success

It’s Game Day, Who’s Your Kicker?

February 2, 2022

It’s Game Day, Who’s Your Kicker?

In the U.S. National Football League, January is known as the playoff month, leading up to the all-important Super Bowl, scheduled this year for February 13^th. With 53 players allowed on each team roster, most of the players have backups. The kicker is the only unique role on the team. Kickers come out on the field to make the extra point after a touchdown, and to make field goals.

Many games are won or lost by the accuracy of kickers. The Cincinnati Bengal’s kicker Evan McPherson’s 52-yard field goal cinched their 19-16 win over the Tennessee Titans on January 22^nd. This advanced the Bengals to the American Football Conference championship game. The following weekend, McPherson’s 33-yard field goal in overtime secured the 27-24 win over the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Bengals now advance to the Super Bowl. As a rookie he is also the first player in NFL history to make more than four field goals in multiple games in a single postseason.⁽¹⁾ (more…)

Recognize Your Worth: Choose Confidence

August 5, 2020

Priscilla Archangel

Confidence, Purpose, Self-Worth

Recognize Your Worth: Choose Confidence

Think back to the start of your professional journey. What if you knew your full capabilities, your potential, your value? What difference would that have made in your decisions? How would it have increased your confidence to pursue your goals?

A research study has shown that our confidence increases over the course of our career^[1]. It makes sense. Over time, we learn from our successes and failures. We discover how to get better results based on our personal style and capabilities. We figure out how to navigate tough situations. We gain clarity about our goals. In fact, the women surveyed rated themselves as 15 points less confident than men in their mid-20s, with both increasing to the same level of confidence by the time they reached their mid-40s. (more…)

10 Key Questions for Leaders – Part 1

December 2, 2015

Priscilla Archangel

Priorities, Results

10 Key Questions for Leaders – Part 1

Leaders are faced with a myriad of issues each day, but one of their most critical responsibilities is to step back from the urgent and focus on the important. They must achieve a balance between the reactionary crisis mode and the proactive planning mode. This means pausing and reflecting on how they’re influencing behaviors to ensure the right outcomes. To accomplish that, there are 10 key important questions that, properly addressed, will strengthen both their leadership and their organizational effectiveness.

What is the disruptive threat to your business model? Leaders should be constantly aware of ongoing threats to their business model and its products or services, and take action to address it. Jim Kennedy, Chairman and former CEO of Cox Enterprises provided a great example when he diversified his business away from classified ads to leverage the growing role of the internet, by successfully launching Autotrader.com. So make a list of all the products and services provided by your organization, your team, and even you, based on your skillsets. Now for each one, think about two or three ways that your product, service or skillset can be provided faster, cheaper or differently. What technological advances might make your current products or services obsolete? How might consumer preferences shift away from your current model? Believe in the possibility and probability of those ideas, then focus on how you’ll anticipate the future and address that threat. Shift your business model to where the customers are going, instead of where they are now.

Purpose. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Many organizations and teams shift into automatic mode as their activities become routinized. They assume that demand will continue for their products and services, and evolve into placing more focus on what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it, instead of WHY they’re doing it. But asking the question WHY, connects you to the purpose of your activities. It’s the motivator and driving force that inspires the team to the appropriate behaviors that will support it. Once they understand your WHY, an emotional link can form as they pinpoint their contribution to accomplishing it. The underlying WHY or purpose of an individual, team or organization typically does not change, because it’s a fundamental belief and value. According to Simon Sinek, the how and what changes as necessary to continue to support the WHY. When you know your purpose or your WHY and communicate it effectively, this clarity attracts others to you who recognize a benefit from it.
Failure. Where have you failed, and what insights have you learned from it? If you’ve never failed, you’ve never attempted something of impact and significance, relative to your abilities. Failure can add value when we learn something from it, and build upon it. Thomas Edison failed many times in trying to develop a light bulb. The Wright brothers failed initially before leveraging their underdog status to become the first in flight. J. C. Penney was sick and bankrupt before he built his namesake store into a retailing giant. But they learned from their failures, kept trying and eventually succeeded. The only bad failure is if you fall into shame and shut down afterwards. Instead, find a stepping stone to move forward. Failure is a requirement for growth. It’s accompanied by exploration, curiosity, pursuit, action, and flexibility. And most importantly, reflecting on and learning lessons that can be constructively shared with others.
Curiosity. What are you curious about? Curiosity is a precursor to learning. Though it’s easy to be consumed with the daily challenges of leadership roles, it’s important to take time to explore insights in related areas to stimulate thought processes, and spur new ideas. Research shows that successful CEOs are curious, and this curiosity leads to growth. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook started his Year of Books online reading club to encourage discovery about different beliefs, cultures and technologies. And Richard Kinder, Chairman and CEO of Kinder Morgan reads about 50 books a year. He learns from how other leaders have confronted challenges, particularly overwhelming ones for which they had few ready answers. His curiosity in reading is linked to his interests, and fuels his passion for learning. So dig into those areas that you’re curious about, and your learning will form the basis for future growth.
Service. What does my team need from me in order for them to be successful? As a leader, your responsibility is to serve your employees, enabling them in turn to provide value to customers, investors, and the community. You serve your team by creating a compelling vision, and providing the processes, tools and structure to support innovation, recognition, teamwork, and success. Service requires a continual focus on others to understand their needs, motivations, and aspirations, and to provide them with opportunities for growth. This includes a measure of humility to steer the focus from your own, to the teams’ accomplishments, and to ensure that your decisions serve them and not yourself. Service also provides a greater connection to the team as you partner together in the organization’s success. Leaders who focus on service take responsibility when things go wrong. Leaders who focus on service empower their team. Leaders who focus on service attract, retain and develop talented people.

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Your Dream or Your Nightmare: Keys to Successful Small Business Development

May 1, 2015

Priscilla Archangel

Capability, Results

Your Dream or Your Nightmare: Keys to Successful Small Business Development

This is supposed to be your dream come true. Finally, your business is up and running. You’re breathing life into your big idea. You no longer have to answer to the boss because you are the boss. You’re working your business plan. You’re finding your path to financial freedom. You know your target market and you’re finding new clients. You have positive feedback on your products and services. You’re developing new technology. You’re finding additional funding. You’ve finally found the right team to work with. You have the right workspace. You can feel the exciting energy when you walk into your business each morning. (more…)

Find a Strength

February 1, 2015

Priscilla Archangel

Capability

Find A Strength

Palmer is very luckey. Really. His last name is Luckey. At the age of 22, he’s also one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30, and founder of Oculus VR. His company is developing virtual reality technology and was recently purchased by Facebook for $2 billion, even though the product is still in prototype stage and not making any money yet. Luckey’s goal is to make virtual reality affordable for mass market consumption and to integrate it into our everyday lives. Mark Zuckerberg is obviously a believer and thinks it will become a mode of communication with a magnitude similar to television or telephones. With a net worth of $500 million Palmer is the youngest self-made multi-millionaire. (more…)

Passion: Blinded or Balanced

September 30, 2014

Priscilla Archangel

Capability

Passion: Blinded or Balanced?

Ann Marie Sastry has a big idea. With over 70 patents and 80 scientific publications to her credit, she describes herself as a “happy warrior who’s driven by doing the next new thing.” That drive leads her to put in 100 hour work weeks and spend over two decades in pursuit of developing new battery technology application for use in electric vehicles. She’s scrapped the traditional chemical lithium technology to rethink the basics of energy, power, mass, volume, cost and safety, all in search of a new approach. She’s also raised $30 million from a variety of backers in support of her grand idea.

Sastry has an entrepreneurial zeal for her product that compels her to pursue any and every approach and perspective to accomplish her goal. She has a passion and optimism for success that propels her forward, and expects that within a year or two her product will be in full production. But for every successful entrepreneur, there are many more whose dreams never turn into reality. That’s because the same passion that propels her forward with a clear focus on success, can be blinding to others and cause them to miss the obvious cues that unfortunately their grand idea won’t get off the ground.

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The Mighty Ones

August 31, 2014

Priscilla Archangel

Capability, Results

The Mighty Ones

The applause was deafening. The congratulations overwhelmed your email box. The press clippings were glowing. Everyone was buzzing, because your recent product launch was successful. Last quarter’s earnings beat even the analysts’ predictions. The company’s stock price was up 15%. Operating costs were down, and sales volumes were number one in the industry.

So how do you follow that act? All of this excitement doesn’t build a platform upon which to rest. Instead it forms a bar, higher than the last one, over which you must hurdle. After all, the stockholders expect more earnings. Customers expect better products. Employees expect more career opportunity. And so it goes. How do you manage all of these expectations for continuous improvement against the best strategy for the company’s growth? How do you compete for market dominance without succumbing to market vulnerabilities?

This is the pivotal point. The choices you make will become either a stepping stone to greater success, or the rock that trips up your company, your team, or your own leadership success. Companies and people don’t automatically enter a “safe” zone when they reach a measure of accomplishment. But in some cases, their behavior suggests that they think their momentum can’t be stopped.

You’ve heard the saying, “the higher you climb, the harder you fall.” While that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, in the midst of success, it’s important to remain grounded; like holding onto a guardrail.

Jim Collins, author of the best-selling books Good to Great and Built to Last, provides an explanation on how once-mighty companies fall. He highlights five stages in his book How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Hubris born of success. Here an organization or team exhibits extreme pride and arrogance based on past accomplishments.
Undisciplined pursuit of more. Companies in this stage overreach, become obsessed with growth, and fail to manage the process and pace effectively, ultimately undermining their long-term value.
Denial of risk and peril. By this stage, companies are so caught up in successes that they become blind to the possibilities of failure.
Grasping for salvation. This is the moment where the company’s decisions lead to new life or certain death.
Capitulation to irrelevance or death. At this point organizations are spiraling out of control and either give in to certain death, or shrink into irrelevance.

So how does one avoid this death spiral, whether within your team, your organization or for your own leadership abilities? Here are a few tips from my playbook.

Build a culture of humility. Keep the focus on the value you provide to your customers; and the “why” of your organization. What’s the impact if you cease to exist? It’s really not all about your company. It’s about the value you provide to others. This is a giving mentality, where long term relationships, integrity and quality products or services are most important; instead of a getting mentality, where there’s constant pressure on the customer to buy.
Find your truth teller. Unfortunately, some leaders surround themselves with other leaders who will tell them what they want to hear. Or they don’t create a culture where their team feels comfortable fully informing them about business issues. Make sure you surround yourself with people who are encouraged and willing to speak up and say the difficult things or raise questions that may be contrary to the prevailing direction.
Strike your balance. If you try to be all things to all customers; if you overreach in too many different directions, you lose your balance and end up grasping for a lifeline. A tightrope walker is constantly shifting his weight to keep his center of mass above his feet. This alignment is critical in your organization or team to ensure stability between competing priorities.
Exhibit learning leadership. Only when the leader of the team demonstrates a continual desire to learn, to admit faults and deficiencies, and to seek input from the entire team and others outside the company, will others in the organization follow suit.
Master discipline. Establish a system that produces results, and keep repeating it. Measure the right factors. Ensure team members are learning agile and will support the culture. Focus on a consistent vision. Stick to what works.

Note that these recommendations have nothing to do with functional or technical skills. You can hire individuals on your team to fulfill those roles. This has everything to do with pure leadership; influencing others to move forward in the right direction, based on the right decisions. These are important steps in building a “mighty” organization. So, are you a “mighty” leader?

Fail Your Way to Success

October 30, 2013

Priscilla Archangel

Courage

Fail Your Way To Success

Failure is typically considered a bad experience. We don’t perform as expected. We’re unsuccessful at attaining a goal. Our health or wealth deteriorates. We’re unfairly blamed for something we didn’t do. We lose someone or something that we love. But the reality is that all of us experience inadequacy, frustration, defeat and botch things up, multiple times in our lives. The question is, what do we learn from our failures, particularly the significant ones? Do we pick ourselves up and push forward, or does it paralyze us? Do we blame others and look for someone to save us, or do we use it as a tool to shape our future?

Failure is a hot topic this month with the launch of 2 new books. Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn by leadership guru John Maxwell explores the question of “What do we learn when we fail?” Experiencing failure is a given in everyone’s life, but we often don’t want to talk about it, we just try to endure it. Maxwell believes that the common saying “experience is the best teacher” is more accurately phrased as “evaluated experience is the best teacher”. His book shares lessons on humility, hope, reality, responsibility, improvement, problems, bad experiences, change, teachability, adversity and maturity, as key traits of learners who succeed in the face of problems, failure, and losses.

IStockphoto

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams wrote How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. In an interview with Gary Rosen in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Review, Adams advises readers not to follow their passion because it may not be very rational. For instance, a sports enthusiast who decides to open a sports paraphernalia store because he’s passionate about it, may not have a good business plan. So don’t get passionate beyond the initial stage with something that isn’t working. Instead, try lots of things that won’t kill you, bankrupt you, etc. until something works. Adams failed at inventions, computer programs, and other initiatives, but every time he did something he learned from it, and that skill came in handy. Everything he did was all designed to give him experience that would become a stronger base.

Experiencing Failure

While we all experience failure, we generally want to experience it in private with minimal publicity. After all, it’s embarrassing, especially when it looks like so many others around us are winning. Because it impacts our self-image, it can leave us in fear of greater failure if we see ourselves as losers, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, we can decide to focus on avoiding that same mistake in the future. We can convert failure to a positive experience, using focus and faith. Focus on what you learned and what you did right. Have faith in God and yourself to change as a result of what you’ve learned.

The bigger the failure the greater effort it takes to get out of it, and the more we learn. Failure is all relative. What we perceive to be failure may simply require us to redefine success. The most successful people are those who learn from their (and others’) mistakes, refuse to let those mistakes define them (don’t wallow in them), use them as stepping stones, and share them with others.

Failure isn’t always your fault, but it may be your responsibility. For example, if you hire someone who later steals from you, it’s not your fault that this person is a thief, but it is your responsibility to hire people who seem to be trustworthy. So you can learn to screen candidates more thoroughly, and put more security measures in place in hopes that it won’t happen again. Or maybe you were responsible for a project, and someone on your team lied and failed to perform their assignment as part of that project. Because you’re the leader, you bear the responsibility for that failure, even though you didn’t personally do something wrong. Things may happen that are unfair. There may be a horrible miscarriage of justice, a failure that’s pinned on you. But the situation is now out of your control, and you are carrying the blame. You still have a choice to deal with sour lemons, or to make lemonade. You can’t control the decisions others have made, but you can control how you respond.

Benefits of Failure

So as you reflect on your failures, reflect on these accomplishments.

Failure is a badge of courage. If we’ve never failed, we’ve never attempted anything worthwhile.
Failure informs us on our weaknesses and directs us to our strengths.
Failure gives us something to laugh about so that we can have fun with ourselves.
Failure gives us something to cry about so that we can appreciate the happy times.
Failure closes doors that don’t fit our purpose and helps point us to opportunities best suited for us.
Failure keeps us humble, recognizing that we’re not infallible.
Failure helps us appreciate success.
Failure highlights our wrong decisions so that we can learn how to make right ones.
Failure helps us identify what we need to learn.
Failure helps us identify what we can teach others.
Failure helps us avoid more failure.

So the next time you experience failure…(maybe later today?)…don’t kick yourself, curse others, or spiral into depression. Instead, find a quiet spot and spend time meditating on what exactly went wrong, how you would handle it differently next time, what you’re learning from it, and how you can recover from the negative impact of it. Write that lesson down, then move forward, resolved not to repeat it.

Purchase John Maxwell’s book here and select Products.

Watch Scott Adams’ interview here.

Solve a Problem

September 30, 2012

Priscilla Archangel

Capability

Solve A Problem

Kevin Plank recognized a problem. As a football player at the University of Maryland, he became increasingly focused on the fact that after they played, the cotton t-shirts worn by the players under their pads were constantly soaked with perspiration. Kevin felt that the weight of the shirts negatively impacted their performance on the field. Already an entrepreneurial hustler on campus, Kevin decided to find a way to develop a shirt that would draw moisture away from the body. He started with a synthetic fabric made from women’s undergarments, and a friend joined him in marketing their product to sports teams and retailers. His brashness, creativity and pure hustle paid off, and they were eventually able to sign well known endorsers. Today, his company, Under Armour has a full line of athletic clothes, undergarments and shoes for men and women. They went from their first big sale in 1996 to becoming a publicly traded company in 2005, and their 2012 second quarter apparel net revenues increased 23% to $253 million compared with $205 million in the same period of the prior year. (Click here to read the full story by Monte Burke in the September issue of ForbesLife.)

Plank’s solution to a problem became his key to success. Problems are all around us every day. The question is whether we recognize situations around us as “problems”, and what do we do about it. This requires attention to our surroundings and issues, and a willingness to own a role in developing a solution.

A Peanut and a Sweet Potato

George Washington Carver is a perfect example of this. According to Os Hillman in his book Change Agent: Engaging Your Passion To Be The One Who Makes A Difference,(p. 104) Carver lived in an era of pervasive racial discrimination when he encouraged southern farmers to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes because their land was depleted due to planting too many cotton crops. They initially criticized him for this suggestion, believing that the market wouldn’t support it, but nonetheless began to do so. Carver, a Christian from an early age, would get up in the morning and go out to the fields where he sought the wisdom of God on what to do with these crops. God obviously answered his prayer because he subsequently created three hundred products from the peanut, and one hundred from the sweet potato. This revitalized the economy in the south, and made him a friend and confidante to presidents and business leaders. Why? Because they recognized that he was a problem solver. He had the ability to recognize problems where others overlooked them. Then he was willing to own the problem and take on the challenge of addressing it. Finally he had the vision and creativity to develop and implement a solution.

Your Personal Problem

Unfortunately too many of us look past the problems surrounding us with the attitude that we have no ability to impact or address them. We feel powerless and incapable of coming up with a solution, and look to someone else to handle it. But there’s nothing special about Kevin Plank or George Washington Carver. They simply opened their minds to future possibilities, and didn’t let their circumstances limit them. Both had a vision to see a problem situation and identify a potential resolution for it. They didn’t blame others around them for these problems; they stepped up and took responsibility for the solutions. Individuals who demonstrate this skillset are valuable members of any team

Each of us has a problem or set of problems assigned to us from God that we are uniquely equipped to solve. God is exposing the problem to us, and drawing us to Him so that He can reveal the solution. Based on our instincts, interests and initiative we can be a change agent in our environment. Joseph demonstrated this capability in ancient Egypt when he interpreted the King’s dream of the coming seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine. Then he provided a proposal on how to prepare for the famine. He was instantly appointed second in command in the kingdom. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have used their billions in assets to address global issues of hunger, poverty, education and health care. Every problem solver won’t reach the same number of people, but every problem needs to be addressed.

So what problems has God assigned to you? Be diligent in discovering them because solving them is your pathway to your purpose and your road to success.

It’s Game Day, Who’s Your Kicker?

Recognize Your Worth: Choose Confidence

10 Key Questions for Leaders – Part 1

Your Dream or Your Nightmare: Keys to Successful Small Business Development

Find A Strength

Passion: Blinded or Balanced?

The Mighty Ones

Fail Your Way To Success

Solve A Problem

Leadership Tips