Musings on Leadership

 As a leader, you have unlimited demands on your limited time. Everyone wants something from you and they want it NOW! Trying to do everything NOW and please everyone is a sure-fire recipe for a nervous breakdown. That's where the 4 D's method of time management comes in handy. The 4 D method was famously used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and popularized by author Stephen Covey. This method forces you to consistently focus on important and urgent tasks. I wrote about this previously in The Eisenhower Box . The 4 D's are: Do it. Defer it. Delegate it. Delete it. Do it . These are tasks that are urgent AND important.  These are tasks that YOU have to do - and do immediately. Your top customer, responsible for 20% of your firm's revenue, has called and said they're going with another vendor. If you don't "fix" this, say goodbye to your nice bonus and prepare to explain to the company president what happened! Everything in your life comes to a stop. T...

Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest minds in human history. Some of his contributions were: The modern telescope. Spectral analysis and identifying the seven colors in the rainbow. Calculus. The law of universal gravitation. And, to explain the motion of the planets, he created his 3 laws of motion. It's these 3 laws that I will be talking about. They are: An object will continue in its state of rest or uniform motion unless compelled to change that state by an external force. (Also known as the law of inertia.) If a net force acts on an object, it will cause an acceleration of that object. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You may be asking how this has ANYTHING to do with leadership, motivation, or Toastmasters. Let me give you some examples. Newton's 1st Law of Motion: An object will continue in its state of rest or uniform motion unless compelled to change that state by an external force. I love the fall - especially college football! Saturdays...

 If you're not familiar with the term, a "stretch" goal is a target that's set above what you expect to  accomplish. For example, if your non-profit usually raises $50,000 a year in donations, a "stretch" goal might be to aim for $60,000 for the coming year. Stretch goals aren't designed to scare you. They're designed to help you grow as an individual; to get you to think of new methods, techniques, and strategies; to get you to think outside the box. They're designed to be slightly uncomfortable because growth doesn't start until we leave our comfort zone. Think of the state as "productive discomfort". But do they work? American psychologist, and pioneer in goal-setting theory, Edwin Locke, looked at a dozen studies to see if he could find a quantitative correlation between a goal's difficulty, and its achievement. According to Locke, " the harder the goal the higher the level of performance...Although subjects with very h...

I'm currently reading, " Measure What Matters " by John Doerr. This post will be very short - really just a question. The American philosopher and educator, John Dewey, once said, " We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience. " As a leader, do you periodically take time to reflect on your experiences? If you and your team have just finished a project, has the entire team taken a moment to reflect on the project, what they learned, what went wrong, what went right?  If you're not periodically taking time to reflect - how are you ever going to learn from your mistakes - or what you're doing right?

 During my campaign for International Director, I am frequently asked about my views on the challenges facing Toastmasters. I thought I might take a break from my leadership posts to talk about my views on the future of the organization and the challenges facing us. Retention In my opinion, the biggest challenge facing Toastmasters isn't COVID - it's member retention. It's only natural that a club will lose a certain number of members every year. People move, they experience life changes, their priorities change, etc. The number most commonly mentioned in Toastmasters is that we lose 40% of our membership every. single. year! If you run a business, and you lose 40% of your customers each and every year, you won't be in business for long. People in sales know this adage but, the least expensive customer to get is one that's already purchased from you. While we may not spend actual money to get guests to attend our meetings (although some may), we spend time contactin...

 One of the biggest lessons I learned, as a leader, was to say "no" without feeling guilty.  As a leader there seems to be a never-ending demand on your time. Someone wants to talk with you. Someone else wants you to attend their meeting. Someone has a great idea for a new project. And on and on. It feels like the more you do, the more you're asked to do. If your plate is full, what they're asking doesn't take priority over what's on your agenda, and it doesn't absolutely HAVE to be done by you, it's okay to say, "no". In fact, saying "no" can be an excellent delegation opportunity! " That sounds like a GREAT idea but I don't don't have the bandwidth to take that on right now. Could YOU head that up for us? " (You'll find out quickly just HOW good of an idea THEY think it really is! LOL!)

 ( This post is inspired by an article I read on the Trello blog. If you're not familiar with it, Trello is a web-based collaboration tool. At one glance you can see what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process. Think of it as a white board, filled with sticky notes, with each sticky note being a task. ) If you're not familiar with them, one-on-one meetings are meetings between a manager and a team member to discuss how things are going. Do we really need more meetings? Let's face it, most meetings could have been better handled by an email. In fact, 67% of employees say that excessive meetings get in the way of them making an impact at work! One-on-one meetings CAN be very helpful - and not just for the team member! They can also help YOU improve YOUR performance. For the team member, use them to discuss priorities, challenges, and professional development. For you, the leader, these meetings provide an opportunity to: build...

To be an effective leader, you essentially need two traits: 1) the skill and competence to be promoted to a leadership position and, 2) the ability to attract willing followers. John Maxwell says, " If you think you're leading, but no one is following, then you are only taking a walk. " I was very careful, in that first paragraph, to qualify "followers" with "willing". You can absolutely be a leader with unwilling followers. I've often heard it said that the most difficult type of leadership is leadership in a volunteer organization. At your job, you HAVE to follow what your boss says or you'll be fired. In a volunteer organization, they don't HAVE to do ANYTHING you say. You have to MOTIVATE them to WANT to do what you ask. Good leaders, on the other hand, spend their time ensuring that their "followers" actually WANT them as their leader. Lieutenant General Hal Moore, the solder on whom the movie " We Were Soldiers " w...

This post  is inspired by " Above The Line: Lessons in leadership and life from a Championship program " ( here ). The author is former Ohio State University head football coach Urban Meyer. This book chronicles Ohio State's 2014 championship year when they won the very first College Football Playoff championship. But it also gives a lot of information about what goes into creating an elite program like Ohio State's. The Power of Belief My slogan during my campaign for Division Director was "Believe and Achieve". I truly believe that you can't achieve ANYTHING without first believing that you can achieve it. Belief is EXTREMELY important to a leader. They have to believe in themselves. They have to convince others to believe in them. They have to convince others to buy into their vision of where the organization can go. But it all starts with belief in yourself. When you believe in yourself, you find a strength of will within you. Strength of will isn...

I've written on the subject of defeats before but I came across a quote by Maya Angelou that I love: "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it." We've all suffered defeats. You didn't get the promotion or raise you felt like you had earned. You didn't get the job for which you were SO right. You asked someone out and they turned you down. Failure is a fact of life. I don't know of ANYONE who hasn't had at least one or two failures along the way. A study by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, researchers at Columbia University, found that it's MUCH better to praise a child for his or her EFFORT instead of their RESULTS. They studied 412 fifth graders, ages 10 - 12, and found that when you praised children for being smart, they began to focus solely on results and began to resist trying anythin...

  This week's tip comes from the classic book by Dr. Spencer Johnson,   "Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions . In earlier tips I've said that, as a leader, most of the decisions you'll make will be difficult ones. Sometimes these decisions have no "right" answer. So what's a leader to do? In Dr. Johnson's book, he puts forth a 4-step system that you can use to make the best possible decisions. Make a tentative decision. Ask 3 practical questions: Am I pursuing the real need? Am I informed about my options? Have I thought this through to a better result? Ask 3 private questions: Am I telling myself the REAL truth? Does this decision feel right to me? Do my actions show I believe I deserve better? If all 6 answers are "Yes", proceed. If ANY answer is "No", rethink the decision. The first 3 in step #2 questions are "head" questions and they help you gather and analyze information. The second 3 question...

This post is inspired by a YouTube speech I saw by Simon Sinek. (You can watch it here .)  Go after the things you want. Simon tells a story about a long line for some free bagels. The friend that he was with didn't want to stand in the long line. But Simon wanted a free bagel! So Simon walked up, reached between two people and grabbed a couple of bagels. The moral of the story is that some people focus on the thing they want while others can only see the thing that's preventing them from getting the thing they want. There is a caveat however. You're allowed to go after anything you want. You're just not allowed to deny anyone else the right to go after what they want. Sometimes the problem is you. In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a problem where women would die within 72 hours of giving birth. They called it the Black Death of Childbed (also known as Puerperal Fever). Doctors (surgeons) who performed autopsies during the mornings would call on women in the afte...

There are two steps to becoming a leader: YOU have to believe you CAN be a leader. THEY have to believe you ARE a leader. Simple, huh? The purpose of this email is to help with #2. This may seem obvious but ... people WILL treat you differently depending on how you dress, conduct, and present yourself. Toastmasters is a professional development organization. You come here to learn skills to help you advance in the workplace. Does dressing that casually and informally help you achieve that? If you want your boss to consider you for a promotion, they have to see you as a leader first. Put yourselves in the shoes of a guest that's coming to your club to learn how to grow their communication and leadership skills and they see a room full of people dressed in jeans, shorts, t-shirts, sneakers, or flip flops. Do you think they're going to feel confident that you can help them achieve their goals? This is especially true if you're a club officer. You should aim to dress a little...

This one's a bit long but there's a lot of good information in here. Amazon's Leadership Principles It's amazing to think about. Just 20 years ago Amazon was a small little website that sold books. 20 years later and they're solid competitors, if not industry leaders, in retail, publishing, logistics, wireless, toys, devices, apparel, and cloud computing - just to name a few. Part of the reason for their success is their culture of hiring and developing leaders with a focus on the 14 Amazon leadership principles that have guided the company's decision-making. EVERY Amazon employee is expected to adhere to these principles. Many of these principles apply to Toastmasters as well. For brevity's sake I'll just talk about the ones that apply to Toastmasters. My comments will be in italics. You can find the full list of Amazon's Leadership Principles  here . Customer Obsession Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn...

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!!! Human nature being what it is, we have a tendency to live, work, and socialize with people that looks like us. As a leader, you can't afford to do that. As a leader you should never stop learning and the more diverse the people around you, the more you have to learn and leverage.  To illustrate the power of diversity, look at your hand. By itself, it's not very powerful. Each finger, by itself, isn't very powerful. But clench them into a fist and get all fingers working together and now you have power! The different fingers represent the diversity of different people on your team. The idea isn't to become like everyone else but to be willing to understand and entertain different thoughts, perspectives, and ideas.

In a previous post I talked about " The Mousetrap Way " by Manoj Vasudevan. This comes from that same book. When you're trying to inspire others to take action, remember  Now ,  Wow , and  How . Now What needs to change? What stories or anecdotes can you use to prove your point? Make them understand that doing nothing can be painful. Wow Help your team visualize the desired results. Focus on the end result - don't worry about the "how" just yet. Don't make promises you can't keep. How What actions need to be taken? Explain them in a way that makes them look practical and achievable. THIS is where you articulate your idea. Subtly challenge them so that they feel the urge to give your idea(s) a try. Example: A politician that's trying to get you to vote for them. Now  - The current situation is in our country is bad. Wow  - Together we can create jobs and prosperity. How  - Vote for me.

(NOTE: This post was inspired by a conversation I had with our Toastmasters International Director towards the end of my District Director year. He asked me what I'd learned during my year as District Director. These aren't ALL I learned but they sprang to mind first.) Everyone is watching and listening. You may think you're no one special, the only time people listen is when you get up in front to talk. Don't be fooled. When you're a leader, EVERYONE is listening to what you say, and watching what you do ALL. OF. THE. TIME! If you're in a club meeting, or a speech contest, and you're on your phone checking FaceBook, or texting, or emailing - people will notice. They may not say anything to YOU, but they WILL talk to each other. Yes, you may BE bored to tears, or you didn't get a lot of sleep last night, but imagine what that brand new member, giving their Ice Breaker speech, thinks when they see the Club President, or the visiting Area Director, with th...

Good leaders get their people to believe in THEM. Good leaders show what THEY'RE able to do. Great leaders get their people to believe in THEMSELVES. Great leaders show you what YOU'RE able to do. Great leadership is about transferring belief. Great leaders are able to get their teams to buy into their vision for the organization. In essence, transferring their own belief in their vision to their teams. What might not be self-evident in this concept is that in order to get others to believe in themselves - you - the leader - first have to believe in YOURSELF. How do you do that? Become comfortable with discomfort. True growth doesn't start until you leave your comfort zone. When you're trying something new, learn to tamp down the negative self-talk that could hold you back. Learn to say "yes" when presented with new situations with which you're not comfortable and learn that that's okay. Learn that it's okay to fail. Failing doesn't make you a ...

First off, don't confuse this principle with the Pareto Principle (80-20 rule) which states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The 10-80-10 principle comes from Urban Meyer, former head coach of the Ohio State Buckeye football team. In 2014 the Buckeyes won the very first College Football Playoff and were crowned the national champions. As Coach Meyer explains in his book, " Above The Line ", 10% of your team will be your elite performers. They're self-starters and will give you their absolute best regardless of what you do. He calls these people "the nucleus". The other 10% are the people that you're never going to reach. They just don't care. They're walking through life just checking off boxes. (We all know some of THEM don't we?) The 80% are the team members you need to focus on. For the most part they're reliable and trustworthy. Maybe they just don't possess the drive, determination, or knowledge they n...

Every organization has a culture. It may be planned or it may have just grown organically. This culture is composed of group norms, shared perceptions, stated values, and shared goals and objectives. It even includes the way people interact with each other. A simpler definition for culture I ran across, that applies to leadership is, " Culture is what your team does when you're not around. " These three items, culture, behavior, and results, are all linked. As a leader, YOU create the team's culture. The culture you create drives the behaviors your team will exhibit. The behaviors of your team will drive the results you achieve. This is why leadership is VITAL. Your team will perform to the level of leadership YOU provide. I'm sure you've all had the experience of serving under a manager or boss who didn't lead anything. I'm willing to bet the group also didn't achieve much either. Leadership isn't A difference, it's THE difference. Creatin...