How would you complete this phrase?

“If it ain’t broke… __________?”

“Don’t fix it, right?  

Here’s the problem with that: Time Breaks Everything!

You all know the story and have seen the casualties to go with it… taxis totally missed Uber and lost millions in sales and market share.

The casualty list is exhaustive and here are a few…

• Record companies didn’t see iTunes/Spotify
• Kodak didn’t see digital
• Typewriters didn’t see computers
• Blockbuster didn’t see Netflix
• Gillette didn’t see Dollar Shave Club

So, do you think that’s still going on? Well… duh.

How can you prevent your industry, organization, or even your personal career from being Ubered… disrupted… rendered completely irrelevant?

Plot your own demise.

As much as possible, I want you to metaphorically step outside of yourself, look at your business anew and ask, “What IF someone were going to “Uber” us? How could they do what we do in a considerably better, cheaper and/or easier way?

The Transportation Security Administration hires experts to randomly smuggle firearms, explosives and all manner of contraband through their security.

Why? They’re looking for vulnerabilities. And so should YOU! 

There are three areas to consider immediately:

1. Technology. How could someone totally reinvent your business using an app, robots, artificial intelligence, software or crowd-sourcing?

2. Customer Service. The common denominator with most of the above businesses is their downfall was preceded by poor customer service? How could someone do the same thing you do and by simply being considerably better to their customers take you business? Where have your customers accepted sub-par treatment?

3. Quality. What have your employees or customers come to accept as a limitation which someone else could solve and take business away from you?

All the businesses mentioned above were so busy doing what made them successful that they failed to see the larger picture, the trends, the changes happening right in front of them.

A great example we see in progress right now is the way Tesla, like them or not, is revolutionizing the automobile industry…

1. Technology - theirs is the most advanced in the industry.
2. Customer service - they have reinvented the sales/buying process getting rid of the objectionable tenets of the dealership model.
3. Quality - a standard internal combustion engine/vehicle has approximately 1000 moving parts; a Tesla has eight.

Mindset: This isn’t about vulnerability, it’s about opportunity. 

My point here is not merely a defensive play to guard against being rendered irrelevant so you can continue as before.  

My real point is that discovering your vulnerabilities reveals your opportunities… to lead, to improve, to grow and to better serve your customers.  

Every vulnerability is an opportunity… discover them before someone else does.

Plot your own demise!

The employees we’ve interviewed who loved where they work had a very specific quality in common: they trusted their managers.

One of the biggest misconceptions we come across in our undercover workplace research is the idea that employees have to earn the trust of their managers. If you are a leader who still views loyalty this way, it’s time to flip your script. Because you can’t expect trust if you haven’t earned it yourself.

The employees we’ve interviewed who loved where they work had a very specific quality in common: they trusted their managers. They knew they could ask for help in a crisis; they knew they could express a worry or a complaint without being punished for it somewhere down the line. And because these employees trusted their leaders—meaning they didn’t have to perform under the weight of anxiety or resentment—they felt free to return that same loyalty.

And we’ve found in our research that they return it by the boatload.

Creating Employee Trust Through Designed Moments

Earning that level of trust from your staff is not about making a big show of what a great pal you are, or what a super cool boss you can be. It’s about little, everyday actions—I call them “designed moments.” These types of moments are the #1 thing that come up when we ask employees to tell us about a manager who inspired unbreakable loyalty.

What is a designed moment? It’s simply a moment of attention and consideration—one that stands out and feels like the opposite of the daily routine. Moments like these can have a sense of wonder to them, giving an employee a deep sense of being noticed, supported, and even cared for. Think of them as a personalized action you can take to turn an ordinary workday into a powerful memory.

Sounds pretty incredible, right? But, it’s more subtle than you think.

Here are just a few real-world examples of designed moments that made a huge impact on the employees we’ve interviewed:

• Inviting the team out for a surprise lunch
• Sending a six-month supply of diapers to an employee who had a new baby
• Launching a GoFundMe campaign for an employee who was having a health crisis
• Picking up the phone and checking in on how an employee was doing after an ambitious project fell through
• “Calling out” an employee’s contribution to a success, and offering a heartfelt thanks
• Recognizing an employee’s specific talents, and the future the manager saw in them

Get the idea? Simple, thoughtful actions, made regularly over time with each employee.

Building a Bank Account of Trust

Do these moments seem small? Well, they are. But it’s their very smallness that packs such a powerful degree of surprise and meaning for the employees who receive them. That’s the amazing thing about designed moments: it isn’t about staging a huge event, like paying for college or sending your employees on a vacation. You’re not holding a lottery, with random big winners. Instead, what you’re doing is making regular deposits of trust.

It’s like building a bank account of loyalty with each of your employees. And, just like with a bank account, when you deposit a lot—even if it’s slowly, in small amounts—you can ask for more in return.

Over time, each of your designed moments—each investment you make in care, attention, and praise—will move your employees closer to a relationship founded in trust, connection, and, yes, even love. But you can only reap those returns if you keep making your deposits.

And I mean with each employee, as often as you can.

Challenge: Create a Designed Moment

There is no recipe for a designed moment—and that’s because they have to be genuine, and—this is the most important thing—they have to be personalized both to the situation and to the employee. So, to determine the best way to design a moment for a given employee, you have to invest your time and interest in that person, and get to know them as an individual: their talents, goals, hopes, dreams, interests—and disinterests, too.

Here’s where to start: with one single employee. Pick someone—perhaps a person you’ve been struggling to connect with—and try to design one moment that will have meaning for that person. Is there a big life event on the horizon you could acknowledge or support? Something they have accomplished at work to celebrate? What kind of action could you take that might startle them out of their daily grind—in a really good way?

Can’t think of anything? That’s a clue you need to start a little further back. Invest some time in getting to know that employee better. Work alongside them. Ask about their lives. Pay a little more attention to how their workday is going. This groundwork will give you better insight into what might make an impact for that individual.

Remember: deposits of trust aren’t about making a big show. They’re about simply being there for your employees, both in the literal and metaphorical sense.

It’s Time to Take Responsibility for Trust

If you want your people to truly commit to you, you first have to earn it. Yes, winning that trust—building those individual bank accounts—takes effort and time (sometimes lots of time). But once you have loyalty, it’s contagious—and it won’t be long before you’ve created a workplace culture in which your whole team has each other’s back.

So, design those impact moments, invest in that loyalty, and keep making those small, everyday deposits of trust. Because if your people trust you, they will give their all for you.

Nine out of 10 people are currently in consideration of a job change. 51% of them are doing something about it, researching, posting their resume, talking to their friends and colleagues..

Tim Sanders shares how important it is that leaders move "upstream" in their mitigation efforts towards retaining their talented employees by being strategic, not reactive. Get the market edge by being proactive in your strategy to support your people - your business success depends upon it. 

VIDEO TRANSLATION
Starting in 2018, researchers begin to call for War For Talent, part two, pointing to an ever-tightening full-time job market in categories ranging from technology to marketing, creative design, analytics, and all forms of knowledge work.

And, then in the spring of 2020, here comes the COVID pandemic, which ushered in a wave of burnout over the coming months. And today, we have a crisis bubbling up between workers and leaders — it's a conflict about whether you continue to work at home, or you have to go in to the “risk” environment of the office. Millions will leave for that reason alone.

And then, there's been a paradigm shift for so many who now consider the importance of life versus the importance of the job at hand. That's why in May of this year, economists started to call for the Great Resignation — a wave of millions of people leaving their current jobs.

Now, I've reviewed these numbers, so consider this. Nine out of 10 people are currently in consideration of a job change. 51% of them are doing something about it, researching, posting their resume, talking to their friends and colleagues. The most conservative prediction I've seen suggests that 25% of workers will job leap in 2022.

Recent research at Upwork also finds that 10 million people that are leaving the full-time workforce are considering never coming back, choosing instead the flexibility of becoming a freelancer. As one executive recently quipped, "The skills gap is turning into a skills canyon." Now what does this mean to you?

Well, if they're not already, your managers are going to be drowning in digital transformation or business growth debt, where they cannot resource the work as requirements pile up. Customer service backlogs will drag down your reputation, projects will run late or never get launched, programs will get cancelled, and for so many companies, business will grind to a halt.

But, those companies that think "upstream," putting a prevention in place for this discontinuity — they will gain a market edge over those that don't for years to come. Just consider the case of information technology — CIO Dive documents that your managers are losing 3 to 9 hours every week trying to use talent acquisition, or antiquated staffing solutions to fill their skills gaps.

I think that the difference between thinking tactical and thinking strategic comes down to which end of the stream you're looking at. If you think prevention, solving a problem before it happens, you're thinking "upstream" and that’s strategic.

If you're reactive, that's thinking "downstream" — for your company, that's an incredible risk.

Ask yourself right now, which beliefs do you currently carry around with you, that are no longer serving you, that are negative beliefs?

Vinh Giang uses humor and magic to highlight how misdirection is used in his magic tricks and how misdirection also negatively impacts our assumptions/beliefs in our professional and private lives.  

Understanding how misdirection causes negative beliefs and communications to continue in your life, Vinh shares thoughts on how we need to recognize and challenge these negative perceptions in ourselves and transform them into positive beliefs that build us up to our greatest potential. 

VIDEO TRANSLATION

I'd love to show you one of the first pieces of magic that I ever learned as a young magician. Now I want you to watch this coin very closely. If I take this coin here and I squeeze it hard enough, what you will see is the following — if I just snap my fingers, I can make the coin completely vanish and disappear. That’s amazing, right?

The reason you find it amazing is because you've made a false assumption. You've been misdirected. And, the false assumption that you made was that I took the coin and put it into this hand. Whereas in actual reality, what happened was, the coin never left this hand.

So, I'll show you exactly how I did this. What I did was, I pretended to take the coin. But again, the coin stays in this hand. But, the assumption you made was it went into this hand. Again, misdirection has occurred.

When you fall for a magician's misdirection, it's fun, and dare I say, amazing. But, here's the dilemma — misdirection doesn't just happen with magicians. You experience misdirection every day in your personal life and your professional life and it limits your potential.

I want you to think about this, especially in your workplace right now, and in your life personally. How many false assumptions have you made? I mean, I can tell you now in my life, I made the assumptions in the past that I'm not credible enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. I'm not good looking enough. And, when you start repeating these assumptions to yourself over and over again, they gradually become beliefs.

And that right there, my friends, is when you've misdirected yourself. Every single thing we do in our life is grounded in our past history of assumptions. We need to continually have the courage to question our assumptions, and especially have the courage to challenge our existing negative beliefs.

Ask yourself right now, which beliefs do you currently carry around with you, that are no longer serving you, that are negative beliefs? I challenge you to question those beliefs because they may be standing on some pretty darn weak and silly assumptions.

Look, in closing, allow magicians to continually misdirect you — have fun with magic. We all need a little bit of magic in our lives. We all need a bit of astonishment.

But, stop playing tricks on yourself. Stop fooling yourself into believing that you're not good enough. You're not capable and you're not worthy. These are not real assumptions. These are false. You are good enough. You are capable and you are worthy.

Let me leave you with one last quote by Albert Einstein, who says “assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong.”

The key to growth, high performance and real impact is commitment.

As a young entrepreneur I had a mentor who used to tell me, “If you treat your business casually, you will become a casualty of your business.”

This advice has stuck with me for nearly 20 years and with time I have found it to be applicable in many areas beyond business.

If you treat your health casually, you will become a casualty.

If you treat your personal and professional growth casually, you will become a casualty.

If you treat your marriage casually, you will become a casualty.

If you treat parenting casually, then your kids will become a casualty.

The key to growth, high performance and real impact is commitment.

True commitment opens doors, gains followers and extends positive influence.

The Commitment Scale asks us to assess where we are living.
At a level of distraction? Constantly being pulled away by every distraction.

At a level of decision? Making a decision plants your flag. It cuts off other options and gives you direction.

At a level of discipline? Where we follow through and choose consistency.

At a level of devotion? Where you are driven by purpose. Where you don’t treat things casually, you are fully committed.

It is devotion that builds brands, loyal followers, committed teams and leaves a legacy.

Don’t be casual.

Words paint a thousand pictures, through stories, tales, and more. Creating imaginary worlds to jump into and explore.

Once upon a time…how those words can still conjure up the magic of childhood for many of us when our parents would read us books at bedtime. Perhaps you are a parent and are reading books to your little ones again.

Words are essential for all of us and have the power to build you up or tear you down. They can spark a war or negotiate peace.

Most adults still find it challenging to find the right words for the right moments.

And many adults still fail to understand the impact of what leaves their mouth, their pen or their keyboard…

Could it be possible that reading a book like this with the children in our lives could help raise the consciousness of ourselves AND our children?

The young at heart can also hear simple truths from this book, so get your cup of tea and nestle into your armchair to read this book’s deceptively simple message on how your words each day will change your world.

Illustrations by Eevi Jones

"We do not ever want to turn a blind eye to our employees. How much fruit would they be capable of bearing if they received a little more attention, a little more care."

Ignorance is Not Bliss
I have an entire chapter in my most recent book on leadership, The Art of Caring Leadership, on looking for greatness in those we lead. I detail how to take into consideration their strengths in order to better lead them and guide your organization to success. The art of leadership is perfected and achieves greater success when the leading extends beyond just the hands of leadership. The more you know about your employees’ strengths, the better your team will work.

While leadership can feel very lonely in theory, especially for leaders who are part of a one-person team, it is an action that thrives the more perspectives it takes into consideration. A leader who makes decisions without consulting others comes across as self-centered. Leaders, like all human beings, are imperfect and we have limited perspectives and often very particular points of view.

A Plumb Metaphor
Think of it in terms of this story. When I first moved into my house back in 2007, I barely noticed a big purple tree in our front yard. Fast forward a bit, my neighbors are moving away and they come over to say goodbye. She mentions how grateful she was for all the plums they got from our tree. It was a plum tree! I had a fruit-bearing tree in my yard for months without even noticing it! Luckily, my neighbor was able to put some of the plums to good use, but I wonder how many grew and died without ever being used.

We do not ever want to turn a blind eye to our employees. How much fruit would they be capable of bearing if they received a little more attention, a little more care. Heck, even just looking is the key sometimes. Imagine that, their talents on full display for anyone to see if you just stop and observe for a mere matter of minutes.

I don’t know about you, but I can attest I know what a plum looks like. I really just didn’t ever look. But the plums were right there, plumb in the middle of my yard.

What’s the Plum Tree in your Life?
In the chapter of my book on looking for and leveraging greatness, I detail some actionable steps leaders can take to notice more.

The first way to do this is by looking for the things that make your employees shine. Spend some time with them, ask them key questions and learn what it is that sets their hearts on fire. Whether work related or not, these details are invaluable and establish a deeper connection between leadership and employees.

A Fruitful Environment
There is something else that is just as important as watching for these shining moments: provide your employees a space to shine in. Begin meetings with casual discussion about people’s lives, listen to what it is they spend their time talking about, or what excites them. Make sure their position gives them room to take risks and innovate. If you manage employees who perform a lot of the “busy work” for your organization, then present them with a new challenge or task that expands their horizons more.

If you have routine meetings or performance reviews, then incorporate interview questions that get your team to consider their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes people are very in tune with their best skills and lesser abilities. Asking someone what they can improve in and what they excel in can be very telling for a leader who has less time to devote to observational activities. The environment for conversations with leadership can be the perfect place to catch the driving passions of your team, the things that make their eyes light up.

Find Outside Support
It can be hard to be the sole driver of an initiative and one that requires deeper connections with all your employees is a tall order. I do encourage leaders to give as much of themselves as they can while trying to get to know their employees. I recognize that there are human limitations. To compensate for our own fallibility, I always recommend a secondary source of information. Your personal research might not unearth all the skills and talents of your team. Oftentimes, your employees aren’t even aware of all of their special talents. It’s better for everyone to also study your team’s strengths through an outside source.

One of the best ways to know and see where your employees produce their richest fruits is by using assessments to gauge their strengths. I love the StrengthsFinder assessment. Once you pin down their strengths you have the fun job of making sure they can utilize their skills and maximize their strengths. Trust me when I say, it is fun for both the employee and their leader when the employee discovers the best that’s inside of them. People thrive doing what they are good at, and we tend to enjoy it more too.

Other Ways to Harvest
Apart from going to the employee themselves, or to their scores on assessments, there are other means of discovering your teams’ strengths.

● Social or intranet posts
● All staff feedback
● Team successes and failures

After exercising each of these principles to uncover your team’s strengths, you will be well-equipped to open the doors for your employees so that they may thrive.

Without considering your team’s strengths and giving them opportunities to use them, your organization can suffer. Organizations that don’t offer fertile soil for your employees to grow in find themselves held back by things like: revenue losses, tarnished reputation, lost customers and a lack of faith in leadership.

Be a part of their success story and they will be the fruits of yours.

Buy Heather's book today, "The Art of Caring Leadership: How Leading with Heart Uplifts Teams and Organizations" 

"Embracing an off-balance life allows our minds to learn the patterns that we have created in our life and to determine whether they are working for us, or not."

• Your Work
• Your Relationships
• Your Health
• Your Spiritual Growth
• Your Passions/Personal Interests

If you look at each of these as 5 different pursuits, you’re always going to be overwhelmed – there’s never enough time. But, when you see these 5 spheres as interconnected, you will see that small or big adjustments can be made to the connections between them. I call the connections between these spheres, lifelines.

The 10 lifelines are the key to a more fulfilling life and rewarding life – they are:

1. Work ⇔ Relationships
2. Work ⇔ Health
3. Work ⇔ Spiritual Growth
4. Work ⇔ Personal Interests
5. Relationships ⇔ Health
6. Relationships ⇔ Spiritual Growth
7. Relationships ⇔ Personal Interests
8. Health ⇔ Spiritual Growth
9. Health ⇔ Personal Interests
10. Spiritual ⇔ Health Personal Interests

When you began to anticipate, prepare for, and correct breaks along your lifelines, you will begin to see a more fulfilled life. How about work and health? Does your job support you to be healthy or challenge your health in certain ways? If so, what are you going to do about that?

Evaluate the lifelines between your 5 spheres of influence - are there changes you can make that will bring more harmony between the aspects of your life? Are there new ways of thinking that will eliminate negativity that is holding you back in one area, while impacting another one? Your mind is powerful – what you think is what you are. Change the patterns and choose to become off-balance, on purpose. You will be amazed at the happiness that is within your reach.

In person events provide one of the most in-depth learning experiences that is almost impossible to recreate in a virtual setting.

Last month, Phil M Jones did an event for American Equity in Las Vegas. When we chatted after the event, he said that he "felt safer at every part of that event than he does getting supplies from the grocery store." We asked him why and thought that his answers might be of interest to all of you who are seriously re-looking at your in-person events.

WE ASKED THE CLIENT:  How much extra effort/burden did all of your protocols put on your team/company?

And, we are very grateful that his client gave us his perspective as well which you'll also find below.

PS: a big shout-out to Speakers Spotlight for connecting Phil with their American Equity client!

KAREN: Was there anything your client at American Equity did to make you feel safe prior to the event?

PHIL: Prior to the event there was a level of diligence that really helped to give confidence that 2 things were being taken very seriously. One was the well-being of all who participated in the event itself and second was an unrelenting passion for creating a fabulous experience for attendees.

Making the effort to ensure all attendees could show a recent negative test was a huge reassurance in their dedication to safety, especially when backed up with not only their persistence in securing and documenting my own personal result, but also their numerous steps at the event itself.

KAREN: What happened when you arrived in Vegas? Was there something special that was done for you at the airport? with the car service? upon your arrival at The Cosmopolitan?

PHIL: As a solo traveller, I feel that typically I can navigate my own logistics to avoid too many unknowns, but the airport meet and greet removed an additional layer of human interaction that was very welcome.

KAREN: What type of protocols were implemented on-site for the attendees and yourself that made you feel safe and still like a human being?

PHIL: I think this is where things really shined. They created a dedicated space for their event and attendees. The main event hall, the lobby areas plus all the food and entertainment amenities were all private to event attendees only, were incredibly spacious and even the fact that a dedicated member of staff was serving coffees from the urn, plus dedicated staff were creating custom food plates, made a welcome and comforting change to the free-for-all of many past events.

When these steps were added to a well communicated and respected, colored lanyard, social distancing guideline, plus ample space for all attendees having their own dedicated desk space in the meeting room - there seemed to be ample space and respect to converse and communicate freely while being at a comfortable social distance.

Finally, there was an unwritten respect and grace that all presenters and on site staff had for all protocols - nobody was cracking jokes at the seriousness being taken - regular moments were taken to re-communicate the protocols to all attendees - and it was mostly normalized without judgement. This resulted in people seemingly accepting the rules as opposed to debating their place - this made for far more meaningful conversations.

KAREN: How valuable do you think this in-person event was for re-connecting and learning for the attendees?

PHIL: In-person events provide one of the most in-depth learning experiences that is almost impossible to recreate in a virtual setting. I am talking about peer to peer commentary, reflection, reinvention and creation. It is essential to spend time learning from the real experiences of others and challenge everyone’s thoughts by presenting them with new areas of focus.

A great speaker does the important job of sharing new ideas and then in turn starting new conversations - in-person events then develop those conversations, turning them into shared experience, collaborative thinking and then help create lasting change.

So many people are lacking inspiration, direction and purpose right now as well as a shared frustration. An in-person event can help deliver solutions to all those problems, with attendees leaving empowered, inspired, belonging and re-energized.

KAREN: Do you have any advice for anyone who is re-thinking their in-person event?

PHIL: The start of EVERY event is the audience and the responsibility for all of us in the industry is to deliver experiences that change their world. If you can still work within some very real constraints to create a life changing experience then fighting to achieve that, as opposed to picking the option of re-scheduling or streaming recorded content online, could well be worth the extra effort and energy.

Not ALL events should run - but we all know that GREAT events are one of the most powerful tools we all hold a part in to change our world.

WE ASKED THE CLIENT:  How much extra effort/burden did all of your protocols put on your team/company?

JOHN LICKTEIG, AMERICAN EQUITY: I will say there was a lot of extra effort that went forth in planning this event and was completely different from events I’ve done in the past. However we wanted to make sure all of our attendees felt safe in the environment they were in and I think my company delivered that flawlessly. We outlined and communicated all of the protocols that were set in place in order to host this live event.

Mike Walsh's video highlights rule #9, the future of AI is personal, from his 10 New Rules for a New World.

"A crisis is something you recover from, whereas a chrysalis is a bridge from one state to another."

One of the biggest dangers in any disaster is a premature plan for normalcy. As vaccine programs roll out worldwide, organizations and governments are preparing for economic recovery, a return to offices, corporate travel, and a resumption of business as usual. We all need a little optimism, but nostalgia can be as dangerous as disruption. Some doors are one-way only. What if the pandemic was not a crisis but rather a chrysalis?

The difference is a subtle but important one. A crisis is something you recover from, whereas a chrysalis is a bridge from one state to another. The difficulty is knowing whether the changes you are experiencing are merely temporary or part of a more permanent redefinition.

COVID-19 may have started as a crisis, but it quickly became a forcing function that unleashed digital transformation on every aspect of our lives - whether it be how we work or how we buy things, run our factories or deliver healthcare. What is likely to make these changes permanent is not just gains in efficiency but also the unexpected ways these forces are now interacting with each other.

More becomes different. More data, more computation, more automation, and more transactions - don’t just add up to more speed or resilience - they can reverberate throughout your organization until you become something else entirely. In any complex adaptive system - whether it be a supply chain, a workplace, or a biological ecosystem - small changes amplified by reinforcing feedback loops can hit critical mass and trigger radical reinvention. Water becomes ice; tremors become an earthquake; a viral video can make you a global star.

From this perspective, what if the end of the pandemic is not a pendulum swinging back to normality; but rather a portal from the world we knew to a radical new future that we are yet to fully understand? If you change enough of the infrastructure that runs what you do, at some point, you also change who you are. Likewise, if you change enough of the forces that run the world, you will inevitably change that as well.

I’ve spent the last year thinking about what all the small changes in our lives add up to. The list of pandemic era adaptations is long and constantly growing: working from home, social distancing, automated service delivery, augmented reality training, mRNA technologies, drones and robotics, process automation, telehealth services, retail live-streaming, AI-powered drug discovery, and the growing influence of data in the way we run our organizations.

I firmly believe that the sum of all of these innovations not only exceeds what we have seen before but also that their combination and interaction are the foundations of something new: a new world that runs on new rules.

I am in the process of researching the terrain of that new world and compiling what those new rules might be. They are the basis of my latest keynote presentation. Potentially, they may also be the basis of a new book. More on that later.