Category Archives: setting goals

We Have To Do Everything NOW, So We Can Fail Faster

Posted on April 14, 2013 | 1 Comment

Seventh and last in a series about communication and change management.

I’ve got a lot of renovation projects started around my house. We installed hardware floors eight years ago, and still haven’t put the baseboards in. I know it was eight years because the night we put the last nail in is the night my god-daughter was born. In fact, we baby-sat her older sister while Mom & Dad (who’d been helping us) went to the hospital to deliver their latest.

When everything is a priority, important things get missed

When everything is a priority, important things get missed

The outside of the house is half painted, the garage needs new gutters, and I have the bricks but not the sand to re-lay the back patio so that it slope away from the house instead of towards it. I started that job when I took the old wooden patio out. I don’t remember how many years ago that was.

There’s lots of things we could be doing, and yet nothing seems to get done. We’ve gone from doing a little here (let’s get an estimate on finishing the tiling on the back landing) to doing a little there (oops, the playhouse needs repair! Let’s turn it into a garden shed while we’re at it – the kids are all grown up and don’t need it anymore.)

It’s demoralizing really. Lots of activity, no sense of progress. Companies and teams can suffer from the same organizational schizophrenia. When everything is important, then nothing is important, and nobody is clear about what to do next.

Fix #7 Focus

There’s a saying about how the cobbler’s children go barefoot because he’s too busy making shoes for everybody else. So I took my own advice. I stepped back to figure out what I was trying to accomplish over all. Then I picked one thing to do to get me closer to that.

Sooner or later we’re going to need to sell the house we’re in. The kids will all be moved out soon. The house is too big for just the two of us. Maybe we’ll find a little place out in the country. Or the mountains. Or maybe next to a slow-moving river in a little valley out on the prairie.

Regardless, we’re going to need to get our investment plus maybe a little extra out of it. We were never going to get there if we kept doing the same thing we are now, which is trying to come up with the perfect plan and budget.

Pick One Thing

We picked one project and we’re focused on that. We’re installing the baseboards,  re-painting the wall, and moving around some furniture and pictures. Then we can get our offices set up, and get some extra closet space to make the kitchen more livable. But the baseboards are going in. We’ve spent the last two weekends working, and the progress is tangible. At the end of today the pronouncement was “Let’s keep going!

It is so easy to plan everything out to the Nth degree, and let slip the time we could actually be doing things. Time is the one thing we cannot run down to the hardware store and get more of.

Decisions are Expensive

Making decisions is expensive. Holding two competing ideas, alternatives, or options in your brain at the same time, and choosing between them, costs the brain a lot of energy. Our ability to make quality decisions degrades with each subsequent decision during the day. Save your decision making energy for when you really need it. Once you’ve made a decision, act on it!

“Do Not Do” List

Leader’s make decisions. Those decision include what not to do. And that has to be communicated as explicitly as what you are going to do.  What if you made a “Not” list? List all the things that you’re not going to do? If need be, you can even make a “Later” list, as in “This might be next, but I’m not going to spend time and energy thinking about it now.”

Start With the End in Mind

Have a vision for where your company / team / organization is going. Then pick something, usually the most urgent “do now” stuff, and get it done. Something that if you focused on it for a set time would give you the best chance of getting closer to your goal. Give yourself a deadline. Remove all other distractions. Then do it until it’s done. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Focus precedes success, which generates momentum, energy, enthusiasm, and that elusive “employee engagement”.

What’s on your “do not do” list?

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Posted in effeciency, effectiveness, execution, focus, leadership, setting goals, 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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Manage Your Performance Review

Posted on June 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

If you want to communicate well with your boss you have to plan for it. It’s not enough to do your job well, unfortunately. Especially if you’re the “shy” type and your boss isn’t. What does help is to make regular communication with your boss part of your routine – and I know us introverted types have a routine. It’s often part of our base behaviour.

I once had a friend at GD who would sit down once a year for an afternoon in a comfy chair. Glass of fine scotch in hand, pen & paper in the other he would spend a couple of hours by himself reviewing his accomplishments for the last year. He figured out what he wanted to do in the next year. He would consider his career, his volunteer and recreational activities, relationships, and how happy he was with his life.

The Power of Review

He gave himself his own performance review, planned what to do next, and then went and did it. I’m not sure where he is now, but I’m sure he’s still on the fast track, or doing what he loves, or both.

The Plan – Do – Review cycle is one of those simple ideas with a lot of applications. Fighter pilots call it OODA (Observe – Orient – Decide – Act). David Allen of GTD fame models it as Capture – Organize – Review – Do.

Here’s the simple idea:  Use “Plan – Do – Review” to show your boss you know what you’re doing. Make her job of reviewing your performance easier. Admit it, some bosses don’t prepare for performance appraisals very well anyway.

Sometimes the only way it will happen is if we can make it easier for them. Is this “right”? Probably not, but do you want to leave your hands in the hope that somebody else is going to do the right thing? Your promotions, raises, and career depend on your boss knowing (and remembering, and documenting) what you’ve done for the last year. Don’t depend on them to follow your best self-interest. It might not happen unless you make it happen.

Plan – Do – Review In Action

You can apply the Plan – Do – Review trope to your hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. work. Try it, and with an honest effort you’ll find yourself looking for new contexts and situations you’ll want to apply it to.

If you’ve spent the last year creating a “brag” folder, listing your accomplishments, reviewing your own performance, and mitigating your own weaknesses, wouldn’t that make you look good on your appraisal anyway?

Get Better and Get Credit

I’ve borrowed much of this concept from “Rock Your Review” by Tanya Stevenson, a great book and a quick read from somebody’s who’s done what she describes, and done it very well. Here’s my take:

  • At the beginning of every work week, review your calendar, to-do list, and work assignments. Decide what the most important things you need to get done that week are, and plan how you’re going to get them done.
  • Do It

Use Review To Capture Too

  • At the end of the week, take some time to assess yourself against your plan. Did you do what you set out to do? What did you get done? What are you going to do about what was left un-done? What obstacles did you run into that you need help with? What suggestions would you like to make, and what did you learn? What do you plan to get done next week?
  • Write your accomplishments into a short e-mail to yourself, or capture it in some other way that’s appropriate to your work. At the end of the year you should have a nice fat folder brimming with 52 weeks of your accomplishments.

The question then becomes: what to do with this trove of productivity? You’ve captured what you want to communicate, how does the real communication happen?

Next Week

Telling your boss how great you are without feeling like an ass.

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Posted in communications, continuous improvement, decision making, effectiveness, executing, execution, feedback, GTD, influencing, meetings, performance appraisal, performance review, productivity, self development, self improvement, self-awareness, setting goals, strategy, your career

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Why You Shouldn’t Get Started

Posted on December 8, 2010 | 4 Comments

Another perspective on the homily “Just get started.” Cal Newport argues that not starting drives success. Stop distracting yourself, and focus on what it is that’s important to you: business or personal, skill or endeavour.

Focus is key. It works for resumes, for hiring, and for driving business results.

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Grow Your Business By Killing Uncertainty

Posted on December 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

An interesting article from Chip and Dan Heath about how people hate ambiguity, the thought experiments that illustrate people’s aversion to it, and how to turn ambiguity into action.

So what? Take this example from Tesco’s:

Good leaders excel at converting something ambiguous into something behavioral. Take Terry Leahy, one of the leaders responsible for reversing the fortunes of Tesco, now the U.K.’s No. 1 grocer. One of Tesco’s ambiguous goals was to do a better job “listening to customers.” Leahy broke down that goal into a set of specific actions. For instance, cashiers were trained to call for help anytime more than one person was waiting in the checkout line. In addition, Tesco received 100,000 queries per week from customers. Leahy’s team made sure that all Tesco managers had access to customer concerns. (If you want to listen to customers, you had better make sure your managers can hear what they’re saying.) As a result, they learned counterintuitive lessons, such as that customers dislike stainless-steel refrigerators, which remind people of a hospital — not an ideal association for a grocer.

To convert strategy into action, decompose your goals into specific, doable actions. If you can see, hear, or feel the result of the action you’ve probably got it.

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Posted in behaviour, communications, effeciency, effectiveness, engagement, executing, execution, focus, GTD, setting goals

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The Difference Between Learning and Knowing

Posted on August 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

In Verne Harnish’s book “The Rockefeller Habits” he tell the story of a management consult visiting a steel mill. “With our services you’ll know how to manage better.” The CEO blew him off.

“What we need around here is not more knowing, but more doing! If you’ll pep us up to do the things we already know how to do, I’ll gladly pay you anything you ask.”

The consultant got the CEO to write down the five most important things he needed to get done in the next business day in order of importance. Then he told him:

“Put the list in your pocket, and start working on the most important number one. Look out that item every 15 minutes until it’s done. Then move on the next, and the next. Don’t be concerned if you only finished two or three, or even one, by quitting time. You’ll be working on the most important ones, and the others can wait . . . then send me a cheque for whatever you think it’s worth.”

The consultant was Ivy Lee, the CEO was Charles Schwab, and the mill was Bethlehem steel. Two weeks later they sent him a cheque for $25,000. Still a lot of money today, but a king’s ransom when this story took place.

When we are trying to learn something new, change a habit, modify our behaviour, or try to become more disciplined executing our commitments, all humans will hit a wall. Reading a book, going to a course or participating in a workshop are all great ways to keep “sharpening our saw” and learn new things, but if we don’t do anything with what we’ve learned, then we’ve wasted our time and money.

The wall we hit is the limited human capacity to change. We can only change so many habits at a time. Trying to force ourselves to lose weight, quit smoking, keep our e-mail caught up, and give a bit of positive feedback to every employee all at the same time, we are doomed to failure. We would be better off choosing the one thing that’s most important to us and just working on it until it becomes part of daily routine. Then choosing the next most important one, and working on it.

How long does it take to learn a new habit (or unlearn an old one)? The current research tells us about three months for the big things like quitting smoking, losing weight, or becoming competent at a complex skill like managing our time. That seems like a lot, and it is. If we try to rush things, however, we’ll just have to start over again later. Or give up and feel guilty about or inability to improve our lives.

Be patient. We can learning faster by doing, and we can go faster by slowing down.

So what’s the best way turn a good idea from a book, conference, course, webinar, blog, podcast, lunch-and-learn, or other learning into action? When I got sent on a training or conference  or read a book, I liked to find the one good idea. Then I would take that one good idea and summarize it on a sticky note. The sticky note went up on my monitor, and I would do something towards making that learning reality every day. After about two weeks the concept, process, or habit became ingrained in my daily routine, or it didn’t. With this focus on implementing a single good idea and reminding myself of it on a continuous basis I had a success rate of about 60%. Without it, I was able to succeed 0% of the time.

If it’s a really good book, course, etc., I set up a reminder in three months to go back and review my notes or re-read the book. Then I can pick out the next best thing to implement, and repeat. If I totally failed, then revisiting the source material would help me get re-inspired about making the change. Sometime I even decided that, no, that was a stupid idea after all, and I moved on.

It’s tough at first, but you’ll get better at it. It’s kind of like compound interest – the better you get at learning and executing, the better you get at executing and learning.

Bernie works as a leadership and business coach, consultant, and facilitator. He believes there are simple things outstanding leaders do well, and that not to do anything about bad leadership once you know about it is abuse. Check out what he does with RESULTS.com

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Posted in change, continous learning, continuous improvement, developing staff, execution, learning, life-long learning, self-awareness, setting goals, to do lists

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What’s Your Priority?

Posted on August 3, 2010 | 1 Comment

Priority is expressed in the amount of time you spent on it. The calendar never lies.

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Do You Know Where Your Priorities Are?

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

If I asked most people what they’re priorities in life or at work are I get blank look, followed by an awkward silence. Then I get the answer they think I expect from them: “Er, my family is the most important thing in my life” or “Delivering product x by time y for cost z.” at work, or “Starting my new business.”

If I really want to know what their priorities are, I’ll look at their calendar.

When our stated goals, priorities, and values are laid down beside how we actually spend our time it can be revealing. Somebody will tell me that spending time with their  family is the most important thing to them, yet they spend their weekends working. They’ll tell me starting their own business is what’s most important to them, but they’ll spend all day “doing” e-mail.  I’ve come across one person whose calendar and life actually lined up, and he was one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. He was a pretty happy guy and had a beautiful wife too. Funny that.

Managing how you spend your time is a lot like managing your own budget. Financial advisors will tell you if you want to get your spending under control you have to know where you’re spending your money to begin with. They’ll tell you to keep a record of your expenses, and write down every penny spent. Having done this financial exercise for myself once, it surprised me how much I spent on lunches and dinners out. I still do, but at least now I know where my money’s going.

You can do a similar exercise for yourself to see where you really spend your time. Then you’ll know where your day goes, if you were wondering why you never get those things done.

You can do this exercise either for yourself at work, or during the entire day from waking to sleep. I’d suggest you start with just your work day or business.

You’ll need a calendar and a timer. If you don’t own or use a day-timer or calendar, just keep track on a piece of paper or note-book. Most cell phones have a timer, which you can set to vibrate if it’s important that you don’t go “Ding!” in the middle of a client meeting.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Write down what your priorities and deliverables are. Not just for the week this exercise is taking place, but for the year. These are the same as your job description*, which are  the same as what you get evaluated against on your annual performance review**. If you’re in charge of sales for western Canada, your priority will probably be something like “Increase gross sales in by 15% over last year.” If you’re a project manager, your goal might be “Deliver project x by date y for cost z.” Here’s a link if you want to review how to set personal goals.
  2. Set your timer to go off at a regular interval. Use five minutes if you want to get a really good idea of what’s going on, although many find this a bit much. Ten minutes is good. Fifteen is the useful maximum.
  3. When the timer goes off, take note of what you’re doing. If you’re processing e-mail, write down “e-mail”. If you’re cruising the inter-tubes, write that down. Working on your monthly report, writing a proposal, meeting with your staff, working on that high-priority project, talking on the phone, whatever. Write it all down.
  4. At the end of the day, add up all the minutes you spent doing a certain thing. For example, if your timer is ten minutes, and you were doing e-mail six times that day, that’s ten minutes six times for a total of 60 minutes or one hour. If your interval was fifteen minutes, and you were working on your monthly report five times, thats fifteen times five for a total of 75 minutes.
  5. Repeat daily for an entire week.
  6. At the end of the week, add up all your time. Compare to your stated priorities.

Now you can tell why you’re not getting “anything” done, where “anything” is that thing that you keep meaning to do but keep putting off because you don’t have enough time and it’s causing all that stress you’re feeling in your gut. If you’re one of the lucky few who’s goals, priorities, and time are all lines up, congratulations and carry on.

*If your day-to-day work is not the same as your job description, then there’s a conversation you need to start with your boss. Either the job description or the work has to change, but that’s a different topic.

** If you’re an entrepreneur, small business man or woman, consultant, coach, or agent, you don’t get a freebie here. You might be able to become fabulously wealthy or happy by just tripping into it and following your passion. Most people are successful because the plan for it and they’re following their passion. What’s preventing you from setting your personal goals and reviewing them regularly?

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Following Your Passion

Posted on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments

As a Scout leader, having actually sat around a campfire and sung “Kumbaya” (not my choice, but it takes all kinds), I don’t have much patience for leadership mumbo-jumbo. I’ve grown up with leadership theory from age thirteen, and most of it is crap.

If I don’t know what behaviour to change, or what to do as a result of what somebody is trying to tell me, then it’s useless to me. It’s like telling somebody that you love them, but if you’re not willing to do anything about it, it’s just meaningless words. If I can get one good,  real, physical action or behaviour out of a workshop, book, article, or seminar, then I’ll count it as good and try to merge it into my daily practise.

I was writing another blog post about remembering names, and I realized that the example I wanted to use was also a perfect real-life example of how following your passion leads to success. Until now “follow your passion” was one of those leadership mumbo-jumbo phrases that meant nothing to me, because I didn’t know what it looked like.

I had the privilege of watching Bob Gray at the PMI SAC conference. As a kid he wanted to be magician. It was his passion and obsession. It drove his parents crazy, and he spent all his time and effort learning magic tricks. One of the tricks he learned was how to read minds. Turns out that the clairvoyance and mind-reading that stage magicians do is really a memory trick. If you can learn to memorize things, then you can seem to read peoples thoughts.

Bob has trained his memory to a phenomenal level. For example he can tell you the capital, population, and major exports of any country in the world. He’s also in the Guinness World Book of Records for being the only human who can speak backwards. That is, if you give him a word, he can speak it backwards to you. Not just by inverting the word and speaking each syllable from back to front, but in such a way that if you recorded him and then played the recording itself backwards, it would sound like the original word. I suspect this is also a memory trick. Since there are only so many distinct sounds in the English language, memorize each of them and their corresponding backward sound . . .

Neat trick, but so what?

When Bob ‘grew up’ and stopped being a stage magician he got a real job with a health club. Part of his job was sales. He was so good at it, that the head office asked him to teach other employees how he did it. He used this childhood magician training to remember his clients’ names. Not only their names, but also their spouses’ names, childrens’ names, hobbies, what they did for a living, and other details. Because he knew his clients names, they were more likely to sign-up and renew their health club membership. Somebody at that club cared about them. That turned into more sales and success for Bob, which in turn resulted in recognition and appreciation from the company.

Now Bob makes a very comfortable living travel to conferences and giving workshops on memory techniques. Again, he used his performance experience as a stage magician, springing from his childhood passion, to get his point across in an entertaining and memorable way. I watched him teach a room of six hundred people a better way to remember peoples names in less than an hour, and we had fun doing it.

So what?

Bob followed his passion. Even when he had to get a “real”  job which had nothing to do with being a magician, he used his natural talents and passion to help make him more successful in that job.

So what?

Bob is an apparently happy, well-adjusted, and financial secure person who enjoys his work. This is certainly one definition of success, and Bob achieved it by leveraging his talent and passion for magic, entertaining people, and sharing.

What’s your talent, and how are you using it in your life?

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So What

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

“Leadership training is like first-aid training. You never know when you’re going to need it, but when you do, it could save a life” – General Lewis MacKenzie

A frustration many of us experience when taking all this wonderful training and realizing a week, month, or year later that we don’t even remember the instructor’s name. Early on I figured I’d either have to start finding a way to carry out something, anything of what I’d leaned, or stop wasting my time and my employer’s money by not going to any more trainings.

I’ve been to a lot of training in my life. Starting at age thirteen in Air Cadets (I was a geek from an early age), on through working my way through university in the Communications Reserve, and then working my way up the corporate ladder. I’ve leaned team building, listening skills, and project management. I’ve been to lunch-&-learns, off-sites, and conferences.

I don’t remember or use most of what I was supposed to learn at most of these conferences, but I got something useful out of all of them. Even the bloody awful ones. I did this by applying the “so what?” question.

The “so what” questions will help you figure out one thing, anything, that you can take back to work with me and put into action the next day. Something you can write down in one sentence on a yellow stickee note and put up on your computer monitor and practise daily until it becomes a habit. If the class was active listening, the summary was “pay attention”. I might summarize the basics of project management as “who does what by when”.

What happens if you don’t apply what you’ve learnt? I’m talking in general now, not just in terms of management and leadership. It takes about 30 days of daily practise for a habit to become ingrained. Even as something as simple as flossing your teeth. We all know that it’s important for dental hygiene, but some of us have a hard time doing it every month, let alone every day. Yet once it does become a habit, something we do without thought or hesitancy, it become effortless.

It seems trivial and over-simplistic to put a one sentence reminder on a yellow stickee. But that sentence (or image or sound) is a trigger for everything else that came before it. Leaving it up on your computer monitor (or bathroom mirror, or dresser) reminds you the entire experience it came from.

Becoming better at what we do, if it’s welding or managing welders, is also a habit. It requires focused, disciplined effort, feedback, and practise. After a while it becomes automatic, like driving a car or flossing your teeth. Then you’re ready for the next change.

In our busy lives, the thought of adding one more thing to an already long list of things we feel bad about not doing is not appealing. Yet doing the same thing day after day, when it’s not working, is not going to make things better either. Making things a little better every day is like compound interest. Doing something a little better every day you do it adds up a lot over time.

If a big goal is so overwhelming that it doesn’t seem possible, break it down into smaller goals. Find that one little thing that you can do better, and practise it until it’s a habit. Then move on to the next one. One at a time, over time, is the fastest way to improve.

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