I went to a leadership conference this week. It was a private conference, so I can't name names, but I learned some really interesting things, and a couple of them are things I want to start teaching to the people I work with, so I figured I'd get them down here first.

Downtown Toronto this week.

Vulnerability

The first was about personal relationships, and how showing vulnerability can help with work relationships. That's NOT how a lot of us were taught to think about work (keep it professional, keep it about the job, etc), but it's one of the ideas I keep coming back to.

Fail faster

Now, the one I really want to teach is the concept of fail faster. The idea is that you can learn to practice at work, just like hitting a golf ball is practicing, and you don't hit one ball and call it a day (not all of them are going to go straight!), you keep hitting them, and that's how you get better. It's a really interesting concept, I think it's important, and I want the people I work with to get comfortable with it.

Watch the film

There's also the concept of watching film, which is something elite athletes do. The film is the data, the analytics and the metrics of all the things they've been doing, whether it's in practice or in games, and they go back and analyze it so they can get better.

I see this with my son Harry, who is an elite athlete. He's filmed himself practicing, and he watches game film on himself as well as his opponents, and he uses ALL of that data to help him get better in his game, and to help him keep up and continue to improve.

Look at that, and then think about how often we do the same thing at work. People at work need to analyze the things that they do with data, just like an athlete watches film, and we should be doing that in the professional world TOO!

Back to my original point, these are things I want to teach the people I work with, and Harry is the example I'd hold up for how professionals in the business world should operate. There's more to work out here, but I wanted to capture these ideas first.