I love sports. Sports also provide awesome insight into leadership. To start, who wants to hire a head football coach for a prestigous college football team, whose only credentials are having coached his daughter's middle school volleyball team? This "coach" has not proven anything, besides the fact that he must have a lot of patience. He may be an awesome leader.He may have countless hours of armchair quarterbacking. He may even have won a trophy in college during the summer flag football tournament, but that is not what and Athletic Director is looking for. He doesn't...

What does Thanksgiving mean to you?  Is it the colossal amounts of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie?  Charlie Brown? The Lions playing football, or is it the overarching theme of saying thanks and giving appreciation for the things and people in your life that deserve it.    For me one of the most meaningful parts of the holiday is the thanksgiving, the intentional time that we take to think about and give gratitude to the things and people that we often miss or overlook life.  I was recently pondering how Thanksgiving might effect and relate to...

If you had the chance to meet anyone famous, who would you choose?   Would you pick a professional athlete, a politician, a celebrity, or a CEO?   Why would you choose this specific man or woman?   What would you ask them?   This last week in ELP, we were asked to compile a list of 10 leaders we’d like to interview and what we would ask them if the opportunity ever arose.   Who do we choose? Donald Trump or Donald Miller? Bono or Jeff Bezos?   As we sat deliberating which names made the cut and which didn’t, I realized that it doesn’t truly...

Why would someone want you to be their leader?   Tim asked us this question in our meeting this last week.  I said, “Because I care about the individual while I lead them to the big picture.”  Others in the room stated similar reasons and when we were done Tim shared that the Harvard Business Review recently discovered that while all leaders need strategic direction and vision, there are four additional qualities that make for extraordinary leaders.   At the top of this list was vulnerability. What they found was when a leader shares weakness it invites...

I remember getting reprimanded in the second week of my first job after college.  I was hired on as a design engineer for a material handing company – think robotic cranes and airport conveyers.  My supervisor sent me an email, although he sat on the other side of the cubical.    He called me out for consistently showing up late to work.  The trouble was I didn't know I was being late.  I didn't even know there was a specific time to start.  Apparently I was supposed to be at the office ready to go at 7:30 am.   I saw other engineers...

If you’re anything like me, you have a love/hate relationship with to-do lists.   I’ve been ‘blessed’ with the kind of brain that doesn’t turn off at five o’clock. I find myself up at two in the morning, ideas running around in my head like a stampede of wild elephants.   It’s only when I finally grab my iPhone, adding my genius idea to my ever-growing to-do list, that I can go back to sleep… confident that the idea will be there in the morning when I’m coherent enough to act on it. (It’s a 50/50 chance that the idea is...