Tim Ferris, in his book titled, ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ discusses the danger of email and what it has done to our level of productivity – “email has become chat mail”. Consider your own work. Yes, email has a place and can add a lot of value, some of the time… however, most of the time it’s likely just a constant barrage of semi-important information that takes quiet productivity time away and often means you operating in what Steven Covey would call, quadrant 1 – the unimportant but urgent environment. We have created a system that is dragging us all down, and how we manage it needs to change  because it’s not going away.

I remember working at a factory the summer I left high school. I stood on a production line for 8 hours a day and placed a bag that collected grass clippings into a box. It was the final piece of the product. There was a direct correlation between the amount of bags I placed and the number of hours I worked. If I stood there for 5, I’d place proportionally less than if I stood there for 8. No ifs, no buts. So, it made sense to pay me for the hours I stood there.

Name a sports team that has experienced consistent success without a leader (a.k.a, a coach in the sports world). The leader who stands at the sidelines and looks at everything holistically, making decisions to help the team, but not being part of the plays.

We all know the changes technology has brought society over the last 10 years; as individuals if we hadn’t kept pace with these changes we would have struggled. Change is inevitable and most realize that.

You can tell a lot about an organizations’ leadership culture by looking at their internal corporate policies.

Such policies should exist to provide very broad guidelines on how the organization should operate and are necessary to ensure an organizational culture and brand can be established.

If you want to attract the best people, then it’s  time to change the way we work and the incentives that are offered.

I dream of a day when I don’t see job advertisements that use a specific minimum number of years’ experience to screen, and subsequently recruit employees. I dream because I strongly buy into the principle that all experience cannot be counted as equal.

The biggest risk organizations face now and over the next 3-5 years is the loss of corporate knowledge as baby boomers retire. It will expose our reliance on people-driven processes and highlight gaps that are left.

As a leader, you’re the link in a chain – the link between the organization and your team. You need to follow and lead to maintain a healthy balance and not stress the link too much. You follow the organizations direction, it’s vision, it’s mandate, it’s policies, and you lead your team that way. Too much movement in one direction, such as an emphasis on following and not enough on leading, or vice versa, and the link will be tensioned, sometimes to the point of breaking. You need to move with the ebb and flow, and for this to work harmoniously, you need both leadership and followership.

It amazes me how deadlines are created and then compressed, over and over again, as the task is passed down the chain to the actual people who will be doing the work. The person who created the original task maybe wanted it within 10 days, but by the time the people who are actually going to do the work get the task the deadline’s been compressed to two.

Knee jerk reactions, a lack of trust across the organization, fear of failure/getting it wrong, too much micro-management, and all of a sudden you have the ‘doers’ operating in crisis mode. And not just this time, because the workplace is full of these short-term tasks and deadlines. So what do you get; you get an environment where everything is urgent and the people who do a lot of the real work are not given the right time to do it. You get anxiety, stress, and resentment. More than anything else you get a mediocre organization that’s killing its staff!

I  was recently asked a question about how we can improve creativity within the workplace. My answer: we need to embrace failure and mistakes, and remove many of the unnecessary corporate rules that we often have to operate within. Yes, boundaries are important, and absolutely required. But having boundaries doesn’t mean creating a strict corporate box that we must stay within. Especially if we’re trying to encourage creativity.

I remember when I was in Afghanistan, ‘living’ in the vast expanse of deserts and valleys surrounding what few rivers existed. It was our life for over 6 months. We were in a different world, one that wasn’t connected with all the technology that we are and were used to. We’d gone back in time, and there were periods where the only connection I had with my home-life was a letter flown in on a helicopter. I remember one time I went weeks without receiving a letter. And when I did receive one, the joy was simply indescribable. The same could almost be said for fresh food. We ate rations, with no fresh food, for weeks and weeks on end. When ‘they’ managed to get us some fresh food, it was like all of our Christmas’s had arrived at once.

Delegation. It’s the hardest thing to do as a leader, and yet it’s by far the most important.   And it’s not directing the work and asking those you lead to do certain tasks that is the hard part, it’s ensuring you actually delegate  those tasks.

To delegate successfully means you are substituting your own judgment for theirs.

Finding yourself in a leadership role without prior experience can be daunting, especially when leading a team with more seasoned people who have been in their roles a long time and have a lot of proficiency in what they do. This article explores how to showcase leadership qualities despite being a new leader and lacking extensive experience.

Many individuals step into leadership positions with less experience than their team members. It’s not as uncommon as you think; you’re not alone. To add value in such situations, it’s crucial to redefine the traditional role of a leader. Unlike the past, where leadership was primarily about managing tasks, today’s leaders focus on uniting their teams, overcoming obstacles, and aligning with the organization’s vision.

Someone asked me a while ago, “Phil, who do you get your leadership style from?”

I thought it was an interesting question, and my mind immediately jumped to consider the leaders I respect the most, along with the well-known leadership styles and models that exist: the democratic leadership style, the laissez-faire, the authoritative, the transactional, and transformative. I tried to pin down which one I took my own leadership style from.

Then it hit me – I shouldn’t take my style from anyone. I should only ever create my own.

In a world that is often fixated on outcomes, where success is measured solely by the end product, the end results, are we inadvertently neglecting the value of effort and performance? 

I’m not suggesting that results aren’t vital for the success – they are – as a small business owner it doesn’t matter how much effort I put in, how strong of a performance I have, if I don’t produce results, and ultimately, make money so I can pay myself, then I wouldn’t be a small business owner for long.

Results matter, they always have, they always will, yet, the pervasive mindset that they’re the only thing that matters is a dangerous one that permeates through the realms of business and extends its reach into sports, education, and various other facets of society.

We need to shift our focus towards recognizing and rewarding performance, effort, and results in equal measure.

A theme that I seem to be discussing more often recently is the need for leaders to speak last.  Like most things I write about, I’m sensitive to this topic, not because I’ve always done it the right way, but because I’ve often done it the wrong way – speaking first and smothering the great ideas the team I had the privilege of leading might have come up with.

Red teaming involves appointing individuals to play the role of the ‘adversary’, tasked with scrutinizing plans and decisions for weaknesses and gaps.  It could be as simple as asking someone to try to find the gaps in our thinking during our planning discussions at simple meetings, to a more detailed approach, nominating a small team to question our assumptions and highlight the underdeveloped what-ifs that we’d overlooked.