Your Greatest Risk Is Business As Usual

Posted on by Alexa Bach-McElrone

Psychologists say that pessimism takes root in times of stress. And we are swimming in a river of stress. I know because as companies are awakening to the need to grow instead of just survive, they are asking me to help change their mind-set. You see we’ve become a culture of pessimism, and pessimists don’t come up with creative ideas that create new value. For the past 20 years American business has been obsessed with efficiency and productivity. Do more with less. Root out waste. Work harder. Work longer. Avoid risk. Benchmark. Do what everyone else is doing only do it better. Become world-class at blah. It is leadership without imagination. And it is everywhere.

It is also completely out of gas as a business strategy.

Striving for super efficiency seems smart if your goal is to avoid risk. It’s a problem however when trying to avoid risk is the highest risk you can take. Think of it this way. Microsoft has become a big lumbering bureaucracy seemingly capable of only making me-too products. Years after more innovative companies have blazed a new trail and taken consumers by storm, the best Microsoft innovations are Bing, Zune, and new versions of Windows.

But these are second tier products next to Google, iPods, and cloud based software. But why try to copy someone else’s bright idea? The world doesn’t need another fake Rolex even if you can make some money selling them. For years the business world had a bad case of Apple envy. Apple just kept cranking out I-wish-I-thought-of-that products that seemed to ignite vast amounts of consumer lust for anything with a half-eaten Apple logo on it. Under Steve Jobs Apple had a swagger of optimism.

And it produced a stream of game changing innovations. When Steve passed I saw leaders try to mimic what they thought he would do. They picked up their megaphones, yelling at their sweaty palmed boat rowers, “Innovate, dammit, innovate!”

But telling people to be creative doesn’t produce creativity. Only purpose does. 

Yes, I said it takes purpose to generate positive innovation. It is driven by the confidence that your creative response to reality will optimize the future. Instead of wishing, it is doing. It requires intense focus on reality. But unlike pessimism it doesn’t seek to eliminate risk. It seeks to make a difference that matters. This is a whole new skill set for leaders who have become addicted to saving money instead of investing it.

It’s a prime reason why our economy is stuck.

It explains why corporate treasuries are overflowing with trillions of unused capital. Leaders are wary. For the past several years most companies have struggled to keep profitable rather than grow.  But leading for profitability is a “solved problem.” It takes no imagination to shrink costs faster than sales, just ask H-P.

What I see are fear-driven leaders that are too scared to imagine innovation and too tired to deal with complexity.

It’s easier to just drive their old business model with less people and fewer expenses. I call it fake productivity. It’s crazy. We live in an age where we all know that with growth comes innovation executed with speed and agility, and yet most of our global enterprises are tangled in risk adverse bureaucracy leading to decision constipation and employee exhaustion. The antidote of this slow motion leadership is not to grow by buying and destroying valuable acquisitions but to reignite internal talent to create new value propositions, attract new customers, and solve problems people care about. It means re-designing business structures as hives of entrepreneurship.

It means growing cultures of optimism — agile, adaptive cultures capable of rapidly testing, learning and scaling success.

How? We we must personally take charge of our inner voice of purpose.

We must seek future – changing opportunities to create sustainable abundance instead of waiting for the world to change.

And we must edit the pessimistic voices that scare us into being small. It is a time to be bold. If Tesla, an electric car company, can launch in the recession, if TOMS shoes’ can sell 10,000,000 shoes so they can give away 10,000,000 shoes… hell, if Costco can pay their average employee $40,000 a year… anything is possible. The time to shake our fists, mutter and complain about dumbness and greed has long past.

It’s time to take some risks to create work and enterprises that help create the best future we can imagine.

 

The Instant Leadership Process – What’s Really Holding You Back

Posted on by Will Marre

In a previous post, I wrote that there is little to no evidence that our attempts at leadership development over the last 50 years have resulted in better leadership. That’s right, although there has been literally thousands of books written on great leadership, armies of leadership consultants, and millions of dollars spent on leadership development, we don’t seem to have a critical mass of great leaders.

Looking at employee surveys from the 1960s to the present, there’s no data to support that employees today have any better opinion about their leaders’ abilities than employees did 50 years ago.

I’m not suggesting we give up on training and developing leaders, but what I am suggesting is that we get ‘real’ about its effectiveness. 

And the problem that we have today is that the demands of leadership have radically changed in the last 10 years. Leading a company with a hierarchical structure is vastly different than leading an organization which gets work done though networks. In fact, it’s much harder to lead a network of people with varying skills and abilities to achieve goals than it is to cascade your leadership influence through a chair of command.

What’s needed is a radical new approach that gets work done by having people follow a leadership process.

I believe this is far more realistic and effective than depending on developing individual leaders to be great. I do because I’ve had direct experience with it, working in some outrageously competitive business situations and highly resistant cultures.

This is how simple it is.

When a leader of a team or an organization is trying to accomplish anything, this process must be followed.

WHAT: A leader must create focus by clearly articulating the goal.

WHY: People become creative and innovative and understand the purpose behind the goal. A motivating goal will have two dimensions – a human purpose and a business purpose. If your only purpose is to make money or win market share your people will quickly become exhausted and disengaged.

This step is essential with today’s workforce… it’s usually skipped by most leaders.

HOW: Everyone must collaborate getting to the best ‘HOW.’ This demands new disciplined processes that create universal engagement that breaks down silos and creates a continuous strategic-tactical conversation. When this doesn’t occur the law of unintended consequences destroys execution.

DO: Leaders must drive goal-focused action constantly. Team members should always be looking for the next smart thing to do and initiate.

REVIEW: Leaders and teams must swim in a stream of feedback. You cannot wait for formal after-action-reviews to make important changes. Action reviews informally take place in three-minute hallway conversations and constant communication. (Formal after-action-reviews are also vital when critical milestones are either met or missed.)

The power of this process is that everybody can already do these things.

They just need to get into a habit of doing it. It needs to become embedded in the leadership culture. Of course individual skill makes any of these five steps better. So no-one is off the hook for individual leadership development.

However, in my experience without a common leadership process organizations are simply held back by the lack of skills of their poorest leaders rather than by the abilities of their best ones.

The biggest challenge to implement the systematic leadership process is that bad leaders say, “I already do this.” When they do, I say, “oh yeah?” Then I simply go one or two levels down and ask, “What are your most important goals and why are they the most important?” I continue, “Do these goals and the purpose behind them inspire you or discourage you?” Most often the answers I get reveal that people feel confused, pessimistic or cynical about success.

That’s why they’re on the lookout for another job. That’s why they are disengaged. That’s why it’s so damn difficult to get much done.

See for yourself. Use 5-STAR and ask your teammates or your leader or your employees if they are clearly focused on your most important business goal. Ask if they know why it’s important… both the business purpose and the human purpose. Then ask if everybody has been involved with the execution process so that glitches are minimized and important changes are made on a timely basis. Then ask…

“Are we getting better at executing our most important priorities or are we repeating the same mistakes we usually make?” So go ahead, give it a rip… and tell me what you find. The bottom line is that we are no longer playing football where coaches call in the play from the sidelines.

Business has become basketball. Everyone plays offense. Everyone plays defense. Action is a continuous flow where players are always trying to make it easy for each other to succeed so the team can win. Is that how your enterprise runs?

 

The Solution to Leadership Failure

Posted on by Will Marre

An earlier post produced a huge and thoughtful response from many senior leaders around the world. Responses confirm that leaders are having a difficult time getting the right things done on a timely basis in this time of ferocious competition. Several responses also brought up new challenges that I will deal with in future blogs. One of the biggest questions arose from my assertion that attempts to train business leaders are failing. After all, it’s a pretty big statement given the thousands of business schools that are trying to teach business leaders around the globe. The problem is business schools and companies are still training business leaders to succeed in hierarchies.

Organizations where things get done through chains of command. These are organizations where critical knowledge is often centralized. Resources are hoarded and defended. Annual planning cycles lock people into priorities that quickly become irrelevant in the face of new competitive threats.

The complexity of these large cumbersome organizations create bureaucracies that makes simple tasks and changes virtually impossible.

For instance more and more new clients are asking if I take credit cards. They want to know because the procurement processes are so broken that it takes weeks or months to contract with new suppliers. This locks them into into old suppliers with old ideas and tired solutions. And change that takes weeks or months is a timeline left over from the industrial age. That’s a leadership problem. Oh and one more thing…

most employees don’t want to work for their employers.

We know that because 80% of people who currently have jobs are actively looking for a new job on the Internet. And Gallop just finished its worldwide engagement survey and once again found that over 70% of workers are not committed to their organization’s goals.

The primary reason for that is that goals employees feel ineffective in their work. It’s too difficult to succeed when people’s goals are constantly shifting. Employees feel exhausted from relentless stress caused from having highly demanding jobs with low control and autonomy. Again, it’s just too hard to get things done. And the majority of employees find their work intrinsically meaningless… yet work is way too demanding for it to be purposeless.

Those are leadership problems. They are big, sweaty, stinky problems. These are not problems that can be overcome by getting 20% better at one leadership competency or targeting high potential leaders to go through a year-long program.

We simply don’t have time to develop the new leadership competencies needed one leader at a time.

So this is what I did. Five years ago, at the onset of the great recession I started a research project with students from the University of California San Diego and Clemson University School of Business. We named it Apple to Zappos. We set out to discover what leaders of persistently successful organizations were doing differently than everyone else.

I interviewed top executives of the best performing companies ranging from Apple to IBM to Nike to Zappos. We looked at seven criteria – growth, profitability, innovation, employee engagement social responsibility, sustainability, and brand power. We also examined best leader practices research from Teresa Amabile who is the Director of Research at Harvard Business School. I spent a year working closely with Joe Folkman of Zenger-Folkman doing a deep dive on their Extraordinary Leader research. We analyzed global research studies from Towers-Watson, McKinsey and Company and several others. This was my conclusion.

Success creates successful behaviors. Leaders perform badly when they are failing. Employees perform poorly when they are consistently unable to achieve goals.

Put simply, leadership success, employee success and business success are united in a continuous virtuous cycle. Once that cycle turns downward… leaders get worse pushing the business down faster and faster while pushing their employees to continuous failure.

It is the primary job of business leaders to make it easy for their employees to succeed… that’s what creates business success.

I know, it’s simple. Yet few leaders get this and even fewer know how to do it. So as I work in the war zone of 21st century, helping companies who are fighting to stay relevant, profitable and growing I had to come up with something that was simply different than traditional leadership development. The result is something I simply call 5-STAR.

It’s based on the finding that winning behavior in extraordinary organizations comes down to five things. Leaders and their teams must be…

  1. Focused
  2. Creative
  3. Collaborative
  4. Fast acting
  5. Constantly improving

Simple but not easy. This is not easy because people tend to be either both focused and fast acting or creative and collaborative. It’s yin and yang. This creates natural tension. For instance in most organizations senior leaders are goal-focused and action- driven. Their implicit belief is that value is created by fast and flawless execution.

But that’s only partly true. If you get really fast at doing things customers don’t value you simply accelerate failure.

There is another large group in most organizations that are purpose-driven innovators. They are motivated to create new value. Value that really matters to people. They like to create and collaborate. They always have questions and their questions slow things down. This drives the focused-doers crazy. The reality is, for an organization to work, you need both yin and yang. But you won’t drive business teamwork by going to a tepee and sweating together.

Our research of persistently great companies shows they create teamwork by winning together. As I thought about the challenge of coming up with fast ways to transform leadership and culture I began to experiment with training teams in a leadership process that didn’t demand individual change.

My premise is if you just follow the process you will start to win. Every team member will get engaged… and that will fuel a winning balance of focus and creativity and collaboration and action that drives continuous improvement… value, growth and profits.

 

The Solution to Leadership Failure

Posted on by Real Leaders

An earlier post produced a huge and thoughtful response from many senior leaders around the world. Responses confirm that leaders are having a difficult time getting the right things done on a timely basis in this time of ferocious competition. Several responses also brought up new challenges that I will deal with in future blogs. One of the biggest questions arose from my assertion that attempts to train business leaders are failing. After all, it’s a pretty big statement given the thousands of business schools that are trying to teach business leaders around the globe. The problem is business schools and companies are still training business leaders to succeed in hierarchies.

Organizations where things get done through chains of command. These are organizations where critical knowledge is often centralized. Resources are hoarded and defended. Annual planning cycles lock people into priorities that quickly become irrelevant in the face of new competitive threats.

The complexity of these large cumbersome organizations create bureaucracies that makes simple tasks and changes virtually impossible.

For instance more and more new clients are asking if I take credit cards. They want to know because the procurement processes are so broken that it takes weeks or months to contract with new suppliers. This locks them into into old suppliers with old ideas and tired solutions. And change that takes weeks or months is a timeline left over from the industrial age. That’s a leadership problem. Oh and one more thing…

most employees don’t want to work for their employers.

We know that because 80% of people who currently have jobs are actively looking for a new job on the Internet. And Gallop just finished its worldwide engagement survey and once again found that over 70% of workers are not committed to their organization’s goals.

The primary reason for that is that goals employees feel ineffective in their work. It’s too difficult to succeed when people’s goals are constantly shifting. Employees feel exhausted from relentless stress caused from having highly demanding jobs with low control and autonomy. Again, it’s just too hard to get things done. And the majority of employees find their work intrinsically meaningless… yet work is way too demanding for it to be purposeless.

Those are leadership problems. They are big, sweaty, stinky problems. These are not problems that can be overcome by getting 20% better at one leadership competency or targeting high potential leaders to go through a year-long program.

We simply don’t have time to develop the new leadership competencies needed one leader at a time.

So this is what I did. Five years ago, at the onset of the great recession I started a research project with students from the University of California San Diego and Clemson University School of Business. We named it Apple to Zappos. We set out to discover what leaders of persistently successful organizations were doing differently than everyone else.

I interviewed top executives of the best performing companies ranging from Apple to IBM to Nike to Zappos. We looked at seven criteria – growth, profitability, innovation, employee engagement social responsibility, sustainability, and brand power. We also examined best leader practices research from Teresa Amabile who is the Director of Research at Harvard Business School. I spent a year working closely with Joe Folkman of Zenger-Folkman doing a deep dive on their Extraordinary Leader research. We analyzed global research studies from Towers-Watson, McKinsey and Company and several others. This was my conclusion.

Success creates successful behaviors. Leaders perform badly when they are failing. Employees perform poorly when they are consistently unable to achieve goals.

Put simply, leadership success, employee success and business success are united in a continuous virtuous cycle. Once that cycle turns downward… leaders get worse pushing the business down faster and faster while pushing their employees to continuous failure.

It is the primary job of business leaders to make it easy for their employees to succeed… that’s what creates business success.

I know, it’s simple. Yet few leaders get this and even fewer know how to do it. So as I work in the war zone of 21st century, helping companies who are fighting to stay relevant, profitable and growing I had to come up with something that was simply different than traditional leadership development. The result is something I simply call 5-STAR.

It’s based on the finding that winning behavior in extraordinary organizations comes down to five things. Leaders and their teams must be…

  1. Focused
  2. Creative
  3. Collaborative
  4. Fast acting
  5. Constantly improving

Simple but not easy. This is not easy because people tend to be either both focused and fast acting or creative and collaborative. It’s yin and yang. This creates natural tension. For instance in most organizations senior leaders are goal-focused and action- driven. Their implicit belief is that value is created by fast and flawless execution.

But that’s only partly true. If you get really fast at doing things customers don’t value you simply accelerate failure.

There is another large group in most organizations that are purpose-driven innovators. They are motivated to create new value. Value that really matters to people. They like to create and collaborate. They always have questions and their questions slow things down. This drives the focused-doers crazy. The reality is, for an organization to work, you need both yin and yang. But you won’t drive business teamwork by going to a tepee and sweating together.

Our research of persistently great companies shows they create teamwork by winning together. As I thought about the challenge of coming up with fast ways to transform leadership and culture I began to experiment with training teams in a leadership process that didn’t demand individual change.

My premise is if you just follow the process you will start to win. Every team member will get engaged… and that will fuel a winning balance of focus and creativity and collaboration and action that drives continuous improvement… value, growth and profits.

 

Are You Your Biggest Problem?

Posted on by Will Marre

I am. I am a big fat problem for myself. So are you. We all are. That’s the way life is. It’s natural to think you are normal…but you’re not and neither am I. We are all quirky as hell. Of course we have a self-protective inner story to tell us that we’re not…but we are…each of us.

Decades of psychological research confirms that our greatest weakness is a lack of self-awareness. 

If you ask five friends to describe your strengths and weaknesses and the impact you have on others those five are likely to say things that are very similar. However, if you wrote down your answers to that same question and compared it to what your five friends say about you…your answers would be the most different. We don’t see ourselves the way others see us. We tend to exaggerate our strengths and make excuses for our weaknesses. Or we make the mistake of thinking our strengths compensate for weaknesses.

Like our family and coworkers don’t care that we’re crabby and short tempered because we mean well…we are just stressed. But that’s just a story. We made it up.

We make up a lot of stories.

The brilliant research on self-awareness, Daniel Goleman, tells us that we are Olympic gold-medal winning self-excusers. We expertly blame and rationalize to shirt responsibility for our frustrations and failures to people and forces beyond our control. The universal human pattern for this is simple.

First, we deny there’s a problem. 

That’s because if there is a problem, we will have to attend to it. We will have to invest energy and do something different. We just wish problems would go away on their own. Maybe if we wish hard enough…

Second, we blame others.

This takes a lot less effort than changing out behavior of ourselves to get a new outcome. We are not very psychologically agile. It’s much easier just to keep doing what we’re doing and blaming others for what doesn’t work.

Finally, we rationalize. 

We accept the previously unacceptable. We convince ourselves it doesn’t matter after all. We even use those terrible words “it is what it is.” This pattern is very common in human relationships going bad. It happens with couples, families and friends. It’s universal because we are all low on self-awareness and high on self-protection.

We judge ourselves through our motives but others by their behavior. 

This is much more than a personal problem. It is a central problem in leadership. It’s why countries go to war, governments stop working, and corporations fail. Research confirms that low self-awareness is the most common, single leadership weakness.

The signs of low self-awareness in leaders are overconfidence, insistence  and closed-mindedness. 

These outer behaviors are most often a mask for inner self-doubt. You see self-doubt as a natural outcome if you don’t have a strong sense of your essential identity. This is the deep, genuine inner ‘you’ that would remain the same no matter if you won the lottery or were forced to live on the street. Sometime when I’m coaching a leader I ask them “who would you be if you had been born and raised by a poor family in a developing country?  Who would you be if you hadn’t gone to college? Who would you be if you were born 200 years ago? “ Yes, I know these are strange questions… they are meant to be.

What I’m trying to get people to think about is who are you at your core?

Who are you independent of your circumstances, your upbringing, your job, your car, your house, your family? Who? How do you find meaning in life? What do you most value? Do you have any commitments or beliefs that you would die for? And if you do…. are you willing to live for them? Are you willing to stand for them? Speak up for them? The best way I have learned to transcend self-doubt is to get acquainted with your authentic, inner self.

The core part of you, your essential self, has no doubts about you or inflated views of your capabilities.

Neither is it self-protective or defensive. This is not New Age woo-woo. Rather it is at the core of deep, life-satisfaction. I have deeply enjoyed working with a few well grounded CEOs. I knew they had capacity to become great leaders because they sought feedback. They had the inner strength to remain non-defensive and very curious about their impact on others. Above all they know who they were, what they stood for and how they felt about important things. They demanded a lot from themselves but were also self- compassionate when they were tired or foolish.  They didn’t pretend to be perfect or to be anybody they were not. At the same time they had no excuses for their own failures.

Confidence without arrogance is extremely powerful.

So how about you? What’s your level of self-awareness? What’s your level of non-defensive confidence? Are you curious enough? Open-minded enough? Do you know what makes your life worth loving? Aristotle said that the best life is one in which you fulfill your nature in the pursuit of a noble purpose.

Do you know what it means to “fulfill your nature?”  

If you do, turn up the volume on your efforts. If you don’t know, invest your energy in becoming self-aware… it is the only foundation that will weather the storms of life.

 

Are You Your Biggest Problem?

Posted on by Real Leaders

I am. I am a big fat problem for myself. So are you. We all are. That’s the way life is. It’s natural to think you are normal…but you’re not and neither am I. We are all quirky as hell. Of course we have a self-protective inner story to tell us that we’re not…but we are…each of us.

Decades of psychological research confirms that our greatest weakness is a lack of self-awareness. 

If you ask five friends to describe your strengths and weaknesses and the impact you have on others those five are likely to say things that are very similar. However, if you wrote down your answers to that same question and compared it to what your five friends say about you…your answers would be the most different. We don’t see ourselves the way others see us. We tend to exaggerate our strengths and make excuses for our weaknesses. Or we make the mistake of thinking our strengths compensate for weaknesses.

Like our family and coworkers don’t care that we’re crabby and short tempered because we mean well…we are just stressed. But that’s just a story. We made it up.

We make up a lot of stories.

The brilliant research on self-awareness, Daniel Goleman, tells us that we are Olympic gold-medal winning self-excusers. We expertly blame and rationalize to shirt responsibility for our frustrations and failures to people and forces beyond our control. The universal human pattern for this is simple.

First, we deny there’s a problem. 

That’s because if there is a problem, we will have to attend to it. We will have to invest energy and do something different. We just wish problems would go away on their own. Maybe if we wish hard enough…

Second, we blame others.

This takes a lot less effort than changing out behavior of ourselves to get a new outcome. We are not very psychologically agile. It’s much easier just to keep doing what we’re doing and blaming others for what doesn’t work.

Finally, we rationalize. 

We accept the previously unacceptable. We convince ourselves it doesn’t matter after all. We even use those terrible words “it is what it is.” This pattern is very common in human relationships going bad. It happens with couples, families and friends. It’s universal because we are all low on self-awareness and high on self-protection.

We judge ourselves through our motives but others by their behavior. 

This is much more than a personal problem. It is a central problem in leadership. It’s why countries go to war, governments stop working, and corporations fail. Research confirms that low self-awareness is the most common, single leadership weakness.

The signs of low self-awareness in leaders are overconfidence, insistence  and closed-mindedness. 

These outer behaviors are most often a mask for inner self-doubt. You see self-doubt as a natural outcome if you don’t have a strong sense of your essential identity. This is the deep, genuine inner ‘you’ that would remain the same no matter if you won the lottery or were forced to live on the street. Sometime when I’m coaching a leader I ask them “who would you be if you had been born and raised by a poor family in a developing country?  Who would you be if you hadn’t gone to college? Who would you be if you were born 200 years ago? “ Yes, I know these are strange questions… they are meant to be.

What I’m trying to get people to think about is who are you at your core?

Who are you independent of your circumstances, your upbringing, your job, your car, your house, your family? Who? How do you find meaning in life? What do you most value? Do you have any commitments or beliefs that you would die for? And if you do…. are you willing to live for them? Are you willing to stand for them? Speak up for them? The best way I have learned to transcend self-doubt is to get acquainted with your authentic, inner self.

The core part of you, your essential self, has no doubts about you or inflated views of your capabilities.

Neither is it self-protective or defensive. This is not New Age woo-woo. Rather it is at the core of deep, life-satisfaction. I have deeply enjoyed working with a few well grounded CEOs. I knew they had capacity to become great leaders because they sought feedback. They had the inner strength to remain non-defensive and very curious about their impact on others. Above all they know who they were, what they stood for and how they felt about important things. They demanded a lot from themselves but were also self- compassionate when they were tired or foolish.  They didn’t pretend to be perfect or to be anybody they were not. At the same time they had no excuses for their own failures.

Confidence without arrogance is extremely powerful.

So how about you? What’s your level of self-awareness? What’s your level of non-defensive confidence? Are you curious enough? Open-minded enough? Do you know what makes your life worth loving? Aristotle said that the best life is one in which you fulfill your nature in the pursuit of a noble purpose.

Do you know what it means to “fulfill your nature?”  

If you do, turn up the volume on your efforts. If you don’t know, invest your energy in becoming self-aware… it is the only foundation that will weather the storms of life.

 

Adapt or Fail – Why 70% of Your Team Isn’t Committed to Your Success

Posted on by Real Leaders

Whenever you work really, really hard and fail, it is because you’re missing something. Usually it’s reality. It is tempting to deny that anything has changed. Or that you need to know something that you don’t. Or that others aren’t inspired by the same things you are. Or that you’re going to have to take responsibility for things you don’t want to. The list goes on. There are countless reasons to deny the real reasons we are failing. So we wait.

We wait for things to get back to normal. Well, things are not going to go back to normal because something really, really big has changed. It is a revolution of epic proportion. It is simply this.

Anyone can know anything, instantly. 

In the last five years, access to knowledge through smartphones enables almost everyone to know anything they want to know within minutes. I frequently tell my career classes that anyone can become an expert in a specific field within six months. 

Hell, you can become more knowledgeable about a certain topic than 80% of people in three weeks. All you need to do is spend 20 minutes a day with a search engine on the Internet watching videos, reading articles, or searching the research. Want to become knowledgeable about 3D printing, how to finance a business, what makes a happy marriage, how to surf, garden, play the guitar, write a book, write code, manage a project, meditate, or quantum physics? It’s all there.

And there’s more. You can connect with people who are interested in the same things you are very, very easily. I know, you’ve heard versions of these breakthroughs incessantly. This is hardly new news.

But what is new is the radical impact these things are having on businesses and organizations of all types.

And radial is not too strong a word. Consider this. The invention of the printing press in 1450 was the beginning of the end of the dark ages. Remember the dark ages were really dark. In many places, human beings took a step back in terms of their calling in life and even life expectancy. For instance, in Roman times indoor plumbing, clean water and municipal sewage systems were common.

In the dark ages, people threw their crap out the window. Only 1% of Europeans could read or write the year the printing press was inventing. 50 years later, 50% of Europeans were literate. This democratization of knowledge spurred new questions and massive curiosity. The grip of the Catholic Church on people’s thinking violently conflicted with the Protestant Reformation.

The age of world exploration was born and the Renaissance flourished. The philosophers of the Enlightenment created new models of thinking about individual rights and human potential, and led to modern democracies, explosive growth in university education and the scientific method. Okay, that was a big change. Now, imagine that kind of world shaking change happening in a very compressed timeframe. That’s what’s going on. In my work, I see it being played out every day in the area of business. It shows up in tow powerful palaces… leadership and culture.

I think we should face the fact that most of our efforts at leadership development have failed. 

Although billions have been invested over the last 50 years and tens of thousands of books written to promote better leadership, there is virtually no evidence that leaders are any better today than they were five decades ago. When I ask business audiences today how many great leaders they have enjoyed working for over their careers, the highest number I get is two. That’s exactly the same number of audiences were giving me 35 years ago when I started working with Stephen Covey. Perhaps that’s not because developing great leaders is futile, but rather because the challenges of leadership are expanding faster than our ability to help leaders improve.

And, I’m convinced the gap between what’s needed and what’s happening is getting worse. 

It is because the technology and social revolution has changed the way value is created, work gets done and they very nature of the workforce. Here are the main points.

1. Organizational hierarchies are relics of the industrial age.

They are in the way of success. They are designed to maximize the productivity of routine work and minimize risk. When General McChrystal took over the Special Forces command nearly a decade ago it took 96 hours to plan a special operation. Within two years he was able to reduce that time to 20 minutes. He did it by converting the Special Forces command from a hierarchy to a network. Leading networks is a very different skill set than leading a chain of command. And most current business leaders are very, very bad at leading networks.

2. Competence is measured by strategic velocity.

That is the speed at which strategy is decided upon and executed. Most leaders today are still relying on PowerPoints and annual planning cycles. That is leadership malpractice. Today there is a huge gulf between what must be done and what gets done.

3. To be competent, leaders must open-minded enough to constantly evolve strategy and agile enough to stay engaged in the details of execution.

This requires the expertise to create strategy that is responsive to constantly changing trends, opportunities and threats and the social intelligence to work with teams of people as a peer to execute it. (Steve Jobs was an emperor in terms of strategy. But he was a teammate in product development meetings.) In my experience most leaders don’t have a clue on how to do this.

4. The workforce is changed.

Not just millennial’s… everyone. Employees used to give their best efforts because they had the security of long-term employment. They also felt they had a stake in the organization’s long-term success. No more. Research reveals that 80% of employed people constantly search the Internet for a better job. Global surveys that determine the level of commitment employees have to their employer’s success reveal that 70% are not very committed. This is unsustainable. For a network to thrive people must be focused, creative, collaborative and absolutely committed to results. Creating that requires number 5.

5. Human purpose is not optional. Since virtually all employees feel like they are simply hired guns it is impossible to create high-performing teams without genuine shared purpose. Survival and success on their own are not shared purpose. Shared purpose is working together to improve the quality of life of customers’ in a distinct way.

This is not just corporate social responsibility. It is not simply sustainability. It must be your reason for being in business. Real value-driving-purpose has to be at the core of an organization’s money making business model. Haley Rushing of the Purpose Institute recently shared their research with me. It’s simple.

Clear purpose drives:

    • Innovation, product development, pricing, brand, culture, advertising, hiring, technology investment, market segmentation, supply chain management… everything.
    • Purpose makes hard decisions easier and faster.
    • Most important, human purpose connects people directly with their job and the enterprise. It increases commitment and reduces friction.
    • Purpose is the inspirational glue that keeps networks working at very high rates of innovation execution.

6. You have to know what the hell you doing. Leaders must have extremely high levels of business acumen and competence. Purpose is no substitute for competence. Passion alone can put you out of business faster because you mistake your good intentions for good outcomes.

That’s my brief explanation of why old models don’t work, employees are disengaged and once great enterprises will fail if they are not lead in radically new ways. The good news is there are lots of people interested in this new way of leading and working. I hope you are.

 

How to Have a Career That Matters

Posted on by Will Marre

Are you whispering or are you singing at the top of your lungs? When I was doing research for Save the World and Still be Home for Diner, I interviewed scores of people who wanted to matter. Not in the look-at-me way. Not in the I-want-to-be-famous-on-YouTube way. They just wanted to bloom where they were planted. To sing their song. To make their difference. I talked to them and watched them work. As I listened to their stories about how they discovered their calling and turned it in to a career, I discovered something I never suspected.

Their success came because they were pushed by the current of two fast flowing rivers that converged in one glorious torrent.

River One is the river of ‘Inspired Desire.’ They really wanted to make the world better. Although some were now rich and famous, that was not their goal. Never. Making their difference was.

Research reveals at least six big challenges for humanity.

If you want the world to get better…becoming great at addressing one of these six challenges is pretty damn important. Here are the challenges:

  1. Human rights/oppression: equality, equal justice, dignity, women’s and children’s rights, tolerance, freedom of speech, worship, assembly, etc.
  2. Health/disease: wellness, sports, entertainment, disease prevention, education, research, children’s and women’s health, access, affordability, cancer, AIDS, heart disease, stress, care-giving, etc.
  3. Peace/violence: respect, diplomacy, communication, negotiation, ending war, terrorism, nuclear prolifereation, genocide, abuse, etc.
  4. Education/ignorance: literacy, graduation rates, arts education, science and math, girls and women, computer/digital early childhood, gifted special needs, etc.
  5. Sustainability/environmental collapse: pollution, water shortages, resource depletion, conservation, park development, cleanup, climate change, energy research, etc.
  6. Wealth/poverty: access to capital, food, housing, budgeting, entrepreneurship, career development, job creation, skill training, economic literacy, trade homelessness, etc.

There are many additional ways to help individual human beings and humanity. This is just a list to get you started thinking… Most of us will spend 100,000 hours of our lives working. Most of our waking hours. So why not do something that makes the world a better place to live?

With all the needs humanity has, it seems a shame to invest your gifts doing something trivial. 

What I discovered from the difference-makers I studied was that you can turn virtually any career into something that benefits humanity. You just need to hold that intention and the infinite numbers of ways you can make a difference show up every day. So, I am not suggesting that each one of us has to become Gandhi or Lincoln or Einstein…remember a humble janitor prevents the spread of disease by just doing their job well. I just wonder what kind of world we’d have if all of our mission statements for Me Inc. arose from turning our values into value. I am not suggesting that you take a vow of poverty, but rather a vow of purpose.

I suggest that because the happiest, most creative people I know work that way. 

And, it’s not that hard. That’s where the second river flows in. My interviews and observations of ordinary people with extraordinary careers helped me see it clearly. For these people, River Two is the river of their own Design. They are highly self-aware. They know what they are best at and what brings them joy ‘in the doing.’ They’ve come to understand how their talent and skills work together to create a measure of unique greatness. Most important, they know how to learn what they need to learn in order to do what they really desire to do.

Their stories taught me that sometimes learning is difficult. Painful. Exhausting. Yet necessary to unleash the power of their talents and passions. 

So that’s it. When you harness the river of your Desires in the river of your Design, your career begins to flow so fast it carves its own path to the canyons of life. Let me make this practical. I teach lots of career workshops for corporations for University of California at San Diego. And one thing I found is that people want fast, practical tools to convert these fancy-schmancy principles into immediate action. So here you go.

First, get clear on where you are in your career. You can do that by answering these questions about your work.

  1. What do you do? (What is the essence of your work?)
  2. Who do you do it for? (Who pays you?)
  3. What is the human and economic impact of it? (Why do you get paid?)

Some real examples:

  1. “I do computer programming.”
  2. “For an e-commerce company.”
  3. “To quickly change product offers to customers so my company grow.”

Here’s another:

  1. “I am the Chief Executive Officer that determines strategy and allocates resources.”
  2. “For a sports shoe and athletic apparel company.”
  3. “To ensure the company grows by designing and selling best-in-the-world products.”

One more:

  1. “I do project management.”
  2. “For a technology company.”
  3. “To eliminate waste and shorten delivery time.”

Okay, that’s pretty simple. Now, let’s paddle down the river you’re floating on. This time, do the same exercise except…imagine how you might answer those question two years from now if all your most inspiring career development plans paid off. And add one question.

How’s the world better off for you doing your job?

Here are some answers that are follow-ups to the examples above. The programmer:

  1. “I do artificial intelligence programming.”
  2. “For a progressive video games studio.”
  3. “To create wildly popular products.”
  4. “That teaches players real history and the consequences of making good or bad decisions.” (pretty cool)

The CEO:

  1. “I align our business strategy with a bigger purpose of using our resources to create a better world.”
  2. “For sports shoe/apparel company.”
  3. “To increase our customers worldwide in order to grown, prosper and…”
  4. “Promote the value of sports in developing self-discipline, skill, health and camaraderie.” (just plain amazing)

The project manager:

  1. “I design lean development processes.”
  2. “For the biotech industry.”
  3. “To help speed development time.”
  4. “To get life-saving medicines and therapies to people faster.” (so much more exciting than being a project manager)

See how easy that was? It all begins with your mindset.

Once you become clear on your deepest desires and understand how you are best designed to succeed, you will know what skills you need to master to do something extraordinary. 

You’ll naturally tell the world what you’re up to. You’ll find people who are interested in the same things you are. And you will see opportunities that were previously invisible. Maybe even in the job you have right now. The amazing people I interviewed didn’t have any special intelligence and often had major disadvantages compared to their peers.

What they had was clarity. 

And a willingness to invest in  their future self. They got started by taking the daily steps that got them moving in the direction that was most fulfilling. Anyone of us can do the same. My conviction is that non of us are extra. We are all different for a reason. We all have a difference only we can make. Just start.

 

How to Have a Career That Matters

Posted on by Real Leaders

Are you whispering or are you singing at the top of your lungs? When I was doing research for Save the World and Still be Home for Diner, I interviewed scores of people who wanted to matter. Not in the look-at-me way. Not in the I-want-to-be-famous-on-YouTube way. They just wanted to bloom where they were planted. To sing their song. To make their difference. I talked to them and watched them work. As I listened to their stories about how they discovered their calling and turned it in to a career, I discovered something I never suspected.

Their success came because they were pushed by the current of two fast flowing rivers that converged in one glorious torrent.

River One is the river of ‘Inspired Desire.’ They really wanted to make the world better. Although some were now rich and famous, that was not their goal. Never. Making their difference was.

Research reveals at least six big challenges for humanity.

If you want the world to get better…becoming great at addressing one of these six challenges is pretty damn important. Here are the challenges:

  1. Human rights/oppression: equality, equal justice, dignity, women’s and children’s rights, tolerance, freedom of speech, worship, assembly, etc.
  2. Health/disease: wellness, sports, entertainment, disease prevention, education, research, children’s and women’s health, access, affordability, cancer, AIDS, heart disease, stress, care-giving, etc.
  3. Peace/violence: respect, diplomacy, communication, negotiation, ending war, terrorism, nuclear prolifereation, genocide, abuse, etc.
  4. Education/ignorance: literacy, graduation rates, arts education, science and math, girls and women, computer/digital early childhood, gifted special needs, etc.
  5. Sustainability/environmental collapse: pollution, water shortages, resource depletion, conservation, park development, cleanup, climate change, energy research, etc.
  6. Wealth/poverty: access to capital, food, housing, budgeting, entrepreneurship, career development, job creation, skill training, economic literacy, trade homelessness, etc.

There are many additional ways to help individual human beings and humanity. This is just a list to get you started thinking… Most of us will spend 100,000 hours of our lives working. Most of our waking hours. So why not do something that makes the world a better place to live?

With all the needs humanity has, it seems a shame to invest your gifts doing something trivial. 

What I discovered from the difference-makers I studied was that you can turn virtually any career into something that benefits humanity. You just need to hold that intention and the infinite numbers of ways you can make a difference show up every day. So, I am not suggesting that each one of us has to become Gandhi or Lincoln or Einstein…remember a humble janitor prevents the spread of disease by just doing their job well. I just wonder what kind of world we’d have if all of our mission statements for Me Inc. arose from turning our values into value. I am not suggesting that you take a vow of poverty, but rather a vow of purpose.

I suggest that because the happiest, most creative people I know work that way. 

And, it’s not that hard. That’s where the second river flows in. My interviews and observations of ordinary people with extraordinary careers helped me see it clearly. For these people, River Two is the river of their own Design. They are highly self-aware. They know what they are best at and what brings them joy ‘in the doing.’ They’ve come to understand how their talent and skills work together to create a measure of unique greatness. Most important, they know how to learn what they need to learn in order to do what they really desire to do.

Their stories taught me that sometimes learning is difficult. Painful. Exhausting. Yet necessary to unleash the power of their talents and passions. 

So that’s it. When you harness the river of your Desires in the river of your Design, your career begins to flow so fast it carves its own path to the canyons of life. Let me make this practical. I teach lots of career workshops for corporations for University of California at San Diego. And one thing I found is that people want fast, practical tools to convert these fancy-schmancy principles into immediate action. So here you go.

First, get clear on where you are in your career. You can do that by answering these questions about your work.

  1. What do you do? (What is the essence of your work?)
  2. Who do you do it for? (Who pays you?)
  3. What is the human and economic impact of it? (Why do you get paid?)

Some real examples:

  1. “I do computer programming.”
  2. “For an e-commerce company.”
  3. “To quickly change product offers to customers so my company grow.”

Here’s another:

  1. “I am the Chief Executive Officer that determines strategy and allocates resources.”
  2. “For a sports shoe and athletic apparel company.”
  3. “To ensure the company grows by designing and selling best-in-the-world products.”

One more:

  1. “I do project management.”
  2. “For a technology company.”
  3. “To eliminate waste and shorten delivery time.”

Okay, that’s pretty simple. Now, let’s paddle down the river you’re floating on. This time, do the same exercise except…imagine how you might answer those question two years from now if all your most inspiring career development plans paid off. And add one question.

How’s the world better off for you doing your job?

Here are some answers that are follow-ups to the examples above. The programmer:

  1. “I do artificial intelligence programming.”
  2. “For a progressive video games studio.”
  3. “To create wildly popular products.”
  4. “That teaches players real history and the consequences of making good or bad decisions.” (pretty cool)

The CEO:

  1. “I align our business strategy with a bigger purpose of using our resources to create a better world.”
  2. “For sports shoe/apparel company.”
  3. “To increase our customers worldwide in order to grown, prosper and…”
  4. “Promote the value of sports in developing self-discipline, skill, health and camaraderie.” (just plain amazing)

The project manager:

  1. “I design lean development processes.”
  2. “For the biotech industry.”
  3. “To help speed development time.”
  4. “To get life-saving medicines and therapies to people faster.” (so much more exciting than being a project manager)

See how easy that was? It all begins with your mindset.

Once you become clear on your deepest desires and understand how you are best designed to succeed, you will know what skills you need to master to do something extraordinary. 

You’ll naturally tell the world what you’re up to. You’ll find people who are interested in the same things you are. And you will see opportunities that were previously invisible. Maybe even in the job you have right now. The amazing people I interviewed didn’t have any special intelligence and often had major disadvantages compared to their peers.

What they had was clarity. 

And a willingness to invest in  their future self. They got started by taking the daily steps that got them moving in the direction that was most fulfilling. Anyone of us can do the same. My conviction is that non of us are extra. We are all different for a reason. We all have a difference only we can make. Just start.

 

How You Think – 5 Ways We May or May Not Be Wired for Achievement

Posted on by Will Marre

We have learned more about how our brains work during the last five years than the last 5,000. For instance, we know the old “right-brain, left-brain” model is a gross over simplification of how our brains really processes information and decides to act. The brain functions like a network drawing on vital information that is gathered and evaluated throughout the three pounds of flesh that rests within our skull.

We are constantly building our new neural network. Depending on what we are constantly thinking about, what stresses us, what interests us, what is vital to us. We are constantly constructing new “cell towers” that powerfully shoot electrical energy across our thinking network so that we can act and react. Each of our neural network is as individual as our fingerprint. Yet new research from Harvard’s Stephen Kosslyn (“Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think”) confirms that each of us use one of several Brain Achievement Maps.

A Brain Achievement Map, something I call BAM, is our habitual way of thinking. It’s how we individually select what’s important to us. What keeps our attention, how we learn what we need to learn, who we go to for help, when to act and when not to. Most importantly, it helps us set goals and achieve them. So, there are five common BAMs.

Not surprisingly, most men are wired up for two of them and most women for the other three. 

Here they are:

  1. Achiever: This BAM is found among most business leaders. It focuses your brain on goal achievement. You set the agenda and establish goals. WHen this is your BAM you are looking at trends, competitors and opportunities. You tell others WHAT is important to achieve.
  2. Motivator: This BAM causes people to answer the question – Why? It is your brain seeking purpose. It seeks moral achievement over money, fame or power. When this is your BAM it is difficult to act unless you’re clear on WHY you should.
  3. Collaborator: This BAM seeks interaction. Clarity is created through conversation. Different points of view are welcomed. Inclusion is vital. Decisions are the result of synthesis. The HOW is arrived at as a team. WHen this is your BAM social harmony is pure oxygen.
  4. Driver: This BAM thrives on action. It requires sustained high energy and focuses on immediate goals. Results are what matter. DO it now, no excuses. When this is your BAm you insist on accountability and relentless effort.
  5. Adapter: This BAM seeks practical, immediate improvement. It focuses on what’s working and what might work better. Improving is what matters. If this is your BAM, you thrive on “do, learn, do some more.”

It shouldn’t surprise you that male brains tend to be more Achiever and Driver brains. Females tend to be wired as Motivators, Collaborators and Adapters. What’s critical to understand is these gender differences don’t seem to be solely related to the differences in how boys and girls are raised.

The white matter in a female brain is significantly greater than in a male’s brain. White matter is the substance the brain uses to connect the dots from the far reaches of our neural networks. This means the female brain is engineered to be more collaborative, more diversity-embracing, more synthesizing, more empathetic, and quicker to improve. Even the neural connections between our prefrontal cortex where our values reside, and the rest of our brain capacity is greater in women than in men.

That’s why women generally have better impulse control and start far fewer biker gangs than men do. 

All this has leadership implications that are mission-critical for our future. There’s a stream of new data from organizations such as Sodexo, McKinsey and Company, Catalyst, and the Center for Talent Innovation that convincingly make the case that having many women in leadership positions have a direct impact on growth, profitability and innovation. Sodexo’s research reports that when one third of board members are women, profit margins are 42% better.

That’s a lot better. The key seems to be in having enough women in leaders. One token female does little to influence the achiever-driven brains of men. So organizations become half-brained. Resulting in half-assed business strategy, and poor executed with disengaged employees. That – in my experience – is the norm. Whole-brained organizations have enough women in senior business-driving positions to make a difference.

Having a female head of HR is not sufficient. Women also need to be driving business development, R&D, sales, marketing, operations and every other male-dominated domain of the enterprise. This is not to say that all women teams are the best.

The evidence is that mixed teams of men and women leaders produce better results than one gender teams of either. 

Perhaps now we’re learning why that’s true. Brain Balance. And now some coaching for aspiring women leaders. Please recognize that leading is not easy because your’e doing a lot more thinking than men do. I know this is no surprise. A recent review of 46,000 male and female brain scans revealed that women’s brains were significantly more active in nearly 90% of human brain function.

Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. All this super-strong brain activity makes you more vulnerable to self-doubt, self-criticism, anxiety and chocolate cravings. There’s an area deep in your prefrontal cortex (anterior cingulate gyrus) that makes you hyper sensitive to personal perfectionism. Your “How am I doing?” meter is supersensitive. Your heightened social awareness makes you feel vulnerable to judgement.

And your strong sense of responsibility can drive you to be over-controlling. Perhaps the most difficult news is that your brain doesn’t produce even half of the serotonin that men enjoy. Serotonin is the brain chemical that gives you a feeling of continuous well-being and the sense that all is well.

That’s why it’s usually men who say, “Life is good.” Women on the other hand are much busier trying to make life good.

I’m convinced that women are the primary source of civilization. Some current proof of that is the amazing 98% repayment rate of microloans make to women in developing countries. Microloans are made without collateral but with the mutual social guarantees of 6 to 8 women borrowers.

Each woman pledges her hundred percent support to every other woman in the group to ensure all loan payments are made. So they are. Most microfinancce organizations don’t even loan money to men. That’s because they either spend the loan proceeds or the profit from their business on gambling or alcohol. Women, on the other hand invest their profits in building their businesses, their children’s education or community projects.

Yes, that’s awesome and all, but very stressful. My counsel to women is to realize that in many ways you have one foot on your accelerator and one foot on your break. That creates a lot of noise and smoke, but not speedy progress. Your accelerator is your bright brain that is perfectly designed to thrive in our complex 21st century world. Your break is that inner voice that is constantly second-guessing you.

The bottom line is don’t expect men to behave much differently than they do they are simply not equipped to. And don’t you hang back. Don’t you wait. 

Our future needs a leadership revolution led by men and women working together to create a future we want our children to grow up in.

 

0