Thinking Win/Win sounds great, but how does it play out in real life? Let’s take this situation as an example. Your engineering team has been asked to estimate what work needs to be done and how long it will take to produce a certain feature or product. The team returnsContinue Reading

Win/Win is a belief in the Third Alternative. It’s not your way or my way; it’s a better way, a higher way. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People The first three habits in Covey’s 7 Habits are what he categorizes as personal victories. The first three habits,Continue Reading

We may have the greatest intention of putting first things first. The end of the day comes and when we look back, well, we didn’t achieve what we set out to achieve. We were supremely busy, but we didn’t have time for ‘first things’. You might think you don’t haveContinue Reading

How do we go about actually putting first things first? In Habit 3 of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the author lays out the key activities of Quadrant II organization. These are: Identifying Roles Selecting Goals Scheduling Daily Adapting Roles The roles we are identifying are our rolesContinue Reading

What is a Q2 Leader? A Q2 Leader spends intentional time in Quadrant II of Covey’s Time Management Matrix from the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This is where important, but not urgent, work is done. It’s where we build relationships, discover opportunities, learn, and envision theContinue Reading

We’re finally at the Habit in Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where the name of this blog, Q2 Leader, comes from. As with all the habits, Covey covers a lot of ground, so we’ll be looking at an overview of the chapter. 4 Generations of Time ManagementContinue Reading

Rainbow and palm tree

How big we think determines the size of our accomplishments. David J. Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big Do you feel like you were made for more but you’re not sure what? After all, you made it through school (and let’s face it, that wasn’t all that easy), but nowContinue Reading

As you were doing the exercise to discover what’s important to you, did being trustworthy come up? We all appreciate being around people we can trust. In order to grow a relationship with someone you trust, we must be trustworthy ourselves. So…how do we work on our trustworthiness? In thisContinue Reading

Sunlight through trees

“Why do you want to go into engineering? It’s so hard.” Ever hear that? I imagine I heard that when I was in high school. But I knew I was a decent student who was good at math and science, and I know that the aptitude tests said I wouldContinue Reading

Habit 2 in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change challenges us to think about who we really want to be, who we really are, and the delta between the two. We’ll talk about a powerful exercise that uncovers what we valueContinue Reading