My Guiding Principles for 2023
I know that it’s… mid-March and, traditionally, that would be considered quite late for a “Looking ahead to 2023” style post, but I am returning to work after an 8 week paternity leave, and it’s the start of my company’s new fiscal year, so it feels like two major “start of a new era” milestones for me. I’m going with it.
After a week back at work, I am feeling some combination of:
Energized, rested with a clearer vision of where I need to take my Marketing department
Excited about all the possibilities that we’ve still left untouched (thus far)
A little “holy moly” about how much work is ahead of us to get to where we need to go.
But the “holy moly” feeling isn’t accompanied by a sense of weariness like most revelations. Instead, it’s imbued with ambition. I’ve got gas in the tank and I’m ready for the long haul.
Getting back into the swing of things, here are the couple of guiding principles that are going to be on my mind for the foreseeable future.
1. Turn It Up To Ten
Anyone who knows me personally knows that “Dreaming big” isn’t really something anyone needs to encourage me to do. My life, by and large, is a testament to thinking bigger than seems initially possible, and then going and making it happen.
But the concept of thinking really big, or “turning it up to ten”, is something I want to bring to life this year.
Turn It Up To Ten: Similar to cranking the volume on a guitar amplifier up as loud as it’ll go, taking an idea to its farthest (il)logical conclusion in pursuit of the extraordinary.
The purpose isn’t to be tame: it’s to imagine how much better something could be with a little more effort. I once heard someone describe art as that: putting in more effort than the bare minimum required, just because. I love that.
This year, I imagine I’m going to be asking my team to “turn it up to ten” quite often when they present me with an idea. Rather than aiming for a B in something, I’d like to get as many As as possible.
2. Pivot Faster
Towards the end of last year, with the public launch of a massive new marketing project, I was admittedly feeling stressed out and slightly nervous about all the ways it could go wrong. Had I put in enough time to think it through properly? Was I missing something key? Was this idea really any good?
Since I’ve returned to work, that project has taken on a bit of a life of its own and we’ve had to do what should’ve been obvious to me (had I been paying attention to the warning signs) at the end of last year: pivot the idea towards what was working.
I had held on firmly to what I believed to be the best path forward, but I recognize now that I didn’t have the total buy-in of the team around me that were going to be the corporate bringing-to-life of this project. It was no wonder we had to refine our approach.
The bigger a company gets, the slower it moves to do anything. As our department/company grows, I want to maintain our agility in bringing new ideas to life in a timely manner.
I don’t know that I would say we failed to pivot that project quickly enough—it’s still doing just fine right now—but I know that not getting stuck in our own ways, and being able to adapt to quick changes, is going to be vital to success for us in 2023.
3. Discuss More Stupid Ideas
Don’t miss me on this one: I’ve long believed (and continue to) that ideas are cheap and all-too-easy. The only measure of success is what you actually manage to do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But I think what can happen here, when we’re too focused on practicality and implementation, is that we forget to dream and suggest thoughts that are “dumb” or “way too wacky to be taken seriously.”
However, I think when we throw all caution to the wind and imagine, “If we had an unlimited budget and we could do anything, what would we do with this?”, the ideas we end up on are not actually that hard to pull off.
It’s not that we aren’t thinking big enough, it’s that almost nothing in the world is quite as difficult as it seems.
What I want to do—in my own head, in meetings with my department, in meetings with other Managers and Executive leadership at my company—is be bolder to suggest silly thoughts that are really unconventional.
4. Collaborate More… and Less
Here’s another tension I’ll be living in for most of 2023: both inviting my team into more decisions that I make, and taking the lead on getting stuff done by making the executive decision more frequently.
I spent most of 2022 collaborating with my team, and I want to keep doing that. I believe that leaders exist not to raise up followers, but to raise up other leaders. We do that by collaborating as often as possible about what’s going on in our heads and inviting others into that process with us.
And in 2022, we got to some seriously amazing places with our department by collaborating. I, absolutely, do not always have the best ideas, and I need my team to help me refine them. I love collaboration, and I think my 2022 would demonstrate that.
But—and maybe I’m just speaking for myself here—I think there can be a danger about collaboration.
Sometimes collaboration is just an excuse to be indecisive.
Guilty as charged! I have definitely used collaboration to feel out the room and get a consensus on what other people think of my decision before making it final. It’s not that the collaboration is disingenuous, it’s that it is being done at a time when I should just step up, do the job I’ve been hired for, and make the bloody decision so we can move on.
So, on the other end of the spectrum, I want to collaborate less with my team where it will save us time and afford us the ability to get things done faster.
5. Be Ruthless About What Doesn’t Matter
This is a really tough one for me, because it’ll be executed in two ways that I struggle with probably equally:
Saying no to more things
Delegating more to others.
When I was self-employed, I wore a lot of hats. When you’re an entrepreneur, you do everything yourself because it all rests on you. You are the sink-or-swim of your life.
On top of that, I think we’re all a little bit of people-pleasers at our core. It feels good to make other people happy. It is charitable to help people.
But, definitely by the end of 2022, I had found myself getting bogged-down with a lot of less-important projects because I said yes to things really easily and struggled to give things over to my team.
Now that I’m easing back into work, I want to / need to give more of that work to others in order to free myself up to devote my time and energy to the most high-value tasks I can complete for the company.
And I really think all of us could learn a lesson from that.
Saying no to unimportant tasks gives you the freedom to focus on the stuff that you do that only you can do, that will let you push the company forward the most that you can push it.
Recognize that every “no” to one thing is a “yes” to another, and vice-versa. We need not feel guilty saying no to things because we’re still completing the bigger goal of growing the company—we’re just articulating that we aren’t the right fit for the task.
Closing Thought:
I heard someone say that, in a business, if you’re not growing then you are shrinking. If you’re not winning, you’re losing. If you’re not advancing, you’re receding. There is no neutral ground.
I had to chew on it, but I think he’s kinda right. But I think he’s wrong to narrow that thought only to business.
It’s also true for us as people. If we’re not regularly taking inventory of our improvements (or setting our sights on what we hope those improvements might be), we’re going to be slipping back.
I don’t know about you, but I never want to go back to my old ways.
Always onward.
