Leadership Basics

Listen More, Talk Less

Here’s the thing, leadership is not rocket-science once you are sure what you are aiming for.

Are you making widgets on an assembly line?

Are you brainstorming innovation?

Are you ensuring ridged compliance in safety or audit situations?

Each of these situations requires a bit of a different touch with leaders. When there is no wiggle room for how a job gets done, an authoritarian approach may be your best choice. When creation is key, a transformational leader may be required. If you are leading a multitude of teams a delegation approach may succeed.

The thread that is common throughout all leadership, no matter the leadership school of thought, is the relationship between leaders and their teams. I have seen some posts on SM and with no verification if they are true, I have opinions. The most upsetting ones discuss time off. Losing a family member and being denied bereavement, getting married and having your honeymoon cancelled or bosses changing and vacation approval being rolled back because the new boss hasn’t approved it. If in any of these situations you think that there is validity in the denial, you are not fit for leadership.

Now I am not talking about someone who’s aunt has died 7 times in the last six months. We have all met those people and that is not in this discussion. And before anyone says Gen Z, this has been a problem since the beginning of time, there is no relation to one generation. (HAHA you see what I did there…never mind.)

I’m talking about good employees that have excelled in your organization leaving because a new boss denied preapproved vacation. The cost of this irrational decision is thousands of dollars in rehire, retrain and recertification costs. I guarantee that it cost more than the temporary pain of some days off. But the biggest cost is the trust in your team to your leader.

Decisions like this destroy the trust that a team places in a leader. The whispers will go on for years after the last decision. It makes good employees look for other jobs, even if they were unaffected by the decision. They no longer have faith in the whole organization.  It means that your organization will be left with only employees who can’t get other jobs or employees that decide to just keep their head down and pass time.

It does not leave your organization stronger, more profitable or in a better market position. It leaves your organization as a training ground for new staff that will leave as soon as possible. It leaves your organizations wasting money on training and makes it very easy for competitors to pick up trained staff and disgruntled customers.

Top leaders should be very worried about middle managers that are setting a course of the company by allowing sub par leaders to make decisions that do not make sense.

Supporting leaders while they are learning does not mean backing them regardless of behaviour, it means teaching them how to be better leaders and stopping mistakes before they happen.

Mentor the leaders that your company needs, not just the leader that fits in the seat.

Bosses Are Not Always Right!

Conflict Resolution

The Bosses are Not Always Right Version

When teams are locked in conflict, it can seem like there is no way to get both sides to work towards a goal together again. The reality is that people are much more similar than we are different but getting people to see that can be very difficult.

One common misconception is that a dispute can be ruled over. For instance, a boss might decree one side of the argument to be “right”, and then both sides are expected to drop the conversation and hard feelings and get on with their day. Unfortunately, it leaves one side feeling very let down with a lose and one side elated, with a win. But it does very little to clear the air and can leave the organization in a very vulnerable state.

Now this is not earth-shaking information, but bosses are not always right. Bosses have the same limitations that we all do. Great bosses recognize it, and poor bosses don’t. Declaring a winner without careful consideration of the sides can obliterate the reason that there was a heated discussion in the first place. Maybe one side sees a looming problem that the other side doesn’t.

Regardless of the conflict, we need to understand where or why the conflict is arising before we can make a judgement. Preventing problems are vital to running a profitable business. Mistakes will always happen but if we can minimize them, that is the best way to operate.

If you are a leader, please beware of making decrees without understanding both sides. You might end up hurting more than you help.

Gratitude for Women

Happy International Women’s Day to everyone who celebrates women.

I encourage everyone to celebrate the women in your life every day, do not just wait for March 8th to do it. Chances are good that the women in your life do a lot to make life turn out in just the way we like it to. Even if you are woman, other women do things that make your life better. Maybe it’s the woman in the office that organizes the potlucks. Maybe it’s your office mate that drops little gifts on your keyboard once in a while. Maybe she’s your boss and she runs a great company. However, women affect your life, notice it, recognize it, and pass your gratitude along.

But what we should not do, is pay International Women’s Day the very public sharing of all the great memes thanking the women in our lives and then signing their pay cheques that are 80% less than their male counterparts. We should not go home to a warm home filled with a woman’s invisible effort and not do our part of the housework. We should not let our partner take the night shift with the baby for the 50th night in a row because ‘she does so much better on less sleep than you do.’

We should stand up to our bothers and fathers who do not display the gratitude that should be displayed to the women in their lives. You can model better behaviour and never say a word. As a guest in their home, clear the plates after supper and when the snide comments come, counter them with, “She cooked, it is the least I can do.” Shine a spotlight on bad behaviour.

And as we raise our children, please try to focus on how each decision we make can affect the outcome of their lives. The words you say have meaning. Lots of meanings. When a child is wearing a stethoscope and playing, ask if they want to be a doctor or a nurse, instead of the assumption that that if they are male, they want to be a doctor and if they are female, if they want to be a nurse. You may not even think that this matters, but I can assure you it does. Girls and young women are barraged by tiny, small comments that alone, may not matter much but added up over 18 years, shapes what they “think” they are capable of.

Small things like asking only your daughters to load the dishwasher or do the laundry, chips away at their well being. As a parent, you are teaching your daughters how they should be treated and your sons how they should treat their partners. The exact same thing can be said about only getting your son to shovel snow or cut the grass. Children are equally capable. It is our own bias that makes the difference. We have to check our own bias at the parenting door.

Nothing will change if we do not change it. It is up to us, every day, to make the changes, consciously and with insistence, to formally equalize the playing field. Hopefully before the predicted 200 years.

What does Leadership mean to you?

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Struggling to fill seats in your Organization

Struggling to fill seats in your organization?

I have an opinion for you. And it is not a popular one in leadership, but it is the cold hard truth that people need to hear.

If you want to keep people in your industry, you need to pay them. And pay them what they are worth to your business. As leaders we have got about as much traction as we can from pizza parties and half assed appreciation.

We can stand around kicking dirt talking about merit, leadership opportunities and continued development but it isn’t working. We like to think we are intelligent people so the answer shouldn’t be hard to figure out. But all I see are headlines about short staffing and people leaving and bosses scratching their heads and it makes me want to scream into the void.

If your company hasn’t raised their starting wage in 5 years, you are the problem. If you don’t give wage increases until people make move to leave, you are the problem.  If your business plan is based on giant CEO salaries and stock options and your staff are overwhelmed and burnt out, you are the problem. If the bar for your staff keeps moving and the wage doesn’t, you guessed it, you are the problem. If minimum wage has caught up to your stating wage, again, louder for those in the back, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!

We can appreciate people all we want but if we are not keeping up with the cost of living at the bare minimum, we will get left behind. Our best people will leave for the next opportunity that comes across their desks. And if they ever figure out that they are being gaslit out of promotions and into heaps of work, they will leave faster than you can blink.

And frankly, we deserve it.

What are your guardrails?

February 24, 2025

Sometimes we approach leadership with the memory of a boss that we wish we were like and want to emulate. Sometimes we have a dread filled memory that we want to avoid at all costs. It helps to have these two ideas in mind when thinking about the leader that you want to be. The best and the worst memories set up guard rails in our minds to know where we want to fall. It is a wonderful place to start.

My son has dyslexia and an auditory processing disorder. He loved strict teachers that kept the class quiet while they were working. He did not enjoy the background noise of classes that might have overlapping conversations or more informal lessons. Did this mean that strict teachers were better? Was informal teaching bad? Absolutely not! But it did mean his preferred style of teacher was more regulated. He learned to wear headphones and work in the hallway if he needed to.

When you are beginning to learn about leadership you need to begin at a place that feels right for what you are trying to accomplish. In your first 90 days, you might be struggling to figure everything out so you may not have time to catch your breath, let alone figure out a style that works for you. But you will have to learn how you work best and what you need to do to get your work done.

It will be slow, and you can expect mistakes. Trying to obtain perfection will only burn you out. But trying to figure it out will be worth it. I promise!

Leadership Magic

February 24, 2025

There are so many leadership books kicking around. Some are amazing and some not so much. Podcasts, YouTube, and all sorts of social media offer so much advice that it is hard to search through and decide what is best for you.

There are also numerous leadership styles from which you can choose. And some have different uses that make sense in certain situations. Chances are if you are getting into leadership, your workplace has set you on the style of leadership you need. Some roles require a more authoritarian approach, such as role in compliance or accounting. A role that requires things to be done in a certain way to be correct, very cut, and dried. Some roles are more flexible. The role dictates the outcome and however you get there, it is up to you, typically a more creative endeavor.

Those styles point out how to get the job done in my opinion. They do not really help with how your team feels about the job they are doing or how to engage your team in various aspects of their work. My goal is to help people understand how to engage their teams and how to work within the bounds of a healthy corporation with budget constraints and regulatory concerns.

Follow along and I will share my leadership musings. Sometimes you swing and miss, but sometimes you connect in such a way that you can feel the magic happening. I want to help you find your own leadership magic.