Leadership Viewpoint

Planning is the first step toward making your goals come to life. There are tons of sources online to help you set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Let’s assume that you have them written as our starting point. If you don’t have them written, go do that before you spend any more time here.

The planning that we’re focusing on here is the type that leads to real action, starting with your annual calendar. Think ahead and get everything you can laid out on your calendar. Be sure to include: key business projects. milestones, vacations and time off, major company meetings, national holidays, key personal dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and anything else of note. Computers have made this so much easier than paper systems ever were, since recurring items can be entered once and appear indefinitely if appropriate.

At the beginning of each month, sit back and review your annual plan and make any needed changes. Then turn your focus to the month at hand. Now it’s time to get really clear about ‘to do’ lists to make certain that everything actually happens. At the beginning of each month, take an hour or so to anticipate what you need to do to make your calendared schedule come together smoothly. Block time on your schedule accordingly – not just for meetings, but also for real focused, quality work time. At the beginning of each week, ensure that your time is laid out well for the week, and do your detailed ‘to do’ list for the next day. Make that ‘to do’ list a daily ritual. Focus on consistently taking care of your top priority activities every single day.

The only guarantee that comes with all this planning is that you will know what ought to be done when an emergency occurs and pulls you off-track! Without good planning, the odds are high that you will stay off-track. With good planning, you’ll probably get back to your important tasks and improve your long term success dramatically. That’s the real point of planning.

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Have you ever struggled with the right balance of humor and fun in the workplace? Clearly we want our people to be happy and enjoy their workday, so some humor is appropriate. In fact, there’s plenty of research indicating that laughter is good for our health, our energy, our mindset, personal productivity and maintaining a positive approach to challenges. It’s also a fundamental ingredient to creativity, which is highly valuable to all successful businesses in our knowledge based workplace.

Conversely, we don’t want the atmosphere at work to become sophomoric or offensive to anyone. The only thing we can be reasonably sure of is that some people will get it wrong on occasion. So what are the guidelines to getting it right? Appropriate humor in the workplace helps to bond people together, rather than separating individuals or groups. This is bad news for Don Rickles’ genre humor, which picks on individual idiosyncrasies. Further, it’s bad news for blond jokes, or anything that victimizes a specific group or type of people. A better approach is to learn to laugh at ourselves and the everyday things that happen. Once our people see their leader relax and laugh, they feel comfortable following suit.

Many organizations, ours included, struggle with email jokes, which have truly become pervasive. In addition to the time wasted, concerns about legal liabilities in the case of an action become worrisome. Speak with both your attorney and your HR team to strike the right balance in your company communications regarding email. The goal is to be legally covered without becoming a sterile workplace. It can be a challenging balance to strike.

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Determination is a trait that makes us crazy when we deal with it in others; yet every successful person has a healthy dose of it! Think about a determined child – how do they behave? Repeatedly going after the one thing that they are not supposed to have? Relentlessly asking for the toy that’s too expensive? Mercilessly poking their sibling until they get a rise out of him or her? In our efforts to encourage children to behave in socially acceptable ways, we sometimes go too far. Some kids wind up caving in completely and applying that learned behavior to all aspects of their life. Of course, that is rarely what the parents had intended. Different children respond differently to similar parental feedback, so one child may become passive, while his or her sibling may actually become even more determined.

Our workforce is comprised of these children, albeit a few years later, and whatever conditioning their parents did is ours to contend with, or reap the benefits of, today. Can we change their level of determination at this stage of life? The answer, of course, is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The odds of influencing a largely passive adult and turning him or her into an assertive, determined performer are slim. It is rare to see wholesale changes in people. More realistically, we can expect to see refinements in the behavior patterns that are typically exhibited. Think back to a parent conditioning a child. The key to altering behavior then was consistent feedback. Guess what? It still is!

This means that far more than annual reviews is needed. First, we need to hire people with the basic attributes the position demands. Then, to successfully mold our team, we need to provide each person with consistent feedback about our expectations, their current behavior and the gaps as we see them. Just as important, we must also consistently tell them where they excel, to reinforce their positive behavior. Just as it was with children, individuals will respond differently to feedback, so we must alter our feedback accordingly. It is, perhaps, the most important work that any leader does. After all, if we take care of and groom our people, they will take care of the business.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of learned helplessness. It’s a term that came out of psychology (Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism). Scientists conditioned a dog with electric shocks every time a bell rang. Once the dog was conditioned to expect a shock every time the bell rang, they put the dog into an open box, where it could easily escape. Then they rang the bell, and the dog just laid there, awaiting what it thought was the inevitable shock. Dogs that hadn’t been conditioned with the electric shocks simply jumped out of the box and ran off.

Sometimes it feels as if people around us have received similar conditioning. Often they just sit there, when the very things they want are easily within their reach. Something has squelched their natural drive for success. Great leaders seem to have the opposite conditioning effect on their people. First, they identify and hire ‘go getters’. Then they systematically pump them up, build their confidence and provide them with opportunities for small wins. Later, when a situation puts them in a ‘box’, they instinctively exhibit winning behaviors.

The beauty of being a person, rather than a dog, is that we have intelligence, self awareness and free will. We can actually go out and condition ourselves. Many of us do it in little ways, such as positive self talk, and asking good questions. It doesn’t have to stop there. We can do the same thing for ourselves that great leaders do. We can set ourselves up for small successes and build up to the bigger challenges. It takes a change in focus – from the things we cannot do, to focusing on the things we can do.

Imagine you are learning a new hobby. Would you start out with an advanced project? Of course not, you’d look for ‘Beginner’ on every project you considered. Then you would move up as your experience and confidence improved. Personal power is very similar. Find some ‘beginner’ projects and build yourself up to the ‘advanced’ level. I often recommend volunteer work for newbies. It’s a great way to build yourself up and poise yourself for greater challenges down the road.

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It used to be that you identified a job opening and hired somebody to fill it; simple, clean and efficient. Now we keep hearing about ‘talent management’, and executives want to know what it is and why they can’t just hire somebody if and when a need arises.

In fact, talent management starts with strategy and planning; it becomes a virtuous circle when done well. Start by assessing your current staff against your long term business growth needs. Identify where you anticipate each person will be in a few years. Then look for the gaps. Next, recruit today to fill any critical near term gaps, and develop your key people extensively. Finally, ensure that you have a serious plan in place to retain your people.

There are some excellent software solutions available to support this work. Since it is a highly collaborative and ongoing process, it is critical to systematically connect HR, line managers and senior management. Successful implementation demands a well trained, strategically oriented HR professional. Many organizations are finding that this is one of the key positions that needs to be filled!

Talent management has become critically important for a few key reasons. First, many businesses have become more knowledge based than production oriented. Ensuring that bright, talented people are in key positions is fundamental to success. Second, baby boomers are starting to retire, so there will literally be more openings than people to fill them. If businesses continue to wait for openings before developing their replacements, the situation will likely become untenable.

Remember that retention planning is fundamental to a true talent management strategy. If a business forgets this piece of the puzzle, it may find that its best people are picked off by competitors, just as they were about to produce a return on investment.

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Over the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed a very strange shift in the world of job search. We have received a number of inquiries from parents, looking for leadership development positions for their children. Can you imagine learning about leadership from a person with so little initiative and self esteem that he or she allows mommy or daddy to conduct his or her job search? We cannot.

In response to these requests, we inform the parent that the mere fact that the applicant is not inquiring personally disqualifies him or her from consideration. Most parents have been appreciative of the direct feedback. Yesterday, however, an irate mother fired back an angry letter quoting a leadership firm in Toronto that responded favorably to the same inquiry that we had rejected. Besides relief that we will not be involved with an angry and dysfunctional family, we are left to ponder reasonable standards for the workplace. As trainers and consultants, we place high value on “teaching others to fish”. Yet, in this case, an industry colleague has dropped reasonable standards.

As business leaders, it is incumbent on us to place high expectations on our people. We’ve heard rhetoric about the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, typically from President Bush referring to students from poor areas. Politics aside, ‘low expectations’ are extremely damaging in the workplace. When we open the door to low standards for one person, it becomes too easy to rationalize it the next time. Clearly if you want to build a great business, it is critical to hire and develop a great workforce to run it. Aim high, and encourage your workforce to join you at the top!

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As youngsters, most of us try to be like everybody else. Our goal is to position ourselves as one of the gang, to fit in. Years later, in business, it is critically important to stand out, to position ourselves as unique or expert in some regard.

Let’s think about this with respect to a typical professional office. Some of the typical, positive positions include:

Strategist
Presenter
Idea Seller
Computer Geek
Numbers Person
Developer of People
Negotiator
Listener
Troubleshooter
Detail Person

The positions overlap, and most of us fill all of these to some extent. To assess your current positioning, ask yourself, “For which of these areas do my colleagues really on count me?” When someone comes to you for advice, in which area are they most likely to need support? If you are all over the board, either you are brilliant at everything, or you are not successfully positioned as much of anything.

If you are capable of excelling in all these roles, you may want to consider focusing your energies on the one or two areas you enjoy that are most highly valued at your organization. The key is to have management recognize your outstanding abilities. Take care not to be regarded as ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. That may prove a recipe for disposability. Just as the white Wonder Bread of years ago has been largely replaced by a myriad of specialty breads, generalists have also been largely replaced by a myriad of specialists. Be certain to position yourself well so an ‘expert’ doesn’t nudge you out of your workplace.

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As you are working with your clients, it’s critically important to ensure that they always feel that working with you is of value. By definition, value is what they get for the money. To increase it, either cost must go down, or what they receive must go up. If you’re a discounter, you probably choose to take price down, and you may try to cut the costs of your goods and services accordingly.

If you are a premium seller, then you try to add to what the client receives. The ideal addition is something that is very valuable to the client, but a negligible cost to you. To identify such items, stand back and look at everything you have at your disposal, not just your typical product/service offerings. Value-added items are often from resources that you don’t typically sell. They may be adjunct goods and services, or they may be exposure or ‘connections’ related. In many service industries, sellers add extra services – a package deal for instance.

We sometimes see sellers set up client networking opportunities. One of my colleagues arranges a large meeting with outside speakers quarterly for his clientele. His clients all meet one another and receive a morning of informative talks from area experts in non-competing fields. These experts receive exposure to a group of potential clients, and are generally grateful for the opportunity. It’s a clear win-win and everybody feels indebted to him.

Think about your own business. What can you do to add value to your clientele? What can you afford to give away, simply as a privilege of doing business with you? What can you do that nobody else in your field does for their clients? How can you make the experience of working with you better than working with anyone else?

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Some days it seems I am surrounded by people that talk about what needs to be done rather than simply doing it. They talk, meet, think, plan, ponder, consider, consult, compliment, coordinate, console, influence decision makers, impress senior managers and ultimately, little is accomplished. If only a tenth of that time were spent actually executing, productivity would skyrocket! It seems that in an effort to ensure that everybody is onboard and feels good, style has too often overtaken substance in the workplace.

People are very, very busy in corporate America. What I often find, however, is that they are busy with a plethora of non-productive activities. The basics of good time management demand that we attack our work in this order:

1. Plan
2. Communicate
3. Manage
4. Do

Lately, it seems a preponderance of people want to fumble about with the top three and hope that somebody else will take care of number four. As a result, too little is accomplished, and everyone is frustrated. Perhaps the information age has resulted in too many chiefs and not enough workers to execute the plans. More likely, corporate rewards are emphasizing appearances more than substance, and people instinctively gravitate toward whatever is rewarded.

Remember that the most effective leaders set an example of excellence, and that includes more than feel good talk. It also demands superb execution. Do it consistently, and others will willingly follow your example.

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This morning the news is hitting that Barack Obama, Illinois Senator and candidate for President, spent four years as a child studying at a Muslim school in Indonesia. Because he supposedly hadn’t ‘revealed’ this before, it is being touted as ‘big news’.

It strikes me that the distance between attending a Muslim school for four years as a child and Muslim extremists is about as far as a child attending a Catholic school for four years and the Pope. If your family is living in Indonesia, and you want your children to get a good education, the odds are that you will send the child to a private school, which will most likely be Muslim.

Also concerning, this ‘news’ was discovered and released by Hilary Clinton’s campaign people. What kind of horrible campaign do we have ahead of us? Are we doomed to another round of silly exposés, or might we actually discuss issues that matter to our lives?

As for many Americans’ fear of everything Muslim, please remain calm. The vast majority of Muslims are warm, loving peaceful people. They are at least as horrified by Muslim extremists as the rest of us. Rather than fearing every Muslim, we would do well to engage and befriend them. It is the breaking down of barriers that leads to understanding, acceptance and ultimately peace. Press hysterics over nothing only serve to widen our divide and feed stereotypes. This hits our workplace and adds to diversity issues. We can and must do better.

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