Stephen R. Graves's Blog, page 6

The Modern Leader: Using Your Head and Having Heart

Nelson Mandela said, “A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”

In our life and work, though, we often choose one or the other.

For most of the 20th century, the business world valued only the head. Feelings and people skills didn’t matter. Just get the job done. (Instead, it seemed like being a jerk was a prerequisite for success.) This task-driven approach to leadership was heavily dependent on a left-brain addiction to linear logic, and American businesses flourished. Have spreadsheet and strategic plan, will travel. And so it was.

In the 21st century, though, the pendulum swung. People who grew up with parents from the automation age didn’t buy this head-centered approach to leadership. They saw the life carnage of that world and refused to sign up. When they were old enough to start their own businesses and write their own business books, they wrote a very different story. They saw that every business transaction is actually a human interaction. They were right.

But top business leaders know that Mandela was also right. You need both. You need a good head and a good heart.

Using Your Head

There are reasons why the analytical leader with intense drive is often successful — he or she is smart, focused, determined, and productive. 

And intense drive is important. After all, much of business remains dependent on left-brain logic, and it always will be. Michael Porter said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Strategy equals choice. Strategy requires hard, purposeful thought.

The bottom line is still the bottom line. Every business deal is a very complex series of chess moves that must be mapped on a moving board with multiple threats on all sides. The more complex a business decision is, the more time and energy must be spent understanding every little detail and how each part fits into the whole. 

You have to use your head for this. You don’t just want to feel good about a project; you want to nail it. Most business failures invariably can be traced back to overlooked flaws in the original plan or the daily execution. Even innovation is not simply finding the great idea deep inside but really hard head work.

What about you? Do you feel comfortable doing quantitative and qualitative analysis? Can you set aside personal frustration in order to stay focus? Do you consider risk when making significant decisions? Do you believe that playing your role well and steadying the business is a gift to your people? Do you know the key gauges and metrics for your department?

A smile and a handshake are helpful, but it’s often the toilsome work spent behind the scenes that will determine the success of the project. 

Having Heart

The realization of the heart’s importance to leadership in the last twenty-five years, however, was a long-overdue correction. Head-only businesses have a massive blind spot: People do not follow organizational charts or spreadsheets or 5-year plans — people follow people.

The re-appreciation of a leader with a high EQ (Emotional Quotient) was a breath of fresh air. The business world (including venture capital firms) slowly began to realize that not just our intellect, but all of our senses are crucial to accurate perception and decision-making. We need to listen not just to reason, but to our gut, as well.  

I remember after the Sago, West Virginia, coal mine disaster in 2006, the owner of the holding company of the mine hesitated on national television to say he would make a personal contribution to a relief fund for families. This was a guy who was a master at squeezing profit out of businesses. He was a master with his head, but in a time of human tragedy, he had disregarded the heart. It was a sad display of sound leadership. 

What about you? Are you able to easily empathize with those you lead? Are you known for strong connectivity and relationship building? Is it important to you to understand the situation behind underperformers? Do you feel a moral responsibility to help those around you succeed? Do you trust your gut in making decisions?

It’s not just about treating co-workers right (though it includes that). It’s about exuding to co-workers, customers, and clients that you care about making not just the right business decision but the right decision. Period. 

So you do a little extra customer service even though it doesn’t have an immediate payback. You encourage co-workers to go above and beyond on a project to help another department meet a deadline. If you’re a naturally left-brained leader, you ask for help and insight from those who excel at compassion and empathy. 

You need to see with the eyes of your heart along with calculating with the left-brain logic of your brain to most effective as a leader in the modern world. 

Conclusion

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “To handle yourself, use your head. To handle others, use your heart.” That oversimplifies it a bit, but it’s a great starting point. If you swing the pendulum too far either way, bad things happen.

Business is not a séance session. Some of us need to come back to earth and deal with reality. A business that is all heart and no profit will soon be empathetically hugging people as they go out the door just before the lights are turned off. If you aren’t using your head, then don’t be surprised when your heart finds itself under water financially.  Effective leaders constantly update their strategies and plans,  evaluating and re-evaluating the latest data shaping their businesses’ realities. 

At the same time, however, effective leaders don’t work on strategy in a vacuum that locks out emotions. They understand the very real economic value of relationships and the harsh consequences that await an organization that neglects its human capital and its social responsibilities.

Great leaders know that improvement and success depend on having heart as well as using their head.

3 Sources of Superior Performance

“Ma’am, can we step to the side and talk about it?”

That’s what I heard this young assistant manager say, and when I heard it, I was thinking, “This is going to be good.” If I hadn’t already been sitting down, I would have pulled up a chair and watched.

Here’s the situation: I was doing some work at a fast-food restaurant recently, and all of a sudden, a woman stormed in and started making a major scene at the counter. She was in the drive-thru moments earlier, her order had been wrong, and the confusion had irritated her and caused her to be late to work.

Mostly she was just mad. Her volume kept escalating, along with her demands to see someone take the blame and make it right. She wanted blood. Everyone in the restaurant knew it—everyone in line, everyone eating, every employee. Fifty people were watching this early morning made-for-TV drama that she was creating.

After a couple minutes of this craziness, a young assistant manager, maybe 25 years old, walked out of the back and calmly approached the woman, saying, “Ma’am, can we step aside and talk about it?”

She said yes.

He guided her away from the limelight, introduced himself, then, a moment later, asked her to sit down. She stubbornly mumbled – sure.

Then, he said, “I know you’ve said this before, but will you start from the beginning and tell me again what happened.” With steam circling her head, she rolled her eyes but agreed, and told her tale from the beginning, but this time, her volume was decreasing. The manager was listening and nodding.

At the end, he thanked her for sharing her story and apologized in a genuine, non-defensive way and offered her some coupons for free food. Over a seven-minute conversation, the woman, meanwhile, had completely changed her tune. She had gone from saying she’d never eat there again to “I love it here.” All because he sat and listened.

It was textbook. This young manager defused the situation perfectly, eliminating a distraction for other guests and turning an adversary into an advocate. I wanted to stand up and applaud.

Later, when this same assistant manager was making his rounds, I pulled him aside and congratulated him. “That was incredibly well done,” I said. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

“Well,” he said, “I have some natural wiring towards a calming personality, but my dad also taught me how to lay emotions aside during volatile conversations. Then, the restaurant here gave me some great training early on explaining how to handle a situation like that. I just put it into practice.”

Did you hear it? Right there, he gave us his three sources for his superior performance as a young leader / manager.

1.“Natural wiring”—Some people just have a natural talent for certain things. You can’t teach the 80-inch wingspan of Michael Phelps after all. Or like the legendary singer Sammy Davis, Jr., said, “What have I got? No looks. No money. No education. Just talent.” To this point, some people are just great resolvers of conflict, great conversationalists, great strategists, etc.

Action step: Identify the natural gifting of the new talent in your organization. Any manager or leader is performing in handcuffs when they don’t leverage the natural wiring of those under their stewardship. What are the things team members do well that you just can’t teach? How can you put them into position to use those natural strengths?

2. “My dad taught me…”—This is the second half of the nature vs. nurture question. Nurturing and upbringing really does matter. Now, I’m not saying that the son of a CEO will necessarily be a CEO but rather that it’s nice when you can reinforce training rather than create it. Whether it’s a parent or a previous employer, they’ve done a lot of the work for you.

Action step: When hiring, look at a resume and ask questions to determine what kind of training someone has already had. What education do they have? Real-life experience? Where have they overcome adversity? How have they initiated change in the workplace? If you are a parent recommit to teaching and training your children practical tools for life and work.

3. “I got some great training early on…”— Presidents talk about the first 100 days of their administration. When it’s a new employee you have some span of time to effectively train them. Remember people only implement what they buy into and what they understand. And furthermore, if you want them to have a certain skill set you better make sure they are trained in it.

Action step: What are the skills that you new employees and team must have? Don’t overload on the soft or hard skill sets. Balance them out in both. But remember that they need to do more than just read about stuff. Put them into scenarios to buy in and understand. The young man in the restaurant explained the very specific training he received to disarm a hostile customer like he had.

What’s the common denominator? The earlier the training is the better. Whether you’re born with it or it’s your upbringing or it’s on the job training, the sooner you get it the better.

The young assistant manager I watched had all three of these training sources, but here’s the good news: you don’t need all three. One of the three might even be enough. Someone with incredible natural wiring can survive bad training. Someone with no natural wiring can, with work ethic and great training, succeed in these areas.

Since you can’t control the first two, make sure you control the 3rd one and provide phenomenal training for yourself and your employees. Spend time and money designing a training program that equips employees to know the culture and become problem solvers. Harvard Business Review gives some practical tips here.

As this Forbes article points out, training is different from onboarding, but they can happen at the same time. The key to successful training, though, is that it includes both “how” to do things and “why.” This is especially true with millennials, who must buy into the “why” before they’ll commit to the “what.”

Zig Ziglar said, “The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.” Of course, the best option is to train employees and keep them. I know that fast food restaurant would be well served if this manager stuck around. He just saved a customer, turning an enemy into an advocate. And me, into a fan.

The Relatable Producer: Being Results-Driven and People-Focused

Going into the 21st century, Peter Drucker wrote, “The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.”

Two decades into the century, Drucker’s words prove prophetic. The key to sustainable success in the 21st century is people, plain and simple.

Only, notice what Drucker said—it’s not just people; it is people and their productivity.

Conventional wisdom holds that you are either a compassionate people person or a task-driven maniac. The truth, though, is that to achieve long-term results, you cannot afford to neglect either side of the pendulum. I say break all the pendulums! You may be stronger in one, but you have to be proficient in both. 

You have to be results-driven and people-focused.

Results-Driven

In his book The World is Flat,Thomas Friedman wrote, “One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past.”

Friedman wrote that fifteen years ago, but 2020 only proved this point. One of the things that 2020 taught us is that most businesses are not as immune to economic downturns as they thought. There is no inevitable “we will last forever.” Companies must produce results today.

Globalization, in particular, demands this reality. The cost of labor is the Achilles’ heel of American business. Long gone are the days when corporate payrolls had the luxury of fat workforces with departments that got anything they wanted. It is more expensive for someone in America to do something than it is for someone in India to do the same thing. That means you must deliver more value per hour if you want to keep making a living. 

Put another way, results aren’t optional if you want next month’s paycheck. There is no insulation from the reality of the market or its rigorous, competitive demands. As Winston Churchill said, “No matter how beautiful the strategy, one should occasionally look at the results.” 

And this falls on the manager. Every manager has to manage a team so that the team produces results—clear, quantifiable results.

Does the following describe you?

Do you deliver and over-deliver on results when given a task?Can you say no to assignments or requests that are unreasonable, or you otherwise know you can’t accomplish?Do the people you lead have clear goals and performance metrics?Are your goals known by the team and not constantly moving?Do you hold underperformers accountable?

If this isn’t you, there are many tools to help grow productivity (and it helps to differentiate productivity from hours). The book Traction by Gino Wickmanoffers one helpful structure for clarity and results, but there are others as well. Get curious. Ask friends and peers for best practices on driving results. 

But results are only one side of the coin. 

People-Focused

You cannot get where you need to go without the help of other stakeholders. You need people—focused, energetic, and positive people—who are willing to create your organization’s next chapter alongside you. 

You also can’t fake caring about people just to get results out of them. (And you shouldn’t want to.) You should genuinely focus on your people.

In this day and age, of course, focus on people is nonnegotiable. Millennial and Gen Z employees demand a work culture where relationships are developed and people are shown respect. With whom they work is as important to them as what they do. The same goes for customers and vendors. It is one huge, symbiotic web of relational links. With price squeezed to the max, decisions increasingly come down to relationships built on integrity and trust.

And it works. In 2015, Harvard Business Review found that a positive work culture retains employees, reduces health insurance bills, and eliminates employee disengagement costs. None of these findings were brand new information, but they offer data that shows what we often know anecdotally.

The shift by today’s workers (and consequently, your team) toward free agency brings with it a tremendous need for you as a leader to develop great people skills. Since they know that you can make no promises about their future, the way you treat them matters all the more. People who quit their job typically quit their leader long before they turn in their resignation. 

As a result, the taskmaster is an endangered species—you must now lead with a velvet hammer. The hatchet man who delivers over everybody else’s dead body will come calling the second time only to find that no one returns his call.

What about you? What of the below is true for you?

I listen. People feel heard and understood by me.The people I lead love the culture we have created.Ongoing conversations with people on my team energize me (and them).I have a good knowledge of the emotional and mental state of the people reporting to me.I am known for my energy and warmth toward people.

Genuinely caring for people doesn’t just happen; it is a developed skill. Leadership expert John Maxwell wrote, “People who add value to others do so intentionally. . . . To add value to others, leaders must give of themselves, and that rarely happens by accident.” 

How can you practically begin to “give of yourself” to those around you?

Conclusion

As your responsibilities increase, so will your dependence on other people to get the results you want. Simultaneously, as you deliver meaningful results, team members are energized.

The double-edged truth is that both people and the bottom line matter. They are inextricably intertwined. Embrace it.

The Four Check Points of a Viable Business

I have to say this once a week to someone about something: “An idea is not a business.”

An idea is an idea. Granted, not all ideas are equal. Some ideas are evolutionary, some are revolutionary, and some are incremental. Some ideas are purpose-driven and cause infused. Some ideas are going to make millions and some ideas are never going to break even, but they will impact the globe. Some ideas are shaped by the gospel and some ideas are fueled by the seven deadly sins. At the end of the day, even though ideas come in different sizes, shapes, and values; no idea by itself is a business until it becomes a business.

Is this a business?

I’m a small-time investor compared to the Shark Tank titans. But I hear ideas all the time. Part of it is my age and reputation. Part of it is who I run with every week. Perhaps I hear more ideas than most people because I live in the heart of the Wal-Mart HQ ecosystem. And part of it is intentionally the way I have engineered my life and work.

Plus, I’ve had the privilege to sit on the board of Praxis, a non-profit that is engineered to help businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs around the world. It is a remarkable entrepreneurial engine of category leadership, profound thinking, and kingdom conviction.

Summary: Rarely a week goes by that I don’t have a breakfast or a lunch with someone pitching his new idea. And I have to be able to quickly discern my POV and interest, and then offer a response.

Half of all startups fail within four years. So, the question becomes, if there are so many ideas, why do so few businesses last?

One reason is because an idea is not a business. In fact, according to one serial entrepreneur, the idea is actually only the third best indicator of startup success, after timing and team.

But how do you determine if your idea is a business?

Four Check Points

Customer—Who wants what you’re making, offering, selling, or serving? Are you like my kids with school fundraisers years ago, simply begging friends and family to get involved? Once you drop your gimmicks and incentives, who wants your offering? Who is willing to pay what you are asking for your product or service? If you don’t have a clear customer, you really don’t have a sustainable business. It can’t be “I bet there are some people who would want this.” It’s up to you to identify your core customer—local retirees, farmers, college students, or stay at home moms—and then go get them involved.

Unless you have a top 10 global brand you’d better have a plan to find and retain customers. Remembering, wishing, and hoping is not a strategy. And for that matter marketing is not a customer strategy. Marketing can help build brand awareness and perhaps juice a sales strategy, but let’s be clear: marketing and sales are different efforts and every sustainable business has a sales engine of some kind that is proportionate with the vision and offerings.

Offering—Every business has to define its offering. Until you have a tight offering it will be hard to recruit and retain valuable customers. It doesn’t have to be a perfected offering, but a distinguishable one. Another way of seeing this is asking yourself, What business am I in? For example, a local eatery must decide if it is in the dine-in, catering, specialty recipe, or an event business. And which of the four or five meals a day are you competing for? Have you proven up your price points? And do you have any BOGO attached to your product?

When I am doing a quick and dirty analysis of a business, I often look to see if they have tailwinds, edges, and depth. Nailing down your offering requires bringing edges. You have to decide where your offering starts and stops. This is often one of the hardest challenges for entrepreneurs or ambitious leaders. They want to solve all the parts of the “supply chain,” as it were. Not-for-profits are especially vulnerable to this. Knowing what you do and don’t do and where your offerings start and stop is crucial.

People—Who’s playing what role in the company or enterprise? Who is the CEO, the COO, the board, the employees? Who is selling and servicing the customers? Even if it’s a one-man show or a family-run business (like the way Five Guys restaurant started), you need people covering the necessary roles/functionalities to keep the company going.

Some companies have just a few people and some have a huge team of teams. Some organizations are built on layers of volunteers and some are more of a “mom and pop” simple flat organization. Is your team a collection of high performers or are you attempting to launch or scale with a group of has been’s or wanna be’s? Some say talent is over-rated, and there is a point to that. Regardless, most companies of any strength have talent embedded throughout the organization, at least in the crucial roles.

Finances—Three things: You are going to need funding throughout the journey. You need to track your cash at every step. And you need to monitor your costs. A long-time friend who has invested millions of dollars through the years likes to tell startups “double your costs, cut your profit forecast in half and double the time it is going to take to make money.”

Every company eventually has to fold their idea(s) into the financial realties: Are we charging the right amount? Are we tracking our profitability? Where will my funding come from—banks, friends, savings account, investors? What are the stipulations attached to that money? How does the upcoming year forecast look? How are our costs compared to our revenues? Do I really understand how to make money in the business I’m in?

Until you have a financial support system in place, though, you don’t have a business.

And you don’t have a business if you are perpetually incentivizing people to be engaged with your service or product. Eventually you must charge someone what you deem fair and see if they will pay what they deem reasonable. This value exchange is what kicks you into real business.

Conclusion

A viable business has all four of these things in place. They don’t have to all be fully mature. You can launch without all four in place, but if you are going to scale with any predictability versus luck you’d better get your hands around these four pillars.

Otherwise, all you have is an idea.

Embracing Team and Performing Alone

In the summer of 2004, America sent its “Dream Team” of the world’s best basketball talent to the Olympics in Athens, Greece, for the much-heralded return of the Olympiad to its motherland. However, the Dream Team proved a poor advertisement for the pure virtue of sporting excellence that the Olympic Rings symbolize.  

The Americans had only lost two men’s basketball games in Olympic history and hadn’t lost any since 1988. But in Athens, the U.S. lost three games and came home in shame with the ignominious booby prize of a bronze medal. The team’s roster was immensely talented, but they were all air and not enough net. They were not a team. Each was playing only for himself—or at least that’s the way it appeared. Perhaps they had never really learned to be team players. Perhaps they had been coddled as “the talent” for so long that they had no appreciation for the team. 

As they each put on their individual performances, their less talented opponents ran circles around them like the Harlem Globetrotters. With the Americans distracted by their own center-court grandstanding, the underdogs pulled off the upset by simply playing as a team. They ran offensive plays that required some players to set screens or make passes in order to free up a scorer for an open shot. And they played “help” defense, communicating with each other about what was going on and helping teammates when they needed it. They proved that a sum is greater than its parts, and the Americans never added up to a whole. 

Simply working in a group does not make it a team. There has to be clear goals and trust.

What a difference four years later when the “Redeem Team” took another approach at the Beijing Olympics. Instead of a training camp that lasted three weeks, the team worked together for three years. Instead of being guaranteed playing time or starting jobs, the players were told those decisions were up to the coach. Instead of focusing on one-on-one moves and dunks, they rediscovered the genius of team—which still led to plenty of dunks. Watch the first few minutes of highlights from their game against Lithuania, a team that had beat them in the previous Olympics. They’re playing hard and playing together. 

The Redeem Team rolled through the games without a loss—and with gold medals around the players’ necks. 

What’s the leadership lesson here? It’s pretty obvious: Sharing the load (and the credit) pays off.

Businessman and writer Max De Pree said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.”

At the same time, there are situations where you have to deliver solo. Not everything is done as a team. Sure, the Chicago Bulls weren’t a championship team in the NBA until they complemented Michael Jordan with the likes of Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. But there were times when Jordan took the ball and dominated a game on his own. When the game was on the line, everyone knew who was going to get the ball. And players like Jordan put in hours and hours of work on their own to refine their skills. 

As former president Harry Truman said, “To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone.” 

Some work is attached to your calendar with just your name assigned to it—and no one else’s. Some work shows up on other people’s lists and, for whatever reason, doesn’t get done, and the responsibility falls to you as the boss.

For these things, you must have the discipline to carve out the energy and time to just go get it done. No big party. No group effort. No mutual motivation. Just you and your assignment. This is why books like David Allen’s Getting Things Done are bestsellers—because leaders intrinsically know that they must sometimes perform alone.

Every successful athlete knows the loneliness of preparation and training. Every successful leader understands the self-discipline of getting up early and staying late to ensure a project’s success. 

Successful, sustainable leaders operate effectively on a team and are efficient on their own when they must. What about you? Which side of the spectrum comes most naturally to you? Rate yourself between 1 (rarely) to a 5 (always) in each of these categories. 

Embracing Team 

____ I share credit with the whole team. 

____ My team communicates well with each other.  

____ I am deliberate about developing the leaders around me. If something happened to me, I know they would pick up the slack.  

____ I will recruit others to join a project, even if all they bring is moral support. 

____ I believe that the most powerful competitive advantage any company has is its high-performance teams. 

Performing Alone 

____ I regularly take time alone to brainstorm and plan. 

____ I really like working alone. 

____ I can sort through all the things to be done, find the things with my name on them, and just go “Git-R-Done.” I don’t need an external pump-up session. 

____ I find that most work is easier if you just do it yourself. 

____ Involving others usually slows things down or complicates things.

Add up your scores. If one category has a lower score, consider putting in some effort over the next three months to grow in this area. Spend more time listening to your team or more time with your door shut knocking stuff out. Pick someone to really invest in or pick a project that you purposefully won’t get lots of opinions on. Ultimately, you must embrace team and perform alone, but choose one of the two and focus on that for now.

Think // Plan // Do

I don’t just coach CEOs. I own or co-own some small businesses as well. In a couple of them I am instituting a framework called Think/Plan/Do.

I’m convinced that every successful business and organization devotes time and energy to each of these three activities:

Think—How might we _________?Plan—What’s the right order?Do—“Git ‘r done.”

We’re all naturally wired to one or the other. You probably self-identified already, but if not, tests like the Birkman Analysis, Enneagram, or the old “Honey, which one of these do you think I’m best at?” can do the trick.

Most people are not naturally good at all three. According to Harvard Business Review, only 8% of leaders are good at strategy and execution. And that’s only two of the three areas.

Businesses and organizations can naturally lean one way or the other as well, but they can’t afford to just do one or two well. Long-lasting success requires effort and focus in all three areas.

Thinking, planning and doing are separate but interdependent disciplines and activities. When 3M looks at a new project, they have branches for what they call scouts, entrepreneurs, and implementers. The categories don’t perfectly line up with think/plan/do, but you get the idea. You’ve got to have all three disciplines.

You don’t need all three in the exact same ratio necessarily. Every organization is different and needs thinking, planning, and doing in different doses and in different seasons. A drug company that has most of its people in research, for example, had better have some phenomenal outputs because they’re so heavily weighted on the “thinking” side.

Apple, on the other hand, is entrepreneurial by nature, so it defaults to doing. Just ship it. But when they ship the iPhone X, it’s clear that a whole lot of thinking and planning has gone on behind the scenes.

You’ve got to have all three—Think, Plan, Do.

THINK

The kind of thinking I’m talking about is not planning. I’m talking about imagining and brainstorming. But it’s also not just daydreaming. It’s reasoning, researching, observing, and analyzing. What are some ways to think?

Thinking about the future to imagine what could be.Problem-solving thinking to deal with current obstacles.Exposure thinking to spot new ideas, models, and studies.Strategic thinking to get better and more focused on your core issues.

Focused, deliberate, structured thinking can be difficult because we’re addicted to performance, noise, and activity. Cal Newport’s Deep Work is a book on this idea; we’ve got to cut out noise in order to do good thinking.

We’ve also got to be willing to be non-productive because thinking doesn’t always produce something great. In fact, it often doesn’t.

But keep in mind what the author John Steinbeck said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” And there are, in fact, ways to improve your thinking.

Carve off some time and find some space (you might need a change of venue for a good view) to be quiet and think. Think with your eyes open and your brain on. Get a journal and pen or iPad or laptop to record what you come up with. Consider some conversations or reading that will help you along the way, and get thinking.

PLAN

At some point, you’ve got to stop thinking, though. If you think forever, you’ll never actually get anything done. You’ve got to convert your genius thinking and newfound directional clarity into a plan.

There are different types of plans (this article talks about tactical vs. operational vs. contingency), but no matter the format of the plan, a good plan must do at least these five things:

Translate the thinking into an action planEvaluate the resources needed and resources in placeSequence the tasksProvide clarity of the desired outcomesSuggest metrics to evaluate along the way

But let me be clear. There’s not a perfect one-size-fits-all plan out there. It has to fit your style and fit the organizational style. It has to be simple enough to be widely used but beefy enough to carry the weighty thinking behind it. I’ve seen plans scribbled on a napkin, and I’ve seen plans that tell me when and where in the office to get a Diet Coke in 2027. That’s only a slight exaggeration.

The packaging, though, can vary widely. Carl Schramm, who wrote Burn the Business Plan, argues for a new approach that looks nothing like a traditional business plan, but even in that, there is sequencing and clarity in the right places.

DO

Seth Godin is the chief evangelist of “Just Ship It.” You can watch a Ted Talk on what he calls “Quieting the Lizard Brain” here, but in short, the idea is that you can’t wait for the perfect plan. At some point, you have to “do.”

Doers are those who make, achieve, perform, act, and execute. They’re usually intuitive, and they can think on the fly because they make rapid adjustments (in contrast, planners are usually pretty poor pivoters).

Millennials are often pretty good at doing because they’re comfortable iterating, whereas many baby boomers need the perfect plan and then execution begins. Are you a doer by nature?

The value of doing is that learning is accelerated. You find the holes in your plan and in your thinking—how does the customer really respond? Do I have the sequencing right? Do I have the right resources in place? How does this affect my work-life balance and my family?

There are certainly limitations to “just ship it”, but there is certainly something to be said to ending the planning and procrastination and getting something out there.

As the Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

Conclusion

Organizations don’t have sustained success if they’re only good at one or two of the three. Whether it’s a huge Fortune 500 company or a local non-profit start-up, both have to be thinking, planning, and doing … all the time.

The Lion and the Lemming: Leading Others and Managing Yourself

Leadership has an inner and outer dimension. Being a leader means both managing yourself and leading others. Most leaders usually excel at one—some excel at neither. But to be a sustainable and successful leader, you have to learn to excel at both. 

Like most either/or, both/and spectrums, most leaders usually default to one or the other side. How about you? Give yourself a score from one to five on each of the following categories, with one being, I’ve heard of people with this skill, I wonder what it’s like! and five being is there any other way?

Leading Others 

____ I clearly communicate my expectations to those I lead. 

____ I am available to those under my leadership when they need guidance or resources. 

____ I motivate and inspire the people I lead. 

____ Monitoring progress and giving feedback is enjoyable for me. 

____ I am known for giving people room to grow and develop under my leadership. 

Managing Yourself 

____ Staying mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy is a priority for me. 

____ I have strong, life-giving relationships around me. 

____ I model the things I preach to others—especially the little things. 

____ I work hard to maintain integrity in the details of my daily work. 

____ I keep an updated self-development and growth plan in front of me. 

Add up your numbers. If one category’s sum is significantly lower than the other, that’s your default weakness. Read on and look to grow. If your sums are pretty equal, read on anyway!

In thinking about these topics, leading others and managing others, two animals come to mind: the lion and the lemming. 

Leading Others

The lion leads a pride—the group of big cats whose welfare he oversees. He makes sure they are fed. He sees that they get rest. He protects them from attack. He mediates order and keeps everyone in line. When there is a healthy leader at the top, the pride is at peace to function and grow. Without a healthy leader, chaos erupts: The lions fight each other for control. 

Leadership is like that at all levels. People need direction, and while that direction includes input from below, it’s established at the top. It is self-evident that leaders must lead. They must take the initiative. They make it incumbent upon themselves to get the group from point A to point B.

Peter Drucker said, “Leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” If there is a higher authority, the leader represents the group to that higher authority. If the group is dysfunctional, then it is always the leader’s fault at some level. Leaders own the bottom line, no matter how many people are involved with the variables.

Know any leaders like that? Want to become a strong leader yourself? It is a skill you can learn, but if it doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t expect it to. You’ll have to work at it.

Managing Yourself

There is a second type of animal that makes a dangerous leader: the lemming. Few of us have ever seen a live lemming, and not many of us could pick one out of a Wild Kingdom photo lineup. You don’t see lemmings in family crests or as movie studio icons. But these small rodents living in the Arctic Circle are infamous in urban legends for following their leader in mass suicidal plunges off cliffs. The lemming leader is highly effective at moving his followers. The problem is that he is leading them to a steep fall onto unforgiving rocks.

The lemming has no internal moral compass. He does not manage himself before he leads others. He whimsically sets out in any direction and takes others with him. 

Leaders like this become legendary in the worst way. Think Enron from the 1990s, where misguided executives took the energy company from blue chip to cow chip by using deceptive accounting practices to inflate the company’s value. 

Scandals like this, and other more recent ones, result from leaders failing to manage themselves. They read too many books about leading others and master that black magic, but they never deal with the potential blackness lurking inside their own soul—that which lurks inside each one of us. They avoid Orrin Woodward’s rule of leadership, “Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong.” 

Patrick Lencioni famously said that temptations come to CEOs in five categories. Lencioni’s five are great, but I’ve got my own set, and they’re one word each: greed, lust, revenge, independence, and pride. All five require a somewhat counterintuitive response to keep them from infecting organizations like cancer.

I’ve recently written about these temptations and their antidotes at greater length, so if you’re scoring lowly on the “managing yourself” gauge, dig a bit deeper and have the courage to authentically ask for help.

Lions and lemmings: We can learn something from each. To which animal do you look and see yourself?

The Four Dangers of Success

I’ve become convinced that most people handle failure much better than they handle success. Failure can make a man, and success can ruin a man. I’ve seen it in the lives of the business leaders with whom I’ve worked. I’ve seen it in politicians. I’ve seen it in athletes, in actors, in celebrities who regularly make the news and in local hometown titans.

“Regular people” who win the lottery sure do feel successful, but research shows that lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American.

Even Tom Brady has wrestled with the idea of “Is success enough?”

Perhaps the challenge of success is why Albert Einstein once said, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

It’s not that success is bad, but it must be digested.

When you digest something, you’ve broken it down and it becomes part of the body, not just an attachment on the side or something that sticks in your gut and causes nothing but pain. Success is something you fully consume, or else it will fully consume you.

How can success consume you? Four dangers come to mind:

First, success often causes an overinflated view of your abilities. Think of what success brings—congratulatory praises for the star athlete from well-meaning friends, family, and fans; a bigger office, a fancy title, a higher salary, and other perks for the rising-star executive; standing ovations for the speaker or preacher; honors and accolades for the straight-A student. Everything here shouts, “I did this!”

Second, success often brings with it a sense of entitlement that harms your relationships. People simply treat you differently when you’re successful. They don’t question your decisions as often or as forcefully. They go to greater lengths to accommodate your whims. They ask your opinion, even if you have no particular expertise on a subject. And they laugh at your jokes, even if they aren’t funny. Entitlement says, “You exist to serve me” rather than “I exist to serve you.”

Third, success is addicting, and you become willing to do just about anything to keep it. King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, tried to have a man killed when his rule felt threatened. If Solomon could do that, then we’re all vulnerable. We’ll cut corners, abandon friends, work longer than we should, go back on our word, and more. And we do it to remain at the top. Success becomes an idol, a false god we serve.

Fourth, we can go to the other extreme and get complacent. A.W. Tozer wrote, “Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.” But it’s not just about the spiritual. Martin Filler said, “The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition.” Successful CEOs stop looking to lead. Successful parents start phoning it in for their younger kids. You get the idea.

Success often seems great until you wake up and realize it is costing you everything that really matters because you’ve slowly abandoned the beliefs and the people who got you to the top. Jesus said, “For what will it benefit someone if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will anyone give in exchange for his life?” (Matthew 16:26) And yet, I’ve coached and watched so many people trying to gain the whole world. Be careful!

I’m not anti-success, though. The message here is how to digest success, not how to avoid it. I’ve seen the amazing good that people can do with success when they digest it properly. When they use their authority, their finances, and their acclaim to help others and to serve God, they always end up living a more fulfilled, satisfied life.

Proverbs 27:21 says, “The crucible is for silver and the furnace for gold, and each is tested by the praise accorded him” (NASB). The praise of men refines us. It reveals who we really are inside—do we get our value from the praise of men or do we see the praise of men as something fleeting to be viewed and used wisely?

So how do we digest success? It begins with the simple but challenging matter of remembering—remembering who helped you in your success, remembering the more noble purposes of success, and, most of all, remembering the deepest source of success: God.

If your success turns you to this kind of remembrance, three good things will result:

Success will increase your humility and rein in your arrogance.Success will cause you to think, “Look what God enabled me to do!” instead of “Look what I’ve done!”Success will trigger a desire to help others, promote others, and leverage your good will for others and God’s kingdom.

In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, God warns the Israelite people of their future success. Perhaps a warning of success to come sounds odd, but look at what He says to them (and to us): “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and my own ability have gained this wealth for me,’ but remember that the Lord your God gives you the power to gain wealth, in order to confirm his covenant he swore to your fathers, as it is today. If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve them and bow in worship to them, I testify against you today that you will perish” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18).

Your Candy and Conveyor Belt: Working Functionally and Thinking Corporately

In one of the most famous episodes of I Love Lucy (for the youngsters: a groundbreaking early TV sitcom), Lucy and Ethel get jobs in a candy factory. After failing in several departments, they are given one final chance: to wrap the chocolates lined atop a conveyor belt. As the belt speeds up, they fall behind and frantically try to catch up. When they hear their boss coming, panic sets in, and they hide the candy anywhere they can—in their hats, shirts, and mouths.  

Learn a lesson from Lucy: You have to keep an eye on both your candy and the conveyor belt. You have to do your own work and, simultaneously, see it within the larger process of everything headed your way.  

A balanced leader thinks both functionally and corporately. We all have to fulfill our function in the process. You’ve heard the saying, “Too many cooks spoil the soup.” That’s because everyone wants to be a cook, but someone needs to be a waiter, and someone else has to be a supplier, and someone else needs to clean up, and someone else needs to organize all the ingredients, and someone else… You get the idea.  

Working Functionally

It’s pretty simple: Find the roles that are yours—the ones that will slip through the cracks if you don’t do them—and then do them. Do them well. Do them on time. Do them the way they are supposed to be done.  

I’ve written about the essential tasks for senior leaders, but the principle applies to every level of leadership. Find your role and own it.

Are you an owner of your role? That is what it means to work functionally. It means that you need and appreciate others’ help, but you feel the utmost responsibility for your tasks. It means you’re not a bottleneck; people are not waiting on you to make decisions. You stay on top of email and phone correspondence.

Every seat of leadership has functional assignments to be done, from the board chair to the CEO to the hourly worker just starting. A high-performing team is only achieved when everyone gets their stuff done as it’s assigned to them. By the way, you can’t do all your work and someone else’s work simultaneously. Slippage is going to happen somewhere. The classic workaround is not sustainable for a high-performance enterprise. How are you doing with carrying the water of your specific role? Can you stay in your swim lane? Is your team lucky to have you because of your functional excellence?

Thinking Corporately

The danger, though, is working with your head constantly down, never looking up to see what’s going on around you. Taking in the larger view means thinking corporately. Business is an interconnected organism, and we have to stay connected to its bigger picture to be effective at our small part of it. 

This is one of the biggest challenges I see for modern leaders because it’s so hard for them to shake free from the nose-to-the-grindstone approach that was part of their initial training. Most mid- and upper-level managers are extremely competent within their vertical function. They had to become experts within their department, whether it’s sales, marketing, accounting, production, technology, or another aspect of the business. 

However, when they’re promoted to oversee multiple departments, they have to learn to think corporately—that is, to understand the business of your business. As Laurence Peter said, “Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.”

In a small business, it’s often “all hands on deck” all the time. Small businesses aren’t big enough to allow for silos, and they are small enough that everyone can see into multiple aspects of the organization.  

The same principle, however, also holds true in larger organizations. A client in a large public company called me once and said he needed to learn how to work “on the business, not just in the business.” He needed to develop his ability to collect and process the broader range of information he now needed for effective decision-making. 

What about you? Do you understand how your department’s performance and decisions affect others? Are you able to navigate the tension between functions and departments? Is your culture dominated by collaboration or competition? Can you stay high and strategic, or are you pulled down into all the silos?

Baseball manager Casey Stengel said, “It’s easy to get good players. Getting them to play together, that’s the hard part.” The VP of sales has to understand the key challenges facing the VP of creative services. The accounting department needs to relate to the demands of customer interfaces, and the local marketing team needs to be fully aware of the numbers and the accounting. Sure, some of this is achieved through cross-training. But it all starts with the premise that employees need an organizational eye, not just functional hands. 

Conclusion

Many businesses have been sunk by someone “just doing their job,” head down and focused only on one piece of the puzzle without regard for the bigger picture. The captain of the RMS Titanic, to use one example, became obsessed with one goal. He felt vertical pressure from White Star Line for the new ship to break the transatlantic crossing record on its maiden voyage. 

On the other hand, countless businesses have also been sunk because of a visionary leader who sees it all and recruits a bunch of people just like them. Everyone wants to do everything and be involved in every decision, and so nothing ends up getting accomplished.

What’s needed is the power of and.

In conclusion, realize that the best leaders chase both ideas in parallel. You have to have your eyes trained down into your work vertically while scoping the bigger picture. It is the beauty and genius of the both/and, instead of the either/or. As theologian Tyron Edwards said, “Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.”

Over the decades, I have compiled a list of complementing capabilities required to lead in the modern world. Remember, you need a bit of both to be effective in leadership over the long term.

Being results-driven AND people-focusedDoing Friday’s payroll AND inventing the futureHaving heart AND using your headThinking corporately AND working functionallyLeading others AND managing yourselfFeeling confident AND being humbleEmbracing team AND performing alone

I will be releasing short articles on a few of these over the next few months. Keep an eye out for them.

Macro, Micro and Non-Managers

Micromanagement comes naturally at a start-up.

You know this if you’re a founder. You micromanage either because you’re the only employee or because every detail feels so important to get right.

But then the business grows. And you’re no longer a one-man band.

You realize that you’re not going to build anything sizable by yourself. You can’t scale something by yourself. If you’re in the non-profit world, you realize your vision can’t turn into a movement without involving other people in the dream.

At that moment—the moment when you bring others in—you become a manager, and you have a choice. Will you micromanage, macromanage, or not manage?

Micromanaging
Sometimes micromanagement feels necessary.

Often, founders think, If we’re going to maintain our consistency, I must micromanage.

Micromanagers are the ones who tell you what to do and then how to do it. And then they do it with you.

Is this you? Want to find out? Check out the article “Signs That You’re a Micromanager” from Harvard Business Review. In short, if you’re only satisfied with projects and deliverables that you’re highly involved in, you’re a micromanager.

Now let me be clear: micromanaging is not all bad, as there is a season for high engagement and direction from managers. But that season must be a short one.

Macromanaging
Macromanagers tell the “what” and the “why” but are incredibly restrained on the “how.”

It’s actually because they’re so clear on the “what” to do that they’re freed up to trust their subordinates to surprise them with the “how.” And it’s because they’re so convincing on the “why” that subordinates are inspired to buy in and continually push forward with new ideas.

This reality also means that the more talented your people are, the less they want micromanaging. They want space to create and to offer up their contributions. As a macromanager, you must direct that but don’t stifle it.

In particular, the longer you work with someone, the more you want to move to a strategy of macromanagement. If you’re getting more involved with the details of a subordinate’s work over time, either you made a bad hire, or you’ll soon have to make a new hire because your micromanagement will burn them out.

I should also add that macromanagement requires that you become excellent at delegation. Not just okay at delegation; you need to be great at pushing tasks and responsibilities down and out in the business, and the more the better.

This delegation strategy frees up the senior leader’s time for the stuff that uniquely belongs to the senior manager and, again, spurs problem solving and creativity among employees. As Peter Drucker said, “Leadership is not being on top of people but being in the center of action.”

Non-managing
One thing I want to make very clear before I close: macromanagement is not non-management (although HBR made that mistake a couple years back.)

Non-management is backing off and giving no direction at all. In my three decades of working with organizational leaders, though, I’ve become more and more convinced that people need to be managed.

Seventy-five percent of employees who say they have effective managers report that they have daily interaction with their managers. Interestingly, though, despite seeing their bosses or managers regularly, they feel empowered and trusted, not micromanaged.

What gives?

Tom Peters puts it well when he says, “A leader’s passion for minutiae need not equate with second-guessing subordinates. The effective detail-oriented boss, for example, will devote most of her or his energy to removing the infinitesimal roadblocks to team performance that can be so intimidating to participants.”

Good managers don’t back away, they simply redirect their focus. They focus on giving clear direction and inspiration on the front end, then staying ahead of employees to remove roadblocks while constantly turning around to give feedback.

Conclusion
One last note: macromanagement is not about the size of the team. You need not wait until your team is 10 or 100 or 1,000 to begin to macromanage. Macromanagement is more about a style of management and the reach of the organization.

In fact, a commitment to macromanagement says you will start small, giving instruction and feedback, but you know that eventually, you will push decision-making authority down and out. There may be seasons where you have to rein in that authority because the stakes are higher, but you still push out.

Micromanagers have to be involved for their own sanity. Macromanagers have to be involved for their team’s effectiveness. Which means they’re probably way less involved than you might think.