Pull The Trigger
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Personnel Development
There may be nothing harder to do as a leader than make the decision to terminate an employee. To be honest we feel to some degree we have failed and that is hard to accept.
This is especially true if we hired the person in the first place. Not only have they failed but now our performance as a leader may be in question also. We cannot let our own emotional need for personal success stand in the way of doing what is right for the organization.
There are three critical things that I must do as a leader before I feel that my responsibility has been completed prior to any termination. The first is to provide clear expectations of what is required in their job description. It is impossible for someone to meet your expectations if they have not been clearly communicated early and often.
The second important thing is to make sure the person has had adequate training and resources to complete their job successfully. It is not fair to ask someone to grow a particular area and not give them the financial and manpower assets they need to be effective.
The last issue for me is a comprehensive and ongoing feedback system that lets a person know exactly where they stand in the area of performance. It is not right to see someone make mistakes day after day and stick your head in the sand hoping it will go away only to drop a bomb on them at annual review or even worse an unexpected termination. If you do not have the leadership skills to positively confront someone about what they are doing wrong then you may be the one in the wrong job and not them.
If you have done all of these three things well and given this person every opportunity to improve and they don’t then you should feel no guilt or sense of failure. Never obsess on the five to ten percent of your staff that may need to go every year. What is extremely important is to remember the ninety to ninety five percent who are doing their jobs well and are watching to see if you have the character as their leader to pull the trigger.
The Power Of Momentum
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Personal Development, Time Management
There are very few things more difficult to deal with in your personal or professional life than a loss of momentum. It can be brought on by some major tragedy or a series of small compromises over a very long period of time.
Eventually we get to a place where we start worrying about things outside our control and that drains us of what little emotional energy we have left. Also because we are so focused on the negative we stop doing the things we should and can do and that brings even more despair.
The only way to break this cycle is to start doing what you can do and build some small daily wins into your life. This principle works with individuals as well as organizations.
With every small win comes movement and that generates confidence that things are finally headed in the right direction. When we regain our confidence then we attempt even more things that product even bigger wins and the power of the momentum begins to put the wind back in our sails.
It is very ironic that when we get to the places of greatest difficulty in our lives it is the very smallest of things that can break the downward cycle. We are desperately searching for the big answer that is going to solve all our problems when the solution was right in front of us all the time.
The good news is that the power of momentum works in a positive way to an even greater degree than it does toward the negative. When you repeatedly do what you can do daily the positive flow of your life moves you beyond all the negative issues that may still be there but now they are in the proper perspective.
Clock Building Not Time Telling
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Personnel Development, Servant Leader
The days of all decisions being made solely at the top with a few people involved are fading fast. Throughout the Industrial Age of leadership during the last half of 20th century this was the only model of leadership. The overwhelming percentage of the workforce was for the most part simply telling time based on the clear instructions that were given for them to follow.
Today we are leading from an Information and Idea Age model of leadership. The entire development process has been delegated to various teams so that everyone who can contribute will be involved. In essence people are now being asked to help build the clock.
Most people think the changing role of the top executives is by far the most dramatic shift that has occurred. In a sense of scope that may be true. Key leaders today do not have to know all the answers to all the questions they only need to know what are the right questions to ask?
There primary responsibility today is to make sure they have the best possible people on their team because the quality and success of the clocks they are making will determine the future success of the entire organization.
The most dramatic shift in leadership today certainly from a standpoint of scale is not at the top but in the middle of organizations. There is a big difference in telling time compared to building clocks. Today people are daily being asked what do you think and what would you recommend?
Many organizations are caught in the middle of this transition and seem to be stuck. The problem could be that you are asking people who only know how to tell time to build clocks and they are not capable of making that change. Don’t give up on clock building just find the right people who know how to build great clocks and you will be fine.
Big Hairy Audacious Goals
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Leading Change
There has always been a delicate balance in goal setting between what can be done and what could be done. Goals should be realistic and achievable but they also must be courageous and challenging. Safe is not good enough anymore and we must be willing to take risks that stretch us outside our comfort zone to achieve greatness.
I absolutely love this quote that is extremely timely in our current environment, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much no suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
When President Kennedy said in the early 60’s we are going to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of this decade the overwhelmingly majority of people thought he had lost his mind, and yet we did it.
The world has changed dramatically in the last decade. The power of technology and the globalization of all the world economies are driving change in unprecedented ways that no one could have imagined either just a few years ago. When this recession is over we are never going back to the ways things used to be.
What goals are you setting for yourself and your organization that are commensurate for the challenges that lie ahead in the 21st century? They must be big hairy and audacious if they are going to lead to outstanding performance.
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.
Three Critical Questions For Leading Change
I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process. You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.
Your team is out in open and you are eating your lunch on the ground. The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.
In first scenario you as team leader say to your team in stern voice get up and follow me right now. A few people respond but the majority stay in place. Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.
The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move. Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind. The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.
The third scenario is you say to team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe. Everyone moves and no one is hurt.
In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore especially with next generation workforce. The second scene was perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading. The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.
The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story. Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change. What is the Problem? How are we going to Solve it? Why is this important to You?
Leading Change
The greatest mistake organizations make during difficult times like we are currently experiencing is to try to manage change rather than leading the process. Sometimes survival is the only critical issue and then you do whatever you have to do to stay alive.
Most of time though we look very short term and develop a bunker mentality that’s only goal is to ride out this storm until things get better. This means of course reducing expenses through personnel reductions , delays in capital investment, marketing and of course training and development. Especially, all those bad trips and conferences that congress is railing about.
Leading change recognizes the brutal facts that the fundamentals of global economics have been permanently changed. Effective leaders will use the urgency and severity of this current cycle to reposition their entire organizational culture for success in the 21st Century and beyond. The future is incredibly positive for all those who are willing to embrace it. No going back!
Growth Barriers
There are many things that can keep a church from growing and reaching its potential. The most obvious is for whatever reason God is not able to bless the work and all you are left with is human effort and nothing supernatural can happen.
The list of other real issues includes lack of resources in the areas of staffing, programming and facilities that will prevent you from reaching the next level. Oh by the way, every significant increase of 500 people creates an entirely new list of different challenges that must be addressed in all of these areas.
Sometimes the problem is that a church gets out of balance in any one of these areas to the detriment of all the others. The most obvious is over building your site and incurring too much debt that strangles everything else you are trying to accomplish.
The single most significant issue beyond the blessings of God is the constantly changing role of the pastor and the people. In most small churches the pastor does the ministry and the people run the church. For any church to reach its potential the pastor must do the leading and the people must be equipped to do the ministry.
In my experience far too many times when this ongoing transition breaks down the primary blame is placed on the people and their unwillingness to follow. The hard cold truth is the reason they are not following is there is not a leader in place that has the character and integrity to say clearly come follow me as I follow Christ.
New Marketing
A good friend of mine recently exposed me to Seth Godin who is the author of several incredible books on the subject of new marketing and how it is significantly different from the old models most of us know. He has an incredible blog and I would encourage you to visit Seth Godin.com and click on Seth’s head to read his blog.
In his book Meatball Sundae he writes, “New marketing leverages scarce attention and creates interactions among communities with similar interests. New marketing treats every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media. Marketers do this by telling stories, creating remarkable products, and gaining permission to deliver messages directly to interested people.”
One of his incredible insights is that Old Marketing was all about interrupting people with ads that may have no interest whatsoever to the person involved. Can I hear click the remote control?
New Marketing is about connecting people with similar interests so that when they get your information there is already a high degree of buy in because of the products and services involved and the relationships that already exist within the community.
As a matter of fact, the relationships within the community will initially be a stronger selling point than any brand loyalty to your company. Failing to see the power in this human dynamic will position you with a competitive disadvantage the in new economy.
Marketing has always been about knowing what people want and providing them a way to get it. That basic dynamic will probably never change. What has changed forever is how and when people get their information and what they do with it to make sure their friends know about it as well.