One of the hardest parts about leadership is understanding nuance. Sometimes situations require a different approach than we’re used to. Other times, we find ourselves slipping a bit, or falling into old patterns.
And when we study and observe other leaders, nuance is definitely our friend as well.
Nuance is how you can have empathy for others. It’s also how you can recognize that someone did the right things for the wrong reasons or the wrong things for the right reason.
And it opens up your mind to more people you can learn from.
The truth is, none of us are perfect leaders. If it had sufficient detail and rules, we would all fail any leadership purity test that any of us could come up with.
It’s why we’re happy to highlight flawed leaders like Steve Jobs when they did positive things, as well as call out good leaders when they make a mistake.
It’s in understanding the nuance that you can grow as a leader.
Because as the old saying goes, “First you learn the rules, then you learn when and how you can break them.”
Much of this newsletter each week is about the nuance of leadership, which you’ll see some of it in today’s edition.
Let’s dive in…
Table of contents:
- 🥘 Food for Thought on Making the Right Choice for You
- 🙈 Examples in Poor Leadership on Zuck Passing the Buck
- 🔜 Get Ready for Your Last Chance to take Lighthouse Courses
- 📚 Book of the Month on My Favorite Presentation Lessons from Own the Room
- ❓ Poll of the Week on OKRs and scaling teams
➡️ Did a friend forward this to you? Get every issue straight to your inbox by signing up here.
Note: This is a preview of our weekly leadership newsletter, Lighthouse Leadership Weekly (LLW).To get this sent to your inbox every week, along with our latest long form essays on this blog, you can sign up here.
🥘 Food for Thought on Making the Right Choice
One of the things that you can’t really teach in leadership is passion.
When you truly love what you do, your energy is infectious. Your team can feel it, and it comes through in every interaction, every task, every teachable moment, and every speech or presentation you give. (More on that last one in a bit…)
That’s why it’s such a powerful amplifier for leaders to truly believe in the mission of their work/job/company.
You can’t fake it. Your team knows at least on a subconscious level if your heart isn’t in it; an “I’m just here for the paycheck” can poison the well for your entire team (and attract a lot of people with the same mindset).
It reminds me of the classic Steve Jobs quote we’ve talked about before:
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” - Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
Are you passionate about your work today?
I hope you’ve used some of the holiday break we recently completed to reflect on where you are. If you take a step back, you may be surprised by what you find. It can renew your zest and passion for your job, or show a cold reality standing right in front of you.
No matter where you’re at in your career it’s easy to end up in the wrong role for a variety of reasons:
- A series of small changes can add up to a big shift that takes you away from what you once loved.
- Accepting a job that you were initially excited about that turns out to not be what you wanted nor hoped.
- Transferring roles thinking that the same company has the same culture, values, and responsibilities everywhere, only to find out that’s not the case.
- Your personal evolution and changes in your life can make you not love the work as much as you once did.
None of this is about placing blame, beating yourself up, or creating feelings of regret.
Instead, it’s about recognizing when, as Jobs puts it, “…I need to change something.”
How do you figure out what to do with your career?
You only get one shot at this life, so it’s important to make the most of it. Wasting away in a job you hate isn’t just depressing and hard to get up for each day; it’s also robbing the world of your unique gifts.
That’s why I was excited to see that product management influencer Lenny Ratchitsky had a guest on talking about exactly this question.
🧞 The Genie Method.
Private Equity fund executive Graham Weaver teaches a top-rated course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB). To help his students figure out what to do with their lives, he uses “The Genie Method”.
It works by imagining you come across a genie who asks you a simple, yet powerful question:
“What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
What traps so many of us is the momentum (and fear) of the status quo. It’s easy to keep doing what you’re already doing, and it’s genuinely scary to take a leap outside of the “safe path.”
And I love how Weaver talks about building up the courage to first listen to yourself to hear what the answer to that question is deep down and more importantly to then bravely act on it.
It’s not easy to take the plunge, but the point is to build momentum.
He encourages his students to think about first the powerful dream they have, and then figure out what small steps they can take today to start inching towards it.
It turns out, if you just do a few small things, no matter how small, every day to head towards that goal, you will find that you can get there over time. And that’s how you wake up shifting from a cog in a big company machine and instead the founder of a great company, running a life-changing charity, or any number of other soul-inspiring goals.
There’s no reasonable way for me to summarize the discussion, so if this resonates with you, I encourage you to dig deeper here:
- Go listen to the Lenny podcast episode here.
- Read Graham Weaver’s blog post and follow the links there to go even deeper.
How have you found career delight and navigated your way to your dream career?
Reply and I’ll share the best advice next week.
I stumbled across an excerpt from a NY Times article this week and it’s worth discussing here because it captures a lot about leadership and corporate culture:
“Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable…Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.
Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for Facebook’s culture, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.”
A CEO and Founder, who famously structured his company to maintain control no matter how much capital he raised publicly or privately, blaming his ex-COO for the company’s culture is making a massive series of leadership mistakes.
- Lack of Accountability - a CEO and founder is the ultimate leader in an organization. Everything that happens is at least partially your fault and to your credit. To blame the entire culture on someone else shows a large lack of accountability as well as recognition of your own impact and control of your culture.
- Lack of Ownership - There is no accountability in throwing his former COO under the bus. Ultimately, even if Sandberg did take a lot of ownership of culture-related decisions, Zuckerberg could have intervened at any time as CEO to either also influence the culture, or to discipline or fire Sandberg if he felt she wasn’t representing his desired culture and values well.
- Lack of Humility - It takes courage to admit when you’re wrong, especially publicly. As I’ve followed Zuckerberg over the years, he has dodged this over and over again, whether by paying hefty government fines where they avoid admitting any wrongdoing, put out videos to rehab his image without accounting for anything he’s done, or making statements like this to throw his team under the bus.
Is it any surprise that Facebook has had a series of ups and downs, controversies, and product misses?
This kind of leadership tells people all throughout the organization that side-stepping problems are better than taking them head-on and encourages scapegoating that can have a chilling effect on innovation and problem-solving.
Why speak up if you’ll be then blamed? Why take responsibility if your boss doesn’t?
Your example is the most powerful message to your team.
True Leaders Take Responsibility.
Remember the wise words of legendary, 10-time NCAA championship-winning basketball coach John Wooden:
Whether things are going amazingly well, or you’re struggling, this message from Wooden can help you be a more effective leader. It sets the right tone for your team to also then be accountable, and makes it much easier to solve problems because it removes your ego from the equation.
—
You can admire what they’ve done, use their products daily, and also see how he’s coming up short as a leader.
No one can deny that Facebook has made a tremendous impact on the world and has products used by billions of people every day. That’s an impressive feat by any measure.
Yet, the question remains on what they could be and what they could accomplish if Zuckerberg didn’t make leadership missteps like this one.
🔜 Get Ready for Your Last Chance to take Lighthouse Courses
Last week I told you about our decision to give you one final chance to take any leadership course we’ve developed over the years.
The first wave of those courses will be made available starting THIS MONDAY, January 20th, following the schedule we mentioned previously:
- Week 1: January 20-24th, “The Classic Fundamentals”
Courses available:- The Mindsets of Great Managers: Step by step, learn the fundamentals to become a servant leader.
- The Coach’s Clinic: Learn a variety of tools and tactics to give praise that motivates and feedback that drives great performance.
- The Secret Habits of Senior Leaders: Scale yourself as a leader and learn how to thrive when transitioning from a manager of ICs to a manager of managers.
- Sales Week 2: January 27-31st, “Mastering Management Skills”
Courses available:- The 1 on 1 Master Class
- Mastering Managing Up
- Mastering Motivation
With that in mind, I want you to have all the information you need to make the right decision for you and your fellow managers.
If you want to level up your (or the managers on your team’s) skills, here’s how we can help you, and you can choose the best program(s) for your needs:
- New to Lighthouse Lessons courses? We have an in-depth FAQ covering how the bite-size, 20 minutes a week lessons work, overall program length, the schedule you need to commit to, how flexible programs are, and more here: Lighthouse Lessons FAQ.
- What you’ll learn in each program: To help you choose the right programs, you can get a full breakdown of all of our courses, and the exact lessons you’ll receive for each one in our handy, shareable PDF here.
- Hear how we’ve helped others. It can help to understand how others have benefited from our programs, which is why we have great case studies you can read about helping the managers at the startup, Jornaya, and at scale, training hundreds of managers per year with the Textron team.
If you have any other questions before kickoff on Monday, reply to this email and I’m happy to personally help you.
And when you’re ready to join us for a final course, reserve your and your team’s spots at https://lessons.getlighthouse.com/
📚 Book of the Month on My Favorite Presentation Lessons from Own the Room
This month’s book of the month, Own the Room, is about a skill that we all need to master as leaders: Giving presentations.
I learned so much from this book that I took notes that I reference before creating big presentations. This helps guide me to make the best impact possible and make sure I apply the great ideas from the book.
I want to share a few of my favorites with you today and hopefully inspire you to pick up the book if you haven’t already.
1) The Best Openers
When you start a presentation, you have 30 seconds before your audience starts zoning out, looking at social media or email on their phones, or otherwise no longer paying attention.
To grab people’s attention, the authors recommend one of three approaches:
The best openers pique the imagination and then make an intelligent link to your topic.
1) Ask and Answer a Counterintuitive Question:
Ask a question that has a surprising answer. It needs to relate to your talk, but an interruption in their expectations makes them want to listen to the rest of what you have to say.
For example, it turns out a key mechanism in weight loss is literally your breathing when you’re asleep. Most people would assume that you literally burn fat and that’s what makes it go away.
2) Make an Attention-Getting Statement:
Choose a fact or statement that will get their attention. Make it visually powerful and something they’ll care about.
A good example of this is when a study recently went viral claiming that we all ingest a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. Anyone who cares about their health wants to immediately know more.
3) Personalize Your Message:
Tell a story that explains why you’re passionate about what you’re about to discuss. Evidence shows we love examples and stories over lectures.
This can also help you really channel your energy to make your talk great because telling a story that is meaningful to you brings out your emotions and helps you connect with your audience.
People do business with individuals they know and trust. Let your audience get to know you.
4) Finish strong so your audience remembers you
While your opener is what gets people to listen to the rest of your talk, your close determines what people remember, and whether they act on what you talked about.
That’s why you need to spend just as much time on your closing remarks as you do having a great opener.
To close well, remember the fundamentals:
- Slow down your speaking to really let your final points sink in.
- Look around the room, making great eye contact with many people in your audience
- Speak with exclamation points at the end of sentences to really emphasize your biggest points.
But how do you specifically close out the very end of your speech or presentation? Here are some tactics the book recommended:
- 1) Call to Action: Give a specific and structured answer. Make it as easy as possible for them to know what to do next.
- 2) Bookending: Come full circle and reference your opening. Finish the story you started, and add one more key insight they need to take away.
- 3) Recapping: Hammer home your 3 biggest core ideas (any more than 3 is too much to remember). But don’t say “To recap” or “In summary” because people will tune you out thinking they already heard what you’re about to say.
- 4) An Inspirational Quote: Choose a powerful quote from someone your audience will respect to hammer home your point. Put who said the quote at the END. (That way they’re not judging who said it before they hear it)
- 5) Use Triplicates: Start multiple statements with the same phrase, like “I believe…” “We will…” “I know…” “We envision" to drive home your 3 most important points, with your strongest one last.
- 6) Close with a personal story: Show your understanding of your audience, by sharing a powerful example of your core theme in action that your audience can relate to.
This list is a great example of why I really like this book; they don’t try to force you to present only one way. Instead, they give you a variety of options with examples. This helps you personalize your presentation and tailor it to your specific situation.
5) Great storytelling follows the OSB Template
It’s not surprising that a psychologist, actors, and directors have some strong opinions on how to tell a story. Fortunately, they share how they think the best stories are constructed and shared.
The OSB Template: Obstacle, Solution, Benefit
The goal is to tell a great story in just 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Here’s how it works in 3 simple steps:
- Obstacle: Set the stage and the barriers: Paint a vivid picture your audience can visualize while presenting a challenge that makes listeners say, “What happened next?!?!?!”
- Solution: What did you do/ how can you help them? Share specifics on how the problems were solved. Be sure to work in surprise elements and unexpected results. Once again, counter-intuitiveness draws attention.
- Benefit: not just the obvious. What was the surprise benefit? Was there a transformation? How? Describe the AHA! moment. Your goal is to make it clear you understand your audience, and that you are uniquely able to solve the problem.
—
While these ideas have helped me improve my public speaking and presentation skills, this barely scratches the surface of what Own the Room Covers.
Other topics you’ll learn about include: 10 ways to lose pitches, handling questions during your presentation, how to move your body to be more engaging and persuasive, dealing with stage fright, using PowerPoint effectively, and more.
If it’s time for you to become a better presenter, get your copy of Own the Room and start reading it now.
❓ Poll of the Week
Last week we asked you about OKRs, and we got exactly the kind of divide we expected:
While the majority of voters do think they help, a healthy minority see them as a big waste of time.
That lines up with what I’ve seen in my own experience. Done well, they can help with bringing alignment and clarity to teams.
Yet, too often, priorities change, communication is poor, and they end up being a meaningless activity that have no bearing on real day-to-day work, nor company priorities.
—-
Now, this week, we take a look at another common question: the biggest challenge in scaling your team.
Tell us what you think and see what others are saying by taking our Linkedin poll here.
You may have noticed this was sent on Sunday morning again instead of Saturday. That’s going to be our new routine, because it turns out, last week’s Sunday send had our highest open rate ever.
Routines are great, but you can’t argue with results!
