A Lesson in Customer Loyalty: How to Shift From Quid-Pro-Quo to Serving People w/Jenn McMillen
Let's Fix Leadership
Whether we’re talking about our customers or teams, loyalty is the currency of successful relationships. In the business world of yore, loyalty was one-sided, it was buy something or do something to get something. Today that quid-pro-quo style falls flat. Just like Taylor Swift…brands who do well understand that having customers and employees is a privilege, and they aim for relational loyalty, not transactional relationships. How do we put authentic loyalty at the heart of our businesses? What has changed about leadership as the world of work continues to evolve? In...
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How to See the Gifts in Workplace Adversity
Let's Fix Leadership
You know that job that makes you miserable, that boss who makes your life hell and that co-worker who’s difficult to work with? They are specially wrapped gifts that can work in your favor. Hear me out… Do these situations suck? Do they test our patience? Yes and yes. But, what you might not see in that moment are the skills, competencies, and empowering opportunities these difficulties give you. I mean, I can personally attribute starting my own business to my own workplace adversity! Difficult bosses and peers serve as live training grounds for enhancing our...
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Not Making a Decision IS Making a Decision...Here's Why
Let's Fix Leadership
Decisions, decisions…the hallmark of good leadership is swift and impactful decision-making. But let’s be real, amidst the whirlwind of emails, meetings, projects, and strategic pivots, the decisions we have to make can be so overwhelming, that we can decide not to decide at all. Here’s the problem though, not making a decision can be just as detrimental as making the wrong one. It causes projects to stall, innovation to wane and it erodes trust and competence. So whenever we’re holding off on making a choice - we have to be clear: is it a strategic pause to...
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How to Master the Art of Influence
Let's Fix Leadership
Influence is a powerful currency for motivation and success…it’s no wonder why influencer marketing has become a literal billion-dollar industry! Being influential doesn’t just work on social media. In a workplace, it’s the lifeblood of leaders who can propel the collective without demanding, manipulating, or dictating. A combination of trust, inspiration, and communication - influence is the silent force that packs a mega punch, and the more influential a leader you are, the more success you’ll have. What are some of the effects of influential leaders? How do we become...
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How to Fix Your Addiction To Being Right
Let's Fix Leadership
“My people don’t do what I ask them to, they don’t listen and they don’t come up with innovative ideas.” Leaders say it all the time, and if I had a penny for everytime I heard this, I could buy my own private island! But before you point a finger at your team, what if this is all because you’re addicted to being right. Yes, like sugar and shopping, being right can be the drug of choice for leaders, and because they are so accustomed to getting it, they alienate their teams. How do you know you’re addicted to being right? Here’s an easy tell: notice how you feel when the good...
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Triangulation: Stop the game, build trust
Let's Fix Leadership
When conflict arises at work, there are two ways people deal with it. Go directly to the person in question or tell other people about it first. Many times, we take the latter route, and it never goes well. If you ever played telephone as a kid, you’ll know that the original message always gets twisted somewhere along the way. At work, the stakes are much higher though. The result: gossip, miscommunication, damaged team dynamics, a toxic work environment, and the question you can’t shake: is everyone talking about everyone else behind their backs? When information gets...
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How to Lead Through All the Noise
Let's Fix Leadership
Ever tried to have an insightful conversation in a room with loud music? It’s noisy…and that’s what leading feels like today. From the oceans of emails flooding our mailboxes, back-to-back meetings filling our calendars, to the urgent but not important tasks that demand our attention. There’s a lot to wade through in today’s world. When we’re distracted and living in the noise, we get stuck there, and sometimes, we don’t even notice it…maybe that’s why they invented noise-canceling headphones. If we want to stay focused on what matters and what moves the needle,...
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The Neuroscience of Leadership: How to Eliminate Fear and Create Safety w/Danny Langloss
Let's Fix Leadership
Now that we know a lot more about how the brain works, a lot of what we’ve been taught about leadership is just plain wrong. We have to throw it out the window and never look back. From a neuroscience perspective, there are 2 categories of chemicals constantly firing off in our brains - happy hormones and fear hormones. The old school model of leadership did nothing but trigger a good old cortisol hijack - induce fear and kill innovation. In order to have cultures that bring out the best in people and produce great results, everything we do has to mitigate fear. In a nutshell: in the modern...
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Contagious Emotions: How to Harness This Perfectly Natural Human Phenomenon
Let's Fix Leadership
Like an illness on a playground, emotions are contagious, and in a business setting, they can spread fast! It’s how the annoyance of one colleague can catch on and bring the whole office down, and how a good vibe can have a huge ripple effect. Being a great leader is understanding that humans are going to human, that our people have emotions, and that they will affect the climate of our organizations. How do we navigate emotional contagion and use it to better our organizations? How do we use our own emotions to lead by example? In this episode, I talk about how to...
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Your Culture Isn’t Your To-Do List, It’s The Long Game w/Rosa Ponce de Leon
Let's Fix Leadership
Unlike the next meeting, deliverable, or deadline, working on our culture isn’t as simple as penciling it into our calendars. It’s a living, breathing process that never ends, it’s the long game that has to be front-of-mind for leaders. We know the world is busy and how easy it is to get bogged down in the to-do list, but the more we can step out of the routine of our roles, the better our organizations get. Weaving culture into every single facet of our teams takes a conscious reassignment of our minds. From focusing on our own silo of priorities to the needs of the whole...
info_outlineIf there’s one word I want to gently pluck out of the vocabulary of leaders, it would be…. “opportunities”.
Why, you ask? I mean it seems like a totally innocent and well-meaning word, right? Well… sometimes, when we tell people on our team what their opportunities are, we actually end up messing with their superpowers.
Instead, we can manage their strengths so they show up with their best foot forward. In this episode, I share a better way to think about opportunities as a leader.