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What kind of questions are you asking yourself?

I had a conversation recently with one of our managers. She has been recognized as a high-potential performer since her very first job. And in the past 2+ years, it has been my great pleasure to see her go from being a “Hi-Po” individual contributor to an increasingly effective manager and leader.

We recently talked about growing our leadership influence both with direct reports and with peer leaders.

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I’ve been able to do 24 workouts in the past eight weeks; an average of three per week.  Not quite as many as I had hoped for, but better by far that the last couple of years.  I’m more committed to physical fitness than I’ve been in a while, and it feels good for this old strength coach to get back into the gym.  Doing a variety of exercises is also reminding me of the need for leaders to practice their own version of development: “Leadership Cross-Training”

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As a multiple-territory franchisee, my wife and I have opened four separate facilities in the past six years.  Today these facilities will do more than $2 million in top-line revenue, with bottom-line net revenues that are growing each year.  I wish I could tell you this was all part of our grand leadership strategy to grow the market.  But it wasn’t

Do you need a leadership strategy?

We didn’t plan on opening any of our current facilities.

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Four ways to think about your activities

I’ve got too much stuff to do.  Not only my stuff, but my team’s stuff.  And the 100+ emails I get every day.  And the unexpected activities that pop onto my schedule at the last minute. etc. etc. etc.

I suspect your days are a lot like mine. Time management for a leader is critical to our impact.

President Eisenhower’s 4-box Time Management Matrix

President Eisenhower had a simple four-box time-management matrix that he used for personal decision making,

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I’ve got a lot on my plate.  There are currently 92 “ToDo” items on my task list,  While many of them are not important-and-urgent, the list of important and urgent items is still pretty intimidating to me.  The requirements from the various areas where I exert leadership can feel overwhelming – like a never-ending game of bop-the-gopher.  And I know I’m not alone; you are just as busy as I am, if not more so.

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Coffee is for Closers

Fellow leader – you may remember the 25-year-old classic sales movie, “Glengarry Glenn Ross” (if not, google “Alec Baldwin selling” for a sample – but be prepared for your ears to burn!)  If you saw the movie, you may remember that Alec Baldwin played an archetypical hard-driving sales manager, pushing his under-performing sales team to close more sales.

Glengary Glen Ross

During his monologue early in the movie,

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Unfair

She sent me a blistering email. It was lengthy. It was vindictive. It was accusatory. She threw several of the people on our team under the bus. Including her boss’s boss, who reported directly to me.  Leader – how would you react?

Her accusations were, for the most part, unfounded.  Her perspective was one-sided, defensive and petty.

Her email showed up in my in-box on a Saturday morning, and it threatened to ruin my entire weekend.

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I recently had the privilege of going on a trip with Food for the Hungry to Placer Bonito, Dominican Republic.  Two leadership lessons emerged from our time there.

A beautiful place

Placer Bonito (literally “a beautiful place”) is a poverty-stricken village in the southwestern portion of the Dominican Republic.  (As you may remember from geography lessons, the Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean, southwest of Cuba, and about a 2.5-hour flight from Miami.)

While the countryside around Placer Bonito is indeed beautiful,

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Life is hard

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker: “Life is hard and then you die.”  While a rather morbid philosophical reflection on life, the point of the saying, I suspect, is supposed to be a wry and humorous acknowledgement that you can’t expect things to always be easy. I’m not a fan of pessimistic bumper stickers, but I do think there is a leadership corollary.

Leadership is hard.  Just plain hard. 

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