Seduction 1—Leaders Are Seduced by Motion

Back in Part One, “Get the Process Right!,” I cautioned you against mistaking motion for progress. Here we will expand on the issue. This seduction actually has two applications. The first concerns your approach to daily job duties. When seduced by motion, you can find yourself immersed in such a frantic swirl of daily motion that you routinely confuse activity with accomplishment, put second things first, do the wrong things often and well, and achieve little meaningful results by day's end.

The following questions help diagnose your vulnerability to being seduced by motion:

• Do you schedule MAX acts and work the rest of the day around them, or do you try to cram your MAX acts into a fray-dominated day?
• Do you feel a false sense of accomplishment because you've been busy and in motion all day, or do you rate your effectiveness by whether you spend enough time on the right things? What does your personal MAX board reflect in this regard?
• When you disengage from the essential and immerse in the trivial, how quickly do you catch yourself and correct your course?

The second application of seduction by motion concerns your team's daily activities. Consider these questions:

• As you survey your team, are you at ease because everyone appears busy, or do you dig deeper to determine whether they are actually executing what their personalized success profiles (PSPs) prescribe? In other words, are you prone to confuse their doing a lot with doing what matters?
• Are RAMs held daily and without fail to reinforce the importance of executing high-leverage tasks daily and hold each team member accountable for doing so?

Remedy—Measure your personal and team's effectiveness by what you put into the hours, instead of the number of hours you put in. Resolve not to confuse motion with progress. Remember that nothing tells the story of your success, or failure, faster in this regard than the condition of your MAX board.

Seduction 2—Leaders Are Seduced by Tradition

This seduction includes the tendency to bond with, and become desensitized to the mediocrity of some tenured employees, your old ways of doing things, and key elements of the status quo. Frankly, it's far easier to ignore the necessity of pruning. It is simpler instead to defend the status quo, “how we've always done things,” as well as nonperforming employees when things are going well. But to ward off the complacency that will break your momentum, you must continue to challenge and attack the status quo before the bottom falls out and you fall into a rut. Unfortunately, it often takes a crisis to shake an organization out of its immersion in, and addiction to, tradition.

Remedy—Practice the discipline of changing before you have to and renewing yourself in the absence of a crisis. Teach and expect your people to do likewise. Internalize the discipline of consistent pruning to realign, revitalize, or remove what's inhibiting execution excellence.

Seduction 3—Leaders Are Seduced by Tolerance

Hollywood, the media, and political correctness will wrongly convince you that you should tolerate just about anything today and that not doing so makes you hateful or harsh.

However, the presence of absolutes and what you refuse to tolerate largely define both your culture and your personal leadership. In a strong culture there still is right and wrong, winning and losing, and success and failure, as well as consequences that accompany bad behavior and poor performance.

Remedy—Find and eliminate gray areas for performance and behavior shortfalls with clearer expectations and consequences for failure. Be specific and follow through. MAX boards and daily RAMs are key allies in this regard.

Seduction 4—Leaders Are Seduced by Stupidity

Ignorance means you do not know better. To be stupid means you know better but do the wrong thing anyway. Incidentally, moronic means notably stupid, indicating perhaps that stupidity has become a lifestyle (in which case it's certainly best to stop at stupid). The problem is that stupidity is often masked, and leaders are seduced by it when they are successful despite themselves.

It's essential to face reality and understand that if you do stupid things and are successful, your success is not because you do stupid things, but despite the fact you do stupid things. You can rest assured that eventually, stupidity will catch up with you.

Remedy—Look at areas where you know personal and team behaviors fall short of excellent and where you have felt no urgency to correct them because poor results have not yet reached crisis levels. Then, quickly shake off the seduction of stupidity by deciding to do what you know is beneficial in the long term. Be aware that the shelf life for getting away with stupidity in the short term may be nearing its expiration date.

Seduction 5—Leaders Are Seduced by Success

Remember the lesson of the red belt mind-set: Success is an intoxicant, and intoxicated people don't behave rationally. Because of this, success lies at the core of the other four seductions. Success can make people so arrogant, prideful, and blind to reality that they keep skipping right down the yellow brick road until they smack right into a wall of irrelevance.

Remedy—Understand Jim Collins's principle that “the enemy of great is good” (n.d.). This simply means that the number one reason why so many reading these words are unlikely to become great is because they have gotten good. As a result, they have lost their killer instinct and have stopped stretching, changing, risking, holding others accountable, and narrowing their focus. This doesn't have to happen on your leadership watch, and it will not if you install and execute MAX and apply the to dos and heed the watch out fors listed throughout this chapter.