Harmony or Discord

Centered leaders know when to facilitate harmony or stir up discord. Balancing challenge and support is an art.

We all know leaders who specialize in one or the other -- they either always seek to restore harmony or it seems like they are always challenging, always stirring up trouble. Either approach can fatigue a team quickly and prevent efficiency.

Centered leaders may want harmony but realize that complacency or stasis is never the answer. Sometimes it's necessary to stir things up. Done positively, and with kindness, this is a high performance behavior. Done carelessly or callously, this is disaster.

Challenging leaders realize that people can get tired of being challenged and that sometimes the waves are too rough to sail. Sometimes a leader must find ways to restore stability and create a more harmonious environment. It's more art than science -- and that takes creativity.

How are you at stirring up a challenge when it's needed?

When was the last time you helped create a more harmonious environment?

Are you equipt to do it again, if needed?

What are you doing to develop your courage, creativity, clarity, and compassion today?

-- Douglas Brent Smith

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Perfect Relationships

Is your partner perfect? Are you? I've made enough mistakes in my life and in my relationships to know that the search for perfection is illusive at best and at worst, frustrating. There are no perfect people out there waiting for us, to fall in love with us, to fix us, to bring us what we need, to fulfill our dreams. But that's OK. In fact, that's wonderful. We don't need a perfect person in order to create love. Love creates the perfect person. -- Douglas Brent Smith

Brace Yourself On The Edge

Do you pride yourself in being cutting edge? Do you try new techniques, stay creative, build innovation instead of comfort? Good for you. And if you said no, allow me to encourage you to push the edge a bit more. Get out of your comfort zone. The really big goals makes us just bit uncomfortable. We might even sweat. Push the edge, even knowing that sometimes when you push the edge you get pushed back. People might object to the radical new approach. They might take exception to your changes. Push the edge anyway. Leading often means going where no one else has gone. All the way to the edge. Pack a lunch, it could take a while, but do stay with it. -- Doug Smith

Strategic and Communication Skills

Supervisors often bring strong technical skills to the job. When they have worked in technical jobs prior to becoming a supervisor, they were often the best at what they do. They know the ground level part of their business well enough to solve problems and deal with day to day issues. Leading is all that and more. High performance leadership requires attention to detail AND a constant view of the big picture: where is your team, your market, and your customer base headed? What does the future hold? Strong supervisors learn to add strategic and communication skills to their technical ability. What are you doing today to develop your sense of the big picture? -- Douglas Brent Smith

Do Your Best With Time

Here's another guest entry from my good friend and fraternity brother David Spiegel. If you know anything about the East Coast you'll get a sense for how his day went. If you ever struggle with managing time, some of this may sound familiar. As Dave says, we can't really manage time -- it's what we do with it that matters. Now, let's hear what Dave has to share: In a week where I have dedicated myself to regaining control over my time , I have come to realize that I am trying to accomplish something impossible. Time is time. Every day has exactly 1440 minutes to it and no matter what we do,we can not create any more of it. So instead of creating more time we spend our energy trying to make better use of those precious minutes each day.We attempt to manage time. Well guess what. We have no control over time. Time itself can not be managed. We can not speed it up or slow it down. Do you know why a watched pot never boils? It's a time thing...

No Hiding The Truth

What happens when someone tries to hide the truth? It pops up, unexpected, full-blown and often unforgiving. There is no hiding the truth. The truth always bubbles to the top. Pushing down what we regard as worth hiding, even when it's clearly true, simply delays the inevitable. The truth comes out, and then whoever attempted to hide it looks doubly suspicious and unreliable. Also, when we try to hide the truth we suddenly limit our possibilities. What can we say? What should we suppress? Where are we headed? Who can know and who cannot know? Did we tell the wrong person already? Maybe we should just keep quiet... Truth we try to hide becomes our tallest wall. It's a weight we carry around wondering when we can let it go. It's a wall that prevents us from seeing the beauty that belongs in all truth, even the truth that troubles us. What secret truth are you carrying around? Isn't it time to let that go? -- Douglas Brent Smith Front Range Leadership: ...

Call Fewer Meetings

Do you have too many meetings? Many leaders do. Staff meetings, committee meetings, team meetings, project meetings, all-company meetings...the list goes on. Most of us can think of many meetings that were simply wastes of our time. Time is too important to waste is bad meetings. Do the people in your meeting want to be there? If not, maybe it's not a meeting that you need. Maybe there's another way to communicate your message. Maybe the work that is waiting is too important to wait. We can like the feeling of having a meeting. It feels like we're doing something. But if we're not -- if we are delaying real work, maybe we don't need that meeting after all. What scheduled meeting could you eliminate this week? Wouldn't it be nice to have that time to be...well, happy and more productive? -- Doug Smithy

Letting Go

Are you working hard on any goals that you shouldn't be? Are some things getting in the way of your success? It's easy to accumulate a full schedule of meetings and tasks surrounding goals that were not ours to begin with but now consume all of our time. Bold leaders weed out those types of goals. Strong leaders focus on the goals that they align with their mission. High performance leaders let go of goals that don't belong. When we let go of the wrong goals it makes room for the right ones. Maybe that goal made sense at one time. Maybe it was thrust to you from someone else who meant well but who was not fully away of your mission or the list of goals you were already working on. Maybe the goal just doesn't belong to you. What goal should you let go of today? -- Douglas Brent Smith http://frontrangeleadership.com

Win The Game

It would be nice to win the game. But, do you ever feel like you're in a game that keeps shifting the rules and making it easy to make progress but impossible to win? You've probably noticed lots of game elements creeping into service. Points, incentives, expiring coupons followed by new expiring coupons, leader-boards...on an on a relentless attack on service comes from playing a game designed -- you guessed it -- to maximize profit. If the customer is happy, fine, but the point is to make money. Not to put too fine a point on it but that's a lousy point. What if there could be something better? What if customer service excellence became playing a game where the customer always wins and that makes you happy? You don't have to. "give away the store" to achieve a winning game for all of the players. Just stop stacking the rules against customers and watch how much more they will want to do business with you. -- doug smith

Keep Improving

Do you ever get impatient with small improvements and crave one big leap to the next level? Big changes are great. Geometric revolutions out-excite evolutions every time. But they're not the only way to grow. In fact, it's the small, incremental improvements that prepare us for the big leaps. It's the small changes that facilitate the greater gains. Incremental improvement is just as hard as geometric improvement -- and just as necessary. -- doug smith

Expand Your World

Have you ever noticed that problems come in all sizes and that they seem to take on more importance when we've got less going on? The more I expand my world -- by learning more, experiencing more, trying more -- the smaller some problems seem. As our world expands through growth, training, and experience the problems we carry with us that once seemed so formidable now seem smaller and easier to solve. We also acquire new problems along the way -- bigger problems, but the growth we experience can increase dramatically our capacity to handle ever bigger problems. My problems are bigger when my world is smaller. It's one of the fun paradoxes of high performance leadership. Growing constantly both uncovers bigger problems AND increases our ability to solve whatever problems arise. Grow. Expand. Learn. How are you expanding your world today? -- Douglas Brent Smith Expand your world and the world of the people in your organization by bringing our one-day workshop Sol...

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