Category Archives: teamwork

Outstanding Entrepreneurs Do This Well

Posted on May 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Are you getting sucked back into the daily drama, details, and problem solving that you (supposedly) hired others to take care of? Are you unable to pull your head out of the minutia of running a business to think about where that business needs to go next? Are you reacting to daily and hourly crises instead of being “proactive”?

Sprinter and Rabbits

If you’re a successful entrepreneur, you probably have a strong bias towards action. You’re a doer, a decider, the action gal. It’s a big part of why you’re successful. Like a fast running sprinter, or the hard to catch rabbit, you move fast..

A sprinter runs so fast and so hard they leave everybody else behind in the parking lot. That’s good if you’re ahead of your competition. If you’re leading a business it may be a problem.

If everybody else is still trying to figure out where the finish line is when you’ve already crossed it, then you’re not really being a leader. The idea of leadership is to get everybody across the finish line as quickly as possible. Not just you.

The rabbit is also fast. A rabbit who is trying to evade a coyote will zig-zag and change direction quickly. Also not a bad thing if you’re taking advantage of opportunities and can change direction quickly to stay ahead of your competitors.

This doesn’t mean your staff knows which way you’re going next, or if they’ll be able to keep up. It may seem to them that they’re chasing a crazy rabbit who keeps changing its mind.

If Nobody Else Can Keep Up, Maybe They Aren’t the Problem

Your bias to action comes with a blind spot, sometimes. Making sure the team understands where you’re going next as a company. This helps them make decisions that line up with the company strategy (so you don’t have to), or anticipate where they need to be next. You may be frustrated that people don’t seem to get it, or keep up, or have the same excitement or energy or engagement as you. But they’re frustrated with you too.

They’re frustrated because you’ve left them behind, or they’re tired of chasing your zig-zagging rabbit backside. They can’t see the stuff you, the leader, can see.  And you’ve taken off without sharing what’s happening in your brain. So what are they supposed to do next? You could hire mind-readers, but my wife isn’t available.

You’ve lost your staff. As an entrepreneur or leader you can’t do it all yourself, and you’ve learned (hopefully) how to delegate and supervise. This frees you up to do what you do best: Create and discover new opportunities, get out in front of emerging markets, anticipate changes, hire the right people.

You may keep getting sucked back into the daily drama, details, and problem solving that you hired others to take care of because you keep running away without telling them where the finish line is.

You Need Them, They Need You

You do have to recognize that people can’t read your mind. People don’t know what you know, and they certainly don’t know what you’re thinking. Changes in speed and direction need energy, especially for the non-rabbits.

Those  detail guys and gals sometimes drive you nuts, but they keep you out of trouble. Worker bees get the mundane but important things done every day. The ones that are effective and efficient and complete because they take their time and think things through. And drive you crazy because they can never decide anything without you.

Maybe you can’t slow down to their speed, and maybe they can’t accelerate to yours. But you can meet them halfway.

What You Can Do

* Think a little more

Sit on your new ideas before throwing them out, and expecting people to understand what they’re supposed to do next. Not every idea you have is a good one, so don’t overwhelm the detail guys and gals with stuff that’s not going to happen because you change your mind tomorrow

* Over-communicate.

Keep your message simple and repeat it constantly. If you can’t explain what your company does and who its customers are in a way an eighth grader can understand, then it’s not simple enough.

* Listen more than you talk

Close the loop and listen as intently to your internal staff as you do your customers. You listen to your customers, right? This will tell you if your message is getting through, and having the desired effect. Adjust as necessary.

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Posted in coaching, communications, conflict, delegation, developing staff, engagement, execution, leadership, listening, mentoring, motivating, self-awareness, teamwork

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Your Profile Is Not An Excuse

Posted on April 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’m a fairly detailed, action-oriented kind of guy. In fact, if you look at my DISC profile, I’m about as far away from the “people” side of the chart as you can get. But it’s not an excuse for me to be a jerk.

What it is an opportunity for me to understand how other people see me, and how might sometimes need to change my behaviour to be more effective in working with other people. Notice how I said “change my behaviour”.

Sometimes people seem to think that learning about communication styles and behavioural profiles is  to learn how to manipulate people. The question they’re trying to answer is “How do I make other people do what I want?” The answer is “You don’t.”

What you can do is understand how and when changing your own behaviour makes you a more effective leader, team member, or follower. Where your own blind spots might be. To understand that it’s not always personal, or about you, or about them being a jerk, a liar, a bully, or a milk toast. Their perception of the world is different.

Stated more accurately, your perspective of the world is different from theirs. “They”, people who see the world differently, are in the majority. It’s not up to them to change.

I’m never going to be a Brian Mulroney or a Bill Clinton, with my own personal charismatic-reality-distortion-field. But I can learn to sit up straight, smile, speak clearly, and look people in the eye when I talk to them. In fact, I like to think I’ve done a pretty good job at that, and it’s made me better and more effective in my job.

What are your blind spots? How can you meet the rest of the world half way?

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Posted in behaviour, change, communications, emotional intelligence, influencing, relationships, self improvement, self-awareness, teamwork

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When Blind-Spots Surprise Us

Posted on April 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Katherine Spitzer first woman to run the Boston Marathon 1967

The universe is conspiring against me. Well, not really against. It’s conspiring on my behalf to take me to the next adjacent possibility. It’s tapped me on the forehead and made clear that I need to step up my game, especially about how I speak about women. Please let me explain.

Last week I was listening to a ManagerTools podcast on ethics, where two former West Pointers and now successful consultants were talking about the code of ethics they adopted at the academy:

“I will not lie, steal, cheat, nor tolerate those who do”.

With events in popular culture, the news, and politics, I decided to adopt a new personal honour code:

“I will not lie, steal, cheat, hate, nor tolerate those who do.”

Then I realized this week, while working with a woman CEO of a construction company, twice I used the term “girl” to describe an adult woman. Doh! Seems I have some work to do. I don’t think I do this maliciously, or trying to control others. At least that isn’t my intent, but I realize now it will sure come across that way.

I don’t want to be just another guy talking about women in the workplace. So how do I link my purported values to my behaviour? How does what I believe translate to how I am in the world. How are my words and action perceived by and impact others?

This is the work I do with business owners every day – how do we translate how we want to impact the world into everyday actions that take the company in the right direction? What is really going on? It often comes down to doing the basics well and consistently. In my case, dropping the use of “girl” to refer to adult women. Small changes often make the biggest difference. Especially when they allow us to make bigger changes.

Then I ran across an articles about  Katherine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. That’s her in the picture above running the first time 45 year ago this April. One of her cadre is body-checking a race official attempting to throw her out of “his” race. Katherine ran the race herself. Nobody carried her. That’s what she wanted, I imagine: the opportunity to run, to test herself, to do her best. Just like most of us.

It’s not enough to just give somebody an opportunity, job, or place, then stand by and watch them fail. In order to be leaders, in order for management to be a force for positive change in the world, sometimes we have to get up off our asses and run interference. Call bullies on their bullying. Deliberately solicit every opinion. Not tolerate poor behaviour. Let others lead. Which is what leaders are supposed to be doing when we’re “building teams”.

So I’m going to watch my language better, do some more volunteer one-on-one mentoring, and try to figure out how deep this blind-spot of mine goes. My little circle to start with. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Researching and writing this article has only made me realize how far I might have to go.

Who’s with me? What are you going to do to “lead”? What’s your blind spot?

 

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Posted in behaviour, change, emotional intelligence, self development, self improvement, self-awareness, teamwork

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When Trust is Gone, Nothing Else Works

Posted on March 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

When trust is gone, nothing else works. It’s true for friendships, marriages, politicians, and companies.

I ran into this with recently with a client. Two feuding departments who look to the CEO to resolve differences, but can’t get the decisions they need. Instead of one company working together, there are two departments working in parallel and duplicating effort. But it’s even worse than that.

The Effect

The atmosphere between the two department heads, and between some of their staff, is now poisoned with mistrust. They’re at the stage where they’re actively sabotaging each other.

Instead of having a creative and concrete conflict about substantive issues, solving problems, and moving the company forward they’re covering up weaknesses and mistakes, jumping to conclusions about each others’  intentions and attitudes, and not talking to each other. Grudges fester and meetings are dreadful and unproductive.

So What?

We can’t reach into the past and change things. There are some things we  can do.

First, it’s up to you as a leader to model vulnerability for your team. Admit mistakes, listen to feedback, ask for help. You can’t do it all yourself, that’s why you hired smart people to work with you. Use them to make yourself better, just like you want them to lean on each other.

Support vulnerability. Do not tolerate destructive or critical behaviour. One of my construction clients even has it written in their company ground-rules posted in every meeting room: Swearing is allowed and even encouraged. Personal attacks and blame are not. They laugh a lot, even when things seem to be at their worst. Then they buckle down and get things done.

Lastly, encourage healthy, passionate debate. Get everybody’s opinion. Don’t allow one or two verbal bullies to dominate the conversation. If we all agree all the time, then some of us are redundant. Get all opinions on the table, discuss the worst case scenario, get clear on what you’re trying to do, figure out specifics of who’s going to do what by when.

Then go execute.

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Posted in communications, conflict, conflict management, emotional intelligence, execution, meetings, teamwork

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It’s About People, Really

Posted on March 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

I got a huge compliment from one of the company partners this week. He said “You’ve done a great job learning to connect with people the last year.” Now, this might sound like a left-handed complement, but for me it’s something that I’ve consciously focused on the last little while. I’ll never be a Bill Clinton, but it’s something that was important to get better at.

Changing behaviour like that is hard and requires continuous focus. I came from a software and project management background, and in my earlier life I was little better than most at persuading people to work together. Which is to say that I was a little better than a company full of engineers, programmers, and project managers. When I started working at RESULTS.com I realized that not only was I going to have to raise my game to the next level, but that there are levels above me that I wasn’t even aware of.

In my current role as a business execution specialist connecting with people and building trust and a relationship is the biggest part of the job. They are trusting me with their companies, their livelihoods, and livelihoods of everybody in their company. If you’re a CEO you’re even more so in the hot seat. The buck stops with you.

Which is why I was surprised when I got briefed in on a new client recently. Part of what I was told is that they don’t want any of that fuzzy-wuzzy psychology mumbo-jumbo. Just come in and fix what’s wrong. This gave me the first sign of what my approach was going to have to be. Except I would have to be patient. Spend time face-to-face with the players. Build trust. Establish a relationship. You know, all that fuzzy-wuzzy psychology mumbo-jumbo stuff. Because at the c-suite level it’s all about the people. And trust. And relationships.

If you’re a lumberjack you’d better know how to use a chain-saw. If you’re a manager, leader, or CEO, you better know what makes your people tick and how to get them working together. Either that or you can pay somebody like me a lot of money to “fix what’s wrong”.

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Posted in behaviour, communications, conflict, conflict management, delegation, developing staff, emotional intelligence, engagement, influencing, persauding, relationships, teamwork

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Why Managers Get Fired

Posted on February 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve had a funny month. One of my clients has demoted one of their managers, and fired another. A second customer is considering buying out a minor shareholder who’s also a manager. All of them for either not being able to do their jobs as it relates to managing other people or themselves. It all seems to relate back to feedback, influence, and communication.

I’ll give one example. One of my construction clients had an operator who screwed up and caused unnecessary damage. It was bad enough that the operator suspended. His manager didn’t know how, or didn’t feel confident in doing the suspension himself, and asked the general manager to do it for him.

At this point I’ve got a couple of questions, like how come we’re discussing the fairly straight-forward suspension of an operator at the executive level? Or how come somebody is  a manager (leader) and still not confident confronting poor performance? Or how somebody who couldn’t perform basic managerial tasks without guidance and oversight at every step is hired for a job that is essentially just that. Or how long has this being going on?

Ultimately they decided to let that manager go. After they started digging and asking questions they found other issues. They decided that if that general manager has to do his job for him, then why pay the guy?

Which means that the general manager is now (still) the bottleneck for operations. Which isn’t his role. He has to spend time finding the right gal or guy as a replacement, and run operations in the meantime, while juggling his “real” job of building relationships with existing customers and finding new ones in a new operation in a new city.

How well do you think he’s going to do at hiring a good operations manager with all that on his plate? Oh, yea, he’s also short an operator while the original problem child is on suspension.

So what? Well, if you’re in a “manager”, making your “general manager’s” job easier means handling things at the lowest level possible. If you’re not comfortable at giving specific, fact-based feedback and applying the appropriate consequences, then start now. Yes, you’re going to suck at it and be really uncomfortable with it at first, especially if you haven’t done it before, had a good example of how to do it, or had training. Too bad. All those excuses have a solution, but none of them should hold you back from starting now. Everything is practice until it isn’t. So start practicing.

If you’re the “general manager”, then stop hiring for just experience and knowledge. Look for the ability to develop, coach, and mentor team members. Look for the ability to create teams. For the experience admitting mistakes, fostering trust, taking responsibility, and being comfortable with conflict.

Your Homework This Week: Catch somebody doing something right every day for the next seven days. Give them specific, actionable feedback. If you don’t know what this means then do the research and learn how. *

*hint: I’ve written at least two dozen article on the topic of giving feedback for this blog.

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Posted in coaching, conflict, delegation, developing staff, feedback, mentoring, teamwork

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Improv Rules For Business and Life (Part II)

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Part 2 of Karl & Bernie’s conversation about how the rules for comedy improvisation can and should be applied to business and life. Have fun!

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Posted in behaviour, communications, emotional intelligence, engagement, execution, feedback, focus, listening, motivating, persauding, teamwork

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Improv Rules Applied to Business and Life

Posted on January 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

So my buddy Karl and I finally recorded another podcast on the topic of Improv Lessons for the Corporate World. Give a listen and let us know what you think.

You can also find some previous resources at:

Karl’s guest blog on Give Feedback
Rules of Thumb for Improv in Life and Business: Embrace Failure, Reject Fear 

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Posted in behaviour, communications, creativity, focus, leadership, listening, teamwork

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Creative versus Planner: How to Get Along

Posted on December 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been accused of being “pie are squared”, a little too much of a colour-inside-the-lines kind of guy. Which is fine. If I’m trying to get something done I set my goal, set out the steps, and start ticking things off my to-do list. That doesn’t mean that I always succeed, but I enjoy the process of steadily making progress towards my goal, and the anticipation of completion.

Which is why I couldn’t figure out why how entrepreneurs were just as successful with their approach. It seemed to me that they couldn’t make up their mind, didn’t know were they were going, and changed course at random. Their approach was puzzling to me until I realized they just go through life in rapid-prototype mode.

They start with were they are, figure out what they have, and try to put it together in strange and interesting ways to see what happens. If something useful comes out of it, so much the better. If not, they’ll quickly drop it and go onto the next thing. They’re the creative types.

So if you’re a planner working with a creative type, remember that they don’t think in terms of process, but in terms of what if. For you this means you have to figure out what you (collectively) are trying to accomplish in the long term, which will give you a context for figuring out where the hell that latest idea came from and what it means to you. It also means that you need to check in with the current environment often, to make sure the plans haven’t changed. Sometimes this means waiting a day or two to see if the latest idea stuck, but also be ready to move quickly on it.

For you creative types working with us planners, please remember you’re working on a team now. If you could do it all yourself you wouldn’t need to hire other people. Let them know where you’re going, and try to cross the finish line with all of your people together. There’s no point finishing the race if the rest of the company is still in the parking lot tying on their running shoes. And remember: all those good ideas mean nothing if you can’t make them reality.

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Posted in emotional intelligence, engagement, relationships, self-awareness, teamwork

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Stop Risking Your Company on Good Ideas

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

When I took my Scouts out on camps, there was always a higher purpose. There were the big ones, of course. Like the 9-day jamboree, the 4-day mountain hike, or the 5-day canoe trip. But not every trip was the trip of a lifetime. In fact, I’ve left kids behind because they weren’t ready for it.

How did I know if they weren’t ready?

Build the Right Skills, Tools, and Experience

Firstly, we’d always had a series of smaller camps throughout the entire year to learn, practice, and try-out the skills and tools they’d need. For example, for our five-day canoe trip, we’d start in a local pool, where everybody had to practice recovering from a tipped canoe. Then we moved on to still water, where they learned basic strokes, working together as a team, and controlling the canoe on water.

Then we’d have them move in and out of a real river – which is probably the riskiest part of river canoeing. Along the way they learned hand-signals, whistle signals, how to throw a rescue line, and other river skills.

Us leaders took an extra level of training, actually practicing the skills of rescuing somebody from the river. We all got a chance to put on a wet suit and be rescued, which was both fun and scary. During the trip we had the Scouts throw us lines in the river while we floated by, and they had so much fun they got into the river too.

We didn’t’ just put the kids in a canoe, with a paddle, and said “see you later, we’ll pick you up in five days.” That’s not leadership, and that’s no way to learn leadership. We planned for the best, made ready for the worst, and had a great time. Along the way I’ve used at least two fire extinguishers, one throw-line, and many, many band-aids in earnest. But we never lost a kids or any of their parts.

Build the Right Team

The second thing we did besides training and planning was evaluating. We wanted to see which kids were ready, which were ready to take on even more, and which ones either weren’t taking it seriously or weren’t mentally or emotionally mature enough to be safe in the wilderness. I’ve learned and truly believe that adding or taking away just one person from any team changes the team in unpredictable, non-linear ways. As adults we’re just better at hiding it.

Which is why it amazes me when companies have a good idea, put so much effort into executing it, and then wonder why it failed. They didn’t try things out to see if their good idea would work before putting all their effort and energy behind it.

They didn’t build up skills and experience needed to give it the best chance of success. They didn’t explain and get buy-in from everybody involved about what it would mean to the company. They didn’t build and test the right team. They just put a bunch of people in canoes with paddles and life-jackets, pushed them into the river, and watched them aimlessly float away.

Even worse is when everybody in the company gets into the same boat and drowns. I hope you remembered to hand out the life-jackets.

Be Skeptical of Good Ideas

Try new things in small doses. Don’t stop having good ideas. Just be skeptical of good ideas – try them in small ways first. Build up your capabilities and give your team or company the best chance of success.

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Posted in continuous improvement, developing staff, execution, leadership, life-long learning, setting goals, teamwork

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