Don’t Try to Be Authentic. Be Brave

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“How to be authentic.” People talk to me about authenticity a lot because they pay me the “compliment” that I am authentic. First, I don’t think it’s a good pursuit: learning how to be authentic. Second, I feel there’s a better goal: how to be brave. Because when people talk about authenticity, what they really mean is that they want the confidence to be who they really are and feel brave about talking about it.

“How to Be Authentic” Isn’t a Very Good Goal

I say this because it means you’re learning how to portray authenticity, not how to live with confidence. The term “authenticity” when used in the way people throw it around means to be accurate, factual, reliable. It means that you mean what you say and say what you mean. It troubles me that people feel they can’t do this. But of course, that’s not really what one is saying.

Learn to Be Brave. You’ll Appreciate It More

Bravery is built on courage, and the root of courage is the ability to do something despite feeling fear. That seems a better concept to master. For instance, if you’re like me and you deal with depression, it’s “authentic” that I say that because it’s factual and reliable and accurate, but it’s also “brave” because I say this information knowing that it might sway someone to not hire me. (In my calculus, if a company doesn’t work with people who deal with depression, they’re probably not my kind of people.)

The path to bravery is simply through repetition of effort on one hand, and through contemplating what matters to you on the other. There are so many areas of your business and life where you would do to be more brave:

• Learn not to talk so much, and listen more without fear that people might think you’re not so smart.
• Practice hearing someone’s concerns without overlaying their words with your own autobiography.
• Experience that it’s okay not to know everything without worrying that people won’t trust your knowledge about what you do know.

Bravery is about repeatedly confront what you thought would scare you (or does scare you) and beating it. It’s also about learning more about what matters to you.

Bravery Beats Authenticity

A lot of my friends suddenly found themselves working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their bosses at various companies hadn’t run many remote teams, and didn’t have the tools necessary to manage remote employees. Instead of bravely telling their teams: “Hey, we’re all new to this. Let’s talk about how we can make this work best for everyone,” they acted as if they were professionals in this regard. But lacking that knowledge, they put their teams into greater stress and reduced productivity by forcing more frequent status meetings, and far more video contact than is necessary.

Imagine being a team member working with that group, and having some suggestions. Is it authentic to share your ideas with the boss? No. It’s brave. Which one helps more? Authentic means being factual and trustworthy. It doesn’t mean you’ll tell people you report to what you think might better suit the team as far as arrangements for remote working and status check-ins.

How to be Brave

Instead of worrying about authenticity, focus on helping others. Instead of wondering when you’ll get your turn, work on what you’re doing. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing out on, sink yourself into what you can build for yourself.

Stop worrying about what you’ll lose. There are always more things and people and opportunities out in the world than there are days left in your life. Don’t hold on so tight, and you’ll find your hands free to reach out for the next opportunity and the next.

Bravery is a verb. It’s an active state. It’s a morning ritual and a daily promise. It’s learning that mistakes aren’t failure as much as they’re another opportunity to try something else. And failure is just an outcome you didn’t expect or intend.

I wrote a book about bravery a few years back. The lessons all still work the same way. It’s about building up the tools to be more brave and it might be useful. Let me know. I’m always here to help.

Work With Me

If you’re looking for personal or corporate team coaching, I’m always available to help you win. Just get in touch.

I’m always here to help.

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Leadership Skills for After the Pandemic

Restaurants Reopening After the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic

Leadership skills haven’t changed much in some ways. In others, we’re at a whole new turn in the road for organizations as they learn how to manage teams remotely, as they grapple with issues of transmitting corporate culture without so much physical proximity. What we knew before March 2020 must be checked, edited, revised, and maybe just plain thrown out. So what can we do? What should we do? What does it take to be a great leader now?

Leadership Skills for After the Pandemic

The top qualities of an effective leader revolve these days circle a “Big 3” traits to focus on: communication, collaboration, and configuration. When you see those three topics, your first response is likely: “What? I do all that. I know all about that.” But it’s different these days. I’ll explain.

Communication – The new rule of communicating and being a leader involves brevity and clarity. In writing and verbally, learn to be crisp and clear. Start at the “ask” or the most important point. Chop out explanations and segues. One topic per message.

Collaboration – Bring part of the project, and let the team fill in the rest. Embrace and encourage a diversity of thought. Motivate team members to share their experience as it applies to the project. Inspire team members to own some of the leadership tasks of any given experience.

Configuration – Factories are over. Leading like you run a factory is over. Teams and leaders must embrace more chances to make work what they need it to be. The Work From Home (WFH) elements of COVID-19 showed that office hours didn’t exactly have to be synchronous. What else can be configured differently? Do you need people to live near the office any longer? If not, what else has to change?

As leaders work on their own efforts with communication, collaboration, and configuration, so too will team members need to learn more about how to do the same. Distributed teams means remote leadership and personal leadership become quite important to everyone. Not only will management skills need to exist at the individual contributor level, but also the competencies of listening, delegation and strong interpersonal skills will hinge on being able to improve in the three big Cs.

Good Leaders Inspire Action. Great Leaders Grow More Leaders.

Gone is the fear that you as a boss have to know everything. Empathy and self-awareness become much more important, as do a strong emotional intelligence as well as the humility to presume that you don’t always have the best answer, and that maybe your team members do.

Develop your leadership by growing more leaders. Invite team members to take parts of a project as their responsibility. But empower and educate them a little bit first. The leadership skills necessary to run parts of your business aren’t immediately obvious. (Remember when you started?) Teach them the Three Big Cs above. Everyone needs those. And here are a few more leadership skills to encourage strategic thinking.

If this, then what? – Teach your budding leaders to walk through decisions before taking the action. In his book “It’s Your Ship,” Captain Michael Abrashoff teaches as part of his leadership method the concept of “I intend to.” It’s a level of leadership where team members don’t execute without permission but where they bring their recommended path of action for review by saying, “I intend to take the following action.”

Which decisions need making? – Team members sometimes burn time not knowing which parts of business need more thorough decision making and which don’t merit the time spent. Sometimes, aspiring leaders weigh the strengths and weaknesses of every possible step of a project, instead of knowing which parts can be accepted as a given, or which can be ignored. Teach your aspiring leadership candidates the skill of knowing which parts of a project need a solid decision making system.

Is this aligned with the ultimate goal? – Some people as they attempt successful leadership get far too stuck in task oriented mindsets. Instead, drive goal-level leadership at all turns. Ensure that tasks completed are only valuable if they advance the goal and that filling out a checklist every day isn’t nearly as valuable as moving a project towards a timely and cost effective solution.

Inspire Two-Way Mentorship

As the leader of a team, make it clear that you thrive on developing your team. But also, be just as clear that you seek to learn from the diverse wealth of backgrounds your team employs. Be open to learning new approaches, to understanding different cultural and skill experiences. Actively seek out this two-way mentorship and guidance. Build it into how you spend team time on projects. The rewards will be remarkable.

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Ask About Leadership Training

Chris Brogan wants to talk with you.

If you want to explore what leadership training looks like for your organization using the StoryLeader system, please get in touch. Drop an email at chris@chrisbrogan.com or fill out my nifty contact form.

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People Need Brevity in Stories in 2020 and Beyond

It seems that when people try to communicate, they mostly try to push the most stuff they can into our heads at one time. We say that business storytelling is very important but we don’t teach people how to do it. In the absence of instructions, a lot of people believe that saying more is the same as giving someone useful information.

Brevity is Key for Business Storytelling

Have you looked at a recipe on YouTube lately? We often have to slog through 11 minutes just to get even the simplest recipe. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Look at this amazing video to see a great example of brevity:

He got three different hummus recipes into a video that was less than three minutes long. Think on that the next time you say that brevity isn’t possible.

How Do We Work With Brevity?

1. Start with the end point in mind: What does this story need to do?
2. Trim any explanations: The #1 killer of brevity is thinking we have to explain something beyond a brief in-context line or two at the most.
3. One idea per interaction: We try to cram too much information into all communications efforts. Make each interaction about one thing. Or one small grouping.
4. Read it aloud: Any writing benefits from your voice out loud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d actually say, delete it. (Hint: read this post out loud. Sounds like someone talking, right?)
5. Think bullets and lists: Our brains love small lists. We love bullets. Communicate that way.

There’s a Time for More Words

But it’s far less often than you’d think. You can fire someone politely and professionally with three sentences. You can profess your love with three words. You can communicate entire oceans of meaning with a single look.

Think brevity first at all times. Every time you add more, it’s usually because you’re feeling insecure or afraid. Hurts to hear that, I know, but it’s true.

Until it’s time to NOT be true.

If you want to learn more about how I can help you with leadership, marketing, and sales advice, peek at this and then drop me a line. I’d love to help.

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Why Business Storytelling is a Necessary Tool for 2020 and Beyond

Whenever someone tells you “stories are an important part of leadership,” you do what most people do: you nod and shrug and wonder what the heck anyone means by that. And yet, we use stories informally every day. Your business meeting with prospects breaks for lunch and what do you do? Tell stories of your families and where you’re from, or seek out what each of you have in common. (These are belonging stories in my Three Story Types for Business.) Everyone knows they should be doing something, but what? Why? And how?

Stories Transfer Leadership DNA

When I launched StoryLeader, I realized I needed a way to explain the core benefit of the leadership training practice. What we do when we tell business stories is we transfer leadership DNA throughout the organization. The goal of the stories then becomes ensuring that people at all levels understand what kinds of goals and intentions their leadership has in mind, that people closer to the front line understand what decisions their leadership might make in a given situation, and that with everyone operating from the same perspective, friction is reduced to a minimum.

If you run an analytics group, one of your core mission stories might be about how your organization’s role is to act as a “backup brain” to the groups you support, and that your primary function is to absorb and relieve all their primary brain worries while being alert to prompt for future threats and trends. The more your team thinks about what it means to be a “backup brain,” and that “absorbing worry” is a core function of that brain, they’ll align their decisions and efforts accordingly.

2020 is About Upskilling and That Requires Growth Stories

In the fast world of transformation culture, organizations have to be able to shift quickly with new opportunities, adapt and be more resilient. As human capital starts to account for as much as 50% of a company’s value (source), it becomes important that leaders tell belonging stories so that people feel valued, included, and most vitally part of the solution for all and any challenges that arise.

Employee retention is an exercise in storytelling matched by actions that support the story. The third story type in StoryLeader are called growth stories. Sometimes, these are corrective or lesson tales. Other times, they are the stories that empower us or invigorate us during the challenging parts of our work.

Studies say over and over that when an employee starts to seek employment elsewhere, it’s almost never an issue of pay. More often than not, disengagement comes when the employee no longer feels like they are working on meaningful work. The right growth stories and belonging stories (fronted by action that shows that employee a path to being part of solid execution) are more vital than any dollar or title increase.

Telling Stories is Now a Participatory Sport

The 2019 movie box office revenue for the US was $11.9 billion, but if you add worldwide revenue, the number goes up to $42 billion. That’s a pretty decent figure for movies as entertainment.

UNTIL

Until you realize that the video game industry took in $120 billion last year. Before you scoff and think of yourself as not a video game person, mobile games accounted for $64.4 billion on its own, dwarfing traditional PC or console games.

Why am I sharing this? Because storytelling (movies) has become far more interactive (video games). That means we as leaders have to learn not only how to tell a business story, but that we have to build participatory stories where everyone absorbs and acquires the leadership DNA you intend to transfer.

No, you don’t have to create video games to tell business stories (they fail horribly when people try). But you do have to learn how to tell a more participatory story. (I can help!) Stories must be crafted to be more bite-sized (like a series of text messages) and with room for others to participate and lead from their own level, while retaining the core importance of the mission stories that form the organization’s objectives and intentions.

What Does This Do?

Working on business stories improves decision making, cuts down on rework, reduces friction, and obviously saves time and money in the process. By learning the simple (but not easy) skills of telling better business stories that reinforce the organization’s mission, people’s sense of belonging, and everyone’s path to growth, leaders can focus more on vision and clearing roadblocks. Smart leaders let stories do the heavy lifting, and what I shared in this article is why.

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Chris Brogan runs StoryLeader as a leadership training experience. Get in touch here.

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