Drift 1, off by 60

 A key lesson Stephanie Chung learned from her pilots in the private aviation company she ran was the 1 in 60 rule: drift off course by 1 degree, fly 60 miles and you’ll be off your mark by 1 mile. Pilots frequently check their course and correct little-by-little, rather than wait till they miss LAX by 40 miles. Similarly, in “Ally Leadership: How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You” she encourages leaders to check their team for alignment and collaborative spirit, for inclusion/belonging and bringing their best to the organization. When course adjustments are needed, better to catch them early and not wait till key people have left, the company has not met goals, or worse. 

Ally leadership comes from ALLY: Ask, Listen, Learn, You [take action]. And that you have to EARN your leadership spot in the eyes of your team: Ensure a safe environment, Assure alignment, Rally the troops (the hardest aspect for me who hates “rah, rah” stuff), Navigate the narrows (do the difficult things, stay on a new course rather than revert to old leadership habits…)

The author learned this leadership style from many people, made a few mistakes but worked hard at leading teams/companies made of people not like her (an African American female). She describes a time she resisted taking an assignment to lead a sales team in Texas (too damn hot!) composed of white men, who definitely didn’t want her there let alone be led by her. They’d never hit their sales targets until the year she worked with them. 

If you need to some excellent tips for leading people who are not like you—socioeconomically, generationally, ethnically, ethically, geographically, culturally, experientially and so on—you would do well to read Chong’s book. It reminds me a lot of Covey’s seven habits and Collins’ level 5 leadership. Leadership is not about you; it’s about your team. Help them succeed.

Fishing for Tuna or Scooping Up Krill?

 Juliet Funt, author of "A Minute to Think," described how she sometimes likes to go for tuna, and often really likes scooping up the krill when trying to create space and focus on the big things. She suggests you can go for the big wins, the tuna, if you do the "easy" work of generating and evaluating your work processes & schedules, such as canceling big events or unnecessary projects. Or keep picking up small wins, the krill, if you just go about your normal routines and a different perspective on everyday tasks--e.g. cutting 5+ minutes from meetings, shifting work/changing the battle rhythm from daily to weekly, weekly to monthly, etc. to dig deep. Scooping up the krill can also starve other time-wasting tuna, and reduces energy sharks. (My analogy)

Her Spin Launcher describes a team process to:

• Generate a bunch of ideas, brainstorming, no good or bad ideas (but as Craig Groeschel might suggest every small good/bad decision does matter).
• Separate into categories: types, schedules, etc.; Can and Can't Control
• Evaluate and determine if it's necessary or just wanted by someone. How much "mission proximity"does it have? I've known many research queries and issued reports "just in case" the question comes up or needs to be referenced but most of the time, they're don't.
• Eliminate
• Repeat (because this is like having a haircut; waste, blurred scope, etc. tend to grow back)
• Liberate, capturing the extra time for more productive, profitable efforts. I once eliminated a Perfect Attendance award (half-day PTO each quarter), by replacing it with two personal holidays, because it was causing supervisors to spend 40% of their time on attendance issues instead of personnel development and process improvements.

Krill scooping can be as simple as making sure you have "only" the right people in a meeting that lasts "only" as long as needed to share information and assign tasks. Funt also suggests subtask reduction, such as often design engineers do to reduce number of parts in an assembly. And conducting a survey which you can turn into a Hate Map with most intense RED color meaning the most hated activities or aspects of corporate life.

To help she asserts 4 R's of High-Value work: Revenue, Reputation, Reward, Readiness. (Maybe these are legitimate foci, but sometimes they are outcomes of other high-value work.) Most of the time we find ourselves, according to Juliet Funt, in the 4 P's: panicking, pandering, procedure and padding.