As leaders, expectations are high. Team members depend on you for inspiration and guidance. Senior leaders look to you to perform and contribute. So you take everyone’s order and serve it up on a plate. Day in and day out, those revolving requests keep you on your toes and off balance until one day --- crash! Does that broken plate represent someone’s disappointment or your liberation from a task that was not fruitful? Let’s talk about priorities. 

Setting priorities is essential to managing expectations and accomplishing tasks at the right time and in the right way. The ability to do so is critical to your development as a leader and the reputation you build as one. 

Developing clear priorities for yourself and your direct reports starts by identifying what’s important. What needs to be done first and why? Does the outcome of that task impact other outcomes down the road? For example, if you rely on the relationships between your department and another to complete projects, one of your priorities might be to focus your team on building that relationship. Or, does your review of a report impact a team member’s ability to submit a work request? If so, that task may take precedent over another colleague’s request that is a “nice to have” but isn’t urgent. Congratulations, you’ve just gotten rid of a plate!

How to Set Priorities
It can be difficult to set priorities. At times, everything sounds important and you find yourself buckling under the pressure. You struggle to filter out the most urgent tasks and end up focusing on the easier ones that could have waited (that’s human nature, right?). 

But give yourself a break. Understanding what’s important takes time and careful thought to develop. Often, it’s a team effort. One way to develop priorities that are clear, actionable and supported is to carve out time to create a draft list of priorities, then discuss them with others, perhaps your boss and peers, to be sure that you are in alignment with their priorities and the priorities of the organization. Negotiating priorities is a good way to get stronger buy-in and awareness in the organization.

Once you’ve identified a short list of what’s important, discuss this with your team and identify the “urgent” requests and fire drills that unnecessarily create more spinning plates that get in the way of being able to focus on the important priorities.

If your organization struggles with this, consider creating alignment meetings at the executive level or other conversations to calibrate and negotiate priorities to keep everyone focused on what is important right now, what might be changing, and where the executive team is either supporting or distracting the workforce.  At the executive level, distractions and fire drills have impact on so many more people that deviating from what’s important becomes much more costly in time, energy, frustration and lack of execution.

At a personal level, creating your priorities and making sure that they are in alignment with your commitments as a leader will help you align your team and reduce your spinning plates to a manageable number. Decide what “urgent” activities you will not engage in, and have conversations with others who create them and make requests. Learn to ask for what you need and say “no” to things in a way that supports the relationship with others and also makes your priorities clear.

Keep this in mind.
Keeping multiple plates spinning is possible, as long as you know that the plates that are spinning are the important ones, and you have clear understanding and buy-in from others. Limit your plates and you will be much more successful in executing on the commitments that you’ve made and the priorities of the organization.

​You’ve recently heard the news about C-suite executives, high-ranking government officials and others who lose their, well…composure… in high stakes situations. It’s difficult to discern cause and effect in those situations, and yet there is compelling evidence that lack of sleep, persistently high levels of stressful and complex decisions and situations, and poor habits of self-care will all contribute to low levels of resilience for any human being.
 
Resilience is that ability to bounce back and maintain elasticity, and it’s related to all facets of our lives – body, mind, heart, spirit, however you want to articulate your complex self.  It doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur, celebrity, physician, knowledge worker, executive, parent, leader, follower, or any human being – resilience is a capability that we all need.
 
Resilience in our bodies means that – through repeated practice – we’ve trained our bodies to recover from injury.  Two of the best practices for physical resilience are a thoughtful yoga program and well-designed physical training that suits your goals and capabilities.
 
Resilience in our minds helps us adjust quickly to the shifting sands of reality – those unexpected (yet inevitable) events that can derail a sound mind if we are rigid and unprepared. Preparation and planning are generally part of what you do at work and in life, and those practices serve a purpose in helping you move forward toward a goal or outcome that you want.  If you have planned well for a vacation, for example, a change in weather or an equipment malfunction is easier to manage.
 
Notice what you are attached to in terms of beliefs and habits, and what you are avoiding. That self-observation will provide you with insights to adapt your way of thinking about a situation that may ease your stress, give you better options and reduce the likelihood of coming unglued in an unattractive, unproductive way.
 
Resilience in our hearts and spirits protects us against emotional injury and makes recovery faster and easier. Having a strong sense of self-worth, powerful faith/attitude and compassion toward others are all indicators of emotional resilience.
 
Learning by doing – practicing – through meditation or taking time to reconnect your mind, soul and body throughout the day, can build resilience for the times when you experience a crisis, or when you are under fire for a length of time and you have to show up cool under pressure.  Without practice, it will be tough in the moment to wrangle your emotions and physical responses to respond as your best self.
 
If you want to begin a resilience practice, keep your eye on the word “practice.” As in, “it’s not going to be perfect” kind of practice, the kind of practice that is never truly “done.”  As with anything in life, practice leads us to levels of mastery, not willing ourselves.  You won’t lose 5 pounds by just thinking about it. You’ll need to reduce your caloric intake and exercise more. That’s the practice.
 
Like learning anything new, patience is a virtue. Doing even an imperfect practice is much better than no practice. This is on-the-job training at its best, and most of your daily experiences are opportunities to practice resilience – managing a difficult co-worker, establishing a new vendor relationship, calling a plumber to your house on a Saturday night.
 
One of my mentors, Doug Silsbee, was a pioneer in presence-based leadership.  His teachings began simply with a focus on prioritizing time and space each day and creating a goal for your practice. Doug challenged us to ground at least 10 times a day. That means breathing, feeling your feet on the floor and reshaping your posture to settle yourself for a few minutes.  Your calendar can be a tool to remind you to practice.
 
Try to schedule a couple of 10-15 minute walks each day just to clear your mind and reconnect with your body. Notice if you are feeling emotionally triggered and think about why that might be.  Jot notes down in a journal and keep track of when you need to practice more in order to avoid being triggered.
 
Practice often makes for more practice, and the goal is not to be perfect, but to practice consistently in a way that moves you towards more clear and focused thinking, a calmer emotional state and more awareness of how others are responding to you. That in and of itself will build resilience.

​Relationships are complicated, right?  So let’s break this down a bit. Working relationships are not so much about whether we go out to dinner together after the workday, but more about mutual commitment.  If you and I are committed to each other, we are more likely to support each other, hold each other accountable and pull in the same direction to accomplish our goals.  Trusted relationships can become a powerful force for good in an organization, as more people moving together in the same direction will get there fast. People pulling and pushing against one another will never get there at all.  I need you, and you need me, to be successful.
 
The single most important relationship-building tool is frequent and honest two-way conversation. Great leaders insist on a regular and honest exchange of information and teach their team members also to insist on it. Without this exchange, the conversations that aren’t had, those missed conversations, become an invisible dark force that inhibits relationships.  
 
Imagine all of the conversations that you would need to have with a colleague on a cross-functional project. When the two of you come together, each with expertise in your respective functional area, you have to transcend your expertise and complete something larger than both of you. Combining your skills, personalities, behaviors, approaches and knowledge for the greater good of a successful project can be a feat that would challenge the Yoda in all of us. A large dose of conversation is the secret ingredient to achieve something that is magical and effective.
 
In order to develop a great working relationship, you have to be committed to staying in conversation with someone even when the going gets tough - even when you show up in your functional cape and forget your team wardrobe.  Committing to each other’s success in order for the relationship to work means someone might have to give more at times than the other.  Sometimes you have to adapt behavior to show up in a way that invites participation from the other.  Sometimes it means being willing to apologize when you don’t uphold your commitments.
 
Use the force of two-way conversations and mutual commitment. Learn how to build strong working relationships where success belongs to everyone involved.

Obstacles, distractions and things that get in our way are part of the norm of life, both at home and in the workplace. Recently, my sometimes well-behaved Weimaraner (large, needy and extremely affectionate dog) decided to shred her bed in the middle of the night, leaving the mess for me to discover the next morning when I had no additional time to spare before a demanding client meeting. This is life, right?
 
How you coach yourself through the obstacles of life can mean the difference between having a meltdown, spinning your wheels, or successfully navigating the obstacle and moving forward. Building self-awareness and being open to not having all of the answers are two tools for working through obstacles, especially at work.
 
Recently I worked with a client who is facing some very real obstacles to completing a project because of functional silos that exist in their workplace. The walls seem to be pretty tall and thick in some places, and the environment is territorial. You may have experienced this in your own organization. You and your department might even be “those people.”
 
Working through, around or with obstacles is a lot of what we are called to do in our work as leaders. It could be called problem solving or teamwork or team building or living in chaos, and in today’s VUCA world (the acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), it is the norm. 

​Here are a few tips to consider when coaching yourself through these challenges:
 

• Consider accepting what is, rather than wasting time wondering, “Why me?”  Managing unproductive emotions usually enables you to think more clearly and arrive at a better solution.
• Acknowledge that you don’t have to have all of the answers. As a team leader or member, being vulnerable enough to ask for help when the answers are not apparent or easy will strengthen the team and the success of the outcome of actions that you decide to take.
• Take the time to debrief and learn from why this situation arose and what worked, or not, in the solution. Being a consistent and persistent learner will set you up for more successful outcomes.
• Curiosity is generally more productive than blaming, whether it’s someone else or yourself.  If you ask yourself, “How did I end up here again?” and truthfully respond, you might learn about assumptions you make or promises you’ve broken, or something else that will be useful to help you learn how your behaviors influenced the obstacles that you are facing.
• Think through the missing conversations that would have prevented the obstacles, or could break down the barriers.  Leaders are paid to have productive conversations, and sometimes we resist having a conversation for fear that it will be confrontational, painful, or something else. The conversations we avoid generally create relationship barriers and can contribute to the obstacles we face.
• Tap your sense of humor. Some obstacles are serious; many are not. Using humor as a response to obstacles, whenever reasonable, is good for your soul and the souls around you.

My lesson learned is that dogs are not always predictable, and that it would be a good practice to have an extra dog bed on hand to make it easy for me to stay on my schedule. I admit that I don’t have an answer for why my dog did this, so I accept that this will most likely happen again, and I elect to find humor in the situation. What’s funnier than a million pieces of cotton/poly blend at 6:00 a.m., after all?

Leadership lessons and inspiration can be gained from everyday experiences, whether we are participating or observing. While not automatic, we can choose to look through the lens of inspiration, and that lens can move us to change and grow, or sometimes just keep going. Most recently, I was inspired by the run for the Stanley Cup by Nashville’s local NHL team, the Predators.  Here are a few things that I took from the experience:
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• Having grace under fire is a way of being, and in spite of all of the challenges they faced, our team and coaches took the high road. Their focus was moving forward and playing one game at a time.  As leaders, learning from the past, but realizing that we can’t change it, gives us the energy to adapt, apply and keep moving toward our goals.  In addition, focusing forward prevents us from being distracted by unproductive rabbit holes.

• Pulling together as a team takes work and belief in each other, as well as commitment to each other’s success. 17 Predators scored, both offensive and defensive players. Excellent teamwork enabled these young men to succeed without heavy reliance on the work of just a few. While the team has some outstanding performers, they couldn’t have truly been their best without the commitment of their other team members to “get it done.”

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• Hard work pays off, and sometimes you have to gut your way through, pushing for just one more effort, to see a project or plan to completion.  Our team played with unfailing commitment, even in the face of some failures and tough performances.  The Predators showed us the importance of believing in your purpose, even when the situation feels challenging.

 

• Never underestimate the value of having fun and believing in the possibilities, regardless of the odds stacked against you.  While disappointed that they didn’t bring the Cup to Nashville, each player expressed their excitement in returning in a few months to start the new season and build on what they learned this year.

 

• The halo effect of their positivity and character truly inspired the community to respond with a combination of our Southern culture and hospitality, blending the traditions of the game of hockey.  As a leader, it’s a great outcome to elevate an entire team by creating values and behaviors that transcend the “game” of work.  We love our players, and appreciate their commitment to the community and the fans, and they, in turn, rallied for us.  You can’t ask for more than that in a win-win environment.

Certainly bringing the Cup home would have been an amazing end to this story, and yet we celebrate the Predators' demonstration of commitment, focus and integrity, as well as the great sense of fun that they brought to each game. Their best inspired the rest of community to be committed and bring our best.  It wasn’t perfect, indeed, yet spectacularly successful none-the-less.  It was a nearly ideal leadership experience, and was certainly inspiring enough to consider what worked well that could be applied in other work environments.  How can you bring these lessons to your team?

Most of us start our journey of business ownership with a passion and a heart for the pursuit of our own thing, not beholden to anyone else to make decisions for us or supervise our decisions.  We love the freedom and the sense of adventure, and the ability to pursue something that enriches our lives and pays for the food on our tables.  We believe in finding work that is consistent with who we are, and we also believe that others will want to follow us, buy from us, and also experience all of the value that we can bring to their world.

If you want to have a successful business, though, whether you work for yourself or someone else, you need to know very specifically who you are serving and what makes you uniquely qualified to deliver the value that you say you are offering.  You have to understand what risks you are taking and why you are taking them on this specific market segment. 

You also need to have the discipline to do the things that you should do even when you don’t want to do them.  I think the term today is “adulting” when you make those types of decisions.  And in a new business, knowing who you serve, how you will serve them and making the tough decisions each day to spend your time focused there is a very adult decision.

So, while passion and heart goes a long way, building structure and strategy around your passion will help you relate and deliver better to your ideal customer, and support you in taking risks that are more likely to have a reward for you.  If you want to improve your success:
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• Create a very specific customer profile of the people you serve, and then test your theory. Conduct a survey. Invite some folks to lunch. Ask for feedback from the people you believe that you serve, then listen carefully to what they say. Take appropriate actions based on what you are learning.

• Face your fears and begin doing the things that you don’t like to do, but will bring you success. Prepare for and attend a networking event where you set a goal to meet certain people or a certain number of people. Practice your elevator speech until it begins to feel like it’s consistent with who you are and how you want to be seen by others.

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• Get outside of your comfort zone and take action, rather than being paralyzed by analysis and awaiting the “perfect time” to take action.  Moving forward fearlessly means having a plan, taking some risks and learning from mistakes.

Your heart is only one of your guides on this journey. Creating strategy and structure in addition to identifying your target market, meeting them and fine-tuning while you are learning about them will require courage, discipline and a positive mindset.  Your heart will benefit from having that type of support.

One of the biggest challenges we have today isn’t a dearth of ideas, apps and experts; it’s the ability for a business owner or leader to select a very few things to implement for the biggest impact, and then execute well on those few things.  Entrepreneurs do not have unlimited time, money or other resources to spend scattered across too many ideas, so the real challenge is to make time to decide what top three things will move your business forward and master those. Knowledge isn’t power unless you can activate it to achieve your priorities.

If you are feeling scattered and smothered and potentially covered (thank you, Waffle House, for this hash brown metaphor), it’s time to develop a system to create calm, remove distractions and create focus. Here are a few tips to consider:
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• Even if it’s taken a village to get you to where you are today, working with one coach or mentor at a time allows you to focus. Knowing when to access other points of view is an important distinction when leveraging advice and guidance, and too many ideas muddy your own good decision-making abilities.

• More isn’t always better. More reading, more work on your plate, more projects for your team – more, more, more only leads to more distraction and less execution, which can make you feel overwhelmed and smothered. Those most successful in business actually discipline themselves every day to focus on the important few.

• Accept your limited resources, including time, money and people, and work with what you have. Don’t waste resources on something that isn’t going to give you a return toward your business goals.

• Don’t have goals for your business? Create them and be clear what the return is on any money you are spending, on assignments you are giving to others, and on decisions you are making in the moment. Better yet, don’t make a big decision in the moment. Make time for that decision to see if it fits with your reality of limited resources.

• Know the best way to grow your business. Isolating yourself in your office won’t build business or create revenue. Identify the top three ways for reaching your target audience and be sure that you are working in those three spaces to build business. Here’s a hint: Social media isn’t usually in the top three, but it can support what you are doing face-to-face, building relationships and generating real-time buzz for your products and services.  Even today, people like to connect with others through speaking, meeting and sharing ideas in a live environment.

Making deliberate choices about how you will spend your valuable time and money, and not being distracted by the need to do more will enable you to master the effective few things that will grow your business, and also set you up to be more available to real opportunity that crosses your path.

What you choose to do with your time directly impacts what you accomplish by the end of the day. I know. That sounds so obvious. And yet I hear this so often: “Wow, it’s been SOOOO busy today, but I have no idea what I did.”  In our world of constant stimulation and distraction, disruptions and complexity, it’s easy to be off-the-chain busy and not accomplish anything that pertains to our priorities.

The constant barrage of emails popping into the inbox, text messages dinging, voice mails blinking, cell phones buzzing and other electronic notifications can feel like an assault on the senses and most definitely on the attention span. While the tools that deliver these messages are necessary to our modern way of doing business, we don’t have to be slaves to them. We can manage them, rather than being managed by them.

Building a few habits of how you approach your day can help reduce the busy-ness and increase your focus on your few and most important priorities. Here are several tips to consider:

• Know your top few priorities for the year and keep those close at hand. Confirm those with others you work with to be sure that there is alignment and agreement.

• Make sure you block your time each day for doing the things necessary to achieve those priorities.

• Create time limits for distractions like social media and chatting with friends and co-workers. Spending unplanned time on these types of distractions can be like spending your money on impulse items and wondering where your paycheck went.  

• Learn to say “no” to requests, and help others find their own answers, other resources or some other answer if you are the person they believe always says “yes” to whatever is requested.

• Use the features of your email to decide what you need to address immediately, what can wait until tomorrow, and what, frankly, just needs to be ignored.

• At the end of each day, take a quick look at where you spent your time and how you will adjust for tomorrow and beyond.  Focusing on priorities is a discipline that takes daily attention.

• Celebrate the wins, and learn from what didn’t work as well. Judging yourself isn’t productive; acknowledging and adapting is.

We all face distractions and those days when we aren’t as productive or focused as we had planned. We also all have conscious choices about how we spend our time, which is a responsibility that needs to be managed. Leaders who are successful model the discipline and the habits of evaluating what’s working or not, and shift their habits to adapt to what works best.  

​A person’s response to stress and change is often a reflection of that person’s ability to adapt and flex  – their resilience. Like a little green claymation character, resilient people can change gears gracefully, quickly envision Plan B (and C and D), and keep focused on the end goal despite the detours, road blocks and hazards on the way there.
 
Leaders who are resilient set a tone for their teams that is confident and reassuring, a tone that maintains progress and productivity even while the sands are shifting under their feet. Conversely, leaders who break rather than bend will find themselves with employees who are confused, frustrated, perhaps even fearful - but not productive.
 
However you show up as a leader, whether it’s calm or frenetic, assured or afraid, focused or overwhelmed, your team will become a reflection of you. Stress can be contagious, as can resilience and humor and all other behaviors that we bring to our work. Showing up resilient gives your followers the confidence to resist panic, the inspiration to stay on task, and the motivation to remain committed to the goal.
 
Resilience is a practice and a shift in mindset. We often attribute drama in the workplace to those who are not resilient. That ability to weather a storm, bounce back from a failure, and be calm in the midst of a storm are characteristics that define unflappable, resilient leaders.  They manage stress, chaos and discomfort as just part of the job, and they take the time to practice those things that build resilience, such as disciplines around taking care of themselves, managing their priorities and establishing boundaries around their work and their relationships.
 
Resilience is finding a center of gravity and strength from which to operate in a consistently changing complex and complicated work environment.  Knowing you can bend and being willing to be uncomfortable are highly stabilizing characteristics of strong leaders.

I work within a number of frameworks with my clients to help them see themselves as the leaders they need and want to be. I think about these frameworks as scaffolding that supports learning in a way that has meaning and context for you, the individual leader.  Once the scaffolding is in place, then you can begin to fill out the form and function of the what, why and how of your learning and development.
 
One of my “go-to” frameworks is one that I call “The Four R’s.” All of executive and leadership development cannot be boiled down to these four concepts, but what I’ve observed, experienced and studied is that great leaders will exhibit a strong showing of each of these:
 
Resilience: Effective leaders are those who can bend in strong winds without breaking and manage the continual stress of ongoing change and constant access to information. Often the coaching process investigates ways to develop and strengthen resilience and improve responses to stress and change. Team members are more apt to trust a resilient leader and follow where they need to be led. 
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Relationships: Building workplace relationships is critical to productivity and success, and the single most important relationship-building tool is frequent and honest two-way conversation. Leader success blooms from team member success, the foundation of which is a regular, healthy exchange of information. Great leaders insist on honest conversation and teach their team members also to insist on it – otherwise teams become confused, mislead and demoralized.  Think of a rowing team that works well together and imagine what kind of chaos happens when they don’t. Yikes.

Real: The fear of humiliation often keeps people from being themselves, or being vulnerable in the workplace. It’s tough to admit you don’t have all the answers, particularly if you are the leader. When leaders achieve the ability to be more vulnerable, or “real,” they see team members step toward them and experience a greater degree of connection and cooperation with their employees.

​Rhythm: How work gets done is critically important for a successful organization. Creating a proper work rhythm for a team allows members to speed up and slow down together, gracefully give entry to new members and create an environment of reciprocal trust. Leaders who create that rhythm minimize disruptions and provide a productive and joyful work experience for their team members.  The flow of work and interaction becomes more predictable and consistent. Go back to that rowing analogy. If there isn’t a rhythm, someone is going to feel pain.
 
Consider what framework helps you orient yourself to your personal and professional development. How are you building competence and mastery in the Four R’s?