For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.
In today’s email:
The best book on leadership
Louder
Go slow
Interested > interesting
Kerry Stoke’s career wisdom
ON YOUR CAREER
The best book on leadership
As an executive coach, I’m often asked to recommend the best book I’ve read on leadership. There are many great leadership books that are wise and have influenced my thinking. But there's not a single leadership book we referred above others. So we took on the challenge to produce a roadmap to great leadership at any level. This is the book we now share with our coachees: Triple Intelligence Leadership, how to create extraordinary value by elevating your rational, emotional, and social intelligence.
Rational Intelligence
Excellent decisions require a reliable process. We discuss how to think deeply, generate innovative ideas, form rigorous strategy, chair productive meetings, and select high-performing colleagues.
Emotional Intelligence
A crucial leadership role is to be a mood manager. We discuss how to enhance trust, cultivate empathy and generosity, foster resilience, unleash motivation, and manage underperforming colleagues.
Social Intelligence
The ability to help teams win distinguishes the best leaders. We discuss how to champion a winning culture, optimize the team’s energy and time, execute significant change, build powerful networks, and embrace the mandate to lead.
People crave great leadership. We believe our book can help you deliver great leadership.
COMMUNICATION
Louder
I interviewed a candidate last week. His voice was too quiet. It wasn’t a negotiating ploy to have me lean into the table or to listen harder. He simply wasn’t loud enough to be persuasive.
It doesn’t take much physical effort to project our voice. Sitting with our sternum up enables more air to be pushed across our vocal cords. Opening our mouth wide allows our words to be clear and loud.
Sometimes projecting our voice requires greater psychological effort. We may need to believe more that our ideas are worthy of being heard.
The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.
PRODUCTIVITY
Go slow
3 ways to be more productive by going slower:
Perform pre-mortems: consider how a project could fail and mitigate such risks
Invest time in relationships: people collaborate faster when they know and trust us
Test AI: ask your LLM to re-test its answers for greater accuracy
We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better at something is to get faster at it. But that’s not how mastery works. Mastery comes from doing things slowly, deeply, and with intention.
1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS
Interested > interesting
Friendship brings us happiness.
And friendship is advanced by us being interested in others.
Having someone truly listen to our fears, hopes, and joys builds a deep connection.
Meanwhile, social media prompts us to be interesting, to cultivate an enviable life, to get us on a dopamine treadmill of digital ‘likes’.
Being interested is greater than being interesting for our enduring happiness.
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
CAREER WISDOM
Kerry Stokes
Kerry Stokes (1940 — ) is an Australian billionaire who was adopted at three years of age from a Melbourne orphanage. He left school at fourteen because his family was unable to support him to continue. Stoke’s first job was working in a radio factory. He then worked as a mechanic’s assistant and truck driver before moving to Perth.
Stokes built a small business installing TV antennae which helped him identify opportunities in Perth’s land boom. He soon became a millionaire as a property developer. This entrepreneurialism later extended to owning television stations, newspapers, and Caterpillar franchises.
Stokes has four children, with his son Ryan now assuming many of his management responsibilities. Stokes continues to be active in the arts and philanthropy.
Career & life wisdom:
Business is about taking responsibility and backing your judgment.
You don’t build anything worthwhile without patience.
Success comes from persistence more than brilliance.