Are you a good communicator?

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Most people are really not great communicators. They assume that others see things the way they do, and/or they know what is expected of them, so they either avoid communicating or they communicate in an implicit and ineffective way.

Even those who do communicate often, do it in a much less direct and effective way then they think.

I was coaching two very seasoned and successful executives in the trust and communication between them. Each of them commanded a very large and critical division. Their divisions depended on each other for their success and the overall success of the company. Because these two executives didn’t trust each other they also didn’t communicate in a transparent and honest way and this affected the dynamic between their organizations.

One executive, who was harboring resentments and frustrations toward his peer, left our conversation with a passionate determination to have the brave and direct conversation with his peer. A few days later when I followed up with him, he acknowledged that the conversation took place, it was extremely forthright and bold and had a meaningful impact on his relationship with his peer.

I was pleased to hear this, but when I asked his colleague how the conversation went, he had a drastically different account of what transpired. In his experience, his colleague didn’t communicate openly at all or convey anything new or meaningful. From his standpoint, nothing had improved or changed.

I can’t tell you the number of times one person tells me how bold and direct the conversation was, and the second person says that wasn’t at all.

People don’t communicate in a clear, rigorous, direct and/or bold way and when they are called to the carpet, they often explain and excuse it with “It was a misunderstanding…”.

Well, on rare occasions there are misunderstandings. However, most of the time it is not a matter of “Oops!“.

Communication is the most powerful instrument, tool and/or weapon we have as human beings to build, drive, manage and/or destroy things. It is innate in our human operating system.

People simply don’t want to take responsibility for their potential power and impact, therefore they don’t want to take responsibility for their desires, requests (what they want), how they feel and/or what is working and not working for them.

It is easier and safer to stay small. The way you do that is by communicating in a vague, wishy-washy and cowardly way and blaming the circumstances and events for why things are not moving in the way you want.

There is both an art and a science to communicating effectively. The more you understand and practice the science the better you will get at the art.  Here is a quick overview…

There are two dimensions to communication:

The content, which is the words that come out of your mouth; making sure they are explicit, clear and direct. Making sure the receiver of your communication receives then exactly the way you meant them.

The context, which is the intention, purpose and higher messages behind your words; making sure the receiver of your communication gets where you are coming from, what you are intending and how you feel about the words you are conveying.

For example, “Tough love” – you could be upset with someone and convey harsh words without violating their genuine experience of your great love, respect, and care for them. No contradiction.

The is a construct for conducting and managing powerful communications:

If you want to be a powerful communicator all you need in your toolbox are four tools that will enable you to achieve, drive and manage any outcome you want:

  1. Request an action or outcome. If you don’t explicitly ask for what you want, don’t expect to get/have it. Nothing is too big or small to request. This is so simple and so powerful!
  2. Promise an action or outcome. If you want people to listen to you, rely on you and invest in you, make promises and deliver them. As long as you are authentic nothing is too big or small to promise.
  3. Declare your stance. If you want people to know who you are, declare your stance and where you stand in areas that are important to you. Declarations create platforms for requesting and promising.
  1. Express your feelings. If you want people to know how you feel, tell them. Don’t expect them to already know or assume they already know. There is NO Universal Code or Master Manual for how people should behave, respond or react in key situations.

Three basic tips for being an effective communicator:

  1. Over communicate. Most people under-communicate or they don’t communicate at all. Even if it feels excessive to you, most likely it will feel “perfect” for people around you.
  2. Don’t be lazy. Be explicit, rigorous and direct with your communication. Don’t assume they understand what you mean. Go the extra mile to ensure it.
  3. Take responsibility for how your communication is received. After you communicate, ask the receiver to repeat back to you what you said, what they heard, what they understood and what they are taking away from your communication. Make sure it is what you intended.

It takes courage to be a powerful communicator. It takes courage to be powerful, full stop.

First, in the sea of vagueness, a powerful communicator will always stick out like a thorn.

Second, people tend to get irritated by powerful communicators who break the mode of vagueness and bring clarity, rigor, and accountability to interactions.

So, you have an opportunity to take a stand about the type of communicator you want to be, then promise what you will start and stop doing in order to turn your stand into your natural mode.

Are you controlling or empowering?

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I don’t think I have ever met an executive, leader or manager who didn’t pronounce the importance of teamwork and collaboration, then express their commitment to building that environment around them.

Unfortunately, I have met quite a few executives, leaders, and managers who said it but when the moment of truth arrived, they were too closeminded, proud, self-righteous or afraid to let go of their control and truly invest in, promote and leverage the collective power of their team.

These leaders when in public took every opportunity to express platitudes about “we are stronger together”, “the power of teams” and “feedback is a gift“.

However, when their team members wanted to have real, authentic and courageous conversations about the topics that were important to them, these leaders were very quick to shut down the conversation in a defensive and passive aggressive way.

For example, the Head of HR in a large global technology company launched a company-wide initiative to build a more honest and engaging culture. However, her own organization probably had one of most political, passive-aggressive and siloed cultures in the company, and many of her leaders blamed her lack of willingness to deal with conflict and have uncomfortable conversations, for it.

When it came time to implement the cultural change in the human resources organization the HR leader asked her leaders to invite a few second level HR managers to give both her and them some feedback and input about how the rest of HR were feeling about the culture.

The managers were asked to be honest about the perceptions of their teams, but when they described the senior HR leaders as operating in an ivory tower, disconnected from the rest of the HR team, the HR leader became visibly upset and defensive.

The open conversation quickly shut down, the honesty evaporated, the senior leaders were embarrassed, and the second level managers left shaken by the traumatic experience.

The meetings had a lasting effect on the HR team. As the word quickly caught on about what happened in the meeting, people concluded that it was dangerous to speak up and give critical feedback to the HR leader. The negative feedback didn’t stop. In fact, it increased. It just went underground, making the HR culture even more toxic.

Leaders who want to control everything give feedback to others, but they do not want to receive feedback themselves, especially critical feedback about their leadership behavior and style or any project or program they feel identified with.

Despite their declaration to the contrary, they don’t trust others, they believe they know best and they are smartest. In fact, it is more important to them that things are done exactly the way they want them to be done than it is to promote and develop the spirit of ownership, commitment, accountability and innovation among their team members. By design or by default they foster a culture of compliance, not ownership. Around them, the likelihood of a team member coming up with a better solution or outcome to a problem, or a better way to achieve something is slim.

The people who work for these leaders are very smart and perceptive. They don’t listen to what their leaders say, they watch how their leaders behave. They get the inauthenticity and hypocrisy. They don’t dare bring it up or challenge it for fear of retribution. So, the frustrations, disappointment, and criticism go underground, to the ‘around the cooler’ gossipy backchannel conversation.

Leaders who want to control everything seem to be oblivious and insensitive to the negative undercurrent. For them, as long as people do what they are told things are progressing well. In fact, for them, if there is no bad press means there is no bad news.

However, people don’t forget the traumatic passive-aggressive moments. These become the corporate scars that remind people to “Be careful”, “Not rock the boat” and “Pick their battles” because “Nothing will change anyways“.

While on the surface things may seem to be going well, this passive-aggressive environment is exhausting, discouraging and demotivating.

And, have no delusions, it has a direct consequential toll on performance too.

If you don’t have a clear outcome and someone who owns it, you have nothing!

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I was supporting a group of senior leaders in a global technology company to create breakthrough projects in a few key areas of their business in which they wanted to elevated performance. As a kickoff, I asked each of the project teams to present their ‘Starting Point Status’.

Different projects were at different stages of maturity. However, they all shared a few common mistakes.

One team outlined several initiatives, but it wasn’t clear what was the overarching outcome of their project.  So beyond the individual outcome of each initiative, I couldn’t tell if the initiatives they’d taken on were the right ones for this breakthrough project.

Another team outlined the outcome of their project, but when I asked who was accountable for that overall outcome they stuttered and started to tell me what each project will do and what each function in the company will do to support it. Not what I was asking…

The third project team had a clear outcome and they had outlined the owners of the overall project as well as the different initiatives that supported it. However, when I asked if all the leaders who were listed owned their role and felt passionate about it, they acknowledged that in some cases not and in other cases, they picked leaders by assumption based on their functional role, without talking directly to these people.

All the projects were very strategic to the company as they spanned across multiple functions. In one case, I asked the entire group of senior leaders to share and acknowledge the level of belief, ownership and passionate within the senior team about the project. It became clear quickly that the level was not strong.

The fourth project leader stood up and acknowledged in a heartfelt way that the area they were trying to turn around was an area the company has repeatedly said they wanted to fix but had failed to do so. It wasn’t hard to detect that the same powerful project elements were missing here too.

Generating breakthroughs is both an art and a science.

The art part is people’s personality and style, and their ability to inspire motivation and confidence in others to believe in a bigger cause and follow them to achieve it.

The science part is a few elements that make or break any breakthrough effort.

If you want to structure your projects to achieve breakthrough-results make sure you have the following elements:

  1. An overarching measurable outcome for the project.
  2. A clear and genuine owner for that overarching outcome. You cannot assume this. Someone has to stand up and declare: “You can count on me to ensure this outcome will be achieved!” This doesn’t mean that the project is their problem, or that they have to do everything. In big complex projects, there are multiple people and functions who are involved. But, one leader has to be the driving force.
  3. A passionate belief by all team members in the purpose and importance of the project and in the fact that it can be and will be achieved.

You can view this as the classic “What?” – “Who?” – “Why?”.

People jump to activities and plans too quickly. Why?

Because it is easier to identify activities and plans than it is to confront ownership and commitment.

I have seen elaborate plans be presented so many times. These are often misleading because it appears the team is on top of the project, whilst in reality, they are generating a lot of activities that won’t necessarily hit the mark.

If people don’t wholeheartedly believe in the project, in its purpose and reason for being, as well as in the fact that it can be and will be achieved, you don’t have a strong enough foundation to drive a breakthrough.

And if you don’t have a clear outcome and someone who owns it you have nothing!

 

You can’t have your cake and eat it too…

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Words are only cheap when we make them cheap.

It’s no wonder concepts like “alignment” “empowerment” and “accountability” are considered faded clichés in most organizations.

This is because leaders have abused these terms for so long by pronouncing them left, right and center at their convenience to present themselves as modern and enlightened leaders only to repeatedly not live up to their declarations and to the promise of these powerful leadership concepts.

Many senior executives say they want to build greater trust with their team, but they are unwilling to invest the time to bring their team together in order to build that trust.

Many leaders say they want to empower their people, but when their leaders attempt to give them critical feedback, they become irritated and angry, which suppresses any space for authentic communication.

Many leaders say they want to engage their people in the mission of the company, but when their people give them advice or bring up ideas for improving things, they ignore these inputs because they feel ‘they know best’.

Alignment and ownership, or ‘command-and-control’. They are mutually exclusive. You can’t play both games. You have to choose one or the other.

Leaders who think that alignment means everyone agreeing with their direction, views and management style and wholeheartedly following them and doing what they say with ownership and passion are simply naïve, disconnected and/or delusional.

If you want to build an environment of genuine ownership and alignment it comes with the price of people being encouraged and allowed to think for themselves, express their views and get the job done with their own voice and in their own way.

Empowerment is not a cliché or slogan from a management textbook, it is a powerful leadership paradigm and approach that is not for the faint-hearted.

If you are so convinced that you know best, you have all the answers, you are smarter than everyone in your team or you are simply too afraid of getting feedback and criticism from your people an empowered and aligned team environment is not for you.

If you behave like a dictator you will trade-off people’s ownership, empowerment and commitment. If you don’t listen, you will surround yourself with people who don’t speak.

The problem is that most leaders know how to play the corporate game and say the right slogans. Some actually drink their own Kool-Aid and believe their own stories. They believe that they are committed to promoting empowerment and alignment around them.

If you want to know the truth, find a way to ask your people. Either directly or through a trusted third party. If you are reluctant to do that you are probably not open to building an empowered and aligned team environment. However, if you are eager to do so, you probably are committed to building an open, honest and authentic team environment.

None of this is set in stone. If you recognize that you haven’t been focused on, or effective at building an environment of empowerment, trust and communication in your team you could always shift gears and start doing so.

However, to succeed you must first be honest with yourself and probably with others too, about the type of leader you have been and who you really want to be in the future. You cannot pretend to be committed to building an environment of empowerment, trust, and communication. Your inauthenticity would be clearly recognized. Some leaders really believe in the command-and-control approach. They have achieved good results with that and they don’t have a desire to change. If you are one of those leaders, be honest about that.

However, if you are committed to leading through empowerment, trust, and communication, declare that, acknowledge your gaps and identify your opportunities and start developing the necessary skills to become really good at it.

 

Can you tolerate things getting worse before they get better?

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Consider this rare and true example: A sales team of a technology company was struggling to achieve its objectives. Team members worked long hours, including weekends and holidays to meet their numbers, everyone felt overworked and stressed and needless to say “work-life balance” was a big issue. 

The General Manager of that organization, who was a bold, demanding and strategic leader, came out with an edict to transform his team’s predicament: “No one was allowed to work past 8pm on weekdays or at any time on the weekend.” He made it clear that everyone was still expected to deliver their numbers, and that offenders of his new instructions would suffer the consequence. At first, people were shocked. Many were skeptical. However, after firing the first person who violated his new policy people started to take notice.

In the first month, the team missed its numbers by 20%. Everyone expected the General Manager to cancel his “unrealistic” policy, but he didn’t. In the second month, the results were still around 10% below and only in month three did the team hit its numbers for the first time in a long time. What happened following the third month was quite extraordinary. Not only did the team start to consistently meet its number, but it actually often exceeded its numbers. In addition, something changed in the overall atmosphere within the team. The overall energy, commitment, and dialogue of the team shifted to be much more productive and powerful, and more oriented around how to do more with less.

Unfortunately, this example is indeed rare. Most leaders can’t tolerate even the slightest temporary dip in performance. They panic at the first sign of a dip, and they often react in negative ways that set the team back and send a message that they don’t have the courage and faith to stay the course.

This is especially true in publicly traded companies and the common justification for not taking risk is that it would negatively affect the stock performance.

Case in point, the senior leadership team of a technology company that had acquired a couple of companies and whilst in the process of fully integrating and leveraging its new assets it was struggling to achieve its sales results. After the first missed quarter people blamed it on the integration, so they didn’t make significant adjustments to the strategy. However, when their shortfall repeated itself next two quarters people started to get frustrated and discouraged. Some of the senior leaders urged the CEO to adjust the strategy and make bolder changes in order to plant the seeds for breaking out of the negative vicious circle. However, the CEO didn’t feel comfortable rocking the boat, so things continued to chug along. Eventually, the CEO did listen and make some changes, but he lost a lot of time and the goodwill of his people, stakeholders, and investors.

If you are a status quo leader driving a status quo agenda, you don’t have to worry about doing bold things. However, if you want to take on a bold objective or initiative there is a high likelihood that things will get worse before they get better. It’s not a slogan. If you can’t tolerate the rollercoaster ride, don’t get on the train.

But, without this courage, you will keep retreating backward instead of pushing forward to overcome your courage and resilience barrier.

The good news, however, is that if you do stay the course and reach the other side, things will get even better than they were before you started.

 

Are you just expecting results and progress or relentlessly driving them?

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If you want to achieve a bold outcome or drive a new reality and change in 2019, don’t expect your desired outcomes to just happen, cause them to happen!

This statement may sound over simplistic, obvious and common sense to you. However, I cannot tell you how many times when I work with organizations even at the senior levels, where I see people frustrated because they did everything, they believe is needed in order to get the result and it still didn’t happen. Alternatively, they put in place the process, metrics, milestone and/or alerts to achieve the result and they have been tracking them on a frequent basis or they instructed their team members to achieve the result, and then they relied on the same result happening as in the past.

I am sure you have heard people say things like “We should be further along”, “The initiatives are not achieving big enough results”, “We are moving too slow”, and “We don’t see a change in behavior yet”.

If you mapped out the trend of any significant achievement or initiative, more often than not it would look like a horizontal hockey stick. If you have been around, you know that things often do not go the way we planned them.

Sometimes what we wanted, but didn’t expect, happens. At other times, what we were sure would happen didn’t.

With any meaningful achievement first, you need to invest a lot of effort and energy at first without seeing a lot of return and progress. By the way, I said, “without seeing a lot of return and progress…” I didn’t say “without any return and progress actually happening…” A lot is happening, we just can’t see it until things begin to take off.

Expecting progress, change and results is the wrong approach. You have to drive and cause them!

Just like you wouldn’t dig out a flower seed every week after you planted it to see if it is making progress, you can’t second-guess yourself, your direction or your team.

In fact, if you want to succeed in any significant undertaking you have to manage your expectations and have the mindset that your job is not to “see if it will work” but rather to “ensure and prove that it will work”.

It seems that leaders who don’t stay the course when they want to achieve a bold result, always tend to justify their failure with excuses and blame. I often hear them explain their failure with excuses like: “There was too much going on“, “The change initiative interfered with our core business or results“, and “People stopped being on-board“. The quitters worry more about their own personal brand and image and how they will be perceived. They tend to want to cover their behind.

In contrast, leaders who stay the course tend to always look inward at the source of what is working and not working – especially what isn’t working. They don’t care about blame or fault. They only care about how to make sure the promise of the new future will stay alive and be realized.

When things go well, they become nervous and shake people up in order to avoid complacency or arrogance. When things don’t go well, they rally their teams and engage in questions such as – “What are we doing or not doing that is causing this?” and “What could we do differently?”

So, in order to achieve great things in 2019, give up blaming others and circumstances for what isn’t working, and instead take 100% ownership and responsibility to get it done, even if it is challenging.

It takes more than understanding change to achieve it

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I was invited to help a large global service company transform its bureaucratic, siloed and slow culture into an agile, cohesive and innovative one. In order to learn about this company, I interviewed around thirty managers and employees at all levels.

They all pretty much told me the same things and highlighted the same issues, challenges, and obstacles that were getting in the way of greater performance and change.

They all acknowledged that the organization was too siloed, that managers were too focused on their own area and not enough on the greater success. They all pointed at trust, alignment and communication issues between functions and businesses that were causing tensions, conflicts and hurting effectiveness and costing opportunities and results.

These issues, challenges, and obstacles had been around for many years and everyone knew it. In fact, people frequently expressed frustration about them in around-the-cooler conversations. Everyone sincerely wanted to change them. However, all this didn’t translate to new behavior and change.

Why?

Because understanding and knowing doesn’t produce doing and changing.

I didn’t make this up. Look at our normal day-to-day life. For example, we know we should exercise, eat healthily, balance our personal and work life, not stress out about unimportant things. By golly, we even want to do better in all these areas and more, yet we still continue to do what isn’t working for us.

If you want to change your culture and team dynamics you have to go through a transformative process that is emotional, not merely intellectual. You have to follow three steps: Clear, Create, Commit.

Clear the old dynamics. This means engaging in a brave and honest conversation about what is working and more importantly what isn’t working between teams and levels. It has to be a collective conversation. You have to enable a safe environment for it, and people have to be allowed to communicate and be heard without judgment, arguments, push back and consequence. Just speaking, listening and being heard. You can think about this as emptying the glass.  

Often, people have to communicate their frustrations and concerns and feel heard in order to get beyond them and move on to a new space.

Create and build new dynamics. When the glass is empty you can start filling it with new substance. In fact, you can only really create a new culture or team dynamic and sustain it, when you truly start from a clean slate. If you do the first step well it will enable that. In this step you have to engage in a collective team conversation focused on imagining and creating ideas and possibilities about how you could and want to operate as a team. Things like: (1) open, honest, authentic, courageous and effective conversations, (2) appearing everyone as one team with one voice, and (3) addressing all challenges in a win-win way. The possibilities you create should strike a healthy balance between being aspirational and realistic.

Commit to new behaviors, actions, and results. Committing stakes you to the new and better future state that you desire. When your team members promise each other to start behaving and interacting in a more transparent, candid and brave way it raises the collective bar and changes the expectations, interactions, and conversations within the team. It’s public, people can hold each other to account and no one can hide. If you stay the course and follow through on your commitments the new behavior and actions will start becoming the norm.

So, for a successful transformation of culture and team dynamics remember to clear, create & most importantly commit!

Stop wasting time in worthless meetings

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I was working with two different organizations that were going through significant growth and change. One company had completed its second acquisition of a large competitor and was in the midst of integrating teams, products and strategies to optimize this significant change and growth.

The other company had done such a great job in their core business of selling machines and hardware that they were expanding their market reach into adjacent areas of software development and consulting. This change required new capabilities, skills, processes and mindset.

Needless to say, in both cases, there were many complex details for the leadership teams to debate, make decisions about and iron out both in their growth and change strategy, as well as in its execution. In both cases, decisions were not being made fast enough.

The leadership teams of both of these companies had a similar routine of holding a weekly call for about 90 minutes each, where leaders, in turn, shared updates on the activities they were working on. These weekly calls were mostly oriented around updates and sharing with little-to-no interaction or debate. In fact, most leaders didn’t find these weekly calls very productive and critical, so throughout the calls, they were busy doing their emails while the call was going on, so they weren’t even paying that much attention to their colleague’s updates to begin with.

Needless to say, these weekly update calls were not the forum where the leaders could debate and dig into the big topics of challenges and opportunities that were affecting everyone’s day-to-day life given all the massive growth and change they were going through.

Every one of the leaders in both companies felt a burning need for their leadership team to spend quality time together in order to debate the urgent topics that were on their minds, but they had no other meeting scheduled beyond the weekly calls to do that in.

The leaders actually did have plenty of opportunities to meet each other in-person in their quarterly business reviews (QBR) and other company functions, but these always included many other participants beyond the leaders so there was no opportunity for alone time for the leaders. They occasional dinners together as a leadership team also didn’t provide the opportunity for meaningful debates.

Everyone was frustrated about the lack of quality leadership team time, but no one did anything much about it. When I asked why the leaders don’t schedule additional leadership team meetings people responded with: “We are too busy with the day-to-day” and “We can’t find the time….”. When I challenged them they added and explained: “We have too many other meetings that are filling our schedule, that are a waste of time; things we could cover via email”

I see this exact same dynamic with so many companies!!!

The “We don’t have time” excuse is exactly that – a lame excuse and a cop out!

It’s actually worse, the need for the leadership team to spend quality time in order to debate and address the big challenges and opportunity of their growth and change is real and critical. It is not a “luxury” or “nice to have”. It is a “must” and a “leadership responsibility”. Not doing it is unacceptable.

The solution is actually quite simple and straightforward:

  1. Have the courage to stop/cancel all the meetings that are unproductive and not a good use of time.
  2. Share information that could be shared/updated via email – via email.
  3. Schedule meetings with enough time, on topics that are important. For a company that is going through significant change, the leadership team should meet no less than once a quarter for one or two full days. In some periods/phases of change, even that is insufficient and the leadership team should meet every month or every other month.
  4. Make sure the important meetings are productive, with clear objectives, agenda and someone to manage/facilitate them. Don’t let them decline or get out of control.

If you stop the ineffective and worthless meetings and you make sure the important meetings are productive and worthwhile people won’t feel like there are too many meetings. They will simply see these as “what we do to be successful”

 

How to sustain your excitement with the change you want?

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Have you ever attended a really powerful and great strategic planning meeting at work where at the end of the meeting you felt truly excited, inspired and hopeful about the new future direction? But then you returned back to your day-to-day work environment and it wasn’t long before the routine, workload, churn and perhaps cynicism around you set back in and you lost that sense of optimism and excitement that you had in that meeting?

So how do you sustain your excitement toward a new direction or the change you want to bring about?

Here are a few practical suggestions:

  1. Speak to as many people as you can about it. The more people you will inform and engage in the new future the bigger the conversation you are creating around you about the future. The more participants and “partners” you have in the new direction the easier it will be for you to stay focused and excited about it.
  2. Reference the new direction or strategy in every conversation or meeting. If you believe in the future and you find it relevant, the best way to keep it alive is to keep bringing it up. Keep it real! The more you reference the new direction and strategy the more real you will make it for yourself and others.
  3. Look for opportunities to declare and reaffirm your commitment to the new direction or strategy. The more you speak to people about the new direction and declare your commitment and stand, the more your commitment will empower and energize you back.
  4. Establish clear and effective action plans to achieve and drive your new direction and strategy. Your declarations will strengthen your sense of purpose, your energy and your mental resolve. Clear plans will compel you and others into action. Declarations without action plans tend to feel hollow and they tend to die off. Action plans without clear purpose and context quickly turn into uninspiring busywork. The combination of both purpose and action is very powerful.
  5. Acknowledge, recognize and praise others who stand for, reference and live up to the new direction and future. Basic leadership is to lead by example. A higher level of leadership is to promote others to do the same. A powerful way to do that is to acknowledge, recognize and praise leadership and future-based behavior in others. This practice will also, come back to empower and energize you too.

Declaring your commitment and what you stand for provides you the opportunity to express yourself, be courageous and authentic. Doing these will most definitely empower and energize you.

We are often consumed in our day-to-day by the same concerns, worries and anxieties that come from our past. By focusing on, promoting and staking yourself to the new future direction and strategy you are shifting your orientation and reference point from the past to the future. That shift is real and it will elevate your energy and excitement.

Most people are most happy, energized and alive when they are true to themselves authentic, courageous and self-expressed.

I hope you can you find all these on my list.

Is “good” good enough for you?

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Here’s my high-level assessment of corporate and business teams:

  • Many, perhaps most are dysfunctional or mediocre.
  • Some are good.
  • Few are excellent.

Unfortunately – this report card doesn’t directly correlate with business results.

I say “unfortunately” because pretty much every team talks about wanting to become more effective and some version of moving from “good to great” yadda, yadda, yadda.  However, for most teams this desire lives as a “good idea”, not a “must do”.

If only great teams produced great results it would be easier for the dysfunctional and mediocre, and even good teams to confront and own the consequence of their inadequacy.

But, things don’t work that way and there are a lot of dysfunctional and mediocre teams who still achieve good, even great results.

Part of the problem is that we use a very narrow definition of what constitutes “Great results”. For the most part, it means – revenues, profitability and stock performance.

Contrary to what many executives say about people being their most important asset, there are simply too many examples of companies… well-known companies… who are obsessed with achieving great financial results while treating their people like crap.

There are only a few truly excellent teams because there are only a few truly excellent leaders who care not just about the bottom line, but also about the corporate culture, their people and the way team members interact and go about performing their work.

These leaders don’t tolerate or settle for less than excellence in all aspects of their organization, including in areas that don’t require it in order for the company to succeed, or areas that are not visible to everyone. They don’t cut corners because they relate to excellence as a value, an end, not a means, and the best and only way to do business. They also don’t use cost as an excuse for not driving excellence.

It is always easier to help teams who are dysfunctional to move from “good” to “great” when things are dysfunctional everyone is anxious and on board to turn things around, fix the problems and get the company out of a bad predicament.

But, helping the “good” teams move to “excellent” that is the hardest challenge, because when things are good people often settle and feel that good is “good enough”.

I was working with a technology company that was going through a decline in their corporate culture, business results and brand. When I started to work with them all the executives and managers were eager to turn things around. It wasn’t easy for them to face reality and own their predicament, but when they got over it everyone was on board for the intense remediation plan we put in place for the following year. The plan worked and after a year of quarterly meetings and task forces between them, the company started to turn around. In fact, at the end of that first year, they had achieved the best results in their history, their reputation in the market had improved dramatically and the overall the mood and spirit, at least at the managers and executive levels were at an all-time high. People felt great.

Everyone knew that the recovery plan was a two-year to three-year plan. Everyone signed up for that at the outset. However, the second year was very different from the first one from a commitment and energy standpoint.

The minute the results turned the corner and people felt good they started to get lax and complacent with the program. Meetings were delayed or cancelled, deadlines were not driven or met and overall the humble, self-reflective sentiments that I heard when we started the process turned into more arrogant rhetoric about how they were better than everyone else in the market.

One of the reasons most dysfunctional teams don’t sustain their peaks and breakthroughs when they reach these is because they get lax and complacent and they start losing ground again. I have seen it happen so many times.

“Good” is the enemy of “Excellence”, good makes people complacent, lazy and comfortable. Because there are so many dysfunctional and mediocre teams out there, the good ones stand out as better. Many justify their lack of drive for excellence by explaining that they are better than their competitors. Some are best in their industry.

But, “Better than good” is still a long way from “Excellent”. In addition, you could be better than everyone else around you and still not even close to what you could achieve.

So, you have to decide – is “good” good enough for you?

Stop focusing on lagging indicators!

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I was supporting a technology company that was going through tremendous growth and change. They had ripped apart and restructured their entire business and they were working very hard on integrating the new pieces.

Even though they were going through all this change they were given no relief from achieving their bold sales numbers. What made things worse is that they had fallen short in their few previous quarters. Needless to say, the pressure and stress were very high. Everyone was focused on achieving the next quarter’s results.

But, a growing number of leaders were becoming frustrated. They felt that the short-term focus was part of the problem. They believed that the team’s single focus on the next thirty-day and ninety-day results was perpetuating the short-term challenges and problems that were causing the continuous shortfalls. The short-term focus was preventing the team from coming up with longer-term strategies that may not help in the near future but would lay the foundation for elevating the team out of its predicament in the longer run.

It was hard for this team to change its mindset.  Many leaders felt that if the team doesn’t make its short-term results the company won’t have a longer-term future.

Have you ever been in a situation like this? Where your existing results were in jeopardy and even though you knew that reacting to the poor results in the short term would be a mistake you couldn’t help but do so.

I see this dynamic in organizations all the time.

Many leaders don’t seem to understand that their business results are lagging indicators, therefore focusing on them, or reacting to them is the wrong thing to do.

You don’t want to focus on the lagging indicator. You want to focus on their source.

Context is the source of results.  In organizations context manifests through the culture of the organization: how people at all levels, functions and locations behave and act, what people consider possible and impossible, achievable and unachievable, and the degree to which people feel that they matter, they can make a difference and they can affect and change things.

Leaders who understand this know that they have to focus on and nurture their people’s ownership, commitment, empowerment and motivation. Everything else falls out of that.

If your people are frustrated, they feel like the company is not doing the right things and they can’t speak up or influence and change that, they’ll leave or worse – they will stay as skeptical, cynical and resigned team members. You can be sure that if this happens the results will start stalling or declining – it’s not a matter of if, only when.

But, if your people feel genuinely excited and committed; that they matter and they can make a difference, they will own the objectives and they will go the extra mile to reach them. And, if the results are declining, they will work together in a very transparent and candid way to get to the source of the issues and turn things around.

Your people’s level of excitement, commitment and ownership, as well as their clarity of destination and sense of empowerment to make the difference in achieving it, is your leading indicator of success.

Strong results will dry up when the context is weak. On the other hand, a strong context will overcome any bad results! And, don’t get confused about the benchmark: you could be better than your competitors, even the best in your industry and still be much less than you could be.

If you and your team are clear about who you are, what you stand for, what you are committed to, and you have a plan, and then you and your team act and behave consistently with your commitments, values and plan, it is only a matter of when, not if you will achieve what you want.

The universe three tests rule – a Fable:

A team of professionals who were successful for many years in their craft decided to take their game to a new level. They took on a bold stand and aligned on a set of audacious objectives to leap themselves beyond anything they have ever done or achieved before.

The universe listened to their declaration and said skeptically: “I have heard so many empty declarations. What is different with this team?”

To check them out, the universe threw at them a few small obstacles and challenges to make their new endeavor more challenging.

The professionals remained calm and collected, they stayed the course, overcame these small curveballs and moved on.

The universe took notice, but it wasn’t overly impressed. “Beginner’s luck,” it said as it released a bigger wave of issues and problems for the professionals to deal with.

These bigger obstacles definitely raffled the professional’s feathers. They scrambled and struggled to overcome the problems. Their partnership and trust were strained. However, eventually, they figured it out and continued forward with commitment and resolve.

“OK, you have my attention!” the universe stated. “Now let’s see if you are truly for real.” The universe unleashed issues, challenges, problems and unfavorable circumstances bigger than the first two times combined.

The team scrambled and struggled. Their performance and results declined, some of their people gave up and left, and their own partnership, trust and belief in the future were significantly strained. But, at the end they endured, they figured it out and continued forward with commitment and resolve.

The universe, who was taking notice the whole time finally exclaimed: “Yes! You are for real!” and then everything began to change. Instead of issues, problems and obstacles, the universe started sending favorable incidents, meetings, material assistant and circumstances that the team couldn’t have anticipated would come their way. As a result, they started to gain momentum towards their desired change and eventually achieved it.

The End!

Most teams give up too quickly!

Their first mistake – they focus on the results, which are lagging indicators.

Their second mistake – they don’t focus on nurturing people’s commitment, ownership and empowerment, which are leading indicators.

Their third mistake – they don’t stay the course for long enough to pass the universe three tests and get to the other side, where they could reap the rewards.

Why is the why so important?

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I was working with a team inside of a large technology company that was going through a lot of organizational change. In fact, for the previous three years or so every year they had another big leadership role shift and following that there was always a corresponding reorganization and some layoffs. I could tell that people were getting weary of it all. Every wave of change left people somewhat disoriented and many repeatedly felt like they had to start building things all over again, which was a disheartening feeling.

During my long-standing engagement with this team I had many opportunities to asked its leaders and managers to explain the reasoning behind, and purpose of the changes. These were very committed, loyal team members who were with the company for many years. In many previous change events, I got clear answers to my questions. However, this time was different. They couldn’t tell me why the current changes, which were shaking up and disrupting the company, were needed and what their purpose was. As I travelled across this global company I got similar responses of lack of clarity and confidence.

I have seen companies get away with significant corporate change, reorganization, disruption and turbulence, even repeatedly over several years, when leadership was able to clearly convey to its team members, mainly their leaders and managers, what their future destination and strategy is, and why the changes, that are making everyone’s life more difficult today, are necessary in order to achieve a better, greater desirable future for everyone.

But, in this case, the why wasn’t clear to people, and many, perhaps most seem to be more irritated, frustrated and disheartened by the change than before.

Have you ever experienced a major change in your company that affected your ability to fulfill your job, and you didn’t fully understand or agree with the need for this change?

With every change, there is the what, how and why.

What will the change look like?

How will it work and affect me?

Why are we doing it in the first place?

The what and how provide people with clarity on the process, timeline and what is expected of them. Think of it as clear marching orders. That is important in order to drive efficiency and effectiveness and avoid operational and implementation confusion and chaos.

However, the what and how do no generate personal buy-in, ownership and confidence. Only clarity regarding the reason and purpose can provide that. That is the why.

From my experience, buy-in and ownership are the most important things for change, and often the most difficult thing to universally achieve. In fact, the bigger, longer and more complex the change, the bigger the understanding, buy-in and ownership of the why need to be.

Context is a very powerful phenomenon. It gives people trust, faith and confidence, as well as patience, tolerance and sustaining power in the greatest challenges and toughest times. It doesn’t cost a penny to explain to people and enroll them in why the changes are necessary. It takes a powerful conversation.

If you want to drive change in your organization, make sure everyone at least understands and respects the why. If you want to drive the change in a high-performance manner, make sure people also believe and buy into the why.