Awhile back I wrote about boundary conditions and how when we expand our boundary conditions, we can find greater growth.
I am one that does not like to show too much emotion. All my life I have been steady, not too hot and not too cold. This has served me well in many things, but it has meant that I have a narrow range of emotions and it is limiting to me and impacts the way I connect with others.
In a recent class with leaders at Microsoft I pushed against my boundary conditions.
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The boom of AI has changed the way people all around us are seeing the world. This is not another thought about AI, and not even one about trusting AI but rather on the impact of speed and cost on making the progress we want to make as leaders.
I learned from Steven M.R. Covey a simple idea about trust that became real to me as I pondered the age of AI and the pace of innovation. The idea is that trust accelerates progress (and business) and there is a simple heuristic we can follow to assess the level of trust in our families, communities, teams, or organizations.
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There is no one way to build a leadership development program but there are key ideas and thoughts that we do not want to forget when designing one. I’ll share with you one of them here.
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Building and strengthening your own leadership and the leadership of others is not an easy task. It requires focus, intentionality, and most often a mindset shift.
The beginning of this mindset shift for me happened right after college. I was working for a serial entrepreneur who taught me about Don Clifton and the early days of positive psychology. He had the following research question after finding there were mountains of research studies about how to “fix” psychological challenges we all face in life.
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Sometimes when I am talking to someone, I will have an image come to my mind that illustrates for me an idea or concept. This happened to me last week while talking to a good friend across the pond.
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One of my favorite things to do is go on a walk with my wife and son during my lunch break right before we put my son down for a nap. On a recent walk he joined us on his scooter.
As he rode ahead of us, he would look back to make sure we were still there. The moment he started to look back his scooter began to drift. He felt the swerve, looked forward, adjusted himself and then almost immediately looked back only to drift again.
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Research done by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov states that it takes no longer than 100 milliseconds to form an impression of a stranger from their face.
Within a tenth of a second we are making judgments and forming first impressions. We are judgment making machines.
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Last week I was asked a fascinating question by an experienced facilitator that taught me something new about learning. I was describing a process and methodology we would follow for an exercise and then afterwards he pulled me aside to build on the structure with a question.
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This week we delivered an event designed to help leaders dig deep into who they are, why they work and how they can use that as a filter for making decisions.
The experience is deeply impactful and for some life changing. One of the things I learned this week is about our orientation in leadership.
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At Microsoft we have implemented a habit called the “check in”. This habit consists of two primary questions “what am I feeling?” and “what might be distracting me?”
Often, we include a third question, but it always changes depending on the context and owner of the meeting.
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I teach and invite people to act. Proud husband, father and amateur pizzaiolo