The Drive to Create—Rocket Fuel for Entrepreneurs
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
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?
In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
Strengthen Your Team By Seeking People Who Believe that They Can Grow
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Life and Business, Professional Growth
In this must-read article: “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow,” by Janet Rae-Dupree, Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck summarizes decades of research into how people think about intelligence and talent with the following:
“Those who believe that they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re every going to have approach life with a fixed mind-set. Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a growth mind-set.”
Dweck goes on to indicate: “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”
The article continues with some great examples and worthwhile advice for any leader or recruiter charged with building or strengthening a team.
Rethink How and Where You Look for Talent:
The greatest personal/professional successes that I’ve witnessed over my career have come from individuals with an unyielding thirst for knowledge and personal development. While many of these individuals were gifted with natural abilities, their innate sense of adventure and experimentation and their attitude that failure puts you one step closer to success, combined to help these individuals create great careers.
Interestingly, many of the successes that I recall were with individuals working in lower-level jobs due to lack of formal credentials. The secretary that developed into a remarkable marketing professional; the customer service rep that became a consistent top-seller and ultimately a successful sales executive and the technician that developed into a great product manager, are just a few of the examples of people that were driven by a growth mind-set. Of course, it didn’t hurt that these professionals benefitted from a supervisor or manager along the way that took the time to get to know them and recognize their potential for growth. It took an enlightened observer to see the talent and the hunger in these individuals
Don’t Let the Pedigree Be the Only Determinant:
I can think of numerous examples of situations where clearly brilliant individuals failed miserably because they were afraid that if they slipped up, the world might question their brilliance. Instead of helping the business, these individuals spent most of their time making certain that everyone around them understood how smart they were. And while the academic credentials were visible, if you looked beneath the ivy, there was no innate drive to succeed; no focus on innovating and no interest even to learn by trying and failing.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Look back on your own recent string of hires and promotions, and if your batting average is lower than you would like it to be, consider Ms. Dweck’s advice: “look for both talent and a growth mind-set in prospective hires—people with a passion for learning who thrive on challenge and change. And remember to open your eyes and look around you for talent in unexpected places. Your greatest future success stories might be closer than they appear.
Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Organizational Transformation, 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?
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Project Management
I recently conducted a leadership workshop for a group of technical professionals at an industry conference, and as always, I walked away from the session with a couple of insights gained from the input of the participants. One that surprised me was that after talking about characteristics of high performance project teams, I asked for a show of hands from anyone that had been a member of this type of team. Only 5 out of 58 raised their hands. Even discounting for the people that don’t tend to respond to "showing of hands" requests, anything even close to the 10% range here seems abysmal.
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