Boundless #7 | 🏉 What Aussie Rules Football Teaches Us About Leadership | 💭 Learning the "how" vs. the "what"
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#Thoughts
On Corporate Training
I've been thinking a lot about corporate training. Most training we do misses an opportunity to be truly transformative (I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago). This is because we focus on the "what" of the job instead of the "how".
When I was at McKinsey & Company, I experienced something dramatically different. We were trained on the "how" - how to solve problems, how to communicate, how to write. Consulting is perfectly set up for this - you don't know what you'll be working on after you get hired, but I think companies can still learn from this. This was and is still fundamentally different than any other company I worked in or have worked with.
At most companies, people squabble over different styles of working together. At McKinsey, what seemed like a constraint, was an advantage. Instead of managing 100 different partners versions of "how" we focused instead on doing great work and getting better at our underlying competence on those foundational skills.
As companies grow and lose their connection to a core set of underlying values, it becomes harder and harder to have that shared alignment around the how - and we instead mislead ourselves into placing importance on what we are doing. The companies and individuals that thrive over the next 25 years will be the ones that focus on the how - things like how we communicate, how we solve problems, how we motivate people and how we design organizations for high-performance.
#BoundlessPod
Cody Royle, Aussie Rules Football Coach & Author
Cody wrote a book on what the business world can learn from sports on talent management. He was motivated by his "baffling" corporate job where they talked about working as a team, but it had no connection to the high-performance team environment of his weekend job, coaching the Canadian National Aussie Rules Football team. I love the work Cody is doing!
Check out last weeks episode of the #boundlesspod
Listen
#Create
Launching Soon - Future of Work Mindset Assessment
I've been hard at work creating a comprehensive tool to assess the "future of work mindset" - I released an early V1.0 of this and have gotten some great feedback. I'm quickly improving the tool which I hope to launch in the next week or two.
The tool will assess three categories - Foundations, How You Create & How You Adapt. The next steps will be to turn this into a customized report for people to take action on and also will be developed into an online course to be launched in late spring/early summer.
I will be offering free coaching on this assessment report to the next five supporters on Patreon (which you can do for as little as $1 a month).
#Community
Work That Inspires Me & Things I Wish I Wrote
Tom Critchlow - I'll be releasing a podcast with Tom Critchlow tomorrow, who I met after stumbling upon his writing on being an independent consultant. My two favorite pieces of his writing:
Venkatesh Rao @ Ribbon Farm: An approach to developing your "12 Life Rules" (from my weekly #boundlessreads) from one of the most interesting writers and freelancers on the web.
#Supporters
Gratitude!
I continue to be overwhelmed by all the support to help me do the work I am most passionate about - which is helping as many people as possible do the work that matters to them. Thanks so much to JEFF for being the latest rockstar to support me on Patreon and also being one of the first people who came to me for career guidance almost 9 years ago!
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#ICYMI\
Links, articles, and content from past weeks
1. Career Transition Playbook: A 50+ page workbook that will help you take action on a massive change in your career and your direction
2. Boundless Podcast: Janet Matta, Career Coach: Taking The Unconventional Paths In Your Career