The Foxhole

I once worked with a high school basketball team. At the beginning of the season, the coach named one of his players team captain. The coach later revealed to me that he chose the team captain based on the boy’s character and leadership potential.

About a month later, after weeks of intense practice preparing for the upcoming season, the coach led his team through an exercise called “The Foxhole.” It is an exercise that I encourage all teams to execute.

The Foxhole is based off of military jargon. In trench warfare, members of the same team would dig a hole dubbed a “foxhole.” The team would live in the foxhole, eating, sleeping, and fighting together. There was no world outside of the foxhole. The men inside that hole lived and died as one. They became closer than brothers and literally trusted each other with their lives.

The Foxhole exercise run by this coach was for each member of the team to imagine they were in battle and dug into a foxhole. In their foxhole would be three other members of their team. In this exercise, each team member had to choose three teammates to accompany them in that foxhole.

The coach had his team take ten minutes to think about their answers without speaking to anyone. Then, when the time was up, he had them write their foxholes down and submit them.

On a team of a dozen kids, there were a dozen different combinations of foxholes. There was, however, one similarity in each of the foxholes: every single member of that team included their team captain in their foxhole.

The coach later told me that it was at that moment, when he saw this, that he realized that he had made the right choice in team captain. In a life-or-death situation, each member of his team wanted their team captain at their back.

Leadership is about your team knowing that you have their back.

What trust looks like

If things are ever going to go sideways, a team needs to trust that their leader is going to have their back. That’s the kind of trust that leadership requires.

I have talked to many people about leadership, and one of the complaints I hear far too often is that people don’t trust their leaders to have their backs. They see their leaders as middlemen rather than leaders. These are the managers who will throw their team under the bus in order to curry favour with the CEO. These are the principals who will ignore the complaints of their teachers because they only care about input from their Board of Trustees. That does not garner trust. That is not leadership.

So how do you build that kind of trust? I have a few suggestions for you.

Trust requires:

1. Building caring relationships

Stop and think for a moment about the people in your foxhole. This is a great exercise that you should do in-depth, but for now just quickly think about the top three to five people who would be in your foxhole. Got them? Great. Now, what do they all have in common?

If you are like most people, the people in your foxhole all share one important characteristic: they are people who care about you and your well-being.

This seems obvious, but it is important to building trust.

We trust people who care about us.

If you build a positive relationship and that other person knows that you actually care about their well-being, they will want you in their foxhole. And that is a leadership win.

2. Practicing competency

Go back and think about the people who are in your foxhole. I bet you didn’t choose people who are incompetent. We don’t trust incompetent people. Think about it. If your neck is on the line, you want to be able to trust someone who knows what they’re doing.

If you want people to trust you, they need to trust your ability.

3. Demonstrating integrity

Think about your foxhole again. These are the people who you trust with your life. Are any of them particularly untrustworthy? Probably not. You trust them because they have demonstrated in the past that they are trustworthy.

In other words, we naturally trust people who demonstrate that they are trustworthy. Again, it seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget. If you want people to trust you, walk in integrity. That means doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking.

Dynamic lessons

In short, if you want people to trust you, you have to prove that you are worthy of their trust.

We looked at three ways you can earn your team’s trust:

1. Building caring relationships. People will naturally trust people who demonstrate that they care about them, so build trust by showing that you care.
2. Practicing competency. You don’t have to be the best at everything that you do, but if you want people to trust you, you have to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing.
3. Demonstrate integrity. People are usually pretty good judges of character. So do the right thing, even when no one is looking. Then, when people are looking, they’ll see someone who is trustworthy.

What are your thoughts on building trust in the workplace. How do you build trust?

Books that influenced this article:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

Leadership is an Art by Max De Pree

The post Lessons from a Foxhole: The Importance of Trust in Leadership appeared first on Great North Dynamics.

Risk-takers are the ones who change the world.

It was April 9, 1917 – Easter Monday, right in the middle of the First World War. The Germans were entrenched in their position in northern France on the high ground known as Vimy Ridge. From this strategic position near the Belgian border, the Germans had successfully repelled numerous attacks by Allied forces.

Over the previous two weeks, the Germans had been bombarded by Allied artillery. They knew that the Canadians and the British were planning another full-scale assault – the planned assault had been revealed by a Canadian defector to the British – they just didn’t know when. Or how.

Unbeknownst to the Germans, in the early hours of that fateful Easter Monday morning, the combined forces of four Canadian army divisions and one British division were about to emerge from underground tunnels and launch their assault on the German position.

The plan was one of the most audacious strategies employed to date in early-20th century warfare. It involved months of training for the specific conditions of Vimy Ridge, weeks of artillery barrages, months of underground tunnelling, and all to attack an enemy that already knew an attack was coming.

From it’s very beginning, this was a risky plan. Not only were the Canadians tasked with taking over a heavily-fortified enemy position, but their own allies had tried and failed at the same mission TWICE. In order for the Canadians to pull this mission off,  not only would they have to achieve something their allies could not, but they would also have to come up with a plan just crazy enough that it might even work.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge lasted for four long, bloody, gruelling days. And by the time the sun set on April 12, 1917, the Canadians had forced the Germans from their final positions and taken Vimy Ridge.

This story is of particular importance to Canadians because this battle, the Battle of Vimy Ridge, is widely accepted as the “birth of a nation”, or Canada’s “coming-of-age”. This battle was the first time that multiple Canadian military divisions operated in a war theatre under the leadership of a Canadian commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng.

I tell this story for two reasons. First, April 9, 2017, was just celebrated across Canada and by Canadians around the world, because it marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge – the birth of the Canadian nation. I had the honour of laying a wreath and laying my respects on behalf of the Government of Canada at my local memorial, and it was humbling to be a part of such a sombre yet significant moment. The second reason I share this story is because it illustrates perfectly the value and techniques of effective risk-takers.

In this post I want to use this story and other information to demonstrate that risk-takers can change the world, but to do so they need three things: an audacious vision, meticulous preparation, and an irrepressible flexibility.

Risk-Takers Can Change the World

World change doesn’t happen by accident.

If changing the world – through any of the private, public, non-profit, or education sectors – was easy, everyone would do it. But the fact is that there are very few people who have a lasting, world-altering legacy. And those people are risk-takers.

Think about it. If you live a comfortable life and take no risks, you will spend your life in the comfortable cushion you’ve created for yourself. And there is nothing wrong with that! If you have no desire to make a lasting impact on the world around you, then by all means, enjoy your comfortable life. But if you want to leave far-reaching legacy, you will need to take risks.

For many people, the legacy they leave is their family. I fully support this, because I think there is no greater legacy to leave behind than our relationships, especially with family. But guess what: having a family is a risk in and of itself. Having kids is a risk, because you don’t know what the outcome will be. Entering into a long-term relationship with someone is a risk, because you can’t predict the future.

Whether you want to start a family, a revolutionary business model, or a political campaign to exact social justice, you will have to take risks to accomplish your goals.

Everything worth doing will come with some level of risk. The question is where do you want to go and how much are you willing to risk to get there?

Audacious Vision

A leader is someone who can inspire a vision in their team.

In the case of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, that leader was Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, and that vision was the taking of a strategic German stronghold in the face of overwhelming odds.

When you dare to dream wild enough to take a big risk, there has to be something inside of you that WANTS to succeed. That desire to succeed has to be stronger than the fear of failure. That’s where vision comes into play.

Whether you have a team of followers or not, if you want to be an effective risk-taker, you need to have an audacious vision.

Developing a vision can be a difficult task, but it is critical to success. Your overarching vision will guide your planning and help you execute each step towards success.

If you want to know more about learning how to create and share a vision, you can check out my blogpost on inspiring vision. You should also check out my workbook on developing a personal vision for your life, as there are many tools and strategies there that can help you.

Meticulous Preparation

The Battle of Vimy Ridge took four long, arduous days. But, if you have read Sun Tzu in his classic, The Art of War, then you understand that the outcome of the battle was decided long before the first shot was fired.

The Allies had spent months preparing for their assault on the German stronghold. Their strategists had been compiling all the information they had on the enemy positions, their experiences from previous (failed) attempts at taking the ridge, and the strengths and weaknesses of not only the German divisions but of their own as well.

The battle is won in the preparation.

Once the Allies came up with an attack plan, they then practiced it, over and over again. Let me remind you that this was 1917. Military maneuvers had just evolved from standing in a straight line and shooting at each other until one side surrendered to lining soldiers up in a trench and swapping canisters of mustard gas. Training for and practicing specific, strategic military maneuvers was a radical idea.

When you’re taking a risk, no innovation is too radical.

The execution of the plan was so important to the Allied soldiers that they practiced that execution as often and as thoroughly as they could. They knew that without the proper execution, all the preparation in the world would be useless.

Once you have a strategic plan in mind – and you should take the time to create a thorough plan – you need to make sure that you (or your team) has the ability to follow-through with the execution.

Once a plan is put into motion, there are so many variables that can directly affect you. There is only so much that you can predict. That is why practicing the execution is so important, because you need to know that you can execute your plan without even thinking about it. It should be second nature, a knee-jerk reaction, instinct.

If you have meticulously prepared by developing a detailed plan and practiced its execution, it doesn’t matter if there are bullets whizzing by your head or competing businesses nipping at your heels, you will be able to fight your way through, sticking to the plan the whole way.

Irrepressible Flexibility

The strategic plans for the Canadian-led assault on Vimy Ridge predicted that the German stronghold would fall largely into Canadian hands by early-afternoon on the first day. Instead, what followed was four days of some of the most horrific fighting conditions ever known to man.

The Germans provided a stronger resistance than the Canadians expected, and the trench warfare was fierce. This was World War One, remember, when chemical weapons were still widely used and soldiers advanced from trenches only to be mown down by machine guns. This was as close to hell on Earth as you could get.

The first thing that will keep you going under such circumstances is, as we discussed earlier, an audacious vision.

During the times when you are faced with your bell on earth, your vision is what will sustain your perseverance.

But vision alone is not enough to win a war. You need to be flexible.

When night fell on the first night and the Canadian plan had anticipated a victory by this point, it would be very tempting for the Allied soldiers, whose lives were miserable, to turn around and say “better luck next time.” But that is not a risk-taker’s response.

Risk-takers recognize that when things don’t go as planned, the plan has to change.

Rather than retreating when the strategy’s timeline was not met, the Canadians pressed their advantage. They continued to bring the fight to the Germans for three whole days before finally taking the ridge.

In other words, the Allied forces were flexible. Their plans had to change, but they pursued their goal against all opposition.

No matter how detailed your plans are, things will still go NOT according to plan. You need to be flexible and adapt to change. I wrote an entire blog post on adapting to change. You should probably read it.

Dynamic Lessons

I am going to end this post the same way I started it, by stating a simple truth: risk-takers are the ones who change the world. Risk-taking is a dangerous business, but it is necessary to reach long-term success.

In order to be an effective risk-taker, you must make sure you follow these three steps:

1. Create an audacious vision. Risk-taking is audacious in and of itself, and to make it work you need to be daring and create an audacious vision that will guide you through the ups and downs.
2. Carry out meticulous planning. Once you put your plan into action, real-life happens and you will face tons of differing variables. Do yourself a favour and make sure your plan is detailed enough to survive.
3. Maintain irrepressible flexibility. Things will not go your way. For all your meticulous planning, things will still happen that your plan did not account for. You need to be flexible and be able to roll with the punches.

Are you ready to be a risk-taker? I’m excited for you! Let me know in the comments section what kinds of risks you’re taking and how you’re planning for them! Or post it on social media and tag me (@kylewierks on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Great North Dynamics on Facebook). I’ll make sure to comment!

This post was inspired by a TEDx Talk I gave recently (the Saturday before I wrote this, in fact). The talk I gave was about the importance of imagination and creativity in a world that prioritizes realism over imagination, and I spoke about the importance of creativity in risk-taking. It was recorded and will be posted online (I’ll keep you posted on that).

Creating Your Personal Vision

Check out You Can’t Reach What You Can’t See: Developing a Personal Vision for Your Life. This workbook will help you create a vision that will guide your career planning.

Books that influenced this article:

The Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris

$100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

The post Risk-Takers: What History Can Teach Us About World-Change appeared first on Great North Dynamics.

We have all worked with someone — or for someone — who was inconsistent in their communication or expectations. Not only is it annoying, it can also hurt morale and undermine your team. A team requires consistent communication and clear expectations in order to achieve set goals.

While we can all think of someone who has failed in consistent communication and/or expectations, we are all guilty of it too. Whether stress, apathy, lack of vision, lack of time, or otherwise, we have all been inconsistent at some point or another in the way we communicate with others or in our expectations of others or ourselves.

This post identifies three important areas of communication in which leaders must be consistent (and how they can achieve consistency), and then discusses how to set consistent expectations for your team and for yourself.

Consistent communication

I have met many leaders who are strong communicators — and some leaders who are not. Communication is a key to your success as a leader (more on that in another post).

The problem is generally not that leaders do not communicate, it is that they communicate inconsistently.

There are a few areas where leaders communicate with inconsistency. As a side note, these communication tips are good for mass communication as well.

1. Messaging

You need to use consistent messaging when interacting with your team. What you say to one team member does not need to be verbatim what you said to another, but the message should be identical. In the same way, the message you tell a team member on Monday and what you tell the same person on Friday should be the same. If your messaging is inconsistent, you will give mixed messages to your team, which leads to confusion and distrust.

2. Transparency

Leaders should always seek to be transparent with their team, except under circumstances that require confidentiality. If you commit to being transparent with your team, that is all the more reason to act with transparency. Again, with the exception of confidential or secret information entrusted to you by others, you should not give some information while with-holding other information from your team. Be consistent in your transparency so your team can trust you.

3. Timing

If you commit to regular communication your team — whether it is a project update, a check in, or anything else — you need to be consistent. As a leader, you should be checking in with your team members regularly anyways, so the commitment should not even have to be made. Be consistent in the timing of your interactions with your team. Don’t meet with each team member individually once every two weeks for a month and then wait three months before scheduling another meeting. Your team is judging you as a leader, and it is far more professional to have a consistent meeting schedule than not. If, on the other hand, you commit to only holding meetings when they are necessary, then do just that. Don’t waste your team’s time with unorganized meetings.

 Consistent expectations

All leaders should have clearly defined expectations from their team. If you expect your team to behave in a certain way or meet a certain goal, that should be made clear to them. If you, as a team member, are given a set of expectations, you should work hard to meet those expectations.

Leaders should also have expectations for themselves. These expectations should be higher than those they have for their team. If you expect your team to achieve excellence in their work, your work should be more excellent; if you expect your team to be punctual, you should be early. The same goes for leaders who are not in a leadership position (what I call “everyday leaders”). If you are a leader among your peers or wish to become a leader, you need to have very high, yet realistic, expectations for yourself.

In order for your expectations to be effective, they must be consistent.

Whether you have expectations for your team or for yourself, you must keep them consistent. If your team (or you) meets your expectations, they deserve congratulations. Don’t ignore their achievements; doing so will undermine the importance of your expectations.

Let me put it this way. Your expectations exist only because you make them so. It is your words that have created these expectations in your mind and the minds of your team. But words have a shelf life. You need to reinforce them. You could choose to continually remind your team of your expectations, and you probably should; however, it is far more effective to congratulate excellence when you see it. At the same time, if someone continually fails to meet your expectations, you need to address that.

No matter what, your expectations should be consistent. Your team needs to know exactly what is expected of them. If your expectations are not concrete, your team will suffer for it, because they don’t know what defines success for them. It is also important for you to have consistent expectations for yourself. You cannot expect excellence for yourself and then shrug it off if you miss that goal; on the other hand, you cannot expect yourself to put in three days of overtime in a week and then get upset if you reach three but fail to meet four.

There will be times when your expectations have to change. This is okay. When the time comes, make these changes very clear to your team (and yourself). If possible, give a reason for the change in expectations.

You may realize after you set out your expectations that you expected too much (or too little). You can change the severity of your expectations as well, but again make sure that your team is fully aware of these changes. They need to know what is expected of them, and in return they will expect that you will inform them if anything changes.

Dynamic Lessons

Even though leaders and their teams must be flexible and adaptable, people still thrive on a certain amount of consistency. As a leader, your communication with and expectations of your team should be consistent.

When exercising consistency with your team, you use the same principles that you would use to ensure consistency in mass communication with the public. First, ensure you have consistent messaging; the message you give to your team should be consistent (unless circumstances change, then you should communicate that change to your whole team). Second, you should have consistent transparency; your whole team should know the same thing (unless confidential information pertains to only a select group). Third, be consistent in your timing; check in regularly with your team members and ensure constant flow of communication.

It is also imperative that leaders keep their expectations consistent, both for their team and for themselves. Your team needs to know exactly what is expected of them. On the other hand, you need to know exactly to what standards you are holding yourself, and ensure that you hold yourself accountable to those standards.

Have you ever worked with or for someone who was inconsistent in their communication or their expectations? How did you handle that?

Books that influenced this article:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

The post How to Drive Consistency in Communication and Expectation appeared first on Great North Dynamics.

In leadership, the value of inspiring vision cannot be overstated. Time and time again I will mention the importance of inspiring vision because it is crucial that leaders, teams, and organizations be purposeful in maintaining a solid vision. However, it is common that a team can lose or outgrow its vision. Sometimes a vision needs to be re-envisioned, re-purposed, or reinvented.

The process of re-imagining your vision is so important that I have dedicated this post to three steps on how to inspire your vision back into your team (or inspiring your vision for the first time).

1. Stop everything

It is vitally important that you fix this, and that might mean stopping everything. In his book Creativity, Inc., Edwin Catmull describes a vitally important measure that Pixar had to take: they closed their campus for an entire day and paid their staff to attend a workshop that would design their corporate vision for the future. In order to get Pixar’s staff on the same vision, they stopped everything and made that vision their number one priority.

Starbucks did something similar in 2008. Business Insider has a great article about how Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz turned the company around. One of the ways he did that was by closing every Starbucks store in order to retrain their staff. The purpose was to rediscover Starbucks’ vision for perfection. According to this article, this cost Starbucks over $6 million, but it was worth it to perfect the vision that would make Starbucks excellent. This is a good example of how vision and excellence go hand-in-hand.

If your team has lost its vision, it is imperative that you, as a leader, make regaining that vision a number one priority. Stop everything and make vision your focus.

2. Dare to dream

If you were a Canadian hockey fan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you probably remember the Kokanee beer commercials featuring the Sasquatch (if you haven’t seen these, I highly recommend them). One such commercial is firmly imprinted in my memory. For those who don’t know, these commercials feature a forest ranger and his assistant, Arnold, who protect the Kokanee Glacier from the Sasquatch. In this commercial, the ranger hires three beautiful women to help protect the glacier from the Sasquatch. Arnold turns to the ranger and says, “But I thought the Sasquatch wasn’t real.” The ranger’s classic response was simple: “Dare to dream, Arnold. Dare to dream.”

When it comes to your vision, you have to dare to dream. The grander the vision, the greater the accomplishment. There are a few ways to produce such a vision.

1. Corporate vision. The case of Edwin Catmull and the Pixar vision seminar is a classic example of this tactic. The Pixar organization engaged their entire staff, from their accountants to their executive, to produce a corporate vision that included participation from their entire staff.
2. Team vision. I worked with an organization that saw a marked decrease in enthusiasm and ownership in their team (I’ve written a separate article on ownership). It was decided that the problem was in the communication of the vision to the team; they forgot why they did what they did. This particular organization decided to create a team vision that would reinvigorate the team. To do so they took a select number of trusted team members — in their case six — and together we created a vision for the rest of the team to follow.
3. Personal vision. If you are an entrepreneur, chances are that you have a vision that you want to realize. This is not a vision that you have created with others; it is yours. It is perfectly acceptable to use your personal vision as the head of a team.

Regardless of whether your vision is the result of corporate consultations, a small team brainstorm, or your own brain child, the creation of your vision is only the first step (steps on creating this vision will be discussed in a later post). Now you have to communicate that vision.

3. Insane communication

A vision is only a picture in your head if nobody else can see it.

That means that once you have your vision established, you have to sell it, and not to your customers. Before anything else, you have to sell your vision to your team.

If you are an executive, that would mean selling it to your executive team. At you’re at a lower level of leadership, that could mean selling it to your own team, or even to your peers. If you want someone else to carry that vision, they need to  be sold on it. I have a couple tips for the initial sale of your vision.

1. Keep it simple. If you over-complicate your vision, you will kill it before it has a chance to take root. There will be plenty of time to go over the intricacies and the individual steps to success later. But to inspire vision, keep it simple.
2. Focus on the why, not the how. Another way to put it is focus on the result, not the process. Again, you will have many opportunities to lay out your fifty-step plan to achieving your vision, but people don’t buy into a vision because they love the idea of the process; they own a vision because they desire the end result.
3. Make it personal. People are, deep down, selfish creatures, and the question burning in the back of our minds is, “What’s in it for me?” We will all deny that, of course, and sometimes we aren’t even aware that we’re thinking it, but there is a selfish lens that we all use. So make it personal. Tell your team exactly what the realization of your vision will produce for them, personally. Will stakeholders get a financial return? Will staff be able to be a part of a revolutionary industry that changes the way the world works? Can the volunteers at your non-profit be able to change lives? The more people you are selling your vision to the harder it is to make it personal, but at the end of the day, you want your team to have a personal stake in the realization of your vision.
4. Be realistic. Don’t try to sell anyone a unicorn. Your vision is going to take a lot of hard work to realize. It will probably call for a lot of sacrifice, both in time and money. Be realistic with your team. Let them know that it will be tough. Give them a taste of what is to come. If you sow your vision in reality, your team won’t be surprised when things get tough a month down the road. There won’t be a mob at your door complaining that it’s too hard. They need to know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. And they need to know that it is all going to be worth it.

Speaking of realistic, it is not an easy thing to sell your vision. But it is necessary, and it will be worth it when your team buys into it.

Communication does not end when the vision is sold. You will need to be in constant communication with your team to ensure that your vision does not die. Remind your team regularly about why you’re doing what you’re doing. That vision will empower everyone.

Dynamic lessons

Are you, your team, or your organization struggling with maintaining or developing a vision? The good news is that you’re not alone; thousands, if not millions, of individuals and organizations are going through the same thing. The better news is that there is a solution.

I gave you three simple steps to reinspiring vision in your team and organization:

1. Stop everything. Vision is vital to your organization’s survival and success. Take the time to get it right.
2. Dare to dream. This is the time for big dreams and aggressive goals. If you want the comfortable route, get out of leadership.
3. Insane communication. Once you’ve developed your vision, you have to communicate it. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.

If you want more help in developing vision for you or your team, there are resources available for that. I have published a workbook dedicated to helping you develop a personal vision for yourself. To inspire vision in others, first you must inspire vision in yourself.

Have you ever struggled with developing or maintaining a vision? How did you make it work? I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below.

Creating Your Personal Vision

Check out You Can’t Reach What You Can’t See: Developing a Personal Vision for Your Life. This workbook will help you create a vision that will guide your career planning.

Books that influenced this article:

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

The post Three Steps to Inspiring Vision in Your Team appeared first on Great North Dynamics.

Successful leaders have strong problem-solving skills. If you do not have these skills, then I challenge you to follow these steps and train yourself to become a problem-solver.

You cannot train a problem-solver if you do not have the skill yourself.

This post will cover three ways to teach someone how to become a problem solver. A team full of problem solvers works efficiently.

1. Ask for solutions

Most people are really good at recognizing problems and pointing them out. This is why you can’t go on social media without seeing someone complaining about something. We are good complainers.

Most people are good at recognizing problems; a strong team member goes one step further and develops a possible solution.

When someone brings you a problem, challenge them to develop a solution. Ask them how they would solve it, or what they think about the problem. Don’t let them get away with identifying a problem; give them the opportunity to solve it.

2. Include them in your process

Some people learn through instruction, others through execution, and still others through demonstration. If someone is not a problem-solver, it may be because they have never had the opportunity to observe the problem-solving process.

Everyone has their own technique for problem-solving; some operate through intuition, others have a very strict set of steps. Include your trainee in your process; walk them through it. Do not expect them to follow your technique exactly, because everyone is different, but allow them to see how you solve problems on a daily basis. Alternatively, have them follow someone else on your team who is an accomplished problem-solver and have your veteran mentor the other.

3. Task them with problems to solve

Tackle the issue head-on. If someone doesn’t know how to solve a problem, make the problem unavoidable: give it to them.

By this point you should have some degree of trust in them, and you have to be willing to run the risk of it backfiring. Don’t give your untested trainee the biggest client you have and tell him to fix their problem. It’s not a smart risk. But if you have already prodded the person in question to come up with solutions to routine problems and have shown them how you solve problems, it is a worthwhile risk to give them their own task that will require them to solve their own problems.

The simplest way to do this is find a non-essential task that needs completing. Provide the task without instruction and tell your protege to figure out how to do it on their own. If they complete that, then give them more complicated tasks or problems to resolve. Continue to build their confidence.

The key to problem-solving is believing that you can solve the problem.

Dynamic Lessons

A strong leader empowers their team to be problem-solvers. It isn’t always easy to teach others to problem-solve, so here are three simple steps you can take.

1. Ask for solutions. When they come to you with problems, ask them for solutions. Make them consider the options.
2. Include them in your process. When you have something important to decide or a major issue to clear up, involve them in the decision-making process. They don’t have to add value, but let them see how you problem-solve.
3. Task them with problems to solve. In other words, provide them with opportunities to problem-solve on their own. People learn best by doing.

Have you ever had to teach someone to become a problem-solver? How did you do it?

Books that influenced this article:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

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Peyton Manning is regarded as one of the best quarterbacks of his generation, possibly even in history, and for good reason. By the time that he retired, he held the following records:

1. Total career passing yards (71,940)
2. Total single season passing yards (5,477)
3. Seasons with 4,000+ yards (14)
4. Games with 400+ yards (14)
5. Total career touchdown passes (539)
6. Total touchdown passes in a single season (55)
7. Number of seasons with 25+ touchdowns (16)
8. Number of games with at least 4 touchdowns (35)
9. Number of four-touchdown games in one season (9)
10. Number of total wins (200)

These are just the records that Manning holds on his own (not to mention the more obscure records that he holds, such as the oldest quarterback to win a Superbowl (39) or the most playoff appearances by a quarterback (15), to name a few). In addition, Manning is tied for the top spot for these records:

1. Average yards per game over a career (342.3)
2. Number of 400+ yard games in a single season (4)
3. Number of touchdowns thrown in one game (7)

In case you aren’t a football fan, let me shed some light on these statistics: Peyton Manning is an impressive individual. Some of the records he holds are quite close to the competition, but many of them have a huge gap between him and second place. In other words, Manning is an elite among elite players, and a very successful man.

When Manning and the Denver Broncos took the field on February 7, 2016, this was their second Superbowl appearance in two years. On February 2, 2014, Manning led the Broncos onto the field at Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, to do battle with Russell Wilson and the Seattle Seahawks in Superbowl 48. In 2014, however, the end result was very different from 2016.

On the very first offensive drive of Superbowl 48, Peyton Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, fumbled a snap that Seattle returned for a touchdown. Seattle never looked back, and for the rest of the game, the Broncos were steamrolled. The final score: Seattle: 43, Denver: 8.

This was a huge surprise to the football world. It’s not that the Seahawks were the underdogs — the Seahawks had the highest-rated defence in the league — but nobody expected such a blow-out. The Broncos had the best offence in the league by far. Peyton Manning had just had one of the best seasons of his storied career. The question on everyone’s lips was: “Can the Seahawks keep up with Peyton?” Nobody thought to ask if Peyton could keep up with the Seahawks.

The defeat was humiliating and the wounds were fresh. Peyton Manning had just played a record-setting season (he had set three single-season records for that season: most season passing yards, most touchdown passes in a season, and most four-touchdown games in one season) and had capped it off by losing the most important game of the season. How do you come back from that?

The answer, according to Peyton Manning himself, was self-evaluation. The first day back at the the Broncos training facility in Denver, Manning and the rest of his team watched the entire Superbowl game on tape. Multiple times. No, they weren’t reliving the defeat, they were watching themselves. Manning watched every single snap, every pivot, every throw, every play that he did. And he learned.

That’s not all that Manning reviewed. Over the course of the 2013-2014 season, Manning threw 787 passes (regular season and playoffs combined). He rewatched every single pass. He wasn’t just looking at his throwing technique either; he was watching to see where his receivers lined up, where their defenders matched them, the routes his receivers ran, where his eyes went, which receiver he threw the ball at, and how the defence responded. After each throw he would ask himself if he threw to the right receiver or if there was a better option. What did he do right? What did he do wrong?

Manning was so dedicated to watching game film that he went high-tech, even mobile. He had a top-of-the-line home theatre installed in his home for the sole purpose of watching game film at home. If that wasn’t enough, he also had a tablet that he carried everywhere with him, so that he could watch game film whenever he had a spare moment. For Peyton Manning, the time he spent actually playing the game paled in comparison with the amount of time he spent evaluating his own performance.

In the 2013-2014 season, Manning threw 55 touchdown passes (the most ever thrown in a single season). Was he happy with that? No. There were missed opportunities that he identified on film where he could have made more touchdown passes. More game film to study, to learn from.

So what is the point of all this work? Two years later returning to the Superbowl and winning that all-important final game was the point. Armed with the knowledge, Manning was prepared for the work it would take to get back to the top. Now, he did not do it alone. If there is one sport that epitomizes the concept of team, it is football. There are eleven players on the field, and each one is vital to the success of the team. As a leader, Manning had to first evaluate himself and improve himself before he could ask his team to do the same.

Demaryius Thomas is a wide receiver and was one of Manning’s teammates in both the 2014 and 2016 Superbowls. He was once interviewed by ESPN about Manning’s film review habits and he said, “[Peyton] will always say if he thought he could have done something differently. He’s not afraid to just say it. … When guys see somebody like Peyton so accountable, you have to be accountable. You can’t help it. He’s Peyton doing that — how are you going to just duck your head and not admit what you did?”

As team captain and a leader, Manning focused on improving himself before improving his team. The rest of his team saw their leader, the 2013 Most Valuable Player and arguably the best regular-season quarterback of all-time, evaluating every single second of his own performance in order to improve. Such action inspired them to evaluate their own performance, to get better, to match their leader. And they did. And two years later they won the Superbowl and became the best football team in the world.

Dynamic Lessons

Leadership is not just about inspiring others; it is equally about inspiring yourself.

1. You are first and foremost responsible for yourself. If you want to succeed, you must take ownership of your actions. There are always ways for you to improve. If the MVP of the NFL and the single-season touchdown record holder can find ways to improve his game and spot places that he could have made more touchdowns, then you can find areas of your own performance that you could tweak to become better and more efficient.
2. When a leader voluntarily evaluates his/her own performance, the rest of the team will follow. Oftentimes leading by example is far more important than leading by instruction. You want your team to be able to evaluate themselves, so show them how it’s done.
3. It’s a team game. You might not be a football player, or even a sports fan, but you are probably working in a team. Teamwork means, believe it or not, working together. When you constantly evaluate yourself and improve yourself, you make yourself and your team better.
4. Failure and success are equally instructional. This is perhaps the most important lesson. Manning learned not just from his mistakes, but also from his successes. He had the most successful individual season he ever had in 2013, even though he ended up losing the Superbowl. Both his failures and his successes were instrumental in teaching him and his team the lessons they needed to learn in order to win two years later.

Have you ever taken the time to stop and evaluate yourself and your outcomes? What did you learn about yourself?

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It is true that Jenny did not enjoy her position, but that is not the main reason she left the organization. Leaders know that sometimes they have to take on tasks that they might not enjoy, and Jenny knew this. She was willing to take on the task for the betterment of her team. The problem, however, was twofold: first, this task turned from a temporary measure into a permanent position; and second, Jenny’s skills were not of any use in this position. Let’s take a look at both of these issues separately.

1. Turning a temporary task into a permanent position

Leaders are willing to take on an undesirable task for the good of the team. Such a willingness is a sign of a good leader. Some leaders are even willing to take on such a task for an indefinite period of time. But if you’re going to leave a leader in that situation, you need to provide constant encouragement and the promise of an end to that task. Jenny received neither from her leadership, and the longer she remained in the thankless position doing a job she disliked, the more she resented it.

Unfortunately, this is a classic leadership mistake. A leader needs a role to be filled, so she asks a team member to fill that role, just temporarily. The team member does a great job at it (because the leader has assembled a team of winners who excel at any task), so the leader decides to just make the task a permanent position.

If you are going to make a temporary task a permanent position, either give that member an opportunity to refuse the change or give them a vision for why they are needed in that position. Only make a temporary task a permanent position if it is the right fit for everyone.

It is selfish to force someone to permanently fill a role that is the wrong fit.

Even better, a leader should immediately look for a way to transition that team member out of that role. Jenny should have been in that role for a temporary, finite period, and replaced at the first opportunity. Upon the replacement, Jenny could have been assigned to a position that better suited her abilities.

2. Ignoring your team member’s skill set

Jenny is a natural-born leader. She is good with people and now has a job where she works with and leads people on a daily basis and she is good at it. Rather than embrace her skills and providing her with an opportunity to use them, Jenny’s leaders put her in a position where she worked by herself with little or no influence on anyone. Her talents and natural skills were useless to her in that position.

It seems obvious that a leader should place her team members in positions well-suited for their skills, but sadly this is not always a gimme. If you’re in doubt, ask that team member where they feel comfortable. Review the position with them to make sure they find it a good fit.

And allow your team member the ability to approach you if they feel that their skills are being underutilized.

As a temporary measure, sometimes you need to put someone in a role where their skill sets are not being utilized. But if you must do that, make sure you have a plan to bail them out as soon as possible. In some rare occasions you may even find that your team member has an entire skill set perfectly suited for that role that you knew nothing about. In such cases it may be worth making a permanent move, but again, this should be a decision made WITH your team member, not for him.

Dynamic lessons

As a leader, it is your job to make sure that you are getting the best OUT of your team, but also that you are getting the best FOR your team.

Communicate with your team members; find out where they feel comfortable and challenged, but also where they feel out of place. Find a position that utlizes their skill sets. If you must move them to a temporary role, make sure you have a plan in place to replace them as soon as possible.

Have you ever been assigned a role, temporary or otherwise, that was a bad fit for you? How did you feel? How did you respond? We would love to hear your stories in the comment section below!

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