If you are always winning, you’ll never know what to do when you lose. You’ll never know how to help your team when they are faced with that change in paradigm, when things go wrong when people aren’t there when stuff doesn’t line up. You need that feeling of something going wrong, you need that emphasis of something breaking and having to figure your way out, you need that pressure to know you have to…
Start small, master the small, get really scary good at it, keep track of it and how you are doing. And then add more. But don’t add until you’ve mastered the first small thing. Otherwise, it’s simply a set of experiments you are doing (not bad either) but not the goal.
A team needs principles, tenets, values, a mantra, a song, a theme… They need something they can get behind, something they can always fall back on when they are not sure what to do. If you’re making one for your team, some thoughts; Don’t do it by yourself – it can be a great team exercise. Keep it digestible – a page, a print-out, something that can be viewed everywhere and anywhere and doesn’t require…
Some of my most memorable one-on-ones have been a walk to get a coffee (or let’s be honest tea). They are not planned, they are not structured and they start with a simple question – “How is it going?” or “What do you think of this?”. You don’t need to make them a complex lunch, planning session, build-up that takes 1 hour. Most times you’ll get more out of that relaxed 15 min discussion.
You might be able to do it faster, and you might know more of what happens behind the scenes, but if you’re always jumping in, you’re never going to see what they can do, on their own, when you’re not around. Let them work, see what they can do when you’re not around, give them reign, and see what happens. Trust is built on seeing what they can do when you are not hovering over…