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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?

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.

"We need to prioritize better...", a phrase often heard when costs increase and resources become more constrained.

Ah, so it's that simple?

Prioritization means arranging or doing things in a particular order, while prioritization is the process of doing so. It’s obvious what it is, but not how to do it.

Everything we prioritize is a bet, meaning we make an informed decision to allocate our resources to one thing over another, despite uncertainty.

This is necessary because there will always be more work than there is capacity to execute. No matter how many talented people you have, you’ll never have enough to do everything. If everything is important, then nothing is important.

Unfortunately, there’s no magical formula for how to prioritize, and it’s rarely as simple as a mathematical exercise.

It's a constant balancing act between running and improving what already exists, pursuing new strategic bets, and weighing short-term gains against long-term impact.

There are many frameworks and techniques, but for me, it boils down to a collective judgement. A discussion between relevant disciplines, key people, and stakeholders.

Evaluate ideas in relation to each other. Compare and contrast. Which of these do we believe will have the biggest impact on our strategy, customers and business? How much effort and resources do we think it will require from us? Can we afford it as things look today? What are the consequences of not doing it? How confident are we in our assumptions?

To prioritize, we need filters. This is where strategy and goals come into play. What is it that you want to achieve, and what is the strategy to get there? If this is unclear, the prioritizations will suffer.

Without a clear sense of direction, it becomes difficult to determine what tasks are most important.

Where does it get difficult? If you want to do more of something, you must do less of something else. Pausing or stopping ongoing initiatives is crazy hard. It’s always easier to spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping.

Our cognitive biases and lack of clear thinking doesn't help. Prioritization has a human element. It's emotional. Our feelings take over.

We prefer to keep things the way they are.

We feel uncomfortable with loosing what we have. When something we like is (or threatens to be) taken away, we often value it higher, aka Loss Aversion.

We have a tendency to continue because we have invested resources in it, such as time, money, or competency, aka Sunk-Cost Fallacy.

The scarcer common resources become (money, capacity), the more territorial behavior we get. It's a self-preservation mechanism inherent in all of us.

So what can we do?

First, widen your options. Downgrading one of many is easier than if you only have one or two ongoing. With only one option you become too invested. You take it personally.

You ask yourself "How can I make this work?" instead of "Is there a better way? What else can we do with the same time and money?"

With a portfolio of options and activities, it's easier to step back and look for patterns. Which initiatives repeatedly create value? Where are the dependencies and synergies?

Second, shift your perspectives. It's very hard for us to see the world from outside our own perspective.

An example is the thought exercise Andrew Grove went through with Gordon Moore before committing to making a massive change in Intel's business: "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?"

When we think of our colleagues or peers, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees. Ask yourself, "What would I tell my colleague to do in this situation?"

One of the best tools to get an outside view to improve your prioritization is to get other people's perspectives. But don't share your opinion first. Provide what the person needs to know to give valuable feedback, like what you try to accomplish, and nothing more. 

"What would be your process for prioritizing if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it?"

Third, set, in advance, guardrails and "tripwires" to snap us out of autopilot. These are signals that make us reconsider a prioritization. Signals that tell us when to jump and take action.

An artificial deadline is one example of a tripwire. Other examples include performance indicators, budget caps, behavioral patterns, and time-based reviews or check-ins.

Fourth, start talking about the opportunity cost. Limited resources always have alternative uses. Opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. It's the thing you can't have because you picked something else.

The cost of using a limited resource for a specific activity, can be measured as the value or opportunity lost by not using it for a better alternative.

Opportunity cost can challenge the comfort of the status quo and make the cost of inaction more visible. You can highlight that continuing a low-value activity means sacrificing higher-value opportunities.

You can shift the narrative from "stopping an activity" to "investing in something better."

How do you prioritize?

One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.

Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.

Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?

A strategy is the unique value a business provides to the market.There should be no difference between your written explanation and your spoken one.

• What must you do to deliver on this?
• What needs to change?
• What do you need to stop doing?
• What needs to be added?

If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.

"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith

Why do we need empowerment?

What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?

Leader-follower

In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions. 

They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion. 

You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions. 

Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?

Turn disempowered phrases like 

• "I would like to", 
• "Could we", 
• "What should I do about" 

... into empowered phrases like 

• "We intend to", 
• "We plan on", 
• "We will". 

Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.

Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do. 

Resist the urge to provide solutions.

When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.

What comes first, mindset or behavior?

Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.

When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.

That's how you turn a ship around.