This week I was with a client, solely working on their strategy and then operationalizing it.  For two full days, I worked with their leadership team on their External Map, to their SWIMLANES, and then back.  It was an intense two days that concluded with my client walking out confidently with their 3HAG aligned to their BHAG.  Their next steps are to create a company 1HAG and 90-day plan.

All of this hard work will be shared with my client’s company, both verbally in smaller meetings with their leaders and to the whole company in their scheduled Town Hall Meeting.  My client will also be sharing their strategy and operationalizing plan visually through strategic pictures on their office walls and via Metronome Growth Systems.

 Strategic Pictures

 Metronome Growth Systems (aka MGS or Metronome) has been a great tool for my clients as well as for me as a coach.  My clients have been using Metronome for almost 2...

Last week, I attended, with my clients, the ScaleUp 2018 Summit in Denver Colorado and wow – what a great lineup of speakers! Each speaker provided a unique take on a shared theme and provided useful tools and stories to apply to our own businesses and lives. But personally, a highlight of the Summit for me was seeing that so many of my clients – full leadership teams – attended as well. 

From attending too many educational conferences to count, I can honestly say that when you allow yourself to give full attention and go in with an open mind, any speaker can leave you with a piece of knowledge or tool that can help you grow. This is why I strongly encourage our clients and their teams to attend, and set them up for success when they do.

From the past two ScaleUp Summits, we have found that the most impactful way that we set clients up for success in team learning and growth is with our additional half-day post-summit. With our...

At the foundation of every high-performing team is Team Trust.  Not one-on-one trust (well, you need that too), but TEAM trust. This is where team members are comfortable and feel safe to say what they are thinking no matter what situation they are facing and regardless of who is in the room.  We all know the feeling of discomfort of being on a team without Team Trust. You are in a conversation or meeting and feel the overwhelming need to speak up and share information, but the fear of vulnerability and judgement bites your tongue. You do not feel the support of a trusting team to provide a safe environment for you to present your opinion and feedback. The catch 22 is that in these situations, you also know how imperative it is that you do speak up. It’s gut-wrenching!

 In order to progress forward towards any goal, we need to state the BRUTAL FACTS, from the start! [Read my last blog for more on what the BRUTAL FACTS...

Growing a company is much like becoming a champion sports team. You need a high performing team and a plan for the long term, the near term, and the now. The team follows a disciplined process to practice and play together to reach their goals. Winning teams have all these elements, plus they ensure that when they meet to practice and play, they face the brutal facts of their state and situation. Staying real and facing the truth ensures they to stay focused on the now and stay aligned to their future, allowing them to feel confident that they are making the necessary adjustments to reach their goals. Seems pretty obvious.

In business, we require all of the same elements to successfully grow a company. In high growth companies, no different than winning teams, they must keep a disciplined cadence of when they “practice and play” – its with their meetings!  In their meetings, they need to be clear and stay focused on the long(10+ year),...

I loved learning about the 10,000 hour rule when Malcom Galdwell brought it forward in his book “Outliers”.  The 10,000 hour rule was derived from the work of Psychologist K Anders Ericsson, who studied the way people become experts in their fields. However, since its release, many studies have focused on disproving Gladwells 10,000 hour “rule”. Additional studies support a theory that the correlation between hours spent practising and the achievement of mastery are extremely industry/situation dependant. But regardless of the arguments for and against Gladwell’s theory, who really has 10,000 hours to dedicate solely to ONE thing anyway?!

As a CEO growing a business and as a CEO Coach, I see first-hand that no one in a leadership role (or any role really) has 10,000 hours to spend mastering just one element needed to grow our companies.  We are trying to be “masterful” at the entire system it takes to grow a...

I had the great pleasure to meet and hear Judith E. Glaser speak at the Scale Up Summit in May 2018 in New Orleans.  Her latest book “Conversational Intelligence” is one of the most powerful books you can read to create trust with anybody in your life but as well create trust with your team in your business to get results. It is a must read for everyone.  Judith delivered an amazing session closing out with a very long, standing ovation from the room!  Her work will make a difference in your life.  It already has in mine.

 One of her many tools is “Double Clicking”. This tool got its name because the process mimics the ‘double‐clicking’ that we use when opening folders on the computer. When Judith uses Double‐Clicking with teams, she asks them to delve into (or double‐click) on their individual mindscapes to share and compare word meanings and perceptions with each other.  Its a perfect...

When I was building my first company, looking for examples of how to build a culture of trust, there were not as many visible or discussed as there are today. (Jim Collins definitely put a large effort into this research). The “old business” approach to leadership of relying on trust in power was over. Thriving businesses, like ours, were getting places by adopting a “new business” approach: rely on the power of trust!

I knew the power of trust started with our leaders and the leadership team.  We had to become vulnerable with each other first and I was the one to drive this as CEO. Being a huge fan and ‘groupie’ of Pat Lencioni’s work, we start working through the 5 Temptations of a CEO, Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive and then later the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  As a coach I still use all these tools and messages with my clients. (I just re-read the Four of Obsessions of a...

Recently, I rewatched Kathryn Schulz’s TED TALK that synopses her book, Being Wrong. It is one of my favourite business books. It is such a humbling reminder that we are all human and therefore we all make human error.

Kathryn states that the feeling of being right all of the time, is actually dangerous. Now, this doesn’t mean compromising any knowledge you have gained from your experiences. This means loosening the attachment we have to our own “rightness”.

 As a CEO, or just plain human being, you NEED to allow the opportunity for being wrong. Without opening the door to failure, you are compromising the likelihood of success. Unlike any other animals on this planet, humans are obsessed with figuring out how and why our world is the way it is. Without this curiosity and acceptance of not knowing everything (aka not being RIGHT all the time) we would not be the productive, creative, or innovative species we are.

In my later years as a serial CEO, and currently today in my coaching practise, I have found myself saying “GOOD ENOUGH” a lot. Like EVERYDAY! This was not always the case. As a recovering perfectionist, those words used to keep me up at night. I never thought that one day, something being “Good Enough” would actually be a key to my companies and clients success!

Being “Good Enough” actually meant getting over being wrong, and as a CEO, being wrong is very scary. It means you might be leading your team in the “wrong” direction, letting them down, letting their families down, or over all failure. But in order to move forward, you HAVE to not be scared of being wrong! You have to accept things when they are “Good Enough”.

I had to get used to working with my teams to “Gut Out the Answers” and ask ourselves, “ Is it GOOD ENOUGH for now?”.  

It always was.

We...

We are taught at a young age that goal setting is very valuable for achieving our dreams and aspirations. We are also taught that writing down those goals increases our likelihood of achieving them. These things have not changed one bit, for anyone. But even after we write down those goals, why do some people achieve goals more successfully and efficiently than others? The burning question for both business and life.

Let me start by sharing some of my own experience.

When building my first company, we had big dreams! And like many new and growing companies, we also made [big] mistakes. Our first mistake was not setting goals that connected to those big dreams. Yes I know, this seems like a silly mistake seeing how we have all been told since our youth to write down our goals.  Well, hindsight is always 20-20.  

When we finally discovered this mistake, we were four years into our first company, having raised lots of venture capital and trying to...