Always Be Coaching

In sales, there’s an old saying that has echoed through offices and training rooms for decades.

Always be closing.

It’s meant to keep the salesperson focused on their end goal. Keep the deal moving forward. Stay alert to opportunity. Maintain momentum.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe leaders need a different version of that advice.

Always be coaching.

As a leader, your mission is to develop the people who will come after you. You lift others through quiet, daily work that helps them grow. Your job is to bring out the best in yourself and in the people who will eventually step into your role. Coaching drives growth and keeps it moving forward.

Coaching your team is a way of saying, “Your future matters to me.” Coaching your children says, “I believe you have more inside you than you can see today.” And coaching yourself acknowledges the simple truth that growth must continue throughout life, especially for the leader.

Great coaches do more than explain ideas. They create space for practice. They help others turn new knowledge into muscle memory. They offer challenges sized just right for the moment. They ask questions that change how a person thinks about a problem. They reveal a new angle or a new path forward when something feels unsolvable.

Coaching takes learning to the next level. You learn something. You put it into practice. Then you pass it on. Teaching anchors the lesson. It deepens the insight. It turns wisdom into a gift you can hand to others.

Coaching doesn’t require perfect knowledge. It requires humble generosity. Share the insight you gained from yesterday’s challenge. Share the questions that helped you see an issue more clearly. Share the perspective that lifted your confidence when you needed it most.

Leadership is a relay. Someone handed the baton to you. One day you’ll hand it to someone else. The best leaders prepare the people who will run ahead long after they’ve finished their leg of the race.

Who have you coached today?
This week?
This month?

This is your responsibility. Your opportunity. Your mission.

Always be coaching.

Photo by Sylvain Mauroux on Unsplash – who are you helping to climb their next mountain?

What Worked Yesterday Isn’t Enough – Rethinking Customer Expectations and Continuous Improvement

I heard a quote recently from Tony Xu, the CEO of DoorDash:

“What we’ve delivered for a customer yesterday probably isn’t good enough for what we will deliver for them today.”

It’s not about failure. Xu isn’t saying we got it wrong. He’s pointing to something more subtle that applies not only to tech companies like DoorDash, but to every business in every industry. Regional banks. Manufacturers. Educators. Consultants. Entrepreneurs. Even nonprofit leaders. No one is exempt.

It’s tempting to believe that what worked before will keep working. After all, if it’s not broken, why fix it? That quiet assumption that if we keep doing what we’ve always done, success will follow.

But that mindset is quietly dangerous. The world isn’t that simple.

Customers don’t live in yesterday. They live in the now. They’re comparing their experience with us not just to our competitors, but to the best parts of every interaction they’ve had today.

They’re comparing our website to their grocery buying app. Our onboarding process to a streaming service subscription they love. Our customer service calls to the help they received (or didn’t) from their cell phone company.

We’re not being compared to the bank down the road or the business across the street. We’re being measured against the most seamless, most helpful, most human-centered experience our customers have ever had.

That’s a very high bar. It’s unfair…and they don’t care.

It’s easy to forget their perspective from inside our organizations. We become focused on the big system conversion we’re managing, the vendor issue we’re troubleshooting, the reorganization plans we’re working on this quarter, or the new regulatory review that’s keeping us up at night.

These are real and important things. But the customer doesn’t see them, nor should they.

They’re living in their own world, with their own challenges and needs. They’re asking, quietly and constantly, “Are you making this easier, or harder, for me?”

They’re rightfully selfish in that way.

Some important questions to consider:

–What are my customers or team members quietly expecting that I haven’t noticed yet?

–What have I continued doing because it worked before, even though the market has changed?

–What future am I preparing for? The one I’ve known in the past, or the one that’s unfolding in a new direction?

–Am I making excuses that only make sense inside our organization?

I don’t think leadership is about chasing every trend. But I do believe it’s about staying awake. Staying open. Listening for what’s emerging and not just reacting to what someone else has made clear.

The fact that something worked yesterday doesn’t make it sacred. It makes it a foundation. And foundations are meant to be built upon…not celebrated as finished.

If we truly care about the people we serve, we’ll stay curious about how to serve them better. Because they’re not standing still. Their lives are shifting. Our job isn’t to cling (desperately) to relevance. It’s to keep earning it.

So, we never stop building. We keep asking the hard questions. We stay close to our customers so we can hear what they’re not saying yet. And we must choose to meet tomorrow’s expectations before they arrive at our doorstep.

Yesterday’s work mattered. It carried us here. But it’s today’s effort—and our willingness to keep stretching—that will decide if we’re still invited to serve tomorrow.

As Shunryu Suzuki once said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

It’s great to be an expert in our field. But sometimes, a beginner’s mindset is exactly what we need to see things from the most important perspective. Our current and future customers’ perspective.

Photo by Bayu Syaits on Unsplash – I love the imagery of these two climbers at the top of a mountain. They may take a short rest to celebrate their achievement, but that next peak is already in their sights.

Always Better

Seeking better every day yields a compounding effect that far surpasses the value of merely being best for one day…

We’re taught at an early age to do our best. That we should strive to be the best.

Being the best is a great accomplishment.

Best student. Best musician. Best cook. Best athlete. Best employee. Best boss. Best entrepreneur. Best leader. Best parent. Best friend.

There are at least three problems with best:

Best is often a subjective comparison to the subset that’s around you. There’s a phrase, “big fish in a small pond,” that represents this well. You’re the best runner in your school. But, when it comes time to run against another school, your best isn’t good enough. You finish second in the race. Every time the subset gets larger, best gets redefined.

Best is a fleeting moment in time. You might be the best today, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

The value of best goes down quickly. Does it matter to your 48-year-old self that you were the best student (however that was measured) back in high school? Sure, it’s a proud accomplishment from your past, but does it really impact your life 30 years later?

I propose an alternative to being the best: being always better.

Consider the challenge and reward of always better:

No matter what measuring stick you use, if the goal is to always be better than yesterday, the challenge is clear, and the improvement is measurable.

There’s no place to hide when the goal is always better. No excuses for not improving, even just a little bit, from yesterday, last year, ten years ago.

Always better pits you against your past self. The subset never changes. It’s you.

If the definition of success is to always be better than before, you get to celebrate success every day that you improve.

What if you don’t improve today? That’s okay, we all have setbacks. Setbacks remind us not to take our improvements for granted. We get to see how great it is to come back to where we were, and then take another step toward our better self after that.

Seeking better every day yields a compounding effect that far surpasses the value of merely being best for one day.

Ask these questions of yourself:

What am I doing to improve today?

Am I focused on learning from my mistakes, or imagining a new way, and charting an improved course today?

Do I realize that each day is an opportunity to be better than yesterday?

Am I willing to challenge my own status quo, my comfort zone, today?

Am I a better student, musician, cook, athlete, employee, boss, entrepreneur, leader, parent, friend, or whatever else you find most important, than I was yesterday? If not, why not?

Ironically, if you work on always being better, there’s a good chance you’ll become the best. But you won’t care, because the reward you seek comes from the never-ending quest to be always better.