Happy Tuesday!

My travel schedule now looks a lot like it did before Covid – I’m spending more time with a tray table on the seat in front of me, even though I am still on a camera virtually – a lot.

This week I am in Northern California working with leaders from school districts, helping them become more effective leaders. If you would like to talk about how we can help your leaders – whether me or others on our team, and whether virtual or in-person – send a note to your contact on our team or just send a note here and we can have a conversation about that.

If you aren’t sure if we would be a good fit, or how exactly we could help, I encourage you to join me for my webinar on February 13th at 3:30 pm ET, titled Navigating Uncertainty: Mastering Flexible Leadership in a Changing World. It will help you see my latest thinking on leading (which is part of my upcoming book, Flexible Leadership) Your registration is free – get it here.

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You are Remarkable!

Kevin 😊

Learning From Doing New Stuff

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a couple of new things, and I’ve learned something important from these experiences. While I would hope all of us are trying new things regularly, what is different about these two things for me is that they are or will be public – which makes them a bit higher risk! Let me explain.

While I have done tons of video over the years, including Remarkable TV, LinkedIn Learning (including this and this as examples), The Remarkable Leadership Podcast, Virtual LeaderCon and more, I haven’t done much informal short “selfie” videos – until recently.

I’ve started doing informal short videos, with just me and my phone to share ideas from my upcoming book, Flexible Leadership, and I am learning a lot. Here’s one example.

And last week, I went into a studio to narrate the audio version of this book!

Here are the three big lessons I learned or was reminded of:

1. Realize relevant experience, but don’t assume you know it all. When we realize we know some things, it can help us learn new things. But we can’t assume our relevant experience is enough.

2. Ask questions! Talk to the people who do have more experience and expertise to learn as much as you can before you start.

3. Listen carefully to (and welcome) feedback. Trust me that the audio book in final form will be far better because I adapted my speaking, etc. based on the feedback from the experts in real time. And if you subscribe to my social media channels, hopefully you will see real-time growth and improvement in the short videos in the coming weeks.

None of these lessons may be earth-shattering – but rather than moving past them and nod knowingly, I hope you will stop and ask yourself if you are doing these things – or more importantly, when can you apply them yourself on your own “new stuff.”

Training Leaders is More Than Leadership Training

Read that title again and realize it was written by a guy who has in some ways been delivering leadership training for over 30 years. It is a hard statement to type and read.

And it is 100% true.

This doesn’t mean my life’s work (and the work of our team) has been for naught, and that I should somehow refund all that organizations have invested with us.

There is a strong correlation between organizations and teams that succeed and the quality and effectiveness of their leaders. It’s true that many organizations “get by” with average or below average leaders. In industries with strong economics, or in times when things are stable, a baseline of success can overshadow the outsized role of leadership to organizational success.

KEEP READING

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