You can find energizing moments in each aspect of your life, but to do so you must learn how to catch them, hold on to them, to feel the pull of their weight and allow yourself to follow where they lead.
Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.
Strengths are not activities you’re good at, they’re activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you’re doing it you look forward to doing it; while you’re doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you’ve done it, it seems to fulfill a need of yours.
In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.
Great managers know they don’t have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them. A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them.
CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.
The opposite of a leader isn’t a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.
No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.
Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.
The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person’s trigger.
Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.
People leave managers, not companies.
The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.
Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.
We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.
The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.
If you want to be clear, act.
If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.
Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we’re taking on too much, but because we’re taking on too little of what really strengthens us.
Teach your children how to identify their own strengths and challenge them to contribute these strengths to others.