Fix your strategy, decisions, and meetings 📙
Sharing my first chapter and potential book titles
Below, I share the introductory chapter of my upcoming book.
Leading an organization and trying to have it achieve meaningful results is a challenging task.
Perhaps you’ve laid out the strategy and tried to inspire your teams to go after it, but somehow, the results are lacking. You may feel you’re doing everything possible to empower them, but they still don’t take ownership and look to you for approval. You may believe some are disengaged and lack the desire to join you in making an impact.
At the same time, you may have noticed that people are entrepreneurial in their personal lives. For example, we act like capable, autonomous adults when we travel, move to a different city, or explore various hobbies and interests. Somehow, we don’t always show this behavior in the workplace.
Traditional ways of working, based on top-down planning and control, don’t stimulate people to use their full potential. Perhaps you or someone in your organization has acknowledged that organizational structures and systems must transform to keep up with constant change and promote more adaptive behavior.
However, over the years, I’ve seen many change programs fail to make a lasting impact because leadership behavior doesn’t change accordingly. I’ve worked with numerous leaders who hold the organization back because they don’t practice what they ask their colleagues to do—not that they don’t want to, but they don’t know how.
For example, they ask their people to…
take ownership and initiative, but still request to approve every detail;
'be agile,' but hold onto outdated planning and reporting practices;
have a 'growth mindset' but don't welcome being challenged themselves;
innovate, but scrutinize the consequential failures.
The fact is that to change a culture, leaders must go first. As someone once told me, "People watch your feet, not your lips."
And with my work with leadership teams, I’ve found that many of them are not collaborating like the high-performing teams they could be. Common problems are:
talking on top of each other instead of having effective dialogues;
a tendency to have many unfocused digressions;
spending many hours reviewing PowerPoints;
maintaining long lists of ‘priorities’ that are mere ‘wishlists’;
an unhelpful mindset of striving for perfection, planning & controlling;
elephants in the room are not discussed.
When left unaddressed, these behavioral patterns perpetuate throughout the organization. However, when a leadership team takes the initiative to transform itself and starts to collaborate like a high-performing team, it has the potential to create an adaptive culture across the organization.
This book is an invitation for leaders like you to try a new approach. Stop working harder, but take a step back and rethink how you work. This book guides your journey and is full of ideas and practical things to do differently.
The book contains the wisdom and experience that my colleagues from Unblock and I have gained after coaching and training dozens of leadership teams over the last decade. It comprises the three major leverage points we’ve discovered that can unblock organizations:
Strategy: clarity of the direction, trade-offs, and priorities;
Decision-Making: a framework within which there is the freedom to take initiative and practices to make decisions quickly;
Teamwork: through conversations that stimulate collaboration and trust: meeting rhythms for learning, reflection, steering, and information exchange.
Get early access
Today I completed five new chapters and released them to my beta readers. I’ve now hit the milestone of 25,000 words!
Are you interested in getting early access and giving me feedback as one of my beta readers? Please get in touch.
Picking a book title
I’m experimenting with different book titles that pair well with my current draft subtitle, “Twelve Leadership Habits to Fix Your Organization’s Broken Strategy, Decision-making, and Meetings.” Which of these do you like best?
Formula X news
While I’m working on my new book, I still get many speaking requests related to my other book Formula X. Last week, I was asked to share my vision of the lessons that business can take away from the world of Formula 1 - a mix of a clear purpose, continuous learning, reversible decisions, and leadership is what creates high-performing, innovative organizations. 📸
I’ve also posted the video of a fun Q&A session with the South African team of B/S/H, covering:
why Formula X was written as a business novel
creating a culture where failure is safe and expected
how clarity of purpose enables speed and agility
dealing with conflicting priorities
how to adopt a rhythm of reflecting & learning
Watch it here (26 minutes):
Join free leadership roundtables
🚨 Eliminating meeting overload is the topic of our next Unblock Leadership Roundtable. If you are leading a team and are interested in joining, read more here.
Thanks for reading!