Book Time

Category: Leadership

  • Letting Fires Burn

    Letting Fires Burn

    A while back

    I wrote a post about creating clarity. You can read it here. In that, I referenced a story about a team member who was working to help solve a problem for another employee and how I redirected their efforts. I was practicing (more…)

  • Inspect what you Expect

    Inspect what you Expect

    The past few posts have been about the reality that at any given point in your organization there are 3-5 big questions that you need to have fast answers for and be able to make decisions against those answers. The other part of that is enabling the people around you, specifically those who report to you, to make decisions that align with you. You want them to know your (more…)

  • Your 3 big questions

    Your 3 big questions

    The other day, I was having a discussion with some friends about the golden circle. What’s that? It came out of the book Start With Why and it looks like this (more…)

  • How do you know?

    How do you know?

    When I was younger

    My parents would reward my brother and I by giving us money for grades. Would would get an amount for A’s and a smaller amount for B’s. The expectation was that we wouldn’t make C’s or lower so there were no rewards below B’s. What does this have to do with business? (more…)

  • Leading With Questions – At Home

    Leading With Questions – At Home

    We’ve been talking about leading with questions in several contexts of the last several posts. You can read about those here, here, and here. This time let’s talk about how to do that in the home. If you’re like me (which means you’re a crazy oddball who is only about 10% of the population), then I’m sorry that you get frustrated so easily. Also, in that context, leading this way allows room for you to grow in patience, since you probably won’t like most of the answers to the questions that you ask. I’ll come back to that.

    Let me start with the big idea. Here it is…DO. NOT. (more…)

  • Leading with Questions – In Work

    Leading with Questions – In Work

    We’ve been talking about leading with questions. You can read the first two posts here and here. Today we’re going to talk about what this looks like in a work setting. I work in an organization that has a great culture towards professional coaching. This isn’t just something that we say, it’s implemented on a ground level. The best example I have to give you a picture of this is (more…)

  • Leading with Questions – In Church

    Leading with Questions – In Church

    Last week we talked about the need to lead with questions. You can read that here. Have you ever had one of those conversations that changes everything? How did it go? Were you expecting that? I know the conversations that were most impactful to me were (more…)

  • Leading with Questions

    Leading with Questions

    Over years of leading others, I’ve found it’s helpful to have a list of questions that are always asked in a given situation. In both coaching and mentoring contexts I have a specific (more…)

  • Best cake maker ever

    Best cake maker ever

    It was an amazing cake

    I still remember it years later. This had to have happened between 15 – 20 years ago. This cake was great. It actually pushed me to ask the lady who’d ordered it where she went. (Some artisan cake shop? Some big name bakery?) Her response surprised me…. (more…)

  • Developing Expertise

    Developing Expertise

    10000 hours. That’s the common knowledge rule on the amount of time it takes to develop expertise. This was a thought developed by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Now that’s 10000 hours to World Class, Olympic Grade, Nobel Prize type expertise. Now…to get to competency. To get to competency is a different (more…)