Category Archives: Uncategorized

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

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I have read a number of books on leadership, and I intend to read many more, but The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership stands out as a great summary list of qualities you want to cultivate in yourself.  It was so impressive that I committed the list to memory. The book’s purpose is to give you a list of laws, or attributes, that you need to be aware of, understand their value, and then to encourage you to seek to develop those attributes in yourself.  The Laws are:

  1. The Law of the Lid
  2. The Law of Influence
  3. The Law of Process
  4. The Law of Navigation
  5. The Law of Addition
  6. The Law of Solid Ground
  7. The Law of Respect
  8. The Law of Intuition
  9. The Law of Magnetism
  10. The Law of Connection
  11. The Law of the Inner Circle
  12. The Law of Empowerment
  13. The Law of the Picture
  14. The Law of Buy-In
  15. The Law of Victory
  16. The Law of Momentum
  17. The Law of Priorities
  18. The Law of Sacrifice
  19. The Law of Timing
  20. The Law of Explosive Growth
  21. The Law of Legacy

I expect to go into these in more detail in future blog posts because each one has an entire chapter dedicated to it and writing a terse description of each law is probably a hair too terse.

As a leader understanding how to unpack each one of these principles will help you guide your team to excellengce and to help them lead others to excellence.  It will build a Leadership Pipeline that can handle the varying demands on each layer because they have a root system that is feeding them, growing them, and allowing them to handle the daily tasks of a leader.

Core Competency

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Have you ever met a person who has it all together? I’m sorry I worded that incorrectly: have you ever met a person who fooled you into thinking they have it all together? Those people irritate me because I’m constantly finding places to grow. The key difference between the “together” people and the rest of us is usually the combination of intention and discipline and understanding. What they’re understanding is probably their core competency. A core competency is a single value and decision making motive that drives a person’s actions. My core competency is developing others (this this blog), and so when I take first steps to learn something it is often driven by the desire to master something to teach it to someone else, or to have a parallel point of understanding to use for analogy in teaching someone else.

Check out this list of 31 Core Competencies that may contain the prime driver for your life.

Once you identify your core competency you need to then figure out how this helps you, how it limits you, and how to use it to grow yourself where your don’t have a core competency. I just mentioned above that I use my core competency (developing others) to motivate myself to grow, learn, experience, and change my current understanding. However, it means that I can also be weaker when I have to do something by myself that I can’t see helping me help others down the road. But I can also know this weakness about myself and choose to not let my core competency be a boat anchor, and instead I can be mature about my actions and move past that element that could hinder me.

Your core competency can then be paired with your personality type as a lens for understanding your perspective to both focus in on your goals, change your framing on life, and as a way to begin seeking personal growth to have development in areas you know you need to change in.

Core competency is a great place to educate yourself in, help others recognize, and to start mentoring your team in. It may help create productive breakthroughs for your whole organizations.

– the MGMT

The Jobs of a Manager

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I was asked in an interview, “How should a first line manager split their time to fulfill their duties?” First: this is a great interview question because it asks two questions in one, and secondly: I had no clue to either answer. I gave a best guess based on my experience in volunteer leadership at church and failed miserably. But I got to have food for thought (that interview alone will lead to dozens of articles here) and I’m grateful for the answers it led to. There are multiple articles out on the Internet about this topic, but they tend to say the same things, so there’s consistency, and this article will add to the pattern.

Let’s take a look at (some of) the duties of a first line manager:

  • Receiving direction and initiatives from upper management
  • Coordinating administrative details
  • Hiring & firing
  • Team Accountability
  • Team Training
  • Team Coaching
  • Team Mentoring
  • Rejecting meeting invites for things that don’t specify why they should attend

The answer that it turns out my interviewer was looking for was a 50% split of duties above accountability and 50% from accountability down. What really happens in most organizations is not that. The top 50% is not the focus of this article, the bottom 50% is. We’ll cover the top 50% in other articles.

Accountability is critical to follow through and delivery, this blog will cover that in spades over time. But in the short term that manager is responsible for delivering results through resource allocation, prioritization, communication about what is expected when by whom and even consequences of failure. And lastly celebration of success when everything is delivered (the ability of accountability). This should be budgeted for 20% of their total work time.

Managers need to spend 5% of their time on training. This is an ongoing task for new hires, new policy implementation and new tech.

10% of a manager’s time should be spent purposefully coaching team members to improve their current job’s skills. This will help reduce mistakes, improve efficiency and increase trust in team interactions.

Another 10% should be alloted for mentoring. This is for career development within your team related to career growth. Employees who have “upward mobility potential” are happier, more focused and engaged. Employees with no visible hope of upward mobility are likely to drown in frustration of being trapped.

By having a known quantity or expectation this will let you say no to the right things deliberately and yes to the important things with confidence. There are few options out there for perfect management jobs, but you can begin making your choices for your self and your team to deliver excellence by scheduling these things on purpose.

– the MGMT

The Impact of Management

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I have had a large number of weird and excellent experiences with management throughout my career. I’ve embarrassed myself in front of owners, C-level executives, VP’s and of course flung myself off of the cliffs onto the rocks of first line managers. Somehow I’m still employed. I’ve complained about leaders who have “jokingly” called me a racist [my friends would disagree], leaders who asked for a 360 feedback and then attacked me for being honest, and had leaders who decided personal growth was for the birds.

Managers can deliver culture, purpose, career growth, and opportunity. I’ve worked for leaders that made me want to fight in the trenches next to them and lay all of my energy and skills on the line. I’ve had leaders who made me feel like one of God’s gifts to the software field. They made their team their family – and I was a special part of that.

So philosophy of management should be cared for and taken in as a personal mission for those who lead. Something to be done deliberately because the default is entropy.

I want to be a manager because of what the best of what management can bring, and to help stop the spread of bad management.

– the MGMT

I Suck at Management

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Saying you suck at something is a great way to get attention. Self deprecation means that people give you a lot of room for mistakes. But what if you’re an inexperienced student of a thing such as management? Well, then you start a blog to chew on the issues and topics for the development, growth, and mastery of said things.

This is that blog. Let’s learn together, grow together, and challenge one another’s assumptions. Then down the road we’ll stop sucking, we’ll start changing the cultures, bottom lines, and futures of those around us.

Cheers!

– The MGMT

Yessing and Knowing

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I keep seeing or reading quotes and articles about saying yes to more things for experience and saying no to more things for time management.  This balance is crazy hard because you can’t say yes to everything and not become overwhelmed, but you can’t say no to everything or else life gets very boring 🙂

There’s actually something powerful about combining the two so that you say yes to only the experiences and opportunities that will truly add value. Then you’ll know when. To say yes and know when to say no.  It’s a longer term perspective thing.

Vulnerable

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I’m Mr. TMI (too much information). It’s my defense mechanism. You see shame loses its power when you speak about something that might be embarrassing. The cat’s out of the bag. I’ve never been very popular and often growing up in public school I was ridiculed for various things: my faith, my hobbies, my idiosyncrasies, my love of music (I wasn’t a jock). So I over shared and over – informed so that I could reduce the fact that someone else would shine light on my ‘weirdness.’ I’ll just put it out there in the open.

All that to say when my friend Dave O’Hara told me about the book Daring Greatly the topic resonated with me. Vulnerability is a powerful tool for intimacy between people, but shame keeps us from committing to true vulberability. It turns out people use one of (at least) two techniques to handle the shame issue, both of which may hinder intimacy through vulnerability. One way is to over shared (like me), the other way is to strive for perfection. Perfection has no shame – except that no one is truly perfect and no one is going to escape from the shame of their eventual imperfection.

I’m learning a lot about vulnerability and shame as I read the book, but I’m finding that I am guessing the next chapter or point because the implications of these topics in the research is very, very real to me.

I want to be vulnerable and intimate with others, but I need to do that in a healthy way. I want to put shame away in my relationships. I want to rise up to the challenge of healthy intimacy. It’s  a great place to be at nearly 38. I haven’t been here before.

Where are you growing?

And

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The scriptures are hard because of the and. Be gracious and forgiving and kind and loving. And righteous. The polarization within Christendom is often due to the and where readers have blindly sought the or.

I died to the Law because I was identified with Christ. Grace is my motivator (grace is not merely the forgiveness of sins, it is blessing beyond that), but the life of Christ is to be lived out in me. But that life is done through rest and relationship, not through rigidity or legalism.

The standard for love and righteousness come from the same God. This means that instead of my getting to “or”, I get to “and.” This is a powerful truth that demands I step aside with my attitude and self importance and I get to be a model of submissive grace, serving righteousness, and compassionate listening.