High Impact Leaders

On today's episode, I'm going to explore the concept of experience being the best teacher. It is true that people learn by doing. We've actually built our coaching practice on that concept. When a good coach helps someone develop a new skill and the person has a success, his or her confidence will grow.

But the concept of experience being the best teacher is also absolutely false. And if you don't understand why, you may be inadvertently lengthening your learning curve when you try something new.

So today, I'm going to cover a few things that, once you understand them, will increase your success level pretty dramatically. They are the concepts that helped me go from a broke, really in-debt college kid to a multimillionaire in just a few years.

Show Notes: Experience is NOT the Best Teacher (How to Shorten Your Learning Curve.)

Poor leadership skills can ruin team morale. As a manager, you hold more power than you might think. Obviously, you can hire and fire your subordinates. You can also promote them… or not promote them. You may also have the ability to approve a raise. If not, you at least have the ability to conduct the annual review.

In essence, your leadership skills and moral compass have a direct impact on their career. Even if you treat everyone fairly, your impact on their lives is unmistakable. This is why having a great boss is the number one wish of most employees. They often rank this above more vacation time and a bigger paycheck.

However, some managers can inadvertently destroy the confidence of their employees. When this happens, it can permanently damage morale. Low morale then creates poor employee retention.

Even the best executives avoid committing these bad leadership behaviors.

Full Shoe Notes: 5 Ways that Poor Leadership Skills Can Harm Morale (and How to Fix Them)

Government reports are saying that unemployment is still very low. However, I'm starting to see more and more layoffs from really big companies. In fact, Business News Daily reported that layoffs are continuing to pile up at a rate that is approaching the way they were in the early days of the pandemic.

So, this week, I'm going to cover a few ideas on how to update your resume just in case you are one of these folks who are looking for a  new employer. If it is time to dust off the old resume or CV, use the strategies that I cover today.

Before we get to the technical stuff, though, we will show you how to avoid falling into the most dangerous resume trap out there. (Here is a little hint… Your resume should never be about YOU.)

Instead, you want to focus on the problems that you have helped employers solve. If these prospective employers know that when they hire you, they will have fewer challenges to deal with, you will put yourself at the top of the hiring list.

Instead of Making Your Resume a List of Accomplishments, Make It a List of Problems Solved.

Don’t get me wrong. Your resume should absolutely be about you and your accomplishments. However, if that is all that you highlight, you will miss out on a great opportunity to set yourself apart from your competition. Human beings tend to all have a few things in common. Most of us are pretty self-centered. We all have problems. We also all have challenges that we have to deal with. Well, guess what. Your prospective employer isn’t a title or a company. The prospective employer is an actual human being. The prospective employer has challenges and problems.

So when he or she makes a hiring decision, the main thing they want to know is the following…

Often, we assume that the prospective employer will read our qualifications and automatically conclude that this qualification will be of benefit to the company. By the way, most prospective employers are smart people. So many actually will do this. However, if you do this step for the employer, you make that person’s job easier.

So if you do this simple step, you now present yourself as someone who can make the job of the employer much easier. That is huge considering the main goal the prospective employer has. The way that you are presenting your information to the employer is making his or her job easier. You are a problem-solver.

Show Notes: How to Update Your Resume in 2023

A couple of weeks ago, I covered a few ways to communicate more effectively to build more teamwork. This week, I'm going to go into more detail about a specific type of communication -- constructive criticism. Just last week, I had one of my team members ask me to give her specific feedback about how she could improve.

The moment she asked for this, I had the quote from Somerset Maugham playing in my head. He said, "People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

So, I thought it might be a good time to go into more detail about what constructive criticism is and how it differs from destructive criticism (or just criticism.) You might be surprised that the type of criticism has little to do with how it is delivered, the tone you use, and your body language (although, each of those things plays a part.) It has more to do with something we've covered extensively in previous episodes.

Show Notes: The Difference Between Constructive and Destructive Criticism

Knowledge is vital to getting ahead, but it’s just the ticket to get into the game.  What you DO WITH the knowledge is much more important to your success.  The most highly sought after skill in business is not accounting, or engineering, or computer skills – it’s public speaking.   Folks who reach the highest level of every institution typically know less about the day-to-day operations than the newest employee. However, they tend to excel at leading and motivating people.  The very best leaders in any organization are not the people who grow their own stature.  They are the people who grow other leaders.

Once I figured this out, I realized that just about everything that I was doing to get ahead was absolutely wrong.

To Be a Great Leader, Teach the People Around You Secrets to Success.

For instance, I used to work from early morning into late in the night to make my productivity high for the company.  I was working really hard, but I never got promoted.  The reason why was that I was so productive, that the manager couldn’t afford to promote me.  If he did, he’d have to hire two people to replace me.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  I’m not saying sluff off and you’ll get promoted.  Instead, I started to teach the people around me how to do what I was doing to increase their own productivity.  Many hands make light work. 

When the next promotion came around, I was the obvious choice.  In my early days, I always wanted to make myself look good and make my “competition”, my coworkers, look bad.  I figured that was an effective way to get ahead. 

Instead, that just made my coworkers mistrust me, and when I needed their help, it was very challenging to get it.  After the leadership course, I realized that people who build up their coworkers are seen as “natural” leaders. So I took a different approach with remarkable results.

Show Notes: Leaders Have Senority When Times Get Tough.

“What is effective communication?”

If you’ve ever worked on a team that had a crazy amount of chemistry, you already know the answer. Everything they touched was gold, they produced more than any other team combined, and they had fun doing it.
Unfortunately, you know that that is not the norm. Most teams have people you don’t like, that one person that doesn’t do anything, one person who shows up always talking about their personal life, one person who thinks they’re better than everyone else, and you have to try and make it work.
So, what’s the difference between those two teams?

I would say it all comes down to how they communicate!

Good communication skills are at the heart of successful team building. A survey conducted by the Project Management Institute (PMI) reported that one out of five projects are unsuccessful due to ineffective communication. This underlines how essential communication is within a team, where each member must understand not only their role but also the roles of their team members, the team’s objectives, and how their collective efforts contribute to these goals.

Effective workplace communication goes beyond merely exchanging information – it’s about understanding emotions and intentions behind the information. Two studies by Watson Wyatt Worldwide were performed in 2003 and 2005 to identify which communication practices deliver the best return.

The studies confirmed what we’ve all suspected: good internal communication correlates to higher levels of employee engagement and lower turnover rates. This statistic underscores the importance of addressing poor communication issues if the common goal is team cohesion and enhancing overall team performance.

Show Notes: 5 Key Elements of Effective Communication

My topic this week is Christmas Team Building Activities to Build Morale and Fun at Work... And I know what some of you are thinking... Doug, it's August. My kids just went back to school. Football season hasn't even started yet. Why on Earth are you covering Christmas stuff right now?

I used to agree with you, by the way. I'm the guy walking around department stores in October saying, "Halloween isn't even over yet, and there are already Christmas decorations out... Why?"

However, this episode is a little different. I'm going to cover how to organize team-building activities for Christmas and end-of-year parties. And if you haven't started organizing those types of parties and meetings yet, you are probably already behind the curve.

Many of these activities will take weeks (sometimes months) to prepare. So, if you are a solo-prenuer or run a small business, you can skip this episode. But if you manage a team of people, you'll want to pay attention because the tips on this episode can help create a stellar end-of-year activity for your group that builds camaraderie and fun.

Show Notes: Start Organizing Your Christmas Team Building Activities Now

Last week, I covered a few meeting tips to help you run more efficient and effective meetings.

So on this episode, I'm going cover a very cool group problem-solving technique that will help you and your team solve really challenging problems very quickly and with a consensus from the group. What we've found using this process over the years is that once the group comes up with a perfect solution to the problem at hand, the solution is obvious. There is no need to persuade part of your team to want to implement the solution.

This simple process is responsible for more of the big technological breakthroughs over the years than any other. I think you'll really like the process and get phenomenal value out of it.

Show Notes: Group Problem-Solving Techniques for Meetings

For the next couple of weeks, I will cover a few meeting tips. This week, I'm going to start with a few tips that will make your meetings more interesting (basically less boring,) help you and your team be more productive in your team meetings, and how to make the whole process more efficient.

Next week, I will give you a few tips on how to run problem-solving meetings. That specific type of meeting has the highest potential for things to go off the rails. So, make sure to come back next week, where I'll give you a very simple process that will help you solve any challenge as a group, get the group to have a consensus on the solution, and help you implement a series of breakthrough ideas in your industry. The process is very powerful!

Tips for Leading More Efficient and Effective Meetings.

The tips in this episode are strategies I have collected over the years from class members who swear by their effectiveness. I hope they work for you as well.

Show Notes: Tips for Effective Team Meetings