So… How do we know we are heading in the right direction?

It’s our second issue of 2023, and I’m glad you’re here—whether you’re a first-timer or you’ve been around since the start way back when… Some prehistoric time circa Fall of 2022.

In all seriousness, if you have been following along for some time now, I’m glad. It means something here is valuable to you. If that’s the case, will you share it with a friend or two who may enjoy it also?

It’s my favorite time of the year. Revisiting plans and recentering around our guiding star or purpose.

How do we keep ourselves on track as we head into the New Year?

In the last issue, I shared my 2023 “Letter to Ourselves,” detailing the year I believe we’ll have at PotentialSquared. (If you missed that issue, you can check it out here; I shared the story on this yearly practice, and why I love it so much).

That was all about my vision for where we’re headed and what we’re going to accomplish in the next 12 months. And now… Now, we have to have a Purpose or True North that guides our journeys and keeps us on track when we face the inevitable storms or change of wind direction.

So how do you do that? How do you keep on track?

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Welcome back to the Leader’s Playground!

Lessons in Leadership

What’s your True North or your Purpose and how do you find it? In the last issue, I shared my 2023 “Letter to Ourselves,” outlining what I believe our true purpose is as a team at P2.

From evolving our leadership team so that everyone at the company has more space to blossom, to making heroes of our clients around the world, we are moving closer to what we learned in 2022 is our true, core purpose:

“Creating leaders that future generations will be proud of!”

The key question people ask is how did you get to that Purpose. Defining your true purpose—whether that’s as individual humans, parents, or team leaders—is trickier than it sounds.

We’ve seen infinite iterations here at P2 and those iterations have come through crafting, putting them out in the world to test, listening to the reaction and tweaking. Our original purpose was to “Create heroes of the people we work with." That iterated eventually into “Disrupting the way people are led” and now has been honed down to the one I just shared above.

The testing and failing is a key part of that process. Our purpose statement now has the team and clients engaged and with a focus.

Finding our purpose is often a long-term process of refining and recentering. Most of us begin with the grand, lovely vision (think: achieving world peace for all). But then it’s about testing and honing until you have a clear laser focus that drives actions and decisions on a daily basis.

This means that you have to continually test your actions in the moment to see if they are in service of that purpose. One of the sub-elements of our purpose is to “give wings to unlikely leaders.” I can use this as a guide in my next month to see if my actions are helping that element and fueling the bigger purpose. How much am I doing that is shifting in a positive way opportunities for unlikely leaders to thrive?

So hone your Purpose. Sail it out of the harbor. Test it. Listen to how it resonates with your team and customers. Tweak, recenter, and sail it out again.

And whilst you are doing that, remember that just because you have a compelling purpose as a business and a Leadership Team, you still need to be doing the ‘World Class Basics’ of Leadership to see it come to reality.

We’ll talk about this next time…

What to Read This Week

I’m reading Scaling Up (after a recommendation from Lisa Tilley, one of my colleagues) and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone in a leadership role, whether that be for a small team or a global organization. Finding your true purpose, as discussed above, is one of the key ideas of this book.

Verne writes around mastering the Rockefeller habits, building based on tried and true basics, and uses the 10 Rockefeller Habits to give a checklist to leaders to ensure how they are operating is the right way.

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 16,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today.

Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 200 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scale up.

There’s a good chance you’ve read this already—if you haven’t, I urge you to give it a read.

The Leadership Tales Podcast

Who knew that one could look so youthful yet call themselves an elder?! The Leadership Tales podcast returned for Season 4 on Tuesday, and we started strong with one of my favorite guests of the entire season: Michael Bungay Stanier.

MBS and I had a good laugh recording this episode as we chatted about the values of leading like an “elder,” despite looking and sounding much more like a 28 year old ‘bloke’ (British version of man, chap…you can choose your own word).

I love the work MBS does so much because it’s all about being a better elder, or leader, in our communities. It’s in line with our purpose of “Creating Leaders that future generations would be proud of." MBS is creating leaders that future generations will be proud of through his own example and the coaching and speaking work he does.

He’s the author of a number of successful books including: End Malaria, Do More Great Work, Get Unstuck & Get Going, Great Work Provocations and most recently The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever. He is also the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, and is a Rhodes Scholar.

Be sure to check out the episode and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts—and if you can, please leave a review. Each review helps put our show in front of more listeners, which means more opportunities for those who need them.

And if you missed our Best of Series 1 & 2 or the Best of Series 3 special episodes, you can still give them a listen.

Finally, if you know of someone you think would be a great guest on the show, reply and let me know about them. I want to share stories from leaders making a positive difference in the world—and the more tales we tell, the better.

Until next time...

Thanks again for joining me, and please do forward this on to a friend who may enjoy it—the best way to gain wisdom is in community. The more, the merrier!

See you in two weeks!

Cheers,Colin

To learn more about my book, Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader, click here.