Welcome to Friday 411, issue #093. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll use this refresher to implement ridiculously practical growth.
1 Insight
A client recently asked us how we create our own content. The short answer involves a lot of education and experience, including decades of reading about leadership. In order to harvest fresh ideas and produce new material, we have to stay abreast of what else is out there. One of our biggest complaints with what we read is it’s either:
- Too fluffy (“just believe in yourself”)
- Or too intense (“wake up at 3 am, meditate, and change everything you’re doing”).
Many leadership professionals talk too much about theory and don’t provide enough tangible steps. You listen to an expert who steers you toward the right direction and then says, “Now go figure out how to actually implement this.” You may be inspired, but you’re unequipped for growth.
When we started AdVance Leadership, we made one of our core values Ridiculous Practicality. We find it essential to stay grounded in applicable insights. (And we wanted the word “ridiculous” in our core values.)
As 2024 closes, let’s take a look back on the five newsletters that best equipped readers for growth.
1. How to Uncover the Root Issues of Your Team’s Biggest Challenges
Every leader faces challenges every day, but many leaders get stuck putting out fires. When you get stuck in firefighting mode, you ignore the hidden embers of the problems. When you ignore those small sparks, fires flare.
Fortunately, most problems stem from one of seven root issues: Character, Competence, Capacity, Clarity, Community, Culture, and Consistency. In this article we look at a service industry whose front line employees weren’t meeting daily quotas. Smothering the embers avoids unproductive fire fighting. For more on this topic, also check out Two reasons Communication Is (Almost) Never the Real Issue.
2. How to Make Difficult Conversations Easy (Or, At Least, Easier)
The necessity of hard conversations in leadership is inevitable, especially if you have disruptive team members. But it’s easy to postpone and avoid these uncomfortable meetings. They require courage and a strategy to handle them well. If you’re not prepared, you can bet that the conversation won’t go as expected.
Answering seven questions can help you prepare for difficult conversations. When you intiate tough talks, you can never guarantee that it will go well. But these questions help you engage with confidence.
3. Three Leadership Lessons When You Have a Challenging Season
Both personal and professional challenges have caused 2024 to be an incredibly difficult year for the two of us. When leaders experience challenging seasons, difficulty is compounded. A leaders’ life trickles down to everyone they lead.
We learned three lessons for getting through these seasons:
- Press into your life-giving habits that help you to be a better version of yourself.
- Think I Choose vs. I Must.
- The voice inside your head is a consultant, not your boss.
These lessons can help you as much as they helped us.
4. Leading By Example is Insufficient
Leading by example is critical in leadership. But, when you’re trying to get people to change behavior, it is not enough. There is no guarantee that people will see your actions. Even if they do, you don’t know if they will understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.
The better way is to lead by explained example. Don’t rely on your behaviors to speak for themselves. Verbalize what you want people to imitate and why.
5. Five Ways to Be a Humble and Confident Leader
Great leaders walk a fine line. You must be confident enough in your vision to inspire people to believe in it and take action. Yet you must be humble enough to listen, learn, and admit when you make mistakes.
When you mess up, utilize the five statements we reveal in this post. These statements will help you demonstrate humility while bolstering confidence in your leadership.
1 Action
Decide which article you need to focus on now. Read it and implement it.