Leadership | Dave Holvig

December 10, 2021December 11, 2021

Love The Ones You’re With. (An easy way to guard against the great resignation.)

When someone decides to leave staff (without even thinking), we throw elaborate goodbye parties and give emotional speeches. Through tears, we tell people how important they are and what a profound impact they’ve had on us.

We focus on who they are, except quirks become perks, annoying habits are now hilarious, and little wins are memorialized as landmark achievements.

We don’t hold back; no, we go overboard. We have cake parties.

But what if we did that before the resignation?

Dare I suggest the possibility that there would be no resignation? (No great resignation?? Crazy talk?)

November 5, 2021November 5, 2021

Avoiding The P-Trap of Comparison. (Why you don’t need to be the best to lead the rest.)

We all know that comparison kills contentment. But do we understand that for leaders, comparison kills credibility and skews our view of reality?

You can’t lead a team and compete with them at the same time.

So, what do you do when someone comes along who is better than you? (And they always do… eventually.)

October 8, 2021October 8, 2021

How to lead people through trying-times online (with no regrets).

I can’t be the only one who’s gotten that unsolicited weekly usage report from my iPhone and thought the average time was for the week—not the day.

…Luckily, I’m able to quickly justify it because of my insatiable desire to learn through long-form podcasts.

Yes, I’m delusional, but so are you!

Most of us are online a lot of the time.

**Somewhere along the line we became unhinged from our ‘digital self.’**

We started to believe we could say and do things online because that was just our shadow self, our avatar.

We get into weird arguments and draw hard lines. We barge into conversations with high passion and ‘low to no expertise’ and then scratch our heads in disbelief when it’s not embraced. It’s madness. But why?

Would we do that in real life?

How often do you find yourself arguing with someone at the grocery store? When’s the last time you insulted your neighbor? “Hey Scott, the guy you voted for is an idiot!”

The answer should be never, I hope! But it happens all the time online.

Here’s the problem: Who you are online is who you are.

September 3, 2021September 3, 2021

Why Gen Z thinks work time is the BEST time to schedule a haircut.

(And what we can all learn from them.)

Let me start by saying I’m not an expert on the topic of Gen Z. Not even a little bit. Instead, I’m drawing from my own experiences and making a few wild assumptions.

Don’t question it, go with it.

No science. No data. Just a sinking suspicion that I’m not the only one who has been surprised by the workday haircut. I’ll explain.

Imagine this… I would ask someone in their early 20’s to do a task related to their job, and they would freely admit to me (their boss) that they were unavailable—because they had a haircut—smack in the middle of the workday!

This one took me a while to figure out. I’ll admit I was perplexed at first.

My initial thoughts:

“You have two days off a week, is there something I’m missing?”

“Maybe their stylist is only available on a Wednesday at 2pm?”

“Maybe they need their hair a certain way FOR work that I’m unaware of?”

Disclaimer: For the sake of this blog the haircut is symbolic, and the term Gen Z could also apply to ‘young’ Millennials.

Feel free to substitute haircut for ANY superfluous activity you’ve been given as an excuse that has nothing to do with the job they were hired to do. i.e., Massage, oil change, carwash, or anything dog-related.

FWIW, if this response was an isolated incident, I certainly wouldn’t be blogging about it! It was a pattern that became the impetus for my own personal quest to try and better understand the ‘Gen Z angle.’

Once I started shearing through the layers—one trendy word and awkward interaction at a time—I made a few discoveries along the way. Buckle up!

August 6, 2021August 6, 2021

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.

Make it mandatory and you’ll never know if you could have led through it. Share on X Continue reading

July 2, 2021July 2, 2021

Why Cruising Leads To Better Thinking

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.

June 4, 2021June 19, 2021

Why Encouragement Is The Nourishment We Need Right Now

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…