One of the attributes I have noticed in nearly every great leader that I’ve worked with is that they know how to get back up after they fall. I don’t think they fall any less than the rest of us, or any less hard. But they don’t lay there very long. I actually believe that leaders make more mistakes than most people, they just recover faster. Leaders are constantly pushing limits, challenging themselves, trying new things and often without the benefit of watching someone else do it. They are living in those places where mistakes are part of every day. It’s what they do immediately after they screw up that separates them from others. They also have the potential for some really bad days. Leaders often take on more accountability and responsibility than others. They create a situation where their days have much more opportunity for something to go wrong and be their fault, or at least their responsibility to fix. They deal with more moving parts than most and that means things can go awry quickly and often. Let’s face it, if you stay under the covers all day you don’t put yourself in harm’s way. But leaders are out in the mix, where life is unpredictable. What they do that enables them to survive and grow in a mistake…
One of the most basic questions leaders often ask is how do I get the people in the organization to do what the organization needs them to. I was working with the president of a multi-billion dollar business when he said, “my biggest problem is that I know exactly what the people in this business need to do to make it successful, but I don’t know how to get them to do it.” I think that sums up the biggest challenge many business leaders face. The answer itself is relatively simple. People will move in a given direction when they can answer yes to four basic questions. The leaders job is to make sure that the answer to each of these simple questions is yes. And just because the questions are simple, doesn’t mean answering them with a yes is. Here are the four questions that will change the game. Do they want to? In that very same business where the president was struggling to get his people to change behaviors I encountered one of his lieutenants saying this in a meeting about a new direction the sales force needed to take: “I don’t care if they buy into it or not, I just need them to do it.” I immediately understood one of the reasons the president was feeling challenged if he had other leaders thinking that way within…
Although I haven’t been able to watch as much as I would like, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing some of the Winter Olympic Games this time around. I enjoy watching the competition but I also like learning about how some of these incredible athletes got to the top of their sport and the level of commitment that they bring to their endeavor. What I’m constantly impressed by is the amount of personal sacrifice they make, often beginning at an early age, in order to capture something that’s bigger. There’s no question that some of them are pushed to some degree, especially when they show real promise at a particular sport. But at some juncture in their life, they make a choice and decide to put everything they have into their chance to accomplish something incredible. I was struck by one particular story that I watched during these games about Apolo Ohno, the American speed skater who has now become the most decorated Winter Olympic athlete of all time. The story was about how after the 2006 Olympics, Ohno began living the life of fame and notoriety that often draws people away from the efforts that got them there in the first place. The story was about how Ohno was invited to all of the A-list parties and hottest events, and…
Typically when I start coaching a new client, I spend our first meeting doing a lot of listening. It doesn’t take long to figure outwhere the opportunities are to help someone if you just let them talk for a while. A while back I was coaching an executive and he spent a great deal of our first meeting explaining all of the things that were keeping him from leading. While most leaders will have a number of things they wish were different in the world, this particular executive spent more time than most explaining to me why he couldn’t possibly succeed as a leader in this environment. There was a long list of reasons why he had to spend all of his time solving problems that his people, and their people, created. After listening for a while I asked him how he was going to adapt to more effectively lead this business and these people. Then I suggested that maybe these people needed a different leader. He bristled at the suggestion that someone else could do his job better than he could. I explained to him that I didn’t say they needed a different person, he may very well be the perfect person, but he wasn’t yet the right leader. As long as he saw his people as the problem, he wasn’t capable of leading them. I had the…
In my last post I talked about the research done recently indicating that employee satisfaction across the country has tumbled to an all time low of 45%. I listed one key to creating organizational satisfaction and in this post I’d like to touch on two more. Take a look at my first post here to see how we started the discussion. Here’s two more reasons that organizations don’t often build a culture that drives employee satisfaction, and some ways to think differently about those challenges. Organizations focus on accomplishments, not progress Many of the organizations I’ve worked for or with are laser focused on what they need to get done but pay much less attention to how they get better at doing those things in the first place. One recently appointed CEO announced, "We have everything we need… to be the best financial services company in the world. What we need to do now is very simple. We need to execute." The real question that begs is how do the employees, who have virtually the same collective set of skills, experience and knowledge tomorrow that they have today, execute any better? It’s akin to saying that tomorrow I’m going to run faster, in spite of the fact that ive done nothing today to improve my running…
I was reading some research done recently by the conference board that said employee satisfaction across the country had dropped to an all time low of 45%. If it’s anywhere near accurate, it means that for the first time since we started measuring it, over half of us are unhappy in our jobs. The other scary statistic was that it had declined from 61% since 1987 and from 52% just last year. I’ve never met a leader who thinks they can create a successful business or team with less than half of their people being happy and yet, if you believe the research, there’s a lot of leaders out there trying to be successful in that very environment. I’ve asked myself for years why so many organizations, in spite of the lip service given to employee engagement and development, really don’t do a very good job of making it happen. I equate it to the path so many of us take with regard to things that don’t have immediate impact but bring long term dramatic results. Retirement planning and saving money, exercise, diet, maintenance on our car or home. We put so many of these things off because they won’t make a huge difference in our life in the next quarter or year. And then I think of all the individuals who commit their entire being to a distant…
It’s that time of year when so many of us are in the midst of trying to keep the New Year’s resolutions we made. Most of the nearly half of Americans who make them have already broken those promises to themselves. And if you believe the research, those of us who have managed to keep them for the first few weeks, or months, will soon abandon those behavior changes we were so enthusiastic about as we began the new year. It’s also highly likely that next December we will set similar goals for change and then, once again, allow them to fade into things that we wish we had done. Why is it that behavior change is so difficult for us to achieve? After all, it’s our own behavior isn't it?. We should be, with the exception of certain medical conditions, completely in control of it. The answer lies in how we go about setting and reaching our goals in the first place, any time of year. We typically focus on the new action we want to adopt without any real, thoughtful analysis of why we want to adopt it, and equally as important, what kept us from adopting it last year, and the year before that and the year before that. All of the forces that kept us in the behavior patterns we would like to change don’t go away when the clock strikes…
I’ve worked with a lot of companies that focus on changing their processes to improve efficiency and improve execution. It’s amazing how much simplifying a process or removing a hurdle can help people do their jobs more effectively and improve profitability. Unfortunately, many organizations also try to use process to change human behavior. That simply doesn’t work. If people aren’t already executing a process, improving it really won’t help unless the poor process was the only thing in the way in the first place. The bottom line on process improvement is this: if people aren’t already doing something, making it easier to do won’t dramatically change things. And mandating it may achieve compliance, but not quality or commitment. Some of the most common examples that I see of creating a process with the goal of changing human behavior are performance management, coaching, communication, decision-making and even sales. If people aren’t executing against what’s already in place, or even creating their own ways to get these things done, then making them easier won’t help. It’s like improving a road that no one wants to drive on. It’s just a smooth empty road. Let’s take performance management as an example since I think…
A good friend of mine sent me a video clip the other day that I found to be very interesting. It was an experiment conducted at a train terminal in Stockholm and in this day and age of viral information I’m sure many of you have seen it by now. The experiment was to determine if you could change the choices people make by adding fun to the equation. I took a look at the website mentioned in the video, thefuntheory.com, and apparently it’s an initiative sponsored by Volkswagen and there are several of these types of experiments underway. Another clever effort to capture the viral information phenomenon and capitalize on the publicity and the marketing opportunities that are sure to follow. This particular experiment involved changing a set of stairs in the train terminal into a piano keyboard, complete with sound as people stepped on the keys. The stairs were located right beside an escalator and, as you can imagine, on a normal day most people chose the convenience over the exercise. In this case though, with the musical steps in place, 66% more people than normal chose to use the steps and forgo the escalator. I’m certain it’s an indictment of some kind about how I think but my mind immediately went to how this simple…
I had never heard the term “burning platform” before. Apparently it got used a lot in the company I was working with though. The executive said that this new initiative was critical and so the team needed to create a “burning platform” to instill a sense of urgency in the business. I found out later that the metaphor meant that if you needed a new platform built, the best way to make sure the work got done was to set the one you were standing on ablaze. When I first heard it, I thought that it was an interesting way to think about the urgency that is necessary to capture a market opportunity before the competitor does or to rally the troops for some time sensitive and critical effort. Then I learned that it was used by this executive on something close to a daily basis. If the platform is constantly on fire, people just learn to work in the heat. What I found as I talked to people in the organization was that everything was urgent. Every new initiative was critical, every new project, essential to the business. What I also learned was that because of the environment that constant urgency creates, speed was valued more than direction and work, more than results. The culture had turned into one where people were rewarded…