A short leadership talk by Chad Silverstein advising new hires and leaders to set clear short-term goals, proactively share them for accountability, and transparently report outcomes and lessons. He promotes converting experiences (including failures) into documented learning using a simple worksheet (situation, what happened, lessons, next steps) to build trust and improve team performance.
Chapters
One of my favorite pieces of advice that I'd give new people when they started my company is I'd say if you want to make a good first impression on the leadership team and the people that are training you, then figure out whatever goals you want to accomplish in the first 30 days or the first quarter, whatever it is, and write them out. And then just give it to whoever it is and don't even expect a response. Just let them know these are the things I'm working on. Not only will it give you something to hold yourself accountable, because you know, you gave it to, you know, the people that you want to hold you accountable. And whether they do or not doesn't make a difference. The fact is you did something that no one else in the system probably has ever done for them. And when they're in the meetings talking about new people, guess who they're talking about? They're talking about you. And I think this goes a long way for any high performing leaders who work with other high performing leaders. One, to model the way. And two, if you're running your company and you have clients, investors, whatever it is, there is real power in being able to show people what you're working on before they have to ask or wonder. And also give them the results at the end and tell them what you did well and tell them what you didn't do well. Be open about it and what you're going to do and what you learned about it. There's just so much strength in that. And high performing leaders, they're constantly assessing their work, their results, they can get crazy about it and they share it and there's real power in that. And you're rare if you do it and if you don't do it, that's an easy thing that you can start doing. And it doesn't matter what role or position you're in, whether you're the head of the system or you're the brand new employee, you'll make as big of an impact either way. And it really says something about your leadership skills if you can be transparent with what you're working on and how you're closing gaps and how you're improving and then sharing your learning with your team too. It's an amazing thing for leaders to be able to do that. We had what's called an experience transformer. I recently shared this with the band because this came up in one of our band practices and we would just write out, we had a worksheet for it. We got this in Dan Sullivan's Strategic coach program. And it was, what was the situation? What happened? What did we learn from it? What can we do next time to make it better? And there was just all these, like, little nuggets that we learned, and then we would just give it to each other. We give it to the other people in the company and let them learn from it. And it's powerful to take an experience and transform it into an opportunity to learn and then share that learning. It's like, it's how you 10x the trust and the performance on your team. Turn failures into these successes. Get in the habit of doing it. If you're a high performer, you're a leader, and you want to make an impact, and you want other people to follow and be other. Have more high performers, show them how to get it done and do it yourself. That is. It's a great discipline.
