The Real Reason No One Listens When You Speak

3 Steps to Communicate Powerfully with Your Team

People have been figuring out ways to communicate with each other since they first set foot on the earth—from cave drawings and hieroglyphics to modern day emojis. 😎

We’ve become masters of getting our ideas across. Without dialogue, our teams disintegrate. But communication requires more than the transmission of information.

On a boat flying across the bay, crew members must become efficient and effective at relaying information. Wasting time and energy, or worse, risking miscommunication, just won’t do.

In your business, what are your critical communication points? Do you speak to employees or team members in person or via video calls? Will a team member text you with a question, call you, email you, or wait until you come asking? How does your behavior influence how willing teammates are to communicate with you?

Every interaction is a potential miscommunication unless you are intentional about integrating.  

The Communication Checklist

As you re-envision what you want successful communication to look like on your team, take these three steps:

1. Identify

It’s also important to identify the key people with whom you need to communicate the most—and help leaders on your team do the same with their key personnel. Everyone needs a leader who will hear him or her. As a leader, you must take responsibility for communication as far as it is within your control.

2. Adapt

Integrated communication depends on doing it in ways others understand and appreciate. Does one member love to contact you directly? Give them a chance to do so.

Are they independent and work on their own until checked upon? Be sure to check in on them at regular intervals.

It’s impossible—and not necessary—to get everyone to speak the same language. Do your best to integrate with the people you lead and speak to them using their preferred style.

3. Ask

When I’m working with turnarounds or start-ups, I like doing critical communication in morning huddles. These are short team meetings designed to communicate critical information, focus the team, and get back at it.

To make sure you are communicating effectively, consider these questions:

  • What are the critical components I need to communicate?
  • What does my team need to know?
  • Whom should I tell first?
  • Are there any critical communication points being missed?
  • Is my communication one-way or two-way?
  • Is the message I’m trying to deliver the message that’s being received?

People Who Listen are People Who Feel Heard

All communication is not created equal. Many leaders technically say all the right information—but they’re still not communicating. They’re just transmitting. Because if you are talking and nobody is listening, you aren’t communicating.

In the military, when somebody has given an order, the soldiers respond back with a term called “Hooah!” It stands for H.U.A. Heard. Understood. Acknowledged. Effective communication asks for an echo check from the team, a confirmation that not only have they heard, but they understand what to do, acknowledge their role, and are moving to action.

Don’t mistake leadership monologues for company dialogue. Communication means not only that transmission has occurred, but also that recipients have received the information—and they know what to do with it.

As a leader start the communication evaluation with yourself. Perform a communication audit. Ask your team members to rate your communication skills, and take what they say to heart.

Then perform a listening audit. Work to listen to your team members and use their best input.

When people feel truly heard, they rise to the occasion every time. When you start listening to them, they’ll start listening to you.

How to Make Sense of Your Team Performance

Identify Where Underperformance Strikes to Blow by the Competition

Measuring Your Team Performance

If someone dropped you in the middle of nowhere Alaska with just a map and an X on it… would you know how to get there?

Of course not. (And if you attempted, would be lucky to avoid frostbite.)

Because, as any adventurer knows, before you can move towards a goal, you need to know where you are on the map. You would need to identify some landmarks to gauge where you are and some checkpoints to measure your progress toward the goal.

Evaluating the right route for your team—even if you know where to go—requires the same assessment. Any leader needs to know the landmarks or checkpoints that lie between the organization and optimal performance.

When assessing where you are as a team, there are two general categories of landmarks or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you can use: tangible and intangible.

Tangible KPIs

As a general leadership rule, you should stay out of the operational weeds. It’s your job to plan and sustain the big-picture and train up the right delegates for detail work.

However, assessing your team well does require a season in the weeds to really understand who is doing what.

Only then can you assess the skills of each team member and position him or her for maximum value and production. Only then can you identify strengths and weaknesses and position each of them in the best possible position to contribute to the team performance.

You’ll want to take a look at things like:

  • Output
  • KPIs
  • Conflicts
  • Collaboration
  • Turnover
  • Wants and needs
  • Beliefs and behaviors
  • Capacity
  • Capabilities
  • Empowerment levels

Intangible KPIs

Other performance indicators are more easily missed because they don’t show up as numbers or percentages. But oh, do they matter! They are intangible so far as they are the performance indicators of healthy culture, problem-solving, and the relationship between team members. The four intangible KPIs I like to look at first are:

Trust. Trust is the currency of leadership. It starts when your team can trust you and you can trust your team. On the other hand, mistrust creates isolation. 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?

Competence. Trust can only take you so far when you’ve got a competence problem. As an InSPIRED leader, you have a responsibility to create and guide a competent team. That means you’ve got to understand your team’s core competencies:

  • What is it that your department does?
  • What are the critical deliverables?
  • What are the critical roles?
  • Within the critical roles, what does competency look like?

Communication. All communication is not created equal. Many conversations among/to team members technically use all the right information—but they’re still not communicating. They’re just transmitting. Communication means not only that transmission has occurred, but also that recipients have received the information—and they know what to do with it.

Commitment. We all start with some level of competence, but knowledge in any industry has to be learned. Give me a person who has some level of competence, but is trustworthy with a heart full of commitment—and I can turn that person into a vital and integrated member of the team. You will gain competence every day if your heart is committed.

Becoming a Master Navigator

Together these KPIs make up your team compass. Most leaders focus on the tangibles, but the secret to finding true north is understanding both the measurable performance indicators and the abstract characteristics that set the context and culture for everything you output.
Keep them in your pocket at all times, and it won’t matter where you get dropped—if you can evaluate where your team is now, you can strategize how to get them anywhere.

Excellence Doesn’t Happen by Accident—Do THIS Instead

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.


The Secret to Delivering Your Best Performance Every Day

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:
  1. Know what you’re good at—and what you’re not good at.
  2. Discover what energizes you—and what drains you.
  3. 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.   

The Fatal Flaw in Business Planning

Business People Planning Strategy Analysis Office Concept

Vince Lombardi is often credited with saying, “The man on the mountaintop didn’t fall there.”

Success doesn’t favor one person over another on a whim. The longer I’ve been in the business/leadership industry, the more clearly I have seen that only by being Intentional in business planning can you achieve remarkable results as an InSPIRED leader.

You can try to skip over it. You can dash headlong towards the prize. You can hope against hope that your team can win on passion alone. But as adventurous as spontaneity sounds, when you’re planning a next-level strategy, only intentional steps will keep you off the thin ice.

A Tale of Two Leaders

Rory and Bob were two visionary leaders with a strong drive to accomplish great things.

Each wanted to be first-to-market in their shared industry. Each had identified a market objective that would put his organization on the map—but only for the one who achieved it first. The desire to achieve drove them to act. But good intentions, goals, and dreams will only get you so far.  

When Rory heard of the opportunity, his start-up organization was already strong and well-prepared. Though originally positioned to tackle a different objective, he chose to pivot and pursue this new opportunity.

Because he had been intentional about building a first-rate team and resourcing them well, he was able to retool them quickly.

When Bob learned of Rory’s new market focus, he became reactionary.

He also decided to pivot and race for the objective, but wasn’t nearly as well prepared. His team wasn’t as strong, nor was it resourced to deal with the inevitable struggles every team encounters when forging new ground.

Bob’s lack of intentional business planning meant the resources and capital they did have were often squandered. Each failed opportunity lowered the morale of the organization.

One by one, his key performers lost interest and left to chase his or her own dreams. When what was left of Bob’s team finally managed to achieve their objective—exhausted and frustrated—they had come in second place behind Rory’s team.

In that industry, second place might as well have been a total failure. Crushed after defeat, Bob had little left in his leadership tank and even less capital. His few remaining team members left him. His company never recovered and closed its doors permanently.

Making It Out Alive

Rory’s team had been prepared, strategic, and intentional. Bob’s team had attempted to wing it and engage in a fire-drill-rush to market.

Maybe you’ve worked with a leader like Bob who rushed headlong into what looked like a golden opportunity, only to see it fail and leave everyone burned out and heading for the exits.  You may even have been a leader like that and known the pain of seeing your summit dreams dashed.

You may have survived, but barely, with painful scars to prove it.

For every moment of business acclaim, there must be countless hours of preparation. For every moment at the Everest summit, there are months of pre-planning. For every minute an athlete stands on the medal podium, there are years of disciplined activity.

Success is never an accident. It always begins with being intentional in your business planning, again and again.

The Step Before You Start

If the story of Rory and Bob sounds familiar, you’ve probably heard it before.

Rory? His real name was Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole. Bob’s real name was Robert Falcon Scott, the second person to reach the South Pole—five weeks later. By the time Scott arrived, he found a Norwegian flag and a note from “Rory.”

Unfortunately for Scott and the other four members of his team, his failure to be intentional proved fatal.

As a leader, you have a choice: be intentional on the front end—and multiply your chances of success, or fail to do so—and multiply the pain of failure for you and the people you lead.

For many leaders and organizations, un-intentionality is the norm. There may be a loose sketch of a plan or some grand vision, but little in terms of precisely how to get there.


When leaders don’t own the day, the day owns them—and their people pay the price.

I see it in organizations all the time. People act in constant fire-drill mode as management keeps them on high alert. Nerves fray, fuses get short, and relational explosions become a regular part of the workplace background noise. One person confided to me that the “always-on” environment felt like living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) all the time.

Under this level of constant stress, productivity plummets because it’s hard for anyone to go too far in any one direction when pulled in twenty other directions. Why would someone take time to build any kind of efficiency when leadership will probably react to yet another shiny object tomorrow? Not to mention the impact this un-intentionality has on the quality of life outside of work.

Intentionality Attracts the Right Talent

So what happens?

The highly-talented, high performers pack up and leave for a better place where intentional leadership, clear vision, and appreciation is the norm.


Talent always has a choice.

Organizations are left with C and D players after the A-team bolts and the B-team slowly slips out the side exits. C and D players aren’t particularly talented, but they’ve learned to survive within the chaos that un-intentionality brings. They do enough to stay out of the way, but not enough to make a positive contribution to the culture.

You may know what this feels like. Perhaps you’ve felt the pain before:

  • No prep. You were promoted to a leadership role because you performed well at your current position. But no one equipped you. When you got here, you found landmines, silos, secret handshakes, and unwritten expectations. You shoulder the burden and do your best simply trying to stay one step ahead of the next crisis!
  • No path. You have a job you enjoy at an organization you’re proud to represent, but you want to advance. You know you are talented and create success for the organization, but there’s no intentional advancement path for you. Leadership either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. You feel more like a cog in the machine than a critical part of the organization.
  • No clue. You work under a leader who is clueless. He or she may project confidence, but it’s untethered to reality. The team doesn’t respect the leader, so there’s an “every-man-for-himself / 8-in-the-gate / just-cash-the-check” mindset that permeates the team. You keep pushing forward, but your efforts fall short without buy-in from everyone else.
  • No restraint. You work for a leader or an organization whose appetite for achievement (and accompanying change) doesn’t match the organization’s metabolism or bandwidth. So everyone lives in a state of constant organizational indigestion—and all the potential ulcers that go with it.


Imagine what your workplace would be like if intentionality were the norm rather than the exception.

Take the Next Best Step

What if every employee was equipped and energized to bring their best to the table each day? What if people knew exactly where they fit and were provided the tools to contribute and thrive?

What if leaders spent more time on business planning—where to go and how to get there—and less time firefighting or looking over their shoulders at the competition?

Sound like an impossible dream? I assure you, it’s not. Organizations like this do exist. In fact, as a leader, you can help your organization become a place like this.

Here’s how to get started: Set aside a consistent amount of time each week to intentionally plan your next steps. Maybe two hours on a Monday. Maybe an entire Friday. Maybe for half an hour each morning.

Whatever fits your style and schedule, take a break from the hustle of team movement and take an intentional breath.

Make sure that each move your team makes has a purpose, and when you cross the finish line—with all members safe and sound—your team will thank you for it.