Effective leaders are more self-aware than their less successful counterparts. They look in the mirror, assume responsibility for the success of their business, and focus on a handful of daily deliverables paramount to that success and execute them day in and day out. I term these deliverables your Leadership Twelve-Pack. As I present this daily priority to-do list for leaders, evaluate your proficiency and attention to these areas, as they will have a decided bearing on your success in fixing, building, or stretching your organization.
I had a conversation with a client recently who related how his general manager had fired three key people after the store had two consecutive bad months. The client was miffed because this was the same braggart who’d been taking the credit a few months back when business was rolling. My friend went on to mention that the general manager wasn’t showing up on weekends and missed the last day of the month even though the store was struggling. He lamented that in recent months this guy had been acting more like he owned the place than like an employee there. The client took responsibility for letting things get so far off track. I suggested his general manager might be approaching his “sell by” date and recommended a course of action.
This encounter reminded me what’s at stake when you choose a manager of your people. Careers will be made or broken based on this choice; the organization’s reputation will be glorified or crucified because of this person, and whether good people stay or go elsewhere depends primarily on the environment created and reinforced by the leader. When you’re the leader you have to come to grips with the fact that if you’ve been taking credit for the rain, you must shoulder the blame for the drought. Unfortunately, too many managers have a black belt in blame. By firing others, you take the focus off yourself and put it on all the “losers” who were booted out. Perhaps your people really were that bad and needed replacing, but ultimately, whom is that situation a reflection of? Great leaders take the heat and let their players take the bows.
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Nothing gets measurably better in an organization until the leaders do. When you work on the leaders you’re striking at the root. Everything else is merely hacking at the leaves.
Good leaders know how to use both the window and the mirror. When things are going well they look out the window and credit the team. They determine what more they can do to support, reward, and motivate the people making it happen. When things turn sour, effective leaders look in the mirror and assume responsibility for results, and change their own course before they blame or alter the course of others. Poor leaders, on the other hand, use the window and mirror differently. When things are going badly they look out the window and blame the team. They complain that people aren’t doing enough, aren’t committed enough, and aren’t good enough. But when business is rolling along they spend their time in front of the mirror taking bows and celebrating their genius. In leadership there are two words for this behavior: severe delusion. Real leaders accept responsibility for the health of their enterprise. They know that if they misdiagnose the causes of business problems they will mistreat them. They also know that leadership is earned and not assumed, that real leaders run for office every day. They sell themselves and their vision. They know they don’t have a lifetime term and that there are two ways their people can fire them: by leaving and by not performing. Either way, the leader loses.
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Anyone who has to remind his people that he is the boss or that he is the leader isn’t much of either.
It’s important to remember that having a leadership title doesn’t make you a leader. What a foolish notion to think one’s competency has been increased by virtue of a change in title. As a leader, you should also understand that it’s your followers who decide whether you’re the leader.
As a leader in your organization, your job is to go first. Leaders change, listen, and learn first. They trust first and connect with their followers rather than waiting for followers to connect with them. They understand that leadership is influence and relationships and that without both you cannot lead. As my friend John Maxwell noted, “He who thinketh he leadeth but hath no followers is simply out for a walk.” A leader’s job is to serve followers, not be served by them. Your job is to add value to your people. You are there for them; they’re not there for you. Your team doesn’t belong to you; you belong to your team. Any other conception of your role than this is a corrupt understanding of leadership.
As a leader you must commit yourself to a cause and not commit the cause to yourself. You must lead by personal example and not personal convenience. You must commit to a lifetime of learning and executing diligent daily disciplines whereby you do the right things day in and day out. As you study your Leadership Twelve-Pack in this chapter, look at it as a nonnegotiable commitment to a series of diligent daily disciplines through which you assume responsibility for living consistently. How you execute them and the time you spend on each will depend on your personal strengths, style, and organizational needs. Your calling is to take responsibility for making certain these disciplines are executed. There may be times when your situation dictates that your time be immersed in one or two disciplines to the temporary exclusion of others. Because of this, the ideal supplement to your own leadership is to build a team that carries the load of many twelve-pack tasks while you are engaged in others. To think you’ll have time to execute all twelve every day is naive. The key objective is that they are executed; the “how” is your responsibility.
The first six-pack of responsibilities pertains to organizational clarity, resource allocation, and making a personal impact. They are listed in no ranked order of performance priority, as that will vary depending on each leader’s individual situation, team, and organization. I can sum up in one word the key to identifying, working within, and sticking to the disciplines of executing your Leadership Twelve-Pack: awareness. As a leader, you must become more self-aware of where you’re spending your time and with whom you’re spending it, and commit to focusing on and adjusting your daily course so that the majority of your time is invested in this handful of daily deliverables that will most greatly determine your effectiveness as a leader.
People will try hard to hit a standard if they know what it is, but it’s unfair to expect them to work longer and harder if their destination is covered in fog. In the culture of merit described in Chapter 2, accountability was a key component of creating a positive pressure to perform. But without clear performance and behavior expectations accountability is impossible. It’s the leader’s duty to define what is expected in both regards.
Core values are not some Pollyanna happy hot-tub talk dreamt up by business schools to make your life as a leader more complicated. Core values are a code of conduct you are unwilling to compromise on in your organization. While I advocate diversity of thinking in a business, there must be complete agreement on and adherence to a common set of core values. Ideally, they will be memorable, few, and easy to articulate. They create a standard that positively influences the behavior of your people. They act as a North Star in guiding their interactions with customers and coworkers. Ideally, core values are discussed during the interview process. Share them with applicants and be very blunt. Tell applicants that this is the way you do business and that if they think they’d be a poor fit for these values they should let you know now, since those who come on board and don’t live the values are not going to like their job—and you’re not going to like them. You will also train on those values and communicate them endlessly in meetings and during performance reviews. Core values must be devised to fit your organizational needs. Some of the more effective core values I’ve helped clients develop are as follows:
The good of the team comes before the good of any individual.
The worst decision is to make no decision.
We treat and reward people in the manner they earn and deserve.
No one will be punished for making a decision or using good old common sense when taking care of a customer, even if it breaks our other rules.
Your own core values are up to you and your leadership team. Choose them carefully. The best way you can communicate their importance is to live them. The second-best way is to measure people against them. At employee review time, people should be held accountable to these behavior benchmarks. While at General Electric, Jack Welch developed a four-tier matrix system for evaluating employees.[23] It measured both performance and behavior standards. This clarity made evaluations easier and more consistent:
TYPE 1: Makes the numbers and lives the values. Result: The person goes onward and upward.
TYPE 2: Doesn’t make the numbers or live the values. Result: The person is gone.
TYPE 3: Lives the values but misses the numbers. Result: Another chance or two, perhaps in a different position.
TYPE 4: Hits the numbers but doesn’t live the values. Result: The person is gone.
Obviously, the first three groups are pretty easy calls. It’s the type 4s that make you lose sleep because it’s an unnatural act to remove someone making the numbers. But as a leader you are the steward of your culture and have an innate obligation to remove the type 4s. If you keep a skunk just because he makes the numbers you’ll be seen as a sellout by the rest of the team. Try to turn the person around first, but know that in the long run a core-value violator costs you much more to keep than to remove. In fact, nothing reduces you to sellout status as surely as retaining or promoting skunks just because they make the numbers.
There are two primary errors leaders make with performance expectations: They don’t set enough of them, so people aren’t sure what exactly is expected, and when they do establish them they set the bar too low. For instance, when you hire salespeople, do you let them know what their sales averages are expected to be after ninety days? Or how about the minimum number of phone calls they’re supposed to make each day, how many outside prospects they’re expected to contact, or the number of closing techniques they are expected to master? If you don’t communicate performance expectations, how can you hold people accountable later for not reaching them? You can’t. So you won’t. And this is precisely why you keep some of the wrong people too long. Since there is no clear benchmark to hold them accountable to, you are reluctant to do so.
Second, when you do set performance expectations do you set them high enough? Expectations should not be designed to make people feel cozy and comfortable. They should stretch people. Some organizations have expected so little for so long they’re in a rut and don’t even know it.
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Low expectations presume incompetence. When you presume incompetence long enough, you unwittingly create it.
Performance expectations should be set after careful thought, because once they are established you’ll have to follow through with consequences when they’re not reached. So make sure you can live with them. Just as with core values, when you set but fail to enforce performance standards they turn into a joke, and people will look at them as suggestions more than mandates. Many organizations develop minimum performance standards whereby an employee failing to sustain a predetermined production level over a sixty- or ninety-day period is put on probation or terminated. This is clearly explained up front and put in writing. If you set up minimum performance standards you will create clarity, focus, and urgency. There will be no gray area. People will know exactly where they stand and basically fire themselves if they fail to produce. I always recommend that minimum performance standards be set up as a negative guarantee, not a positive guarantee. In other words, if your minimum performance standard for a ninety-day period is eight sales, the fact that employees attain the eight doesn’t mean they automatically keep their jobs. Factors like character, attitude, and customer care will also be factored in, and the employees know this. However, if they fail to hit the eight, they know exactly what the consequence is and are not surprised when it happens.
To execute this daily discipline as part of your twelve-pack will take constant communication, focus, and attention. Once you set standards, you must also stay flexible to amend or increase them as necessary over time. In addition, by rewarding those who are living the values and hitting the numbers at the same time you are confronting those who are not, you’ll make the expectations real and they’ll become a key component in defining your culture of merit. And this culture will dictate the behavior that determines your level of results.
Ultimately, it’s not important that you get everything done at your job every day. Nor is it important that you get enough done. What is most important is that you get the right things done. Unfortunately, too many leaders do the wrong things well. They engage in tasks that are low return, that they’re no good at, or that they shouldn’t be doing at all and squander their most precious resource: time. The Pareto Principle, the 80–20 rule, states that 20 percent of your activities bring you 80 percent of your results. In other words, if you have a job description or a to-do list with ten things on it, two to three of those items will bring you substantial results. Not everything on that list has equal value or will bring equivalent return. Your job is to determine what your high-leverage activities are and commit to executing them as part of your Leadership Twelve-Pack, day in and day out. What the specific activities are depends on your position, strengths, and responsibilities, and they may change over time. But until you determine and commit to them you will continue to confuse activity with accomplishment. You may be busy all day and still not be effective. People who think they have ten priorities have no idea what their job is. They may have ten items on their to-do list, but they don’t have ten priorities. If everything is important then nothing is important!
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It’s not the hours or days you put in that make you effective, it’s what you put in the hours and days. What good does it do to put in more hours and days if you’re putting the wrong things in them to begin with?
To help execute the Pareto Principle more effectively, schedule your high-leverage activities to make sure you get them done. Don’t leave them to chance. As a sales manager, I attended a course that told me I’d get a high return from having one-on-one coaching sessions with my salespeople. I bought into this premise, but upon returning to my job I found that I never managed to find time to hold one-on-ones. It was frustrating to know where I would get a high return on my time but never do it. Finally, I began scheduling the sessions on the calendar as appointments. I journeyed a step further and scheduled them early in the day since I’m a morning person and am at my best at that time. I recommend you do the same and schedule your top-priority tasks. Perhaps you get a high return from training your people or recruiting new faces into your organization. Stop hoping to find time for them and commit to getting them done. When coaching managers on how to best utilize their time I am always amazed (but no longer surprised) when examining their list of priorities to rarely ever find thinking time scheduled. Few leaders ever block off time to lock the office door, take the phone off the hook, and consciously work on their problems and opportunities. They’re so busy working in their business they don’t take the time to step back and work on it. This is foolish, because you’ll find that the more you step back and work on your business the easier it becomes to work in it.
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You can’t take a casual approach to your time. Casualness leads to casualties.
Motivational teacher Jim Rohn admonishes leaders not to spend major time or money on minor things and, just as important, not to spend minor time or money on the major ones.[24] Jim’s words are great advice, but it takes discipline and awareness from the leader. You will get off track. You will find yourself immersed in the thick of things and not putting first things first. The key is to be more aware, to recognize when you’ve gotten off track and make a course correction by getting back to what matters.
Once you begin developing a more effective team as outlined in Chapter 3, you’ll find it easier to work on your high-return tasks because you’ll have more capable people around you helping to carry the load, protecting you from becoming immersed in the trivial, marginal, and menial. The leaders who are the worst time managers are the lone-ranger bosses who do far too much themselves because they never learn to get it done through others. Before you start adding things to your to-do list in a blundering attempt to become more effective, I recommend you do one thing first: Start a stop-doing list. Identify the low-return tasks you’re not going to do anymore so you’ll have more time freed up to do what counts. Once you make this trade-off and outsource, delegate, or stop doing the items on your stop-doing list, you’ll be investing your time and energy where you get maximum impact and not letting activity fake you out. Once you begin your stop-doing list, you’ll have time for the highest-paid activity in America: thinking time. As strange as it sounds, most people don’t deliberately think. They operate out of instinct, or react, or make it up as they go along. Most people simply see a moving line and get in it. Sitting in a quiet room alone with your legal pad of problems and opportunities and thinking of appropriate action will pay bigger dividends than nearly any other activity on your to-do list.
For most leaders, working on their high-leverage activities also means working in their areas of greatest strength. It’s essential you spend as much time in these gifted areas as possible and learn to delegate, train others to do, outsource, or simply stop doing altogether the things that take you out of your strengths. Too many leaders squander time working in weak areas. This hole-plugging approach to time management causes you to spend too much time on what doesn’t work. Working in your areas of weakness causes you to play a perpetual game of catch-up. You gain self-esteem and momentum only when you work in your strong areas. You’ll find that you can get by when you work on your weaknesses but you get great only as you work on your strengths.
I’ll leave you with one final thought concerning time management and becoming a more effective leader. Some readers will think this sounds negative, while others will recognize its truth and feel a strange sense of relief. Here goes: You will never get all your work done. You will never get caught up. It won’t happen. There is always an infinite amount of work that will be waiting in the wings. Come to grips with the fact that the only way you can expect to be more productive and happier at the same time is by doing the things that bring you the greatest return and create the highest impact.
The third component of your daily Leadership Twelve-Pack also takes heightened awareness because the natural tendency of leaders is to try to be everything to everyone. But just as you committed to investing in your high-leverage tasks in the prior section, you must become equally diligent and disciplined about investing more in your high-leverage people. Based on what we covered in Chapter 3 concerning the admonition not to treat unequals equally, you should already grasp the vitality of this discipline. From here on out your job is to discipline yourself to follow through and spend more time, money, energy, and resources leveraging your best people. You can apply Jim Rohn’s advice in point 2 and apply it to people: Don’t spend major time or money on minor producers. Don’t spend minor time or money on the major producers.
Remember, if you find yourself spending excessive time motivating and tightly managing certain people, you have the wrong people. They will steal your time and resources away from the strengths of your organization, causing you to attempt to fix the unfixable while your best people’s potential dies a slow death on a vine of neglect.
You can take this point to a higher and more effective degree by using the same “give your best to the best” mantra to your highest-return customers. Devise ways to identify, incentivize, reward, and serve them at higher levels. Since the cost of customer retention is miniscule compared to the expense of customer acquisition, giving your best to your best customers is great economics.
In the next chapter I’ll discuss how failing to work on oneself is one of the six temptations of successful leaders. For now, suffice it to say that one of your daily disciplines is to make a concerted effort to increase your own capacity to produce. This means you read the books, listen to the tapes and CDs, and attend the courses that elevate your own personal growth. Some leaders get so busy doing that they stop learning. You can’t afford this. But you must be aware that, since life isn’t just going to come along and improve you, you must apply the same diligence to developing your mind as you use when devising a regimented workout program to develop your body.
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Getting better is a life’s work. It’s a daily thing, not a destination thing.
Many leaders think they don’t have time to read books or listen to audio programs in their field. They are wrong. The key is that you have to make trade-offs to get it done. If you commute to work, turn off the R-rated disc jockey and listen to a tape or CD on how to grow your business, improve your leadership, or get more done through others. Turn your drive time into improvement time. When at home, turn off the mindless television every once in a while, open a book, and study the life of a successful business or historical leader and determine how to apply their principles to your business. Zig Ziglar nailed it when he said that mindless television and radio was an income suppressant. Besides, if you don’t have and model a personal growth program, how can you credibly tell others on your team they must change, risk, grow, and continue to learn? You can’t. So you won’t. And in the process you’ll become a lid on your people. Start a library at home and at work filled with resources on how to manage, lead, motivate, think strategically, set goals, stay motivated, develop others, and manage your time. As a leader, it’s up to you to create a learning culture. Besides, if your people are outlearning you, you’re headed for trouble, because it is difficult if not impossible to lead people who have outgrown you.
It’s also important to realize that time and experience in the business don’t constitute personal growth. In fact, the wrong experiences can make you worse. Just because you show doesn’t mean you grow. A personal growth program is a concentrated effort. You measure your progress just as you would on a diet, a workout program, or another project requiring discipline and accountability. It must be specific and simple: one book per month or one tape per month, for instance. Over time, you can take it up to new levels. The key is to make personal growth part of your daily discipline. It’s like an apple a day. Eating seven on Saturday night doesn’t have the same effect as consuming one every day. As you grow bigger on the inside you’ll find you can grow your business bigger on the outside. Learning is energizing and motivating, and when you share what you learn with others you multiply your effectiveness. Personal growth for leaders is not an option. As John F. Kennedy was to say in a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart the day he was assassinated, “Leading and learning are indispensable to one another.”
Since prior chapters have dealt intensely with creating vision and strategy, this daily discipline will focus on communicating the vision and evaluating and adjusting the strategy.
Leaders bring vision to life by living it, modeling it, and talking about it every chance they get. This weaves it into the culture, keeps others engaged in the campaign, and reinforces credibility that the vision is real and not a whim or flavor of the month. Progress toward the vision should be discussed in each meeting, during one-on-one coaching sessions, and in memos and e-mails. Just about the time you’re sick of talking about it is when the rest of your employees start to get it. As mentioned before, keeping the vision concise and easy to communicate is essential since you’ll be describing it often. The best things ever spoken or written were brief. The Lord’s Prayer has 66 words in it. The Gettysburg Address has 286, and the Declaration of Independence, 1,332 (and that’s pushing it!). On the other hand, the United States Department of Agriculture’s regulation on the sale of cabbage has 26,911![25] Don’t go there.
I once accompanied a small group that spent two hours discussing leadership at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, with Coretta Scott King and Bernice King, widow and daughter, respectively, of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.[26] The Kings made special mention that one of Dr. King’s gifts was his ability to turn every conversation back toward the vision of his movement. By doing so he kept the cause at the forefront of everyone’s mind in spite of distractions and setbacks. You must find ways to emulate this skill in order to keep your vision in focus, alive, and potent.
Some leaders worry that they may overcommunicate their vision. Don’t sweat this, because there is no such thing as overcommunicating. Most workers are inundated with so much information that they instinctively tune most of it out. Only as you repeat the vision endlessly will you break through the “here it comes again” defenses.
Rigid strategies derail your efforts and waste time, energy, and resources. While you must remain focused like a laser on your vision, you must become very flexible in your strategy. In short, if something isn’t working, change it. Part of your daily discipline is to read and respond to the results you’re getting and determine if you are on the right track—and when you aren’t, to alter your course. You must continually run through your mind the game film of how you’re executing and how results are unfolding and be able to turn on a dime when necessary. Evaluating strategy also means you ask your team plenty of questions about what is working and what is not and pay heed to and act on the feedback you receive.
If you falter on the disciplines of communicating vision and evaluating and adjusting strategy, you’ll find yourself presiding over a dead or dying future picture and acting as undertaker for decaying best-laid plans.
Effective leaders show up. They climb out of the ivory tower and into the trenches. They lead from the front. In fact, you cannot effectively execute the aforementioned disciplines unless you stay engaged with your people. You can’t create the right environment and positively impact people by remote control, memo, e-mail, or voice mail. Executing this discipline in your twelve-pack will separate you from those leaders who, over time, trade in “peoplework” for paperwork and lose their impact as leaders. As General Patton said, “You young lieutenants have to realize that your platoon is like a piece of spaghetti. You can’t push it. You’ve got to get out front and lead it.”[27]
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Leading from the rear—literally leading from your rear end—is a catalyst to leadership irrelevance. You cannot impact people as you polish a chair with your behind.
Leading from the front and positively impacting others are accomplished by the following:
Committing to daily wander-arounds. A wander-around is when you dislodge yourself from the administrative trap of your office and connect with your people. You are visible and accessible; you positively reinforce, ask questions, and listen to answers, hold one-on-ones, talk about and model the vision, confront poor performers, attend high-impact meetings, and train your people. Here’s the catch: If you’re having a bad day and your face shows it, stay in your office. Everyone has bad days. The key is to be self-aware enough to realize it and minimize the damage you do to morale, momentum, and the workplace environment. Wander-arounds are supposed to be constructive and empowering. You ruin their effect when you turn them into drive-by’s. This brings us to the next point.
Control your attitude and emotions. As a rule, leaders are expected to do a better job of controlling their emotions than followers. This comes with the territory. Realize that you are on display and everything you say will elevate or devastate, earn respect or lose it, enhance your presence or cheapen it. Thus, model the right attitude as you lead from the front. The Law of Leadership Modeling states that the positive things you do in excess, followers will emulate in moderation. But the negative things you do in moderation, they will emulate in excess.
There is little more damaging or demoralizing than a leader with a lousy attitude: the continual critic, fault finder, whiner, gossip, or spreader of rumors. A manager in one of my seminars confided that he talked about his personal problems with his subordinates because it helped him build rapport. He declared that he wanted them to think of him as a normal person just like they were. I couldn’t have been more stunned had I been treated well at a DMV office. I suggested to this whiner that he should not discuss his personal problems with underlings for a number of reasons. First, it would distract them. I asked what he thought it cost to take their eyes off their work and put them on his problems. Second, it would cheapen his presence and diminish his credibility as their leader. And third, they wouldn’t care! They had their own problems! I told him that 90 percent of the people couldn’t care less about his problems and the other 10 percent were glad he had them, so talking about them accomplished nothing. Remember the words of Winston Churchill: “If you can’t laugh, smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, stay out of the way until you can.”[28] The Lion of Britain went on to observe that success in life is determined by one’s ability to maintain enthusiasm in between failures.[29]
Be more self-aware and continually make adjustments. There’s that “awareness” word again. But good leaders are simply more aware of their actions than poor ones. Suffice it to say that everyone becomes more remote than they should be from time to time. They go from leader to administrator and spend more time presiding than impacting. The key is to be aware of when this happens and make an adjustment by getting back into the trenches. Failing to execute this discipline causes endless problems in your business. In fact, it’s so important I’ll cover it in greater depth in the next chapter as one of the six temptations of successful leaders and organizations.
I once had a manager tell me he avoided wander-arounds and engaging his people too often because he got tired of hearing all their gripes and the bad news they brought him. I told him that as a leader his job was to hear as much bad news as possible and to act on it. It certainly wasn’t to avoid it or pretend like it didn’t exist. In fact, the day your people stop bringing you problems is the day you stop leading them, because they think you either can’t do anything about their issue or don’t care enough to take action. Either way, you’re done.
The second six-pack of responsibilities relates to team building, people development, and upgrading your roster of players. As with the first six-pack, these are daily disciplines that require diligent attention. Remember the key words to execution: day in, day out.
A major responsibility is to ensure that the people in your organization are growing. This is a daily discipline, not something you tend to once a year at an off-site training retreat. If your organization outgrows its people it will plateau. In fact, no organization can grow consistently faster than its ability to get enough people to implement that growth and still hope to become a great company.
Ensuring that people are developed at all levels in your organization means you do the following:
Make certain that consistent and high-impact training meetings are conducted. These meetings should include product knowledge, selling skills, and other competencies related to job performance.
Conclude training meetings with marching orders. This ensures that skills and knowledge are internalized between formal training meetings. Marching orders can be a product of the week or a closing skill of the week that your people practice and refine, and are then tested on and held accountable for at the beginning of the next meeting. Managers must stop the “spray and pray” approach to training whereby they pontificate for an hour, conclude the meeting, and then next week start all over again with no accountability for learning what was covered previously.
An hour-a-week training meeting is barely enough to maintain people, much less get them better. Your people will get better at what they do in their daily routine between your formal weekly meetings. Take a salesperson, for instance. She will not get any better when in front of a customer. Whatever hand she’s holding she’ll have to play. She gets better in between customers, with her daily practice routine. This is when she puts her cards together and determines whether she holds four aces or has to fold and lose another deal the next time she’s presenting a product to a prospect. Daily practice accomplishes something else of vital importance: It more directly invests your people in their own success. Once they put in the sweat and time of practice, it’s tougher not to care or to mail in the month when it’s not going well. They’re less likely to quit on you when more of their own time and effort are at stake. As Vince Lombardi said, “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”[30]
Attend, conduct, or help facilitate training meetings when appropriate. One of your daily disciplines should be to lend your presence and talents to these meetings whenever possible. The message you send by showing up is “This is important,” and it’s more effective than a hundred speeches on the virtues of training.
Conduct one-on-ones with your key people and make sure other managers are doing the same. Your people need these coaching sessions to give and receive feedback and to be challenged, held accountable, and reminded of vision, values, and expectations. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one-on-ones are indispensable to growing your team and are too important to hold only when they’re convenient. Schedule them.
Determine that you and the other managers have customized and are executing plans to personally develop the high-potentials on the team. This should be done by identifying and closing skill gaps needed to contribute at higher levels. Your people with the most upward mobility deserve more of your time and attention through development initiatives.
As outlined in Chapter 1, there is no better way a leader can spend time than in actively looking for great people to join the team. This means you make time to personally recruit and interview the people who hold the keys to building your organization. This must become a daily discipline, part of who you are and what you do, because proactivity is the key to finding great people. Leaders who wait until they’re shorthanded to run ads, interview, and hire never bring on the best people. They become desperate, get clouded vision, and lower the bar so people can clear it and plug the holes.
I spoke with a manager recently who was complaining that the human resource personnel in charge of screening job applicants for his department continued to send him subpar candidates. He was playing the victim, and as I listened impatiently to his diatribe my disgust came to a boil. I told this sniveler that if it was his team, his paycheck, and his department he’d be well advised to go out and personally find people for his team rather than waiting for eagles to fall from the sky and onto his doorstep. In fact, if you’re serious about building a great team you had better be prepared to go find the great players yourself.
I was reminded of the power of “eagle shopping” while visiting a major shopping center during the holiday season. This mall was filled with kiosks scattered throughout the aisles. Some of the kiosk vendors were slouched in their chairs working crossword puzzles or reading newspapers, others were talking loudly on their cell phones, a few were stuffing their face with pizzas and pretzels, and a rare, special one or two were actually working.
One young lady selling nail polish and accessories captured my attention. She was standing in the aisle, politely and assertively approaching shoppers as they passed her cart and offering a short demonstration. I watched as she was repeatedly rejected. She never lost her smile or broke her stride. Soon she made a sale. Within five minutes she made another. I bought a Diet Coke and pretzel of my own, sat at a nearby bench, and continued to watch this pro at work. Here she was, no supervisor present, surrounded by slugs at like kiosks waiting for something to happen. But she was making it happen. When my wife emerged from a shoe store, I purposely led her in the direction of the nail polish pro, and soon we were hearing the pitch I’d seen her give a dozen times. Within five minutes my spouse bought $50 worth of junk she didn’t need, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. I thought about all the managers in this city—even right there in that very mall—who cried about there being a shortage of talented people in their unique area and how they couldn’t find good workers. What a cop-out! Great people are everywhere. You just have to want them badly enough to go look for them. And then you’d better have a compelling reason for them to join your team: the EVP that I discussed in Chapter 1. But they’re worth the work it takes to get them, and finding them, interviewing them, and hiring them should be part of your daily disciplines as a leader.
The ninth daily discipline in your Leadership Twelve-Pack is unpleasant. It’s also one of the most important contributions you make to the organization and the rest of the team. By confronting, turning around, or removing poor performers you preserve your merit culture, reinforce company standards, and build your personal credibility. While it’s acceptable to treat people in accordance with their potential for a while, eventually you must treat them in accordance with their performance. I’ve discussed poor performers and options for dealing with them throughout this book and have little to add in this section other than to urge you toward greater self-awareness of your daily responsibilities in exercising this discipline.
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If you don’t quickly confront, turn around, or remove poor performers, you endorse their debilitating behavior by default. You become a collaborator in their corporate debauchery.
Confronting poor performers and deficient performance should be done quickly, privately, and succinctly. Be professional, humane, and respectful. Correcting someone’s performance is not a license to get personal, sarcastic, or caustic. Love the person; hate the performance. Understand the difference or you become an abuser of people. Think of confronting unacceptable behavior in an employee much as you would in a child you loved. You care too much to see them flounder. You don’t want to see them get hurt or do harm by continuing in their errant ways. At the same time, you don’t want to destroy their self-esteem and render them vegetables for the rest of the day, week, or month. So you balance an iron hand with a velvet glove and proceed with compassionate firmness. You not only make them aware of the problem, you help them figure a way out. The whole idea behind confronting is to improve behavior and performance, not to humiliate.
When you confront, turn around, or remove poor performers you fulfill an important obligation to your team’s momentum and morale. Others will respect you for your actions, and you’ll lose their respect if you blink on this issue. The reason this is a daily discipline is that it takes constant attention to keep your people out of a gray area and focused on results, and to prevent them from straying too far off track. I can scarcely think of a poor situation that was improved by refusing to face it or by hesitating to meet it head on.
And make sure other managers are holding them with their direct reports as well. Your job is to force reality into every management position and department. Brutally honest performance reviews are a platform for accomplishing this task. They go above and beyond what a one-on-one coaching session entails. Performance reviews are more formal. Unlike in a one-on-one, you will do most of the talking. And while this is not a daily discipline per se, the feedback you observe on a daily basis will become a vital part of the review process. How often you conduct a performance review is up to you. I recommend one formal review per month. Obviously, you’ll offer plenty of feedback between these monthly reviews to reinforce good behaviors and confront poor ones. But the formal review gives you an opportunity to formulate what you’ve seen in the past month into a bigger picture rather than daily bites. A formal monthly performance review affords you the chance to consistently force realism into every job function and every employee. They should include or cover the items discussed in the following sections.
These are equally important. The natural tendency of most managers is to take employees’ strengths for granted and pick apart their weaknesses. This is a severe error. It is impossible to motivate people by working only on their weaknesses. Your people can gain a sense of esteem and accomplishment only when working in areas of strength and having those strengths affirmed. Thus, you should spend disproportionate time affirming their strong points and encouraging them to spend more time in these gifted areas. This doesn’t mean that you ignore weaknesses, but you must become more discerning about them. For instance, if an employee is weak in an area that isn’t essential to his or her becoming great in that job, get the employee some help. Outsource the weakness or train someone else to do it. This will free the person up to spend more time at what he or she is best at and be more productive. However, there are four weaknesses that constitute a fatal flaw in most positions. A fatal flaw is a weakness in an area that makes it nearly impossible for people to approach their potential. These four weaknesses should be confronted and coached during the performance review, as they are key constraints to moving forward. The four weaknesses that must be brought to an employee’s attention and worked on are discipline, attitude, character, and people skills.
These will include behavior and results objectives that establish a basis for future accountability. Your job is to help the employee design a plan to move from where he or she is to the next desired level.
If you don’t discuss progress or shortfalls based on the plans you established at past reviews, the evaluations turn into little more than a formality and will be devoid of impact. In fact, this should be among the first orders of business before moving on to new territory.
Be respectful but don’t sugarcoat what you’ve got to say. If your employees have done a great job, tell them they’re great. If they’re failing, tell them they’re failing. Create a culture of candor during these reviews so they know exactly where they stand and what they must do to move forward.
Structure a review form that details the key points covered and the employee’s commitments, and document progress or shortfalls. As much of this as possible should be prepared in advance.
A few of my favorites are these:
When you conduct them professionally and in the right spirit, good employees will positively anticipate these reviews. They’ll look forward to kudos for the good works they’ve done, will seek out your advice on how to get better, and will be motivated by the clarity you provide as to where they stand. Predictably, the employees who dread these get-togethers will be those who missed their numbers, displayed poor behavior, or did not perform the tasks set out in the prior review and now have to bluff their way through the current one.
Consistent, organized, high-impact monthly performance reviews are among a leader’s greatest tools to create clarity and establish accountability. You fail yourself and your team members if you merely throw your review outline together the night before your meeting. Take notes of key behavioral highlights and low points throughout the month. Give thought to the personal development of each person you’re coaching, and focus like a laser on how you can help each person reach another level.
If you or other leaders in your organization shun, dislike, or don’t see the importance of these reviews, quite frankly, you have no idea what your real job is as a leader. There is little that brings a more significant return on your time than the personalized feedback and coaching presented in the employee performance evaluation. It takes work, resolve, and skill. If you ignore it you will never grow a team to its maximum potential, and you won’t grow to yours. Nothing will teach you more about yourself or your people than the discipline of facilitating these reviews.
The status quo is best described as Latin for “the mess we’re in.” It’s the mind-set that declares that something must work because it’s still around and that it’s still around because it must work. Many leaders have become bound and gagged by tradition. This is why a key leadership daily discipline is to continually challenge the status quo in the workplace. This includes asking the right questions, making sure new voices are included in change and strategy conversations, taking and encouraging risks, and acting as a primary change catalyst. Following are four practices you can execute to help rattle the status quo in your organization:
As you are working your way into a leadership position you are expected to come up with the right answers and are rewarded for doing so. But as you rise higher in leadership you are expected to ask more of the right questions. Effective leaders ask often and they ask the tough ones as well. They challenge current systems, philosophies, and practices. Two of their favorite questions are “Why?” and “What?” “Why are we still using this system? Why not raise performance standards? Why is this person still on the payroll? Why aren’t we dreaming like we used to? Why are we doing it that way? Why don’t we try it this way? What would happen if we stopped this or started that? What if we changed our marketing message? What would be the impact of establishing minimum standards? What would it take to make it tougher for the average to join this company? What can I do better? What can I do to make you more successful? What do I do around here that breaks momentum? What should I do more of or less of, start doing, or stop doing altogether?”
Effective leaders ask pointed questions to challenge the status quo, to disturb the equilibrium, to stretch thinking, and to collapse comfort zones. But they don’t stop there. They listen intently to the answers and take action quickly whenever appropriate. They create a culture where everyone knows sacred cows cannot find refuge.
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is limiting their interaction to a select group—their inner circle. Building and collaborating with an effective inner circle of trusted advisers is a key leadership responsibility. But if you don’t include people from all levels in your change and strategy conversations you will disenfranchise 90 percent of the people in your business. When you think about it, you may have little to learn from your leadership team. Your positions are well documented, and you can finish one another’s sentences. Thus, make it a practice to invite guests to your strategy meetings—employees who have never before attended, people from all levels in your hierarchy. These are the people on the front lines, and they are often the first to identify trends, sniff out new competitors, or detect potential product or service problems.
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The people on your periphery—in most cases the powerless—often have vital knowledge before the powerful.
Who are the first people to hear customer complaints or questions about your product or service? The lowly clerks answering the customer service lines, of course. And those most likely to hear about how a new competitor is beating you or how your service compares with that of a competitor are your front-line salespeople. Bearing this in mind, when was the last time someone from either of these departments was invited to a strategy session or executive meeting? The thought of including new voices in change and strategy conversations will ruffle some executives who, while espousing openness to change, secretly hope for a more compliant organization over a vociferous one.
When your people see you taking risks, trying new things, and attacking the status quo you give them license to do likewise. But when they see you frozen in a comfort zone and calcifying in a mold, they find reasons to play it safe and maintain. A good leader creates an environment where his or her people take shots and insists they keep taking them even when they miss. This is not permission to engage in reckless, bet-the-company craziness. I’m speaking of mature risk, where you do your homework, seek feedback from others, and if the upside looks worth it, decide to go for it.
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The most successful people are not those who fail the least. They are those who are the least afraid to fail.
You will never gain a competitive edge by following the herd. The only way to get ahead is to take a risk. Otherwise, you play a perpetual game of catch-up and excel at optimization but never innovate. These are precursors to corporate irrelevance. If you play it safe you may never make a major blunder, but you’ll never have a breakthrough, either. In fact, in most cases you’re better off making a blunder, realizing you’re on the wrong track, and righting your course than you are slowly killing your business with suffocating incrementalism.
Cost cutting is normally a knee-jerk reaction to a bad month, quarter, or year. As mentioned previously, while cost cutting is important, you cannot shrink your way to greatness. However, great companies never stop looking for ways to cut costs, contain costs, and better leverage their dollars. This is why developing a cost discipline mind-set rounds out your Leadership Twelve-Pack. It does you little good to innovate and create top-line growth if you spend more than you take in to get it. The easiest money to bring to your bottom line is reduced costs. In fact, to build a business that sustains greatness over the long haul, cost discipline must become a guiding precept, a core competency. Since the results of cutting costs can be disastrous when executed with reckless abandon, following are three guidelines to intelligent cost cutting and containment.
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While you can’t shrink your way to greatness, you can spend your way to obscurity.
As noted in Chapter 4, cutting your capacity to produce backfires on your cost containment efforts. Cutting your capacity to produce covers a multitude of sins: scaling back on the frequency or quality of both initial and ongoing employee training; shortcutting the interview or predictive testing process and hiring recklessly as a result; cutting your line staff back so drastically that the people still on the payroll become overwhelmed and lose all motivation and effectiveness; going too far in reducing management staff so that your leaders have no time to develop people and merely maintain them by default; reducing revenue-generating jobs in sales as part of wholesale; making across-the-board cutbacks—and the list goes on.
Focus each department on cutting the 20 percent of activities that create 80 percent of costs and you will spawn dozens—even hundreds—of cost-saving ideas throughout your organization. This also ensures that the right things are being cut, since managers can customize the cuts to best fit their departmental situations. This is more effective than when the out-of-touch corporate gurus mandate across-the-board cuts in specific areas without any regard to the unique needs of a business unit.
If you just start blasting away at expenses without any strategic consideration, you may fix some problems but you’ll also create many more. For instance, if you run a sales operation and your cost strategy is to cut advertising expenses, you had better consider tying the following applications into your strategy:
How can you train your sales team to do a more efficient job with the traffic they have, since they will be seeing less of it? This may include polishing up presentation skills, closing techniques, and proficiency at overcoming objections.
What can you do to retain the customers you already have and entice them to make additional purchases? Since the cost of customer retention is miniscule compared to the cost of customer acquisition, how do you plan on keeping what you have and ensuring a flow of future sales that will help compensate for the lack of fresh traffic that advertising cuts create?
What systems do you have in place, or will you need to fine-tune, for prospect follow-up so that if a customer leaves without purchasing your product or service, you increase your odds of bringing him or her back through diligent and organized follow-up? Since you will be seeing fewer customers, you will need to maximize every opportunity, and you’ll need a plan to do so.
What training will you need to start or intensify as part of your strategy for executing these three points? Who will conduct the training, how often, and when?
Just about the time you think you’ve trimmed all the fat from an operation, you can rest assured there’s probably one more layer to go. This is why cost containment must be a daily mind-set—not something you react to after a budget review or a red-ink month. If you are aware of and thinking in terms of cost containment on a daily basis, you will infect others with the same attribute.
I mentioned at the start of this chapter that executing your Leadership Twelve-Pack can be summed up in one word: awareness. I want to close the chapter with the same thought in order to reinforce this awareness in you. You are going to get off track in your daily disciplines, but that’s not the point. The point is that, by being more aware of what your job as a leader really is and where you’ll gain maximum return, you’ll be less likely to stay off track, and you’ll make a faster adjustment and get on with the business of leading effectively.
There is little question that after you identify the key tasks in your Leadership Twelve-Pack and begin to execute them consistently you will fall off track from time to time as you try to implement them. In fact, since we are all fallible human beings, this is to be expected. The key to limiting the damage that comes with getting off track, however, is to realize it quickly and make an immediate adjustment to right your course. This chapter is designed to make you more aware of your potentially highest-return activities so that when you do start to major in minor things you can straighten out in a hurry. The danger with not realizing that you’re off track and staying adrift is that you start to create a rut for yourself. Ruts are very misunderstood in business and in life. Because of this, you will benefit by considering the following passages to gain a greater perspective on these devastating and demoralizing business traps so you can avoid them or extricate yourself quickly when you find yourself trapped in one.
The First Rule of Ruts: Realize when you find yourself in a rut that it’s not the result of something you did last night. Rather, it’s the result of a series of bad decisions, failed disciplines, and repeated errors in judgment over time that are just now manifesting themselves. For instance, somewhere along the line you may have gotten away from the following practices:
Consistently training your people. You found reasons to cancel the meeting rather than making it a priority and holding it without excuse. This weakens discipline and allows your team’s sharp edges to become dulled and diminished. Some managers have the same aversion to conducting effective, consistent, and credible training meetings that Superman does to Kryptonite. If you think your job is just to close deals and develop inventories, budgets, and forecasts, you don’t have a clue what leadership is about.
Holding people accountable. Rather than confronting and correcting poor performance you opted to live with it, since at the time comfortable inaction was more convenient. By turning a blind eye to defunct performance and/or deficient behaviors you tacitly reinforced the wrong thing, and as a result you’re reaping a harvest of mediocrity sown by your own neglect.
Making necessary decisions and changes. Rather than continuously rattling the status quo and innovating your way to new and higher levels to maintain your momentum, you pledged allegiance to the status quo.
The bad news is that when you abandon these listed activities and other disciplines in your Leadership Twelve-Pack, the negative results don’t show up overnight. In fact, you’d be much better off if the instant you got off track you were cursed with a Goodyear Blimp–sized boil on your backside that didn’t go away until you took action. But since that doesn’t happen it’s easy to keep doing the wrong things until they become a devastating habit.
The Second Rule of Ruts: When you find yourself in a rut, stop digging—and start climbing! In other words, stop doing the stupid things that put you in the rut in the first place and get back to the disciplines necessary to build and sustain results. If you stay in your rut it can turn into a grave. In fact, the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth, width, and amount of time you’re in it. Make no mistake: The results you’re getting are the results you should be getting, and if you want different results you must change what you do.
The Third Rule of Ruts: The seeds of your next rut are often sown during the good times. When are you most likely to abandon training, holding people accountable, and making needed changes and decisions and to become isolated in your office spending more time with paperwork than peoplework? When business is good! It’s during the good times that training just doesn’t seem as necessary, holding people accountable doesn’t appear as urgent, and building a fence around what you have is more attractive than changing it; and it’s when you’re likely to believe you’ve paid your dues in the trenches and can now retire to the friendly confines of your office to impersonate a real leader. The keys to combating the tendency to let up when things are rolling are acute awareness and fierce discipline. Since you now know that this is when you’re most vulnerable to letting up, you must make the extra effort to pull yourself and your team through the natural tendency to see success as a permission slip to crawl into a hammock and take a nap.
The Fourth Rule of Ruts: Personal ruts normally precede corporate ruts. The speed of the leader is the speed of the pack, and that can be bad news when the boss gets lazy, rusty, or just plain complacent. On a recent cruise vacation I was reminded that human beings are not at their best when life is too safe. For seven glorious days I had no appointments, no pressure to perform, no place I had to be, and nothing that I had to do. The result? I gained seven pounds in seven days. If I had taken the two-week cruise I’d have gotten fat enough to run for sheriff when I returned home. The lesson? The good times can put you to sleep, personally as well as organizationally, but a personal rut normally precedes a corporate decline. That’s exactly why more is expected from leaders than from followers: There is so much more at stake when a leader lets up, loses focus, or goes stale. This is the price of leadership, and there’s no sense whining about it. It simply comes with your position.
I want to reiterate two keys that will help you avoid ruts: awareness and discipline. Once you become more aware of the pitfalls of ruts and of when you’re most vulnerable to sowing the seeds for them, you’ll be less likely to aid and abet their emergence. And as you develop the discipline to do the right things every day, not just the days when it’s convenient, easy, cheap, or popular, you can bulletproof your business and yourself against future declines. It doesn’t take brilliance but it does take tenacity.