“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.” Abraham Lincoln

Kirk is on vacation this week. He’s taking some time to “sharpen his axe” so he can be a healthier more productive husband, father, friend, and leader. It’s hard for any leader to disconnect, but it’s even harder to deal with the consequences of not taking time for true self-care. Learn and grow from 9 award-winning CEOs, esteemed journalists, and overall great people about how they think about slowing down to speed up in this special podcast we produced to help you. 

“Ideas are great… but they are only as good as the people executing them.”

Sean Spector, CEO + Founder Of Dropoff

It’s almost a foregone conclusion - if you set the strategy and keep measuring it, it will all work out. However, a mediocre strategy with an amazing, aligned team will beat the brilliant strategy with a mediocre team almost every single time. The problem can be counterintuitive. We have all kinds of metrics and measurements to see how the business is performing, but we often neglect the most important metric to executing our strategy: how are our people doing (both personally and professionally)? That’s what today’s episode is all about: how to increase velocity by knowing how your people are doing through impactful 1-on-1s.

Working closely with leaders and their organizations, I hear a ton of myths around strategy. Many people have a strong opinion on what they think will (or will not) work when it comes to developing and executing their growth strategy. For example, “OKRs don’t work… We have to get everyone aligned to these goals… We need to set stretch goals... We have too many meetings... We need a 10-year vision...” The list goes on and on.

Today, I’m not only going to dispel some common misunderstandings around developing and executing strategy, but I am also going to share the best practices learned from some of the world’s best strategists and CEOs.

The best gift you can give yourself, your team, your investors, your customers, and your organization is the ability to execute. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution of those ideas is where dimes turn into fortunes.

Today you’ll learn how other successful CEOs and their teams make sure their strategy comes alive through an unlikely process. You will see how to move your team beyond compliance to commitment (to the plan) with 1 key question. This 1 key question will drive clarity and desired alignment to execute in 2021.

What confidence level do you have in your 2021 strategy? Will it be executed with the quality, timeliness, and budget you have promised to your investors, customers, and team members? In the latest For You Leaders podcast series, “Call the Shot, Make the Shot,” I will share the best practices around strategy from some of the world’s fastest-growing companies, like Amazon, HomeAway, Dropoff, and many others.

It’s true. NOTHING KILLS FASTER THAN SUCCESS.

That’s because success has a way of masking the issues that rob an organization of its full potential. Every healthy business matures through 3 distinct stages of growth with different characteristics and problems at each stage. If you are successful, you will grow yourself into problems. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to know which stage of growth your organization is in. You must be able to predict and prepare for the journey ahead so you don’t stall out - or worse.

In the Velocity Vector Series’s final chapter, I will unpack exactly what happens as a company scales. I’ll also explain the two critical inflection points in every growing business and what you need to do as a leader to solve the crucial Warning Signs of Success that growth causes in every healthy organization. 

The goal of the Velocity Vector is to provide you with a framework and the mindset needed to achieve Decision Velocity. Although Decision Velocity sounds provocative and like something you should have, what is Decision Velocity? More importantly, why is it the unspoken goal of every leader, yet so elusive?