So, Here's My Story...

Learning a new board game can be frustrating – it’s a lot of information to learn without any real context. And it might also reveal a lot about things in your business, like onboarding staff. Why is that important for business?  Just as it is with learning how to do a new job, learning a new board game can mean a lot of new information that doesn’t have a lot of contextual meaning. But what if you change how you learn a new board game – a brief summary of the rules and goals of the game, and then an open round or hand where you can talk through strategy and decisions to help everyone understand the game better, before you play “for real”?  Or is there more value in jumping in immediately to play, and learning through the process of failure? Some of this depends on learning styles, but the universal truth is that people can only take in so much information when they don’t have context of where to put it or why it matters. This is often revealed in the questions they ask: those questions often show how much th

When you get a chance to be among random groups of strangers, it can quickly become clear that there are always commonalities that bind us. And we can learn a lot about company culture by observing our common needs and behaviors.  Why is that important for business?  Experiencing the commonality of what everyone is going through can be very reassuring. It’s also what makes up company culture. Culture isn’t organized, catalyzed or sparked by a mission statement or a team building meeting. Culture is what happens in the interstitial moments of shared experiences.  And sometimes, in certain moments, what is required of leaders is not an overarching strategy, but simply about taking charge and finding certainty in that moment.  Figuring out how you are going to navigate the new rules of business post-COVID is going to be like going through a drawer in your house: you have to take it all out and decide if it matters and why it matters, and decide what goes back in. You need to ask yourself if you are actually solv

Leadership means making decisions for your company and everyone in it. And sometimes, especially when it comes to things like COVID and health, those decisions are extra challenging.  Why is that important for business?  When it comes to coming back to the office, there are more variables than ever to consider – who can work remotely, do you wear masks, is everyone vaccinated are just some of the more complicated problems leaders are dealing with right now.  When you are in charge of a large group of individuals, everything gets exponentially challenging. You might be used to the thick skin necessary to brook dissension for unpopular decisions, but it’s harder to do this when the ramifications are about other people’s health, not just having a great quarter.  Right now, leaders have a heightened responsibility to check in with the pieces of your perspective and make sure they are built on a solid foundation. We need to be incredibly clear on the metrics we are using.  What story do you want to tell? So, that'

What can we learn from a software used to ring up pastries, that ends up helping with cancer treatment? If this episode is any indication, a lot.  Why is that important for business?  In Tokyo, a pastry shop in a train station wanted to make it easier to ring up pastries without packaging. And it led to a big development in cancer treatment (you can read the story here). So what can we learn from this?  There are lessons about perseverance. About connecting your people, culture, and company to something important. How having a sense a your work “mattering” can help with engagement. And how you can choose to connect to something that matters, even if you aren’t doing something that seems to deeply matter – as the Talmud says, “whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.” You can still connect to a larger mission, even if you aren’t fulfilling your dreams. You just have to look at individual impact and think of ways to make things better just because you were there.  W

Have you ever thought you nailed an interview – maybe even had a standing ovation-level interview – but still ended up in second place? Maybe went out and celebrated and got yourself a giant celebratory hat? Let’s talk about that hat, and what it symbolizes.  Why is that important for business?  There is a critical excitement you feel at the beginning of a journey whose end is uncertain. Everyone is susceptible to that energy and even need to feed off of it sometimes. As an entrepreneur, you have to – to some degree - get excited about the chicken counting process. No, you shouldn’t base your psychological wellbeing on those unhatched chickens, but you can’t thrive in business without forecasting incredible futures from this thing you are labouring so hard to create. You have to put yourself out there.  Complacency takes energy out of the system. You have to know your hearts at risk and might get dashed against the rocks - there’s no other way to go about it.  What story do you want to tell? So, that's our st

You can learn a lot about how to handle change (and seemingly never-ending not change) by taking two 20-hour train rides. Or you can just listen to Jodi’s story instead.  Why is that important for business?  Things feel like they are on the cusp of some sort of return to “normalcy”, in business and in life (as we talked about in episode 199, The Next New Normal). And we all have to sort through the stack of things that have changed because of COVID and consider what we are excited to bring back (and can); what we are excited to bring back (and can’t), and the buckets of things that we are now realizing we don’t want to bring back.  As we consider this next shift, it can help to give yourself a longer runway – having something to look forward to but keeping it far enough in the distance that you have time to prepare. And maintain compassion for yourself and others and avoid judging who is farther along on the track of normality.  What story do you want to tell? So, that's our story... now, we want to hear you

Ever struggle between what’s best for your client, and what’s best for the culture of your organization? Both are critical to your long-term success, so let’s talk about how to navigate those decisions.  Why is that important for business?  In your business, you have to take the long view. Culture works on trust, and if you allow bad behaviour among your team, you can be indicating that clients are more important than culture.  As a leader, this is the balance you have to navigate. You are balancing a three-legged stool - competency of service, fiscal responsibility, and culture – and all are equally important. You can’t short-change any of the legs or the stool won’t stand up for long.  Part of this is controlling emotional responses. If you want to be a leader, you have to learn to manage your emotional reactions to other people.  And, at the same time, you can’t exist in a pressure cooker without a release valve. You need to be able to communicate, either directly or to a third-party, about inevitable conf

Have you ever thought about a scammer, “you are very bad at your job?” What if, instead, it’s an issue of leadership at Scam Headquarters? What if scammers could use business coaches too?  Why is that important for business?  A scam is essentially a business, and because of this, flawed leadership and personnel issues can plague them just as they can your business. Some even have customer service lines to help you process your extortion payments or send fruit baskets for participating. So, if a company running a scam can learn about business, what can we learn about business from a company running a scam? Giving your employees directives can be helpful in getting them to do exactly what you want. But if they don’t understand the larger picture – if they don’t have general guidelines to create an internal GPS of what their job is – they won’t know how to react to situations or come up with solutions on their own.  In our 2nd episode, we talked about the importance of making things easy. And while confused mind

What are you excited to return to, post-pandemic, and what parts do you plan to bring into your “new normal”? Sometimes, a meme can spark some really interesting conversations.  Why is that important for business?  We didn’t get a lot of choice when this pandemic hit – we had to adapt, and we had to adapt fast. And now, as it finally feels like we might get some semblance of “normal” back, there are a lot of things we are excited about doing again. But there are also things we have experienced from the pandemic that we want to hold onto. And we need to start thinking about those things now.   We are going to be experiencing a next new “normal” and we need to consciously consider how navigate it and negotiate for what we want. If we don’t ask these questions and get clarity now, we’re all going to accidentally go back to a reality that we might not actually want.  We need to acknowledge the legitimacy of all the ways people have been making it work and look for intersection points in our business where it also

REPLAY OF EPISODE 69: When illness befell the Hume household, Jodi learned an important lesson about empathy, and how bad we can be at empathizing if we haven’t experienced something for ourselves. It turns out, empathy involves more than emotional intelligence. Why is that important for business?  So often in business, we jump to conclusions about the motivations, experiences and decisions of others. Sometimes, this lack of empathy is a matter of needing to develop some emotional intelligence. But perhaps more often, it is simply a lack of knowledge or a need to ask more questions.  Lack of empathy is often a lack of curiosity. We think we know what we are looking at and don’t take the time to do additional diagnostics. In the moment when you want to be frustrated with a behaviour, there is power in being willing to ask a couple of questions.  In this way, empathy in general is more like a shared understanding as opposed to an emotional response. If you don’t understand why someone has a problem with somethi

How do you pick a mentor? What is necessary to being a good mentor? And do you still need a Sherpa if you have already summited the mountain? Why is that important for business?  Mentors or NA sponsors are something that successful people use to succeed in business and sobriety. But once you’ve “made it”, do you still need on?  A mentor isn’t someone that gives you the answers. A good mentor or sponsor is there to help you avoid falling into your usual traps, and keep you focused on the line of thinking that got you to the summit in the first place. They need to know and understand you so they can help you evolve. There is a weight and gravity that comes with the title, and they need you to be able to not figure out if something is a good idea, but if it is a good idea for you. They need to know you well enough not to necessarily answer, but to help you re-orient you back to yourself.  Once you are reoriented, you often know what the next thing is. And they need to be able to recognize what a valuable failure

It turns out, you can train a dog to stop barking if you train him to retrieve throw cushions instead. Let’s find out how that trick can work with humans. Why is that important for business?  When you see a behaviour you don’t like – barking at the door, for instance – you may have better luck stopping it by introducing a new replacement behaviour – fetching pillows - than by focusing on the barking. It can be much more effective to train a dog to do something instead of training them not to do something.  And it just might be the same for those of us on two legs.  But it is important to not step over the part where the dogs had training. “Do this instead” works best when the “instead” is clearly communicated and sufficient or necessary training occurs. Like here.  Be aware that in every interaction you have, you are training people how best to interact with you and how to get what they want from you. If you respond to an email immediately, for instance, you are teaching someone that that is a fast and effici

A lot of car ads discuss the importance of going from zero to 100, but rarely they talk about how well they go from 100 to zero. And it turns out, neither do businesses.  Why is that important for business?  Business owners focus a lot on growth, scalability and everything to do with speed, power and velocity. But safety, or measured initiatives, aren’t as sexy. Sometimes, to go fast, you need to build your brakes up so you don’t spin out on the curves.  Braking is an art in and of itself.  We have to learn to ebb as hard as we flow. Look at the meme below, and consider honouring all of the parts of endurance, including the pausing. Leaning back is often accompanied by guilt or the need to justify. But what if you asked yourself, “what do I need to do right now to do my best work? Is it pushing forward or leaning back?” When you take the guilt out of the conversation, and consider that – on a racetrack and in business too - knowing when and how to brake is part of completing the race. There is a large Venn di

When you see a business opportunity, it’s natural to focus on the potential return on investment, and the consequences if it doesn’t work. But it’s important to remember another key question: what happens if it does work? Why is that important for business?  When examining a business opportunity, we need to look at what happens if it fails, but also, what happens if succeeds. If you were to imagine yourself celebrating everything working out from the opportunity exactly as designed, would you be happy or excited?  What kind of business joy would be inherent in the successful venture? Especially during these COVID times, businesses have fought really hard to get to ask the question: is this the kind of work we want to do? But if you have that ability, it is important to consider the difference between work that you get to do and work that you have to do. It’s a discipline to ask those questions and remember that you can ask those questions. While turning down opportunities can feel like a luxury, sometimes you

Overwhelmed with all the plates you have to keep spinning as an entrepreneur? It might be time to examine some of those plates and see which ones you don’t actually need to be spinning.  Why is that important for business?  In business, you have a lot of decisions and things you need to be aware of, and all of them have a weight. But sometimes, you are worrying about things further down the decision tree that won’t actually come up if you make some of the more pressing decisions. It can help with overwhelm to examine all of the decisions you have weighing on your mind and consider which ones you actually need to make right now.  It might also be true, in pandemic times, that you have some degree of planning apathy because you can’t possibly know what’s coming at all. In that case, you might just need to examine what you do have some degree of control over and focus there.  It can be hard to see when you are stuck in either end of the continuum, though, which is why you need some outside help sometimes – it’s

Whether you are responding to a college applicant or your insulin-dependent wife, sometimes it can be a thin line between building expectations and letting them build expectations in a vacuum.  Why is that important for business?  There are many times in business where you are going to be confronted with your own and your client’s uncertainty. And while it is usually important to share what you know early (and be okay not knowing much), you also don’t want to set people up for disappointment with early information that may not be accurate. And a lot of this might depend on the stakes being discussed.  In episode 158, we talked about the need to communicate, even without an answer. And it can be especially important to map out the client experience and find points of high anxiety where extra communication might be welcome. But it’s also critical to be aware of the expectations you can be setting up.  Some people need to calibrate their chances, with percentage likelihoods, for example.  The important thing to

Feedback is important, even (maybe even especially) if it is negative. But in the absence of something that tells you when you are getting warmer, it can be hard to find the right path. Why is that important for business?  In business, whether it is among work colleagues, employers or clients, you need help to understand how to do a good job. If you only ever get expressions of dissatisfaction, without any inkling of what is working, it can make it nearly impossible to meet expectations. It’s like playing the “colder-warmer” seeking game – if you only ever get told you are “colder”, never “warmer”, you can’t find the spot. You need some kind of signal to navigate towards, not just away from. You need some feedback as to where the value is. This can’t be formulaic or prescriptive or it can backfire. But if you notice a good thing, you should mention the good thing. If you want to lead people to something, you have to add some “warmer”. This isn’t about compliments, which are usually about the person, but about

Referrals – they’re the lifeblood of business, so they say. But how do you make sure you keep your referral cred (much like street cred, but with referrals) when you can’t assess the quality of the work of the person to whom you are referring?  Why is that important for business?  When you are referring out, it is usually because that is not your area of expertise. So how do you know the person is good?  Making a referral is about trust. You have to assess whether you believe them to be generally competent, and whether or not you trust them. Look at the type of questions they ask, the way they take care of clients, and the way they make an effort to understand and address their client’s specific needs. You have to separate the process from the results, because you can’t always evaluate results objectively. What each person considers “good work” is different. There are objective aspects, but a lot of it is subjective, and those are the parts that you communicate when referring to a person. You have to manage e

Business and life are full of moments of overwhelm and disorientation. And in those moments, we need to take a moment to identify what works to help us locate some grounding. We need to find our stomp, or our spit.  Why is that important for business?  We’ve all found ourselves spinning in circles, not knowing which way was up. Like if you are caught in an avalanche, the thing you need to do before you do anything else is orient yourself. And sometimes, that means spitting to find out which way gravity is pulling. Or when you’re dizzy, sometimes it is just stomping to reminding yourself of the one thing you know – where the floor is. You need to narrow your perception to that one thing, and there is where you get your bearings.  In work, it might be finding that thing amongst all of your work tasks that gets you in the flow (even if that is a spreadsheet).  That thing that reorients you often needs to be a very physical thing. There is no such thing as level without a physical reference point.  What story do

How do you delineate when work ends and home life begins when both happen in the same space? Why is that important for business?  There is something important to many people about the distinctions between work and home life, whether it be the commute (as we talked about in this previous episode) or having an office outside of the home. Having a physical or at least psychological separation between the two can be important. You need a work place, not just a place of work.  Having a distinct space can also influence the quality of our efforts, both at work and at home. The benefits of working out of the home, when possible, means there is no porous boundary and you can focus on the task at hand, instead of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and any other thing that happens to catch your eye. Having everything you need to do in front of you at all times makes deciding what is most important a little more challenging.  It is important to at least think about ways to create a ritual or practice that acts to sep