Author: Dr. Brad Lebo

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From Doer to Leader

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. ~Jack Welch

Many of the owners and executives we work with are making the transition from Doer to Leader. They are going from being the best in the room at what they do to being good at letting others being the best in the room.

In his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith lists 20 habits that effective Doers NEED TO DROP to become effective Leaders. What these 20 habits have in common is the way the person views his or her role. The Doer sees himself as the central figure in solving every problem or need and isn’t afraid to put people in their place if they challenge this view. The leader, in contrast, sees herself as the facilitator of other people being central figures in meeting challenges. This usually means wrestling with the habits that have kept them as the central figure in the past.

In other words, the challenge of going from Doer to Leader is giving-up everything that has made you successful and turning into someone who promotes other’s success.

Easier said than done.

Goldsmith’s book is a great place to start if you are trying to make a transition from Doer to Leader. Other resources/tools are:

  • Join a group to help you make the transition (see here for more information about a group we sponsor).
  • Use WordRapport™ Email, our exclusive tool, to get feedback on how you are coming across to others in your email. See here for more information. 
  • Hire a coach who has made the transition so they can help you navigate it. 

Making the transition from Doer to Leader has many rewards. First is you become a more effective executive for your organization. Both you and your organization benefit from that. Also, if you do it well, you will be more relaxed and productive AND your work environment will be more rewarding for everyone!

Contact us if you have questions or other feedback.

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The Real Challenge in Delegating

One of the things most coaches tell the managers they work with is to delegate. The speech goes something like this: You’ve got to learn to delegate because:

  • It frees you up to do more important things (you save time and get more done),
  • it helps develop the skills of subordinates (they learn new skills and take on more responsibility) and
  • it gives subordinates a path for growth (making their job more compelling).

There are two traps for those trying to delegate. The first is obvious and is most often cited when someone has trouble delegating: They just can’t give up the tasks to others. The hazards of this for the manager who cannot delegate are numerous and include:

  • Burnout,
  • inability to take on a greater role,
  • no development of subordinates leading to low morale, turnover and particularly harsh, the loss of the best people (who are always looking to grow and won’t tolerate never being asked to do more).

The second trap is less obvious but just as debilitating. That is the challenge of “letting go” when delegating. This means not only turning over a task to someone else (getting past trap one), it also means tolerating their doing it differently and perhaps not as well (at least at first).

The most effective managers understand that there are always multiple ways to do something well and that it takes time to perfect any of those ways. In a word, effective managers are more tolerant of how something gets done (as long as it does get done). They appreciate diversity in how someone else takes on a task and also seem to enjoy watching a new approach bloom. In other words, they “let go” when they delegate.

Like most of what is written here, it is easier to say, “delegate and watch with appreciation what happens next,” than to do it. Let us know if you would like to some help with it. You’ll be glad you did.

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What Your Growing Company Can Learn from Deflategate

Deflategate has captured many people’s attention over the last three months. Some of those people, like me, will look for the lessons in how to handle everything from procedures to grievances. The issue that keeps rising to the surface for me, because I see it frequently in the growing companies I work in, is how to handle the breaking of some rule or policy.

What I see from the NFL, is their making it up as they go along. Now I may be biased (I admit to being a fan of the Patriots). But it seems inescapable that there is no consistent and well thought out procedure for handling the breaking of a rule. The NFL is consistent at penalizing offsides and too many players on the field. They are inconsistent when it comes to tampering with a football (if the Patriots even did that). See the Panthers and Vikings tampering incident from this past season, for comparison.  This is where the charge that they make it up as they go along comes from.

Learn from the NFL’s mistake. As your company grows, develop a process for handling misbehavior in all its human forms. Deliberate on what the process should be. Wait until the dust settles from the emotional upheaval of a transgression to do so. Write the process or procedure down. Be consistent in applying the process across the organization. Differentiate between levels of rule breaking and have ranges of consequences (make the punishment fit the crime). Have steps in punishment making it worse for repeat offenders. Don’t worry about getting it perfect. Things change and both rules and consequences change. But having a narrow range of responses and thoughtful precedents helps.

If your organization is growing, it is only a matter of time before someone breaks a rule. Don’t make it up as you go. At least not after the first time.

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Power at Work

A big part of what we offer the leaders of organizations is greater self-awareness about how they come across to those around them. Indeed, organizational health and its benefits (improved productivity, retention of key people and problem solving) are impossible without some degree of self-awareness about how a leader’s behavior impacts others.

One of the things that’s easy to overlook, if you’re a leader, is just how powerful you are in the eyes of your employees. Indeed, we’ve watched entire teams pivot in reaction to the body language of the leader. This is normal and natural in organizations. What we’re pointing out is that leaders should be aware of their power and use it wisely.

What does that mean? Well, imagine you are a superhero and that every time you point your finger, a bolt of lightning strikes whatever or whomever you’re pointing at. If this was true, our bet is you’d be very careful about where you point your finger.

So, the next time you are displeased with the effort of your employee, consider the power you use in expressing your displeasure. A little bit goes a long way and makes it easier to have a corrective conversation unburdened by strong emotion (fear or resentment for starters).

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Why is it Always About You?: A Threat to Organizational Health

In her book, Why is is Always About You?, Sandy Hotchkiss talks about how certain people put their needs above everyone else’s and ultimately abuse their power. Although we have not spoken with her about it, we expect she would agree with the statement that these same people undermine organizational health and are prime contributors to organizational ill-health and its symptoms: poor morale, poor alignment, poor execution, poor retention and the like.

So, what is it about these people that make them toxic to organizational health? Mostly, it’s about their need to see themselves as powerful and what they do to protect their power–whether they have real power, like a CEO or Senior Executive, or little power, like a first time supervisor. Whatever their level in the organization, their need for power is likely to show up in one or more of the following behaviors.

Please note: These behaviors are based on the book, Why is it Always About You? They may be conscious behaviors but more often are unconscious or something people don’t realize they are doing in the moment.

A Tendency to Scapegoat – These individuals don’t tolerate failure well and blame is consistently shifted to others. This can appear as extreme defensiveness or a failure to acknowledge mistakes.

Work/Life Imbalance – These individuals often directly or indirectly ask others to go “above and beyond” to ensure their own success. That people are often willing to sacrifice their own work/life balance to serve a leader is something these individuals will all too eagerly exploit.

Importance of Admiration – The need for admiration for these individuals will manifest in a couple of ways: always needing to be the one with the final word, with the best idea/plan OR dejection when there are setbacks or challenges to his or her ideas and plans. It is the intensity of emotion that is the telltale sign of the importance of admiration: success brings intense joy while setbacks bring intense self-doubt.

Unusual Levels of Unprofessional Behavior – Unprofessional behavior like blurring the boundary between one’s personal and professional life or expressing emotions intensely, varies in degree from very minor to extreme. A red flag should go up when you feel too much personal information is being asked for or when there are frequent and unpredictable strong outbursts of emotions. Both of these “unprofessional” behaviors are signs of trouble that inevitably undermine healthy interaction and boundary setting in a workplace.

At Vital Growth we work hard to help organizations maximize their organizational health. We know improving organizational health is a huge competitive advantage for any business. Sometimes it’s a matter of making a team more functional. Sometimes its a matter of finding out and working with a power abusing individual who is eroding organizational health in his or her department or throughout the organization.

Give us a call if you think you’ve got a power monger in your workplace. We can coach you through your choices.

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What Successful Companies Can Learn From A Lean Startup

You may not have heard of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It’s a book that’s spoken of a lot in the startup world but less so in the mainstream business world. That’s a shame. Not only is it an interesting business book in its own right but it also has some important lessons for businesses that are beyond the startup stage.

Indeed, in the competitive world of business, unless you are consistently getting better, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes market share away from you. Which is to say, even established, successful businesses will benefit from the practices mentioned in The Lean Startup as they work to remain competitive in their market(s).

We think there are two particularly important practices that are relevant to post-startup businesses (from local to multinational). The first of these is “getting out of the building” to speak with customers about the pain/gain your product/service provides for them.

The details of how to do this are well beyond the scope of this short write-up but at the 30,000 foot level, it means gaining a better understanding of what your customers value and why they’re willing to part with cash to buy from you.

If you do this well, you may be surprised to find a variety of different reasons customers buy from you. Cataloging the different reasons why people buy will help you start to “archetype” your customers and, in turn, customize your interaction with them so as to maximize meeting their specific needs. If you can achieve even modest success at archetyping your customers accurately, you will take a huge step toward maximizing both your income and your customer loyalty.

The trick is that just asking your customers is probably not good enough to figure out what they really value. Which brings up the second practice: forming hypotheses about what they value and then rigorously testing each hypothesis.

For example, you may think your customers value your great service (your hypothesis) when some value your pricing alone, while others value the convenience of buying from you, while still others value the status of saying they bought from you or their relationship with a particular sales agent. You can test your hypothesis by altering the level of service, for example, and see if doing so changes buying behavior. While most customers have multiple factors influencing their buying decisions, buying behavior is the gold standard (no pun intended) for evaluating what value they hold above all others.

Testing hypotheses is the best way to really understand your customers better. It’s hard work to do it well. But it can take most of the guesswork out of your marketing efforts and will give you the best chance of staying competitive in your market(s).

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When is a Business Coach Worth the Price?

To answer this question, it might be helpful to think of yourself as a professional athlete. If you were a professional athlete (or even a motivated weekend warrior), you would weigh the benefit of improved athletic performance against the cost of the coach.

For most professional athletes, this is a pretty easy calculation. The promise of improved athletic performance (with the associated fame and fortune), almost always outweighs the cost. This is why every professional athlete has one or more coaches in her orbit.

Is the calculation any different for a business owner or executive? For many, it is not. The worldwide coaching industry is reported to generate $9 billion in revenue annually–clearly many business professionals are calculating that improved performance in business outweighs the cost of hiring a coach.

But what are business coaches providing that justifies their cost?

Professional athletes seek coaching to help them break through to the next level of performance whether it be by adopting new training tools or by correcting bad habits (physical or psychological) that limit performance or cause injury. “Business athletes” seek coaching for the same reasons: improved performance for themselves or their organization through the adoption of new tools or the correction of bad habits.

So, do you have bad habits (in your business) or might new tools increase your business performance? Some of the symptoms of bad business habits and old tools that we notice are: 1) underperforming employees staying employed, 2) the best employees being frustrated or leaving, and 3) employees not getting the most important things done.

What is the cost of these bad habits? It depends on the size of your organization and the degree of dysfunction caused by the habits. The only thing we can say for sure is that there are direct costs and opportunity costs (for example, respectively, salary paid to underperforming employees and revenue missed because of one or more underachieving employees).

These direct and opportunity costs accumulate pretty quickly. One recent client, estimated $50,000 in coaching increased his revenue by $2,500,000. A fantastic return on his investment and certainly worth the cost.

What, for example, if coaching helped you or your organization weed out weak or bad employees (the bad habit being to not weed out such employees)? What might the return be on an investment in coaching for this challenge?

One source (Calculating the Dollar Costs of a Bad or Weak-performing Employee by Dr. John Sullivan Jan 6, 2014) suggests the cost of a weak employee is, at minimum, 33% of the average annual revenue per employee (total organizational revenue divided by number of employees) and, at a maximum, 300% of the average annual revenue per employee.

This means, with an average annual revenue per employee of $150,000, weeding out one minimally weak employee would save $50,000. If the weak employee was at the extreme end of weak (lots of absenteeism, several missed sales opportunities or a cause of accidents, etc.), the annual savings would be $450,000 (or $37,500 for every month of continued employment).

Most coaches can help with the process of weeding out weak employees in a couple of hours of work. Thereby delivering another fantastic return on an investment in coaching.

Not all fixes are as quick as this example suggests. For instance, getting employees to focus on the most important priorities takes time to setup and additional time to make part of an organization’s DNA. But, any coach worth her fee, is going to introduce tools and break habits that can improve performance for the long-run.

It’s almost a given that a professional athlete will benefit from coaching when his performance is stalling because of a bad habit (physical or psychological) or because he’s not staying up with the techniques and tools used by his competitors. The same is true of business athletes. In both cases, when performance is lagging, the clear answer is that coaching is worth the price and an investment that, more often than not, brings a fantastic return.

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Generating Cash by Improving Organizational Health

Organizational health is something most leaders don’t pay enough attention to. We think that’s because it’s a) hard to know what to do when an organization is ill or sick and b) even if you know what to do, it’s hard to do what needs to be done.

The symptoms of organizational ill-health or illness are, poor results, poor morale, good people leaving (turnover), poor problem solving and resolution, “drifting” (the opposite of goal directed activity), etc. All of these symptoms waste people’s time and energy and, by extension, the organization’s CASH.

While most organizations exhibit some of the symptoms mentioned above, the organizations that are paralyzed by them need to act sooner than later. It is like a flu. If you are able to get through the day and be fairly productive, it’s okay to see if the symptoms pass. If you’re unable to get out of bed, however, it’s time to see the doctor.

There is a relatively simple recipe for improving organizational health: improve the health of the team that leads the organization and have those leaders take what they’ve learned about being healthy back to their teams–spreading health and chasing away dysfunction.

This recipe reflects a couple of simple truths. Organizational health or ill-health always starts at the top and the cure of organizational ill-health must be top down.

Improving the health of the team that leads an organization is not a trivial task but it is achievable. There are some great resources to help organizations improve their leadership team health starting with the classic, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.

What it all comes down to, in our opinions, is establishing a culture where people strive for what’s best for the team (organization) and can speak their minds without fear of being harmed (personally or professionally). It may be an oversimplification but healthy teams are made up of people who are fiercely dedicated to the success of their organization and who are also willing to put their ego and fears aside for that success.

In closing, improving an organization’s health improves communication, accountability, problem solving and retention. Improving an organization’s health also generates cash by reducing the wasted time and effort of employees and by decreasing turnover. It may not be easy to improve an organization’s health but it’s like found money when it’s done.

 

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How Organizational Alignment Generates Cash

Improved organizational alignment generates cash by improving productivity and reducing the rate of new hires (because people produce more). Both increased productivity and reduced hiring puts cash in the bank for an organization.

Skeptical? Well, surveys estimate that between 25 and 40% of a worker’s time is wasted in non-productive activities including work toward unclear objectives and participation in ineffective meetings. What impact would you expect to your bottom line if you captured even half of the three to nearly four months wasted every year by your average employee?

So, what can you do to combat wasted time and the cash drain it represents?

You can start by working on setting the priorities for your organization and then getting everyone aligned behind those priorities.

To get people aligned consider four ingredients: clear expectations, progress milestones (metrics), a clear timeline and set priorities for when expectations conflict. In our experience, clear expectations are pretty common. Less common are the metrics that measure progress, a defined review period and a strategy for resolving conflicts between expectations.

When all four ingredients are present, there is tremendous focus and little uncertainty about what exactly needs to be done by when. For example, there is a big difference between the directives: “grow sales” and “your top priority is to make new connections with prospective customers. We expect you to make 10 new connections and to touch base with 25 connections that you have made in the past six months, each week. We expect these contacts to result in two or more sales each week. We will meet every other week to assess your activity and progress.”

This type of focus produces three outcomes: 1) a clear roadmap of how a person needs to behave to be successful, 2) the results you are looking for, or 3) nowhere to hide for the subpar or marginal performer.

The bottom line of this type of focus is ultimately more cash in the bank–put there by the discipline of organizational alignment.

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Getting Things Done

Getting things done or “executing” is a kind of grind. It’s not directly exciting or glamorous like a BIG IDEA or a NEW INITIATIVE. It’s not necessarily sexy or the reason why people stand out in meetings (see BIG IDEA).

Perhaps its pedestrian status is the reason getting things done is relatively rare. In any event, getting things done is a skill that can be taught.

If you’ve read, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, then you know one good formula for executing. Our interpretation of the formula goes like this:

  • Know your people and your business–this includes knowing the strengths and shortcomings of your people as well as the opportunities and risks associated with your business.
  • Insist on realism–this means keeping one’s head up and alert. It’s too easy to look at the world through “rose colored glasses” and to ignore critics. Listen to everyone, including employees, customers, potential customers–seek their honest feedback. Remember that people say as much with what they do say as they do with what they don’t say.
  • Identify clear goals and priorities–clear goals are achievable and include the steps that need to be taken along the way to achieving them.
  • Follow-through–who’s responsible, when will a milestone be achieved and what’s the process for reviewing progress? Are these elements clear and is the review frequent enough to stay on top of the progress or lack of it?
  • Reward the doers–intelligently reward behavior that gets things done but don’t over-reward it or ignore the fact that rewarding past behavior should not diminish future desirable behavior.
  • Expand people’s capabilities–invest in your people with training and coaching that helps them meet new challenges.
  • Know yourself–No one person can handle all the complexity of today’s business world. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses is the first step of seeking the input of others for their perspective as well as their contributions that best compliment your own.

Like with any formula, the formula for getting things done requires attention to all the ingredients. It’s not a hard formula to follow if you really attend to all the ingredients but that is easier said than done. One suggestion is to make a list of all the ingredients listed above and then ask yourself, once a week, if you are including each in your day-to-day work. Try it, you may be surprised how this little exercise helps you really get things done.