Archive of posts from March 2018

How brave are you?

Most teams wouldn’t doubt their answer until asked to give away their trade secrets. That which they believe makes them competitive, or unique.

So, if you could give away your secrets, would you? For example:

• Your team’s secret sauce: Giving it away means it’s no longer secret. It also means your genius is finally truly on display for others to make a remark about.
• How you cut costs or double value: Giving it away means...

We’ve talked about how A players got that way: by leading B players into A players.

But who leads he/she who leads you? To leverage a classic video-game term, this person needs a “1-Up”.

I define a 1-Up as “Extending council and grace to _whoever is 1-Up from you on your team, so that they can grow, too.”_

Giving them a 1-Up will give them ‘extra life’ to serve more powerfully.

Great teams understand that leadership flows both ways....

We’ve heard it said, “You need to be hungry to be successful”

Yet if you succeed, you won’t be hungry.

Focusing on your hunger is focusing on the wrong person.

Leadership is about getting others fed. Success starts not with being hungry, but with seeking those who are.

And then doing something about it.

Doing so makes a positive, needed change. One you’ll find, if you look past your own stomach.

“Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.” – Dalai Lama Tolerance, combined with compassion, adds a flexibility to teams and individuals that make them very tough to break.

A team that lacks either won’t survive a storm:

• A crazy day you managed to pull through. Tolerance lets you survive it, compassion forces you fix it so teammates won’t repeat your mistakes.
• A project that had issues. Tolerance lets you accommodate...

“He’s still awake? What time zone is he on?” He’s on Adam Standard Time.’

Of course, this isn’t an actual timezone.

Except it is, for me. I choose my waking hours based on what my body tells me because peak performance comes from knowing myself, not from merely copying others.

This rule applies to all of us:

• Our language: The best email reply might come from our intuition as well as the manual (assuming the manual doesn’t factor in...

On effective teams, “sales” isn’t a role.

It’s conventional wisdom: “Salesperson bends their arm so Production people can do Product things”. Except:

• Educating a prospect is sales.
• Educating a client is sales.
• Helping them evaluate is sales.
• Enrolling them with the best fit for them is sales.
• Onboarding and guiding them is sales.
• Production is sales.
• Delivery is sales.
• Support is sales.

“Sales” means sharing your mindset with those it’ll benefit–and keeping them there. It keeps them moving...

Is your team like fast-food?

As with what we eat, teams can fall onto a spectrum ranging from “fast-food” to “organic”.

• Fast-food teams: These aren’t good for you, nor were they made to be. There is no cause, only a product, and a profit. The old way.
• Organic teams: These are good for you, on purpose. There is a cause, a product, and a profit. The new way.

As with food, organic tends to cost a bit more,...

What is ‘distraction’?

It’s an interruption of thought or attention; something we see as a negative, something to be overcome.

What if distractions had something to teach us?

• A thought gap: A distraction may be telling you there’s something to start, perhaps in your team, that hasn’t happened yet (E.g. “I keep reading about this exciting market shift… perhaps we should do something about it?”)
• Change needed: Or it may be telling you there’s something to stop–or change–that may have...

Making great vanilla sponge is simple.

Four steps:

• Step 1: Make lousy vanilla sponge,
• Step 2: Learn why it was lousy,
• Step 3: Make slightly less-lousy vanilla sponge,
• Step 4: Go to Step 2.

To be good cake makers, we need to be prepared to be lousy cake makers, first.

We need to invest in cakes, products, ideas, offers, and ads that don’t work.

We’ve talked how important good vanilla sponge is for great teams. Are you...

Do you like cats? I don’t.

I don’t mind if you like cats, though.

Whether we’re working with customers and clients, or our fellow team members, we are not the same:

• The best sales teams know how to adjust their message based on the culture of their prospects.
• The best content teams know how to adjust their message based on the language and tone of their readers.<
• The best design teams know how to adjust the user’s experience based...

What if “doubt” was designed to be useful?

Over the last 100 days, I decided to write one blog post per day. Over the 100 days prior to that, I hadn’t written any.

One of my favorite formulas proved true again: “I don’t know if I can do that” + “I choose to do it” = “I did that”.

And it manifested in a familiar order: Hard. To very hard. To not so hard. To manageable. To fast. To easy....

Proactive? You have an addiction problem.

Jumping in. Getting it done. Saving the day. Great traits.

When you’re great with ‘urgency’, you fall out of practice with ‘important’. Perhaps to the point where you may even feel guilty for doing ‘important’ work.

You’re addicted to urgency. There should be no ‘urgent’.

Once you’re hooked on urgency, you’ll tolerate it, instead of contributing to an environment that never sets on fire.

If you’re a proactive member of your team (and I...

Were you picked last in sports at school?

Do you remember who got picked first? It was normally the one most gifted in that sport. The one that changed the game.

In your market, would your audience pick your team first?

• If they had a problem, who would they ask first? Whoever they believed had the best implementation strategies (to resolve the problem).
• If they had an idea, who would they ask first? Whoever they believed had the best divergent-thinking skills...

We’ve heard sayings like “What’s her MO?” in TV dramas before.

“MO”–Modus Operandi–is a method of doing something. The Napoleon Hill Foundation defines it as a “Magnificent Obsession”, a positive dream that pushes us forward.

If you work with a great team, you probably have two of these:

• Your Modus Operandi: Your magnificent obsession–your calling–and your method of pursuing it.
• Your team’s Modus Operandi: The magnificent obsession behind your team as a whole.

Can you move in light of...

That’s something most people want.

And the common methods of achieving this are going away:

• Cheaper means less skill: Chunking delegated tasks to those who do one thing on repeat (human or machine) removes those who make it better. Great for being out-innovated, and decreased value creation.
• Cheaper means less choice: Making what you and the next customer get both identical removes that which makes each special. Great for becoming a marginalized commodity.

“Winning today at the expense of tomorrow”...

Long reports say the least. Long proposals are read the least. Long speeches put people to sleep.

They’re long because each word isn’t carefully chosen. Short ones are harder to make. Because clarity is hard.

Sometimes, shorter is much better.

“Get this cheatsheet. It shows you the 3-easy-steps to make an ebook… That’s written about how to run a good webinar… Or attend this webinar to discover how to run an effective sales call… Which gives you an effective sales call designed to sell you a course… On how to make a great cheatsheet.”

Great things don’t always come in a box, and they aren’t always easy.

The promise of “It’s easy” risks making people confuse “This is challenging” with...

There are three sides to every coin.

And when it comes to decision-making on high-performance teams, there are three options available to us, every time.

The third option just takes a little more searching for. Here are some examples:

• 1. Over-promising: Doing less than promised. 2. Under-promising: Promising less than able. 3. Showing promise: Doing more than is comfortable, causing growth.

• 1. Burn-out: Doing more than able. 2. Burn-in: Damage caused by doing too little. 3....