To live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There’s no need to overextend yourself. All it takes is realizing that it’s all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities.  – Stephen Covey

Putting “first things first” is making sure to always do the most important and critical things first and developing this as a success habit. Not only is this important for achieving more but it is proven that both stress and procrastination is caused by delaying the things you gut tells you must be done first. Of course it is easy to know you should “put first things first” and harder to actually consistently do it which is what we will look at here.  Continue reading “First things first” →

Anchor: something that serves to hold firmly, a reliable or principle support.

Maintaining motivation levels on challenging projects or through long periods of intensive work is both challenging individually and on the group level. Keeping the end in mind, the reason why you are doing things, is easier said than done when you are half way towards a very time consuming objective. This is where having anchor events matter. Anchor events, as the name suggests, are organizated activities that join together the reasons why you are doing a project. They provide an anchor to remind all involved why they are working so hard on a project and give everyone a point to aim for which is closer than the end goal. Long term goals may have multiple anchor events binding them together. Continue reading “Power of Anchor Events” →

Character is our heart and soul, personality is merely our voice.

Great managers understand the difference between personality and character. Personality is the outer shell influencing how we are perceived and how we are judged in concrete moments. Character meanwhile is our inner core and determines who we actually are and influences how people define us in more definitive ways, like as friends, partners and leaders. Character is something built up over time and when developed right should rarely change, personality has many faces and is subject to constant development. Understanding the difference between the two is important in leadership.  Continue reading “Character versus personality” →

What a tragedy it would be if you lived your entire life without discovering who you are, without reaching your full potential. – Ray Mancini

One of the greatest human motivators is to identify, tap into and then release potential inside of ourselves and of others. Releasing potential in its simplest form is improving and taking clear steps towards being the best version of our-self. Great managers harness this and create a culture of releasing and realizing potential, one where staff believe getting better is not only necessary but possible.  Continue reading “Harnessing potential” →

A task is something “to do”, an objective is something “to achieve”.

A great leader doesn’t lead their staff to think like robots, they rather strive to get their team thinking and acting independently. Independent thinkers who have accepted responsibility to think about their work as a set of things to be achieved, rather than a list of things to be done. Staff who achieve more think about objectives over tasks. A task is something to do, an objective is something to achieve. A task is usually viewed with a fixed gofer like mindset. As a consequence rarely when someone is thinking about something to be done, do they show willingness or capability to adapt. An objective meanwhile is something that forces the mind to focus on the end point and hence requires the person to adapt their journey to get to that goal. Continue reading “Think objectives over tasks” →

Having the right trigger responses helps you to keep on track.

There will be moments at work where you doubt your ability to deal with situations and many times where you are at risk of forming a negative fixed mindset that will hold you back. It is in these moments where having a certain number of trigger responses comes in handy. In these situations, a trigger response is a thought that influences you to amend your possibly negative course of action and change it into a positive response. Continue reading “Power Statements + Trigger Responses” →

I strongly believe a great manager should as a general rule be aiming for as many win/win scenarios as possible, ones which have a productive outcome for all parties. However there will always be moments where staff are so stuck in a mindset that taking the step by step understanding approach as the first port of call will not achieve what is required. Often two sides can be so entrenched in their own sense of being right that finding a middle ground, a third way, just isn’t possible without first getting them out of that “am i right” mindset. Likewise a whole team can have become so frustrated by something that a culture of complaining has become the norm and no amount of listening to these issues makes a difference to that starting attitude. It is in these situations that the “So what! Now what?” approach is required. Continue reading ““So what, now what?” in conflict resolution” →

“A principle is a natural law like gravity. If you drop something, gravity controls. If I don’t tell you the truth, you won’t trust me; that’s a natural law.”

Stephen Covey

When we trace the decisions we make and analyse what was behind them, very often we can detect “centres of influence”. Centres of influence are forces that guide us towards thinking and acting in a certain way and more often than not although many centres influence us, each of us has inclination to be more influenced by certain areas over others. Stephen Covey in his “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” presents that we have the following centres that influence us most:  Continue reading “Principle Centered Leadership” →

“Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay.”

Dalai Lama XIV

Nurturing greatness in staff should be a goal of any manager. Great leaders spot talent and create a culture of realizing potential among their team. They aim to give their staff wings, so that they can face responsibility autonomously and fly on wards to great things. As Stephen Covey outlined in his great book on self-development: “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”,  great managers do “stewardship delegation” over “gofer”. Continue reading “Giving staff wings: stewardship delegation over gofer” →

Success isn’t doing everything, it is doing what matters most.

The (good) experience of a manager can often be seen in how they organize what they have to do. In Einsenhower’s Matrix we learned how to group what you have to do by priority quadrants but now i would like to look at how to form success lists. Success lists are cut down “to do lists” so that what is left are only the strategic actions that contribute to success. Of course cutting down a long list of “things to do” into a much smaller coherent group of success actions is not easy. Continue reading “Success Lists over to do lists” →