The experienced conductor stopped mid-rehearsal, set down the baton, and walked off the podium.
The orchestra kept playing.
The tempo continued, dynamics held, the phrasing stayed exactly as she’d shaped it. She hadn’t left because the piece was easy. She left because the orchestra had absorbed her intent so completely that her presence was no longer the thing holding it together.
That’s leadership. It’s not what happens when you’re in the room, but what happens when you’re not.
Enjoy your September news2use.
Regards, Dan
“Relevant & pragmatic ideas, tools and insights to play at your best.”
For You
Most of my bosses were open about their strengths, their development areas, and their shortcomings. They invited me to give them feedback as I saw fit. That openness did something specific to me: it triggered a sense of personal responsibility to act the same way. It kept me engaged because I trusted what I was seeing.
When you hide your shortcomings, pretend to have it figured out, and quietly discourage the feedback that would tell you otherwise, you don’t protect your standing. You erode it. People stop bringing you the truth, and without the truth you lose your ability to influence them. Sharing what you need help with isn’t a vulnerability tax you pay. It’s an ownershift, the move that separates high-performance cultures from the rest.
Now ask yourself: how do you, and the leaders across your organization, show visibly that you need and want help? If the honest answer is “we don’t,” that’s your ownershift opportunity this month.
For You & Your Team
Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Rome, and across Germany, these past months put me in the room with leadership teams pursuing innovation and organic growth. The teams achieving it, versus the teams just talking about it, split along one line: a practiced discipline of being transparent, surfacing problems early, challenging hard and respectfully, learning from mistakes, and making mistakes. That last part is the one many teams keep talking themselves out of. You cannot learn from mistakes you never let yourselves make. That’s not a motivational line, it’s the mechanism. And when a team quietly optimizes for never being wrong, innovation and growth won’t materialize.
Three questions to check your team’s mistakes orientation this month.
- When was the last time someone on your team admitted an error before it was discovered, not after?
- What happens, specifically, to the next person who takes a visible swing and misses, are they backed publicly or quietly written off?
- Name the last mistake your team made that changed how you operate, or has “we learn from our mistakes” become something you say rather than something you can point to?
For You, Your Team & Your Business
There’s a fresh crop of head coaches across the NFL this season, some new to the chair, others seasoned veterans starting over somewhere new. While they differ in style, they share one thing: each is bringing a system of team play to the organization, their own version of how the team will operate, adjust, and improve week over week. Running a business isn’t running a football team, but the parallel holds where it matters most.
What’s missing at most executive teams isn’t strategy or troubleshooting, there’s no shortage of either. What’s missing is a system of continuous improvement for the executive team itself.
Plenty of leaders understand, in principle, that the fastest way to improve the business is to improve the team running it. Yet few operate that way. Here are three questions to see if your focus is where it should be.
- Does your executive team have a framework for examining its own performance, not the business, but its own?
- When you last hit a strategic setback, did the post-mortem look at the market, or did it also look at how your team decided, communicated, and behaved along the way?
- If a new head coach inherited your executive team tomorrow, would a system that drives continuous improvement in the leadership team be there for review, or would they be building one from nothing?
Failing to create and work with a system for continuous improvement in the executive team means the team doesn’t play at its best. And when the executive team doesn’t play at its best, neither does anyone else.
People, Places & Technology
Most leadership failures aren’t failures of intelligence. They’re failures of perspective, the blind spots that come from seeing the business only from your own vantage point. The Panoramic Leader, by Cornelia Choe and Dr Marshall Goldsmith, is a valuable resource to help close that gap. I know Cornelia and Marshall personally, and they’ve put their heads and hearts into this book. If your strategic thinking has started running on autopilot, this is worth your time.
Thought for the Day
“Leadership is what happens after you leave the room.”