Reading Time: < 1 min When you’re a solopreneur, working on your own, you need to control every decision. It can be brutal, but necessary. As your company grows, though, getting out of making every decision is the best thing you can do. It can also be very tough, but also very necessary. In his book “The Dichotomy of Leadership“, […]
Leadership
Share with context
Reading Time: < 1 min As my team will tell you, I’ve been bad over the years about forwarding information to them with just one line from me: “Thoughts?”. That’s not helpful. When I sent those items, such as a review of a new software tool, I legitimately just wanted to hear their overall feedback. However, it could also be […]
What matters is doing the right thing
Reading Time: < 1 min There are two kinds of people in the world: There is certainly some crossover there, but if your focus is always trying to “be right” you might miss opportunities to shift gears and do the right thing. In Kim Scott’s book “Radical Candor“, she shares this thought from Steve Jobs about being right. I don’t […]
Standards over obedience
Reading Time: < 1 min Generally speaking, there two big ways to get your team to do what needs to be done. Obedience: You can require obedience, with a very detailed list of what needs to be done, and expect them to follow it to the letter. If you’re flipping burgers at McDonald’s, this is how it needs to be. […]
Dumb rules come from lazy leadership
Reading Time: < 1 min We’ve all worked at organizations where they had some rules that were clearly overkill, or even didn’t make sense at all. Most of these rules can be traced back to an incident in the past, and people say “Oh yes, that rule is because of Steve”. Rather than management talking to Steve about his behavior, […]
Transparency isn’t the same as honesty
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s always felt to me that being transparent was a big part of being honest. It can be, but they aren’t the same thing. In his book “Lost and Founder“, author Rand Fishkin explains it this way: Transparency isn’t the same as honesty. Honesty is saying only things that are true. Many founders and startup […]
The whirlwind is a thief
Reading Time: 2 min In reading the book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution“, they talked a lot about “the whirlwind” — all of that junk you have to do every day just to keep moving forward. This largely includes email, but also many meetings, phone calls, and other distractions. These are things that are semi-important, but they often prevent […]
Misaligned incentives
Reading Time: 2 min As a small business owner, I’m often looking for ways to better incentivize our staff to work hard and for our clients to stick with us. For our clients it’s not about “incentives”, but rather providing the right products, data and outcomes to satisfy their needs, so it’s not all that different from what an […]
Who should you really serve?
Reading Time: 2 min When working in any organization, it’s important to remember who you serve and it’s not always as obvious as it seems. Years ago when I worked at a few different churches, I went on a lot of mission trips with the high school youth groups. These trips were all still in the United States (we […]
Assigning fault versus solving problems
Reading Time: 2 min As time goes on, I’ve been finding myself caring a lot less about “who is at fault?” when something goes wrong. I’ll certainly want to investigate why something went wrong, but the who is less relevant. I’ll admit, part of this is because I’m lucky with how great our team is at GreenMellen. I’m confident […]