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The power and magic of a quality Thank YOU
The power and magic of a quality Thank YOU
We are all quite busy and often hustle from one meeting to the next, from one project to the following, and from one task to the looming next one that requires our attention.
With that, it’s easy to forget what others did for us, helping us along the way. Even if we remember their crucial contributions, how often do we stop and take the time to say “Thank YOU” in a genuine and heartfelt way? Not…
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Health must come first!
Health must come first!
Over the last three weeks, we had a few people – including myself – being out and sick. This is the season for it, but it also reminded me harshly of the importance of proactively investing in our future health.
The reason I’m writing about this is because I consider myself a pretty well-informed and health-aware person. I have been active my whole life, health is my number one value, and I even…
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Designing for scale – How do you maximize throughput for your operation?
Designing for scale – How do you maximize throughput for your operation?
Last week, I was in a meeting where we brainstormed ways to accelerate and increase throughput for our prospect management within the constraints of the limited headcount we have available. Like many operational flows, the problem boils down to a typical prospect maturity funnel: you have many prospects coming in, but only a few of them will make it all the way through to actual customers.
Don’t…
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How we decide on where to put our resources
How we decide on where to put our resources
A while back, I was asked in a 1:1 how one should decide where to put resources and effort.
There’s a pretty simple and basic framework to making those decisions, and it all comes down to ROI (Return on Investment): getting the most value out of the resources you are able to invest. This applies to decisions large and small: what product to purchase, what project to prioritize, how to plan your…
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Show, don't tell - Tell, don't ask
Show, don’t tell – Tell, don’t ask
How do you make things real for your audience? How do you move complex work forward swiftly?
Easy: you go from wishful thinking to concrete and tangible. You “Show, don’t tell”, and you “Tell, don’t ask”.
The first quote is an old saying, and I’m sure you’ve heard it many times. I made up the second one, but I like it just as much. 😊 Here is what both of those approaches mean to me:
Show…
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Listening is your most powerful collaboration and leadership tool
Listening is your most powerful collaboration and leadership tool
That means really listening!
Did you ever watch yourself and checked what percentage of the discussion you were the one talking and how much of it you were listening? Most of us will be surprised by what we find.
To add some more self-reflection, check your thoughts during the periods when you are listening. Are you really following, digesting, and trying to understand what you’re hearing, or…
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Reflection on the power of reflections
Reflection on the power of reflections
Recent performance discussions with my team prompted me to muse a little bit about reflections and the power of reflective thinking. In my mind, the biggest single value of formal performance discussions is that it prompts us to pause, reflect, and decide what we want to take away and change from those insights. Forget the forms and processes – instead, focus on the insights you can take…
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Focus on the opportunity, not the challenges
Focus on the opportunity, not the challenges
I was going to write about asking “Why not” instead of “Why” – which is advice I’m hearing often – but then I decided differently. While well-intentioned, I think that advice might drive the wrong behavior if it’s heard and understood the wrong way.
In many meetings, we tend to focus our time on why things won’t work, why they are hard, and why we cannot do them right now. We are guessing what…
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Countdown deal: Back to school, back to work
Countdown deal: Back to school, back to work
We’re running a countdown deal for our career and management book: “Thriving in High-Pressure Environments“.
Check it out on Kindle for $0.99 for a limited time starting today for a week (9/18 to 9/25.)
And if you would take the time to leave a few stars or even a review we would really appreciate it! 🙂
Thriving in High-Pressure EnvironmentsLessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other…
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Optimize your impact, not your hours
Optimize your impact, not your hours
I was recently asked: “How do you optimize your productivity hours?”
My answer was clearly not what the person had expected: “You don’t. You optimize your impact!”
When we think about productivity, we often look at the wrong metric: the hours spent and the effort taken, not the output and impact of what we did. However, how busy we felt or how hard it was, doesn’t matter with regards to our…
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Managing work-stress — Full-circle ownership
Managing work-stress — Full-circle ownership
My personal dance with work-stress
A shiny new gadget
My first real job was 24/7 onsite support for mission-critical data center servers that ran national credit card processing.
As part of the job, I got a brand new Nokia cell phone, which was a big deal then – none of my friends had anything fancy like that. We were at a party at a nearby lake, and I proudly showed this gadget around – then…
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Musings on data
We all love data, and we all make data-driven decisions. – Or at least that’s what we say when someone asks us because “data-driven” is the thing you need to be these days if you want to be cool.
You can spend a LOT of time getting, tracking, analyzing, and reviewing data – but do you actually get value out of that time investment? Maybe, maybe not. In order to get a good ROI on your data…
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Do you have a Worry list?
Do you have a Worry list?
Hint: you should! 😊
We all have a lot on our minds – juggling different responsibilities, complex project dependencies, competing priorities. The risk of keeping so many things in our heads is that we will miss a bunch. We had a great idea, go to bed, and poof, it’s gone.
The solution to this is to get those ideas, questions, challenges out of your head and into what a former manager of mine…
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Get something on paper first – only then start talking
Get something on paper first – only then start talking
There are three types of meetings and interactions with people (I’m sure the official literature has more, but for me, it comes down to these three critical archetypes):
Brainstorming – You have no idea what to do, and you need as many ideas as possible from everyone.Making decisions – You have a plan or are pretty close to a plan and just need to get over the final step of making a…
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Leadership styles and developing agility in how you lead
Leadership styles and developing agility in how you lead
Last week, we discussed how important it is to develop communication agility and to pick the right communication modality for the situation and intended outcome.
It’s equally, if not more important, to develop a similarly broad range of leadership techniques and styles. Specifically, your leadership style should look very different, depending on its direction in the hierarchy.
The sad story is…
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Communication agility
Being an effective communicator is critical for being successful in today’s world. Gone are the days where we lived alone on our farms – everything is interconnected today and requires collaboration and with that, effective communication.
The key to such effective communication is to know how to communicate when. We talked about making the content of your communications relevant before – now…
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Four ounces of force
Four ounces of force
Effective negotiations and problem/conflict solving are all about gently guiding instead of butting heads. That is unless you are at a car dealership, in which case butting heads without flinching is the strategy to go.
So how can you gently guide while gaining a deeper understanding along the way? You need to seek for common purpose and goals!
Finding common purpose and goals
It all starts…
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