When your passion is your work

Most people work.

Many have a passion.

But when ones passion and their work are unified, magic happens.  When you love it, it doesn’t feel like work.

You become great at it.  A leader at it.  A resource for it.  Successful at it.  And in most cases, you are much more likely to make a lot of money at it.

Are you working at what you’re passionate about?

Yesterday’s Score…

…doesn’t count in today’s game.

What are you doing TODAY?

People are not equal

Smart managers and leaders know that people have different values, abilities, commitments, speeds, personalities and all kinds of varying qualities – so they don’t insist on treating everyone the same.

Instead they find people whose qualities and talents are best suited for the particular positions, and treat them in varying ways to get the best out of them.

Performance variations between employees is expected and accounted for with variations in pay.  The only way to get uniform performance from people is to push the bar down to the lowest common denominator.  If you want an environment where people do their best, you can’t demand equal performance.

Celebrate what you want more of

Atta’ boy!

Great job!

Let’s eat!

Let me tell everyone else about you…

Let’s have cake!

Let’s put your picture up!

Thank you!

I appreciate your department – and you!

Way to go!

Here’s a gift!

There’s a thousand ways you can say it – but SAY IT!

How to lead

The interviewer sat down with the old man.  “After such a long career, with so many notable successes, you must have a secret for getting people to believe in you.”

The confident veteran paused to prepare a thoughtful answer.

“I do.  I got them to believe in the thing that’s most valuable to them.”

The reporter leaned forward.  “What’s that?”

“Themselves.”

Balance the team

If you are an expert on offense (marketing, positioning, sales), get an expert on defense (operations, controls, production).

You need expertise in both.

Which is your strongest?  Weakest?

What are you going to do about it?

Tell your People what you want

All activity in your business can be expressed as a number.  Measure what you want to improve.  But here’s the thing – you have to tell your team what you want to improve!

How can anyone hit a target they don’t know is there, or don’t know they should be aiming at?

Run TO the problems

Leaders are needed most when things are going bad.

Are you all over your biggest problems?

Double Vision

Can you have it all?  (Here’s a perspective for you)  No.  You can’t have it all.

Many of us chase contradicting dreams.  I want to travel the world and I want to have kids.

I want my business to be wildly successful/I want to take 5 weeks off a year and work 35 hours a week.

I want to have top-shelf service and the lowest prices.

I want to buy this and that and the other, and I want to save money.

You can’t have it all – but you likely can have just about anything you want.  The first part is deciding what it is.  And when you decide, you also decide to exclude other things and be good with that.

You don’t have double vision in any area of your life – do you?

“Where are we going, Captain?”

You can’t be the captain of the ship if you don’t know where the ship is going.

Where’s your ship going?