Cross-functional and cross-business teams are ‘real teams’

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Most large companies today operate within a matrix management model. They scale through cross-functional and cross-business collaboration because no single function can deliver a complete customer solution alone.

The Sales function can’t succeed without the Product function. Product can’t succeed without Engineering. Engineering can’t succeed without services and support, and so on.

Conceptually, everyone understands this. But in practice, most organizations still behave as if every function lives in its own silo.

I hear the same refrain everywhere:

“This isn’t really my team.”

“We don’t report to the same leader.”

“This is more of a committee than a team.”

That mindset quietly undermines performance.

The Illusion of the Matrix

Matrix management was designed to drive cross-functional integration, efficiency, and collaboration in large and complex enterprises. It’s how global organizations scale without endless duplication in resources and cost. But when it’s not led effectively, the matrix becomes a maze of dotted lines with unclear ownership, competing priorities and finger-pointing. Functional leaders pull toward their targets, incentives and agendas. Business units compete for resources and investment dollars to support their teams. The result: cross-functional initiatives crawl, conflict festers, and customers feel the confusion, dysfunction and service deficit.

The matrix management model doesn’t fail because it’s a bad model. It fails because too many leaders continue to think and behave like they’re in silos.

Real Teams, Not Reporting Lines

A real team isn’t defined by who reports to whom. It’s defined by a common purpose, shared values, mutual trust, and collective ownership of results.

If your name is on the same mission, you’re a team, whether your paychecks flow through the same VP or not.

In fact, cross-functional teams have to operate with even stronger cohesion and trust than traditional homogeneous teams. Why? Because alignment doesn’t happen automatically through hierarchy. It must be built deliberately through relationships, shared accountability, and clear communication.

In matrix environments, the ability to operate as one team is not a luxury; it’s the difference between growth and stagnation.

When Cross-Functional Teams Don’t Gel

A global security technology company learned this the hard way. Its product and engineering divisions were under immense pressure to release new products faster. But they were constantly missing deadlines, and when products and features were released, repeated quality issues emerged.

On paper, the solution was obvious: product and engineering needed to function as one integrated unit. But in reality, they didn’t. Product blamed Engineering for slow and inaccurate execution. Engineering blamed Product for unclear and overly aggressive requirements. Marketing and Sales behaved as two frustrated and powerless spectators, blaming both Product and Engineering.

All teams showed up to joint meetings, exchanged updates, and went back to their silos. They were going through the motions — but not leading together.

Their excuse was familiar:

“We don’t report to the same leader, so we’re not really a team.”

That belief turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The dysfunction deepened. Products continued to slip. Morale dropped. Customers noticed.

The lesson? Collaboration without ownership is theater.

When Cross-Functional Teams Become Powerhouses

Contrast that with a large technology company whose CRO faced a critical challenge: generate a breakthrough in bookings and market share in a fiercely competitive market.

He created a cross-functional leadership team comprising heads of Marketing, Engineering, Channel Sales, Services, Operations, and Post-Sales Support. Each reported to different leaders. But for this mission, they were his A-team.

From the start, he made the expectations clear: “We’re not a committee. We’re a leadership team with one goal — and we win or fail together.”

They met weekly. They shared data transparently. They called out barriers in real time. They celebrated wins as one unit. And when tensions rose — which they did — they stayed in the conversation until they were resolved, and the team was aligned.

It took a year of intensity, accountability, and truth-telling. But they achieved their goal. Market share grew. Bookings surged. And perhaps most importantly, deep trust and lifelong friendships were formed along the way. Many later described that year as a career highlight.

The difference wasn’t reporting lines. It was mindset, trust, and shared commitment.

What Cohesion Looks Like

Real cross-functional cohesion means:

  • Shared ownership. Everyone sees the goal as ours, not theirs.
  • Open communication. People tell the truth early and directly; no politics, no hidden agendas.
  • Mutual respect. Functions stop competing for credit and start obsessing over excellence.
  • Joint accountability. Success or failure belongs to everyone in the room.

When a cross-functional team operates like that, the matrix stops being a constraint and it becomes a multiplier. Team members become genuinely “in it together,” and reporting lines become irrelevant. This unlocks agility, speed, and creativity that no single function could achieve alone.

The Bottom Line

In today’s complex enterprises, every major strategic and operational objective — growth, customer success, innovation — depends on cross-functional collaboration.

But collaboration practices aren’t enough. These groups must operate as real teams.

It doesn’t matter who you report to. What matters is what future you’re creating together and who you’re committed to.

Organizations that understand this and intentionally build cohesive, aligned, trust-based cross-functional teams will outpace, out-innovate, and outlast their competitors.

Because when non-homogeneous teams learn to function as true teams, the matrix stops being a maze, and becomes a system for breakthrough performance.

“Agreeing to disagree” is leadership failure

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How many times have you sat in a senior team meeting where the conversation went nowhere? The debate gets heated, people defend their positions, personal preferences surface, and when it’s time to reach a conclusion, everyone is exhausted and no closer to an aligned decision. Someone says, “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.” And the room nods. Meeting over. On the surface, it sounds civil and respectful. In reality, it’s one of the most damaging phrases in leadership.

“Agreeing to disagree” is never an acceptable conclusion. It’s always a collapse. It signals that the team has chosen comfort over courage, ego over ownership, and personal preference over collective responsibility. And the cost is considerable.

The Hidden Damage of “Agreeing to Disagree”

When leadership teams fail to achieve alignment, they send powerful and corrosive messages throughout the organization:

  • To the company: Direction is optional. If the top team can’t commit, why should anyone else be expected to?
  • To the culture: Politics win. Silos stay safe. Hard truths are avoided.
  • To execution: Momentum stalls. Teams hedge their bets. Strategies die in PowerPoint.

The result is organizational drift. Initiatives limp forward half-heartedly. Decisions get revisited and changed or reversed. And when results fall short, leaders have a built-in excuse: “I never believed in that plan anyway.”

This is not leadership. It’s abdication.

Alignment Is Not Total Agreement

Powerful leadership teams understand a critical distinction: alignment is not about total unanimous agreement. It’s about committing to a shared course of action, even when not everyone gets their way.

Alignment means setting aside ego, preferences, and turf agendas in service of something greater — the company’s future.

This is hard work. It requires courageous conversations, deep listening, and a willingness to be influenced. It demands leaders to elevate their thinking from “my view” to “our responsibility.” But the payoff is profound.

When teams align — truly align — they create a force multiplier. They send a clear, unified signal to the organization. People stop watching and waiting and start delivering and building. Execution accelerates.

Two Teams, Two Futures

Take two real leadership teams grappling with equally complex challenges. The contrast couldn’t be clearer.

Members of the leadership team at a national technology company had strong personalities and deeply held opinions. After months of debate over a bold strategic move to introduce a new product mix to the market, they reached a stalemate. Leaders in sales, marketing, operations, and services clung to their own perspectives and agendas about what was the right approach and what would or wouldn’t work, unwilling to compromise. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” the CEO finally said, trying to ease tensions and avoid imposing his way. And they did. The decision remained vague. Execution became confused. Six months later, the initiative stalled, the market window closed, and finger-pointing replaced accountability and success.

In contrast, the leadership team of a large, unionised manufacturing plant faced an even greater challenge of how to engage and motivate the entire workforce, including the unions, in a strategic initiative to boost production and quality during a time of union-management unrest. The leaders started with sharp disagreements — but they refused to stop at a polite stalemate. They stayed in the conversation. They listened deeply. They challenged each other with respect and intensity. It was uncomfortable and exhausting. But ultimately, they aligned behind one bold direction. Not everyone loved it, but everyone owned it.

The results spoke for themselves: faster decisions, improved execution, and a level of cross-functional collaboration the company had never seen. In fact, in this breakthrough process, some management and union colleagues shifted their personal relationship from adversarial to respectful and even to friendship. That decision became the turning point in their growth.

The difference wasn’t intelligence or talent. It was courage.

The Broader Consequences

“Agreeing to disagree” doesn’t just sabotage decisions — it shapes culture. It teaches people that avoidance is acceptable. It normalizes half-hearted commitment. And it builds a leadership brand rooted in indecision and disconnection.

Worse, it undermines trust. Teams stop believing that leaders mean what they say. They start interpreting every strategic decision as optional. And once that belief takes hold, accountability evaporates.

Contrast that with a culture where alignment is non-negotiable. Leaders model the discipline of staying in the conversation until they can stand behind a shared choice. People see what ownership looks like. They learn that disagreement is welcome — but detachment is not. And when decisions are made, they rally behind them with clarity and commitment.

The Real Work of Leadership

Leadership is not about winning arguments or protecting preferences. It’s about creating the conditions for aligned action.

That means leaning into the discomfort of disagreement and staying there until alignment is reached. It means replacing “agreeing to disagree” with “committed to move forward together.”

In the end, organizations don’t fail because they make a decision that’s 80% right. They fail because their leaders can’t align behind anything at all. A united team behind an imperfect decision will always outperform a divided team chasing a perfect one.

So, the next time your team reaches for the easy exit of “agreeing to disagree,” stop. Recognize it for what it is — a cop-out. Then choose to do the real work of leadership: the hard, courageous, transformative work of aligning on the future and owning it together.

 

Beyond SMART: How Bold, “Unrealistic” Goals Unlock Innovation and Passion

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Conventional management tells us that if we want to succeed in our business, we must create SMART goals.

The A in SMART stands for Achievable, which in other words means Realistic. In fact, if you Google ‘Achievable’ under SMART, it states: “Goals should be realistic – not pedestals from which you inevitably tumble.”

Realistic is often analogous to Familiar and within our comfort zone.

When people create realistic goals, they naturally rely on their past experiences. Essentially, this involves reviewing their past successes and failures, analysing them, and deriving rational explanations and conclusions about what worked and what didn’t, why they achieved certain results, and what they can and cannot do in the future. Based on that analysis, they make realistic predictions about the goals they will commit to for the future.

If you think about it, realistic goals are goals that you already know or feel you know how to achieve. In simple terms, this is the past repeating itself.

The main flaw in this past-based approach to goal setting is that it drastically limits our scope of possibilities, and consequently imagination, innovation, resourcefulness, passion, and growth.

Our state of mind and state of being are very much shaped by our goals. Not just by whether we achieve them or not. But by their degree of boldness and challenge. Realistic goals are often predictable and small, so they don’t inspire.

I recently spoke with a senior product executive client who was searching for a new job and had received offers from two companies. One offer was to join a large, mature product firm with a secured pipeline of orders for the next three years, at a mid-level position (lower than his previous role). The second was to join a smaller, well-funded startup with a new proven proprietary product that they needed to optimize, market, and sell effectively at the C-suite level.

The executive, who is a very smart, dynamic, and passionate leader, was weighing the pros and cons of these offers, trying to convince me that the first offer was a wiser choice because joining a large, stable company would provide him more stability and security in the long term. When I probed deeper, he shared that the CEO of the large company assured him of a promotion to a more senior and influential role in 2-3 years, assuming good performance. The CEO of the smaller startup, on the other hand, enthusiastically offered him a strategic position in co-creating the future of the company.

When the executive described the large company, he said all the right things, but his tone was monotonous and disengaged. I could tell he was speaking from his head. However, when he talked about the smaller company, he was excited and lit up. It was clear he was speaking from his heart.

When unrealistic goals are authentic, in other words, they come from our heart, they stimulate, inspire and drive us to think differently (outside the box). They compel us to be innovative and figure out new ways of doing familiar things.

Deep inside, most people thrive on challenge. To stay motivated, our goals must be greater than what we are currently capable of. Great goals should evoke an emotion of excitement and fear.

As Joe Vitale (author) wrote:

“Good goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot”.

But unrealistic goals should not be treated as pedestals from which you inevitably tumble, according to the SMART definition. They must be accompanied by action.

When you take on realistic goals, you often already know how to achieve them. However, it’s okay not to know how to achieve your authentic, bold, and unrealistic goals when you take them on. You should be excited and clear about your goal description, then you must take action.

Knowing the entire plan for their execution is not possible or necessary. However, you must take baby steps toward them. Your first steps will reveal your next steps, and so on. The path to realize bold and unrealistic goals is not a straight line. It often has unexpected twists and turns along the way. You achieve bold and unrealistic goals not through prediction or certainty from what you already know, but through real-time discovery, insight, learning, and growing.

As Goethe wrote in one of his couplets:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

Larry Page, the founder of Google, has driven a goal-setting philosophy within the company that promotes setting ambitious goals where there is roughly a 50% chance of success. Larry’s leadership approach comes from the rationale that inspired people tend to come up with much greater ideas. His approach is not about setting intentionally unachievable goals, but rather about pushing for significant, potentially transformative results, even if it involves a higher risk of not fully reaching the target. What he has found is that the goals that do succeed make a much greater impact. If you want to subscribe to this approach, make sure that around 50% of your goals have a 50% likelihood of success.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the kind of person you choose to be.

  • Do you want to be someone who consistently achieves 100% of your goals by keeping them safe, familiar, and comfortably within reach?
  • Or do you want to set bold, transformative goals that stretch your thinking, fuel your growth, and position you to make a far greater impact?

The choice is yours: pursue certainty and stay where you are or embrace challenge and discover just how far you can go.

Don’t confuse efficient compliance with real transformation

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For a significant transformation initiative to succeed, the CEO must ensure that all their senior executives are fully (genuinely) aligned and own the transformation purpose, outcomes and process.

Large-scale transformation processes are often complex and messy. Many CEOs use a Project Management (PM) function to oversee, track, and manage the transformation execution process. A strong PM function can make a significant difference in achieving the transformation outcomes. However, a strong PM function can also undermine and jeopardize the transformation’s intent and purpose.

A powerful transformation is never just about achieving better outcomes. By design, it is always about aspiration and inspiration. And no matter how complex the change initiative, senior leaders cannot outsource or delegate the aspiration, inspiration, and execution of their transformation to anyone else. It’s solely the role of the senior executive team to fuel the transformation with clarity, spirit, and inspiration. Therefore, organizational transformation can only move as fast as the senior leadership team can lead, drive, and inspire change.

Take a large global technology company, for example, that undertook a strategic transformation program to elevate its product portfolio, market share, customer experience and business performance.

The CEO and senior executives aligned on a 2-year bold strategy with clear breakthrough outcomes to fulfill their change vision of the future. All executives emerged from the transformational strategic planning exercise genuinely aligned and excited to take the company to the next level.

They assigned managers to lead bold execution initiatives under them and added a PM function to manage and oversee the cadence of execution tracking, presentations, and status reviews to ensure consistent and effective execution of their intent.

As with every large change initiative, reality set in. The existing work that hadn’t gone away competed with the future work, and executives were getting overwhelmed with the challenge of managing everything.

As a result, they spent less time engaging in meaningful strategic dialogue about how to make the transformation most impactful. They also deprioritized mentoring, coaching, and supporting their managers who were at the forefront of executing the transformation. In fact, they began to rely more heavily on the PM function to manage the process by providing more frequent updates and status reports on the transformation.

The problem, however, was that the PM function wasn’t privy to the creation of the vision and strategy in the first place. They didn’t have the necessary context of what the CEO and senior executives intended to achieve and why. All they cared about was ‘checking the box’ on hitting the published outcomes on their due dates. They considered their mission to be providing timely and accurate reports on the status of outcome attainment. The PM function did not focus on ensuring that the overall intent of the transformation was being fulfilled.

As the CEO and executives pushed the PM function harder to provide updates, the PM function pushed the execution managers for updates too. The managers, who were overwhelmed themselves, became resentful toward the PM function and the executives for signing them up for extracurricular change-leadership accountability, only to abandon them when things became tough.

A year passed and although everyone worked extremely hard and the PM function presented an overall ‘green scorecard’ for outcome attainment; people didn’t experience a sense of accomplishment or victory. In fact, many questioned if anything substantial had really changed in the company.

There was a growing sentiment among the execution managers and senior executives that their promising large-scale transformation initiative intended to change the company became a major efficiency and process compliance exercise, lacking energy, spirit and soul.

 

Complete 2020 in the most meaningful way, especially given COVID-19.

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Completing a chapter effectively can be a meaningful and powerful endeavor if you approach it with a deliberate and conscious mindset. Unfortunately, most people tend to focus more on starting a project and executing it, and when it reaches its end, they just move to the next one. We tend to underestimate the power and value of completing things effectively, not merely finishing or ending them.

The dictionary defines ‘Finishing‘ as ‘Bringing a task or activity to an end. It defines ‘Completing‘ as ‘Making something whole or perfect’.

You don’t have to do anything for something to end. It is the nature of any cycle. Things begin, go through their evolution, and end. A year, a project, or a lifetime, it’s all the same principle. But, in order to feel complete at the end of your year, with all the good things and bad things that happened, you need to apply deliberate and mindful focus and awareness.

How do you complete things?

If you review the year’s events without the distinction of completion in mind, you are likely to focus on the cold facts of what occurred. You will ask yourself questions such as: “What did I do?”, “What didn’t I do?” and “What results did I achieve?”. Most likely, your sense of satisfaction would be determined by the number of outcomes you achieved. If you achieved most of your goals, you would most likely feel good. If not, you would feel bad.

In contrast, if you look at 2020 through the lens of completion, you will push your thinking and reflection to a deeper level beyond merely the facts of what happened. You will still account for the facts of what occurred; however, you will be compelled to own what happened and what didn’t happen in a more meaningful way.

You will ask yourself questions such as “What did I accomplish?”, “What did I learn?”, “Where and how did I grow?” and “How am I better, stronger, and more prepared for the future?”. This type of taking stock will deepen your connection with your higher purpose and vision, and it will make you feel more satisfied and complete.

Your experience of success and failure are based on interpretations, not facts. You can feel victorious and successful even when you didn’t meet your goals. And, you can feel disappointed and unfulfilled when you did meet them. The feeling of success or failure is often determined by the notion of completion.

Completing the past and feeling that you have learned and gained the most out of it will enable you to put things in a more powerful perspective. It will help you put the past behind you, and this will leave you feeling freer, stronger, and more empowered, and excited to focus on the future from a clean slate.

However, if you leave things incomplete, past incompletions could haunt you and cloud your thoughts, plans, and aspirations for the future. You could become more hesitant to take on new things because of past failures, and/or you could take on things with a sense of vengeance and need to prove something, which could rob you of enjoying the journey. In both cases, you would be reacting to your past, and that won’t be effective or satisfying.

Completing 2020 in an empowering way seems to be more important than ever because of COVID-19. Everyone’s world turned ‘upside-down’. Plans and routines were stalled, canceled, or drastically changed. People lost their jobs, livelihood, businesses, and perhaps loved ones. And many of us were not able to achieve the goals and aspirations we may have had for 2020 before the pandemic took hold.

The good news is that you can bring completion to your past at any moment, no matter how good or bad things were. You just need to take stock, draw productive and empowering conclusions from past events, and then declare the past complete. It requires taking a stand, and it takes courage. But it can be easy and fun!

How to complete 2020 in a practical and meaningful way:

As you end 2020, reflect on this year. First, make a list of the facts – what happened, what you did and didn’t do and accomplish. It’s useful to start there. But don’t end there.

Ask yourself:

  1. What did I accomplish?
  2. What did I learn?
  3. Where any of my disappointments ‘blessings in disguise?”
  4. Where and how did I grow and improve in the areas I care about?
  5. How did I forward my bigger personal and professional vision and purpose?
  6. What am I most grateful for?
  7. Whom do I want to recognize and thank? (Make sure you tell them.)

Once you declare 2020 complete, you will feel a sense of satisfaction, peace, and fulfillment. In that space, you can powerfully start creating your next year to be your best year ever.

In conclusion, on a personal note – Thank you for following my blogs during 2020 even though I posted less of them. I hope at least some of them were useful to you. I will be taking some much-needed time off myself, and I look forward to continuing to post regular posts at the beginning of 2021.  2020 created a lot of ‘new norms’ and with them new thoughts, insights, and learnings. I look forward to sharing my thoughts and experiences with you in 2021.

Wishing you and your family a Healthy and Happy Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!

 

Stay out of your head!

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The last few months have certainly tested our mental stamina and resolve. One person I spoke to told me that COVID is easy for him because he loves to stay at home and not go out. However, I am sure that for most of us staying at home with minimal-to-no going out is a challenging proposition.

I have been working virtually for many years, so I am quite comfortable working in a virtual-mode. However, working solely virtually without physical meetings and interaction with clients or going out of the house has been trying for me too.

Repeated instructions like “Stay at home!”, “Stay in touch with family and friends” and “Stay 6 feet from others” have been ringing in our ears as they mark this period.  I want to add another strong recommendation to the list for those of you who want to stay centered, focused, and strong in these challenging times: Stay out of your head!

The conversations that go on inside our head are not innocent, arbitrary or random. Their aim is to keep us contained and ‘out of trouble.’  They achieve that purpose by filling our consciousness with discouraging, gloomy and scary information and warnings.

Each of us has our fears, baggage, and demons from the past. The conversations in our head exploit those to their end. They make us draw disempowering conclusions about situations that seem bad, which leads to disempowering reactive decisions.

It’s no surprise that the media is speaking about a spike in anxiety, depression, and suicide during the COVID months.

It’s not because people have spent too much time at home. It is because they have spent too much time in their head.

Most of us consume way too much TV, news, and social media, and for many, it can also be their primary source of information and knowledge. Both mainstream media and social media – regardless of your political persuasion – have been polluting our minds and stressing us out. Many people believe what they hear and see without questioning it, and can struggle to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction.

This predicament is discouraging and demotivating.

So, how do you stay out of your head?

Simple, be in action!

Being in action is the only alternative to being in our head. Action takes place in the real world.

When you are engaged in any kind of action – be it exercising, drawing, dancing, listening to music, playing an instrument, knitting, reading or communicating/sharing your thoughts and feelings with a friend or family member – you focus outward.

In fact, if you think about it, when you are engaged in action, you stop thinking about your worries and fears. All noise disappears into the background, and your entire attention, focus and consciousness are on what you are doing.

To be clear, I am not suggesting you stop watching TV and/or engaging in social media, this is not necessary or practical, and you wouldn’t do it. I am, however, strongly suggesting that you manage your time to reflect a healthy balance between doing things that throw you into your head (exacerbating your fears, worries, anxieties, etc.) versus the actions that keep you out of your head.

I have found that when I spend most of my days in activities that pull me out of my head and require me to focus outward (activities such as supporting others, writing blogs and articles, and/or playing my classical guitar), it enables me to overcome any fears and anxieties if/when they arise.

Whether you are at home or not, working now or not, I recommend you take on a conscious commitment to spend the majority of your days out of your head.

To that end, make a list of the things you love/like to do or something you could do that would get you out of your head and start doing them.

What is your mid-term mark for leveraging COVID?

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If you had to give yourself and your organization a mid-term mark (four months in) for how powerful you have been in leveraging the COVID era, what would it be?

Based on my observations, from supporting several companies and teams in the last few months, you could be in one of three spaces:

  1. Hoping to survive COVID,
  2. Trying to stay productive,
  3. Excelling and taking your business and culture to a new level.

I am sure most if not all companies went through some degree of survival mode in the beginning when the business and economic reality of COVID hit. At first, some leaders were in denial, brushing off the severity of the pandemic. Other leaders expressed hope that it would simply go away, even when there was mounting evidence that the epidemic was spreading globally and here to stay.

I would like to believe that most leaders were able to collect themselves, think rationally and strategically and move on to a more productive space.

Unfortunately, I saw some leaders who didn’t and remained in panic and reactive mode.  They continued to make panicky decisions such as: freezing all budgets across the board without distinction; stopping all corporate programs – “run the business” and “improve the business” without exception; and laying off as many employees as possible to mitigate short term risk, without any enlightened regard for longer-term consequences.

Some companies seem to still be in that space today after four months. What a waste of energy and time!

Other leaders pride themselves on the fact that they quickly and efficiently shifted their entire workforce to a virtual work mode from home. In many cases, this shift was an admirable logistic undertaking given the size and geographical spread of their workforce.

Some companies are used to working virtually; they have the platform and technology to do so. However, for some companies working from home is an entirely foreign concept. In one case, employees literally unplugged their desktop computers (not laptops) and took them home via Uber.

The physical move to home was no small task for many. And then, establishing a virtual routine of productive business performance and customer service is also an admirable accomplishment.

Unfortunately, many leaders stopped there, settling for uninterrupted productivity.  As long as they could continue to provide the same services (or close) that they were offering pre-COVID virtually and uninterruptedly, they were content.

In one case, the CEO of a large regional division (which was faring well in virtual mode) told his executives to put on-hold all improvement and transformational programs for the time being, because as he put it, “They are ‘excessive’ during these challenging days.”

I believe this CEO’s mindset is quite common these days, and most companies feel that staying productive is a high enough mark.

The companies that inspire me most are those who quickly passed the first two spaces and then pushed themselves to the next level.

One CEO told his leaders to “discard COVID as an excuse.” His words were blunt, but he succeeded in setting the bold expectation of continuing to take the business, that was already on a path of transformation, to the next level – full speed ahead, without reservations.

Another CEO of medium size lighting company with the same mindset launched the most significant improvement programs his company has ever had focussing on many critical areas, including Sales, Production, R&D, and Marketing. By doing so, he increased productivity, effectiveness, results, and impact beyond the best months pre-COVID. His company will never be the same.

In fact, the two CEOs and other leaders who took bold initiatives believe that COVID is not a time to be cautious, think conservatively, hold back resources, or play safe. On the contrary, the COVID era is the perfect opportunity to rethink things, challenge the status quo, figure out approaches to truly work smarter, scale, and significantly improve processes and ways of doing business. Actions not merely to survive or overcome a tough epidemic but to generate lasting breakthroughs in their business.

Much has been written about the influence of COVID on businesses, and much more will be written over time. But when all is said and done, what are you really going to learn and take forward from the COVID era?

 

Complete 2019 in a meaningful way

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Effectively completing a chapter can be a meaningful and powerful endeavor if you approach it with a deliberate and conscious mindset. Unfortunately, most people tend to focus more on starting a project and executing it, and when it reaches its end, they just move to the next one. We tend to underestimate the power and value of completing things effectively, not merely finishing or ending them.

The dictionary defines ‘Finishing‘ as ‘Bringing a task or activity to an end.’ It defines ‘Completing‘ as ‘Making something whole or perfect.’

You don’t have to do anything for something to end. It is the nature of any cycle. Things begin, go through their evolution and end. A year, a project, or a lifetime, it’s all the same principle. But, in order to feel complete at the end of your year, with all the good things and bad things that happened, you need to apply deliberate and mindful focus and awareness.

How do you complete things?

If you review the year’s events without the distinction of completion in mind, you are likely to focus on the cold facts of what occurred. You will ask yourself questions such as: “What did I do?”, “What didn’t I do?” and “What results did I achieve?”. Most likely, your sense of satisfaction would be determined by the number of outcomes you achieved. If you achieved most of your goals, you would most likely feel good. If not, you would feel bad.

In contrast, if you look at 2019 through the lens of completion, you will push your thinking and reflection to a deeper level beyond merely the facts of what happened. You will still account for the facts of what occurred; however, you will be compelled to own what happened and what didn’t happen in a more meaningful way.

You will ask yourself questions such as “What did I accomplish?”, “What did I learn?”, “Where and how did I grow?” and “How am I better, stronger and more prepared for the future?”. This type of taking stock will deepen your connection with your higher purpose and vision, and it will make you feel more satisfied and complete.

Your experience of success and failure are based on interpretations, not facts. You can feel victorious and successful even when you didn’t meet your goals. And, you can feel disappointed and unfulfilled when you did meet them. The feeling of success or failure is often determined by the notion of completion.

Completing the past and feeling that you have learned and gained the most out of it will enable you to put things in a more powerful perspective. It will help you put the past behind you, and this will leave you feeling freer, stronger, and more empowered and excited to focus on the future from a clean slate.

However, if you leave things incomplete, past incompletions could haunt you and cloud your thoughts, plans, and aspirations for the future. You could become more hesitant to take on new things because of past failures and/or you could take on things with a sense of vengeance and need to prove something, which could rob you of enjoying the journey. In both cases, you would be reacting to your past, and that won’t be effective or satisfying.

The good news is that you can bring completion to your past at any moment, no matter how good or bad things were. You just need to take stock, draw empowering conclusions from past events, and then declare the past complete. It requires taking a stand, and it takes courage. But it is easy and fun!

How to complete 2019 in a practical and meaningful way:

As you end 2019, reflect on your year. First, make the list of the facts – what happened, what you did and didn’t do and accomplish. It’s useful to start there. But don’t end there.

Ask yourself:

  1. What did I accomplish?
  2. What did I learn?
  3. Where and how did I grow and improve in the areas I care about?
  4. How did I forward my bigger personal and professional vision and purpose?
  5. What am I most grateful for?
  6. Whom do I want to recognize and thank? (Make sure you tell them.)

Once you declare 2019 complete, you will feel a sense of satisfaction, peace, and fulfillment. In that space, you can powerfully start creating your next year to be your best year ever.

In conclusion, on a personal note – Thank you for following my blogs during 2019. I hope at least some of them were useful to you. I will be taking some time off myself and will post my next blog in the week of January 13th, 2020.

Wishing you and your family a Happy Holiday Season and Happy New Year!

 

Are you driving outcomes or activities?

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So often, when teams define their strategy, they tend to target activities instead of outcomes.

For example, they promise:

  • ‘Installing a new order shipping tracking system’ instead of ‘80% of our orders are shipped on time’;
  • ‘Create a process that gives visibility to post-sales issues’ versus ‘all post-sales issues are resolved within 24 hours’; and
  • ‘All sales employees have gone through our sales training program’ instead of ‘we have raised the average productivity of the sales team from 2 million per person to 3 million.’

While activities are essential for executing and delivering the results, they should not be the starting point of any strategy.

The job of leaders is to make strategic choices about where they want to take their organization. When it comes to strategic outcomes, there are no right or wrong answers. In fact, no matter how much analysis you do, you never really know if your bet will succeed. We have all seen sure bets fall short, and unexpected bets succeed beyond expectations. In order for a team to create a powerful strategy, the leaders must be 100% aligned on their strategic choices/commitments.

While outcomes are derived from choices, activities should be derived from the outcomes. Outcomes change when leaders feel there is a strategic reason to change them (for example, market change, merger & acquisition, etc.). However, activities should be periodically inspected and adjusted any time they are no longer useful or effective. Needless to say, the focus and direction of activities could change much more frequently than outcomes.

When a team locks into clear outcomes, that higher purpose helps the managers and employees determine their action plans and activities. But when leaders lock into activities, this often creates busyness in the organization.

I can’t tell you how many times I see people being so consumed with busywork that they have lost track of the higher purpose that led to the busyness in the first place.

In addition, the focus on the activities (means) versus outcomes (end) hinders the ability of the team to assess the effectiveness of their activities and make the necessary changes if they are not effective. Most organizations are good at adding activities, but they rarely stop them.

Lastly, the activity-based approach undermines accountability. Real accountability is always for clear outcomes. Accountability for clear results fosters a mindset of overcoming obstacles. The activity-based approach tolerates shortfalls and promotes a circumstantial mindset of blame and excuses.

People often justify the activity-based approach with statements like: “We can’t control/guarantee the results. We can only control/guarantee our activities…”

But that is like searching for your lost car keys under the lamp post versus where you actually lost them.

Yes, you may be able to control your activities. But the activities you can control may not get you to your desired outcomes.

When it comes to strategy, there seem to be two schools of thought:

“Promise your desired outcomes and then put the activities in place to fulfill them.”

“Promise the activities that you assume will get you to your desired outcomes and hope they will be enough.”

Leaders who believe in the first seem to have a more powerful paradigm and approach towards outcomes.

They seem to believe that they do have control over achieving their outcomes. They seem to believe that:

  1. If achieving their outcomes requires enrolling others who are not part of their team to the task, they have the ability to do so.
  2. If achieving their outcomes requires coming up with new ways of doing things, they have the ability to figure that out.
  3. If achieving their outcomes requires investment in resources and budgets, they have the ability to make the business case for that.
  4. And, if achieving their outcomes requires some “magic” and “luck” if they stay optimistic, positive, and determined in their attitude, conversations, interactions, and energy, they have a higher chance to succeed.

The last paragraph may seem not tangible or real to you… However, ask any Olympic athlete or championship sports team about the importance of positive, high-energy mindset to winning and the amount of focus and time they spend on this topic, and you will be surprised by how tangible and real this dimension is for winning.

In today’s world, where opportunities are abundant, resources are scarce, competition is fierce, and everyone is looking for ways to scale and do more with less; you can’t afford to waste time and cycles on busyness and activities that may not deliver the results you want. You have to be much more deliberate and powerful than that.

The job of a leader is not to track and report on activities. It is to cause outcomes.

So, if you are not going to promise to cause specific outcomes, don’t promise anything at all!

Are you a micromanager?

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Employee performance is directly linked to their sense of ownership, commitment, and accountability for the success of their organization. Their passion, ownership, commitment, and accountability is reduced when they feel distrusted, disrespected, and/or under-valued by their managers and/or by the senior leadership of their company.

By micromanaging their people, managers generate an environment of compliance and fear, which causes employees to play it safe and “cover their behinds” instead of stepping up and going beyond the call of duty to drive progress, overcome obstacles and pursue opportunities.

Most managers who micromanage their employees suppress their spirit and performance. That in itself is a bad thing. But, it is also the wrong focus. Instead of trying to control their people, managers should be providing leadership and confidence to their team; they should be highlighting their strategic objectives and priorities and inspiring their employees to take them on. They should also be ensuring that their people have the wherewithal to execute and succeed.

In fact, micromanagement puts in motion a destructive vicious circle: The manager relates to his people as uncommitted, incompetent and/or unreliable. The people, in turn, play it safe and don’t take ownership, risk, and accountability. Results suffer. This confirms the manager’s point of view and he continues to micromanage.

Most of the time the issue lies with the manager. Managers who micromanage and control their people do it because of their own insecurity and fear of failure and not because their employees are, in fact, incompetent, uncommitted, or unreliable.

If you think about it, the only time micromanaging can be an effective management strategy is when the manager truly trusts his or her people, AND their people know it. In this condition, people won’t feel belittled and disempowered by their manager’s inspection of their actions and achievement.

If you are a manager (or part of a team) and you want to strike a healthier balance between trusting and inspecting without suppressing your reports or peers, you must put the following building blocks in place and manage them effectively:

  1. Build a team that you genuinely trust in terms of commitment and competency. Use this foundation to establish a dynamic of authentic, honest, and courageous communication within your team.
  2. Communicate and enroll/align your team members around your future vision and objectives. Make sure all your team members clearly understand and are on the same page about your shared future. Make sure they feel genuinely passionate about it, committed to it, and accountable for it.
  3. Orient your team members around results and deliverables rather than tasks and activities. In order to build an environment of real accountability. Accountability can only exist when people publicly promise clear, measurable results, and they expect to be held accountable for them.
  4. Ensure that roles, responsibilities, expectations, and processes are completely clear to all team members. This is to eliminate the chance of ambiguity, confusion, excuses, or the mischief of the popular finger-pointing game.
  5. Put in place a simple and effective mechanism/process for tracking all key commitments, deliverables, and promised results. Make sure to check-in on a monthly and quarterly basis.
  6. Lastly, recognize people who step up in attitude, behavior, performance and/or results. Don’t be stingy or lazy about recognizing the people who step up. If you apply the same passion for recognizing people as you do to micromanaging them, it will help you strike a positive balance.

If someone is not performing up to an agreed-upon standard or expectation, you must be willing to have a straight and honest conversation with them.  This conversation will either need to elevate the individual to a higher level of performance or make it clear that they are not up for the task, and they should be replaced. But, make sure to give people a real opportunity to understand, own, and do something about their poor performance.

If you build a strong team dynamic, where people own the game and communicate in an honest and direct way, you will either not need to micromanage, or if you still continue to inspect on a regular basis, people will not feel intimidated, invalidated or discouraged by it.

Always remember – that in the absence of genuine ownership, commitment, and honest communication, no amount of micromanagement will be effective anyway.

 

Stop Prioritizing and Start Promising!

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You would think that getting your priorities straight would be the answer to the overwhelming, stressful burden of too many commitments, too little time and scarce resources.  Well, you may want to think again!

Setting priorities is definitely a solution, but it isn’t the most powerful and effective one.

You write down everything you are supposed to do, want to do, said you would do and have to do. You then take that list and through some form of screening criteria, rank each in order of importance, sense of opportunity, urgency or obligation. You then tackle each item on your to-do list in order of importance starting with the “A” priorities then, as time and capacity permit, getting to those ranked “B” and “C”.

From a practical content standpoint, this method sounds very clear, logical and effective. However, in reality, things often don’t work out according to our lists. In addition, from a mindset standpoint prioritizing often gets us to compromise and sell-out too easily and quickly. .

Take the following real story (fictional name):

George was a very ambitious, driven and impatient sales manager. He had many things he wanted to achieve in his professional and personal life. In fact, he wanted to achieve everything right away. But he knew it wasn’t realistic, so he made a list of his six commitments and prioritized them from first to last. At the top of his list was to achieve a record sales year with his team, in the middle he had going to the gym at least 3 times a week and at the bottom, he had dating and finding a relationship.

His first priority was all consuming. He worked 80-hour weeks in order to achieve his sales goals and when he got to the weekend he was so exhausted that most of the time he simply couldn’t get himself to go to the gym, never mind going on dates. At first, he was frustrated with his inability to get beyond his first priority to the others. However, as time passed the frustration turned into resignation, apathy, and skepticism. He simply stopped believing that he could have a life beyond achieving his sales goals.

Every time one of his friends or family members would ask why he isn’t exercising or dating he would blame his work for it. In fact, when he would socialize with some of his other professional friends who had the same predicament he had, they would often talk about how “you can’t have a personal life while having a successful career, especially being a successful sales manager.” They all believed that.

In contrast, Kevin, a mid-level lawyer was also very ambitious and driven. He was putting in extreme hours hoping to become a partner. He was completely dedicated to his professional success but, like  George, he wanted a life beyond work.

Prioritizing and Promising are two completely different approaches to achieving your goals. They evoke and compel a significantly different mindset and behavior.

Prioritizing evokes the mindset of “I’ll do my best and if I can’t get to the other priorities it’s because the previous ones took too much of my time and effort…”

Promising evokes the mindset of “I’ll keep my word no matter what. No excuse is acceptable…”

It is much easier to prioritize than to promise. The prioritizing approach has a built-in tolerance and acceptance to excuses, justifications and copouts. That is why when you don’t live up to your commitment it is so easy to say things like: “Something more important came up” or “I didn’t get to it because I was too busy with something else…”  After all, like in George’s story, it is acceptable that if you are so busy in your work you won’t have time to exercise, spend time with your wife or husband and/or kids and do other things that are important to you.

Neither of these approaches guarantees success. However, promising is a much more powerful approach.

It evokes a higher and more authentic mindset of ownership and accountability and it makes you much less determined and limited by circumstances. No matter what circumstances you have to deal with, when you make a promise you tend to not get stopped by these.

Making promises about what you will fulfill in your commitments could be more challenging because you have to be honest with yourself and own the truth about what really is important to you. You have to take a stand and not sell out on it. This requires courage. As my friend’s 8-year-old son said to his dad: “Daddy if I make you a promise, I’m going to keep it.”

I don’t know about you, but if I am going into battle with someone, I want them fully committed, not merely “doing their best…”. You are only going to get that level of relentless commitment from someone who has promised to do something.

No one keeps their promises all the time. Hopefully, we will keep them most of the time. However, there will be times when we won’t. That’s a fact. However, by making explicit promises you carve-out a clear path for action and fulfillment. This reduces the chance for surprises, excuses, and drama, especially when challenges arise.

While the dialogue around priorities is often a one-way street – you decide what your priorities are and you are the one to tell others that “you just couldn’t get to it today” the dialogue of promises by design is a two-way street.

Promises are really only effective if you make them to someone. In fact, if you promise your entire family that you are going to lose a certain number of pounds (weight) in the next 6 months, it’s probably going to be more powerful and effective than if you tell one person or tell no one at all. The minute you make a promise to others you are now tied at the hip. The promise is no longer just your commitment – it becomes our commitment. The success of this project is now our success. The dialogue of promising evokes a much deeper and more powerful dynamic of open, honest, courageous and effective communication, and trust. It also generates a stronger sense of bond, partnership, trust and owning each other’s success with the people you promise to.  A joint approach is more effective and fulfilling than going it alone.

When people have a more earnest relationship with their promises it causes two things.

First, they are much less casual about saying “I promise” than the myriad of ways people add a priority to an already overflowing list. “I’ll do my best”, “Let me see what I can do”, “I’ll get to it as soon as I can”, “I’ll try”, “Leave it with me”, and many other half-hearted statements that fill the conference rooms and corridors of corporations.

Secondly, when people make a promise to do something, and at some point, prior to the time it is due they realize their promise is in jeopardy of not being fulfilled, they are far more likely to reach out to the receiver of that promise and attempt to negotiate – in advance – a mutually agreeable solution. Together people can figure out alternative ways to fulfill the same commitment with new or different promises. This also strengthens the partnership and trust between the promise maker and receiver.

Obviously, if you don’t do what you say repeatedly your credibility and sense of partnership with others are likely to suffer. However, when you keep using the “lower priority” excuse and you assign the blame for not living up to your commitments elsewhere, it will also undermine your own sense of possibilities, ability, and power to make things happen and have the life you want.

The point of prioritizing is not to avoid responsibility and make excuses for the commitments you make, but rather to be more effective at making and keeping commitments. This being the case, making and managing promises, rather than hiding arm’s length behind “not-up-to-me” excuses of “priorities changed” puts us in the driving seat,

Which of these approaches appeals to you most?

 

Are you managing your objectives or are they managing you?

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Aspiring people have personal and professional goals as do most driven teams.

However, having goals is a double-edged sword. Goals could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you relate to them.

Why?

We create goals in order to focus, compel and motivate ourselves and others. If we are ambitious, we typically take on bold and aggressive ones. We don’t stop there; we typically create a detailed execution plan with strategies and milestones.

Then we delve into implementing our goals and it doesn’t take long before we are so immersed in the roller coaster of our day-to-day life that we forget that we are the ones who came up with our goals in the first place.

When we achieve our goals, meet our milestones and/or achieve our plan as we wanted, we feel great. More than that, we believe we are great. Our mood and spirit are uplifted, we feel empowered and invincible.

However, when we fall short or fail to achieve our goals, milestones or plan we tend to feel disappointed, upset, anxious and/or stressed. We often second-guess our ability to achieve future goals, in the same or other areas. We get nervous about how others will view us. We often even make it mean that we will never achieve our vision or that it will never work smoothly for us.

For the most part, our relationship with falling short is not simple or objective; we don’t view it as: “we have failed to achieve a goal”. We make it mean something much bigger: “we are failures”.

Actually, in both success and failure, we tend to have a reactive and undermining relationship. Both leave us smaller than our circumstances, commitments and dreams. If we fail to achieve a goal, we feel a failure. If we achieve our goal, we feel invincible.

In both scenarios, our identity and self-worth are wrapped up in external circumstances. In either scenario, we are only as worthy as our results in relation to our objectives. And, because we created our objectives and then forgot that key fact, we are now prisoners of our own creation.

The only reason for having goals in the first place is in order to empower and inspire us to reach higher grounds. Creating goals that compel us is a powerful act. However, by forgetting, or not owning that we are the creators of such a powerful dynamic, we lose all the power.

Corporations often take the objective game to a whole other level of drama.

I was supporting a regional sales team of a global product and service organization that recently became public. The company was growing steadily due to the sales team achieving their sales objectives each quarter.

Then, toward the end of one-quarter things changed. A few big regional deals that the team was betting on to achieve its goals didn’t go through according to the plan and the region was at risk of missing its sales objective.

The global sales leader called the regional president multiple times urging, even demanding him to do whatever it took to meet his objectives.

The regional account managers started giving excessive discounts, at times giving up all profitability just to move deals forward in order to achieve their objectives.

The region ended up barely achieving their objective. However, no one felt good about it. People felt they did the wrong thing for the wrong reason; they felt the price of the apparent success was too high – giving up profitable business and ravaging the next quarter’s prospects just to cross the line with the objective at hand.

I guess it is easier to give a huge discount to a client, even at the expense of doing the wrong thing for the health of the business, than to have the tough conversation with your colleagues or boss about not allowing objectives to dictate bad behavior.

I recently spoke to the CEO of a different company who took on bold objectives and missed his first milestone. He shared with me that he felt guilty about the high bar he set, because had he not done that his people would have felt happy and successful.

I see this type of unhealthy, reactionary, survival-based behavior around objectives play out all the time in so many companies.

The lesson here is:

  1. All goals, strategies, and plans are made up.
  2. Don’t be a victim of your objectives.
  3. Own the fact that you created them for the purpose of focus and empowerment.
  4. Have the courage to manage your objectives, including saying ‘no’ to them when they are no longer the right way to go.
  5. Most important, don’t let your objectives manage you.