The Drive to Create—Rocket Fuel for Entrepreneurs
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth
I sat and talked yesterday with a uniquely impressive entrepreneur. She is not yet successful, and in fact she is barely two weeks young in her new adventure. If I was asked to handicap her chances of success, the odds would be very good.
I’ve known this professional for a number of years and it’s always been clear that she would move out from underneath her position as an employee and go off on her own. It was just a matter of time.
The time happened recently as the work environment became untenable not only for my friend, but for a number of the other talented members on her team. Bad Boss syndrome came home to roost as cutbacks and new policies were implemented that both destroyed internal morale and damaged the customer experience.
My friend and her team took matters into their own hands, and in a mere few weeks in their new service business, schedules are filled, business is good and the air in their shop is filled with the excitement of something new being created.
As we chatted about the experience, I asked my friend some of the vexing questions that trip up so many big organization executives.
- What’s your vision for your practice?
- What do you want people to associate your business with?
- What’s unique about your practice?
- 5 years from now, when you look back, what will you have accomplished?
- Why did your team follow and what makes them tick in this venture?
She fielded the questions effortlessly and offered simple but powerful answers that stopped me in my tracks. I’m not used to hearing answers to these questions without them being couched in business-speak and filled with lofty, mission-statement sounding answers that are like sugar-free frosting on a wedding cake.
Her answers focused on creating opportunities for employees, working with customers that the team loves and finding ways to contribute to the community. The answers came from the heart, were offered without hesitation and were backed by specific ideas.
There was also an underlying theme that the fuel propelling the team was the ability to do something truly unique in building a business. I sensed a burning desire on the part of my friend and her colleagues to create their own great organization, and to provide opportunities for those interested in working hard to pursue them. The talk on the floor was all about creation and avoiding the mistakes of former bad bosses and building for the future.
Money was not singled out as a driver. However, when I inquired about the “M” issue, she looked at me and indicated that they were already profitable and exceeding their best expectations in just two weeks.
The drive to create is powerful and while the pilot burns in the background for many, for the few that dare to jump in, the power to create is what fires the rocket.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Is your pilot burning? What do you want to create? What will push you to move from ideas to actions?
Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Deming’s first of his 14 Points for Management reads: Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
The phrase, “Constancy of Purpose” strikes me as perhaps the best way I’ve heard to describe that intangible but palpable drive that propels the most effective individuals and the most successful organizations.
Instead of being singularly focused in pursuit of our goals, most professionals that I know struggle to find even a shred of time to work on the most important priorities. It’s not that they don’t have the time, but rather, they allow the noise in the environment to keep them from focusing.
Other individuals fail to recognize their true priorities, or at least they fail to understand how to connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities, and as a result, they work on what they want to, or they do little or nothing at all. This is as much a leadership failure as it is the failure of the individual.
I marvel at top executives that talk about “empowered employees” and hold round-tables and town-hall meetings in an effort to create the illusion of focus and connectedness, but that fail to figure out how to light the fuse that creates the constancy of purpose in the minds and hearts of every single individual in the organization. These leaders understand that they are supposed to do something, and as a result, they drive a lot of activities but don’t necessarily create a constancy of purpose in the organization. In military parlance, they are “all action and no vector.”
Organizations and individuals march forward when they have a clear goal and sight and are driven by some deep collective conviction that when successful, the world will be a better place, that they will be better professionals and that their positions and as a result, their families will be secure. The earlier that a leader understands that creating “constancy of purpose” is a core task, the faster they are on their way to truly fulfilling their obligation and responsibility as a leader.
Creating Constancy of Purpose on Your Team:
- Don’t assume that everyone around or under you understands why they are there and what their priorities are. It is up to you as leader to provide this critical context.
- Constantly focus on connecting your team’s output and activities to the organization’s big picture.
- In the absence of a broad organization “constancy of purpose” (most environments), it is up to you as leader to manufacture one for your team. Better yet, engage your team in creating their own overarching purpose. Just remember that you still need to plug it into the organization’s pursuit of success, however success is defined.
- The best ideas often reside in the minds of the quietest people. Create opportunities for the silent but brilliant individuals to contribute.
- Everyone drifts from the true north of their priorities—you need to allow an appropriate amount of drift for individuals and teams and no when and how to help them reorient.
- If you are at the top of the food chain, you do own mission, vision and values, and they need to be much more than posters on the wall in conference rooms and lobbies. You cannot spend enough time thinking about and working on making the mission, vision and values come alive for the organization. It’s not a campaign or a one-off meeting…your goal is to make these often trivial and trivialized words serve as the rallying cry and standards for performance and behavior.
The Bottom Line for Now:
Leadership is profession and leading is a true privilege. This most difficult of all human endeavors—leading, motivating and guiding teams to achieve can be done by seeking compliance or providing inspiration. I’ll place my bet on the leader that fuels the collective and individual passions of a firm’s employees. What’s your firm’s Constancy of Purpose?
Can You Create A Mission-Driven Focus in a For-Profit Business?
Leaders from the top on down in Not-For-Profits hold an unfair advantage over their erstwhile counterparts in the For-Profit world. Managers in Not-for-Profit are driven by a powerful sense of purpose that delivers meaning and context for even the most mundane of activities. As one young Not-For-Profit manager in my recent Leadership Mastery workshop indicated, “I can’t imagine not having the mission to inspire and energize me everyday.”
My question: Can For-Profit organizations replicate the motivational and contextual power of “The Mission” through other proxies like goals, strategies, bonuses and targets all focused around competitors, financials and metrics like market-share and compound annual growth rate?
My short-answer: It’s hard to simulate a mission and develop a sense of purpose in an environment focused on issues that are significantly more mundane than human welfare. Difficult, but not impossible. I’ll explore some ideas for this below.
First, a sidebar on my observations about leading in Not-For –Profit:
Having spent my entire career in the For-Profit world, I learn something every time I have the good fortune to work with the dedicated professionals that staff and lead the organizations that do so much good in our communities. It’s refreshing to work with people laser-focused on serving their customers and motivated by the belief that they are making a tangible difference everyday.
I have also been impressed by the level of leadership maturity and sophistication that I see in the younger leaders in these organizations. Many Not-For-Profits run on volunteer workforces, and honing great leadership skills at a young age is a survival skill for a manager in this environment. The sophistication and good practices that I have seen displayed by managers with less than five years experience are impressive. Important habits and concepts including professional development, goal-setting, providing feedback and establishing genuine connections are well understood and readily applied by many of these young leaders.
Last and not least, it’s hard to look at the good work being done in many Not-For-Profits and not acknowledge that these dedicated and capable leaders might earn considerably more money if they were plying their profession in a profit-driven organization. The skills that they are developing and honing are the very skills critically needed by almost every organization attempting to grow and win in the market. And yet in many cases, the lure of money is not a driving force for those serving in Not-For-Profit.
What For-Profit Leaders Can Learn from Their Mission-Driven Counterparts:
- People thrive and commit when they feel a greater sense of purpose in their activities. Leaders in For-Profits must strive to connect the firm’s activities and offerings to the benefits that they provide to customers. Even seemingly mundane offerings contribute to improving someone’s life, making hard tasks easier or solving other problems. Leaders must connect the dots between these benefits and an employee’s reason-for-being.
- Mission statements should not be a gobbledygook of pie-in-the-sky motivations, but rather, brief, meaningful descriptions of the reason-for-being of an organization. Additionally, instead of the poster on the wall proclaiming the lame mission, the content and context of this mission should be taught, reinforced and referenced liberally. Just like corporate values, statements of mission are useless unless practiced and ultimately embedded in the organization’s DNA.
- Leaders should ply their trade as if they are operating with a volunteer workforce. Imagine having to walk in the door everyday and reach out to your employees, support their professional development, provide them with timely feedback, encourage them to strive for new levels and help them find the lessons-learned from mistakes. Armed with the context of “my workers are volunteers and it is my job to keep them happy, motivated, learning and here,” I suspect that many leaders will suddenly discover their true priorities.
- Just as people require context and purpose to do their best work, they tend to thrive in environments where success breeds more success and big, new challenges are viewed as great new opportunities. In my informal polling of several hundred managers over the past few months, I have only found a handful that feel as if they’ve been a part of a high-performance team at some point in their careers. What a shame. I suspect that most leaders don’t preoccupy on the notion that their goal is to create an environment that results in a high-performance team….one that is highly innovative or one that is operationally excellent (or both). Not-For-Profit leaders understand that the mission will only be successful if the team gets it right, and they naturally focus on the tasks needed to support team development.
- Many (not all) Not-For-Profit leaders stay close to their mission by working with and serving their clients in the community. Sometimes out of necessity and other times out of the sheer joy of serving, this is an outstanding way of staying Tuned- In to customers. For-Profit leaders would be well served to push away from the desk and spend some time helping and learning from their customers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Working in Not-For-Profit may not be for everyone, and in fact, while I’ve painted a picture with the positives that I have observed, there are many familiar challenges as well. Large organizations struggle with politics and bureaucracy, “lifers” suffer from chronic “We’ve always done it this way,” and turnover and burnout are common maladies plaguing many organizations.
However, in spite of overwhelming challenges and never-ending pursuit of funding, many of these organizations persevere, in large part due to the incredible dedication of the people working and leading at all levels. Most For-Profit environments lack the sense of purpose and mission that I’ve observed in Not-For-Profits, yet managers everywhere have the same set of tools at their disposal. For-Profit leaders are well served to take a few tips from their lower-paid and in many cases, more effective counterparts.
Why Strategy is the Leader’s Most Potent Tool
As a leader, imagine having a metaphorical tool at your beck and call that was capable of catalyzing action, focusing the collective energies of your team members and providing a greater sense of purpose to everyone around you. This tool is strategy and all too often and for varying reasons, this tool is left idle in the bottom of the leadership toolbox, brought out only for special occasions like the annual off site or in preparation for budgeting. The best tool misapplied is no better than a crude implement. Unfortunately, strategy as a leadership tool is widely misunderstood and rarely or poorly applied.
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