What To Do When You Are Stuck
When some people face dramatic change they choose to live in denial as if this is not really happening to me. On the other extreme others know the change is real to the point of becoming emotionally depressed about their new state of life.
The common sometimes fatal result of both of these mindsets is the paralysis of inactivity. We don’t want to get out of bed, go to work or even talk with anyone.
We must, as Jim Collins said of effective leadership in Good to Great, be willing to confront the brutal facts that sometimes I cannot return to my life the way it used to be.
I must assume personal responsibility to change myself first and start leading myself by making good daily decisions before my life can begin to turn around in different direction. The only way to do that is to do what you can with what you have right where you are and do it today with all your heart.
Change always produces movement. If we let it this movement can be downward and very destructive. The only way to stop this negative cycle is to start doing the simple things that you are able to do right now that will allow you to accomplish something good today.
You must get on offense and use the power of movement produced by activity to turn your life in a new positive direction. You must take some risk today by raising your sails and doing the clear things you know need to be done before you can ever feel the movement produced by the wind taking you to a better place.
The Doom Loop
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change
In sharp contrast to the breakthrough impact of the companies that practiced the flywheel effect all of the organizations that could not transition from Good to Great were caught in The Doom Loop. Instead of the consistent daily movement of the flywheel they went for the big impact event that would give the immediate impression of progress only later to regress into failure.
They were not willing to use the deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it. “The comparison companies frequently launched new programs-often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at motivating the troops-only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results.”
They wanted the big event or the grand program or the new celebrity CEO that would allow them to skip the daily discipline of the flywheel and move immediately to breakthrough. The repeated pattern of this cycle consistently produced disappointing results and then reaction without understanding starts the loop all over again.
Peter Drucker commented on these companies, “The drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”
The Doom Loop is a classic example of an organization continuing to do the same wrong things over and over again and yet somehow expecting different results. At the core of this problem is a leadership team that is more concerned with short term personal success than what is best for the long term benefit of everyone involved?
In the end this is not a strategy problem but a character one.
The Flywheel
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Time Management, Vision Casting
The concept of the flywheel was used by Jim Collins in his best selling leadership book Good to Great. The major point of the illustration is that significant change occurs when you do the right things repeatedly over time and eventually you will have a breakthrough that results in significant success.
We all would love to have the quick fix strategy work instead, we want instant culture change. For every company that moved from Good to Great there was no single defining action, no grand programs, no celebrity leader and no one killer innovation that produced the results.
“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”
A great example that really makes the point is used is from the legendary coaching career of John Wooden at UCLA. Most basketball fans know that he won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years and at one point had a sixty-one-game winning streak.
What most of us do not know is that for fifteen years coach Wooden worked in relative obscurity at UCLA before he ever won his first national title. During that time he was building the foundation for the program of great recruiting, player discipline and refining his style of playing the full court press style of defense.
The real character question for leaders today is how many are willing to pay the price of not demanding short term success at the expense of long term sustainability for the organization? It may keep you off the front page of the business section of your local paper but in this economic environment that can be a very good thing.
Communicating New Vision
After you know that you have top down buy in to the new vision for your organization, you need to create a team that can develop a strategic plan for the change you need that will allow you to move into the future. I cannot tell you the number of times I have reached this point in the process with great new ideas and the approval to implement the necessary changes only to fail.
The next step is that is extremely important is communicating the change vision. In all my years of doing this I think this is the beginning point of where the process starts to break down. We all have served on teams and worked for months on change initiatives and come out of the process totally together and passionate only to meet one year later trying to decide why the plan died.
What we simply fail to remember is that we have thought, discussed, and even hotly debated these ideas for literally hundreds of hours and the people who are on the front lines for execution have had no exposure whatsoever. We always undervalue the process of bringing everyone else up to speed and wonder why in the end they simply don’t get it.
There are several key criteria for effective communication. They are: keep it simple, use multiple forums and methods, repetition, repetition, repetition, and environments that allow give and take. The only way I have found to know that people have got it, is to let them hear everything they need over time and then let them ask questions and give back to me in their own words what we want them to understand.
Another very important aspect of communicating vision is that the leaders must be prepared to immediately walk their talk. John Kotter writes based on his research, “Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision.” If the vision is empowering teams and the top leaders of the company are still micromanaging everything you can be sure the plan is dead.
Good People Are Everything
A few years ago Mark DeMoss wrote a great book called The Little Red Book of Wisdom. He shares the personal and professional core values that helped him develop one the most successful Public Relations firms in the country.
Just as Jim Collins did in Good to Great and Jack Welch in Winning he drives home the most important asset for any organization are the people who work there. He states in one chapter, “the implication is that in business, how you treat your people trumps what you do with your clients, schedules, output, and spreadsheets.”
He believes there are four major motivators in attracting and retaining the best of the best.
1. The first is mission—People need to totally buy in to the big thing your company is all about.
2. The second is a good leader—Not the smartest or the brightest but someone who knows where they want the organization to go and has the character to lead.
3. The third motivator is corporate culture—This aspect is especially important to the next generation workforce because they must have an environment that is participatory and not highly directive.
4. The forth factor is compensation and benefits—This goes way beyond the basics to giving special recognition to best people who over time earn up to six weeks of paid leave and a $10,000 bonus.
For years everyone thought the most important decisions a leader had to make was What their organization needed to do in the area of products and marketing. Now the focus has shifted to Who are the people on your team. Get the right people and they will help you define the What, How, When and Where.