Leadership Is Language

These curious questions sound like this:

."What's behind what you are saying?"

."Can you tell us more about that?"

. "What are you seeing that leads you to believe that?

The difference between doing and thinking can be described in several ways:

Our interaction with the world is doing.

Improving our interactions with the world is thinking.

Proving and performing is doing.

Growing and improving is thinking.

A focused, exclusive, driving, proving mindset is best for doing.

An open, curious, seeking, improving mindset is be

To celebrate with, not for: appreciate, don't evaluate; observe, don't judge; and prize, don't praise.

Celebrating by describing what you have observed and signaling appreciation for the behaviors can sound like this:

• "I see that you've organized the presentation into three sections-I've got your points organized in my head now."


• "It lo

First, failure to treat completion as a deliberate step in the process translates into a failure to see the work in discrete elements; this failure carries risks. One risk is escalation of commitment because we see longer production runs, longer operational cycles linked to one original decision. This makes the organization less likely to change co

Doing is important, but action must be balanced with thinking. Just like Fred and Sue in the introduction-too much activity without thought results in wasted or erroneous actions and bad decisions, and too much thinking without action results in inaction and frustration.

The key to learning and growing, as a company and as a person, is correctly bal

Adults are no different. In short, if we are conditioned to think of ourself as "the smart one," we will avoid challenges that actually test our intelligence and its limits. Of course, taking on such challenges is the only way we can learn and grow. Therefore, the wrong kind of praise becomes stultifying, sapping our willingness to hone o

The right balance of doing and thinking keeps an organization adaptive and agile, innovative and entrepreneurial. It gives the people in the organization a sense of purpose and progress, which helps drive continuous improvement. In short, the right balance of doing and thinking drives learning. It keeps the company relevant and solvent. It keeps em

For leaders, managing the frequency of the completion play by controlling the length of redwork periods and frequency of the bluework periods allows us to take a proactive approach to controlling the clock. If we have made a thin slice for a commitment and planned the completion of redwork, we have protected ourselves to a large degree against the

All my leadership training up to that point had been abour mak ing decisions and getting the team to implement them. I had peven questioned this paradigm until that moment aboard Santa Fe. Improw ing my decisions simply couldn't happen fast enough to matter. I needed a different solution entirely. The problem, I realized, wasn't that I'd given a ba