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.
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the second in a series of posts that I want to make about what I think is a very important subject, our most important relationships. For the people we care about the most we should be willing to make a few critical promises to demonstrate our level of commitment to them.
The first promise in the series was I will carefully listen to what you have to say. When we sincerely want to understand what the other person is feeling and thinking we acknowledge their value as a person.
The second promise is that I will always tell you the truth. The foundation of any relationship is the trust that is shared when I know what you are telling me is the truth.
Obviously, I am not talking about saying that Susan Boyle should become a model. If you meet her tell her she looks good and really mean it. However, she does have a beautiful voice and she reminded us all not to judge the character of a person by their outward appearance.
When we lie to someone it says more about us than it does about them. Not telling the truth is our way of deflecting blame and not assuming personal responsibility.
If someone tells me something that really hurts but I know in my heart it is the truth then I can still respect and trust them. When they make it up and tell me what is convenient for the moment I am the one who is ultimately hurt and they just burned a bridge that sometimes cannot be rebuilt.
Customer Service At Home
Filed under: Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Parenting, Personal Development
We all enjoy the experience of some organization or person who goes the extra mile and delivers high quality personal service. In a day when most companies either put you on a phone tree from hell or only allow contact through email it is really nice when another person is simply pleasant and nice.
Mobile Travel Guide declares themselves as the gold standard of travel ratings and reviews. They rate hotels and restaurants on a system of one to five stars based on their performance. When you see their sign and there are at least three to the coveted five stars rating you know that the experience will be a good one.
Every day when we all go out into the public world of work and our daily to do list we interact with lots of other people. Most of the time, we really try very hard to be courteous and polite to others especially if they are customers, suppliers, co workers or friends. We give, give, and give to other people all day until we are emotionally spent by the time we head home.
When I evaluate my customer service rating at home I have to admit many times I would not receive even one star much less three to five. I treat the people I care about the most with the least amount of patience and kindness.
If the Mobile staff were to interview the people who are the closest to you how many stars would you receive? I am going to do whatever it takes to consistently improve my score. How about you?
The Dip
A good friend of mine exposed me to the writings of Seth Godin. He is an expert on new marketing and the use of the internet with one of the most read blogs on the web.
The Dip is a book about knowing when to quit and on the other hand when to stick it out. Every new project, job, relationship and hobby start out exciting and fun but at some point the newness wears off and the reality of how hard it really is sinks in.
A Dip is a temporary setback that you can overcome if you stick it out and do not quit. The other extreme is a cul-de-sac which is a situation that you should quit as soon as you know this is not what you need to be doing.
How do you know the difference? Great question. The key to me involves passion and excellence.
If you are not passionate about what you are doing then that is a clear sign that you are probably in a cul-de-sac. To be able to break through all the problems we all face everyday requires a burning desire to do something you know that really makes a difference.
The other criteria require total transparent honesty with self. You must evaluate if the product you are offering to the market is the quality that would make people want to participate in what you are doing.
If it is then you have every reason to hope that over time other people will hear about what you are doing and will buy in and even tell their network about your services. The book is all about knowing when to quit the wrong stuff and stick it out with the right.
Listening
The key area that is lacking for most leaders as they face the highly participative team dynamics that exist today is people skills. All executive coaching research clearly points to this reality and most leaders have major blind spots when it comes to this truth and that is why it can destroy team morale and productivity.
Of all the people skills that show up on most lists of inappropriate behavior poor listening goes to the top in all current studies. Marshall Goldsmith calls it the most passive aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
All of us catch ourselves thinking about what we want to say rather than really concentrating on what the other person is communicating. Stephen Covey made seeking to understand the other person a priority before you seek to be understood as one of his 7 habits of highly effective people.
We must understand that listening is not a passive behavior. It requires several active disciplines to be successful.
We can clarify what someone has said by restating what we heard and what we think they meant. We can explore by asking additional questions about what has been said. Then we can seek confirmation from the person that is what they intended to convey.
Once you are confident you have fully understood what the other person is saying then you must take a moment to think before you speak. Make sure your response is not coming across as defensive or attacking the other person regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
Delegation
One of the best ways to leverage your leadership influence is to delegate as much work as possible to competent team members. At the start of every day you should ask yourself is there anything that needs to be done that I can give to someone else with the appropriate investment of my time?
In the Industrial age model of leadership the leaders made all of the decisions about priorities and strategies and the team was responsible only for execution. This resulted in very little delegation and significantly reduced productivity.
In this type of environment the leader would walk into the meeting and tell the group this is the new program for the fall and hear are your individual assignments, are there any questions?
In the Information age of leadership the leaders still make the decisions about priorities but delegate the development of the strategies and execution to the team. This is a major improvement and gets everyone into the game.
This meeting would involve the leader saying to the team, this is a program that we are considering for the fall, what do you think?
In the new Idea age the leader is willing to delegate the setting of priorities, strategies and execution with reserving the right to make the final decision on all recommendations from team. A meeting would include the leader saying to the team what are your recommendations for programs for the fall and why?
The need for and the type of delegation is changing dramatically in the last twenty years. In the past the leader was suppose to know all the answers to all the questions. Today they need to know how to ask the right questions and the team is responsible for the answers.
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!
Execution
It is amazing to me how all of the most respected people in the field of leadership are so consistently saying the same things about the most important things that all organizations need to be doing. It really started when Steven Covey wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People followed by Jim Collins Good to Great and now every bestselling book on leadership prioritizes the same factors.
Execution is a great read by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. They define execution as the discipline of getting things done.
They start with the number one issue of the day the personal character of the leader. If you are not able to execute your own personal priorities then you will never be able to establish execution as a priority for your organization.
In the spirit of Good to Great they insist that the leader must never delegate their most important responsibility of getting the right people on the team. This factor more than any other will determine if you r people can consistently move beyond creative development and project planning to actually get the job done.
The next priority is to create a culture of discipline where execution is valued. A great insight is that we don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Translation, at some point in time we need to stop talking about the problem and start doing something to solve it.
Finally, after the leader has set clear goals and priorities you must evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Then it is extremely important to reward the doers who are actually getting the job done and this will move execution to the top of your leadership core values.