https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/practical-fibonacci-beginners-guide-relative-sizing
If you know of any articles, whitepapers or other information that you feel would be of relevant to this topic please post it in the comments. |
How to keep going when you can’t keep going anymore, especially in stressful times, busy professionals may hit a wall and feel too overwhelmed to go on. When that happens, it can be helpful to rethink priorities, lighten your to-do list, pace yourself to conserve energy, rest regularly for greater stamina and mindfulness, and take time for self-care. |
I always say if you need a toilet brush, yeah get on Amazon, but if you need a gift or something for your home just always try and support local first. |
Lori Ronca, owner of HomeGrown Decatur, as quoted by Decaturish |
How Web Creators Can Start Live Streaming in 2022, Dive into the most popular types of hosting around so you can explore the best choices for your website. |
How leaders can unwrap the gift of uncertainty |
2023
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Week 14
Week 15
Week 16
Week 17
Week 18
Week 19
Week 20
Week 21
Week 22
Week 23
Week 24
Week 25
Week 26
Week 27
Week 28
Week 29
Week 30
Week 31
Friday – Morning Caffeine: “Champion the right to be yourself; dare to be different and set your own pattern; live your own life and follow your own star.”
Week 32
Morning Caffeine – “Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.” – James Carswell
Tuesday – Morning Caffeine: Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”
Wednesday – Morning Caffeine: “Success is not so much achievement as achieving. Refuse to join the cautious crowd that plays not to lose – play to win.” – David J. Mahoney
Friday – Morning Caffeine:” –
Week 33
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 34
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As you work with individuals in your organization to develop their vision for the future, it is crucial that you establish specific, measurable goals. These goals will help individuals realize their ambitions. In addition, as a mentor, you must establish that you are sincerely interested in the problems of the person you are mentoring. By taking action to support the individual, you will prove that you are indeed working in their best interest and always keeping the end in mind.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 35
Monday – Morning Caffeine “When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a manager, what does this say about that person’s leadership?” – David Marquet
Tuesday – Morning Caffeine: “The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
Wednesday – Morning Caffeine: “Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.” – Edwin Hubble Chapin
Thursday – Morning Caffeine: “Good work and good companions are the building blocks of self-esteem.”
Friday – Morning Caffeine: “Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.” – John Henry Newman
Week 36
Monday – Morning Caffeine: “Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce understanding the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened” – David Marquet.
Tuesday – Morning Caffeine: “Good work and good companions are the building blocks of self-esteem.”
Wednesday – Morning Caffeine: “Above all be of single aim; have a legitimate and useful purpose, and devote yourself unreservedly to it.”
Thursday – Morning Caffeine: “Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one.” – Bill Bradley
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 37
Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Why do we need empowerment? Do you need someone else to empower you? How reliant is your organization on the decision-making of one person or a small group of people? What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use? When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind? What assumptions are embedded in those images? How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader? To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?” – David Marquet.
Tuesday – Morning Caffeine: ” We accomplish things by directing our desires, not ignoring them.”
Wednesday – Morning Caffeine: “Am I motivated by what I want out of life, or am I mass-motivated.” – Earl Nightingale
Thursday – Morning Caffeine: “Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.” – Plato
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 38
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience” – David Marquet
Tuesday – Morning Caffeine: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” – Chinese Proverb
Wednesday – Morning Caffeine: “He who makes great demands on himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.” – Andre Gide
Thursday – Morning Caffeine: “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above them.” – Washing Irving
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 39
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 40
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is the enabling art.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 41
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to “give control, create leaders.” I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 42
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Don’t Empower, Emancipate” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 43
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 44
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Control without competence is chaos.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 45
Monday – Morning Caffeine “A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 46
Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation? How does the perspective of the time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 47
Monday – Morning Caffeine “But leadership is about making the lives of others easier, not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 48
Monday – Morning Caffeine “People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 49
Monday – Morning Caffeine “What we need is release or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation, we recognize the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people and allow those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer can empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 50
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The goal of a leader is to give no orders. Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 51
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you have the fortitude to go against the grain? There are significant benefits to thinking differently about leadership.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Week 52
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Many empowerment programs fail because they are just that, “programs” or “initiatives” rather than the central principle—the genetic code, if you will—behind how the organization does business. You can’t “direct” empowerment programs. Directed empowerment programs are flawed because they are predicated on this assumption: I can empower you (and you don’t). Fundamentally, that’s disempowering.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “When thinking about the principles and their utility, I used this question: If I were a crew member and faced with deciding between two different courses of action, would these principles provide me with the right criteria against which to select the appropriate course of action? The guiding principles needed to do just that: provide guidance on decisions.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you play “bring me a rock” in your organization, where vague understanding of the goal results in wasted time?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel is determining what junior personnel should be doing.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Managers say these things to assuage their conscience. When things go wrong, they can blame others for not speaking up. But leaders make the lives of others easier by not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Frequently, I wouldn’t just say, “Very well.” There were too many unanswered questions about the safety and appropriateness of the proposed event, so I asked many questions. One day I caught myself, and instead of asking the questions I had in mind, I asked the OOD what he thought I was thinking about his “I intend to submerge.” “Well, Captain, I think you are wondering if it’s safe and appropriate to submerge.” “Correct. So why don’t you just tell me why you think submerging is safe and appropriate? All I’ll need to say is ‘Very well.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Rather than telling everyone what we needed to do, I would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, I told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “THINK OUT LOUD is a mechanism for CONTROL because when I heard what my watch officers were thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and let them execute their plans.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “We realized that resilience and effectiveness sometimes meant questioning orders.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was a lesson that would serve me well.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I was disturbed by the close coupling of the technical competence of the leader with the performance of the organization.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels is more important. There is an extra burden for technical competence.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “If all you need your people to do is follow orders, it isn’t important that they understand what you are trying to accomplish.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “We let our administrative processes get in the way of prompt recognition. Many times we would submit awards three months before the departure of a sailor, only to find ourselves calling during the last week to track down the award before his departure; when I say immediate recognition, I mean immediate. Not thirty days. Not thirty minutes. Immediate.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them? How will you communicate your principles to others? Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards? Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria? Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people? Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The practice outweighs the rhetoric. In” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers? How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviors you want? Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine: “I can do things you cannot and you can do things I cannot. Together we can do great things.” (Mother Teresa)
Monday – Morning Caffeine “It might seem like a little thing, but on board a nuclear submarine, little things like lack of punctuality are indicative of much, much bigger problems.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Back in Pearl Harbor, we visited the USS Bowfin submarine museum and called it officer training. I was worried that the crew would think some of these things tacky, but that wasn’t the case. It helped provide organizational clarity into what we were about—the why for our service. USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you aware that you turned in a blank sheet?” “Yes, sir, I am.” “Well, don’t you think that you, as the commander, have an obligation to create a vision for your command?” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, I feel that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The guiding principles needed to do just that: provide guidance on decisions.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “having the courage to change, and tolerating failures.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Continuous improvement is how we get better. We continually seek ways to learn from processes and improve them and ourselves. The chain of command has an obligation to develop and institute mechanisms (such as conducting debriefs) to achieve continuous improvement.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment We encourage those below us to take action and support them if they make mistakes.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I have seen this, for instance, in an organization that talked about safety first but whose real interests were in profits and accepting degradations in safety if they seemed “reasonable.” After all, the safest thing to do is to shut down and send everyone home. But not acknowledging that they would be balancing safety with profits resulted in miscommunication, lack of credibility (because everyone knew the truth), and unaligned decisions. USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. All business concerning a leaking valve or failed circuit card had to occur outside these meetings. During the first set of discussions, we adapted a useful technique for long-term focus and planning. I asked each of them to write their end-of-tour awards. Since these supervisors are assigned to the submarine for three years, this particular exercise made them look that far into the future.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “There were plenty of signs that my view was distorted—had I been willing to see them? People would hesitantly offer a good idea every now and then. Occasionally, they would take smart, decisive action without my direction. Once in a while, I would make a mistake, directing my team in a way that wasn’t optimal or was just plain wrong. In these scenarios, my subordinates would comply with bad orders, despite all my lectures, to speak up if they ever saw a problem. Afterward, when things went off the rails, they would shrug and say they were just doing what they’d been told. In response, I would double down on giving clear, concise, and correct orders.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS, is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about. This is called clarity,” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “In a leader-follower structure, the performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader. As a result, there is a natural tendency to develop personality-driven leadership.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals? Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “THE END IN MIND is an important mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “We hadn’t been keeping track of the appropriate data, and we’d have to start doing so.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The key is that as the importance of doing things right increases, so does the need to act deliberately.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Through trial and error, the team arrived at a body of practices and principles that were dramatically more effective than those within the leader-follower model. It was only toward the end that we understood we had replaced the leader-follower model with the leader-leader model.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you react when an employee admits to doing something on autopilot without deliberately thinking about the action or its consequences? Do you think that by implementing a system of taking deliberate action, you can eliminate errors in your company or within certain departments in your company? Will employees in your workplace revert to acting hastily and automatically in a real-life situation? How effectively do you learn from mistakes?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “By explaining the process to the team and giving them the tools to improve their performance, you empowered them to determine their own success.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do we create resilient organizations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system? Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct? Do you want obedience or effectiveness? Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “What would you and your team like to accomplish? How can you, as a leader, help your people accomplish it? Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both professional and personal goals? Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences of their own behavior?”- David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.”- David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language? How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings? How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes? Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance? To what degree does trust factor in the above?” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization? What is the cost of being open about problems in your organization, and what are the benefits? How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter? How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors? How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organization?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “With physics, you don’t have problems; you only have the consequences of your actions. They become problems when we decide that what happened wasn’t what we wanted to happen.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “The next time you have a problem at your company, think about this: Is this simply a problem in execution, or was there a decision in the past, perhaps the distant past, that set us down the path where this operational problem was more likely to happen? Is the problem rooted in faulty blue work in the past?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are your people trying to achieve excellence or just to avoid making mistakes? Has your organization become action-averse because taking action sometimes results in errors? Have you let error-reduction programs sap the lifeblood out of initiative and risk-taking? Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success? Are you able to identify the symptoms of avoiding errors in your workplace? When you ask people what their jobs are, do they answer in terms of reducing errors?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you ready to take the first steps toward leader-leader? Are you ready to take the first steps toward an empowered and engaged workforce? Are you ready to embrace the changes that will unleash the intellectual and creative power of the people you work with? Do you have the stamina for long-term thinking?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Instead of looking at a task as just a chore, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the associated piece of equipment, the procedure, or if nothing else, about how to delegate or accomplish tasks.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As leaders, the way to get out of the cajole, manipulate, plead, and hope for certain behaviors game is to focus on immediate, positive, and certain psychological rewards after we observe the behaviors that are useful and effective in the business.”- David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Process thinking asks questions like: “What are we missing?” “How might this go wrong?” “If we do this and it ends up going south, what would be the most likely culprit?”- David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Are people eager to go to training?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Instead, we were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived. We called this “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “In brainstorming, I would like as many different ideas as possible. In decision-making, I would like a wide range of options. In determining the truth, I would like to hear different perspectives.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Are you limiting your leadership to empowerment? What programs have you instituted to supplement control with competence and clarity? Have you divested yourself of the attitude that you, as a corporate leader, will empower your staff?” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “What do we do on a day-to-day basis? We learn.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” – David Marquet.
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.” – David Marquet
Friday – Morning Caffeine –
“System 2 thinking asks questions like: “What are we missing?” “How might this go wrong?” “If we do this and it ends up going south, what would be the most likely culprit?”
― L. David Marquet,
“This shows the degree to which we reward personality-centered leadership structures and accept their limitations. These may have been good ships in that they avoided problems, but they certainly did not have good leadership.”
― L. David Marquet,
“The best way not to make a mistake is not to do anything or make any decisions.”
― L. David Marquet,
“Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Would you consider writing a creed for your organization modeled after the one we wrote for Santa Fe? Are people eager to go to training?”
― L. David Marquet,
“Instead, we were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived. We called this “Don’t move information to authority. Move authority to the information.”
― L. David Marquet,
“In brainstorming, I would like as many different ideas as possible. In decision-making, I would like a wide range of options. In determining the truth, I would like to hear different perspectives.”
― L. David Marquet
“Are you limiting your leadership to empowerment? What programs have you instituted to supplement control with competence and clarity? Have you divested yourself of the attitude that you, as a corporate leader, will empower your staff?”
― L. David Marquet,
“What do we do on a day-to-day basis? We learn.”
― L. David Marquet,
“As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
― L. David Marquet,
“the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.”
― L. David Marquet,
“Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.”
― L. David Marquet
“You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance?” – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!” – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “We found that when people know they will be asked questions, they study their responsibilities ahead of time. This increases the intellectual involvement of the crew significantly. People are thinking about what they will be required to do and independently study for it.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “An effective survey question to ask your employees is how many minutes a week they spend learning on their own, not mandated, not directed. Typically it’s a small number. An organizational measure of improving health would be to increase that number. If you want engaged teams.” – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants? How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation? When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tune out the procedures? What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them? Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfill?” – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “He reserved only the tip-of-the-iceberg-type decisions for his own confirmation. The great mass of the iceberg—the other 95 percent of the decisions—were being made without any involvement or confirmation by the captain whatsoever.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Operating this way—conforming to hierarchical roles, maintaining emotional distance from others, avoiding vulnerability at all costs—is lonely and unfulfilling.” – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “He felt if he required them to own the problem and the solution to it, they would begin to view themselves as a vitally important link in the chain of command. He created a culture where those sailors had a real sense of adding value.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “As the level of control is divested, it becomes more and more important that the team is aligned with the goal of the organization.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “We are in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in human history, where the primary work of mankind is moving from the Industrial Age of “control” to the Knowledge Worker Age of “release.” Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential. – David Marquet
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Disengaged, dissatisfied, uncommitted employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of their colleagues.” – David Marquet.
Monday – Morning Caffeine “Leadership is the art, science, or gift by which a person is enabled and privileged to direct the thoughts, plans, and actions of others in such a manner as to obtain and command their obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation.” – David Marquet.
Morning Caffeine “When you step outside your comfort zone and are UNCOMFORTABLE, this leads to evolving, and on the other side is..” Katherine Fox
Crab Mentality
A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket next to him.
As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside.
The man was puzzled and asked the fisherman, “Why don’t you cover your bait bucket so those crabs won’t escape?”
“You don’t understand.”, the man replied, “One crab can quickly climb out. But when there are multiple crabs in the bucket, they keep each other from crawling out. If one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that it’ll share the same fate as the rest of them.”
You see, a crab mentality is detrimental to a team, and make no mistake, we’re all part of some team, whether it’s work, sports, family, or friends. Each of us is a teammate.
Great teammates don’t possess a crab mentality. Great teammates aren’t concerned about themselves only.
A crab mentality says, “If I can’t get my way or achieve my goals or look good, then nobody can”.
We’re all part of a group or a team and great teams have great teammates!
What is human-centered leadership?
So, what exactly is human-centered leadership?
We became deeply committed to human-centered leadership after spending two decades in executive-level corporate leadership. We had witnessed time and time again executives and managers burning out themselves and their teams with a win-at-all-cost mentality.
And some leaders were so concerned with people-pleasing they failed to hold themselves and their teams accountable. They avoided the difficult conversations vital to having their worker’s backs and whole-heartedly representing the big-picture values and vision of their companies.
We had individually been so frustrated and alarmed that we just started to blog. And we didn’t even know each other at the time!
We shared two passions:
Together we built Let’s Grow Leaders to help human-centered leaders find clarity in uncertainty, drive innovation, and achieve breakthrough results.
The inner-workings of our leadership development programs are rooted in what we call The 5 Cs, indicators of a solid team:
🠚 Clarity – we know where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.
🠚 Capacity – we invest in building our people, systems and tools.
🠚 Commitment – we keep our promises.
🠚 Curiosity – we ask great questions and take appropriate risks.
🠚 Connection – we trust one another and invest in our mutual success.
To delve deeper into The 5 C’s and assess where you and your teams fall on the spectrum of possibility download the tool and then have a conversation about it.
Why Web Creators Embrace Live Streaming |
Live video content can uniquely enhance your online visibility and strengthen the connection between you and your audience. |
Helping Project Managers to Help Themselves by Lonnie Pacelli In his zeal to help those still climbing the career mountain, Lonnie shares 12 Wisdom Nuggets to help others avoid experiential wisdom and replace it with inherited wisdom! (Here’s a taste: Make regret-free family choices.) |
![]() We’ve been mired in the pandemic for more than a year now. Yet all that uncertainty doesn’t mean project leaders are lacking job opportunities, especially as companies start to see a light. Read more in 2021 Jobs Outlook: Chaos, Risk—and Opportunity. |
![]() Citizen development is a broad discipline utilizing business analysis concepts, agile PM, software development and more to create the future of work by leveraging digital transformation in all life and business areas. Read 5 Tips to Quickstart Your Citizen Developer Career. |
![]() How do you handle being a temporary custodian assigned to keep a project going until it’s time to “resume our regular scheduled programming”? It presents some unique risks. Kiron provides Tips for the temporary project manager. |
![]() In the next installment of the Discover PMI – Ask Us Anything Series, we will provide an overview of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about PMI Membership Offerings to Support Your Career Journey.” Learn more and sign up today! |
Lessons Learned for the Next Time
By: Mark Mullaly, Ph.D., PMP
From the personal experiences we have had during the pandemic, we need to build a shared sense of what it has meant, and how we move forward. This is particularly true as we manage the process of re-entry to a world that may look the same but now feels a little stranger and instills a little more wariness and caution.
Are You Making These 6 Virtual Working Mistakes?
By: Bruce Harpham
The improvised nature of virtual work we embraced in 2020 is no longer good enough. It’s time to look for ways to improve our performance, comfort and happiness. Specifically, there are individual and team virtual working mistakes to avoid.
Plan C: Unanchored Project Management During the Pandemic
By: Michael Huber
Already a nomad project manager accustomed to a solitary life on his motorcycle, this unanchored PM found new challenges when the pandemic hit. Read how he adapted—and how his outlook can help you move forward during trying times.
The Return of the Gut-Driven PM?
By: Andy Jordan
There have always been project managers who have succeeded working on the edges (or outside of) accepted approaches. Are those PMs headed for a renaissance? If you’re a project manager looking to develop and grow your career over the next few years, what should you be doing?
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The best way to manage the number of emails you receive is to limit the number of messages you send out. Other tips include finding alternatives to email for handling internal communications and project management. Full Story: Inc. (tiered subscription model) (3/23) |
Step back and allow team members to bring their own skills and ideas to projects rather than jumping in and solving problems or giving your opinion or criticisms, writes Lolly Daskal. “Try to keep your eye on the consequences of everything you do as a leader and ask yourself whether it’s helping or hurting,” Daskal writes. |
Full Story: SmartBrief/Leadership
Personal
39 questions to make small talk with anyone
40 questions to ask before yo accept a job offer
The letter to write when you don’t get the job
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The best way to manage the number of emails you receive is to limit the number of messages you send out. Other tips include finding alternatives to email for handling internal communications and project management. Full Story: Inc. (tiered subscription model) (3/23) |
Step back and allow team members to bring their own skills and ideas to projects rather than jumping in and solving problems or giving your opinion or criticisms, writes Lolly Daskal. “Try to keep your eye on the consequences of everything you do as a leader and ask yourself whether it’s helping or hurting,” Daskal writes. |
Definition: e-business (electronic business), E-business (electronic business) is the conduct of business processes on the internet.
Rapid prototyping process brings technology to life |
Carnegie Mellon University’s Chris Harrison and his team are developing the user interfaces of the future. He explains why a rapid prototyping process is critical to building technology that changes lives. |
You know the routine. They make a terrible decision that ends up costing the company money. When they realize they’ve dug themselves into a deep hole, they’re upset, blaming you or your co-workers.
It’s a catch-22 many developers find themselves in on a routine basis.
Is your boss making bad calls? Are you walking on eggshells? Learn practical strategies for helping your boss make better decisions… without losing your job in the process.
“Too much hard work is counterproductive. Here four leaders share how they ease the pressure.”
“Now is the perfect time to find out how you can shine by playing to your strengths”
Full Story: Substack/Superorganizers (9/11) 8 steps to transform tasks into a “success list”
A checklist (Product Backlog) can become a “success list” when it includes only what you can accomplish that day (this Sprint) and when you block out the time required, writes Naphtali Hoff, who offers six other tips. Consider sharing your list with people who can keep you on track.
Success to the Successful: Are You Perpetuating Privilege?, According to System Leadership Theory, this pattern is called Success to the Successful. And it is by far, the system trap I hate the most. It’s insidious, systemic and to most people, conveniently invisible. But above all, it’s lazy.”
6 Ideas to Turn Your Leadership Journal Into Professional Development Gold, The idea of journaling sounds old-fashioned and even anachronistic in our era. Nonetheless, much like the simple but powerful checklist tool for productivity and quality, a properly maintained journal is a powerful and eminently utilitarian tool for promoting continuous personal improvement. For those responsible for guiding others, a leadership journal might quickly become your best friend in your drive to strengthen your daily effectiveness. Here are some ideas to put your leadership journal to work.