Howard M. Shore's Blog, page 4
July 1, 2019
Build an Unstoppable Team Today With These Two Simple Tricks
Were you ever on a team where you felt unstoppable? Where the efforts of each person were catalytic? Where the momentum steadily built until you were racing past your target? You might have experienced this in your life—perhaps on a sports team, in your workplace, volunteering, or even in your family.
How are these unstoppable teams built? What allows a team to operate at its highest level?
Alden Mills, a decorated U.S. Navy SEAL, says the answer lies in moving from human selfishness to selflessness. In other words, it’s about the team members shifting their focus from themselves to something much larger than themselves. Mills claims this is the first leadership principle of Navy SEAL training, and the brilliant thing is that it applies to business leaders as well. How does he know? Easy, because he has been both. This mindset switch is the key to building resilient, goal-oriented teams regardless of the environment.
There’s an African proverb that captures this perfectly. It’s one of my favorite expressions. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
What factors create remarkable collective success? I believe there are two sides to this story that have to come together to create fairy-tale teams. One comes from above, and the other from below.
The Right People
Not all teammates are created equal. Toxic teammates exist in the workplace. They can destroy teams, sometimes on purpose!
There are different types of toxic teammates—those who lack social skills and prefer working alone, those who do nothing but complain, those who are lazy and love taking the recognition without doing any of the work—the list goes on. They all have one thing in common: they have an uncanny ability to destroy the productivity of the team.
Toxic teammates believe they are fundamentally victims and don’t show up to win. They show up to whine. They have a whole arsenal of destructive behaviors to reverse productivity that they can whip out on any given day, including gossiping, procrastinating, and staving off responsibility. They’ll say or believe things like: “That’s not my job,” or “They don’t pay me to care,” or “Not my problem.” One bad apple can spoil the barrel. Some experts claim that toxic teammates can reduce a team’s productivity by as much as 30 to 40 percent!
These characteristics are night and day from those that unstoppable teammates possess. Alden advises looking for the seven personality traits below to spot people likely to become unstoppable teammates:
Competence – a curiosity to learn new skills and develop mastery over important skills and subjects.
Perspective – self-awareness of how past experiences and challenges have shaped their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
Communicativeness – the desire and ability to express ideas and emotions.
Drive – a can-do spirit, strong work ethic, and hunger to succeed.
Humility – inclusiveness, self-awareness, and respect for others.
Flexibility – an openness to new perspectives and to embracing other ways of thinking.
Selflessness – an aptitude for service and placing others’ truth and interests above their own.
So trick number one is simple: weed your team of any toxic people. And do it quickly, before their toxicity seeps into your team’s foundation and leaves costly and time-consuming cracks for you to fix.
At the same time, creating unstoppable teams is about finding the right balance. It’s about Yin and Yang. Having the right people is the element from the bottom. Your leadership is the element from the top. You have to have the right team structure in place for your leadership to succeed.
We could talk here about the different strategies you could use to optimize your human resources and make your team a productivity machine. But managing people is a lot more complicated than moving pieces around a chessboard. It doesn’t really matter whether you have the best strategy if you forget this ultimate principle: Treat your employees as if they are volunteers.
Lousy leaders think that signing paychecks gives them permission to treat people like slaves. Lousy leaders try to control their employees and treat them as passive objects. Lousy leaders think that they are the masterminds behind the game and that their employees are simply the hands they need to move the pieces.
That leadership style is foul, and yet it is so common in the workplace! How often have you heard a manager or leader complain about the incompetence of his employees? How all he wishes is for them to just shut up and do their jobs? You’ve probably worked for someone who had that mentality (maybe that’s what drove you to open up your own business). Or maybe you have a fellow business owner that you’ve overheard speak this way about his employees.
The bottom line is this: Nobody performs optimally under this leadership style. Nobody likes being in a workplace where they are controlled. People need freedom and autonomy to perform properly.
Let me illustrate this for you. Have you ever been discouraged about something personal or professional and confided in a friend or mentor about your feelings, only to have them spend the next hour lecturing you on what to do to fix your problems? I have, and trust me when I say it does not do any good. And yet I find myself going right to that how-to-fix-it mode when my wife comes to me with anything that’s bothering her. Why does this happen?
Because we like the power of telling. Telling is easy. Telling is fun. It takes a lot more digging, learning, and growing to listen to the other person and understand their struggles deeply. It takes a lot more mental power to ask the right questions that lead people to finding their own answers. Telling is putting a bandaid on an open wound and calling it a day; leading through questioning is getting a degree in medicine to properly close the wound.
It’s normal if you’re having a hard time making sense of how this applies to interacting with employees. On one hand, you have literally hired them to do the job that needs to be done to run your business. But people aren’t robots. So how do you strike the right balance between guiding and controlling so that your team performs optimally?
Treat Everybody as a Volunteer.
The answer is simple: treat everybody as volunteers. Peter Drucker is the man behind this transformative mindset. When we treat people as volunteers, we rein in our egos and embrace humility. We accept that we don’t have everything figured out and start relying on others’ contributions to piece together the puzzle. We start to create collaborative conditions where every person’s contributions are valued. By letting go of control, our teams start to catch fire.
Drucker gives a few words of wisdom to the leaders bold enough to embrace this mindset:
Focus on people with passion and not just those with talent.
Seek agreement, not instruction, on expectations and deliverables.
Ask permission to hold people accountable.
Express gratitude sincerely.
Address tough conversations with kindness.
Focus on aligning organizational and individual values.
Build meaningful relationships.
Listen attentively.
Include all members of the team.
Respect everyone deeply and equally.
Where on the spectrum do your team’s issues fall? Does your team need an attitude makeover? Or is it your leadership mindset that needs a reset?
The post Build an Unstoppable Team Today With These Two Simple Tricks appeared first on Howard Shore.
June 25, 2019
The Four Agreements
Leadership and spirituality are intimately connected. Spirituality is about actualizing your potential in realms that go beyond the physical and material. Leadership’s definition isn’t far off. Leadership is about unlocking the full potential of your people by providing vision, creating an environment of motivation, serving, having empathy, listening, inspiring, challenging, and providing direction. See the overlap? I do.
Some would even argue that leadership and spirituality are two entities without dissimilarity. And no, it’s not just lazy hippies wandering aimlessly on the street that see the importance of spirituality. Some of the greatest minds of all time have argued this.
Take Steve Jobs, for example, whose famous quotes reflect his deeply spiritual side:
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?”
These quotes are from just one man, but most of the greatest leaders of all time, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, have been deeply spiritual or religious in their own way.
Let me make an important disclaimer before I go any further. I am not saying that you need to be religious to be a great leader. Spirituality manifests through different pathways—for some people it happens to be religion. When I talk about spirituality, I am referring to the practice of self-awareness and striving to fulfill your higher potential.
Don Miguel Ruiz agrees. He’s a famous author who wrote one of my favorite books on leadership of all time, called The Four Agreements. Ruiz fundamentally believes that the world (or your perspective of the world) is made up of labels, concepts, and beliefs. But these are all illusions, and you are living in a dream that has been programmed into you from the day you were born. Kind of sounds like The Matrix, doesn’t it?
But let me go on because there is wisdom in his words. Ruiz believes that how you see the world has been programmed into your psyche throughout your life from the words that came from your parents, your teachers, your communities, and your peers—everyone in your social circle. Those words then grew into the labels, concepts, and beliefs that define the rules and the boundaries of your reality.
In other words, Ruiz believes that your mindset is just a program. Which means that through self-awareness, you can re-code it however you like. I can’t begin to express how deeply I love this concept. Our life, the way we choose to see it, is our own choice. Two people can see the same life in different ways. One can be ecstatic or miserable, angry or indifferent, happy or sad while looking at the same set of circumstances. It is all a life of our own making.
This concept is imperative for you to grasp if you’re striving to become a better leader. Your mindset is the key to unlocking your greatness. It is the secret to having peace of mind and utter tranquility.
Don Miguel Ruiz defines four agreements to make with yourself today to elevate your self-awareness.
1. Be impeccable with your word
The words and thoughts we tell ourselves can change our beliefs and actions for better or worse. Words are more powerful than you think. If our reality is just a set of beliefs, labels, and concepts, then our words are the building blocks that construct that reality. Your internal dialogue will influence what actually becomes of your life. Negative words sabotage the situation by creating a story that you believe. Positive words can lead you to achieve things beyond what you thought was possible. Be conservative and mindful with your words, both with yourself and others.
I’ll use an example involving my wife to illustrate. She’s a brilliant woman and judge—one of the smartest people I know—but she convinced herself that she is poor at math. She asked for my help with one part of her job that requires her to do basic calculations. It’s an annual requirement. After reviewing her work a few times, it became obvious that she knew exactly what she was doing. She got the calculations right every time! Yet she still insisted I review her work even after showing repeated perfection. Deep down, she doubted herself so deeply. This belief obviously isn’t based on reality; it’s based on her internal dialogue whispering that she isn’t good enough. Words hold tremendous power.
2. Don’t take anything personally
In the same way that words create reality, your words are also a product of your reality. When you take other people’s words personally you are being selfish. Everybody has a different vantage point when judging a situation. The way they communicate their perception is a reflection of their reality, not the reality of the situation. Don’t take someone’s hurtful words personally; if you look at it from their point of view, it probably has little (if anything) to do with you. If you shared the same reality you would know no better than to act and speak in exactly the same way as they do.
I once worked with two partners who had a deep and brooding resentment for each other. One felt he’d been carrying the business for years without any appreciation from the other. The other deeply respected the work ethic of his partner but never vocalized his feelings. Their business almost split apart until we got them talking in the same room and realized their problem was one of miscommunication—two people with different vantage points, different realities, and different ways of using their words. Using the four agreements, the partners reconciled and have had a positive relationship since.
3. Don’t make assumptions
We all have a natural tendency to assume things. The world is less chaotic if we accept that our understanding of reality reflects the truth. Our world could not function if we wallowed in perpetual self-doubt and uncertainty about reality. Assumptions are essential, but they can also be destructive.
Assumptions aren’t always right. Our view of the world is created by facts (which are often incomplete) and beliefs (which may not be based on facts). Most of us once believed the world was flat and that the universe revolved around us. These assumptions created order and peace in our minds as we walked in a world of great uncertainty. But those beliefs were certainly not based on fact, and they did not reflect reality. One of the greatest challenges is discerning between the concrete (real, truth, and fact) and the incomplete (beliefs, assumptions, etc.). We become greater leaders when we accept that our perceptions of reality are incomplete.
4. Always do your best
Always do the best you can, regardless of your situation. Your performance will fluctuate on a day-to-day basis based on changing circumstances that are both within and beyond our control. Accept these circumstances and always do your best for that day. You will have deep satisfaction when you have done your best.
It is not useful to compare today’s performance to yesterday’s, or to someone else’s. Such comparisons will slow your potential and the potential of those around you. However, we make such comparisons all the time. Early on in my career, the company I worked for entrusted me with an important project. The person who managed the project the previous year blew past the targets, so the stakes were high. During the project, I suffered a concussion, and my performance took a major hit. I couldn’t put in the hours to meet the target; my brain literally hurt. At first, I beat myself up about my performance and the impending defeat. But then I accepted my altered circumstances and acknowledged my efforts. No, I wasn’t putting in the time my predecessor had or that I put in before the injury. I was putting in as much time as I possibly could. In these unfavorable circumstances, it was all I could ask for. And so I accepted my circumstances and resolved to have the deep satisfaction of knowing that I had done my best.
These four agreements are fundamentally about integrity. In some ways, they go against the grain of what our society teaches and what the average person values. We live in an ego-driven world, where sometimes the drive for greatness comes from a feeling of deep insecurity. Nowhere is the ego embedded in these agreements.
These agreements have many powerful teachings. Yes, they teach you that your mindset is but a construct, but they also teach you compassion and integrity. They teach you to lead with compassion. They teach you that sometimes in life you will fail to live up to your expectations; and so will others. You will make mistakes; as others will too. Being human is complicated. We are all the products of the illusions that make up our realities. But we create our realities. What reality will you create?
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June 17, 2019
The #1 Reason Your Competitors Are Beating You
Are you a leader struggling to achieve your vision? Are your “winning” strategies good in theory but lackluster in reality? ls your market dominated by a few giants that leave you feeling like David up against Goliath?
You’re not alone if you’ve ever felt this way. I’ve experienced this at many different points in my life, in sports, school, and business.
The first time was when I was in junior high when I tried out for the basketball team. Growing up I was always athletic, reasonably fast, good jumping ability, and until this moment a great basketball player. Our team was good but not great, and I felt I would have a great chance at making the team. That was until I showed up for the first day of tryouts.
I was like, where did they find these giants? First thing they did was weigh and measure all of us. Buzz Harris and I were the only two kids that were not even five feet tall. The rest of these kids look like seven-footers. Of course I am exaggerating, but some these kids were dunking, and there were a few kids that were 6′7″ in 8th grade. The ones who were not so tall made me feel like I was running in place. Sure enough, I choked on the second day, rolled my ankle and used that as excuse not to show up to tryouts any more. I never even gave myself a chance to make the team. Later, in high school I again had a chance to try out for a team. Things were different. I was now six feet tall and could jump above the rim. I had real skills. I showed up twice and again convinced myself I was not as good as the other kids on the court.
How did this happen?
This story isn’t unique. The Goliaths always seem impossible to beat until someone does. Most industries have at least 100 companies trying to beat the Goliath, but only one or two ever do. What do they do differently from all the others trying to bring the giant down?
I spent years haunted by that question. Despite never making a school sports team, I still wanted to be an athlete. For years I played intramural leagues and was always one of the better players.. For a while, I was convinced that I was the problem: that I wasn’t smart enough, fast enough, resilient enough, strong enough—you name it, I thought it. It wasn’t until my adulthood that I discovered an important truth: my problem was my mindset, not my abilities.
The best-selling authors of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works would agree. Written by A.G Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, and Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management, the main concept of their book is simple: strategy is about winning, and winning is about making choices on how and where to play. They pull on years of professional experience as top managers as they set out to demystify strategy and to coach managers on bringing a discipline of strategic thinking and strategic practice alive within an organization.
Their view is that there are three motivational categories into which every person and organization can be grouped: those that are promotion-focused, prevention-focused, and completely checked out.
Playing to Participate
Playing to participate describes a company or an individual that has completely checked out. They’ve decided that participation is the greatest accomplishment they can achieve. Winning is not even on their radar. They’ve given up before they’ve even started. They lose every time.
Playing Not to Lose
This mindset is prevention-focused. Prevention-focused people and companies are vigilant and play to not lose. They see their goals as responsibilities and concentrate on staying safe. They worry about what might go wrong if they don’t work hard enough or aren’t careful enough. They hang on to what they have, to maintain the status quo. These companies are often risk-averse and fail to make the tough choices and significant investments that would make winning even a remote possibility.
Playing to Win
Promotion-focused people and companies see their goals as creating a path to gain or advancement and concentrate on the final reward that accompanies achieving them. They are eager, and they play to win. Promotion-focused people and companies are those comfortable taking chances, who like to work quickly, who dream big and think creatively. They’ll do whatever it takes to achieve their ambitious goals.
I’ve used their framework for strategy and it is simple, yet powerful. Your strategy is determined by your answers to five closely interrelated questions that cascade down from the top and filter up to refine and reinforce the choices above. In general, there are fewer choice cascades for smaller companies (in fact there may only be one), whereas in larger organizations there may be sub-levels of choices.
What is your winning aspiration?
This is the most important—yet broadest—question you must first ask yourself. Your aspiration states why you exist, what you seek to be, and what winning looks like for you. It will allow you to recognize whether you are playing to win or just playing not to lose, and lead you to define what winning looks like at various levels.
Where will you play?
The question of where you will play is the first of the key questions that forces you to refine your strategy. Choosing the industry is like finding the right playing field. You’ll never win a football game on a squash court. Your team will never win the NBA finals if you’re enrolled in a high school league. If you try to play in every field concurrently, you’ll end up underperforming and failing in all sectors. To achieve your aspiration, you need to decide where you’ll compete, and where you’ll not compete. You can go for a narrow or broad choice, but you must choose.
How will you win?
Once you’ve chosen where to play and defined what winning means, you need to define how to win in the space you chose. You’ve probably already discussed the strengths, model, and value proposition you need to gain a competitive advantage in your industry. Refine this now that you’ve stepped back and asked the big questions that ensure you’ve placed your organization in the right field. There are heaps of strategies available for you to choose. Broadly, you can go for a price or product differentiation strategy, or any combination of the two if that’s what you need to win in your playing field.
What capabilities must be in place?
Your core capabilities are the entire set of activities that jointly allow you to implement your where-to-play and how-to-win strategic choices. An activity system is a visual representation of these capabilities. A small business may have 1 activity system for the whole company, while a large corporation will have different activity systems for each business unit.
What management systems are required?
Having a sound strategy isn’t enough. At the end of the day, it takes thoughtful and directed manpower to put your winning strategy into place. To win, your organization needs supporting systems and structures for your employees to do their job effectively, as well as key performance indicators that tell you how well you’re delivering on your strategic choices.
I realized after reading this book that I never made a team because I was playing to participate instead of playing to win. But what was most transformative was realizing that I’d I spent the first quarter of my life falling short of my goals and letting others take the prize I pined for because I was playing not to lose. Total paradigm shift!
So I ask you this: Are you going to be one of the hundreds of Davids that fail to take down Goliath? Or are you playing to win?
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June 11, 2019
Mindsets that Unlock Greatness
“What’s the most valuable thing in your life?”
A Rolex watch? A college diploma? A loving partner? A business ripe with potential?
I was once asked this by a teacher in college, and it changed my life. I still remember that cold day in December, and the energy of the classroom was in a major slump. Finals were approaching, and the hours and hours spent studying late into the night started to show up in the eyes of my peers. Our spirits were weak. I’d almost skipped class that day.
My professor usually dove right into the material, leaving no time for our tired minds to recollect where we had left off the previous week. This week he stood at the front of the room with fire in his eyes and looked eagerly out at his students.
Unsurprisingly, the room remained silent after he posed the question. “Go on,” he encouraged. “We’re not moving on until someone answers my question.” Sheepishly, I put up my hand and said, “My family, since they’ve given me wisdom beyond my years.” The teacher nodded in agreement and turned to the rest of the room. “Anyone else?” A chorus of responses echoed back: “My computer because it is a gateway to infinite knowledge,” “Nelson Mandela’s biography because it taught me how to lead.” And the answers continued.
“You have all provided logical answers and identified things that one should cherish, but that’s not what I asked,” replied the professor. “I asked you to tell me what the most valuable thing you own is. You have all missed the one thing that can’t be taken away from you, that you alone control, and that you will have for life. It happens to be the most powerful thing you’ll ever own. It’s your mind.”
The professor was correct. Everything we need is right there in our head. Our minds possess incredible power. The way we perceive the world shapes our entire existence. It’s remarkable to know that no two people will experience the world in the same way. No two minds see the world the same way, and thus no two people behave the same way.
The mind is your most valuable asset, yet how much attention do you give it? We all universally carve time into our schedules for work, education, food, housekeeping, sleep—the list goes on. But do you carve time into your schedule for your mind?
“Your mind is a flexible mirror; adjust it to see the world better”. — Amit Ray
There are three important things we need to understand how our own minds work:
Mindsets are not fixed. Modes of thinking are developed from messages in society, interactions with others, and experiences at home, work, and school. As an example, take the “win no matter the cost” mindset of professional athletes. Most people don’t self-sacrifice and put the collective objective before everything else the way athletes do. It takes training to see the world with that level of laser-focus. This unique athlete mindset is not innate. It is curated through interactions with teammates, coaching, and immersion in an ultra-competitive field. It is as much a product of sociology as it is biology.
Our thoughts are habitual. Our minds are always processing the environment and racing with thoughts that don’t get half a second of attention from our higher consciousness. The thinking habits we’ve created will play out over and over again until we change the way we process these events. Just because they’re unnoticed doesn’t mean they aren’t important. These unconscious thoughts can dramatically shape the way we see the world. If our unconscious is saying: “I don’t feel good enough,” our mind slowly starts to believe that we truly aren’t good enough. All of a sudden we will stop taking risks and chasing after what we want. These thoughts are merely whispers on the surface of our mind, but when put on autopilot (as they are 99% of the time) they become habit, action, and then behavior.
We are in complete control. In personality psychology, the “locus of control” is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives. There are two loci of control: internal and external. People with a strong internal locus of control believe that events in their life are derived primarily from their actions: for example, when receiving negative feedback from a customer, they see their team’s abilities as the problem requiring improvement. People that tend towards an external locus of control believe that their successes or failures result from external factors beyond their control, such as luck, fate, circumstance, injustice, and bias from others who are unfair, prejudiced, or unskilled. Someone with an external locus of control would think the negative customer feedback is the fault of the customer who is too difficult or too stupid to understand. An internal locus of control breeds a strong sense of ownership over one’s actions that allows companies to adapt, be nimble, and prosper. I urge you to adopt an internal locus of control.
Shifting your mindset is a massive undertaking that requires intensive effort. But it’s an effort that is well-placed for top leaders in the company. Your mindset affects everything: it affects your decision-making and appetite for risk. It affects your strategy and ability to pull your team out of ruts. It affects the mindset of your employees as it trickles down throughout all levels of the organization.
Is your business in a critical period of “do-or-die”? Is it time for your company to have a mindset cleanse? Are you longing to be an unstoppable leader?
Our five-week mindset series is perfect for anybody saying “yes” to those questions. We’ve thoughtfully designed it to give your mindset a chance to reset. Each week we will cover a thoughtfully curated power mindset that will lead your business to success. We will teach you psychological hacks used in sport, powerful agreements to keep laser-focus, management techniques to build unstoppable teams, and new mental scripts that boost confidence. You’ll unlock greatness not only in yourself, but in your entire company.
Your mindset is your most valuable asset. Your mindset can act as a catalyst for greatness or a lid to success. The mindset of the top leader knows great power. It is a worthy—if not critical—investment. The time for you to act is now.
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June 3, 2019
The Ultimate Rulebook for Next-Level Productivity
Ah, productivity. Sweet, sweet productivity. If you’re anything like me, you’ll agree that having a productive day is one of the best feelings in the world.
When you close your eyes and think of ultimate productivity, what comes to mind? A few of the scenes that dance behind my eyes are crushing our sales goal, having a meeting with a client that leads to breakthrough thinking and action, and meeting with my team and clarifying actions and seeing everyone motivated to drive our number one priority forward. I can just taste the sweetness of those moments.
Did you know that you can create a workplace as adrenaline-filled and productive as all of those moments? One where your team has hyper-productivity without impending burnout?
I want you to take a minute to remember the peak moments of your team’s productivity. Those times when your team literally did the impossible. When they moved mountains, If you’re like most company owners, these moments happened organically, not intentionally. Often our efforts to motivate our teams to fall flat or go completely unnoticed. That’s why we’re going to teach you leadership strategies to keep your team’s productivity hyper-focused and more importantly, under your control.
Let me show you how.
Your Problem is Not Your Employees
Let’s get one thing clear: your employees are not the problem if you’re struggling with workplace productivity. It’s an easy mental trap to fall into and we are all guilty of it. In a way, it’s rational. If you’re putting in 100% effort to achieve your objectives and they’re still not being achieved, then the problem must be your employees, right?The truth is that their workplace productivity is complicated. It’s a lot more than just the sum of the different parts. That’s why there are experts like Jordan Cohen, who have spent their entire career studying this complex phenomenon. Cohen says we have to change the way we think about productivity to create effective strategies to improve it. Let’s start with two important metal shifts.First, stop thinking about productivity as something within individuals and think about it instead as something produced by individuals. Productivity isn’t a “have” or “have-not” situation. It’s not about whether your employees are innately productive, but whether they are choosing to exercise their ability to be productive.Second, think about productivity on an organizational level, not an individual level. It’s not about having productive employees in your workplace but having a productive workplace culture for your employees.
In other words, you are in control. Productivity is not a “luck of the draw” matter that depends solely on the people you recruit. Leadership’s role is to manage the collective productivity of the company by shifting culture, setting priorities, buffering unreasonable expectations, and focusing your team’s energy. There are loads of strategies you can employ. We list the most important of them below.
Clean Up Your House
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that leading by example is one of the best ways to increase the productivity of your entire workplace. After all, the job of the CEO is to be the visionary force that inspires the team to fulfill the organization’s potential. Your team has to trust that you have the chops to execute what they are working towards. You also need technical knowledge to improve your team’s productivity. Leading by example is the key to keeping productivity from going sour.I’ll give you a personal example. I once made a switch between departments after getting promoted. The excitement I started my new position with quickly faded as I adjusted to the culture of this new team that quite frankly, sucked. The employees were unhappy and gossiped about management, my colleagues were defensive and uncollaborative, and the management would offset responsibilities on team members that couldn’t finish the job. It was impossible to get anything done. The reason for our dysfunction was our poor leadership. We had a director who would stroll into the office at 11 am and leave whenever he pleased. He would expect team members to work 80 hour weeks to meet deadlines they didn’t know had been set. The team was a mess, but cleaning up the leadership is the only thing that could have saved this failing team.
Mobilize Your Team on the Big Rocks
One of the essential skills your team needs to learn is how to differentiate task management from priority management. Learning how to put “first things first” is one of the vital productivity pillars of the recurring bestseller that Stephen R. Covey wrote 30 years ago called “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I’ll recount his brilliant illustration below.One day a professor pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed mason jar and set it on a table in front of his classroom. He grabbed a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them one at a time into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked the class, “Is this jar full?”. With certainty, everyone said, “Yes.””Really?” he said as he reached under the table and revealed a bucket of gravel. He dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, causing pieces of gravel to wedge into the spaces between the big rocks. He smiled and asked the group once more, “Is the jar full?” By this time, the class was onto him. “Probably not,” one of them answered. “Good!” he replied and reached under the table to bring out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in, and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more, he asked the question, “Is this jar full?” “No!” the class shouted. He smiled and grabbed a pitcher of water and poured it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then he looked up at the class and asked, “What is the point of this illustration?”One student raised his hand and said, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try hard, you can always fit some more things into it.” “No,” the professor replied, “that’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is this: If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”
Make Your Priorities The Driving Force
I want you to think about your organization as a human body. If this were the case, your employees and team members would be the skeleton. Your daily activities and procedures would be the muscles. Your quarterly priorities and annual objectives would be the blood that runs through your organization’s veins.Like blood to the body, your priorities and objectives touch every aspect of the organization. They bring energy and motivation to your teams. They are the driving force of your organization. Humans don’t get a monthly injection of blood that supplies them with all the blood they need for a month. Blood is produced, recycled, and refined every minute of the day to keep our bodies working optimally. Your priorities should have the same level of importance in your company.You can’t present your priorities in an ad-hoc manner once at the beginning of the quarter if you want your team to be intensely focused and motivated on achieving these priorities. They should be communicated and referred to daily. They should be continuously refined and adapted to sudden changes in the environment. They should be created in collaboration with your managers and staff who are intimately connected to your customers.Achieving next level productivity isn’t just within your control; it’s within your reach.
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May 27, 2019
Implementing Radical Candor to Drive Great Results
You’re a manager. Congratulations! You’ve been bestowed with the incredible opportunity of calling the shots, setting the strategy and leading the team towards success! You’ve also been loaded with responsibility and scrutiny from both those above and below you. You’ve now got to organize and care for a whole team of people. For all it’s glory, management can be tricky, even with the easiest of employees. The struggle is real.
You’re not alone if “overwhelming” is the word you use to describe your management job. A 2011 Brett-Koehler survey revealed that 90% of managers don’t feel they have the skills to manage. Up to 68% confess to hating being a manager.
The workplace is yearning for candid bosses and bosses yearn equally for a workplace that allows them to be candid. Fear of conflict and upsetting others stops this ideal from becoming commonplace. We’re instructed clearly from a young age: “don’t say anything at all if you can’t say anything nice” but this isn’t effective and is ruinous to managers whose job is to have these difficult conversations.
Luckily, there’s a new order in store for managers. Radical Candor is Kim Scott’s management philosophy about developing relationships to drive organizational success. Her book is inspired by her own experience as a top manager at Google and Apple, in supplement to management case studies from other geniuses such as Steve Jobs. At its core, radical candor is a set of simple principles designed to make employees and managers not just only love their work, but whom they work with too.
The formula is simple. It’s about creating teams that care deeply and challenge directly from all directions to drive incredible results. This description is but a taste of her compelling work; you can refer to our blog post from last week here to get a full meal’s worth of her philosophy.
Let’s put this new paradigm into practice and jump into the next phase of radical candor: implementation. But do catch yourself up on last week first; it’s crucial to wrestle with the concepts before you try to implement them.
Scott gives managers five tools to bring their teams to the radically candid sweet spot.
Establish Trust
Stay Centered
We’re all familiar with what to do on an airplane should the oxygen cut out.“Put on your mask before helping others” rings across every airplane before take-off. The oxygen mask rule holds true for management more than anyone else. You can’t give a damn about others if you don’t give a damn about yourself. You can’t manage, care for or guide other people properly if you don’t help yourself first. We’ve all felt stressed to the edge of insanity before. This place can’t be your norm; you have to step away from stress and into centered-living to manage candidly.
Work-life integration
We often think of work-life balance as a zero-sum game. Anything that you put into your work life robs your personal life and vice versa. The world is full of antiquated platitudes that perpetuate this myth such as “Working overtime means you’re an emotionally unavailable partner” or “having children makes it impossible to advance your career.” This simply isn’t true. Work-life balance isn’t a zero-sum game. Success in your personal life can benefit your work, as can professional success in your personal life. I challenge you instead to think of balance as work-life integration. Think of it as both coming together to create the story that is you.
Free at work
Everybody needs freedom at work. Nobody works effectively (see also: happily) when they’re micro-managed or treated as electronic paper-pushers! You can create an environment where employees thrive by relinquishing authoritarian control and giving employees ownership of some sort. It’s your choice as the manager to strategize the amount and type of freedom employees are given – but I urge you to trust them enough to let go of control. They may very well go above and beyond your expectations.
Socializing at work
The best way to get to know your employees is on the job. Make socializing with your employees a part of your everyday rhythm. It’ll humanize you and allow you to build genuine relationships with your employees. It doesn’t have to be lengthy to be profound.
Bear in mind that alcohol creates a sub-optimal condition for socializing. So don’t bank on relationship-building happening at the annual Christmas party.
Setting and respecting boundaries
“Setting boundaries” is deceitful; the reality is that they exist. Everybody has things that make them tick. Find out what those things are for your employees when giving feedback.
I’ll give you a personal example. I had an employee who would anger when told “not to take things personally.” I never understood why. From my standpoint, the problem wasn’t her; the problem was her work. I realized once I got to know her that her work was a part of her; she cared so deeply that she genuinely viewed it as an extension of her. Once I learned this, I stopped making this comment to her. This simple fix allowed us to hold onto an excellent employee that later became one of my most trusted advisors.
General Guidance
Criticize in private
Humans are complicated. They bring their whole selves to work, including their feelings. Sometimes the reason you’ve created tension between yourself and an employee has nothing to do with what or even how you said it; the problem was where it was said.Receiving constructive feedback is tough enough on its own. It can be humiliating to have your shortcomings made public in front of your superiors or team members. A simple way to build trust is to keep it in until you can find a private moment to share the feedback. And as a bonus, this will give you time to strategize how you will frame your feedback.
Embrace discomfort and welcome criticism
You are the exception of the “criticize in the private” rule. Why? Because you need to demonstrate to everyone that you (the boss) are receptive to feedback to change the culture. The more you open yourself up to feedback, the more your employees will as well. Plus it’ll be a learning opportunity to learn from your employees about how to give feedback, and how not to give feedback.
Impromptu Guidance
Guidance can’t always shouldn’t always come in a structured form during a meeting. It’s often more powerful to give feedback right away. Imagine working on something all week only to have had your efforts amount to nothing because your manager saved their feedback for your weekly meeting. You wouldn’t be pleased. You’ve got to strike the right balance between urgency and strategy when giving feedback. Timing is everything.
Formal Reviews
Most organizations have annual or semi-annual reviews to evaluate their employees’ performance formally. The general structure is to merge the manager’s feedback with those of their peers, be it in an anonymous way or not. Performance reviews are an opportunity to guide your employees down a constructive path. However, , your process needs needs revamping. Scott gives a few suggestions:
Ask for feedback first. Start by listening to your employees so you can understand how the shortcomings of your management influenced their performance. This will frame the rest of the conversation to be constructive, not critical.
No surprises. Your feedback should be frequent enough that your employees know what is coming. Performance improvement plans are scary for employees, whose livelihood depends on their job. Nobody’s performance will improve with the surprise of this added stress.
Write everything down before giving feedback. Commit yourself to give the whole picture, even if the conversation gets tough. This includes the bad.
Follow the 50/50 rule. Half of your conversation should be spent reviewing the past. The other half should be focused on the future.
Teams
Employees don’t work in isolation; isn’t it kind of funny we’ve decided to review them that way? Deliverables aren’t met by the results of one person alone either. They’re an amalgamation of the team’s coordinator efforts. I encourage you to reconsider the balance you’ve struck between evaluating the individuals versus the team.
Team Feedback
Consider reviewing your employees as teams, not individuals. Why not revitalize your feedback by making it a team affair? Striving to contribute to the team can be a powerful way to motivate struggling employees.
Career Conversations
Understand employees long-term visions and hopes for their career and life. Ask them their life story to find out what motivates them and why they’ve made the choices they have. Ask them their dreams and see if you can find alignment between these dreams and your organization’s evolution.
Create a 3-18 month plan.
Come up with clear ways to see how your organization can become a force to propel your employee along their life’s vision. Determine how you can equip them with the skills they need to become a powerful implementer of their dream.
Results
The final piece of wisdom Scott offers concerns results-driven feedback. Her philosophy of overt and ongoing feedback forms her recommendation for communicating results. She encourages leaders to consider four different types of meetings:
1-to-1 Conversation: Have a weekly or semi-weekly touchpoint with each employee, where possible.
Staff Meetings: Focus on orienting your team on the lessons learned from the previous week and mobilizing them around the three goals of the upcoming week.
Big Debate Meetings: Hold meetings to initiate discussion on critical internal and external challenges with your teams. Make it clear that the goal is not to reach consensus but rather to have a candid conversation.
Big Decision Meetings: Follow debate meetings with decision meetings where others reach consensus and find common ground.
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May 20, 2019
How to Deliver Feedback to Unlock Your Best Team Ever
Have you ever found yourself fuming after someone told you not to take their criticism “personally?” Have you ever struggled to give clear, direct feedback to employees without hurting their feelings or worse, negatively affecting their performance?
You’re not alone if you’ve ever found yourself on either end of this spectrum. Both of these scenarios play out regularly in the workplace. Giving feedback in the workplace is a powerful tool for achieving results. It’s essential to managing teams. It’s also incredibly challenging to do correctly. Most of us fail miserably.
This is especially burdensome for managers. From the time we learn to speak, we’re told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. This advice doesn’t work for managers or anyone who works on a team. In other words, everyone that works in your organization. Everyone who works in your organization is responsible for delivering results. They’re trusted to deliver on their projects, complete a task, serve a customer, and to do their part to meet the organization’s objectives. But they can’t do it alone; their job is to lead, to delegate, to manage, and to get things done. Having difficult conversations with subordinates, colleagues, and superiors needs to happen to deliver results and get the job done.
These conversations can be daunting. If conducted poorly, can ruin a relationship with a colleague and compromise the productivity of an entire team. Making conversations effective is a tremendous opportunity that has much room for improvement in every organization we have encountered. Kim Scott is an exception.
Fixing the feedback problem is her mission. She’s the creative genius behind “Radical Candor,” a novel that is rising to the top of Executive’s reading lists. Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google before making the switch to Apple University, where she developed classes on optimal management. Embedding vivid storytelling and case studies, as well as psychological and organizational theory, she has created a compelling yet practical framework to teach managers how to be awesome bosses.
Her new management philosophy for being a “kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” focuses on creating an enabling environment for effective, results-driven teams. The four main pillars of her strategy are: to build radically candid relationships, to get, give and encourage guidance, to understand what motivates each person on your team, and to drive results collaboratively.
Build Radically Candid Relationships
There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes into being a manager. Or an employee. On the one hand, work is highly impersonal – it’s a matter of the job being done right or not. On the other hand, it is incredibly personal – it’s a compilation of your best efforts over a few weeks, months or years. In some cases, this can literally include blood, sweat, and tears.
Great bosses acknowledge this and develop strong relationships with their employees. They make their trust and respect in their employees known. Great teams recognize that they must have trust, care, and honesty with everyone on the team. They have no exceptions. The radical candor method shows that the best bosses do two distinct things: they care personally and challenge directly.
Caring involves leaving the notion of keeping it entirely “professional” at the door, and treating your employees as true equals. Caring means acknowledging that we are all human beings with human struggles and feelings, not emotionless robots. It also means steadfastly discarding the damaging sense of superiority that can impede personal connection.
Challenging directly is a two-way street where both the manager and employee care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and to admit their mistakes. When paired with caring, it can allow both parties to build the best relationship of your career.
Create a Culture of Open Communication
Radical candor is a bit of a paradox: it’s much about being honest and authentic as it is about being strategic and intentional in your communication. Caring personally and challenging directly are the two dimensions of proper guidance that help achieve radical candor. But you can easily fall short on one – or even both – of those dimensions and end up in a less-than-ideal relationship with your employee. The table below gives an overview of three toxic states of guidance.
In essence, obnoxious aggression is when management acts without taking two seconds to show they care. The result is employees that feel belittled, undervalued, humiliated – the list goes on. Manipulative insincerity is the second poor guidance form. This happens when you don’t care enough to challenge directly, so you end up giving praise in place of criticism. It can be political – an attempt to “get ahead” by being fake – but produces no growth for either party. The final category is ruinous empathy. It’s an attempt to keep the peace at work. But avoiding or even intentionally overlooking poor performance to avoid tension produces measly results, and the team performance as a whole will suffer.
Understand What Motivates Each Person on Your Team
Each person on your team is motivated by different external and internal factors. They all have different ambitions and skill-sets. Some are “rock-stars” that want to stay focused on their craft. They find their work rewarding and don’t need another promotion to feel fulfilled. Others are “superstars” that need to be challenged and given opportunities to explore growth and fulfill their potential. Both are equally valuable to a team.
Typically, talent management focuses on the superstars and sourcing ways to keep them engaged. This approach doesn’t work for rockstars who’s motivation comes from things unrelated to their growth trajectory. Ditch the “one-size-fits-all” formula for performance management and start identifying the unique motivators of each person to maximize the performance of your employees and team as a whole.
In a similar vein, managers often focus on struggling employees to get their performance up to par. This might be good for the individual, but it probably isn’t for the team. Imagine if you invested that time in making your good employees great, or your great employees phenomenal. Focusing your energy on excellence as opposed to mediocrity is a quick way to boost the performance of the team unit.
Drive Results Collaboratively
We all want to get things done as efficiently as possible, and sometimes the quickest and easiest way is to tell people what to do. Kim Scott calls this the “get shit done” (GSD) wheel. Knowing how to get things done without being autocratic is an art that takes effort to curate. Laying the groundwork for collaboration releases your team from the GSD wheel that stifles creativity in the short run, and ruins relationships in the long run.
There are seven simple steps to create teams that excel at both productivity and collaboration:
Listen
Actively welcome the voices of all team members and candidly listen to their suggestions to create a culture of listening. This shows your employees that you value their contributions. Strive to incorporate an element of their feedback into your solution where possible.
Clarify
Ask for clarification if you don’t understand the point your employee is trying to make. It’s a way of showing engagement. The idea may have tremendous insight even if expressed poorly. Your role as a boss is like that of an editor, not an author.
Debate
The debate takes time and energy, true. But the good debate also gives back time, in the form of efficiency, and gives back energy, in the form of motivated and impassioned employees. Scott suggests the following rules to guide your debates: keep the conversation focused on ideas, not egos, create an obligation to dissent, pause for emotion/exhaustion, use humor and have fun, be clear about when the debate will end. Don’t jump rapidly to a decision just because the debate has gotten painful.
Decide
To escape the GSD wheel, you need to create a transparent decision-making process that empowers the people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible, as opposed to always taking the reins.
Persuade
Once your decision has been made, you need to convince others to get on board with the decision to execute it. The lift for this will be lighter if they’ve been involved with the decision-making process through active debate and listening.
Execute
Part of a boss’s job is to take the “collaboration tax” on themselves so that his or her team can spend more time executing. Follow these simple rules: don’t waste your team’s time, keep the “dirt under your fingernails” by getting involved in the actual work and block time to execute.
Learn
Good bosses learn from their mistakes and are intentional in implementing lessons learned the next time around. And yet, denial is the more common reaction to imperfection than learning. Guard yourself against the two enormous pressures that lead bosses to quit: pressure to be perfect and burnout.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by this step-wise checklist. It isn’t intended to become your rulebook for structuring your conversations. In fact, it’s more of a description of how your conversations will start to flow once you adopt a collaboratively candid management style naturally. These conversations don’t have to be lengthy to be rich – try it and see.
Radical candor can transform organizations and even lend themselvesa competitive advantage in the industry. It creates a workplace where employees are engaged and respected, and where management is sensitized to their areas of improvement. Radical candor leads to innovations in processes and mitigation in risks. It can empower your organization to execute winning strategies.
Steve Jobs was famous for getting into heated debates with his employees over his ideas. He wanted them to tell him when his idea was terrible. He wanted his ideas to be challenged and refined into their purest form of perfection. Apple is one of the most innovative and nimble multinational corporations in the world because of his open and welcoming approach to feedback, which continues on today. Radical candor is guinuinely a win-win.
In the spirit of irony, allow me to be honest with you: radical candor is challenging to implement. Not every organization is ready for this cultural transformation. I encourage you to be one of the few that is.
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