They are “in the front, with the team,” and truly understand the business.

But what is the main purpose of spending time in the front? Is it about learning how to do the jobs of the frontline folks? Is it about knowing the intricacies of the operations?

Yes, and.

As a leader, when we spend time in the front, we have the opportunity to hone a few unique leadership skills:

1. UNDERSTANDING and ASSESSING the performance of the processes and people through observation, inquisition, and participation (in addition to reports and updates)
2. VALIDATING their understanding of key messages
3. REINFORCING the consistency of their understanding of key messages
4. CONVINCING the team that you are here to help them enjoy their job more and you CAN help them enjoy their job more.

So next time when you get onto the sales floor, or show up at the setup of a roadshow, challenge yourself to …

• Become more effective and accurate in understanding what they are doing and assessing how they are doing (performance)
• Be able to hear clearly what they are hearing
• Bring consistency to what they are hearing
• Have the answer to the question “What is the 1 thing I can do, ONLY I can do, for them?”

That you couldn’t land on a decision without disappointing someone?

That you wondered if you were too “democratic?” Here is an approach to lead through this.

Often when we discuss strategies and actions, we tend to focus on what’s possible: 

• What are ways we can execute the plan?
• What are ideas to go after our quarterly goal?
• Let’s brainstorm on all the different execution plans!

When there are many options or ideas on the table, things get tricky because of the interpersonal dynamics: 

• Teammates are invested in their options and ideas
• All the peer-to-peer and peer-to-boss dynamics come into play
• Most critically, you the boss are now forced to have to juggle between the perception of being “democratic” and “autocratic” 

One way to steer the discussion towards a more actionable direction is to move away from the POSSIBILITIES and move towards the PROBABILITIES:

• What is the likelihood of “Plan A” achieving our goals? 
• What are the probabilities of this option failing? Base on what supporting facts? 
• What additional information do we need to verify this probability?

Lastly, a thought to continue the thinking: 

How do possibility and probability relate to being in the present?

He felt overwhelmed and often second guessed himself. I relate to him. I felt the same too when I had to lead functions and professionals that were out of my wheel house. His self-doubts turned every action and decision he had to make into a painful drag. It got pretty bad that he began asking himself – “Is this who I truly am? I miss being a chef!” I shared the same thought often – “Is this who I truly am? I shouldn’t be wasting time dealing with office bureaucracies. I miss being a high functioning star sales!”

What I worked on with him was to help him feel less suffocated and stalled. We worked on getting him mentally “unstuck” and “forward moving.” This was how we honed his “mental mobility:”

1. Becoming aware of what is happening and how we are feeling

We worked on becoming more consistent in asking ourselves questions such as “What’s happening?” “What am I feeling about the situation?” What don’t I understand?”

It is very important that you are aware of how you are feeling. More often than not we let our emotions linger to affect our actions and decisions. The best way to remain calm and rational is to first notice how we feel.

Think about it. What would you do if you know you are feeling furious? We know it isn’t the best time to decide on anything when we are furious. Therefore the first step is to learn to become aware of how we feel. The first step is to try to create a bit of a gap between how we feel and how we react.

2. Expose the choices we actually have

We worked on seeing all situations through a buffet of available choices by asking ourselves: “What are all the available options?” “How do these fit into our current priorities?” “Why do I want to do this? Who and what am I doing this for?”

More often than not, we tend to be too subjective when we consider our options. We tend to be influenced too heavily by our emotions. For example, if we are feeling inadequate, we tend to only think of options that protect us from risks instead of options that explore possibilities. Or when we are feeling overjoyed we tend to only think of possibilities and do not consider the risks.

In summary, the goal here is to consciously become more objective in exposing and assess our options. The goal here is to help ourselves come up with options that are more balanced.

3. Strengthen self-trust

Lastly, I point to my clients evidence of why they should trust themselves. More often than not, I trust my clients more than they trust themselves, because as a non-judgemental observer looking from the outside, I have a much clearer view of how my clients lead and act. Ultimately, through the coaching relationship, I want my clients to see themselves objectively and operate from that vantage point. I want to remind my clients that they are mobile—that they have the capability of choice and can move in the direction of their desired ends.

This is something that will take time. It is very important that we have a balanced memory of ourselves. Only when we can assess ourselves objectively, we can trust ourselves more. The best way to approach this is to keep track of our successes and failures. We have to work on building the evidence of our successes and failure.

From my experience, having an up-to-date list of our successes and failure gives us the best chance to be as objective as we should when we have to evaluate ourselves. Having an up-to-date list allows us to rationally decide whether or not we should trust ourselves.

Try it on yourself or with your team.

1. Try to become more aware of feelings and self talks.
2. Objectively brainstorm and assess options.
3. Force everyone to look at both evidence of success and failure equally.

Let me know how it goes.

Life is choosing; Leadership is deciding

At the core, life is a collection of moments of decision making. These decisions can be how you react to something someone said. These decisions can also be which button to press when a zombie shows up on your video game screen.

The same is true with leadership- leadership is about how you choose and react to situations and people. These decisions can be how you react to what your boss say about you. These decisions can also be how you react to your team missing a target.

Therefore the most important thing to figure out, in life and as a leader, is to press the right buttons, to respond appropriately.

Once another monk asked Yunmen, “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”

Yunmen said, “An appropriate response.””

雲門文偃, Yunmen Wenyan, a monk in China during the Tang Dynasty (864–949).

The Gap Between The Trigger and The Reaction

In order to press the most appropriate buttons on the “game controller of our lives,” we need to give ourselves enough space between the triggers of our reactions and how we actually react. We need to create enough space for ourselves to understand the situation and to choose and press the appropriate button.

Let’s look at an example:

When my daughter whined during her violin practice, I had a choice to make and I needed to respond. When we slowed things down, a few things would emerge:

1. There was a mess of emotions triggered by her whining:
   • “She was disobedient and did not respect me”
   • “I felt ashamed that she had no perseverance”
   • “I was a bad parent”
   • “I was angry because she sucked at playing and that made me look bad”
   • etc.
2. I could actually choose how I wanted to respond to these emotions
3. There were actually more than one response to choose from. There was more than one button to choose from:
   • Button A: Yell at her
   • Button B: Groan loudly
   • Button C: Passive aggressively question her
   • Button D: LOL
   • etc.

Essentially, if we could slow time down every moment in life, we would see that these steps were sandwiched between the trigger and our reaction. Let’s explore a moment in the workplace:

“Employee did not appear to be paying attention to me during a meeting”

1. Mess of emotions:
   • “I feel disrespected! You ignored me!”
   • “She is slow”
   • “Argh I suck. I must have been too verbose”
2. I could actually choose how I wanted to respond to these emotions.
3. There was more than one response to choose from. There was more than one button to choose from:
   • Button A: “Repeat what I said”
   • Button B: “Call her out for not paying attention”
   • Button C: “Convey the same thing again, but differently”
   • Button D: “Do nothing”

Practice Choosing

Meditation was the most effective intervention to help me slow down. Meditation allowed me to practice pausing and noticing. It gave me the time and the “training space” so then I could strengthen the mental muscles of pausing and noticing:

• How often did I pause and notice during my one on one chat with my boss?
• How did I choose when the audience was not engaged?
• What were the emotions when the other side counter-offered?

It was an on-going effort to remember to pause. It was an on-going effort to battle overwhelming and novel emotions. It was an on-going effort to remember what buttons were available for me to choose from. Meditation created a highly controlled environment so I could practice continuously. It allowed me to work on paying attention to the most subtle movements and changes. Meditation gave me techniques to notice the quietest emotions and the most hidden thoughts. Meditation allowed me to strengthen the muscles inside my brain to discern the signal from the noise inside my head.

Another wonderful thing about meditation was I got to work on my ability to magnify even the most subtle feelings. For example, metta meditation trained me to trigger and resonate specific emotions on demand. When I got good at manipulating emotions, I became more agile in creating the appropriate emotional state to respond.

When I first began meditating back in 2012 when the meditation app “Headspace” was launched, I did not think it would have anything to do with how I led. Throughout the years, meditation and I were on an on-and-off relationship, until 2018, when I discovered Sam Harris’ Waking Up App. It fundamentally changed how I understood meditation. It opened doors to how I could apply this new way of living and leading. The app turned meditation into a practice of a lifetime.

They are cheesy, but important.

Find a room and spend some time with them privately:

1. “Don’t Just Lead, Lead Well”

When you cook, you make sure your food tastes good. When you play tennis, you will try to play well.

What about when you lead? From 0 – 10, how well do you think you are leading?

How often do you systematically review how well you are leading?

What does “leading well” mean to you?

2. “Reading Tentative is the New Listening”

Go and review recent text messages and email exchanges you had with others.

From 0 – 10, how good a listener are you when it comes to messaging?

How often do you get through a bunch of messages with a bunch of people simultaneously?

How much care and patience do you put into reading and replying them?

3. “Knowledge is Useless Until It Descends Into Habits”

How effective are you guiding your teams convert knowledge into individual and team habits?

Do you tend to preach, teach, or preach + teach?

Or create movements.

Here are 3 things you can do to herd cats and lead change:

1. Give it a name

Cheesy as this might sound, but giving the initiative a name make it much easier for people to refer to, relate to, to share, etc. “Project Beanbag” is far easy to refer to than “that secret project, you know, that one?”

2. Tell everyone about it, talk about it, over and over

The key here is make sure you rehearse and finesse your pitch. Listen to presidential candidates, or authors on book tours. They are very good at succinctly making their pitches. Even comedians are good examples to learn from. They are particularly good at delivering the same jokes DIFFERENTLY every night.

Reward it, often, out loud, publicly, precisely

This is the most important. You must reward behaviours that support the initiatives in order to maintain the momentum. This is particularly hard because the difficulties lie not within the act of rewarding, but in accurately identifying the right behaviours.

More often than not, confusion roots in somebody not saying something that needs to be said, or not saying it in a way that can be heard.

I believe the leadership skill that every leader should hone is relating.

Consider books. Thousands of books are written on a topic, and thousands more are being written on that same topic. 

Why? Because we relate very differently to different concepts, ideas, stories.

Some people find the Little Prince life changing while I find it comical.

I loved leadership quotes from Simon Sinek and wanted to tattoo them onto my belly. But I didn’t, because my wife hated these quotes and reminded me while love was unconditional, marriage was conditional.

We resonate with different things. What inspires us differ dramatically. Therefore a leader who can relate effectively to a large variety of audience, and can do so with a broad range of concepts and topics, is a leader that can rally large and diverse teams to deliver meaningful and impactful results.

Relating better is #bossbetter.

Why? Well, often we need to move goalposts in order to get after the why.

Giving context is a good way to justify goalposts moving to our teams.

What’s the difference between giving the why vs giving context?

When we explain the why, we tend to miss the context around the why.

That’s why.

Plus, context is more inspiring and liberating.

Context tells us:

• This is what’s going on. This is what the issues are.
• This is what we are trying to do. This is how we came up with these actions.
• This is what you can do. This is what you need to do.
• This is what I will do. This is why I do what I do.
• This is what success needs to look like. This is why we define success this way.
• …

What are ways to improve this leadership skill?
Develop your methods to answer the following questions:

• How effective am I in giving context in different settings? 1 on 1? 1 to many?
• How effective am I assessing how others understand context?
• How effective am I inspiring actions and ownership from context?

Start with 1 of these 4 skills –

4 core leadership skills according to Peter Drucker:

Communication.
Teamwork.
Self-development. 
Development of others.

Now pick 1. 

You see, most of the time, it’s about WHAT you put your time into.

Too many of us spend too much time hopping from one skill to another, and don’t spend the time needed to hone a skill.

Start with 1. Then focus on it, dive into it, and work at it.

Diligently.

You are bound to be successful.

Most of us can’t, especially when it comes to work skills.

Here are 3 skills you may consider putting time into:

1. sell
2. tell stories
3. herd genius
4. We are all Sales:
   In life, you are constantly selling. You can break “selling” into sub-skills, such as negotiation, influencing, empathetic listening, jedi-mind-tricking, whatever.

The moment you start working on selling, you will start improving on one or more of those “sub-skills.”

Life is selling. Embrace it.

2. Great stories sell ok products
   You know this is true. You know “story telling” is a critical skill. You just need to decide if you want to actually work on it.
3. Herd genius

• Diversity?
• Hire people smarter than me?
• Create an environment where the best ideas win?
  That’s why you need to get great at herding genius.

Nothing new here, you may think.

Yea, so can you name what you are actually working on?

bossbetter