Podcasts about coaching for leaders

Knowing she's never been good with people, a leader seeks coaching to her deepen relationships in ways she can tolerate.Two ways to deepen workplace relationships:Matching & Curiosity4 Ways to Match:Match Purpose Match Energy Match Conversations Match Vulnerability Express Curiosity by Asking Deep QuestionsMake sure your questions are open-endedInvite reflectionKeep the other person talkingAnswering questions powerfully is another way to deepen relationships. Check out our recent episode on that topic.Deepen relationships at work by listening to Dave Stachowiak's conversation on Coaching For Leaders with Charles Duhigg about his book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Recently, Tom joined Dave on Coaching for Leaders to explore How to Take Initiative. A lively, thought-provoking episode.Coaches! Join us at ICF Los Angeles's Executive Coaching Special Interest Group. Check us out on the ICF-LA website. Categories in the archive to explore for more ideas about deepening relationships:Communication SkillsBuilding RelationshipsManaging YourselfFive episodes that'll help you get deeper:Building EmpathyBuilding ListeningBuilding RapportInfluenceThe Conflict ConversationAre you ready to invest in yourself? We offer listeners world-class coaching at an affordable price. Reach out to Tom here.Transcripts of every episode, including this one, are available for free here. More resources are in our monthly email. Sign up here.Until next time!From The Look & Sound of Leadership team 

Charisma coaching for leaders is no longer just a buzzword—it's a powerful tool for executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals looking to connect more deeply, communicate more effectively, and lead with authenticity. In this episode, we sit down with Richard Reid, a leadership coach, behavioral psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of Charisma Unlocked, to explore how charisma can be learned, refined, and used to build influence in both personal and professional settings.If you've ever wondered how to be a charismatic leader, how to become a charismatic leader, or how to use charisma in leadership without sacrificing authenticity, this episode is for you. Richard shares practical frameworks and stories from his 20+ years of coaching experience to help you enhance your leadership presence and influence, improve charisma and communication skills, and develop emotional agility in high-stakes environments.We also explore how to overcome common inner challenges like imposter syndrome in leaders, how to enhance emotional intelligence for executives, and why building psychological safety in leadership is essential to elevating team performance. Richard's unique neuro agility for decision making protocol offers a cutting-edge approach to thriving under pressure while maintaining clarity and control.Whether you're an aspiring leader or a seasoned executive, this conversation delivers actionable insights on authentic leadership development, mastering behavioral psychology in business, and practical executive coaching for confidence.Timestamps:00:00 – Introduction to Richard Reid and his journey01:00 – From psychotherapy to leadership and charisma coaching02:00 – Core pain points leaders face: connection, communication, confidence03:00 – Richard's coaching process: managing internal emotions first04:00 – The truth about charisma: it's a learnable skill05:00 – Authentic charisma vs. performative charisma06:30 – The importance of creating win-win dynamics07:00 – Leadership humility, accountability, and modern team engagement08:30 – Charisma as a psychological safety tool09:00 – How subtle communication and body language changes impact influence10:30 – Breathing, posture, and voice: managing your presence12:00 – Preventing emotional leakage between meetings13:30 – Setting intentions before leading conversations14:30 – Structuring sentences for clarity and digital communication16:00 – Neuro Agility Protocol: training the brain for high-pressure decisions17:30 – Where to find Richard Reid onlineTo check out the YouTube (video podcast), visit: https://www.youtube.com/@drchrisloomdphdDisclaimer: Not advice. Educational purposes only. Not an endorsement for or against. Results not vetted. Views of the guests do not represent those of the host or show.  Click here to join PodMatch (the "AirBNB" of Podcasting): https://www.joinpodmatch.com/drchrisloomdphdWe couldn't do it without the support of our listeners. To help support the show:CashApp- https://cash.app/$drchrisloomdphdVenmo- https://account.venmo.com/u/Chris-Loo-4Spotify- https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christopher-loo/supportBuy Me a Coffee- https://www.buymeacoffee.com/chrisJxClick here to check out our bookstore, e-courses, and workshops: https://www.drchrisloomdphd.com/shopFollow our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/chL1357Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drchrisloomdphdFollow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thereal_drchrislooFollow the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3NkM6US7cjsiAYTBjWGdx6?si=1da9d0a17be14d18Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=6992935013231071233Subscribe to our email list: https://financial-freedom-podcast-with-dr-loo.kit.com/Thank you to all of our sponsors and advertisers that help support the show!Financial Freedom for Physicians, Copyright 2025

Listener Question: How do I stay engaged with a broken or compromised system?Coaching Insight: The answer depends on context—but it starts with deciding if you want to engageHero's Journey Framework: Crisis, the low point, perspective, and the invitation to re-enterTemptation of Distance: Why staying detached can feel safe but keeps us isolatedThe Cost of Return: Re-engaging means risking hurt again—but also invites growthCycle of Life: We never “arrive”—we grow through constant cycles of disappointment and resolveThe Low Show: A creative collaboration with Scott Erickson rooted in this rhythm Links For Justin:Coaching with JustinOrder In Rest - New Book of PoemsOrder In The Low - NEW Book with Scott EricksonOrder Sacred StridesJustinMcRoberts.comSupport this podcastNEW Single - Let GoNEW Music - Sliver of HopeNEW Music - The Dood and The BirdThe Book - It Is What You Make itHearts and Minds Amazon Barnes and Noble

Are you a coach or in the coaching industry? Are you a leader in your industry and ready for the next level? Are you tired of being passed over for opportunities and want to stand in front of the competition? In this episode, Kim Ades talks about how to properly create, launch, and monetize a thriving coaching business. She also discusses the biggest mistakes that new coaches make when building their business, and you'll never guess what she learned in the process. Kim Ades (pronounced add-iss) is the President and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching® and JournalEngine®. Recognized as a pioneer in the field of leadership coaching and thought mastery, Kim uses her unique philosophy and direct coaching style to help leaders focus their thinking to achieve extraordinary results. Author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach, and mom of five, Kim's claim to fame is teaching her powerful coaching process to other coaches, leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs worldwide. Kim has been a featured speaker for many organizations including Microsoft, ICF, and SHRM Links: https://frameofmindcoaching.com/speaking/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVgdsUHCMSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK33r-ed9Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzI_5UCQxoQ   Want to get booked & paid to speak consistently? Are you tired of searching for hours, or even days, with no hope of booking a paid gig? Download the No BS No Fluff Guide To Getting Booked & Paid To Speak and start booking paid gigs, filling up your calendar, and living the dream you've always wannted. Downloadthe guide and get booked & paid to speak here  

Kim Ades joins Brynne Tillman to explore innovative coaching techniques using journal-based methods. As the founder of Frame of Mind Coaching, Kim reveals how daily journaling helps high achievers break through deep-seated beliefs and behavioral patterns that hinder success. The episode dives into the importance of building strong coach-client relationships and how journaling can transform not only personal growth but also sales performance. Kim shares transformative stories and offers powerful prompts to kick-start self-assessment, illustrating the profound impact of aligning mindset with goals for optimal outcomes.

Success comes from collaboration, not individual effort. Everyone is on their own journey, but the paths we take and how efficiently we travel them can vary dramatically. As leaders, we often bear the weight of responsibility, thinking we must shoulder every burden alone. But what if that very mindset is holding us back? In today's episode, we're challenging the myth of the self-made leader and exploring why even the most capable among us benefit from guidance. Here are three key insights you'll gain from our discussion: 1.The Power of Perspective: Discover how an outside view can illuminate blind spots and open up possibilities you never saw before. 2.Accelerated Growth: Learn how coaching can dramatically shorten your learning curve, helping you achieve your goals faster and more efficiently. 3.The Ripple Effect: Understand how investing in your own growth through coaching doesn't just benefit you – it amplifies your impact on your team and organization. Join us as we share personal stories, debunk common misconceptions, and reveal why the most successful leaders aren't going it alone – they're leveraging the transformative power of coaching. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this episode will challenge you to rethink your approach to personal and professional development. Let's dive in!

Key Questions:Virginia Purnell (00:50) How did you end up where you are today?(04:52) Do you guys do group coaching with that then?(08:54) So how do you get in front of those people?(09:41) Are you on LinkedIn then? Do you guys do posting on there and stuff like that(11:00) So why do you feel like leadership is so important? Is it more than just the shadow or the light aspect?(18:30) What are some big goals that you guys have in the next year or two?(19:39) So how would your reach affect your business?(20:34) So how many people are in your, typically, are in your groups that when you do your group coaching?(21:28) Yeah. But What do you feel like is your number one roadblock with growing your visibility, your reach?(24:06) What would be some actionable advice that you can share with us that we can implement immediately.(25:08) Do you help people set that up or like, develop it if they don't have it?(27:41) What's the best advice that you have ever given somebody?(35:21) Is there something that we haven't touched on that you did want to talk about?(35:32) Where can we go to learn more about you and what you do? Episode Summary: In this episode of Entrepreneur Conundrum, host Virginia Purnell speaks with Susan Ireland, a leadership powerhouse with over 30 years of experience at Boeing and co-founder of Seasons Leadership. Susan shares her journey from her extensive career at Boeing to her current role in empowering business leaders through coaching and consulting. Alongside her partner, Debbie Collard, Susan is dedicated to addressing gaps in leadership quality and making leadership education accessible through their company, Seasons Leadership. They offer one-on-one coaching, business consulting, training, and a free bi-weekly podcast and blog.Key Topics Discussed:Susan's career journey and her transition from Boeing to leadership coaching.The founding of Seasons Leadership and its mission to enhance leadership quality.The importance of leadership in creating positive work environments and cultures.How leadership extends beyond positional titles to influence various areas of life.Strategies for improving visibility and reach for leadership initiatives.The significance of implementing a structured leadership and management system.Practical advice for entrepreneurs and business owners on leadership and self-care.Actionable Advice:Start by defining your vision, mission, and values clearly.Implement a structured leadership and management system to ensure repeatable and disciplined business practices.Take care of yourself first to be able to lead effectively.Focus on building a positive and inclusive work culture.Embrace continuous improvement and progress over perfection.Susan Irelandseasonsleadership.comhttps://www.susanireland.coachhttps://www.seasonsleadership.com/podcasthttps://lnkd.in/gkBpesRyhttps://www.facebook.com/seasonsleadershiphttps://www.instagram.com/seasons_leadership/https://www.youtube.com/@seasonsleadershipVirginia PurnellFunnel & Visibility SpecialistDistinct Digital Marketing(833) 762-5336virginia@distinctdigitalmarketing.comwww.distinctdigitalmarketing.com

Knowing she'll need to network to achieve her career goals, an ambitious leader asks her coach what a good networking conversation actually sounds like.Resources for Building Your Networking SkillsLeverage the latest algorithm on LinkedIn with this research report.Coaching For Leaders podcast: “How to Grow Your Professional Network”Coaching For Leaders podcast: “Executive Presence with Your Elevator Speech”10 Rules for NetworkingLink to 10 Rules of Networking PDF in Essential Tools binSorting & LabelingLink to Sorting & Labeling PDF in Essential Tools binThe Look & Sound of Leadership: “Assume Equality”The Look & Sound of Leadership: “Being Concise”This month's episode is in the podcast archive in three categories:For WomenRelationship BuildingSocial SkillsFive episodes to grow your networking skills: 162 - Acting on the Corporate Stage180 - Becoming Expert193 - Branding Yourself176 - The Executive Impostor192 - Pursuing a Promotion 2020Grab a free transcript of this episode here. Be in touch with Tom here.We share more resources in our monthly Essential News email. Sign up here.Listen to Tom's conversation with Scott Ritzheimer on “Secrets of the High Demand Coach.”COACHES!Join us at the Executive Coaching Special Interest Group sponsored by ICF Los Angeles. You'll get CCE's, too!From all of us here at The Look & Sound of Leadership, thanks! #podcast#leadershipnetworking#growyournetwork#professoinalconnections#networkingskills#leadershipdevelopment#networkbuilding#careerconnections

Transformative coaching is a form of coaching that focuses on facilitating deep, lasting change in individuals by helping them shift their perspectives, beliefs, and behaviors. It involves exploring underlying assumptions, challenging limiting beliefs, and fostering personal growth and development to help clients achieve their goals and create meaningful change in their lives but do leaders really know the value and how to perform transformative coaching? Hey, let's talk about it!

It's really no big deal, until it is. A pilot who is flying, or captain who is navigating and sets a bearing just one degree off will land somewhere other than their desired destination. In business, sometimes this is called "mission creep." This exists when the organization is moving toward a goal, but then accepts something goal-adjacent. It's not exactly the goal, but the connection seems reasonable. Then the goal-adjacent space is the new goal and the next goal-adjacent initiative is even farther from the original goal. Any one of those single goal-adjacent deviations are no big deal. Until they compound. Then, comprehensively, it is absolutely a big deal. Being on target requires leaders to be focused and diligent. It's not always exceptionally heavy lifting, but it is consistent to keep on task. Additionally, making big changes requires the "mission creep" analogy to be reverse engineered. A great big goal typically requires little adjustments rather than one big change. Even when one big change is the order of the day, there are many rippling incremental changes to make way for the big thing. As you consider change, consider whether it is intentional or accidental. Review how you know that, and as you go...

I met my incredible guest, psychologist and executive coach Hayssam Alamine, a while ago when working on one of my projects. We've been trying to arrange a podcast recording for quite some time, but it happened only now and apparently for a reason. Currently, there is a period in my life when emotions overwhelm me, and I am trying to figure out how to manage them and stay focused on what is important in life.Our conversation turned out to be incredibly enlightening and supportive for me. Hayssam shared his inspirational story of how a difficult period in life can become a source of strength; he explained how to deal with emotions and develop EQ, which is an essential trait of future leaders. I hope you will get some useful tips and insights as I did. We also prepared a summary of the whole episode, a little "cheat sheet" filled with key takeaways that can be printed out as a reminder. The link for download is available here. Enjoy watching, and please share your thoughts in the comments.______Visit our website Brands Through StoriesSubscribe on platforms to get new episodes early: YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify

Applying coaching skills as a leader is one of the best ways to develop people and boost employee engagement. And in fact, many leaders have attended "coaching skills for leaders" or "manager as a coach" trainings. Why then, we might ask, is not everyone in every organisation fully engaged, yet. Is coaching not working, after all?We are convinced coaching does work, but there are factors that keep leaders from applying them.What is coaching?Coaching should not be seen as a remedy to fix underperformance. Coaching is not about telling people hat to do. According to Sir Joh Whitmore, "Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them."A simple recipe for applying coaching skills at work: tell less, listen more, ask powerful questions — and all this on a foundations of trust-based relationships.Tell less: Leaders can't have all the answers; instead, they need to utilise the collective intelligence of the people.Listen more: Listening is more powerful than most people think. Who people feel listened to, they feel taken seriously as a person, and this in itself can boost motivation.Ask powerful questions: Asking triggers thinking, taps into a person's own intelligence and leverages potential. It can create buy-in and build self-leadership. Good questions are open and often start with "how" or "why." They encourage solution-focused thinking rather than analysing problems. Trust: Coaching is not a mechanical process. The relationship between coach and coachee is as important as a the “technique”. Without trust, coaching won't work. Seeing the other person full of potential  removes the obstacles that keep them for utilising their potential.Not every situation at work calls for coaching though. Coaching is for longer-term development, and also depends on a persons "readiness."Leaders can apply coaching skills informally during 1:1 interactions or team meetings, or in a more formal coaching setting.It is paramount for leaders to invest the time necessary for coaching to work. This can be challenging because while coaching is important, it rarely ever becomes urgent.Lastly, there is no shortcut to mastery in using coaching skills for leaders. You can't become perfect without passing the beginner stage during which you need to live with making mistakes and learning from them. Reflection Questions for Leaders:Suppose a miracle happened overnight, and all these obstacles that prevent you from using more coaching at work are removed. How will you start discovering that the miracle actually happened?  And after that then, what will you be doing then that you are not doing now?On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you today that your team members are capable to deliver outstanding work? Now, suppose you fully believed that your team members are truly full of potential. How would you then interact differently with them? How satisfied are you with the proportion of time that you spend as a leader in the urgent but not important quadrant versus the not urgent but important quadrant?More info about us and our work is also on our website secondcrackleadership.comDo you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for us? Would you like to explore how we can help you to drive results in your organisations through a company-wide initiative or individual executive coaching? Then email us at hello@secondcrackleadership.com.To connect with us on LinkedIn:Martin AldergårdGerrit Pelzer 

Gain a New Perspective on Life & Business with Rich Habets Have you ever caught yourself in the loop of proving others wrong just to assert your own correctness? Meet Rich Habets, a master at fostering meaningful discussions, be it one-on-one or with teams, all without the need to make anyone feel wrong. In our conversation today, Rich delves into his approach, guiding clients to introspect and uncover valuable insights within the words of others. As the founder and lead coach at Insight, Inc., Rich has been the driving force for the past 14 years. His mission? Empowering over 6,000 individuals and collaborating with 30+ world-class companies. What sets Rich apart is his knack for propelling clients, who are already formidable, to even greater heights. A silent yet powerful ally behind the scenes, he plays a key role in their journeys. Rich's mission is crystal clear: to assist others in tapping into their untapped potential, transforming their lives into beacons of success, growth, and personal accomplishment. Stay tuned as Rich shares insights on unlocking that hidden potential for a life that truly shines. Connect with Rich Habets on the web: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter

This weekend on the show we're joined by Dave Stachowiak, host of the popular Coaching for Leaders podcast, a show aimed at helping you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Dave joined us on our most recent webinar to discuss all things related to the workplace. Want more of Jill and Dave? Subscribe to Jill on Money LIVE to watch the full webinar. Have a money question? Email us here Subscribe to Jill on Money LIVE YouTube: @jillonmoney Instagram: @jillonmoney Twitter: @jillonmoney "Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This weekend on the show we're joined by Dave Stachowiak, host of the popular Coaching for Leaders podcast, a show aimed at helping you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Dave joined us on our most recent webinar to discuss all things related to the workplace. Want more of Jill and Dave? Subscribe to Jill on Money LIVE to watch the full webinar. Have a money question? Email us here Subscribe to Jill on Money LIVE YouTube: @jillonmoney Instagram: @jillonmoney Twitter: @jillonmoney "Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The A Better HR Business podcast looks at how consultants and tech firms in the broad Human Resources field grow their businesses; and how they help employers get the best out of their people. Today we're joined on the show by Terrell Holmes, Founder of The Good Org, a coaching business that helps executives and teams in industry-leading tech organizations and start-ups weather the storms that come with rapid growth and major change. To do this, Terrell leverages his 15 years of working directly in the tech and marketing industries; facilitating programs for Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB); and working with companies like Apple, Bio-Rad, and Kongregate Games. Terrell is an organization development consultant who champions insight and communication as catalysts for change. Over 15 years in Marketing Technology, Terrell identified recurring issues in communication and relationship management, leading to the establishment of The Good Org, LLC to tackle these challenges head-on. By employing cutting-edge evidence-based practices, Terrell strives for tangible real-world impact. Clients such as Apple, The City of Berkeley, eBay, Kaiser Permanente, Kongregate, and The State of California have benefitted from his expertise in leadership development, group dynamics, change management, and behavior. To further his vision of transforming the American work landscape, Terrell engages in various professional pursuits. These include serving as a Peacebuilding Consultant, an Adjunct Professor of Organization Development at the University of San Francisco's Masagung Graduate School of Management, and an Interpersonal Dynamics Group Facilitator at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. With 16 years of experience in advertising and marketing technology, Terrell possesses a unique understanding of the intricate complexities faced by rapidly-evolving organizations. He holds a Master of Science in Organization Development (MSOD) from the University of San Francisco, complemented by a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies from Virginia Tech. The Good Org offers the right solutions for individuals and companies seeking transformation. Their team of experienced coaches, trainers, and Organization Development practitioners can assist in assessing organizational goals and designing customized interventions to ensure their achievement. The Good Org provides a range of services, including Power Sessions, 1:1 Leadership Development Coaching Package, and OD Consulting Services, all aimed at propelling employees and organizations to new heights. With their expertise and tailored approach, The Good Org empowers clients to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change within their organizations. In a wide-ranging discussion, Terrell and I talked about: ☑️ Workplace situations and challenges that The Good Org helps business leaders to solve. ☑️ How does Terrell's coaching approach differ from traditional transformational leadership strategies in the tech industry? ☑️ The advantages of combining executive coaching with org development consulting work. ☑️ And much more. Thanks, Terrell! Visit The Good Org now. For the video version, show notes and to see details of my previous guests, check out the podcast page here: www.GetMoreHRClients.com/Podcast WANT MORE CUSTOMERS OR CLIENTS? Want more clients for your HR-related consultancy or HR Tech business? Check out: www.GetMoreHRClients.com/Services. WANT TO START AN HR BUSINESS? Want to launch your own consulting business in the broad Human Resources sector? Check out: www.GetMoreHRClients.com/Start for resources.

Come and be a part of UpLevel's summer series, "Bringing Humanity into the Workplace." We will be exploring the importance of this topic and gaining valuable insights through discussions with colleagues, friends, and clients. Every Wednesday for the next two months, join us to learn how to incorporate humanity into your organization.To unlock the potential within each individual means more than just acknowledging their skills and abilities. It involves exploring their aspirations, dreams, and untapped talent. It means nurturing their growth and providing them with the necessary tools and support to reach new heights.Investing in coaching is an investment in your team. As a leader, taking the time to understand your team, and providing guidance and support to overcome obstacles, creates an environment where vulnerability is embraced and mistakes are viewed as opportunities for growth. As employees are supported and encouraged through coaching, something magical happens. They begin to break through the limitations they once believed defined them. They start discovering hidden strengths and talents they didn't even know they possessed. They build resilience and learn to navigate challenges with confidence.Join Rachel Baldi and Christie Mann in this episode of The UpLevel Podcast as they delve into their mission of Bringing Humanity into the Workplace and the life-changing effects of coaching. Through inspiring stories of individuals and organizations, they encourage us to recognize the untapped potential in ourselves and those around us. UpLevel's goal is to promote workplaces that celebrate the unique humanity of every individual. We hope you'll listen in so you can learn how you can uplevel your own workplace.In this episode:Best practices to help organizations humanize their workplaceMethods to help organizations establish an effective coaching culture in their workplaceReal-life examples of companies with thriving coaching culturesDelve into the connection between coaching and unleashing employee potentialDiscover the value of workplace well-being and its impact on employees and organizationsThe critical role coaching cultures play in modern organizationsInsights on building a results-driven coaching culture at workHow coaching can be the key to unlocking workplace potentialThe importance of fostering well-being in the workplace and its effects on overall successwww.uplevelproductions.comhttps://www.instagram.com/uplevelproductions/https://www.linkedin.com/company/uplevelproductionscompanyhttps://www.facebook.com/uplevelproductionscompany

Lazy leadership sees a lack of outcomes as a lack of effort. "DO MORE! "WORK HARDER!" What if people ARE working harder AND are putting in excess hours? A single horse can pull a wagon with square wheels only so fast. More horses, better wagon. The idea of working smarter not harder has its place. But in order to work smarter, we need to first stop working entirely to fully assess where we are and what needs to change. Just tweaking things that are easy and convenient might not move the needle on your productivity. People are more satisfied in their jobs when they can use creativity, have autonomy, and feel a sense of purpose. There is no better way than to allow an employee to examine their own tasks and responsibilities and come up with new and more efficient ways to get them done to the same or better outcomes. When we give people the chance to invest in their own day-to-day, they are happier, more engaged, and more efficient. Some insights on just working harder, foolish change for the sake of change, and of course, whether we have a half-hearted or whole-hearted effort and why come from the No More Leadership BS team. You don't have to be bad to get better; this episode can help everyone improve their leadership.

Leaders know how valuable coaching conversations can be but it's not always easy to find the time. In this episode, Wendy Swire, author of Anytime Coaching: Unleashing Employee Performance, gives us effective and impactful coaching skills to use at any time. The Anytime Coaching model equips managers (from first-time supervisors to senior executives) with tools they can use immediately to transform the way they work with employees and colleagues unleashing their best thinking and developing their overall competence.  Tune in to learn how the anytime coaching approach enables you to understand the importance of both self-awareness and organizational awareness, view your employees and the work you do in fresh and positive ways, know how to respond once you have observed, inquired, and listened, recognize how to share feedback and realign when coaching conversations get off track. Whether you lead a temporary, cross-functional team on a short-term project or formally manage large groups of people on a daily basis, Wendy's practical tips and insights will help you improve performance and achieve results. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dress sharply. Style your hair just right. Whiten your teeth. These are your keys to the C-suite. Look how you want to look, but how do leaders behave? How much BS have we observed and believed because of it's overwhelming presence? "People perform better with financial incentives," is NOT true, but it's a common leadership trope that people believe. This is just one example of many that keeps leaders from being more than barely adequate. How does one develop into a good leader, dare we say a great leader? By starting with leadership development now. The first step is to unlearn bad habits. The second step miles down that road is to earn better habits. It turns out that the best leaders grew and learned through practice, coaching, and mentorship. The No More Leadership BS team offers ways to reconsider leadership to ensure that leaders are being effective, authentic, and can very likely improve employee retention and engagement through their own development. Self-improvement is not selfish, it's an investment. No one else is going to invest in you more than you do. Leaders leveling up is up to you!

Today (Friday, February 3rd) is the FINAL DAY to join Coaching for Leaders Plus for the inaugural membership of $100 USD annually. Discover how to use Coaching for Leaders Plus to accelerate your learning, build your confidence, and invest more fully in developing others.

Join Coaching for Leaders Plus to accelerate your learning, build your confidence, and invest more fully in developing others. Activate your membership by Friday, February 3rd to receive the inaugural membership of $100 USD annually.

I'd like to begin this episode by acknowledging the land that I am learning and living on is the traditional un-ceded, un-surrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg People. Passio Fidelis, or, passionate faithfulness.  The ability to be true to yourself and your goals as you lead.  This phrase is the guiding principle that our guest uses as he coaches leaders from the trenches, helping them be the most effective and robust leaders possibleAnd so, in this episode, you'll hear from John Robertson, a fellow Canadian, Ottawa resident, and (Founder and President of FORTLOG Services), who will offer advice and practical tools to help emerging leaders be their best coaches, ensuring we can all be passionately faithful to, and for, our teams. Trench Leadership: A Podcast From the Front is humbled to have been listed #8 in the Top 20 for Best Canadian Leadership-themed podcasts in 2022.Reviews are the best way for us to know what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, and what we should talk about in the future, so please click on the links below and let us know if this episode was helpful.Connect Here:Trench Leadership Web-site: www.trenchleadership.caLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trench-leadership-a-podcast-from-the-front/?viewAsMember=trueFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/Trench-Leadership-A-Podcast-from-the-Front-10027091202630Instagram: trench_leadershipYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3DKPuh_ipqJqyeR0vv46QTwitter: @TrenchLeadersh1Iglen Studios: https://www.iglen.comConcussion Legacy Foundation web-site: https://www.concussionfoundation.caDispatches Adventure Ride web-site: https://www.dispatchesride.com John's Episode Links:1. www.fortlog.co2. www.fortlog.co/trenchleadership3. www.runtowardtheroar.online4. https://www.facebook.com/FORTLOGServices5. www.linkedin.com/in/johnrobertson-fortlog6. email: john@fortlog.coJohn's Recommended Book/Movie List:Books:1. Gus Lee Courage - the Backbone of Leadership2. Jim Collins - Good to Great for Social Sector3. Lee Child - Jack Reacher SeriesMovies:1. Outlaw Josey Wales2. Die Hard Series

A senior executive worries that his lieutenants are not being taken seriously by the senior leadership team. He discusses with a coach how to help his rising leaders accelerate their growth. This is that conversation.     We created a new free Essential Tool for you called “Executive Thinking.” It illustrates the “altitude” analogy Tom told during the episode. It also supports one of the four exercises you can do with your team.Additional Essential Tools that support other exercises are “Before You Write Your Presentation” and “Sorting & Labeling.”Liberating Structures is the free resource Tom was raving about. The specific exercise he mentioned was TRIZ. Tom has talked about Liberating Structures in the episodes “How to Re-engage a Team” and “Leading Offsites.”If you're approaching year-end performance reviews, there are tools to support you – no matter which side of the review you're on! – in Performance Reviews. Tom referenced two shows that can help you learn Sorting & Labeling.Coaching For Leaders with Dave Stachowiak: The Way to Make Sense to Others.The Everyday Innovator with Chad McCallister: How Product Managers Look & Sound like Leaders.This current episode is tagged in the library in three categories:Executive PresenceLeadershipPerception – How You're PerceivedIn addition to the various episodes listed above, five that relate specifically to executive thinking are:180  Becoming Expert193  Branding Yourself202  The Executive Executive178  Executive Presence – Three Pillars11  Sounding ExecutiveAs we hurtle in our year-end traditions, stay mindful!Tom and The Look & Sound of Leadership team. 

How do you convince people to buy from you?Since birth, stories have been embedded in us through books

The recent years have presented new challenges for pastors and leaders, and many studies are showing that discouragement is at an all time high. Even apart the unique events of the past few years, pastoring and leading can be difficult. What is CGN doing as a network to provide care and coaching for pastors and leaders? In this episode, Brian Brodersen, Kellen Criswell, and Nick Cady are joined by Rob Salvato, who leads the Leadership Care and Coaching Team for CGN. In our discussion, Rob shares about the ways their team is developing systems and providing resources to help pastors and leaders in practical ways, including providing resources to help them lead, and providing a lifeline for those who are struggling. Together we share about some of the struggles we've faced as leaders, and how relationships within our network helped us in those times; as well as how we would like to make that experience available to anyone who needs it. Check out the Leadership Collective Podcast here. The Calvary Chapel / CGN International Conference is coming up soon — it will be from June 26-29 in Costa Mesa, California. For more information and registration, visit conference.calvarychapel.com New episodes are being released every 2 weeks, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast, so those episodes will be delivered to your device as soon as they come out. We'd love to hear feedback from you on these episodes. You can email us at CGN@calvarychapel.com

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS!The Genesis of the Well Rounded Leadership Show:  Scratching that Radio Show itchEntrepreneur History of the Host - Lessons LearnedThe Importance of Leadership & Personal Growth in Today's Hiring ClimateGOAL:  Be Better.  PERIOD.Leaders are Curious - The Kobe Bryant ExampleInhabit the Process of Being the Best - Tom Brady ExampleTony's Stated Intent for the PodcastMy Motivation to Be Better & Self Leadership.Pursuit of Overall Wellness:  Physical, Mental/Intellectual, Emotional, Spiritual, Social, Community & ProfessionalCurious Kills Cats but Lack of Curiosity Limits LeadersInspirational and Aspirational LeadersEmail:  tony@wellroundedleaders.com       LinkedIn:   www.linkedin.com/in/tonydjax/

Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss how to navigate being a leader and making change during and post COVID. Dave gives tips on balancing leadership roles, how to grow as a leader, and early foundational tips for starting a nonprofit. Dave Stachowiak Dave is the host and founder of Coaching for Leaders, a top-rated management podcast downloaded 25 million times. With more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie and a thriving, global leadership academy, he helps leaders discover practical wisdom, build meaningful relationships, and create movement for genuine results. Dave is also founder of the Coaching for Leaders Academy, a year-long leadership development cohort. His credentials include a doctoral degree in organizational leadership from Pepperdine University, several international business leadership awards from Dale Carnegie, and graduation from Coach U. He also serves on the board of the Global Center for Women & Justice at Vanguard University and co-hosts the Ending Human Trafficking podcast with longtime friend, Sandie Morgan. Key Points Leaders in nonprofits balance: 1)Leading the organizations mission and big picture; and 2) Managing the complex day-to-day organizational management Having a community and partnering with others in the same field can be beneficial for leaders to gain new skills and learn from people who are working in the same sphere and similar roles. Nonprofit leaders, or individuals who want to become leaders, need to distinguish between what feels good in the moment and what is actually good for the movement. Building a strong team and knowing how and what to delegate is key to sustainability. Resources Coaching for Leaders The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business by Michael Hyatt How to Sell Your Vision with Michael Hyatt | Coaching for Leaders podcast How Great Teams Find Purpose, with David Burkus | Coaching for Leaders podcast Business Model Generation Effective Delegation of Authority, with Hassan Osman | Coaching for Leaders podcast How to Work With a Board, with Denice Hinden | Coaching for Leaders podcast How to Define a Role, with Pat Griffin | Coaching for Leaders podcast Love the show? Consider supporting us on Patreon! Become a Patron Transcript Dave [00:00:00] You're listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 276, Nonprofit Leadership with Coaching for Leaders host, Dave Stachowiak. Hey, that's me. Production Credits [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak. Sandie [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan. Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, every two weeks we get together, we have a fabulous guest on who's an expert in some area to help us. Today you just have outdone yourself with the guest you have found. I am so impressed. Sandie [00:00:57] Oh, my goodness, Dave, I'm so excited to tell everybody that my guest is Dave Stachowiak. Yay. And let me just do, be a little bit formal here. His bio: Dave is the host and founder of Coaching for Leaders, a top rated management podcast downloaded 25 million times with more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie and a thriving Global Leadership Academy, he helps leaders discover practical wisdom, build meaningful relationships, and create movement for genuine results. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, Dave. Dave [00:01:44] What a pleasure to be here. I feel like I've been here before somehow. Sandie [00:01:49] Well,

What an absolute treat of an episode this is! International leadership and business coach Gregory Gray joins to discuss all the benefits of having a leadership coach, including: The unique advantages a coach can bring to leaders at all levels  What it means to move from manage-leading to leadership-leading  How to start your Vision Story  Why you always need to be recruiting  And so, so much more Greg is an expert in building teams and efficient businesses. He is the author of Business Owner Freedom, host of the Everyday Business Leader Podcast, and Founder of Gray University. His work helps leaders break free of daily busy work and find the time to focus on the long-term. His detailed strategies to build self-managing and self-accountable teams are part of his framework that will take you to another level of leadership success. Listen in now!

A no-nonsense leader is asked to add coaching to her list of duties. She turns to the coach who'd coached her for a quick immersion course. Coaching your people requires a shift in thinking and a specific set of behaviors. These ideas are captured in a PDF about the GROW model. It's available to you for free here.This month we are offering three free mini-courses. Come join us!Demystifying Workplace ConflictUnderstanding Yourself and Others (DiSC)Get 15% off your registration with either of these courses by using the coupon code PODCAST at checkout. Offer applies to your first registration.The Look & Sound of LeadershipGet 50% off our flagship course with the coupon code LEADERSHIP at checkout!During the episode, Tom and Laurel mentioned Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High. A great skill-building resource.This episode lives in three categories in the Podcast Library:Management SkillsPerception – How you Perceive OthersRelationship Building.Five related episodes you might listen to are: 132 – Coaching Your People 91 – Facilitating Open Dialogue   155 – The Human Element83 – Leadership and Listening  26 – Questions as LeadershipYou can explore more ideas about coaching your people on Dave Stachowiak's Coaching For Leaders podcast. Episode 190: How to Improve Your Coaching Skills.Tom raved about Dave's conversation with Connson Locke. That's on Coaching for Leadership, Episode 546: How to Speak Up. Catch Tom answering coaching questions on the Unlocking Leadership – Ask the Coaches podcast. How To Build Executive PresenceHow to Become a Strategic ThinkerRebuilding Engagement prior to Restructuring, Can an Executive Coach Help?Gratitude, as always, to those who reach out to us and to those who post reviews. Thanks!From all of us here at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be healthy and safe. Thanks for listening.See you next month!Sohee Tom

In this episode of the Beginners Mind Series, you'll learn how to use a coaching approach to successfully lead teams in today's fast-paced, complex business environment, understand the role of a coach and how you can be an effective coach for your team. Join Marcia Reynolds and Simerjeet Singh as they discuss leadership coaching & what it takes to get the most out of your coaching sessions with your team members. Dr. Marcia Reynolds helps global organizations grow their leadership using coaching for accelerated results. Her clients include executives and emerging leaders in multinational corporations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. She also speaks at coaching and leadership conferences around the world and has taught classes and coached leaders in 43 countries. She is recognized by Global Gurus as the #5 coach in the world and is one of 10 coaches inducted by the International Coach Federation into their Circle of Distinction. To know more, pls visit her official website - www.covisioning.com Or connect with her on - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marciareynolds/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MarciaReynolds Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/outsmartyourbrain/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarciaReynolds Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/O3tSczHLkrM #BeginnersMind #CoachingForLeaders #LeadershipDevelopment #LeadershipWisdom #LeadershipCoach #CoachingSkills #CoachingTips #CoachingCulture #Podcast #SimerjeetSingh #LeadershipSpeaker Follow us on: https://linktr.ee/SimerjeetSingh

Transcription:Speaker 1 (00:03):Welcome to the solarpreneur podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. My name is Taylor Armstrong. I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fail. I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs, the industry, to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro and closing more deals. What is a sore anywhere you might ask? A solopreneur is a new breed of solar pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery. And you are about to become what's going on in solarpreneurSpeaker 2 (00:44):Nation Taylor Armstrong. Back with another episode here to help your life easier in your solar sales journey, helping you crush it, helping you get more referrals, generate more leads and dominate. That's what we're all about. So I wanted to give you a couple updates on the things going on around my neck of the woods here in San Diego, just got back from a Mario kart tournament with our sales team, and you'll be sad to know that I came in second place. Did not, um, pull out the win, but we had a hundred dollars go to the winner, had a cool little tournament. So if you're not doing fun, little activities like that, I would highly suggest it. Do that with your teams, get types of, uh, events, activities, go on. We, we do one weekly, but it can be a little much sometimes. So I would suggest maybe every couple of weeks, get your team together through an awesome activity, get some food and, uh, yeah.Speaker 2 (01:45):Do tournaments. People love it, but yeah, came in second place and uh, I grew up on Mario kart. Um, if any of you want to challenge me? I am down anytime I lost a one match cause that freaking blue shell came and hit me at the very end. If you know Mario kart, you know what I'm talking about, but anyways, so that's, what's going on here. We're keeping the activities going we're gearing up. Um, spring is coming quickly to this summer months are flying by and guess what it's already almost done with Q1. So take a step back to look at where are you at in your goals we're already done with the first quarter. We're going into the second quarter pretty quick here. So if you're not crushing it this year, start to analyze where are you at? And that's going to lead us directly into the episode, which is why should you have a coach?Speaker 2 (02:40):Okay. Um, and the reason I'm doing this episode is because next um, episode we have coming up, we have coach Michael Burton coming on. If you haven't heard a coach Burt, he is pretty high profile. Dude. I saw him speak it. Um, actually grant Kurt owns X con and he's coached hundreds and hundreds of sales people probably into the thousands business leaders, entrepreneurs. He has I think a dozen or two books. Anyways. We introduced him in that, in the next episode, but you're not going to want to miss out on that. And it got me really thinking about why is coaching important? Hey, obviously we're going to talk more about that in the next episode do, but just made me start reflecting. Why should we have coaches in when I first started in sales, that was pretty much unheard of. I was like, I was like, no one needs a coach in sales.Speaker 2 (03:36):You got a manager. You need, you don't need a coach. But then as I've talked about in some previous episodes, I actually have hired many coaches and it has been, I would say one of the single most important things to my growth, helping me close more deals, help them keeping me accountable and helping me grow as a sales person and entrepreneur. So start to consider if you've never had a coach, I want you to consider getting one. Okay. And what, what top, you know, business people, entrepreneurs they're investing in themselves. So I think that's the first principle with this. If you're not investing in yourself, you are going to have a tough time growing. I mean, I'm sure it can be done. There's guys that do it, but what you're doing by hiring coaches, you're accelerating your growth because you're talking with someone who's already taken the steps that you're looking to take.Speaker 2 (04:30):And that's something that you should look for in a coach. Who's been there. Who's done the thing that you want to do. Okay. My background with this, I'm always kind of improvement background wanting to be better. I think I've told some stories with this in previous episodes, but I was actually a music guy and nerd, I guess some people call me the band geek, the band nerd, back in high school. I was the one going to the band camps going, um, you know, practicing. And I played this instrument called the marimba it's percussion. Um, so for those who don't know marimba, it's basically a giant xylophone. You hold the four mallets and you play this thing. People say, you look like Wolverine or something. Guess you're only holding two in each hand, but you play this thing. And um, yeah, he just jam out on you.Speaker 2 (05:21):You got four sticks in your hands and you're um, yeah, you're practicing a ton. Learning the grip, learning the technique. You're getting callouses on your fingers. So that was my background in high school. I was percussion. Now I want to be the best marimbist in the world. That wasn't my goal. And what I did is I would go and do pretty much what I'm telling you right now. I would go and look for the best people to learn from. And then I would go look for their summer camps. They had these summer camps. You could go to every top marimbas had, um, you know, you'd pay, you'd fly out to wherever they were. I flew the one in Orlando and I flew to one in, uh, Michigan flew to one Texas. Yeah, Texas all over the place, going to these camps, trying to learn from these top marimbas.Speaker 2 (06:12):And the thing about it was I was already at a disadvantage because I went to a small school, can have high school, Southern Utah town, old Blake, 3000 people had 200 kids in my school. So you can imagine with 200 kids there wasn't a ton going on with music. Um, there wasn't a ton of going on, uh, with anything really. I mean, barely had enough kids to have even a school band at that size of school. So I was already at a disadvantage, no one even had no one even knew what a marimba was really in my town, let alone had one. There was one other guy I knew that had one in my town. But besides that, there was not even this, this instrument didn't even exist. So I saved up, worked hard. My parents helped me buy a marimba. Um, it was kind of like Christmas work and combined, they got me a marimba.Speaker 2 (07:05):And um, I would practice this thing sometimes like five, six hours a day. So I was going all out and then I was just trying to be the best they had this competition called the Utah day of percussion. So I was like, all right, I'm going to go beat out all these big kids in the city, all these big time kids. And I slapped that gold down and that was my goal. And that's when I started going to these camps. And then I think was it 2010 or something? I went, um, after going to all these camps, after practicing my butt off six hours a day, I went in, I locked down the first place and everyone heard this kid get up on stage Taylor Armstrong, first place, marimba Canab high school. And all these kids that the huge score is like, what the heck?Speaker 2 (07:55):Who is what's Canab high school. I don't even know that that town exists. No one even had been to this event at my school didn't know existed. So the big key with this, the reason I'm sharing this story is because I think you can apply it to anything in your life. If you want to get good at something, you need to go seek out the best people, go with some of their content. And that's what this podcast is about is we're surrounding you with the top guys. We're getting the best of the best in the industry. We're putting them in your ears and we're giving you the shortcut to it. I would have loved when I was learning marimba. I would have loved to have like a marimba podcast or something like that to listen to didn't exist at that time. Um, but that's the key you needed to be obsessed.Speaker 2 (08:40):Like Grant Cardone says be obsessed or be average. Anything you're doing there's success leaves clues. I think, uh, Jim ruins says that scene. You can go seek out these guys, see what they're doing? Yeah. Go to their events that they have him pay them, do whatever it takes. If you're not the top guy in your office, go see what the top guy is doing. Gain your, if you are in a smaller company, maybe you're the top guy, but that's the disadvantage. You have a fear of smaller company gall and go to events, surround yourself with the top. Guys, you got door to door con, that's an event. You got these guys at knock star. I was talking about, um, you got this and we're planning on future events and things to help you grow. That's the key with this. Go out. Be coachable. Don't be afraid to invest in yourself in any top, all these top entrepreneurs, top guys, their messaging.Speaker 2 (09:39):Um, the number I hear is 15 to 20% in yourself. So start thinking about that. Are you putting 15 to 20% of what you earn into personal development into growth? Okay. So if you're making six figures, which hopefully anyone in this industry is, are you putting, what does that 15 to 20 grand are you missing 15 to 20 grand a year? If you're making 200 grand, you should be doing double that 30 to 40 grand. Okay. So think about that. Start investing in yourself if you're not already. Okay. Um, but just a couple, a couple reasons, I guess why you should have a coach, number one, they're going to help you see things. You can't see yourself. Okay. A lot of times when we're just analyzing ourselves, um, we're not, we're not good at giving yourselves feedback. We're not good at being honest with ourselves.Speaker 2 (10:34):And when I first hired a coach talked about it, but for my competition, ourselves competition, he helped me see that I wasn't, um, being honest in my routines and he helped me break apart. Okay. What are you doing in the mornings? How much time are you actually spending selling? And that's the first time to that point. I started actually tracking how many, how many hours am I putting on the doors? How many appointments in my booking? How many appointments am I sitting in? And then when I first started tracking it, I said, no wonder, I'm not getting results. I'm always sitting in like two appointments a week. It's going to be pretty tough to close multiple deals a week. If you're only sending into, so I've been going to help you see things, you can't see yourself. And number two, they're going to hold you accountable.Speaker 2 (11:21):At least a good coach should they should hold you super accountable. Um, and again, put your money on the line. If you're paying someone, that's going to add another element to it. If you have money invested in something, you're going to be much more likely to do it. I, right now I have a trainer fitness trainer. He gives me workouts every week. I have to send them videos. I'm the guy at the gym. That's taken videos of my squats, which probably annoys people have made dead. This stuff like that. I have to send them the video, every workout I do. And he breaks it down and he says, Taylor, your butt's not down far enough. And that that's a big thing. He helped me improve by the way I was doing like those half squats. Okay. But your legs need to go below the parallel point and get down.Speaker 2 (12:08):So that's something I didn't see myself. He helped me to it. And since I'm paying this guy, I'm paying a trainer. Guess what? I'm going to be way more likely to go to the gym. Cause I'm like, well, freak. I don't want to waste my money. I don't want to pay this guy. If I'm not going to show up to the gym, wasting the money. So it's the same thing. Don't be afraid to invest in the coach. Make sure they're holding you accountable. And number three, like I mentioned in the beginning, they are going to save you tons of time, because guess what a good coach has already done. The thing that you're trying to get to, Hey, Tim Ferris has a book, um, for the four hour week work week. If you haven't read that one, but he talks about go and model, not the best person in the world, but the second best person in the world, I thought this is a cool little hack.Speaker 2 (12:58):Something you can write down right here. So go model what? The second best person in the world. Cause guess what? The first person in the world, they're going to charge a lot to coach people. They got the credibility, they got the credentials. They're the best. Right? But what about the second best? What if you went out and paid the guy that got second place to Michael Phelps, that was like millisecond behind them. Okay. Probably more than that, but maybe he was two seconds behind me. Michael Phelps. Do you think he's going to be a little bit cheaper and then Michael Phelps to pay and get results from probably his and he's still pretty freaking good, right? Second best in the world. So that's a hack. Anything you're trying to get good at. You don't need to hire necessarily the best in the world can. Sometimes they're not the best teachers anyways.Speaker 2 (13:50):I know I'm not the best in the world that so in solar, but I think I am better at teaching then, then probably some of the best in the world. Okay. So the best aren't going to always be the greatest teachers. But think about that. Go look at the second best person in the world. Go with the people that are getting results and model after them. So little hack. Okay. They're going to shortcut your success. Any coach that's and that's a way to find a good coach. We talk about this with, um, coach Burt in the next episode, but how do you know who to actually trust and who to hire a coach? You okay. I think Jesus said in the Bible, by their fruits, you shall know them. Right? So, same thing. If you're looking for a coach, look at their fruits, what have they accomplished?Speaker 2 (14:40):What have they done? Okay. If they have not sold anything, if they have not gotten, you know, decent results better than you, then maybe you don't model. And I'll be, I mean, I'll be straight up and say it, I did 150 deals in a year. If you've done more than that, then maybe I'm not the coach for you because that's more than I've done. Right. But if you've done less than that, then I think there's things I can share with you that are going to take your skills to the next level. Okay. But look at who's ahead of you. Look at what results they've had and then that's the people you want to follow. That's the people you want to learn from and anyone that's trained to coach out there, don't be afraid to say, Hey, what results have you had? Okay. Especially if you're going to pay someone, you want to make sure these people are legit.Speaker 2 (15:29):You want to make sure they have walked the path that you're trying to fall and gotten the results that you're trying to get. Okay. So just some thoughts I had, don't be afraid to get a coach Powell and already, and guys, we are opening. Speaking of coaching, we're opening very soon, our new coaching platform. Kay. And I can't share all the details, but it's going to be game changing. You're not going to want to miss out on it. It's going to be super interactive and yeah, no one in the industry has done something like this before. So if you're not hurting on this wait list, go get on it. It says solciety.co. That's S O L C I E T Y . C O . We have the wait-list open right now. So go join the wait list. And you're going to want to be first to get on this.Speaker 2 (16:21):Okay. Let's me special pricing. And we're going to have the best of the best in the industry on our new coaching platform. Okay. And if you want to surround yourself with the best, this is where you start go to solsociety. Okay. So we can't wait to see you on the next episode, coach Burt is going to drop some value bombs. He is the best coach, I think for sales, probably in the game right now. So don't miss out, share this with someone that you think can be improved by it and then make sure you're on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you soon.Speaker 1 (16:56):Hey, solarpreneurs. Quick question. What if you could surround yourself with industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs, and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day. For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level. That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new solar learning community, exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with the top performers in the industry. And it's called solciety. This learning community was designed from the ground up to level the playing field and give solar pros access to proven mentors who want to give back to this community and to help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry and brightest minds for, are you ready for it? Less than $3 and 45 cents a day currently solciety's closed. The public and membership is by invitation only, but solar printers can go to solciety.co to learn more and have the option to join a wait list. When a membership becomes available in your area. Again, this is exclusively for solarpreneur listeners. So be sure to go to www.solciety.co to join the wait list and learn more now. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you again in the next step.Speaker 3 (18:25):[inaudible]. 

We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios.  The premise is always the same.  The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone.  What about for leaders when coaching their team members?  Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower.   Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it?  Leaders are busy people and have tons of pressure on their shoulders.  Life is a whirlwind of meetings and pushing the plan's execution.  Expecting people to do what they are being paid to do, can easily supplant the encouragement vibe from the leader.  Telling people you recognise their strengths, means taking the time to audit and then communicate those strengths.  Being supportive means taking the time to be across what is happening at the individual level.  Do we do that?  Giving positive reinforcement means having the right conversations at the right time.  The word “time” keeps popping up, because that is the deadly enemy of good intentions.   If we flipped open your calendar from last week and we added up how much one-on-one encouragement you gave to the members your team, would we be talking in terms of hours or milliseconds of conversation?  Time management is a key to people management.  You can't manage people if you are not in control of your time and if you have not made certain choices about where you will prioritise your time.  We see this in family time being sacrificed on the alter of getting the results.  The employees can easily be in the same group as the family, missing out on the leader's attention.   The second super hero of leadership coaching is Focus.  Managers manage processes, budgets, timelines and the execution of results.  The machinery of the firm runs flawlessly.  There are no defects and no delays.  Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction for the firm and they build the people.  The building the people part is where there has to be intentional focus on the individual.  All of the other components of executing and gaining results can means the focus is not on the people development. We need to track the assignments we have given people, to make sure that we are there for them, if they need help.  We need to offer up our undivided attention to listen to our people. No thoughts of what needs to be done scrambling around in our brain, while we sit there half listening to what we are being told.    Elevate is probably the most difficult of the super hero leader coaching efforts to pull off.  We can tell everyone what to do and how to it.  We can do it all by ourselves.  Neither of these choices develop our people though.  We must coach them by asking what they need to do. We need to push them to operate with the mindset of the leader.  We need them to self discover things that will guide them around what needs to be done and how they should be done.   We have to challenge them in ways that inspire, as opposed to crushing them.  There is a fine line between applying the right dimension of push and crushing someone.    We all get into a rut in our work. As the leader coach if we can have our people challenge typical ways of thinking or doing, then that potentially unleashes a tremendous opportunity for creativity.  It means we need to allocate the time to interact with our team and that time may not be very easy to find.  We can also suggest they do less of or more of something.  We can challenge them to consider doing the opposite of what they are currently doing. All of these “more”, “less”, “opposite” alternatives are there to get the team thinking in a different way about our business.  If we see an opportunity for improvement, we can push for immediate change.  This can become an issue though if we push too hard at the wrong time.  Getting the balance right is the equation we need to solve.   Our fourth super hero is to Empower.  There is no word in Japanese which can easily capture this idea.  That makes the communication of the idea a bit tricky. We know that the Johari Window describes leadership blindspots.  We need to work on our high potential's awareness of what everyone knows, but they don't know about themselves.  Doing 360 surveys and educating them on how to get feedback are positive actions that will build the leadership bench.  Having an improved perspective enables them to make the changes necessary to become a more effective leader.   Getting them to think about how to transfer experiences from one environment to another is a stretch that is needed.  We all tend to be trapped by the limitations of our previous experiences.  The issue becomes that, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail”.  We need to educate our people about not falling into that leadership trap.    Engaging emotions is a powerful driver of commitment and accountability.  Understanding what is important to each person is the necessary key to the door of change.  That means spending the time and making the communication effort to uncover the trigger emotions, the drivers for positive change.  We need to model it for them and then encourage them to do the same, when they have the responsibility of leadership.   The four drivers of coaching composed of Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower make for powerful leadership precepts.  These take time and the best time to start using them was yesterday.  The second best time is today.

#121: I'm thrilled to announce I'm launching two levels of coaching for individual leaders. Until now I've only worked with corporations. Details on that announcement and two lessons I learned from coaching sessions last week in this episode.Click here to DM me on LinkedIn for more information about coaching packages:https://www.linkedin.com/in/russleads/Tap here to check out my new book, Decide to Lead, on Amazon. Thank you so much to the hundreds of you who have already purchased it!Join the private Facebook Group for leaders called The Culture Champions. Visit theculturehacks.com to join.--About the podcast:The Culture Hacks Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives on their organization culture. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ about what he does with company culture message him on LinkedIn!

Sarah is joined by speaker, consultant, podcaster, author of 3 books, and corporate coach, Rory Rowland. They are talking about coaching for leaders, the difference between corporate coaching and executive coaching, and asking open-ended questions. Stick around until the end for this week's coaching challenge!

Coaching for leaders and managers is essential to drive peak performance for your call center and business. According to Bill Eckstrom, the most effective leader behaves more like a coach. So, how exactly do you behave that way and what do great leaders do to increase sales, enhance performance, and sustain growth? In this episode of the Fast Leader Show, Bill Eckstrom lays out the strategies and tactics for you to apply coaching for leaders and managers. Learn how you can become more comfortable with discomfort and its importance in your call center and team's growth.

Rick Heyland and his guests David Webster and Chris Sheepshanks (from the Centre for Teams) invite all leaders to increase the quality and quantity of coaching during the current pandemic. They discuss coaching ideas, topics and opportunities that any leader can apply to the current crisis and beyond.  The Leadership coaching recommendations include; Be Calm, Be Mindful and Be Intentional to name a few.

Chris Ferdinandi on Greater Than Code, Ben Orenstein on Maintainable, Susan Rice on Coaching For Leaders, Courtland Allen on Software Engineering Unlocked, and Matt Stratton on Hired Thought. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 16, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CHRIS FERDINANDI ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Chris Ferdinandi with hosts Rein Henrichs and Jacob Stoebel. Chris is a proponent of plain vanilla JavaScript. He says that modern web development has grown so much in scope and complexity that it makes it difficult for beginners to get started and it can negatively impact the performance of the web for users in ways that developers with fast machines don’t always feel. One of the reasons things are the way they are today, Chris says, is because a lot of backend developers migrated to the front end because that was where the exciting stuff was happening and they brought with them their approaches and best practices. The front end, however, is a very different medium. In the back end, you have control over how fast the server is, when things run, the operating system, etc. On the front end, you have none of this. People are accessing what we build on a variety of devices that may or may not be able to handle the data we’re sending and may have unpredictable internet connections. If a file fails to download or the user goes through a train tunnel and we’ve built things in a modern JavaScript-heavy way, the whole house of cards falls apart on these users. Chris would like people not to abandon JavaScript altogether, but to be a little more thoughtful about how we use it. Modern web development involves a few things: frameworks, package managers, and doing more and more things (such as CSS) in JavaScript. All of this JavaScript has the effect of slowing down performance because 100KB of JavaScript is not the same as 100KB of CSS, a JPEG, or HTML because the browser needs to parse and interpret it. Because of these performance problems, single page apps have become more popular. But now you’re recreating in JavaScript all the things the browser gave you out of the box like routing, shifting focus, and handling forward and back buttons. You’re solving performance problems created by JavaScript with even more JavaScript, which is the most fragile part of the stack because it doesn’t fail gracefully. If a browser encounters an HTML element it doesn’t recognize, it just treats it as a div and moves on. If you have a CSS property you mis-typed, the browser ignores it. But if you mistype a variable in JavaScript, the whole thing falls apart and anything that comes after that never happens.  For Chris, a better approach to web development is one that is more lean and more narrowly-focused on just the things you need. His first principle is to embrace the platform. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that DOM manipulation that used to be really hard years ago is really easy these days in vanilla JavaScript. Also, many of the things that JavaScript was required for in the past can be done more efficiently today with HTML and CSS. He also says that we need to remember that the web is for everyone. Because we are often using high-end computers, the latest mobile devices, and fast internet connections, we forget that this is not the experience for a majority of web users. We build things that work fine on our machines but are painfully slow for the people who actually use the things we build. They ended their discussion with reflections. Chris’s reflection was about learning JavaScript and web development for the first time. He says that people learning shouldn’t be made to feel like they need to dive in to the latest trends, but should instead find a way to learn the fundamentals. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/170-the-case-for-vanilla-javascript-with-chris-ferdinandi/id1163023878?i=1000466076138 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-case-for-vanilla-javascript BEN ORENSTEIN ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Robby Russell. Ben believes that, in a maintainable codebase, the code should match how you think about the world. When speaking about the domain with your teammates, do you use the same terminology that the code uses? Do you use the term “user” but the code uses the term “customer”? Getting your terms consistent is a specific case of a more general principle of implicit and explicit knowledge. Maintainable systems have as much knowledge put into them as possible so that they become sources of truth. Ben’s definition of technical debt is a technical shortcut you took intentionally after weighing it against alternatives and deciding it was worth it in the short team with the eventual intention of eliminating it. He says it is hard to get time on a schedule dedicated to cleaning up technical debt, so it is your professional responsibility to clean it up as you go. Ben says that asking permission to clean up technical debt as you deliver a feature is like asking permission to do your job well. He says that the idea of “We’ll go fix this later” never happens and, if you don’t believe him, grep your codebase for the string “TODO”. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work/id1459893010?i=1000466511242 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work-_fGCpf6F SUSAN RICE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Susan Rice with host Dave Stachowiak. From the time she was seven, Susan would hear her parents fighting loudly and violently when she was trying to sleep at night. When the fighting got scary and out of control, Susan would step in. Sometimes that meant talking them down and sometimes that meant separating them. The mediation she did with her parents taught her how to interact with parties who were intractably opposed. This developed in her a lack of discomfort with conflict, disagreement, and argument. She said that this helped her to be willing to stand up and not be conflict-averse. This reminded me of the Buster Benson episode of Lead From The Heart I summarized in my last article. Dave asked Susan about a section of her book Tough Love in which she described some feedback she received from former congressman Howard Wolpe when she was Assistant Secretary of State. He warned her bluntly that she would fail as Assistant Secretary if she did not correct course and she came to agree with that. She was only thirty-two at the time and had never held a position like this before. In 1998, six months into her tenure, a series of crises hit. Africa’s “first world war” broke out and, then in August of 1998, Al Qaida attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing twelve Americans and over two hundred Kenyans and Tanzanians. This was both a horrific loss and a policy blow for those who were working on Africa at the time. Rather than addressing the pain they were all feeling head on, her approach to dealing with it was to charge through it as she did her parent’s divorce. This wasn’t a leadership style that would work in that context and Howard Wolpe gave her the tough love she needed at the time. Over the Christmas holiday, she reflected on what he had told her and realized that he was right. She had to be more patient. She had to be more respectful and solicitous of other people’s views and perspectives. Dave asked what she did first to make this change in her leadership style. Susan says she started by being more humble. She brought people into decision-making even if their recommendations were not ones that she ultimately accepted. She says, ”You can get a long way leading a team, even if many members of the team don’t actually agree with the direction you’re steering towards, if they feel that their advice, perspective, recommendations have truly been heard and appreciated.” Dave asked how she ensures in meetings between high ranking officials that everyone is genuinely heard even when she doesn’t agree with everything they are saying. She says it is not just what happens when you’re sitting around the meeting table. It comes down to the preparations going into the discussion: the quality of the paper that lays out the issues and the actions and the coherence of the agenda. Managing the meeting, though, is the hardest part. You have to make sure the options are given due consideration and everybody gets a chance to express their judgment. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/456-how-to-be-diplomatic-with-susan-rice/id458827716?i=1000466472793 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/be-diplomatic-susan-rice/ COURTLAND ALLEN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING UNLOCKED The Software Engineering Unlocked podcast featured Courtland Allen, founder of the Indie Hackers podcast and community with host Dr. Michaela Greiler. Michaela asked Courtland what was different about Indie Hackers compared to the earlier startups he had founded that made for its success. He said that for Indie Hackers, his notion of a business idea changed. Back in 2009, if you asked him about a business idea, he would have described a product idea and wouldn’t have been able to say much about how to get the product in customer’s hands, how much to charge for it, or even who the customer was. With Indie Hackers, he was thinking about all aspects of the business. She asked whether the original Indie Hackers idea was to build a community. Courtland said that while there was no desire to do a podcast at first, he always had a plan to build a community. He had multiple phases for Indie Hackers to go through to get to where he wanted it to be. Phase one was a blog where people who wanted to earn financial and creative freedom though revenue-generating side projects could go to find interviews Courtland had done with people like themselves. He figured these blog readers would subscribe to his newsletter and from there he would build a community forum where people could help each other. Somewhere along the line, the podcast was added based on community demand. Michaela asked how Courtland managed to keep Indie Hackers successful as a business when similar communities are struggling. Courtland believes that there are a few principles behind the success of Indie Hackers. The first is that you are much more likely to generate meaningful revenue quickly if you are charging for something that each customer is willing to pay a lot of money for. Regarding building a successful community, you have to start with your marketing. A community is a chicken-and-egg problem where the whole value of a community is the people inside it, making it really hard to start from nothing. With Indie Hackers, he started with content that brought in the people who could form the community. Courtland had thousands of people coming to the website before he turned it into a community. Another example is dev.to. Its founder, Ben Halpern, spent years just growing his Twitter account, tweeting funny jokes and helpful tips for developers. When he launched his community, he was able to advertise it from his Twitter account. A second thing you need to build a community is to seed it with discussions. As Courtland also described in an episode of Software Engineering Daily that I summarized in “Lighting Up The Brain and Joining A Gym”, he started his community by having conversations with fake accounts that were secretly also himself. Ben Halpern kickstarted the dev.to community with discussions with his friends. Choice of topic is critical too. You want a topic that you can talk about forever. The dev.to community’s topic is software engineering. It is the perfect topic because lots of people are learning and trying to learn from each other and there are countless issues and frameworks to talk about. Similarly, there are countless topics and subtopics around founding companies. As Courtland also said on Software Engineering Daily, you also need to think about the timing for when people get together and the space your community takes up. If you throw a party in a small room, you only need ten people to make that party feel like a success, but if you throw it in a football stadium, you need forty thousand people for it to feel like a success. It is the same with an online community. If you constrain it by saying something like, “Our community is just one discussion thread every Sunday at 3:00pm,” then even with ten people, that community can feel like it’s thriving. He talked about how he got advertisers interested in Indie Hackers and how he eventually got Indie Hackers acquired by Stripe and now no longer spends time selling ads. Not much has changed, he says, now that he is an employee of Stripe because Indie Hackers and Stripe were aligned from the beginning. Michaela asked why he decided, despite his desire to write as little code as possible, to create custom software for the Indie Hackers forum when he could have chosen third-party forum software. Courtland said he wanted Indie Hackers to have a strong brand and it is hard to have a strong brand if the thing you’re building looks like everything else. So he put a lot of time making the community unique. He spent a lot of time on the name of the community and the design of the website, all in support of having a strong brand. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/starting-profitable-business-in-six-weeks-courtland/id1477527378?i=1000465925620 Website link: https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/episode-12-profitable-business-courtland-allen/ MATT STRATTON ON HIRED THOUGHT The Hired Thought podcast featured Matt Stratton with host Ben Mosior. Since his move from Chef to PagerDuty, Matt’s focus has shifted from software delivery and infrastructure code to incidents and outages. Ben brought up Matt’s talk “Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma.” Matt’s motivation for creating this talk was his own treatment for PTSD and a discussion with J. Paul Reed where they kept seeing similarities between Matt’s experiences and what companies go through when they experience an incident. Trauma occurs when our response to something is ineffective. Two people can have a similar experience and it can be traumatic to one person and just a bad day for the other. We respond to perceived trauma physiologically the same way as actual trauma. Events that are reminiscent of trauma that occurred to Matt as a child trigger him to have the same physiological response today. Organizations do the same thing. An organization that has an outage that is similar to an event that happened before and, say, cost them a million dollars a minute, will react the same way. Just as an adult re-experiencing a childhood trauma because of a triggering event shouldn’t necessarily respond the same way, an organization needs to learn how to respond differently to these similar stimuli. Matt talked about the window of tolerance beyond which you become activated and have an unhealthy response. He says that it can get spiky or you can get stuck-on or stuck-off. If you are stuck-on, you have anxiety and other symptoms. If you are stuck-off, there is lethargy. In an organization, we can get into a hyper-aroused state fearing any type of change, getting into analysis paralysis, or becoming over-vigilant. None of these states are healthy and they trickle down into the emotional health of employees. The good news is there are things we can do to help the organization be better. Ben added that a lot of therapy is about building up the language to describe what is happening so that when it happens or when you are reflecting back later, you can share the experience and develop skills to lengthen your window of tolerance. Matt talked about how in cognitive behavioral therapy we try to identify when a distortion occurs, knowing that the feeling we experience is not something we can change, but our response to it can be changed. In an organization, we can do the same thing. Matt is striving to excise the word “prevention” from his vocabulary and instead become more resilient when something bad happens. For a person, this can mean that you can have something happen and then you can get back inside your window of tolerance quickly. For an organization, this means that an incident can happen and we can restore service and get on with business. We need to normalize incident response. It is not an anomaly to have an incident. The irony is that we’ve gotten worse at responding to incidents as we’ve gotten better at distributing on call. Back in his days as a sysadmin, Matt was on call constantly and incident response was business as usual. Today, if you are doing a healthy on call rotation with developers on call in their own domain, you can be on call for a year and experience just two incidents. Then, when you have an incident, you freak out. You don’t want to be trying to remember how to do incident response and you don’t want to think of the response process as an exceptional thing that we only sometimes do. Ben connected this to the book The Fifth Discipline. He says we always feel like we have to do something in response to something bad happening. The other thing the book points out is that whenever you are doing an intervention, yes, you may have short term actions that buy you time, but at all times, you need to be building capabilities. When you normalize incident response and you regularly show people what it looks like to work together in a high-pressure situation, you learn to respond to incidents in healthy ways. Matt says we need to run our failure injection exercises and game days like real incidents. This is also an opportunity to train your incident commanders. In these scenarios, we know what’s wrong and we can bail out at any time. Then, when a real incident occurs at 2:00am some morning, the people who did the exercise associate the real incident with the calm exercise they did in the office on an afternoon. Sometimes there are people who want run an exercise and not tell the incident response team what’s wrong. Matt has to explain to these people that it is not an exercise in troubleshooting or to stress test your people. You don’t need to inject stress into the people who work for you. You want to do the opposite. When we are doing incident response all the time as part of the regular cadence of work, when a real incident occurs, we will associate it with the positive physiology of our response during the exercise. That means we should treat every incident the same, even false alarms. If you get a few minutes into responding to an incident and realize it is a false alarm, finish it out as an incident. Get on the bridge and do as you would in a real incident. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/6-organizational-resilience/id1479303584?i=1000466488009 Website link: https://hiredthought.com/2020/02/24/6-organizational-resilience/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Jurgen Appelo on Agile Toolkit, Amitai Schleier on Mob Mentality, Colleen Bordeaux on Coaching For Leaders, Scott Hanselman on Hanselminutes, and Buster Benson on Lead From The Heart. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 2, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JURGEN APPELO ON AGILE TOOLKIT The Agile Toolkit podcast featured Jurgen Appelo with host Bob Payne. Jurgen says that companies go through several stages in their lifecycle and investors make investment decisions based on what stage they think a company is in. Some investors, for example, wait until a company has achieved product-market fit before investing. At first, budgets are small because the risks are higher. Then, as more evidence is accumulated and the weaker companies have failed, the remaining companies get the bigger budgets. This is called an innovation funnel. Seeing how well this works in startup funding, Jurgen started to see the benefit that this could have if adopted inside organizations. Corporations tend to invest in projects by predicting what ideas will succeed. Instead, they could create an ecosystem where all the ideas can participate and they would go through stages like a startup where they need to find product-solution fit, product-market fit, and those that make it to the end get the biggest funding. They talked about business agility and Jurgen says that it is more important to focus on innovation and you will achieve business agility as part of the package. Bob pointed out that organizations are setting up skunkworks and innovation labs but, unless they can integrate their innovations with the core business, they will end up like Xerox Parc and other companies will exploit their innovations and disrupt them. Jurgen says that this innovator’s dilemma, as described by Clayton Christensen, requires you to switch to the mindset that your products and services don’t have eternal life. This is normal for any organism, but a species can live forever. The innovator’s dilemma, he says, was solved millions of years ago in nature. We need to borrow this regeneration capability from nature and say that the innovation is not the product or service; it is the system for generating products and services. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jurgen-appelo-startup-scaleup-screwum-lean-agile-dc-2019/id78532866?i=1000465296924 Website link: https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/2/d/3/2d3a6b2936031059/leanAndAgileDC2019_Jurgen_Appelo.mp3?c_id=64647230&cs_id=64647230&expiration=1582618595&hwt=2e7c8bfffbafc47eef3a10950edf34ae AMITAI SCHLEIER ON MOB MENTALITY The Mob Mentality podcast featured Amitai Schleier with hosts Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick. As a technical Agile coach, Amitai likes to sit with programmers and program, sit with testers and test, and sit with managers and manage. He loves to put things in terms of cost and risk and one of his areas of specialty is legacy code. When Amitai tried to make a career change from being a developer to being a technical Agile coach, he believed that if he could just say the right words in the right order with the right tone of voice, people would have to agree with him and behavior change would occur. This didn’t work. He realized that getting the words right is important, but you need to earn people’s trust first. He pair-coached with Llewellyn Falco and this taught him about the synergy between mobbing and coaching. One example of that synergy is in how you know whether the coaching is working. You measure by observing whether the new behaviors the coach introduced continue to be practiced when the coach isn’t around. An expensive way to test this is, after a year of coaching them, go away for a year and come back and see what still gets practiced. A cheaper and more Agile way is to have an iteration with a feedback cycle where you visit just long enough for the team to form a new habit and go away long enough to see if the habit sticks. Chris asked Amitai to talk about teams that he introduced to mobbing. Amitai described a team that had problems working together. Amitai had the program manager say to the team that, in the next iteration, if the team didn’t get fewer stories done, the manager would be disappointed because the team wasn’t trying hard enough to learn something. In practice, teams that start mobbing don’t slow down that much, but they need to hear that they’re allowed to. As a result of the switch to mobbing, the person who had been keeping decision-making for himself started talking people through what he knew, people who had previously been uninvolved started to engage with the problem-solving process, and the whole team was energized by it. Amitai doesn’t love that he had to force it on them the way he did and prefers to invite people to change their behavior, but sometimes, he says, you have to manufacture the willingness. Chris asked about the benefits and difficulties of mob programming with legacy code. First, Amitai said, mob programming is more extreme than Extreme Programming. If we were defining XP today, we would skip pairing and go straight to mobbing. Legacy code, or, valuable code we are afraid to change, is a kind of nexus of extremes as well. The cognitive challenges of software development are turned up all the way and mob programming is a great way to deal with these greater cognitive challenges. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/amitai-schleier-on-the-synergy-of-mobbing-and-coaching/id1485950034?i=1000463210922 Website link: https://mobmentalityshow.podbean.com/e/amitai-schleier-on-the-synergy-of-mobbing-and-coaching/ COLLEEN BORDEAUX ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Colleen Bordeaux with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave started by asking about a quote from Colleen’s book, “Am I Doing This Right?” The Charles Jones quote says, “You are the same today that you’re going to be in five years except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.” Colleen says that when she looks at the people from whom she has learned the most and the people who helped her become who she is today, she finds that they all credit their success to the relationships they’ve cultivated and the books they’ve read. They spoke about the health implications of loneliness. Colleen says that our purpose and fulfillment in life and work is connected deeply to the relationships we cultivate and our ability to cultivate relationships is about being able to show up as ourselves. To Colleen, authenticity means being open to connecting with people and sharing your real experiences, who you are, and the challenges you’ve had so that it gives others permission to do the same. People are craving real human connection and we need to a better job of facilitating it. When Colleen was most lonely and isolated it was when she was in high school and her older brother became addicted to drugs, putting her family through an upheaval. Her high school and community had a culture of perfectionism and her family struggled not only with her brother’s addiction but also a fear of judgement from other people. Colleen felt she couldn’t share her feelings of loneliness with her friends or teachers because she didn’t know anyone who would receive it without judging her family. As she grew up and her family worked through it, she started to share her feelings and realized that the people in her network had their own struggles in their own families and were also afraid to share. They talked about how the negative relationships in our lives can make us into destructive thinkers rather than productive thinkers. Colleen described a time when she fell victim to this. She was insecure, negative, gossipy, super-judgmental, and someone who would get jealous or envious when she saw people around her succeeding and happy. The root cause, she says, was that she was not introspective and had no control over her own mindset. She says you have to look at yourself and consider, “Am I a net-positive in the lives of the people who I surround myself with? Am I somebody who encourages, supports, and gives positivity and light to the people around me or am I somebody who is quick to judge, quick to shut down, and somebody who struggles to nip my negative impulses in the bud?” When Colleen helped herself evolve from a crab to a magnanimous thinker, her relationships blossomed. She told a story about being on a huge project that involved constant travel and little autonomy. Instead of trying to fix the situation, she allowed her negativity to run rampant. She decided the problem was everybody else and the firm itself, so she went looking for a new job. She got an offer and she told one of her mentors. This mentor said, “Colleen, you can go ahead and take this job, but eventually you’re going to end up in the same situation. What are you going to do then?” She says that this hit her like a ton of bricks. Changing her circumstances might momentarily have distracted her, but it was her own thinking that was the real problem. Her mentor’s advice was that running away from things doesn’t move you forward. You are better off staying put, focusing on what you can control, and seeking what truly excites and energizes you to the point where you can’t stop thinking about it and you want to run towards it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/455-how-to-create-great-relationships-colleen-bordeaux/id458827716?i=1000465792556 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/great-relationships-colleen-bordeaux/ SCOTT HANSELMAN ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Scott Hanselman with host Jeff Fritz. For the first time in about 700 episodes, Scott Hanselman was the guest on Hanselminutes. This episode came from an interview he did with the Live Coders who write code live in front of an audience on Twitch. Jeff asked first about Scott’s longevity. Scott’s blog has been going on for seventeen years and the podcast has been going on for fourteen years. The reason he has been able to do it consistently for that long is because he is not doing it five days a week. Scott says you need to set up systems by which your community can be self-sustaining and not require you to show up every single day. The next question came from community member roberttables. He asked how Scott delegates responsibilities for aspects of a community when community mentorship is not part of your role. Scott says that one of the things he finds communities don’t do is they don’t express what their long term goals are. He compared it to a couple getting married and having wedding vows but no mission statement. He and his wife wrote a business plan for the community of two that they were creating. When you put together a community, he says, whether it is a marriage or a community of fifty live coders, you set a tone. You have to make sure that 80 to 90% of the people are 100% behind the goals. Then, if a troll shows up, they are overwhelmed by the positivity of the group. That’s how you scale. It starts with two people agreeing on what they are doing. As an example of doing this wrong, he talked about how Reddit communities have problems because Reddit wasn’t founded with the agreement that we would all be nice to each other. Now they are trying to retcon niceness into the community. Scott says, “You can’t retcon nice.” The next question was from rockzombie2, who wanted to know how Scott grew his following. Scott says consistency is king. He asked, “How often have you visited someone’s blog and the very last blog post is a rededication of themselves to blogging?” That’s because people set up failure systems. Instead, it’s got to be something that you can’t ever stop. The interval between blog posts should be large enough that you start to miss it but not so large that coming back to it is a chore. You also need to have an internal check-in where you ask yourself, “Does this feed my spirit? Is this the thing that makes me happy?” If you feel you need a blog to grow, then that’s the wrong attitude. Michael Jolley, aka, BaldBeardedBuilder, asked how Scott manages the various kinds of content he produces. Scott says he keeps a backlog of ideas that are so good that they can write themselves. If he gets excited about something, he will both blog about it and reach out to someone related to the thing that has him excited and schedule a podcast. KymPhillpotts asked about resources for improving interviewing techniques. Scott believes interviewing is similar to improv. Just as you would in improv, you want to use the concept of “Yes, and...” He also recommended listening to early Terry Gross interviews from the mid-nineties. He recommends ignoring the content and instead studying how she conducts the interview. He says that people seem to think that you can just turn on the mic and start interviewing people and it is going to go well. He argues that you need deliberate practice. You need to listen to yourself and watch yourself on video and learn what you need to do better. Being charming is an art. You can practice it and become better at it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/myself-its-not-weird-at-all/id117488860?i=1000462813484 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/myself-not-weird-at-all-HZclNwEe BUSTER BENSON ON LEAD FROM THE HEART The Lead From The Heart podcast featured Buster Benson with host Mark C. Crowley. Buster has written a book called “Why Are We Yelling? The Art Of Productive Disagreement”. Buster started out by saying that disagreements as battles has been a useful tool for us as a species before we had institutions of reason and science. It was how you claimed your spot on the hill. While “might makes right” continues to be what we fall back to when everything else falls apart, it is no longer the most productive way to think about disagreement. The kinds of problems we face today and the arena that we’re having conversations in have changed. Before, it was about keeping the tribe together. Now, it is about creating relationships and collaborating across tribes. We need to train ourselves to become great collaborators and see disagreement as an opportunity and as a skill we can practice. Mark brought up a statistic from Buster’s book that says nine in ten of us feel that arguments are almost always an unproductive venture. As a result, we steer clear of them. He asked Buster what he has learned about why having disagreements is so highly supportive of having healthy relationships. Buster says that if you think about a disagreement as a milestone or landmark of something important that is currently in a stuck state and ask what, long term, is going to best guarantee the success of this relationship, it is about becoming high-functioning in terms of addressing and facing problems and resolving them. This is difficult because avoidance is natural. When you are thrown into an arena where you don’t have the skills to operate in it successfully, you naturally run away.  Buster talked about anxiety debt. These are the things you have not been able to face with confidence and they end up wearing you down, decreasing your happiness, and making you less healthy. Just as there is never an urgent need to clean up tech debt until it threatens the success of your company, anxiety debt in your relationships can be neglected and become harder and harder to address as it accumulates over time. Mark asked how to get yourself centered so that you can have a disagreement that doesn’t knock you off your foundation. Buster says the first step is get over the misconception that we can change minds. Minds do change, but we don’t change them directly; we change them with our own mind changing. Rather than thinking “I’m going to move your mind from point A to point B”, think of your own mind and the other party’s mind each as a pile of rocks and you each have to contribute your rocks to building a new, third pile that incorporates both perspectives. This third perspective is more inclusive and transcends the problem. You don’t know in advance where the third perspective is and you have to use the other person’s perspective to triangulate it with your own. That means you have to use them as a resource rather than a receptacle of new information. Mark asked about emotional situations where things are so polarized that each side thinks the other is crazy. Buster says that in these situations, the fact that we think each other is crazy raises the question, “What do I not know about you and what do you not know about me that makes us think each other is crazy?” To resolve this, you can ask questions that you don’t know the answers to. No matter what the other party says, it will give you new information and new insight into things. Mark asked for an example. Buster says that if you are with your polar opposite political opponent, you can ask a set of questions that help you understand how their beliefs arose. These questions take you out of battle stance and help you build a relationship with them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/buster-benson-mastering-art-productive-disagreement/id1365633369?i=1000464961355 Website link: https://blubrry.com/leadfromtheheartpodcast/55513911/buster-benson-mastering-the-art-of-productive-disagreement/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Neil Pasricha on Coaching For Leaders, Corey Quinn on On Call Nightmares, Craig Daniel on Build by Drift, and Bryan Liles on Hanselminutes. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the four podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 6, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. NEIL PASRICHA ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Neil Pasricha with host Dave Stachowiak. Neil described his first professional role, working at Proctor & Gamble. He had graduated from Queen’s University in 2002, one of the top business schools in Canada and, at the time, a job at Proctor & Gamble was one of the top marketing jobs you could get. Neil felt like Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket.  But he was horrible at the job. He had been expecting to spend his days creating PowerPoint presentations and instead was asked to create spreadsheets to analyze trucking, gasoline, and a million other variables to determine how much to increase the price of mascara. As a high achieving adolescent, he took his failure to be his own fault rather than a factor beyond his control. He worked late, came in on weekends, and started grinding his teeth. A few months in, the company wanted to put him on a performance improvement plan. He couldn’t handle the notion of being fired, so he quit nine months in. He catastrophized this event. He thought, “If I can’t work here, at the best company, with the most supportive culture, kind people, and a lot of structure, I can’t work anywhere.” He thought, “If I can’t do marketing, my highest mark in business school, I certainly can’t do finance,” and, “If I look for another job, they’re just going to call P&G who will say ‘This guy is horrible.’” He pictured the worst-case scenario: he thought he would go bankrupt and thought his life was over as a working person. He calls this, “pointing the spotlight at yourself”. High achievers have a tendency to think, “It’s all about me and I’m terrible.” He was a low-resilience person. He wrote his new book, You Are Awesome, about resilience because he identified himself as lacking it. Like most of us these days, he grew up without famines, wars, and other sources of societal stress. He got the gold stars and participation ribbons and didn’t have the tools to handle failure. He didn’t see for years that the P&G blow actually was his first lesson in resilience. He says we look at successful people and think their lives were a string of successes, but the most successful people are those that have also seen the most failure. He cited Cy Young, who has won the most games in baseball ever. He also has the most losses. Nolan Ryan, who has the most strikeouts, also has the most walks. Dave talked about his first full-time role as director of a center that helped students learn math and reading skills. He was average at the job and the culture wanted people to show a lot of initiative. He struggled, got passed over for promotions, and the feedback he was given was that he wasn’t moving fast enough, wasn’t taking initiative, and wasn’t meeting deadlines. Like Neil, Dave dropped out and started his coaching business. Neil says that Dave’s and his own feelings of incompetence are a result of the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the feeling that we’re being noticed, observed, and judged more than we really are. Nobody at P&G probably even remembers Neil, but the spotlight effect had caused Neil to feel that everybody had watched him fail. To help reduce this effect, Neil asks himself three questions: 1. “Will this matter on my deathbed?” 2. “Can I do something about this?” And 3. “Is this a story I’m telling myself?” For example, if you fail a biology test, the story you might tell yourself, “I failed my parents.” Dave asked whether Neil is now comfortable with being uncomfortable. Neil had thought that he had reached a point where he was finally comfortable with being uncomfortable, but when he left Walmart to take his side hustle full-time, he suddenly felt uncomfortable again. He says you have to treat it like yoga. You have to keep learning it until you learn it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/448-the-value-of-being-uncomfortable-with-neil-pasricha/id458827716?i=1000461086169 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/value-being-uncomfortable-neil-pasricha/ COREY QUINN ON ON CALL NIGHTMARES The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Corey Quinn with host Jay Gordon. Corey started his on call career in what he called an “abusive” environment. One year in, a new manager was dropped in and the first thing this manager decided was that he wasn’t going to be on call himself. The number of people on call dropped from four to three and then another person left. So Corey was on call 50% of the time and he could never schedule his life around it. At the end of that time, Corey swore he would never put himself in this situation again. When he started the Duckbill Group, he decided that anything he did would be “business hours only”. Jay asked Corey what in 2019 most excited him in the world of cloud. Corey said that it was the awareness by the providers that building the fastest, most exciting, far fetched, far flung technologies was not going to be what won them the hearts and minds of their customers. Instead, he saw the large providers speaking to enterprises about migrating from data centers to cloud environments. They talked about Microsoft’s advantage in selling the cloud to enterprises. Corey says one of Microsoft’s big advantages in cloud is that they have forty years experience apologizing for software failures. Explaining these failures to non-technical audiences is something Microsoft excels at and Google and Amazon have had to learn. Jay brought up that the embrace of managed Kubernetes was a big trend in 2019. Corey says that his objection to it is that if you run everything on top of Kubernetes, you’ve abstracted away what you’re doing from the cloud providers’ built-in primitives so much that it becomes challenging to do workload attribution of cost. Programmatically figuring out which workload is the expensive one is surprising difficult. Jay talked about Hashicorp’s rise in 2019, providing tooling around cloud agnosticism. Corey said that one of the best conversations he had on his own podcast, Screaming In The Cloud, this past year was with Hashimoto. Hashimoto argued that Terraform provides workflow portability rather than workload portability and that one is worth pursuing and the other one is not. Jay said that this was the first year that Amazon talked about multicloud. Corey says they talked about hybrid but still avoided multicloud. Corey believes that every cloud provider hates multicloud until they realize a large customer is going to go with a different provider, then multicloud is wonderful. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-46-year-in-review-corey-quinn-duckbill-group/id1447430839?i=1000460596737 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-12-23T11_00_16-08_00 CRAIG DANIEL ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build podcast by Drift featured Craig Daniel with host Maggie Crowley. Their topic was “What does Drift look for when hiring product managers?” Craig says that the product manager role is unique in that you don’t have direct reports but you need to be able to influence the engineering team, the designers, and a slew of stakeholders that includes customers. Regarding technical skills, Craig says they look for systems thinkers with the ability to break down a problem, articulate their breakdown, look at data and combine that data with qualitative research. Maggie asked about hiring for associate PM roles and Craig says it goes back to a core principle that a person’s aptitude and attitude outweighs their experience. Craig defines aptitude as a combination of ability to learn and curiosity. These people are those who can grow faster than normal. Maggie added that these people are paying attention to the world around them, are asking questions of the tools that they’re using, and are not just assuming things are the way they are. For more experienced hires, Craig is looking for results. Sometimes there are good people who were in bad companies or joined a startup prior to product-market fit that never got off the ground. If they don’t have results, you want to see outputs: shipping things, building partnerships, and media coverage. People who are successful in product are those that can build coalitions, roll up their sleeves, do the hard work, and get stuff done. Maggie says that PMs can be afraid to be accountable for the end result. It is easy to say, “I wrote my one pager,” “I wrote the spec,” or “We stuck to the timeline.” There are so many excuses that you lose sight of the fact that you need to be accountable for results. Regarding the interview process, Craig says Drift’s process consists of a design leader interview, a product team interview, an executive interview, and something called, “The Who method.” Craig himself is looking for fit. This is not culture fit. It means, “What is this person great at, what do they want to do, and what do we have available or can make available?” To get at fit, Craig asks about their superpowers. If they’re at a company with, say, five product managers, what would everyone say they are the best of the five at? What are they worst of the five at? He also wants examples of truly exceptional work. This tells him what they think exceptional is, what their emotional intelligence is (are they a braggart?), and what their value system is. Craig says he has made a lot of mistakes over the years hiring PMs and, as a result, has learned to be more systematic about it. You have to have a practical part of the interview where you have the candidate go to the whiteboard, break down a problem, or tell the interviewer about work they’ve done in the past. A particularly good practical problem is to have them talk about a product they use everyday and describe both what’s great about it and what needs to be improved about it. They talked about the Who method (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345504194). For example, if the candidate tells you they were responsible for a half-a-million user product, the Who method lets you find out how much of that was their responsibility versus something they are just taking credit for. He talked about an aspect of the Who method called the threat of reference check. You ask the candidate, say, who their previous manager was, and then say, “When I call your previous manager, what are they going to say about you?”  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-really-matters-when-hiring-a-pm/id1445050691?i=1000461459804 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/what-really-matters-when-hiring-a-pm BRYAN LILES ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Bryan Liles with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started out by asking Bryan what he means by “a complete engineer”. Bryan says he has rules for everything and rule #1 is that there is a competition out there but you are only competing with yourself. You can watch what other people do and you can emulate them, but don’t compare yourself to others. Regarding being a complete developer, he says you have two aspects of being a developer: 1) writing software for money and 2) providing an impact to the world. That impact may be helping other developers level up, providing a role model, or simply doing no harm. Growing up, Bryan’s dream was simply to have a better life for himself than his parents had. Now, he wants to show people that his life was not a fluke but is a result of preparing himself for opportunities. The world Bryan wants to live in is one in which we’re trying our best and we’re also looking out for the people that come after us. Bryan talked about his recent project Octant that is a console for showing what’s going on in your Kubernetes cluster. He says that often we start to make a product and we start listing a bunch of features we want it to have. He says this is like that friend that talks too much and tells boring stories that go on for too long. We all prefer the friend who tells simple stories and it is the same with software products: you need to start off simply and solve one problem at a time. The interview ended with Bryan’s three pieces of advice that he gives to all black males that he meets. First, he says to ignore the advice that says you have to be the dumbest person in the room. That works when you have privilege and you have a safety net. Instead, be the smartest person in the room, but don’t tell anyone. Second, opportunity is rare, so when it comes, be ready. His third piece of advice is to get used to, but not comfortable, with failure. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/being-a-complete-engineer-and-bryan-liles-rules-to-life/id117488860?i=1000460922091 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/being-a-complete-engineer-and-bryan-liles-rules-to-life-BiK2k99r LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Bret Weinstein on The Jim Rutt Show, Barry O’Reilly on The Product Experience, Dave Farley on Engineering Culture at InfoQ, Jim Mattis on Coaching For Leaders, and Ben Mosior on Agile Uprising. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting November 25, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRET WEINSTEIN ON THE JIM RUTT SHOW The Jim Rutt Show featured Bret Weinstein with host Jim Rutt. Brett talked about the sustainability crisis (not necessarily related to climate) in which we are using resources and creating waste in a way that, mathematically, cannot continue indefinitely. Jim added that half of the mass of large animals on earth are now humans and domestic animals, most of which are cattle. He says this tells us that we are at or beyond the ability of our ecosystem to allow us to carry on the way we have been. Jim believes that the engine that is driving us toward eco-cide is the pursuit of money-on-money return powered by psychologically-astute advertising that got underway in the 1930s and is now reaching near-perfection with the highly-instrumented attention-hijacking mechanisms of social media. He compared it to the paperclip maximizer idea in artificial general intelligence. Brett says that the way you can tell that AI algorithms are out-of-control is to look at the behavior of people in the best position to understand the power of these algorithms. Defectors from Facebook or elsewhere describe the extreme measures they go through to retain control of the own lives in the face of algorithms they had a hand in writing. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep24-bret-weinstein-on-evolving-culture/id1470622572?i=1000456522456 Website link: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/bret-weinstein/ BARRY O’REILLY ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Barry O’Reilly with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. Lily asked Barry where his notion of “unlearning” came from. Barry said that while writing the book “Lean Enterprise,” he had an “aha” moment in which he realized that, while teaching people new things was tough, what was even harder was getting them to unlearn their existing behavior, especially if it made them successful in the past. Randy asked Barry what signs indicate when you are unlearning well as opposed to simply getting lucky. Barry says that a lot of people think knowing when to adapt is serendipitous or intuitive to other people, but there is a system you can learn that can make the process intentional and deliberate. People get stuck. They stick to the sets of behaviors that they know and understand or that feel comfortable to them. When those behaviors aren’t driving the results or outcomes that they are aiming for, often people’s natural reaction is to point at other people as the cause of the failure. If you’re serious about making progress, you have to own the results. You have to ask yourself what you can do differently to change the outcomes that you are getting. You need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You need to think big about the aspiration or outcome you are trying to achieve, but you start small as you start to relearn. Starting small creates safety. You get a fast feedback loop, learn quickly, and you feel successful as you try new behaviors. Barry asked Lily and Randy where most people in product roles spend most of their time and they said, “meetings.” They estimated that the effectiveness rate for such meetings was about 50%. As a product manager, Barry says, he would be trying to make that number better, but most people blindly walk into meetings and never make any changes to how meetings are run. Barry gets leadership teams to describe a better outcome and one small thing they can do to make things better. For meetings, one team came up with a simple step: five minutes before the meeting would end, the leader would stop it and ask the team how effective they thought the meeting was and what outcomes they were taking away from the meeting. When a leader starts to demonstrate a new behavior in meetings like pausing five minutes before the end and asking people how effective the meeting was, other people start to take these behaviors back to their teams. Role modeling these new behaviors in your organization can have a systemic impact because people see you trying out these new behaviors and that inspires them to be serious about making their own improvements. Berry went on to say that the belief that you cannot influence these kinds of changes needs to be unlearned. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/learning-to-unlearn-barry-oreilly-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000456659421 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/learning-to-unlearn-barry-oreilly-on-the-product-experience/ DAVE FARLEY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY AT INFOQ The Engineering Culture at InfoQ podcast featured Dave Farley with host Shane Hastie. Shane asked about Dave’s talk about taking back software engineering. Dave says that software engineering is a term that is falling out of favor. People started to think of software development as a craft and of themselves as craftspeople. Working on high performance trading systems, he adopted practices that he considers a genuine engineering discipline and this made a dramatic difference in performance, effectiveness, quality, and speed of development. He says we’ve been too prescriptive in trying to define what software engineering means. An engineering discipline for software need to be general enough to still be true in a hundred years. He says we suffer in our industry from not having very many measuring sticks and we choose technologies, processes, and approaches based on who is the most persuasive person or guru. His talk was about five principles that are likely to be durable, broadly applicable, and broadly acceptable to people. First, we’ve learned that planned approaches don’t work. Working iteratively through a process of discovery is foundational. Second, we’ve discovered from continuous integration and delivery that fast, efficient, high quality feedback has a dramatic impact on our ability to move forward with confidence and quality. Third is being experimental and adopting the scientific method. Fourth is working incrementally, building software from a modular point of view, and growing complex systems from simple systems. Fifth is being empirical and testing what we build against reality, learning from that, and adapting. Shane asked whether these ideas are just common sense. Dave agreed that they are common sense but they are uncommonly practiced. He says that the majority of his own career in software development was built around guesswork. They would guess about what users wanted, guess about whether the software was going to be fast enough, resilient enough, and scalable enough, and guess about whether there were going to be bugs in it. They would guess about these things instead of testing these things as an experiment. He cited Extreme Programming and Continuous Delivery as genuine engineering disciplines. Shane pointed out that this requires a significant level of discipline that is rare in our industry. Dave agreed and gave the example of the team he worked with to build the trading system mentioned earlier. They were not only the best team he worked with, but also the most productive, solving problems in genuinely original ways, and they did it all by consciously adopting these techniques. It wasn’t because they were smarter than other teams, but because of their disciplined, agile approach. Shane asked how we can get a more experimental mindset in software development. Dave says we first need to get more data-driven and figure out useful measures to apply. For example, in high-performance software, we want to know things like how fast, what throughput, what latency, and what percentage of messages need to get through at a particular rate. The difference between an engineer and anyone else is that engineers spend a lot of time thinking about how things can go wrong. He gave the example of how he does Test-Driven Development: before he runs a test he has just written, he will say what error message he expects to get. This is a genuine experiment: he forms a hypothesis and he’s precise about the nature of the failure he is expecting. Shane asked Dave for his opinion about pair-programming. Dave considers pairing one of the most powerful tools an organization has to start becoming a learning organization and he considers pairing a foundational idea for establishing engineering rigor. Shane asked how we can convince the individual hero developer that it is a good idea to work with somebody else. Dave encourages his clients to experiment with pair-programming and you cannot do that for an hour or two. He encourages a minimum of a sprint or two and he combines it with rotating people who are in the pairs (also known as promiscuous pair-programming). In his experience, when you ask people who have never paired before it to pair, the majority do not want to. After they have done it for a reasonable period of time, the majority then want to keep doing it. Often, only a small number of people hate it and will never like it and companies need to make a tough decision about what to do about that. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dave-farley-on-taking-back-software-engineering/id1161431874?i=1000456425449 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-dave-farley JIM MATTIS ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Jim Mattis with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave asked about 1990 when Mattis was in the Saudi Arabian desert, preparing for an invasion that would become the first Gulf War. He employed a technique called the focused telescope. Mattis said that he faced the challenge of information flow. Leaders typically have sufficient information somewhere in their organization, but the pipes of information flow need to be open such that this information is available in time to make decisions. Mattis would take young, capable officers who would go out to units that were executing the mission and those officers would clarify and confirm to the attacking commanders the mission and report back to Mattis. This opened up the information flow in real-time to make better decisions. Dave asked where Mattis got the idea. Mattis said that every time you are promoted in the military you are given a new reading list and he got this idea from the readings. Dave then asked about 2001, when Mattis was in command of the marines in Afghanistan searching for Osama Bin Laden. Mattis said that he had shifted from being under a naval commander to an army commander and he did not spend the time getting to know his new commander. When intelligence came in that Osama Bin Laden was in the Tora Bora region, he knew they needed to stop him from escaping to Pakistan. Mattis had studied the Geronimo campaign of the U.S. cavalry in the late 1800s and saw how they set up communication stations to track activity on the border. He wanted to do the same to block escape routes in Tora Bora. He forgot the inform his boss and his boss did not understand the urgency of the situation or the plans to block Bin Laden’s escape. He says you have to ask yourself three questions everyday: “What do I know?”, “Who needs to know?” and “Have I told them?” Dave then asked about 2003 when Mattis was commanding a division to remove Saddam Hussein from power. One of his colonels was failing to move with haste. Mattis says that the officer, who he admires to this day, had a tempo that was less than needed at the time and Mattis determined that he was asking this officer to do something that was beyond his moral ability to do. Mattis said that war is a harsh auditor of your recruiting, your equipment, your training, and your leadership. He needed everyone in the fight and he knew he had to delegate the decision-making to the lowest competent level but it had to be consistent with his intent which was to move fast enough to confront the enemy with cascading dilemmas to prevent them from digging back in. So he removed that officer from command. Dave then jumped ahead one year to 2004 in Fallujah when four allied contractors were killed and Mattis had a plan to recover the bodies and track down those responsible. The President of the United States made the decision to attack the city instead. Dave asked Mattis what kept him from resigning in this situation. Mattis reminded us that the military has civilian control. When the civilian leadership says to do something, you keep faith with the constitution and get on with it. Mattis had read enough history to know the challenges associated with attacking a city with 300,000 innocent civilians. Mattis’s idea was to work with the other tribes in town that were repulsed by this terrorist activity and to use the spies they had in the city to hunt down the perpetrators. Given the known brutality of urban fighting, this was a better plan, but they were ordered to attack instead. Mattis said he could have resigned but the 19-year-old lance corporals in his army of 23,000 couldn’t quit and he wasn’t going to leave them on the battlefield. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/440-leadership-in-the-midst-of-chaos-with-jim-mattis/id458827716?i=1000456425891 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/leadership-chaos-jim-mattis/ BEN MOSIOR ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Ben Mosior with host Jay Hrcsko. Ben started out as a sysadmin and started taking more interest in the people side of technology. He now runs a company called Hired Thought where he makes systems more purposeful. Ben came across Wardley Mapping when people he was following in the DevOps community started to reference it. At the time, he was dealing with a difficult decision about whether to spend money that was tied to buying server hardware and thereby shifting attention away from the cloud that had been his focus. He learned that Wardley Mapping was a way to make sense of these kinds of situations and make a good call. He ultimately decided to decline to money and he now had an explicit strategy where before he had none. Wardley Mapping highlighted how much he originally didn’t know what he was doing. Ben describes a Wardley map as being two things: a visual way to represent a system oriented around users and a way to articulate how parts of that system are changing. It is a directed acyclic graph where position has meaning. The x-axis represents evolution and describes how the components of a business, such as activities, practices, data, and knowledge, change over time. They start in the uncharted space where nobody has seen it before, nobody understands it, and it fails much of the time. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the industrialized space where everything is known, is ordered, is boring, and failure is surprising. Having a way to express where a business component is between those two extremes informs how to treat that business component. They talked about the y-axis and how it represents the degree to which the business component is visible to the user. Ben says the y-axis is useful for thinking about what parts of the system the user cares most and least about. Mapping is intended to be an extremely collaborative activity. The map helps us share a common model for how we think about a space. Ben referenced George Box’s quote about all models being wrong and the scientist needing to be alert to what is importantly wrong about the model while ignoring those aspects whose approximate nature, or wrongness, makes the model no less useful. A map helps highlight when the model of your system is wrong in a fundamental way. When people look at a map and talk about it, you start to work towards consensus on understanding the system and start running into label conflicts. Producing the map artifact enables us to challenge it, talk to each other, and be transparent about what we think it is. The artifact itself is just one step in a five step process called the strategy cycle.  The five factors in the strategy cycle are purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, and leadership. Purpose is the game we’re playing. It is why you come to work everyday. The landscape is the map. It represents the competitive landscape. Climate is the rules of the game, the external forces acting on that landscape that we don’t have control over. Doctrine is how we train ourselves, the principles that we choose to apply universally, such as always focusing on user needs. Last is leadership, the decision-making part that integrates all the rest. Ben says that we often jump straight from purpose to leadership and the process of sitting with the context of the other steps helps us make better decisions. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wardley-mapping-with-ben-mosior-hired-thought/id1163230424?i=1000456388231 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/wardley-mapping-with-ben-mosior-hired-thought LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Zach Stone on Drunken PM, Etienne de Bruin on Programming Leadership, Josh Seiden on The Product Experience, Pooja Agarwal on Coaching For Leaders, and Cate Huston on Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 30, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ZACH STONE ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Zach Stone with host Dave Prior. Dave and Zack talked about Motivational Interviewing or MI, a technique for helping a person navigate the process of making changes in their life. They first talked about what doesn’t work. Walking up to a smoker of twenty years and listing to them all the reasons why smoking is bad for them is not going to change their behavior. It is the same thing when you are trying to change the way a person does their work. Listing the reasons you think they should change makes the change all about what you want when it should be all about what they want. The person you want to change is an expert in their own life. A big part of Motivational Interviewing is finding the natural desires, reasons, and needs for why they should change and making them visible. Dave likened the difference between telling people to change and using motivational interviewing to the difference between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Zach shared a quote from Lao Tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist. When their work is done, their aim fulfilled, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” At the core of that quote, he says, is a sentiment around empowerment and autonomy. If we want to create an environment where people feel ownership and create sustainable change, people need to feel like that change came from them and is owned by them. Change is a never-ending process; it is not an event; it is not something that happens overnight. Dave asked, if we’ve been dealing the problem of organizational change for so long, why have we not yet solved it? Zach went all the way back to Theory X and Theory Y and how we are still often stuck in Theory X even today. He pointed out that the habits of how we work become almost like addictions we can’t shake. Dave says he tries to be a Theory Y person, but finds himself falling into Theory X all the time. Zach says that this is “change fatigue”. A big part of motivational interviewing is recognizing that we have within us the “righting reflex”: the reflex to correct and inform and tell people how they should be acting. It is not something that you can really escape; you can just own it, be aware of it, and work around it as much as possible. Zach says organizations have immune systems that fight the change you try to inject into them. The reason MI is so elegant, he says, is because it maximizes the work not done. In MI, you try to pull change by igniting the natural mechanisms that are already there rather than asserting yourself on top of that system. The textbook definition of MI is that it is a collaborative conversation to strengthen a person’s own motivation for and commitment to change. It is both a set of principles and a framework of techniques. The five main tools are open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summarizing, and informing. Zach told the story of speaking with a CIO about their technology stack. He shared with him that the developers at that company thought that innovation was stalling and technical debt was piling up. The CIO answered that they needed to develop new features and there was no time to address technical debt. Zach tried to affirm by talking about having seen some great innovation coming from this CIO’s teams and asking how they could keep it going. What became apparent was that the CIO was not going to budge. So he asked an open-ended question: “What do you think will happen if you let your technical debt pile up?” The CIO replied, “It is probably going to slow us down and hurt our ability to recruit top talent.” So Zach used reflection. Zach said, “On one hand, you feel you need to keep moving on developing features even if it means technical debt cleanup takes a backseat. On the other hand, if you do this, it is going to hurt your ability to recruit talent and eventually will slow down feature development.” He let that sit and thanked the CIO for his time because it was clear that the CIO was not ready to make a shift in his thinking. Two and half months went by and Zach leveraged the power of the group of this CIO’s technical leads. At a gathering of these leads where the CIO was present, Zach asked what their number one obstacle was and they all said, “Time.” Hearing it from people he trusted and respected, the CIO said that they would be launching an effort to address the technical debt issue. He used “change talk”: he made a commitment to change in a public forum. The research shows that the more people engage in change talk, the more likely they are to put plans into action. The next day, emails were flying back and forth, meetings were set, mechanisms were getting put in place for the tech leads and their teams to address this issue. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/motivational-interviewing-zach-stone/id1121124593?i=1000447916792 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/motivational-interviewing-zach-stone-august-2019 ETIENNE DE BRUIN ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP The Programming Leadership podcast featured Etienne de Bruin with host Marcus Blankenship. Etienne is the CEO of 7CTOs, a company that puts Chief Technology Officers into a peer mentoring environment to help them learn everything from situational leadership to achieving personal and professional goals. When he started the 7CTOs community, Etienne thought the conversations would focus on the software development lifecycle, technical debt, and managing the CEO’s expectations, but every time the focus went to the people challenges. He attributes the success of 7CTOs to how it addresses problems that require emotional intelligence (EQ) rather than IQ. Etienne told a story about when he first started a startup twelve years ago, he thought he was a fantastic CTO: he knew his stuff and he built the product’s first iteration with his bare hands. He had a reality check when he and his team did a retreat where they attempted to brainstorm ideas. He thought he was succeeding on inclusion and making every voice count from the most junior to the most senior. He was surprised to find that very few were participating. Until that moment, he hadn’t been aware of how fearful everyone was of collaborating with him because he was so blunt in his feedback and he was only happy if the idea was his own. He realized that he wasn’t going to succeed in the next level of his company’s development if he didn’t change. He had to let go of the idea that his employees were just there to execute his ideas and to see them as independent, creative human beings. He read the book Creative Confidence and it showed him that every single person is creative and we just vary in our confidence about our creativity.  Marcus said that if employees are not there just to be extensions of ourselves, what kind of employees should we be looking for. Etienne said that there are two things we want to do when we hire. First, we want the candidate to fulfill the minimum requirements of the job spec. Second, we want the candidate to be set up to succeed inside of the team. Etienne has used personality tests like DISC profiles and enneagrams to get an idea of how well the candidate can meet the second criterion. They got into a discussion about the difference between avoiding emotions and having emotions but realizing you have a choice in how you respond to them. Etienne pointed out that you can rely on other people to help you through your emotions. You can increase your EQ with the help of others. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/putting-the-emotion-into-eq-with-etienne-de-bruin/id1461916939?i=1000447505984 Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/putting-the-emotion-into-eq/ JOSH SEIDEN ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Josh Seiden with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. Lily, referring to Josh’s new book Outcomes Over Output, asked Josh how he defines an outcome. He says it is a change in human behavior that drives business results. One reason that this is a useful definition is that it is specific. When you use outcome in the broad sense, it can be heard as a synonym for result or goal. A second reason is that human behavior is observable, concrete, and action-oriented. This definition for outcome lets you ask the questions, “What are we going to do to deliver these outcomes? How can we change people’s behavior through the systems that we are building?” These questions lead to concrete answers where you can observe the results. The reason Josh says “human behavior” is because he is referring to any actor in the system. In UX design, the actor is usually assumed to be the user. But, in this case, it can be the user, the customer, an internal person (such as someone in customer support), a journalist you want writing about your product, or any person who is participating in the system that is to be built. Lily said that in her own attempts to move more towards outcomes, she has had the problem of having too high-level an outcome. Josh says that the Logic Model framework from the non-profit, social-good sector can help with this. In this framework, high-level measures like profit, cost, net promoter score, or customer retention are called impacts. It is unlikely that an individual team can move such numbers on their own. So you ask what outcomes will create the impact that you seek and you get something that is scoped down enough to be actionable on the team level. Randy asked why it is so hard for organizations to change their thinking about this and stop setting goals around milestones, dates, projects, and outputs. Josh says that you can’t get around the problem of output because making stuff is how you get to the outcome. He gave the example of Scrum. Scrum is built around the sprint. The sprint isn’t complete until you create a finished piece of software you can ship. This is important, but it doesn’t mean that what you created has the effect in the world that you want it to have. Randy asked about the problem of the increase in dependencies and complexity as companies grow. Josh says you have to think about how to increase the independence of the teams. He says you should think of your internal teams (those that are not customer-facing) as having customers. If you are an internal team, you can ask, “What does the customer-facing team that is our customer need and what is the smallest thing I can give them so that they are unblocked and can start serving their customer.” By remodeling this relationship from a dependency to a customer service model, you can string outcomes down the value chain and hopefully reduce dependencies that way. Another alternative is to give teams a shared or aligned outcome. They compared Josh’s terminology with that of Objectives & Key Results (OKR). Josh agreed with Lily that his definition of an outcome matches up with a key result. He used the John Doerr example of how Google once had an objective of solving the problem of the Internet being too slow by making browsing feel more like flipping through a magazine, which became the Google Chrome program. The key result was based on the number of users actively using Chrome. It wasn’t that they shipped it. It wasn’t the number of downloads. When you ensure a KR is not an output but a meaningful result in the world, it drives you to an outcome-centric definition. Josh talked about a section from his book called “the three magic questions.” The first question is, “What are the user and customer behaviors that drive business results?” The next question is, “How do we get people to do more of these things?” The last question is, “How do we know when we’re right?” Lily asked how you build outcomes into your roadmap. Josh told the story from his other book, Sense and Respond, about a large startup in New York whose annual planning process was to produce an outcome-based roadmap. They might say something like, “We want to increase our marketshare in Europe” or “We want to shore up our business with this customer segment.” The product teams listed all the projects they could do, the demand from the market, and the things that need fixing. The product managers would try to reconcile those two things and choose the body of work that aligned with leadership priorities. They would commit to leadership to, say, increase marketshare in Europe by some percentage, but would not sign up for outputs. Instead, they would reserve the right to swap in and out projects based on whether they were moving the needle or not on the outcomes. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000445191364 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/07/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-the-product-experience/ POOJA AGARWAL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Pooja Agarwal with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave brought up that, in her book, Pooja says that the science of learning sits dormant in academic journals rather than being easily accessible. She says that we are all learners and we are all teachers. Teaching is something we do everyday even without thinking about it. Dave asked about the three stages of learning that Pooja describes in her book. Pooja pointed out that the three stage model is a simplistic model but is a helpful framework. The first stage is encoding or getting things into our heads. The second stage is storage. The third stage, retrieval, is where we pull information out. In higher ed, she says, we often think of retrieval as showing what you know, but we learn when we retrieve. By that act of retrieving, we are helping ourselves remember something in the future. Dave gave an example from a previous episode on delegation. He said that, after delegating a task, leaders often ask, “Do you understand?” A better question would be something like, “What are the key deliverables of what I have delegated to you?” This question gets the employee to articulate it to not only assess where they are in their learning but also to reinforce their learning. Dave asked about the statement in the book to stop reviewing things and instead ask for what was discussed. Pooja said that as leaders we often start meetings with, “Here’s what we did at the last meeting, so here’s what we’re going to accomplish today.” Instead, ask people to take a minute and write down what they can remember from the previous meeting. This engages them in such a way that it helps them to better understand the content of the present meeting.  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/421-help-people-learn-through-powerful-teaching-pooja/id458827716?i=1000445006344 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/learn-through-powerful-teaching-pooja-agarwal/ CATE HUSTON ON DISTRIBUTED, WITH MATT MULLENWEG The “Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg” podcast featured Cate Huston with host Matt Mullenweg. Cate leads the developer experience team at Automattic. This team is concerned with what it means to be a developer at Automattic, including the challenges of distributed, remote development, how developers can learn from each other, and how developers can get the support they need to chart their own career paths. She says a critical part of the developer experience is the connection between the hiring process and the on-boarding process. They are thinking about how to make the hiring process a good experience where the candidate can see if Automattic is the right fit for them and Automattic can see if the candidate is the right fit for the company. They want this to carry through as the new employee joins the team and becomes successful in their new role. Because the Automattic organization is so large and the developer experience team is so small, they look for pivot points to maximize their impact. She gave an example: when a team gets a new lead, that is a pivot point. They support this new lead and help them develop and iterate on their process. Cate’s advice to Automattic job candidates is to be patient because distributed companies take longer to hire and there is a lot of competition for remote jobs. A well-crafted cover letter is a must. When Cate is hiring an engineer, she is looking for two things. The first is the ability to work with the kind of complex, legacy codebase they have. The second is to be able to respond well to feedback because you are expected to grow over time in your career. She talked about self-awareness. As an example of low self-awareness, she talked about how some people need to be seen as being “nice,” regardless of whether it is true or not. The gap between the way somebody talks about themselves and their actions reveals their lack of self-awareness. She listed some things that increase self-awareness: reading a broad variety of fiction, cultivating a broad network of people, and traveling outside your comfort zone. Matt added that you can travel outside your comfort zone without leaving your city by visiting parts of your city you haven’t traveled to before. Cate also recommends shedding defensiveness and getting curious. She also recommends asking for advice. People often don’t give advice when they think you are doing a good job. When she gives feedback to people, she asks them if they felt seen when they received the feedback. Matt tries to remind himself that feedback is a gift. Cate says that if somebody cares about you enough to tell you that they think you should do better, that means they think you can do better. Cate also recommends that we stop giving advice, especially without context or understanding of what someone is trying to achieve. Instead, pause, ask questions, get context, and reflect back to someone what they are saying to you. Last, Cate says to own up and admit what is not going well. She gave an example of her team recently doubling in size. Seeing her job changing, she asked the team what the most useful thing she does for them was and what she should stop doing. Matt asked what else makes a great engineering culture. Here is Cate’s answer: Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/automattics-cate-huston-on-building-distributed-engineering/id1463243282?i=1000447512202 Website link: https://distributed.blog/2019/08/22/cate-huston-distributed-engineering/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Dave Stachowiak shares how to develop the strongest personal and professional relationships.   You'll Learn: The productivity hack that helps you be more present The under-appreciated value of small talk What to do when you don’t like networking   About Dave: Dave Stachowiak is the host and founder of Coaching for Leaders, a top-rated leadership podcast downloaded over 10 million times. With more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie and a thriving, global leadership academy, Dave helps leaders discover practical wisdom, build meaningful relationships, and create movement for genuine results. He’s served clients including Boeing, The University of California, and the United States Air Force. Forbes named him one of the 25 Professional Networking Experts to watch. Dave’s website and podcast: Coaching for Leaders Bonni’s website and podcast: Teaching In Higher Ed   Resources mentioned in the show: Personality: Nathan Czubaj Podcast: Happen to Your Career with Scott Anthony Barlow Book: How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie Book: Getting Things Done by David Allen Book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey Book: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier Previous episode: 170: Managing Inner–and Outer–Critics with Dave Stachowiak Previous episode: 413: How to Exude Credibility with Rob Jolles   Thank you Sponsors! Backblaze. Safeguard all your files with unlimited cloud-based backup for just $6 a month with Backblaze.com/awesome    View transcript, show notes, and links at http://AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep486

Are you a fan of the RODEcaster Pro? You're in luck if so. They recently released a new update to their product, that makes transferring files much easier. That's not all we talk about though, MacKenzie guest hosts because Todd is out of town for DragonCon. There is lots going on with Blubrry, multiple releases this week and information learning coming up in September. The podcasting community will that Australia is hosting their annual OzPod Conference this October. Don't miss the interview with podcaster Dave Stachowiak. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Podcast Insider. Interview: Dave Stachowiak: Coaching for Leaders Podcast Podcasting News: RODEcaster Pro Firmware 2.0 OzPod Podcasting Conference back on Oct 3rd Best Practices: File specs: 48khz or 44.1khz sample rate. 128kbps MP3 is standard file format for podcasts. You can use 64kbps mono or 96kbps stereo if you'd like. Blubrry News: Webinars: PowerPress for WordPress on Sept 18. We'll be hosting a webinar on how to get the most out of Audioburst sometime in September as well. Deezer: Now available for any Blubrry user, located in the Podcaster Dashboard - Destinations. New Partner: Journity! focuses on creating exceptional websites for nonprofit organizations - and all of services work with them. We've got an update to PowerPress with some bug fixes and better CastFeedValidator integration and Apple categories Blubrry Support: Realistic support response times: We promise we'll answer you! It might not be within an hour though. Our team is mighty, but small. And remember, patience will result in a fuller, better answer. Social media: We're not monitoring social media for support tickets, because we have a ticket system for our service.   Coming at you from the Convo By Design podcast studio at Blubrry’s Columbus, Ohio office. Promo code INSIDER for a free month at Blubrry.com Contact Us: todd@blubrry.com mike@blubrry.com mackenzie@blubrry.com

Are you a fan of the RODEcaster Pro? You're in luck if so. They recently released a new update to their product, that makes transferring files much easier. That's not all we talk about though, MacKenzie guest hosts because Todd is out of town for DragonCon. There is lots going on with Blubrry, multiple releases this week and information learning coming up in September. The podcasting community will that Australia is hosting their annual OzPod Conference this October. Don't miss the interview with podcaster Dave Stachowiak. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Podcast Insider. Interview: Dave Stachowiak: Coaching for Leaders Podcast Podcasting News: RODEcaster Pro Firmware 2.0 OzPod Podcasting Conference back on Oct 3rd Best Practices: File specs: 48khz or 44.1khz sample rate. 128kbps MP3 is standard file format for podcasts. You can use 64kbps mono or 96kbps stereo if you'd like. Blubrry News: Webinars: PowerPress for WordPress on Sept 18. We'll be hosting a webinar on how to get the most out of Audioburst sometime in September as well. Deezer: Now available for any Blubrry user, located in the Podcaster Dashboard - Destinations. New Partner: Journity! focuses on creating exceptional websites for nonprofit organizations - and all of services work with them. We've got an update to PowerPress with some bug fixes and better CastFeedValidator integration and Apple categories Blubrry Support: Realistic support response times: We promise we'll answer you! It might not be within an hour though. Our team is mighty, but small. And remember, patience will result in a fuller, better answer. Social media: We're not monitoring social media for support tickets, because we have a ticket system for our service.   Coming at you from the Convo By Design podcast studio at Blubrry’s Columbus, Ohio office. Promo code INSIDER for a free month at Blubrry.com Contact Us: todd@blubrry.com mike@blubrry.com mackenzie@blubrry.com

Are you a fan of the RODEcaster Pro? You're in luck if so. They recently released a new update to their product, that makes transferring files much easier. That's not all we talk about though, MacKenzie guest hosts because Todd is out of town for DragonCon. There is lots going on with Blubrry, multiple releases this week and information learning coming up in September. The podcasting community will that Australia is hosting their annual OzPod Conference this October. Don't miss the interview with podcaster Dave Stachowiak. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Podcast Insider. Interview: Dave Stachowiak: Coaching for Leaders Podcast Podcasting News: RODEcaster Pro Firmware 2.0 OzPod Podcasting Conference back on Oct 3rd Best Practices: File specs: 48khz or 44.1khz sample rate. 128kbps MP3 is standard file format for podcasts. You can use 64kbps mono or 96kbps stereo if you'd like. Blubrry News: Webinars: PowerPress for WordPress on Sept 18. We'll be hosting a webinar on how to get the most out of Audioburst sometime in September as well. Deezer: Now available for any Blubrry user, located in the Podcaster Dashboard - Destinations. New Partner: Journity! focuses on creating exceptional websites for nonprofit organizations - and all of services work with them. We've got an update to PowerPress with some bug fixes and better CastFeedValidator integration and Apple categories Blubrry Support: Realistic support response times: We promise we'll answer you! It might not be within an hour though. Our team is mighty, but small. And remember, patience will result in a fuller, better answer. Social media: We're not monitoring social media for support tickets, because we have a ticket system for our service.   Coming at you from the Convo By Design podcast studio at Blubrry’s Columbus, Ohio office. Promo code INSIDER for a free month at Blubrry.com Contact Us: todd@blubrry.com mike@blubrry.com mackenzie@blubrry.com

Martin Thompson on Arrested DevOps, Dr. Carola Lilienthal on Legacy Code Rocks, Jeff Gothelf on Agile Atelier, Safi Bahcall on Coaching For Leaders, and Mike Burrows on A Geek Leader.  I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting August 19, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARTIN THOMPSON ON ARRESTED DEVOPS The Arrested DevOps podcast featured Martin Thompson with host Jessica Kerr. Martin and Jessica talked about the parallels between optimizing the performance of software systems and doing the same for human systems. Using ideas from queuing theory, they discussed the notion of adding small amounts of slack to a system to make it drastically more responsive. Martin connected Amdahl’s Law to the more general Universal Scalability Law, which is more comprehensive because it takes into account coherence cost, which is the time needed to reach agreement between parties working together. He added that Brook’s Law from The Mythical Man Month is the Universal Scalability Law by a different name. They talked about the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Parallelism, Martin says, is doing multiple things at the same time. Concurrency means dealing with multiple things at the same time, a definition Martin says he stole from Rob Pike. He further decomposed the universal scalability law into its parameters. One parameter represents whether you can subdivide the work (the contention penalty) and the other represents the time to reach agreement (the coherence penalty). If your team can reach agreement faster, they can get better throughput because they can have more parallelism with less concurrency. They got into a discussion of the importance of feedback in information theory. Sending information and not confirming reception is a naïve approach and this has been understood for a long time and yet software is still built that ignores this. Two phase commit is an example. If you study the two phase commit protocol in any detail, Martin says, you realize it is fundamentally broken, yet corporations don’t want to say that. They talked about how to design distributed applications in the presence of partial failures. Martin says to make your communications idempotent, give each message a sequence number, and use this sequence number to identify and ignore replayed messages. According to Martin, designing your systems this way is just good hygiene and professionalism. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/protocols-and-sympathy-with-martin-thompson/id773888088?i=1000444947737 Website link: https://www.arresteddevops.com/protocols/ DR. CAROLA LILIENTHAL ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featuring Dr. Carola Lilienthal with hosts Andrea Goulet and Scott Ford. They talked about Domain-Driven Design. Carola said her company read Eric Evans’ book and immediately took to it. Talking to users, writing software in the user's domain, and using a common vocabulary fit with what they were already doing so they adopted it easily. They talked about Carola’s modularity maturity index. It consists of three areas of sustainability: 1) modularity, 2) hierarchy, and 3) pattern consistency.  Andrea brought up the fact that larger codebases aren’t necessarily more difficult to change as Carola found in her research. Carola says that, based on the three hundred systems she’s studied, systems under a million lines of code are often in a worse state than larger systems. Around a million lines of code, she says, something happens: either people start structuring the system and putting in guard rails that keep the product maintainable or the system doesn’t grow any more. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sustainable-software-architecture-dr-carola-lilienthal/id1146634772?i=1000443349633 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/sustainable-software-architecture-with-dr-carola-lilienthal JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Rahul and Jeff talked about the intersection of Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking to find commonalities. They examined customer-centricity, measuring success, continuous testing, and the importance of having a hypothesis. Jeff had been working as a designer on waterfall projects for the first decade of his career and, on a good day, only saw 50% of his work get implemented. Ten years into his career, Jeff got exposed to Agile software development and it forced him to revisit his design process and his process for doing product development as a whole. Because Jeff was in a leadership position and had a boss that understood the new methodology, Jeff got the chance to run process experiments to learn what the best collaboration model was for him and his team. This became the basis of his book, Lean UX. Rahul asked Jeff how he would define Design Thinking. Jeff described Design Thinking as applying the designer’s toolkit to solve business problems. This includes empathizing with customers, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, testing ideas with customers, and iterating.  Rahul asked if there is a specific situation in which to apply Design Thinking. Jeff says that he has yet to find a client or an industry where customer-centricity, continuous learning, risk mitigation, experimentation, and iteration don’t make sense. Even when working with people at GE who make locomotives and working with organizations that make room-sized air conditioning units that sit on top of skyscrapers, Jeff was able to successfully introduce them to ideas like talking to customers, identifying risks, and continuously improving their product. Rahul asked how the principles of Design Thinking fit with the Agile principles. Jeff says that everybody thinks that Agile is its own thing, Design Thinking is its own thing, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Startup are their own thing. The tactical execution of those methodologies might be different, but at their core, Jeff says these methods all share the same principles.  They are all customer-centric. They all measure success as an outcome, as a change in customer behavior. They all focus on testing your ideas quickly and moving off of bad ideas quickly. And they all focus on continuously improving and iterating the thing you are making as you continue to invest in it. They then got into a discussion about the importance of measuring the impact on the user of the product you are building. Jeff says that, unfortunately, shipping the thing is still one of the major definitions of success for most organizations. But in a world of continuous software when you can push a software update five times a minute like Amazon does, delivering the thing is a non-event and it should be a non-event. We shouldn’t celebrate it. What we should celebrate is the change in customer behavior that tells us that we’ve delivered value. These are things like showing up at the website, engaging with the app, buying the product, telling your friends, whatever it is we care about for our product. This line of thought led to the quote above. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-11-intersection-agile-lean-design-thinking/id1459098259?i=1000445718430 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/30/episode-11-the-intersection-of-agile-lean-and-design-thinking-with-jeff-gothelf/ SAFI BAHCALL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Safi Bahcall (author of the book Loonshots) with host Dave Stachowiak. They talked about what science has to say about the best ways to nurture new ideas. They started out with a discussion of children’s books and Safi’s first example of a loonshot was Dr. Seuss. He had just been rejected by every publisher he took his first story to when he ran into a friend in the street. This friend asked Dr. Seuss about what he had under his arm and when he found out it was a manuscript for a children’s story that Dr. Seuss was taking home to burn, the friend revealed that he had just taken a job at a publisher across the street and asked Dr. Seuss if he would like to come into the publisher’s office. The Cat In The Hat was born. Safi used the story of the moon landing as an illustration of the difference between a moonshot and a loonshot. A moonshot was Kennedy’s speech announcing that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A loonshot was forty years earlier when Robert Goddard suggested getting to the moon with liquid-fueled jet propulsion and was ridiculed by many, including the New York Times. The reason it is important to understand the difference is because Goddard’s ideas, though neglected by the Americans, were embraced by Nazi Germany. German scientists used Goddard’s ideas to build jet engines and planes that flew 100 mph faster than any Allied plane. The mistake of neglecting Goddard’s ideas was fatal. Companies often ask Safi how they can innovate and create new products while continuing to keep their original product or service competitive. He thinks about these situations using three metaphors: the ice cube, garden hoe, and heart. He starts by thinking about the artists who create new product ideas and soldiers to execute on turning those ideas into real products in the marketplace. The ice cube is a rigid phase that suits the soldiers and a melted ice cube is a fluid phase that suits the artists. Understanding the problem starts with the ‘beautiful baby’ problem. The artist sees their new idea as a beautiful baby. The soldiers look at the same thing and see a shriveled up raisin. They’re both right. The garden hoe comes from understanding that the failure point in most innovation is rarely in the supply of new ideas, it is in the transfer between artists and soldiers. Great leaders are those who think of themselves as gardeners managing the transfer between the artists and soldiers. The heart is about loving your artists and soldiers equally. When we lionize the artists as the media often do, we demotivate the soldiers. I liked what Safi had to say about the problem with following the standard advice about active listening. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/418-the-way-to-nurture-new-ideas-with-safi-bahcall/id458827716?i=1000443895174 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/nurture-new-ideas-safi-bahcall/ MIKE BURROWS ON A GEEK LEADER The A Geek Leader podcast featured Mike Burrows with host John Rouda. Mike talked about his career leading up to the writing of AgendaShift. He described the goal of AgendaShift as trying to introduce agility not by prescribing a set of practices or rolling out a framework but by getting agreement on outcomes and working out different ways of achieving them in an hypothesis-driven way. He then mentioned his newer book that he was working on at the time the podcast aired and has just come out this month, Right to Left. Right to Left is about working backwards from outcomes. John asked what the shift was that led to this outcome-focused approach. Mike said that while working in the government digital space in the UK, he witnessed rapid change. Instead of one supplier creating documentation for a new system, a second supplier building it, and a third supplier supporting it, and the whole thing being an expensive mess that disappoints its end users, he says they now have a system where projects will be halted if they are not serious about engaging with users, doing user research, understanding needs, and working iteratively to deliver evolving services. He says that if it can happen in the government space, it can happen anywhere. John asked about what a new manager coming from an individual contributor role would need to learn for dealing with the people side of managing projects. Mike recommended tempering any temptation to micro-manage. On his first day taking over a management position at UBS, he had people lining up at his desk looking to be micro-managed because that is how his predecessor worked. He told them that if this is how it is going to work, it is going to make him miserable and it is going to make them miserable and he encouraged them to self-organize. Mike’s second recommendation is to learn to value and respect people who come from other disciplines than technology, as he says in the above quote. John asked Mike to describe AgendaShift. Mike says that the best two words that describe it come from Daniel Mezick: it is an engagement model. Much like Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility, AgendaShift describes how change agents can engage with their organizations. In the Lean/Agile space, pushing Agile on people is self-defeating and creates more problems than it solves. Instead, facilitate outcomes that the people of the organization can agree on and start solving problems. AgendaShift starts with discovery. There are workshop tools to creating a high-level plan. Then they use an assessment tool for identifying opportunities to increase transparency, get workloads under control, or to engage better with customers. They identify obstacles and the outcomes hiding behind those obstacles. They use a “clean language”-based game to model a landscape of obstacles and outcomes and get people to think about the journey, their priorities, and what the key landmarks along the way will be. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/id1043194456?i=1000424584602 Website link:https://www.ageekleader.com/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on The Changelog, Stacey Barr on Coaching For Leaders, Nic Sementa on Drunken PM, Christopher Avery on Agile Uprising, and Steve Poling on Maintainable. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting August 5, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON THE CHANGELOG The Changelog podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Adam Stacoviak. Dave and Andy were on the show to talk about the 20th anniversary of the book The Pragmatic Programmer and its new edition. Adam asked how the book remains relevant given the short half-lives of most technology books. Dave clarified that the book is not really a technology book but a book about people and people haven’t changed that much. The biggest updates to the book were not due to changes in technology but due to changes in the authors’ experience and their discovery of better ways of explaining things. One example was the DRY principle that has come to mean, “Don’t cut and paste,” while its original meaning was not about code at all but had to do with knowledge. Andy was surprised upon revising the book to realize how much the world has changed in twenty years. Twenty years ago, he says, AOL was carpet-bombing people with CDs, very few of us had to worry about security as it was a struggle enough to get your code to work at all, and unit testing wasn’t commonly practiced. Andy said that they originally had intended to write a little whitepaper describing what they observed going from client to client and seeing the same classes of mistakes over and over. They came up with a set of stories, anecdotes, and metaphors to explain the concepts like “tracer bullet”. They intended to hand out this little whitepaper at clients but it just kept growing until it was a book. Adam asked what has changed in the last twenty years. Andy noticed on reviewing that he found the book more object-oriented than he thought it was. Dave says that people haven’t changed, but people’s sensibilities have: with the pervasive impact of computer technology on our lives, the responsibility being put on developers to behave ethically has increased dramatically. In his experience, twenty years ago, you wrote boring code that did some business function. Today, we’re writing code that can change people’s lives. We need to think a lot harder about the impact of the code we write. Adam asked how we can institutionalize the passing on of knowledge by those who came before. Andy wishes that academia had a greater interest in teaching the history of computing. Dave says this doesn’t need to be a separate class. If you want to become an author, you do a lot of reading. Instead of reading books, he says, developers should be reading code and reading a great variety of code. Teaching, he says, should involve learning how people did things in the past, reading their code, and then discussing why they made the choices they did. He gave the example of the C increment and decrement operators. In Bell Labs, the machines had seven addressing modes and two of them were pre- and post- increment address dereference. So the C operators mapped directly to the hardware. Another example is the famous paper, “GOTO Considered Harmful.” Entire languages have been written without GOTO based on the title of that paper. The original letter that the paper came from did not even have this title. The letter was about program-proving and the editors gave a “sexier” title. We carry around these things we have received based on headlines like “GOTO Considered Harmful” and we don’t even know why we do it. Adam asked how the next generation is going to gain a reverence for computing history. Andy suggested that mentors could instill this. Dave pointed out that we now live in an age when you can experience the history first hand. Today, you can emulate a PDP-11/70 in a browser. If you want to look at what Turing did at Bletchley Park, it’s there and you can play with it, but people don’t. Dave continued on to compare software development to jazz and talked about the importance of knowing the theory Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-pragmatic-programmers/id341623264?i=1000444208385 Website link: https://changelog.com/podcast/352 STACEY BARR ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Stacey Barr with host Dave Stachowiak. Stacey spoke about performance measurement in business and I wish more people understood the things she had to say. Stacey says that humans are not particularly good at judging how things change through time, but performance metrics can do that for us. Performance metric numbers also help us make comparisons a lot more reliably than we can without them. Measurement is about filling the gap in human perception so that we can know with a lot more certainty what’s really happening with the results we’re trying to achieve in our business. Dave asked what kinds of mistakes people make around performance measurement. Stacey says that there are a few and the first place you’ll see them is in the KPI column of a corporate plan. A common one is initiatives. An initiative usually describes an action or a project that has been chosen to improve performance. For example, if your goal is to improve customer loyalty, you may have an initiative to implement a customer relationship management system. That’s not a measure. An initiative is not evidence that you’ve changed anything for the better. Next, she talked about milestones. She says that a milestone is about getting something done by a particular point in time. A milestone might be, “We want to meet the medical council requirements for re-accreditation by June of next year.” These are commonly mistaken for performance measures but she asks, “Would the achievement of this milestone really change anything?” A whole lot of things may have gotten in the way that made that date no longer an appropriate date or that action no longer an appropriate action. A milestone as performance measure focuses us too much on ticking boxes and expending effort, and that takes us away from what we really need to focus on, which is to influence something to make it better. When a milestone is the performance measure, we’re not checking whether the activities are the right activities or the best activities.  She then spoke about customer surveys. A common problem she says is that many will create a customer survey without thinking about the performance measures they need that survey to supply the data for.  She also talked about “management speak” or “business jargon” and mentioned Don Watson’s book Death Sentences (https://www.amazon.com/Death-Sentences-Management-Speak-Strangling-Language/dp/1592401406) where he calls these words “weasel words.” She says these words sound important, sophisticated, and meaningful, but they are empty of meaning. She went on to give examples: holistic, effective, efficient, accountable, reliable, quality, impact, and sustainability. When you see these weasel words in the names of measures, you’ve identified a mistake because people won’t know what the weasel word truly means, they won’t know how to quantify it, and they won’t know what data to go after. She also made a great point about the value of ensuring that we are measuring certain metrics frequently enough. Measuring frequently enough is important because it allows us to distinguish between a pattern of natural variability and changes to that pattern. Finally, she told a story about presenting some research she was proud of to a committee and not getting the result she expected. I found this story extremely relatable. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/419-performance-measurement-that-gets-results-stacey/id458827716?i=1000444467235 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/performance-measurement-results-stacey-barr/ NIC SEMENTA ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Nic Sementa with host Dave Prior. Nic is an Agilist whose expertise is in dynamic funnel development (understanding the pieces that make up marketing and sales funnels) and the psychology of the sale. He and his business partner speak about Agile marketing, the conscious communication code, and personal agility. Dave asked Nic how he learned about the language of persuasion. Nic says he’s a firm believer in building on your strengths and considers talking one of his strengths and says his talking skills have gotten him out of fist fights. He talked about subtly taking control of conversation using “pace, pace, lead.” He says we’re hardwired to either run away or attack back when conflict starts, but what you should do instead is run with your opponent. He says it is like a conversational rope-a-dope. You agree with them, you gain control of the conversation by matching the other person’s speed, and then you lead. If they come in fast and fired up, you agree with them while also being fast and fired up, then once they start agreeing with you, you slow down and lead the pace of the conversation. Dave asked how you avoid getting swept up in your own flight-or-fight reflex. Nic says you have to not take anything personally, not even a personal attack. As soon as you take something personally, you lose your ability to act. Instead, he says, you want to suck all the emotions out of the conversation and deal only with objectivity. He says that once you take away the emotions most people become quite rational. You’re not trying to take control of the other person, just their emotions. Dave asked Nic how he developed these skills and Nic explained that it was part of his upbringing to need to develop these skills. Nic described his childhood family life as a place where “Easter egg hunts can turn into knife fights,” so dealing with conflict came naturally to him. Dave asked what he can teach the rest of us who don’t have as much experience with conflict. He says you have to remind yourself that you are not a moral authority and therefore your opinion isn’t what matters; the objective situation is what matters. We’re trained that when something happens, we assume that that something is happening to us. For example, when a TV is louder than we like, we assume that the TV is too loud. He says we should remind ourselves we are not a moral authority with the simple phrase, “than I would like.” For example, when you’re perceiving a conflict and you are thinking, “Man, this guy is angry and he is loud and the situation is horrible,” instead think, “This guy is angrier than I would like, and louder than I would like, and the situation is worse than I would like, but what actually is going on?” Dave asked about non-violent communication. Nic described it as coming from the writings of Dr. Marshall Rosenberg about people’s natural tendency to speak in a way that implies a high level of moral authority, disconnects them from what is actually going on, and puts them in a position where they are judging others on a consistent basis and taking everything personally. Dr. Rosenberg wrote a curriculum to give people tools to combat this tendency. Nic used these tools to deal with the complicated situations in his personal and professional life without changing his own personality. He says you don’t have to be an nth-degree yogi who doesn’t eat dairy, meat, or sugar and meditates fourteen hours a day to use non-violent communication. You can be a hard-nosed sales dog and use the same tools without dropping your tone to a position of weakness. Nic says his own epiphany moment for non-violent communication was realizing that it was designed to give you power with people instead of power over people. This connects strongly with the notion of deconstructive criticism in How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work (https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Change-Work-Transformation/dp/078796378X) by Kegan and Lahey. Dave asked Nic how he avoids thinking that he knows what people need. Nic says being objective helps and so does thinking, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Nic related a story of a business partner that used to ask Nic everyday, “What is one less thing we could do and still make the same money?” Most people are focused instead on doing more, Nic says, because most people forget the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule. They also forget the Peter Principle and put themselves above their level of competency. They ended the conversation with Dave asking Nic for some final tips on communication. Nic says that being able to truly communicate well with your team comes from you understanding that, in addition to the conversations that you have with everybody else, you have another that happens with yourself. One of the most important benefits of telling the people around you why you care about them, why you appreciate them, and what their strengths are, is that, by doing so, you remind yourself. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-language-of-persuasion-w-nic-sementa/id1121124593?i=1000443404883 SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/the-language-of-persuasion-w-nic-sementa CHRISTOPHER AVERY ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Christopher Avery with host Brad Stokes. Christopher says that he has been fascinated with the psychology of cause and effect for the past thirty years. That interest produced a pattern called the Responsibility Process that is about processing thoughts about taking and avoiding ownership. We tend to like owning the stuff that we think we caused intentionally and is good and we tend to not like owning the stuff that we don’t like and we tend to think such things were caused, not by us, but by something external. Christopher says that the Responsibility Process is valuable for anyone who wants to live a happier life, be more emotionally free, experience the power of real choices in every situation, and be more effective and valuable. Christopher asks us to imagine a stack of words and phrases starting at the bottom with the phrase “lay blame,” then “justify,” “shame,” “obligation,” and finally, “responsibility.” Every time something goes wrong, even if you are just tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, it produces a little bit of angst or anxiety and our mind tries to help us cope by starting at the bottom of the stack and asking, “Who did this to me? Who caused this? Who put the crack in the sidewalk?” The lay blame state has its own cause-effect logic. It makes us think that we are experiencing the effect and the cause is coming from outside of us. For the anxiety to go away, somebody else has to change. By coincidence, this is practically the same topic that Nic Sementa delved into in the Drunken PM podcast I referenced earlier. If we recognize that we are in the lay blame state, we may graduate to the justify state. If we transcend that state, we graduate to the shame state where we don’t blame somebody else but blame ourselves. This state is full of self-punishment and self-loathing. If we realize that it is a choice we are making to stay in the shame state, we can graduate to the state of obligation. This is the state of feeling burdened in a process, a flow, or a promise. It is only when we refuse to feel trapped that we can enter the state of responsibility, where you are owning your ability and power to create, choose, and attract. Christopher says the state of responsibility is always accessible to us. If we practice the responsibility process, we can get to the responsibility state more quickly. Brad pointed out that the obligation state could easily be confused with the responsibility state. Christopher says this is exactly right and before we had the notion of these various states, the word responsibility was used to represent all of them. Christopher says that, for much of our lives, authorities have been reinforcing the idea that we should beat ourselves up when we make a mistake (shame) and do what we’re “supposed” to do even if we despise it (obligation). In obligation, we build up resentment against who or what has us trapped. We resent the mortgage, the kids, the needy elderly parents, and the boss. If you have been making decisions in your life for more than a few years, he says, then you are the architect of your own life and it is a product of your choices. From there Christopher goes on to say that your life is a product of your filters which may be caused by your environment, parents, church, schools, and neighborhoods. He then asks, “Do you want to defend those filters or examine them?” I see another connection here to the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, this time in their book Immunity To Change (https://www.amazon.com/Immunity-Change-Potential-Organization-Leadership/dp/1422117367), which talks about examining the hidden assumptions that prevent us from changing things within ourselves even when we desperately want to change them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-responsibility-process-with-christopher-avery/id1163230424?i=1000443858617 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/the-responsibility-process-with-christopher-avery STEVE POLING ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featuring Steve Poling with host Robby Russel. Steve and Robby talked about technical debt. Steve says he’s been on projects where the tech debt got so bad that they engaged in rewrites, which he calls declaring bankruptcy. Steve suggests that the enduring popularity of technical debt as a metaphor is because it works to explain the tax on engineering velocity in terms that business people understand. It accumulates, it gets worse, and we want to pay it down. Robby asked about what processes Steve has used to keep on top of tech debt. Steve started by describing the anti-pattern from the quote above, which reminds me of the Joel Spolsky essay, Things You Should Never Do, Part 1, in which Spolsky spoke about the downsides of rewriting from scratch. Steve says he drank the test-driven development Kool-aid and he now believes that if you do the red-green-refactor of TDD, you can prevent the accumulation of tech debt. Without the refactor step, however, technical debt will continue to accumulate. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/steve-poling-the-real-enemy-is-murphy/id1459893010?i=1000444476559 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/steve-poling-the-real-enemy-is-murphy-vSKLVY5H LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Today on the show I’m joined by Dave Stachowiak, a long distance friend of mine (we still haven’t met in person!) and host of the popular Coaching for Leaders podcast, a show aimed at helping you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.  The workplace landscape is full of people wondering: What am I supposed to do to create a vision for my team?How do I get better feedback from my stakeholders?Where do I start in holding a difficult employee accountable?When's the right time to make the next move in my career?How can I successfully manage my former peers? If that describes you, there is hope, as it's a myth that leadership skills can't be learned. Almost nobody is a born leader. Most leaders learn how to lead through the school of hard knocks, good training, years of hard work, effective coaching, and great mentors. It’s no surprise that the most effective leaders have always known that investing in their leadership skills will pay off, big time. That's why many leaders have invested in coaching, executive MBA programs, and conferences. We all have the potential. Anyone can learn to lead teams, companies, non-profits, and especially their own family. Have a money question? Email me here. Please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Connect with me at these places for all my content: https://www.jillonmoney.com/ https://twitter.com/jillonmoney https://www.facebook.com/JillonMoney https://www.instagram.com/jillonmoney/ https://www.youtube.com/c/JillSchlesinger https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillonmoney/ https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jill-on-money https://apple.co/2pmVi50 "Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com.

Cal Newport on Coaching For Leaders, Becoming Mr. Why on Troubleshooting Agile, Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf on Agile For Humans, Thai Wood on Greater Than Code, and Jeff Campbell on Scrum Master Toolbox. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 15, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CAL NEWPORT ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Cal Newport with host Dave Stachowiak. Cal talked about the inspiration for his new book Digital Minimalism having come from readers of his previous book Deep Work who liked what that book had done for their work lives and asked, “What about my personal life?” Dave and Cal talked about competitive Rock, Paper, Scissors, and how the top competitors in that sport are so good at understanding and taking advantage of the way our brains work. This took them to the main point of the book, which is that technologies like social media are not understood by our brains in the same way as true social interaction, so we can be interacting on social media all day long and still feel lonely. Dave asked about the impact the modern tendency to replace face-to-face conversation with virtual connection such as email, text, and social media likes, can have for leaders. Cal described the scenario in which a person in a leadership position with a remote component to it reads, say, an email and can’t put a finger on the emotional affect — she can’t tell whether the author of the email is really angry with her or really happy. He says we need the complex, social-processing part of the brain that relies on analog cues such as the back-and-forth of hearing a voice or seeing body language. It is how we understand people, connect with people, and coordinate with people towards common goals. Taking this kind of conversation out of the picture makes it difficult to be a leader. Dave asked what Cal learned from his readers and blog followers. Cal said he was surprised to learn from his readers and followers the degree to which digital distraction was filling a void for them. He had assumed that simply reducing or taming the digital distractions would allow us to immediately get back to the things we know are more important. He learned instead that, for a lot of people, it is unclear what they are going to do next once they have taken the lightweight distraction out of their lives. He says he is much more sympathetic now about the difficulty of figuring out what you want to do instead of just mindless swiping in every down moment. In the book, he asks people to take a 30-day period to limit social media use and he said, “People are often surprised by how little they miss things like Facebook during this process and also surprised by how much they’re at a loss to figure out what they should be doing instead.” iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/400-how-to-reclaim-conversation-with-cal-newport/id458827716?i=1000432139932&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/400/ BECOMING MR. WHY ON TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE The Troubleshooting Agile podcast with hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick spent an episode talking about someone they call “Mr. Why.” Squirrel told a story about a client who would get orders from on high that said, “Thou shalt do it this way.” He would also get orders with explanations that do not make any sense such as investors making technical decisions. Squirrel calls this client “Mr. Why” because most people in these types of environments eventually stop asking the why. The challenge for this client is not that he doesn’t ask why but that he only asks himself. Squirrel said that he tells Mr. Why that we want to be opposite of lawyers, who are carefully trained never to ask the question, “Why?” Jeffrey said that he thinks the legalistic type of question is the model that people often think is the proper way to analyze a situation: legalistically building a case rather than collaboratively trying to get to answers and this could be why people fall into communication patterns in which their goal is to win rather than to jointly discover. To me, this sounds exactly like the difference between constructive and deconstructive criticism described in the book, How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. The constructive criticizer is making an airtight case about the behavior he or she is criticizing even when doing so constructively, while the deconstructive criticizer is seeking to jointly discover the truth with the help of the recipient of the criticism. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-mr-why/id1327456890?i=1000432455338&mt=2 SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/becoming-mr-why GARY PEDRETTI AND JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Gary Pedretti and Jeff Gothelf with host Ryan Ripley. Ryan asked a question that he hears a lot: how do we do UX activities and product discovery within a sprint? Gary says that from the developer community, he hears that design work takes too long. From the designer community, he hears that they think their work is strategic and sprints feel tactical or that they think developers don’t really care about design. Jeff pointed out that the fundamental values and principles of Scrum and UX are the same, but melding the processes in a way that respects both Scrum and UX has proved elusive for a lot of organizations. They talked about a 2007 paper by Desirée Sy and Lynn Miller on staggered sprints that was misunderstood as a series of mini-waterfalls. I believe Jeff was referring to the article named Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design. Jeff explained that they were actually describing two kinds of work being done by the same team, not by separate groups of designers and developers communicating by handoff.  Jeff described experimenting with his team’s processes back in 2008-09 and settling on a process in which designers were part of the Scrum team with engineers and product managers and work was prioritized not just on what needed to be delivered but also on what the team was trying to learn. Gary talked about how the separation of designers from the rest of the team is similar to the separation of database people and application architects from the rest of the team because of a belief that the work of the database designer or application architect needed to be completed before the work of the rest of the team could begin. In each case, people discovered patterns that overcame this limitation, like the patterns of Ambler and Sadalage’s Refactoring Databases book and the patterns of evolutionary or emergent architecture. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/id991671232?i=1000433513601&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-106-exploring-user-experience-and-scrum/ THAI WOOD ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Thai Wood with hosts Jessica Kerr, Sam Livingston-Gray, John K Sawers, and Avdi Grimm. They started with a discussion of resilience engineering and how it spun off of human factors and brought in cognitive systems. Jessica said that old-style human factors got mired in Taylorism whereas cognitive systems is about making systems that work with people in the way that people naturally work. Thai had gotten into tech coming from emergency medicine as an EMT. Jessica asked what he brought to software development from his EMT days. Thai responded that, in medicine, you are trained about burnout, how to identify it, and what resources are available to help with it. In software, despite similar stressors and similar problems, burnout is not talked about that much. Jessica asked Thai how to distinguish between reliability and resilience. Thai said that resilience encompasses the ability to continually adapt to change, whereas reliability might be consistently performing within the same state. He also said that he thinks of robustness as being able to survive certain inputs but not necessarily being able to adapt to them. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/121-emergency-communication-with-thai-wood/id1163023878?i=1000431679618&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/emergency-communication JEFF CAMPBELL ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Campbell with host Vasco Duarte. This episode was the first to be done in a Q & A format. The question for this episode was: Have you been able to break through the proverbial IT gate and start talking about wider Agile adoption together with management? Jeff answered that being able to communicate with management is probably one of the most important factors to success. He told the story of working at a company that went out of business. Reflecting on this period of his career, he arrived at the idea that, if he was unable to convince management that a particular behavior or practice was important, then that was his failing and not theirs. His recommendation for a person looking to influence management is that they should start doing public speaking and teaching. Exposure to teaching, he says, teaches you to be able to express yourself multiple different ways which is critical because not everybody comes to understand a topic the same way. iTune link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-q-jeff/id963592988?i=1000431928436&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/selling-agile-how-to-get-buy-in-from-management-qa-with-jeff-campbell/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

"There is no greater ROI than the investment in developing your employees" Nobody knows this more than the top-ranked Executive Coach, Terry Lipovski. Over the last two decades he has helped organizational leaders around the world maximize their impact, inspire action and improve organizational performance by helping busy leaders to coach their direct reports. Does this work? Companies with Career Development programs have 250% higher productivity, 13% better business results and enjoy an ROI of 7 times their initial investment. Moreover, employees who receive coaching are 86% more likely to stay, and 99% of them are happy with the coaching they receive. With a unique background in both occupational psychology and corporate leadership, Terry has served in leadership roles at Apple, Bell and Rogers, and as a Board Director. He has worked with clients in over 20 countries. including Microsoft, HP, GE, Tesco, Enbridge, TD, Air Canada and the Government of Canada. As an Certified Masteries Coach with the International Association of Coaching, Terry specializes in team building, engagement, strategy, relationships, executive presence and presenting skills. Join us on this episode of Inspiring Leaders as we turn the tables on the show's original host as Dana Janzen interviews Terry Lipovski about the benefits of becoming a leader who coaches and develops their people. LINKS Terry Lipovski on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/terrylipovski Terry Lipovski on Twitter https://twitter.com/TerryLipovski Ubiquity Coaching Website www.ubiquity.coach.com Leadscape Learning Website http://www.leadscapelearning.com International Association of Coaching https://certifiedcoach.org

Mike Cottmeyer on Leading Agile, Daniel Goleman on Coaching For Leaders, Christina Wodtke on Build by Drift, Joe Vallone on Agile Amped, and Cindy Alvarez on Product Love. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MIKE COTTMEYER ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Mike Cottmeyer with host Dave Prior. To kickoff 2019, Dave and Mike got together to talk about the year ahead. What I liked most about this conversation is how it got into a discussion of how to introduce Agile to an organization that is just beginning to move away from traditional waterfall methods. Mike talked about how meal prep services got his wife interested in cooking for the first time and contrasted this with the way Agile is often introduced to enterprises: exclusively showing the end state and leaving out details about what Agile looks like when you’re just starting. Just as the meal prep services show more respect for people beginning to take up cooking, Mike says that the Agile community needs to show more respect for people beginning their Agile journey. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/kicking-off-2019-w-mike-cottmeyer/id995790407?i=1000427423678&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/kicking-off-2019-with-mike-cottmeyer/ DANIEL GOLEMAN ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Daniel Goleman with host Dave Stachowiak. As a fan of Daniel’s work on Emotional Intelligence, I was eager to hear this interview. Daniel talked about three different kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern and compared and contrasted them. I loved what Daniel had to say about distinguishing between a healthy and an unhealthy showing of vulnerability, especially since I read so much advice telling leaders they need to be vulnerable. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/391-getting-better-at-empathy-with-daniel-goleman/id458827716?i=1000428075330&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/391/ CHRISTINA WODTKE ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Christina Wodtke with host Maggie Crowley. Christina’s book, Radical Focus, has been showing up on the recommended lists of most of the people I follow, with some saying that it was the first book they read that really showed how to apply Objectives and Key Results or OKRs, so I was quick to hit play on this new-to-me podcast. What I heard was a great conversation on high-performing teams, avoiding traps in setting OKRs, and most importantly, the fact that OKRs are supposed to be stretch goals. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-15-christina-wodtke-on-radical-focus-living-your/id1445050691?i=1000426996091&mt=2 Website link: https://www.drift.com/blog/christina-wodtke-okrs/ JOE VALLONE ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Joe Vallone with host Adam Mattis. While there was a lot of talk about the Scaled Agile Framework in this conversation and I’m still working out how I feel about that, there was also a great conversation about lean startup ideas, particularly innovation accounting and Joe provided concrete examples from the SR21 Blackbird to self-driving cars to make his point. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/innovation-accounting/id992128516?i=1000427846817&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/innovation-accounting/ CINDY ALVAREZ ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Cindy Alvarez with host Eric Boduch. Cindy Alvarez is the author of a book in Eric Ries’ Lean series: Lean Customer Development. I loved how Cindy took the old saw about Henry Ford and the faster horse and talked about how maybe Ford should have rephrased the question to get the customers to talk about problems instead of solutions. I also loved her emphasis on good listening techniques and how this can mean having to tolerate an uncomfortable amount of silence. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/cindy-alvarez-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-customer/id1343610309?i=1000428744289&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-cindy-alvarez-product-manager-at-microsoft-and-author-of-lean-customer-development/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Clare Sudbery on Agile Amped, Dennis Stevens on Leading Agile, Howard H White on Coaching For Leaders, Mike Burrows on Being Human, and Dominic Price on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting December 24, 2018. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CLARE SUDBERY ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Clare Sudbery with host Chris Murman. Clare talked about leaving the IT industry due to boredom and taking up a career teaching mathematics and described how she regained an interest in IT and became a lead consultant developer at ThoughtWorks. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/id992128516?i=1000423906096&mt=2 Website link: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/lets-stop-making-people-feel-stupid/ DENNIS STEVENS ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Dennis Stevens with host Dave Prior. Dennis talked about how to connect strategy to execution in an organization. Dennis then spoke about optionality and had a great quote about how organizations get into situations where responding to change becomes difficult: "An interesting phenomenon that you see in organizations is everybody wants to start their projects on day one because they want to get their money starting to be spent before their stuff gets de-prioritized. Once you've started spending it, it's really hard for organizations to stop projects. The net result of this is everything is being worked on all at the same time and there's no stopping point in the middle for somebody to come in and go, "Hey, wait! We've learned something; we want to change," because we're not sequencing the work. We're not flowing the work through the system in a way that we can adapt. So there's no optionality. How do we break work down so we can finish stuff? Even if it's not the most important thing, you're still actually better off, from an optionality and adaptability standpoint and from a risk and a quality standpoint, finishing one thing before you start the second." iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/designing-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model/id995790407?i=1000425277842&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/designing-a-feedback-driven-strategic-execution-model-w-dennis-stevens/ HOWARD H WHITE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featuring Howard H White with host Dave Stachowiak. This is probably my favorite interview in quite some time. Howard tells the story of transferring schools in junior high so that he could go to school with a girl he fancied, only to end up at the new school all alone, knowing nobody and being the only black kid in ninth grade. After being inspired by a conversation with the new school's basketball coach, he takes up basketball, begins to excel at it, becomes class president, gets injured, but then pivots into a job at Nike. He then tells the story of how he convinced the co-founder of Nike to let him establish the Jordan brand even though Michael Jordan had retired. This is a must-listen. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/384-your-attitude-defines-your-altitude/id458827716?i=1000425474718&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/384/ MIKE BURROWS ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Mike Burrows with host Richard Atherton. Mike talked about his career path, what led him to Agile, Lean, and Kanban, and he told a story of an organization that had more projects in progress than people in the company. He talked about how the use of pair-programming brought the work-in-progress down below the number of programmers on his team. Richard asked him why he thought pair-programming helped so much with this and Mike talked about how pairs are more likely than individuals to ask for help when they get stuck rather than picking up a new task and increasing the work-in-progress. Mike talked about working with David Anderson on a project in South Africa where they encountered engineers who had gotten into their mid-twenties without ever having seen a project get completed. He talked about how a generation of managers were taught that Waterfall was the proper way to develop software and he believes that there is still an industry that supports that worldview. He says he refuses to describe Agile now from left-to-right by starting with backlogs and only describes it from right-to-left by starting with outcomes. Everything else, as in the quote above, he sees as pandering to those who still have the Waterfall mindset. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows/id1369745673?i=1000425784892&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/38-start-with-the-end-in-mind-with-mike-burrows-70596 DOMINIC PRICE ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dominic Price with host Shane Hastie. Dominic talked about what led him to be a keynote speaker at Agile 2018 in which he spoke about how many agile "transformations" focus on becoming Agile through the following of rituals rather than focusing on moving to new ways of working. He criticized the focus on Agile as an end state instead of continuous evolution. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dominic-price-on-why-agile-is-not-always-the-answer/id1161431874?i=1000424791583&mt=2 Website link: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/agile-is-not-always-the-answer FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

In this episode you will discover how coaching can help you create the life that you want, faster and more easily than you may have ever believed possible.

Coaching is, for many managers, a highly under appreciated skill. It is usually assumed that anyone who is good at something, when promoted to manager, will naturally be good at teaching and coaching those skills. Not so much. Teaching and coaching are powerful skills that have to be learned just as much as the skills that get managers promoted. And those skills will make you a far more effective leader. In this episode, Kelly and Robby are joined by perennial champion football coach, Bill Blankenship to talk coaching for leaders in the workplace. The post CM 140: “Coaching For Leaders” appeared first on CounterMentors.

Fellow careers podcaster Dave Stachowiak shares wisdom on dealing with the inner critic, getting great feedback, and more   You'll Learn: How to best interact with the inner critic The magic question to ask for better feedback How much feedback is too much feedback   About Dave: Dave is a Senior Vice President with Dale Carnegie of Southern Los Angeles and has led training programs for top organizations like the Northrop Grumman Corporation, The United States Air Force, the Boeing Company, and the University of California system. Dave founded Coaching for Leaders in 2011 and was named in Forbes as one of the 25 Professional Networking Experts to Watch in 2015.   View transcript, show notes, and links at http://AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep170

The state of leadership, mastermind groups and leadership v. management with Coaching for Leaders Podcast host Dave Stachowiak. Bio: Dave Stachowiak serves as the Executive Vice President for Talent Development for Dale Carnegie of Southern Los Angeles, and is also the host of the highly rated Coaching for Leaders Podcast. Through his work at Dale Carnegie, Dave has served such clients as Boeing, ExxonMobil, The United States Air Force and American Honda, and was named by his clients as a top 20 Dale Carnegie instructor in the world. Dave launched the Coaching for Leaders Podcast in 2011, filling a void he noticed where most business and leadership podcasts were aimed exclusively at online entrepreneurs and not everyday people looking to grow in their leadership skills. Dave has a PhD in organizational leadership from Pepperdine University. Interview: For those of us who aren't familiar with you or your work, can you fill us in a bit on your journey and how you found yourself drawn to this field of training leaders? Not a confident person through high school, but made a pact to put himself out there when he reached college Nominated for homecoming court at the end of senior year Hired personal coaches; worked on himself You have the rare combination of academic AND experiential credentials on the topic of leadership; how have those two worked together to form how you look at leadership? Leverage the best of both At Dale Carnegie, has the opportunity to hear what leaders are dealing with on day to day basis Always be learning; act as the student along with the rest of us and bring experts to the show What do we know about leadership in 2016 that we didn't know 10, 20 or 50 years ago? Fundamentals haven't changed But, in practice some things are different Command and Control doesn't work Access to information; glassdoor, etc. means people will know how your organization treat others Broader sense of what life is about Less about money and titles More about work/life balance and quality of life (Resource: Daniel Pink – Human Motivation) Starting to move away from traditional ways to do performance reviews, raises (but still a struggle) Important for job candidates to raise work/life balance issues during the hiring process if they are important to them You're not going to change the culture of the employer as a new employee (Resource: Scott Barlow – Happen To Your Career Podcast) Career = Carriage/Journey We have a lot of folks listening who, by title or job description, do not have leadership authority. They are early in their careers or the newest volunteer in a charity, etc. Can we lead and influence people and organizations from those roles, and if so, how? Retired Admiral Verne Clark, U.S. Navy – After a point in time in his leadership, he ceased giving orders – his leadership was via influence True leadership doesn't come from formal authority, but rather whether people are willing to follow you Favorite definition of leadership – people follow you! If they don't have a choice (i.e. in a boss/employee relationship) are they really following you? Political leaders great case study because we don't have to follow them Chris Voss (Resource: Never Split The Difference) If you can lead and influence in a volunteer capacity, imagine what you can do if you actually have some of the position and/or management authority Resource: Eight Ways To Influence Without Authority Resource: Coaching for Leaders Episode with John Kotter – Leadership v. Management Leadership is about direction; management is about execution One is not good and the other bad; they are distinct, complimentary and important skills I mentioned in the intro one reason you started Coaching for Leaders was a lack of content for those of us who weren't online entrepreneurs; why is that distinction important? What do we who aren't online entrepreneurs need to learn about leadership that is different? Leadership usually not top of mind for an online entrepreneur, especially one in startup phase when there may not even be a team yet Nobody really doing this! Senior people in small/medium size organizations are typical listeners, and there isn't much in the way of formal leadership training they offer Leadership can be very lonely; helpful to have resources What is a mastermind group and what does it look like? Peers get together with a facilitator Great relationships not bound by political issues within an organization Twice monthly online meeting where they talk though leadership challenges Used to just be for the wealthy, but now have become more mainstream and accessible with technology Need to be consistent, committed In a more recent episode, you discussed the topic of how to go about managing your former peers after being promoted. I think many in our audience are experience that or will very soon. What can you tell us about that difficult leadership task? First need to acknowledge it is a big transition! Sit down and have a conversation with your former peers who you now lead; ask how they feel about it and then LISTEN! Resource: The Look and Sound of Leadership (podcast; Tom Henschel) 20/60/20: 20% are excited for you; 60% not sure/don't care; 20% frustrated/animus (just assume this will be the case) Airplane analogy for the importance of diversifying your relationships – have a lot of engines on your plane, so when one goes down, the whole plane doesn't go down. If all your relationships are at work, and there is a big transition there, it's a lot to handle because ALL of your relationships were impacted. You are in the process of updating your tagline to Coaching for Leaders; the current one is Leaders Aren't Born, They're Made. Can you expand on that line how you came to believe that? Why did you decide to update the tag line and where is that headed? One of my mastermind members mentioned that the tag line was fine, but didn't connect to what the show delivered. So it will likely be more along the lines of actionable, expertise, access. You have created a wonderful bank of resources at your website coachingforleaders.com, including a list of your Top Ten Leadership books. Can you tell us about that list and maybe one or two specific books that we should start with if we are wanting to build a foundation of leadership knowledge? Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey The best way to be a great leader is to start leading yourself well How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie How to have great relationships, which results in leading well Focus on seeing things from the other person's perspective You have studied leadership, talked about it with other experts, trained others in it. If you were to write a book about leadership, what would its title be? The Listener's Guide to Coaching For Leaders – so people could go right to a particular episode/guest to learn about the topic or issue they are interested in or going through. Where can people go to learn more about you and how can they discover Coaching for Leaders? Coachingforleaders.com Thank Yous/Acknowledgements: Antioch Live/Clear Day Media Group – music More here. Jonathan Davis – production Clint Musslewhite – voice over

What are 3 red flags that you’ve already put a “glass lid” on your income? What gets you to six figures will NOT get your to seven. The ways of thinking, strategies that got you to one level will not take you to the next. Actually, there is one major way of thinking that destroys any hope of most entrepreneurs being wealth and happy. That’s what we are going to discuss today. Your Magic Takeaway: The real reason their businesses and lives don’t actually work. It’s an American Myth that they must abandon and adopt an entirely new way of seeing wealth and success. By identifying how they have been lost in the myth and making a new decision to take a new path, they become empowered to achieve what they actually yearn for in their business, finances, relationships and life.Do youalwaysseem to be just "one day" behind but someone you never catch up:Do big opportunities never really pan out and if this is your pattern, how can you ever be truly successful?"Just a bit more" is somehow never quite enough. What is the answer?On today's show The Six Figure Myth, JV and Connie will help you find your answers.

Dave Stachowiak has spent the last eleven years honing his skills at the prestigious Dale Carnegie corporate training and self-improvement firm. He is currently Executive Vice President of Talent Development with Dale Carnegie of Southern Los Angeles. Dave leads training programs for top organizations, and was named by Forbes as one of the 25 Professional Networking Experts to Watch in 2015. He produces and hosts the Coaching for Leaders weekly podcast, as well as the daily Carnegie Coach podcast with the Dale Carnegie organization. In this episode, Dave describes the epiphany he had during a sales call, and how it changed his professional life forever. We also talk about how to honor your core energy and strengths, especially when you're in an environment that is more extroverted in nature. Full show notes available at http://theintrovertentrepreneur.com/2015/09/23/ep89-dave-stachowiak-of-coaching-for-leaders/

What are 3 red flags that you’ve already put a “glass lid” on your income? What gets you to six figures will NOT get your to seven. The ways of thinking, strategies that got you to one level will not take you to the next. Actually, there is one major way of thinking that destroys any hope of most entrepreneurs being wealth and happy. That’s what we are going to discuss today. Your Magic Takeaway: The real reason their businesses and lives don’t actually work. It’s an American Myth that they must abandon and adopt an entirely new way of seeing wealth and success. By identifying how they have been lost in the myth and making a new decision to take a new path, they become empowered to achieve what they actually yearn for in their business, finances, relationships and life.Do youalwaysseem to be just "one day" behind but someone you never catch up:Do big opportunities never really pan out and if this is your pattern, how can you ever be truly successful?"Just a bit more" is somehow never quite enough. What is the answer?On today's show The Six Figure Myth, JV and Connie will help you find your answers.

Dave Stachowiak is a leadership trainer and coach with the Dale Carnegie organization in Southern California and host of the "Coaching For Leaders" podcast.  He shares with Coach Nation how we can implement the strategies in Carnegie's work to improve relationships with clients and grow our businesses! 

How do you balance work when going through a major life change, like a new baby? In this episode of the Smart Business podcast, we take on that question. I invited my friend Dr. Dave Stachowiak of the Coaching for Leaders podcast to come on and share his thoughts. Dave is an expert in leadership […] The post 048: Dr. Dave Stachowiak of the Coaching for Leaders Podcast | Work-Life Balance appeared first on Smart Business Revolution.

Leaders are most effective when they help others take action. Learn some coaching skills to help people find the clarity to move forward.