Leadership Concepts / Toolkit

Moving from individual contributor to team or organization leader? Here's your first lesson (whether you want it or not) -?

1) Only touch items once.?

If you are going to read an email, deal with it right then. Otherwise don't read until you are going to action. Same with meetings, etc.. This is key to managing your own time.??

2) Never be the bottleneck for your team.?

Either delegate the decision, give the team guard rails within which you are ok with their decisions, or make the decision yourself quickly.?This unlocks your teams efficiency.??

3) Ask people what they need from you in order to do their best work. Communication style, support, freedom to choose, time flexibility, etc... Where it works, give it to them and then challenge them to generate the best output of their career.??

4) Do deep work straight through to completion.?

If you have to really think, you cant be context switching and answering messages. Block a minimum full hour for writing communications, strategic planning, etc.?

5) Value the results above all else.?

This removes a lot of office perception politics and nonsense. It shouldn't matter if it takes them 5 hours or 50 hours - value the outcome more than their process and then assign the next challenge. Too many managers look at time rather than output.?

6) No non-propulsive activity.?

There are a ton of wasted calories in any organization. Minimize this as much as you can and shield your teams from it. As you rise in an organization a key value you now provide to your team is handling the noise so they can do the real work. Learn to disdain workload that is repetitive, non value-add, inefficient and does not advance the businesses goals.?

7) Set a clear vision and a project roadmap to achieve it (roles/goals/boss)

Your entire organization should be able to articulate the vision and goals for the year. Once this is federated out to every teammate, you can have effective decentralized decision making wherein the sum of individual efforts will add up to the whole. Without clarity on this, you risk chaotic, slow and sub-optimal decisions.

8) Read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

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