Category: Culture

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Mandatory Influence (Please Read Now!)

The Art Of Requiring Participation.

Every time I receive an email in outlook with a high-priority flag and a required response, I giggle. So, what you’re saying is, “I care about this thing a lot, but I don’t have time to write an email that will convince you of its importance. Instead, I’m forcing you to respond whether you care or not.”

Got it!

The bummer is that they will never know who would have responded uncoerced and what they could have done better next time.

Two big misses!  

Make it mandatory and you’ll never know if you could have led through it.

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Why Cruising Leads To Better Thinking

doing her best thinking while cruising

There are seasons as a leader when it’s okay to cruise.

If you were driving cross country, you wouldn’t hesitate to use cruise control on those long boring stretches; you’d be unwise not to.

We drive a big green van from the ’90s on all family road trips, and wouldn’t you know it, the cruise control doesn’t work.

I want to cruise, I used to drive with my thumbs, but the green machine would like me to stay vigilant, never resting, never easing off, always on. The way many of us approach work.

As leaders, we need to pay attention to the seasons we’re in and the conditions we are navigating.

  • Is it rush hour?
  • Are we racing for some reason and need our leather driving gloves?
  • Or is it an endless straightaway with perfect visibility, an ideal time to throw in the AirPods and block out the road noise (kids)?

Each requires something different from us.

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Why Encouragement Is The Nourishment We Need Right Now

a mid-pandemic picture of productivity.

Today is traumatic. We were not designed to carry this much weight in perpetuity. Constant pivoting wears people down. And whether we know it or not, after more than a year of trying to lead through this craziness, we are all experiencing some degree of trauma with a healthy dose of PTSD to wash it down.

We are not entirely out of the covid-woods yet, but we are running out of gas. And to top it off, the way we work has fundamentally changed, maybe forever. “We can either run from it or learn from it,” as the wise baboon ‘Rafikki’ once said. (Lion King)

Decision fatigue is now a default setting for leaders after facing impossible scenarios and lose-lose catch-22’s day after day with no definitive end in sight.   

Our teams are looking to us for answers that nobody has, not even Fauci. We are exhausted. Some leaders have already tapped out.  

But I’m afraid it won’t be decision fatigue that ultimately takes us out; it will be a lack of encouragement over a long period of time…

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