1. Scrappy is your biggest armour. It provides speed and agility. Getting started with a ‘loose’ approach is more important than getting all the t’s crossed. Define. Build. Deliver. Evolve. Learn. Repeat.
2. Pace, alignment and ambition are the three ingredients of better. Define your ambition, collective agree of where you are and checkin on progress.
3. Having a shared caring philosophy aids motivation. Wellbeing is important and showing you care goes a long way. Phone, text, email, send a card in the post to say thank you and ask how their ‘off work’ time is going. Remembering a birthday or their ‘special people’ is free and special.
4. Talk less do more. Time for deep work is precious and where the gold happens. Block time where no meetings happen.
5. Bring expertise into the conversation at the right time. Restrict intervention to when it is essential.
6. Adjustment is king. Every day is new. Messages are precious and change regularly. Be clear on the today message so people know what the focus is. What, when, how communication creates the win. List the top 3 needs for today, communicate them and share what it means.
7. Collective shared understanding is energising and empowering. Be explicit about what you mean. Translated it so everyone can visualise what you mean.
8. Live off your strengths and let everyone else do the same. What we love to do and what we are good at tend to over lap. List the top things you and your team enjoy the most. Invite the rest of the team to have a go too.Allow everyone to build on their strengths so they can do superb work. Recruit to fill the additional strengths you need.
9. Shared utilisation is a gift. Different skills and people have different work loads. Knowing things are shared out feels fair. Be open about team work loads and use it as a tool to share the work so the main business intent can be focused and achieved. Offer work time across the team.
10. Grow together rather than independently. As each day close its an invitation to share what have we done better today than we did yesterday?
11. Protect those at the coal face from the crazy. Involve only when its essential.
12. Translate and share how you operate and what we care about. Answer these questions. What is my rhythm of work, when do I do my best work? and How best can you manage me? Your team can then support you better.
13. Align values and understanding with those you work with. List three things that are important to you. Ask the rest of the team to do the same. Where are the similarities and differences. List the rules that you will all live by.
14. Share the picture of success. Pictures paint a 1000 words. Makes sure you are all looking and acting on the same one. Define the ‘how’ by sharing what the picture of success is. Be clear on results, roles, responsibilities and accountability.
15. How you turn up impacts everything. Internal stuff matters. Watch for the signs. Be curious about things that are outside work for you and your team. Give yourself and others the support and the opportunity to share and sort. Share with each other what you do to turn up at work in the best way possible way. E.g. go for a walk, cold shower, HITT for 7 minutes, meditation, strongest coffee you can get your hands on.
16. Roles and responsibility fuzz when you run at a pace. Be clear as things evolve what your and others roles are and make sure everyone in the team knows too.
17. Urgency fatigue is a danger when you are running to stay the #1 and keep competitors away. Urgency management and self care are critical to keep people on track. Check in weekly as to how self care is being managed. How are we managing our wellness? Share what is working for you to manage the urgency.
18. Dont be precious. Things move fast. Yesterdays ideas may be good but also outdated with new goals and direction. Be less precious with yesterdays great ideas allows you to be agile and have new ideas with the changing tides.
19. Agility works best in small groups. When you grow keep the agility cells of small independently run teams. Expand the communication lines so the teams are interlocking engines of success and peak performance.
20. Consistency is king. Find your sweet spot in the day when you work at your best. Guard it. Keep everyone else away. Let others know and the consistency of delivery and what you do be consistent will be known by your output and availability.
21. Fear and risk work side by side. Fear of not being #1 in the market. Risk of not keeping up. Having data points what superb work and success is being delivered will help you to stay in the safe zone but not comfort zone.
22. Know the sign of a priority shift. Heed the signs and act. Communicate a consistent message across all teams.
23. Know which plate to keep spinning while delegating or smashing the rest. What is essential to deliver? What is OK to deliver, What is nice to deliver? Keep #1 share #2 and ditch #3 for the time being and revisit.
24. Focused talking. Be clear what the outcomes is when you do talk. Dont leave threads still open when you leave the meeting. Everyone should leave the meeting knowing the teams successes, the results and actions ‘I’ have to complete from the meeting.
25. Be kind. Each day, moment is an experiment. Be kind to yourself and others with all the learnings you have. Remember those who learn through testing and failure gain the most.
