When teaching or coaching emerging leaders, one topic I push hard on is values. Values refer to the fundamental beliefs and guiding principles that define what an individual, organization, or community stands for. These principles act as a moral and operational compass, influencing behavior, decision-making, and culture. They are part of the magic three: mission, vision and values.
Reflecting on the recent election, the Harris campaign's lack of a clear and compelling vision became evident in contrast to Trump’s well-communicated stance, making it challenging for voters to see her future for America. Drawing from the change formula, a successful campaign requires acknowledging dissatisfaction, defining a visionary goal, and setting clear steps toward achieving it—elements that were more apparent in Obama’s 2008 campaign, where “hope and change” aligned with voters' aspirations and activated widespread engagement. Ultimately, the Harris campaign's struggles highlight the need for leaders to craft a vision that resonates powerfully and unites people around a shared purpose, as fear alone can often overshadow hope if it lacks sufficient clarity and preparation.
As Election Day 2024 nears, reflecting on Abraham Lincoln’s legacy offers valuable insights into adaptive leadership, resilience, and unity. Known for his humility, conviction, and strategic flexibility, Lincoln showed how true leaders use disruptions to inspire lasting change. This election, we can look to Lincoln’s example of courage and empathy, guiding us to face challenges boldly and strive for a united future.
Conflict at work is inevitable, but with the right tools, it can become an opportunity for growth. In this post we explore how leaders can guide teams through conflict by understanding how the brain processes emotions through the downstairs, middle room, and upstairs functions of the brain.
Belief-behavior conversations, as we discussed in our e-book: Revitalize and Retain Staff, aim to address the root causes behind actions, rather than merely correcting surface-level behavior. Pixar’s leadership used this approach to facilitate open, meaningful dialogues, helping the team uncover the underlying beliefs fueling their actions. Once these beliefs were identified, leaders guided team members toward reframing them, creating lasting behavioral change.
Welcome to 2019! I’m excited to boot up the blog again and hope to be pushing out more content this year with a focus on leadership.
Growing Millennial Leadership is a passion project for me and like many things, it needs to evolve. This year many of my topics will be around real practical leadership skills, as well as the innovation, grit and resilience that is needed to not just be a good employee, entrepreneur or leader, but also to lead a healthier life.
Innovation, or the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market, has a lot to do with the tasks, processes, and smart people! However, true innovation relies more on the ability to trust and be vulnerable in the incubator stage of an idea or innovation.
False innovation can be defined, if we borrow some language from vulnerability author Brené Brown as, “the absence of honest conversation about the hard work that takes us from lying facedown in the arena to rising strong has led to two dangerous outcomes: the propensity to gold-plate grit and a badassery deficit.”
Based on a presentation given at NYC Relate Live Conference, this 10-page white paper digs down into the concept of the Beloved Brand Triangle that author Matt Harrington created and showcased at the conference. Learn how Millennials, trust are all intertwined and walk away with key questions to ask your organization and customers to build a more beloved, Millennial-friendly company.
Let’s build out the Beloved Brand Triangle with thesis #3. The final point on our triangle is narrative belonging. Narrative Belonging is the ongoing effort by a brand to tell the story continually of how a customer that uses the brand will have a sense of belonging to the product and service that will greatly enhance the customer’s existence and experience.
The challenge for many companies is that the Millennial generation will hold you to your sales pitch. The days of the “snake oil” salesman are dead. For many companies, who are not entirely truthful, who lack competency and character in their business practices and product, they will rue the day that 93 million Millennials find out that they are in fact not telling the truth. This generation, who has a rigorous demand for excellence, will hop on their social platforms and announce to the world that you are now deemed untrustworthy.
Millennials. Brands. Trust. Three things that seemingly go together, yet each one has its own origin story. Exploring each one is the task at hand for the next month and a half as we prepare for the Relate Live New York City conference on October 22-23. How we fit these massive topics all into a 45 minute presentation, giving each one its own stage time, while connecting the dots, threading the narrative through all of them to come away with useful insights and nuggets of knowledge for conference goers will be our challenge.
There are always three things going on in any transaction or more importantly group/team/department/company: tasks, processes, and relationships. You can imagine that most of us focus a majority of our time on tasks (60%), A good organization focuses some of their energy on good processes (30%). This leaves about 10% just to focus on relationships which is actually the hardest and perhaps the most important thing to focus on as companies can always make a new machine, a new process, more tasks, but it's culture and people make up the differential factor between a good company and a great company.
The workplace is needing to reimagine their organizational culture as the Millennial generation come with different expectations, approaches and lifestyles then previous generations. Learn from generations specialist Matt Harrington about 3 areas to focus on when looking for the right cultural fit for your Millennial workers.
