May 27, 2020
Sara Canaday is
the author of You —
According to Them,
and Leadership
Unchained: Defy Conventional Wisdom for Breakthrough
Performance. Sara
shares how leaders can better adapt to the changing landscape,
because conventional or
traditional success strategies can now limit our recovery and
growth. Sara contends we need to shift from being a doer to being a
driver.
Key Takeaways
[3:00] Conventional or
traditional success strategies that we’ve learned can now limit our
future success as the landscape today is so different.
[6:15] When Sara says take a
strategic pause, she doesn’t mean to take a mental time out. She
means to really absorb all the knowledge you’ve learned lately and
see what stands out.
[8:45] The idea of doing nothing
scares a lot of people, even when they consciously know it could
benefit them greatly.
[16:30] In Sara’s book,
You — According to
Them, the biggest thing
that leaders took away from that book was shifting the focus from
being a doer to a driver.
[24:35] It’s up to all of us to find our own
purpose in the bigger scheme of things. A company tells you what
your function is - not necessarily purpose.
[31:35] As a young woman, Sara
learned that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to be
serious, and that thinking backfired on her.
[33:40] There is a balance
between standing out and fitting in. Be a renegade in your ideas,
but not in your behavior.
[37:15] People like listening to
the loudest person in the room because it feels like action-taking,
but those people can create massive casualties in an organization.
The only way to prevent this is to really slow down and think
things through, but that’s not deemed ‘efficient.’
[39:55] You have a lot of
control over who gets your time and attention more than you
realize, even if you feel like you don’t have the ‘authority’ or a
high-demanding boss in front of you.
[43:10] In order to get people
engaged, we have to show them that we’re just as engaged in what
they want for themselves.
[47:00] Leaders need to be
willing to shake up the way they think.
Quotable Quotes
- “Take a
strategic pause, make unbreakable appointments with yourself to
sit, and let everything you’ve read/seen/heard in a week or a day
marinate so you can see connections you may not have
seen.”
- “How
many of us were rewarded for being doers? We’ve been conditioned,
so it takes a real mind shift to sit still.”
- “You can
have all the smarts in the world, but that alone is not going to
get you where you need to be.”
- “The
experiences we give ourselves are important.”
- “If
you enter the game of business, you enter the game to play. So play
to win!”
Resources Mentioned
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