Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons: the Five Things They All Come Back To

Ask yourself: What do I look at? Because that becomes what your team works on.

Focus on serving the customer, internal or external, whatever your role. Never lose sight of what they need. This is the one that holds when everything else is in flux.

Keep it simple. Question complexity. Say no to good ideas if they take you off track. Saying no to bad ideas is easy and nobody needs coaching for it. Saying no to genuinely good ideas that aren't yours to do this year is the actual skill, and it is much harder than it sounds.

Always get to the root cause. People or process, it doesn't matter. Never band-aid over a problem. A patched problem doesn't disappear. It just returns later, larger, and usually at the worst possible moment.

The thing to notice: your team works on what you ask about, not what you announced at the offsite. If you ask about the numbers every Monday and about your people once a quarter, you have told them exactly what matters, whatever the values on the wall say.

Ask yourself: What do I accept? Because that becomes normal.

Hold yourself and your team to high standards. Be excellent. Not aspirationally. Actually.

Let your team know where they stand. Certainty and clarity build confidence. Ambiguity does the opposite, and people fill a vacuum with the worst available interpretation.

You will make mistakes. Own them, and always come with a solution. The owning is what earns you the right to expect the same.

Don't let people down. Don't cancel meetings. Do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it. This sounds small. It is not small. It is the entire foundation of whether people believe anything else you say.

Don't be a dick. Self-explanatory.



The thing to notice: your standard is not what you announced. It is the worst thing you have walked past. Everybody on your team knows what that is, and most of them could tell you the date.

Ask yourself: What still reaches me that shouldn't? Because that sets the speed of your team, and the strength of your bench.



Empower your people. Don't take back the responsibility you hired them for.

Leave your team to get on with their jobs. Don't interfere. This is close enough to the point above that I nearly cut it, but it matters so much that it earns saying twice.

Never shirk your own responsibility either. Make decisions promptly. Empowerment isn't abdication. The calls that genuinely are yours must be made, and made quickly, or everything below you stalls.

When you're stuck, go to your peers first. Never straight to your boss. It builds your network, it develops your judgement, and it means the problems that do reach upward are the ones that genuinely need to.

The thing to notice: every decision that lands on your desk unnecessarily costs you twice. Once while it waits for you. Once because the person who should have made it didn't get the chance to grow from it.

Ask yourself: What pressure am I transmitting? Because that determines whether your team can think, and whether they can tell you the truth.



Have a system and process for everything. It removes stress for everyone. Structure is not bureaucracy. Structure is what lets people stop improvising and start thinking.

Work really hard. There is no substitute. Important to remember, working hard and transmitting urgency are two different things, and only one of them is useful to the people around you.

Stay calm and considered in meetings. Channel a graceful swan. This one took me years, and it is probably the most valuable single habit on the entire list.

The thing to notice: people cannot think clearly and manage your mood at the same time. Whichever one you make more urgent is the one they will do.

Ask yourself: What version of me do people get? Because that determines whether problems reach you early or late.



Get to know your people well. What drives them, what motivates them, what matters to them. Everyone's reason for being there is different, and assuming you know is the fastest way to get it wrong.

Be kind. Always. People remember how you made them feel long after they have forgotten what you decided.

Celebrate the wins as a team, and give credit where it's due. Constantly. It costs nothing and compounds.

Speak to everyone with the same respect you'd use with the CEO, regardless of their title. People are watching how you treat those who can do nothing for you. It tells them more about you than any of your decisions do.

Have an opinion, and the courage to share it respectfully, especially upward. Silence gets you nothing.

The thing to notice: this is the most expensive setting to leave unchosen. If people can't predict which version of you they'll get, they will bring you problems late. And late problems are the expensive ones.

Twenty lessons is a lot to follow. Five decisions is manageable.

You are already making all five. Right now, today, in whatever meeting you have after this. You set them by what you ask about, what you walk past, what you keep on your own desk, what mood you carry into a room, and who you are on a bad Thursday afternoon.

The question isn't whether you have settings. It's whether you chose them.

Most leaders didn't. They picked them up: from a good boss, from a bad one, from whatever got rewarded the year they were promoted. That isn't a failing. It is how nearly everyone ends up leading.



Leading by default doesn't mean leading badly. It means leading in a way you never actually chose.

Take the five headings. For each one, answer the question honestly. Not what you'd like to be true, what is true this month.

What do I look at?
What do I accept?
What still reaches me that shouldn't?
What pressure do I transmit?
What version of me do people get?

Then pick the one where the gap between what you intended and what is actually happening is widest. Not the one that's most broken. The one where the gap is widest. That's where the change is available.



Change that one thing.