Thought Patrol Podcast

As a leader, you need to learn how to communicate. Take feedback. Improve and go again.

Learning is like climbing a mountain. Hard work and often just one step at a time. But when you get there it’s worthwhile.

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A team is more than the individuals involved and there is value between roles. As a leader we need to connect those we lead, with each other. Don’t fall for the temptation to make decisions without collaboration. Collaboration and coordination are important in every team to make it a success.

Christmas is very special. For me, it's a time to be thankful, to be grateful, and to give thanks for the larger and the smaller things in life, and a time to remember God's gift to us. In this special season, just have a great time and enjoy. Have a wonderful New Year looking forward to 2022. I'm sure it'll have its challenges, but it will be interesting. From my family to your family, have a fantastic Christmas and a prosperous and blessed 2022!

If you have a pulse, you’ll have noticed that things changed fast in 2020. The security of the plans we had, the certainty we had assumed, all got thrown out of the window, by of all things, a tiny virus. 

One thing I teach my clients, and help their companies embrace, is to learn fast and stay agile. It's front and centre in some of the successes that I've had in my leadership past. Yet 2020 has absolutely galvanised that view as I've seen those locked in their old ways failing to respond. Leaders who learned fast were proactive and reactive. Their solutions were relevant, and they pivoted productively. The organisations that were agile we're just able to move faster. As the environment changed, the needs changed, and the opportunities were seized by those able to learn fast. As leadership guru Tom Peters says, “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.” So true and never so important as now.  VIEW MORE HERE

One of the most profound lockdown leadership lessons I've learned, with 2020 hindsight, is the importance of staying connected. I've always known this to be true from a leadership perspective. The aloof leader, locked behind doors, not connecting and not engaging, is rarely effective. 20 years as a CEO of six different companies taught me the power and importance of connection. Yet this year it has been profoundly highlighted to me, and the leaders that I serve.

So, what do I mean by connection? I’ll leave that to the venerable Brené Brown, who said, “I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”  That is a very high bar for any commercial environment, and unfortunately not even close in most.  But I think we should all be on that journey as leaders, albeit that Brown’s definition is the ideal. VIEW MORE HERE

We're continuing our series of 2020 hindsight; a look at lock down leadership lessons, I've learned over the past 12 months. One important factor in successfully navigating a crisis is the need for simplicity. I think there is a lesson for businesses and their leaders to keep it simple. 

There definitely seems to be something innate in us, that compels us to add complexity where it's not necessary. I think underlying this is the wrong assumption that complexity is a sign of competence. When I hear people being complex or giving long answers, it’s often used as a cover for incompetence or self-justification. In the many turnarounds I've been involved with, the solutions have always been very simple, even in the most complex environments. VIEW MORE HERE

One of the things that has been a surprising outcome of meeting with groups of leaders during 2020 is a definite change in the usual priorities. Once the urgency of protecting the business and preserving the company was in place, leaders started talking about other things. The often-robust conversations of a purely commercial nature became deeper, and more personal.

Forced time away from work, more connection with family, and a prevailing threat helped us all to reassess our priorities. My 2020 hindsight, leadership lockdown lesson is the importance of putting ‘love’ first. Yes, this is commercial leadership content and yes, I’m talking about love.

We're taking a look at some of the things I've learned over 2020 with a little bit of 2020 hindsight. In this session, I'm going to cover the importance of building trust. Lincoln Chafee, the American politician said, “Trust is built with consistency.” Very true, but I would add transparency and integrity. 

As a leader, when you don't have trust, or haven't created an environment of trust for your team, things move slowly. With low trust, you experience low productivity and even toxic environments. Often when there is no trust, that gap is filled with fear.

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This is a continuation of a small series I'm doing on 2020 hindsight. These are leadership lessons I've learned from the lockdown. In this session, “Know what comes first”. In a year where there was a lot going on, as you may have noticed, having clarity around priorities has been paramount. “Our life is the sum total of all the decisions we make every day, and those decisions are determined by our priorities.” According to the Bahamian Clergyman, Myles Munroe. Wise words.

If we don't know what comes first, we will be busy, but not necessarily effective. We all have a huge amount of noise in our world. The tendency will be to become reactive rather than proactive. We will randomly respond to what's happening, rather than considering our primary most effective response. If we do have a sense of what should come first, then we have more clarity. If we cut through the clutter and the noise, we tend to make better decisions. 

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Here’s a 2020 hindsight; a lockdown leadership lesson I've learned during this ‘interesting’ year. Embrace uncertainty. Danish Physicist Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.” I do like a physicist with a sense of humour. But it's very true, we do like to think that we are in control, that our futures are certain. We are the most insured, some would argue, over-insured people in history. We try and reduce risk, increase certainty and think that we can control our future's.

Once again, there's nothing wrong with those things, but if we do not learn to embrace uncertainty, we can be left disappointed, resentful and cynical. It can also lead to a lack of resilience. Yet if we embrace uncertainty, recognise that the environment and life in general, cannot always be shaped into our desired state, we can be both realistic and resilient. This year taught me that embracing uncertainty is essential to sustainable growth, as an individual, as a leader and for our organisations.

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