May 2019 - Influence Leadership

28 May 2019

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller Posted in Execution, Leadership essentials, Success Permalink

Excellence Doesn’t Happen by Accident—Do THIS Instead

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller On May 28, 2019

The Magical Mindset that Produces Results Every Time

Have you ever been driving to a place you’ve never been before and become disoriented?

Maybe you turned left when you should have gone right, or you zoomed past your exit because you were talking.

How likely is it that you’ll end up at your destination without at least pausing to take stock of where you are and making a new plan to get where you need to go? Not very.

The same principle holds true in leadership. When you find yourself off course, you must make course corrections.

Accidental successes are neither repeatable nor sustainable. That’s why you must lead on purpose—be intentional.

Perfect Requires Practice

Think about the ballerina who stands for hours en pointe, wooden blocks digging bloody gashes into her toes, so she can hop to her toes effortlessly and glide across the stage when the curtain goes up.

Those graceful movements don’t happen by accident. She practices for decades to perform with excellence in that moment.

If you prefer an example with more speed, think about the painstaking years that go into engineering a Formula One race car. An entire team of experts meticulously designs every aspect of the vehicle for maximum speed and aerodynamics to achieve a single purpose—to win the checkered flag.

Likewise, no mountaineer ever reached the summit accidentally. Careful planning, intentional preparation, and a firm understanding of your destination position you to reach whatever your own summits may be.

Do You Have a Destiny Mindset?

All of it makes up what I call the Destiny Mindset. As you may notice, the words destiny and destination share the same root—destinare, which is Latin for “make firm, establish.”

While the word destiny carries the idea of being “predetermined and sure to come true,” your destination is something you “determine, appoint, choose, make firm or fast.”

Unless you predetermine your destiny, you’ll never reach your destination, let alone make the moves required to get there.

Without intentionality, you’ll be the disoriented driver cruising down the road, always in motion, but clueless about which way to turn.

Sure, you’ll get somewhere, but will it be the destiny you long to fulfill?

I challenge you to refuse to operate in this haphazard way in your leadership.

Don’t mistake movement for momentum or action for results.

The Right Destination Requires Intentional Planning

It all begins with realizing that excellence is never an accident. It’s always the result of being intentional. You have to have a plan. If you don’t know where you’re headed, you won’t know how to prepare for the journey.

When you’re not savvy about the trail, you get caught up in the action of the day-to-day and forget to watch for checkpoints. When you’re stuck in fire-ready-aim mode, you can easily drift off course.

That’s why you must have an intentional plan to ensure you’re hitting the right target consistently. So what sort of things must you be intentional about? Here are a few to get started:

Mindset. Your mindset dictates everything else you do and everything you believe. If you aren’t intentionally monitoring your mindset, you’ll unintentionally believe things that will pull you off track.
Yourself. Being intentional about yourself means understanding who you are and who you are not. It’s about having a plan to lead when strong and team when weak. It’s being honest with yourself about who you are and who you hope to become.
Your summit. Not every summit is worth climbing, so be intentional about choosing yours. Once you know where you want and need to go, you can get intentional about making the climb.
Your team. Provide good leadership for them, because they are a critical component of the climb. Good leadership is an art, and, as Seneca put it, “That which occurs by chance is not an art.”
Your culture. Good culture empowers your team and kickstarts execution. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Operations. Be intentional about what you need to deliver. Then create a solid plan to get it done.
Your organizational structure and goals. Do you do business by design or by accident?
Your customers. At the end of the day, they will determine your success or failure.

Too many good people simply accept whatever happens to them as their lot in life.

However, when you adopt a Destiny Mindset, you plant your flag and proclaim to yourself and the world: I believe I have a higher purpose. That purpose is my chosen destination.

I believe each of us is destined for greatness.

Visualize the leadership destiny you want—it has to start there—then develop an intentional plan to reach that destination.

21 May 2019

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller Posted in Culture, Leadership essentials, leadership roles, Organizational Effectiveness, Real, Team Heath Permalink

The Real Reason Why Your Team Is Falling Short

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller On May 21, 2019

How Much Leadership Currency Do You Have?

Trust is the currency of leadership.

It starts when your team can trust you and you can trust your team. It expands when other departments in the organization trust you as a leader and trust your team to execute on its promises and responsibilities.

It expands even further when your external customers trust you as an organization to deliver a solution to their needs and to do so in a valuable and timely manner.

Integration without trust is like a boat without a keel.

The keel is the strong backbone of a ship, made out of wood, metal, or other sturdy material. It juts down into the water beneath the boat like an upside-down shark fin and can weigh tons.

In fact, a keel can make up almost half of the overall weight of a typical sailboat. It needs to be sufficiently heavy to stabilize, while being light enough for agility and adaptation at speed.

You might think that something so heavy would immediately sink the ship. Instead, the weight works as ballast, keeping everything balanced in rough waters.

Trust works in the same way. When you have a team you can trust, through good days and bad, that you may wobble, but you won’t keel over.

Do You Have the Trust You Need?

There are two types of trust—relational and transactional.

When most people think of trust, they think of relational trust, because trust begins and ends on the strength of relationships. Every team has some sort of relationship history and these interconnected relationships either build up or erode trust.

Trust isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s built over hundreds of little moments of interaction between real, complex people with emotions, feelings, and fears. Thus, a powerful component of relational trust is positive intent—choosing to believe the best of team members first, and then doing the necessary research into a problem.

When any team struggles to believe the best of one another, communication breaks down, and growth grinds to a halt. The absence of relational trust makes everything exponentially more difficult to do.

But there’s another sort of trust that is equally necessary.

Transactional trust means you believe that a person or team can execute on your expectations, follow through, and get things done. It differs from relational trust in that you may trust someone to be a good person with the best of intentions, but whether or not they can be trusted to get the job done is another matter entirely.

Do you trust each other to deliver results? If someone promises to get something done, can you believe them?

If you can’t trust people or teams to deliver the results they promise, you’ve both got a big problem.

You may have people on your team whose integrity and ethics are top-notch, but who, unfortunately, lack the skill and competence to complete the task. That’s a breakdown in transactional trust that must be remedied. Also, it’s important to consider the enhanced customer trust a London virtual office postal address can provide. With Virtually There’s London virtual office services, your business appears more established and trustworthy. It’s a subtle yet effective strategy for home-based businesses to boost their reputation.

In a business, transactional trust makes up a large part of the ballast that keeps the ship upright. If you have a person on your team that isn’t getting it done transactionally, that’s a place where you aren’t integrated and something needs to change.

Do you Choose Excuses or Results?

I always say that your team can choose excuses or results. Of course, it’s tempting to keep giving the benefit of the doubt and avoid confrontation, but that doesn’t do anybody any good. To build trust, you’ve got to address the problem and provide the training or guidance necessary to improve the situation.

Mistrust creates isolation and isolation in a team environment always leads to disaster. So, ask yourself:

Does my team trust me?
Do I trust my team?
Do external customers trust us?
Do other departments within the organization trust us?
Do I know what my team can and can’t do—and how to grow where we are lacking?

The best teams have this awareness in common. They know they can rely on each other to do the job well—and if there are problems, team members will speak up.

So which one will you choose for your team? Excuses or results? Isolation or trustworthy community?

If you’re just starting this leadership journey today, have grace with yourself and your team. Trust is built over time with integrity and honesty. Start by being trustworthy yourself. Next, look for ways to give other people a chance to be trustworthy with you.

Where do you see the need for more trust—relational or transactional—in your team? What conversations/steps will you take this week to begin moving back towards effective, efficient, and trusting performance?

14 May 2019

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller Posted in Integration, Leadership essentials, Organizational Effectiveness Permalink

How to Unleash the Power of a Fully Integrated Team

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller On May 14, 2019

The One Thing Leaders Must Do to Get Results

You probably know the pain.

Investing countless hours in redundant meetings only to find out the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing the entire time.

Getting the runaround between departments trying to track down simple information.

Struggling to get leaders on the same page when communication snafus blow up what should have been a quick project.

The unintended results? Wasted time, project delays, budget overruns, and competing expectations. The list could go on and on.

How many times have you thought, It really shouldn’t be this hard to get things done?

When you do, know that you have identified a point of disintegration.

You’re not crazy. It truly isn’t supposed to be this way.

Don’t bury those thoughts. Heed the signal that your team isn’t properly aligned somewhere.

A leader with a disintegrated team is like the emperor with no clothes. Everyone knows about the problem except the leader. If team members believe stress, struggle, and production pain are just “how it’s supposed to be,” they’ll continue to suffer and unintentionally underperform—until disaster strikes.

Thankfully, you can avoid million-dollar mistakes before you lose any more time, sleep, or your most precious resource—people.

3 Levels to Release Remarkable Results

While disintegration is not sustainable, integration changes everything. I’m not talking about perfection, but rather the alignment, understanding, and adaptability of the group for the mission as it unfolds in real time in the real world.

So, what kinds of things need to be integrated? Here are a few examples:

Culture and values into hiring, on-boarding, and daily activities
Management modeling with daily habits
Strategy and strategic approach with marketplace wants, needs, and reality
Product and service offerings with customer wants or needs
Strategy with organizational capabilities and capacity
Strategy and operations with systems and processes at scale
People and processes
Change appetite with change metabolism

Complete integration requires attention at three levels:

You. The first person you need to integrate is yourself. If you are scattered regarding a vision for your team or dysfunctional when it comes to your own ability to get things done, you can’t expect everyone else to have clarity.

[call out] Leaders set the tone and pace for the team.

So, ask yourself: How am I integrating with coworkers, team members, customers, mentors, other influencers? Where do I need to step up my game?

2. Your team (internal customers). Once you’ve addressed your own integration challenges, consider the integration of your own team with others in the organization. Integrated teams are drawn together holistically on a shared mission. Ask:

Do I know the critical people I need to integrate with?
Do I intentionally reach out to peers?
Do I know what their personality style is and how best to integrate with that style and communicate in their language?
Can I trust them to have the know-how and flexibility to either get the job done or to communicate their problems?
Do they trust me?

3. Your external customers. How integrated are you with your external customers? Customer integration means you know your target audience well. You are on the same page with them and understand their problems, pain points, needs and wants. Ask:

How accurately am I working to solve real customer problems with my product or service before they even know there is a problem?
How easy am I to do business with?
How seamless would customers say our interactions are?
Do customers come back to us?
Do they tell others about us?

When you intentionally integrate fully with yourself, your team, and your customers, everything starts to run more efficiently. Zombies disappear and work gets done.

Integration Begins with YOU

You don’t have to be a military leader or the coach of an underdog sports team. When any team is integrated and functioning properly, the results are truly inspiring. However, you are responsible for equipping your team to run at an integrated, day-to-day level.

At its core, communication begins with you. Are you talking with your team or at your team? Is communication one way or actual? Integration runs on dialogue.

The most important thing to realize is that integrated teamwork begins and ends with leadership.

Model integration for your team. Make it a priority. And you’ll enjoy plenty of first-place—even come-from-behind—finishes of your own.

07 May 2019

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller Posted in Attitude, employee engagement, Leadership essentials, Passion, Success Permalink

The Secret to Delivering Your Best Performance Every Day

Sticky Post By Chris Fuller On May 7, 2019

3 Steps to Turn Burnout into Passion-Filled Purpose

Do you enjoy what you do every day? Do you wake up raring to tackle the next challenge?

Everyone can relate to doing a job they don’t enjoy. In fact, most Americans say they don’t look forward to going to work each day.

According to Gallup research, “An astounding 70% of U.S. employees are not showing up to work fully committed to delivering their best performance. Adding insult to injury, 52% of those workers are basically sleepwalking through their day, and 18% of them are busy acting out their unhappiness.”

In a workplace where employees are unhappy or ambivalent about their jobs, there’s often an underlying issue that goes beyond mere job dissatisfaction. One critical concern that can greatly affect an employee’s experience is harassment. Ensuring employee rights against harassment is essential to fostering a positive work environment. When individuals face harassment at work, it can lead to intense dissatisfaction or even hatred towards their jobs. Creating a workplace free from harassment is crucial in helping employees feel valued and ensuring their well-being.

Should You Bail Out or Dig In?

Let me be candid: if you are in a job you aren’t passionate about, you may need to start laying out a plan to pursue another path that better aligns with your passion.

In my experience, if you can align your passion with what you do at least two-thirds of the time, there’s no need to panic and jump ship. If not, you may need to make a move.

But before you do, I suggest you get clear on your passion first, because the problem may not be your job or organization at all.

The issue may be that you don’t have clarity about what lights you up or don’t know how to align that passion with the greater purpose of your organization.

Progress Begins with Purpose

Your purpose is largely made up of three components: what you’re passionate about, what you’re good at, and the sweet spot where you can make a living bringing those two together.

Your Passions. Start by listing all the things you would do for free simply because they make you feel fulfilled. Remember, inspiration may influence you, but passion moves you. When you’re tapping into passion, think, I cannot not do this. What do you love doing so much that it doesn’t even feel like work? But passion alone isn’t enough. It has to align with the reality of…

Your Strengths. Analyze your strengths and talents and factor them into the purpose equation. For example, you can be passionate about singing, but not be able to carry a tune in a bucket. You may long to be the life of every party but be wired to make your highest contribution in strategic thinking and reflection. In addition to taking assessments designed to uncover your natural personality and wiring, consider these three things:

Know what you’re good at—and what you’re not good at.
Discover what energizes you—and what drains you.
Identify what recharges you—and what decharges you.

For example, when I get in front of an audience and start teaching principles and helping people, something amazing happens. Even when I come into the room exhausted, I get re-energized by the experience and walk out with more energy than I had walking in. Not surprisingly, that strength zone is where you’ll deliver your best results in…

Your Opportunities. Where do your passions and strengths intersect? That’s where you’ll find a competitive advantage, a place where you can deliver something unique to the workplace and, for that matter, the broader marketplace. Your oppotunity sweet spot is where you have the greatest potential to make your highest contribution, doing what you love in a way that is profitable to other people and rewarding to you.

Pro Tip: Your sweet spot has to make sense in the marketplace if you’re going to make a living pursuing it. I’ve known many people who’ve launched into the speaker business by quitting everything else and simply declaring, “I’m going to be a speaker.” It never lasts long.

People ask me all the time, Chris, how do you do what you’re doing?

My counsel is this: develop your sweet spot role on the side until your audience demands your full attention. That’s when you can allow yourself to fully focus on your purpose-driven passion.

Take Your Passion With You

It’s one thing to be in a job you hate. It’s another thing to be in a job where you do well and make good money, but lack respect for the leader or passion for the work.

That’s a trap that keeps good people paralyzed every day. They choose to remain a cog in the wheel rather than find and focus on what lights them up.

InSPIRED leaders discover what they were made to do and then pursue it with abandon. So, my question is this: if you’re going to do anything in life, why not do something that lights you up?

If you’re going to do anything in life, why not do something that lights you up?

The beauty of this mindset is that the brighter you are, the brighter you make your world. I want to do something that lights up the world. I want to light it up in a way that lights others up and encourages them to live out their unique brilliance.

That’s why I walked away from a good career many years ago to build a great life.

Let me be clear: I’m not advising everyone to quit their jobs tomorrow—or ever, for that matter. Not at all.

In fact, what I am suggesting is that the disengagement so many people feel is a direct result of the disconnect between personal passion and organizational purpose.

The responsibility to close that gap lies both with the individual to get clear on his or her passion and with company leadership to create a culture that resonates with a bigger and better why.

The disengagement so many people feel is a direct result of the disconnect between personal passion and organizational purpose.

People aren’t like matches. Burnout isn’t the end.

It’s never too late to rediscover what lights you up and bring that same purpose and passion to wherever you decide to live, work, and lead.

I challenge you to invest intentional time this week to revisit these three elements—your passions, your strengths, and your opportunities—and rediscover why you started your journey in the first place.

It changes everything.