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Articles by Jake Wilder
How Great Employees Get the Most out of Their One-on-Ones
By Jake Wilder Don't Waste These Opportunities "Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects," said Greg Mortenson, offering a critical piece of leadership advice. Yet as most companies focus on building relationships with their customers, they overlook a much more important bond: the one between managers and employees. While customer relationships...
Leadership Lessons from the Disastrous Children's Crusade
By Jake Wilder Vision without Strategy is a Recipe for Failure "Charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around," wrote Warren Bennis. Yet too often we confuse these traits. We're trained to see people and organizations in terms of their charm. We idolize leaders who offer bold visions and instinctively seem to follow the most dominant person in the room...
5 Steps to Stop Letting Perfectionism Hold You Back
By Jake Wilder A Guide from a Recovering Perfectionist "Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving," advised Neil Gaiman in his sixth rule of writing and David Foster Wallace similarly warned, "If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything." But while most of us understand the dangers of perfectionism, we still seem to find ourselves falling victim to it.
A Simple Way for Managers to Improve Happiness at Work
By Jake Wilder Stop Being Such a Boss "Leadership is the ability to facilitate movement in the needed direction and have people feel good about it," wrote Tom Smith. Managers tend to focus on the first part of that advice but neglect the second. There's a tendency to think that if people are getting the work done, whether they feel good about it or not is immaterial.
How to Master (or at Least Not Bomb) Short, Impromptu Speeches
By Jake Wilder Six Easy Tips to Avoid Public Embarrassment Everyone's staring at me, and I don't know what to do. I'm standing in front of maybe twenty-five technicians, and I'm supposed to give an impromptu speech. No one told me I was going to be doing this. I had nothing prepared and my mind was a complete blank. Although I suppose it was my...
Some Really Bad Advice I Hope You Don't Follow
By Jake Wilder Great Leaders Don't Burn Their Ships When Hernan Cortez landed his fleet in Veracruz to begin his conquest of the Aztec Empire, he told his crew to burn his ships. One officer made the mistake of questioning the order and was immediately killed. As the story goes, the rest of his army sat on the beach, drinking rum, while they watched their fleet burn down in the harbor. Cortez's...
Great Leaders Apologize When They're Wrong
By Jake Wilder It's a Sign of Strength "If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically," said Dale Carnegie, offering some of the best advice that almost everyone ignores. Apologies are a rare occurrence in today's organizations. People tend to associate saying they're sorry with admitting weakness. They think it will sacrifice their credibility and cause people to think less of them.
Three Mistakes People Make When Pitching Their Ideas
By Jake Wilder And How to Avoid Them I finished my presentation and looked around the room. I was sure that I nailed it. The case for action was clear. I covered all the points I wanted to make. Now I just needed to secure everyone's support for the proposal. I scanned the faces around the table and saw... disinterest. Polite disinterest, mind you, but disinterest...
The Simplest Possible Feedback Model that Anyone Can Use
By Jake Wilder Be a Better Leader in Twenty Seconds Photo: iStock "We all need people who will give us feedback," said Bill Gates. "That's how we improve." And yet, too often, that's the very thing that holds most people back. Without someone to offer constructive feedback, they don't see what they're doing wrong and lose out on the chance to grow.
Strong Leaders Don't Quiet Fire People
By Jake Wilder It's a Practice for Cowards Photo: iStock "I think I'm being quiet fired," my friend Erin told me. I had no idea what she was talking about. Quiet fired? Like what happened to Milton in Office Space? Is that actually happening to people? It turns out that yes, yes it is.
Keep Writing, Even if No One's Reading
By Jake Wilder There are Many More Benefits than Claps Photo: iStock Finally, I'm ready to hit publish. I just spent hours writing an article, editing it, and making sure it's perfect. Well, perfectish. Regardless, it's done. I click publish with an act of finality and wait for the views to start rolling in.
Charlie Munger's Reading Strategy Changed My Approach to Books
By Jake Wilder Start Many, Finish a Few Photo: iStock Someone told me the other day, with a certain amount of pride, that he doesn't read. He knows how, but he doesn't. If it's not required for his job, he has no interest in reading it. Which is a shame. When Warren Buffet was asked about the keys to his success, he pointed to a pile of books and said, "Read ...
No One Wants to be a Micromanager
By Jake Wilder But It Happens Anyway Photo: iStock No manager wants to be a micromanager. No leader looks forward to demoralizing their people through overinvolvement. I've yet to find anyone who takes on a management role so that they can just do everyone else's work. But it happens. Because it's an easy trap to fall into.
Great Leaders Assume Positive Intentions from People
By Jake Wilder People are Rarely Stupid. Let's Not Assume That They Are. Photo: iStock "It is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own," wrote Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. I'll add a management correlation: It's much easier to blame other people's mistakes on negative intentions than our own.
Hire Slow, Fire Fast is Bad Advice
By Jake Wilder Just Because It's Catchy Doesn't Mean It's Right Photo: iStock "I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies," said Lawrence Bossidy. One of the most important things a manager can do is get the people right. It defines the capabilities of your team and creates a culture that can be your greatest competitive...
What are You Willing to Sacrifice?
By Jake Wilder What Are You Not? Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels "You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it," wrote J.M. Barrie. Life is a series of trade-offs. We trade hard work for success. We sacrifice convenience to achieve our goals. Every day brings decisions where we trade one thing for another. As Emerson said, "For everything you have missed, you have ...
Success in Life Often Comes Down to One Question
What are the things that failures don’t like to do? “It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat… It’s all been wrong,” complained George Costanza in the classic Seinfeld episode, The Opposite.
One Simple Practice to Make You More Resilient Every Day.
Let Your Own Narrative Give You Strength. “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” said Ernest Hemingway. Notice that he didn’t say we’re all strong at the broken places. Whether we find ourselves in this group depends on one thing: resilience. There’s a lot of talk about resilience lately. Be resilient. Be gritty. Fail fast. Fail forward. Bounce back.
94 Actionable Ideas From 7 Books that Made Me a Better Leader.
Photo by Bethany Laird on Unsplash The mark of a great book, at least to me, is whether it changes how we see the world and how we act within it. And while there’s no shortage of great books out there, when I think about those that helped define my own leadership practices, the following seven stand out. I highly encourage you to read them yourself, because the below points don’t do them justice.
Be a Better Leader. Learn From this Vaccine Rollout Mistake.
In Times of Uncertainty, Control is Self-Defeating. “Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could,” said Steve Jobs, describing the core difference between managers and leaders. Managers thrive on executing to established processes. When problems come up, their first instinct is to find what worked last time and follow that same path.
Why Collaborating With Your Competition Is Often the Best Strategy
Life’s competitive enough as it is. In 1974, a 27-year-old filmmaker named Steven Spielberg had just finished shooting a horror movie that took place on the water. The film was over budget and behind schedule. The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, had been so unreliable that they didn’t get many of the planned shots for the movie. At a cost of roughly $7M to make, the studio was quickly losing hope that it would make its money back. Until one test screening.
5 Lessons on Leadership From Barack Obama’s a Promised Land
“If I wanted to be president, I told myself, I needed to act like one.” “Oh, let’s not be petty, seeking sincerity in memoirs doesn’t make much sense,” wrote Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, adding, “It’s worth asking what version of his self and world the author’s chosen — since there’s always room for choice.” And as anyone who’s had the misfortune of reading Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue (who knew you could fit that much BS in one book?) or Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About...
Why the Tragedy of the Commons Is Wrong.
And Knowing that Will Make You a Better Leader. “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others,” wrote Aristotle. Two millennia later, Garrett Hardin would put a name to this behavior — the tragedy of the commons — and offer the following example: Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.
How Remembering Bias Can Help You Improve Your Life
All’s Well That Ends Well You’ve volunteered for an experiment and have two choices: Option 1: Put your hand in 14° Celsius water (painfully cold, but not intolerable) for 60 seconds. Option 2: Put your hand in 14° Celsius water for that same 60 seconds. Then immerse it in slightly warmer water (roughly 15 or 16° Celsius — still painfully cold, but a little warmer) for another 30 seconds. I’m guessing you said Option 1. It’s a choice between 60 seconds of pain and 90 seconds of pain.
Winning Cultures Worlds Apart
At first glance, it doesn’t seem there’s much common ground between the National Football League and the high stakes world of carrier aviation. However, when it comes to winning, they share a lot. Between 2005 and 2011 the New York Giants made five NFL playoff appearances and won the ultimate prize — the Super Bowl — twice. By any objective measure it was a good run for a storied organization. However, in the next eight years they made only one post-season appearance.
Pathways for public engagement in budgeting to address community needs
Driving inclusive open budgeting through user-centered research and open-source software A mockup of our Product Design Iteration 3.0 created by Gregory Johnson As a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow, I’m exploring public engagement in budgeting that helps address community needs through tech-enabled demonstrations in my hometown of Miami, Florida.
The ‘Culture of no Culture’ Paradox
Source: Houston.org “We’re looking to hire someone with X, Y, Z skills and someone who would fit into our company’s culture”, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? With so many organisations strategically investing in Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) programmes, could the ideology of a ‘company culture’ and hiring for ‘culture fitness’ be undermining the objectives of D&I and doing more harm than good?
How One Woman Earned Over $250,000 Selling Sourdough Baking Courses Online
And how you can utilize her tactics to grow your own side-hustle. Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash Have you ever felt like your niche is too niche? Teresa Greenway’s success will dismantle that insecurity. In 2004, one of Teresa’s daughters spent a frustrating month trying to bake sourdough bread. Upon giving up, she told Theresa that it was impossible. Well, Teresa decided to put that to the test. She spent several months of trial and error until she figured it out.
Discussing Politics at Work Sucks. But You Need to Do It Anyway.
Don’t Avoid The Political Conversations. Improve Them. The other day I was ambushed by a MAGA loyalist. He got me in the few seconds I was waiting for my Keurig to brew in the work kitchen. Before I knew it, I was in a battle of wits over immigration and economic growth. Twenty minutes in (okay, maybe it was more like three), I’d heard enough and said I was late for a meeting. I’m sure he felt as though he won the debate. Is it a debate if one side’s uninterested?
Did Today Suck? Get Better, Not Bitter.
There are no failures. Just new directions. “The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it,” Jane Hirshfield wrote in The Weighing. And while we do tend to rise to the challenge, some days seem intent on pushing us past our limit. Maybe today sucked. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. But today’s disappointment still stings. You already know that failure’s valuable.
How to Encourage Everyone to Be a Leader
Leadership is too important to leave to Management. “Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves,” according to Stephen Covey. If leadership is encouraging people see their own potential, challenging the status quo of today, and helping others achieve a better vision for tomorrow, you don’t need to be a manager to be a leader.
How to Stop Being so Angry. It’s Hurting Your Success.
Control Your Anger. Don’t Let it Control You. “There are two things a person should never be angry at,” Plato once said, “what they can help, and what they cannot.” And yet we tend to get angry with both. It’s difficult to go through an entire day without finding something that brings up some well-deserved, self-righteous ire. As we’ve all seen, anger can be a valuable tool in confronting injustice. But as the great Ursula K.
Using Spectrum Thinking for More Brain Power and Successful Decisions
(Image courtesy of Oz Chen) Binary thinking, also referred to as either-or or black-white thinking that presents two mutually exclusive options is common yet often unproductive. This right-wrong, yes-no, two-option choice is helpful in some contexts yet disagreements, problems, human interactions, choices and decisions are complex and binary conclusions are not only not always better or best decisions, they can be extremely misguided.
If You Want to be More Creative, Learn to Observe.
Chance only favors the prepared if they take notice. In 1700s England, it was illegal to use cotton or linen rags to bury the dead. There was such a dire shortage that some proposed digging up Egyptian mummies to harvest their wrappings. Homemakers across Europe and America were under pressure to recycle every scrap of old clothing. Why? They needed rags to make paper — and given the huge increase in demand for paper — there was a critical shortage. Until one scientist figured out a better way.
Why You’re Struggling to Be Creative. And How to Improve.
Learn a Lesson from Charles Barbier You’ve probably never heard of Charles Barbier. He served in the French army under Napoleon. In an attempt to help soldiers communicate in the dark without exposing themselves to the enemy, Barbier developed a code of embossed dots — 12 dots to represent 36 different sounds — that he dubbed night writing. Unfortunately, the code proved too difficult for soldiers to manage and never caught on in the military.
13 Things Great New Employees Do
It’s never been more important to outperform your competition. There’s never been more pressure to quickly prove your value as a new employee. It’s a time of deep uncertainty at many companies. Furloughs and lay-offs are more common. Many companies have halted their hiring programs. And for those now working remotely, they need to develop trust across a team without the benefit of face-to-face interactions. Maybe you’ve landed your dream job. Or maybe you’re somewhere unexpected.
How to Be a Great Leader Every Day
18 Simple Ways to Build Your Leadership Muscles “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less,” wrote John Maxwell. When most people think of leadership, they think of someone running a major organization or spearheading a social movement. When they hear the word leader, they think of people in the spotlight. We need to get rid of this definition. It’s wrong. It perpetuates the myth that leadership is reserved for a select few.
How to Get Better Feedback as a Manager
It Doesn’t Need to be Awkward If you’re trying to improve your performance through employee exit interviews, it’s not going to work out well. For one, it’s a very lagging metric. Like American health care, you’ll spend significantly more money on recovery than if you’d invested a fraction of the amount into prevention. But more importantly, people don’t use them to give honest feedback. There’s limited upside for someone to be candid.
How to Create a Toxic Work Culture
7 Key Lessons from Failures at The Ellen DeGeneres Show “There is no magic formula for company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated,” advised Richard Branson. As David Cummings described culture as “the only sustainable advantage” that’s completely in our control, and Brian Chesky describes culture as a “shared way of doing something with a passion,” a great culture is both a tremendous asset and fully within the control of every company.
Diversity in PR - A Time to Move beyond Token Gestures?
Following the death of George Floyd, businesses around the world are facing growing pressure to address racial equity at work. The scale and intensity of the protests that followed, send a clear message that we cannot go back to ‘business as usual’. It’s one thing that most can agree on. However, achieving real progress is quite another. There is undoubtedly a good business case for diversity at work.
Is That Criticism Worth Listening To?
5 Questions to Define Your Criticism. And Keep it from Defining You. “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?” replied Peter Bentley of Bentley & Son Publishing House in response to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He would go on to suggest: “While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers.
Why You Need to Take Your Vacation Now More Than Ever
The Benefits Go Far Beyond Recharging “One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster,” wrote Bertrand Russell, in trying to help us all realize that, contrary to our default thinking, the world will keep spinning without our daily involvement.
4 Easy Ways to Improve Your Communication
And Make Sure People Understand All of Your Genius Ideas “The single biggest problem in communication,” George Bernard Shaw said, “is the illusion that it has taken place.” And as Groucho Marx wisely said, “quote me as saying I was mis-quoted,” misunderstandings and miscommunications are a common source of our frustration. I’ve found that when someone doesn’t do something that I asked them to do, 90% of the time it’s because I didn’t communicate it well.
The Key to Success Is Failing Differently
Do More of What Scares You People aren’t afraid of failure. They’re afraid of failing differently. People fail all the time. Most of the time it’s not a surprise. Most of our failures come from doing the same thing over and over again. We don’t change things, yet somehow hope that the results will get better on their own. Because people aren’t afraid of failing. As long as they’re failing in the same way as everyone else. It’s safe. It’s common.
The Real Reason You Procrastinate and How to Stop.
The Simplest Solutions are Often the Best. “Procrastination,” Christopher Parker said, “is like a credit card; it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.” Procrastination is one of those things that we all know to avoid, yet somehow find ourselves doing regardless. Like many of life’s frustrations, we usually know what we should do, we just don’t do it. Procrastination’s a prime example. We fully know that we should be taking on certain challenges, yet we can’t bring ourselves to do it.
To Improve Innovation, Embrace Your Constraints
Stop Limiting Yourself to the Obvious Solutions You’ve just arrived in Vietnam. The government asked you to come and solve a major issue for the country — childhood malnutrition. You don’t speak Vietnamese. You don’t know anyone here. And you have six months to fix things. This was the situation that Monique and Jerry Sternin found themselves in 30 years ago.
How the Prisoner’s Dilemma Can Make You a Better Manager
Are You Prioritizing Collaboration or Competition? You’re sitting in a police interrogation room after having just “borrowed” a car. Your friend is similarly waiting in a separate room, contemplating his own fate and poor decision-making to this point. There’s enough evidence to convict you both on grand theft auto, so if you stay silent throughout the interrogation, you’re each looking at a one-year sentence. However, the police think that you’re also guilty of a hit-and-run.
How to Improve Those Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Virtual Meetings
Simple Actions That Yield Significant Results You just spent an hour hosting a virtual meeting. One hour of awkward silence and forced conversation. One of your team members somehow managed to post eight pictures of her dog to Facebook during your presentation. It makes you wonder whether, given this new virtual environment, it’s even worth hosting these meetings any longer.
Supersheroes 01: Rhyanna Watson
Every man should have several sheroes, women who inspire them with their courageous sense of reinvention, embrace of vulnerability and relentless creativity. I have many and that number grows over time. I wanted to write a book about them, but few understood the necessity of this concept. Often when I think a subject is a book, I’m told it’s really a blog or a podcast. I usually bristle at the advice, but this time I’m taking it.
How to Manage Your Energy When You Don’t Have Any
It’s a Flywheel, Not a Battery Aristotle once wrote, “The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” But what do you do when you can’t find the energy to do even the most basic tasks? When your alarm’s going off and you know you shouldn’t hit that snooze button (again), yet you can’t seem to get yourself out of bed. Or when all you need to do is make a phone call or respond to an email, but even that is beyond your capacity at the moment.
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