The point I’m driving at is that while you as a leader may do just fine with the ambiguity of unfinished goals—simultaneously cleaning up last year’s mess and rolling out shiny new initiatives, many of your people detest loose ends, unfinished business, and incomplete goals.

What do your people want (other than more money)? They want clarity, autonomy, empowerment, respect, and organizational accountability. They want to make a difference and do good, meaningful work. They want to know that leadership cares and that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction with the same commitment and vigor that they apply to their own work.

To illustrate how this course will be different, on the first day of class, we’ll be discussing the concept of the accidental manager, and the importance of aligning one’s personal purpose with a chosen vocation. We’ll have a group discussion on several concepts that are essential to building resilience and a healthy relationship with work. Those concepts are self love, curiosity, courage, compassion, gratitude, agility, situational awareness, and self-awareness, just to name a few.

This urge to do it yourself is one that comes naturally—at least for some of us. Remember class projects in high school and college? Were you the Type A high achiever that jumped in when deadlines approached and “took over” to prevent a failing grade or substandard outcome? I played this role many times in college and look back on my behavior with a cringe.

Most importantly, ask yourself if your reaction to a new acquaintance is based on the response that our hyper-polarized society expects you to have, or are you willing to learn and grow your thinking and your network beyond the confines of a fixed mindset to an issue, people, or culture.

Continuous improvement is based on three primary tenets: identifying & minimizing waste, respecting people, and maintaining a maniacal focus on the customer. My advice today is this: use the holiday shopping season to look for examples of service excellence and service failure.

As the plane taxied out, we made a 90 degree turn onto runway 4-22, sat for 30 seconds or so, and then instead of roaring off into the sky, the engines whimpered and we made another 90 degree turn onto an adjacent empty tarmac. We all sat in relative silence, waiting for the captain to make an announcement about why our takeoff was aborted. We waited, waited, and waited some more.

This week, I’d like to drill a bit deeper into the benefits of diversity versus uniformity and a key trap leaders can easily fall into. We’ll call it the expectations trap. Just as leaders can be tempted to reduce friction and drag with a homogeneous “Team Yes” by hiring people who look and think like they do, it’s also easy to project expectations for dedication, effort, productivity, engagement, and results onto others.

A balancing act all leaders must grapple with is the short-term benefit of moving fast with minimal drag from a personally curated “Team Yes,” versus the long-term satisfaction that comes from building a diverse team that will simultaneously challenge, support, and push the boundaries of your current state positions and thinking.

Your personal self evaluation should take precedence over the self evaluation that is required as part of your annual performance review at work. In doing so, you’re making it clear to yourself that your personal performance and well-being takes priority to what is happening at work. All too often, work takes precedence, we get stuck on the hamster wheel, and we’re left personally unfulfilled.

Are you feeling disengaged or ‘stuck’ at work? Does it feel like you’re trudging through mud and that the light in your eyes has dimmed? From my own personal experience, it can be very difficult to pinpoint the root cause of these feelings and it’s even harder to break through to an improved state of well-being and engagement.

Second, here’s a reminder to hiring managers everywhere to hire veterans. Why? Veterans are resilient, they know how to persevere, they understand collaboration and teamwork, they’ve acquired valuable skills from one of the best training and human development organizations on the planet.