CHAPTER 4

How to Keep Your People Focused on Results

“Gentlemen, what are your intentions?”

–CAPTAIN JIM LOVELL, APOLLO 13

We begin our discussion on results by offering specific techniques to increase your team’s focus on what matters most, to recover from distractions, and to hold your team accountable.

• • •

The Apollo 13 mission suffered a major setback when an explosion damaged the spacecraft en route to the moon. The world watched as the astronauts tried to survive and return to Earth. If you’ve seen the eponymous 1995 film by Ron Howard, you might remember the scene where Captain Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, asks the other astronauts, “Gentlemen, what are your intentions? Mine are to go home.”

Lovell actually said this line, though the circumstances were slightly different from how the movie portrayed it. They were coming around from the far side of the moon and preparing a fuel burn to add momentum for the trip back to Earth. This was the first mission for the other two astronauts, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, and they were busy taking pictures. Lovell called them back to the mission with his question and concluded by saying, “If we don’t get home, you won’t be able to have your pictures developed.”¹

Sometimes you will need to get your team back on track as Lovell did. Of course, another part of Winning Well is getting everyone on the same track in the first place. During a recent cross-country flight, Karin happened to sit next to an astronaut, Frederick Gregory, the former deputy administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who led the international management team for the International Space Station. They talked about leadership and what it takes to win well, and she asked him what it took for 14 diverse leaders from countries with tricky political dynamics to work together so successfully. He said:

“Hands down it’s about focusing everyone on a common goal. Once we realized we all had the same big goal, we were able to get past the distraction of different opinions of how we should get there. We learned to release some of our preferred approaches and be open to other ways to accomplish our shared vision.”

As an example, Gregory recounted that, “In order to get respect from the Russians, we first had to prove we could hold our own when it came to vodka. Once we proved that one night, we didn’t need the vodka anymore and got to work.”

Every manager experiences the challenge of distracted people or people pushing in different directions. Managers who lose their soul become frustrated with their team, blame them for their lack of focus, and punish people. However, like Lovell on the Apollo 13 mission, managers who win well are able to lead their people back to the mission and maintain their focus on results. How do they do it?

ACHIEVE REAL RESULTS WITH REAL PEOPLE

To keep your people focused on results, start with your own mindset. Managers who win well understand that people will be distracted. Many managers respond to this reality with frustration: “Hang on just a minute—these people are getting paid good money to stay focused. Surely I can expect that from them?”

Let’s think about this for a moment. Those astronauts’ very lives were at stake, and yet the beauty outside their window was irresistible. Even in dire circumstances, people can prioritize the less-immediate things.

You are in the fourth chapter of this book. How many times have you been distracted from your reading? How many interruptions have you faced? Have you diligently answered every Winning Well Action Plan question? We imagine you’ve had to set the book down and then refocus. Just like you, your people face many distractions every day. You can help reduce distractions and build a foundation for consistent results and healthy relationships by following these four steps.

1. Set Clear Expectations

We’ve found that roughly 90 percent of the problems managers have with poor performance result from deficiencies with this first step. No matter how clear your expectations are to you, it’s likely they’re not as clear to your people. When expectations are foggy, your people will lose focus and put their energy into other activities that make more sense to them. Of course, when they seem to slack off, your natural reaction is to get ticked off. Your reaction annoys your staff, who then wonder why you don’t appreciate how hard they’re working. And so the cycle continues.

Be clear and confident about what you expect and when it will be completed. In Chapters 5 and 9, we’ll give you much more detail about how to do this in meetings as well as when you delegate. In the meantime, here is a quick and useful tool you can use to know for certain whether your people understand the expectations.

When you finish a discussion or share instructions, don’t leave the conversation until you check for understanding. Here are several questions you can use:

 “Before we go, Joe, will you share what you understand the expectations to be?”

 “Joe, can you tell me what you heard?”

 “Let’s review what we’re doing next. What are the three steps we’ll take today?”

 “Good discussion. Joe, can you tell us what are we doing today and tomorrow?”

Your goal is to get your people to share the steps, guidelines, agreement, actions, or expectations. You don’t know that they know until you hear them say it.

You don’t know that they know until you hear them say it.

• • •

Dora was a district manager who took an area president, Steve, out to visit a distribution facility. This was his first visit to any of the centers in her district, so she needed to execute flawlessly.

The visit went well, and Steve made a number of excellent suggestions. Dora met with her local management team who had participated in the meeting and asked if they understood the suggestions. They said yes, and Dora asked them to put together an action plan. She would set up a call so they could review it the following week before sending it along to the president.

The next week, the management team joined the call, and Dora asked them to take her through the plan. There was complete silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, it came out: The managers thought they were going to build the plan on the call together. They’d done nothing and had lost an entire week. Dora had to assign extra resources to get it done quickly. The team was capable but did not understand what she had asked of them.

The problem was in her check for understanding. It’s not enough to ask, “Do you understand?” Have your people repeat the expectations. When you check for understanding, your people might repeat back two action items but leave out a third. Then you can remind them. Or they might repeat all three but have the details wrong. The sooner you discover misaligned expectations, the faster you can clarify and get everyone pointed in the same direction.

2. Train and Equip People to Meet the Expectations

After unclear expectations, the next pitfall is to assume that everyone has the knowledge or skills to meet those expectations. Ensure that your team members are set up for success.

David once worked with a technology company whose bright engineers were creating cutting-edge technology that was used across the globe. As the company grew, it encountered communication challenges, missed deadlines, and frequent conflict as managers became upset with their people and one another.

Most of these problems stemmed from the fact that the engineers weren’t using the scheduling software properly. The managers looked at their cadre of talented, smart engineers and assumed they wouldn’t need to train the engineers in how to use the software. However, one button in the software wasn’t immediately obvious to half the engineers, and as a consequence, they missed meetings, deadlines slipped, and tempers flared.

Be sure to train and equip people to meet expectations.

3. Reinforce Expectations

Effective managers continually reinforce expectations and keep clear priorities in front of their team, offering reminders where they’re going and why. Your mind receives 11 million bits of information every second you are awake.² With that much information coming at your people, it can’t hurt to say things twice. Your major strategic themes, objectives, and key priorities warrant repetition at least once every 28 days.

If your employees were a rock band, reinforcing expectations would be the drums or bass line that anchors the song and keeps everyone on track. It takes a consistent, steady, regular beat to keep your people focused.

4. Close the Loop with Celebration and Accountability

You’ve done all the hard work to ensure that expectations are clear and that people have the skills and equipment to meet the expectations, and you’ve consistently maintained everyone’s focus. The next step is to maintain the momentum through celebration and accountability.

You can easily demotivate your team when you fail to celebrate success or practice accountability. Think of celebration and accountability as the final part of the expectation circle, the feedback that closes the loop and makes it likely your team will stay focused on what matters most.

When you don’t close the results loop with feedback, you effectively tell your team their work doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they did it right, and it doesn’t matter if they did it wrong. When either result is usually met with silence, people ask, “What’s the point?” and give up or move on.

Celebration can be as simple as calling your people together and privately acknowledging that they did it. In Chapter 20 we give you many more resources to celebrate and encourage your people. For now, when you celebrate, make sure the feedback you give is specific, meaningful to them, and relevant to the work and results. You’ll get more of what you encourage and celebrate.

The word accountability isn’t code for “beating people up when they don’t perform.” Think of accountability as “keeping our mutual agreements with one another.” When we don’t keep those agreements or fulfill our commitments, we need to talk about it. In Chapter 7 we share some tools to handle your accountability conversations well. In the meantime, sometimes all it takes is to call attention to an issue. You might say, “We agreed that we would do this, and we haven’t. What happened and how can we get it done?”

Remember that your employees are human beings and even with the best intentions, good people can lose focus on results. It’s your job to help them maintain a healthy focus on results with clear expectations, training to meet the expectations, consistent reinforcement of the expectations, and accountability with celebration.

YOUR WINNING WELL ACTION PLAN

Whenever you find yourself challenged with a management issue, we invite you to first ask these questions:

NOTES

1.  Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 240.

2.  Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, “Information Theory,” by George Markowsky, accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287907/information-theory/214958/Physiology.