Truth Over Grift

Some people may be seduced into thinking truth does not matter, so let’s gut check this topic for minute, for the sake of our collective mental health and success.

First, there are fundamentals that foster healthy human and societal interactions, generating healthy hopeful futures.

Positively impactful leaders are teachers, generous givers, investors, collaborators, problem solvers, and serve others by pouring their efforts into life giving community. That is the picture of leadership success for the benefit of all of us, drawing on the best of us.

Second, in the face of the days that “good” leadership is portrayed as narcissistic, confusion creating, self-serving, in love with its own voice, and a generator for divisiveness over wholeness, remember you don’t have to take the bait. You don’t have to fall victim to the grift.

This grift often shows up as a leader who fabricates root causes for given or fake concerns and intentionally generates anxiety. They present solutions but these solutions are actually problem amplifiers. The grift is based on inverting the reality to manipulate others and imbue power to them. The “solutions” are destruction in disguise and intentionally create confusion bonding “followers” to the leader promising they can fix it all, if you just give over control to them.

What to do?

• Start with being broadly informed in order to be insightful.  

• No singular sources of information and ensure your sources are not opinion and media oriented, explicitly designed to generate money via your attention.

• Be on your guard for fake and false presentations.

• Shine light on any deceit with confidence.

False leaders eventually fail, and the slippery con will be ultimately exposed when misrepresentations fall away, and true agendas are exposed.

In order to limit the damage and trauma that is left in the wake behind toxic leadership, buffer and protect those that are vulnerable. Follow up with caring deeply for others in community through all forms of advocacy. Action absorbs anxiety and is the best antidote to worry.

You can spot the difference between a con and honest engagement because the con will prove to be lifeless, dying vine with no positive outcomes. On the side of authenticity, it will be vibrant and bear the sweet fruit benefits. Toxic leaders generate fear driven through untruths while healthy leaders choose to create freedom and peaceful community. Pay attention to which direction the indictors are pointing, and you will have a better chance of avoiding the grift and false leadership theatre.

Force Multipliers

Teams are made up of people with talents, skills, and capabilities. Some of these characteristics overlap but they also have varied distribution, meaning individuals possesses variances and that is a very good thing.

Each person is a human toolbox equipped to perform certain tasks, duties, or roles. Also, each person on a team is a contribution multiplier. Every member of a team is a human with unique emotions, perceptions, aspirations, with varied paths to contribution.

Teams full of diverse and capable talent do not need leaders who supervise or give direction and then inspect like a factory floor supervisor. They do need great leaders of teams who are force multipliers. These types of leaders understand how to effectively work toward enabling, equipping, and creating a performant system of people. Through clarity of vision, orientation, strategic plans, and execution they setup performance levers and amplifiers for the people they lead.

Performance oriented teams respond best to leaders who understand how to balance work targets, skills, people, and approaches with a combination of working EQ, people intelligence, and soft skills deployed to communicate with impact. They find ways that amplify team member contribution, generate imagination, and tap into potential delivering the right innovations and change.

Clean Push for 2025

Welcome to 2025!

I tend to be less of a fan of resolutions for the new year. Resolutions often seem to be a list of aspirational yet broken promises to ourselves. That is generally not a very attractive start to whatever growth or success you want to experience in the upcoming year. I suggest a different picture to hold in our minds.

If you have ever watched Olympic bobsledding, you quickly understand the success of an entire run down the course starts at the top. The strength, coordination, and timing of the first few steps of the team pushing the sled at the top of the hill dictates how well the entire rune will go. Then, after that big initial tightly choreographed push, the ride becomes all about the navigation of tight corners at high speed without creating friction.

The cleaner the push at the top, the faster the run. Also, ironically, the faster the speeds, the more challenging it is to control a friction free run, avoiding brushing the walls or worse, losing control and rolling the sled over at 90 miles per hour.

The push, the speed, the navigation, the reduced friction, and the confidence and courage to “let it ride” are key to the most competitive results. The scores highlight competition between teams but when you carefully listen to the team members discuss their performance, you notice something. At every step of execution from how they push, load the sled, break or steer, they are competing with themselves, looking to achieve their personal best for every stage of the run. It’s a team sport with an intense component of individual performance. When strong individual performances come together, the end result can be a multiplier for elite execution and results.

What does this have to do with 2025? I like to think that the January of a new year is like that push at the top of the hill. It sets the stage, sets expectations and aspirations, takes courage and is where you get to build your best momentum for the best results at the bottom. It’s a beautiful picture where every run is full of potential and opportunity.

When you show up for your 2025 run, your preparation, your mindset, and your execution of all you have learned and practiced previously comes together to drive your own personal and professional growth towards great results at the bottom of the course. Better yet, you can have great runs and not so great runs but are still able to get better and keep growing.

I think this makes for a better strategy than the classic approach to resolutions and depending on willpower to magically help you accomplish your best. For 2025, dare to put yourself in the driver’s seat.

Be Real

The concept of grasping and experiencing the genuine and authentic part of life can seem increasingly more elusive with hyper-mobile societies and the advent of generative AI and deepfakes technologies, among a dozen other trends. Many of us run faster and harder in most every area of our lives than ever before in human history. The best deep and meaningful connections and true community requires an intentionality and a reduced speed that is in a state of friction with much of what surrounds us culturally and technologically. Despite all of those headwinds, my sense is that being real and authentic is worth the fight and effort. What does it take? Her are some practices to keep in mind and continually practice.

• Seek to give attention more than seeking it.

• Let others know they are important.

• Discern when others are being genuine or just masking and manipulating.

• Your own skin feels great on you, not uncomfortable.

• What you say and do demonstrates trustworthiness.

• Seek out simplicity of needs over the complexity of wants.

• Mature EQ enables you to manage critique and feedback whether on target or not.

• Aware of strengths and blind spots while avoiding both arrogance and self-depreciation.

• Consistentcy is a hallmark behavior.

Making Bank

Most people work hard in life to make the investment and effort to be successful at any number of things through time, energy, resources, and perseverance. There are times we look back at all the work and can still be unsure of our progress and question its value.

A powerful mindset to explore is to orient your mental posture towards having confidence that what you have done so far has been banked, meaning it’s there, it counts, and is a compounding investment. This perspective frees you up to turn 180 degrees from assessing and critiquing what’s already done and recast your focus on looking ahead and moving towards what’s next, leveraging what’s in the bank.

RPM’s

If you are the type of person who likes to create checklists as an execution guide for your day, week, or even your life, here are some targets to incorporate into your behavior patterns, professionally and personally, to keep moving the needle.

It’s really about the RPMs. In this case we’re not talking about “Revolutions Per Minute” but “Resonance Per Moment”. Creating harmonization across all you do and invest in yourself is what builds up the amplification and impact of who you are.

Try these:

• Learn something 

• Teach something

• Inspire others to keep going

• Take the best risks

• Manage change well

• Make decisions you can feel good about

• Do work you are excited to do

Performance Killers

Toxic leaders don’t foster performance, they undermine it. 

Toxic leaders breed inferior work, break down collaboration, impede ownership, and extinguish purpose and engagement.

Toxic leaders generate a constant hum of incivility that breaks confidence while creating increasing resentment and unrest.

Toxic leaders’ behaviors dismantle others from the inside out.

Toxic leaders take away agency and violate the physical, emotional, and psychological experiences of others, diminishing and assaulting professional and interpersonal identities. 

Toxic leaders exert control and violate boundaries that result in repeated and unilateral damage.

Toxic leaders are grifters, conmen (and women) who spin up operating realities that are untrue and distribute conflict and fear to empower themselves instead of others.

Toxic leaders are abusive, but the abuse too frequently goes unrecognized as such in professional spaces.

Respect ALWAYS generates the best results. When leaders uplift and support others for the greater good, they inspire true leadership and foster a culture of trust and empowerment.

Interviewing Is Story Curation

When an organization interviews a candidate for a job opening the interviewer is most often focused on a candidate’s skills and experiences. It’s too seldom understood that the most valuable and impactful interviews go beyond these basic components to include a greater sense of the candidate’s professional story, inclusive of their values and motivations. This means asking better questions and practicing much deeper listening and conversational reflection and mirroring.

A more powerful wheilding of the interview process can be found in exploring the intersection of the candidates professional and personal story arc and the organizations own story and narrative direction. To capture that value, the interview must move beyond a skills and experience inventory and inspection approach to venturing into deeper waters.

 Much like a movie director pulls the context and meaning out of a script to transform it and create an impactful experience on screen, interviewers can work within a larger frame that creates a broader landscape for both the candidate and the hiring organization. It allows both parties to attain better clarity and a sense of the potential opportunity related to joining into one another’s stories. In most organizations, there is room to develop interviewing skills to be more impactful and foster the benefits that come from becoming intentional story curators.