"...keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
Raising Bill Gates -- Gate's dad shared with Fortune an exclusive excerpt from his book "Showing Up for Life" -- worth spending three minutes reading, especially to learn Gate's parent's reaction when he decided to drop out of school. And I didn't know he was always known as Trey in his family and had launched a business before Microsoft.
Embracing Change and Stability -- below are two quotes by leadership professor Dr. John Kotter -- re-read a couple times.
Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.
Managers promote stability while Leaders press for change; and only organizations that embrace both sides of that contradiction can thrive in turbulent times.
Power of Daily Huddle -- Jake Jacobs was the first one to point out to me that the power of the daily huddle is that it provides a sort of "radical" stability to help drive/survive radical change. Thus it's a critical tool for both managing and leading the business.
The SUIT Agenda -- George Contos, CEO of New Jersey-based World Wide Metric, has added a twist to the standard daily huddle. Noted Contos in a recent email "We have been doing the daily huddle for the past 5 months. We stand in the conference room, no paper, no coffee...just our brains and our hearts...12 min max. We go thru the same thing every day, what we call SUIT: -Sales- Updates -Issues/bottlenecks - Topic
Some days we don't have any updates, issues, or even a topic and we are done in 2 minutes. I found I was running out of topics and my team was not really bringing up the issues.
Rotating Quarterbacks -- continues Contos, "So what I decided to do was have a new quarterback (as we call it) run the Huddle every week on Wednesdays. Every member of the team has to run the huddle and present a topic for discussion/learning. During the week prior they come to me with the idea and we work together to focus it, hone it and make it clear and simple and not complicated. This is our 3rd month doing it. I could never have planned for the kind of results we are now getting."
Peer to Peer Accountability -- "I am not talking about sales either. The peer to peer accountability....the topics that are chosen are their topics which benefit the team...they are excited to do this and want to do a good job. And they are getting more confident. They are coming to me now weeks in advance of their turn to get started on their topic. Now, finally in the past few weeks the level of trust has come so far that we are having debates and conflict and challenging each other in dialog to do better. And now we are!"
Change Things Up -- I asked Contos if this caused the Wednesday meeting to go beyond 15 minutes. Responded Contos, "Yes they go over, sometimes...mostly because a discussion begins....I encourage it. As long as the phones don't go crazy we carry on for up to 20+ minutes and that may happen on regular days as well. I think the Wednesday meetings changed things up and added a sense of diversity. Plus the more time the team spends together the camaraderie grows...the sharing grows and we're starting to have breakthroughs together." Concludes Contos, "Business has changed. We have to work smarter and more strategic... everyday."
Contos is tackling complexity and driving change using his meeting rhythm. It can do the same for you.