with resources efficiently and effectively. Clearly and comfortably delegates both routine and important tasks and decisions with responsibility and accountability; Good at figuring out the processes necessary to get things done; Excellent at delegation, goal formation, managing employees, and meeting management.
Roadblock – Has low detail orientation; lets things fall through the cracks;
Integral to forming and managing my Beliefs was sailing together with The College Kids. Dad’s engineering background, of course, brought him to sailing – one of the most technically challenging sports around, and yet, also the most simple. Can you as a Team organize yourselves and the boat to take advantage of the wind and events to be first across the line. Simple – not easy, as with most discussions of Beliefs. The model we use to talk about it is also from sailing – an Iceberg…
Born only a few years after the Staple Singers started, my home was a constant hub of activity from our Church. I have never asked why, but my parents managed the College Kids group at First United Methodist Church of Richardson, Texas. So many of my basic Beliefs came from this season, it is hard to even remember where things started. Certainly, I have always thought of Church as a fun place – we had big parties both at the house and at Church, and as my Dad would always add, without the need of alcohol to have fun 😉
🖋 The view from the new office was great – facing east over a man-made lake, I would be rocking out to Ray and watching the sunrise most mornings. I had negotiated hard for my offer – with the encouragement of my mentor, and was now glowing in the realization that I was well-positioned. A role that was a mix of technology leadership which I knew, and people development which I wanted to focus on now, Together in one place. One morning in the first week I was there, the recruiting manager who I had negotiated with came in, closed the door, and asked “Do you have anything you would like to tell me?”
The Bermuda Triangle of my corporate experiences are: Pain, Change, and Courage. You might wonder why I chose Lovin, Touchin, Squeezin as the soundtrack of this post, and to be very clear, unlike others managers in the corporate world, those were never done by me 😉 But leveraging the principles of understanding what people really need and want from their workplace helped me manage and navigate between all of these elements. So what best practices have I experienced?
“Why do I have to Change… AGAIN?” It is one of my most often asked questions — usually as I wrote about yesterday, in a raised tone of voice. The less polite version is clearer — “THEY should Change!!!” Yes… and “They” are not in this conversation… you are. You asked for this. Or didn’t, but either way, here we are again, managing Change… and the impossible nature of that work. In a workshop early in my Coaching career, a man said he can cure migraine headaches.
As I turned out of my subdivision this morning, I came face to face with a car that was coming down the hill right at me… and of course, that meant I was coming uphill right at him. Luckily we had a “centerline” and with the road curving, what appeared to be a problem was resolved as we both stayed “on our side”. It occurred to me how much implicit trust is involved in The Middle.
… do you know the scene in Forrest Gump where he just stopped running… and didn’t really offer an explanation? Thankfully, a few of you noticed that I “stopped writing” – which meant a few were actually paying attention and reading these daily muses. To be honest, like Forrest there was not a lot of thought given to it: once I realized I was going to make it for 365 in a row, that was an easy target. And crossed, it was interesting that I still had something to say – sorta
Mistakes are the Joy of management, You read that right, and by the end of this, I hope to help you see that is true. We like to think that we are there to ensure things are done “right” and “perfectly” but if you read these enough, you know that mistakes are what has made both my life more interesting, and also the music I love the most. Today’s track is a perfect example of this, going through multiple mistakes to come one of the most important and iconic U2 songs.
“Faith isn’t Faith until it is all you are holding onto”... read the bumper sticker that was on...
Like many things I start, they go well… until some odd unintended consequence pops up, usually...
Mid-day yesterday, the Earth passed through the mid-point of the trip between Winter and Summer -...
I have been thinking about Teams a lot lately, particularly those that are formed in a crisis. They typically execute with “show up in a conference room at ….” and from there, take on a life and a feeling that is hard to describe. Leaders of those teams have a unique challenge – how to assemble a group that has all of the various skills that might be needed, and then, how to keep them together when there is not a lot that they share. Differences that bring strength and breadth also challenge you to communicate and lead in a way that says execution is about the work and not about what happens to you or others 😉
After listening, the hardest thing I work with leaders on is unlearning what they know. That may seem counterintuitive, but honestly, they don’t know it. Their brains have made it up… based on facts that it has chosen to observe, and ignoring those that it really doesn’t want to notice. The fancy name for it is the Ladder of Inference, but Paul Simon says it clearer “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear.. and disregards the rest”. When you really understand the depth and breadth of this deception, it is really any wonder we know anything…
Success had been tasted, but also had left some residue for Van to wonder about and resolve. Now in New York, he was influenced by Bert who helped Here Comes the Night and Gloria become hits to sign a contract that he didn’t read. He had a few songs collected and was persuaded to go into the A&R studio to record “4 singles” – which is typically 4 ‘good’ songs, and 4 that are the B sides. Now admittedly his B sides were great, but these were all recorded in only 2 days in March of 1967, and he really didn’t think much more about it…
… until he was called to let him know his first solo album was being released, including cover art that was highly psychedelic, and titled Blowin’ Your Mind. Van had never been a drug user, and was adamantly opposed to the release of the album, but the contract was clear that all control had been given completely to Bert, and as such the album came out. Even after Bert’s death later that year, the contract was in dispute which included a ban on performing without Bang Records approval… and Van was forced to move to Boston.
He struggled, but eventually was able to work out of the contract and land at Warner Brothers after, I kid you not, a $20,000 drop of cash in a warehouse on Ninth Avenue…and the commitment for 36 more songs. Van recorded them – on an out-of-tune guitar, with lyrics about Ringworms and sandwiches. They are known now as the “revenge recordings” and only saw the light of day in a 2017 release by Bang 😉 And… the wonder is that the time in Boston allowed him to work on one of the greatest albums ever… but I am again ahead of the story…
Like Van and his contract, your brain literally sees what it wants to see… even if that is not real. It constructs facts that match what it has seen before… unless you can slow it down and wonder what you are missing… what is not seen, or heard, or inferred. And it is particularly perilous as you ascend into leadership – where the common idea is you are paid for what you … know. And often that can work… until it doesn’t. And then you need to have either the ability to wonder yourself what you are missing, or have people around you that see it… Differently.
Those people blow your mind, saving you from decisions that the “facts’ in your head may support, but are actually wonders of your imagination. Differences in perspective that you need to either develop in yourself, or in those around you, so that your decisions are based on an integrated view. Differences that will challenge you, will even raise your anger, but can… in fact… slow down that supercomputer on your shoulders … to actually make better decisions. They are around you, and, like the hit that started a career that we still celebrate in spite of the contract, may come from a Brown Eyed Girl.
Your brain is an amazing invention, observing and integrating literally billions of bits of information every second. They measured the bandwidth of your eyes which is close to 9 GigaBytes a second. For reference, that amazing 4K TV you watch is about 25 MEGA bytes/second… so your eyes can actually send your brain 360 separate programs simultaneously. Use that when you get in trouble as I do for channel surfing. One they cannot do well is see a hot pan or in the dark, and in both cases, without other senses, you would get hurt… which is exactly the same in leadership.