Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

It’s a new year and while many are focusing on resolutions, I didn’t make any this year. Not because I’m clever or lazy or so perfect that I couldn’t stand to improve behaviors, habits or beliefs…I think that there will always be room for improvement. I’m avoiding short term disappointment, guilt and anxiety. It’s also important to remember that we are running a marathon, not a sprint.

I’m busy enough on high priority items and have decided that a certain amount of white space in the calendar is necessary to incorporate and critical to defend.

From a time management perspective, If you don’t feel like you have the time to do something well, what makes you think you’ll have the time to do something over?

I resolve, by not resolving, to do… less… better and actually get more done. This also relates to delegation. Are you humble enough to accept the fact that you aren’t the best at everything? Even more so, have you identified what you are exceptionally good at and also identified who is best at other tasks you need done whether at work or at home?

A coworker identified these tasks as PtG (Pay the Guy).

Whether it is a renaissance complex or simply getting caught up in the whirlwind of life, we tend to attract tasks like flies to a strip and then get frustrated when we can’t get them all done in a timely manner.

In addition to putting more white space on your calendar, delegating more tasks and identifying what you a REALLY good at, I’ll offer up the prioritization advice reportedly worth nearly half a million dollars today. You decide whether it’s worth that much to you.

Story:
You may have heard the story about Ivy Lee and Charles Schwab (the steel guy, not the investment guy)
Lee offered to increase the productivity of Schwab’s executives by 20%. The idea is very simple and the story goes that Scwab wrote a check to Lee for $25,000 which equates to roughly $400,000 today.

Lee’s idea
1. Before you leave work, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow.
2. Go home. Leave work at the office. Spend time with your family. Read books. Write. Have fun.
3. The next morning, start with the first thing on your list. Work at it until it’s completed.
4. Work down your list. Interruptions will happen. Get back to your list as quickly as you can.
5. Repeat. Anything still on your list will probably go to the top of tomorrow’s list, unless it’s no longer relevant. Flesh out the list and go home.

If you are already doing this, Congratulations!
If not, give it a try. It does make a difference.

Have a blessed weekend!

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

The holiday season is upon us and if we look beyond the wild buzz of retailers, the disruption of the weather that brings us snow and cold as reasons to stay inside and even beyond the charming behavior of our children, nieces & nephews, grandchildren or other youngsters grabbing our attention at the annual Christmas program…we should not forget the reason for the season.

Isaiah 9:6a For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

This is a big ol’ birthday bash for the answer-with an after party we can only dream of.

The older I get, the louder the question that nags at me in the dark annals of my subconscious…
What is all of this about?
Why am I here?
What purpose do I serve?
What happens when I am unable to connect my ambition with a purpose like I have previously as a son, husband, father, grandfather, employee, manager, leader, and mentor.

It’s the same answer.

Christ

John 3:16 For God so loved the world (that’s you and me, kids) that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him shall have everlasting life.

This is a broken world we were born into that carries with it sin, pain, death, destruction, and evil. We busily work to rationalize our existence, to minimize pain by pretending it isn’t all around us, insulate our sin with material items, lull ourselves into a false sense of security that we can somehow cheat death.

God designed each and every one of us with strengths, weaknesses, purpose and mortality. He doesn’t make mistakes. He knows everything you have done, are doing and will do…everything.

Jesus’ purpose was to become the way, the truth and the light. Through God’s ultimate sacrifice, he came and conquered sin, death and the devil. Our purpose, while on earth, includes celebrating his birthday like many of us are about to do but it goes beyond that.
Challenge: What if you woke every morning like it was Christmas morning and with child-like enthusiasm, you bound out of bed and instead of looking under a tree, you read a chapter or two from the greatest story about the greatest gift and carried that gift throughout your day with inner peace and joy, sharing it with those who need to hear it most.

Have a blessed weekend and Christmas holiday! May it be filled with laughter and the Fruits of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

Note to my faithful readers: I have elected to put down the “drumsticks” for a week or two. The cadence will continue in the New Year.

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

I spent most of this week in Las Vegas at the PowerGen conference put on by Pennwell publications. With roughly 20,000 attendees (manufacturers to service providers) it was an exciting and enjoyable, albeit huge venue. I probably saw less than 20% of the showroom floor.

What I learned was virtually everyone associated with power generation is trying to better understand what next looks like.

The industry used to be simple; fuel sources were predominantly fossil-based until it was widely believed that coal-fired power generation was detrimental to our planet. The socioeconomic drivers would surprise you. President Obama just finished making promises in Paris based on what I consider selective science. I’d parallel his position on gun control and healthcare with his cabinet’s view on the environment. Simple, uneducated approaches to complex issues with careless disregard for root cause analysis leads to ridiculous legislation and confounds an entire industry, if not the entire business climate.

Power generation is a complicated business and the incredible reliability the typical consumer enjoys is beyond comprehensive reach for the vast majority of the public and among those who have the capacity to understand it, many are apathetic.

I’ll make it really simple …
•When the wind doesn’t blow, wind turbines can’t generate electricity.
•When the sun doesn’t shine, solar farms can’t generate electricity.
•When it doesn’t rain or snow/melt and fish species are endangered, hydro electric dams don’t function to the capacity they were designed for.
•We lack adequate, economic storage
•Gas generation is cheap right now but that will change-I guarantee it.
•Nuclear generation has a troubled past with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear technology is largely misunderstood and human beings don’t deal with uncertainty well. Thank you, misinformed media.
•Coal supply is plentiful and when the idealists with no regard for the technical aspects of this complex issue (base load generation needs to start) reach for their light switch and it affects their ears but not their eyes, perhaps they’ll come to their senses.

My position is that we require a mixed portfolio of power generation resources.
-There is no single answer.
-There is no simple answer.
-The answer is far more technical than political and needs to balance energy affordability, energy security and energy sustainability.

Leadership includes finding long-term answers that take into account all issues rather than pushing a simplified response through an executive order or a government agency position.

Have a blessed weekend.

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

One of my junior high foreign language instructors, Mrs. Marks, told us that she took philosophy while studying in France. Her final exam (perhaps thesis-it’s been several decades) was to answer the question, “Why?”, and it was to be presented orally, in French, not her native tongue. She shared that after much deliberation on how to respond, she simply said, “Pourquoi ne pas?” (Why not?) – she recalls that she received a passing grade even though she was supposed to provide 45 minutes of discussion on the topic.

What inspires deep thinking for you?

Have you ever pulled your head out of the whirlwind long enough to contemplate the bigger questions of:

•Why am I here? {Purpose}
•What’s my one thing? {Core Competency}
•What positive qualities have I been blessed with and am I emphasizing those strengths and using them to improve my life and the lives of those around me? {Focus}
•Will the contributions I’ve made and the sacrifices I’ve suffered through be remembered accurately and fully understood why specific decisions were made? {Legacy}
•What brings me joy? {Happiness}
•Does my family really know how much I love them? {Demonstrated Affection}

Perhaps the most important question you should ask yourself today:

What actions and behaviors am I going to start changing for the better as a result of reading this post today?

Leaders are learners, not just while in school. School didn’t pose all of life’s questions and put the answers in the back of the book, at least not the schools I went to. School should have prepared you for life’s questions by teaching you how to become a problem solver;
-State the question completely, yet succinctly
-Gather data and information
-Form an assessment with the tools made available to you
-Take action
-If it doesn’t provide the desired result, repeat the process.

Remember, Edison tried a multitude of attempts to perfect the light bulb (some sources claim 1,000 and others claim as many as 10,000 attempts). When asked how he dealt with that amount of failure, he simply acknowledged that he discovered that many ways not to do it [or that it was a 10,000 (or place your favorite number here) step process].

Have a blessed weekend.

Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

I’m going to depart from my leadership tone for this week. It’s Thanksgiving and most of you are not at work today. If you have a vacation policy that allows the day after Thanksgiving as a personal holiday, a regular holiday for those robust places to work or you just took the Friday after a Thursday holiday, it doesn’t matter. You’re not at work…

So what are you doing with this gifted day?

You likely stuffed yourself with the Butterball dressed up next to the cornucopia, accompanied by candied yams, French cut green bean and mushroom soup casserole with the dried onions on top, stuffing with or without the giblets, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, or some variation of that. You probably took a tryptophan-induced nap, watched some TV, played some games…

• So maybe your waist grew 1” closer to blowing out your waistband but that isn’t what I was referring to in the blog title.

• In college, I recall a Gold Star band trumpet player who grew his scruffy beard for deer hunting season around this time of year. He was convinced that good food and family time made his beard grow fuller and faster, like it was 1” closer to a real beard by the time he returned from the holiday.

• Actually, life affects us in funny ways. Things that sneak up on us (or at least me) where we find the person we want to spend our life with, we raise a family, we prepare our children for the “real world” and we usher them off to get smart, get a job and create a life for themselves. Holidays roll around and we hope like crazy that they desire to come back and share some time and stories. They move miles and/or states away and we hope they feel “the emotional tug” to get 1” closer…at least once or twice a year.

I recently saw an interesting Harvard Business Review article from a couple of decades ago highlighting the book by Daniel Goleman that explained how a leader’s high Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) is what makes them exceptional. (So maybe I can’t help but slip a lesson about leadership into my story.)  The five areas that describe EQ are;

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Social Skill

Moving 1″ closer to adulthood or 1″ closer to becoming an effective leader, you need to open up your heart.

Open up your hearts this holiday season, not just your pie hole. 🙂

Have a blessed remainder of this extended Thanksgiving weekend.

Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

When you’ve accumulated knowledge, wisdom, courage, intuition, maturity, and confidence-what do you do with it? Keep it to yourself? Use it for your own benefit, wealth or job security?

We tend to want others to play by the same rules we were taught to play by, don’t we? This condition we create adds no value, it simply builds a wall. Does this really serve anyone? With age comes wisdom…isn’t part of wisdom to recognize that knowledge gathering evolves with our surroundings? For instance, my three year old grandson can navigate an iPad like nobody’s business. He still enjoys having someone read to him but the pace and vehicles for his learning has expanded compared to mine at that age. We must also evolve.

Here’s a novel idea…
Assume noble intent. That “kid”; young, inexperienced, naive, innocent, shy kid you’ve unfortunately, maybe even accidentally dismissed might be the vessel God sent to you to carry your experience into the next generation.

What does it take to be a mentor? I submit it starts with building a bridge. Not half way, not most of the way…all the way! When you cross that newly built bridge, you will find a willing set of hands, an engaged mind, and steady feet that simply needs tools, someone to instill confidence in them, and to show them the way.

The bridge pictured above (courtesy of WordPress) was built adjacent to Hoover dam in Nevada. This complex engineering and construction feat is a marvel. It’s amazing what we can do when we put our minds to something. So, you may be saying to yourself, building a bridge the whole way is difficult, time consuming, expensive, risky…blah, blah, blah. Yes, it is. It’s also rewarding, energizing and the absolute right thing to do.

Look in your mirror today. Stare at your eyes for a minute. Those eyes have most likely seen things that others younger than you haven’t. You possess skills others don’t. You’ve got something to give. Something to pass on.

It starts with a bridge. Build the whole thing! Because you can. Because at some point, long before you knew what a bridge was, someone, probably several someone’s, built one all the way to you.

Have a blessed weekend!

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

My misperceptions of strong leaders of large and successful organizations included being a hard ass, subscribing to command and control tactics, all stick, no carrot, fire branded by all the stressful situations they encounter on a daily basis.

Those situations may exist in pockets of the workforce but are probably not associated with successful companies you’d want to be part of today.

It was nine years ago, late October in New York where, at a CEO roundtable, I heard leaders sharing information on their successes and failures. Making themselves vulnerable, passing on stories of incredible endurance, passion and love. Yes, old men in suits and ties, in a theater setting, talking to a nearly all male audience about love. Was this the twilight zone?

Nope, just a tectonic shift in my beliefs. Nearly a decade later, I recall the moment but I still didn’t anticipate that would begin the melting process.

Scientists say we are made of mostly water. If so, perhaps the hardening of the heart is actually more freezing than hardening. If, over time, we begin to realize that our perceptions were inaccurate, inappropriate and misapplied, what would YOU call the change in thought? Softening, thawing, melting…how else would you explain the relative ease at which I start leaking out of my eye sockets?

The human condition is a confounding proposition. You enter into this world fragile, screaming in pain, covered in vernix and amniotic fluid and we immediately begin to form a thicker skin; cry ourselves to sleep, demonstrate our ability to take a joke, a skinned knee, a disappointment at the school dance, perceived failures in life that harden our hearts. If we try to stay tender, we hurt more.

Then, one day, the process starts to reverse…if you’re lucky. The birth of your own child or grandchild. Milestone accomplishments from first step to first word, to first date to first job. God gifted you with a blessing: innocence, new beginnings, watching the same process you went through but filled with joy rather than pain…and you start to melt, from the inside outward.

Youngsters with your elastic, supple, ivory soap like skin…you will grow calloused over time … until you don’t. You have the ability to expedite the human condition by acknowledging this process and consciously electing to bypass it.

No freezing, no melting, just love.

Have a blessed weekend

Good morning, Americans! It’s Wednesday! (and Veteran’s Day)

Words cannot capture the emotion…

•I heard the other day that when a wife loses her husband, she is called – widow.

•When a child loses their parent, they are called – orphan.

•But when a parent loses their child…there is no word to describe it. It’s not supposed to happen. When it happens while they are serving their country, pride may be added to the myriad emotions the family goes through but pain runs deepest.

War is hell.
War is sacrifice beyond measure or explanation or expectation.
War leaves scars both visible and invisible.

Whether service in our armed forces included a war, a conflict, an invasion, the threat of war, peace keeping or exercises meant to prevent war, service men and women have my, and the nation’s, utmost respect.

Protectors of every freedom we enjoy in this country, THANK YOU for your service.

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

Walking through the TSA line on my way to a leadership team meeting I was facilitating, I notice the thread close to my…zipper…is unraveling. It looks like my fly is open even though it is not. Worse than that, I can’t just tug on the zipper to remedy the embarrassing moment. Huh.

I was fortunate to have a mending kit with and the time to “sew” that morning. I can’t operate a needle and thread (actual triage picture above). This is a prime example of function over form. The job ahead is to hold pants together for 12-14 hours. Doesn’t have to look pretty on the inside.

Busting at the seams doesn’t exactly scream “this is what success looks like” or “follow me”. It looks like you scrimped on the wardrobe budget or you’ve held on to something past it’s useful life. Neither was the case this time. Just a loose thread gone rogue.

What lessons did I take away from this:

• Be prepared. The sewing kit was old and I burned through two colors trying to secure the flap. But I had one, it worked and I’m glad I remembered it was there.

• Don’t get rattled. Hard to believe after seeing the stitches that I wasn’t bothered sitting on the toilet seat playing make-shift tailor. I had other options…dress pants or jeans in my carry on bag. Fixing this was about exercising self control.

• Stay focused on the prize. There will be obstacles on your daily journey. Rise above the moments and display tolerance. We’ve all heard the phrase “don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff” but do we reflect on how quickly we take the bait, get frazzled, frustrated and even fly off the handle?
OK, maybe that’s just me.

Smile at adversity. Welcome the challenges that get tossed your direction. Consider them God promptings. He wants you to be entirely dependent on him and we all require regular reminders.

Have a blessed weekend!

Good morning, Leaders! It’s Friday!

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero
Roman Philosopher and Statesman
107 B.C. – 43 B.C.

Thank You. Two words.
While in Boston last week, I joined some of my Team during a pizza lunch before leaving for the week. Right before exiting, the senior staffer who started the office said to me in hush tones, “Are you going to say a few words?” …which isn’t really a question but I recognize a well placed rhetorical. (Kind of like, “Would you like a breath mint?”… There is only one answer.) To which I replied, “Maybe a couple”. His New England quit wit came right back with, “I hope it’s not ‘You’re fired’.” Not at all. It was …Thank You.

Thank You. Three times.
My dear wife Carole has been following Wayne Dyer for a while now and his recent passing was sad for both of us. His humility, approach and testament to living a peaceful, spiritual life has made a difference in our lives. After his passing, his company made one of his latest movies (The Shift) available for viewing online. As we watched it together, one scene showed him waking up and once he sat upright, he said “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” The very first words out of his mouth. What a great way to start the day!

Thank You. It’s contagious.
When I arrived in Fargo last Friday, it was raining. I flew the last leg on the tiniest jet in the fleet so even my international carry-on-sized roller wouldn’t fit. I had to gate check it which usually means waiting for the bag to come through the luggage carousel, a ritual I have been less than enthused about for some time now and have taken extensive steps to avoid. I was preparing to stand by the carousel for a duration eerily similar to the length of the last flight, patience spent. To my surprise, here is one of the ground crew bringing up the gate-checked carry ons to the jet bridge in a rain slicker. Even my crusty faced, travel weary carcass couldn’t help but say, “Thank You!” She looked at me with a bit of a surprise like I’m just doing my job, but the rain is kind of a pain, flashed a big smile and said “Thank You!” right back.

What two words expressing a genuine sentiment can have more of an impact?

I appreciate what you are doing.
I appreciate what you did.
I appreciate who you are.
I recognize your contributions.
I honor your efforts.
I empathize with your plight and even if it’s in your position description and you get compensated for it, I’m glad you are here providing this service.
I love you.

I can’t even comprehend what it would be like if you started a revolution today with an attitude of gratitude. No judgement… just appreciation, noble intent and love.

No time like the present.

Have a blessed weekend!…and Thank You for reading, commenting and forwarding.