Great Relationships Require Great Results
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
–WINSTON CHURCHILL
It’s easy to make excuses, particularly when others are skeptical. We’ve both experienced times when naysayers told us to lower our expectations. One or the other of us had been told not to expect:
• People to embrace a new process
• “Those” people to be able to perform at that level
• To sell that product in that rural market
• To get that job without direct experience
• To make an impact too quickly
• That kind of motivation to work in a union environment
• The vice president to wear that costume
• Those famous writers to respond to my email
And the people who told us these things were wrong. Professional relationships thrive in an environment of high expectations and excellent results. In this chapter you’ll receive a variety of tools to ensure that your expectations are sufficiently challenging and to provide your people the confidence to reach them.
• • •
It was one year since Christine had been handed the challenge of managing an inmate-run clothing factory at a state men’s prison. This wasn’t a scene from Orange Is the New Black. As one of only a few female staff members and lacking any supervisory experience, Christine was in a tough place and skeptical about the assignment.
However, Christine’s factory ultimately outproduced the prototype operation, had an impeccable safety record, and could run itself without supervision. David interviewed Christine to find out what made such a rapid transition possible.
“It began with my belief in the people. When they came to me, they wanted to tell me about what they had done on the outside—why they were in prison. I cut them off, told them I didn’t really care about who they were last year.
“I told them, ‘This is who we are going to be in this factory, and this is what we’re going to do.’ Most of them didn’t believe it at first, but pretty quickly they responded to someone believing in them.”
She went on to describe how the inmates would initially object to sewing because they thought it wasn’t something men did. Christine would walk over to one of the industrial sewing machines, quietly operate it, produce a garment, return to the men, and say, “You’re telling me women can run this industrial machine better than you men? I don’t believe that.”
Christine met them where they were, even though she might not have agreed with their chauvinism. She challenged the men to be more than inmates, to become better men and achieve more than they thought was possible, and they did.
Christine’s magic worked because she truly believed in their potential for contribution. She refused to see them as their past and truly believed in the possibility of a bright future. If she had not believed it, neither would they.
Before you can challenge your employees, you must be sure you’re up to the challenge.
Great results start with thinking bigger. Great results require audacious goals. Great results can’t happen if you doubt they are possible.
Your employees need you to be the visionary, to think bigger than they can imagine. Otherwise you’re just a group of people muddling through. Our FAST model can help you organize and move to greater results in less time.
THE FAST MODEL FOR BIG RESULTS
To get results fast, use the Winning Well FAST model to focus your efforts.
F—Focus
To move results quickly, focus is key. Resist the urge to fix everything. Identify and communicate the biggest priorities and break the work into manageable tasks. Focus on what each team member needs for success.
Align on two to three key leadership messages to share in every context. Communicate them to the point where it feels obnoxious, then communicate more. Check for understanding. Communicate again. Test it by asking, “What do you think I most want to talk about today?” If they don’t shout out the priorities, you’re not clear.
Make big work small. It’s tempting to build action plans with lots of activity to show you are trying. Less is more. Too much action overwhelms and confuses. Identify two to three actions that will make the biggest impact and hit them hard. Reinforce with focused and consistent leadership messaging.
Use data to get surgical in your approach. Know the outliers and give them focused recognition and support. Avoid broad-brush interventions. Focus just-in-time actions on those who need them.
Slow down early and listen to concerns. Stop to acknowledge progress.
New initiatives are almost always piled onto an existing workload. Acknowledge conflicting goals and competing priorities. Listen carefully to concerns. Prioritize. Give permission to stop. Some balls must drop. Decide which ones.
When you’re moving fast, don’t forget to pause at progress. Acknowledge small wins. Celebrate new behaviors. Recognize breakthrough thinking.
S—Stretch
Fast-paced change provides great growth opportunities. Stretch yourself and others. Provide special projects and stretch assignments. Turn strong players into teachers. Ask everyone what they must do next to achieve.
Stretch people to try new behaviors. Stretch boundaries, assumptions, and rules. Spend time asking, “What have we never tried before?” Engage people who bring different backgrounds and perspectives from outside the team.
T—Think
Go slow enough to think about what you’re doing and who you’re involving.
Every fast-moving project contains elements of stupid (e.g., time-wasting tasks, old processes, and reports that no longer align with a new vision). Empower everyone to say “Stop” as needed.
Carefully measure progress and fine-tune as needed. Watch for unintended consequences. Be ready to change course as needed.
When moving fast, it’s easy to exclude. Think about peripheral players who must understand your plan. Slowing down to include the right players early leads to smoother acceleration.
When David was an elected city councilman, he watched the amazing power of expectations instantly transform the conversation.
When city government faced a contentious decision, there were often three or four groups involved. The professional city staff with their interests, the elected officials (who rarely agreed), contractors, and the public would frequently reach logjams—even when everyone generally agreed that change was needed.
These groups would get stuck. “What are we going to do?” they would ask each other. Somebody would propose a solution, and it would get shot down: “Oh, we can’t do that.”
After a few minutes of this, the mayor would say, “We can find a thousand reasons why this won’t work. That’s not the question. For the next ten minutes, let’s just answer this question: How can we get it done?”
That question presupposed that a solution was possible and that they could accomplish their goals. Not surprisingly, they did. In the time it takes to snap your fingers, that one question and the belief it communicated were all they needed to break the impasse.
That’s the power of a positive expectation and belief in what the future can be.
Expect more and watch your people’s energy lift as they rise to the challenge.
HOW TO SET CLEAR EXPECTATIONS
Setting clear expectations requires deliberate effort. Here’s a process to ensure that you’re communicating exactly what you expect.
1. Get clear on your own expectations.
If you’re not clear on what you want, we guarantee you won’t be able to communicate it. We’ve both worked for the person (perhaps you have too) who could never articulate just what he wanted. He just knew it when he saw it—and he rarely ever seemed to see it.
The lack of clear expectations always resulted in rounds and rounds of frustrating iterations wasting everyone’s time and weakening respect along the way. Don’t be that guy, or you’ll drive your folks crazy.
2. Engage in conversation.
Be clear about what you want, but also listen carefully to concerns. Better to identify expectation disconnects as early in the game as possible.
3. Write them down.
In most circumstances it’s useful to write down agreed-to expectations. This works one-on-one and with teams. The process of writing down expectations often leads to further clarity and serves as an objective reminder as expectation violations arise.
4. Check in.
From time to time it’s useful to check in. You can easily draw a box with four quadrants to guide the conversation (you can download the worksheet from our website, www.WinningWellBook.com). Just above the box, write “What I expect,” and just below it write, “What I don’t expect.” Outside the left side write, “What I get,” and outside the right side write, “What I don’t get.”
First, each person, including you, completes the matrix, jotting down areas where expectations are being met and where they are not. For example, in the top left quadrant, each person writes down what she expects and gets from the other person. In the top right, each person writes down what she expects that she doesn’t get, and so on.
Next, discuss areas of agreement and areas of concern. What does each person completing the matrix expect that he does receive, or doesn’t expect and doesn’t receive? Take time to discuss each quadrant of the matrix. Start with appreciation for what people expect and do receive. Recognize the good and then identify the gaps or the disconnects and discuss.
Finally, identify specific actions that would enable you to work more effectively together.
What if you believe your audacious goal is achievable, and you’ve set your clear expectations, but your team is skeptical? The next step is to help them taste the win. One of the best ways we’ve found to do this is to isolate one or two needed behaviors and then spend a day making it really fun to try them out. We call this powerful technique confidence bursts.
The idea is to create a full-court press of the given behavior to prove what is possible at individual and organizational levels.
Build a temporary scaffold of support around employees with lots of extra attention, skill-building, fun, recognition, and celebration. The risk is low—it’s just one day and it doesn’t feel like a big commitment to change. Once people experience success with the behavior, their confidence improves and the ceiling of what they perceive as possible moves a little higher.
Every time we’ve have done this, the results have been head turning and remarkable. The best part comes in the afterglow discussion: If you (and we) can make this much magic on this day, why not every day?
We find that a few sets of these intervals spaced one month apart can lead to remarkable and lasting results.
You’ll know the behavior has sunk in when the impact of these “burst days” begins to dwindle but the overall results stay high. The behaviors have become so frequent that the extrinsic motivation is no longer necessary. The value in the behaviors has become an intrinsic choice.
HOW TO HOLD A CONFIDENCE BURST DAY
Here’s a step-by-step process for creating a confidence burst day.
1. Pick one or two tangible skills to work on.
2. Schedule the special day and create anticipation.
3. Begin the day with energy and fun; make it feel like a holiday.
4. Set specific, measurable goals that can be achieved that day.
5. Hold training and focused skill building throughout the day.
6. Have your team members with the most expertise in the skill you’re working to build work side by side with those still learning.
7. Celebrate every little success in a big, public way.
8. Communicate specific success stories, including the “how” behind them.
9. Celebrate and debrief at the end of the day on what worked differently this day and what was learned.
10. Begin the next day with a reminder of key learning.
ARTICULATE RESULTS
Of course, once you get the results, it’s important to have the confidence and ability to explain them.
Pete was a retail store district manager. His district was performing well, but his store managers would inevitably fall apart every time a senior executive visited a store unannounced. Although nothing was wrong with the stores, the managers would get so nervous they’d clam up, misspeak, or babble on about inconsequential minutiae. Pete’s credibility was taking a hit.
Many people in Pete’s position would have gone into self-preservation mode, invested longer hours to show up more and more in the stores, thrown in a few ultimatums, and given any manager with a bad visit a documented warning. But Pete knew that although that might get their attention, what these managers needed most was confidence. He didn’t just want to win, he wanted to win well. Reacting with longer hours and ultimatums would have had the opposite impact in this case.
So Pete came up with the Green Jacket Effect. He began practicing with the team. He’d have all the store managers take turns visiting one another’s stores wearing a really ugly green jacket. The jacket triggered a simulation of an executive visit.
Whoever was wearing the green jacket was to be treated like an executive visitor. Which of course had the side benefit of that person thinking like an executive: interpreting trends, asking great questions, knowing what BS answers sound like.
The store managers practiced telling their store’s story. The more they practiced, the less nervous they became. Soon they could explain their results and articulate their action plans, and give shout-outs to recognize high performers.
Of course every business is different, but being able to explain your results and talk about your business is an important skill for any manager to master. Here are some tips for when you need to share your results. Use these ideas during executive visits, for presentations to boards, and when delivering presentations to other managers.
• Greet the executive or other visitor proactively with a firm handshake (demonstrate that you’re glad she came).
• Proactively explain your numbers and the reasons behind them.
• Start with your opportunities and articulate key actions.
• Share your creative approaches to implementing key initiatives.
• Introduce the visitor to other employees, and share something unique that each person does.
• Recognize a few people for their outstanding contributions—things that make people say, “Wow!”
• Talk about your challenges and how the visitor can help.
• Share ideas for improved processes and say how you are pursuing them.
• Take active notes on all suggestions.
• Send a thank-you email summarizing all follow-up items.
Sometimes the best way to challenge your people is to get out of the way.
Meet Chang, a millennial high-school orchestra director. It was the last concert of the season. The seniors wore roses and beamed with the energy of folks getting ready to start on a new adventure.
Chang held up his baton, and the music began. Powerful. Brilliant. Exciting—an energetic send-off to the next phase of their lives.
Then he looked at the orchestra and grinned.
He stepped off the podium stage right, folded his arms, and watched from the sidelines. Five measures later, he looked at the audience, smiled with confidence, and walked off the stage. He never came back.
The orchestra continued. Powerful. Brilliant. More exciting. The audience sat mesmerized by the leadership moment. The students didn’t miss a beat. They were performing—without their leader. Or were they?
Chang had left the stage confident that:
• The vision was understood
• They had a game plan
• They were accomplished players
• They had practiced
• They would listen to one another
Chang’s confidence said:
• I believe in you.
• You’re ready for the next phase.
• It was never about me.
• Go be brilliant.
No conductor—just audacious confidence, high expectations, and a willingness to get out of the way.
1. Test your goals and expectations for the team. Are you doing everything you can to challenge the team to achieve more? Are your expectations clear? Use the expectations exercise described in this chapter with your team to discuss how expectations are, and are not, being met.
2. Which of your employees could benefit from a deeper one-on-one conversation on expectations?
3.What are three ways you can get your employees to help one another improve like Pete did with his green jacket?