Do Senior Leaders have the courage to confront and own their shortfalls?

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If you want to elevate your team to a new level of ownership, accountability and performance you have to start by taking stock of, and owning your current reality and past.

You have to confront what worked, what didn’t work and what still isn’t working. Sometimes, you even have to take responsibility for things that happened before you arrived.

Why is this important?

Because when you are honest and own your past it is easier to put it behind you. You can then create the space for a powerful new chapter, unlimited by past constraints.

If you focus too much on the things that worked, you can easily get comfortable, complacent and/or arrogant, and that could limit your ability to do new things and improve on what is working.

If you avoid looking at your past, you won’t learn the lessons that it has to offer and you can easily repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Obviously, it’s easier for leaders to take responsibility for the good things. In fact, many leaders don’t like to review the things that haven’t worked, especially if they feel issues and shortfalls are associated with them in some way.

In fact, many leaders don’t like to review the things that haven’t worked, especially if they feel issues and shortfalls are associated with them in some way.

Take, for example, one leader who was promoted to the highest position in their global function after being the number two for many years. Being a global support function inside a sales organization, this function struggled for many years with its credibility and reputation. Its customers didn’t feel the function was providing the value and impact they wanted. As a result team members felt criticized, under-valued and demotivated. In fact, many managers and employees in the function also felt that their senior management was too caught up in silo and political games, instead of providing the team with a powerful direction, priorities, support and air coverage to do a good job.

When the new leader took the job, everyone was hoping for change. But, first people wanted an opportunity to express their frustrations about the past, including feedback about the new leader. They wanted to be heard. They wanted the new leader to listen and acknowledge what hadn’t worked.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because the leader was unwilling to hear criticism about himself or past performance or the dynamic of the function, which he felt was being associated with him.

Another very senior executive in a different global company, also head of a global function, avoided and prohibited any discussion about past failures with her team. Team members wanted desperately to bring up, acknowledge and address the political issues that had held this function back from being world class for so long. However, their boss wouldn’t hear of it. When team members attempted to bring up past issues or criticism, in meetings, in order to move beyond them, she would shut down the conversation.

When I asked her why she was doing that she said: “Discussing our past ailments and failures only brings our past back and this prevents us from moving forward.”

I see the same types of mindset and dynamics in so many teams. In fact, I have seen several cases leaders avoided entering a much-needed change initiative just because of their fear of confronting their shortfalls.

So, why is it so hard for leaders to deal with the past?

Most leaders either don’t know how to confront past issues in a productive way. Like our first example, many leaders simply take the bad stuff too personally.

And, like our second leader, many leaders feel that if they don’t bring bad issues up it makes them go away. This is not true! In fact, when you are honest and own your past, it’s easier to put it behind you. Then you can create a space for a powerful new chapter, unlimited by past constraints.

If you are defensive about the past or avoid it or try to build a new future on top of it, the undercurrent will keep dragging you down. And, even if you are able to produce great results, it will usually come with people collateral damage.

Of course, I also have examples of senior leaders who are genuinely open and interested in confronting and taking ownership of past issues and shortfalls, including their own. In my experience, these leaders have generated much greater results with much higher motivation and sense of fulfillment in their teams.

You would think that the most senior leaders would be the most mature and self-confident, therefore they would be less threatened by criticism and more open and prepared to hear it. But, unfortunately experience has shown me that it’s often not the case. Senior leaders are often less open to embrace and admit mistakes, or take responsibility for things that they did or didn’t do that caused others to suffer.

Do you have the courage to confront and own past shortfalls?

 

 

 

How to make meaningful progress when taking your game to the next level

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If you want to be successful at taking your game to the next level, you have to be conscious of how you think and what comes out of your mouth.

I was leading a meeting recently with a telecom management team that had taken on a bold commitment to take their team’s leadership and performance to a higher level.  This was a good team that had been performing well. However, the changes in their markets, customers, and technologies were requiring them to think, innovate, and perform at a different level.

They were about three months into their transformation process and, in this meeting, we were reviewing their progress.

One by one, the leaders shared their views. One of the leaders summarized: “We are making progress, but not enough!” Everyone nodded their heads in agreement. People added: “We need to bring more energy, courage, innovation, collaboration, and change to the game.”

I asked them “Why are you not making enough progress?” “Why are you not bringing the level of energy, courage, innovation, collaboration, and change that you know you need?”

Their responses were things to the tune of: “It’s because of the holidays,” “It’s because of the year end,” “It’s because of the wider changes that are taking place in our company,” “We are doing quite well, so there’s not a lot of opportunities for big improvements,” and “It just takes time to make progress.”

So many teams and people, when taking on new levels of game, fall into the same traps of blaming their circumstances for their lack of progress and talking about their transformation in ways that undermine what they are trying to achieve.

If you want to avoid these pitfalls and make significant progress in taking your game to the next level, follow these principles:

  1. Take 100% ownership for your progress or lack thereof. Give up blaming your circumstances for not making enough progress or for not bringing enough energy, courage, innovation and/or collaboration to the game. Always relate to what you have or don’t have as your own doing.
  2. Promise clear results that require you to rise to the occasion. People bring high energy, courage and innovation to the game when they have promised specific results that are important to them, that require high energy, courage, and innovation. For example: one of the leaders stated that the people are not yet seeing any change in this leadership team. So, the team took on a promise that by our next meeting, three months later, their employees would notice a new level of energy, courage, innovation, and collaboration coming from the team. By promising this new state, the leaders now had an obligation to step up their leadership and performance in order to deliver.
  3. Focus on the areas of gap and opportunity, not how great you are. One of the biggest impediments to transformation is when people feel threatened or invalidated by acknowledging deficits and gaps. When discussing progress, I often hear people say things like: “We were already good at this.” If you are already good at something you will not be compelled to improve it. Even the greatest teams and people can find “next level” gaps, deficits and opportunities for improvement. Focusing on these does not invalidate your greatness.
  4. Avoid using phrases like: “We should do X” or “We have to do more of Y.” People simply don’t do what they “should” or “have to.” Either promise that you “Will do X” or don’t expect to see progress in the area you are talking about.
  5. Go out of your way to prove the validity of your commitment. When teams are driving significant change, team members often remain skeptical throughout the process. They adopt the “let’s see if this works” point of view. This mindset is understandable, but not powerful. If you want to be most effective, be clear about the future state you want, be all-in and trust your journey, no matter what ups-and-downs you encounter along the way. Don’t check if it works. Prove that it works.
  6. Collect as much evidence for progress as you can. Transforming a team to the next level is never about perfection. The focus should be driving as much progress as possible. In the realm of progress, everything counts – big, medium and small wins. And, being public about them is key. So identify, acknowledge and celebrate all of them. The more you identify areas of progress, the more it gives you appetite to find more. So, make it your priority to collect as many areas of progress as possible.

At the end of the meeting, the leaders took on a new perspective. They stopped accepting the reality: “We are making progress BUT not enough” and took on a commitment to cause a new genuine state: “We are excited about the progress we are making.”

This seems a simple shift, but it is very powerful. It is also a future worthy of proving right!

Photo by: Richard Potts

We’re Halfway Through 2013—But Did You Ever Really Complete 2012?

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There’s a distinct difference between ending something and completing it. Events in the physical world have a beginning, middle and end to them – whether we like it or not. We get older. Another year passes. And our lives keep moving forward, towards an eventual ending point.

Similarly, there is a physical rhythm to our professional year that is beyond our control. In a way, we’re passengers in time. The year ends, a new year begins, and the sand in the hourglass keeps trickling down.

Completion is different. Completion is a mindset, a paradigm, and a way of viewing our efforts, achievements, successes and failures in the most empowering way.

We have no control over the fact that 2012 is now over and that we’re already halfway through 2013, but we do have full say about our relationship to what happened in the previous year, including what we delivered and what was accomplished We also have control over the conclusions and lessons we will take with us from the previous year into the next.

So here we are in June of 2013. But many of us have never really taken the time to complete 2012.

To bring closure to last year and fully prepare yourself and your team for the rest of 2013, consider the following questions–starting with some basic facts. In 2012:

  1. What results did you promise or want to deliver?
  2. What results did you actually achieve?
  3. What objectives did you deliver, and what promises did you keep?
  4. What objectives and promises did you not deliver/keep? Where did you and/or your team fall short?

Once you have embraced the hard facts, take a look at some of the bigger-picture aspects of 2012:

  1. What did you accomplish in 2012 beyond your targeted results? It’s important to honor and even celebrate what got accomplished, even if it seems small or “not enough.”
  2. How did you forward your bigger vision and purpose (whether you made all your numbers or not)?
  3. In what areas and in what ways did you get stronger? What “muscles” If you post the piece about building your warrior muscle before this blog, then you could link to it here.and new competencies did you develop? What did you learn to do – by choice or by necessity – that will make you stronger and better in the future?
  4. What valuable lessons did you learn from your successes and/or failures? This is particularly relevant and important in tough years – which can make us stronger and better prepared for future chapters.
  5. How did your successes and/or failures in 2012 better prepare you for greater success in 2013?
  6. What can you commit to in 2013 and beyond, given all that occurred and all that you learned in 2012?

The beauty of completion is that it enables and empowers us to draw out the opportunities, learning and gold from everything that happened in the past. By viewing our past deeds and achievements through the lens of “completion,” we can foster a continuous path of personal development, growth and fulfillment.

When we end a year without completion, we often feel somewhat “stuck” and not quite ready and excited to move forward. However, when we take the time to complete each year, we experience a powerful sense of harmony, confidence and calmness. We feel empowered, ready and excited about moving on to the next chapter.

So go ahead and complete 2012, and keep what you have learned in mind, because 2014 will be here before you know it.

How To Cultivate Strategic Thinking In Your Company

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It’s very easy today for people to become paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. This places a greater demand on leaders to keep staff focused on the prospect of a brighter, yet plausible, future. This week’s post examines how managers can do this by helping their staff learn to think strategically about the company and their own careers.

We have found that encouraging strategic thinking from the top of the organization to the shop floor is largely a matter of executive action and intention. In our experience, when executives make strategy development an activity exclusive to the top members of the organization, they discourage strategic thinking.

Specifically, executives and managers stifle strategic thinking by not actively being open to others’ feedback, pushback and ideas. When people feel that their suggestions are not being met with receptiveness, they will not participate in a strategic discussion even when given the chance.

To overcome this dynamic, we advise getting everyone in the company involved in strategic conversations. If you demonstrate that you are committed to other people’s ideas by incorporating and promoting them, you will encourage people to think strategically.

One easy process is to pick several areas where you want to create a breakthrough in performance and form teams. Gather people from varying levels and departments, creating a blue team and red team for each desired area of breakthrough. Then have a friendly competition for ideas on how to achieve the desired leap forward.

To encourage maximum strategic thinking, tell the groups that you are looking for “out-of-the-box, yet plausible” ways to take the organization to the next level.

Another common contributor to hindered strategic thinking is asking your staff to always put forth their tactical ideas, but never their strategic ones.

Executives can encourage higher-order thinking by making sure meetings are balanced out between time dedicated to discussing long-term strategic issues and short-term tactical ones. One of the biggest complaints we hear in companies is that all the meetings are about tactical items. Employees complain that time is never spent having conversations about the bigger picture and longer-term issues.

What can you do today to encourage strategic thinking? I would love to hear your comments.

Micro-management Is The Enemy of Strategic Thinking

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In last week’s blog post, we discussed the way that leaders’ actions impact the cultivation of strategic thinking within their companies. This week, we continue the theme by examining the role that micromanaging plays in the process.

Heed the warning. Leaders who micromanage create an environment of compliance where people won’t think strategically and don’t act as partners.

Micromanaging suffocates strategic thinking because it forces people to interact at a tactical level only. It requires people to protect their world, and a huge amount of their energy just goes into how to survive and keep their boss off their back.

One research study on micromanagement by Dr. Robert Hurley PhD at Fordham University found that 30 to 35% of executives succeed as managers but faltered as leaders when they found themselves in higher-level positions. “For this sizable group of under-performing executives, the underlying root cause is compulsive micromanagement caused by perfectionist tendencies. By micromanagement we mean an over-controlling style that inappropriately inhibits the people the executive needs to mobilize,” says Dr. Hurley.

To counteract this, we suggest that executives and managers ask their staff to think about what they would do if they were put in charge of a particular situation, department or organization. Ask your staff what they would start, stop or continue, then discuss the responses as a group so people can learn to think strategically at a level or two above their current job.

Just remember that you will never get any company strategy perfect, rational or right enough to work without having engagement and commitment at all levels. Encouraging your staff to participate in strategic planning and practice strategic thinking is key to creating a strategy that does not just get talked, but walked.

Cheat Sheet of Strategic Thinking Dos and Don’ts

Do:

  • Actively ask for input from all departments and levels.
  • Promote and incorporate others’ ideas.
  • Ask your staff what they would start, stop or continue in your position.
  • Routinely balance out your meetings by discussing both strategic and tactical issues.

Don’t:

  • Make strategic development an exclusive club limited to the higher-ups.
  • Stifle strategic thinking by not being open to and acting on others’ feedback.
  • Try and maintain control by micromanaging.
  • Solely focus on and encourage tactical thinking in meetings.

How has strategic thinking been hindered in your organization? I would love to hear your comments.

4 Steps To Creating Total Strategic Alignment

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Most leaders believe that it takes between six and 12 months, or longer, to develop a strategy. They mistakenly think that the criteria for a meaningful strategy are the amount of research and market analysis that goes into it, and the time spent vetting it with experts.

But our observation is that how well communicated a strategy is, is far more important than how logical or well researched it is. The effectiveness of any strategy is directly proportional to the level of ownership, commitment and accountability among the executive team. A strategy is only as good as the levels of commitment the people who are accountable to fulfilling it, possess.

Here are the essential fours steps necessary to create total strategic commitment and alignment.

Step one: Do a commitment audit and tell the truth about the current levels of ownership, commitment and accountability within the organization. Ask people to be blunt about the degree to which they understand – and believe in – your current strategic plan.

Step two: Craft a bold and compelling future. Help your leadership team roll the clock forward two to three years from now. What is a clear, concise and well-articulated 15- to 20-word statement that describes what you are committed to building as an organization?

Step three: Define your specific success criteria. What are the three, four or five key measurable outcomes that will let you know you have reached that future state?

Step four: Get everyone on board with these. This means cascading the process through the ranks of management, sharing the content of the strategy with all levels of staff and listening to and addressing issues of competence, sincerity and courage.

Remember, the issue is not, “What is the right solution?” but, “What will people buy into, take ownership for, believe in and commit to?” When staff buy into a strategy, it’s because they trust their leaders are telling the truth about the need for it, they believe that their leaders have the courage and resolve to address the real issues, and they have faith their leaders are competent to do what needs to be done in order to implement the strategy.

On top of this, when staff feel cared for, concerned about and respected, they will naturally support and contribute to the strategy being realized.

Six Steps To Make Your Meetings More Effective

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In this week’s post, I offer six approaches you should consider in making your meetings more commitment driven.

1. Before planning an agenda, ask yourself the key questions that will allow you to make your meeting meaningful.

  • What do we want to accomplish?
  • Who should attend the meeting in order to accomplish what we intend?
  • What do we want people to leave the meeting with?
  • What could we do during the meeting to achieve the desired objectives?
  • How much time do we need in order to achieve the objectives?

2. If appropriate, include a cross-section of individuals who will be attending the meeting in the agenda-planning phase. Getting these folks involved from the start will ensure important input up front and gain buy-in for outcomes ahead of time.

3. At the beginning of the meeting, review the intended outcomes and ensure people are there to achieve those objectives. If appropriate — and only if there is flexibility in the schedule and the willingness to do so — ask people whether there are other objectives that would make a difference, and include those if possible.

4. Once the meeting starts, manage toward outcomes, not time allocations. If 30 minutes is allocated to come to agreement for how the team members are going to implement Project X, and the members are agreed in 20 minutes, move on to the next topic. If the conversation is not complete in 30 minutes, but good progress is being made, allocate another few minutes and get closure. Completing the topic will create energy and momentum to address the next item on the agenda.

5. Keep the discussion focused. If the conversation wanders to another topic, and that topic is not part of the intended outcome of the meeting, ask people whether the objective this topic addresses should preempt one of the topics agreed upon at the outset of the meeting. If not, park it. If yes, move forward and pursue the new conversation.

6. At the end of the meeting, review the commitments made — who will do what, and by when? These commitments should be what the minutes of the meeting capture, rather than detailing all the topics discussed.

Six Warning Signs You Lack Employee Engagement and Commitment

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In the past two blog posts regarding this topic I explored the problem of lack of commitment and looked at two case studies. In this post I examine what to do if you want to tackle your commitment problem. Where do you begin? What are the most effective ways to assess if and where there are commitment problems? Here’s a list of some observable indicators:

1. People don’t speak up even when they know things aren’t being dealt with honestly and directly. This is relatively easy to spot, especially in meetings. Everyone knows important issues are not being addressed. Yet they fail to speak up because of fear or cynicism.

2. Missed commitments met with excuses, explanations, rationalizations and finger-pointing rather than a rigorous and energetic desire to get to the source of the problems, get back on track and take ownership for what went wrong.

3. Problems discussed and debated endlessly, with little lasting improvement from repeated attempts at resolution.

4. Initiatives to improve organizational performance progressing slowly or stalling altogether, despite sizable investments in resources and technology.

5. “Hallway” conversations are also a good indicator and can be easily detected. For example, when people spend their time talking about how things are not their fault or how another department or organizational level is to blame for sub-optimal results, commitment is lacking.

6. When people complain about how busy they are rather than doing what needs to be done, or complain about the unreasonableness of leaders’ expectations, this too can be a good indicator that people are avoiding rather than taking responsibility.

These are the informal ways of discerning commitment problems. We suggest that CEOs who feel they may have such issues go beyond sensing to asking employees directly – the members of their executive team and workers up and down the organization. In diagnosing the state of commitment in dozens of organizations, we have found questions such as these to be revealing. To what degree do employees:

  • Effectively address and resolve difficult issues around here?
  • Take ownership for solving problems rather than make excuses or point fingers when things go wrong?
  • Take risks and challenge the status quo?
  • Have confidence in the leaders of this organization?
  • Feel they can be honest with their leaders, including about negative or contentious issues?
  • Feel connected with, and empowered by, their leaders?
  • Communicate honestly and directly, without fear of retribution?
  • Trust each other and work together effectively across departments?
  • Come to work every day feeling that they make a critical difference to the future of the business?
  • Feel enthusiastic about their work experience?

There are also proven assessment tools and surveys available to help gauge commitment and engagement, the Gallup Q12 being a particularly noteworthy one where a 0.2 improvement along a 5-point scale has been statistically proven to correlate with an improvement in employee productivity.

One word of caution: If trust is low and fear is present, employees will not be truthful about the poor state of commitment. They must feel safe to tell it like it is. They must believe executives are genuinely interested in hearing unvarnished views, and they must feel encouraged to speak up about the real state of things, and praised when they do. Otherwise they will pay lip service to the process and say only the things they believe are safe. Unfortunately, this kind of lip service is more the norm than the exception.

To significantly improve commitment, the CEO and his team must be completely honest about, fully aware of, and own the current reality, especially the aspects that are dysfunctional. Once they understand the size of the commitment problem and no longer take it personally, they can begin to transform the cynicism, resignation, apathy and complacency into an environment of passion, ownership and total support.

A Tale of Two CEOs and Employee Commitment

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In a previous blog post on this topic, I outlined the problem of CEOs mistaking compliance for commitment. In this next post, I show the profound difference that owning the commitment problem makes, by comparing two CEOs of $1+ billion-plus organizations, leaders in their respective industries, one a manufacturer and the other a services firm.

Both had significant commitment issues to deal with – weak trust and alignment between levels and functions that were undermining ambitious growth plans. The CEO of the services firm, who rose to his position after having been one of its best salespeople, was a proud but arrogant leader.

Despite repeated attempts by senior managers, including his direct reports, to convey to him the high levels of politics, distrust, and lack of commitment throughout the organization, he wasn’t moved, insisting that employees were “just whining and not doing their jobs.”

As a result, his aggressive cost reduction and productivity improvement initiative gained little, if any, passion and ownership among his leaders, achieved far less than he had hoped, and was an uphill struggle with many excuses and explanations along the way.

The CEO of the manufacturing company was also a proud and tough leader. He rose to his position by having turned around two other divisions in his company. However, when his management team criticized him around the lack of trust and collaboration across departments, he listened – not immediately but over several weeks. He decided the commitment problem was serious enough to launch a process to resolve it.

Admitting the depth of his company’s commitment problems was not easy for him, given his command-and-control style. The results of his growth initiative, however, were spectacular, both in terms of meeting the performance objectives as well as creating a strong platform for cross-functional collaboration and partnership.

Two CEOs. Two commitment problems. Two approaches to solving them – one discounted it, the other admitted it and fixed it. Most important, two very different outcomes in terms of both business performance and organizational morale.

Are you paying attention to indications of commitment problems, or blaming “whiners?” These problems don’t go away by ignoring them.

Does Your Organization Have a Commitment Problem?

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Organizational commitment to a CEO’s strategy is a key factor in how successful that strategy will be. How far employees at all levels will go to execute the strategy — what we call their “strategic commitment” – doesn’t just make the difference between stellar and mediocre results – it can be the deciding factor in producing any results at all. But in many organizations, such commitment is often lacking, and executives don’t even know it. When revenue and profits are suffering, these managers rarely look to a deficiency in commitment as the culprit.

As a result, many CEOs avoid dealing with commitment problems simply because they assume they don’t have one. They believe that if people are doing their jobs without interruption and abiding by organizational rules and procedures, everything is fine. But this point of view mistakes compliance for commitment. Most likely they haven’t had direct experience of how robust commitment produces extraordinary levels of personal effort, investment, engagement and contribution.

Why then are so many CEOs blind to commitment problems in their organizations? Many are simply out of touch with the sentiments of employees — even their direct reports. When they do sense morale problems, they often avoid them, worried that they reflect poorly on their leadership. They sugarcoat situations to preserve their self-image. Further, they may not feel competent at addressing such commitment problems, believing this is the work of their HR department.

But in our experience, it doesn’t have to be this way. We have seen that getting employees to embrace and adopt a strategy is the ultimate factor in whether that strategy will succeed according to plan. And despite what some may think, every CEO and his management team possess the ability to generate substantial levels of commitment – even in the most dire of circumstances.

The first step is probably the hardest and most important: being brutally honest about the extent of the commitment problem. Only when leaders are willing to admit the level of apathy or dissension – and only when they recognize the impact of it – can they hope to reverse things.

Confronting the internal politics, silos and trust issues can be a grueling and uncomfortable exercise for the CEO and his team. People have become accustomed to workplace environments where pretending, protecting and “covering your ass” are the norm. In fact, they are so used to such toxic workplaces that they need an enormous amount of courage to try to reverse it.

However, when we see the CEO and his team undertake this task with sincerity and conviction, it has always elevated their levels of cohesion, trust and communication. In every case, it has given the CEO and all employees much greater hope, confidence and commitment.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

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Last week, the Conference Board research group released its latest report on job satisfaction. The results are pretty grim; only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their work, the lowest level ever recorded in more than 22 years of studying the issue. Experts say the drop in workers’ happiness can be partly blamed on the worst recession since the 1930s, which made it difficult for some people to find challenging and suitable jobs. But worker dissatisfaction has been on the rise for more than two decades.

Quoting Linda Barrington, managing director of human capital at the Conference Board, who helped write the report, “It says something troubling about work in America. It is not about the business cycle or one grumpy generation,” she says.

The report cites several reasons for the decline, including:

  • Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.
  • Incomes have not kept up with inflation.
  • The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.

Of note to us, however, are comments from the one employee the Associated Press interviewed about the report. Nate Carrasco, 26, of Odesa, Texas, says he’s been pretty unhappy in most of his jobs, including his current one at an auto parts store. “There is no sense of teamwork in most places any more,” Carrasco gripes.

He continues: Carrasco said he wishes his bosses would take time to listen to workers’ ideas – and their difficulties on the job. “Most of the time they only listen to what their bosses are saying,” he says. “Bosses need to come down to the employee level more and see what actually goes on, versus what their paperwork tells them is happening in the stores.”

There are a couple of key lessons here. First, you may not have the flexibility to change what people are being paid, especially when times are tough. Second, you may not be able to give everyone the “interesting” jobs.

But improving collaboration, getting people engaged in what they are doing, creating opportunities for people to find ways to improve the products or processes they use and are making every day, are all within your control. Stop blaming the economy, or the markets, or the climate, or any other outside-your-control factor for the levels of satisfaction and engagement within your organization. It’s not your job to make people happy, but it is your job to get them engaged and involved. Do that, and you’ll soon find them more satisfied and more productive.

Start the New Year with a Bang!

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What will it take for 2010 to be an extraordinary year for you and your organization? One where you position yourself for success?

As we discussed in our previous post, “Complete Your Year Powerfully,” step one is taking stock of your successes and shortfalls from 2009 so you are free of the regrets, resentments, guilt or denial that could drain you of energy as you enter the New Year.

Once you’re at peace with 2009, the opportunity before you is to generate a deep alignment around a bold, ambitious future for 2010. Rather than merely reacting to 2009 by extrapolating 2010 objectives and opportunities from spreadsheets of best case/worst case scenarios, we recommend a generative approach. This is much more powerful and energizing, but it will require you to think deeper.

Gather your team and imagine you are rolling the clock forward to the end of 2010, and ask yourselves the questions below. Let the conversation be guided by imagination and possibility rather than prediction and constraints. Make this a “remembering” exercise rather than a “predicting,” “anticipating” or “planning” conversation.

  1. What did we accomplish in 2010 that allowed us to be so successful?
  2. How did we distinguish ourselves in the eyes of our customers, key stakeholders and team members?
  3. What meaningful positive changes did we cause with respect to products, services, processes or performance?
  4. What are we known for today (end of 2010) that we were not known for in 2009 – internally or externally – that we feel good about?
  5. What characteristics did we exhibit as a team that we are proud of?
  6. What obstacles did we overcome, and how did we do so?

Now, take whatever time is needed to narrow this list down to the 4-6 items – strategic commitments – that fit in the space between mere prediction and fantasy. These should be aspirational, yet plausible – otherwise people will nod “yes” but feel “no way,” which will evidence itself in the lack of effort people expend trying to deliver. These items should be those that every single person in the room aligns with; by that we mean they are willing to make the list their own, and fully buy into their achievement.

This discussion might take several hours, or even extend over multiple meetings. Better to get total alignment now than deal with the, “but it wasn’t really my idea and I didn’t think we could do it’s” later on when progress is lacking.

Establish owners for each item, with clear measures of success, and agree on a process to track these on a monthly or quarterly basis – or more frequently if necessary.

Communicate these items to your entire organization, and ask people to ensure that what they are working on connects to at least one strategic commitment.

One last thought – people’s mood, outlook and behavior are driven by what they are anticipating and looking forward to (good or bad). Which means the primary job of leaders is to get people inspired about what their organization can achieve, and ensure they are clear about how to achieve it. This approach incorporates both these dimensions, therefore if done well will enable you to start your year with a bang.

Posted by Josh Leibner and Gershon Mader