Article Archives

How to Confront the Brutal Facts

Let’s talk about negative things in business that nobody wants to talk about – what Jim Collins calls the Brutal Facts. Furthermore, let's address how to confront the brutal facts so it becomes a good thing.

Here’s an example: I once worked with a great company going through a rough patch with the finance team. Turns out, the CFO – who was wonderful and had grown with the company - was now way over his head. The demands of the role had grown five times, while the CFO and the team had only grown about three times, so there was a gap. As a result, the finance department was letting the company down. While the CEO had a sense of what was going on and preferred not to have to deal with it, it was really starting to hurt a lot of people.

In our two-day strategic planning meeting, for this company, we found out that the finance team wasn't able to give the business what it needed. Most people try to walk by such a sensitive topic and leave that for another time. They just don't want to get into it, in the room, for fear of how it might turn out and more, importantly - out of compassion for their colleagues – don’t want to embarrass them in front of everybody.

But we have great tools to flush out and deal with the brutal facts - respectfully and professionally.

The challenge in dealing with the brutal facts is that our experiences are often about brutal opinions, not grounded in facts, which is a destructive conversation.

What We Did

We broke people into four different groups and asked them to list all the facts about the Brutal Facts. It's important to note that we didn't ask for judgments or opinions. We only wanted to discuss the facts that could be verified.

Armed with these sheets of facts, we could then have a very constructive debate about what we could do. In the end we prioritized the issues and the team came up with an action plan to address them.

It was a way of turning an issue no one wanted to address into a deep, constructive debate. In the end, this led to a very positive outcome: the business got more of what it needed. And the CFO and team were able to feel much better about their work and take it up a notch.

The Challenge

What brutal facts are you not talking about in your business?
How can you constructively gather the facts about the brutal facts, have a healthy debate and move ahead?

if you want to hear more about how to deal with brutal facts and the power in confronting them, listen to this episode of the Growth Whisperers.

And if you need help to deal constructively with some brutal facts in your business, call us – we’d love to help.

Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco

Do You Have Helpful Cassandras in Your Life?

I want you to think about something that the late Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel) referred to as “Helpful Cassandras”. These are people who are really critical and likely to, in a positive way, let you know possible faults in your ideas and thinking. They are the honest voice in the room telling you your idea is actually flawed when everyone else may be telling you it's brilliant.

As leaders rise up in organizations and get more power, more clout and more success, it's harder to find people who disagree with you. Andy Grove found that, in committee or project meetings, everyone would agree - and that can be really dangerous.

So, who do you have in your life who is critical of your ideas? Tells you that you have spinach in your teeth? Helps you to find the flaws in what you're doing so it improves your thinking? Not people who break you down but people who challenge your thinking, debate with you and find ways to shape your ideas to make them better and better. These people are critical.

Of course, once you finally get to a decision point, they need to agree with you, support the decision and move ahead. They can't continue to criticize or debate because that would be counterproductive.

The Challenge

Think about all the meetings you are in, the teams you are on, the projects you are part of…

Do you have someone who’s really there, in a positive way, finding the negatives, the weaknesses or the gaps so you make better decisions and have better thinking?

If you want to hear more about this, listen to this episode of The Growth Whisperers podcast as we dig deeper into this topic, and look at the things that are required to create better collective intelligence with your team.

About Kevin:

CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.

Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.

These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.

About Lawrence & Co:

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco

Over Planning vs. Perfect Engagement

“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.” - Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter, 1798 –1863

What will get you better results: A Perfect Plan or Perfect Engagement? All too often leaders get caught over planning, trying to make their strategy, product or presentation absolutely perfect.

Don’t get me wrong – I love and appreciate quality because it does make a difference. But we can get lost in the middle of projects when we are not clear on the destination.

When leaders get obsessed with perfection, they can forget about the message they are trying to communicate - and the result they want the receiver of the message to think and to feel.

So, instead of getting too deep into tweaking, editing and polishing your product, start by asking yourself…

“What am I trying to get the receiver to think, feel and then do?”

Once you are crystal clear, go and perfect your product. You are much more likely to get the outcome you desire – knowing exactly where you are going.

“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.” - Salvador Dali, Spanish surrealist painter, 1904 –1989

About Kevin:

CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.

These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.

About Lawrence & Co:

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco

Teach Your Children Mental Resilience

Managing mental resilience and health is challenging enough as an adult.

We can understand why we’re stressed or upset, we know there are resources and tools to help us. (Review Chapters 3 Double Your Resilience, Chapter 6 Deal with Your Emotional Junk and Chapter 7 Manage Your Mental Health in Your Oxygen Mask First for more about this.) And we’ve lived long enough to know that we sometimes can’t manage our way out of it alone.

However, it's different for our children. They don’t have the perspective to articulate their stress, or to ask for help.

One of the fallouts of this pandemic, we’re now seeing, is how much our kids are struggling with uncertainty and worry and lack of social interaction. And we’re learning how important it is to teach our children mental resilience and how to manage their emotions in an uncertain world.

Learning this critical life skill can’t wait until they are in a career and stressed on the job.

Two-thirds of children and youth in British Columbia are struggling with mild to moderate mental health challenges during the pandemic, up from one third before the arrival of COVID-19. - Vancouver Sun

It’s heartbreaking that so many kids are suffering from depression, anxiety, can’t focus, feel lonely and even suicidal. And not encouraging that we lack the social service supports to help them.

That being said, there is a lot we can do at home, starting at an early age. Teaching them how to deal with their emotions appropriately is as important as learning how to cross the street safely and know how to swim, to be independent, to have good hygiene and manners, to have compassion and to contribute.

Pay attention. We get so busy managing day-to-day activities we often miss cues.
Validate your child’s emotions. Acknowledge it’s OK to have feelings of all kinds.
Be calm and a safe place to land.
Teach them. Show them how to calm themselves down, and to express themselves appropriately.
Manage their sleep and screen time.
Model resilience behaviours. How you behave when you are stressed – and what you do to mitigate it - is your best teaching tool.
Get educated. We’re not born knowing how to manage every situation. Every parent can learn strategies and tools to better help their children.

Learning and practicing resilience rituals, is a leadership skill that will serve you, your team and your family in every stage of work, self and life.

The Challenge

How good are you at practicing your own resilience rituals so that you are the best version of yourself, taking care of your body, mind and spirit?
What conversations might you have, or tools might you share with the children in your life?

About Kevin:

CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.

These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.

About Lawrence & Co:

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco

Life Lessons to Master

My son’s high school graduation is on the horizon. As he stands on the edge of the next phase of his life I’ve been thinking a lot about what life lessons I can pass along to him.

Of course, he’ll learn his own as he meets new work and life challenges but, as a parent, my job is to make sure I plant some guideposts to ease his way.

That’s why this 2019 article about Warren Buffet’s greatest life lessons caught my eye. Then turning 89, he was asked about his six best pieces of life advice. They’re pretty simple.

6 Life Lessons to Master

Marry the right person. The biggest decision of your life, he says, will change your aspirations.
Invest in yourself. Learn to communicate both in writing and in person – a skill that can increase your value by at least 50%. And take care of your body and mind. If you were given one car for your whole life, how would you treat it so that it lasts?
Associate with ‘high-grade’ people. Surround yourself with people who are better than you are
Work for people you respect. And don’t just take a job for the money.
Ignore the noise. Keep a level head and stay the course when investing.
Success isn’t measured by money. Love is. Push it out and it comes back tenfold.

The Challenge

What are the life lessons you can pass on?
How can you keep them alive for yourself?

About Kevin:

CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.

These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.

About Lawrence & Co:

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco

The Value of Failure

One of our natural instincts is to avoid mistakes and pain. It's deeply wired into our DNA and what our ancestors required in order to survive.

In the world we live in today, while there are still really dangerous things that can deeply hurt us, we can get too worried about trying to avoid mistakes. As a result, we slow ourselves down and limit our learning experiences.

Becoming masterful and competent in our careers often means learning how to avoid making the same mistakes. But, as we train the next generation of technicians and leaders, we often forget about the value of failure and the learning it can offer us.

We want to have them to have a better and easier growth path by helping them to avoid making mistakes, in the first place. Sometimes, we create just the opposite - which I talk about in this recent blog - slowing their learning and making them more risk adverse.

In fact, as leaders and parents, our job is to help the next generation find ways to experience and learn from mistakes - and to understand the value of failure.

I love the story in this recent article about a teacher who gives each student a bag of 1,000 beads. Each time they make a mistake, they take out one bead and achieve mastery only when the bag is empty. The faster they make mistakes, the faster they progress.

Making a mistake becomes an achievement to celebrate.

Hopefully, by accelerating the pace at which people make many little mistakes, they’ll achieve the wisdom to avoid big ones in the future.

The Challenge

What can you do to increase your own mistake rate in a healthy range of accelerated learning?
Where are you playing too safe and too slow?
How can you accelerate the growth of the people around you as they progress towards mastery?

About Kevin:

CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.

These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.

About Lawrence & Co:

We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.

by lawrenceandco