Gratitude, leadership skills, and building aligned organisations

Executive overview

Most leaders manage people without ever receiving formal training in the core skills that make it work. They grind harder instead of stepping back to learn the door that's right beside them.

The fix is investing in six foundational skills, aligning everyone to a shared three-year vision, and asking members or employees what they want instead of guessing.

The biggest multiplier is not strategy or hustle — it is developing your people and genuinely caring about the humans around you.

The six leadership skills everyone needs

• Situational leadership — adapt your style to the person and task, not a fixed approach
• Coaching — grow people rather than monitor them
• Delegation — hand off properly so you stop following up on everything
• Project management — give projects structure so they land
• Time management — protect capacity for high-value work
• One-on-one meetings — the core rhythm for accountability and connection
• Most managers have learned these by accident; formal training changes outcomes fast
• These six skills transfer unchanged to remote, hybrid, and global teams

The vivid vision framework

• A vivid vision is a four-to-five page written description of what the organisation looks like, acts like, and feels like three years from now
• Cover every aspect: members, revenue, conferences, culture, dashboards, communication
• Share it with employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and board members so everyone pulls in the same direction
• Without a shared vision, good ideas pull the organisation in twelve different directions simultaneously
• For associations with annual board turnover: commit to a three-year vivid vision regardless of who is on the board
• Year one board writes it; year two and three boards execute it; year three board writes the next one
• Changing vision every year creates whiplash — alignment is where scale happens

Asking instead of guessing: the letter to Santa

• Leaders waste effort trying to guess what members or employees want — ask them directly
• Twice a year, send a net promoter score survey: "On a scale of 1–10, how enthusiastically would you recommend us?"
• Follow-up question: "What is one thing we can do to make this even better?"
• Alternate rounds: every other survey ask specifically for ideas that cost nothing
• The ideas that come back are often free and immediately impactful
• Sell people on the reason a process works; don't just tell them to follow it

Generational differences and team dynamics

• Baby Boomers: 15-year company tenure; Gen X: 5–10 years; Gen Y: 2–5 years; Gen Z: 6 months–2 years
• The incentives and satisfiers differ by generation — the fundamentals of leading people do not
• A 22-year-old COO may excel at automation and process integration; a 65-year-old brings 40 years of leadership wisdom — each can teach the other
• Leaders must identify their first team (the organisation) versus their second team (their functional area)
• A wide receiver plays for the whole team, not just the offence — executives must do the same

Removing cultural cancers

• One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch — cultural cancers kill team performance
• Cultural cancers: negative employees, persistent underperformers, people who argue with everything
• Remove them; you often don't need to backfill because they were not contributing meaningfully
• A players are racehorses; B players are workhorses; C players belong in the glue factory
• Most leaders spend the most time on their worst people — invert this
• Time spent developing A and B players compounds; time spent propping up C players evaporates

Investing in leadership training

• Most senior leaders have never had formal training on interviewing, delegation, or coaching
• Doing something repeatedly does not mean doing it correctly — a wrong baseball swing stays wrong for 50 years
• The course "Invest in Your Leaders" covers the 12 core leadership skills applicable to any manager, director, or board member
• Leadership skills are timeless; marketing tactics from the 1990s are not — choose a niche that compounds

Gratitude and what actually matters

• Close friend John Ruhlin (author of Giftology) died at 44, leaving four daughters aged 4–13
• The lesson: life is a gift; we are a gift to each other
• Go back to customers, suppliers, partners, and members and say thank you
• Send gifts; show gratitude; praise people for living the core values
• Running a business is how we make money — it is not what matters
• The butterfly effect of genuine care builds better organisations and better humans