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:
Continue reading Three Top Leadership Tips That Work“I don’t need a generative AI strategy. What I need is an automation strategy,” said Tom Peck, Chief Information and Digital Officer of Sysco.
This hit home for me.
We as professionals know to find solutions to problems so stop searching for problems for AI to solve and start searching for solutions to your problems.
In the rush to adopt AI, we often miss the bigger picture: technology is only valuable when it drives efficiency and real results.
Continue reading Is AI Distorting Your Big Picture?Let’s help you to grow into the inspirational leader your company needs right now. I’ll share a few simple tips that you can use right now, today to start making positive changes.
Customers are changing, employees are changing, markets are changing. The skills that used to work are changing.
If you’re …
Continue reading Unlocking Inspirational Leadership: 4 Key Skills to Help You & Your Team ThriveThis Is Your Opportunity To Start Again
Avoid Your Lust For Certainty – Go Get What’s There For The Brave
Your lust for certainty is killing your decision making.
Something amazingly big has started; wait, make that something amazing and big has started. These are concerning and exciting times for those prepared to move forward with their eyes wide open and their hearts full, to the genuine opportunity yet to come, just like explorers
Continue reading Go Get What’s There For The BraveCulture 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?
Continue reading Can you list the emotions your customers want? Are you right?This is one of my core principles. Everyday I work hard to ensure that members of my team can wake up with a sense of purpose. It sounds easy, but like most things in leadership – it’s difficult.
It’s a big goal to set. I try and achieve it every day – and to be honest I don’t always succeed. That’s why this is a team task. During the retros and during my walks and conversations with people, I ask and collect information that will help me work out how to make everyone ‘wake up with a sense of purpose’.
This is how we put a bounce in our team mates step, how we make them want to jump out of bed in the morning and how we inspire them to bring their best to work.
Continue reading Leadership Series: Wake Up With A Sense Of PurposeI was working with a client the other day and was asked how we attract such great talent to our projects. “Steve, you always seem to have the motivated team, the stars… that makes delivery easy”
Whilst attracting bright talent is a focus of mine (who doesn’t want to work with bright people?), we work hard at it, we also work hard at keeping them and maintaining the motivation.
Our underlying philosophy is pretty simple and is broken down into three points that anyone can use. Continue reading Leadership Tip: Inspiring Your Team
My plane from Sydney has just been delayed 4 hours. I’ve just finished up facilitating a day long workshop with a high energy client. My brain is alive with ideas, i’m pumped, so what better time to write a blog on innovation.
Ok, i’m going to correct myself right here. You don’t GET people to innovate. As a leader you create an environment where innovation, ideas and suggestions are the norm. Then, using the right ‘tools’ you stimulate and capture innovation.
Innovation, sadly its a term that has been used to death, but I hope that it never loses its importance in peoples priorities.
The days of having an idea then milking the market for 20 years with the same idea are all-but-gone. Companies, and now Governments need to continually be coming up with better ways to do what they do, continually changing what they do, testing, ditching the failures, leveraging the wins and trying again.
… but how to do embed a culture of innovation through our your team, your department, division or enterprise?
I have implemented what I call the ‘Innovation To Implementation Cycle’ which has consistently shown great results – it is not easy to implement, but if you don’t…
I’m going to put some Continue reading How to get people to innovate
Customer experience is the latest buzz word, as popular as … a cold beer on a hot day… and rightly so, delivering what your customers want in a saturated market place is a smart way to stand out and compete, that’s exactly why I created Emotional Based Design… a tool for everyone to do just that.
No-one likes a long running task. Day after day, coming in to work to do more of the long running task. Its a demoraliser…
I teach teams an agile/SCRUM trick, and that is to create your tasks so they can be completed within one day. This way you go home with a sense of achievement, not dread!
Impossible you say… well let me explain a bit more. I don’t mean Continue reading Leadership Tip Achieve
