Problem 3

Part 3 of 3

We’ve aggregated a pretty expansive set of tools into our roadmap:

• Mined the best in class from the numerous coaching certifications we carry.   
• Read hundreds of the best books on organizational health, strategic planning, effective meetings, and operating with purpose.
• Worked with dozens of clients.
• Aggregated the best tools and processes from our partner’s former consulting practice.
• Combined all that with the imperative of purpose we bring to individuals in LifePlan retreats and to organizations in our Strategic Enterprise retreats.

The Roadmap we take every organization down, whether it is our team coaching, our executive board experience with one-on-one coaching, or through our free tools, is exactly the same.

• Identify a Team - Key representatives from every part of the organization.
• Get Healthy - Work with them to establish a healthy baseline for interaction.
• Establish or Enhance - Core Values and Purpose
• Craft a Vision - Draw a clear and concise picture of the future.
• Get Focused - What are the vital few things we must focus on to realize our vision.
• Develop a Strategic Plan - Goals, initiatives, and action steps with ownership and timelines.
• Meeting Governance - Establish a high execution model to meet, provide accountability, and accomplish tasks.
• Organizational Design - Create the ideal structure and team of the future to realize your vision… walk your team in that direction.
• Reset Goals & Initiatives - Craft an annual meeting structure where you reset quarterly and annually.

It might not surprise you that some companies we talk to simply want a strategic plan.  They feel like that is the ultimate solution to all their problems.  We couldn’t disagree more.  That, in a vacuum, will not solve your problems.  In our extensive experience and research, if you don’t walk through the essential steps necessary to get to this kind of strategic plan, the plan won’t be…

• Owned
• Embraced
• Accomplished

Let’s be honest, you and your team are already really busy.  But if you don’t regularly gather together with the essential few employees.  If you don’t work with them to get clear on who you are and what you believe.  If they don’t participate in crafting a more inspired future.  If you don’t jointly commit to the essential few things that must happen to get you there.  If there isn’t meeting governance that drives accountability and establishes regular resets…

NOTHING WILL CHANGE

What we all need is not a plan, but a new way to live.  A systematic and planned approach that takes us from where we are to the place we’ve always desired to be.  That will comfortably take us from chaos and overwhelm to clarity, margin, and freedom.

• Are you really ready to change things?
• Have you given up on believing they can?
• Let us know, we feel called to help.  We’ll help you determine which path is best for you.

Problem 2

Part 2 of 3

This is another variation on the Problem I talked about in the last post. 

Since calling or gifting is…

• Something given to you 
• Entrusted by another
• For the sake of everyone

…doing it vocationally is sort of challenging.  Some people can’t afford a private coach or to have a team of coaches come work with their teams.

(And, BTW, based on what we’ve experienced, I am pretty convinced that most companies can’t afford to not hire a coach or a coaching team, but I will spare you what already sounds like a shameless sales pitch.)

As we prayed through how we are to offer proper stewardship over all these processes, exercises, and tools that lead organizations down a transformation journey, we were left with a very clear conclusion, we are supposed to make it available to everyone.

We defined 3 different paths that lead to the same destination:

• Coaching for Your Team - Hire us to work with you and your team directly.
• Get a Coach - Meet with me or another coach and gather around a table with other leaders.
• Do It Yourself - We’re building a free online database of all the tools, processes, and exercises we use to take a team on a complete transformational journey.

This resolve gets tested sometimes.  There was a business leader that contacted me earlier this year.  He needed some strategic help with his team.  He needed a clear plan.  He is a high integrity guy who runs a great business.  They are one of those best places to work companies.  And they have grown as a result and he needs help in order to continue to scale the business in a healthy way.  (The best companies become the greatest ones because they keep striving for even greater success.)

Frankly, we were pretty excited that we would get to work with them.  A few nights ago, however, he wrote to say that he had hired an employee who just happened to have a lot of strategic planning experience in his past.

I responded quickly…

“Congratulations!  Sounds like a great hire.  Let us
know if we can do anything to help.”

I wrestled with how to make that sincere.  I am not trying to keep a foot in the door.  I am sincerely interested in helping them and others find the success they desire.  I am going to point him toward our free resources online, but I felt like I needed to share even more.  In our next post, Problem 3, I’ll share the intended path I believe a company must walk down in order to realize true transformation.

• Do you dislike the place you are at with your business?  Are you motivated to do something about it?  Are you coachable?  Are you wanting someone to come work with you and your team?  (Coaching for Your Team)
• Are you the kind of leader that just wants someone to walk alongside you to provide support, accountability, and encouragement on getting the right things done?  (Coaching for You)
• Are you the kind of rare individual who can read new ideas, communicate them well, and get them implemented fully within your team?  (Do It Yourself)

Gestures

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

- Mark Twain

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My friend Jeff played piano with Tim McGraw for almost two decades.  When he started to look into recording on his own, he met with some industry types to talk about getting singed to a record deal.  They told him they had to figure out his potential commercial viability by calculating the strength of his following as an artist.  

Believe it or not Facebook follows, Twitter traffic, number of likes, fan emails to his artist website, etc. all had a numerical value.  But the thing that was worth the most… many, many order of magnitude beyond all the rest… was hand written (snail mail) letters from fans.

Someone taking the time to bypass all the convenience and impersonality of the much easier technological methods of communication, reflected a depth of feeling and interest that dwarfed the others.  

I am not surprised.  Are you?

I ignore a heap of e-mails on a daily basis, but don’t think I’ve ever left a handwritten letter unopened.

I heard Frank Blake, former Chairman/CEO of Home Depot talk about some of the tools he implemented as part of his successful run.  One particular thing he mentioned was that he wrote an average of 100 handwritten notes to employees every week of his 8 year term.

100 handwritten notes a week!!!!

I can’t imagine doing that. When I was leaving a 15 year career with a bank I was very fond of, a friend challenged me to finds ways to honor those I respected that I was leaving behind.  By the time I was done, I had interoffice’d 47 handwritten notes to other leaders at the bank.  The process took on a life of its own and it was incredibly gratifying to do, but it took an inordinate amount of time.

Frank said he wasn’t sure if the letter writing thing was really making a difference until he started to see them framed all over the place and saw the ripple effect of many of his mid-level managers continuing the practice through their staff members as well.

But the day that he decided he would never stop writing was when he was visiting one of the stores in Atlanta.  An employee approached him and asked him to rewrite the note he had sent to her.  He said that he would, but wanted to know why.  She said that all her co-workers told her that her note couldn’t be real… there was no way the chairman of a company with hundreds of thousands of employees would write personal notes.  Surely it had been done by machine.

But when she dunked the note in water to see if it were real, the ink ran and she had her answer.  She wanted another one so that she could frame it and save it forever.  He realized that team members are so jaded about even the sincerest of gestures of management, that he had to continue to fight to change their perceptions in this very small way.

Consider

• How do you honor your team members as a regular practice?

• Do you do it in ways that they actually receive it as sincere?

• How would the sincerity of a handwritten note be consistent with the way you treat them on a day-to-day basis?

• Got any stationary? Maybe you need to get some writing going.

Smile

smile

/smīl/

verb

1. form one's features into a pleased, kind, or amused expression, typically with the corners of the mouth turned up and the front teeth exposed.

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I stopped at a convenience store just down the street from the golf course where I would be speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.  I was a little behind schedule, but needed to stop for some aspirin due to a piercing headache.  I never expected I would find a line six people deep at this time of day.

I’ve been working on being more patient with some success, but given the circumstances there was a good chance I wasn’t going to pass this test.  There was a young girl checking people out and another employee standing beside her watching and giving her instructions.

Why don’t they open another register?

Why doesn’t he grab the reins for a minute until they get caught up?

Before I had a chance to get too frustrated, he turned to the line and addressed everyone:

“Hey, can you believe this is her first day?  She is doing an incredible

job handling all the new things she is learning, don’t you think?”

He was grinning from ear-to-ear and his sincere delight in her almost required that you join him in celebrating her.  Almost on cue, everyone in line, including me, told her that the wait was no problem and that she was doing a great job.

Not only had he diffused the situation, but also honored her in the process and completely changed my mood.

How did he do that?

There are any number of other things he could have done that would have expedited the line and gotten us all out of there a few seconds quicker, but he chose a different way.  He not only encouraged her, but invited all of us to do the same.  As a result of that smile and those thoughtful words, he triggered all manner of good things in each of us.  

Showing others kindness:

1. Causes increased levels of dopamine in the brain that makes us feel better.
2. Produces the hormone oxytocin which causes the release of nitric oxide in your blood vessels which reduces blood pressure.
3. Reduces levels of free radicals and inflammation in the cardiovascular system and thus slows aging at its source.

And if that weren’t enough, he also invited us to join him in fulfilling the role that God placed each of us here for; making Him better known by the way we care for others.

It is unlikely he was thinking of any of that.  As a great leader he simply cared about how all of this would make her feel… the lasting impact of this incident.  The fear and concern on her face replaced by a big smile told him that he had hit his mark.

Consider

• How would you have responded to that situation as a leader?
• Is there someone you need to honor and encourage where you are currently doing otherwise?
• How can you encourage this in your organization’s culture?

Tendency

I chased a girl into the Speech and Theater program when I was in high school.  I was walking away from a drug culture, the train had already left the station for any sports involvement, and I was looking for a place to belong.  I was painfully shy and lacked any sense of identity.  Speech helped me gain confidence, taught me to better frame up my thoughts, gave me a place to belong, and got me closer to the aforementioned girl.

As you might imagine, as a thick-tongued boy lacking confidence, they kept chiding me to speak louder and enunciate.  It wasn’t until I felt like I was almost screaming and articulating every syllable as an individual word, that they felt like I was actually speaking in an appropriate manner.  Sometimes when you are not used to speaking up or having anyone care about what you have to say, you have to exaggerate in the other direction.  You have to do what feels like shouting, just to be heard.

I call that “fighting your tendency.”  It is a concept that seems to show up in conversations all the time.  It is the simple idea that you have go against the grain of your default behavior to get decidedly different results.

• If you tend to not speak up, you may have to talk in a way that feels excessive to you.
• If you tend to say too much like me, censor yourself to the point of almost feeling like you’re not saying anything.
• If you tend to micromanage, do what feels like completely taking your hands off the reins.
• If you tend to abdicate authority, do the opposite.
• If your spouse feels unloved, despite the fact that you think you’ve made it abundantly clear, make it unmistakably clear.

Fight the tendency to respond and behave the way you always have.  

For me, learning to ask questions instead of incessantly blabbering unwanted or unrequested answers, has changed the quality of almost every conversation.  I am trying to STOP dominating every conversation.  In fact, the 300 or so episodes of this very blog have allowed me a platform to share some of the deep thoughts and stirrings of my heart instead of trying to cram all of them into every conversation.

I am fighting my tendency by trying to be slower to speak and quicker to listen.

And it isn’t that our tendency isn’t often offered out of the best of intentions.  When my wife read a female companion version to the book “Wild at Heart” that had changed my life and been the focus of my ministry, I went to work:

• I signed her and a friend up for a retreat in Colorado based on the book without asking her (it was the middle of winter and she was in her third trimester with our fourth child).
• I ordered her 10 copies of the book.
• I help draft a list of the ladies she might invite to a study.
• I created the invitation that I thought she could send to all of them.

Yeah, it’s funny now, but I think I crushed her desire to actually pursue other women.  She didn’t actually start engaging women with this message in earnest for several years after that.  My heart was good, but my actions were bad.

All my best intentions, wrapped in my legalistic desire to control everything, ruined (temporarily) an opportunity for my wife to share her heart and inspiration about a life-changing message with others.  When it comes to many things, I have had to learn to sit back and keep my opinions and micro-managing to myself.  

Because my tendency is to take over, even when I think I am only encouraging, it can feel like micro-managing to others.  Going against my natural tendency, has brought some necessary balance to things.  Or at least I think so.  Maybe you should ask my wife.

What are your tendencies?

What are you offering too much of that you need to restrain?

Where are you offering too little that you need to step it up?

If you have the courage, ask your spouse or team members where they would like you to step it up and where they would like you to back off.  Ask them what tendencies you have that they would prefer that you fight!

Thinning

“Thinning the heard” is an expression used in ranching circles.  (Animal rights activist might want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) It typically refers to the practice of reducing the size of a herd of large farm animals by removing the genetically weaker ones.  It also can mean to hunt or kill off animals as a means of population control.

A quick Google search reveals that the expression is also used in a variety of contemporaneous, and sometimes offensive, ways.  It is referenced in reducing an iTunes playlist, narrowing the field of availability in a bar, and noting the fact that some of those people refusing to wear motorcycle helmets may not live to tell all their tales.

We’ve also have started using it in an organizational context.  Leaders of organizations are often daunted by the task of getting all the right people on the bus.  They can’t even begin to think about getting all of them in the right seats.  

• There are too many that don’t seem to be the right people.
• There are too many that don’t seem to be actively engaged.
• There is too much other work to do rather than focus on getting the right folks.
• It is too uncomfortable for them to remove the wrong folks.

Guess what?  You will never achieve the success you desire until you deal with this issue.  We coach the companies we work with to adopt two simple rules in dealing with substandard work or behavior.  We gained conviction about these practices when we learned that a church in Chicago utilizes them:

• Under-Performance - Get an understanding of how their performance needs to change.  Schedule a 90 day review.  Commit to whatever resources, training, etc. is required to get them there.
• Bad Attitude - Agree to what “right” looks like and set a 30-day review date.  Commit to do whatever you can do to help aid in the transition, but mutually agree that attitude is a choice.

If at the end of the 30 or 90 day periods, the behavior/performance hasn’t changed or isn't dramatically trending in the right direction, the employee is released to find a better fit for their skill set or a more suitable environment to allow for a better attitude.  Harsh?  Remember, we learned these practices from a church.  Their philosophy is that their stewardship responsibility is to maintain a high performing and positively engaged team.  We want everyone to work somewhere where their skills, efforts, and attitude can thrive.

We’ve observed something else in the teams we work with.  Once they get really clear on their desired culture (Values, Purpose and Vision), the herd starts to thin itself.  The inconsistency with the now clearly defined culture makes it difficult to remain on the team.  Also, the rest of the team buying into and operating under the powerfully embodied culture won’t allow others who don’t fit, to remain.

Without the owner having to be the bad guy, the herd gets thinned.

Not only does a clearly defined culture provide direction, elicit excitement, and cultivate engagement, it also helps ensure you have the right people on the bus.

Is it time to thin the herd?

Do you have the policies and practices in place to make that happen?

Is your culture and future clearly defined enough that the team will help thin the herd for you?

How much longer will you suffer the cost of low engagement by having the wrong team members?