Think back to the last time you joined a new organisation. What was your onboarding like? “Hi, here's your laptop. Here's where the toilets are. Here is the printer. Here is the cupboard with the pens. Here are a whole bunch of people whose names you won't remember for weeks. Here's a technical introduction to the work. Here are your logins to the tools you will need. Off you go.” There might be a welcome lunch to help you get to know the people you will be working with, or some sort of ritual embarrassment at the next all hands meeting so they can "get to know you" a bit better (what's one thing about you that no one knows...). There will probably be some mandatory, cover-our-legal-butts "training" in health and safety and various HR policies that will leave you feeling dumber than when you started.

I suspect most people around the world have similar onboarding experiences in just about every organisation. It's the way things are done. And it's wrong. Not so much for what it includes, but for what it leaves out. The traditional onboarding experience misses some crucial things that help new people get settled into a new role in a new organisation. While it might give you the basic mechanics of your job, it doesn't help you integrate into the new organisation. You are left to discover all the hidden little things all by yourself. The fact that we can't raise that topic in meetings because of last time. The fact that while the process says this, what we actually do is something else because of history. Or the fact that, given a choice between this and that, we always chose this because that's what is important to the organisation. In short, what traditional onboarding doesn't do is introduce you to the culture of the organisation you have just joined.

I'm sure we have all been in this position - you are in a meeting where ideas are being shared. Someone puts forward an idea and someone raises an objection. The raiser of the idea reacts as if they have just been punched in the face - angry, defensive, aggressive. Or sullen, withdrawn, silent. Fight or flight. And all because someone raised an objection to their idea. People tend to hold their ideas very tightly. They identify with them. They are their idea. So an attack on their idea is very literally an attack on them.

Or what about this one - you were just in a meeting and someone says to you "that was a pretty bad idea they raised.. what a fool they must be". In this case we are associating the idea with the character of the person who raised it. The idea was bad so therefore, by extension, they must be bad. We see both of these situations all the time. Both associating strongly with your own ideas, and conflating the quality of an idea with the attributes or character of the person who raised it, are things most of us do all the time, and they are both extremely unhelpful.

One of the most effective things any person or team can do to improve the way they work is to make their work visible. Unless you work in a factory building physical things, chances are most of your work is invisible. It lives in emails and in documents and in conversations. It's not physical stuff that you can easily see in front of you. It's hard to get an overall picture of where all your work is in your process and where things are getting stuck. On a factory floor you can see a pile of parts build up in front of a bottleneck. It's really hard to do that with invisible work. Invisible work generally only becomes visible when there is a problem.

So if you want to understand your work, you need some way to make it visible. Make a big board somewhere and put cards on it representing all the work that is in flight and where it is in your process. By visualising work that is usually invisible, you can start to see patterns and make changes to improve the flow. If is invisible you can't control it. You only become aware of it when it jumps out at you and causes you a problem. By making the invisible visible you gain control over something. That works great for things like invisible work, but what about other invisible things? Things like our own internal states - our thoughts and emotions.

Last time I wrote about the drive for change being caused by a tension between the way we want the world to be and the way the world is. We looked at the two ways in which to release that tension - change reality to match your vision, or lower your vision to match reality. We explored the sad fact that most of the time it’s much easier to lower your expectations and what happens when you do that. We also looked at how you can keep your dreams alive in the face of difficulty - by not fixating on reaching the goal but focusing on the progress made along the journey. That post generated a bunch of questions from readers so I thought I'd write a follow-up to address them.

There were three main questions raised - does the goal have to be an external goal (change the world) and not an internal goal (change me); is any changing of your goal a bad thing; and what to do if you are a really goal oriented person and keep focusing on reaching that goal.

We all carry within us a picture of how we would like reality to be. Then there is the objective reality that surrounds us. When those two do not agree, an uncomfortable tension is built up and it is this tension that creates the desire for change. Our imagined state is usually a much happier/more productive/more complete state than the one we actually find ourselves in. How many times have you said to yourself something like "I wish I could be more..." or even more commonly "I wish work could be more like...."? The difference between our dreams and aspirations and where we find ourselves creates a mental tension and this drives the desire to change.

Mental tension is uncomfortable. It needs to be resolved. It won't resolve itself - something needs to change to resolve that tension. There are only two things that can change here, either we make changes to make the world we live in more like the one we aspire to, or we lower our aspirations to make our dreams more like reality. Either we change the world, or the world changes us. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to adjust our aspirations downwards than to make real change in the world.

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

Last time we asked the question - "What makes a great leader?" and in order to answer that, we had to look at what it is that a leader actually does. What really is leadership? It turns out that the function of a leader is to allow large groups to work in a coordinated and purposeful way. Then we started to look at what sort of skills leaders are encouraged to develop and which of those skills really make the difference between a leader and a great leader.

The skills that really make a difference are not the ones that many people assume are the important ones. Technical skill in whatever it is you are doing is fairly unimportant. How driven you are personally is not that important. The reason for this is that those skills are ones that don't scale. Being technically good as the leader doesn't make the group any better once you hit the capacity of that one leader to dispense technical advice. Being driven to succeed as a leader doesn't make the group driven to succeed. Those things are individual things. They have a scale of one. What matters when leading groups are skills that scale across the whole group - things that lift the whole group up, not just the leader.

What is leadership and why do we need it? If you do a search for leadership books on Amazon you get back thousands of titles, all with a different take on what makes a great leader. Some emphasise technical skills. Some emphasise people skills, others emphasise whatever magic formula the author believes holds the secret. You could read leadership books for the rest of your life and and up more confused than you were when you started.

So what is the secret? What does make a great leader. Why do we need leaders anyway? The only way we will answer the question of what makes a great leader is to work out what leaders really do.

As a brewer, when you hook up a keg of beer to the gas and hook up the tap, one of the things you learn quite quickly (unless you really like drinking nothing but foam) is that the pressure of the gas pushing the liquid through the tube creates a resistance in that tube that poses the flow. The more pressure, the more resistance. Eventually the resistance becomes too much, creates turbulence and the tap will pour gas and foam rather than lovely beer. Electrical engineers recognise this phenomenon as well - the more current you push through a wire (the pressure of the electrons), the more the wire will resist their flow and cause energy to be lost as heat. Eventually the wire will get so hot that it will melt.

This is a well known phenomenon of many of the physical sciences. Whenever you push one thing into or through another thing, there is resistance and that resistance is proportional to the pressure doing the pushing - small pressure, small resistance. Large pressure, large resistance. Importantly, that resistance can build to a point where it will cause damage to the materials involved. Push too hard and the wire will melt or the pipe will burst. Pushing harder may actually get you less flow because the resistance is greater. So why am I telling you this? Because it applies to coaching as well, but unlike the physical sciences we often don't recognise it.