“I think we are living in an epidemic of obedience.” These are some of the first words from Nancy Kline’s book More Time to Think. And in it she hypothesizes a better world would be a place where we have more independent thinking. I totally agree. How do we get there? It’s our job to...
David Marquet and Peter Russian share big news — Introducing Intent-Based Leadership International
March 10, 2021by Sandy Wilmer
I’m excited to announce the launch of Intent-Based Leadership International. Over the past 9 years, I have been humbled and inspired by leaders like you that have committed to building better workplaces based on giving people more control over their work — building leader-leader organizations in what we call the Intent-Based Leadership way. I’ve had...
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...
Leadership Nudge® 339 – Revisit Your Decisions
February 3, 2021by Sandy Wilmer
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...
Leadership Nudge® 338 – Power Gradient Matters
January 20, 2021by Sandy Wilmer
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...
Leadership Nudge® 337 – Discontinuous Improvement
January 13, 2021by Sandy Wilmer
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...
Leadership Nudge® 335 – The Ladder of Leadership: Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward
December 16, 2020by Sandy Wilmer
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...