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What advice do you wish you had when you pursued your first leadership role?

Steffan, you will now go from the guy making recommendations to the guy making decisions. You go from being an individual contributor to delivering through others. You now lead a team of people doing what you used to be good at, that got you promoted in the first place.

That's a big change. How to make good decisions, facilitate a meeting, craft a strategy or delegate work is not something that everyone naturally just know how to do. If you think they are natural abilities, then you might feel there's something wrong with you if you don't have them. Please don't. It's a skill you can learn. You will do mistakes, but over time you will nail it. Leadership is an education.

People is your work now. Invest time in them, be present, be available. Listen. Ask how you can help all the time. Then comes communication, communication, communication, setting budgets, performance reviews, 1:1 meetings, meetings with stakeholders, recruitment, setting goals, prioritize, help finding solutions on complex problems, solving conflicts.

Don't forget to take care of yourself. What gives you energy? What drains you for energy? What do you need to do yourself, and what can you delegate to others? Do one thing at a time. Use your team. Create a support system around you, and use it. Block time in your calendar to think and reflect.

Never create a bunch of tasks that you assign to your team for execution. Provide context, intent. Let your brilliant team and problem solvers define and own their tasks and actions. A good plan developed and understood by the team is better than a "brilliant" plan by you.

Don't stress if you don't have a vision on the first day. You are not Steve Jobs. Visions can be found. Find it together with your team and let it be the compass in everything you do. What would you like to achieve together? What's the future we are trying to create? How do we plan to accomplish that? Let it become theirs, not only yours.

Watch out for compromises in this process. If you try to come up with something that pleases everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

Steffan, you are not a super human and don't pretend to be one. You have your strengths, but also your weaknesses and gaps. Your job is to build a team and surround yourself with people closing those gaps. Your job is not to know everything.

There will be periods where you doubt yourself and question everything, but suddenly you will see someone on your team achieve more than they thought they were capable of.

You will see your team come together to solve impossible problems. You will see a team that would do anything to help each other out. Impact. That's the joy of leadership. That's your reward. That's the reason why you became a leader.

Good luck my friend!

Best Regards,

Steffan Sørenes, a year older and (somewhat) wiser

That's the coaching habit. Coaching is today a commonly used term, but the actual practice of coaching doesn't seem to be occurring that often. And when it does, it doesn't seem to work.

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential, but we all have a deeply ingrained habit of slipping into the advice-giver/expert/answer-it/solve-it/fix-it mode.

There is still a place for your advice and answer as a leader, you should just try to slow down the rush to it as your default behavior.

A little more asking people questions and a little less telling people what to do. Here are the seven magic questions to ask.

What's on your mind?

An open question that invites people to get to the heart of the matter and share what's most important to them.

And what else?

A question that creates more wisdom, more insights, and more options because the first answer someone gives you is almost always never the only answer, and it's rarely the best answer. When someone says "there is nothing else" you have succeeded.

What's the real challenge here for you?

It's time to focus. When people start talking to you about the challenge at hand, what they are laying out for you is rarely the actual problem. The "for you" pins the question to the person you are talking to.

What do you want?

This one is difficult to answer. We often don't know what we actually want. The illusion that both parties to the conversation know what the other party wants is pervasive, and it sets the stage for plenty of frustrating exchanges.

How can I help?

This question is forcing your colleague to make a direct and clear request. That may be useful because she might not be sure why she started this conversation with you. 

Second, this question stops you from rushing into "rescuer" mode where you offer advice or start to take over responsibilities.

If you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?

This question is more complex than it sounds, which accounts for its potential. It puts the spotlight on how to create the space and focus, energy and resources that you'll need to truly do that 'Yes'. 

It's all too easy to shove another 'Yes' into the bag of our overcommitted lives.

What was most useful for you? / What did you find most valuable about this chat?

This one gives you feedback, it will give you guidance on what to do more of next time. It gives your colleague a chance to recall and reflect on key takeaways from the conversation. That's when we start learning.

Drop the "Why?" questions

In a coaching conversation, don't ask the 'Why' questions. You put them on the defensive. Rather than "Why did you do that?", try "What where you hoping for there?" or "What made you choose this course of action?".

And by the way, don't forget to ask the questions with genuine interest and curiosity and acknowledge the answers.

"The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier.

So what do you find in a great story?

• Identifiable characters. Someone we care about and connect to.

• Authentic emotion. Felt by the identifiable character. It is through that emotion that the receiver experiences empathy with the story. This is essential to make it more relatable, compelling, and sticky.

• A significant moment. A specific point in space, time or circumstance that sets the story aside from the rest. Instead of going big and broad, we need to go small and detailed. Don't stay too vague, too high level, too broad and too general.

• Specific details. Involve use of specific, descriptive, sometimes unexpected details and imagery that are relevant to the intended audience in an effort to create and draw the listeners into a world that sounds familiar to their own. The finer the detail, the better. This is how you tell the audience that you know them.

Why don't we tell more stories? The biggest barrier to not telling your story is assuming you don't have a story in the first place.

It isn't a lack of stories that keeps you from being able to find yours but rather the ineffective questions we use to get them. Getting better stories requires asking better questions. 

Our stories attach themselves to the nouns in our lives. The people, the places, the things, the events. A memory can be turned into a story.

Pick a story that fits your needs, your business and your audience. 

You are not telling a story for the story's sake. Who are you telling this story to? What do you want them to think, feel, know or do?

Start with a story next time! It eases the natural tension that sometimes exists between audience and speaker. Starting with a story helps to break down barriers and makes you a person just like them instead of the expert in front of the room they are forced to listen to.

"Stories that Stick" by Kindra Hall

What do Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Donna Dubinsky, Shellye Archambeau and the boys and girls flag football teams at Sacred Hearth have in common?

They, and many others, had Bill Campbell, that passed away April 18, 2016, as a coach, mentor and perhaps most importantly, as a friend.

He was Silicon Valley's best-kept secret.

Without Bill, Google would not be where it is today. After Bill passed away, Google started teaching his principles via internal seminars to emerging leaders.

He worked side by side with Steve Jobs to build Apple from near bankruptcy.

Spending his first decade of the career coaching football, Bill learned that great teams need to work together, and he learned how to make it happen. Being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader.

Bill taught business leaders that the path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things.

The book is loaded with his lessons and simple, yet powerful, practices and principles.