Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 45

Get a Life!

Leave All Work and No Play in the Dust

For my first job in Washington, DC, I worked very long hours. One night, a rare dinner date was lined up. “What time do you get off?” my date asked to coordinate. A long, awkward pause followed. “It’s kind of a philosophical question,” I finally admitted.

That was fine by me at the time, but it shouldn’t have been. We all have busy seasons in our lives, yet there’s more to life than work. A whole lot more.

This can be a hard point for especially driven people to grasp. We tend to see a lot of the things with which people occupy their time as pointless distractions.

Hobbies? Why? Closing time? What’s that? Weekends? You mean second and third Fridays, right? A normal amount of sleep? Who has the time?

Turning it around

I eventually figured out that this was the wrong way of doing life, with a lot of help from family and friends. But that took a long time—7 years in DC, all told.

When it finally dawned on me what was wrong, I changed everything. In a shift chronicled in this space before, I switched jobs, moved all the way to the other side of the country, and started living life in earnest. Among many other things, I

Went to Bellingham Bells baseball games and bought season ticketsGot back into comic booksAccidentally started collecting original paintingsAte at practically every restaurant in Whatcom CountyGot marriedStarted cookingTried my feet at stand-up comedyBought a houseStarted a Saturday brunch for family and friends

There is one work-related myth that highly productive people, including the younger version of yours truly, often believe. It is that if you make time to live life, you can’t accomplish very much at your job.

The older version of me knows better. People who have made the same shift are likely to look back at their work product and say, “Oh balderdash!” All work and no play makes Jack a dull, ineffective worker, we now know.

By doing nothing but work, we court burnout. This leads to stagnation. By living life, we renew our mental and physical energies. This allows us to work much more creatively and productively in the time we do work.

“ By doing nothing but work, we court burnout. This leads to stagnation.

—JEREMY LOTT

Not easy

I can just about hear some of your eyes rolling at this point. Sure, maybe that worked out for me, but your circumstances are different. It’s not so easy for you to pull it off right now, given where you are in life and in your organization.

Know this: Living life is rewarding for me and for others who have made the shift, but it’s very far from easy. If you’re reasonably good at what you do, more work than you can manage will stalk you.

You’ll make a mistake and say “yes” to too much of it sometimes. This will lead you to wonder if you’ve even made any progress. And if not, what’s the point of fighting it?

Know that it’s going to be a struggle. You’ll have to fight to keep it from crowding out any chance of living. You’ll have to learn to say “no” more creatively and forcefully.

The solace temptation

This will be especially hard when your own life goes from great to a horror – as happened in my own life just last year. When serious setbacks happen, you’ll be tempted to find solace in your work.

Granted, piling it on can be a great distraction, for a time. But I would argue that you owe it to look yourself in the mirror and ask, “Is that really what I want out of life?”

“ If you’re reasonably good at what you do, more work than you can manage will stalk you. You’ll have to learn to say “no” more creatively and forcefully.

—JEREMY LOTT

The end?

Work can be truly great, but most jobs end these days and much sooner than they did for our forebears. Too many people find themselves out of a job and unsure of what to do with themselves.

They get lost because they derived most of the telos – their unfolding, momentum, or purpose – in their lives from their employment. In setting themselves up for the “good life” down the road, they never really learn how to live.

That may be the end that you’re staring down, but it doesn’t have to be. Do you see where your story is headed and crave a course correction?

Then start here: Decide that there’s more to your life than working, and go fight for it.

Self-Care As a Leadership Discipline

For leaders, there never seems to be enough time in the day, and our own needs are often the ones that get shortchanged. Now imagine what your life would be like if you really did have time for both your career and family and to take care of yourself.

5 Ways to Hold Shorter Meetings

Take Things to the Next Level, in Half the Time

When Bryan Stockton was pushed out as CEO of toymaker Mattel, he fingered a complacent company culture for dipping profits. In fact, he went one step further and blamed the lack of innovation on bad meetings.

Stockton’s story has been on my mind because I’m releasing a new book today called No Fail Meetings. Meetings are important but the way they’re being conducted in many organizations today is incredibly wasteful.

How wasteful? Some estimates peg the loss to American businesses of bad meetings as high as $37 billion annually. Many large companies lose as much as $75 million a year to bad meetings. I don’t care how big the company is – $75 million is a huge hit to the bottom line. In my book, I lay out a detailed plan for holding fewer, more effective meetings, and would encourage all leaders who are looking to get a handle on meetings to give it a read.

Fewer AND shorter

For this column, I want to focus on the shortening those important meetings that have to be held. It may be a challenge to both cut the number of meetings and their length at the same time. With fewer meetings, you might feel pressure to make the remaining meetings longer to make up for it, but that is a huge mistake.

Time on the clock is money. In meetings, that compounds. If you have a meeting of a half dozen or more people, one hour-long meeting can cost your organization hundreds of dollars. If it’s a meeting of the executive staff, thousands. If you halve not only the number but also the length of meetings, you’ll save a lot of company time and money for better uses.

Here are five tested ideas for how to get out of those meetings faster:

1. Schedule shorter meetings

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to the time allotted to it. That is absolutely true of meetings. One reason we spend so much time in them is that we schedule them too long. Consequently, conversations that should have taken ten minutes instead frequently stretch to fill a whole hour—and people’s eyes glaze over about halfway through.

“ One reason we spend so much time in meetings is that we schedule them too long.

—MICHAEL HYATT

A solution to this problem is simply to schedule shorter meetings. However, since the boss or manager usually runs a meeting, we can run into an obvious problem. Let’s say the half hour is up and she wants to keep talking?

2. Stick to the time limit

Don’t just cut her off and say, “Time’s up!” but a reminder that you’re going over doesn’t hurt. If you want to hack down the length of meetings, it’s best to have that conversation well in advance and agree that, in almost all cases, you’ll stick to the time limit or even break early.

It also helps to appoint a meeting facilitator, one of whose jobs is to say that time has almost been reached and is now up, people. The meeting facilitator serves other, vital functions for effective meetings that I detail in the book.

3. Have meetings off-site

You can use the venue to help enforce this time limit. At your office, there’s little to keep you from running long. But if you have a meeting room reserved off-site for a limited time, others can help you enforce the time limits. After all, others may need the space after. Or you can use virtual space to hold meetings and use applications with automatic cutoff times. When the app quits, the meeting’s over.

4. and 5. Plan and read ahead

Two other major reasons that meetings run so long is that we don’t do enough planning or reading ahead. If you go into the meeting with a detailed agenda and with people already up to speed on the issues up for discussion, you will better know where you’re going and what the obstacles are that have to be cleared out of the way.

Good meetings can be great

Meetings can be one of the greatest wastes of time and money in business, but they can also be some of the most effective ways to pool talent and collaborate on key projects. In other words, meetings can make or break your business. No Fail Meetings offers a proven process to stage high-level, successful meetings and avoid all the rest. What are you waiting for?

Get Your Copy Today!

 

 

How to Shut Down Annoying Meeting Behaviors

Tips for Dealing with 8 Common Disruptors

As a young leader, I was excited to attend the annual gathering of my professional organization. It promised three days of learning and networking, plus a few business sessions. During the first session, one of my elder colleagues, a man wearing bright red suspenders, rose to ask a question, something something about whether a point of privilege required a second or could be decided by the chair without a vote. It was the kind of thing that would have had Henry Robert himself reaching for the Rules of Order.

Later that day, he stood again, this time to call for a division of the house after a voice vote. So we all voted again, this time by standing.

It went on like that for three days. Every time we got close to a decision, Mr. Red Suspenders pulled another rabbit out of his procedural hat and killed the momentum.

A couple of years later, I moved to another part of the country and attended a different regional gathering. Much to my surprise, the same guy showed up there, this time asking a series of questions with a negative undertone. His cynicism was infectious and polarized what should have been a straightforward business meeting.

Actually, it wasn’t the very same man, but they could have been twins. Both had the same need for attention and the same annoying habit of derailing discussion. I think they even wore the same suspenders.

Over the years, I’ve run into this guy—or one of his siblings—in board meetings, brainstorming sessions, creative conferences, classrooms, industry panels, and any number of places people gather to get things done. He comes from a family of eight, and I’ve gained some skill at spotting the family resemblance and shutting down the disruptive behavior.

Here are the additional seven most annoying people you meet in a meeting—and how to handle them.

The Latecomer

Habitual latecomers are a huge distraction, especially when the leader restarts the meeting for their benefit.

To deal with a chronically tardy attendee, first ignore them. Don’t trigger further disruption with a greeting. Above all, don’t reward the behavior by repeating previously given information. When they ask, “What did I miss?” say, “You can catch up on that later.” Then quickly move on.

If the behavior persists, address it in a personal meeting. If it continues to be a disruption, you can resort to the “nuclear option”: bar entry to the room after the session starts.

The Cynic

They cynic is recognizable by three persistent behaviors: muttering, head wagging, and eye rolling. This naysayer is usually an old-timer within the organization. Having been around for years, they believe they’ve seen it all and that no new approach will ever be successful.

Dealing with the cynic in public will only enlarge their platform. Call out the behavior one-on-one, focusing on what’s acceptable in the meeting. (To address their long list of gripes would require a three-day retreat.)

Say something like, “Please don’t hold side conversations during the meeting,” or “If you have specific objections, voice them. But it’s discourteous to roll your eyes every time someone speaks.”

The Contrarian

The contrarian differs from the cynic in motivation. While the cynic is driven by disillusionment, the contrarian is fueled by anger. They may believe they should be the one leading the meeting, or that their department doesn’t get proper funding, or that their pet project should have been adopted. Their anger is manifested through constant objections and questions posed with a decided edge.

Deal with the contrarian by calling out the hidden agenda, during the meeting if need be. “Jeff, I’m sorry your project was defunded, but we have a responsibility to bring in this project on deadline.” Or, “Wow, it seems like you have a lot of anger about this issue. Why is that?” Generally, the contrarian wants to keep the hidden agenda hidden.

Ramblin’ Man

Allowing attendees to ramble and repeat the same comments is one of the top 10 reasons people hate meetings. Most ramblers are innocent perpetrators; they don’t realize what they’re doing.

Gently redirect the rambler with a simple two-step. First, look for a moment to butt in. Yes, just cut them off. Second, quickly affirm what they’ve said and then redirect. “Thanks, Ron. I like that thought. Let’s see what others are thinking.”

If Ramblin’ Man pipes up too often, adopt a one-and-done rule so that no one speaks twice until everyone has spoken once. To head him off at the pass, call on specific group members to speak rather than opening the floor.

Ms. Know-It-All

Expertise is welcome in any meeting, but when combined with arrogance it makes for an insufferable attendee. Know-it-alls generally have something important to contribute, but their condescension and closed-mindedness shut down any meaningful discussion.

Deal with them by pointedly overruling their attempt to shut down debate. “I appreciate your experience, Stephanie. That’s valuable. But I think it’s important to hear what others think as well.” As with the rambler, you can pre-empt the know-it-all by calling on others to speak first.

The Multitasker

This disruptor takes many forms: the snacker, the texter, the email catcher upper, the quick phone caller. Their mere presence is a huge distraction to others.

Deal with the multitasker firmly, directly, and immediately. “Jim, let’s have laptops closed for this session,” or, “Barb, can you please take that call outside? We need to keep on track.”

The Weak Presenter

By failing to take control of a meeting, a weak presenter allows others to derail it. If your team has a weak leader, see them outside the meeting and offer to help. Point out the behavior that’s causing a problem, then tactfully mention a technique for dealing with it. “To keep our meetings on time, maybe we should skip the recap for latecomers,” or, “Could we have a no-food policy for these meetings? I think we’d get in and out quicker.”

If you’re a typical executive, you’ll spend up to 50 percent of your time in meetings, and your employees will attend over 60 meetings per month. You owe it to yourself to make that time as productive as it can be. As a leader, you have full authority to send Mr. Red Suspenders packing. Your entire team will thank you.

How Did We End Up with So Many Meetings?

A History of Distrust and Micromanagement

Meetings are a necessity. Meetings also often stink. Typically, they are a waste of time. There are too many meetings—and most of them are often poorly-organized, lack coherent agendas, serve to do little more than reaffirm hierarchies than achieve results. As a result, poorly-run meetings cost companies $37 billion a year in lost productivity. Employees (including 65 percent of managers) say meetings keep them from getting work done, and job dissatisfaction increases exponentially.

Yet we spend more time than ever holding and attending meetings. The average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings, more than double the time spent in the 1960s, according to University of North Carolina Charlotte Professor Cliff W. Scott. Thanks to the slow-but-steady embrace of telecommuting, advancements in technology that make it easier to hold meetings anywhere, and our nation’s longstanding myth that working harder and longer yields better results, we continue to drown in meetings.

So why do we have so many meetings? Thank the legacy of management scientists whose efforts did more to foster micromanagement and distrust than make workplaces more efficient. Add in the reality that workplaces are poorly-structured to achieve results, and there is little wonder why meetings rarely get the job done.

A legacy of distrust

Until the early 20th century, few Americans ever attended a work meeting. Sure, you would have attended a town hall or school board meeting if you lived in a small town. But in general, the only people attending meetings on any regular basis were politicians and the men who owned and ran corporations. Even for the latter, those were likely rare.

Then came Frederick Winslow Taylor and his concept of scientific management. Driven as much by distrust of workers and disdain for expertise and specialization as by the legitimate need to make it easier to bring millions of unskilled men to efficiently pump out more products, Taylor and his disciples thought micromanaging employees (and the underlying belief in centralized planning) was as critical to making workplaces efficient as the motion studies they used to set production quotas.

This meant requiring workers to punch time clocks in order to track how long they worked, and corporate bureaucracies that included workers reporting to several supervisors who tracked the assembly line (as well as each other). By the mid-20th century, this micromanagement spread into white-collar fields such as law through practices such as billable hours, under which partners and associates jot down every little thing they do during the workday.

“ Meetings are a necessity. Meetings also often stink.

—RISHAWN BIDDLE

Meetings became part of that micromanagement impulse. How can you trust your staff to do their jobs if you aren’t regularly conferring with them? Thus came the shop floor meetings where foremen grunted out orders, meetings up on the floors above where vice presidents dictated to mid-level managers, and meetings in the corporate suite where CEOs checked on everyone while crafting five-year plans. Over time, even more meetings, from those for crafting vision statements to those dreaded performance reviews, became the norm.

As the Soviet Union and many a once-powerful industrial giant found out, the micromanaging turned out to be ineffective and wasteful, especially as knowledge-based work with an emphasis in expertise and specialization became the norm. As gurus such as Peter Drucker and Nan Russell point out, trust is critical to the success of institutions.

Yet the distrust promoted by Taylor remains a specter in many workplaces – especially in the form of the endless meetings that remain the norm. As with cubicles and open floor plans, scheduling meetings often end up being more about command and control than about getting work done.

When meetings don’t work

But it isn’t just about the glut of meetings. It is also about how they are structured. As with the drive-bys and interruptions that make it difficult for you and your colleagues to do your best work, poorly-organized meetings are another way in which workplaces are structured to make innovation, creativity, and teamwork illusory.

Just 17 percent of executives said meetings were productive, according to a survey led by Harvard Business School Professor Leslie A. Perlow. They aren’t alone. Few people think that meetings foster productive teamwork or help them in their individual efforts. The disdain for them often shows up in colleagues showing up late for meetings as well as in those references to Dilbert comic strips about how meetings waste time.

“ As with cubicles and open floor plans, scheduling meetings often end up being more about command and control than about getting work done.

—RISHAWN BIDDLE

Legendary management consultant Williams R. Daniels declared 22 years ago that poorly-structured meetings are signs of bad workplaces. This makes sense. After all, how can teams and colleagues trust each other if something as simple as a meeting agenda cannot be developed beforehand? Poorly-structured meetings waste the precious time you and your colleagues need to do the best work as well as help your institutions succeed in their missions.

A well-structured meeting is actually quite simple to put together. Michael Hyatt has a new book called No Fail Meetings, released today, that packed with ideas how to make meetings more focused, fewer, and shorter. (Buy your copy without delay.) But as with developing Focus Thursdays for uninterrupted work, making sure that meetings are well-structured takes intentional effort. This, of course, starts from the corporate suite and filters all the way down through the enterprise. But each one of us can take steps to both have better meetings when necessary—and fewer of them in the first place.

Why stop at Thursday?

In fact, in a sort of inverse Focus Thursday, Education technology entrepreneur Mattan Griffel suggests that meetings should be limited to one day during the week. That move would not only allow for you and your colleagues to gain uninterrupted time for work, it would even force people to decide whether a meeting is necessary in the first place. In the age of email, Slack, and other forms of communication, not every issue requires a face-to-face or teleconference.

While many organizations couldn’t implement this advice right away, moving toward it would help. More focus time and fewer meetings is a step in the direction of greater productivity and greater job satisfaction.

We will never totally get away from meetings. But we can do a whole lot more with fewer of them, done right.

How to Keep Meetings from Ruining Your Productivity

Meetings are a necessary part of organizational life, and every leader needs to convene them. Unfortunately, we often allow them to run on autopilot, trapping our team in a never-ending cycle of pointless meetings. Today, we’ll show you the real purpose of meetings. And we’ll share 3 questions that will make your team more productive than ever before.

Don’t Bet the Farm on Brainstorming

3 Reasons to Think Twice Before Scheduling that Meeting

I can tell you with some precision the moment I first doubted group brainstorming. This was many moons ago. A medium sized media firm that wanted to grow much larger had engaged my consulting services. They held a company-wide powwow, flying most of the managers and yours truly to corporate headquarters in Darkest Peru.

The CEO was a good speaker. He shared his vision for the company in broad strokes. He then invited us to help build on that by filling out post-it notes and placing them all over the room – grouped by category and recorded via camera phones for future use. He read all of these suggestions off. The ideas ranged from well-meaning but wrong to curious to useful. He used them to build a head of steam and most left the confab more excited about their jobs than when they arrived.

We were excited because it was fun. His enthusiasm was infectious and he was saying we, collectively, were the solution to the company’s problems. But an annoying little voice in the back of my head kept saying, “You know, I’m just not sure this will work.”

Fun, fun, fun

The reason my inner hopeful realist piped up was that most of the suggestions didn’t really address the problems that were limiting the company’s growth. Most of the ideas weren’t bad. Some of them were even quite good. But the bulk of them seemed unlikely to significantly advance the company’s larger objective of getting to the next level.

The same conversation that took place in my noggin also happened to Google’s Jake Knapp. Except it wasn’t HIS inner voice and it happened during a meeting. “Improving team processes” at Google had “became an obsession for me,” he writes in the book Sprint.

Knapp’s first attempts at improving company processes were a familiar corporate tactic. He got teams of engineers together for brainstorming workshops, and most everyone genuinely seemed to enjoy it. “Group brainstorming, where everyone shouts out ideas, is a lot of fun. After a few hours together, we have a big pile of sticky notes and everyone would be in great spirits,” Knapp explains.

But then something unexpected happened: “One day, in the middle of a brainstorm, an engineer interrupted the process. ‘How do you know brainstorming works?’ he asked.”

Good question!

Knapp confesses that he “wasn’t sure what to say” and that the truth of the matter was “embarrassing.” He had been dutifully surveying brainstormers to measure if they “enjoyed the workshops,” yet he hadn’t been measuring, well, “the actual results.”

So he took a hard look and didn’t like what he found. After reviewing the results from all the workshops that he had held, he “noticed a problem.” Namely, the ideas that “went on to launch and become successful were not generated in the shout-out-loud brainstorms” that he had been championing.

Rather, the best ideas were generated in response to great challenge under time pressure, and usually by an individual puzzling it out while occasionally consulting colleagues. “When the excitement of the workshop was over,” Knapp explains, “the brainstorm ideas just couldn’t compete.”

Don’t throw the brain out with the bathwater

This is not a plea to abandon all brainstorming. We keep at it because sometimes it works and enough of us have seen it work. People start throwing out ideas and something sparks and it leads to an undeniably good outcome.

Knapp himself didn’t think the tactic should be altogether abandoned. Instead, he incorporated a kind of structured brainstorming with sorting functions into his Sprint framework for developing prototypes that he went to champion at Google Ventures.

But Knapp rightly noticed both that there are many limits to brainstorming and that we tend to oversell its successes. If we want to get the most out of brainstorming, then we ought to be aware of these limits. The three that stand out are:

1. Brainstorming is susceptible to social pressure

If the right answer to, “How can we increase productivity?” is “Fire Wally” and Wally is at that meeting, this suggestion is unlikely to emerge from brainstorming. Similarly, if the boss is there and people know he doesn’t like a certain idea, even though it’s a good one, they’re unlikely to do much more than hint in that direction—if they’re feeling particularly brave.

“ If we want to get the most out of brainstorming, we need to be aware of these limits.

—JEREMY LOTT

2. Brainstorming can add too much clutter

The problem is not that people will come up with too many bad ideas but that they will come up with an overwhelming number of suggestions. This can lead to a decision fatigue by the person or persons tasked with sifting through the lists for diamonds and ponies.

3. Brainstorming takes the place of thinking

Too often, rather than sitting down, taking the time, really focusing on a problem to puzzle it out, we decide that’s too hard and schedule a brainstorming session instead.

Now certainly, if we’re really stuck after real effort, we should seek help. But to default to unstructured brainstorming is a mistake. We are robbing ourselves of the chance to do our best work. And we are expecting our coworkers to be miracle workers as we drag them into yet another meeting.

How to Lead High Achievers

Every leader would love to have a team of all-stars. But we sometimes discourage and frustrate our high performers without even realizing it. In this episode, we’ll show you how to manage the three tensions you face when leading high achievers. When we’re done, you will have the confidence to lead a highly engaged and productive team that produces way beyond your expectations.

4 Things Your People Need to Win at Work

What it REALLY Takes to Lead a Team to Victory

Good leaders know that you’re only as strong as your team. Businesses thrive or fail based on your team’s ability to execute the organization’s mission and goals with skill, precision, and passion.

Companies today lob everything from free gym memberships to unlimited vacation days at their most qualified applicants. But putting the right people in place is only half the battle. When it comes to guiding those team members to success, it’s the right working conditions—not free snacks, Friday happy hours, or the latest gadgets and software—that make the difference.

“ Good leaders know that you’re only as strong as your team.

—ANDREA WILLIAMS

Here are the four things your team members really need in order to their jobs, according to experts:

1. Psychological safety

Want to ensure your company is constantly on the cusp of innovation and advancement? Create an environment that gives team members freedom to experiment and collaborate without the fear of retribution.

“An environment where it’s safe to fail, to share what was learned from failure, and to be able to ask questions and seek support allows for learning and effective collaboration,” says Anna Kawar, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Leading Through Connection, an organization that equips leaders with the proper mindset and skills for increase effectiveness. “A leader can ensure that this is the case by modeling vulnerability, being transparent about what is known and unknown, asking the team questions to spark insight and discussion, and responding to failure in a constructive way to surface learning and not discourage innovation.”

Kawar stresses that opportunities for team feedback can be incorporated in easy, stress-free ways, such as check-ins every Monday morning or at the beginning of regularly scheduled team meetings. Kawar notes that this open team culture is great but fragile.

Giving people the opportunity to share personal triumphs and setbacks creates a culture of trust and safety. However, this atmosphere is quickly soured by team members who attack their colleagues and denigrate their efforts and achievements. To ensure safety, the nay-sayers must be course-corrected.

2. Constructive feedback

In addition to soliciting regular feedback from his team, experts agree that a good leader must also distribute feedback in heavy, constructive doses.

“A good way to think of feedback with employees is like a tank of gas in a car,” says millennial workplace expert Jeff Butler. “You need to fill up the car with gas (positive feedback) before you take gas out (constructive criticism). By utilizing this approach, not only do you allow individuals to receive constructive criticism, but they will begin to realize that you see what they are doing right, and you appreciate them for those things. Very often, employees never hear the positive feedback because they are only focusing on the negative. By separating the two, you will avoid undermining the positive feedback you give.”

Constructive feedback doesn’t just boost team morale; according to business and leadership coach Stan Peake of Insite Performance Coaching, this accountability is critical to continuous improvement and more productive than a quarterly review of failures. “Teams and individuals need to know when they are on target and when they are missing the mark,” Peake says. “It is a conversation about performance that is missing the mark and what can be done in real time to adjust their trajectory.”

3. Clearly defined goals

No matter the intention to deliver useful feedback, it’s difficult to assess a team member’s performance or progress toward certain goals if those goals aren’t clearly defined. “In the last 20 years, I’ve owned or co-owned four companies in four different industries, and after working with hundreds of direct reports, I’ve never seen anyone paste their job description to their desk,” Peake says. “Most employees—and contractors, for that matter—have a few key metrics that serve as the bar measuring their success at all times.”

Deborah Whitby, an Austin, Texas-based entrepreneur and church leader, agrees. She adds that distilling these metrics to their most actionable and easily understood form doesn’t just keep team members on track. The process also provides critical information to leaders about the organization’s health in key areas.

“[Team members] are not the visionary within the organization and should not be expected to thrive and be driven by an arbitrary long-term trajectory or dream,” Whitby explains “Even if the direction of the company and vision of the project is compelling and clear, employees need a gauge against which to measure their performance and be held accountable.”

“ Once goals and expectations are defined, a leader’s job is to simply give team members the tools they need to execute.

—ANDREA WILLIAMS

4. Access to vital information

Once goals and expectations are defined, a leader’s job is to simply give team members the tools they need to execute. And more often than not, says Kanwar, these tools refer to a friction-free flow of information.

“Teams are effective when each member has access to the information he or she needs, when he or she needs it,” Kanwar adds. “This allows people to make optimal decisions, find innovative solutions, and solve problems quickly and efficiently. A leader should, therefore, focus on ensuring that information flows into, through, and out of the team as smoothly as possible. When information is hoarded either within or outside of their team, it makes it harder for people to be effective at their jobs.”

Just Enough Cook

In Defense of Quiet Competence

Steve Jobs was a virtuoso. Using technology and design, he changed the way we think about computers, phones, music, and movies. Tim Cook, by contrast, comes off as a boring technocrat.

Jobs’s chosen successor as CEO of Apple is good at keeping the global supply chains for the company’s products going, which sounds like great COO material (his former job). Cook lacks Jobs’s panache, his attention to the smallest details, and his world-bending vision. He has come in for his share of criticism for thinking small, dabbling in politics, overseeing unimpressive product rollouts, and letting some services slip.

Michael Hyatt was so unimpressed by the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar last year that he returned it for a refund, calling the computer “everything Steve Jobs was against.” On Cook’s watch, song downloads, once a cash cow, have been eclipsed by CD and vinyl sales in the analog world and streaming services in digital. And the company had to eat crow when news broke that it was intentionally slowing down older iPhones to conserve battery life.

House that Cook bought

Given the picture I have just painted, you might think investors in one of the world’s largest companies are clamoring for Cook’s resignation and looking for more forward thinking leadership. Far from it. In the real world, investors love him.

One very satisfied investor is Scott Richert, a senior content network manager for the religious newspaper Our Sunday Visitor. Richert sent me two dates paired with two numbers: 8/24/11= $53.35 and 4/13/18= $174.73

$174.73 was the price of a single unit of Apple stock (AAPL) on the day Richert answered the question, “What value has Tim Cook added to Apple as CEO?” $53.35 was what (adjusting for a stock split) you could have bought that same unit for on August 24, 2011, the day Cook took over.

That significant increase in stock value (of over 200 percent in under 7 years) was on top of dividend payouts to investors in the intervening years—a dividend that “Steve Jobs was adamantly opposed to,” Richert pointed out.

Richert also sent a picture of his family’s grand old house in Huntington, Indiana. “[Tim Cook] didn’t add that to Apple, but that climb in AAPL added that to me,” he explained.

Design was Jobs one

Some leaders manage with a very heavy hand because of what social scientists call the “self-enhancement bias.” That is the mistaken belief that they know better and can do better than those under them in most cases. It’s also known as the “know-it all-bias” and the “I-can-do-everything bias.” It can lead to both micromanagement and poor planning.

Jobs had an undeniable genius for product design. That genius also made him susceptible to the self-enhancement bias. He raged against Apple computers having interior cooling fans because the sound disturbed him. Eventually, he grudgingly allowed fans to be installed and turned his concern where it should have been in the first place: on making the fans quieter. (Which Apple pulled off with aplomb.)

His passion for design closely associating the CEO with his products in the minds of consumers. When you bought a MacBook, iPhone, iPad, or an iPod, you thought of it as something Steve Jobs designed, even though he had actual designers and engineers working on aspects of the product. And people couldn’t wait to find out what he would come up with next.

After the pipeline

A lot of the criticisms of Cook have boiled down to this: He’s not Steve Jobs. A less secure leader might have tried to become his predecessor. Cook never has.

He oversaw the launch of the things that were in the “product pipeline” when Jobs died in 2011 and hasn’t tried to wow us with any of his unique visions since. The one significant rollout of a new product that happened under Cook, the Apple Watch, was a modest success that he didn’t try to take credit for.

Instead, he has kept things running smoothly, most of the time. When problems crop up, he does his best to address them. The most controversial political stance he took was probably the time where he refused to make a “back door” into an iPhone so that the government, or other actors, can get at Apple customers’ data.

Cook has made money doing this but by the standards of the CEOs of most huge tech companies, he’s a relative piker. And as we get close to his seven-year anniversary on the job, he is winning over former critics with a leadership style that borders on humility.

“Today I give up”

Leonid Bershidsky is one such objecter. “I’ve long been a critic of Apple but today I give up,” he began a recent column in Bloomberg View.

Under Tim Cook, he explained, “Apple is a rock of common sense, sobriety, dignified engineering supremacy, prudent financial and supply chain management, effective marketing, and customer-oriented retailing.” It has become a “traditional business that does most things well,” that usually gets things right, and that tries to fix the problems that crop up not just with apologies but also with real solutions.

Cook is not a loud man, but he doesn’t need to be to get the point across on this one. The results of his leadership speak volumes.