Nobody wants to fail, and as leaders we don’t want to see our people fail. If we walk around all day with our heads in the clouds and pretend failure isn’t a possibility, it’ll wreck you, Instead, get comfortable with failure, Invite it in and learn from it.
Why it is important to have alignment on your team and across your organization? Without it, your folks can only see the trees in front of them, their immediate tasks and they miss the forest – the forest being your long-term goals and strategy.
You may not be blowing stuff up for a living, but you are leading a team of people that ultimately service other people. And once in a while, mistakes will happen. It’s what you do with those mistakes that sets you apart as a warrior at work.
We’re in a world that changes a mile a minute, and even as leaders we can’t be everywhere at once. We have to empower our people and each other to command attention and inform their team of anything that could get in the way of success.
In an organization with silos and the right goals, you can have the best of both worlds.
Warriors at work know they’re part of teams, and that means you can lean on your teammates to help you with the solutions you need to drive your organization forward.
It’s a fact that no one, not even you, is going to be with your organization forever. You have to prepare yourself and your team for what to do when people do cycle out, because warriors at work are not only interested in improving themselves, they want their organizations to continue to be successful long after they leave. That means thinking about turnover now, rather than later.
Thousands of hours of training go into a perfectly placed shot. Knowing how to identify a target, bringing the right resources to bear and work as a team are just as important as pulling the trigger, because without all that stuff they’d never have the opportunity for the shot in the first place.
Innovation isn’t always about that breakthrough product or service that revolutionizes the marketplace. Mostly, innovation is about continuously improving the way you do business so you can capitalize on changes in your environment. Do that enough times and to an outsider, it looks like you’ve accomplished something magical.
Whether you’re leading yourself or an entire organization, you’ll have to make plans and execute them if you want to be successful. To project growth, to hire more people, to open additional offices or move into new markets, plans that work are where it all starts.
Most business leaders ask me how to turn around performance, and I have to reach across the table and grab them by the shirt collar and say ‘You’re asking the wrong question! The question you should be asking is ‘How did you let performance slip to these levels in the first place? How did you allow it to become part of your culture?’ Turning around underperformance begins with digging out the weed from the roots.
Warriors don't just define objectives that are precise and profitable but also line up the resources their folks will need ahead of time, setting them up for success. Your experienced people may know where everything they need is but your junior folks don’t, and the minute you ask those experiences folks to stretch further than they ever have there’s a big chance of failure. If people don't drive performance, then what does?
James Mattis, the secretary of defense, (Or when I knew him, General Mattis) said that leaders should plan by understanding the situation their unit is in, where it’s been and where it’s going. Teams that do that are successful 98%-100% of the time. Imagine what that would do for your organization - to know that your strategy would be successful between 98 and 100 percent of the time?
When I was studying how United States Marines performed at a high level, I noticed that every patrol had a little ritual. No matter how beat up, tired or bloody they were, they would gather around in a circle and ask some simple questions – did we achieve our objective? What went right, what went wrong, what can we all do better, and when will it happen? Marines had less than anybody else out there, and they knew they had to constantly look for new and better ways of getting the job done. What would change in your organization if people were continuously improving?
In my work studying high performing organizations, the Department Of Defense sent me out to study combat units, and these folks had massive to-do lists. If they went out on a patrol and just worked from a checklist, they’d never be able to pivot when change occurred. Before they went out on every patrol, their leaders let them know what their priorities were and what success looked like so if they needed to change their route they’d know where they were supposed to finish. Wouldn’t it be valuable for your teams to be able to respond to last-minute changes and still get you the result you need on time and at a high quality?
Rider Wanderer Kat
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