Coach Dan's Blog

Happy Monday. As you set your goals for the upcoming week, why not challenge yourself to try one small thing? Leaders who ask questions instead of giving instructions create an enviornment where team members feel empowered and passonate about solving problems. 💡 "What are your ideas about how to solve this?" 💡"If you were me, how would you address this?" 💡"If you could solve this problem right now, what would you do?" Give your team members the space to be creative, and the support to implement their own solutions - and they will thrive! What's stopping you from making a small change today? We all win together.  

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou What ONE THING will you do to make someone feel seen / heard / listened to / understood / valued / good today?

Attributes and characteristics of high-performing teams are essential to achieve outstanding results for customers. The Three E framework is an effective way to measure a team's effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement. By balancing and managing these three elements, teams can sustainably and indefinitely deliver exceptional results.

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One of the most important contributions that leaders can make in any transformation is to model the types of behaviors that we want teams and team members to adopt!  Modeling our target behaviors sends a very clear message that we are invested in not only changing the way we approach work, but also the culture that enables and reinforces those target behaviors.  Making small but thoughtful changes in the way you present yourself to your teams and partners can go a long way in creating the kind of organization we need.  As you’re working with your teams and partners, consider incorporating just one small thing from the following ideas. Pro tip – Don't have time to read this whole document right now?  Check out the “tl;dr” (Typed Long; Didn’t Read) section at the bottom of this post for an executive summary. Emphasize outcomes and put a premium on achieving business results rather than focusing on output.  Agile minded leaders view results in terms of achieving b...

I hear those words a lot.  "Hi!  My name is ... I report to ..."  I may have missed the part of orientation that taught us that standard introduction.  It's what we say when we meet someone new, or start working with a new team. Sometimes to me it feels like a security blanket of sorts.  Or a justification as to why that person showed up to a certain meeting.  Regardless of why it happens, it happens.  A lot.  To me, that phrase has become a symbol of why we as a company, still have a way to go with our transformation. At the risk of repeating myself over and over... I'd like to refresh us all on the "why" of this transformation we are all working on. Our customers matter.  They count on us to help them achieve their financial goals.  Without them, and their continued use of our services, we wouldn't have a company (and consequently jobs, which means we would not be a part of so-and-so's organization!)  Our customers matter so much ...

  I ' ve heard a lot of talk about empowerment lately, so I thought I might offer a perspective (and maybe some advice) on the topic.  Let's start with a definition we can all rally around, shall we? "Empowered employees believe they have the tools, resources, autonomy and support they need to act independently and be held accountable for the decisions they make" - Society for Human Resources Management. As much as we'd like, this doesn't just magically happen..... If you show up on a Tuesday and say " OK team, you're empowered ".  I'm sorry to tell you, you will be pretty disappointed in the results. You see, for employees to actually act independently -  to make decisions on behalf of the company - to help them achieve their objectives, people have to feel  safe .  Employees have to feel like they have the ability, but also the backing by their managers and leaders, so if a mistake is made, the don't find themselves under a bus.  Empowe...

 

 Empowerment begins with your team feeling psychologically safe. This week's blog post is specially crafted for leaders, managers, product managers and product owners.  Don't let that slow you down if you have a different fancy job title, of course, but today I'm speaking directly to the leaders of teams! One of my favorite definitions of empowerment comes from CEQ, Collaborative Equalit y: “Empowerment is defined as …the largest amount of voluntary and discretionary action in support of the company’s goals.  It is people proactively, and habitually, doing the right things at right time; people working out what’s needed and acting without instruction; people looking within the team for support, not looking upwards for answers." Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?  Problem is, it doesn’t just happen!  You have to work every day at creating and maintaining an environment where your teams feel safe to “work out what’s needed and act without instruction.” Here are some...

 Learn more about International Bagpipe Day

 

Somehow in the workplace we've equated being a good leader with being infallible... with never making a mistake or a misstep.  I gotta be honest, that sounds EXHAUSTING to me!  I would argue that one of the most important characteristics of being a great leader, is showing that it's ok to make mistakes.  That it's ok to be wrong.  To take risks that didn't work out the way we hoped.  To give us permission to be human as we strive to serve our customers and our users. Consider this During an Australian Open tennis match in March of 2020, star player Rafael Nadal returned an out-of-bounds serve and absolutely (and quite accidentally) CLOBBERED ball-girl, Anita Birchall in the head.  Now mind you, Rafael did nothing WRONG.  It just happened. but it impacted poor Anita. The referee checked in to make Anita was OK, even as clearly shook Anita (who is definitely a boss-girl) scanned her zone to see if the ball (that had just bounced off the side of her face...