The following articles can accelerate your practice by providing examples how to respond to each of these questions.

1. Mission / Vision

What’s the Difference Between a Mission Statement and Vision Statement
When we start writing a mission or vision statement, we don’t always think about the differences between them. This article describes the differences between these two types of statements.

51 Mission Statement Examples from The World’s Best Companies
Want to write a mission statement but don’t know where to start? This handy reference breaks down mission and vision statement examples by industry and sector. It is an excellent place to begin for inspiration.

What Makes a Great Mission Statement
When drafting a mission statement, apply these four tests to your mission statement to make it as compelling as it can be.

7 Rules of a Vision Statement that Lasts
These simple rules are useful to consider when creating your vision statement. My favourite principle – is the vision statement “collective”, in that it’s shared by those who will act on it?

2. Creating Strategy

How To Create Great Strategy With 4 Simple Questions
All strategy starts with a question. It is the question that inspires us to search for an answer, and it is the answer that informs a path of action. The four questions summarized in this article are fundamental to any strategy.

7 Steps To Build A Digital Strategy
Although this article focuses on ‘digital strategy’ the same strategy process (from inputs to action) is relevant to any areas of enquiry. I would have used a process like this over a hundred times. It is inspired by Jo Voros’ excellent paper on strategic processes.

Use Your ‘Desired Future’ To Set Goals For The Next 6 Months
All strategy requires us to consider “what would happen if we didn’t act” and then what “scenario (or possible future) will unfold if we act.” While this article has a focus on personal goal setting, thinking about preferred/desired futures versus probable futures is important to strategy making.

3. Enabling Execution

Vision and strategy cannot fulfil their purpose without action. So when considering execution, we also need to about what constitutes high performance, how teams are best organized and the role of mindset in pursuing goals.

Cracking The Code Of Highly Effective Teams
Google’s Project Aristotle is a great reference for the conditions in which teams thrive. In this article, we look at some of the principles of this prior research and how to setup teams for success.

4 Patterns For High Performance
There is more than one route to high performance. I’ve seen many teams become disappointed when they failed at something, but often on the other side of failure is great success. In this article we take a look at some of the alternative patterns for strong performance, so that we can consider success as the result of a series of many attempts and different pathways, rather than one, single way.

The Mindset That Can Make Or Break Performance
Mindset can create and break great teams. Show me the team who has endured difficulty and still done well, rather than the team that has prospered only in favorable conditions, and we will see just how important mindset is. This article discusses the role of belief in mindset, based on a sports research study by Gary Ness and Robert Patton. And of course, there is also Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindsets to realize our full potential.

9 Prioritization Techniques For Product Managers
To execute against strategy, we have to prioritize time and resources. Prioritization frameworks offer one of the best ways to do this. From frameworks based on high levels of process, though to ones that are more fluid (and can be done at short notice with a team and a whiteboard), this article describes the preferred techniques of product managers.

I hope these articles offer ways to build upon your practice. If you have any techniques or experiences you would like to share, please leave a comment below.

The post 11 Articles To Improve Mission, Strategy and Execution appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Over the last few years I’ve read three books that capture three highly valuable decision making models. In my opinion, these books offer a new way to think about how we weigh up choices and make decisions.

The books are Blink, Checklist Manifesto and Simple Rules. 

Each of these book writes about a very challenging idea. The idea that, in some circumstances, decision making can be made more effective using streamlined techniques. 

So streamlined and simple that our rational brain may have a hard time accepting that these techniques can produce effective results when compared with more traditional models. 

Examples of more traditional models are those described in Peter Drucker’s well known article on effective decisions or Dartmouth’s 7 step decision-making process. 

Blink, Checklist Manifesto, and Simple Rules suggest decision making: 

• using a streamlined process for decisions and actions that is exponentially faster to other more time intensive approaches, while being equally as effective. 
• relying on simple principles that have, already built within them, logic that distill wider lessons, insights and data. 
• a connection with deeper knowledge that is either known by you already (through your experiences) or based on knowledge from the applied practice of other experts. 
• by using a framework that is specific to the context and set of circumstances it is intended for (eg. pilots using checklists specific to take off protocols). 

Each of these books suggest there are ways to operate faster, with equal to or less risk than alternative decision making processes, in repeatable ways, often with greater flexibility.

Let’s take a look at the high level lessons from each book.

Thin-Slicing for Decision Making

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that“there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” 

Gladwell refers to the concept of “thin-slicing,” where we take our observations in a given moment, apply our learnings from experience and intuition, and make rapid decisions. 

In some circumstances, these snap decisions can be as or more effective than those that take months to deliberate. 

The distinction here is on how you can train your intuition.

Untrained intuition that is not based on experience and learning, can lead to bad decisions, with even worse outcomes. In contrast, trained intuition based on experience can provide unparalleled speed and results. 

What is fascinating about Blink is the idea that our experience leads to expertise and this expertise can be drawn upon in a split second for effective decision making.

In Blink, Gladwell gives many examples of where thin-slicing has proved accurate. Included amongst these is the acquisition of a sculpture by the J. Paul Getty Museum. 

Upon acquiring the sculpture, a number of resident experts had a “gut feeling” that something was “off” with the work. Some time later, the sculpture was found to be inauthentic. 

There are two lessons for us in this. The first is to revisit those instincts and gut feelings we may all have, but don’t pay attention to. The second is to think more broadly about the model proposed by Blink; that based on your own area of expertise, you will have developed lessons and intuitions, honed through hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of practice. 

Reforge, a San Francisco startup, recently raised Series B funding on the concept that Product Managers have periods of intense learning in their careers where they acquire valuable expertise. 

These periods have ‘inflection points’, where this expertise can be strengthened to equip them for their next challenge. Reforge aims to capture these lessons and share them with wider communities and thereby challenge traditional models of skill creation.

Though this is seperate from Blink, both Reforge and Blink tug at the same thread – that experience leads to expertise and knowledge which can be applied to respond to a parallel situation (eg. a new product launch program) in a new context (a different company) to provide a better outcome.

How To Use

Consider the timeline of your career:

• What are the experiences that shaped your career to who you are today? 
• When have these experiences resulted in new knowledge for you that, consciously or unconsciously, you have embedded into how you operate? 
• Have these experiences changed how you use instinct and gut feeling to approach decisions? Do you listen to or ignore those instincts? 
• When you have used your instincts for decision making, have these decisions proved effective in the medium term? 

I’m not suggesting to use gut feeling and instinct as the sole principle to make decisions. 

However, as leaders and managers, listening to what our expertise and intuition may tell us, can improve our own self awareness and make us better leaders.

We can make this more robust by identifying when our instinct kicks in, and testing these decisions with deeper analysis, to see if our instinct is consistent with what wider data validates over the medium term.

Checklists For Decision Making

According to Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, though we have amassed incredible “know-how” in the 21st century, “avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralising and frustrating.” We need a new strategy for overcoming the burdens of too much data and failure, a strategy that “takes advantage of the knowledge of people but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacy” (p13).

Based on his research, Gawande suggests that this new strategy is the Checklist. 

Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.

While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.

The Checklist does not replace human knowledge and decision making. Rather, it is a tool that streamlines what is required to maximise the opportunity for success, based on what has been learnt from processes that have been rolled out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times. 

Pilots use checklists methodologically in pre-flight routines. Product Management teams use checklists to ensure that software has passed key gates (eg. user acceptance testing, integration testing, etc) before it is released. Australian companies, like Safety Culture and Culture Amp, provide products inspired by the checklist. 

Checklists can take the form of read-do lists (ie. a recipe is a simple read-do checklist) or do-confirm lists (ie. confirm something is done before moving to the next step). 

Checklists are a powerful instrument because they support decisions (eg. if we have confirmed the patient’s name matches the surgery required, we decide to move to the next step) as well as diffuse who has the authority to make the decision (ie. if the correct step has not been followed, any person in the operating theatre can stop the process, not just the surgeon). 

Checklists improve decision making by automating simple and repeatable processes that have been proven to work. 

People involved in these processes can rely on the checklist for those processes that are known, and focus their energy on elements of the process that are ambiguous or require further thought.

How To Use

• In your own work, are there specific and repeatable processes where decision making is required, that could be partially automated by a checklist? 
• If so, are there examples from both your company and the best practices of other companies, that could form the basis of a checklist? 
• Once you create a draft checklist, confirm it with all members of the team involved in the process. Is it simple enough to be followed and also detailed enough to be useful? The checklist should contain the most important steps of a process, not all steps. 
• Where and how would you implement this checklist? Who within the team would have the authority to stop a process if the checklist was not met? 

Simple Rules For Decision Making

Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull are the authors of Simple Rules. 

Through their research, they’ve analysed how companies apply no more than a few rules to focus their decisions and ensure ongoing success.

From Nike to Yahoo, simple rules provide structure for such decisions as which markets to expand into, how to grow new products, and when to exit a business or product line to minimize losses.

According to their model, simple rules can be broken down into the following categories:

• Boundary rules: which opportunities to select? 
• Prioritizing rules: how to filter amongst many options? 
• Stopping rules: when to quit or exit? 
• How-to rule: how to move forward? 
• Coordination rules: how to work with each other and collaborate?
• Timing rules: when to act? 

Simple rules act as a bridge between strategy and practice, connecting day-to-day decisions and actions with broader plans. They can help teams perform at their best by removing the paralysis that comes with evaluating too many alternatives.

Like checklists and thin-slicing, simple rules give another alternative to streamline decision making. Equally, to be effective, these rules must be based upon exisiting knowledge of what works, focused on a specific problem, and connected to a learning loop that refines the practice of these rules overtime. 

How To Use

The book’s authors have written a useful article on how to apply simple rules, which is broken down into these steps.

• Identify the bottleneck. This is where demand exceeds resources, and thus the organization is stopped from achieving its goals.
• Listen to data, over opinion.
• Allow people who will have to follow the rules, create them.
• Follow the rules.
• Evolve the rules based on what works.

Now, I’m not saying these models (thin slicing, checklists and simple rules) are perfect. Or that they should replace alternative, more detailed, decision making. 

I am suggesting that for leaders and managers, they are a great first place to look, because they are very effective. If we can leverage these methods, they also offer high benefits in speed and efficacy. 

The post 3 Deceptively Simple Decision Making Models You May Not Know About appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Companies are very good at organizing for vertical objectives, but not always as good at managing horizontal patterns of work.

This is where boundary spanning is important.

“Boundary spanning” is the process of designing activities and skills that connect and support cross-functional activities to improve communication and facilitate better alignment toward goals.

When reviewing success across marketing, sales, business and IT programs, HBR says, “In the successes we have seen, in almost every case, there is a very special profile of the person leading the effort. This Most Valuable Player of technology implementations is a boundary spanner.”

One of best ways to think more about this process is to first consider vertical vs horizontal objectives.

Today’s Companies Need To Support Both Vertical & Horizontal Objectives

Vertical Objectives

Vertical objectives are those of a specific organizing unit, such as a department, program, or team. These objectives are those where the outcomes of the work are largely within the remit of the team that is managing them.

Horizontal Objectives

Horizontal activities are those that span multiple areas. These horizontal activities call for different programs and teams to collaborate, even though these areas may be organized into vertical structures.

Horizontal activities are essential to today’s business because:

• work is increasingly complex, requiring all elements of a company to work together, in order to realize the company’s vision.
• customer experiences, which have become a differentiator in today’s experience-driven economy often rely on joining together end-to-end processes.
• modern teams (think agile teams, hybrid teams, etc.) are made up of people from many departments. These teams are ‘horizontal’ by nature, but if they embody a ‘vertical’ mindset, they will not perform at their best.
• many businesses and products operate on a global basis, which requires teams to bridge geographies, processes, systems, and departments.

Kitty Wooley, who worked at the US Department of Education for many years and has researched this area says, “At this point in history… all of the problems, any big problem, any hairy wicked problem, is bigger than any one agency or any corporation. So, people have to work together to solve it.”

Why Isn’t Boundary Spanning Always Supported?

While horizontal activities are more common in workplaces today, they don’t always receive formal and explicit support. Why does this happen?

This can be from a combination of reasons, such as:

• People may lack the skills and experience supporting horizontal activities and navigating the challenges that come with these patterns of work (for example, “how do we collaborate to reach a decision when I’m used to making the decision on X”).
• Company objectives and KPIs may be focused largely on vertical activities (often this is the result of how legacy KPIs have been set, flagging that the organization has not yet changed to also support a horizontal pattern of work).
• Leaders and managers (at various levels) may not set an example for their teams that encourages horizontal collaboration.

The Cost of Not Supporting Boundary Spanning Work

You may have been part of companies that haven’t supported horizontal work.

If so, you likely will have seen firsthand some of the consequences of this, which include:

• When people reach out for support from other departments, they may have difficulty finding an audience.
• Seeking collaboration from other business units requires heavy influencing (rather than collaboration being a ‘default behavior’).
• Language used amongst people—an often classic symptom of cultures unsupportive of boundary spanning work—is characterized by ‘us and them’.
• In these environments, it’s not unusual for people to feel challenged, anxious, and unsettled when engaged in those activities that are beyond their direct team.

These symptoms block the organization from doing more complex tasks efficiently and effectively.

And it’s a double-edged sword.

On the surface, vertically-driven teams produce very strong results in the short and medium term. These are usually directly tied to the vertical objectives they support. However, the more complex and important work to an organization’s longer-term goals, which can only be done by teams collaborating horizontally across the organization, is sidestepped or deferred to the future.

Beyond company effectiveness, there can also be a high human cost. People in these challenging environments can feel unfulfilled in their roles, that it’s difficult to sustain energy in the role over extended periods, and may leave the company in search of a better environment.

How to Actively Support Boundary Spanning in Your Company

With this said, how can we be better at supporting horizontal work?

In order to know how you support these practices, it’s useful to think about the levels where you can target your support:

• Individual: Encourage and support the person who naturally connects dots within the organization. Create time for them and ask how you can assist their efforts.
• Team: Many companies have teams that, by their nature, span boundaries. Strategy teams or cross-departmental program teams often work horizontally to do their work. When you build connections with these teams and help their work, you support boundary spanning.
• Organizational: Boundary spanning is a competence and skill set. Like Design Thinking or Project Management. By training your people how to collaborate and manage cross-functional work, you are helping your company build strengths in boundary spanning practices.

If you are leading a team, department, or company, you will have a role in supporting boundary spanning.

In addition to thinking about boundary spanning at these three levels, these simple activities can create a culture that fosters horizontal collaboration:

1. Creating common language – Often teams use different language to describe similar things. By creating a common language across teams, we improve the opportunity for common communication.
2. Elevate toward larger goals – When conflict arises between teams, elevate the conversation to a larger opportunity, so that teams can align on the bigger picture. For example, I once saw two departments arguing about their different objectives. When we “levelled up” and focused on the company objective that their separate initiatives were connected to, they found common ground about how each team played a role in the company’s success.
3. Orient toward customers – Everyone in a business has a stake in helping customers. By focusing on a company’s customers, and how Product X makes customers’ lives better, we provide a source of inspiration for teams working across horizontal activities.
4. Listen with empathy – When we listen to people with empathy, we seek to understand their perspective and give them space to contribute their view. This creates a context for boundary spanning conversations.
5. Unblock what’s not working – Strong managers and leaders look to identify where things are not working and take positive steps to help make their teams’ lives easier. Rather than put up with things when they’re not working, look to how you can actively shape an alternate, positive approach.
6. Encourage diverse views – There is a reason companies like IDEO favor multi-disciplined teams for innovation processes. Because diversity of viewpoints and styles exist in these teams, they are more accepting and embracing of alternate views, which encourages boundary spanning conversations. When you’re setting up new teams, ensure they have diverse members and perspectives, so differences and alternate experiences are welcomed.
7. Build in-person experiences for remote team – Even completely remote teams need time to come together and build face-to-face connections. Research suggests that in-person time getting to know each other is very important for reinforcing relationships, even if this time together is only once every 6 – 12 months). Wildbit, a completely remote company, organizes yearly retreats to get its remote teams together and says these are especially important because these retreats create “little moments of connection, the shared energy, and the sense of belonging that happen when we just sit around chairs and talk, get to know each other, and support each other both personally and at work.”

These easy practices can help you crack the code of building more effective teams that focus on both vertical and horizontal objectives.

The post How Boundary Spanning Supports Great Teams appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

This question is essential to product managers – because the way time and people are organized directly affects the outcomes these teams can provide.

Prioritization techniques help product managers and their teams bring structure to the way work is planned and actioned.

I’ve been fascinated by the various options available to sharpen our focus through prioritization.

In this post we’ll look at 9 prioritization techniques to help you plan work better and make teams happier in the process.

While the focus of these is product teams, these techniques can be adapted to projects, departments or wider business goals.

IMPACT

Impact stands for Interesting, Meaningful, People, Actionable, Clear and Testable.

As Product Plan states, “IMPACT is a mindset for ensuring you’re doing things that matter.”

You can use IMPACT as a rough assessment tool as well as to gauge the dimensions of any opportunity your team plans to work on.

You can also assign a scale to each letter of IMPACT (eg. 1 – 10), to score and rank ideas more rigourosly against this framework.

MoSCoW

MoSCoW stands for Must, Should, Would, Could. This prioritization technique is most useful for specific requirements / features / sub-ideas of a larger theme.

It translates to:

• M – we Must have this to fulfil the requirement / customer need / solution (in other words, “without this fundamental item we cannot launch!”).
• S – we Should have this to fulfil X.
• C – we Could have this to fulfil X.
• W – we Would (in a perfect world) have this to fulfil X.

I have used MoSCoW at least fifty times across various products and projects. It is quick, well-known, and effective, at least for a first-cut of priorities.

Once teams have classified features against MoSCoW, the attention focuses on the Musts and Shoulds. Often the Coulds and Woulds are ‘nice to have’ and are addressed in future releases.

Value / Effort

Value and Effort product prioritization is a powerful tool to bring focus to what matters most.

Value can be a combination of what is valuable to the business (new revenue, repeat revenue, new customers, increased engagement) and Effort is comprised of what draws on a team’s time (complexity of feature, resources required to work on the solution, ambiguity of the problem).

With value / effort, ideas are ranked against these two dimensions (out of either a 5 or 10 point scale).

The tool is most useful when results are then plotted against four quadrants (1. time sinks, 2, big projects, 3, quick wins, 4. fill ins) as shown in this post from Jexo on the Value vs Effort method.

Product Tree

The Product Tree allows product teams to engage in product and strategy planning in a fun and engaging way.

Using the metaphor of a tree – teams group, prioritize and sequence product features based on the tree’s trunk, branches, roots and leaves.

In this model, the branches represent core functionalities, roots are technical requirements and capabilities, and branches and sub-branches are feature themes and ideas.

The tree can be used as the primary metaphor for this exercise; Miro has a great template for Product Tree planning. Or, it can be used more loosely, allowing the tree to be more like a fish bone diagram.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this techniques is the Product Tree from Up Banking, which is a highly useful example as it’s published online.

RICE

RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort for any idea on the pipeline.

As an example:

• Reach – how many customers will this idea/feature reach and over which time period?
• Impact – how much impact will this idea/feature have on a specific and important metric? Here, the metric could be measures like “uplift in conversion as part of the acquisition funnel”, “increase in customer engagement with the mobile app,” or “reduction in customer churn for online customers.” Again, often impact against the chosen metric is scored against a 5 or 10 point scale.
• Confidence – this is the level of confidence we have on the idea/feature’s ability to provide the outcomes (usually of Reach and Impact) when it is delivered. This lens helps us guard against unrealistic or overoptimistic expectations.
• Effort – Effort is based on the total project time an idea / feature will take to release, based on “person months.” A person month is the effort expended by one person in a month. So, if an idea / feature takes a week of planning, two weeks of design and five weeks of engineering / development / testing time, it would score 2.

Once we have these variables for each idea / feature, we multiply the first three (Reach x Impact x Confidence) and divide by the fourth (Effort).

The output of this provides each idea / feature’s RICE score, which is a proxy for total impact against total effort.

Those items with the highest score should be those that have greatest impact.

What is great about the RICE framework is that it includes consideration of ‘confidence’ for outcomes, which is not always present in other prioritization techniques.

Story Mapping

The true value of Story Mapping lies in its focus on jobs/customer needs and also developing a ‘view of entire journey contexts’ before breaking epics and features into releases.

I first learnt about Story Mapping many years ago when attending a course by Jeff Patton on ‘Passionate Product Ownership’.

Of all the methods included in this post, if time is available to populate the Story Map, I would lean on Story Mapping as a preferred tool.

Jeff Patton has very well regarded book on this topic. This post from Digite on story mapping is also highly useful.

Weighted Shortest Job First

WSJF (often pronounced Wiz-Jif) is from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). It can be used to prioritize and sequence epics, features, and capabilities that create maximum economic benefit.

WSJF estimates the Cost of Delay and divides this by the Job Duration (or Size), with the view that those items with the highest score, should be prioritized first, to provide the greatest overall value.

The value of this method is that it brings a higher degree of rigour and process to evaluating items of work. This should support the highest customer and economic value in the quickest timeframe possible.

The downside of this prioritization technique is that it requires a significant degree of process, that teams understand (and are not overwhelmed by) the method, and can take people a while to get into the rhythm of planning releases in this way.

Speed Boat

If WSJF is higher on process, speed boat prioritization is perceived as light, quick and fun.

In Speed boat prioritization, we start with a drawing.

Sketch a speedboat with an anchor, tell the group that the anchor represents all the features that are stopping the boat from going as fast / be as strong as it could, and ask the group to draw and label more anchors that represent features that are preventing the product from being awesome.

Often this visualization of problems / issues / constraints permits teams to provide constructive criticism of a product, in a highly visual and productive way.

Criteria-Based

Sometimes projects and products require wider prioritization lenses than can be provided by the models above.

An example I’ve seen often is when a company has 5 strategic objectives (eg. customer experience, compliance, financial return, platform, etc) and some or all of these would be useful to include in prioritizing product features.

In these cases, criteria-based prioritization can be valuable as the only (or an ancillary) method of prioritization for ideas in the pipeline.

This method involves:

• agreeing on the criteria to be used (ideally 5 – 7);
• determining a scoring system for these criteria (this is where a rubric is highly useful);
• scoring ideas/features against this framework;
• discussing the results to then determine the sequence for these items to be delivered.

This technique is much like the IMPACT technique we started this list with, only here, we are defining the criteria to be used, instead of using the acronym of IMPACT.

The upside of using this approach is that it is highly flexible and can be bespoke, based on the needs of the business.

The downside is that it can take time to reach agreement on the criteria (and the way they’re weighted), but once in place, it is a solid framework.

These are a slice of the many prioritization techniques available to plan and deliver work effectively. Many of these I learnt through my own lessons as a product manager. They are highly useful in combination with a strategy process.

I hope this list helps you. If you have a preferred method, consider letting others know which one it is, by leaving a comment below.

The post 9 Prioritization Techniques For Product Managers appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

This is because questions in the operational zone are often different from those you’ll find in the strategic zone.

The more your career progresses, the larger these challenges become.

The Operational Zone

The operational zone is where the urgency of the day-to-day is managed.

This zone is incredibly important. It is what keeps customers happy, a business running and ultimately makes or breaks the success of a team.

In the operational zone are:

• calls/emails from customers
• new orders from customers
• errors/problems
• workarounds and bandaids for known issues
• general budget management
• some meetings
• check-ins with direct reports
• team and workflow management
• communications (all types, from emails to project updates)
• the need to reinforce and reference priorities
• setting an example through day-to-day habits

The operational zone is where stuff gets done, today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. It is the here and now.

The Strategic Zone

The strategic zone is where the future happens.

It is where you get above the clouds and see the entire shape of things beneath you (I refer to this as the ‘context of the whole’).

This is where you map the journey ahead.

The strategic zone is where you foresee a way to make everything better beyond today – improvements to products that will make customers happier, investments in new capabilities to help your business, everything associated with being a more successful person and business.

In a survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the most important leadership behaviour important to the organization’s success.

In the strategic zone you will find:

• next year’s plan
• next year’s budget cycle
• the roadmap for your team
• new product development
• market development
• future targets
• deeper analysis of performance patterns
• analysis of competition and competitive strategy
• trends, opportunities, emerging issues
• wild cards and “black swans” (unlikely, but high impact events)
• people and talent development
• culture development
• large investments and business cases
• hard questions and wicked problems that require more time than is available in the operational zone

Like the operational zone, the strategic zone is also incredibly important.

Without thought to the strategic zone, businesses fail to plan for what’s just round the corner.

How Operational and Strategic Zones Change As Your Career Progresses

Now that we’ve looked at these two areas, let’s look at how the demands placed on you to spend time in each will change as your career progresses.

First, you’ll be expected to spend more time in the strategic zone. This is because more senior roles in companies often have larger ‘spans of time’ in terms of responsibility. Forbes notes this as a shift in focus from the short to long term.

For example, a Product Manager may operate on priorities with a 1 to 3 year timeframe. In contrast, a CEO is expected to think about the health of the organisation not just this year, but over the next 10 years.

Second, you will still have to manage the demands of the operational zone. I know many Product Managers who start their day looking at the daily measures and key statistics for their product.

These dual demands increase the higher you go.

This is the conundrum.

Many people I know feel that, as they spend more time on strategic issues, they spend less on operational ones. But it doesn’t always happen that way.

Your peers, your bosses, the board of directors….they still expect operational issues to be dealt with…and dealt with well.

And when we don’t keep an eye on those issues, we risk dropping the ball.

As a result, the operational zone can often feel more important than the strategic zone.

Say you face this dilemma.

You block out the entire afternoon in your calendar to spend time with your team, so you can analyze the design for next year’s product launch. In the morning you get a call from a major customer who is threatening to pull their business if you don’t resolve their issue today.

What do you do?

This dilemma is common for us all; it’s a face-off between an issue in the operational zone that requires time that otherwise would be spent in a strategic zone workshop.

In this dilemma the scales are often skewed because the operational issue feels more important than the strategic one.

It is hard to not see an upset and important customer as the more important issue, ins’t it?

Beware The Bias of The Present

In most situations, the operational zone issue will feel 10 times more real and threatening then the strategic zone issue.

Because the strategic zone issue is in the future, it will seem distant and less tangible.

The future is unconsciously more abstract to us than, say, an upset customer today.

Yet, both decisions carry consequences.

In the example above, the decision we could make about the future design of a new product could easily make the company more successful than responding to a single customer.

The greatest single challenge we face in leadership is to recognise that both operational and strategic zone issues are equally important.

This requires a mindset shift.

We have to manage how we perceive strategic issues, so that we view them with the same urgency as those in the operational zone.

How The Majority of People Deal With This Situation

Let’s think back to our example of the angry customer. How do most people deal with this situation?

8 times out of 10 the person in this scenario will postpone the planning session with their team and deal with the customer.

1 time in 10 they will put off the customer and go ahead with the planning session (this is not ideal, nor the best answer, because in no circumstance do we want to lose business).

It feels like its ‘lose – lose’ no matter which option is taken.

However, there is one other option.

It is hardly ever taken, yet can provide the best path. In this option, you manage both operational and strategic zone issues without compromise.

What 1 in 10 Leaders Do To Balance Operational And Strategic Demands

Great leaders do three things that allow them to respond to this issue unlike 90% of managers.

1. First, they ask what is most important;
2. Second, they have learnt to manage their capacity, not their time;
3. Third, they manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question (the most important action of all three of these points!).

1. Ask what’s most important

The first thing to ask is what truly needs our time and what does not.

At first, it’s natural for us to think we are needed to solve everything. Aren’t we important?

It was empowering to learn I wasn’t as important as I thought. I realised I had so many incredible and talented people around me who could help with all sorts of challenges.

If you’re struggling with this, try an exercise.

Think of the CEOs you’ve most admired. What were the activities you saw them do that you felt were most important?

Maybe it was a time when they addressed the entire company or gave an overview of priorities for the year. Maybe you saw them give an investor announcement. Perhaps you heard the CEO taking with people, taking time to greet them and listen, so the CEO understood their people at all levels.

You likely did not see the CEO doing every day things, every day. In fact, according to FastCompany, most CEO’s only spend 11% of their time on routine activities, like attending meetings.

CEOs constantly challenge themselves by asking ‘what are the most important things to spend time on?’.

Now imagine you’re the CEO of your team. From your team’s perspective:

• where do you think they need you most?
• what would be the ways you could be most impactful to them?
• what will make a difference to how they see you, the job your team is there to do, and the company?

When we do this exercise, it can tell us some ‘home truths’. It helps us quickly see where we can spend our time for greatest impact.

2. Manage Capacity, Not Time

Sometimes it feels like the only way to solve issues is to throw more of our time at the problem.

But the answer isn’t more time. The answer is more capacity.

Time and capacity are different responses to the same issue. And they produce very different outcomes.

Time is a limited resource for us. You only have so many hours available to you in a day. Capacity is not limited in the same way.

We can expand our capacity by increasing our personal resourcefulness and the resources that we have access to.

Here are just some the methods to increase your capacity:

1. Do what you do well, the most.
   A task becomes easy when you’re doing something you’re naturally skilled at. Often this happens when you’re in flow. You can likely do more of these tasks, more quickly than other people you know. By doing things that you do well, more often, you will increase the volume of work you’re able to get done.
2. Do what you do less well, less.
   Activities you’re not naturally skilled at or have low interest in are often time consuming. By refocusing where we spend our time, and doing less of these tasks, we increase our capacity.
3. Delegate
   For those activities that are not important for you to do , consider which of these can be delegated to others. The act of ‘delegating’ is a skill in itself.
4. Oversee, don’t manage
   I know many managers who are involved in the detail of activities other people are leading. This takes loads of their time. By trusting others to do great work, and being involved at the right time, overseeing but not managing work, we dramatically increase our capacity.
5. Train your people to problem solve.
   Sure, we could jump in and likely solve many problems for others. But every time we do this, we rob our people of an opportunity to learn. By training our teams to solve problems, we develop others and, in doing so, make teams more effective and give a chance for problems to be solved before they reach us.
6. Encourage people to come to you with escalations, not the problem.
   Problem solving takes patience and often multiple attempts. When we encourage our teams to stick with a problem, raising issues with us when they cannot be solved or when they’re becoming increasingly severe, we help people strengthen their problem solving skills.
7. Ask for help.
   We often think asking for help is a sign of weakness. In fact, it’s a sign of humility, openness and strength. I ask for help often, especially on complex activities. I view it as a way of accessing expertise I do not have. It’s also one of the best ways I know to build trusted working relationships.
8. Manage to a buffer, not to your limit.
   Most people I know manage their time to 100% of their capacity. Then, when a new priority emerges, they find themselves stretched to fit it in. I recommend to keep a little in reserve (5-10% available time) so that if something urgent arises, you have the resourcefulness to give it attention without burning out.
9. Seek more resources
   If you are stretched and doing important work, it is always an option to ask for more resources. From my experience, if there is a strong justification for the work (whether that is in the form of business benefits or reduced risk), companies act reasonably to these requests.

These are some simple but effective strategies to increase the capacity available to you to manage operational issues, so you can spend more time in the strategic zone.

3. Manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question

This final action is perhaps the most powerful of all three actions that leaders take, but is also the least used.

Great leaders treat the potential for future operational issues as strategic zone questions. They devote time to planning ahead to solve issues before they arise.

Let’s look at an example. In the case of the upset customer, strategic zone questions could be:

• how can we setup our business so that if a customer is upset, we have a process to resolve their issue quickly; or
• how can we improve the design of product X so that the issue we’ve heard from three customers does not happen again; or
• how can we test a prototype of a product before it’s released to customers, to spot and solve issues, before they ever reach a single customer

Each of these questions asks us to solve a challenge before it becomes a problem in the future, by asking a strategic question today.

Strong leaders are constantly scanning their business for signals that indicate future operational issues. Then, they proactively work with their teams to setup preventative measures and systems that will solve for those issues in the strategic zone, before they become crises.

I hope these suggestions are useful to you, whether you are just starting with your first role or already have an established career. Please consider sharing your feedback by leaving a comment below.

The post How To Manage Operational and Strategic Goals In Your Career appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

If you feel you have 100% of the skills and capabilities for your next role, don’t take it.

Sound irrational?

People ask how much of a stretch is ideal when taking the next step in their career?

In my view, the ideal is to have 60% to 90% of the skills and capabilities for your next role. This leaves a 10% to 40% stretch.

“Stretch” gives you space and room for growth.

If you are a 100% fit for your next role, as soon as you step into it, there will be nothing for you to learn.

Consider It An Investment, In Yourself

Think of it this way.

We evaluate investments by the rate of return. A rate of return for bank interest rates is, say, 1 – 4%. That’s the baseline. A good rate of return would be 5 – 10%. A great rate of return would be 10 – 20%.

If you walk into a role and you’ve 100% of the skills, there’s little to no possibility for growth.

Growth is one of the very best investment returns you can receive from taking your next job.

At 0% professional growth, this is way less than what a bank returns for investing cash. And, we should consider professional growth more valuable than money.

This is why it’s an unwise career decision to take on a role you’re 100% ready for.

This is also why I say 60% to 90% is the sweet spot. At 90%, you’re assuming there is potential for at least 10% growth in a role. This is a modest, but still favourable, return for your professional growth. If you’re risk averse, it’s also a comfortable place to start for your next challenge.

If you step into a role where you’ve got 60% of the skills, there will be a steeper learning curve from the get-go.

It will be more demanding on you, especially in the first six months of the role (maybe a year). But, there will be higher return in your professional growth. Just think of how much you could learn?

Of course, we may be less likely to be hired for a role where we’ve 60% of the required skills. But it is not unheard of and we’ll never know if we don’t try.

5 Questions To Assess Stretch Level For Any Role

Given these things, how can you assess stretch?

I see stretch as a combination of 5 factors:

1. Leadership – do you have the necessary leadership skills to fulfil the role? Leadership might be a considered a combination of working with senior stakeholders, setting directions for a team, leading initiatives, managing budgets.
2. People Management – do you have the required people management skills to fulfil the role? If the role oversees five people, it will have less demanding requirements than if the role oversees fifty. Make no mistake, people management is very important, whether you manage one person or a hundred.
3. Skills / Capabilities – all roles require a specific set of specialist and/or generalist skills and capabilities. These are also the requirements that are most clearly defined in any role description. As a result, the best way to uncover these is to work through the position description or look at equivalent roles in similar industries. You can gauge this factor by dot-pointing all of the skill requirements for the role, and thinking about whether you possess them.
4. Experience – it’s important to think about experience. Do you have direct, hands-on experience, working with the issues and subjects that are relevant to this role? Often we don’t consider this element (thinking instead only about our specific skills), but experience counts, especially when we’re faced with challenges in the early days of starting a new job.
5. Life Circumstance – the final element to consider are life circumstances. The question here is, do you have the environment and circumstances that will help you ti excel in this role? And, if you don’t, can you see a way to put these support structures in place? For example, if the role requires travel twenty times a year and you have a young family, are you able to commit to this? This is just one example. Others will be based on your particular circumstances and what’s important to you.

While Life Circumstance is not strictly a requirement of a role, it does impact our likely success in any job. I like to include this question because even if we score highly in the other four, if we don’t have the right circumstances supporting us in a role, we’ll not perform at our best.

With these five factors in mind, think about the role you’re interested in, and mark yourself out of 10 for each of these factors.

When you’re done, add your scores and multiply by 2. Then minus from 100.

The figure you end up with is the stretch for the role.

Why Gut Is Sometimes More Important Than Science

You might be reading this and thinking, “that’s not all that scientific.”

Well, it’s not. It’s also not intended to be. It’s meant to be quick and based on your gut responses to the questions above.

Even though this a simple exercise, many people will not go to this effort when assessing a new role.

The majority of people will only think about whether they possess the skills for a role. Few people would think about all five question areas. Even fewer still would rank themselves out of 100 and then define how much of the job is a stretch.

So why is this worth doing?

Because going into a new role, these insights can be incredibly useful. They can:

• give you a clear sense of just how big the gap is for a new role.
• identity what level of professional growth the role may provide you, which is an important measure of return.
• help you identify and setup systems and processes when you start the new role to close the gap, as quickly as possible.

The goal of the exercise is not to think about why you are not qualified (ie. the gap) for a role.

The goal is to help you think about “stretch” as something that is attractive (because it represents growth) and to encourage you to apply because of this stretch, not despite it.

So if stretch is such a great thing, why don’t we actively look for it?

Not only do we not look for it as positive, but some research suggests that we look for stretch in different ways.

The Gender Imbalance

There is an often quoted study by HP which suggested that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, and women only apply when they meet 100% of them. The study suggested that this is due to different perceptions of confidence; men are more prepared to back themselves to address any gaps than women.

However, further research has looked at this more deeply, including a survey by Tara Mohr of a further thousand men and women.

Mohr’s results suggest confidence is not the most significant barrier to applying for roles. Mohr’s study found that in applying for a new role, a significant barrier is that women perceive that the “the job qualifications are real requirements, and see the hiring process as more by-the-book.”

In other words, it is not lack of confidence that creates the imbalance, but differences in how genders perceive whether the requirements and hiring processes are flexible and/or open to further influence.

The take away of this research is, regardless of gender, we should always consider throwing our hat in the ring, even if we perceive the gap in our qualifications to be significant.

While you will have a better chance at securing a role when you have 90% of the required capabilities, people with 60% of the skills do occasionally get the job!

I have known star performers in one industry who have switched careers and started new jobs. On paper, they held only 60% of the skills. Yet, they still got the role. Their hiring manager perceived that the skills they had from other industries were transferable. When they started in the new job, they were able to rapidly translate these skills to the role and succeed.

What is important when filling a larger gap in skills, is how we plan to fill these gaps. This is where having a great mentor, advisor or coach can give you an edge. Mentors, advisors and coaches are especially powerful when they’re working within the company where you are seeking a role.

Another consideration is whether the role is even right for you. I’ve known many people who’ve been attracted to new roles by big pay jumps, only to find these roles unfulfilling. You might consider other factors ahead of pay, such as whether the role gives you strong career prospects, access to leaders you respect, and fulfils your sense of purpose.

A Word For Hiring Managers and Leaders

It’s not only candidates that have responsibilities during a hiring process. As leaders and hiring managers, we can do a lot to make the hiring process fair.

Just as people going for a role have to think about the level of stretch the role requires of them, we have to face some realities in our hiring decisions.

We have to be open to those candidates who do not match the role 100%. Just because a candidate isn’t a 100% match for a role, doesn’t mean they do not have a great deal to offer.

Over the last ten years recruitment services provided by sites such as LinkedIn have provided incredible features to help match candidates to role requirements. Often though, this has reinforced specialization (not generalization) in career pathways.

The world needs both specialists and generalists. If we are only ever hiring specialists, we will miss the skill-set many generalists have, which is to build connection and meaning from subjects that appear seperate, but are actually related.

So if you have influence over hiring decisions, I encourage you to also consider those candidates who do not appear a 100% match for a role, but will bring other skills and experiences that may actually be more valuable.

As leaders and managers, we also have to acknowledge the unconscious bias that still exists in hiring decisions.

For every 100 men promoted and hired to a management position, only 72 are women. Unconscious bias, including performance bias, is still a reality that influences hiring decisions. Ensuring we have not only a mix of gender in our hiring process (and not only gender diversity, but all aspects of diversity), but that we’re considering the role of unconscious bias in how we hear and appoint candidates, is a step we can take.

Unconscious bias affects career prospects beyond hiring decisions. It also affects how people get access to leaders when they’re exploring career directions.

Women are 24% less likely to receive advice from senior leaders than men. And advice from senior leaders can be the crucial step in helping someone go for a role where there is more stretch and growth potential for their skills.

Mentors in particular help people gain access to skills, build confidence in their abilities and provide advocacy and support.

So if you are in a position where you give guidance to others, an important consideration is whether there is diversity and equity in those who have access to your advice.

The post About To Take Your Next Job? Think About This First appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I was six when I disassembled a remote control car and crossed the wires, convinced I could make it go faster. Not the most ingenious idea, I know. But I tried and failed and learnt something from the process. Fortunately I’m neither a mechanic nor an electrical engineer today.

Boredom inspired these explorations.

A curious mind sought entertainment. Because the immediate environment didn’t appear to offer it, I had to create my own.

I have no doubt this same curiosity has helped me build a career – from mapping out user journeys for complex websites through to writing strategies for new business ideas; much of this connects back with those earlier times.

Boredom was, and still is, a source of inspiration for me.

A Telling Interview With Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

In an interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, Buffet shares with us there are some days in his calendar where nothing is written down.  The interviewer, Charlie Rose, shows us by holding up the calendar to the camera.¹⁾

It seems contrary to everything we’ve learnt about time management. The fact is one of the richest and most successful men in the world is intentional about scheduling nothing, at least as it’s written on paper.

In the interview, it seems like Gates shares the same amazement we do. He even articulates it for us…

“Sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority….it’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you’ve filled (up) everything in your schedule.”

Bill Gates

The Gates and Buffet conversation summarizes what many of us may be feeling – that a packed schedule might be the key to time efficiency in the short term, but it might not lead to success in the long term.

It actually might not be any fun either. Go on, we can admit it. Being atomically busy can be a bit of a drag, really. What’s more, atomic busyness might also be robbing us of our flexibility, humour and ability to be strong leaders and deal with the unknown.²⁾

Having an open calendar is a far cry from being bored. But I ask you to consider, for a moment, that occupying our available time with meaningful pursuits is also the result of learning to cope with, pre-empt and overcome boredom. In this way it might be one of the keys to finding flow in our work and personal goals.

Is It Time To Declutter Our Schedule, As Marie Kondo Has Done Our Homes?

If there’s one thing Marie Kondo has done, it’s bring simplicity back into our home lives.

As we scramble through cupboards filled to the brim with odds and ends, where the broken strings of old tennis rackets almost take out an eye, Kondo teaches us to keep and treasure items which “spark joy”, or alternatively give a ceremonious “thanks” for items which do not, and discard them.

So simple! The one question of “does it spark joy” to restore balance and zen to our every day home lives.

While Kondo has helped us clear our physical spaces, we’ve some way to go with our mental ones.

We might ask ourselves, if our calendar was an object, packed with 15 minute intervals, would it spark joy when we picked it up?  Buffet knows the answer. It seems he’s also acted on this knowledge.

So, is it time to “Kondo” our calendar? If Kondo can re-frame clutter to cleanliness with a simple “thanks”, can we do the same with our schedule?

Boredom Is Not A Dirty Word

The first thing we’d need to do is acknowledge that “boredom” is not a dirty word. For the last decade, maybe two, we’ve run scared every time we hear it. Just the thought of the word can make us clutch for some form of entertainment.

Our chronic avoidance of boredom has even affected research. In an analysis of articles published on subjects affecting human emotion – happiness, sadness, anxiety or anger – there were roughly 128 articles for each emotion, but only 12 with boredom as their subject.³⁾

Are we anxious about studying boredom? Perhaps there’s a deeper aversion to boredom we just don’t want to face.

There’s no doubt boredom has a bad rap. It’s been linked to a whole suite of negative outcomes, from reduced interpersonal relationships, decreased task accuracy, and increased risk taking behaviour.

It is only recently social researchers have realised that boredom serves an important function.

When we no longer feel stimulated by an activity, we grow bored. We start to contemplate possible responses to the situation. In this way, the displeasure of boredom is both a trigger and motivator to seek alternative experiences and goals and, in so doing, change our circumstance.

Boredom moves us. And at its most effective, it moves us toward those pursuits that are more meaningful or congruent with our goals. 

This is one of the reasons Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, states:

“To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”

Cal Newport

If our impulse is to reach for the nearest distraction as soon as we feel bored, we might be short-circuiting an important exploratory behaviour that may be the solution to our long-term fulfilment. Like fear, if we spend too much time avoiding it, we may fail to see what’s on the other side of it. 

In a pilot study by two European researchers, participants who experienced a higher degree of boredom demonstrated a higher correlation with a subsequent search for more meaningful activities. The researchers found the interim results so interesting they crafted a larger study to see whether the degree of boredom might motivate socially positive actions.

The way they did this was straightforward; they asked 31 students to complete a recurring, repetitive task (eg. estimate the odds of selecting a blue or red ball in a random distribution of balls). At the end of this task they asked them how much they would donate to a charity associated with their university.⁴⁾

The research concluded that people who experienced higher degrees of boredom were more likely to donate to the cause. The higher the degree of boredom, the more likely those affected participants sought greater meaning elsewhere.

This and other research suggests that boredom plays an important role in how we pursue goals and fulfilment. At the least, it argues that we consider the positive role boredom can play, and not just the negative one, as has been the focus of much research to date. 

There is increasing evidence that suggests that boredom may not only be a mental state, but an emotion as well. In a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, boredom was found to elicit a similar response to feelings of elation.⁵⁾

Boredom, Creativity & Innovation

Having attended at least ten hacking events over the last decade (for companies I worked for, as a participant, an observer and occasionally a judge), I am convinced that boredom plays a role in the success of these events.

With many hack days running over 48 to 72 hours, what ignites people’s enthusiasm is the chance to do something different from their usual activities and tackle new products and services that either respond to the lacklustre performance of existing ones or promise entirely new ways to do things. In other words, these teams find what’s boring within what exists, and replace it with something more compelling.

When we think about it, hack events are successful because they are an important interruption to what is often a routine annual calendar. They are the equivalent of Buffet’s open schedule. They deliver an opportunity to break away from routine and participate in a new discovery.     

Hack days often start off the same way; with a sense of nervous excitement and open possibility. Participants have described this to me as an uncomfortable feeling that they know will subside as the days progress. 

Hack days are effective because they apply structure to give space to unstructured activities. They are the equivalent of being intentional about scheduling “open time”. 

What Can We Do

There is a simple way you can explore the connection between boredom and creativity in your life.

The next time you feel bored, instead of reaching for something to fill the space (whether our social media feed or some other form of entertainment)… why not endure a little longer?

Ask yourself the question – what other activity could fill this time which may be more meaningful?

Even if you have only a short time available to you (20 minutes), consider using this time toward a personal goal.

What we’re doing here is ‘trading activities’. We’re raising our awareness of knee jerk patterns, and replacing them with purposeful ones, and being aware that boredom is the catalyst to doing so.

I’m also not suggesting to do this all the time. We all need a break and I love my Netflix time, just like anyone. But lately I do consciously switch these activities with thinking time.

At first this might feel strange, even a little uncomfortable. But when we swap activities for ones which take us closer toward our goals, it’s a likely sign we’re on the right track.

The post Why Boredom Can Be Good For You & Your Creativity appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

As a generalist, I look to lessons across a broad range of disciplines. This led me to this book.

I’m glad it did, because in one sentence the author reminded me of one of the most important lessons in leadership.

“A leader’s relationship with their people should be transformational, not transactional.”

John McMahon

It’s a deceptively simple sentence. This one line captures so much about what leadership is.

It also captures a lot about the leaders I’ve most admired.

We may not relate to the word ‘transformational’.

The focus here is on leadership having a larger impact in the lives of the people we work with – whether that’s by creating meaning, helping people develop, or motivating teams to do their best work.

What Great Leaders Do

Great leaders are present, listen and inspire.

They are present in that they show up and give others the respect of being there, without distractions. They listen, giving balance in conversation to those they’re with, to understand the full context of what is being said. They inspire by first identifying the circumstances, values, goals and motivations of their team and connecting these motivations with organisational objectives.

We know when we’re in the presence of great leaders, for all of the reasons above.

When you think about the leaders you most respect, have they shown these qualities?

Were the interactions you had with them motivating or transactional?

How Leaders Fail

When leaders are distracted and not present, do not listen with intention, and know little about what truly motivates and moves their team, leadership fails.

Interactions become transactional. An appreciation of the relationship falls away.

When we operate like this, we manage the outputs of the work only, and not the people who are responsible for producing those outputs.

This approach may yield short term wins (maybe that’s why it’s a tempting pattern), but ultimately leaves people feeling flat, anxious and unsatisfied. It is also the deflating territory of micro-management.

I wish it were simple.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just chose to be the leaders we want to be?

I used to think being a leader was like graduating. Once we got there, we’d know, and there’d be no going back.

But leadership takes effort and awareness.

In any given day we can switch between transformational and transactional leadership. Even the best leaders have moments where they exit a meeting, feel flustered and think they could have handled the situation better.

I realise now that great leadership is about knowing we cannot always get it right.

We’re human. We’re bound to slip occasionally.

What Separates Truly Great Leaders

What separates great leaders from others is their willingness to continually check themselves for how they are in any moment. The very best leaders constantly assess whether they’re being all they need to be, and quickly adjust when there’s a disconnect.

They do this because they know if they don’t, their people will not get the best version of themselves.

If you are ever feeling as though you’re slipping into a transactional pattern, there are steps you can take.

• Manage anxiety
  Often we become transactional because we’re anxious about something. We might be worried about a deadline or the next budget. HBR has a very useful summary of of articles and podcasts on the subject of ‘leading through anxiety.’
• Manage energy and resourcefulness
  The question of whether we are resourceful (a transformational state) or reactive (a transactional state) is also a question of how much energy we have to respond to any situation. We can manage ourselves and our levels of resilience to be better leaders, by using simple practices like getting regular exercise and downtime.
• Assess against the ideal team dynamic
  A useful test of our leadership is to assess ourselves against the question “right now are we supporting the principles of high performing teams?” Perhaps the most important principle is to support psychological safety for our team members, which becomes more difficult when we’re operating in a transactional pattern of leadership.

If you use or have seen other specific strategies to supporting strong leadership, consider sharing your view with others by leaving a comment below.

The post The One Thing Great Leaders Do appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

While these terms are often use interchangeably, they can mean very different things. They also are supported by different actions and behaviours.

In your own career you may have observed this too. You may have also thought about taking on one of these roles yourself, so that you could share your skills and expertise with others.

A Short Summary Of The Difference Between a Mentor, Advisor and Coach

In thinking about these roles, I thought carefully about how I interpreted the differences between these roles.

Often a mentor or advisor is assumed to have personally succeeded in a discipline related to the area they are mentoring or advising on.

For example, a successful entrepreneur could mentor or advise other aspiring entrepreneurs.

A mentor provides a psychological commitment over an enduring period to help an individual on a chosen path.

An advisor provides value by giving targeted and potentially infrequent advice. Often, there is an expectation that an advisor will be more directive than the other roles. Mentors and coaches may lead by asking questions and giving open space for the person they’re guiding to discover their own answers.

A coach is there to assist an individual, team or business to reach their full potential.

While mentors and advisors are often expected to have expertise and personal experience in the area they provide guidance on, the same is not always true for a coach. For example, a coach may have a successful career coaching professional soccer teams, but not have been a player themselves.

A More Detailed Summary Of These Differences

In thinking about these differences, I also thought about some of the approaches each role could take.

If you are looking for a more detailed explanation of the differences, this table gives a more detailed breakdown of the outcomes of a mentor, advisor and a coach.

If you are planning to take on one of these roles, I would encourage you to consider if you agree with the distinctions in the table above.

What would you change? What do you agree with? Just doing this will give you further clarity on how you will take on any of these roles.

While definitions vary, I would caution against the way ‘mentors’ are used in many business settings. Often I will hear people say “maybe you should get a mentor for an hour a month to help you with your development plan?”

This is a useful action but also a somewhat narrow view of mentorship.

True mentorship is gained through meaningful connection, shared time, and both philosophical and practical teaching. Often a mentorship used in business settings is actually more like an advisor relationship. It may also be worthwhile considering the qualities of a great mentor.

Any of these three roles can provide an incredible opportunity for you to connect with others. In doing this, you may discover a broader appreciation for both the skills you possess and how your skills can help others.

If you have views on this article or would like to share your experiences of being or working with a mentor, advisor or coach, consider leaving a comment below.

The post What’s the Difference Between a Mentor, Advisor, and a Coach? appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I was thinking about writing, but I had no idea where to begin! So I caught up with a very good friend who is published author, and asked her. 

“How am I going to get this going?”

“Just start,” she said. “If you don’t, you definitely won’t get going. If you start, your next question will be how to keep it going.”

It was a simple and valuable lesson.

I am an advocate for detailed planning. Much of my work involves writing strategy, creating roadmaps and doing involved analysis.

Sometimes though, we have to throw out a plan and just begin. 

Through action, we can find our way.

An issue with detailed planning is that it can be too detailed, too complex and take too much time. It is useful to a point, but there are so many pathways to high performance, sometimes we have to look at goal setting from multiple angles.

That’s why I think there’s a role for a rapid plan. Something that can help us get unstuck instantly when we feel we need direction. This is where where the 5 x 5 goal planning matrix fits in.

The 5 x 5 Goal Planning Matrix

This goal planning matrix can be used for anything.

From planning personal goals at the start of the year through to shaping the start of a new initiative. It can be used as a stand alone activity or as the start of a larger process, like planning SMART and HARD goals.

It is highly effective. And it is incredibly quick!

Here’s how it goes:

• Define 5 areas
• Create 5 goals
• Write 5 actions per goal
• Define 5 milestones (dates)
• Set 5 priorities by area / domain

Understand Each Area Of The Goal Planning Matrix

Here’s a more detailed break down to help you understand each activity.

Step 1: Define 5 Areas

An area is a domain or themes that is important to our goals. These could be areas of personal happiness (physical, emotional, mental, financial, social) or areas of a project. These are the zones and groups where you wish to plan your goals.

Step 2: Create 5 x Goals

Against each area, plan five goals. As an example, say one of your domains is ‘physical’. Five goals could be:

• Eat nutritious meals regularly 
• Sleep regularly and deeply
• Take time each day to calm your mind
• Go to the gym / walk / run
• Drink plenty of water throughout the day

It’s that simple. Five goals for each of the domains you write. 

Step 3: Write 5 x Actions 

Any goal must start with action. Just like the conversation with my friend at the start of this article. She said, ‘start somewhere’. So my very first action was to write one blog post.

In this stage of your planning, you will write the starting action for each of the goals you just created. 

So, if the goal is ‘go to the gym’ the starting action could be ‘sign up for a gym membership’ or, if you already have a membership, it might be ‘go to the gym this Monday, Wednesday and Friday.’

The purpose of these actions is to give you the very first starting point to work on your goal.

Step 4: Define 5 x Milestones

Adding milestones to our actions, in the form of a specific due date or month, gives us a target to aim for. All we need do is ask ourselves, “by when do we want this action to be complete?”

Step 5: Set Priorities by Area / Domain

As the final step, you’re now going to rank the goals you created in the first step.

When you rank your goals, I’d like you to ask yourself the question, “which of these goals is most important to me in this domain?”

From there, rank your goals from 1 (being the most important) to 5 (being still important, but not as important as the other actions).

Just Look At What You Can Create

When we look at our entire list of 25 actions, it can become daunting.

By prioritizing our goals, we now have a starting point within each domain to begin our actions.

This way we don’t have to be overwhelmed. Just start by picking your top action in each domain.

This framework can be completed with a sense of play. We could think very deeply about our domains and goals and actions, or just write what first comes into our mind. I guarantee you, if it is at the front of your thinking, it will be meaningful to you. 

When we approach the activity in this way, it can be done in just fifteen minutes. And that’s the whole idea! To give us a rapid plan to orient ourselves and get moving. 

How Bout A Template!

Right back at you. Here is a link to a simple sheet that will help do this even more quickly

Go ahead, give it a go, I’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below.

The post Use This 15 Minute 5 x 5 Goal Planning Matrix To Jump Start Your Goals appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.