Love the idea of the new playbook for leaders but having trouble remembering the new plays and how to implement them? Here’s a set of 8 one-page summary sheets for many of the key concepts in Leadership is Language as well as the plays. The 8 one-pagers cover: The new playbook for leaders (the 6...
Wouldn’t it be great if we did all the things we were supposed to do, every day. Well, at some point or another, each of us runs into our own habits — habits and patterns in our lives that we’ve created that move us toward or away, from our goals. Your habits determine who you...
The joy of an industrial age organization is that we separated the doers from the deciders. If you were a decider (also known as a boss, leader, white-collar, salaried person) then you made decisions for what the doers (also know as followers, blue-collar, hourly person) ought to do. Since the workforce was not involved in...
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
The Complete Play allows Celebration One of the six plays in the Industrial Age management playbook was CONTINUE — continue the redwork of production as long as possible, minimizing interruptions. Now, we want to chunk the work into smaller intervals that allow us to reflect, improve, and celebrate what we’ve done. The new play is...
Congratulations, the work you’ve been doing is done. Your quarterly report is submitted. Your product is in customers hands. You’ve finished a year of teaching eighth graders. Your patient has left your care recovered. Your book is published. Whatever it is you do, at some point you complete your work and get ready for the...
The Industrial Age Obey the Clock play pushes to get the team moving forward. Since we’ve separated the deciders (blueworkers) from the doers (redworkers), the deciders need to convince, cajole, bribe, shame, or threaten the doers to DO the work they had little or no part in choosing and sounds like “I’ll tell you what...
The Industrial Age playbook was designed to keep the team in redwork for as long as possible. An uninterrupted assembly line turning our product day after day after day. We still default to those plays that keep the team in motion, moving forward, making “progress.” Any stoppage of the assembly line, any pause in redwork,...
The power gradient is the amount of social distance there is between one person and another. The power gradient is the feeling of “how much more important are people in the next tier in the hierarchy than we are” and “how much more important are we then people below us.” In Industrial Age organizations (where...
In the last six weeks of the IBL blog, we have compared the old plays of the Industrial Age playbook to the new playbook for leaders found in Leadership Is Language. Here’s a recap. First, we have two different work modes. Redwork is the active production work that benefits from reducing variability and a prove...
