Coach Dan's Blog

📖 “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.” -  William Faulkner It takes courage to stand up and say something that may go against the grain, or be an unpopular opinion. Faulkner challenges us to change the world by sharing our ideas - for standing up and challenging the status quo. Leaders have to strike a balance between efficient decision making, and creating a space where team members feel safe to add a differing perspective or contrary idea to the conversation. Innovation requires "outside of the box" thinking. Do you create an environment where team members can "rasie their voice?" Need some ideas to try? Maybe explore one or more of these... ✔️ Establish (and continually revisit) shared norms ✔️ Give space and effectively listening ✔️ Communicate with compassion ✔️ Reward speaking up ✔️ Frame work as experiments ...

  📖 A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."
 -Lao Tzu True leadership is about helping people to grow, and enabling them to succeed. By creating a clear understanding of the goal, equipping people with the tools they need, creating an environment where people can feel empowered and inspiring them to work together to achieve... a leader fulfills their purpose. Are you leading to equip, empower and inspire? Or are you leading to be seen?

  📖 “He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.” - Michel de Montaigne Those who belive the loudest voices have the best answer often miss out on hearing some of the most innovative ideas. Do not assign the highest value to the loudest idea. Ask the quiet people on the team what they think. It might just learn something new!

📖 “If I were asked for the most important advice I could give, I should simply say: stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” - Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy understood the importance of awareness and reflection. Pausing a moment and reflecting on your day is a vital way to continuously improve the way you work with your team, your partners, your clients and your customers. Did you pause and reflect today?  

  "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." Alvin Toffler Continuious Improvement means continuious learning. It means undderstanding that just because something worked yesterday, doesn't mean it will work tomorrow. It means that everything should be on the table to reevaluate and reassess. A growth mindset in necessary to continuiously improve. When was the last time you challenged your thinking, and learned something new?

  🥳 Happy National Awkward Moments Day! - March 18 Celebrate the day by Seeing the humor in awkward moments and have fun with them. Being vulnerable –Share stories about our own awkward moments with your team. Laugh over them and enjoy the memory. Helping someone else recover from an awkward moment. They may be embarrassing at first. Everyone is human, and everyone has awkward moments! Keeping in mind that no one is perfect, ever.

📖 “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” -Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche's thinking about how individuals interact when in a group closely aligns with the concept defined by Irving Janis in 1972 called "groupthink." ✏️ Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinions of the rest of the group. Individuals with differing opinions, or even opposed to the group's decisions frequently remain quiet in order to keep the peace rather than disrupt the crowd's uniformity. This phenomenon is common in the workplace, as the decision-making cycle continues to compress, and the pressure to deliver increases. It's a danger to leaders and managers because it reduces the likelihood of teams identifying and mitigating risk. Creativity and innovation is pushed to the side in favor of "goin...

  📖 “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” - John Dewey Some people view failure as a negative, and I can understand why that might be. Consider this.... 🤔 If you never fail, did you really give everything you could to something? 🤔 If you never fail, have you discovered everything there is to know about what you tried? 🤔 If you never fail, did you really ever take any risks? Making a team afraid to fail means they will never accomplish all that they could have in the first place... Try something and fail? Reflect and apply your learnings - this is the way to continuous improvement. What's stopping you?

  📖 "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Jane Goodall   The daily leadership calendar hits just right again!   Every single day we make an impact on those around us. Everything from the questions we ask, to the tone of our voice makes an impact on another person's day. What we believe in... what we value - comes shining through in the way that we show up to our colleagues, teams, partners, friends and families.   What kind of impact are you having today?   ❔ Are you leading with curiosity? Asking questions to grow and challenge, and then empowering to follow through can help a team member learn a new skill, or gain confidence in skills that are developing.   ❔ Are you balancing results with growth? Getting the job done is important, and when you balance getting results with learning new skills, ...

📖 “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”  ―  Plutarch Today is a great day to kindle the fire of curiosity in your mind. 🔥 Ask questions. 🔥 Listen to understand. 🔥 Encourage others to share different perspectives and ideas. 🔥 Show enthusiasm for finding answers. 🔥 Read or follow someone new. If you don't make time for curiosity, you run the risk of snuffing that fire out completely! What's stopping you? We all win together!

  “Do not give them a candle to light the way, teach them how to make fire instead. That is the meaning of enlightenment.” ― Kamand Kojouri   It's a fine line- balancing between helping your partners achieve a goal, and teaching them the skills (and building the experience) necessary to achieve their goals over and over and over again.   ⛔ "Just tell us what to do, and we will do it." ⛔ "Provide us the steps or the checklist." ⛔ "How do you want us to do this?"   This language is common, and it suggests to me that the team (regardless of level) has been conditioned to not take risks. To me it means they have learned through experience that their safest course of action is to have someone else solve the problem and instead just do as told.     In other words, they are doing exactly what they have been trained (and incen ted) to do.   Sure- some problems need to be solved right now! There can be an immediate benefit ...