doug smith training

Who needs to improve their performance? Everyone! Of course! How do we improve performance? We improve performance in hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways, and yet these four ways are critical: Knowledge: knowing what to do. Practice: working at repeating the desired behaviors and actions. Feedback: staying open to and using observations about our performance. Discipline: relentlessly following the path to success, even when it's hard. Better performance comes from knowledge, practice, feedback, and discipline. For you, for your team members, for anyone interested in improving performance. And then, as it says on the shampoo bottle, rinse and repeat. Performance improvement never ends. -- Doug Smith

High performance leaders develop even their best team members into better team members. Growth never ends. -- Doug Smith

Setting the right goal frees us of a thousand excuses. There's no need to dance around the reasons you have not achieved your goal when your goal truly matters. It does not guarantee that you are done, or will be done. What it does guarantee is that you won't resent the effort. And, in todays busy world, why not focus on what you care deeply about. Why not set the right goal? -- Doug Smith

Who is in charge of your team? Of every little detail? The best way to build your team members is to put each one in charge of something. Give them as much as they can handle (and then a little more.) Trust them. Build them. Develop them. Challenge them. An early mistake I made as a supervisor was to try to be the answer man. People would line up to my cubicle to get answers to my questions. And most of the time I had great answers. But you know what? Their own answers, I learned, were far better. Better because they had a rich amount of experience to draw from. Better because they could then own the solution. And better because it freed me up to do other things. To be more strategic and to spend more time with team members on their development, not their supervision. The better you supervise, the less you'll need to supervise.  And the more leadership that you share, the less your team will rely on you for answers. Take charge AND allow your team members to lead. Share

The best way to stop a task from causing stress is to finish it. -- Doug Smith

It's much easier to agree on our goals when we share our most important values. -- Doug Smith

Have you ever had more goals than you can handle? Faster, better, smarter! The world puts pressure on us to set and achieve far more goals than we ever have before. Maybe it's too much. It certainly feels that way sometimes. Here's fuel for your efforts: passion. Set goals you not just care about, but can't live without. Set and work on goals that matter to you, to your team, to the world. Warm the world with the passion around your goals. Then, no matter how hard, no matter how long it takes, the effort will fill you with rewards. Passion is a fabulous fuel for goals. Don't fake it -- find it! -- Doug Smith