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It All Starts with You

Organizations form when someone has a good idea, experiences early success, and then needs help in order to deliver on the promise. Somewhere between a good idea and market success, most businesses run into the challenge of setting up a system that helps move things forward more efficiently.

As the organization grows, a dilemma appears. Sooner or later we all discover the need for reliable, repeatable processes or systems lest the wheel becomes the constant reinvention. Systems and processes, however, can become overly engineered and eventually create more headaches than they solve, resulting in extra layers of approval and sign-off, thus delaying progress.

Employees often resist processes for reasons ranging from not wanting to be cramped in their style to fears of repeating the kind of bureaucratic nightmares they have experienced in past jobs.

Recently, I was working with two different companies, one in the technology security business and another in health care information automation. Both were successful, with a history of innovation and rapid growth, and yet both were frustrated by the lack of efficiency that had crept into their businesses.

The technology security CEO put it this way: “We’re a billiondollar company with a 50-million-dollar infrastructure.” This company manages by consensus. Pretty much everyone needs to be on board. When consensus is lacking, just about any project, market plan, or customer service initiative can easily be derailed. Even routine matters require meetings, study, revisions, more study, and then tentative exploration of the possibility.

Unless, of course, the CEO sees another “bright, shiny object,” and off people go again down a track that will drastically redirect company energy and resources. The “bright, shiny object” phenomenon prevents them from thinking strategically beyond the latest and greatest idea, while also leaving a number of groups in the dust when directions change and they didn’t get the memo.

The health care information company CEO had a markedly different take on things: “We hire the best and brightest, but still they lack common sense.” In this culture, decisions of any consequence run through the CEO’s office, because the CEO does not trust that even senior managers will make the right decisions. On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with success—while not the largest in the field, the company is number one in its category and has been growing like crazy. On the other hand, it is now confronting the consequences of its rapid growth and success. Too much going on, too many people involved, and too many opportunities on the horizon—no one CEO can put that many fingers into that many pies.

How do these companies adopt processes that can be trusted and implemented without overwhelming the cultures they have built? Both CEOs recognized the need to improve the way they operate their companies, for reasons that include increasing efficiency as well as improving their ability to compete in broader markets. However, as we plumbed the issues and possible solutions, both became paralyzed with the fear of implementing new processes that would result in an overbureaucratization of their “fast, flexible, and nimble organizations.”

In actuality, though, neither company is quite as fast, flexible, or nimble as it once was. The fact is that they now tend to stumble over what used to be simple things. Coordination among groups has become somewhere between difficult and nonexistent. Approvals either take forever or are granted swiftly only to be overturned a short time later.

Employees are beginning to express frustration with the roadblocks to getting things done. Middle managers are becoming increasingly fearful that their decisions will be second-guessed. The combination of frustration and fear leads people to slow things down even more in a multitude of ways. Some are forever looking for “buy-in” before moving; some simply dig in and focus on dozens of small tasks, enabling them to demonstrate productivity in terms of the number of things accomplished—not necessarily the important things, just ones that can be counted; some are taking their own initiative, finding ways to get things done despite the organization roadblocks.

This book will look at some of the sources of organizational roadblocks and offer suggestions that you can employ to get things moving, to overcome internal resistance, and to make a difference. Again, as you find yourself bumping into what appear to be roadblocks or resistance, it will be important to keep in mind that just about every hurdle initially showed up for an apparently good reason.

It’s not as if a senior team of roadblock specialists convenes weekly to figure out what else it can do to make things more difficult. For example, lengthy decision processes often come into existence for reasons such as lowering risk or engaging multiple stakeholders. It’s hard to argue with lowering risk or engaging employees, yet it’s also hard to find the value in delays when something critical shows up.

Some workaround suggestions will be fairly low risk; others may require you to take a deep breath, make sure your résumé is in good shape, and forge ahead knowing that the outcome may not be what you hoped for. The larger, perhaps riskier suggestions involve big ideas, concepts, and philosophies, often centering on the roles of leadership and management. Some of these will be strategic in nature, addressing what you are doing and why you are doing it. The smaller, lower-risk suggestions will be mostly tactical, emphasizing how you go about getting things done, meeting milestones, or complying with internal process standards.

Some of the actions we will discuss will be individual in form, things that you can do on your own or that involve just you and one other person. Some may involve you and your team members, and others may involve coordination across multiple teams. I will address a range of issues, many of which will reflect the following paradox: nothing in this book works, and yet everything in the book can work. The real difference will be what you choose to make work, to apply, or to utilize. None of these are perfect ideas, but each can be perfected.

A particular paradox and challenge will appear over and over again: what works for you and what works for me may be different, even if the same basic concept is in play for both of us. What you can make work and what I can make work may depend on any number of variables. Rather than reading this book in search of perfect answers that work perfectly, look for ideas that you can apply in your own unique way, and perfect them in your own environment.

CONTROL, INFLUENCE, AND RESPOND

Let’s start with a simple way of examining your work world, building on a form of strategic thinking popularized by Steven Covey.

Years ago, the leaders of a unit of our armed forces hired me to help them improve efficiency in their operations. As part of the background for the engagement, they cited a model featuring three concentric circles as a way of thinking about strategy (see Figure 1.1). The three circles represent everything in your environment: things you can directly control all on your own, things you may be able to change if you can influence the right folks, and those things that are truly external to you and to which you can only respond.

If you control what you can and influence where possible, then you are most likely to be as well equipped as possible to respond to external circumstances. Change, competitive threats, new technologies, and the like are just the way it is out there. The only thing you can do about the outside environment is respond. Winners are able to respond nimbly, with flexibility and adaptability, because they have figured out how to get things done, not just how to appease bureaucracies.

FIGURE 1.1

Imagine that the three layers represent your entire work life.

• Control. The inner circle contains all those things that you can control yourself, regardless of what others may say or do. While small, this circle does include choices you can make all on your own.

• Influence. The second layer relates to those areas of performance where you may be able to be impactful, but you require the approval, cooperation, support, or agreement of another. There may be many more areas here where you could imagine improvement, but it’s not just up to you.

• Respond. This outer layer represents the rest of life. Turning again to the example of the weather, you can’t really do anything about the rain other than decide how you respond. You can stay indoors, put on a raincoat, use an umbrella, or just decide that getting wet is OK. This is where most of life takes place: competitors do what they do, the economy moves the way it moves, and change just happens.

However, if you have prepared well by controlling what you can and influencing where possible, you should be able to respond or adapt to changing conditions that surround you in a much nimbler and more deft way. All kinds of people spend too much energy fretting about that environmental layer, where they can neither control nor influence the outcome. Contrary to conventional wisdom, where we get in trouble has less to do with what happens in the outer layer and much more to do with how well we manage the inner two circles.

Another common approach, which we will address in more detail later, takes the form of people trying to influence someone or something by complaining and finding fault with others. Even when the complaints about others are well founded, most complainers wind up being dismissed by management as “whiners.” That’s because the whiner-complainer rarely takes responsibility for his or her own role in the current situation or how to make it better. It’s almost always someone else who needs to change.

The most important place to begin is right in the middle—that apparently small circle where you actually have control.

INTENTION VERSUS METHOD

If you allow yourself to lose sight of your purpose or intention, you will be unlikely to find a way through and will instead become overly focused on the hurdle in front of you. Once you clarify your intention and commit to it, you may begin to discover multiple ways to get there.

In the Introduction, I described David Allen’s flight delay problems and how he worked around them. If he had glumly focused on the “insurmountable” problem of that uncontrollable variable, the weather, he would not have found his way to that meeting in Louisville. However, once focused on the positive outcome, his brain was able to step beyond the obvious and start the search for options.

We call this the distinction between intention and method. For every intention, there are multiple methods that may get you there. In the Louisville example, many people would have been stumped by the lack of choices of airplanes going to Louisville. That’s because their focus would have been on the method of travel rather than the intention of being there on time.

What do you do when the options come down to unattractive and even less attractive? That depends on a combination of your intention and your commitment. If the intention is sufficiently clear, as it was in this case, then you simply have to ask yourself if you are fully committed to the outcome.

There’s an old saying from the early days of the personal growth movement that applies here: 99 percent is a bitch, 100 percent is a breeze. I first heard this in 1973 when I attended a personal growth workshop. I suspect the concept, if not the actual phrase, goes so far back that no one really knows where it came from. With a 99 percent commitment, David might or might not have made it to Louisville. He might have called it a day in L.A. or a night in St. Louis. He might even have made it all the way to Louisville.

Even if he had made it that far, though, what state of mind would he have been in on arrival? If David had been operating from the 99 percent level, I suspect he would have been somewhere between exhausted and grumpy. At the 100 percent level, he showed up fresh, alert, and enthused. Not only was he thrilled to be working with this superb client, but also he could take deep satisfaction in the result he produced and the creativity he exhibited to get there.

RESPONSE-ABILITY

Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy, coined the term response-ability. The way to apply this concept to your own life is as follows: whenever you encounter a roadblock of any kind, look to yourself first. I suggest that in just about any situation, your ability to respond (response-ability) will be a function of your ability to control what you can, to influence what you can, and to simply respond to the rest.

As situations arise that require some form of workaround, consider what is within your own power to control, something you can do without needing to enlist anyone else in order to make a difference. No matter what the situation or circumstance, you will always have some choices in the matter, the foremost of which is how you choose to respond: your response-ability.

As you look for options, you will need to address at least two pieces to the puzzle: available responses measured against your ability to exercise those responses.

Sometimes people get into difficulty by declaring defeat— “There’s nothing I can do about this.” “It’s hopeless.” “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” As Henry Ford noted, if you believe you can’t do anything, you won’t even try. As stated in the Introduction, how you frame the problem is the problem. If you tell yourself there’s nothing to be done, there may be available choices or responses that you simply don’t see because of your mental attitude.

On the other hand, you may perceive numerous responses to any particular roadblock and recognize that one of them is the absolute best. It’s the most elegant, most direct, and all-around perfect workaround. Except for one possible fly in the ointment: what if this perfect workaround response is something for which you are not currently skilled, trained, or prepared?

If it’s a capability question, two courses are open. In some cases, you may be better off taking a less elegant solution that gets you through the immediate workaround challenge. In other cases, those in which the situation is likely to arise again, you may need to acquire the skill or training necessary to execute the more complex or elegant workaround. It may take more time and effort to develop the capability for this more elegant workaround, but investing that time and effort may in turn pay dividends when the same issue arises again in the future.

In any situation, you will have a range of responses and a range of abilities to tap. What makes one person effective and another less so may come down to how they frame the problem and how they perceive their ability to respond. If you need to get someone else on board, your first step is to look to anything you can handle on your own, your personal response-ability, before trying to enlist the other person. By taking control of what is truly yours, you will be in a much more powerful and influential position when you reach out to influence the choices someone else may need to make. At this point, you will finally be in the best position to respond effectively to outside circumstances, even those that seem out of your control, like the weather.

ACCOUNTABILITY: OWN THE GOAL, OWN THE PROCESS

In a way, accountability brings us back full circle, in that intention, commitment, response-ability, and accountability all support one another. In many respects, effective workarounds begin and end with accountability. You might have already experienced the conundrum of having established what you thought was a clear intention, committed to it 100 percent, and still come up short. An accountability mind-set asks the question, “What was my role in this outcome?” It may also ask, “What’s my role in the solution?” This mind-set recognizes response-ability but stops short of blaming yourself—or anyone else, for that matter. Accountability is simply a way of owning the outcome, recognizing what’s in front of you, and then taking the next best step you can.

Perhaps you have noticed that blame, complaint, and ducking accountability or response-ability have become somewhat commonplace in our daily lives. Not-my-fault and not-my-job attitudes abound out there. Given that many of us have encountered managers who punish mistakes rather than encourage learning, it is understandable that blame and finger-pointing have become so familiar. Not very effective, but understandable.

When you encounter problems in your job, it will serve you much better in the long run if you ask yourself how you could have been better prepared so that these kinds of obstacles are avoided next time around. Reverting to complaints or blame will drain off a considerable amount of your power to make choices and your ability to influence others.

IT ALL STARTS WITH YOU

Remember, the place to begin thinking about workarounds may just be with you! One of my favorite simple but telling questions is: What could you do that would make a difference in your job that requires no one’s approval, cooperation, support, or agreement other than your own?

Think about your own job for just a minute. Try answering that simple question and see what you come up with. If you can discover wasteful exercises or processes within the company you work for, ask yourself what wasteful processes or exercises you have of your own. Are you late producing documents, deliverables, or other work products simply because you put tasks off, take too much time, or perhaps are a bit disorganized? If so, what can you do to become more efficient? What would happen if you got a bit more organized, planned your work just a bit better, or otherwise did what you could to improve? The simple answer is that you may get more work done, with a little less stress, and possibly with a bit more appreciation from others. You may even find that by making things easier on yourself, you also make things easier on someone else.

HOW IT WORKS

As we assess the various roadblocks to performance, we will identify several kinds of tips. Some will be more strategic in character, asking you to consider what you are trying to get done and why. Some will be more tactical, directed instead to how you will accomplish the result or complete the project.

Along the way, you will be asked to think about the tasks ahead and divide each into three areas of thought and action. Obviously, the best way to start is by exploring the control question: What could you do on your own that will make a difference? From there, the question concerns what you could do if you had agreement, support, cooperation, or approval and how you might influence those who would need to come along. Finally, you consider how handling the two inner circles of control and influence will enable you and your organization to respond more effectively to your business environment.

RISK, REWARD, AND MOVING FORWARD

As you will discover, many of the workarounds that you can employ are basically stealthy ones. That is, no one is likely to notice what you did differently, but people may notice that things are moving better. Even if no one else is aware of the change, at least you will be. One of the chief benefits of this approach lies in the improved quality of experience you will find in your job along with your enhanced ability to overcome obstacles and get important work done.

In addition to getting something done, you are likely to enjoy the fruits of increased job satisfaction, less stress, and a fuller sense of control. Even if no one else observes the extra effort you took to move something along, you will still reap the dual rewards of accomplishment and an improved job experience. Then again, you are also likely to uncover areas where significant improvement can take place, but without sufficient air cover, you are in danger of raising the political hackles of another group or of someone more senior than you or otherwise exposing yourself to the whims of corporate politics.

We have all heard the sage advice for surviving corporate politics: choose your battles wisely. You won’t win all the time, and losing the wrong battle could be somewhere between career limiting and career ending. When your efforts are managed well, you can execute some valuable workarounds that not only will improve your job performance but also may establish you as someone to watch as you build on your record of success.

WORKAROUND QUESTIONS

In each chapter, you will find powerful workaround questions that will help you push through any of the roadblocks that are standing between you and your professional goals. Let’s start by considering the following questions, which are intended to provide a more practical context for you as you read the chapters to come:

1. Where do you see room for improvement within your job, team, department, or business?

2. How clear are the goals and objectives where you work?

3. What kinds of communication issues do you see on the job?

4. How often do people encounter problems and devote more effort to placing blame than to fixing the problem?

5. Do various groups, teams, or departments seem to work in isolation when collaboration would be more useful?

6. How easy or difficult is it for your organization to arrive at a decision?

7. Do you encounter pockets of arrogance or “know-it-all” thinking that get in the way of improvement?

8. How effective are the meetings that you attend?

9. Do projects get delayed as people work to gain buy-in or consensus?

10. How efficient and effective is the e-mail system in your organization?

11. How effective versus bureaucratic are the processes in your organization?

12. Does your organization get bogged down trying to get to perfect solutions?

13. Are you just plain overwhelmed by the amount of work you have on your plate?