Manager vs Leaders – Steve Randall

Three Top Leadership Tips That Work

My visionary Dad taught me this early in my career.

When I first started leading teams, I believed my value was in having all the answers. But as time went on, I realized something crucial: the strongest leaders are the ones who admit they don’t know it all.

Here’s what my Dad taught, and i’ve learned, that shifted my approach entirely:

Have You Ever Missed Christmas?

Have you ever missed Christmas?

It’s a deadline. A deadline for millions of people.

Have you ever heard someone say.. “Sorry kids, missed it. Took longer than estimated to organise so we will have to reschedule’?

No, neither have I.

I know this is a sad insight into my brain but for the sake of furthering leadership I’ll take the hit… let’s look at Christmas as a program of work… a collection of complex projects… millions of projects, billions of dependencies, complex supply chains, global distribution, purchasing, budgeting, resourcing… and no ‘boss’.

So how can billions of people achieve the delivery of their Christmas projects, on time, on scope – (roughly within budget)? It’s the biggest program run every year – and there is no overarching governance, no overarching assurance, no status reports… all we have is trust – entrusted leadership, inspiration, and an emotional commitment to deliver.

Continue reading Have You Ever Missed Christmas?

Can you list the emotions your customers want? Are you right?

Culture Master Class

The game of business is not about finishing. It is about finding and continuously delivering value to customers. You role is now to work with your teams to find ways to sniff out ideas from customers (and your teams), to be constantly focused on testing or validating what value is in these ideas (by talking with customers and getting something in their hands to try), and to relentlessly work with your teams to shorten cycle times (innovation (idea) to test (value validation) to release (customer).

Business is about Customer Experience. How do your customers feel while engaging with you? How do they feel when they think about you? How do they feel after they have engaged with you? How does your product or service make them feel? Do you frustrate your customers anywhere on their journey? Do you slow them down? Do you confuse them? Do you make it hard for them to buy from you or engage with you?

Culture Master Class Series:

Try this today. It will start to foster a culture of ‘one-team’, a culture of learning, and importantly a culture or delivering value to customers.

Here is one ‘simple’ change you can learn to make that will mature your thinking from manager to leader and start creating a culture of ‘Trust, Truth & Transparency’.

Managers ask the three questions: ‘What will I get?’, ‘ When will I get it?’ and ‘What will it cost?’. These questions come a need to satisfy a short-term ‘lust for certainty’ – a satisfaction that is usually short lived.

Sadly these questions are not usually answered clearly – leading to a breakdown in trust, truth and transparency.

These questions come from a belief that value is released at the end of a set of tasks. This is old school thinking. Inspirational leaders know that value is streamed to customers, driven by customers and should only end when customers are no longer seeing value.