Bossit: Recent Episodes
Benjamin Ford
Bossit’s an early stage start up with the ambition of helping you develop your professional and personal life skills.
The long-term plan is to do this using bitesize lessons, over audio, in core leadership skills delivered through a mobile app.
It will address topics such as productivity, communication, resilience, coaching, building relationships, team management, problem-solving, etc.
It will offer short bursts of insights, tactical tips and tricks, questions to consider and activities to try. We’ll ask you to do something or reflect on something in order to get you to consider the way you approach tasks, people and problems.
The lessons are bitesize, taking about 10 minutes each day and leveraging what you’re already working on in your day to day, to help you improve immediately and with minimal overhead on your time and energy.
A series of sessions on a given topic will progress incrementally, building off of the previous session, to help you form habits and make it easier to retain what you learn.
We welcome you to try out as many of the topics as you deem relevant. The cadence we suggest is once you start a series, that you listen to a session every work day unless otherwise advised.
We would greatly appreciate it if you’d be willing to provide feedback on a series by completing an online survey. The survey has 10 questions and would take less than 3 minutes to complete. The relevant link can be found in the Episode Web Page link of every final session in a given series.
Thanks for listening and we hope that you find Bossit useful to developing yourself as a better business leader.
Getting started
Bossit’s an early stage start up with the ambition of helping you develop your professional and personal life skills.
The long-term plan is to do this using bitesize lessons, over audio, in core leadership skills delivered through a mobile app.
It will address topics such as productivity, communication, resilience, coaching, building relationships, team management, problem-solving, etc.
It will offer short bursts of insights, tactical tips and tricks, questions to consider and activities to try. We’ll ask you to do something or reflect on something in order to get you to consider the way you approach tasks, people and problems.
The lessons are bitesize, taking about 10 minutes each day and leveraging what you’re already working on in your day to day, to help you improve immediately and with minimal overhead on your time and energy.
A series of sessions on a given topic will progress incrementally, building off of the previous session, to help you form habits and make it easier to retain what you learn.
We welcome you to try out as many of the topics as you deem relevant. The cadence we suggest is once you start a series, that you listen to a session every work day unless otherwise advised.
We would greatly appreciate it if you’d be willing to provide feedback on a series by completing an online survey. The survey has 10 questions and would take less than 3 minutes to complete. The relevant link can be found in the Episode Web Page link of every final session in a given series.
Thanks for listening and we hope that you find Bossit useful to developing yourself as a better business leader.
Actioning your tasks
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By blocking time on the calendar to do a task, without interruption, it is possible to do the task with greater efficiency. It might also stop you from mindlessly accepting calendar invites to fill the time.
However, it’s best not to block out your entire day - it’s worth having some cushion time in your calendar for overruns or unanticipated tasks and challenges that arise.
Having a ‘done list’ which lists all accomplishments and tasks you have completed, and not just the tasks on your list, can help boost your energy.
That brings us to the end of our series on task management. Capturing, Defining, Sorting, Reviewing and now finally Actioning. Don’t forget, following the system explicitly is what will offer the true value and keeping a routine will make it easier. Best of luck with it.
Reviewing all of your lists
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The purpose of reviewing is to ensure you stay aware of everything you have to-do, so that you can suitably prioritise and stay in control.
It’s helpful to get into a routine for when and how you review all of your different lists.
When it comes to your Calendar, it’s helpful to check this at the start of every day because it helps you to understand what you have to do in totality.
When it comes to your To-Do list, it’s helpful to review this everyday, normally several times. It’s worth reviewing every time you complete a to-do, in order to scratch it off your list and maintain a clear picture of what’s still on your plate.
You can help ensure effective prioritisation by involving others in the decision making. It can help to ask your team (if you have one) or people who know you well to look over your to-do list and share their perspective on whether they feel your prioritisation is right.
The frequency at which you review your your Waiting list will depend on the way you delegate or the kind of occurrences you might be waiting on. For some people they’ll check once a week, others every day, others maybe multiple times in a day.
Add deadlines to tasks you’ve delegated and order the list by the tasks that are due soonest.
Review the Someday list every few weeks.
Your activity today is to spend 5 minutes not only reviewing your calendar and your lists but also coming up with a routine to ensure regular review.
Re-prioritising as the day evolves
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The plan you have at the start of the day isn’t necessarily the plan you’ll follow, or even want to follow as the day goes on. New tasks are bound to pop up as you’re busy trying to deal with the ones already on your list.
You can re-prioritise by repeating the stages of capturing, defining and sorting. However, we need a way to find some kind of balance between re-prioritising and simply getting on with things.
Try being disciplined and exposing yourself to new requests less frequently. This would mean checking emails, voicemails and texts less frequently and only at set intervals.
Use a more simple and flexible to-do list, which is easier to adapt, making re-prioritisation faster, such as post-it notes.
Agree specific working norms with the sources of your tasks, namely the people you work with. e.g., they can only interrupt you at set times.
Build additional time buffer into your day when you process in the morning, anticipating that more will come your way as the day goes on.
Your activity for today is to try out some of these techniques, re-prioritising regularly throughout the day to ensure you are maintaining an up-to date, relevant to-do list.
Sorting through your to-dos
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Sorting involves categorising, grouping and ordering your tasks, which will help us to decide what task we should complete, when.
Examples of categories people often use to group tasks by are: - Personal / Professional: You categorise based on the part of your life that your task relates to. - Location: You separate tasks depending on where you like to do them. - Projects: For when a task is part of a larger project or workstream. - Timings: Based on how long will it take to complete the task. - Energy demands: Understanding what your tasks demand in terms of energy and when you’re in a position to offer that. - And priority level: How important and urgent the task is to you.
Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes thinking about how you work, what kind of categorisation is most relevant to you, then start drawing up your template or editing your task manager in a way that cuts your tasks by your most relevant categories, so you can better figure out what should be done when.
Prioritising your tasks
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Very often, urgent tasks make the most noise and grab the most attention, making it harder to ignore them or focus on other things but it’s the importance of something to you that matters most when assessing the priority of your tasks.
So you need to ask yourself the question, how important is this to me and why? - Because it’s intrinsically important and I value it? Or; - Because it’s critical to achieving a goal of mine? Or; - Because it matters to someone I care about.
Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes reviewing the tasks you have on your list and ask yourself the question, how important is this task to me?
Be critical and intentional about removing things that aren’t actually important and only then assess their urgency.
You need to be disciplined and pragmatic here - you can only have so many priorities. When you have too many, nothing becomes a priority and it defeats the purpose of doing this in the first place.
Defining the outcomes and next steps
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Your activity for today is to get your inboxes together and process them in one go, ideally without any distractions or interruptions.
Ask yourself these questions: - Can I delete it? If so, then trash it. - Can I do it now in less than 2 minutes? If so, do it. - Is it just useful information to store? If so, store it somewhere. - Does it need to be done on or after a specific time? If so, add it to your Calendar. - Is it waiting on something else to happen first? If so, add it to a list called “Waiting“. - Is it something only for the future? If so, add it to a list called “Someday”. - Everything else goes in your To-Do list.
For all of your tasks define them clearly with: - What a good outcome looks like; and - What’s the next step.
For tasks on your To-Do list, add: - How long will it take; - How will it affect your energy; - Does it need to be done in a certain way or at a specific place; and - How much of a priority is it?
Capturing your tasks
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There are two broad methods to capturing your tasks.
The first is capturing what’s already stuck in your head by performing a mindsweep. You want to empty every single item from your head that your mind considers incomplete and record it in a list, that you always keep to hand.
The second method is to capture them as they arise, before they settle in your mind. These tend to collect in places such as email, text, and voicemail inboxes.
However, you want a “parking-lot” list always to hand where you can capture tasks that don’t have pre-assigned inboxes - such as for recording tasks that arise in meetings / conversation.
Your activity for today is to spend 5-10 minutes performing a mindsweep, capturing all the tasks that are lurking in your brain. Note them down and then for the rest of the day, when a task comes up, try to get into the habit of ensuring it’s stored somewhere ready for you to process.
What is it
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In this series we’ll be defining a structured approach to help you get a firmer grip on what you have to do, helping you to become more productive and more balanced.
The system breaks down into 5 stages: 1. Capturing tasks and recording them, so that they’re not stuck in your mind; 2. Defining them, including what a successful outcome looks like and how you start getting there; 3. Sorting them by relevant metrics such as priority and category, to help you decide when and how to address them as well as track them; 4. Reviewing them regularly and being reminded of them at the right time, to keep on top of it all; and 5. Actioning them in a way that will make you most successful.
Your activity for today is to spend 3 minutes identifying and logging the different sources of where your tasks generally come from. Examples are emails, texts, voicemails, meetings and conference calls, conversations with your boss, letters, things your family asks you.
Communicating it effectively and learning from it
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Now that you’ve made a decision, it’s likely that you’ll have to take action of some kind in order to implement it, so being clear on the decision with yourself and with others is crucial to its success.
Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes: - Consider the stakeholders that you need to inform - their relevance to the decision, their relevance to its implementation, their relevance to you and crucially how they’ll react to the decision; - Start preparing when and how you’ll communicate the decision all of them - creating a story to effectively communicate the decision, clarifying how and why the decision has been made and carefully explaining its implications; and - Prepare a way to track the success of your decision as objectively as possible so that you can learn from it.
Making the decision and committing to it
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Sometimes there is no downside to delaying a decision; such as when you can’t implement the decision yet, when delaying doesn’t cost you any options, or when there is nothing and nobody waiting on you.
If there are strong benefits to making the decision now and real downsides to delaying it any longer, then you have to get on with it and make it.
If you are making a decision, first you want a transparent prioritisation of the different factors that you’re using to make it. This is important because it will help you to justify the decision to yourself - giving you more confidence in it - and it will also help when you communicate the decision to stakeholders.
When it comes to assessing your choices, some people prefer to do this in the round, playing back everything they’ve discovered and worked through in their mind, but ultimately using intuition and instinct to reach a decision. Others prefer a more a structured way and there are frameworks that can help with this. e.g., - Decision trees; - A list of Pros vs Cons; - A decision matrix - a table of columns with headings made up of your different options and rows of the prioritised factors.
Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes determining the approach you’ll follow to make your decision and then take the necessary time to process the variables, reach a decision and commit to it.
Avoiding pitfalls and blindspots
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To reduce blindspots, follow WRAP: - Widen your options and your advisor pool - Reality test your assumptions - Attain distance before deciding; and - Prepare to be wrong.
Potential blindspots include: 1. Knowable unknowns. 2. Confirmation bias: where you too easily interpret evidence as confirming your own view. 3. Over-confidence. 4. False analogy: where you wrongly think your decision is the same as one that you’ve dealt with in the past. 5. Extrapolation fallacy: where you assume that the future will play out just like the past. 6. Availability bias: where you prefer the easiest option to implement. 7. Tunnel vision: where you get so fixated on one factor or option that you miss other pertinent matters. 8. Loss aversion: where you prefer the option involving the least amount of risk, regardless of potential upside in the riskier options. 9. Sunk cost fallacy: where you consider irrelevant factors such as previously invested resources. 10. Vividness: where the most vivid option overly fixates you. 11. Timidness: where stakeholders don’t feel empowered to share their perspective. 12. Groupthink: where the stakeholders all fall in line and fail to challenge eachother; limiting diversity. 13. Anchoring: where everyone in a group gets fixated on a particular idea and fails to ever come off of it. 14. Information overload: where you collate so much information and knowledge that you don’t know how to process it. 15. Uncertainty paralysis: where you feel too uncertain to make the decision and keep collecting more data or performing more analysis to try and get comfortable.
Your task for today is to review what you’ve done so far and whether any of these blindspots might be present in your own process and if so, how you might mitigate them.
Predicting the outcomes
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Before you can decide which option to take, you need to deal with the uncertainty surrounding each of them.
Unknowns can be categorised into 3 types: 1. Knowable unknowns - these are things you could know about but don’t. Hopefully you’ll have reduced these as much as you can by widening and diversifying your advisor group. 2. Inaccessible unknowns - these are things you’d know if you could get access them. For example, things a foe or a competitor might know - you can’t ask them because you’re competing with them. 3. Unknowable unknowns - these are things that are simply impossible to predict and which you just have to embrace.
There is a strong correlation between astute decision making and the willingness to embrace uncertainty and accept it as a given.
Your task for today is to try and adopt a humble mindset where you recognise that you can’t guarantee you know everything and embrace that. Then spend 5-10 minutes predicting the outcomes of your different options: - What are their known implications, both direct and indirect? - What are the upsides? - What risks are there and what are their likelihoods of occurring?
Generating alternatives
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The question of “which one” is always better than “whether or not” when it comes to making decisions. There is plenty of evidence that shows a strong correlation between a higher number of alternatives and decision success.
Generating alternatives as a separate exercise, after having created your initial list, can help because it provides distance in your mind from your initial thinking.
Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes developing alternative ideas for your list: - Deliberately rule out current options so that you can consider new ones; - Learn more about extremist positions in order to take your mind to new places; - Imagine constraints don’t apply and consider, what would you do differently?
Determining your options
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When figuring out the options available, you need to be open-minded and adopt a creative mindset. Try not to apply any constraints or consider the implications - just think imaginatively. You’ll have the ability to dismiss things later on.
Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes exploring those questions: - Being as creative and unconstrained as possible, what are your options? The obvious, the less obvious, what comes from your experience, what comes from research and what do your stakeholders propose? - For each option, how are the factors involved and what are the implications? - Can you rule any options out by applying filters or constraints? - What do your stakeholders think of your refined list?
Involving the right people in the right way
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A decision stakeholder is anyone who is involved in or affected by your decision.
There are three different types of stakeholders: - Those who decide with you, or you require their buy-in or resources to successfully implement the decision; - Those who are affected by the decision directly or indirectly; and - Those who advise by offering you different, diverse and relevant expertise and experience.
These 3 types are not mutually exclusive either, and a person can fulfil any combination of the 3 roles.
Your task for today is to spend 10-15 minutes deciding who to involve and how. Consider: - Who is accountable for implementation success? - Who controls the resources required to implement successfully? - Who is affected in someway and should be consulted? - Who has the relevant and diverse expertise and experience to advise? Then decide how you want to involve these people: - In what setting should you engage them? 1-1, small group or large group. - How will you weigh their input? - When will you involve them? - And what information should you give them?
Defining the scope
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When it comes to making decisions, transparency is your friend. You want to increase your awareness, your knowledge, your understanding and to do this, it requires you to carefully think through what’s going on.
The first step here is to try and capture the context surrounding your decision as a question.
Spend 5-10 minutes asking yourself: - What’s the overall question you’re trying to answer? - Who and what might be affected by your decision? - Whether it is truly yours to make and if you are free to make it your own way? - What exactly are you deciding on, by when, and what you are not? - What are the factors affecting your decision and how important are they to you? - How do the factors interact or conflict?
This visibility alone is a huge first step in helping you to make a better decision because it greatly heightens your awareness.
Putting yourself in the right mind-set
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When making a decision want to adopt a mindset of patience and confident readiness. That way you won’t be too hasty, but still ready to act when necessary.
Your task for today is to take a few moments to reflect and decide: - How intentional are you being? - How patient are you being? - And how confident are you?
Then carve out regular intervals, dedicated to the decision, to ensure you don’t dwell on it when you need to focus on other things. Add timeslots to your diary and include reminders to: 1. Be intentional 2. Be patient 3. Be confident
Why be a structured decision-maker
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Decision-making requires you to predict an uncertain future and regardless of how good someone’s intuition is, no-one can perfectly predict the future.
A well-structured decision-making approach helps leverage your intuition whilst filling in some of the pieces you may have missed otherwise.
The premise is that you can’t always make the right decision… but you can always make the decision right.
At a simple level the process will involve three parts: 1. Building awareness and insight, from your own perspective and others. 2. Considering the options and predicting their outcomes. 3. Making the decision, committing to it, communicating it and learning from it.
Your task is to identify a decision that you need to make either in your work or your personal life, that is: - Relatively complex; and - You don’t need to make the decision for more than 2-3 weeks time (so that you have the opportunity to follow the process throughout the series).
Evaluating outcomes and providing feedback
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Once delegated work has been delivered back to you, you’ll want to set aside enough time to review it thoroughly and offer feedback to the person who delivered it.
Compare their work to the desired outcomes that you mutually agreed when you delegated the task. Success should be measured on as consistent and objective basis as possible to maintain a feeling of fairness and trust between you.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to provide them feedback on whether their work falls below, meets, or exceeds objectives.
If the work falls below the desired outcome, be clear on why the work doesn’t meet the objectives and the reason for proposing any suggested changes.
If their work meets or exceeds the desired outcome, tell them this. Feedback should always involve recognition of success. You can opt to praise them which should help build their self-confidence and motivation, improving their experience, your relationship and making it easier to delegate to them in future.
However, it would be worth going beyond just praise of their success and additionally provide them with detailed feedback on how they’ve leveraged and developed their strengths.
Your activity for today is to review any delegated work that’s been returned to you recently and determine what feedback you should share. If you need help developing your feedback, consider listening to the BOSSIT series on “Sharing Valued Feedback”.
Providing coaching and support
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If the person you’ve delegated to wants support, a way you can help them accelerate their learning and complete the tasks faster is by initially increasing the level of interaction between you and them at the start of the task, when they are setting an approach for completing it. By inputting early and often on their approach, it should mean less potential for missing objectives and less re-work required later on.
If they approach you for assistance then it’s important to avoid "upward delegation”. If there’s a problem that needs fixing, or a challenge they can’t yet overcome, don't permit them to shift responsibility for completing the task back to you. Guide them on how they can do it instead of simply taking it back off of them.
An effective way of guiding them is by indirect coaching through the use of open questions such as: - What approach have you used or seen used in similar situations? - What are your potential next steps and what does success look like for each step? - What obstacles exist and how will you navigate those obstacles? - What resources do you need?
However, if they seem able to complete the task but appear to be lacking drive then you need to help build their motivation and commitment: - If they’re overstretched by their overall workload then they might need your help prioritising; - If they feel under-valued, then it’s about recognising them and their efforts; - If they feel micromanaged through the task then you need their feedback on how you can change your style; - If they don’t see value in achieving the goal then you’ll need to clarify it’s value to them, the team, your organisation, your client or customer, or even society; - If they believe the task to be generally unachievable then you’ll have to help coach them; and - If they’re lacking in self-confidence then you need to find opportunities to instil confidence and offer praise on jobs well done.
Your activity for today is to reach out to the person you’ve delegated to and offer them support if they need it.
Checking in
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Even though you have now delegated your task to someone else, it’s important to recognise that since it originated with you, that you retain overall accountability for its successful completion.
When it comes to taking accountability, you’ll want to take a balanced approach. On one end of the scale, you don’t want to totally abandon the task or the person you’ve delegated it to. Equally, you want to avoid micro-managing the person.
If you regularly check-in with the person that you’ve delegated to, you can ask them for feedback not only on how things are going with the task and whether they require support but also, you can ask them for feedback on how they feel about your interactions and this can help guide you.
Your activity for today is to spend a few minutes preparing a proposed schedule for checking-in with the person you’ve delegated to, then finding a time to meet with them: - Agree a schedule of check-ins, timelines and deadlines; - Consider that they’ll likely need more time than you to complete the task; - Focus on results, not method; - If it’s not going well, take opportunities to teach instead of reclaiming ownership; and - Understand their mindset - will they take ownership and drive things forward whilst involving you? Or will they isolate themselves and exclude you?
Handing it over
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Delegating a task tends to be a bit of a balancing act. If you offer too little guidance or clarity, it makes it harder for them to successfully complete the task. Telling someone to do something and then just walking away, leaving them to get on with it is delegating… it just often tends to be ineffective because of the lack of oversight and support.
However, too much guidance and instruction can come across as painful micromanaging - one of the least wanted traits in a leader. So you want to try and strike a balance between the two; asserting the right information and asking the right questions.
Try to arrange the handover as early as you can - that way, the other person has as much time as possible to prepare for and complete the task, reducing the pressure on them.
Your activity for today is to spend a few minutes preparing for your handover meeting and then meet up to delegate the task: - Start the meeting as a human - be inclusive and not transactional. - Generate buy-in - explain context, rationale and overall benefits, as well as why they were chosen to do it. - Outline expectations - what’s the desired outcome, the deadline, and the resources available to them. Ensure they know what they can expect from you in terms of availability and support. - Create room for them to ask you questions - this will help them to take ownership. - Agree a plan together for how they’ll complete the task and how you can support them throughout, whilst maintaining comfort over its progression.
By using questions instead of directing what you think they should do, you can create a dialogue and build a stronger rapport, as well as their confidence and sense of ownership.
Defining the task
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Before you can fully handover ownership of this task, it’s crucial to properly define it first. That way, you can properly align with the person you’re delegating to and ensure you both understand it the same way.
Your activity for today is to spend no more than 5-10 minutes forming a perspective on your task definition. Try and outline its: - Context - detail the task’s rationale and benefits. Why are you doing it? - Stakeholders - who should be involved, either for their input or their buy-in? - Scope - what should the task involve and what should it not? Are there any constraints or boundaries to it? - Resources - what be used to complete the task? - Desired outcome - what does successful completion look like, including any measurable results and timeline?
Choosing whom you should delegate to
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When you delegate, you’re transferring responsibility for completing the task to someone else, as well as the authority to get it done.
To ensure this person fully takes on that responsibility though, they’ll need to feel that they have ownership of the task, which is a problem if you try delegating the task to more than one person. So always task to an individual and not a group.
Your activity for today is to spend 5-10 minutes reviewing who you should delegate the chosen task to. Consider: - Who would be motivated to complete the task? - Who has the relevant expertise & experience? - Whose learning goals match the task at hand? - Who has sufficient capacity? - Who is the task most relevant to? - How able are you to suitably support them on this task?
There isn’t normally a perfect answer for who you should delegate to but you want to strike enough of a balance across all of these considerations to make you and them feel comfortable that delegating this task to them makes sense.
Identifying what you should delegate
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Delegating can be hard because we want to hold onto control, ensuring things stay at their best. Try and shift your mindset to one where you’re ready to let go. If you can’t release control and be prepared to accept some uncertainty, then it will be hard to delegate effectively.
As such, you might want to start small for now, selecting a task that you’re more ready to let go off.
Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes reviewing your list in order to choose a task to delegate for the next 2 weeks. Prioritise tasks for delegation when: - It’s not critical that you do them personally; - You have a team member that can be upskilled sufficiently to complete the task; - There is sufficient time for them to do the task without excessive pressure; - You have sufficient time to support them on the task; - The delegation is an investment because the task will recur; and - Ideally, your team members will want to do the task.
Why you should delegate more
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Over this series we’ll run through some steps you can take to make delegating easier and more successful, such as; how to identify what to delegate, how to choose the right person to delegate to, how to set them up for success, and how to manage them throughout the task. To help you learn, you’ll want to delegate an actual task to someone during the series so that you can practice the steps as we cover them.
Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes considering what tasks you have to delegate that: - Would take hours or days to complete and can be done over the course of the next 2 weeks; and - Which isn’t mission critical. Since you’ll be practising delegation techniques, it’s best to choose a task that’s meaningful but where you won’t have the need to take it back from someone if they need more help or time with it.
Write down your options in a list.
Preparing for your delivery
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The best deliveries are prepared deliveries and that means practising - you should always build in sufficient time to practice before doing it for real.
You can practice by yourself, which can uncover opportunities for further refinements, increase your confidence and smoothen your delivery but practising by yourself is of limited value compared with presenting to somebody else.
If you can find someone to practice with, ideally someone of similar experience and knowledge as the audience on the relevant matters, then you can extract even more value from the practice.
If they can highlight the most impactful and least impactful aspects of your presentation, whether that be the messages or how they are delivered, it can help you decide what changes, if any, you want to make before going into the real thing.
The added stress of practising in front of other people will help better prepare you for the real thing too.
Your activity for today is to find someone to practice your presentation on and receive feedback.
Which brings us to the end of our series on storylining. It will become easier and you’ll get better at it the more you practice and always remember to GAME it out. Best of luck.
Expressing your storyline
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Stories can be communicated in a variety of forms, such as: - Spoken word, i.e., saying it out loud; - Written word memos and reports; - Slides with words and visuals such as illustrations, charts, and diagrams; - Videos; - Interactive simulations or games; and - Props such as galleries, mock-ups and models.
It’s crucial to determine not only the best way to express your entire story but also how to express each individual message - some messages may be better said out loud whereas others may be better communicated with a visual.
And when you’re determining the medium you wish to use to express your story, you need to consider not only the messages but also your own style and most importantly, the audience - you need to determine what your audience requires and express your story accordingly.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes considering how to express your story and then start putting it into place, writing up your report or speaker notes, creating your visuals or props, whatever it may be.
Refining your Messages
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The best storylines tend to have more than one person crafting them.
It’s best not to spend too long working on a storyline by yourself before you take it to someone else - someone who knows the situation and the topic - and ask them to review it and give you feedback. They can offer you a new perspective.
You want to take their feedback, ensure you understand it fully, consider it openly, and only then iterate your storyline as you see fit.
Spend 10 minutes identifying someone who can review your storyline for you and offer you feedback. Then tomorrow, or once they have provided you with the feedback, take some time to consider it and iterate your storyline.
Structuring your Messages
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Storylining structure is how your messages tie together and flow from start to finish.
The structure you want to use will depend on the content of your messages, your audience, the story’s goals and your own style.
A common business storylining structure is called SCR, which is an acronym for Situation, Complication, Resolution. - The situation is the context; - The complication is the problem that has arisen; and - The resolution is the answer to that problem.
Imagine how your audience would react to each of your messages as you go through them in sequence. - Would they react positively or negatively? - Would they want to hear more, or cut you off? - Would they have a question which might interrupt your flow?
By imagining how your audience might react, you can re-structure your storyline to make it more conducive to your specific audience.
Great storylines also exhibit certain characteristics. You want to ask yourself: - Is it clear? - Is it concise? - Is it coherent i.e., does it make sense? - Is it compelling to the audience? Does it make them think, feel or do something different?
You can leverage the goals you defined as a checklist too. Imagine yourself as the audience and determine whether your storyline, as it stands, would achieve those goals.
Your task for today is to spend 10 minutes structuring your storyline into your first full draft.
Creating your Messages
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You need 5-10 key messages that will form the backbone of your storyline and lay the foundation for everything else you want to say.
Initially, don’t worry about their order or their precise wording, just write down the the first 5-10 bullet points that come to mind as the most important points you would want to make to your specific audience.
Try to ensure your messages are appropriately synthesised - If you can imagine your audience asking you the question “so what” in response to you saying one of your messages then identify how you’d answer them and use that as your message instead.
Next, run through each message, checking to see whether it needs to be supported. If you’re asserting a conclusion, you need to ask yourself whether it requires facts or insights to be shared in order to back it up.
Next, read through your points again removing any superfluous adjectives. These are adjectives which are subjective and which don’t add value to the message.
Your task for today is to spend 10 minutes writing down your main messages, as well as any keys facts and insights you need to justify them.
Analysing the Audience
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Audience is the second component of the GAME framework. GAME stands for: Goal, Audience, Message, Expression.
Explore what you know about the audience, in order to determine how that should affect the messaging and overall storyline.
We can understand our audience better by performing what’s known as “audience analysis” - a series of questions that we need to ask ourselves.
Your task for today is to perform audience analysis for your upcoming meeting, so grab a pad of paper and draw up up 8 columns.
In the first column, write down the names of your audience members as rows. Then in the second column, note down the goals for each audience member.
Then column by column we will be answering relevant questions for each audience member: 1. Where are they in terms of their understanding and involvement in our story - what do they currently think, feel or do about the topic we’re raising? 2. What are they expecting from us? If we’re bringing them something different then we need to recognise this and not surprise or confuse them. 3. What are they most concerned about? This needs to be acknowledged. 4. What drives them about our topic and will hold their interest or motivate them most? 5. What do we need from them? This can affect our style. 6. What format and style of communications do they prefer?
Once you’ve gone through these questions and considered them for your audience, it may be worth validating these with someone else if you can.
Setting your Goals
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When it comes to defining a Goal for a storyline we suggest being tactical and having specific goals for your specific audience, around the themes of: - “Head” - how do you want them to think? - “Heart” - how do you want them to feel? - “Hands” - what do you want them to do?
The clearer you are on what you’re trying to achieve with your storyline, the easier it should be to create the right messages.
Defining goals also acts as a very helpful checklist once your story’s been drafted to compare against and confirm whether the story you’ve developed will actually help you achieve them or not.
Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes thinking about your upcoming presentation or meeting and its audience, in order to determine what you’re trying to achieve. - What are your goals? Write them down. - What do you want your audience to think, to feel, to do? - Do these goals differ by the different members of your audience? If so, you want to capture this.
Remember, you want your goals to be granular and clear, but not overly complicated.
How to be a better storyliner
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If we want to do better, we need to be intentional and apply a structured process that can guide our approach to storylining.
In this series we’re going to talk through a structured approach to building storylines, and practice on one that you need to write currently. We’ll be leveraging a framework called “GAME” developed by an expert in the field called Steve Seager, as well as leveraging some techniques used by the pros at the consulting firms.
“GAME” stands for: - Goal - what is the objective of your communication? - Audience - what do we know about them that will affect our messages? - Message - what should the content and structure be? - Expression - how should it be delivered?
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes choosing a communication or meeting that you have coming up where you know you’ll need to convince others of something. Identify who will be at the meeting, what it’s about and broadly what you’re trying to convince them of. The meeting will need to be in more than two weeks, in order to have the necessary time to progress through the series, assuming that you do one session a day.
What it means to storyline
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When you do need to affect someone in someway, then there are few ways to do this more powerfully than with a good story.
Your messages, the actual substance of what you’re saying, are crucial to affecting your audience. How you word them and the order in which you deliver them matter just as much as how you deliver them.
In the business environment, a storyline would look like a series of bullet point messages, one after the other, which if your audience read from start to finish would not just convey key facts and insights but also their meaning and implications for the audience. The messages also need to be written and sequenced in such a way as to make them clear, coherent and compelling.
And it’s crucial to develop this storyline before you start putting together slides or preparing speaker notes for a presentation in order to realise its power.
Since messaging is such a crucial competent of storylining, a pre-requisite skill is the ability to synthesise - to be able to draw out the meaning and implications of facts and insight. You need to be able to take a step back from data and information, go beyond what is merely interesting and ask yourself “so what?”. Why does this matter? What does this mean?
Your task for today is to start warming up this skill by practising some synthesis. Spend 5 minutes choosing your favourite movie or book and try to synthesis its meaning into a single sentence. For example, my synthesis of the movie Titanic might be “arrogance results in tragedy”.
Ongoing feedback and support
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Asking whether someone wants ongoing support from you, hearing what they have to say, and being honest about what you can provide them with is a great step forward.
If they ask you to provide ongoing feedback on a specific area or relating to a particular task, be sure to make a note of that and find a suitable trigger to ensure that you follow through.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes adding notes to your feedback log for the person you most recently shared feedback with: - What do they most want feedback on going forward? - What tasks will they be doing that present opportunities to address that feedback? - Can you add triggers to remind you to observe them for feedback at those times?
Keep your feedback log to hand and add to it when you make an observation that you want to share feedback on. Alternatively, spend 5 minutes on it daily, capturing what you observed in the day. A calendar reminder in the afternoon can serve as a trigger to make this a habit.
Delivering feedback constructively
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Before sharing feedback, consider the other person’s feedback preferences to determine: - When you should do it - a time unlikely to be cancelled and soon enough to be useful; - Where - ideally a safe space that’s comfortable for sharing confidentially; and - For how long - enough time for questions and to make it a collaborative discussion.
If you don’t know the other person well, or you’re concerned about how they might react to the feedback, then there’s a feedback delivery framework you can try called OILS: - Observation - what did they say or do and when? - Implication - how did their actions affect you? - Listen - invite them to ask questions and get clarity. - Suggest - propose what they could do.
When you share an implication, it’s crucial to steer clear of subjective judgements about them as an individual, such as who they are or what they believe. Either stay objective or if you make things subjective, make it about your own feelings.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes preparing some feedback for someone in particular. Determine the time and place, as well as outline what you’ll share with them. Refer to your feedback log and be sure to prioritise what you want to share, trying to include both strengths and development ideas.
Once you’ve shared feedback with them, consider asking them for feedback on your approach.
Developing actionable feedback to share
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Being intentional about when you choose to share feedback, considering the other person’s preferences and the feedback you have to share, will generally lead to a better outcome.
In the event that you share feedback in scheduled 1-to-1 settings, it can help if you’re prepared for it by arming yourself with actionable comments that you’ve developed beforehand.
A great way to do this is by taking notes on those you’ll be sharing feedback with, keeping a feedback log always to hand such as a notebook or mobile app.
When you see something worth providing feedback on, you can take a note of: - What did they actually do or say and when did this happen; - The implication of what they did or said - such as how it made you feel or how it affected the work you’re doing; and - If you already have a clear idea of anything they should do differently, make a note of that too.
This will help make your feedback fact-based, targeted and actionable - key ingredients to making it more valuable for them.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes preparing your feedback log and adding the people you want to offer feedback to, as well as incorporating any feedback you already have for them in the above format.
Why share feedback?
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A common wish for many is to receive more actionable feedback from their colleagues. Feedback that will help them improve, help them to develop and also, make them feel valued.
If you help others grow through effective feedback, they’re better able to support you and more likely to commit to your shared endeavours.
So your task for today is to spend 5 minutes reflecting on this and making a list of: - Who you’re sharing feedback with and how often; and - What kind of feedback you’ve been sharing with them - how actionable is it?
Then consider: - Who else you ought to be sharing feedback with? You should be sharing it with anyone you value and have meaningful interactions with. - Whether you should be sharing more often? It should be regular and frequent enough to help them learn. - Whether you’re giving them the feedback they need to improve? It should cover topics relevant to their development and be clearly actionable.
Actioning your feedback
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It can help if you capture all of the feedback you receive in a journal, including: - The feedback topic; - Who provided it and when; - What example they shared and when that took place; and - What suggestion they have for you.
Having a detailed feedback journal can: - Help you decide what feedback to prioritise for development; - Tracking your development by checking in with the feedback provider.
Once you’ve decided what feedback you want to prioritise, develop an action plan to address it, potentially asking the feedback provider for their input or review.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes setting up your feedback journal, adding any relevant feedback you’ve already had. Once you’ve had some of your feedback sessions and filled it out further, take the time to prioritise what you want to address and develop a plan for working at it.
How to ready yourself for feedback
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You can affect the feedback offered to you by: - How you request it; - How you support preparations; - Your mindset going into the discussion and the associated behaviours you exhibit; - The questions you ask; and - How you wrap-up the session.
Request feedback by being specific about what you want from the other person, both in terms of topics and in terms of style.
Support preparations through helpful suggestions: - Schedule the session into both of your calendars, mutually agreeing a time and date that doesn’t put them under pressure and affords them time to prepare; - Consider how long you’ll need together and discuss this with them - enough time not to feel rushed but not so long as to feel like a burden; - Suggest a safe space - somewhere they feel comfortable confiding in you without being overheard or where they may have to pause due to interruptions; - Make regular appointments in a time slot that is unlikely to be cancelled; - Make feedback sessions about just one individual at a time.
Adopt a mindset that recognises feedback as a gift - you want to be appreciative and receptive throughout the discussion and decide what to do with it afterwards. Avoid your body language coming across as defensive.
Asking genuine questions to understand why they have their perception and what specifically you can to to address it are helpful. Questions designed to try and change their perception are less helpful.
Wrap-up effectively by summarising what you heard from them, asking them to provide more feedback going forward and by thanking them will help demonstrate your appreciation.
Your task for today is to identify 2 or 3 suggestions that you like the most and put them into action ahead of your next feedback session.
How to get the feedback you need
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If someone isn’t sharing feedback with you as often as you’d like, it could be because: 1. They don’t know how important it is to you; 2. They don’t recognise what to share; or 3. They’re apprehensive about sharing.
These can be addressed by:
(1) Explicitly requesting the feedback you want from them; not just encouraging it.
(2) Help someone formulate more useful feedback for you by: - Telling them the strengths and development areas that you’re most interested in shaping. - Letting them know what tasks or activities you’d most like them to consider. - Asking them to keep a live record of observations with what you did or what you said that they liked or wish you’d done differently. - Sharing an example of feedback you’ve received in the past which was particularly helpful for you. - Sharing a feedback model for delivering feedback which you and they might both find helpful.
(3) Reassuring them by: - Fostering a supportive, open environment which builds their confidence. - Appearing accessible and receptive to feedback. - Not putting them on the spot and affording them time to prepare. - Demonstrating that you will fully consider or action what they have to share with you. - Making clear you won’t hold it against them if they criticise you.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes identifying why you might not be receiving the feedback you need from someone in particular and then engage them to see if you can address this.
How feedback helps you
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Effective feedback isn’t a judgement about you as an individual; it’s when someone offers you their perspective on what you say or how you act and how that affects them, potentially making a suggestion for further action.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes considering what useful feedback you’re already receiving and from whom, as well as who you need more from.
Write out the answers as a list of; - People that you receive or want to receive feedback from; - The quality of that feedback; and - How often they share it, as well as anything specific you want to know from them.
The list should encompass everyone you have meaningful interactions with.
Facilitating the meeting
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Well-prepared meetings can still fail when they don’t have a facilitator.
There is a difference between leading a topic of discussion and facilitating the meeting as a whole. - A topic leader will be driving the content discussion on that topic; whereas - A facilitator will focus on the overall process and meeting progress.
A meeting facilitator will ensure that: - Everyone’s objectives and roles are clear; - Attendees are bought into and adhere to the meeting rules; - Time is effectively managed throughout; - The agenda is adhered to; and - Meeting objectives are met.
Effective facilitators add value to the meeting by first aligning on a process with the attendees and then ensuring that process is adhered to. They’re prescriptive on process, not content.
Examples of how facilitators intervene during a meeting include: - If an agenda point is over-running they’ll halt the discussion temporarily and explicitly call out a choice for the attendees on whether to continue the discussion and sacrifice the time from another agenda point or move on now. - If things need to be parked, they’ll be the ones to capture them for follow up. - If someone is breaching the ground rules, they’ll question this. - Implementing breaks and keeping to time overall, ensuring sufficient pace to avoid boredom. - Encouraging attendees to engage when required. - Capturing next steps and aligning on these in a wrap-up, agreeing: what the actions are; who has responsibility for them; and how and when they’ll be followed up.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes identifying who should and will fulfil the facilitator role in your meeting. If it’s you, prepare for it. Consider how you’ll do it successfully and if it’s not you, spend some time coaching who it will be.
Aligning on rules for success
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Establish ground rules for your meetings and align these with your attendees to get them bought in, building on any pre-defined rules your organisation already has.
Consider what should the rules be and why?
Where possible, make rules based around specific behaviours, for example: - Seek understanding of others’ perspectives by asking genuine questions; - Share your rationale when expressing a view, as well as share all pertinent information and examples when applicable; - Check alignment among participants before moving off of a topic; - When using pre-defined terms, ensure everyone knows what they mean; - Test the veracity of each-others’ assumptions; - Request and encourage dissent when others’ share an opposing perspective; - Jointly agree next steps before ending a meeting.
You should compose your own ground rules, seeking input from the other attendees if possible to garner insight and help establish buy-in. Then consider how to communicate the rules and ensure buy-in with all participants.
Your task for today is to take 5-10 minutes to establish your ground rules and generate buy-in for them.
Preparing meeting resources
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A structured meeting agenda is key to success.
It should feature a table with the topics being addressed and headers such as: 1. The meeting topics (in order of priority); 2. Who’ll lead the topic discussion; 3. The time allocated to it; 4. The topic’s goal; and 5. Any relevant pre-read pages (if applicable).
When preparing an agenda, there are some considerations you can make: - The topics’ importance and urgency to all attendees. - The overall flow of topics by priority and whether a decision is required on one before discussing another. - The overall volume of content to cover. - Who should lead a topic based on their knowledge, experience and development goals and what coaching they may require. - What the time allocated to a topic will signal to your attendees about its importance or relevance to you.
If you want input before setting up the meeting, share the following and ask for any proposed changes or additions: - The agenda; - The attendee list (with reasons for their attendance); and - The proposed date, time and location of the meeting.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes developing your agenda and share it with others for feedback if you want their input. And if there’s materials that need preparing, be intentional about what’s going in them and when you’ll send them.
Setting up meetings for success
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You can set up a meeting for success by having a clear purpose/goal and the right resources.
If the goal can be achieved through other, easier means, such as a call, email or text, do this instead of holding a meeting to save effort.
Determine the resources you need by establishing: - A list of attendees with reasons for why they’re attending - what do they offer or get out of the meeting? - A proposed time and place - considering how long it should take, any deadlines and attendee availability. - Any materials you need during the meeting or to send out in advance as a pre-read.
Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes picking a meeting you have coming up: - Define its goal; - Prepare an attendee list; - Have a time and place in mind; and - A perspective on what materials you’ll need.
Getting started
Bossit’s an early stage start up with the ambition of helping you develop your professional and personal life skills.
The long-term plan is to do this using bitesize lessons, over audio, in core leadership skills delivered through a mobile app.
It will address topics such as productivity, communication, resilience, coaching, building relationships, team management, problem-solving, etc.
It will offer short bursts of insights, tactical tips and tricks, questions to consider and activities to try. We’ll ask you to do something or reflect on something in order to get you to consider the way you approach tasks, people and problems.
The lessons are bitesize, taking about 10 minutes each day and leveraging what you’re already working on in your day to day, to help you improve immediately and with minimal overhead on your time and energy.
A series of sessions on a given topic will progress incrementally, building off of the previous session, to help you form habits and make it easier to retain what you learn.
We welcome you to try out as many of the topics as you deem relevant. The cadence we suggest is once you start a series, that you listen to a session every work day unless otherwise advised.
We would greatly appreciate it if you’d be willing to provide feedback on a series by completing an online survey. The survey has 10 questions and would take less than 3 minutes to complete. The relevant link can be found in the Episode Web Page link of every final session in a given series.
Thanks for listening and we hope that you find Bossit useful to developing yourself as a better business leader.