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Leadership category“The most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”

Team agreement | Good practice for high performing teams

Why high-performance teams need team agreements

We start the new team. We gathered a group of talented individuals and we want to grapple with the new challenge. How can we accelerate the team forming, storming and norming phase? We should start with team agreements. Once done, this exercise will boost team productivity. It will also help to create and maintain the team identity. It shouldn’t be the detailed documentation of the team proceedings in the wiki-style procedure. Instead, we should agree on things that are important for our team. Let’s take a look.

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The Right Way to Hold People Accountable

The right way to hold people accountable

It was a long time ago. At that time, I was not too fond of trekking. Yet, I was there, exhausted, but happy. I was at the top of the mountain. I was with my friend who convinced me to go for this journey with him. To our surprise, there was a place where we could buy hot food. My friend asked me did I want anything. I said something like “yes probably, just bring me something”. He disappeared, and a moment later, he was back with a juicy, beautifully smelling burger. He brought me … nothing. I was furious. I was blaming him. It was years after when I realised that it was me who was wrong, and there is the right way to hold people accountable.

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The Responsibility Process

The Responsibility Process: How to Overcome Challenges and Take Personal Responsibility

What do you think when you hear the word “responsibility”? The place where I come from (Poland) it usually has negative connotations, and it means you are in trouble. You broke the glass, you are responsible, and you need to pay for it. It comes hand in hand with the fact that our education systems teach us to avoid failures. All of that combined makes us think that responsibility is a bad thing, and we should avoid being responsible for things in our lives. Is this the full picture? What if we look at this from a different angle? If I am responsible, it means I am response-able – able to respond, able to think logically and move, fix and correct things around me. Let’s take a look at the Responsibility Process.

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How to mark an individual as having high potential

How to Hire for High Potential: 9 Core Characteristics to Look For

Hiring is hard. There are many frameworks that you can apply to find the right candidate. On the one side, it all depends on the organisation, the role you hire for, and the team culture you cultivate. Conversely, human beings have complicated psychology, the baggage of good and bad experiences, knowledge and dominating character traits. How do you find a suitable method to apply to the hiring process? What to do to find the right candidate to demonstrate strong points from experience and adapt to the new job? How to hire for high potential?

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Hippo effect and dichotomy of leadership

Hippo effect and dichotomy of leadership

It was not long after I became a manager for the first time. We had a big project ahead of us, so we organised a kick-off meeting.

It was a good meeting. We quickly went over the schedule; the decisions have been made. The project manager asked all questions, which were answered mainly by me. We took notes. Action points were ready and distributed. I was pleased with myself. Everything seemed to be smooth and going in the right direction. However, things were about to change dramatically.

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The Power of the Retrospective Mindset

The Power of the Retrospective Mindset

It is easy to be busy. Every one of us has plenty to do. We start marching towards our goals, and after some time we can’t catch the breath because we are already running. When we run, it is not easy to stop. It is also easy to run too far in the wrong direction. That’s why retrospective mindset is so important. It goes far beyond the professional context of our lives. It should be the default mode for our endeavours.

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How to Baseline Remote Team Culture

How to Baseline Remote Team Culture

I was recently a guest in The Align Remotely podcast, where Luke Szyrmer, the host, focuses on leading distributed teams and everything associated with that subject, like leadership and operations to help achieve together. It is particularly relevant now when nearly everyone works from home. It was a broad-ranging conversation, but we mainly focused on the topic of how to baseline the remote team culture.

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Extreme Ownership | There are no bad teams, just bad leaders

There are no bad teams, just bad leaders

It was during the most difficult training. The task was simple; row the boat and compete with other teams. The challenge was to do it over and over again in cold weather. One team in one boat was consistently bad, coming as the last one. The instructor decided to implement risky manoeuvre – swap the leaders of the winning and losing boats. The result surprised everyone. However, the experienced instructor just said: “there are no bad teams, just bad leaders.“

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Is time management a myth?

Time management is a myth – it’s all about choices

Very first thing you will notice as a new manager will be that you run out of time in a day. If you search interwebs for a term “time management”, you will quickly find thousands of tips on how to help you to manage your time more effectively. They are all wrong. You can’t manage time. It’s all about you, your choices, and how you can manage you in time. Is time management is a myth? Let’s find out!

Being busy is a choice. I think that busy is a decision. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for “not important enough.”
Simply put: you don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things.

Debbie Millman
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Heroic leadership how to be a good leader

Heroic Leadership – lessons on how to be a good leader

It was 2010. I was sitting in a quiet coffee shop in the main square in Gdańsk. The main purpose of the visit was to attend a workshop about how to be a good leader in local communities. I was sipping coffee and reviewing my notes. At the time, almost everything was a revelation to me, especially the part on implementing heroic leadership to be a good leader:

  • be a protagonist – a person who creates reality
  • it is so easy to be an antagonist
    • a person who is in the best scenario – a passive observer of life,
    • in the worst-case scenario – actively disturbing actions of the protagonist
  • be a leader – everyone can be a leader – even on a very small area of influence
  • do not wait for golden opportunity that are given you on a silver plate – make sure you extract the gold from casual situations
  • read more on “Heroic Leadership” by Chris Lowney.

I was just holding the recommended book and reading the first chapter. The book that changed my approach to many things. It also shaped my choices in my life, in both: professional and private domains.

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