Author Archives: mwin109

Whether we like it or not, our careers and lives are a series of deal making opportunities when you think of a deal in the broadest terms: an agreement by two or more parties for their mutual benefit. The phrase that we lose sight of is “for their mutual benefit” when making a deal. AsContinue reading “The Best Deal Making Outcome”

As a leader in the middle of an organization, it’s always a challenge to decide how much much leadership “stuff” you should really do. Do you need a vision? A mission statement? A charter? A manifesto? A set of values? The list isn’t infinite…but it’s close. For me, I try to focus my teams onContinue reading “Building a Purpose for your Team”

As you may recall, my last discussion was around rethinking and reframing problems to make sure that the solution fit the contextual problem. Today, Id like to pick up the second part of that: the solution. As professional problem solvers (and nearly all of us are exactly that), we know that the outcome is theContinue reading “My How: Look for Creative Solutions”

Nearly every one of us has a common requirement in our current role – problem solving. It doesn’t matter if you are a week out of college or a week from retirement. The contexts will be wildly different, the types of problems will vary dramatically, the range and breadth of solutions will be infinitely differentContinue reading “My How: Reframe the Problem from an Alternate Perspective”

In today’s environment, whether you are an individual contributor or a lead, the world is an increasingly complex place. The combination of matrixed organizational structures, ever changing technology, dynamic social-political environments, and hybrid, international work make for challenges well beyond just “doing the job” at hand. In a complex world, it is easy to alwaysContinue reading “My How: Keep It Simple”

Every single person reading this suffers from a problem that is common: we all have questions in our lives of which we don’t know the answer. Unless you are significantly different than I am, those questions will span every facet of your life: questions about yourself, about your relationships, about your career, about your health,Continue reading “Living with Questions”

Spoiler alert: there is no magic, sure fire way to set goals! Goals come in all shapes and sizes and they are pervasive in our careers and in our personal lives. The can be set by society, by others, and by ourselves. They can create an entire range of emotions: success/failure, accomplishment/defeat, motivation/disincentive, among others.Continue reading “The Magic Formula for Setting Goals!”

Like any philosophy or strategy, many of my principles, values, hows, etc. are easily linked together. Some are simply conveniently tied…but others nearly require one another. My first how “hire for attitude, aptitude and transferable skill” nearly requires you to have more belief in those that you hire than they do. By the act ofContinue reading “My How: Believe in others more than they believe in themselves”

As leaders, the most critical decisions we face in determining our success is how we build our team. Every situation leaders enter will have some level of uniqueness and require something slightly different which likely could require a slightly different team-building strategy. Brilliant strategies, amazing tactical plans, and continuous improvement projects will all go astrayContinue reading “My how: Focus on attitude, aptitude, and transferable skill”

Sports are not a true analog with business, despite many sources pointing to the opposite. Sports require a winner and loser(s). The rules are defined before the game begins and should be understood by all that play. The length of the contest is predefined by time or actions taken. Business is the opposite in manyContinue reading “Why are the great athletes great? And how does that relate to business?”

As humans and as leaders, we all spend most of our time working with partial information, even though we don’t realize it. We assume what we see is what we need to know…like the old saying “your eyes never lie” dictates. As we look around the world beyond us, the vast majority of what happensContinue reading “My Values: Wonder Why”

With the events in the world recently, there have been increasing calls for businesses and leaders to stand up and make their opinions known. We must remember, organizations aren’t monoliths – they are groups of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions that may not all share a common opinion on a social/political topic. ThisContinue reading “Addressing Social/Political News in the Workplace”

As leaders (and as humans), decisions are the foundation of our lives. Interestingly, there isn’t great education on consistent processes to use to make decisions, creating inconsistent decisions from like information. This creates a litany of problems, but I have a couple simple ideas to help you eliminate some decision dilemmas.

It sounds very basic, but I have found that creating a sense of community and togetherness is always better for the individuals and team, especially when the roles and work may not be interdependent or are even siloed from one another. It’s not always easy and requires consistent effort and adjustment, but the concept of “together is better” will improve nearly every facet of an operation when done thoughtfully and authentically.

Being in the middle of an organization has it’s benefits but does come with challenges. The one I see most often manifest is a fundamental misalignment of goals between a group/team/department and the larger organizational brand. For all of us working in the middle, this is a critical topic to understand and be comfortable exploringContinue reading “Matching Your Functional Strategy to your Organization’s Brand”

We’ve all had them: the “don’t come to me with problems if you don’t have a solution!” boss. These simple little “management phrases” and sometimes small moments just simply repeating a cliche can be what define us as leaders. Here, I will argue that creating a situation that rewards unearthing issues and collaborating on solutions benefits everyone much more than the alternative

“People Come First” doesn’t mean that I am super emotive and we spend hours upon hours discussing your innermost feelings. “People come first” means that I spend considerable time and effort forging a strong working relationship with the folks in my sphere. The benefits are both cultural (enjoying each day more) and functional (having the best team dynamics possible).

In our digitally connected world, the idea of authenticity is much revered but I think we can all agree that it is rarely achieved. Ill give you an example. You probably are reading this via LinkedIn. Scroll up and down your LinkedIn feed. Let me guess a quick recap of what you just saw. SeveralContinue reading “Authenticity is an Asset”

Let’s start with a definition for our discussion. Optimism is a belief that the future is promising; it’s not a denial of current situation. Why is that critical? No matter what the area of life (personal, professional, etc.), things currently don’t have to be in a good place or going well for you to findContinue reading “My Values: Find an Optimistic Outlook”

Whether reflecting on our professional lives or personal lives, sentences starting with “I regret” are far too common. Regret is an interesting emotion – typically it’s an expression of sadness or disappointment about something that did or did not happen in past. Just reading the word probably brought a memory or two to you mindContinue reading “Hindsight Used Properly”

Let me start with a hypothesis: I believe the vast majority of us want to see others succeed. Of course we want to succeed as well, but most of us intellectually understand that success isn’t a zero sum game outside of very infrequent situations. If you can accept those assumptions, then what I have toContinue reading “Finding and Maximizing the Value of Talent”

Accountability has become one of the business buzzwords with such a broad meaning that it’s hard to use as a core “value” in many cases. For me, it meant taking some time and understanding what accountability means to me in the workplace and then realizing it was something I do focus on. As a leaderContinue reading “My Values: Be Accountable”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post around developing who you are as a leader. The spirit of the post is about developing your own philosophy. You can read it here if you haven’t: Today I’d like to take a few minutes on how the multitude of voices out there can shape your philosophy.Continue reading “Leadership Voices”

As a leader, the most critical thing we do is create a foundational culture for our teams. Culture can be amorphous in many cases. Sure, there are a list of organizational values, mission statements, and so on. Organizational aspirations are not necessarily equal to the way the organization operates day to day. That isn’t anContinue reading “Describing a Culture: Community vs. Family”

Whether you are a formal leader or informal one, I can guarantee you’ve said some version of the following: “Just reach out if you need help!” Maybe it was on a big project. Maybe it was on some minor day to day task. Maybe it was for something super urgent. Likely, it was on allContinue reading “Providing help as a leader”