Leadership Caffeine: 9 Ideas to Help You Jump the Gap Between Failure and Success
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth
We didn’t see a way forward on this project, so we folded our tents and went home.
People and teams fail on their way to success all of the time. That’s great. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The people and groups I struggle with are those who just fail.
Often, the gap between failure and success appears wide, deep and ominous. This perceived gap keeps people frozen in place for a long while and then as time passes, fear turns to regret.
Regrets are soul killers.
Potential Author: I’ve always wanted to write a book, but who would care about what I have to say?
One thing is for certain…no one will care if you don’t start writing.
Newly unemployed individual: I need to go back to school. I’ve not upgraded my skills in 20-years.
There must have been a lot of great television shows on for those two decades.
Student: I didn’t study for the final because I was satisfied with a B.
Why? Really….why?
Potential Entrepreneur: I want to start this business. People have told me they will contract with me. I just don’t know where to start.
Start by putting one foot in front of the other. Ask for help. Talk to those who have already passed this way. Get going!
Flypaper and Failure:
Years ago, people hung flypaper in their homes to catch and kill flies. This sticky, poison-treated paper offers a nice metaphor for what happens to too many otherwise capable people. They view the distance to success as insurmountable, and instead of moving forward, they sit there, stuck, slowly poisoning themselves in their self-defeating thoughts.
Instead of being consumed by the poison of inactivity and regret while staring across a chasm that looks insurmountable, you need to get moving. If you’re leading others, now is the time to show that you know how to lead.
Nine Ideas to Help You Jump the Gap Between Failure and Success:
1. Start moving. Immediately. Don’t get caught on the flypaper. When you’re close to being stuck, remember that action overcomes stickiness. Now get going!
2. Run, don’t walk to download or purchase Steven Pressfield’s book, Do the Work. Based on his thoughts on “Resistance” outlined in The War of Art, this is the best kick-in-the-ass, get-moving book I’ve ever read. Buy one for everyone on your team if necessary. Pressfield will help all of you get unstuck and moving forward.
3. Ask for help. Get a good coach. We stink at coaching ourselves. Even coaches need coaches. And yes, teams can most definitely benefit from external coaching.
4. Flush your mind of the negative thoughts. Remember that no one cares that you think you cannot do something. No one. This is invisible to the world. It’s in your mind. However, people will care when they notice you doing something.
5. Ignore the critics. Critics show up once you start moving forward. Critics are typically people who feed on your actions because they don’t have any actions of their own. Ignore them.
6. Extra effort shrinks the failure gap. For writers, it’s butts in seats and hands on keyboards. For leaders, it’s often about taking the extra time to listen. For athletes, it’s the extra hour of training…beyond what’s expected or scheduled. No one has ever succeeded by doing too little. You know this…now, do something about it.
7. Get the toxicity out. More often than not, team troubles have their root causes in one or two toxic participants. These people are like critics. They have no actions of their own…only criticism of other people’s actions. Vote them off…or push them off.
8. Quit focusing on what you did wrong. Ask, what did I do right? Do more of it!
9. Become an Occasional Anthropologist. Go somewhere…anywhere but the couch or the office and watch people/customers in their native settings. Send your team out to the four corners of the earth. Observe and wonder. And then go back to work or back to your project and draw upon those observations for ideas and energy.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The gap between failure and success is often much smaller than it appears. The catch is that you have to start moving to shrink the perceived gap and move towards success. Whether it’s your own professional development or that personal dream or aspiration, there’s only one way to jump the gap. Start moving now…and then start running. Happy landings!
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Teams to Succeed
“I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.” -J. Richard Hackman with Diane Cotu, Why Teams Don’t Work, HBR (article requires fee/subscription).
If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable and potentially career altering.
For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.
This Would Be Easy If it Weren’t For the People:
If you are in the unenviable role of pulling together a group to tackle a project, you’ve got more than a few obstacles to overcome, including:
- People
- The egos of people
- Histories, biases and prior experiences of people
- Politics (yep, people again.)
- Communication challenges in working with…you guessed it, people.
Compounding the interpersonal and social challenges found in groups referenced above, groups struggle to learn how to make effective decisions, how resolve conflicts and how to be creative together.
At the end of the day, this group stuff would be really easy if it weren’t for the people.
The Basics Provide the Foundation, But Sometimes You Need a Little Help from Your Friends:
Even if you get everything right up front with a new team…a clear and compelling reason for being, clear roles, group-generated team values, proper organizational support and so forth, you will still run head-on into the human factors referenced above. Every time.
Sometimes you just need help to get beyond the noise created by throwing a group of people together and expecting them to become productive at a high level. A number of years ago in my role as a software company executive, our team and Board agreed that we would invest to completely redevelop the firm’s core software. This Bet-the-Company project called for adoption of new approaches and new technologies and after sputtering along for a period, we recognized the need for help.
This strategic initiative would have died on the ash-heap of failed software development projects if it weren’t for the help of some great people at the firm, Construx , who helped us rethink not only our development approach, but, how we worked together to cut through all of the issues described above. (Note: I have no affiliation or relationship with Construx, just high regard. Thanks, Jerry)
The true value in the approach provided by Construx was not so much the consulting…it was great, but the cultural transformation that resulted in how teams and people worked together. And while not every project merits (or can afford) high-powered consultants, can you truly afford to allow your teams to sputter and struggle along, seriously endangering the health of your business?
If getting work done in groups and via teams is important in your firm, perhaps it’s time to get some help in rethinking how these entities work together.
A Timely and Relevant Editorial Comment:
As an aside, one of my unofficial observations on team performance inside organizations is that over time and based on a series of poor experiences, managers and leaders begin to accept suboptimal outcomes from project teams as the norm. Team members are very aware of the group’s performance problems, but for many reasons, too few people feel empowered to take on the problems and drive change.
Strengthening Team Potential and Performance Beyond the Building Blocks:
Great groups and high-performance teams find a way to be creative together, to fight and then move forward together and to make many more right than bad decisions together. They move quickly across the gap spanned by starting up and breaking the ice on one side to achieving trust on the other side. For some groups, this span is simply never bridged.
Whether you draw upon great outside advisors and coaches to help your teams improve, or, you leverage your best internal talent (good formal and informal leaders) to observe and coach your teams on the difference makers, just do something. Don’t accept consistently poor performance, when high performance may just be a short distance away.
Recognize that new groups don’t naturally know how to work together…don’t know how to fight together and they don’t know how to make decisions together. In many cases, they don’t really know how to talk with each other on the tough performance topics. It’s not that you don’t have smart people in your organization and in these groups, it’s more about how difficult it is to do this right together.
Teach your teams great practices in creativity and problem solving and hold them accountable to applying those practices and tools.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I’ll echo Hackman’s quote at the opening of the post: the potential for extraordinary with teams is always there…just don’t count on it. Improve your chances of success with group efforts by teaching your teams to work together. A little effort will go a long way towards strengthening your organization.
Leadership Caffeine: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today
Filed under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values
The world of work has increasingly become the world of teams and group activities, and to quote Richard Hackman, author of, Leading Teams-Setting the Stage for Great Performance,
“I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”
If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
As an aside, many senior project managers and executive sponsors provide this type of leadership for major project initiatives. The focus in this post is on the gross majority of group, team or committee activities that fly below the radar of formal project management leadership and executive sponsorship. These are often manager-led initiatives or cross-functional groups coming together to tackle a problem.
6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today:
1. Control Your Urge to Put a Team On It-use groups carefully and sparingly and avoid the reflex action to set up a work group, committee or project team for every issue that comes your way. Carefully assess whether a group effort truly stands the best chance of success. There are many situations where the right individual can work with stakeholders and across functions and accomplish the goals or solve the problem more efficiently and effectively than a team.
2. If You Must Set Up a Team…Please Ensure that Goals Are Clear and Compelling: unclear goals promote “churn and flail,” and mundane tasks drive lackadaisical performance. As the responsible organizational leader (not necessarily the work team leader), you must ensure that the goal of the initiative is crystal clear and linked to a key business imperative. Vague goals and unclear context are productivity and morale killers.
3. Starting Today, Rethink the Approach to Choosing Team Leaders. Instead of seniority or rank, work-team leadership must be based on a single criterion: “Who is the person best suited to help us succeed with the task at hand?” Depending upon the nature of the task, an individual with good facilitation skills, or a person that works well across functions might be better suited than a functional manager or the most senior person on the group.
4. Define the Group’s Values Up-Front. Don’t make a career out of this, but definitely don’t skip describing and memorializing the required group behaviors for discussion, debate, attendance, participation and work-completion.
5. Use Simple Assignments to Save Time. Every meeting must have a note-taker (scribe), a timekeeper and a traffic cop. The traffic cop enforces the rules in play (e.g. brainstorming) and helps the team stay on topic and work towards an outcome.
6. Assign a Coach. If the group is expected to work together for more than a few days, it is helpful to ask for an objective 3rd party set of eyes to assess team processes and interpersonal dynamics. You don’t need to spend money to bring in an outside resource with a fancy certification. One organization used representatives from HR (a great way to help get this group engaged with the business of business) and another identified and specified a coaching role and rotated the responsibility between individuals. The coach is not part of the working team, but rather an occasional and objective observer that reports back to the designated team leader on group dynamics and group processes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We are well served to identify continuous improvement opportunities for our collaborative endeavors. I’ve watched great process companies with legions of people wearing colored belts forget about some of the simple suggestions above that can save money and time, spur performance and add to task enjoyment and morale. Today is a great day to help your teams and groups boost their performance!
Want a Dream Team? Give a Visionary a Voice
Who’s the Visionary on your team? Hint: chances are it’s not the leader. Contrary to popular myth, “being a visionary” is neither a prerequisite for leading, nor is it bestowed upon the chosen few as they ascend to their lofty perches above us.
Many Visionaries labor in relative obscurity, often ignored or worse yet, mocked, because of their unique way of looking at the world and the issues in front of them.
If you are leading and are interested in building or creating something more than efficient machine with your team, you are well-served to seek out and cultivate those individuals who are capable of seeing patterns and pictures in the environment that the rest of us miss.
You know these people. They are the ones that sit quietly in meetings while the inane debates rage over how to solve grossly tactical issues and they will occasionally look up and say, “Why don’t we?” or, “What if we did it this way?” After a few moments of silence, someone will usually chime up and say, “Yeah, Mary has a point, what if we..?” With a simple comment or observation, the entire direction of the conversation shifts…often for the better.
Consider this most famous of exchanges:
Lucy Van Pelt: Aren’t the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. I could just lie here all day and watch them drift by. If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud’s formations. What do you think you see, Linus?
Linus Van Pelt: Well, those clouds up there look to me look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean.
[points up]
Linus Van Pelt: That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there…
[points]
Linus Van Pelt: …gives me the impression of the Stoning of Stephen. I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side.
Lucy Van Pelt: Uh huh. That’s very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: Well… I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but I changed my mind.
(from the site: The Internet Movie Database-memorable quotes from the movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.)
The Visionary in this situation is of course the blanket-toting Linus…the odd little kid that is operating on a different level than the rest of the gang. When it comes to cloud gazing, I suspect that I am more like Charlie Brown in that exchange!
One of my favorite Visionaries reads this blog regularly. (I suspect he knows who he is, although I doubt anyone every offered him the label.) This technologist propelled an entire organization on his ideas. While his “visions” were not universally admired by peers or instantly accepted, the fact was and is that his ideas solve technology conundrums for customers in remarkable ways. (Note: visionaries often have detractors.)
Sometimes you need to look hard to find the Visionary on your team. In my own experience, they are not the classic “A” players that work circles around the rest of the team. They aren’t the loudest…in fact quite the opposite. They don’t tend to gravitate to the limelight.
Hints for Cultivating the Visionaries on Your Team:
- Once you uncover someone that has more to offer than the transactional demands of the job, spend time to cultivate a relationship with the individual. Take the time to carve out one on one time and to discuss vexing issues. Ask for input and listen carefully.
- Don’t thrust them into the spotlight if they are uncomfortable with the visibility.
- Place them on project teams where the challenges require new ways of doing things. Choose a Project Manager that is good at drawing out alternative perspectives and managing the talent on the team.
- Align Visionaries with doers. My best teams have blended both in the right proportion to ensure both innovation and great execution.
- And as a fair warning, be careful to not bestow a special label on the individual or you risk alienating him or her further and damaging your own credibility. This isn’t an issue of playing favorites, it’s one of extracting the often quiet and potentially valuable voice on your team.
The Bottom-Line:
I’ll end where I started. Want a dream team? Give a visionary a voice and then listen hard and learn.
Detoxing Your Team
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Values
Most of us can recall working with someone that had such a strong, negative impact on the work environment that you could t literally feel the emotional mood swing when this person walked into a meeting.
For some unknown reason, perhaps a karmic-imbalance in the universe, these toxic characters have the unnerving and disconcerting tendency to be great survivors. They rule their teams like Tony Soprano and they manage the higher-ups with diplomatic skills that would make a great politician proud. And they do all of this in broad daylight, while the people that work for and with them roll their eyes and hope not to fall into the toxic character’s line of sight.
While it is easy to intuit that toxic employees are value destroyers, we’ve been short on hard data about the true impact that these individuals have on the work environment. Until now.
The April 2009 Harvard Business Review summarizes a study by Christine Porath and Christina Pearson that offers insights into “How Toxic Colleagues Corrode Performance.” Porath and Pearson polled several thousand managers and employees from a variety of U.S. companies about the impact of toxic people at work, and the results affirm what we’ve long suspected. These people extract a costly toll on the rest of the employees and on overall performance.
Selected highlights when faced with toxic or rude co-workers:
- 48% decreased their work effort
- 47% decreased their time at work
- 66% said their performance declined
- 78% said their commitment to the organization declined.
And so on.
Art’s Observations:
The best advice that I ever learned the hard way took was “fire the politicians.” In one case earlier in my career, I was the enabler for this toxic individual, preferring to see only his strengths and talents and ignoring the havoc he created in the working environment.
Ultimately, I learned to fire toxic characters fast. The individuals that did not share and exhibit the values that we espoused or that ruled through intimidation were the first ones out the door, regardless of their capabilities.
I’ve never regretted firing a toxic employee.
Fair warning. Toxic employees don’t make it easy for you to fire them. The best of the worst actually frighten their bosses into inaction, not through overt intimidation or threats, but through more subtle approaches. Remember, these are skillful politicians with the hearts and minds of gangsters, and they’ve convinced a lot of people about how valuable they are to the organization. A conscientious manager may find herself swimming against the tide of popular opinion from her peers or higher ups on this issue.
Brace yourself for a fight, don’t be intimidated and stick to your guns. It’s easier to back down and the toxic employee is betting on this outcome. Like most thugs and bullies, they don’t expect people to stand-up to them and fight back.
I’m certain that I read “fire the politicians” somewhere, and I wish that I could provide attribution. Regardless, it’s good advice, especially in these tough times when teams are shrinking and those left behind must be capable of performing at a high level.
If you’re on the edge about who should go, you will be well served to get the toxicity out.
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