- The Leader's Playground
- Posts
- From I to We... to Winning
From I to We... to Winning
How can we focus both inward and outward to lead and live better?
Welcome back to The Leader’s Playground! I’m delighted you’re here.
Between seeing my eldest daughter off to university and traveling every other week, it’s been a busy end to summer. And P2 (my leadership development consultancy, otherwise known as PotentialSquared) is in one of its most successful periods yet, but with that comes pressure.
If I’m honest, there’s a lot of me reflecting on my leadership and energy. All the team at P2 are working hard and putting in long hours as we scale to keep up with the growth.
There’s a lot of resiliency involved. And while it’s easy to champion resilience, it’s dangerous to do so without also championing rest—and play. Just as we did in school on the playground, we must remember the rhythm of sprinting hard for the goal or defense, then pausing, hands on knees, to catch our breath and celebrate with our teammates.
It’s also tempting, as busy leaders, to become player-coaches (a concept I discussed last time). We know our teams are overworked, and instead of effectively coaching from the sideline view, we jump on the field and start making plays.
Instead, we must stay in the best position to take care of our teams… Which also means taking care of ourselves. We must be properly selfish. No one benefits from a ragged leader who’s lost sight of the field.
With that, I hope this second issue of The Leader’s Playground inspires you to lead—and play—better.
The Leadership Tales Podcast
In this newest episode of The Leadership Tales Podcast, author and leadership expert Tiziana Casciaro shares how important interdependence is for success in leadership, and how a basic understanding of social science can impact your cogency as a leader.
Italian-born Tiziana has a rich, diverse background in social science, philosophy, neuroscience and psychology. Alongside her co-author Julie Battliana, she has written a comprehensive and practical study on success. With a focus on balance, particularly the balance of confidence and humility, Power, For All is a book which enables today’s leaders to prosper alongside their teams.
I love the work that Tiziana has done on power. It was an energizing conversation for me on so many levels. Give it a listen!
What I'm Curious About This Week
If you’ve read Be More Wrong, you know I enjoy James Clear. One of my favorite bits of wisdom comes from his #1 NYT Best Seller Atomic Habits: “We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.”
All too often, we believe the value of our leadership lies in the vision we share for our team, or the goals we’re willing to strive for. But what good are goals if we have no means to meet them?
In a 2020 issue of his newsletter, “3-2-1,” Clear encourages us to focus less on declaring shiny, big goals, and more on the less glamorous but very honorable work of building systems that allow us to recognize our greatest ambitions.
Diligence and habit-building might not be the sexiest part of leadership, but it’s what sets the great apart from the good.
And if you don’t subscribe to 3-2-1, you might want to. It’s brief, punchy, and always thought-provoking (and there are over one million other subscribers who agree with me!).
From the Lab at P2
A lot of organizations can’t make that leap from “We need a behavior change in the team” to “Here’s how I’ll role model this, inspire belief, change our systems, and create strategy.”
It’s a BIG leap—From ideas to action. From individual to collective.
So, how do we move from recognizing the need for a large-scale behavior change, to actually effecting that change in our organizations?
The “I-We-Winning” model we use in the P2 Lab provides a framework for leadership that makes this type of leap possible—or at least more probable. We use I-We-Winning to structure our leadership courses and to guide the discussion when we visit teams for consultation or coaching.
It’s pretty simple, really. (If you don't believe me, take this screenshot of our team brainstorm board above☝️... Just don't judge the messy behind-the-scenes!)
We start with the “I” of leadership: How do you, individually, show up as a leader? What’s your messaging, values, executive presence? Then the “We”: How do you have effective conversations with individual team members? How do you mentor, coach, and give feedback? In other words, leading one conversation at a time. Finally, we consider the “Organization”: What’s the story that drives the work? How do we go from strategy to action? Where’s your team and organization headed?
As Stephen MR Covey talks about in his book Trust & Inspire, the three principles of leadership are Modeling (living the change you want), Inspiring (being clear on the purpose and the compelling story) and Trusting (giving people space to own their role, fly, fail and learn).
We need to understand ourselves first (I Leadership) before we can have the conversations with our people (We Leadership). Then we need to in his words partner our team in delivering, coach them in their growth and hold them to be self accountable. That leads us to Winning together as an organization.
You’ve got to develop capability in all aspects of I, We, and Winning as a leader. And this starts with a trust-and-inspire mindset and moodset.
Thanks for joining me again. As we finish the week, I offer you James Clear’s challenge: “Spend less time focusing on outcomes and more time focusing on the habits that precede the results.”
If you have questions or thoughts to share, please don’t hesitate to respond to this email. I’d love to chat with you. And if you like what I’m doing and have someone who might enjoy it too, please forward them this email or invite them to subscribe below.
See you with the next issue in October. Be well!
Cheers,Colin
To learn more about my book, Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader, click here.