When we think about great communication, we often imagine eloquent speeches, perfectly worded emails, or a compelling team presentation. But one of the most powerful tools a leader—or really, any professional—can develop has nothing to do with what you say.

It’s about what you hear. And that’s where the skill of active listening is key.

Active listening is more than nodding politely while someone else talks. It's about being fully present, tuning in to what's said and what's not said, and creating the kind of environment where people feel safe enough to speak their truth. And when you do it well, you don’t just hear people—you empower them.

In previous posts, we've talked about how building trust and creating a supportive team culture are key to great leadership. Active listening takes those values and puts them into action. It helps de-escalate conflict, increases engagement, and builds the kind of psychological safety that allows people to do their best work.

So, let’s talk about how you actually do it.

Step 1: Be Present—Really Present

Active listening starts with shutting off the mental autopilot. You know the one: you’re hearing words, nodding politely, but your brain is somewhere between your inbox and your lunch plans. Or, even worse, you’re so busy formulating what you’re going to say next that you miss most of what the other person is saying.

Being present means making eye contact, putting down your phone, closing your laptop, and removing distractions—both external and internal. It’s about giving someone your full attention, not because you have to, but because you truly value what they have to say. (If you don’t value what they have to say, that’s another problem entirely!)

Step 2: Ask Open-Ended Questions

Once you're tuned in, invite the other person to open up. Avoid yes/no questions and opt instead for ones that begin with “What” or “How.” These questions create space for people to express thoughts they might otherwise hold back or not even consider.

A question like “What’s holding this up for you?” invites honesty and opens a door to clarity. It also signals to your team member that you’re not just looking for a quick answer—you’re genuinely interested in their perspective.

Step 3: Reflect and Clarify

One of the most underrated steps in active listening is reflecting what you’ve heard. That might sound like, “So what I’m hearing is…” or “It sounds like you’re feeling unsure because…” This not only confirms your understanding, but it gives the other person a chance to refine or clarify their own thoughts.

Let me give you a real-life example.

I once had a team member who kept putting off an assignment. Week after week, there were excuses—other tasks came up, priorities shifted, time got away from him. I’ll admit, my first instinct was frustration. But instead of confronting him with that frustration, I took a breath, asked a few open-ended questions, and really listened.

What came out was surprising.

He admitted—somewhat sheepishly—that he wasn’t sure how to do the assignment. He didn’t think he had the skills or experience to pull it off, and he was afraid he’d fail. By listening carefully, reflecting what I heard, and giving him the space to be honest, we uncovered the real issue.

And then we fixed it—together.

I helped him find the support he needed, and he completed the assignment successfully. But more than that, he felt heard, and I gained a deeper level of trust from someone who now knew I had his back.

Step 4: Respond Thoughtfully and Follow Through

Once someone opens up to you, your response matters. Resist the urge to jump into “fix-it” mode right away. Acknowledge what’s been shared, express appreciation for their honesty, and then talk about next steps together.

Following up is crucial. Active listening doesn’t end when the conversation does. It continues in your actions, your availability, and your willingness to check in.

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Quick Reference: The Active Listening Formula

• Be present and remove distractions

• Ask open-ended, curiosity-driven questions

• Reflect and clarify to ensure mutual understanding

• Respond thoughtfully and follow through

Pro Tip: People feel more connected to leaders who truly listen—not just to respond, but to understand. Listening well isn’t passive; it’s one of the most active things you can do.

Call to Action

This week, pick one situation—maybe it’s a check-in with a direct report or a conversation with a colleague—and make a conscious effort to practice active listening. Use the steps I’ve described above, and pay attention to any differences in the dynamic.

Are you hearing more? Are they sharing more? Are you both walking away with greater clarity and respect?

Then take a moment to reflect: What would it look like if this became a habit, not an exception?

Start small, listen big—and watch your leadership grow.

If you’d like to go deeper into the REAL Values that Relaxed Leaders live by, then check out these articles from our archives:

RESPECT is a great place for any leader to start.

ENGAGE effectively with others (and the world).

ACCEPT others because of their differences, not in spite of them.

LEAD with these REAL values and learn to relax!

When we talk about strong teams, we tend to focus on skills, strategies, and organizational structures. But behind every successful team—and behind every relaxed, confident leader—is something less tangible but far more powerful: trust.

Not just the kind you earn. But the kind you give.

Yes, trust is a risk. But it’s also a value—a leadership value—and one of the most important tools in your toolbox if you want to build a team that truly thrives.

Trust as a Leadership Value

If you’ve read many of my other posts and are familiar with my RELAX formula, then you understand that relaxed leadership isn’t about being laid back or indifferent. It’s about being grounded and self-assured—secure enough in yourself to offer trust first, even when it feels a little uncomfortable.

Too many business professionals see trust as something you keep locked up until someone proves they deserve it. But that’s a problem because when you withhold trust, you’re often holding back the very thing someone needs to succeed. People generally rise (or fall) to meet the expectations we set for them. So, when you treat them as if they’re not trustworthy, it almost always becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Offering trust first, especially from a leader, tells someone: I believe in you. I think you're capable. I want to see you succeed.

That kind of trust feels good to receive. And it usually inspires people to live up to it.

What Trust Looks Like in Practice

Let’s be honest—offering trust doesn’t mean turning off your brain or giving up oversight. It means stepping back enough to let others show you what they’re capable of.

Many years ago, I had a young supervisor who reported to me. I trusted him to lead his team, meet our goals, and manage his people responsibly. For a while, it looked like everything was going great. They were hitting all their targets and he was saying all the right things when I’d meet with him. But eventually, we discovered he was quietly approving unauthorized overtime and trying to cover it up. That trust had been misused.

The extent of his infractions were so severe that I ended up having to fire him.

But here’s what’s important: the rest of the supervisors saw how I handled it. They saw that I was fair, honest, and transparent—but I didn’t pull back trust from any of them or punish the whole team for one person’s choices. So instead of being nervous or afraid, they doubled down on the trust I continued to give to them. They worked even harder to deserve my trust. And we built something better from it.

That’s the thing about trust—it’s always a calculated risk. But when it pays off, it multiplies.

How Trust Feels on Both Sides

When you offer someone trust—especially before they’ve fully “earned it”—it creates a healthy kind of pressure. Most people don’t want to let someone down who believes in them. They want to rise to the occasion.

When you receive trust, especially from someone you respect, it feels like a challenge and a compliment rolled into one. If done effectively, it lights a fire.

But when trust is withheld—when every decision is second-guessed, when you're micromanaged, when you're given responsibility without authority—it breeds frustration and resentment, which usually leads to disengagement. That’s not what a relaxed leader is trying to do.

All of this is true whether you’re leading a department or collaborating as a peer. You don’t need a title or authority in order to lead with trust.

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Good Culture Starts with Trust

Trust isn’t just a reward for past performance—it’s an investment in future success. Demanding that someone earn your trust makes it transactional, turning it into a payment for work that’s already complete. Relaxed leaders are forward thinkers, so we don’t see trust as a transaction, we see it as an investment in the culture we’re trying to build—a culture that becomes the foundation for all the tremendous things our team will go on to accomplish.

Yes, offering trust takes courage. And sure, sometimes you’ll get burned. But more often than not, you’ll set the stage for your team members to become amazing performers who accomplish goals because they want to live up to the trust you’ve given them.

As relaxed leaders, our job isn’t to demand perfection but to facilitate progress. It’s to create the kind of environment where people feel empowered to grow, take responsibility, and work together. That kind of culture starts with trust.

Call to Action

Take a look at your current work relationships—especially if you're in a leadership role. Are there places where you're holding back trust?

• Are you micromanaging?

• Demanding daily updates?

• Questioning every decision?

If so, choose one relationship and try something different. Back off—just a little—and trust them more. Then tell them what you’re doing, and why.

Say it plainly: “I want to give you more space because I trust you to handle this. If you need me, I’m here. But I think you’ve got it.”

That kind of trust isn’t just earned—it’s given. And it can change everything.

If you’d like to go deeper into the REAL Values that Relaxed Leaders live by, then check out these articles from our archives:

RESPECT is a great place for any leader to start.

ENGAGE effectively with others (and the world).

ACCEPT others because of their differences, not in spite of them.

LEAD with these REAL values and learn to relax!

In our quest to become relaxed leaders, there’s a pivotal shift that happens when we move from solo achievements to team victories. It's about transitioning from the ‘I’ mindset to the ‘We’ perspective. 

As leaders, supervisors, or self-directed professionals, the cultivation of a supportive team culture isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential. But strong teams don’t just happen because we wish them into existence. Strong teams are built upon a solid foundation of collaboration, open communication, and mutual respect, which are the bedrock for increased morale and productivity.

Collaboration and the Art of Listening

Collaboration is the heartbeat of a thriving team culture and, as relaxed leaders, we need to understand that it’s about more than just dividing up tasks; it’s about leveraging the diverse strengths of each team member. 

Instead of taking on all the planning for a project, we begin by inviting input on strategy from the team. Depending upon the particulars of the project, we may even take a backseat and let another team member lead the effort. And when we’re doling out tasks, we remember that collaboration isn’t about giving all the shit-jobs to everyone else and keeping the fun or interesting stuff for ourselves. In fact, we strive to give the most desirable assignments to other members of the team. This approach not only lightens the load but also enhances the team’s investment in the project’s success.

A big part of effective collaboration is communication. It’s the lifeline of effective teamwork. It’s not just about talking; it’s about engaging in meaningful dialogue. Relaxed leaders don’t feel like we need to lecture and dictate. Instead, we start by asking open-ended questions that encourage thoughtful responses, and then we truly listen to what our team members have to say. Unlike many executives, we don’t just listen to reply, we listen to understand. This practice fosters a culture where team members feel heard and valued, leading to innovative solutions and a deeper sense of belonging.

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Mutual Respect is the Foundation of Trust

Respect within a team creates a safe space for growth and creativity. By modeling respect and treating each team member as a valuable contributor, you lay the groundwork for a trusting environment. However, as I’ve discussed before, a relaxed leader’s understanding of respect differs from the standard definition because we believe respect is a basic human right. People don’t earn our respect, they inherently deserve our respect simply because they are human beings.

In my experience, everything falls apart without a foundation of respect, so starting from a place of respect has been key. When I respect my team members, I treat them as individuals and I take the time to understand how they can benefit the team and how helping the team can benefit them. By engaging each team member, understanding their skills, and assigning challenges accordingly, I’ve seen individuals flourish and teams achieve more than they believed possible. Acknowledging the unique skills and potential of each member and pairing those with complementary strengths can lead to remarkable collaborations.

As a relaxed leader, one way that we respect our team members is by delegating responsibility while retaining accountability. Delegating important tasks shows trust in their abilities, and we can hold team members accountable to us, but we must ultimately retain accountability for the outcome. When we retain ultimate accountability, it demonstrates confidence and respect in our team members and reinforces their trust in us as leaders. 

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Practical Steps to Enhance Team Culture

Entire books and countless blog posts have been written about enhancing team culture. I’ve written plenty about it in the past and I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about it in the future. But for now, let me share three things that I’ve found to be extremely effective:

1. Engage with Purpose: It’s not enough to simply dole out assignments. A relaxed leader knows the importance of maintaining that human connection. One way I do that is to regularly check in with my team members, not just about projects but about their professional growth and aspirations. 

2. Challenge and Support: As I mentioned above, I try to avoid simply foisting off the tasks I don’t enjoy doing, and focusing on identifying appropriately challenging tasks helps me do that. I try to assign tasks that stretch a team member’s abilities, while understanding what level of support they need from me in order to succeed. This balance between challenge and support helps me delegate better, encourages development, and conveys trust.

3. Celebrate Diversity: Diversity is the buzzword du jour but relaxed leaders understood the value of it long before it became popular. One of the most effective means I’ve ever found for enhancing team culture is to embrace and highlight the diverse skills and backgrounds within my team. It’s not always easy, but I work to identify each team member’s unique skills and perspective, delegate tasks to leverage that uniqueness whenever possible, and then I show how each contributes to the team’s overall success.

Call to Action

Cultivating a supportive team culture is a journey, not a destination. It requires intention, effort, and consistency. As a relaxed leader, you can start by reflecting on your team’s current dynamics. Where could you enhance collaboration, improve communication, or deepen respect? 

Select one area and implement a strategy aimed at improvement by making small, intentional changes. You can’t force a supportive culture onto your team, so just understand that this will be a step-by-step journey. But take these steps with confidence because the cumulative effect of these small changes will significantly enhance your team’s culture and productivity.

Remember, the strongest teams are built on the foundation of mutual support and respect, so your leadership in this journey can make all the difference!

If you’d like to go deeper into the REAL Values that Relaxed Leaders live by, then check out these articles from our archives:

RESPECT is a great place for any leader to start.

ENGAGE effectively with others (and the world).

ACCEPT others because of their differences, not in spite of them.

LEAD with these REAL values and learn to relax!

I read a meditative reflection the other day that talked about the perfection of an acorn. It’s wonderful just the way it is and yet it’s also full of potential. Under the right conditions, it becomes a seedling, and then a sapling, and finally a tall oak tree. It has its own type of perfection at every stage along the way and yet it still has untapped potential. Even as a fully mature tree, it continues to grow – new leaves, new branches – while enduring broken limbs from storms and burn scars from lightning.

Just like the acorn, every professional has untapped potential, irrespective of their current role or educational background. And no matter where you are in your career – acorn, seedling, sapling, or tall tree – this potential can be unlocked if you have the proper mindset.

Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

Author Richard Bach wrote, “Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.” It’s a profound perspective that many of us need to consider. It’s easy to find someone to blame when we face stagnation in our careers or even our personal lives. The boss who is too demanding while providing no support. The coworker who takes all the credit but does as little work as possible. The spouse who just doesn’t seem to listen.

Pointing fingers at others doesn’t just blind us from the real problems we face, it also creates additional roadblocks because, as Bach pointed out, we’re arguing for limitations, which ensures they’ll exist.

To move forward, the journey often begins with understanding the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. 

A fixed mindset clings to the belief that abilities and intelligence are static. It’s the belief that everyone is born with a certain set of aptitudes and that doesn’t change over time. If you say things like “I’m not a ‘numbers’ person” or “I don’t have an ear for music,” it’s likely you have a fixed mindset. This can lead to avoidance of challenges and a fear of failure. This is also the mindset that leads to blaming others because it’s hard to admit to ourselves what’s really going on. It’s hard to admit that we’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In contrast, a growth mindset thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of a lack of intelligence or natural aptitude in a specific area, but as a springboard for growth and for stretching your existing abilities. This is also a healthier mindset because we’re less likely to blame others. There’s no reason to because we don’t see the world as conspiring against us. We realize that the world barely knows we exist. And even if the system works against us, having a growth mindset means we learn from every setback, knowing that it will ultimately help us move forward.

Take, for example, my own journey. Coming from a background in Communications, I initially doubted my prospects in the automotive industry, a field seemingly reserved for engineers. However, embracing a growth mindset, I discovered that my communication skills were not a limitation but a unique strength. They helped me negotiate better, manage teams effectively, and become the bridge between technical experts and the rest of the world. This shift in mindset transformed my career path in ways I never imagined.

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Daily Habits for Fostering a Growth Mindset

Changing your mindset isn’t easy but it’s certainly not impossible. It begins with understanding the importance of moving from a fixed to a growth mindset. Then it’s all about paying attention to your thoughts and correcting them when you slip back into negative ways of thinking.

Let’s not over-complicate things. I suggest you try doing two things that I’ve been doing more and more consistently over the years:

1. Embrace Challenges: View every challenge as an opportunity. When confronted with a difficult task, see it as a gift to your future self. If you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts or feeling overwhelmed, understand that doing your best is good enough… and then do the second thing.

2. Use the Power of “Yet”: It’s easier to see everything, including failures, as learning experiences if we frame it properly in our minds. Instead of thinking, “I can’t do this,” think “I can’t do this yet.” When we look at it from that perspective, we’ll automatically start figuring out how to do it better the next time.

When I was a young supervisor, I was assigned to supervise an assembly cell welding engine frames. It was a dirty, difficult operation and we were working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I felt completely overwhelmed because I didn’t know how to improve our production numbers and get the people working better together. After a major issue one night, I’d had enough and I decided that I was going to embrace this challenge and figure things out. I couldn’t make the improvements I wanted… yet. 

In the months that followed, we made dramatic improvements. By the time I moved on to another assignment, production numbers were up, quality had improved, absenteeism was down, and the people who hated me in the beginning actually threw a party to congratulate me on my promotion. All because I had shifted from a fixed to a growth mindset.

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Call to Action

Adopting a growth mindset can transform not just how you view your job but how you engage with every aspect of your life. It’s about seeing beyond the immediate hurdles and understanding that every effort is a step towards growth.

The cornerstone of developing a growth mindset is self-reflection. Even after focusing on this for years, I still make time each week to reflect on my reactions to challenges and setbacks. I ask myself, “Did I lean towards a fixed mindset or a growth mindset in this situation?” 

To get started, set aside a few minutes for self-reflection. Reflect on your day: Where did you demonstrate a growth mindset? Where could you have shifted your perspective? 

This simple practice can set you on the path to a fulfilling and continuously evolving professional journey. Remember, it’s not just about reaching the destination; it’s about growing with every step you take!

To learn more, check out The Relaxed Leader Podcast, Episode 9: Have a Growth Mindset!

In sticking with our overall theme of “More in ‘24,” I’d like to talk a little about time management – but with a bit of a twist!

Have you ever felt like a juggler trying to keep multiple balls in the air, only to realize your attempts to improve only add more balls to the mix? In today’s knowledge economy, mastering time management is not just a skill – it’s a necessity. The secret though is learning to prioritize effectively and use the power of time-blocking.

Typical “time management” advice generally helps get more things done but we need to focus on quality over quantity. Accomplishing a long list of minor tasks might feel good but concentrating our efforts on the most important tasks is how to be more successful in the long run. “Getting things done” is not the same as “getting the right things done.”

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Understanding Prioritization in the Workplace

The first step is to identify your true priorities, which isn’t always easy. Most of us work in a fast-paced environment, which means we’re in “reactive mode” much of the time. In case you haven’t noticed, this tends to create bad habits. Over time, we naturally react to whoever is the loudest or whatever task is at the top of the inbox and therefore feels urgent. Many people simply default to using their email inbox as a quasi to-do list. If you’re doing that, I want you to think about this: Your email inbox is a to-do list that everyone (except you) controls!

The first key to successful time management is to know your top priorities.

I suggest that you work closely with your supervisor to determine a shortlist of top priorities that align with your organization’s broader goals. This list must then become the ruler against which everything else gets measured. 

Let me be blunt: You’re not going to get it right the first time. You’ll create your list, start focusing time on tasks related to those priorities, and then your supervisor will give you something more urgent to do. That’s fine – do the urgent task your supervisor gave you but then have a conversation about it later. If this task was a higher priority than everything else on your “highest priorities” list, which your supervisor helped develop, then why wasn’t it on the list? And if the answer is something like, “Well, things will just occasionally come up that are hot and need to be handled,” that’s not good enough. You need to unpack that a bit. Define the parameters for what constitutes one of those “hot” tasks and put those parameters on your list.

For example, my current team focuses on empowering people to improve the digital accessibility of their work products to ensure that people with disabilities have comparable access to information and communications technology. Therefore, the training we give and the coaching we provide is our highest priority. If an urgent request comes in for my team to remediate a document – in other words, to fix someone else’s mistakes for them – it is not a priority. We will get to it after our training and coaching is complete and a subject matter expert is available to review the document. No matter who the request for remediation came from, my team doesn’t drop everything because document remediation is not their priority.

Tactics for Saying ‘No’: Delegate, Defer, or Delay

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least quickly address what many people ask when I talk about priorities: “How am I supposed to say ‘no’ to people in authority?”

First of all, the reason I encourage you to at least finalize your high priorities list with your supervisor is so that you aren’t always the one who has to say ‘no’ to a request. If your supervisor has reviewed and approved your priorities and you are working on tasks that specifically support those priorities, then you are technically doing work assigned by your supervisor. If someone wants you to do something else instead, then they need to talk to your boss.

Of course, telling someone ‘no’ doesn’t always go over very well, but there are things you can do instead. Here are three tactics for you to try:

• Delegate: Pass the task on to someone else who can handle it. This is an excellent way to provide meaningful assignments to junior members of your team. Just because it’s not your priority doesn’t mean it’s not important work for someone to do.

• Defer: Choose to tackle a task later if it’s not truly urgent. If a request doesn’t align with your current priorities, then schedule it for a future date.

• Delay: Postpone tasks that don’t contribute to your immediate goals. This differs from the prior tactic because the idea is to postpone it indefinitely and only return to it when you have available time or when your priorities change.

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Leveraging the Power of Time-Blocking

Now, once you’ve established your priorities, you need to make sure you carve out specific blocks of time to focus solely on them. My recommendation is to implement some time-blocking. 

The second key to successful time management is to protect time for your top priorities.

Time-blocking is a time management method that has you dividing your workday into blocks of time that are then devoted to predetermined tasks. You don’t need to go all out with your time-blocking to benefit from the method though. I suggest you start by scheduling a recurring 2-hour block in your digital calendar each day, dedicated solely to high-priority tasks. 

This block of time is your fortress of focus – no meetings, no emails, just concentrated work. It’s okay to move this block around to fit your day, but make sure it’s there. Starting with just two hours a day can skyrocket your productivity and ensure you're making progress where it counts.

Find What Works for You

I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to managing your priorities to ensure the best use of your time but it’s best if you don’t overthink some of this stuff. There’s no one-size-fits-all in time management and personal productivity, so experiment with these techniques and adjust them to fit your work style. 

Don’t be afraid to try different things and find what works the best for you. Maybe you’re a morning person, and your focus block works best at the start of your day. Or perhaps breaking it into two one-hour blocks aligns better with your workflow. The key is to stay flexible and find what works best for you.

Call to Action

Reflect on your current time management strategies. How can you apply these prioritization and time-blocking techniques to elevate your productivity? Experiment with the 2-hour focus block in your schedule this week, and adjust as needed. Just remember that effective time management isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing more of what matters.

To get started, set a clear, short-term goal. Prioritize tasks that move you toward that goal, and guard your time block like it’s the most important meeting of the day – because, in many ways, it is.

Your journey to masterful time management starts now!

New Year, New You!

Welcome to 2024! This year, I’ve planned a weekly series of emails covering a wide variety of topics to help us level-up our skills and improve our performance. I’d like to suggest we adopt an overall theme of “More in ‘24” – more knowledge, more skills, more productivity, more teamwork and collaboration, more creativity, and doing it all in a way that helps us be much more relaxed!

To kick things off, let’s focus on beginning a journey of personal and professional development. In our workplace, success requires a combination of skill, knowledge, and attitude, so one of the most powerful ways to improve your performance is to learn something new. Leveling up your knowledge and skill is a tremendous point of leverage because you will put in the effort once but it pays dividends for years to come.

Unfortunately, we tend to get caught up in the daily grind and, before we know it, another year has gone by and we’ve done almost nothing towards our self-development goals. For white-collar professionals and knowledge workers, whether team leads, supervisors, managers, or simply self-directed employees, setting meaningful goals is the cornerstone of success – but only if you have a practical plan for achieving those goals. 

This is where the QMWD (Quarter-Month-Week-Day) process comes into play – a structured approach to transform your aspirations into attainable objectives, especially when it comes to learning new skills. 

Understanding the QMWD Process

The QMWD process is your roadmap for goal achievement, broken down into manageable intervals:

1. Quarterly Goal: Choose a significant skill you want to master in three months.

2. Monthly Milestones: Divide this learning objective into three key phases.

3. Weekly Steps: Outline specific learning activities for each week.

4. Daily Tasks: Break down these activities into daily, actionable tasks.

By dissecting your big goal into these smaller units, you're setting yourself up for a journey of consistent progress and achievement. You can use this same process for projects you’re working on but there are plenty of other more robust and widely known methodologies for project management. 

The beauty of the QMWD process for personal and professional development is the simplicity of simply chunking up a large goal into its component steps and then checking them off as you complete them. The only ongoing “administrative overhead” is a weekly review to assure you’re still on track.

Applying the QMWD Process to Skill Acquisition

As an example, one of my goals is to increase my knowledge and improve my skills within the area of instructional design. I have several important training programs I need to create and deliver this year, so I want them to be as effective as possible. Here's how I’m using the QMWD method for this goal:

- Quarterly Goal: Gain proficiency as an Instructional Designer.

- Monthly Milestones: 

  - Month 1: Learn the basics of instructional design.

  - Month 2: Practice the skills by developing a pilot course.

  - Month 3: Pilot the first course, solicit feedback, and make improvements.

- Weekly Steps: 

  - Week 1: Complete two of ten selected online courses.

  - Week 2: Complete the next two online courses.

  - ... (and so on)

  - Week 5: Select learning outcomes and develop high-level outline for pilot course.

  - ... (and so on)

  - Week 9: Deliver first session of pilot course and request feedback from attendees.

  - ... (and so on)

- Daily Tasks: 

  - Day 1: Watch the first ~30 minutes of lectures and take detailed notes.

  - Day 2: Watch remaining lectures and take detailed notes.

  - Day 3: Consolidate and structure notes for ongoing review and use.

  - ... (and so on)

This breakdown ensures that you will be taking a step toward mastering a new, valuable skill every day. Yes, you will need to spend a couple hours up front to think through this, chunk it up into its component steps, and map them out. However, I suggest assigning dates to your Monthly Milestones and Weekly Steps, but then waiting to schedule the Daily Tasks. When you do your Friday review, as described below, you can schedule all of the Daily Tasks for the coming week. This allows you some flexibility and makes it more likely that your plan for the week will be realistic because you’ll know exactly where to allocate time on your calendar for each task.

Making QMWD a Habit for Success

To make the most of the QMWD process, incorporate it into your daily routine. Schedule regular weekly reviews – I suggest every Friday – to track your progress and adapt your plan as needed. Look ahead to the tasks you’ve assigned to the coming week, then block off time on your calendar each day and note what task you need to complete. If you find it helpful, use tools and apps for more efficient tracking and for giving you regular reminders. 

Consistency is the key to success with the QMWD method because it will not only help you achieve your current goal but also establish a robust framework for future learning endeavors.

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Call to Action

As we embrace the new year, challenge yourself to enhance your professional skill set. Choose a skill that will elevate your career, and use the QMWD process to systematically achieve mastery. Remember, each small step taken daily accumulates into significant achievements. 

Begin your journey of growth and learning today; the path to achieving your first-quarter goal starts now!

In Episode 15 of the Relaxed Leader Podcast, I explained my 6-step process for effective delegation. It’s important enough that I’m going to review it again and clearly lay out the process for you.

Some people think it’s a bit complicated. “Six steps just to give someone an assignment?”

Of course not. Managers hand out assignments all the time and following some lengthy, rather detailed process wouldn’t be practical.

Delegation is not the same as basic assignments because true delegation means giving a direct report an assignment that you might normally do yourself. True delegation is entrusting someone with a responsibility that normally belongs to you. It’s not just a simple assignment – it involves trust and risk – so we need to treat it accordingly.

True delegation is entrusting someone with a responsibility that normally belongs to you.

Unfortunately, most leaders don’t know how to effectively delegate to their direct reports. They either give too much or too little direction. Too much direction stifles creativity and you haven’t actually delegated – you’re just assigning a specific set of tasks. Too little direction leaves employees confused about what you really want them to do.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Relaxed Leaders need to give enough detail to establish what to do without saying exactly how to do it.

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6-Step Delegation Process

As I discussed in the podcast, below is what I often use to delegate critical assignments to members of my team. These are the six steps in what I consider to be a highly effective delegation process:

Step 1: Clearly state the desired results.

Step 2: Document the agreed-upon goals.

Step 3: Establish a time-line with key milestones.

Step 4: Grant the necessary authority.

Step 5: Explain both responsibility and accountability.

Step 6: Get affirmative acceptance from the employee.

If you do this correctly, these six steps are all handled during a delegation session. To be clear, handing out tasks and assignments at a staff meeting, for instance, is not the level of delegation I’m talking about. That’s just simple “tasking,” not true delegation; and certainly not the type of delegation that builds the foundation you’ll need to eventually empower your team.

So let’s go through the steps one at a time so you’ll know exactly how to start more effectively delegating to your own team.

Step 1: Clearly state the desired results.

The key here is to focus on the results you want, not on the specific tasks it takes to do it. Think of it as explaining the what not the how – you’re telling them what to do but not how it should be done.

When you do this regularly, you’ll be surprised at how creative your team members can be. It might take a little practice – especially if they’re used to you giving them more specifics up front – but it’s worth it. Start your delegation session by clearly stating the desired results.

Step 2: Document the agreed-upon goals.

As you discuss the desired results of a project or initiative that you’re delegating to a team member, have them explain it back to you, including what they think they’ll do to achieve those results. Use this discussion to help the employee establish their goals for the project and how those goals will be measured.

Allowing the employee to set clear, measurable goals that will achieve the desired results you’ve established is the key. You’ve told them what, now they need to tell you how. If what you’re delegating is a reasonably sized initiative, then documenting these agreed-upon goals should take a sentence or two. If you can’t sum it up that concisely, consider breaking it up into smaller components and then delegate those individually.

The bottom line for this step is that you need to clearly and concisely document the agreed-upon goals.

Step 3: Establish a time-line with key milestones.

To complete the third step most effectively, you should start with a deadline in mind. If you choose to share it with the employee, then be flexible as you discuss it. It’s best to use the goals you’ve just documented and identify appropriate milestones. The idea here is to be able to measure your progress and know if you’re on track to meet your final deadline. It’s a horrible feeling to have a deadline looming and then figure out you’re way off track! Break the goals into milestones, discuss how long each will take, and then create a schedule and time-line from there.

If you don’t control the deadline, make that very clear up front and then talk about priorities. Remember that you’re giving something to a team member who doesn’t do this work as a normal part of their job, so this project is probably not their top priority. It can’t be, unless you’re pulling them from their regular job. Some of their regular duties must take priority over the project you’re delegating, so agree on where it fits into their overall workload.

Step 4: Grant the necessary authority.

When you truly empower team members, you’re granting them wide latitude to take action without your specific review and approval. With delegation, you’re putting boundaries in place to ensure they are able to do only what’s needed. You’ll need to grant them the authority necessary to achieve the set of clearly defined results and specific goals. Such authority must be clearly defined up front, at the delegation session, because you’ll also need to make sure the right people know you’ve granted specific authority to your team member.

Granting this specific, limited authority is like riding a bike with training wheels around your cul-de-sac. True empowerment, on the other hand, is like trail riding in the mountains. Practice with your training wheels first by granting just the necessary authority within the confines of a delegated project.

Step 5: Explain both responsibility and accountability.

Relaxed Leader are comfortable with delegating responsibility but not accountability. The idea is to make your employee completely responsible for the project you’re delegating while not giving away your accountability. If something goes wrong, you will be the one to face your boss or anyone above her, so you need to be ready to step up and be held accountable.

You don’t get to give away your accountability but you should certainly hold your employee accountable to you. This is something you’ll need to think about ahead of time because the consequences shouldn’t be vague. At the initial delegation session, you need to be able to clearly explain both responsibility and accountability to your employee.

Step 6: Get affirmative acceptance from the employee.

The first five steps are all about making sure everything is clear and understood but you still need to verify that your employee is agreeing to everything – and your employee needs to understand that YOU are agreeing to everything too. The most straightforward method is for each of you to sign the documented goals and agreed-upon time-line.

Let’s be clear: a mumbled “okay” from your employee is not acceptable. If you don’t get a very affirmative “yup, I’ve got this,” then you need to spend more time discussing it.

No matter what, don’t skip this final step. Effective delegation includes getting affirmative acceptance from your employee at the end of the delegation session!

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The Bottom Line…

All of these steps can be handled during an initial delegation session – a meeting you set-up specifically for the purpose of effectively delegating a project to your employee. When you follow this process:

• You’ll have documented goals created by your employee and designed to achieve the results you need.

• You’ll have an agreed-upon timeline with clear milestones, which you can review with your employee throughout the project.

• You’ll practice granting authority that’s limited and well-defined authority.

• You’ll practice delegating responsibility and establishing appropriate accountability for your employee.

Best of all, using this six-step delegation process will help you build the foundation you’ll need to begin truly empowering your team. And that’s one of the key things you’ll need to do if you want to become a Relaxed Leader.

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For years, “empowerment” has been a popular buzzword among senior managers and executives. Oh, they love to talk about it and pontificate on how important it is and blah blah blah. But then they turn around and undermine it, creating an environment where true empowerment is avoided like the plague.

In organizations like that, those of us who strive to be Relaxed Leaders have to answer a couple questions. How do we start truly empowering people if our senior leadership doesn’t really seem to support it? What can a first-line supervisor (or even a mid-level manager) do to promote empowerment when the organization is risk-averse and incentivizes the opposite behavior?

One of the best places to begin is by getting very good at effective delegation. And trust me when I say that most people don’t really understand it and definitely aren’t very good at it!

Listen to this episode of The Relaxed Leader podcast to hear why effective delegation is the foundation for empowerment and then learn The Six Steps of Highly Effective Delegation!

Myth-ing the Point

The more I write about the importance of learning to relax and lead, the more I seem to come across leadership advice that preaches the opposite. I was reading something the other day that made me cuss out loud. It was written by a quasi-motivational writer whose stuff I normally enjoy, which made me feel even worse when I read it.

Here is a tiny quote from the article, just to give you a taste: “Leadership is grueling and being a leader, while respectable, is a twenty-four hour a day position with no breaks. You will find that there is no off switch.” I won’t tell you who wrote it because that’s not the point.

The point is that this understanding of what it takes to be a leader seems to be taken from a high-level overview of the mythical leaders we read about in business publications and countless self-improvement books. The message from the article I referenced above can be summed up like this: If you want to be a true leader, then you have to be willing to be “on” 24/7 and be responsible for everything. It’s all on you, so you need to be ready to put all of your heart, soul, time, and attention into it!

I suppose it makes for a great pep talk at a small tech start-up but I believe it’s terrible advice for almost every other leadership position and it’s the opposite of what it means to be a Relaxed Leader. It’s an understanding built on myths, so it’s safe to say they’re myth-ing the point.

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It’s not a Myth-tery

Just to be clear, I’ve never worked in a tech start-up (or any other kind of start-up) and I’ve never earned my living from a small business or passion project. If you need advice on how to survive those environments and stay healthy while maintaining a breakneck, non-stop pace, then I’m probably not your guy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to working long hours – occasionally. When you’re doing meaningful work, the inspiration and satisfaction is enough to get you fired up and keep you going – for a while. Doing what you’re truly passionate about can power you to take on the world – okay, not really, but you see what I mean.

Very few people are cutout to work 12+ hour days, 7 days a week, or be “on” every minute of every day. Even the mythical status held by some billionaires and titans of technology is almost always knocked back down to earth when we get to see behind the curtain. Substance abuse. Anger management. Harassment and a hostile work environment. Depression. Divorce. And on and on and on. This is well-known – it’s not a myth-tery at all – so don’t ignore it.

Do all of these things happen to regular people? Absolutely! And that’s my point – they might not be regular but they’re still people. If you look up to them, want to be like them, and think of them as role models, don’t forget they are still people and they’re not perfect. They have their faults and failings, and the non-stop stress can get to them too. It might not impact their outward success – at least not for a while – but a Relaxed Leader isn’t just concerned about the outward trappings of success.

Stop Myth-construing Things

To be blunt, none of this really matters to most of us who find ourselves in leadership positions. Sure, we might daydream occasionally about making millions running our own successful business but then we come to our senses and realize there’s no shame in what we’re already doing.

Unfortunately, there are lots of people out there who are telling us otherwise, asking us why we’re working for someone else when we could be working for ourselves. They paint a rosy picture, showing us the best day of being an entrepreneur, and then compare it to the worst day of “working for someone else.”

It’s a false comparison – they’re definitely myth-construing things – but it’s something I’ve fallen for many times. Not the “get rich quick” scams but rather the “follow your passion and turn your side hustle into a 6-figure income” stories of success.

Unfortunately, for every entrepreneur success story, there are thousands of other stories of people pouring their hearts and souls into their side hustle or passion project... and never making a dime. The gurus who say they can teach you to turn your side hustle into a wildly successful business will generally downplay those “not successful” stories because, well, marketing. They’re selling a product or service. Can you blame them?

Your choices aren’t that limited though. Your choices aren’t limited to “accepting the daily grind,” “being your own boss,” or the recently popular option of simply quitting, as we’re witnessing in what’s being called “The Great Resignation.”

There’s at least one other option and it’s the one I write about. Especially if you’re in a leadership position, you can learn to improve the situation for yourself and those who work with you. Instead of starting your own business, resigning yourself to a shitty job, or walking out the door, why not figure out how to rock the 9-to-5?

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Not a “Hit-or-Myth” Thing

So let’s bring it back to where I started this little diatribe. Rocking the 9-to-5 doesn’t require leaders to be “on” and available 24/7/365. Being a great leader doesn’t mean you need to be responsible for everything and be all things to all people or any of those other over-the-top descriptions I’ve been stumbling across lately. And unlike that side hustle selling crocheted iPhone covers, rocking the 9-to-5 isn’t a hit-or-myth thing because the correct approach takes most of the randomness and dumb luck out of the equation.

We have an entire generation of new leaders who are getting burnt out faster than we can create them; and we have plenty of seasoned leaders who are struggling to maintain balance in an “always on” world. This is not a sustainable approach to running a business, a government agency, a non-profit, or any other kind of organization. There are better ways of doing it, and one of those ways is to learn how to RELAX and lead.

Review/Reflect to focus on “priority management” instead of “time management.”

Empower others to help your team become a force multiplier.

Leverage coaching moments and strong relationships to drive continuous improvement.

Amplify your team – their voices, ideas, and successes – to keep them supercharged.

Find your X-Factor – the special talent or skill you bring – and truly bring it every day.

Bottom Line (to avoid Myth-Understandings)

If you use the RELAX formula, you’ll become a leader people love to follow and your team will accomplish amazing things. You’ll not only have the outward trappings of success – the awards, accolades, and monetary rewards – you’ll also be less stressed and your quality of life will improve. You won’t need to be “on” 24/7. In fact, you’ll be able to go on vacation feeling confident that your team will take care of everything while you’re enjoying some well-deserved leisure time.

And here’s another great thing about learning to rock the 9-to-5 by becoming a Relaxed Leader: anyone can do it without staying up all night doing a “side hustle” or facing the uncertainty of quitting your job.

Let’s clear up all these myth-understandings:
To succeed, you just need to RELAX and lead!

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Fortune Cookie Wisdom

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes… including you.”
~Anne Lamott

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Monthly Masterclass

Everyone talks about empowerment but I don’t think most leaders really “get it.” Far too many of the supervisors I’ve had over the years equate “empowerment” with “accountability.” In fact, I remember a supervisor at GM telling me that being “empowered” means you don’t get to hide behind the boss – you get to be out in the spotlight to take the glory… or the shame.

Relaxed Leaders delegate responsibility but retain accountability.
~Brandon Jubar

That’s NOT empowerment – it’s abdication of accountability – and it’s not appropriate. As a Relaxed Leader, you absolutely have to embrace this concept: we delegate responsibility but retain accountability. Yes, we hold our direct reports accountable to us but we always remain ultimately accountable for the work they do.

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What Empowerment ISN’T

Empowerment isn’t simply giving someone the power and authority to do whatever they want in whatever way they want either. This is also where too many people get it wrong, and it’s understandable because it’s close to the dictionary definition of “empower.”

Empower is defined as giving (someone) the authority or power to do something. The typical example is when a bookkeeper is empowered to sign checks on behalf of the organization or a lower level finance staff member is empowered to make purchases with the organization’s credit card.

Yes, that’s one definition of empowerment but it’s not really what we’re talking about as part of the RELAX formula. These examples are very narrow in focus and have well-defined rules, restrictions, and oversight to ensure the empowerment remains limited. This task-focused form of empowerment is nothing more than giving someone the authority to execute their part of a tightly controlled process.

What Empowerment IS

For Relaxed Leaders, empowerment is about ensuring people have the knowledge, skills, and information they need in order for us to feel confident giving them very wide latitude. And then it’s about actually giving them that latitude to be creative and try new things.

Lots of leaders understand all of that but they still mess up the whole responsibility vs. accountability piece. Generally speaking, there are two things that tend to happen.

The first is what I mentioned earlier, when leaders try to delegate accountability as part of the empowerment. If something goes wrong, the employee is going to take the hit and the employee knows it. What tends to happen is that the employee plays it safe – she doesn’t really stretch herself or try anything new – and ends up simply doing what’s always been done, using the well-known and accepted practices. Creativity is limited because it ventures too far into the unknown, which could cost her a lot if it fails.

This faux empowerment doesn’t accomplish the goals of true empowerment because it stifles creativity and simply maintains the status quo. In other words, it causes the organization to stagnate.

The second common situation is when the leader delegates responsibility and retains the accountability... but then ensures their employees don’t fail. It’s an understandable approach. The thinking is, “If I’m on the hook for anything that goes wrong, then I’m going to make sure nothing goes wrong!”

This approach isn’t always improper. If you have inexperienced employees, they’ll need a lot more support and guidance in order for them to learn and grow. But in most cases, this type of oversight shouldn’t last long. Just like a baby bird, your inexperienced employees need to get out of the nest and try their wings as soon as possible because you can’t fly for them.

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The Power of Empowerment

Assuming your employees have the basic knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs, then you’re not empowering them if you’re jumping in to ensure they don’t fail. Relaxed Leaders need to have the courage (and the stomach) to let their direct reports fail because the lessons are better and they have a greater impact than what we learn from a success – especially a success that was guaranteed by an intervention by the boss.

Now, we do have to temper this a little bit. The goal isn’t to “give ‘em enough rope” – the goal is to let them try to succeed in situations where they aren’t necessarily guaranteed to succeed. However, if I see an employee heading down a path that I think will lead to certain disaster, I will step in with a coaching intervention. I won’t tell them exactly what to do but I might get them to think through the potential consequences of what they had planned. If they still want to proceed after the coaching conversation, then I’ll need to make a decision. As long as a failure won’t be too detrimental to the team, the organization, or the customer, then I’ll probably let them try it their way. If the outcome is as I predicted (they fail), then I’ll coach them through the process of damage control and problem repair.

The difficult part of this is that I need to be ready to step up and be accountable for the failure – even though I was pretty sure it was going to end the way it did. That can be very difficult to explain to senior leaders, who usually only want to hear good news. When your boss’s boss’s boss wants all your metrics to be “green” all the time, he’ll definitely hate a “red” metric that was caused by you letting someone learn a lesson!

In most organizations, this attitude from senior leadership is one of the main reasons why true empowerment is so difficult for many leaders to embrace.

The Risk & Reward of Empowerment

Relaxed Leaders know that empowering their direct reports isn’t simply a risk – it’s a risk that offers an incredible reward. When the people you’re leading are allowed to be creative and experiment with new ways of doing their work, it gets them excited and energized, and their experimentation can lead to amazing improvements. Even if they try something and it doesn’t work as planned, they’ll see it as a chance to learn and won’t consider it a failure. Or even if they think of it as a failure, they won’t think of themselves as failures – and that’s absolutely critical!

You might be thinking, “Truly empowering people, delegating responsibility and not accountability, and even letting them fail... sure sounds STRESSFUL! How can you be a relaxed leader when you’re doing that?”

Well, I never said being a Relaxed Leader would be easy. Empowering your direct reports is a skill that you’ll need to develop, and building any skill takes study, practice, trial, and even error – all of which can be stressful. But once you’ve developed the skill, true empowerment becomes a force multiplier. You’ll be able to give your team members assignments, make the goals clear, and trust that they’ll tackle them with energy and creativity. At that point, you’ll need to be available to coach a bit, advise a little, and remove obstacles when necessary.

Now doesn’t that sound a bit more relaxed?

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The Bottom Line...

Empowerment is a concept that is often misunderstood by managers because there is risk involved – but the rewards can be amazing if we learn how to empower our direct reports correctly. Figuring out how to effectively empower others takes time and deliberate practice on our part, which can cause some short term stress. But in the long run, learning to empower our direct reports makes it much, much easier to be a truly Relaxed Leader!

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So much of what we do, how we act, and how we react to everything that happens in our lives, comes from our understanding of where we fit into the story. Do we see ourselves as supporting cast? As an extra, just hanging around to complete the overall scene? Maybe even the villain? Or do we make the mistake that too many stressed-out leaders make, and assume that we’re the main character?

As Relaxed Leaders, we should believe that we are not the main character. It’s not all on us and it’s certainly not all about us; but we can still play a pivotal role. We’ll have our exits and entrances, and we’ll play lots of different parts. The key is to remember that even though we can only see the stage from our perspective, the action isn’t always revolving around us. And it doesn’t need to.

Listen to this episode of The Relaxed Leader podcast to learn why thinking of yourself as the “main character” is selfish, detrimental to those around you, and disastrous for you as both a person and as a leader!

Monday Musings

It started back in college, continued through almost two decades in corporate America, and has haunted me through 13 years in government. I can’t seem to escape it. Every time I turn around, someone else is dangling another deceptively easy thing in front of me. They say they’ve mastered it, and so can I. With their help – after paying way too much for their course, book, software, or membership – I will finally be able to completely manage my time!

How it was supposed to work

In college, many professors would talk about the need to learn “time management” techniques so we could be successful in college and beyond. It seemed so straight forward at the time – create a calendar, block out times for different tasks, then live by your calendar. Do that, and you’ll always stay on top of everything and will be less stressed because you're in control of your time.

When I worked at Generous Motors, they spent ridiculous amounts of money sending all of us first line supervisors to multi-day training to learn how to properly use a paper-based planner. Then they spent more money year after year, buying refills because that’s what the system required. Make lists, take notes, and tightly schedule every minute of your day. It was clearly the key to success because every executive had one of those leather-bound planners sitting on their desk.

By the time I went to work for the government, paper-based planners had given way to electronic calendars with task lists and all sorts of bells and whistles. You no longer needed to hand-write uncompleted items from one day to the next – and changing meetings times was a simple click and drag. I mean, it doesn’t make sense to use so much time working with the tools that are supposed to help manage your time, right?

How it actually worked

Nothing ever took the amount of time expected. If I scheduled 2 hours for a college assignment, it either took 4 hours or it took 40 minutes. Either way, it messed up my plan. I spent too much time rejiggering my schedule and it got frustrating. If I scheduled 2 hours but finished in 40 minutes – what should I do? If I started working on the next scheduled assignment, it might be something less important but it fit into the available block of time. But I hadn’t been prepared to work on the most important thing, so I needed to figure out what I should to. (More often than not, I’d just screw off for the extra 80 minutes.)

I ended up only using my calendar to track deadlines. Initially, I focused on final due dates of assignments. Eventually, I learned to break down large assignments into phases and assign deadlines to those. It worked great when I did it. (I was in college and I don’t have OCD, so it definitely didn’t come naturally to me.)

In corporate America, there were always at least a few people who swore by their Frankenstein Planners (you know the ones), while everyone else either used them as regular notebooks or put them on a shelf to collect dust. Similar to my experience in college, trying to schedule every minute of my day and keep track of every possible task just didn’t work very well because life never cooperated. And I worked in a factory, so hauling around that clunky planner was a pain.

I ended up using little 2" x 5" lined notebooks. They fit in my pocket and I could take quick notes, jot down any tasks, and it was always at hand. At the end of the shift, I could take a quick look at my notes, complete anything required for that day, and queue up anything I needed to address the next day. It was a simple little system that worked great in a fast-paced environment with a very focused set of requirements (i.e. high quality auto parts).

By the time I began working for the government, I had been off the factory floor for several years, so my responsibilities had changed. When it takes weeks instead of hours to create your final work product, my little green memo pads weren’t up to the task. And that’s where technology came to the rescue! I offer prayers of thanks every day for my email program with it’s integrated calendar and task list. I can schedule my day in 15-minute increments, set up reminders, drag and drop emails and files into appointments, and make adjustments with a few clicks of the mouse. It’s been like a magic wand or silver bullet (pick your analogy) because it solved all of my problems! Yeah!

Okay. Not really.

This technology did two horrible things:

1. It made it easier to create ever-growing lists of tasks with constantly changing deadlines.

2. It turned my inbox into a To-Do list that everyone else controls.

And let’s be honest – the fact that I can create a very granular schedule and adjust it easily doesn’t address the underlying problem:

Life doesn’t cooperate with our attempts at “time management.”

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The answer is understanding your priorities

Over the last few years, my task tracking system has evolved to better meet the needs of the type of work I do. But the core of it remains the same and it’s not about managing my TIME – it’s about understanding my PRIORITIES.

Yes, there are tasks to track and I have “ticklers” set up to ensure I don’t lose sight of less important matters. And I use my calendar to schedule meetings… but also to set asides blocks of time for focused work. I’ve also tracked my energy levels and I try to schedule those blocks of focused work during high-energy times of the day, which has really cranked up my productivity.

The two important differences are that I’m not a slave to my calendar and I don’t expend much effort reacting to other people’s “urgent” matters. Even if my boss comes to me with something, I don’t simply drop everything and work on it. I’ll start by having a discussion to explain what I see as my top priorities so my boss understands what I’ll have to STOP working on in order to handle his “urgent” matter. Even if I’m told to drop everything and handle the new issue anyway, I’ve not only explained my priorities but I’ve also set more realistic expectations in the process.

Setting priorities isn’t easy

Knowing your priorities probably sounds like pretty basic advice – and certainly nothing revolutionary – but unless you work in a job with clearly defined deliverables, I’d bet you don’t actually have a list of your top priorities. If you can’t list your priorities and explain WHY each one is important, then you’re going to stay stuck in “reactive mode.”

For years, I’ve told my team that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. It looks great on a cheesy office poster but it’s also a very helpful thing to keep in mind. I encourage you to list your priorities and then compare them to the actual work you do each day.

Start by identifying your Top 3 priorities and make a conscious effort to focus on them. If you find that you’re not spending the majority of your time on your self-identified priorities, either your work habits need adjusting or they’re NOT really priorities after all.

The bottom line is that you’ll always be more successful when you manage your priorities instead of working so hard to manage your time!

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I’m adamant about testing what we think we’ve learned because sometimes our successes are just dumb luck. And we also tend to forget (or ignore) the fact that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. That’s why it’s so easy to learn the wrong lessons from success.

Hell, that’s why athletes and their fans have so many strange superstitions. Lucky socks. Lucky happy dance. Lucky beer and hot wings! Whatever. They wore something or did something weird or ate a certain food… and then they experienced some huge win… so now they attribute that success to the clothing or ritual or food or whatever and they repeat the behavior to help ensure wins in the future.

It’s easy to spot these superstitions in athletes and their fans but similar things can happen in business too. People learn the wrong lessons from their successes; they don’t validate what they think they learned; and then they end up doing things that either don’t matter or that actually makes things more difficult.

Doing weird, seemingly unnecessary things might be fine for athletes because it can help put them in the right frame of mind to focus and win... but business isn’t quite the same. Weird, unnecessary stuff in business is called WASTE and it needs to be eliminated, not continued.

Listen to this episode of The Relaxed Leader podcast to learn a process to review and reflect in a way that will help you learn the right lessons from your experiences.

Story Time!

It was cold and dark in the bedroom. The power had been out for over 30 hours, so the snow and freezing temperatures outside had caused the house to cool to a frigid 45 degrees. Fortunately, a couple layers of clothing and several extra blankets had kept my bed nice and toasty.

My watch told me it was 4 AM. Without power or internet, I wouldn’t have to get up and work anytime soon, which was perfectly fine with me. I had no desire to crawl out of my cozy cocoon and do anything in our cold, dark house, so I rolled over and... shit. There it was again. That high-pitched BEEP. I was hoping it was just part of a bad dream.

I waited another couple minutes, just in case my tinnitus was playing tricks on me. BEEP! Damn it. Why does it always happen in the middle of the night? I groaned as I crawled out of bed. I headed downstairs, grabbed a step stool and a 9-volt battery, and went in search of that distant, haunting sound.

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When there’s smoke…

We have smoke detectors all over our house – several on each of the three floors – and they are all wired together. When one goes off, they ALL go off. In a big house, that can very literally be a life saver! The smoke detectors are also hooked up to the electricity, so it takes a long time for their back-up batteries to drain. But they do eventually drain and with the power out, they had been running on batteries alone for quite a while. I ended up having to change the batteries in two smoke detectors that night but luckily the second one started beeping before I crawled back into my warm bed. Better to deal with the frigid temps all at once!

I hear plenty of managers at work talking about the need to get away from “fire fighting.” If you’ve been around business at all, you’ll know they’re not talking about actually fighting real fires – they’re talking about fixing problems that have popped up and become emergencies. Occasionally an emergency will become a “5 alarm fire,” requiring resources to be pulled from lots of other areas to resolve the problem. Needless to say, it’s hard to work on projects when you're dealing with unplanned problems.

In my home, I’ve never had to fight an actual fire – but not because I keep fresh batteries in our smoke detectors. Smoke detectors aren’t about fire prevention, they’re about saving lives in the event that you’ve failed to prevent a fire. Your house might burn down, but hopefully you’ll be able to get your family and your pets to safety first.

…it’s already too late!

Where I work, we measure lots of stuff. We probably have 100 metrics and measures that are gathered and reported all over the place. The problem? Most of them qualify as smoke detectors. They let us know there's an emergency after the fire’s already burning. Is it any wonder we spend so much time in “firefighting mode?”

To prevent fires in my home, I don’t rely on smoke detectors because that’s NOT what they’re for. We do things like making sure candles are in safe locations and aren’t left burning when no one’s around or when we’re sleeping. We ensure electrical cords are in good working condition and if anything unusual happens with anything electrical, we have it checked out. We are careful with the natural gas, the propane grill, and anything else that could possibly cause a fire.

If you want to get out of “firefighting mode” at work, you need to think about it like that. You need to think about doing things that prevent the problems in the first place. You need to focus on “fire prevention.”

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We reward the wrong things.

And you know what? Focusing on “fire prevention” IS NOT A SECRET! In fact, when you read that last paragraph, you probably thought, “No shit, Sherlock.” Anyone who has worked anywhere for any length of time understands the concept. It’s a true no-brainer for most people.

Unfortunately, knowing it and doing it are two very different things.

Doing “fire prevention” on your job is pretty straight-forward:

• Develop good standardized processes.

• Measure different steps or phases in the process and set up “red flags” to tell you when the process isn’t going as expected.

• Have planned responses to those early indicators, which must include capturing data to allow analysis of what when wrong and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

• Rinse. Repeat.

• Focus on continuous process improvement.

But here’s the real problem in most organizations: Fire prevention isn’t rewarded.

Fire prevention isn’t sexy or exciting and it’s hard to quantify. How many fires have we prevented in our home? All of them! But how many is that, exactly? In business, it’s hard to tell if you prevented lots of problems or if your job is just easy and you don’t have much to do.

Fight the proverbial fire at work and you can come out looking like a hero. People get awards for working night and day to address the crisis. They get accolades, bonuses, and even promotions. But the team that focused on prevention and never had a crisis? They rarely get noticed – unless some executive says, “Must be nice and easy working in that department. Nothing is ever going on over there.”

Management doesn’t usually notice fire prevention, so it rarely gets rewarded. And if you’re not rewarding the behavior your organization really needs, is it really any wonder that most people don’t focus on it? Your challenge is to NOT be like most people. Don’t try to fire-fight your way to fame and power. Choose the better path.

Toot your own horn.

Relaxed Leaders aren’t focused on winning awards and receiving accolades – but we don’t shun them either. Awards and accolades bring visibility, so if we receive them, it shines a spotlight on the right way to operate. It shows people that there is a better way to lead. It amplifies the great “fire prevention” work you and your team are doing and can help start to change what gets rewarded.

As you’re improving your processes and putting preventive metrics in place, think about how you can use those metrics to highlight the importance of prevention. Use data from past “fires” to show the value of avoiding those emergencies. Don’t be afraid to say, “We addressed five issues this week – but we caught them early in the process and were able to quickly mitigate them. If left unchecked, any one of them could’ve ended up like ‘past fire XYZ,’ which cost the organization $XXXXX.”

Yes, people might argue that it’s theoretical savings or “cost avoidance” or whatever. If that happens, simply ask, “Are you suggesting we ignore the warning signs and let these things become emergencies?” No one will argue for that.

It might feel like “tooting your own horn” but you need to do it to promote the value and importance of preventing problems instead of just getting good at fixing them.

Think about it this way: If you’re fixing a problem, it means you’ve failed to provide the value you promised. Break/fix is what’s known as a “failure stream” and Relaxed Leaders don’t optimize failure streams. Relaxed Leaders optimize the value stream and starve the failure stream in the process. And if we want our organizations to do the same thing, we need to find a way to shine a spotlight on these boring, un-sexy, best practices!

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Your turn.

Take a look at your processes – your entire workflow – and identify at what step you can first spot “warning signs.” Don’t just measure outcomes because then it’s too late. Measure parts of the process – set up “red flags” as early as possible – and then track what happens. If the number of “fires” goes down, then share your results, giving credit to the appropriate prevention measures, and keeping looking for more “fire prevention” tactics!

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For most non-managerial wage earners, their “to do” list is something controlled by outside forces. Either a boss tells them what to do or their tasks are assigned by the systems and processes in place. If you’re a knowledge worker doing customer support, your tasks are likely determined by customer issues and requests. If you’re in retail, you play your role and execute your part of the processes – cashiers check people out, stock handlers keep shelves full, others clean the restrooms, and so on. People in these roles tend to think of themselves as “worker bees,” just reacting to what comes their way and doing what they’re supposed to do. No more, no less.

But it’s not just people working the front lines of retail and service industries who get stuck in this rut. Far too many knowledge workers do the same thing. They learn all the tasks associated with their jobs and then simply wait for an outside stimulus to tell them what to do next.

If you want to be a Relaxed Leader, you need to get out of “reactive mode.” You need to have some sort of a plan – even a short-term plan – and then ensure you’re making time to do the tasks necessary to execute that plan.

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Being Proactive with Short-term Goals

Several years ago, I held a position where my team’s primary role was responding to customer issues. We weren’t doing break/fix support – that would’ve been easier. We were doing “customer advocacy,” which meant that we got involved when the customer was angry about something. It was our job to figure out what went wrong, smooth things over with the customer, and then ensure the problem was addressed and resolved.

My team was very good at firefighting but I decided we’d be better off focusing our efforts on fire prevention. The problem, as you can imagine, was that we barely had time to be reactive. How were we going to find the time to be proactive?

The environment at the time was very dynamic and the “road map” we would put together at the beginning of the fiscal year was usually irrelevant by the 2nd quarter. Things were just changing too rapidly. So instead of creating all kinds of detailed long-term plans, we decided to set more short-term goals. If we could change something THIS MONTH, what would it be? How would we do it? What tasks would need to be done and by when?

Drive Progress with Weekly Reviews

Once we had some short-term goals, I set aside an hour each week to review the necessary tasks. Every Friday afternoon at 3 PM, I looked at what we had queued up for the week that was ending. Had we completed everything? If not, then what happened? Did I over-estimate what we’d be able to accomplish? Did something unforeseen pop up? Or did we just lose sight of the tasks and fail to work on them with our available time?

If we accomplished the tasks as planned, are we on track with the overall plan? Should we consider tackling more of these tasks the following week? Or should we keep the same cadence?

My Friday afternoon review sessions were used to assess our performance in the week just completed and lay out the plan for the coming week. At that point, I would have a good idea of what else was on our schedule and could determine how many additional tasks I believed we could take on.

The type of work your team does will likely determine how you approach planning the coming week during your review session. When my team was dealing with customer problems we couldn’t predict, then I only scheduled additional tasks that I believed we could comfortably handle. On the other hand, my current team deals with very few “emergency” situations. We now have more control over our calendar and the work we do, so I am much more aggressive when scheduling additional tasks.

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Finding the Right Balance

I have to admit that I continue to be surprised at how many senior managers have long-term plans but have almost no visibility into whether their teams are on track to complete those plans on schedule in any given week. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are the micromanagers who keep such close tabs on everything that their teams slow to a crawl because nothing gets done without the boss’s review and approval.

As Relaxed Leaders, our goal is to find a balance between the two extremes. We need to keep an eye on the long-term plans but never lose sight of our weekly progress. We do this by ensuring our direct reports understand the critical tasks for the week so they know where to focus their energy. However, we also need to set expectations in a way that accounts for all the other day-to-day work our team members have to contend with.

The Weekly Review allows us to do all of this. It gives us the means for keeping everything on track and adjusting course if needed. We understand what happened (or didn’t happen) and why, which helps us understand the team’s overall performance and plan even better in the future.

Your Turn

Relaxed Leaders are rarely surprised because we take time to do weekly reviews. It helps us ensure we’re on track to reach our goals and provides a timely opportunity to adjust priorities if we’re falling behind. Reviewing and reflecting on a weekly basis also helps us process our experiences and identify important lessons we and our teams can learn. But simply knowing it’s a good idea isn’t enough, so start implementing it today.

I’ve created a 1-pager that will help. Just download a copy of my Weekly Review & Reflect Process and get started right away!

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SERIOUSLY – don’t wait until later! “Someday” isn’t a day of the week, so take action today and you’ll be on your way to becoming a much more Relaxed Leader.

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Being a relaxed leader takes more than putting your hands behind your head and your feet up on your desk. In fact, you can become a relaxed leader and never actually strike that pose at all. So let’s spend a little time talking about the building blocks you need in order to relax.

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you won’t be surprised that those building blocks spell out the word RELAX – and the first letter is something you need to start doing right now: Review and Reflect.

First, let’s talk about what the process is NOT.

The process of reviewing and reflecting is not about obsessing over things from the past that you can’t change. I try not to dwell on the past because, like most people, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. And even though I’m generally a good person, I’ve still said and done things I regret. I’ve already tried to repair any damage I may have done, so there’s no reason for me to continue beating myself up over those past poor choices.

Similarly, I try not to waste too much time “should-ing” all over myself either. You know what I mean. You finish a difficult conversation and spend the next few hours thinking, “I should’ve done this” or “I should’ve said that!” It’s easy to create the perfect comeback or awesome argument after the moment has passed, so unless the conversation is going to continue later, I try not to dwell on it.

When we dwell on the past, we tend to dwell in the past. Relaxed leaders don’ do that because it’s hard to move forward when you’re always looking backward.

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Is there a perfect system for you?

There are countless ways to review and reflect, and I can think of at least a dozen people who make their living selling their “perfect system” and then teaching people how to use it. And I’ll admit that I’ve bought plenty of books, ebooks, and online courses with the hope of finding the approach that would be the best for me.

After spending hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours, here’s my conclusion: The perfect system for you doesn't exist... until you create it.

In the coming months, I’ll share more of my system with you but for now, let’s stick to the fundamentals, shall we? No matter how you do it, keep in mind that reviewing and reflecting is focused on three key things: planning, executing, and learning.

Focus on planning, executing, and learning.

Planning is critical to growth and progress because we need to know where we’re headed. Whether you’re considering your long-term vision or short-term goals, it’s important to use a review and reflect process that always accounts for them and keeps them top of mind as you’re charting your course or even juggling priorities.

Executing your plan and completing your tasks is aided by reviewing and reflecting because it’s your way of maintaining the proper focus and ensuring you’ve spent your time wisely. For example, upon reflection I’ve determined that what I thought was a good use of my time wasn’t delivering the results I needed. Had I completed the task? Yes. But crossing something off my to-do list doesn’t make it the best use of my time.

Learning from what you’re doing and experiencing can happen without any specific focus on your part but it’s generally a slow and painful process. But with purposeful review and reflection, clear and helpful lessons can be gleaned quickly. Consider it a force multiplier because the return on the time you invest in the process can improve your results exponentially.

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Review and reflect consistently and frequently.

Don’t worry about finding the perfect process to review and reflect.

Don’t spend anymore time than it takes to finish reading this article.

You don’t need an intricate system or fancy software or an online course in order to get started. You just need to begin.

Start by reviewing your vision and your long-term goals. Are they clear in your mind? Have you been making progress towards them? Why or why not?

(Okay – so if you don’t have a clear vision, then it’s probably worth your time to just follow the process I spell out in Create Your Personal Vision Part 1 and Part 2.)

You don’t need an intricate system or fancy software or an online course in order to get started. You just need to begin.

Now focus on what you’ve done in the past month toward meeting your goals. What has gone well? Where have you gotten off track? Whether your results have been good, bad, or somewhere in between, it’s always important to ask why.

Finally, focus on the month ahead. What do you need to do to move you closer to your long-term goals and your overall vision? Determine what you should reasonably accomplish in the coming month, and then break it down into tasks by week.

Write everything down. Review it at least weekly, though daily is better. Reflect on how you’re doing – what’s going well and where you’re struggling – and make adjustments if you need to.

Worry about a process later.

Don’t worry about having a detailed process at this point. Simply take the time to review and reflect. Focus on planning, executing, and learning. Make improvements as you go. Rinse. Repeat.

Once reviewing and reflecting has become part of your regular routine, then you can start working on a more defined process that’s suits you and best meets your needs. And if you start reviewing and reflecting now, then you’ll be ready to think about specific techniques in a few months when I explain my exact process and help you improve yours.

Until then, just start reviewing and reflecting in order to plan, execute, and learn!

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At the beginning of 2021, I hoped the year would bring a mix of experimenting with new things and getting back to normal. COVID vaccines were going to be approved and made widely available, so I assumed people would set aside the partisan bullshit and get their shots. It was our chance to very quickly get back to living normal lives again.

Unfortunately, less than a week into the new year, it became clear that a global pandemic wasn’t enough of a “common enemy.” Not even hundreds of thousands of COVID-related deaths could breach the partisan divide and bring people together in a common cause. It was extremely disheartening and took the wind out of my “let’s get back to normal” sails but it was also the catalyst for the first incarnation of this newsletter.

The idea that was The Progressive Leader

On Valentine’s Day of 2021, I published my first post on Substack and started letting people know about my newsletter. The goal was to share both my ideas and my experience with up-and-coming leaders. I wanted to help young professionals become progressive leaders – people who would lead others from a foundation of strong values, guided by a clear vision, and focused on true progress that benefited everyone.

After several months of writing and podcasting, I still believed we needed more leaders like that. However, although the ideas I was sharing were solid, I realized that the “branding” was a bit off. When people found the newsletter, they expected to be reading about progressive politics – and nothing but progressive politics.

Well, that’s not what they found. Yes, I consider myself a progressive and I have certainly written about political topics, but my goal was not to train the next generation of progressive politicians. My goal was to help people become better leaders, wherever they were in their lives and in their careers. I can’t do that if the only people checking out my newsletter are looking for liberal political rants.

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The evolution of a newsletter

In August of 2021, I put my newsletter on hiatus. I expected to take no more than a few weeks off in order to shift gears, but then life happened (as it always does) and several months went by. During that time, I revised things on the blog – changed the name, added new graphics, updated the About page – and then came up with a content plan that would get me restarted on the right foot.

So on Monday, January 3, 2022, I’ll be ready to officially relaunch this newsletter as The Relaxed Leader.

Over almost 30 years of being a supervisor, manager, and leader, I’ve found that being a relaxed leader is a great choice for many people. Admittedly, it’s a poor choice for some “Type A” personalities who truly believe they know what’s best (and people should just shut up and do what they’re told). So if that describes YOU, please feel free to move along – there’s nothing for you to see here. For everyone else, please keep on reading...

What is a relaxed leader?

Relaxed leaders aren’t lazy leaders who just kick back and don’t stress because they don’t really care. Relaxed leaders aren’t the same as a Laissez-faire leaders, who don’t give much instruction or guidance and basically let the team members take the lead.

Relaxed leaders have a systematic approach to leadership that focuses on setting priorities, creating and empowering team members, and leveraging specific gifts and talents.

If you’ve read my articles on the REAL values, then you know I love a good acronym, so I’ve come up with one that makes it easier to remember some of the fundamental things a relaxed leader focuses on. And – surprise, surprise! – these building blocks can be remembered using the acronym RELAX:

REVIEW/REFLECT: Keep an eye on your priorities and the effectiveness of your current activities.

For the past couple of years, I’ve done this annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly and (usually) daily. In the coming months I’ll talk about how I do it and explain how it’s helped me build a strong team and create an award-winning program office from the ground up.

EMPOWER: Develop team members who understand priorities and achieve results without constant oversight.

For many years and through several job assignments, I’ve led under-staffed teams (and I’m definitely no exception). I’ve learned how to empower team members in a way that increases their job satisfaction, improves our results, and strengthens our team as a whole.

LEVERAGE: Take advantage of day-to-day situations when effective, focused leadership can dramatically impact team performance and multiply results.

Replacing constant “management” with constant “coaching” is nothing more than changing the type of time-consuming oversight that shouldn’t be necessary when you’ve created an effective team. However, knowing when to step in and when to step back can be tricky, so I’ll talk about how to spot those moments when a little bit of coaching can have an exponential impact.

AMPLIFY: Promote team members and their ideas, celebrate wins, and have a strong communications plan.

This seems like a no-brainer to me and yet I see far too many supervisors and managers take the lion’s share of the credit for the work of their teams. Still others give credit but they do it in a way that emphasizes their own contributions and at least implies their teams succeeded because of them. I’ll talk about everything from proper mindset to actual ways of practicing amplification with your own team.

X-FACTOR: Identify that “special something” only YOU can bring to the team… and BRING IT!

One of the main reasons I’ve always focused on building strong teams is because I know I’m not great at everything. Hell, I’m not even good at everything, which is why I need an excellent team who can be strong in areas where I tend to be weak. But the best leaders don’t just build strong teams who can do everything well – they also identify their own greatest strengths and double-down on them. So in the months ahead, I’ll also be talking about how to figure out the “special something” that you can bring to the table, and how to use it as a force multiplier to help catapult you and your team to success.

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Will you help me share these ideas?

In 2022, I’m going to focus on publishing at least one article and one podcast every week for The Relaxed Leader. I’m also going to work on growing the subscriber list for this newsletter.

I don’t want to simply have a lot of subscribers though. I want to find people who are interested in learning to be better leaders by not only reading what I write and listening to what I record, but also by participating in the comments section and actually trying some of the strategies and tactics I’ll be sharing.

If there are enough engaged readers of the The Relaxed Leader, I’m also willing to try some more interactive things as well, like discussion threads or even some live video-based meetings. I really believe this can develop into a strong online community but, like every other important project I’ve ever tackled, I can’t do it alone.

Do you know anyone who might be willing to join us on this journey? Do you know any up and coming leaders who could use some guidance? Do you know any mid-career folks who want to level-up their skills? If so, send them on over and encourage them to subscribe. We’ll have them on their way to becoming relaxed leaders in no time!

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I launched The Progressive Leader on Substack back in February – on Valentine’s Day, to be exact, since we certainly weren’t going out to dinner in the middle of a global pandemic! I was cranking out content at first – probably more than most people cared to read, if I’m being honest with myself – but I felt like I had a lot to say.

We weren’t just in the middle of a pandemic though, we had just come through a contentious election and had witnessed an insurrection at the United States Capitol. If ever there was I time for solid leaders to step up and fight for progressive change, that was the time!

Here’s the thing though – I’m not actually a member of the “Shouting Class.” Sure, I can get fired up and passionate about certain issues but I’d much rather have a healthy discussion about them and then figure out what we can do to have a positive impact on the problems we face.

Unlike many members of the Shouting Class, I’m not looking for attention and I don’t feel the need to be ranting about something all the time. I’m just not wired that way. In fact, I’m pretty chill most of the time. I don’t get very stressed out and I’m not a worrier anymore. On those rare occasions when I do get REALLY angry – and it’s only happened a few times during my adult life – you definitely don’t want to be anywhere near me... but the likelihood of me getting that mad is slim to none.

My point is that I care about all the crazy bullshit going on in the world but I’m not constantly fired up about it, so I certainly can’t pretend to be that way when I’m creating weekly blog posts and podcasts.

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My messaging missed the mark

Unfortunately, as people started to find The Progressive Leader, it wasn’t what most of them wanted. When they saw the name – The PROGRESSIVE Leader – they immediately thought it would be a political blog, railing against Republicans, all the establishment Democrats, and every leader who isn’t progressive enough for the members of the Shouting Class who are also uber-liberal.

Well, those of you who have stuck with me and continue to read what I write and listen to the podcast know that those folks didn’t find what they were looking for. Yes, I’ve talked about politics and I’ve been clear that I want to help people who have progressive values become highly effective leaders... but I’m not interested in writing about politics all the time or even putting a political spin on everything. And I’m definitely not interested in shouting all the time. I have better things to do in my life than rant about the issue du jour!

Back in May, I took some time to refocus and rethink my approach to this newsletter and podcast. I changed things up a little bit but not too much. I tried to adjust around the original idea of The Progressive Leader and it was okay... but I still wasn’t satisfied. Something was missing. It still wasn’t exactly what I wanted to share with people who are working to become better leaders.

One comment brought clarity!

A few weeks ago, someone said something and it really struck a chord with me. I was talking to a person who had come to me for my opinion/advice. When we were wrapping up our conversation, he said, “I don’t know how you can always be so relaxed. You’ve got so much going on and you’re getting so much accomplished, but you’re never stressed out at all. I’ve got less to deal with and I’m running ragged, freakin’ out most of the time! We need to get together for a beer at some point so you can share your secret!”

“I don’t know how you can always be so relaxed. You’ve got so much going on and you’re getting so much accomplished, but you’re never stressed out at all.”

Now, to be completely honest, I do feel stress; I just deal with it differently than most people, which keeps it from compounding. I actually think a little stress is healthy and helps us maintain balance.

Think about your body when you’re standing up and walking around. It’s the push and pull of the muscles – the tension and release against the stress of gravity and momentum – that actually allows you to move around. Or think about exercise: Muscles get stronger and grow when you put them under stress, whether through increasing the weight used or the length of time they’re worked (endurance).

I think of emotional and psychological stress in the same way – it’s just different pushes, pulls, tensions, and releases – so the idea is to work with them to get you were you want to go. The more you effectively deal with stress, the stronger you become and the easier it gets. Easy peasy.

But not for most people, apparently.

Since that conversation a few weeks ago, I’ve talked to several other people about whether or not they would find it more valuable to learn about being a progressive leader or learning to be a more relaxed leader, and the overwhelming response was that they’d LOVE to know more about how I manage to stay so relaxed.

People want to know how I can always be so calm and seemingly easy-going while getting lots of amazing things done, receiving Departmental recognition and industry awards, and building a team of people who actually talk about what a good boss I am and rave about the great team we’ve built. Toot-toot! (Yes… I just tooted my own horn.)

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It’s time for another change

After a lot of deliberation, I’ve decided that I’m going to start focusing on sharing what I’ve learned about being a highly effective but relaxed leader. I’m going to share the tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies I’ve discovered that help me make progress towards big, ambitious goals without burning out myself or my team. I’ll be sharing plenty of stories from my own experiences but I’ll try to make sure I provide solid advice and actionable ideas for you to use.

I understand it won’t be right for everyone – and if you subscribed to The Progressive Leader looking for political rants, this new direction certainly won’t fill that need. But if you’d like to learn how to be a more effective leader without getting totally stressed out, then stick around – it should be fun!

Coming soon:

Before the end of the calendar year, The Progressive Leader will become The Relaxed Leader. I’ll be updating all of the blog posts and some of the past podcasts. I’ll also be switching from a Substack subdomain to my own custom domain: RelaxedLeader.com

Once I’ve changed everything over, I’ll get back to publishing an article on Monday and a podcast on Friday, with occasional bonus content thrown in here and there, when I have the time (and the inspiration) to do so. Subscribers will still receive emails when posts and podcasts go live, so there’s nothing for you to change – just remember that the emails will be coming from The Relaxed Leader once the changeover is complete.

Finally, I’m starting to plan some potential online courses to offer. I can only share so much through weekly articles and podcasts, so in 2022 I’ll be offering some self-paced online courses to teach the basics of becoming a Relaxed Leader.

Thanks for sticking with me over the past few months and I hope you decide to stay around to see what comes next!

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“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” ~Richard Bach

Every single one of us has a way of looking at the world and psychologists have shown there are two general mindsets that help shape our individual perspective. These mindsets have been formed by our experiences, by the feedback and reinforcement we’ve received from others, and by the way we’ve processed all of those things. Research has shown that our beliefs – about ourselves, others, and how the world works – can predict both the ambitiousness of our goals and how likely we are to reach them.

The two general mindsets identified by researchers are the fixed-mindset and the growth-mindset. What researchers have discovered is that if they can identify a person’s general mindset, they can reliably predict some amazing things. Mindset can predict a person’s likelihood of success in every aspect of life: school, job/career, hobbies, and even personal relationships. In essence, what people fundamentally believe creates the limits of their success.

Relaxed Leaders must understand the power of the beliefs driven by these mindsets – fixed and growth – and then work to mold our beliefs to better support our personal vision and goals!

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Nature, not Nurture

Having a fixed-mindset means you believe that things like intelligence, talent, and even personality traits are inherited or somehow assigned via genetics. You assume people are born with these things and they remain fairly static over time.

Before you conclude that having a fixed-mindset is bad and therefore you don’t have one, keep in mind that it’s actually the most common of the two mindsets. Be honest with yourself. Have you ever said (or thought) anything like this?

“I’m not a numbers person.”

“She’s an extroverted people-person.”

“He’s just more creative than me!”

If you have a fixed-mindset, you tend to see both strengths and weaknesses as simply part of who a person is. You think each person has natural gifts and talents, including areas where they excel more easily than others. You also believe that no one is perfect, so we all have areas where we simply have no natural talent and will always struggle. You simply accept this and deal with it by understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, which drives the choices you make.

Many people I’ve worked with over the years have this mindset and some of them have managed to build successful careers and maintained strong relationships. Having a fixed-mindset doesn’t automatically mean you’ll fail, but there are some negative consequences you need to consider.

If you have a fixed-mindset, you tend to:

• Seek opportunities that play to your strengths because you see it as your only path to success

• Avoid opportunities that expose your weaknesses because you don’t believe you can overcome them

• Avoid opportunities that would require new skills because it increases the likelihood of failure

• Believe mistakes are simply a lack of natural ability, so you miss opportunities for self-reflection and development

• Quit when faced with a major setback because struggling with something means you’re just not good at it

If you have a fixed-mindset, you can still build a successful career and even become a decent leader – but your opportunities for improvement and even greater success will be seriously limited. And if you multiply the limiting mindset by the people you lead, it should be clear that you will never be a truly great leader.

One final thing to note is that having a fixed-mindset also makes you less resilient overall. It’s hard to bounce back from a setback when you see failure as something caused by a lack of innate talent and ability. When you believe you failed because you lacked something that’s impossible for you to learn or needed a skill you can never master, then you tend to start setting your sights lower. You start settling for less. Relaxed Leaders have to avoid that trap!

Nurture, Not Nature

Having a growth-mindset means you believe that things like intelligence, talent, and even personality traits can change significantly over time, especially with focused effort and lots of practice.

Before you conclude that having a growth-mindset is good and therefore you must have one, keep in mind that it’s actually the least common of the two mindsets. Be honest with yourself. Have you ever said (or thought) anything like this?

“I can do anything I put my mind to.”

“She succeeds because she never gives up.”

“Anyone can learn to be an excellent communicator.”

If you have a growth-mindset, you tend to see both strengths and weaknesses as things anyone can change. You don’t believe that initial aptitude in something means it’s some natural gift. You also don’t believe that initially struggling in something means you can never succeed in that area or turn it into a strength. You create your personal vision, set your goals, and then figure out how to achieve them. When it comes down to it, you know that good planning, hard work, and continued growth and learning is the key to success. You don’t believe you’re limited by so-called “natural talent,” which drives the choices you make and allows you to more confidently set lofty goals for yourself and those you lead.

Over the years, I’ve worked with people who consistently exhibit a growth-mindset; and though it doesn’t automatically guarantee success, there are definitely some positive effects that helped them.

If you have a growth-mindset, you tend to:

• Seek projects where you can learn something and expand your skill set, even if it exposes your weaknesses

• Take risks because personal growth is more important than avoiding the possibility of failure

• View mistakes as opportunities for self-reflection and development, not as just some permanent lack of ability

• Embrace negative feedback as necessary for personal growth

• Persevere when faced with a major setback because struggling with something simply means you haven’t mastered it yet

If you have a growth-mindset, you truly believe that hard work and perseverance will pay off. You don’t believe you’re limited by intelligence or “natural ability.” You believe you can learn what you need to know and acquire whatever skills are necessary to achieve your goals. Having a growth-mindset helps you focus on developing your future self and allows you to stop worrying about protecting or defending your current knowledge and abilities. You don’t argue for your limitations – you argue for your unlimited potential.

Relaxed Leaders can do amazing things when powered by a strong growth-mindset.

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Mindset and Stereotypes

Having a growth-mindset is very beneficial for your career but it can also protect you against some of the negative effects of bias. Relaxed Leaders understand that stereotypes and their negative effects play out every day across this country, in neighborhoods, schools, universities, companies, organizations, online, and in our politics. Some groups are stereotyped as being intelligent or ignorant, high-achieving or lazy, naturally good in academics or naturally athletic.

Stereotype threat is when someone is being evaluated on something and a group they identify with is negatively stereotyped in regards to the task being evaluated. Studies show that the person is more likely to do worse than they’re capable of doing. If this happens repeatedly, stereotype threat causes lots of problems. It often leads to lower overall performance, which causes people to choose easier subjects, embark on less ambitious career paths, and avoid anything that challenges the negative stereotypes. Developing a growth-mindset can help a person overcome the effects of stereotype threat.

Relaxed Leaders should start by understanding three things about growth-mindsets:

1. A person with a growth-mindset is more strategic, puts forth more effort, is more persistent, and exhibits far more resilience, which significantly improves overall performance.

2. A person can learn the growth-mindset through coaching interventions that are brief but consistent.

3. A person with a growth mindset has protection from the most damaging effects of negative stereotypes, which will improve their performance, encourage them to tackle more challenging projects, and allow them to truly enjoy their work.

How to Create a Growth-Mindset

Relaxed Leaders may or may not be able to ensure their organizations promote a growth-mindset. Your immediate influence may be limited by your position on the org chart. Even if you can’t change your organization’s culture, you can focus on your own development and the development of those within your sphere of influence.

Do you lead a team? Then be aware of the power of your own mindset and how it’s reflected in your words and actions.

• Conduct review sessions to help team members learn from mistakes instead of fearing them.

• Have regular coaching sessions with all team members and avoid categorizing them as either high-potential or low-potential.

• Offer challenging projects and other developmental opportunities to everyone and not just the chosen few.

You can help others develop a growth-mindset and experience all the benefits that mindset brings, but only if you’ve truly developed a growth-mindset yourself.

Research continues to show that our beliefs powerfully affect our future because they change how we understand both success and failure, and determine the choices we make and the opportunities we accept.

Luckily, you can shape your beliefs so they help you achieve your personal vision and goals. Do these four things and you’ll be well on your way to creating a growth-mindset that will help you achieve your goals and personal vision:

1. Determine your current mindset. Review the definitions above, including the common phrases. It’s likely that you’re not completely in one camp or the other, so try to figure out where you are on the spectrum from fixed to growth

2. Practice growth-mindset “self talk.” Like a muscle, your brain gets stronger with exercise – so practice thinking the right thoughts. When you catch yourself exhibiting a fixed-mindset, make a conscious effort to change your thoughts. Tell yourself you can learn whatever you need to know and acquire whatever skill is necessary. Tell yourself you CAN grow and change.

3. Push the boundaries of your comfort zone. Establish your personal vision, set appropriate goals, and identify something new you need to learn in order to move you toward your goals. Choosing something that clearly moves you closer to an important goal ensures you’ll have the proper motivation. Work on it until you succeed, then select something else to learn. Success reinforces success, so keep going!

4. Respond to struggles or setbacks by using the power of “yet.” No one is perfect and no one succeeds at everything they try… the first time. Having a growth-mindset means understanding that failure is temporary, not permanent. So when you’re trying to learn something new and find yourself struggling or making mistakes, don’t say, “I can’t do this!” Instead, try telling yourself, “I can’t do this… yet!” Know that you’ll get there and, sure enough, you will.

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Bottom Line:

What we fundamentally believe determines the limits of our success. If we have a fixed-mindset, we unnaturally restrict ourselves in far too many ways and ensure we will never come close to reaching our true potential. However, if we have a growth-mindset, the sky’s the limit. We see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, not as threats that will expose some imagined permanent weakness, and we take risks that can lead to amazing accomplishments.

Luckily, anyone can develop a growth-mindset and experience all the benefits that come with it - being more strategic, putting forth more effort, becoming more persistent, and exhibiting far more resilience – and also be a great role model to others. If you want to be the best Relaxed Leader you can be, start working on your mindset today!

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Tuesday Tirade

Years ago, the place where I was working went through an internal reorganization. All of the IT infrastructure support was being taken from the various sub-organizations and consolidated under the CIO. As part of that consolidation of personnel and responsibilities, we also brought together all of the related contracts and managed them centrally.

It might sound pretty straight-forward but if you’ve ever gone through anything like it, I’m sure you can imagine what a nightmare it ended up being.

Whether or not the sub-organizations were completely honest throughout this process (they weren’t) is a subject I might explore at some point – but not today. No, today I want to talk about the habit they developed afterward. A habit that became a knee-jerk reaction, which they couldn’t seem to help but do. It took some otherwise professional people and turned them into jerks. Knee-Jerk Jerks!

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“How can one habit make someone a jerk?”

The habit they developed was to argue against everything we did… but not because we had a string of bad ideas. It actually started very deceitfully. We would inherit a contract – staff and pricing already in place – and they would complain about the cost.

“Why is it more expensive than when we had the contract?”

I would stare back with a confused look on my face. “The cost is exactly the same. It’s the cost you transferred to us.”

The executive would then explain, with a straight face, that our numbers were wrong.

“Ummm... they’re your numbers. This is literally the file you gave us.”

It didn’t matter. The executive would insist the costs were going up. “I don’t care what ‘data’ you put in front of me, I know the IT portion of my budget is higher now than it was before!”

To this day, I don’t know if those executives where bold faced liars or if their direct reports really had them believing their IT budgets had been so much lower than reality.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that these executives got into the habit of simply disagreeing with anything we presented.

• When we proposed consolidating contracts to save money, they said the savings weren’t enough and the service wasn’t good enough (even though the consolidation hadn’t happened yet).

• When we shared the data showing that outages were down, they said they were hearing from “people in the field” that outages were worse.

• When we shared end-user surveys showing the highest customer satisfaction results the organization had ever had, they insisted satisfaction was higher when they managed the support themselves (with no data to back up the claim).

“Are you sure you’re not exaggerating?”

Unfortunately, I’m probably downplaying it a bit. It got to a point where many of these executives simply criticized what we were doing because we were doing it. Here’s a prime example:

My team and I put together a Service Catalog that rolled up all of the contracts into various services, so it was easier to understand all of a sub-organization’s costs by type of service instead of trying to understand all the pieces of hundreds of contracts supporting them. We worked really hard to present costs in a way that would give executives information in a way that would support business decisions.

One of the executives who had complained the most about not understanding his costs met with us, let us complete our presentation, and then said, “This doesn’t help me at all. Where are the details? I want contract-level details! How can I understand my costs without contract-level details?” I spent the next several minutes trying to explain how this Service Catalog actually provided an incredibly valuable view of his costs. He disagreed vehemently and stormed out of the meeting.

So my team and I went to work documenting all of the details of his costs. We gathered all of the contract-level data for his sub-organization and created a new presentation format that would lay out all of the individual costs that rolled up to each of the services in the Service Catalog. A couple weeks after that first frustrating meeting, we met with that same executive and presented all of the detail he insisted he needed.

Once again, he let us complete our presentation and then said, “This doesn’t help me at all. How am I supposed to make heads or tails of all this detail? You expect me to figure out my costs when you dump all these contract-level details on me?” I spent a few minutes trying to explain that this was EXACTLY what he had insisted he needed. He disagreed vehemently and stormed out of the meeting again.

What I realized was that the executive didn’t want high-level, well-organized info. He didn’t actually want line-item, contract-level detail either.

He wanted to regain control.

He wanted to have his IT staff back. He didn’t care if costs were the same or lower or higher. He didn’t care if service was the same or better or worse. He just wanted control, which meant he could never accept what we were doing. He couldn’t even cooperate because that might help us succeed – and if we were successful, then he’d never get his control back. He could never rebuild his little kingdom.

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“Okay, I understand the story – but what’s the bad habit again?”

The horrible habit is a knee-jerk reaction to anything proposed by someone you’ve decided is your “opponent.”

Instead of trying to figure out how to achieve a “win-win,” you’re happy to accept a “lose-lose” because you’re focused on making your “opponent” look bad. Besides, you can just blame your “loss” on your “opponent.” Honesty doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. Only winning matters.

But even winning has been redefined. If you lose less than your “opponent,” then you’ve won. If you can limit your “opponent’s” win – even if it hurts the people you’re supposed to serve – then you consider it a win. Ultimately, as long as you can retain your own power and authority, it’s a win that offsets any losses anyone else suffers (even your constituents).

Sound familiar?

Let me point out the elephant in the room (pun intended). We’ve been watching the same thing play out in politics for years... and it’s only getting worse. The disingenuous “negotiations” from the one side of the aisle aren’t focused on actually helping Americans – they’re focused on maintaining their own power at all costs.

I saw recently where a wannabe pundit on Twitter commented on Juneteenth, saying it was “an affront to the unity of July 4th.” But not long ago, during the prior Administration, the same dude was trumpeting the importance of Senate Republicans introducing legislation to make Juneteenth a Federal holiday! He smugly praised it and wrote, “Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in the White House for 8 years. Why didn’t they ever do it?”

An idea is a great idea if “your people” propose it? But as soon as your “opponent” proposes it, the idea is suddenly a steaming pile of dung? A toddler can see the flaw in that logic!

I’m not shocked that people in power pull this bullshit because they’re clearly just focused on maintaining their own power at all costs. What I continue to be surprised by is how many normal, everyday people are just fine with it.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, they’ve been trained to respond with the same knee-jerk reaction. “If the Libs have proposed it, then it’s not just un-American… it’s ANTI-American! Besides, if the Libtards have proposed it, then it’s all about taking what’s MINE and givin’ it to some freeloader who don’t wanna work! (I know ‘cuz Tucker told me so!)”

“You sound pretty pessimistic for a Relaxed Leader!”

I’ll admit that I’ve grown tired of trying to talk to Regressives who simply spout internet meme ideology.

“Critical Race Theory is an attack on America!”

Really? What don’t you like about it?

“It’s teaching our kids radical bullshit!”

Still no details. No explanation. Why? Because the truth is that they don’t have a thorough understanding of what Critical Race Theory is and isn’t. And even allegedly intelligent people don’t seem to know. Our local Catholic Bishop recently defended opponents of Critical Race Theory and when he was asked to explain what it is, he said, “Well, it has lots of different definitions, but the point is that the Church teaches that racism in all its forms is wrong.”

Okay... what? Sorry, but the important point is that the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington expressed support for opponents of Critical Race Theory and then refused to explain why. He stated that CRT has several definitions, then simply moved onto “the Church teaches racism is wrong?”

I’m not sure whether to classify that answer as a deflection, a non sequitur, or just extremely poor logic. If his point really was that he views Church teaching on racism as the best approach, then he would’ve completely opted out of the CRT debate. But he didn’t. His knee-jerk reaction was to support the conservatives because he always supports conservatives.

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“So what can we do?”

Well, in order to have a conversation, you need two people who are willing to listen to each other in order to understand, and are then willing to respond in a way that thoughtfully presents their individual opinions.

So first, you need to listen.

Second, you need to try to understand.

Third, you need to actually “own” your opinion and understand why you believe whatever position you’ve taken.

Both parties need to do this but too many people never get past step one!

Self-proclaimed progressives aren’t necessarily better. I’m frequently appalled by the vitriol that online progressives spew at conservatives – and at anyone else who doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with their agenda. They’ve fallen victim to the worst habit as well. They’ve become Knee-Jerk Jerks, automatically attacking anyone who disagrees with them.

The Bottom Line:

Knee-jerk Jerks have bought into the belief that “all or nothing” is the only acceptable approach. They see compromise as weakness and swear that “if you’re not for us, you’re against us.” They are the embodiment of the dark side of the Force because only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Relaxed Leaders need to find balance when dealing with Darth Regressive and his knee-jerk hordes. On the one hand, we have to resist the temptation to simply write them off as a lost cause, attacking any idea they have as a bad one simply because it’s theirs. On the other hand, we need to understand that a true negotiation requires two parties who are willing to compromise. When one side demands concession after concession and then undermines the deal anyway, further negotiation is just foolish.

Sometimes the best response to a Knee-jerk Jerk is to simply refuse to play their game and figure out how to make progress without them.

If you like what you’re reading in The Relaxed Leader, can you do me a solid and share it with someone else? Let’s share good ideas with friends and family who also believe we can improve and make progress for everyone!

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