Lead From Here

I came across Parkinson's Law fairly recently as I was diving into how to manage my own time on bigger picture passion projects for myself. I was finding myself continually putting off things that I was super passionate about. As I was exploring what might be happening or how I might be unintentionally sabotaging myself, I came across Parkinson's Law from a video by Ali Abdaal his channel is (http...

The Time Management Matrix (AKA Eisenhower Matrix) is a time management method that uses a 4 quadrant matrix to help you understand the importance and urgency of a task. I remember reading about Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix for the first time and thinking to myself, this doesn't make any sense to me. The Time Management Matrix (TMM) states that all tasks can be categorized based on urgen...

Time Blocking is the next step in my Time Management/Productivity Journey and while I don't remember specifically where I first heard about it, it's hard not to find great content about it on YouTube. After experimenting with Pomodoro, I knew I wanted to create very specific windows of time to do focused work. I just didn't know how I could do this effectively. At this point, I was a full time dev...

The Pomodoro Technique was my first foray into the Time Management/Productivity space. I remember watching it on Thomas Frank's Channel (https://www.youtube.com/@Thomasfrank) many, many years ago. The concept seemed so simple, I knew it had to be effective and as someone who was struggling to get momentum built up in my career, it felt like a potential quick win. With that, I dove head first into...

Time Management is a core fundamental of being an effective person, employee and most especially a leader. Leaders have a unique position in the company where they have to balance a lot of different things from their people to the business all the way to the customers. Effectively managing your time around that is the difference between a good leader and a great leader. Time management is an inter...

Today marks our 100th Episode! I cannot put into words how much it means to me that so many of you have decided to join the Leadership Journey. More content is coming, series with tools to help you on your journey, monthly newsletter (link below), a book club and so much more! Leadership continues to evolve and elevate based on the work of people like Simon Sinek, John Maxwell, Gary Vaynerchuk and...

Leading effective meetings is a super power for people that want to lead. Meetings that go off track, rabbit hole or don't have a clear goal all drive wasting time. That is the last thing you want as a leader! With that, the MOST important question to ask yourself is...is this meeting needed? If it's something you can handle individually or via email or your company's messenger platform, then do t...

We have covered the importance of emotional intelligence on this channel before, check out that video here: https://youtu.be/kqIjcF3IjjY So today, we are going to talk about how your cultivate your emotional intelligence. It starts with a focus on improving the 5 pillars of Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy & Social Skills. Self-awareness is the found...

Leading with influence instead of authority is the main foundation of this channel, it's not about title, it's about taking care of the people around you and helping get things accomplished, regardless of title! How do you influence people? It starts with establishing your credibility. This isn't you talking about it, it's by action and social proof. Whether it's utilizing your skills to respond i...

As a Leader you aren't directly responsible for your employee's well-being, but you absolutely have a role in supporting their well-being. How do you go about supporting their well-being? First off, make sure you are leading by example. Show them what a wellness focused leader looks like, take time off, work reasonable hours and be open with your own well-being journey. Other ways include creating...

Humility is a trait that is often mischaracterized as weak or submissive, but the reality it's takes massive courage and confidence to be humble or act with humility. The key is to lean into your strengths and be open about your weaknesses. Ask for help, don't be afraid to not know the answer, give credit where credit is due, especially when YOU yourself are due the credit. Too often leaders say t...

When it comes to Leadership, there will come a time...maybe more often then you would like...you have to just make the call. You may not have all the information you want to have, there not be consensus, there maybe disagreement, from your people, your peers or your leaders. You still have to make the call. It's important to remember that as a leader, you have a unique point of view in that you ha...

Too often, I hear leaders speak about "the team" or "my people" or "they" or "them". You are part of that team, your authority doesn't create separation, it requires deeper engagement with more responsibility to your teammates! Using terms like they or them when referring to your teams, makes you look bad and create a lack of trust within your team. If your team senses that you think of yourself o...

Customer pain is an inevitability if you own a business. Pain isn't the problem, it's how your manage and respond to pain that can help your business flourish or fail. When you are a start up, your life is chasing pain, you need to support your customers to build solid relationships and have fantastic references to help build your business larger. The problem I see in most companies that find succ...

There is an old school view of toughness and a new school view of toughness, the old thinks the new is "softer" but the results don't lie. The old school view of toughness is built on callousness and is NOT a way to build toughness. Pushing people with control, fear and power will not lead to long term results. That CAN be way to break down a group of people to see if they are up to the task of gr...

Contractors is a very interesting topic from a leaders perspective. They can very quickly support one of your initiatives when utilized correctly, but they can also be the downfall of a project when utilized incorrectly. The biggest mistake companies make is over inflate the impact contractors can make. They will hand them highly specialized, full projects or make them the key resources on those p...

Ambition at it's core isn't a bad thing and you need a bunch of it to become a leader and thrive as a leader...the key is to understand when to utilize it and when to focus on others. A leader that put their own careers in front of their teams or the business are doomed to fail. The strongest leader, shining brightly will be doomed to fail if their teams and business segment are suffering. The cor...

As a leader, consensus is one of the keys to being an effective leader. When you have effective teams full of people that are great at their job, they will inevitably disagree on the path forward. The same goes for your group of peers, whether that is in your department, cross functionally, or both. Building consensus is a skill that must be honed to make sure that we continue to move forward, mak...

Leadership isn't an Achievement...it's a way of life. Viewing Leadership as an achievement makes leaders let their guard down and fall short. Leadership is a journey and if you recently moved into it, you just jumped on that path at the beginning of the journey. From here it continues to bend and curve, with speed bumps randomly placed throughout. You may have been one of the best individual contr...

Deep Work is exactly what is sounds like...it means doing cognitively demanding tasks that require intense focus. Deep work is becoming increasing rare, yet invaluable. Shallow work is the other side of that coin, emails, texts, instant messenger, etc are all things that CAN take up the majority of your day and your focus, if you let them. The key is creating structured chunks of time to work on c...

The 3 Bars Framework is something I read about in Steven Bartlett's book, "The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws of Business and Life". It's a fantastic book, definitely give it a read (https://www.amazon.com/Diary-CEO-Laws-Business-Life/dp/0593715837)! The 3 Bars For Building Great Teams as it's actually called in the book, is used to evaluate people from a culture fit perspective. It takes the emotion...

Resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. In my opinion, there isn't a better definition of a leaders job than this. Some will say your ability to plan or strategize or coach makes you the best leader possible. I think those things are very important in leadership...but your ability to be resilient tops them all. The mark of a great leader is the ability to t...

Teams are made up of humans, so conflict is a very normal and natural part of highly effective teams. The key for leaders is to make sure that you harness it, manage it and most importantly don't let it fester. How do you harness conflict? Well, conflict is usually a disagreement about something. Which means that conflict is actually creating a situation where the "best path forward" is being disc...

This topic is a fun one. People are notoriously terrible at this. I am one of those people. Delegation is the single best way to create opportunities for your people! If you aren't delegating, you are actively holding your people back. This statement is contrary to what most people, myself included, think about delegation. Most people feel like, they don't want to overburden their best people with...

I wanted to give you my top 5 Leadership Habits to help set a foundation of strong and healthy leadership. Each item in the top 5 list is VERY important to finding success as a leader. Top 5 Habits: Be the Last to Speak - This is one of the most important things for leaders to do...if you speak first, you will never get real feedback, even in a healthy culture. Human nature will deflect to the per...