“Bring in the consultants.” If you heard that at your company, how would it resonate with you? Have you had good experience with consultants, or were they poor experiences? Do you use consultants as workforce augmentation or to help you solve complex problems? There are some pretty smart people out there willing to handle your biggest challenges, and here are some thoughts about when to bring an expert consultant in: Continue reading
Why You Should Stop Faking It until You Make It
Or at least you should stop thinking of it that way. Many people recoil at the premise of faking it until you make it. It seems, well, fake. Inauthentic. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. It’s semantics. Someone decided they liked the mnemonic device of rhyming and came up with “fake it until you make it.” What it really should say is, “practice until you make it.” That’s all it is, practice. We do this all the time in the arts, sports, etc., so why can’t it extend to the rest of our lives? Continue reading
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4 Questions to Ask Yourself When Hiring
Technical skills can be taught, character cannot. Hire character. Technical skills are easy to define and measure. You can quantify someone’s expertise on software. You can give a test to measure knowledge. You either have a degree, or you don’t. When hiring we focus on these measurable aspects of a person’s resumé, but these aren’t important, at least not as much as character. You can teach someone software. You can send them to a class to close some gap in technical skills. It’s much more difficult to send someone to a class to teach them to inspire, collaborate, or be visionary. When you hire, focus on the character skills that are non-negotiable. Continue reading
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You Think You Are in Control?
“Life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond to it.” You may have heard this famous statement by Chuck Swindoll. The more life I get under my belt, the more I believe this is true. Crap happens every day, but how it impacts us is directly related to our perspective and our attitude.
What are you doing to make the most of bad circumstances? I had a tough week the other week. As I was driving to a meeting, my car broke down on the side of the road. It was the most inopportune time! I tried to start it and quickly realized I wasn’t going anywhere in my car. After letting the other person know I would no longer be making our meeting, and after arranging the tow truck, I had an hour to kill. I could have spent it sulking about how I couldn’t afford a broken car, how I was missing a critical meeting, or how life sucks, but instead my first thought was, “Well, now I have time to practice my presentation!” For the next hour, on the side of the road, that’s what I did. There isn’t anything you can do about the past. Once something happens to you, all you can do is choose how you are going to respond to it. Always try to make the most of what happens to you and you will find, in the end, it was probably a valuable experience. Continue reading
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If You Escalate, You Fail
“If you have to escalate, you’ve already failed.” Those were the words a vice president of a Fortune 500 company told me during our interview. We were discussing the power of influence, especially when working with international teams. He was advising me that if you have to go over someone’s head to get what you need, then your leadership isn’t effective. Perhaps there are times when you have to resort to escalation, but 90% of the time it’s not necessary.
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Is Achieving Your Goals like a Game of Tug-of-War?
As a business owner or a department head, do you have a strategy for your team? How successful are you at achieving your strategy year over year? What if I said you would be more successful if you did less?
One of the greatest pitfalls I see companies fall into when executing their strategic plan is trying to do too much at once. After going through a strategic brainstorming session, there are so many great ideas on the table. A five-year vision is developed, then the two-year strategic objectives, and finally the tactical initiatives they wish to accomplish that year. Once nicely laid out on a board or in a three-ring binder with page protectors and full-color pages, leaders begin assigning team members to champion each of the tactical initiatives. After receiving their assignments, everyone goes their own separate ways until next year. Continue reading
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Where’s the Hot Water?
I was rinsing out the coffee pot and getting frustrated that the water wouldn’t seem to get hot. Irritated, I started lamenting to myself that we needed a new water heater – and why did we buy a house that needed so much fixing up? Long after the water should have been hot, I checked the faucet. You’ll never get hot water out of the cold water faucet. Oops. Continue reading
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What Type of Goal-Setter Are You?
How often do you stop and reflect on where you’ve been and where you are going? There are those who are religious only on Easter and Christmas; I feel the same can be said about people who only set goals as the New Year approaches. To change your life, you have to start with the little activities. The once-a-year, big activities don’t influence our lives as much as our daily choices. If you want to see change in your life, here are a few habits I suggest: Continue reading
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Which Is Better: A Manager or a Leader?
It’s time to do away with the archaic manager vs. leader dichotomy! The comparison was developed in a time where we didn’t really understand what leadership was. A time when bosses were autocratic, and people worked more to provide for their family and less for personal fulfillment. Now we get it. We understand the concepts of management and leadership. Staying in this mindset is limiting. It causes people to say things like, “I’m a manager. I don’t need to be a leader,” or, “Since I’m a leader, I shouldn’t be doing these management pieces.” It’s time to move our thoughts away from a discrete manager/leader model to a management spectrum and leadership spectrum.
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Still Pulling All-Nighters?
At some point you just have to let it go. You set the gears in motion and then let the outcome happen. I see a lot of people trying to control the minutia all the way until the end. They are pulling all-nighters right before a deadline, calling everyone in a panic to follow up on tasks. While tying up loose ends and validating the upcoming tasks is a value-added activity, there comes a point where it starts detracting from overall performance. Continue reading
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