Use these 5 Techniques to Accelerate the Pace of Change in Your Business

Change often involves resistance and complexity. Here are five ways to increase your chances of success.

As a business coach, I get hired to help companies grow and scale more quickly and more profitably. The founders, owners, and CEOs I work with are hungry to achieve more success and create more impact.

The challenge is that in order to accomplish the goals they have set for themselves and their businesses, they must be willing to make significant changes, both as an individual, and as a company.

People and organizations do not change easily. There is a significant amount of resistance to new ways of working and thinking. With change, comes risk and uncertainty, so it is natural for people and teams to be hesitant.

However, if you want to grow and scale your business, you must change. Your business will need to develop new strategies, establish new processes, and hire new people. More importantly, a company's leadership team needs to adopt new habits, embrace new roles, and evolve their thinking.

While change is hard, you can make it easier and more likely. Here are five techniques that I focus on to help companies embrace change and grow more quickly and successfully.

1. Create a future vision.

One of the main reasons change is hard is that people don't like uncertainty. Asking people to make changes without a clear picture of how the new way will work will only increase anxiety. In fact, the future doesn't even need to be rosy. People would rather move toward a clearly difficult future than one that is foggy.

Paint a vivid picture of the future, using all of the senses and addressing all of the likely questions and concerns that people will have about the new way of working. The more detail you can provide, the stronger it will be. 

2. Expect it to be difficult.

One thing I always tell the executives I work with is that they should expect the process to be difficult. Change is hard and requires discipline and patience. If their expectations are not set correctly, when the going gets tough, they will give up rather than push through. Make it clear it will not bet a cakewalk.

3. Give people time.

It is great to have a goal and be excited to complete it quickly. However, change always takes time and energy and if you expect it to happen quickly and easily, you'll be disappointed. Time is a key factor in helping people navigate through the changing processes. Don't force it. If you feel people redlining, it's better to back off than push them past their limits.

4. Make it OK to fail.

People need to experiment with new ways of working in order to improve and develop mastery. Without a safe space to try out new strategies and techniques, your pace of change will be severely limited. Find ways to let people test things out in low-risk situations.

5. Talk about the emotions.

Change will also trigger emotions and feelings, and too often I see leaders gloss over these important factors. Create a time and place for people to discuss how they are feeling and explore what's driving these reactions. Being open and upfront with emotions will help people process them faster and find a way of addressing them before they fester and become a deeper issue.

Realistically, a high-growth business is full of change and much of it is hard. Everyone must step up and learn new skills and work in new ways. While not everyone will successfully make the transition, those who do will succeed because they've mastered the change process and learned how to transform not only the company as an organization, but themselves as leaders.

Running an Effective Board Meeting Is Not Hard If You Have the Right Strategy. Here are 8 Tips

Board meetings don't have to be adversarial or contentious.

Running a board meeting is not like running other meetings. Company boards have specific and important responsibilities to uphold to shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders. Failing to do so can have consequences.

That said, these meetings need not be hard. In fact, a well-run board meeting can help management make better decisions more quickly and with greater impact. While boards are there to provide governance and oversight, they are also partners in the overall success of the company.

I see many CEOs struggle with running board meetings effectively. Sometimes it's because it's their first time in a leadership role and in other cases it's because they haven't developed a good strategy or clear plan for working with their board members.

While a board is there to oversee the management team and ensure the people leading the company are competent and acting in the best interests of the shareholders, it need not be adversarial or contentious. A good board wants to support their executive team and will do so when they are collaborating openly. Here are the suggestions I give CEOs for running their meetings. 

1. Establish your board purpose.

The first thing to establish is the purpose of the board. Some boards don't have an oversight role. Advisory boards are there to provide input, advice, and access to resources; they don't have voting or governance roles.

However, a board of directors most often does have fiduciary responsibilities. It is important to make sure the board's role is clear not only to you and your leadership team, but your board as well. 

2. Clarify decision-making rights.

I've seen many CEOs end up at odds with their board because when things get tense, the decision-making process becomes a source of friction or conflict.

It's best to immediately clarify how input will be collected, decisions made, and votes cast. Once this is clear, use it for every decision so that the process is set and everyone is familiar with the steps. Then, when big issues come up you can focus on making good decisions, not arguing over the process.

3. Distribute information prior.

While I recommend this for all meetings, for board meetings it is critical that you distribute information beforehand. Send out the agenda items, all background information needed, details on the options being considered, and what input and decisions are needed. This will save time and increase the effectiveness of your meeting.

4. Prioritize agenda items.

Like any meeting, it is important to prioritize agenda items. Too often I see CEOs putting off difficult discussions thinking they can address them later in the meeting. Instead, everyone gets tired and important items aren't given critical thought or they get deferred. Tackle important issues first, even if it's hard.

5. Use round robin.

It's important to get everyone's input during a board meeting. Formally giving everyone an equal chance to speak will make sure voices are heard. It prevents members from lobbying in new issues or ideas late in the process, or even making claims they didn't have input.

I like to use a round robin strategy. I present the agenda items and clarify if I'm looking for input, new options, or a vote. Then, I give everyone 2-3 minutes to write down their ideas. After, I allow each member 2-3 minutes to present without interruption. Some members may choose to pass, but by giving them the floor, they are accountable for not sharing their input.

6. Keep meeting notes.

Obviously, you need good notes for board meetings. While I don't recommend you record board meetings, good notes on what was discussed, options considered, input given, and decisions made can be both useful and important for the future. I typically take notes as the meeting progresses and distribute them after the meeting for comments and edits.

7. Summarize decisions.

When summarizing key decisions, I find it best to include the options considered but not chosen and other key points offered during the process. These notes can provide valuable insight when you're reviewing outcomes and learning how you can improve going forward.

8. Keep good records.

I like board books and running meeting minutes. These allow you to quickly reference previous agenda and meeting notes so that you don't rehash the same issues. If you have to search through old folders to find notes from previous discussions, it will kill a meeting's momentum.

A well-run board meeting will ensure that you get through your items effectively and efficiently. It will also help you leverage the advice and expertise of your board members.

Most importantly, a well-run board meeting will inspire the board's confidence in your performance as CEO. When things get tense, it can mean the difference between a board trusting your ability to execute and questioning your ability to lead.

Here Are 6 Ways to Improve the Level of Accountability on Your Team

Performance is driven by people delivering on their commitments.

It's easy to make promises. It's harder to deliver on them. Yet, you need consistent delivery if you and your team are going to get the results you want. You need clear goals and disciplined execution.

Unfortunately, I see teams struggling with this on a regular basis. In each meeting, there is a flurry of commitments and agreements that all sound great, but as soon as people leave the room, everyone forgets what was said and weeks go by with no results or even recollection of what was promised.

Great teams take commitments seriously. They know that to be successful they need to work collaboratively and depend on each other to complete their work. Members of successful teams don't take promises lightly because they know others will be affected if they don't deliver how and when they promised.

Here are several behaviors that I see in high-performance teams that you can use to raise the bar on commitments and improve your team's results.

1. Set clear long-term goals

Understanding the big picture and long-term goals will allow everyone to better see what work needs to get done. It is also important to establish clear definitions of done and of overall success. This will allow your team members to be more specific with tasks and timelines. Compelling long-term goals will also increase motivation and engagement by aligning people around a bigger idea and a vision for a better, more desirable future.

2. Define roles and responsibilities

Much of the drama on teams around commitments is caused by not having clear roles defined. If each member's responsibilities are not well-defined and not broadly understood, it leaves members guessing about who's working on what and how handoffs will take place. It will lead to incomplete tasks or excessive communications and negotiations on tasks, or both.

Beyond basic roles, it is also important to work out the key processes that you and your team are responsible for. Map out the steps and who will do what at each step. Having clarity on each process will increase efficiency and reduce drama.

3. Capture commitments

I've been in too many meetings where many important items are discussed and plans are made, but no commitments are captured. People leave the room feeling good, but with no clue as to who is doing what and when. It is impossible to build a culture of accountability without capturing and tracking commitments and responsibilities.

All of the best teams I work with as a coach have a central document or system that tracks all of the outstanding and completed commitments for the team. At the beginning of each meeting they review outstanding commitments and identify any delayed or at-risk items. Then, at the end of each meeting, they review who is committed to doing what and when it will be completed. 

4. Ruthlessly prioritize

Another bad habit I see in underperforming teams is over-committing themselves. The fact is there are only so many hours in a day and you can only commit to those items you know you can comfortably complete. Committing to more than this is irresponsible and will end up letting the team down.

Good teams continuously prioritize their work and manage their time to focus commitments on those items that are strategic and important. They will challenge each other if they think someone is either working on something that is low priority or has a full plate and risks over-committing themselves.

5. Focus on personal accountability

I've been in many meetings where people drone on about why they didn't get something done when promised. Unfortunately, this is generally a waste of time. There are challenges with any task and reciting them to your teammates doesn't help.

Instead, focus on what is in your control. When you have or might miss a commitment, focus on what you've learned, what you're going to do differently moving forward, and what your new plan of attack is going to be. By taking personal accountability, you will empower yourself rather than look for excuses beyond your control.

Creating a culture of accountability is not easy. Great teams focus on it during each and every meeting and continuously improve upon it over time. Use the points above to begin defining your commitments. When you follow through, you will see your results improve over time.

The Best Way to Improve Your Team’s Decision Making Is to Record and Review Your Previous Decisions

The best way to improve is to record your thinking process and review your outcomes.

The main job of leadership teams is to make decisions for the company. Teams that make more efficient decisions will win. It will allow them to quickly respond to issues and take advantage of opportunities. It will also expose more impactful issues that will drive strategic growth and transformation.

One of the best ways to learn how your decision-making process is affecting your outcomes is to keep a decision-making journal as a team. This captures the thinking, analysis, assumptions, and criteria you used to make decisions. By reflecting on this later, after you know the outcomes, you can find ways to improve your process.

Here are a few things I suggest to include in your journal to capture the key insights and maximize your learning.

1. Formalize your process

First, define your decision-making process. You can't improve on something that isn't well-defined. What steps do you take to make a decision currently? If you don't have a process, just record what you do during your next decisions and use that as your working model. Then you can evaluate what worked and what didn't and make changes for the future.

For example, if you had a cost overrun because you forgot to budget for legal fees to review the contract, make sure this in on your checklist going forward.

2. Take notes on your thinking and rationale

While you're making your decisions, it is important to capture your thinking rationale, and assumptions. Did your team consider an option but then reject it? Make a note on what it was and why. I also capture all of the brainstorming notes and photos to review later.

Most people are overly optimistic by nature. By tracking estimates and actuals for time and budget estimates you create feedback that can be used to make better estimates in the future.

3. Document the options you considered but didn't take

One of the best things you can do to improve your decision-making is to generate more options. Most teams come up with two or three options and then decide. Better teams spend time coming up with more options and then spend time developing them further into novel solutions.

Capture the ideas you generated and what you toss aside and what you developed. Often times I see ideas that the team disregarded that ended up being great ideas in retrospect. A journal can help you understand what thinking lead to missing that option and how you might do it differently in the future.

4. Define the criteria you used to make your decisions

Before you begin the debate, discuss and agree on what will make the best outcome. Decide what your boundaries and priorities are for a final solution. Do you have a budget or time limit? Is quality more important than quantity? What tradeoffs are you willing to make? Determine these factors before you start.

Then, record the information in your journal and discuss how you've evaluated your options based on those factors. Later, when you review your journal, this will help you see if you missed important criteria or if you misjudged the ability to meet them.

5. Capture the data you had and where you got it

Many decisions are based on the data collected and analyzed. The challenge is that good data can be hard to come by and difficult to assess in the heat of the moment. By recording the available data and the conclusions and decisions you made from it, you capture the context at the time.

Too often I see teams look back on a decision but use their current informational context to evaluate it. This skews the evaluation and can lead a team to miss key insights. You need to assess the decision you made within the context of the information you had at the time, not the information you have now.

6. Record your assumptions and certainty levels

Many times decisions go south because the team made assumptions about what was or was not true, likely, or possible. However, if you don't capture those assumptions, you won't be able to compare them to real outcomes and learn what you can safely assume going forward.

While you can't always capture all of this data, choosing a few key decisions to document your process, thinking, and data will be extremely helpful in reviewing your outcomes and evaluating your effectiveness. Teams that get this right will dramatically accelerate their learning and their results.

5 Simple Steps to Constructive Team Conflict

Teams need healthy debate to advance ideas and strategies. Here's how to keep it constructive.

I spend the bulk of my time working with CEOs and their leadership teams on developing and implementing business strategies in high-growth companies. Done correctly, these strategies can create a significant amount of value. Done poorly, they can squander a unique opportunity these companies have worked hard to create. 

You would think with all of that pressure and intensity, there would be lots of drama and conflict among stressed-out executives. However, that's typically not the case. 

In fact, I find that most teams are playing too nice. In an effort to be more collaborative and be better team players, they end up avoiding conflict, unwilling to engage in any meaningful discussion. As a result, important issues are avoided or glossed over. 

As a coach, my job is to teach teams how to fight fair and tackle issues head-on while being respectful and supportive of each other's opinions, even if there is disagreement. Done right, constructive conflict will build a team's ability to advance ideas and come up with better, more creative solutions.

When working with teams on increasing debate and discussion, I focus their attention on five key steps. If your team is playing too nice, give these a try. 

1. Reaffirm the relationship.

Before launching into a heated debate, it's best to start by reaffirming your relationship with the other person and your intentions. The fact is, even the most confident person's ego is fragile. If you launch into disagreement first, you'll risk putting the other person on the defensive.

Start tough conversations with "I respect your view ..." or "I want to find a solution that works for both of us ..." or "I appreciate the work you've done here ..." rather than launching into a direct attack. Once you put someone on the defensive, the discussion will quickly go downhill.

2. Don't attack--add to the discussion.

Start your comment with "That's a good point. I have a different opinion I'd like to share ..." or "I appreciate that perspective, and I'd like to add mine to the discussion ..." Don't use the words but, however, no, or disagree, as these will set up a fight.

You can also borrow a technique from improv comedy called "yes, and ..." By starting every reply with this phrase--even if you disagree--you create a positive, open energy that advances the discussion rather than tearing it down. 

3. Focus on issues, not people.

It's important not to make things personal, and not to take things personally. If you start a reply with "I don't like your idea," it comes across as a personal attack. By saying "your idea," you are implying that you are not only challenging the idea, but also challenging the individual who proposed it. This will trigger the other person to become defensive.

Instead, start with "That idea has a few challenges I'd like to discuss ..." This puts you and the person on the same side of the table, working together on the idea. Even better, if there are elements of the idea that you like, try saying, "I was thinking about a similar approach and was concerned about ..." Again, separate the person from the idea.

4. Clarify your desired outcome.

One of the best ways to avoid personal conflict is to focus on a common goal. This signals that while you might have a disagreement over a detail or path, you're both aligned at a higher level toward a shared desired future. Try a phrase like "I know we both want this project to be finished by the end of the year ..." or "We all want to make sure we're working efficiently as a team ..." 

5. Make the first offer.

If neither party wants to flex or compromise, the team will end up in a deadlock. The fallacy here is that the person who moves first "loses" the fight. It's not a competition, and if you treat it that way, everyone will lose.

Instead, focus on developing and offering options and strategies for meeting the other person's needs, while maintaining your own needs as well. Don't just give in to make it work--but you might need to be flexible and creative. Everyone wins on the team when you work hard to find new solutions.

While not all team conflicts are easy to resolve quickly, with some focus and bigger-picture thinking, the vast majority of them can be resolved. In fact, getting good at resolving tough conflicts is the sign of a mature and high-functioning team.

7 Simple Secrets to Running a Better Virtual Meeting

Virtual meetings can be challenging to run. Try these seven techniques to make them worth every minute.

As a business strategy and leadership coach, I spend a lot of time with teams on setting and developing priorities and goals. Most of my time is spent in meetings: facilitating conversations, getting to root causes, and working through different opinions on where a business should focus and what it should prioritize.

This work is tough enough in person, dealing with conflicting personalities, differing opinions, and misaligned objectives is a core part of my job. Listening to what's being said while also watching body language and non-verbal cues zeros me in on critical issues that need to be addressed.

Over the years I've worked with more and more companies who have distributed leadership teams. As a result, I'm doing more of my work via video and having to adapt my process and flow to an online meeting format. And while meeting virtually is not the same as in-person, you can still create a powerful and productive experience. In fact, virtual meetings can have some benefits if you leverage the format.

Here are seven key principles that I use with my virtual teams when we host online meetings. Whether you're having a quick 15-minute chat to catch up, or an all-day session to develop strategy, these will help you get more done in less time.

1. Accept that virtual meetings are different.

The trick is to accept that an online meeting will not be the same as an in-person meeting. And once you let go of that expectation, you can begin to apply more efficient virtual meeting strategies.

2. Limit one person per login.

One of my hard and fast rules is that each person in the meeting needs to have their own login, screen and camera. When two or more people try to share a computer, sound and video quality goes down considerably. It also makes it difficult to use the "breakout room" features that are now on many online meeting tools. I want one face per login and good, up-close sound and video.

3. Use two screens.

I encourage everyone in my meetings to have two screens or even two devices. One is for the video meeting tool, the other is for the collaborative documents we're working on. Switching between the two disconnects people from the team. I want everyone to be able to see both the other people and the document at the same time.

4. Leverage collaborative documents.

While many video call apps have screen sharing tools to allow anyone to share a document, this doesn't really allow for collaboration. Instead, I like using a virtual document that everyone can access and edit at the same time. A virtual document like Google Docs allows this to happen. And while you will need some facilitation and structure to avoid chaos, it makes for a much more collaborative meeting.

5. Pay attention to visual cues.

I encourage everyone to use the "gallery view" for the video meeting so they can see everyone at the same time. This way, we can all see people's reactions and non-verbal cues while we're working. A questioning look on someone's face or a hand raise can cue the facilitator to back up and make sure people are following.

6. Invest in good technology.

Once you factor in everyone's billable time, meetings can cost a company thousands of dollars an hour. So when you have delays or interruptions because of technology issues and bad connections, the costs can quickly add up. There is no excuse not to invest in good hardware, software, and bandwidth to make things run smoothly and easily.

7. Have someone facilitate

Once a meeting has more than a few people, it's critical to have a facilitator who can set ground rules and keep the agenda moving. This can be someone in the meeting already; however, it's better to have someone who's not a participant so they can really focus on running the meeting.

While the level of interaction and collaboration of in-person meetings can never be duplicated by virtual meetings, if you follow these tips you'll find that they can still be extremely effective and productive. And for remote and distributed teams, they are a must if you want to create organizational excellence.

Calculating Your Business's Rainy Day Fund Is Not Hard If You Follow These Steps

Every business needs cash in the bank to weather the ups and downs. Here's how to figure out how much you need.

Business is uncertain by its very nature. If it wasn't, everyone would be an entrepreneur. It's what makes business both exciting and stressful. However, good business leaders know the risks they take and make sure they have strategies in place to mitigate downside risks.

Having the right rainy day fund to help cover shortfalls can be the difference between making it through some hard times and finding your business on life support. However, squirreling away too much cash can mean anemic growth and missed opportunities. 

As a business coach who works with CEOs in many different industries and in companies of different sizes, I've learned that calculating this number is a balancing act. Here are some of the factors that you need to consider when deciding how much to squirrel away for a rainy day.

Core staff payroll

For most businesses, people are the most critical and important asset. A company with a team of A-players will outperform the industry every time. Losing these people can be disastrous for the business. You need to make sure you can cover their salaries and benefits for however long you think it might take to get back on your feet.

Non-critical staff payroll

While some staff are no longer needed if your business takes a downturn, you may not be able to cut them quickly. Make sure you have enough to give them enough notice and runway to find another position. Another option here is to put them on furlough if you think business will come back in a reasonable timeframe. I've also had clients who negotiate a partial pay package or a deferred pay arrangement.

Fixed critical expenses

Some expenses can't be reduced or cut without serious deleterious effects on the business. This includes things like rent, insurance, utilities, etc. Make sure you have enough to cover these items and avoid a painful disruption to the business.

Variable and semi-variable expenses

Things like costs-of-goods-sold will directly lower in a downturn. Other costs, like attorney fees associated with new contracts, will also decrease with slower business. Look through your chart of accounts and identify those expense items that will get cut or lowered if sales and revenues fall unexpectedly. Taking action on these items quickly can give you more runway for critical expenses.

Accounts receivable

Another thing to factor into your calculation is your current accounts receivable. For invoices that have been delivered in full and there is no work remaining, you should be able to collect on that money. If you have invoices associated with partial delivery or need-to-complete future work, you might need to factor them to some level.

Accounts payable

Your accounts payable will be a big factor in how much of a cushion you need. If your business hits a few bumps and you don't have new cash to make payments, you'll need to start prioritizing quickly. Focus on critical vendors and suppliers first. And try to negotiate payment terms and a schedule sooner rather than later.

Access to outside funds

If you have access to outside funds, you might not need as big of a cushion. This could be liquid or semi-liquid assets from the owners. You can also look to debt options; however, asking for debt when things are not going well can be a very difficult and expensive option.

Cost of re-hiring

One of the best calculations you can do is to figure out the break-even time between how much you save by letting someone go in a downturn and what it will cost you to replace them when things pick back up. Often times, it's cheaper to pay someone even if you don't need them for a few months than to later go through the pain and cost of recruiting and training someone new.

Reinvestment opportunities

Sometimes I see clients that have too much tucked away. They've amassed large sums of cash out of worry for the next downturn. In the meantime, they've neglected to re-invest in their business to help it grow and prosper, and have missed key financial opportunities. Strike a balance between protecting against undesirable events and pursuing growth and scale.

Risk tolerance and stress

In the end, everyone has a unique risk profile. If keeping your emergency fund lean means you're on-edge and having sleepless nights, then put more away. Increasing your stress and anxiety will reduce your performance and hinder your ability to deal with the situation should a downturn show up.

The amount you should put away is a combination of rational logic and emotional security. However, don't just put money away and forget about it. As the business grows and evolves, so should your calculation and the balance in the account. Forgetting to do so can expose you to risks you didn't intend to take.

Growing Your Business Requires Nurturing Leaders. Here’s How to Do It

The big challenge to growing a business is developing leadership skills at all levels of the organization. Here are five areas that will help.

As a business growth coach, I've worked with dozens of CEOs and their leadership teams on how to scale their business. And while companies who want to grow 50-100 percent a year will consistently face many challenges, finding and developing leadership skills within their teams remains one of the most difficult.

The best strategy in the world will go unrealized if you don't have the right team to implement it. And while it might be easy to find talent with good technical skills, finding good leadership skills is much harder. Unfortunately, without good leaders, you'll be left with a team that struggles with focus and prioritization, and one that lacks the ability to navigate the inevitable change that comes with growth.

I encourage all of my clients to make leadership development a key priority in their business. This will help them to not only grow more quickly, but it will also reduce drama and conflict in the process. Here are five leadership skills that will help you and your team increase your company's leadership quotient.

1. Set clear priorities.

One of your key roles as a leader is to clarify what's important and what's not. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement and chaos of a high-growth company. And for most employees, it can feel like everything is important and urgent.

I like to say that is everything is important, and nothing is important. As a leader, you need to sort through all of the distractions and shiny objectives and make it crystal clear to your people what they need to focus on first and foremost. 

2. Manage to outcomes.

Great leaders leverage the skills and brainpower of their team. They don't try to micromanage and, instead, give their people space and freedom to figure out the best way to accomplish goals and complete tasks. This not only frees up your time, but it also creates great engagement within your group.

In order to do this effectively, however, you need to be super aware of your desired outcomes. Very often, the reason people micromanage is because they haven't actually taken the time to figure out what they want to come out of the process. A good manager starts with the end in mind, sets a clear definition of success, and then lets their people find the best way to accomplish the work in the most efficient way possible.

3. Delegate more to directs.

Delegation is both a skill and an art. As a leader, it's a critical skill you must master in order to be effective and advance. Failing to delegate well will leave you stuck in your current role and hinder your advancement. You need to move anything that is not your most valuable and strategic work on to your direct reports.

The best way to decide what to delegate is to assess all of your work and tasks and sort them by importance and complexity. Keep your focus on highly important and complex tasks. Then delegate starting with simple and unimportant and work your way up.

4. Develop talent through coaching.

Everyone wants to grow and improve. However, many managers just focus on keeping their people happy and productive in their current positions without a view of the future. True leaders know they need to support education and evolution if they want to keep their people engaged. And the best way to do this is to think like a coach.

Set learning and development goals with your people so they can advance and add more value to the company. Then meet with them regularly to review progress and help them when they're stuck or need resources. Yes, you might need to pay them more when they prove successful, but that's nothing compared to having to recruit to fill senior positions.

5. Engage in critical debate

While everyone wants to play nice on a team and be collaborative, as you move into a leadership role it's important to learn to engage in critical debate. Senior leaders have important skills and experience that need to be shared to make good decisions and create proper plans. Effective leaders don't shy away from conflict; however, they do so while keeping things professional.

Developing leaders at all levels of your organization is a sound investment of your time and energy regardless of your business size and growth ambitions. But if you're hoping to scale significantly and in a short time period, leadership development is not just a nice to have, it's a must-do.

6 Leadership Mistakes Most New CEOs Make -- and How to Fix Them

Making your way to the top takes many skills. However, once you get there, those same skills can become a liability.

Making it to the top requires competitive drive, expert knowledge, cunning intellect, and the ability to execute tasks better than anyone else. These skills will help you rise in the ranks and prove your worth. Without them, you're not likely to excel as quickly or decisively as others who are after the same position as you.

Once you do make it to the corner office, these same skills can hinder your ability to be effective. While you need to compete and win to get to the top, once you're there you need to focus on teamwork, collaboration, and motivating others. If you continue to lean only on the skills that helped you rise to the top, you'll fail to build a strong and high-performing leadership team around you.

Making a successful transition to CEO requires you to start doing many things. It also requires you to stop doing just as many, if not more.

Here are the six things that I often see new CEOs doing that hurt their performance and progress. If you're taking a seat at the head of the table, make sure you avoid these habits.

1. Talking too much

When you're rising through the ranks, you need to fight to get a seat at the table and for your voice to be heard. You become an expert at getting your points in edgewise.But as CEO, you no longer need to fight to get your ideas into the conversation.

As a head executive, you need to start listening much more than you speak. Create space and time for other people on your team to share their ideas and comments. Don't jump in while people are speaking and don't always be the first person to comment.

2. Micromanaging

I see this one with many of the technical and scientific CEOs that I coach. They have been extremely successful because they are the best at what they do. They are often the smartest and most experienced people in the company. And they do, in fact, know how to do many things better than anyone else. However, as CEO, if you start telling everyone what to do and how to do it, you'll create an organization of yes-people and order takers.

Instead of issuing detailed instructions on how things should be done, focus on clarifying your end objectives, why those objectives are important, and any key guidelines and boundaries that need to be followed. Let your team figure out how they want to execute and only give them help if they ask for it and truly need it.

3. Throwing out ideas

When you're just a regular member of the team, throwing out ideas helps get new thinking on the table. It's part of the brainstorming and creative thinking process. But watch out: when you're the CEO, even an off-the-cuff idea can come across as an order.

Don't underestimate the power and influence you have in your role. Avoid tossing out ideas without the intention of really wanting to make them happen. Instead of throwing out ideas, focus on asking questions to get your team to think about other ideas and alternatives themselves. 

4. Being the smartest in the room

When you're trying to make your mark you need to prove yourself to others. Demonstrating your capabilities and knowledge is key to moving up the ranks. However, once you're at the top, if you continue to showcase and grandstand you'll just be seen as an ego-driven know-it-all. Instead, focus on giving others the limelight and highlight their expertise and contributions.

5. Trying to win

On the climb up the corporate ladder, engaging in critical debate, having influence over people, and getting your way are key skills to success. And most of the CEOs I work with can out-think and out-argue everyone around them, though it doesn't mean that they should.

Instead of trying to win debates and convincing everyone to do it your way, focus on highlighting and supporting other people's ideas which you find valuable or worthy of exploration.

6. Being too busy

As a manager, being busy is a sign of importance and being in demand. You're busy because you have a lot of work and are needed by the company in many ways. Long hours show dedication and ambition. Once you become CEO though, if you're harried and overloaded you'll fail to see the forest for the trees and it will leave your people without the guidance and clarity they need to have focus.

While there are lots if things to learn and new skills to develop when you move into the chief job, you also have some unlearning to do as well. Don't make the mistake in thinking that what got you to the top will help to keep you there.

Want More Value out of Your Day? Focus on Creating Time Blocks

Time blocking will help you create more focus and productivity.

I spend a lot of time with senior executives on strategy and business planning. We conduct a deep analysis of their business and the market to develop innovative approaches to their business and detailed plans on how they are going to execute over the coming quarters and years.

However, all of this is wasted time if the teams that I work with can't manage their schedules to have the time to actually do the work. When coaching executives in this situation, I typically use an approach I call a defensible calendar.

This system focuses on allocating blocks of time based on your priorities and your optimal hours of the day and week. At the center of this approach is the use of time blocking to create interrupted time, which in turn creates flow.

If you're struggling to find the time to work on a long-term strategy, try these steps to create more focused time for these important, but not urgent, tasks.

1. Determine your allocations

Start by listing out all of the projects and responsibilities you have on your plate. Figure out how much time you ideally need to spend each week. Note if you need one big block of time or if you need to do a little each day. If you keep a good calendar, look back over previous weeks to catch things you may have missed on your list.

You should end up with a list of weekly tasks with total times and frequency. If you have more than 30-35 hours on your list, your first task is to prioritize and delegate this list so that it's down to a reasonable workload.

2. Identify your peak times

Here is where most people get time management wrong. They assume that every hour in a day is the same as every other hour in the day. In fact, our hours vary wildly in terms of quality and focus. Before you plan your schedule, it's important to know what time of day you should be working on which types of tasks.

If you're a morning person, your best hours might be right after breakfast or even when you first wake up. For others, it might be after dinner when you can focus for longer stretches of time and be more creative. To identify your peak times, create a journal and make notes for a few days on the times you feel like you have the greatest mental focus and clarity.

3. Allocate your time blocks

Once you have your prioritized task list and your peak times have been identified, you can begin mapping out your week. Start with the big blocks of time you need for focused, uninterrupted work. This could be each day, or this could just be one or two days a week. Better to start with too many than too few.

Once you have the bigger blocks scheduled, start putting in the medium and smaller blocks. Make sure to include blocks of time for standard tasks (getting to inbox zero, team meetings, reviewing reports, etc.) I typically suggest you allocate 6-7 hours a day and leave one or two buffer blocks during the day for things that come up last minute.

4. Defend your schedule

Once you have your ideal schedule planned, your job is to defend it tooth and nail. When someone calls you for a meeting, make sure to offer them the box you had allocated for that activity. If you forgot to plan for it, give them one of your buffer blocks. But don't move your other blocks! This is the key to this strategy. Make other people adjust to your plan.

5. Adjust and optimize

Sometimes you have to give: your boss needs to meet with you, your most important customer needs to come to a meeting. These things happen. If they come up and you must accommodate their schedule, do so, but don't delete your blocks! Force yourself to shift things around to keep your blocks together as much as possible. Even if you need to move blocks between days and reschedule other meetings.

If you run out of time in a day, move blocks between days. And if you absolutely need to drop something, make sure you're dropping the block that is the least important of all of your tasks. Don't just delete the block that has the conflict; move things around to optimize your schedule.

Adopting this strategy can be hard at first. It will take time to figure out your most important tasks, optimal block size and timing, and your natural energy flow during the day. But once you dial it in, you'll find yourself not only getting more done but getting more of the right things done to accomplish your biggest goals.

Don't Let Your Meetings Fizzle. Be Sure to End Strong for Maximum Productivity

While having a good opening and sticking to an agenda is important, the best meetings have a strong finish as well.

As a coach, I spend the majority of my time facilitating meetings with senior leadership: upwards of 200 to 300 meetings a year. And over that time, I've learned a few tricks.

There are many good meeting habits. At the top of my list is having an agenda: basically a list of topics and decisions. Having a good facilitator is also a great way to boost a meeting. And there are opening conversations and ground rules as well.

However, the one thing I see most meetings get wrong is the ending. Failing to properly wrap up a meeting can be a huge mistake. Without a proper close, all of the hard work that went into your meeting will likely fizzle.

Most meetings end by people trying to cram in one more topic or by people excusing themselves to make other appointments, leaving things half-baked. Instead, take 5-10 minutes at the end of your meetings to cover these five items--you're sure to see an improvement.

1. Identify anything that wasn't covered.

It's often the case that you don't get to everything on your agenda. And if you use a parking lot (which I highly recommend), you'll have new items that need to be processed. At the end of your meeting, be sure to walk through your list of open topics and decide if they need to be on the agenda for the next meeting. You can also assign owners to work on them between meetings to keep the process going.

2. Review action items and commitments.

A good meeting has several action items and commitments. I recommend that you track them during the meeting. Either assign someone to be a scribe who can take notes or record them yourself on the wall or a whiteboard. Capturing action items and commitments is one of the keys to a great meeting.

At the end of a meeting, I like to review everyone's takeaways and next steps. This will help make sure everyone is on the same page as to who is doing exactly what and by when. I can also check my notes and make sure everything was captured. By reviewing people's commitments at the end in front of the group, you further instill a sense of ownership and accountability to the group.

3. Confirm decisions and next steps.

Every meeting has at least a handful of decisions. These can be both big and small. The challenge is to have every decision lead to both an action plan and a communications plan. Too often, teams make decisions but then don't act on them or fail to tell the people who are directly affected.

At the end of the meeting, walk through the decisions that have been made and make sure there is an owner and an action plan for each. Also, confirm who else needs to be notified about the decision that's been made. A lot of organizational drama is caused by decisions being made by one group and another group not being informed.

4. Discuss changes and improvements.

One of the habits of highly effective organizations is developing a culture of continuous improvement. They know they can be better, and they make a focused effort to constantly find ways of improving.

End your meetings with a quick review of what went well in the meeting and what didn't. Bake in the things that have proved effective for the team so you don't lose that value. And then identify one or two things you want to do differently next time. These small improvements will add up over time.

5. Confirm the date and time of the next meeting.

Finally, make sure the next meeting is on the books. Don't leave the meeting hoping someone will figure out the schedule later. While you have people in the room, open up the calendars and find the next date. Better yet, if this is a regular meeting, establish a standing date and time so that it's in the calendars going forward automatically.

Meeting habits are key to organizational effectiveness and a core part of any business. And while many people complain of being in too many meetings, the truth is that they are in too many bad meetings.

Here Are the 3 Key Metrics to Evaluate Your Performance as CEO

Everyone in the company needs a scorecard, even those at the top.

Performance management is key to any successful business. Making sure you have clear goals and responsibilities defined for everyone in the company is important to create alignment and focus. Without a good system of measuring success, results tend to be lackluster.

As a business coach, I work with leadership teams on defining strategic goals and outcomes and developing performance management systems for guiding the execution process. This includes functional and process accountability, standard operating procedures, and role definition.

Key to this are role scorecards. These define the core responsibilities and success metrics for each role in the company. With good role scorecards, management becomes much easier and you can ensure alignment across the organization.

Typically, one of the hardest scorecards to develop is for the CEO. As the head of the company it's hard not to put everything on your scorecard. And this is the mistake I typically see CEOs making.

As the company grows, the CEO roles need to be focused on fewer and fewer things. If you try to focus on too much and keep your fingers in too many pies, you'll hinder the development of your people and slow the growth of your company.

Here are three key areas that I advise CEOs to focus on and which I generally put on their scorecard. If you're looking to grow and scale more quickly, consider focusing on these and creating metrics to define your success.

1. Senior leadership team scorecards

One of my favorite metrics on a CEO's role scorecard is the percentage of leadership team members who are successful on their scorecards. I typically do this as a measure of the green, yellow, and red metrics across all of the leadership team. And if there are any empty seats, those count as zeros.

One of the most important jobs of a CEO is to design their leadership team structure and then find the right talent to put in those seats. By putting the average of their team's score on their scorecard, it forces them to either train and develop their leaders, redefine the roles so people are more successful, or recruit better talent.

2. Customer conversations

As your company grows, you need to spend more time on external strategy than internal processes. Too often, I see companies stuck in their growth because the CEO just can't give up control of operations and deliver.

If you want to grow your business, you need to get out of the office. One of your most important roles as CEO is to have an intimate understanding of the market and to develop insights and predictions about where it's going.

One of the best ways to do this is to spend time with your customers and deeply understand the challenges and struggles they have and where you can provide value and solutions. This is more than just going out to lunch. Go to their offices and watch their people working. The more time you can spend understanding their pain and struggles, the more opportunities and value you can create.

3. Allocation of time to strategic planning

The hardest part about strategy is finding time to do it. When you're a high-growth company, there are a thousand things vying for your attention. Salespeople want help to sell, delivery teams want you to provide insight, and HR wants you to interview and spend time with new employees.

Yes, you need to do all of those things, but you also need to dedicate time for strategy. And since nobody else is demanding that from you, you need to create the structure and discipline to make the time, not find the time.

I like a CEO to set aside at least one-two to three-hour block of time to focus on strategy development. This could be collecting data, developing insights, or creating potential paths for the company. This could also include products/service development and innovation if you have more time. The key is to have a larger block of focused and uninterrupted time to really steep yourself in creating the future of the company.

There are many other factors that show up on CEO scorecards, and each one will be unique to the company and the leader's unique strengths and weaknesses. But these three will drive your development as the head of the company and help accelerate your growth.

Want to Improve Your Company Performance? Improve the Performance of Your Teams

Talent is not the only requirement for success. Teamwork is essential.

Over the last several decades, the nature of work for many people has shifted from assembly line manufacturing to collaborative knowledge work. We are no longer an economy driven by raw production requiring a large quantity of manual labor. We are an economy of ideas and innovation where a small team of highly skilled experts can create enormous value by leveraging technology and networks.

The most valuable companies innovate by developing software, algorithms, connections, and intellectual assets. The challenge with this new type of business is that raw talent is not the only requirement for success. It takes teamwork and collaboration to create these sophisticated solutions.

As a business coach, helping companies rethink their approaches to how they design and manage teams is one of my main areas of focus. Gone are the days when managers lay out a defined work process and then focus on getting their people to follow standard operating procedures. Today's companies are based on self-managed teams with high degrees of autonomy.

For many executives, managing these types of teams is a challenge. Traditional management techniques don't work; in fact, they can hurt the success of a team. Here are five techniques I suggest that managers of modern, high-performance teams use to help them be more successful.

1) Set clear outcomes

The first thing you can do as a team manager is to set clear goals and objectives. Defining the desired outcome and work product will help a team understand where they need to go and what they need to do. By articulating good success criteria, you help evaluate their strategies and tasks and understand what will work, and what won't. Without clear outcomes, a team will struggle to decide what to focus on and increase conflict around the right approach.

2) Clarify boundaries

Once you've set a clear understanding of the final end state of the project, you then need to set the boundaries that the team needs to operate within. Don't overcomplicate these: focus on the hard edges the team needs to stay within. These could be dates, budgets, or tools/technologies that they need to either use or not use. Leave everything else up to the team and let them decide how to get it done.

3) Highlight success

Many managers love to give their teams critical feedback and focus on digging into problems and things that didn't go well. While it's important to reflect and retrospect, focusing on problems will demotivate the team and only draw more attention to the ways not to do things.

Instead, focus your time and energy on the things that went right and are going well. Catch them when they do something successfully, and reflect on what led to a positive result and how the team can leverage their learning to create even more success.

4) Don't interrupt

One of the worst things you can do as a manager is to interrupt a team in flow. Modern teams are engaged in complex and dynamic tasks. It can take a long time for a team to get into the zone and fully immerse itself in their work. Asking questions, getting updates, and making suggestions when a team is in the zone will disrupt the process, which can take hours to rebuild.

Instead, set up a time at the beginning and/or end of the day for check-ins and discussion. For the rest of the time, the best thing you can do as a manager is to protect the team from external distractions. Set up systems and policies that allow the team to have sustained periods of focused time.

5) Remove roadblocks

While a high-performance team is self-managing and can handle their own processes and workflow, they always operate within a larger company context. This can create external obstacles and friction. As a team manager, one of your most important jobs is to remove these blocks for your team. Find out what external forces are holding a team back and use your clout and organizational power to make things easy for the team to be effective.

As the nature of work in companies becomes more complicated and organizations become more team-based, these leadership skills will increase in demand. Effective leaders who know how to create and support high-performance teams will thrive in the future world of business. And companies that develop and promote these types of leaders will quickly become leaders in their own markets.

Every Brand Stands for Something. the Best Brands Make That a Promise.

Your brand communicates to your customers what you stand for. The best brands make it a promise to their customers.

One of my favorite parts of being a business coach is working on strategy. While many things need to go right for a business to succeed, without a solid and effective strategy, your business won't stand a chance of rising to the top.

The best strategies stand for something. They make a clear choice about what they deliver and what they don't. It's about differentiating yourself from the competition in a unique and compelling way. A strategy is about choosing to be extremely good at a few things and a willingness to be bad at many others.

Once you successfully do this, you can truly stand behind your brand in a way that nobody else can. Once you pick how you're going to be different, you create a powerful position that you can fully own. And since nobody does what you do, as well as you do it, you can confidently ask for a superior price and reap an above-average profit.

With a solid strategy, you can back up your brand with a clear promise to your customer. And if you're really good, you can back up that promise with a guarantee. This promise and guarantee communicate why customers should choose your product/service and should remove all buying concerns in their mind.

A great example is the famous Domino's pizza brand promise and guarantee. While there are many aspects of pizza delivery, their focus is on fast and hot. They don't have to have the largest selection of toppings or the highest quality ingredients, but they make a promise that they will deliver your pizza in 30 minutes or less (their promise): and if they don't, it's free (their guarantee).

Creating a brand promise and guarantee will allow you to be more effective in your market. It broadcasts your positioning and draws the right customers to your business and repels the wrong ones. It also helps align your organization to deliver on those key and select-few processes and services you need to get absolutely right.

Here are the key steps for developing your brand promise and guarantee. Done well, these can transform your business and fuel your growth.

1. Who is your best customer?

Before you develop your positioning, you need to know who your target customer is. That starts by looking at your current customers and identifying who your best ones are and what they need and how they think. Once you understand these you can decide which needs and preferences you want to focus on in your strategy.

2. What do you want to be known for?

By focusing on your best customers and choosing the handful of things they care about, you create your positioning. Your positioning is what you are known for and what your reputation is built on. And by choosing a few key areas of focus, you make it easy to communicate. You can't be all things to all people; it's better to be a few things to a focused market segment.

3. What gives the customer hesitation to buy?

Once you have your positioning, focus on what gives your buyer hesitation to buy. What gives them pause or concern? Maybe they aren't sure it will work, or that the motor won't last, or that the color will fade, or that they will change their mind next week when they get home? Figure out what gets in the way of them saying "yes" to your offer.

4. What promise can you make to them?

Take those key hesitations and figure out what you can do to assuage their concerns. If they are worried that you'll be out of stock of the right colors, promise that you'll have the colors they need. If they are worried that the fabric will stain, promise that your fabric is stain-free.

5. What are you willing to suffer on?

Now that you have your promise, you need to decide what you're willing to put on the line. A good guarantee communicates to your customer that you're so confident in your ability to deliver that you're willing to suffer serious pain if you don't live up to your promise. Maybe the customer doesn't have to pay, or you'll provide another one for free, or you'll redo the work until they are completely happy. It says to the customer, we stand behind our promise and put our money where our mouth is.

By focusing your positioning on just a few key customer needs and then building your promise and guarantee, you will communicate to the right customer what you stand for and why they should buy from you. But while a good promise and guarantee should be simple, getting them right will take hard work and tough decisions.

A Leadership Team War Room Creates Alignment and Focus. Here’s How to Create Yours

Like a great general, a great CEO knows that having the right information at the right time is key to success.

While military analogies have limits in business--and are often more cliché than practical--one that I find highly effective is the idea of a war room. A war room is a space where information is gathered and displayed where your team can meet to discuss and decide on strategies and objectives. Done well, a war room can be a powerful tool in creating focus and alignment in your team. 

As a strategic coach, I'm always looking for an edge that I can give my clients. And while more ideas and information can help, more often than not, it's about creating deeper insights and making a better decision with the information you already have.

The problem is that information can be buried in binders and folders or on hard drives (or the cloud these days) and inaccessible to the team. Making this information accessible and placing it in clear view allows it to be used more effectively.

This is what a war room does so well. It takes the key information, data, and plans that a team has developed and organizes it in a structured and visual way so that it's at the team's fingertips. Here are five aspects of a great war room.

1) Close to the action

The best war rooms are located in a central place close to where the work is being done. It should be easy to get to and easy to access. High-performance teams meet daily to review updates and action plans. If your space is too far away to easily access, you won't establish a routine that will drive the pace.

Your war room need not be physical. Several teams that I work with are virtual, with leadership located in disparate parts of the world. A virtual war room creates common data sets, meeting tools, reports, and documents that give everyone on the team the right information in the right format.

2) Common ground

It's important that your war room be accessible to everyone at all times. Don't put it in the CEO's office or the main conference room if these are closed or occupied during the day. You want your war room to be open and available to everyone on the leadership team at all times so they can access information, update plans and reports, and have a space to think about strategy and long-term goals.

3) Information radiators

Having spent almost two decades in Lean/Agile software development, I've borrowed many ideas and concepts and applied them to my business coaching strategy. One of the core ideas that I've borrowed is an information radiator. By organizing information and insights in large format charts, diagrams, and models and putting them on the wall, you create visual access to the critical resources the team needs to plan and make better decisions.

4) Meeting space, not working space

It's important to set up your war room as an ideal place to meet. Generally, war room meetings are short and focused. You need enough space for everyone on the team to be in the room and still see everyone and everything on the walls. I tend to like open spaces where people stand or sit in chairs that can be quickly moved around, rather than conference tables.

Don't encourage people to work in the war room. This allows other people to come in and quickly access the information they need without disrupting others. Quick meetings and work sessions are fine, but for focused work, use another space.

5) Invite change and updates

Everything in the war room should be easy to update and change. I like stickies on walls that can be edited, replaced, moved and reorganized as needed. Don't get attached to any particular setup or format. The key to a good war room is the ability to adapt quickly to changing situations and strategies. Whiteboard and glass walls create great surfaces where diagrams, sheets, notes, and documents quickly posted and edited.

In today's rapidly changing business world, having the right tools and information at your fingertips is key. With the right information in the right format, teams will be able to gain insights and quickly execute strategic moves that will win in their market.

6 Things to Consider Before You Decide to Promote Someone

When a company grows quickly and talent is in short supply, the pressure to promote people is high. Here are six things to consider before you do.

Over the last two decades, I've worked with hundreds of founders and CEOs of high-growth companies, helping them with strategy development and execution. And while we can come up with amazingly effective ideas for how to grow the business and highly developed processes for scaling the companies, the one challenge they all end up facing is finding enough of the right talent quickly.

The fact is, talent quickly becomes the limiting constraint for many high-growth companies. And the biggest demand is for management and leadership. As a company grows from a few dozen to a few hundred people, finding the right people who can manage teams and departments becomes more and more difficult.

One of the common strategies for these companies is to promote from within their existing ranks and then backfill with new, entry-level talent. It's a good strategy when it works, but too often I see companies promoting the wrong people into the wrong roles, and suffering because of it.

Here are six questions I ask when a leader is thinking about promoting someone into a management or executive role. While the answers don't need to be perfect, they will help you understand where you'll face challenges and need to provide support.

1. Do they really want it?

The first thing to consider is if your prospect really wants the new role. While people always want to advance and feel like they're making progress, you'll want to make sure that this is really the role for them. This might take some digging and frank conversation, but make sure you ask the question.

Too often I've seen someone promoted because they were "perfect for the job," only to find out that they took the role under duress and miss their old position. Without a real desire and internal motivation to take on the role, the results will be lackluster at best.

2. Can they manage themselves?

Moving up the management ladder will mean more projects, more people, more issues, and more demands. If someone hasn't developed the skills to deal with multiple--and at times conflicting--priorities and learned how to allocate their time effectively, they can quickly become overwhelmed and ineffective. Make sure they have the management skills to take on these new challenges.

3. Do they have the skills?

If the promotion you're considering involves new skills and capabilities, you need to make sure they are trained and ready. Moving someone into a management role that requires project budgeting and forecasting when the person doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet will be a disaster.

While many of these skills are trainable, make sure you know the gaps and have a plan before making the decision. When promoting someone with clear deficiencies, make their training part of their development plan and set specific goals.

4. Can they manage people?

The classic misstep many companies make is taking a starting player and making them a manager. Just because someone is a great salesperson or a brilliant coder, that doesn't mean they will make a great team manager. In fact, the best technical people often make horrible managers because their expectations and standards are far beyond anyone else on the team. Make sure they have the people skills to lead the team before you put them in charge.

5. Do they embrace the culture?

One of the big risks in promoting someone is that the promotion gives them a much bigger impact on the culture of the company. If they are not a good cultural fit, you'll be exacerbating the problem by giving them a more powerful and influential role. And you'll be sending a message to the team that this person represents what is acceptable within the organization. If your employee doesn't reflect your company's desired culture, think twice before promoting them.

6. Can they make strategic decisions?

As you move up from individual contributor to management and leadership, one of the big changes is your shift in focus from day-to-day operations and tactics to strategy and long-term thinking. Before you move someone up the ladder, make sure can think strategically and see the system-level perspective of the business. Much of this is trainable, but be aware of how much work it will take to get someone to the level you need.

Promoting from within existing ranks is a highly effective and desirable strategy for most organizations much of the time. You know the person well, can assess their capabilities more easily, and can determine culture fit with a high degree of confidence. But if you promote without asking yourself these six questions, you'll likely run into problems down the road.

Hiring is one of your biggest business decisions. Here are five ways to do it better

Hiring has a huge impact on your business. Here are five ways to make sure you're making the right decisions and bringing in the best people possible.

As a strategic coach, I spend the bulk of my time with CEOs and leadership teams of high-growth companies, helping them set strategic goals and driving accountability on execution. Again and again, I see these companies struggle with finding the right people and effectively onboarding them. 

Getting hiring wrong can be a nightmare. Lost time, energy, and money are all immediate and obvious. But less visible is the frustration and hit to team morale that a mis-hire can lead to. Over time, this can cause a business to develop a bad reputation in the market and hinder its ability to grow.

There are a few core strategies that I've seen work really well in most cases when a business needs to hire and onboard a new employee. 

1. Define the process

Being thoughtful about how you're approaching the process, getting clear on the role you're trying to fill, and designing an interview process that ensures you'll have a good cultural fit, in addition to the skills for the job, is all time well spent.

By specifying the stages of the interview, the number of people the candidate will be meeting with, what questions will be asked, and how the information is processed will ensure that things run smoothly and that you'll be able to compare candidates effectively and fairly.

2. Define your expectations

I've seen many companies cycle endlessly through candidates because they haven't clarified what they are hiring for and what criteria they are prioritizing in the process.

Take the time before you even post a job opening to define what the role is, its key responsibilities, how success will be measured, and any other expectations or performance requirements. Being able to clearly articulate what the job entails before you hire someone will make it vastly easier to manage them once they're on board.

3. Set the bar

The fact is that there is always a better candidate out there somewhere. The challenge is in making the decision about how much time and energy you are willing to spend trying to find them. The search for perfect is a never-ending and impossible task.

The best strategy I've seen to overcome this challenge is to set a minimum number of candidates to interview for a given role (usually five to eight people). Chances are you've interviewed as least one person in the top twenty percent of the market. Then set your standard to the best of that lot and hire the next person who meets or beats that bar.

4. Engage your team

Take the time and effort to have your team involved in the process. While not everyone needs to have a formal say in the hiring decision, it's important to have the folks who will be working with your new hire to have a say and to get to know them, and vice versa.

This can happen in the form of group/team interviews where people get a chance to meet a candidate and ask some structured and unstructured questions. It can also be casual, where the team takes a candidate out to lunch or coffee to get to know them.

5. Don't oversell yourself

Too often I see companies working very hard to sell themselves in the interview process. They hype up the company and the role and talk about all of the amazing benefits and opportunities. And while you do need to put your best foot forward, you also need to be careful of overselling yourself.

Good interview processes make it very clear what it's like to work at the company and what is expected of people. If the company is really competitive and everyone is highly driven by personal performance, there is no good reason to try to sell yourselves as a highly collaborative culture. While you might be able to convince a candidate that you are, it's going to be bad for both of you in the end.

I like the final stages of the interview process to be a frank conversation. This is basically where I list out the downsides and difficult things about the company and make sure the candidate is really ready and willing to take on the challenge. It's best for anybody to start a new job with their eyes wide open.

Hiring is tough and no company I've worked with has nailed it every time. However, those companies who can get it right more often than the competition will have a strategic advantage when it comes to growing quickly and effectively over time.

Making the Wrong Hire Is More Than Just a Waste of Money. Here’s Why

Hiring the wrong people can cost you much more than lost wages. It can impact every part of your business and cost you in ways you might not realize.

As a business coach for high-growth companies, I work with organizations that are often starving for talent and under a lot of pressure to grow quickly and make hires fast. However, without truly understanding the costs of making a bad hire, many companies fail to ask the right questions or take the right precautions in their recruiting and interviewing processes.

Here are a few of the considerations you need to keep in mind when designing your strategy and process for making new hires. Putting in steps to assess and evaluate these risks will serve you well in helping you make sure you're making the right people decisions as you grow.

1. Wasted investment in hiring

The first obvious consideration is the time, energy, and money you put into hiring. If you're using a search firm, you could be spending upwards of 30 percent of a first-year's total compensation to make a key hire. For most companies, this isn't chump change. But even if you're doing your own search and recruiting, you're still spending real dollars and significant time on the hiring process.

2. Onboarding effort

While making the hire takes time and energy, most companies end up spending just as much time, if not a lot more, training and onboarding new people. This includes the time your new hire is spending learning the ropes, getting up to speed on projects, learning your software systems, and generally acclimating to the new environment. Even the most experienced and skilled person will need time to become productive.

And don't forget all of the time and energy your current employees will be spending getting your new hires up to speed. At a minimum, I double the time of the new employee, and in some cases, that could be two or three times the work effort. If you're spending hard dollars on training and certifications, then that's money you'll never get back if they don't work out.

3. Team disruption

While it's difficult to quantify the hard costs of team disruption, the productivity drag of a new person on a team is very real. A well-oiled team will be thrown off by a new member and it will take a while for the team to find its new groove.

Some of this is about process design and roles on the team that need to be adjusted. Rebalancing workloads and reassigning projects and clients will take time and a thorough thinking through. There are also changes to the team dynamics and communication structures that will need to be reestablished and optimized with the new players.

4. A-player disengagement

One of the key costs of a bad hire has nothing to do with the hire themselves, but rather their impact on the rest of the team. If you hire someone who's not a good fit or who just can't pull their weight in the role, it will be a drag on the rest of the team. As a result, your current high performers will suffer and become frustrated.

A-players want to work with other A-players. And if they feel like they need to tolerate and pull extra weight for the underperforming team members, they will quickly disengage. Ultimately, one of the biggest costs of making a bad hire is causing one or more of your best people to leave the business.

Finding and developing A-players is very, very expensive, and you should be protecting them at all costs. The last thing you want to do is suffer the costs of a mis-hire and also lose a great employee. 

5. Poor reputation

If a company consistently does a poor job of hiring and cycles through candidates quickly, word will get out. With sites like Glassdoor.com and social media, combined with people's willingness to openly share their hiring and employment experiences, companies are highly exposed and vulnerable to developing a bad reputation.

While potential candidates will write off one or two bad reviews in a long list of positive ones, if they see a trend of companies letting people go quickly, they will think twice. Nobody wants to leave a job, even a bad one, to work for a new company if they are worried they will be on the street again in a matter of months.

Hiring is not easy and you'll never get it perfect. But don't take the job lightly and don't assume you can just hire someone and hope it works itself out. The direct and indirect costs of making the wrong decision will ultimately cost you more than what it would take to develop a clear strategy and effective hiring process.

Every high-performance team needs people in each of these four basic roles

Regardless of the project, your industry, or your company culture, these four roles need to be filled on every team for it to be highly effective.

As a strategic business coach, one of my main goals is to level up the performance of the senior leadership team. There are many models and frameworks I use to assess team behavior and performance. Each of them has pros and cons in different situations.

One of my favorites comes from the psychologist David Kantor and is called the Four-Player Communication Model. It applies to any team solving problems and collaborating to reach common goals. Each role is fairly simple to understand, yet getting them working together on a team can be a balancing act.

Here are descriptions I give to senior executives so they can be more aware of what role they are playing and what roles other people are playing in the situation. Once they are more aware of the roles, they can start adjusting their behavior to balance out the dynamic.

1. The Mover

The primary role in any discussion is the mover. They are the ones who initiate action for the team. This could be a question, a suggestion, or putting an issue on the table. Their role is to encourage the team to engage in discussion and debate and move things forward.

Without a mover, a team will get stuck and become apathetic. They will lack the ability to advance, come up with new ideas, and turn ideas into action plans. While many teams are made up of highly driven executives, it's important that the mover help the team advance, not just be impatient and pushy. A good mover serves the team, not their own personal agenda.

2. The Supporter

I like to say that while the mover is key, the hardest role on the team is the supporter. This is the person who seconds the motion. They take a stand and get behind the idea, opinion, plan, etc. A mover can kick things off, but without a supporter, they will make little impact or progress. 

The key here is that the supporter needs to support the idea, not the person. If the supporter comes across as a sycophant currying favor for political gain, it won't work. They need to put their weight behind the merits of the idea and provide a good rationale.

Often when a senior leadership team is struggling, I see this role missing. Because members of a top team are often used to driving and making decisions, they all want to be movers and nobody wants to take the role of supporter. On really great teams, members know that the supporter role is key to effective decision making and jump into it when they see the need.

3. The Opposer

If it's the supporter's job to add momentum to the mover, it's the opposer's job to provide a check and balance for the team. It's a key role to help make sure that all angles are being considered and possible risks and downsides are fully evaluated. A good opposer will help the team avoid pitfalls and prevent the team from missing other opportunities.

Typically, finding enough opposers is not a problem on a senior leadership team. However, this is not just arguing for argument's sake. A good opposer brings up legitimate concerns and risks and is there to help the team assess all options. Too often I see executives opposing without making a strong case or providing sufficient rationale. Bad opposers will make ad hominem attacks that will destroy a team's trust and effectiveness.

4. The Observer

Finally, every team needs to have people who maintain a higher-level perspective and keep the bigger picture in mind. These are the team's observers. They help guide the process and make sure the team is considering all of the options and factors. A team with good observers will have a strong process and be much less likely to go down rat holes and spin their wheels.

Every effective team I've worked with has demonstrated the use of these four roles consistently. However, members don't need to stay in each role forever. In fact, in the best teams I work with, members will move between roles as the conversation shifts and they see the need to balance out the dynamic.

3 Common Thinking Traps That Derail Many Leadership Team Discussions

Leadership teams can fall into thinking traps like any other team. Here are three common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

As a strategic coach, I spend a lot of time helping leadership teams assess their current situations and find key areas that need focus. At the core of my role is helping teams identify and articulate the issues and then facilitate the discussion between members. I make sure the conversation stays constructive, that all of the issues are being addressed, and that everyone is contributing their thoughts and ideas to the discussion.

Having worked with dozens of leadership teams and held hundreds of strategy and planning sessions, I've found a key set of ruts and bad patterns that teams fall into. These are common thinking traps that every team can find themselves in. However, for leadership teams, the costs of these traps can be very high and impact everyone in the organization.

Here are the three most common ones that I come across and how I typically help teams get out of them. For all of the teams I work with, my initial step is to help them see that they are in a trap, which can be a challenge. From there, we can change their setup and behaviors to get out of the trap and avoid falling in one again in the future.

1. Anchoring

This one is rampant in most leadership teams. Usually, it comes in the form of the CEO or another powerful executive dominating the conversation and leading with strong opinions that everyone else needs to then argue for or against. The problem is that this sways everyone's thinking and will suppress other comments and ideas, which is exactly what we don't want if we're striving for perspective and constructive debate.

The solution to this is to have a clear process for articulating the topic and gathering data and success criteria before launching into solutions and decisions. I also typically have the CEO or other influential executives on the team speak last so they don't skew the discussion.

2. Correlation = causation

It's easy to assume that just because one thing relates to another there is a causal relationship. My favorite example is a study that appeared in Nature in 1999 that showed that parents who leave the lights on in their infant's bedroom at night cause myopia. One year later, Nature published a new study that showed that the lights have no impact, but rather there is a strong correlation between nearsighted parents having nearsighted children. The lights were just something that nearsighted parents left on so they could see better.

Leadership teams fall into this same trap. Just because one thing goes up at the same time as another, it doesn't mean that one causes the other. Making that assumption and failing to find the true cause can lead teams down bad paths.

The way to avoid this is to assume temporarily that the opposite is true and try to prove that by looking for evidence. If you can make a plausible argument, you might be looking at a correlation, not a causation situation.

3. Polarization

As humans, we love drama. It's what makes for compelling movies and page-turner books. But on leadership teams, it's typically a liability. Unfortunately, it can be human nature to take one event or one case and to assign a disproportionate meaning or weight to it in order to make a point or advance a personal agenda.

Key giveaways that this is happening are when I hear people using "never" and "always" in their arguments. This technique is usually employed to emphasize a point or to strengthen an argument, but, instead, they are just setting things up for an argument.

Instead, I encourage teams to speak with realistic data and probabilities. If you know that 82 percent of the deals close within a month, don't say "we always close." And if you know someone was late to the daily huddle three times last week, don't say they are "never on time." While you may think you're making a stronger point, you're just going to pick a fight over the data.

While there are many other traps a team can fall into, these are the top three that stymie most leadership teams. Knowing what they are and when you've fallen into one of them can help you get out more quickly. And once you get better at seeing them, you can start avoiding them altogether.