High Performance Leadership

How do you feel when someone says that they will do something right away, and then they don't? When I say "now!" I mean immediately, and without over-thinking. never under estimate the temptation  to overthink (I think I just did!) When is now? How about now? -- Doug smith  Looking for leadership training? That's what I do: doug smith training

How's your sense of urgency? When I worked for Whole Foods, it was considered a very big deal to constantly display a sense of urgency. If you were walking from one place to another, you moved with a sense of purpose. If you were working on a task, you gave it your all. Every moment was spent finding ways to do things faster, ever faster. That's tough to sustain over the course of a full day and yet, like a muscle you can develop the ability to operate with a perceived sense of urgency. Breathe, yes. Relax, sometimes. But when it is all on the line -- with a customer or with your team -- how's your sense of urgency? High performance leaders are both calm and urgent. Calm at their center and urgent about achieving their goals. -- doug smith

Developing leadership skills has similarities to training to be a fire fighter. You need a combination of study, direction, and experiential application. But the experiential part of the training should build according to your skill level. A first day fire fighter trainee for instance never sees any real fire – they could easily get hurt or hurt someone else. The really difficult tasks must build on skills that have been learned before. Knowledge must be internalized and feel fully integrated before you apply it on a dangerous ground – and leading others can often be dangerous ground.  Leadership develops in scalable stages I’ve been both a fire fighter and a manager and so I can find many similarities in the development process. You can be a novice and inexperienced fire fighter and still contribute to the effort of the crew, provided that you are surrounded with more experienced, patient, and yes even insistent fire fighters who will be assertive and courageous enough to keep y...