Do you show your appreciation to the people around you?
Gary was someone who would regularly make a point of saying thank you. He showed his appreciation, not just for the task you completed, but also for how you went about it.
brian donovan
Are you doing the thinking that is required to change the game?
Robert was busy going nowhere. He was drowning in a sea of emails, back to back meetings, performance reports and people issues.
High impact leaders listen first
Charles dispensed with the PowerPoint talking points he had prepared for the staff information session and asked the audience what they wanted to talk about. He wrote their questions on a whiteboard and worked down their list in a two-way conversation rather than the formal presentation that they had anticipated. It made a real impact. The team were impressed that Charles had spent the time to listen and respond to them, instead of delivering the latest set of key messages about the organisation’s strategy and vision.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Drew Houston the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Dropbox learned about the essential difference between effort and effectiveness from the classic book, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. In a podcast interviewwith Tim Ferriss he says that he applied the principles in the book when he was transitioning from his engineering/IT training to entrepreneurship. It remains one of his primary go-to references.
What evidence are you gathering?
Students in a University psychology class were given a questionnaire the day after the space shuttle Challenger disaster and their responses were kept on file. They were asked where they were, who were they with and what they were doing when it happened. Two and half years later they were asked the same questions. Despite their confidence that they could recall accurately, most were way off compared with their initial responses.