clearly played that piece before.
A lot. And not just on the clock. But…
Adam Fairhead
What if we could condense a year of growth into a single month?
What would that empower you to do? I call this technique “YIAM Growth Challenge” – here’s how it works:
Adam Fairhead
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
This quote gets misinterpreted a lot.
And passionate, talented teams are a big offender.
There’s a temptation to interpret “we can do so much” as _“let’s try to do everything at once.” _Trading the chisel for another hammer dilutes the precision and commitment to good work.
Adam Fairhead
“The successful person is open-minded and tolerant on all subjects. If you close your mind, you will be shut off from the recognition of favorable opportunities and the friendly cooperation of others.” – Napoleon Hill
During a relay race, the trickiest part is always the baton hand-off. The better the hand-off, the easier the race.
How can we become better at hand-offs in our teams? We start, as Dr. Hill suggests, by being open-minded and tolerant on all...
Adam Fairhead
We’ve talked about how rare great teams seem to be. We’ve built fortifying walls together in defense of these teams.
How should we respond to that?
Adam Fairhead
A good friend shared an interesting dilemma today.
His team needs to hear something from an outside source for it to gain any traction. Translation: his insights and opinions are often undermined because he’s on the same team.
If it sounds backward, it is, but it’s also common. Let’s address that today:
Adam Fairhead
We’re told that the “career” is dying.
I’d like to argue that it’s not so much “career” as it is “building teams to last” that is dying. If companies or teams aren’t investing in themselves to maintain or nurture greatness, is it any wonder people look for greener pastures?
We’ve talked about what makes a great team before. What should such teams be investing in?
Adam Fairhead
What goes through your mind while you work? The mindset we bring to our work has a profound effect on what we create.
I like to use these 3 Ps as I enter new tasks:
Adam Fairhead
Great teams are either in high demand or are about to be in high demand. Could over-availability stunt such a teams’ momentum?
Adam Fairhead
Teams that create impact understand how being over-flexible compromises their work and their results.
Flexibility enables work to grow and for every implementation to be done right. This respects your work and your audience.
Over-flexibility cripples your work and for every implementation to be an act of desperation. This disrespects your work and your audience.
Here are some examples:
Adam Fairhead
What are you working on today?
Regardless of the answer, how we answer that question will affect the outcome. Consider these example answers:
Adam Fairhead
You’re really good at keeping rhythm. No, really.
Even if you’re not gifted musically, you know how to “find your groove.”
The problem starts when we don’t choose the ‘groove’, and settle for a ‘funk’. Both have Rhythm.
Adam Fairhead
Drug-dealers and missionaries have a lot in common.
They’re both out there trying to create conversions, albeit for very different reasons.
Their messages are different, but they use the same pattern:</p>
When approaching the marketplace, every team follows the handbook of one of these two things. One coerces and traps. The other serves and supports.
Which...
Adam Fairhead
“It is the business of cavalry to follow up the victory, and to prevent the beaten army from rallying.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
A brand is only as strong as the promises it keeps. Great teams keep their promises. If you do important work, you need to be able to call the cavalry if you get stuck, in case of emergency.
Consider having–and being–cavalry for someone on your team:
Adam Fairhead
Does your next project excite you or stress you out?
Great teams optimize their work to create leading products and services that create a lasting impact. The answer to the question above determines whether or not this is a possibility for them.
Consider the trade-offs of a team that falls into the latter bucket:
Adam Fairhead
Most of us have heard that, in marketing, it’s more effective to describe benefits than features. You may have also heard that the best marketing changes the product (e.g. learning and executing user feedback), not the ads alone.
We have an opportunity to go further: to let marketing change not only the buyer’s product experience but our trusting audience’s world, by privileging them. This comes with promises from you to them:
Example 1:
Adam Fairhead
“Self-approval is a dangerous state of mind” – Napoleon Hill
Doubt is a double-edged sword: an essential ingredient for doing creative work, and a barrier to even trying. Really, it’s a call to action:
Adam Fairhead
Without rhythm, our brains wouldn’t defer breathing to the unconscious. Rhythm means we’ve figured out how to make something work, every time.
And when it comes to breathing, that’s great. But when it comes to creativity, which only appears when we try things that might not work, we have what Einstein would call ‘insanity’ – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Creativity needs an extra step to shake things up. How can we be consistently...
Adam Fairhead
Whether it’s a workout or a project, there comes a point where you say, “That’s enough.” The project is all done. Your legs are burning from the hill climb. Nothing.
Nobody celebrates or talks about what we’ve completed.
But we suddenly get very evangelic whenever something is 101% complete. When we went one more hill, created for 10 more minutes, wrote one more email.
Adam Fairhead
Work. Career. Mission. Which do you have?
Unless you’re a doctor, doing as we’re told works only up to a point, now that the world rewards rule-breakers. Ironically, from that volatility comes the greatest stability.
We assume the world will stay the same. That, in five years time, we’ll type on laptops,...
Adam Fairhead
I don’t know much about cars. When Ferrari releases under-the-hood photos of a new vehicle, I’ve little idea of what I’m looking at. But it looks good.
Under the hood, most of us wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Ferarri’s latest and that of an economy-class vehicle… were it not for the presentation. Shiny, symmetrical, considered, cared for, and painted red.
Open the hood of your work. What do we see?
Adam Fairhead
To-dos can be deceiving because an activity is not an achievement.
“Leave 10 voicemails” is easy to check off, with an assumption they may lead somewhere. But what if the goal wasn’t to merely leave voicemails, but to “receive enthusiastic interest from Mr. X”?
The problem is, if the voicemails yielded no reply, the to-do is still checked off. You ‘succeeded’, even when your goal remains unachieved. Mr. X isn’t enthusiastic yet–you’ve yet to even speak.
Consider replacing your To-do...
Adam Fairhead
Take a look at this week’s calendar. How does it make you feel? Do you feel motivated by the momentum you’ll create, or do you feel locked down by dread?
Dread locks you out of your genius–your ability to do your best work. It moves you from “How can I make today amazing?” to “How can I get through today?” I call the latter state ‘dread locks’. When you have it, for each task in the week, ask yourself:
Adam Fairhead
When you set ‘bad goals’, everything feels entirely within arm’s reach. You need not stretch yourself to attain them.
Microsoft did this during Ballmer’s leadership when they optimized for the 20th century when the rest of the world had moved into the 21st.
When you set ‘good goals’, everything is slightly out of reach. You need to grow from where you are now to possibly reach them. And that creates fear: you might not make it.
If you choose the...
Adam Fairhead
Creating, leading, or belonging to a great team is a privilege.
Like a great childhood, a great team has lasting effects on us that we wouldn’t change for the world. What makes a great team? And how do you know when you’re on one?
Adam Fairhead
When you belong to a great team, it’s great because of you, as well as the others. Otherwise, it would be a ‘mostly great’ team. But we don’t always ‘feel’ great.
Turns out, we can do something about that. We control more of our emotions with our self-talk than we realize. Consider these contrasts:
Adam Fairhead
It’s fascinating how perspective and mental state can totally rewrite our circumstances. A favorite saying of mine is,
“Big problems are just small problems in small worlds.”
Here are three examples of how this might apply:
1. ‘Big’ problem: “I may lose a customer.”
Adam Fairhead
With development accelerating in AI and machine learning, the world is going to transform in a big way. Some wonder where humans might fit into it all, as blue-and-white-collar professions are altered by robots.
Here are 3 things robots can’t do:
Adam Fairhead
When you go on a trip, a vacation, a hike… don’t forget to take pictures and draw a map.
The same applies when doing important work.
When you go ‘there’ again, you have your map. When you find better routes (or worse routes), update your map accordingly.
Doing so makes every trip–and every project–better than the one you did before it. And better than the one your team did, if you’re sharing your map.
Now you all get to spend...
I create a newsletter called GrowthCandy. Each issue shares one idea to help build and spread your work, delivered as a short comic. Fast to read. Easy to apply. Hard to forget!