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Three Things CEOs Do to Make Their Year Successful

January 6, 2022

As I looked around the table at the amazing talent I had assembled for learning about the North America Quality Group, I realized I had a BIG problem. They were all respected subject matter experts, but they lacked leadership and influence skills. Normally I would have to play block & tackle to drive initiatives where my team lacked those skills. Instead I took personal accountability to elevate their leadership skills for a greater impact.

Does this sound familiar? Have you been fortunate enough to have an amazing talent pool, but felt depleted because so often you would have to make up for short-comings in their skills? Do they have challenges handling conflict so you have to step in? Do they know their “stuff,” but can’t drive change with consensus? Do they focus on simply transactional work and can’t create a strategy to drive long term change? These are some of the most common pitfalls I see in a team of experts for which you and I as leaders must fill in the gaps. There’s an easier way in 2022 to achieve your goals with less effort.

I’ve seen many leaders of teams struggle with this issue. However, if you are reading this and you’re an aspiring C-suite leader who simply needs some tools for elevating your capability, you’ve also come to the right place. I’m here to help you as well.

Build a strategy for accountability

First things first; do you have a strategy for 2022 goals? These can be personal or for your organization. If not, have you ever built a strategy? In my last corporate role, I had to duct tape my strategy, taking the corporate strategy and modifying it to my role and my deliverables. I later realized my team also did not have the skills to build a strategy and a roadmap to drive change within their function. It became apparent to me that the framework did not exist and I created it in my book The CEO’s Compass: Your Guide to Get Back on Track.

Once you’ve built the strategy, you need an accountability tool to keep yourself on target each day, week and month until you’ve achieved the goals. I created this accountability tool for myself and it served as the foundation for helping my team do the same for their deliverables. In my book, we further discuss restructuring the monthly one-to-one meetings to focus on essential skills needed to achieve the goals and then on the strategic deliverables. The monthly one-to-one’s served as team accountability to ensure they had everything they needed to be successful.

A leader needs personal accountability to allocate some time each day to advance the strategy. I find when I work with leaders to provide the framework they need, it makes the process quite easy and you get a higher success rate in achieving your personal and team goals.

The book The CEO’s Compass has links to resources pages for all of the tools and templates you need to build a strategy and for personal accountability. If you need me to walk through this with you, let’s book a short call so I can support you.

Have the courage to ask for help

Let’s assume that building a strategy and having monthly accountability sessions with your team makes sense, but you realize developing their essential skills needs more work than you have capacity. What do you do now? You may reach out to HR for resources or google a workshop that you think can help, but in the end, these resources only deliver awareness, but rarely achieve noticeable results. Developing essential skills takes teaching and mentoring for sustainability. You know this in your gut, but still feel helpless to know what to do next. And while you’re mulling this capacity & capability issue, you’ve gotten 50 more emails and the phone is starting to ring. You put this task aside only to realize it’s going to come back and bite you.

I knew this challenge when I was leading an organization and I had to develop those skills while also doing my job as the Director of Quality. From this experience, I developed the C-Suite Leadership Academy designed for the leaders of tomorrow that is ready for deployment and in partnership with your needs. We offer group training and individual coaching to build the unique capability for each individual. I extend this offer to you because I know the challenges you have ahead of you and I simply don’t want to see you struggle anymore. I want you to move from saying “How do I have time for this” to “I’m grateful I’ve found a partner that can help guide me.”

The only thing standing in the way of making a decision is something as simple as courage. It is having the courage to simply ask for help to build the capability you need on your team. If this makes sense, but you’d like to learn more about applying it to your situation, you can email me or simply grab a few minutes on my calendar.

Make value vs. cost-based decisions

I’d like you to take out a piece of paper and pen and go through a quick exercise to estimate your time spent in mitigating issues. These are issues that you had to jump in and “fix” something because your team did not have the essential skills. It’s a quick formula, but it may make decision making easier based on value vs. simply cost:

Value = # Hours / Month resolving issues X your $ Hourly compensation

For Example, if you spend 5 hours per month resolving an issue and your hourly rate is $75 per hour, the formula would look like this:

5 hours X 75 per hour = 4,500

Value = $4,500

What if you invested that same amount of your value into developing your people. Sure, you still need to coach them, but you gain back the time you need to work on strategic work. Remember you are accountable for the strategic work and through your leadership and courage, you can leverage resources to round out the capability of your team.

Now, let me be transparent with you. I WISH I had the external resources to have helped me to develop the essential skills of my team. It was a lot of work to coach the skills they needed for higher impact. Because I did the hard work to see what was needed and I now have clarity and an offer to help build that capability for you. If you see the same gap on your team, I’d love to help you.

Simply email me or connect with me for a quick chat.

Resources

Good Reads

“The Inside of my Eyeballs” by Deborah A. Coviello – a little bit of humor, but seriously, these past weeks I focused on sleep… a lot of sleep! While many take this time to rest and catch up on reading, I took the position to empty my brain and simply “being” vs. “doing”. By doing so, I was able to create my goals and strategy for 2022. Now that it’s running, I can make time to read again and share my best with you.

Good Music

“Blizzard” by Thomas Bergersen – this week the temperatures are changing and winter is finally arriving where I live in Cincinnati Ohio. While people make preparations for “the worst” when a Blizzard comes through, I see it as an opportunity to hunker down and reflect on it’s beauty and powerful force. The beautiful snow represents new beginnings and a clean slate. The immense impact of nature can be yours as well. Is 2022 your year to make a major impact?

Good Advice

“If you want to be unleashed and you want to be unstoppable, you need to clear out your subconscious mind with anything that’s holding you up.”

-Mike “C-Roc” Ciorrocco

Listen and subscribe now:

P.S. Do you have insights to share with CEOs? I’m currently accepting applications for my weekly live show on LinkedIn. You can apply here.

The Three Languages of Leadership

December 31, 2021

My family and I were vacationing in Nice, France three years ago. I had the responsibility of checking us into the hotel because I spoke French. As I listened intently to the check in process, I was a bit nervous to ensure I understood them as well as formulating a response that would be understood. When I spoke to the receptionist, they responded with delight and asked if I was Canadian as my French was very good. I said I was American and they said they sincerely appreciated my effort. It was not typical for Americans to speak to them in French nor make the effort. They suggested we switch to English for the remainder of the transaction and they were exceptionally helpful to settle us in.

Language is the vehicle to exchange information and achieve a result. Language is built on a foundation of history and culture unique to a group of people. When we seek to understand that foundation and leverage language to engage, we build trust and can move forward together.

Leadership has its own language based on the group we are meant to serve. The quicker we can learn that unique language, the faster we can make a lasting impact.

The Language of Simplicity: Keep it simple and people will thank you.

A colleague and I had the honor and challenge of teaching an international group of professionals in Benicarlo Spain. We were teaching Six Sigma Methodology and I was given the task of explaining ANOVA (Analysis of Variation) and do it in a way that was concise and easy to understand. My colleague had other sections of equally challenging content to teach. When we broke for lunch and I sat down with the students, what transpired next is the key to connection through language. They said they liked my colleague very much, but when they spoke they used American English which was full of slang and they could not understand him. They said when I spoke, it was very simple and they could easily process the technical content and translate more easily with me. They thanked me for speaking proper English because I enabled them in the learning process.

The important message is to understand your audience and speak in a language that enables them to process new information and gives them the power to engage in conversation. That is how we create connection and trust. When we speak at a level where they cannot process all the words or expressions, we break their confidence and fail to connect. As leaders, by keeping things simple we create better connections.

The Language of the Locals – They’ll pick you up when you stumble and fall.

During a product transfer for a flavor company from Ireland to the Netherlands, I was interacting with many Dutch colleagues in the factory to enable that process. The Dutch speak exceptional English so it was easy to work with them. It was also important to me to try to learn words and expressions in Dutch so I could read their technical content and also listen to conversations in their native language. When I would respond with a few simple phrases, they were helpful to make corrections to enable me to continue to learn.

In business, we go into many situations where the technical language, the acronyms and words are foreign to us. When we speak in our own language, it takes longer to bring the conversations together and stalls the trust we need to build. It is better to be vulnerable and start to use the other group’s language and make mistakes. When we ask simple questions to explain their unique language, the team is eager to help and in the process it builds trust. When we start using their language, we move the conversation along faster and together.

The Language of the Body: Learn the culture for clues into human connection.

Singapore is a beautiful country and yet again I had the good fortune to teach an international group of colleagues. This time people came to us from Indonesia, India, Thailand, China and Japan who spoke various levels of English. This time, the challenge was not to speak in concise English, but to read what was said… and not said. Our students listened intently to every word we said and took copious notes. When we would take a pause in the training to ask if people had questions, there was silence in the room.

As an instructor, doubt ran through my head. Did we teach it so well, there were no questions? Did we teach it and no one understood what we said? It was very hard to read the situation, but we continued to move forward in hopes we were making an impact.

During a team dinner, I was able to speak to one of the students to ask what they thought of the training. They said they were enjoying it very much and were eager to apply for the training when they returned to their country. This gave me permission to ask the next question about why the students were not asking questions. They responded that in their culture, they do not question the teacher. It is their responsibility to work harder to understand the material on their own. It would bring shame to them if they asked a question.

Had I known that beforehand, we might have restructured the training. We could have provided some knowledge and then asked the students to work in small groups. Then I could listen to their knowledge level and provide additional clarification where I saw gaps in their comprehension.

The lesson for leadership is to not assume comprehension amongst the team. We need to take the responsibility to ensure we read the body language and cultural norms to know if people will speak up when there is doubt. While difficult for some leaders, we need to slow down in order to speed up and bring others along with us. Language is meant to connect people.

Every room you enter is an opportunity to learn a new language and build human connection.

Your willingness regardless of your performance level is what humanizes you to your team. Your team will help you in learning the new language and work with you to create a new language together.

Starting today, think about what new project or team will you impact and ask yourself what language will you need to learn?

If this makes sense, but you’d like to learn more about applying these principles to your situation, you can email me, direct message me on linkedin or simply grab a few minutes on my calendar.

I find through casual conversation leveraging The CEOs Compass often has all the answers for you to get back on track.

The CEO’s Compass: Your Guide to Get Back on Track – If you’re that leader who feels in their gut something is off track, this could be the resource for you.