Tag Archive for: excellence

Leadership Excellence

A Note From Jenny

A Wake-Up Call: Focusing on What Truly Matters

This month gave me a wake-up call in the most literal sense—I took a tumble down the stairs and fractured my T7 vertebrae. While I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone, it forced me to pause and reflect in a way that life’s usual hustle rarely allows.

The shock of it all reminded me to focus on what’s truly important as we approach the finish line for 2024. Professionally, it’s about prioritizing the projects and goals that have the most significant impact. Personally, it’s about making sure I’m showing up for the people and commitments that matter most.

This unexpected moment of clarity helped me realize the power of reevaluating and readjusting, especially as we close out the year. If you’ve been feeling stretched thin or pulled in too many directions, I encourage you to ask yourself: What adjustments can I make now to focus on what truly matters?

Sometimes, life literally knocks us down so we can get back up stronger and more focused. Let’s end 2024 on the right note—aligned with our values and our vision.

Let’s dive in!

 

The Leadership Edge: Mastering Vision, Strategy, and Communication

Leadership isn’t just about managing tasks—it’s about inspiring action, creating impact, and driving results. Drawing from years of coaching and consulting, I’ve identified eight critical areas where leaders can excel. While each area is essential, today I’ll focus on three that are absolutely pivotal: articulating a vision, thinking strategically, and communicating persuasively.

 

  1. Articulate a Vision

What vision have you painted for your team? Does it inspire action?
A compelling vision is more than a statement; it’s a shared story of where you’re going and why it matters. One of my clients—a highly accomplished leader—once realized he had been so focused on targets that he’d neglected to communicate the bigger picture to his team. The moment he clarified and shared his vision, the transformation was remarkable. Teams align and perform better when they understand where they’re headed and why their contributions matter.

Action Step: Take time this week to revisit your team’s vision. Ask yourself: Would I buy into this vision if it were pitched to me?

 

  1. Think and Act Strategically

Great leaders don’t just focus on today; they look ahead.
Strategic planning isn’t just another task—it’s an investment in long-term success. As you think about 2025, identify your top five priorities and the concrete steps needed to bring them to life. This isn’t just about achieving quick wins—it’s about anticipating challenges and positioning your team for sustainable growth.

Practical Insight: Did you know that organizations with well-defined strategic priorities are 3x more likely to achieve their goals? Strategic thinking ensures your team stays aligned and ready for the future.

Action Step: Start mapping out your 2025 strategy. What roadblocks might you encounter? How will you navigate them while keeping your team aligned?

 

  1. Communicate Persuasively

Your words carry weight, and the way you communicate shapes outcomes. Whether it’s presenting a strategy, delivering feedback, or rallying your team, clarity and impact are critical. Think about a recent message you delivered—was it clear, concise, and inspiring? Consider how you might refine your communication style to make a stronger impact.

Action Step: Reflect on a recent meeting or presentation. How could you communicate your ideas more effectively next time?

 

Leadership in Practice: A Quick Exercise

Take a moment to assess your leadership approach in the three areas:

  1. Vision: Does everyone on your team understand your long-term goals and how their work contributes to achieving them?
  2. Strategy: Have you outlined a clear plan for 2025? Are there any gaps that need addressing?
  3. Communication: How often do you communicate key messages, and are they resonating with your team?

Set aside 10 minutes this week to write down your thoughts and identify one area to improve.

 

Looking Ahead

I encourage you to reflect on these three areas: vision, strategy, and communication. They are the foundation of leadership excellence and, when mastered, can elevate both you and your team to new heights.

Remember, leadership isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. Here’s to leading with clarity and confidence,
Jenny Reilly

 

HOW CAN ‘DEEP WORK’ GET YOU BACK TO DOING AN EXTRAORDINARY JOB?

Do you want to do your job or do an extraordinary job?

There are times when we run on all cylinders, everything comes together, and we feel like we are at the top of our game. In contrast, there are times when we may feel we have lost our work mojo, are bored, stagnant, and just go through the motions of our job. I know how I prefer to feel, how about you?

A tool to help you regain focus on what you are doing and how you are doing it is to ensure you immediately implement ‘deep work’ time into your schedule. This mode helps you have an uninterrupted focus on a significant task.

Your ‘deep work’ time should be allocated to projects or tasks that require your undivided attention to move forward and will have the greatest impact. This sounds so straightforward and obvious that you may ask why I even need to write about this, so I challenge you to look at your schedule over the past month and honestly evaluate how much time you allocated to ‘deep work.’

When you allocate time in your day where you can work in isolation, without distraction, the quality and quantity of work you can complete can be extraordinary. It takes time, focus and persistence, but it will be worth it.

Reorganize your month ahead to ensure you have time in your schedule daily for ‘deep work.’

Your days maybe spent, rushing from one meeting to another or putting out continual fires – this is fractured work. Fractured work occurs when you are primarily responding to others’ needs and requirements. It is unrealistic to think that you can cut out fractured work in your day-to-day commitments; however very realistic to combine it with periods of uninterrupted focus.

To do extraordinary work, we need periods of concentration and focus.

Determine how much ‘deep work’ time you need daily, schedule it, and make it a non-negotiable priority for the month ahead.

QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO ANSWER:

  1. How can I schedule my time in September so five days per week, I have at least one hour daily allocated to ‘deep work’?
  2. Are there any periods in the year that I need more time to focus on ‘deep work’? If so, when? Now go ahead and block off that time in your schedule.
  3. What will you have to do in your space to ensure it will promote ‘deep work,’ or where else can you go to facilitate ‘deep work’?

EFFECTIVE ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS WITH DIRECT REPORTS

Having effective one-on-one meetings is a critical leadership skill. I recommend having weekly one-on-one meetings with each of your direct reports. The objective of this meeting is to ensure there is open and transparent communication on priorities, identification of opportunities, issues or challenges and time to address any questions or concerns that may be affecting the progress of your direct report.

To have effective meetings, ensure you have a plan, are organized to optimize your meeting time, have clear outcomes in mind, and record who is responsible for what by when, making it is easier for you to follow up.

The following are an example of questions that you could ask in a one-on-one:

  • What were your biggest wins over the last week/since we last met?
  • What worked well, what didn’t and why?
  • Are there any areas in that I can support you?
  • What are your top three priorities for the upcoming week?
  • Is there anything else that you would like to cover today?

I encourage you to monitor how much you talk in these meetings. My suggestion is that you should not be speaking for more than 20% of the meeting. Focus on listening, not jumping in and solving problems but asking clarifying questions.

MEETING TIPS

For many, meetings are painful, and I am sure you have felt, heard, or empathize with the following:

‘I have too many meetings.’

‘The meetings are too frequent and too long.’

‘Meetings are a waste of my time.’

‘I hate it when people show up late or don’t contribute – why bother!’

 

Here are some helpful tips for you:

  1. Look at the meetings in your schedule over the upcoming week and determine if your attendance is necessary. If it is not, message the organizer with your rationale and withdraw yourself from attendance.
  2. When scheduling a meeting, ensure that the right people are in attendance and the duration is the correct length (the shorter, the better).
  3. If you are organizing or chairing a meeting in advance, prepare and circulate an agenda along with any documents that need to be reviewed.
  4. Follow up on your meeting notes, complete what you said you would and hold others accountable for assigned tasks.

Speak up on annoying behaviours like:

  • Individuals being on their phones during the meeting, checking emails, social or surfing
  • Arriving late and being disruptive
  • Interrupting and talking too much
  • Not coming prepared
  • No participating

Each behaviour is a sign of disinterest and disengagement, don’t ignore it. Be focused on acknowledging it and changing the behaviour.

If you have any questions about implementing deep work times in your schedule or want to learn more on the powerful benefits of executive coaching to elevate your professional success, please reach out to +1 604-616-1967 or jenny@jennyreilly.com and book a complimentary 30-minute strategy session. If you want monthly leadership and professional development tips, sign up for my JRC newsletter or check out my social media on Instagram for top leadership advice throughout the year.

The Golden Rule; the Gold Standard of Leadership

Treat others as you would like to be treated…the Golden Rule sets the framework for the Gold Standard of leadership.

Our perception of ourselves as a leader, and how we are seen by others can be extremely different. What do your staff, colleagues, clients actually think of you? Have you asked? If asked to provide five words to describe you, what would they say?

How do you arrive when meeting with others? Distracted and disheveled? When answering the phone, are you focussed on the caller, patient and professional — or are your thoughts elsewhere? In written communication, are you concise and articulate? Or do you ramble in requests or come off as impatient in your responses?

Being present, focussed and energetic are true leadership traits. If you intentionally think about your interactions and how you would like to be perceived, rather than reacting to others, significant shifts in perceptions and relationships will occur.

How can you set reminders to retain your energy throughout the day? Schedule a cue on your phone to remind yourself or deliberately take a deep breath prior to every new task or meeting. These simple actions can put you in the true frame of mind for a high-performer. How you present yourself –, your positivity, negativity, and energy — can affect a meeting, your performance, or the productivity of others, and most importantly, the desired results.

There are three areas that you can implement strategies in that will affect your influence over professional relationships:

1.Interaction Intentions

Thinking about how you want to appear in a situation is the first step; the act of setting the intention for that appearance simply follows. So many leaders forget the basics and go through their day at lightning speed, without setting an intention for what they want to get out of an interaction. How can you succeed if you haven’t defined success? Consider how you want to be perceived, the results that you would like to attain, how you would like to treat the individual/s that you are meeting with, and how you would like to be treated, and your meetings will be more valuable.

2. Energy and Presence

We’ve all been in a meeting with an “energy-suck” — the person who sinks the room by her heavy sighs and led shackles. Now think of a situation whereby the energy, engagement, and presence of an individual was palpable and buoyed the room. Which do you want to be? The Titanic or the lifesaver? You too can create those same responses by being conscious of the energy and presence you exert through awareness, practice and confidence in what you are doing. Exhaustion, dissatisfaction, disinterest, distraction and frustration create far fewer positive results than focus, energy, passion, and interest. How would you want to be perceived and what can you do to create that perception?

3. Greeting, Positive Framing, and Exit Standards

When meeting with new people, setting a positive first impression is imperative, and you have less than seven seconds to do so. You are read on your energy, expression, appearance, tone, handshake – so make those first seven seconds count!

For those that know you, it takes even less time to read your mood, and how they perceive the interaction will be based on your body language. Whether you are meeting with someone for the first time or meeting with those that you know, set the stage for your desired results.  Positive framing at the commencement of the interaction also goes a long way in achieving the best outcome. If you start off a conversation by highlighting what has not gone well rather than framing it in a positive light, it will likely end   in confrontation, disagreement, and conflict. Your framing can set and change the direction of a meeting, and it is well worth the effort to focus the positive.

Your exit standard is as important as your greeting and framing. How an individual feels after an interaction with you is often remembered more than what is said. Restating any follow-up that will be made is the key to closure for the interaction and full understanding of what next-steps may be.

Are you up for the challenge?

Over the next week, set your interaction intentions prior to every meeting, be conscious of your energy level and presence, and set your own greeting, framing and exit standards. After one week, email me at jenny@jennyreilly.com and let me know if you felt any significant changes in your level of influence.

As a reminder of the three strategies, please download a copy of the related blog post handout by clicking on button below.

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To schedule a free 30-minute coaching consultation to discuss how the strategies worked for you over a week period after implementation, or learn more about 90-day High-Performance Coaching packages please click on the button below.

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Over Deliver = Exceed Client Expectations

Are you planning effectively to exceed your clients’ expectations? Are you maximizing your project management software and internal processes to ensure that you have sufficient time to deliver every stage of your project on time? It is important to be prudent when scheduling, so build in a contingency percentage into every task to ensure you have a runway for the unexpected. Good planning can help you raise the bar on customer satisfaction. At the same time, if you are exceeding client expectations, this trickles down as feedback to the team and in turn increases morale, as staff are proud to be associated with excellence.

You will find with good planning that, more often than not, the contingency you have created may not need to be utilized and you will be able to deliver early. Only make promises that are attainable. When you exceed expectations, you deliver with the ‘wow’ factor. Clients value great service, so exceeding their expectations in turn yields repeat business and increased ROI.

Competence is determined by your ability to perform successfully and efficiently. The objective is that you never deliver short nor late – a high-performance tactic that you want to instill in your daily practice. Always aim to deliver early, better than promised, on (or better still) under budget. In this competitive market economy, bringing in new clients is an obvious objective, but ‘wowing’ and retaining them cannot be underestimated.

Easy ways to exceed customer expectations – yes, all common sense:

  • Be prompt, engaged and present in meetings
  • Put in the time to develop your client relationships
  • Ask questions, and then, more questions, so you fully understand what is expected
  • Deliver exceptional service and quality
  • Clearly communicate what you can and cannot provide to avoid misunderstandings  around expectations
  • Put yourself in your clients’ shoes – what would you need to be ‘wowed’?
  • Acknowledge and thank your clients for the opportunity to have their business

To help you maximize client satisfaction and your personal and professional success in the year ahead, I’m offering a one-day workshop on Tuesday, December 11, 2018 in Vancouver – Organize and Kickstart Your Planning for 2019 – limited space is available.

At the workshop you will:

  1. Design a personal plan for the upcoming year to increase your focus, productivity and results.
  2. Learn high-performance tactics and hacks to enable you to work smarter, not harder or more hours.
  3. Design your year ahead to be the best year ever!