Synthesizing: What Scott W Zimmerman Write about Leadership-related
I came across the page https://scottwzimmerman.com/blog/
Let’s go!
Notice how differently the extraordinary executive invests 100 units of time, energy, and attention to create a positive impact (value creation).
Instead of diluting attention in non-value-creating activities or trying to improve in too many areas at once, the extraordinary professional concentrates attention on what matters most — the one change that changes everything in their area of responsibility!
my takes: I know about this one already. Let’s keep going. But somehow, I’m wondering, am I doing it well? or not?
Think bigger
Unproductive patterns. Escaping unproductive work patterns is no easy task.
Think smaller. Escaping ingrained patterns requires better choices.
Leverage boundaries. You can expect to face 50-60 unplanned interruptions per day. Achieving anything of significance requires focused attention.
Blank canvas. Each week offers an unlimited number of ways to invest your time. Taking back control involves consciously designing days that enliven you
Concentrated effort. Your most significant work is a function of uninterrupted time and the focus you bring.
Daily escapes. The design you envision for your day will come under attack. Rather than succumbing to forces that could undermine your intentions, imagine and enact escape paths.
The power to manifest a professional life filled with greater meaning and impact comes down to the quality of your imagination and choices. Little by little, your weekly adjustments in thought and effort, stacked one atop the other, can create dramatic breakthroughs in the quality of your outcomes and work experience.
It’s easy to give lip service to using thwarted intentions and setbacks as opportunities to learn and adapt. In my work with boards, leaders, and teams, I regularly see stakeholders exclaim the virtues of after-action learning but rarely witness conversations that are anything more than surface-level explorations that frequently degrade into judgment and blame, wherein the opportunity for meaningful learning is lost. The robust inquiries that would improve leaders’ clarity remain mostly absent.
If leaders are to become higher functioning over time, they must level up their clarity, understanding, and insight to enact more powerful choices. Doing so will inform better decisions, more potent actions, and better ability to fulfill their intentions.
Mastery is achieved – as it always is – through dedicated time and practice. If you want to rise above the ordinary, building the robust skills that give you an unfair advantage in fulfilling your intentions, then like a professional athlete, you must deliberately train to improve. If you are interested in a community where you can train to rise above the ordinary, please explore MAX Q.
Working on this.
Pay attention to how simultaneously beautiful and diverse your vulnerable disclosure becomes. What emerges in your daily practice provides a glimpse into your degree of internal coherence and supports greater clarity.
Not only is journaling cathartic, but it may also open your eyes to the gifts of a sustained meditation practice.
I do. Let’s keep going. You should too, dear. Hehe.
When you ask questions to open people up, you have to inquire with a way of being, a care that demonstrates your sincere interest in their reflection and sharing.
How are you?
How’s your family?
Are you taking care of yourself?
Are you in need of any resources?
Anything I can do to help?
Anything I can do to make things easier for you?
And reciprocate their vulnerability. When you share what’s going well and what’s a challenge for you/your family, you are showing your people that you share many of the concerns, needs, and challenges they do. You nurture deeper trust.
If you and your leaders prioritize these “deep bumps” during this crisis, your company will have come together in a new way that makes your relationships and organization stronger on the other side
This one is quite hard for me. Somehow, it’s hard for me to maintain a relationship -like a lot of practice happened out there. I do have my style. Working on this. The goal is to earn trust from reliable one.
Step 1: Survey the under-performing areas
Step 2: Get curious about how your moods and choices perpetuate the issue.
Step 3: Envision new possibilities to positively shift your mood.
Step 4: Generate actions and new behaviors you are committed to putting in motion to create common clarity and build a stronger team.
Applying this. Indeed, being curious is a game changer.
Choosing to play the Bigger Game shifts a team’s perspective from relying on ordinary goals to stepping outside their comfort zones and daring to aspire to greater possibilities. It puts everyone’s collective attention on who they want to become while acknowledging their fears and limitations.
Instead of ducking what they are called to do, playing the Bigger Game as a team invites everyone to identify and openly push the edge of their capabilities. In growing through the inevitable obstacles and setbacks to do, the Bigger Game enables teams to go beyond settling for the ordinary.
Perhaps the greatest gift is the improved players they become as a result of producing something extraordinary, together.
I train my fear where. Currently, I fear nothing but the One whom I should too. Life is amazing. Also, I don’t know, I think this one resonated well with a current dynamic that happened in my study places. Isn’t it amazing? Lucky me.
None of us are immune to getting trapped in unproductive moods, but when those moods keep us from achieving our strategic objectives, they can and must be shifted. When you are not showing up with adequate aspirations and passion, your organization will lack the energy to escape the comfort and familiarity of its current performance.
Since effective leadership requires moving a community of people to action, leaders must become skilled in shaping their moods and the moods of their teams. By building organizations filled with ambitious, excited, curious, flexible, and connected people, no summit is out of reach.
Haha, remembering something. I just managed my mood so damn well till people said that I’m emotionless. I’m not bruh. I’m the sensitive one. I’m easily crying about things that deserve, haha.
14. Is Your Organization Inspired Or Resigned?
When you find your organization falling short of its full potential, don’t limit your assessment to the quality of your goals or your people. Often, the more pressing problem is something that’s out of view: the overriding mood and resulting quality of engagement.
Unconsciously, singing the mantra of working smarter, harder, and faster, which at times may bring some value, is often a gerbil wheel to nowhere. Instead, start paying attention to how prevailing moods may be limiting your organization’s larger potential. When your leaders and teams are no longer reacting and responding to situations borne of unproductive interpretations, their actions will take on greater purpose and power. This is where next-level performance occurs.
Another hard thing to do. Is this my responsibility? Hmmm, wondering.
15. How To Create A Culture Of Problem Solvers
Start putting your energy into permanent solutions to long-standing challenges. There is no need to push recurring issues into the future. Solving these problems in your organization is less time-consuming and more straightforward than you might think. By activating the “team brain,” and giving them authority to enact the solutions they develop, you are on your way to getting the people closest to the work to solve problems every day.
This one also resonated well with the current dynamic in my study place. Don’t know.
As quality thinking and actions take center stage, your problem solvers will begin to generate small tactical wins as they get one opportunity area under control before moving on to the next. Each underlying problem resolved means fewer future fires.
Leaving these tactical wins to your team also creates new space for you to solve progressively more ambitious and pervasive challenges, thereby delivering more significant victories to your stakeholders. These improved choices also enable greater control of your environment, allowing you to invest more leadership energy surfacing new possibilities and shaping your organization for the future.
Realizing this preferred future requires acknowledging the significance of the principles above and having the courage to methodically replace your current choices with newer, better ones.
They said a sign of wellness is not in a hurry. Agreed.
Steven Pressfield once said, “The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his self-mastery.”
While there will never be fewer things competing for our attention, leaders must take responsibility for their patterns. Since we live in an exponential world where things continue to speed up, you must improve your ability to slow things down; to cut your cognitive load. Each moment is an opportunity to make a new choice that puts you on the journey to freedom. As I observe my clients take back control, I can tell you the rewards of their newfound freedom are priceless.
What will you choose?
Another hard thing. I don’t know what kind of thing is a distraction for me. Would say that there is no one currently, is it safe to say so already? I live in freedom. Enjoying the journey, seconds by seconds. Also, I’m not in any rush and not interested in competition with others anymore. Am I making a good decision? I don’t know.
How to Activate This Principle in Your Business
Get curious. Assess the relationship between key leading and lagging indicators for your most challenging goals. Do you have a deep enough understanding of the ratios between key inputs and outputs?
Get clarity. Choose the most vital activity to improve. Ensure the activity is 100% in your team’s control and directly addresses the bottleneck that unlocks all downstream outcomes. Does everyone agree?
Get committed. In striving for higher performance, your team will be outside their comfort zone. They will face setbacks. Anchor your team to the larger aspiration. Inspire their courage. Foster group learning so they adjust their daily approach until they are successful. Are you inspiring new efforts from your team?
Keep Score! Track the details daily. Adjust commitments for the next day to make up for where the team fell short today. Are you focusing on the key difference-making activity?
Breaking the pattern of missing goals starts with a deeper understanding of the components that lead to the outcomes leaders desire. When leaders get clear on the behavior, that if transformed changes everything, and teams get committed to a higher standard on that behavior, get ready for next-level results!
This success principle has repeatedly unlocked 100%+ improvements in performance for leaders in as little as 90 days. Find a place to activate the principle in your business
Working on this one. The last one is indeed the hard one. But yeah, I work to tackle that.
As with most ideas that are not fully formed, it’s vital to invest time for further incubation, imagination, exploration, and envisioning potential next steps. When the timing is right, invite your team to join you to become part of the journey, engaging and contributing ideas to discover even deeper wells of inspired focus.
Creating an improved future often requires new paths forward. It also means bringing more purpose and passion into what you are doing. By blocking time for what is most vital, you are taking an active step toward escaping the unconscious patterns that reinforce the status quo.
Breaking organizational drifting starts with learning to first recognize, and then escape your drifting. In my experience, you will never conquer drifting, instead, you must develop a practice to sculpt your choices into greater alignment.
As you build this habit, your speech will take on new clarity and inspiration, and this new energy, combined with more focused choices, will unlock not only your team’s performance, but continue to fuel new aliveness in your leadership.
Clarity oh clarity. I do invest my time there. Let’s see.
All too often, in the face of a baffling challenge, leaders search outside themselves and their organization. They can become fixated on pursuing a silver bullet to their organization’s dilemma(s), things like new software systems (e.g., ERP, CRM) or best-selling methods (the young rabbit hunter style). Invariably, the invested time, energy, and money do not produce the desired results.
Instead of looking outward to resolve the challenges they face, leaders benefit more from turning inward to:
Deepen their understanding of what’s really going on… to see things as they are
Use their inborn creativity to generate simple changes that allow them to apply the right amount of effort, in the right place, at the right time (the old rabbit hunter style).
When you learn to turn inward, you discover that what you need to meet this moment has been waiting for you.
What’s needed is already present. Developing the wisdom to apply the right leverage, in the right place, at the right time.
I know this one already. Let’s keep going. One thing I realized that once I’m busy working on myself, I become less envy or jealous about anything.
In 2004, Jim Clawson shared with my GE Croton ville cohort that neither title nor position distinguishes leaders from everyone else. Instead, it was their empowered point of view. From the moment I heard it, my ability to distinguish leaders who were playing defense from the consistent winners was profoundly changed. Since then, I’ve found value in explicitly defining the “point of view” that separates effective leaders:
Seeing what needs to be done
Understanding the underlying forces at play
Demonstrating the courage to initiate actions to make things better
So how do you help a leader trade the limiting role(s) they’ve chosen for a more powerful point of view? In my experience, nothing beats:
A direct conversation about what the character they’ve chosen to play reveals about them
“Contrasting” the difference between the character they’ve been playing and that of effective leaders
Asking the leader to articulate their understanding of the implications of the character they’ve been playing vs. stepping up to the effective leader’s way of thinking
Securing their promise to change their way of thinking and actions moving forward
Direct conversations that instill explicit expectations for improvement can help leaders take responsibility for how they are holding themselves and the larger organization back. It can also help them see how casting themselves in the “leader role” empowers them to lead with full power.
Haha, I’m the master of that direct conversation thing. You should too. It’s totally liberating.
That’s all. I just put it here what the summary is. I also provide some reflections on this with my current state. Found some interesting ones. I think you should do yours too. It’s amazing.
Last but not least, thank you for reading. Have a great day!