Your Journey Blog

Confronting stupid by Seth Godin

Some gigs are process oriented: Set up a process correctly and the rest takes care of itself. It's challenging and frightening to get it right, but after that, you merely have to do the hard work of showing up each day. Do the work and you'll get the results.

Other jobs require a different sort of hard work: the guts to be wrong, a confrontation with the risk of being stupid.

The comedian who fears that each new joke might fail, the writer who has to say something new, the leader who must improvise, solving new problems on a regular basis. What makes this work hard is that it might not work.

More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis.

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Ten Marks of a Coachable Leader - Part 2

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams.

Last month we started a journey on examining the qualities of a coachable leader. 

The foundational mark of a coachable leader is that they understand the concept of spiritual authority.They know that every great leader is a strong follower. Spiritual authority is something that is given by God to a leader who has exhibited faith and obedience in their lives.

2. A coachable leader is 'action oriented.' 

There are thinkers and there are doers.  Some are idea generators and others are the implementers.  Both are invaluable in a team setting because there is nothing more horrendous that implementing a bad idea. The opposite is also true, nothing can be more disheartening than failing to deliver on a great idea.

In my experience I have found three reasons why idea people tend to be difficult to coach:

1. Overthinking: Sometimes they get struck in the inner world of overthinking every scenario and find it hard to set specific action steps. 
2. Sacredness of the Idea: Sometimes they get protective of their idea, in some strange way, the idea becomes sacred and the objective takes a secondary role.
3. Fear of Failure: Sometimes they get paralyzed by the fear of failure; gripped with thoughts of all the could go wrong with the project.

As leaders intuitively know, there is a fine line in how long a idea needs to germinate before action needs to happen. Acting too soon can be fatal. Not doing due diligence!  Being reactionary instead of thoughtful. Being impulsive and not calculating. All can have disastrous effects on a leader and his team.  But acting too late can be demoralizing. Overpromising and underdelivering chips away at your creditability.  Indecision causes the loss of momentum. Inactivity generates confusion with those you serve and internally within the team. All of these cripple the morale of an organization. This is why every leader needs a coach who will help them clarify the issues they are facing and help them develop clear action steps to achieve the goal.

The bottom line is that coachable people are those who consistently take action in order to reach a goal.  If a leader is just going to talk and not take action consistently, then the leader isn't ready for coaching and probably not for leadership as well.  You cannot be a successful leader and consistently be inactive. 

The Apostle James wrote, "But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was." (James 1:22-24 NASB)

Reflective Questions:

• What do my team and I need to accomplish today?
• What can I do today to make progress and gain momentum?
• How can I accomplish more in less time with fewer resources?
• What decisions do I need to make to move forward?
• What opportunities can I act upon right now?
• What opportunities will I miss if I fail to act quickly enough?
• What specific steps can I take immediately to get stalled projects moving?
• What did I do today that made a positive contribution to the organization’s success?

Next Time: Coachable people are ready to be stretched

Massive Storm Causes Power Outage in Chicago

Well it was quite an adventure yesterday.  It was the first time that I saw trees literally bending side ways in the 75 mile an hour winds.

I was in my car with my daughter Kallie driving to the office when out of no where the massive storm hit.  A few drops of rain turned into a hurricane in seconds.  I yelled, "Look for the funnel cloud!"  We called home and told Mary head for the basement.  Then the phone went dead.  Everyone was safe except for our famous shed which was crushed by a one of our trees.

According to the Chicago Tribune "a record 868,000 homes and businesses were left without power by the storms that ripped through the area at 75 mph--the highest number of outages in 13 years. But by 6 a.m. that had been reduced to 369,200.

The majority were in the northern suburbs, where 207,300 were still in the dark and without air conditioning. About 71,000 were west of the city, 60,000 in Chicago and Maywood and 30,000 in the south suburbs.

In total, power had been restored to 502,600 customers, said ComEd spokeswoman Tony Hernandez." HT

Unfortunately we are not one of those customers neither at our home or at our office which is still out of power.

So today I am camped out at Panera Bread ... fighting people for those precious outlets.  Spending the day talking to insurance agents. Looking for a someone to cut down the two trees we lost and to take away our mangled shed. 

Jeremiah said it best.  "Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, 'The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.'" Lamentations 3:22-24

The arrogance of willful ignorance - Seth Godin

People have come before us, failed, learned, written it down. Scientists have figured out what works, and proven it. Economists have gained significant understanding about the long-term impacts of short-term decisions. And historians have seen it all before.

How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes... How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?

If you're doing important work (and I'm hoping you are), then you owe it to your audience or your customers or your co-workers to learn everything you can. Feel free to ignore what you learn, but at least learn it.

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