You are an experienced leader and have been successfully leading and coaching direct reports for many years.  As you’ve advanced in your career and moved up in the organization, your role has evolved from managing individual contributors to managing the managers of individual contributors.  As we all know, that can be a difficult transition as you are now another level away from the “real work” of physically making products or delivering services.

This week, I had the opportunity of working with a group of leaders of leaders and we were exploring some of their current leadership challenges. One of the more interesting topics we focused on was the changing needs of first-time coaches.  The consensus of my group of experienced leaders was that today’s first-time coaches need foundational coaching skills.  There are many reasons for this most of which are related to the changing work environment, matrixed organizations, less structure, and a more conflict averse coaching layer of managers.  To the experienced leader managing new leaders, this can be very frustrating.

It happens fast, and it usually sounds very innocent and not such a big deal. One of your employees comes to you and says, “Listen, my girlfriend won a trip to the Caribbean as part of a sales contest and she can bring me along as her guest.  It’s just a long weekend, I would leave Thursday and will definitely be back at work on Tuesday. And I promise, I will check my email while I’m away.”  You think to yourself that this is good worker and while he’s not putting in anything close to a 60-hour work week, he’s diligent and trustworthy and could use a few days off.  You tell him it’s fine and then you do something that you will regret later.  You tell him that he doesn’t have to put the vacation into the system.  You have a couple of what you think are important reasons for telling him this which is in effect literally creating a “side deal” with the employee.  You think to yourself that it’s just easier as you can justify it as a reward, plus you just told another member of your team he couldn’t take any time off because this is an extremely busy time of the year and he is one of those corner-cutters that you will never give any additional benefits of the doubt to so you can’t let it out that other members of the team are being given special consideration.

As we all know, every successful innovator makes mistakes, learns from those mistakes, and then moves forward until the innovation is right.  As Thomas Edison once famously said:

It’s so easy to get caught up in the jargon.  If I had any spare time I would create an app for my  iPhone called Business Jargon Bingo and every time I heard the words business disruption, digital disruption, digital transformation, Rockstar, “taking shots on goal”, “moving the needle”, and game-changer I would add to my digital bingo card (DBC).

While too many companies and the leaders who run them get by with hyperbole and hollow buzz words, one company continues to crush it. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

There are many reasons why leading strategic execution is so difficult and, in most cases, causes companies to fail. The typical culprits of poor execution are a lack of a good strategy, poor communications, poor change management, not enough resources, and overall bad leadership.

Unfortunately for many leaders who will realize it before it’s too late, changing customer expectations is usually far down on the list and not something most leaders pay attention to. However, I think understanding changing customer expectations is critical to immediate and long-term success.