The Free Magical Motivator

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One of the most powerful practices for building a high-trust team; one that operates as a cohesive, aligned and accountable unit is the simple act of acknowledgement, recognition, praise and gratitude. I use these words as synonyms throughout this book.

Why does this matter so much?

Committed and ambitious leaders tend to be overly critical of themselves and of others. They focus on the gaps rather than the progress, on what isn’t working rather than what is. That’s why one bad result can erase ten great ones from our consciousness.

Turning a leadership team into a highly aligned and accountable team takes courage and resilience, especially when leaders have to own their own role in creating the need for change in the first place.

CEOs sometimes try to convince me that criticism is what motivates them and their teams to perform. And in rare cases, that may be true. But for the vast majority of leaders and teams, constant criticism doesn’t motivate. It demoralizes.

I once worked with a CEO who never recognized his leaders or his team. He genuinely believed that recognition would breed complacency. So instead, he assigned extremely aggressive stretch goals, on the theory that “if they shoot for the sun, they’ll reach the moon, but if they shoot for the moon, they’ll only reach the sky.” But his team never hit their goals, and because they never hit them, he never recognized them, even when they had extended enormous effort trying to succeed. At first, everyone was upset and resentful. However, over time, it became worse: they became resigned and numb, and they stopped believing and expecting that they could generate the breakthroughs they wanted.

When a team commits to a bold, breakthrough future, that transformation will always surface every historical limitation, barrier and glass ceiling standing in its way. Confronting those challenges is mentally demanding work. That’s why, when I coach teams in driving their transformation, I always remind them that the name of the game is “Progress, not Perfection.”

The practice of acknowledgement, recognition, praise and gratitude keeps that perspective alive. It keeps people empowered and encouraged, and it reconnects leaders and team members with their own commitment, greatness, value and potential to make a real difference through the inevitable ups and downs of the journey.

Practicing acknowledgement, recognition, praise and gratitude isn’t hard. It takes no real effort, and it doesn’t cost a penny. What it does require is that leaders let go of the default ego-based, zero-sum mindset so many ambitious leaders carry, and replace it with genuine commitment, courage and generosity, the natural characteristics of a future-based mindset.

The impact of acknowledgement, recognition, praise and gratitude is nothing short of magical. It leaves people feeling energized, motivated, valued, appreciated, capable, and committed to achieving so much more, especially while going through tough terrain.

And yet, while everyone understands the merits of recognition, most teams and organizations fail to prioritize it, invest in it, or build it into their culture. In most companies, recognition lives almost entirely inside formal HR programs, disconnected from the daily rhythm of how people actually work together and what they’re dealing with.

One CEO I work with got so committed to this practice that he made it his mission to build it into the DNA of his company’s culture. He dedicated time at the end of every physical or virtual company and leadership meeting, no matter what else was on the agenda, for people to recognize each other. Most of his leaders followed suit, adopting similar practices in their own teams. It left a lasting mark on his culture, on people’s loyalty and commitment, and on his company’s performance.

Some leaders believe that too much recognition is inauthentic. Their claim goes something like: “If I recognized someone on Monday for going above and beyond, why would I recognize them again on Wednesday and Friday? I already told them the first time.” These leaders misunderstand the essence and impact of acknowledgement, recognition, praise and gratitude. They think it’s about sharing information and data. It isn’t. Recognizing someone means touching their heart, genuinely and profoundly. When it’s sincere, it makes people feel seen, known, appreciated and valued. When it’s sincere, there is no limit to how much of it you can give.

One last piece of advice: when you recognize people, talk to them, not about them. Say you want to recognize your co-worker Joe in a team meeting. Don’t look at the rest of the team and say, “I’d like to recognize Joe for staying every night this week to help me finish project X.” Instead, look at Joe and say directly to him, “Joe, I want to recognize you for staying every night this week to help me finish project X.”

If you want to add a powerful skill to your leadership toolbox, start practicing recognition daily. At first, it might feel somewhat contrived. But the more you practice, the more it will become part of your DNA and how you approach relationships and interactions.

Try it and see for yourself

Stop Standing in Your Past and Start Standing in Your Future

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In 1943, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, declared there was a world market for about five computers. In 1895, Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, announced that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. In 1899, the Director of the U.S. Patent Office suggested everything that could be invented already had been.

These weren’t fringe thinkers. These were the smartest, most experienced and informed minds of their generation, and they got it wrong in ways that look almost comic from where we stand now. Which raises one uncomfortable question: what are you just as certain about today that will look equally absurd in a few years?

Let’s be honest, we all walk around with important convictions that feel like facts but are actually just the residue of our past, hardened into beliefs that quietly kill our future before it ever gets a chance to arrive. “We don’t believe what we see, we see what we already believe.” Our thoughts are not pure objective observations of reality. They are projections from the rearview mirror, running on a loop, dressed up as truth and wisdom.

Think about the last time your team started a new bold initiative. I’d bet real money someone said “this is going to be hard” or “it’ll never work here” within the first hour. Those aren’t facts, not even informed predictions. They’re past experiences dressed up in future language, and if you let them go unchallenged, they become exactly what everyone said they would. That’s what I call driving-while-staring-into-the-rearview-mirror. Everything you think you see ahead of you is actually behind you. You’re moving toward a future you can’t see because you’re too busy obsessing over where you’ve already been.

I was brought in to work with a highly siloed global go-to-market team at a major cybersecurity company. Sales was furious at Marketing for not generating enough quality leads. Marketing resented Sales for complaining constantly while not dedicating the time and focus to provide the input Marketing needed to actually help them. Every meeting devolved into the same argument, people talking past each other, blaming, listening only long enough to reload their next objection.

When I started talking to individuals from both groups, the detail that stopped me wasn’t the conflict itself. It was the timeline. This had been going on for years. Different people had different explanations for how it started, but everyone shared one belief with absolute certainty: nothing would ever change. Conflict had become their identity; dysfunction had become their culture. Nobody was standing in an empowering future because they’d stopped believing one was available to them. They were building a story about why the situation could never improve, and they had been building it so long they’d mistaken it for reality.

Now contrast that with a group of managers from two misaligned functions at a well-known technology company that asked me to help them generate clarity and alignment about their roles and responsibilities. We did the hard work together: honest conversations, real ownership, people taking responsibility for their part in what had broken down without hiding behind blame or waiting for the other side to go first. In one session, a senior manager looked across the table at his counterpart and said, “I’ve been protecting my turf for so long I forgot we were supposed to be on the same side.” The room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when someone has said the truth out loud. Then people started talking differently. Instead of “yes, but,..” they were saying “yes, and…” Ideas built on ideas. Energy that had been locked up in years of friction suddenly had somewhere to go.

They put their past down. Not by forgetting it, not by pretending it hadn’t happened or cost them real time and progress, but by consciously choosing to stop carrying it into every conversation going forward. They built a set of shared future goals to replace their previous default predicament. The operating model that followed was rooted entirely in where they were going, not where they had been. And the difference in that room was immediate, unmistakable, and lasting.

I want to push back hard on the advice I hear so many people give about the past, because most of it is useless. “Forget the past, discard it, pretend it didn’t happen.” That’s not just impossible, particularly when the past includes real trauma, failure, loss, and disappointment. It’s also completely unnecessary. You don’t have to erase something to stop letting it run your life. The past deserves to be honored and learned from. What it does not deserve is a permanent seat at the table where you’re trying to build something new.

Most people get this exactly backwards. They remain fixated in the past and leave their future alone, protecting the familiar weight of what went wrong like it’s something precious, treating bold possibility like it’s naive. Leaders do it, teams do it, entire organizations do it for years and call it realism.

If you’re leading a team operating from the past, don’t manage around it. Don’t let it sit quietly poisoning everything downstream. Bring people together, ask them to share what they see, how they feel, what they want and what they believe. Then make sure everyone listens to each other without defense, without correction, without explanation. Just listen. When people feel genuinely heard, the grip of the past loosens, space opens up and, in that space, for the first time, a real future becomes possible.

That’s not optimism. That’s the only way breakthroughs actually happen.

The Conversation Your Team Is Waiting for You to Start

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Most senior leaders I work with are not failing because they lack intelligence or ambition. They are failing because they have made a quiet, largely unconscious decision: that the cost of the conversation that needs to happen is higher than the cost of not having it.

That decision is wrong, and it is costing them everything.

The Calculation Nobody Admits to Making

Here is what I have observed across nearly four decades of working inside organizations at the highest levels. Organizational cowardice is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a real set of incentives.

When a senior leader avoids the tough conversation, they avoid the mess, the risk, and the very real social cost of being the person who names the uncomfortable thing and leaves the meeting with relationships intact, egos unbruised, and a room full of people who feel fine. As twisted as this may seem, that is a genuinely attractive outcome. And the cost of misalignment that compounds quietly underneath the surface feels abstract enough and distant enough that the calculation tips toward silence almost every time.

What most leadership writing misses is that the coward leader is not weak. They are rational, in the narrowest possible sense. They have looked at the ledger and made a choice. Their problem is not the intelligence of the calculation. It is the timeframe. Short-term social comfort purchased at the price of long-term organizational capacity is a catastrophically bad trade. Most leaders making it have simply never confronted the math on what the silence is actually costing them.

What the Silence Actually Costs

I want to be precise about this because the damage from avoided conversations is not dramatic or sudden. It accumulates without announcing itself.

The first cost is misalignment that calcifies. Every conversation that does not happen leaves a gap, and gaps do not stay empty. They fill with assumption and resentment, creating competing interpretations of reality. A leadership team that has been avoiding the accountability conversation for six months is not operating in a neutral state. They are operating in an actively distorted one, where every subsequent decision gets made on top of unresolved tension nobody will name.

The second cost is commitment contraction. When people learn that bold interdependence gets punished by unreliable colleagues and that raising legitimate concerns produces defensiveness rather than accountability, they adapt. They make smaller commitments and shrink their ambitions to what they can control alone. The organization does not lose their capability. It loses their willingness to deploy it at full scale.

The third cost takes longest to see and does the most damage: the gradual replacement of honest dialogue with performed dialogue. Teams that have stopped having real conversations do not go silent. They actually get louder, but, about everything that does not matter. The language becomes more collaborative, the meeting participation more consistent, the email replies more thoughtful, and nothing changes because the conversations that would change something are precisely the ones nobody is having.

The Specific Moment Courage Gets Built

In the work I do with leadership teams, I have watched courage get built and I have watched it get destroyed. The mechanism is identical in both directions: it happens in a single moment, and then the next moment, and then the one after that, until the pattern becomes the culture.

The cloud organization CEO I have written about elsewhere built a courageous culture through one specific and repeatable behavior. When his own senior leaders gave him direct, critical feedback in front of the entire team, feedback about his own tendency to be too directive, his response was a genuine “thank you.” Not performed gratitude, not diplomatic acknowledgment. Actual thanks, backed by visible behavior change that proved he meant it.

That single response, repeated consistently, did something no policy or framework could have accomplished. It established the standard. It told every person in that room that honesty toward anyone in this organization, including the person at the top, would be received as a contribution rather than punished as an offense. Once that standard was established, it became self-reinforcing. Courage begat courage. The team that started by giving the CEO hard feedback eventually became a team that could give each other hard feedback, and the culture that resulted from that capacity was worth more than any strategy document they ever produced.

In contrast, the technology company’s senior team operated by the opposite standard, though nobody ever announced it. When professional feedback was received as personal attack often enough, and when passive aggression became the reliable response to accountability conversations, the standard got established just as clearly. People learned that honesty was dangerous and adapted accordingly. The transformation did not collapse in one dramatic failure. It ran out of oxygen so gradually that by the time anyone named what was happening, the damage had been accumulating for months.

The Question Before the Question

Every leader w

ho reads about organizational cowardice asks the same question: how do I build a more courageous team? It is the right question, but it is not the first question.

The first question is whether you are willing to be the most courageous person in every room you occupy, every time, before you ask anyone else to follow that standard. Not occasionally. Not when the stakes are low enough that courage is comfortable. Every time.

The leader who wants a team willing to have the conversation that needs to happen must first become the leader who has that conversation themselves, visibly and consistently, even when it is personal, even when it is uncomfortable, and especially when it would be easier to let it pass. The team is always watching you. They are not listening primarily to what you say about courage. They are watching what you do when courage becomes costly.

Most leaders reading this already know which conversation they have been avoiding, know which accountability gap has been circling for too long, and know which cross-functional failure has not been named directly. You know which person in the room whose behavior is affecting the whole team you have been choosing not to address.

The team you want starts with that conversation. Not a framework, not an offsite, not a new set of team norms. The conversation you already know you need to have.

The Nod That’s Killing Your Organization

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Most leaders have never seen genuine commitment up close. They’ve seen compliance so polished it looks identical, and that’s precisely what makes it lethal.

Compliance feels like alignment from the front of the room. People nod, ask reasonable questions and leave without objecting. They call it a productive meeting, schedule the follow-up, and move on. Somewhere between the boardroom and their desks, your strategy becomes something they’ll execute adequately and avoid owning completely, attributing it to someone else’s decision when it falls short.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s the operating reality of most organizations, including yours.

The Mirror Nobody Wants to Look At

I worked with a CEO who genuinely believed in open, direct conversation. He said it publicly, repeatedly, and with conviction. He wanted his leaders to challenge him, push back, tell him the uncomfortable truths.

Then someone did. He disagreed and pushed back harder, holding the floor until the room went quiet.

Next meeting, same invitation, slightly less pushback. Meeting after that, less still. Within less than a year, when his senior executives asked their own direct reports for perspectives on critical strategic decisions, the answer coming back was: “Well, this is what the CEO thinks and wants.”

He was furious about the dysfunction dragging down performance, talked about it constantly, and had no idea he was the one building it. His leaders watched him describe a problem he was actively creating and said nothing, because silence had become the only rational response to the culture he’d established, one dominated meeting at a time.

He thought he had a leadership problem. He had a self-awareness problem.

The compliance culture didn’t stay in the boardroom either. It moved down through senior executives to directors to managers until the entire organization was quoting his preferences back at itself like scripture. Nobody owned anything because ownership requires risk, and risk had been systematically punished at the top. The complete collapse of honest information flow is what compliance costs before it ever shows up in a single number on a dashboard.

What Committed Actually Looks Like

The distinction matters more than most executives realize, because compliant and committed people are indistinguishable in a meeting room. The gap opens everywhere else.

Committed leaders get tenacious when things get hard rather than suddenly sophisticated about why the original goal was unrealistic. They surface problems early because they genuinely care whether the initiative succeeds. When something fails, they don’t reach for “I told you so” because they never emotionally detached from the outcome in the first place. They ask for forgiveness rather than permission when they believe something is right and treat bold promises as personal commitments rather than professional positions.

Compliant people do their jobs. When initiatives fail, failure is almost a relief because the outcome now belongs to whoever made the call. They were watching the game while appearing to play it.

The most expensive version of this problem isn’t resistance or open dissent. Both are visible, and visible problems get addressed. The expensive version is professional acquiescence: the nod in the meeting and the eye-roll in the hallway. The “well, leadership wants it this way” response tells you the ownership culture has already collapsed several levels above the person saying it, long before that phrase ever reaches you.

90% of Impossible in Nine Months

I ran a breakthrough session with about 150 leaders from a rapidly growing global technology company, spread across virtually every region of the world.

I asked them to build a list of results they genuinely wanted but didn’t believe were likely to happen: double sales results across all regions, genuine best-practices cadence between regions that had historically operated in silos, real partnership and respect from the direct sales organization that didn’t value them, and recognition from the President of the parent company in his quarterly all-hands.

I called it the desirable and unlikely list.

Nine months later the CEO reported back that his team had achieved 90% of it. Same market as their competitors, same resources, same opportunity. The difference wasn’t strategy or budget or a better product. It was a CEO who understood that genuine alignment takes longer to build than manufactured agreement, and it’s worth a hundred times more on the back end.

He ran his one-on-one meetings as coaching conversations rather than status updates. When decisions needed to be made, he spent the extra hour working through real concerns instead of accepting surface-level nods, because he understood that one hour of actual alignment was worth fifty hours of compliance theater downstream. His leaders learned they were owners of their domains rather than executors of someone else’s vision, and that ownership cascaded through every layer until it produced a list of desirable and unlikely outcomes that was 90% complete in nine months.

The compliant organization down the hall was still running the same transformation initiative it had announced eighteen months earlier.

The Choice You’re Making Right Now

Two organizations exist in every industry. One is compliant, functional, professionally managed, and adequate. The other runs on genuine ownership at every level, where leaders treat outcomes as personal and excuses don’t survive the room.

You already know which one you’d bet on. The harder question is which one you’re actually running.

Because if you’re not actively creating the conditions for commitment through real dialogue and genuine alignment, you are building compliance by default. Every meeting where you invite pushback and then override it trains the room. Every initiative where you announce alignment and skip the hour it actually takes to build it does the same damage. Every moment the room goes quiet and you call it agreement compounds what the first CEO built: a mirror problem disguised as a leadership problem.

The organizations that achieve the desirable and unlikely always chose real commitment over the comfortable performance of it. The ones still running the same transformation initiative two years later chose compliance, most of them without ever realizing they made a choice at all.

Your leaders are nodding right now. The only question worth sitting with is what they’re doing after they leave the room.

 

Accountability: A Privilege or a Burden?

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Accountability has become one of the most abused words in business.

Along with empowerment and ownership, it became fashionable in the early 2000s. Posters went up. Leaders started using the word in meetings. Consultants built frameworks around it.

And somehow, in the process, accountability lost its soul.

Today, when people hear the word accountability, it rarely inspires pride or motivation. More often, it triggers eye rolls, cynicism, or quiet anxiety. It has become shorthand for pressure, blame, and consequences. In many organizations, accountability is not something people step into. It is something they try to avoid.

That alone should tell us something is deeply wrong.

The original intent behind accountability was noble. It was meant to create an environment where people are clear about what they will deliver and committed to doing what they say. It was meant to replace excuses with action. To help people rise above circumstances and overcome obstacles in pursuit of meaningful results.

Somewhere along the way, that intent got hijacked.

In practice, accountability has been twisted into a punitive mechanism. When leaders say, “They need to take accountability,” what they often mean is, “They need to deliver or face consequences.” And by consequences, they usually mean punishment, career damage, or termination.

In some organizations, accountability is openly referred to as “single throat to choke.”

It is no wonder people do not volunteer.

Even the dictionary does not help. Accountability is defined as: the obligation to bear the consequences for failure to perform as expected.

That definition frames accountability as liability, not leadership. As exposure, not opportunity.

But accountability was never meant to be a burden.

At its core, accountability comes from the phrase, “You can count on me.” That is not something imposed. It is something declared. It is an expression of choice, pride, and commitment. It comes from a place of privilege, not fear.

When accountability is experienced as a burden, it drives the wrong behavior.

Fear becomes the operating system. People play it safe. They avoid risks. They withhold ideas. They do not speak up when something is off. When things go wrong, they protect themselves, explain, justify, or blame others. Learning stops. Innovation dies.

This is the exact opposite of what accountability was meant to create.

Real accountability does not flourish in environments of fear. It flourishes in environments of trust, ownership, and engagement.

Any strategy or plan, no matter how brilliant, is only as effective as people’s relationship to it. When people feel genuine accountability, they behave like owners. They care. They go out of their way. They think beyond their job description. They act in service of the whole.

So how do leaders create accountability that feels like a privilege rather than a threat?

First, people must be engaged early in setting goals and direction. Accountability cannot be imposed after the fact. The more people participate in shaping the goals, the more they feel personal ownership for achieving them. This applies whether you are leading a small team or a global organization. The scale changes. The principle does not.

Second, leaders must model open, honest, and courageous communication. People will only speak up if they believe it is safe to do so. No amount of encouragement will matter if leaders are defensive, dismissive, or punitive when challenged. Accountability begins with leaders being accountable for their own behavior.

Third, the language of accountability must replace the language of compliance. Compliance tolerates excuses, blame, and vague commitments. Accountability demands clarity. Clear requests. Clear promises. Clear responses. People know exactly where things stand, and integrity matters more than appearances.

Fourth, failures must be handled in an empowering way. In most organizations, when performance slips, the hunt for blame begins. People hide. They protect themselves. Root causes are never addressed. If you want accountability, stop asking whose fault it is. Start asking what was missing, what got in the way, and what must change. When failure becomes a learning opportunity, people lean in rather than pull back.

Finally, accountability must be recognized and reinforced daily. Not through formal programs, but through genuine acknowledgment. When leaders notice and name acts of ownership, people feel seen and valued. That fuels more accountability, not less.

Here is the hard truth.

Accountability fails not because people do not care. It fails because leaders turn it into a threat instead of an invitation.

When accountability is framed as punishment, people protect themselves. When it is framed as privilege, people rise.

So ask yourself this as a leader.

Have you created an environment where accountability feels like exposure, or one where it feels like an opportunity to matter?

Your answer will determine everything that follows.

Stop Prioritizing If You Want a Breakthrough

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Stop prioritizing may sound reckless, even irresponsible. Not because focus does not matter. But because prioritizing has quietly become one of the most effective ways people avoid responsibility, protect themselves, and stay exactly where they are.

Prioritizing is often sold as mature responsibility. In reality, it frequently becomes a sophisticated cover for excuses.

Think about how prioritizing usually shows up. You list everything you want to do. Everything you should do. Everything you said you would do. Then you rank it. High priority. Medium priority. Low priority. You feel organized. Responsible. In control.

But what actually happens next?

  • “It was a lower priority.”
  • “Something more important came up.”
  • “Priorities shifted.”

Prioritizing gives you permission to fail without owning the failure. It allows you to stay circumstantial. To let conditions, time pressure, or competing demands dictate who you are being. It keeps your identity intact while results stagnate.

This is why prioritizing is deadly to transformation.

Breakthroughs do not come from managing importance. They come from taking a stand. If your transformation is merely one of your priorities, it is already in trouble.

Why? Because…

Priorities compete. Promises do not.

When transformation is a priority, it sits on a list next to everything else. It gets worked on when time allows. When energy is high. When circumstances cooperate. The moment pressure increases, transformation slides down the list. And when it does, you do not feel accountable. You feel justified.

That is how organizations talk themselves out of change.

Promising is different. When you promise, you step into responsibility. You put yourself on the hook. You no longer get to hide behind conditions. You cannot quietly deprioritize without consequence. A promise requires courage because it puts your word, your credibility, and your identity on the line.

Promising forces you to grow.

Every meaningful transformation I have seen began with a promise, explicit, bold, and non-negotiable.

  • “We will become this kind of organization.”
  • “We will deliver at this level.”
  • “We will change how we lead, no matter what.”
  • Not, “We will try.”
  • Not, “We will see how it goes.”
  • Not, “This is a priority this year.”

Those statements protect comfort. They do not produce breakthrough results.

Prioritizing keeps you small because it allows you to retreat without admitting it. Promising stretches you because retreat costs you something.

This is also why promising changes how people work together. Priorities are private. You decide them alone. You inform others after the fact. Promises are relational. The moment you promise, others are involved. Expectations are set. Conversations deepen. Ownership increases. Breakthroughs never happen in isolation.

They require shared commitment, mutual accountability, and the willingness to stay engaged when things get uncomfortable. Promising creates that field. Prioritizing dissolves it.

Let’s be honest. Most people do not fail at transformation because they lack strategy. They fail because they want progress without exposure. Change without risk. Results without vulnerability. Prioritizing offers that illusion. Promising removes it.

When you promise, you step into responsibility. You put yourself on the hook. You no longer get to hide behind conditions. You cannot quietly deprioritize without consequence. And yes, you could fail at delivering your promises. That is not the point. The point is that when a promise is at risk, real leaders step into dialogue early. They renegotiate consciously. They stay accountable. They protect trust. That behavior builds capacity and credibility even when outcomes take longer than expected.

Prioritizing avoids that conversation. Promising demands it.

So if you are serious about transformation, ask yourself this: Is your transformation a priority, or is it a promise?

If it is a priority, it will be negotiated away the moment pressure rises. If it is a promise, it will force you and your team to become someone new.

Breakthroughs do not belong to those who manage their priorities well. They belong to those who have the courage to promise and then grow into their word.

What classical guitar taught me about real breakthroughs

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I have been coaching organizations and leadership teams in generating breakthrough results through total team alignment, ownership and engagement for over 30 years. Most of you know me in that context.

In my personal life I am also an avid classical guitarist. And classical guitar has taught me far more than music. It has enforced my understanding of how breakthroughs actually work. Not in theory. In practice.

The same principles that determine whether I master a demanding piece determine whether an organization or an individual achieves real transformation.

In my work with leadership teams looking for breakthrough performance, I see similar patterns play out every day.

Here are three lessons I have learned the hard way.

Lesson 1: Everything is created twice

Every new creation, innovative idea and future breakthrough reality exists first in someone’s mind. In their intention, thinking and declaration.

When I take on learning a new classical guitar piece, it often feels daunting. The technique, the tempo, the precision required can feel far beyond where I am today. In that moment, the gap between my vision and current reality feels daunting.

The same thing happens in organizations when a bold strategy or breakthrough ambition is declared. People see the distance, the complexity, the challenges. They feel overwhelmed.

What guitar has taught me is that the vision is not the problem. The gap is not the problem. The only real question is whether you are willing to stay present long enough for the unfamiliar to become natural.

What once felt impossible slowly becomes familiar. What felt complex becomes fluid. What felt intimidating becomes part of who you are.

Breakthroughs are not achieved by shrinking the vision. They are achieved by living and growing into it.

Lesson 2: Taking small future-based actions, every day builds accelerated momentum

Mastery does not come from occasional heroic efforts. It comes from daily practice.

When I practice guitar, I do not chase perfection. I chase progress. Small gains. Clean transitions. One phrase at a time. Some days feel strong. Some days feel frustrating. What matters is that I show up and move forward, even slightly, no matter how I feel.

Organizations fail at transformation when they expect dramatic leaps instead of disciplined forward movement. Bold visions are not realized in one stroke. They are realized through consistent, often ‘baby steps’ future-based actions taken every day. The ‘every day’ part is where much of the power and magic exist.

When teams take small, intentional steps toward their vision daily, something powerful happens. They begin closing the gap. The vision feels closer. Confidence builds. Momentum forms.

The future does not arrive all at once. You walk toward it one step at a time.

Lesson 3: Staying the course no matter what reassures success

Some practice sessions are hard. Your fingers feel clumsy. Progress feels slow. You question whether you are improving at all or whether you will succeed in your quest.

Then something unexpected happens.

A passage that was impossible yesterday suddenly flows. A technical barrier dissolves. A leap forward appears that you did not plan or predict.

Those moments only happen because you stayed the course.

The same is true in transformation. Things often get worse before they get better. Performance indicators dip. Processes feel messy. Doubt creeps in. This is the moment where most people retreat. And this is exactly where breakthroughs are born.

If you have the courage and perseverance to stay the course, no matter what, unexpected gains emerge. Capability expands. Confidence strengthens. Results accelerate beyond what you originally imagined or expected.

Breakthroughs do not reward impatience. They reward sustained conviction.

Whether you are mastering a piece of music or leading a bold organizational shift, the principles are the same.

See the future clearly. Move toward it daily. Stay the course when it gets uncomfortable.

That is how transformation works

How great are you willing to be?

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It is an interesting question. Most people say they want to be great, yet very few are truly willing to step into the space where greatness lives. It is not a matter of talent. It is a matter of who you want to be and how you want to show up. Greatness is not an outcome. It is a way of being.

I once worked with a senior manager who was given responsibility for the technical delivery of a major strategic customer in the security space. This was the biggest project of his career. He had every qualification, deep technical expertise, and years of experience. He was empowered to make decisions that influenced key account managers who were not thrilled to see a delivery manager take center stage. All he needed to do was lead.

But he did not trust himself. He showed up apologetic and cautious. Instead of setting direction, he waited for permission. Instead of owning the room, he minimized himself. The customer began to lose confidence. Timelines slipped. Complaints surfaced. In the end, he was replaced by someone with fewer qualifications but far stronger self-belief. It was not competence that cost him the role. It was the way he showed up.

Contrast that with another manager I coached in a different technology company. Her boss suddenly resigned, leaving a critical department without leadership. No one expected her to step up. She was not on anyone’s radar for promotion. But she trusted herself. She walked into meetings with clarity and conviction. She made decisions, created structure, and stabilized the team. Her presence caught the attention of the division head. When the company went looking for a new senior leader, they hired her to replace her boss. She did not ask for permission to lead. She simply led.

This is the contrast. People who do not see themselves as powerful wait for approval. People who trust themselves act, then adjust, then, if needed, ask for forgiveness. One shrinks. One expands. One survives. One grows.

Greatness begins the moment you choose which category you fall into.

I have spent my life igniting, energizing, and empowering people. When people remember their strength and potential at work, it transforms every area of their life. It affects marriage, parenting, health, creativity, and personal fulfillment. Yet I notice something surprising. People say they want to be their best, but when the moment comes to step forward, they hesitate. They pull back from the very experiences that would reveal their true power.

The logic is simple.

If you see yourself as powerful, you can no longer hide. You must create, innovate, take risks, and live outside your comfort zone. That can be frightening.

If you see yourself as unempowered, life gives you excuses and exits. You can stay small and safe.

But the cost of holding back your greatness is enormous. Self-expression fades. Confidence erodes. A quiet frustration grows. You feel that you are missing something, that you are living below your potential.

When you confront this truth honestly, something shifts. You realize that courageous living is a choice. You can choose to show up fully. You can choose to trust yourself. You can choose to be great.

So, ask yourself:

How powerful am I willing to be?

Because greatness is not reserved for a select few, it is reserved for the ones who say yes.

 

Most leaders don’t know how to communicate a message – and it shows

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It still amazes me how many senior leaders, intelligent, experienced, highly educated professionals, simply don’t know how to communicate a message clearly and effectively. There are so many examples. You can see this so clearly when watching leaders deliver presentations.

They spend hours building PowerPoint decks, obsessing over font size and color schemes, but when they stand up to speak, they lose the plot. Their slides are packed, their timing is rushed, and their audience walks away confused, disengaged, or worse, unmoved. Indifferent.

PowerPoint has been the universal business language for decades. But the real problem isn’t the tool. It’s that too many leaders use it as a crutch instead of a medium for impact.

The epidemic of over-talking and under-communicating

I’ve watched countless executives try to cram ninety minutes of content into a thirty-minute meeting. They talk faster, flip slides faster, and seem to believe that if they can “get through it,” they’ve done their job.

They don’t pause to read the room. They don’t notice when people escape to their phones or check out completely. They miss the cues, glazed eyes, crossed arms, restless body language, all signaling one thing: “You lost me.”

Instead of adjusting, they double down. More words. More slides. More noise.

And when time runs out, they rush the ending or skip it altogether. Everyone leaves without clarity or conviction. That’s not communication. That’s self-indulgence.

The real problem: everything feels important

Most leaders fall into the same trap. They’re hypnotized by their own content. They think everything they want to say is equally important.

They confuse information with impact. They confuse talking with influencing.

They forget that communication is not about everything you know. It’s about what will make the biggest difference to your audience in this moment.

If you can’t tell the difference between what’s essential and what’s merely interesting, you will drown your message, and your credibility, in words.

The organizational consequences

Poor communication isn’t just a personal weakness; it’s an organizational liability.

When leaders don’t communicate clearly, the entire company suffers.

  • Alignment breaks down.Teams leave meetings with different interpretations of what was said, and act on conflicting assumptions.
  • Decisions slow down.Too much talk, too little clarity. Time is wasted rehashing topics that should have been settled the first time.
  • Execution falters.People can’t execute what they don’t understand. When messages are vague, accountability erodes.
  • Culture deteriorates.Employees lose faith in leadership, energy drops, and cynicism and resignation rise, because people feel trapped in endless talk with not enough real progress.
  • Results decline.Projects miss deadlines, customers feel the inconsistency, and performance suffers.

The damage compounds over time. The organization becomes a place where communication is tolerated, not mastered, where everyone talks but few are truly heard and make a difference.

By contrast, when leaders communicate with precision and power, the effect is immediate and contagious:

  • Clarity replaces confusion.People know what matters and act accordingly.
  • Momentum builds.Meetings shorten, execution accelerates, and results improve.
  • Culture strengthens.Resignation lifts, people feel connected to purpose and leadership again. And there is an organization consciousness and intent to make the greatest difference when communicating.
  • Trust deepens.When communication is honest and effective, credibility rises, and so does performance.

Communication mastery doesn’t just make you a better speaker. It makes you a more powerful leader who makes a greater difference. And it makes your organization more coherent, confident, and unstoppable.

Communication is about altitude

Every message has an altitude. At 50,000 feet, you’re talking about purpose, vision, and direction. At 10,000 feet, you’re discussing strategy. On the ground, it’s execution and details.

Great communicators know how to adjust their altitude based on time and audience. If you have five minutes, you speak at 50,000 feet. If you have thirty or more, you descend.

But too many leaders try to cover everything, all altitudes, all details, all points, regardless of time. They treat a 15-minute update like a half-day workshop.

This results in information overload, zero retention, and wasted time.

Five ways to communicate like a leader

  1. Start with impact, not information.
    Start from the end. Before you build a single slide, ask yourself: What difference do I want to make with this presentation?What do I want people to think, feel, or do differently as a result? Build your presentation from there. Everything else is noise.
  2. Cut the “interesting.”
    Most leaders overload their message with nice-to-know content. Ruthlessly remove anything that doesn’t serve your core purpose. Your audience doesn’t need to see how smart you are or how much you know. They need to see what matters.
  3. Practice highlighting the essence, no matter your time.
    Practice delivering your message in 30 minutes, 15 minutes, and 5 minutes. Learn to distinguish between essence and preference. When you master that, you’ll always hit the mark, no matter how much time you’re given.
  4. Rehearse for clarity, not performance.
    Stand in front of a mirror or a colleague with a stopwatch. Speak slowly, pause, and breathe. If you can’t deliver your message calmly and clearly in real time, your audience will feel your rush and disconnect.
  5. Read the room.
    During your presentation your audience is giving you feedback every second, with their eyes, posture, and silence. Pay attention. If you’ve lost them, stop. Re-engage. Ask questions. Great presenters don’t deliver speeches. They create conversations.

From content to connection

PowerPoint is a tool. Leadership communication is an art and learnable skill. The goal isn’t to transfer information. It’s to enroll others in purpose, commitment, and action.

The best communicators don’t need more slides. They need more awareness, more empathy, and more discipline to focus on what truly matters.

Your message doesn’t have to be long to be powerful. It has to be clear, human, and relevant. Because in the end, communication either accelerates performance, or undermines it.

Every presentation, meeting, and conversation is an opportunity to raise the standard, to speak with clarity, create alignment, and move people to act. So, communicate with intention, own your message, and make every word count.

 

“Agreeing to disagree” is leadership failure

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How many times have you sat in a senior team meeting where the conversation went nowhere? The debate gets heated, people defend their positions, personal preferences surface, and when it’s time to reach a conclusion, everyone is exhausted and no closer to an aligned decision. Someone says, “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.” And the room nods. Meeting over. On the surface, it sounds civil and respectful. In reality, it’s one of the most damaging phrases in leadership.

“Agreeing to disagree” is never an acceptable conclusion. It’s always a collapse. It signals that the team has chosen comfort over courage, ego over ownership, and personal preference over collective responsibility. And the cost is considerable.

The Hidden Damage of “Agreeing to Disagree”

When leadership teams fail to achieve alignment, they send powerful and corrosive messages throughout the organization:

  • To the company: Direction is optional. If the top team can’t commit, why should anyone else be expected to?
  • To the culture: Politics win. Silos stay safe. Hard truths are avoided.
  • To execution: Momentum stalls. Teams hedge their bets. Strategies die in PowerPoint.

The result is organizational drift. Initiatives limp forward half-heartedly. Decisions get revisited and changed or reversed. And when results fall short, leaders have a built-in excuse: “I never believed in that plan anyway.”

This is not leadership. It’s abdication.

Alignment Is Not Total Agreement

Powerful leadership teams understand a critical distinction: alignment is not about total unanimous agreement. It’s about committing to a shared course of action, even when not everyone gets their way.

Alignment means setting aside ego, preferences, and turf agendas in service of something greater — the company’s future.

This is hard work. It requires courageous conversations, deep listening, and a willingness to be influenced. It demands leaders to elevate their thinking from “my view” to “our responsibility.” But the payoff is profound.

When teams align — truly align — they create a force multiplier. They send a clear, unified signal to the organization. People stop watching and waiting and start delivering and building. Execution accelerates.

Two Teams, Two Futures

Take two real leadership teams grappling with equally complex challenges. The contrast couldn’t be clearer.

Members of the leadership team at a national technology company had strong personalities and deeply held opinions. After months of debate over a bold strategic move to introduce a new product mix to the market, they reached a stalemate. Leaders in sales, marketing, operations, and services clung to their own perspectives and agendas about what was the right approach and what would or wouldn’t work, unwilling to compromise. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” the CEO finally said, trying to ease tensions and avoid imposing his way. And they did. The decision remained vague. Execution became confused. Six months later, the initiative stalled, the market window closed, and finger-pointing replaced accountability and success.

In contrast, the leadership team of a large, unionised manufacturing plant faced an even greater challenge of how to engage and motivate the entire workforce, including the unions, in a strategic initiative to boost production and quality during a time of union-management unrest. The leaders started with sharp disagreements — but they refused to stop at a polite stalemate. They stayed in the conversation. They listened deeply. They challenged each other with respect and intensity. It was uncomfortable and exhausting. But ultimately, they aligned behind one bold direction. Not everyone loved it, but everyone owned it.

The results spoke for themselves: faster decisions, improved execution, and a level of cross-functional collaboration the company had never seen. In fact, in this breakthrough process, some management and union colleagues shifted their personal relationship from adversarial to respectful and even to friendship. That decision became the turning point in their growth.

The difference wasn’t intelligence or talent. It was courage.

The Broader Consequences

“Agreeing to disagree” doesn’t just sabotage decisions — it shapes culture. It teaches people that avoidance is acceptable. It normalizes half-hearted commitment. And it builds a leadership brand rooted in indecision and disconnection.

Worse, it undermines trust. Teams stop believing that leaders mean what they say. They start interpreting every strategic decision as optional. And once that belief takes hold, accountability evaporates.

Contrast that with a culture where alignment is non-negotiable. Leaders model the discipline of staying in the conversation until they can stand behind a shared choice. People see what ownership looks like. They learn that disagreement is welcome — but detachment is not. And when decisions are made, they rally behind them with clarity and commitment.

The Real Work of Leadership

Leadership is not about winning arguments or protecting preferences. It’s about creating the conditions for aligned action.

That means leaning into the discomfort of disagreement and staying there until alignment is reached. It means replacing “agreeing to disagree” with “committed to move forward together.”

In the end, organizations don’t fail because they make a decision that’s 80% right. They fail because their leaders can’t align behind anything at all. A united team behind an imperfect decision will always outperform a divided team chasing a perfect one.

So, the next time your team reaches for the easy exit of “agreeing to disagree,” stop. Recognize it for what it is — a cop-out. Then choose to do the real work of leadership: the hard, courageous, transformative work of aligning on the future and owning it together.

 

Trust is not a nice-to-have. It’s your edge.

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Trust is not just a feel-good word. It is the backbone of every high-performing organization. Without it, even the best strategies fall flat. With it, teams move mountains.

Too many leaders talk about trust as if it’s a soft, secondary value. It isn’t. Trust is oxygen. Without it, your culture stagnates, your performance lags, and your results fall short.

Here’s a real-world story to make the point.

A national technology-based service company acquired another firm with adjacent services to expand their offerings. On paper, it made perfect sense. The acquiring company was a leading brand in the commercial sector, while the acquired company had a strong reputation in government affairs. Their services complemented each other. The market was pushing for integrated solutions. The merger appeared to be a strategic slam dunk.

But there was a problem.

Before the acquisition, the two companies were fierce competitors. Their sales teams had gone head-to-head for years, often bad-mouthing each other to customers. Leaders had publicly challenged each other’s credibility. The cultures were built on mutual distrust. And after the acquisition, no one did the work to repair that. Instead, leadership focused on integration plans, product roadmaps, and operational efficiency. They ignored the trust deficit. And it cost them.

Employees from both sides resisted collaboration. Teams second-guessed each other’s intentions. Key customers noticed the tension and started pulling back. Internal morale dropped. Innovation slowed to a crawl. And within 18 months, the combined market share declined.

The business case for trust was now inescapable.

To their credit, the executive team finally took things seriously and decided to tackle the issue head-on. Not through shallow team-building activities, but through raw, honest conversations.

Leaders from both legacy organizations came together. They acknowledged the elephant in the room: “We don’t trust each other.” Then they did the work. They shared what had fuelled the mistrust, taking responsibility for their part, and committing to creating a new shared future based on transparency, accountability, and mutual respect. They rebuilt trust through actions, not just words—weekly alignment calls, clear ownership, no back-channeling, and celebrating cross-functional wins.

Within six months, collaboration felt genuine, employee engagement increased, product teams co-developed offerings that customers loved, sales rose, and the turnaround was evident.

This demonstrates the power of trust.

When trust is missing, people play defense. They protect turf. They interpret actions with suspicion. Communication becomes filtered, strategic, and self-serving. Ideas are withheld. Innovation dies. Even good people start acting small.

But when trust is present, everything changes. People assume positive intent. They tell the truth faster. They give and receive feedback without drama. They take risks. They act as one team.

Trust transforms culture. And culture drives performance.

If you’re a leader, don’t assume you have trust just because no one’s yelling. Silence can be a symptom of fear, not alignment. Look closer. Are your teams bringing tough issues to the table? Are people pushing back, offering dissent, or just nodding along? Is feedback flowing in all directions?

You can’t fake trust. And you can’t mandate it. But you can build it. Here are a few places to start:

  1. Acknowledge the past. If there has been tension, conflict, or competition, name it. Nothing breaks trust faster than pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.
  2. Model transparency. Say what you think. Share what you know. Be open about your intentions.
  3. Close the gap between words and actions. If you say something matters, back it up with consistent behavior.
  4. Invite feedback. And don’t just tolerate it—thank people for it. Make it safe for others to challenge you.
  5. Celebrate shared wins. Trust grows when people feel part of something bigger than their silo.

Trust isn’t just about being nice. It’s about being real. Real with your words. Real with your actions. Real with your people.

The story of this failed merger is not unique. Mergers often fail because leaders underestimate the cost of mistrust. They focus on integration without unification. They prioritize strategy over relationship.

Don’t make that mistake!

And remember: Trust isn’t just for mergers. It matters just as much for existing teams, cross-functional projects, and any situation where people have to work together to produce results.

If you want stronger results, start with trust. Not because it’s sentimental. Because it’s smart. It makes your organization faster, your people braver, and your business better.

Trust is not a “nice to have.” It’s your edge.

Six barriers you must overcome to achieve your transformation goals

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It takes extraordinary courage, determination, and faith to pursue a bold change initiative, stay the course and see it through.

No one in their right mind would dare to climb Mount Everest without preparation. Similarly, you shouldn’t embark on a bold transformation journey without adequate preparation either.

In a bold transformation process, there are always unpredictable events, circumstances, and challenges that cannot be anticipated or prepared for in advance. These unanticipated events often lead to the most significant changes and breakthroughs.

At the same time, however, some challenges always arise in one way or another. If you do not anticipate, expect, and prepare for them, they could easily become barriers that impede your ability to stay on course in transforming your organization to the next level. Here are six barriers that often disrupt and derail change initiatives:

Barrier 1: Not tolerating a temporary dip in performance and/or results:

When creating a new future, leaders enroll their leaders and managers to think beyond existing paradigms, solve problems differently and pursue opportunities in new ways. People are often genuinely excited to think from the future rather than continuing to approach work from the same past-based mindset and approaches.

For most leaders, “Think outside the box”, “Challenge the status quo”, and “Put yourself at the bottom of a new scale” are hollow slogans that they pay lip service to. But to leaders who are committed to change these are marching orders. However, as people pursue and practice these new marching orders things often get worse before they get better.

Unfortunately, most leaders can’t tolerate even the slightest temporary dip in performance. They get overly nervous at the first sign of a dip, and many leaders react negatively, setting the team back and sending a message that they don’t have the courage and faith to stay the course.

If you can’t tolerate this dynamic, you will keep returning to the status quo instead of pushing forward to overcome this barrier. The good news is that when leaders stay the course and reach the other side of this barrier, things always get better again. In fact, they often get even better than they were before.

Barrier 2: Not making the focus on generating the new future a high enough priority:

At the outset of change initiatives, pretty much all leaders declare to their leaders and managers that creating a new future for the company that takes the game to the next level is “mission critical.” Unfortunately, in most cases, it doesn’t take long before most leaders get spooked by the uncertainty of the transition from the old to the new and start paying lip service to their own declaration.

They set unrealistic expectations that challenge people’s ability to balance existing and new priorities, avoid making tough decisions about realigning cross-functional support for the new, and under-resource future work. These mixed messages make it clear to people that the new future is merely a “nice to have.”

The remedy is simple: Don’t get distracted by the temporary confusion, uncertainty, doubts and rollercoaster of emotions that people experience in the change journey. Stay the course; stay true to your declaration and commitment, do what you said, and keep creating ways to promote and enable the new work. The quicker the new work sets roots and becomes the new norm, the higher the chances for transformational success.

Barrier 3: Buying into people’s complaints that they are too busy:

When moving from vision to execution in a large-scale transformation, the first few months are always the toughest. People are expected to juggle both their existing day job and spend time driving the new initiatives and tasks that will propel the organization toward its new future.

You can hire additional people to support the new initiatives if you have the means. However, many companies simply cannot afford to do that. So, the same people have to do both, and for a period of time, people will feel stretched and overwhelmed. It’s inevitable.

The first phase of execution will test your leadership resolve. On one hand, you can’t ignore people’s hardships and complaints. In fact, you need to think outside the box, be innovative and look for ways to do things differently. You also need to motivate and incentivize people in this transition. This will send the right message to your team.

At the same time, though, you also can’t buy into people’s complaints. You can’t compromise on the key principles and expectations of the change. People will see that you don’t have the resolve and courage. The consequence will be detrimental to your success.

Barrier 4: Expecting results and progress rather than relentlessly driving them:

The operative word here is “expecting”. During change initiatives, I often hear leaders say things like “We should be further along,” “the initiatives are not achieving big enough results,” and “we don’t see a change in behavior yet.”

If you mapped out the trend of a change initiative, more often than not it would look like a horizontal hockey stick. That is the nature of the beast. At first, you invest a lot of effort and energy without seeing a lot of return and at some point, things begin to take off.

Expecting progress, change, and results is the wrong approach. You have to drive it! Just like you wouldn’t dig out a flower seed every week after you planted it to see if it’s making progress, you can’t second-guess yourself, your direction or your team.

In fact, if you want to succeed in your change initiative, you have to manage your expectations and have the mindset that your job is not to “see if it works” but rather to “ensure and prove that it works”. 

Barrier 5: Getting discouraged after the first wave of enthusiasm and excitement wears off:

A change initiative is like a marriage. After a while, the honeymoon will be over, and you will have to keep regenerating and refueling people’s energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to the cause. You have to keep enrolling your people in why the change is important, what the new future will look like and what possibilities and improvements it holds for the company and for them.

You also have to understand that at different phases of the initiative, people will be energized and engaged by different things.

In Phase One, the excitement comes from people envisioning, imagining, hoping, and believing in the new future state, which will benefit the company and them.

Phase Two is the toughest and most critical phase of a change initiative. In fact, this is the phase in which most companies fail. This is the stage when people work the hardest without easily seeing the progress and return of their efforts. In this phase, it is critical for leaders to keep focusing on, promoting, highlighting and recognizing any/all progress, wins and improvements, even small ones. That helps people to continue to be optimistic and hopeful about the change.

Phase Three is when the change has taken hold and noticeable improvements and wins are abundant. Motivating people in this phase is easier as they can easily see the changes and improvements and feel accomplished by being a part of the journey.

Understanding how a change initiative will unfold equips you to overcome this barrier.

Barrier 6: Blaming others and circumstances for what isn’t working, rather than taking ownership and responsibility:

Leaders who don’t stay the course tend to justify their failure with external circumstantial excuses and blame. I often hear them explain their failure with excuses such as: “There was too much going on“, “It wasn’t the right time“, “The market was too challenging” and “People were not on board“.

In contrast, leaders who stay the course seem not to care about blame or fault. They only care about how to make sure the promise of the new future will stay alive and be realized.

When things go well, they become nervous and shake people up in order to avoid complacency or arrogance. When things don’t go well, they rally and engage their teams in root cause analysis to figure out what they can change, correct and do better or differently.

You wouldn’t show up on the day of a marathon race without having prepared and trained, expecting to run. It is exactly the same with any significant change initiative!

The more you educate and prepare yourself, the more you can anticipate, expect and be ready for overcoming the inevitable barriers. If you don’t prepare, these obstacles will catch you by surprise and overwhelm you.

As the boxer Mike Tyson put it:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!”