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A personal value I strive to live by, both as a dad and as a professional, is leading by example.

If I'm not willing to change, why should anyone else? I must behave in ways that are consistent with the values, norms and changes we have agreed on as a team. Practice what I preach.

It's my actions that send the strongest signals about what matters and what others should be doing. Consistency between words and actions also signals reliability. It builds trust.

This means my actions and behavior need to be visible and present. I need to show up and let people see what I stand for.

I am not always great at expressing expectations or coming up with a fancy uplifting speech on the fly, but I can step forward and carry some of the weight. Go first. Be willing to do the hard work alongside my team. It’s my way to demonstrate my investment in what we are trying to achieve.

If I want others to be committed, then I have to be 100 percent, without doubt, fully committed myself.

But there are pitfalls. I risk becoming a bottleneck if I feel the need to be involved in everything or be the “best” at every task.

I also believe our actions and behavior tend to come back on us. You get what you give. If I act in a disagreeable or negative way, that's often what I will get in return.

For example, want more proactivity in your team? Or a stronger tolerance for uncertainty?

I can take the first small step before everything is defined. I can share imperfect ideas to signal that it's okay not to have all the answers. I can meet new ideas with curiosity instead of reacting with doubt or negativity too quickly. I can stay open and calm in ambiguity.

Little by little, we adopt the thoughts, the attitudes and standards of the people around us. It's contagious - for better or worse.

I can never expect people around me to be more open and willing to learn and improve than I am.

It always starts with me.

Food for thought.

If someone mirrored your behaviour, what would that look like? What are people likely to pick up from you?

What is one behaviour you expect from others that you don’t consistently model yourself?

Here's my favorite aphorisms by Nassim Taleb.

• Your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do - something people who take showers discover on occasion.
  
  
• It is harder to say no when you really mean it than when you don't.
  
  
• The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.
  
  
• There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
  
  
• Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
  
  
• Under opacity, incomplete information, and partial understanding, much of what we don't understand is labeled "irrational".
  
  
• Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
  
  
• What I learned on my own I still remember.
  
  
• The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
  
  
• You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
  
  
• To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
  
  
• Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
  
  
• When someone starts a sentence with "simply", you should expect to hear something very complicated.
  
  
• The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
  
  
• It is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
  
  
• You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
  
  
• When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.
  
  
• Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
  
  
• Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.

What's your favorite?

In January, I spent 30 hours in meetings nudging. Influencing a decision or direction by contributing my own viewpoint to the discussion. Selling an idea. Selling a solution.

The list is long of how you can become more influential. A simple start could be to become more likeable. The more you like someone, the more you will be persuaded by them.

Remember, when dealing with people, we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion.

“Winning friends begins with friendliness.” says Dale Carnegie.

Here are timeless tips for becoming more likeable.

• Smile. A smile says "I like you." You make me happy. I am glad to see you. It costs nothing, but creates much.
• Become genuinely interested in other people. We like people who admire us. We are interested in others when they are interested in us. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view. There is a reason why they think and act as they do.
• Remember the name (and some facts). The bigger a company gets, the colder it becomes. One way to warm it up is to remember people's names. A person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Give people a chance to talk. Let them finish. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.
• Talk in terms of the other person's interests. The road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she likes most.
• Always make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

What do you do to become more likable?

Incentives send signals. Unfortunately, too often there is a conflict between what you say and what your incentives signal.

• You encourage teamwork, but incentivize individual success.
• You say you value autonomy, but punish deviation.
• You want innovation, but reward predictability.
• You talk about empoweremnet, but override decisions.

An incentive is a tool used to motivate people to do something they would not do otherwise. It can be used as a solution to a problem. We can use it to better understand why people do what they do.

When you push people to increase one dimension of their output, you can create unintended effects on the other dimensions.

You need to make sure what you incentivize is indeed what you want to encourage because sometimes incentives achieve the opposite of what they were designed for.

Such as the fine introduced to discourage parents from being late picking up kids in the kindergarten, that actually promoted late pickups. Before the policy, parents felt bad when they arrived late. Now parents could just pay to avoid the feeling of guilt.

You need to understand the psychology behind the incentives to make them work.

For instance, we have a tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than to wait for a larger one in the future. The idea is simple: "now" is very strong and hard to resist.

With behavior change, the costs are now; the benefits are in the future. Therefore, make the incentive not too far in the future. If someone changes their behavior in the desired direction, give them an immediate reward.

My eight key takeaways from Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke.

1. You need a method of setting and achieving goals, which is what OKRs are. But it's tempting to just try to apply the OKR technique, without giving people the freedom and trust to figure out how to achieve them.
   
   
2. You can't just set up goals and hope they happen. Willpower is not enough. You have to execute against them as a team. You need a cadence that keeps you on track. A plan to get things done.
   
   
3. Objective is what you want to do. Key Results are how you know if you have achieved them. They keep the objectives real. You create them by asking, "How would we know if we met our objective?"
   
   
4. Only have one Objective with three Key Results. Focus is hard, but it's necessary. OKRs don't work if you stuff them full of every single business-as-usual initiative you have going. And don't try to jam years of work into a single quarter.
   
   
5. But running a business, a product, or a team takes work all by itself. So what about everything else we have to do? They don't need OKRs, as they are not regularly looking for radical improvements. You monitor the OKRs while tracking the things you want to protect while shooting for the moon.
   
   
6. In a big organization not everyone will lead; some will support. You don't need an OKR for every department. We can't all be the hero of the story. Give respect to supporting folks.
   
   
7. We value the things we make together. Set your Objectives and pick your Key Results together as a team.
   
   
8. The farther we predict into the future, the less accurate our predications become. But without a long-term goal, it's hard to make long-term plans and move from reactive to strategic. We solve this by having a specific goal for the near future, and lightweight drafts for the less knowable far future.

A focused goal. Inspiring and measurable. Tracked regularly. That's the core of OKRs.