Leaders help the team manage the rhythm on Redwork (doing) and Bluework (thinking). Make time to pause, evaluate production relative to your goal, make course correction as needed, and then continue working. Good morning! I’m here on beautiful Manasota Key beach (Florida) to talk about Redwork and Bluework, the rhythm of doing and thinking at work. When you...
Leadership Nudge® 341 – When “Why” Becomes “Who”
February 17, 2021by Sandy Wilmer
As information and directives move through an organization, the language often changes from “why” (which sounds like “we need this by Tuesday in order to feed 10,000 more people”) to “who” (which sounds like “Bob wants this done by Tuesday”). When the “why” is maintained, people are intrinsically motivated to be more creative and thoughtful,...
In 1995, Edward Deci published his book entitled Why We Do What We Do. It outlines his Self-Determination Theory and discusses extrinsic and intrinsic motivation with scientific research to support the theory. It’s a great read and helps explain why Intent-Based Leadership works. We recommend reading it to learn more. I recently read this book, Why...
When making decisions, schedule time in the future to revisit those decisions and processes. This practice creates opportunity to ensure your processes are relevant and appropriate given the current environment. Hey, hey, I’m in Switzerland with the greatest cheese on the planet, Gruyere. Now this Gruyere has an expiration date on it, and it makes...
When an organization creates steep power gradients with things like physical separation, executive dining rooms, and intimidating office size, they limit the flow of information. Information flows inversely proportional to the power gradient. Flatten the power gradient to get the information flowing. I’m here at the RBS headquarters outside of Edinburgh airport at Gothenburg in...
We have to actually use a process for a while after making a change in order to measure the effect of the change. If we are trying to tweak a process continuously, we never stabilize the process enough to really know the effect of any given change. Improve in steps to increase the learning along...
Organizations are biased towards continuing whatever action they are doing. Leaders want to inject moments of thinking and decision into this continuous stream of action. This makes it safe to change the course if needed. Organizations are biased towards continuing whatever action that they’re doing. The reason for this is because we’ve made the decision...
An easy way to think about how to use the Ladder of Leadership is to imagine the steps as a way to Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward. Watch David explain in this week’s Nudge. The Ladder of Leadership with the seven steps is sometimes complicated and hard to remember. “Oh, is this step three or...
Use the Ladder of Leadership to both set and measure the level of empowerment in your team. It is both a thermometer and a thermostat for the language of empowerment. As many of you guys know, I was a math geek and an engineer. So there’s this geeky engineering-like substructure behind Intent-Based Leadership and the Ladder of...
Studies show that when we try to control things that we really cannot control, our blood pressure increases and our bodies release of the stress hormone cortisol. For more happiness and less stress make a conscious choice to give up control. A key part of Intent-Based Leadership is about giving up control. We understand the...