Chad Silverstein delivers a short leadership talk about "setting the edge": the discipline leaders use to set culture, tone, and incentives to drive high performance. He emphasizes daily habits (how you start meetings), emotional intelligence in tough times, using creative incentives and contests to reward high performers, and challenging top talent to raise the organizational standard.
Chapters
I love this day because every leader gets an opportunity to set the edge. They get to set the bar in their culture, and that's a huge responsibility. Depending on what kind of a culture you're building, how important it is for your team to be a team that's in flow, that has chemistry, that's a high performing team, that's breaking records, that can be there for each other when it gets tough. And setting the edge has a lot to do with your core, your ability to have emotional intelligence during tough times, and to be able to pick up your team when they need to be picked up, challenge them and hit them when they need to be hit. And setting the edge starts when you walk in the door every single day. How you start your day, how you start your meetings, sometimes even the way you don't start them, meaning you change the tone, do something different, shake things up. Set the edge is a discipline. It is a nuance that you can do different. You don't want to get to a point where you're kind of throwing so much change at people that they're wondering what the next flavor of the month is. But being creative and having fun, you know, we did this in my office with contests. I would set the edge, I would set the bar, I would create, you know, the rules of the game. And as soon as you set that age and you challenge the high performers and you let people take off, you don't know what you can do. I used to have people so upset in my office because I used to give away a lot of money for, for incentives. And a lot of the leaders would question why I was doing what I was doing. Because we're paying people already, they're already making a lot of money. And so they'd say to me, why are you, why are you giving away so much more money for them to do their jobs? They're already getting paid. And I said, because it works. It works. I'm setting the tone. And you put that carrot out there and you give them those accelerators and you say, if you hit X, I'll pay you Y. That's an incentive that people want to go after. And it works. And I proved it worked. And I wanted to keep doing it. And I want to do it bigger and I want to do more of it. And again, this comes circles back to me. This is what I would want. This is how you're going to get the best out of me. Give me that incentive and watch what happens. Watch what happens. Give me, give me a big incentive like that. And watch me set the tone. All you need is a few people. Hopefully you're one of the few. And if you're one of the few, then you should be setting the tone. And if you're not capable, you're not in a role to do that, then find the one who can challenge them more. These are the people that usually are ignored the most because everyone's focused on the low performers. Challenge the high performer and get them to set that tone. Set that bar, make the bar the standard, and you'll see it increase over time. It's incredible.
