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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Henry Cloud
Read between
August 10 - August 23, 2021
When they can trust their ability to predict and shape, then they can confidently make bigger investments. Investment is always driven by trust.
We want people to invest their hearts, minds, and souls with us.
to trust really means to be “careless.”
When we trust each other in a team, we can be careless as well. We do not worry whether or not the other people on the team have our best interests at heart.
We do not worry about their character, or about their capacities. We do not have to watch our backs. We believe in them. And we know their track record. As a result, we invest ourselves.
Connection, intent, character, capacity, and track record are the building blocks of trust. The next question is how to form a team around those elements. How to execute it.
Make Specific Covenants for Behaviors A covenant is a promise to perform.
How will they measure how well they are “behaving”? How will they hold each other accountable for what they have agreed to do? For their values? How will they know that they are getting there?
Make it OK to confess to the team that you are not getting it done and ask for help.
Put In an Observing Structure One of the most powerful practices a team can use is to “observe themselves.”
“How did we do today on practicing our values?”
make time and space to work on building the team. I cannot stress this enough.
the higher you go in leadership, the fewer external forces act upon you and dictate your focus, energy, and direction. Instead you set the terms of engagement and direct your own path, with only the reality of results to push against you.
since your direction depends much upon you, and with so much hanging in the balance, there’s a question that becomes very important to answer: How are you leading yourself?
LEADERS OPEN THEMSELVES TO OUTSIDE INPUTS
Set a boundary on your tendency to be a “closed system,” and open yourself to outside inputs that bring you energy and guidance.
He put together a response that meticulously dismantled each of the chairman’s points, revealing how far from reality the criticism had been. His tone was calm and clinical, but his intellectual condemnation of the chairman was brutal. It was as if the captain of the debate team had just crushed the competition. Just before he hit the “send” button with a “cc” to the rest of the members of the board, he decided to call me.
scorcher.
He could see how in his “fact-driven way” he was totally out of control and had let his anger drive the agenda. It would accomplish little of what he really wanted. In the rush of emotion, he had forgotten his own boundaries, spun out of control, and failed to keep his larger goals in mind. He could see that now, but it had taken “outside eyes” (mine) to look at the situation and to give him the objective feedback that he needed—feedback that he could not provide for himself in such an angry state.
we all get subjective and do not see the whole truth, about ourselves or about others. We need outside eyes to help us.
I recently was referred to a CEO by another CEO who told him, “One of the reasons he will be most helpful to you is that he [meaning me] does not need you. He does not need your business or need to please you in any way. Therefore, he will tell you the truth, whereas someone else might be afraid to do that.” That is one of the values of outside input. Their voices aren’t muffled by conflicts of interest that may be present when you consult the internal advisers you already have.
He had never been limited by his own thinking, and had always turned to trusted advisers when he needed to get better. And he always had gotten better over time. He had opened the system to grow it.
Ken Blanchard says that feedback is the “breakfast of champions.”
the best performance situations are when we are getting the most immediate feedback, which is from the task itself,
not everyone has the same appetite for breakfast
wade in.
If you are afraid of making a mistake, you will never make bold moves.
You can have fears without being “fearful.” “Fearful” is when you let your fears make your decisions for you,
What’s holding me back? Is it lack of information or fear of making a mistake? Put some boundaries around the “need for more information” and the desire for absolute certainty.
Another resistance to change is the desire to “make sure everyone is on board,” or “we reach consensus,” which is sometimes code for “I want to make sure everyone is going to like it.”
Sometimes you may even have to ask your team to “disagree but commit.”
The third group is composed of the “no-no’s,” who are dead set against the change and unlikely to be persuaded otherwise. They require a different boundary altogether. As Kotter points out in his book, A Sense of Urgency, ignoring them is not an option, but there are a few ways you can effectively deal with them: distract them (give them something else to do so their energy and attention are elsewhere); expose them (keep them in the light so their arguments are seen by all to be just negativity and resistance); or remove them. But you have to set boundaries that prevent them from influencing
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“How can I best meet your needs?” is a question that every stakeholder wants to hear. If you do that, you will never have to worry about advancing.
He could look at a market landscape, a competitive environment, or a product offering and instantly see the value, the end game, in a flash. And most of the time he was right. The problem was that his massive strategic intelligence did not always translate into good leadership. He often left his team in the dust, utterly confused. It was as if he had just completed a complicated calculus problem by blurting out the answer without showing the work or the thinking that had gotten him there.
He had to become aware of how his strength in one area led to a weakness in another and make sure that he limited the problems and confusion that could cause.
we identified someone on the team to act as a kind of COO of team communications. This person was in charge of filling in the gaps between the CEO’s pronouncements and the action steps required to bring his ideas into reality.
a great deal maker had to build a firewall that prevented him from touching anything in operations. If he messed with operations, chaos ensued. But, wow, could he do deals! He put a boundary on his weakness, and let his strength soar. Another leader I worked with was prone to overspending the company’s resources on new deals, so he had to put a boundary around his tendency to do that with a new form of governance.
BOUNDARIES WITH YOUR TIME AND ENERGY
gaps between stated priorities and time and effort spent.
if I don’t plan accordingly, if I don’t put the big rocks in first, the urgent will push the vital out of the picture.
boundaries on time, just like financial budgets, force us to prioritize good decisions. If we treat time like it is unlimited, we will say yes to a lot of things that really are not high value. And we lose our way. When you know how much time you have available, and that it is fixed, you will spend it strategically.
Your energy is one of your biggest assets and must be managed. Figure out who and what drains yours.
where I am in the position of helping others manage, negotiate, and resolve conflicts. These meetings require a lot of energy, a lot of focus, and often careful intervention on my part,
We should always avoid the areas where we are not gifted and focus on our strengths instead.
the kinds of patterns that have to do with your makeup and have to be addressed, as they will render your strengths unusable.
The first kind of leader is defined by the work. The second kind is in a process of actively defining the work, and they do that by first defining themselves and taking charge of who they are going to be and how they are going to work. They have good self-leadership boundaries.
How will you protect yourself from your weaknesses?
create a culture where brains can flourish, where people are inspired and empowered to do their very best work.
