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Too often, we say we're coaching people, and what we're really doing is managing them. By managing I mean we direct them, we advise them, we hold them accountable. Those are all important things, but that's not coaching.

A core purpose answers the question: Why does our business exist? It's not to make money, despite what your CFO might say. Your purpose needs to have a higher intention than money. Money is the benefit you get for adding some value to society. What value are you adding?

The one thing I found that has the biggest impact on someone's willingness or likelihood to make a timely decision to take action - to get results - is a lack of confidence.

As a leader, it's critical that you take the time to periodically step back and evaluate the folks on your team. Who are your A-players, your B-players, your C-players, or what I call your toxic C-players?

As the leader of a company or the leader of the team, one of the biggest challenges we have is to keep that energy going - energy going through those obstacles, energy going to reach those opportunities - because if we lose that energy, it cascades down to the rest of our team, growth stops, and we quit.

When you set priorities, but then you don't focus on committing and moving forward to those priorities, the whole planning process becomes a joke. It impacts your productivity, it impacts your morale, and it impacts the whole culture of the leadership team.

There's a lesson I learned a number of years ago - and I say learned it, but I need to relearn it almost every day - called the Law of Positive Intent. The Law of Positive Intent simply says: everyone is just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.

I want to talk to you about innovation. Not company innovation, not product innovation, but personal innovation. If we truly want to consistently innovate for our company, for our product, for our service, we need to be innovating personally.

The success of your company is driven by the success of each function within the company. While that sounds logical, very few companies really know how to measure the success of each function.