Driving profitable growth is at the top of every leader’s priority list. Yet, according to Bain and Company, only 10% succeed in achieving sustainable profitable growth.

While growth is the life-blood of every business, at some point, your company will experience the double edge sword of growth.

Either your company will grow faster than your internal capacity to handle it. Chaos, breakdowns and burnout are the result.

OR

Your company hits a wall and growth flattens. As a result, panic often sets in and leaders make rash decisions – either prolonging the stall or causing the company to spiral downward.

Unfortunately, there are no alarms to warn you of either impending challenge. Growth does not follow a linear path. It can be unpredictable and erratic. Growth walls often catch leaders by surprise.

Some companies don’t survive growth walls. They either go out of business or stay in “no man’s land.”

The focus of this article is to address the latter issue – ie., growth walls. While many leaders see growth walls as a revenues issue. The truth is that flat numbers are the byproduct — not the cause — of stalled growth.

The good news is that there are predictable pitfalls and signals that leaders need to heed to scale their companies. This article focuses on 7 of those growth pitfalls.

 7 Pitfalls That Stall Your Company Growth

1. Running After Growth in all the Wrong Places

Initially, growth is critical for survival. However, as your company scales, not all growth is healthy or good.

How, as a leader, do you distinguish between good and bad growth? Healthy vs. unhealthy growth? 

What % of your new business is coming from your core competencies? What % requires capabilities beyond your core?

Do all your new revenues provide healthy margins? If not, is it a market issue, a competitive issue, a behavioral issue or something else preventing you?

According to Bain, companies leave significant money on table because they are not fully leveraging their core.

Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) says it best …”At Apple we say ‘no’ to great ideas every day in order to do one or two things very well.”

How much of your new growth focuses on what you do best?

2. Success Blind Spots 

Companies that hit a wall have experienced past successful growth.  They are meeting or exceeding revenue goals. Their leaders and employees are proud and rightfully so.

However, success often creates cognitive or psychological leadership blind spots.  Below are 2 examples how.

• Blind Optimism

You make unconscious assumptions that company growth will continue on the same trajectory if you keep on the path you have been. However, markets change and so must your path to future growth.

• Over-Confidence

Past success can exaggerate your ability to control events. And you over-estimate your company’s capabilities.

When over-confident, leaders tend to take on risky opportunities, not ask for help and believe they can handle it all.

Whose unbiased perspective can you access to right-size your decisions and perceptions?

3. Crashing into the Leadership Glass Ceiling

In my extensive experience with growth companies, the number one reason why companies hit the wall is because their leadership team has hit a wall.

Organically grown leaders don’t know what they need to know to get to the next level. As a result, they keep on doing what they have always done – only working harder — expecting a different result. Yes … that’s called insanity :))!

As a company scales, leadership roles also scale and change dramatically at each growth level. To avoid the leadership ceiling, CEOs must ask themselves —

Are you willing to make a major investment in growing your leadership team to the next level?

Does it serve the greater good of your company to be loyal to long time leaders whose roles have outgrown their capabilities and capacities? 

Is it time to hire outside seasoned passionate leaders who have been there and can help you grow?

Both options – ie., cultivating your leaders from within or hiring from the outside – have their upsides and downsides.

If your leadership team has hit a ceiling, get outside help in evaluating the options. Doing nothing will keep your company stuck at the wall.

4. External Oblivion

As a company scales, significant focus is spent on building internal infrastructure. As a result, leaders lose sight of changes in their external environment.

A once fringe competitor may now emerge as a looming threat to your company. Your customers’ needs may have changed without you realizing it.   New disruptive technologies may displace your products/services as alternative solutions to your markets.

Successful growth leaders who break through the wall anticipate the unexpected and turn the unexpected into the profitable.

Are you overly focused on internal superiority that you are missing the cues of external changes?

How are you proactively anticipating and responding to external changes?

5. Hiring for current skills, not long term capabilities

As a company grows, the tendency is to hire employees with current needed skills by your organization.   When small, hiring for the short term is necessary as your resource needs are not always clear.

Once a company hits the $10 – $20 million milestone, hiring people with capabilities to grow your company in next 2 – 3 years is crucial.

What capabilities do you need to hire today to achieve your desired growth for next 3 years?

6. Culture Meltdown

When a company has less than 20 employees, rarely is culture a dominant issue. As the company scales in size, structure and complexity, culture becomes the heart and soul of its growth success.

What causes a culture meltdown as a company scales?

It’s not one thing. It’s multitude of factors that amplify with scale, such as …

• Not Scaling Culture

Some leaders will argue that company culture cannot scale. I both agree and disagree :)).

Your company culture cannot scale if you perceive culture as fixed, unchangeable and static. However, the culture your company needs at $20 million will be different than the culture you need at $50 – $100 million

As you add new people to your organization, as well as your markets evolve, so must your culture evolve.

How are you adapting your culture to the changing needs of your organization and those of your customers?

• Core Values Without Success Measures

While your company’s culture may seem intangible and elusive at times, you can make the intangible tangible and measurable.

The key is to define an abstract value into an operational, measurable success outcome.

I have one client with a core value of excellent customer service. Their measure of success is a customer excellence rating of 25:1. For every 25 customers that rate their service as excellent, only 1 or less customers will rate it as non-excellent.

How do you measure success for each value?

• Healthy Values Gone Bad

Every positive value also has a dark, unhealthy side. However, most leaders are not aware when their values have crossed that line.

A value of excellence, in the extreme, can become perfectionism. Acceptance, at its extreme, can become (unhealthy) tolerance. Customer service, to the extreme, can cost you significant profits.

It’s good to set the bar high. At the other end, know when your values become your Achilles heel, especially as you scale.

7. Mediocrity Sets In

The final danger as companies scale is backsliding into complacency or mediocrity.

Success is a lousy teacher. Complacency often sets in as your company loses its drive and hunger. Nothing will kill growth faster than losing your sense of urgency.

High growth companies should celebrate success. If your company has hit a wall, however, it’s time to take stock.

Has your success morphed into over-comfort and contentment? 

If it has, it’s time to raise your bar, set new sights and refuel your organization’s fire.   Commit to scaling not only in size. Commit also to scaling big WHY and purpose.

Getting Back on the Growth Track: Initial Steps

• Educate yourself about your company’s growth life cycle and the common pitfalls at different growth stages.

• Get your leaders out of day to day operations.

By the time you hit $15 – $20 million in revenues, your leaders should spend about 80% time leading – building teams, delegating, creating strong culture, focusing on long term goals/projects, etc. – and only 20% on daily operations.

To prepare for the transition, ask yourself:

Do your leaders know how to think strategically?

Are their brains wired for big picture, future-orientation, goals/results thinking?

Do they have strong delegation skills to get out of the weeds?

Remember … not all leaders will be able to make the leap to the next level.

• Invest in infrastructure and systems that provide built-in capacity for growth.

• Get outside perspectives

An advisory board or board of directors … visits to “friendly” competitors to see how they do things … hiring a consultant with experience in growth companies. These are all ways to get beyond your blind spots and tap into expertise that may be missing in your organization.

• Invest in scaling your company culture

Continuously communicate your company’s vision and purpose. Entrench your values and behavior norms at all levels of organization. Change your culture as needed.

• Download our complimentary handout — Developing Leaders of Growth: 5 Critical Factors for Driving Double/Triple Digit Growth

The post 7 Leadership Pitfalls That Sabotage Company Growth appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Have you ever experienced in a meeting where a seasoned leader listened intently and then, with exquisite timing, asked one question that shifted the direction, focus and thinking of the entire team?

That is the magic and power of questions!

To move the needle in your organization in 2016, the first place to start is by asking thought-provoking questions.   The 7 questions below are by no means exhaustive. They serve as a starting point to stimulate your own questions.

These (or comparable) questions can make the difference between a successful 2016 and a disappointing one.

Let’s dig in!

7 Leadership Questions That Will Move The Needle in 2016

QUESTION 1: What is your BHAG?

BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a concept introduced by Jim Collins in his book, “Built to Last.” It is one of the characteristics that distinguishes great companies from mediocre ones.

The best definition that I seen is that a BHAG is a statement of strategic intent. A bigger, bolder, more powerful outcome than goals with a target timeframe of 10 – 30 years from now. It’s your ambitious Mount Everest that you want to climb.

Example …

Starbuck’s BHAG is to overtake Coke as the world’s leading brand.

While asking yourself the question … What is our BHAG? … may sound simple, it’s not always easy to answer.

To learn how to develop and test your BHAG, refer to Collin’s book, Built to Last.

QUESTION 2: For what purpose ….?

When I work with leaders, one of the first things I want to know is the underlying motivation for a particular goal, decision, behavior or even emotion.

This question can help uncover those motivations in 3 powerful ways:

• It forces you to chunk up, get out of the weeds and see your situation with a wider lens from a higher elevation.
• It can uncover your unconscious beliefs about cause and effect relationships which may or may not be true.
• It can uncover whether the underlying reasons for your goals/decisions are for healthy or unhealthy reasons.

With each 2016 goal, ask yourself … For what purpose do you want to achieve that goal?  With each response, ask … for what purpose? … again.   It will help shed light on the following.

• Are you choosing right goals for right reasons?
• If they are the right goals, are they for healthy or unhealthy reasons?
• Are there better goals for better reasons?

Oftentimes when companies decide on new goals, strategies or initiatives, they ASSUME they are the right ones. Challenge that with this question.

QUESTION 3: Is your ladder against the right wall?

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”      Stephen Covey

This is one of my favorite questions to ask at least once a year to make sure my goals, decisions and actions are always aligned with my greater purpose.

How do you know if your leadership ladder is against the right or wrong wall?

pixaby

Here’s some questions to ask:

• Do you wake up in the morning excited about your 2016 goals?

• Are your leadership and organizational goals primarily focused on moving up the ladder or do they also serve a greater good?

• What comes first when making leadership decisions – profits or purpose?

• What difference do you want to make in your role? Are you realizing that difference?

If you or your company are experiencing success without a sense of significance, it’s time to put your ladder against a different wall.

QUESTION 4: What’s at stake?

Defining your leadership or company goals is the easy part. Sustainable focus and drive to achieve them – no matter the challenges – is the hard part.

Goal success (or failure) depends predominantly on one thing:

Motivation

By continually asking the question — what’s at stake? – you will..

• Refuel your motivation when the going gets tough
• Create urgency for you and your employees
• Uncover what potentially can be at risk if you do achieve your goals

Below are specific variations of this powerful question to get you started.

What’s at stake …

• … to your company if you don’t achieve your goal this year?

• … to other stakeholders if you don’t achieve your goal?
  • Customers?
  • Employees?
  • Investors?
  • Yourself?
  • The world at large 

• … to your company culture/values if you do achieve your goal?
  • Will your culture possibly be compromised?
  • Will your goals compromise other company priorities?

QUESTION 5: Are you solving the right problem?

A problem well defined is half solved.        Charles Kettering

As a leader, you probably spend considerable time solving problems. Perhaps to the point where you get nothing else done.

Because leaders are action-oriented, the tendency is to jump right to a solution, ASSUMING you are solving the right problem. Yet doing so could cost your company significant resources, time and money. Plus you most likely have not solved the real problem.

I learned this invaluable lesson when I was an executive at US Sprint in the early 1980’s. The company was growing 200% for 5 consecutive years. I got a monthly report of all the key problem areas across the company.

One of the key metrics — # of customer complaints – was sharply increasing. The customer service department wanted to hire more customer service reps.

Yet after digging deeper and asking the question – what’s the real problem, it became clear that engineering’s challenge to install enough transmission capacity to meet the dramatic growth in demand was the real problem.

Next time a problem arises within your organization, take 5 minutes and ask …

Am I solving the right problem?

QUESTION 6: Is your timing correct?

Timing is EVERYTHING in business.

Timing can be the difference between success and failure. It can make or break a product launch, change initiative, new technology or even growing your company.

Yet, for even the best leaders, timing is often an afterthought.   I see it happen often.

Be honest with yourself. For this year’s projects, goals, decisions or initiatives, have you asked yourself … Is this the right timing?

• What will happen if you waited 6 months or a year?
• What opportunity will you miss if you don’t implement now?
• Might you be too early or too late?

If you want to learn more about how to discern right business timing, I recommend William Duggan’s book Strategic Intuition and Sun Tzu’s book, The Are of War. Both should be in every executive’s bookcase!

QUESTION 7: What are your blind spots? What are you missing?

Every one of us has blind spots. Our brains filter out over 99% of outside information because of its limited processing capacity. Such brain limitations create distortions in your thinking and perceptions.

At a leadership and company level, blind spots are costly and sometimes catastrophic. Even the best leaders are challenged by unconscious persistent blind spots.

Below are common blind spots from my work with leaders and organizations. Check how many of these blind spots are or could be true for you. Remember: You may have a blind spot about your blind spots :)).

Leadership (self) blind spots: beliefs and behaviors

• Not seeing your impact on others
• Unaware of your negative beliefs and how they are driving your decisions and behaviors
• Not learning from your past failures and recreating those mistakes over and over
• Assuming that your communications to another is interpreted as you intended

Team & organizational blind spots

• Believing your “once healthy” company culture is still healthy when in fact it is eroding as you scale
• Tolerating (and rationalizing away) mediocre or poor performance
• Avoiding conflicts and tough conversations
• Unconscious, unchallenged (and often erroneous) assumptions driving your goals and strategic plan
• Being overly optimistic

Environmental/external blind spots

• Missing emerging market trends and opportunities
• Assuming you know why your customers buy from you when they actually buy for different reasons
• Perceiving smaller competitors as a non-threat
• Not adjusting your company’s strategies to changing conditions in your industry or environment

BONUS QUESTION: What is YOUR overarching question for the new year?

Now it’s your turn.

What one question – if you asked daily — will help YOU move the needle in a key area within yourself and/or your organization?

For example, if you want to increase your personal productivity, perhaps the question is …

What do I need to stop doing?

Or if you want to increase company revenues, you may ask …

What values drive our customers’ buying decisions?

How can we craft our products/services to those values, thus creating repeat customers?

Questions are the ultimate leadership tool for moving the needle, regardless of the goal or challenge. Now it’s your turn to develop your own list of powerful questions.

Drop me an email if you have questions about how to develop powerful questions :)).

For other articles relating to the power of questions :

• The One Question Every Leader Needs to Ask
• 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results

The post 7 Leadership Questions That Will Move Your Needle in 2016 appeared first on The Empowered Business.

• You could easily predict the performance of your leaders, your teams and your organization?
• You could gain access to the underlying motivators that drive a leader or employee to do their best work?
• You could eliminate costly hiring mistakes and determine in advance to what extent a candidate will perform well in a role?

Such a solution exists and can unleash the potential and performance within your organization.

It’s called motivational profiling.  Your underlying (and often unconscious) attitudes and motivations determine what you pay attention to and focus on in your leadership role.

These deep motivation and attitudinal patterns  (MAPs) ultimately drive – yours and others’ –

• Behaviors
• Decision making style
• Requirements for change and variety
• Dominant motivation driver
• Levels of strategic and visionary thinking
• Relationship to norms/rules
• Orientation toward innovation and creativity
• And much more

Drawing on recent evolutions in cognitive science research, motivational profiling is a state-of-the-art assessment tool that provides a window into yours and your employees’ intrinsic motivations and attitudes at work.

These intrinsic motivations are the invisible forces that pull you and your organization in a certain direction.   By uncovering these patterns, you can unlock the motivational code for improving engagement, productivity and performance in your workplace.

Before delving into 7 key leadership motivation patterns, let’s first look at 3 often-missed truths about performance.

3 truths every leader needs to know about performance

1.  Most companies mistakenly believe that competencies are the #1 driver of performance.  

Not true!  Just because you have a certain capability doesn’t mean that you are motivated to use it.  We all know people who are highly educated and/or talented, yet just get by in their work role.  As Zig Ziglar said,

“Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.”

Competency accounts for, at best, 20% of performance.  Yet companies continue to invest in skills development only to be disappointed by little or no difference in performance.

The truth is your motivation patterns account for as much as 60% of performance.  Motivation patterns reflect whether you want to do something, NOT whether you can do it.

2.  Different leadership roles require different motivation patterns for high performance in that role.

While there are certain patterns important to all leaders – such as, a high people interest, specific leadership roles may require different motivational patterns to be successful.

For example,

A successful CFO is likely to have such MAPs (Motivation and Attitudinal patterns) as — strong motivation toward procedures over options; a preference for solving problems over focus on goals; and a high past time orientation that drives focus on traditions, past experience and benchmarks.

A successful CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is likely to have such MAPs as – strong motivation toward options (ie., how to do something faster, better or cheaper) over procedures; high motivation toward goals, rather than avoiding problems; and high future time orientation with a focus on long term strategies, future customer needs and environmental changes.

Motivational profiling can help you put the best individuals into a specific leadership roles with the best chances of success.  Not only will motivational profiling tell you if an individual is naturally wired to be a successful leader.  It will also tell you for a given leadership role, if he/she is likely to excel.

3.  All behavior is motivated. If you want to change a leader’s behavior, change the motive underlying the behavior.

Common company practices tend to focus on behavioral changes to increase performance.  However, your behavior is a symptom or byproduct of your underlying motives.

Changing just behavior is at best temporary.  For permanent behavioral change, you must change the underlying motivation.

Identify the motive and you will understand the behavior.  Satisfy the motive and you will manage the behavior.

7 motivational patterns of high performance leadership

Since 2002, Carl Harshman — Founder, Institute for Work Attitude and Motivation –  has studied hundreds of business leaders’ MAPs.  He found the following 7 strong (high score) motivation patterns as key drivers of leadership effectiveness and performance.

Goal Orientation

Goal orientation is one of 2 patterns that reflect your direction motivation.  With a high goal orientation score, you are motivated to move toward goals, pleasure or something positive.

Its companion MAP — Problem Solving – reflects to what extent you are motivated to move away from pain, problems or risk.

High performing leaders tend to score high on goal orientation.  They want to focus on and pursue goals more than avoiding problems.

Breadth

The Breadth pattern reflects to what extent a leader focuses on the “big picture.”  It also reflects a leader’s cognitive style to think in broad, large chunks of information.  Like seeing a landscape from 10,000 feet above.

Its companion pattern is Depth – ie.,, thinking in small chunks of information and focusing on details.  Effective managers are typically more oriented toward details, as are functions like quality control and accounting.

Future Orientation

There are 3 Time Orientation patterns – Past, Present and Future.  This set of patterns influences your focus, decision making and thinking style.

High performance leaders tend to think from the future.  They want to pay more attention to a long term, rather than short term, view.  Effective managers, on the other hand, are more Present time oriented to deal with daily activities.

Power

In the context of MAPs assessment, the Power pattern reflects to what extent a leader wants to be in charge.  It is one of three core motivational drivers identified by McClelland.  The other two motivation drivers are Affiliation and Achievement.

High performing leaders score in the healthy range of Power – neither overly strong nor weak.  Too high and the leader becomes domineering.  Too weak and the leader shrinks from being in charge and their own personal power.

People and Group

There are two individual, yet highly related, patterns that high performing leaders tend to score high (or at least normal range) on each.

The People pattern is an interest filter.  A high score means the leader wants to deal with people as part of their role.  Other interest filters are oriented around things, such as systems, tools, money, activity, etc.

The Group pattern is an indication to what extent a leader wants to have contact with people as part of their role.

Evolution

This is one of three patterns that relates to a leader’s relationship with change.  A high Evolution score is typical of high performing leaders and indicates a motivation for planned, incremental change.  The Evolution pattern is synonymous with “continuous improvement.”

The other 2 change patterns are Sameness and Differences.  For different industries, these 2 patterns may play a more important role for leaders.

Shared Responsibility

This pattern and its companion pattern (Sole Responsibility) indicate a leader’s motivation as it relates to responsibility.

High performing leaders tend to have a high Shared Responsibility score.  It indicates that they are motivated to be great team players and delegators.  They want to collaborate and share responsibility.

By no means, are these the only motivation patterns that can impact your leadership performance.  They serve, however, as a starting point to help you identify to what extent you focus on (or motivated by) these 7 areas.

Real stories … real breakthroughs

When I assess leaders’ motivational patterns, I am looking at both 48 distinct motivational patterns, as well as combination of patterns, as clues about what is hindering or can enhance a leader’s performance.

I now have the luxury of accessing these patterns through an online tool.  It has opened the door to deep insights for many leaders, teams and organizations.

Not only has performance improved, leaders and teams rise to the top of their game, more engaged and motivated.  Below are 2 examples.

1.    Within 6 months, low performers became high performers.  Increased revenues – 33%.

Through motivation profiling and Models of Excellence tools, the motivation patterns of high performers within a call center were identified.  Under-performers were trained to replicate motivation patterns of high performers.  Results: 33% increase in revenues in 6 months;  a motivation profile of high performers also served as a recruiting tool for hiring top talent.

2.    Improved leadership teamwork, cohesiveness and performance.

A common leadership issue is being in sync and working as a team.  While some skills come into play for stronger teamwork, the bigger, often missed, issue is the differences in motivation patterns across the leadership team.

The key for this company was to train each leader in their own motivation patterns, as well as those of the other leaders.  When leaders were able to understand each other on a deep motivation level and how their differences were sources of team brilliance (rather than team breakdowns), team communication improved and performance increased.

Check out these free resources for more information:

• iWAM:  Mapping the New Landscape of Human Performance  (PPT download)
• Talent Management:  A Focus on Excellence (free 93 page ebook)

Email me with any questions.

The post Deep Motivations, Not Competencies, Drive Leadership Performance. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I learned growing up, however, that not lying is NOT the same thing as admitting and telling the truth.  The former prevents us from making false statements; the latter has the generative power to change individuals and organizations.

In my decades of working with business leaders, I have found that there is one trait — above all others – that transforms mediocre leaders to extraordinary ones.   That one trait is …

Rigorous truth-telling

Real leaders have backbone.  They admit the uncomfortable truth that others are not willing to even see.  They have a passion to want the truth and confront reality head-on.

It’s not just the responsibility of a leader to see and tell the truth.  It is part of their soul, their moral fiber.  Any compromise destroys trust, respect and credibility with themselves and from others.

The most important person to tell the truth is to Yourself.

We often think about the importance for leaders to tell the truth to others within their organizations.  Yet the most important, yet hardest, aspect of leadership truth telling is being rigorously honest with yourself.

Why?

It takes guts, personal awareness and humility to tell the truth about yourself to yourself.

When I work with leaders, my first goal is to help them get rigorously honest with themselves.  I have found that when leaders are willing to look at how they they avoid or deny the truth, that mirror of truth will liberate them to become the authentic, powerful leader they are meant to be.

Not sure how to uncover your truth as a leader?   Take inventory of the following 7 truths to get real about the present and to fuel your leadership changes in the future.

7 Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders

Truth 1:  Either you are fighting for reasons or fighting for results. 

As a leader, there is no middle ground in what you stand for. You can stand for reasons or you can stand for results.  You CAN”T stand for both.

Real leaders fight for the results they want.  They are bold, committed and persistent about their desired outcomes.

Mediocre leaders fight for reasons why they don’t achieve them. When they say “yes” to reasons, they are essentially saying “no” to results.

Which are you fighting for right now?

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are you tolerating under-performance?
• When you lead a meeting, to what extent do team members give reasons why they did not keep their commitments or reach their goals?
• Have you created an organizational culture of strong accountability?

Truth 2:  Either you are creating your future or reacting to it. 

Real leaders are masters at creating their future because they are internally driven and decisive about what they want.   They take responsibility for all their outcomes and see themselves as the doers of the world.

Mediocre leaders are externally driven and at the effects of their environment.  They believe that they have little control over their outcomes and that things happen to them.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Does your organization find itself in perpetual crises?
• When a negative event happens – like loss of a major customer, do you find yourself in panic or do you seek new options to achieve your goals?
• Does your organization have a clear vision in which every employee knows how he/she contributes?

Truth 3:  Either you are playing to win or playing not to lose.

Underlying this truth, there is a pivotal assumption that realleaders get and mediocre leaders don’t.

What is that pivotal assumption?

It is that you have a clear understanding of what winning is.  Mediocre leaders never even ask themselves questions like … where do we want to win?  Where can we win?  What does winning look like?  

Once you have a clear concept of winning, how do you know if you are playing to win vs. playing not to lose?

The answer is: your identity.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you see yourself as a winner even when you fail?
• Does the thought of risking to win trigger fear in you?
• Do you have a winning strategy to reach your company’s goals?

Truth 4:  Either you are growing or you are stagnating.

For your company to grow, you must grow as a leader.  When you stagnate, so will your company.  It’s that simple.

Real leaders do the things that others think they cannot do.   They continuously “push the envelope” in what is possible.

Mediocre leaders avoid discomfort.  I mean really avoid it.  Discomfort for them triggers fear and threatens their sense of safety and survival.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you push yourself out of your comfort zone daily?
• Are you comfortable with discomfort?
• Do you thrive on challenges or shrink from them?

Truth 5:  Either you embrace conflict or you avoid it.

Conflict has become a dirty word in the business world.

Mediocre leaders avoid conflict at all costs.  It’s viewed as painful, scary and a win/lose situation at best.  As a result, their organizations become homogenous and filled with “yes” people.

As Jim Collins, author, Good to Great, concluded from his extensive research, the #1 difference between good and great companies is that the leaders of great companies fostered healthy conflict to set direction and create innovative solutions for the future.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do your employees ever disagree with your decisions or viewpoints?
• Is there pseudo-harmony within your team?
• Do you tend to placate others whose viewpoints are different than yours?

Truth 6:  Either your actions are moving you “toward” or “away from” your goals. 

All behavior is self-motivated.  Your actions are motivated either to move toward something positive or away from something negative/painful.

Real leaders are “toward” motivated.  There is always the next horizon to reach.  Mediocre leaders tend to be “away from” motivated, driven by negative beliefs or secondary gains.  Their primary focus is on what they don’t want, rather than on what they want.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are your actions mainly focused on reaching your goals or eliminating problems?
• Are any of your actions (such as, checking emails, going to certain meetings, etc.) really a distraction and taking you off-course?
• Are you focused more on what you want or what you don’t want?

Truth 7:  Either you are truly leading or merely following.

Real leaders understand that leadership is a way of thinking and a way of engaging with others.  They take bold steps into the future and hold themselves and others to high standards.    They see themselves as a leader of leaders and their job is to develop other leaders.

Mediocre leaders seek recognition from their team over respect, decide through consensus and deflect responsibility for results and problems to others.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you tend to focus on solutions or problems?
• To what extent are your employees “rowing the boat in the same direction?”
• Is most of your day spent on completing tasks or growing your people?
  

The Greatest Truth of All

The greatest truth of all … is that,

Truth is power.

I know that admitting the truth about yourself can sting in the moment.  And avoiding the truth may seem like the easier route.

In reality, hiding from the truth is like having a 10,000 lb. weight on your shoulders that drags you down.  It holds you and your organization back.  It keeps you in stress and struggle.

Are you ready to dump the baggage?

Start by using the above 7 truths to get honest with yourself:

Are you …

• fighting for results?
• focused on creating the future?
• playing to win?
• growing and getting out of your comfort zone?
• leveraging conflict to create innovative solutions?
• taking actions that move you “toward” our goals?
• truly leading?

Only when you admit reality can you seize your true leadership power and take charge of yours/your organization’s fate.

Which of these leadership truths is holding you back the most?  What support do you need to have a breakthrough?

The post Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I know this statement may sound harsh at first.  I ask you to hold your judgment until after you’ve finished the article to understand why.

For example, when a company is stuck or has plateaued, I often hear reasons like …

• Our company did not grow because of the economy.
• We need more knowledge or technology to beat our competition.
• We have to seize every revenue opportunity as it comes our way or we won’t survive.
• The marketplace is an unfriendly place.

Do any of these sound familiar in your company?

The GRAND illusion is … those outside factors are NEVER the reason.   As soon as you justify outside factors for lack of growth, profitability and/or performance, you are lying to yourself.  You are buying into your own story.

That is not to dismiss the importance of knowledge, systems, the timing of opportunities and other factors that leaders believe with all their hearts are the reasons for their success or failure.

The Real Problem Is Your Leadership “Map.”

I don’t mean the kind of map you stick in the glove box of your car or get from your GPS system.  I am talking about a different kind of map.

In the 1930’s, Alford Korzybski, in his book “Science and Sanity,” made a profound statement about human nature.  A statement still widely used in many contexts, including management.  That is …

The map is not the territory.

This statement says it all … how and why your mind plays “dirty” tricks on you.  That is, your perception of reality is never reality itself.  Rather it is your version or internal representation of reality (or mental map).

100% of your experience of the world is being generated by your mind, not outside events.

Due to your brain’s limited processing capabilities, your mental maps filter out over 99% of external information coming from your five senses.  Your mind attempts to fill in the massive information gap with its own “spin,” story or interpretation about what it perceives.

Not only is your conscious awareness limited.  You also filter every experience through your own learned behaviors, experiences, beliefs, values, interests and states.  As a result, this filtering process distorts, deletes and generalizes your sense of reality.

How Can Your Mental Maps Cause BIG Trouble to Your Organization?

The distortion in thinking and perceptions –based on mental maps – creates over 80% of the problems at a leadership and organizational level.  While your leadership mental maps can actually create many problems in your organization, let’s look at 2 common examples.

Mind Trick #1:  You rationalize away outside circumstances (or your perceptions of those circumstances) as the reason for your organizational failures or lack of results.

Projecting outside circumstances (eg., the economy) as the cause for companies’ lack of results is so rampant in today’s business world.  Yet this one mistake alone is costing companies billions in lost revenues, profits and new opportunities … and leaders don’t even realize it!

The truth is … you either fight for reasons OR you fight for results.  Your brain is not capable of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time.

You can’t fight for growth and fight for the reasons for lack of growth at the same time.  When you focus on the latter, you are reinforcing in your brain why you can’t have growth.

Doing so has a domino effect.  On your attitudes, you become a victim.  On your beliefs, you convince yourself again that “outside circumstances drive your fate.”  On your behaviors, you focus your actions on survival, and ultimately, all this drives results or more lack of growth

Do you see how your perceptions of reality (your mental maps) determine your outcomes?

How is it that at times you become prisoner to your own reasons (and don’t realize it)?  What are the telltale signs?

Level of believability:  Your reasons seem plausible. 

So much so, you perceive your reasons or beliefs as true … as facts.  Those reasons then drive your focus and preclude you from seeing other possibilities.

Because blaming the economy for company failures or lack of results is a common rationalization, let’s use that as an example. 

You speak that rationalization, think it, believe it, feel it, and act consistently with it and then have evidence to back it up that it’s true. You are so identified with your mental map or mind that to you it is not your mind at all, it is the unvarnished truth.  In this case, you believe that the economy is the reason.

Consensus:  Your team, industry peers, the media, etc. all validate your reason. 

They buy into the same reason.  “Of course, the economy is to blame.”   Consensus grows and resignation becomes contagious within your company and industry.  This meme  …. aka thought virus … becomes the norm and goes viral.  Your thinking is infected and you can’t see causes within your control or other possibilities for a different outcome.

That one thought (or mental map) is the real cause for lack of results, not the economy.

That’s not to negate that economic downturns exist and can impact how a company operates and grows.   Your response to a down economy is completely within your control however.

It’s within your control to look for market segments or industries still in a growth mode.  It’s within your control to identify new strategies for seizing opportunities. It’s within your control to focus on your most profitable offerings during downturns.

You get to choose.  Are you going to fight for reasons or fight for results?

Mind Trick  #2:  You believe/assume that your plans and strategies, as long as followed,  (“the map”) will take your company to its desired destination (“the territory”).

Developing strategies and plans is a healthy practice for leaders to do.

However …. and this is a BIG “however” … it is often assumed that if you follow your strategies and plans (“the map”), you will successfully navigate the path (“the territory”) to get to your company’s destination.

There’s something to be said about staying the course and sticking to your strategies.  Yet your strategies often create blind spots that underestimate the impact of external changes on your business.

The issue is not about the content of your strategies and plans.  The issue is the unconscious belief or assumption that you have the right roadmap.  That one belief will cause you to filter critical external information and cues that may be signaling you have the wrong roadmap or you need to change it.

Example: A common blind spot is to overestimate your company’s strengths and capabilities.  If you perceive customer service as a strength, you are apt to assume that “strength” as the basis of your strategy and your differentiator.  That blind spot, however, may cause you to miss other emerging competitors who are better able to service your customers and are threatening your business.

• Where are you missing critical external cues that your strategies (maps) need to be changed?  
• Where are you over-estimating your business capabilities and strengths?  
• To what extent are you attached to your own strategies as being correct that you cannot perceive better ways of reaching your destination?

The above are 2 manifestations of the grand leadership illusion that can sink organizations and performance.  Your mental maps are driving your outcomes, not external circumstances.  The more you understand as a leader how your mind works, the less trapped you will be by your own thoughts and mental paradigms.

Changing Your Leadership “Maps” Can Change Your Results & Performance … At Lightning Speed.

Let’s take a moment to summarize what you need to remember from this article.

Key Points Summary

• The map is not the territory.
• Your mental maps of reality are NOT 100% accurate.  Your mental maps distort reality through your brain processing and filtering systems.
• We react to our own mental maps, not reality. Our maps are affected by our own interpretation about what is happening.  Your negative interpretation of the same event can be another person’s optimism.
• Your territory is constantly changing, so don’t overlay today’s experiences with what happened yesterday. After all, the surroundings were different.  Just because sales slowed or profit margins declined last month does not mean your growth or profitability can’t be stellar this month.
• No two maps are the same. Everyone creates their own maps, each is unique and no two are the same. (Your map is not the same as other leaders on your team.  In fact your maps may be opposite of each other.)

The good news is … your mental maps can be changed.  New mental maps can catalyze your company to its next level of success, just as much as the old ones can keep you stuck in molasses.

The first step to change is to question everything.  Challenge every thought, assumption, belief (disguised as fact) and point of view with which you currently identify.  Especially the ones you believe are right :)).

In future articles, I will be addressing the concept of constrictive minds and their impact on your leadership and organizational performance.  To be notified of those and other articles, sign up for our monthly newsletter and free report at Wired to Win BIG.

The post The One GRAND Leadership Illusion That Sinks Organizations appeared first on The Empowered Business.

At the end of every year, I take a personal private retreat to clear my mind, take inventory of the past year and create a new vision for the new year.  Knowing the power of questions, at the start of each retreat, I ask myself …

What are the 10 most important questions to ask myself in this retreat to take my business (and life) to a more meaningful, impactful and prospering level in the new year?

For 3-4 days, I spend time by the ocean simply reflecting, letting go of any goals, plans or expectations.  I simply allow myself to just be.   To be a blank canvass upon which new insights, penetrating questions and inner promptings begin to emerge.

Every year I walk away with powerful questions that, simply by asking them, transform my thinking, direction and excitement for the future.

I share that with you for one reason only.  To embrace and utilize the power of questions within yourself and your organization on a daily basis.

“The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way.”   African Proverb

Why Focus on Questions, NOT Answers? 

Our greatest shifts and changes in business and in life come NOT from answers, rather from powerful provocative questions.  Questions have the power to:

• Transform
• Open up conversations
• Solve problems creatively
• Shake up your thinking
• Build critical thinking
• Shift your focus
• Inspire new direction
• Shatter your assumptions
• Unleash potential
• Keep you aligned with your sense of identity, purpose and vision

… and much more.

In keeping with this month’s theme of building your strategic thinking muscle, below are 12 provocative strategic questions to create a new future for you and your company.

12 Provocative Strategic Thinking Questions You Need to Be Asking

Vision, Goals and Strategies

• As you envision where you want your company to be in 10 years, what BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) do you see your company achieving?
• In order to achieve your BHAGs, what innovative ideas and strategies did you have to come up with?
• What “enemies” (external or internal) will you have to defeat along the way to achieve your BHAGs?

Markets, Competitors and Customers

• Imagine it’s 5 years from now.  What are your competitors envying the most about your company?
• What do your competitors respect the most about your company?
• What do you envision the future needs of our customers to be in 5– 10 years and how do you expect to meet them?
• What is your company the “best of” in your field or industry?
• When it comes to customers, how is your organization shifting from a “how many” to “who is our most profitable customer” focus?
• How are you staying on top of changing global, competitive, market, economic and technology trends to uncover hidden opportunities?

Changing the Inner Game 

• How are you breaking down big change in your organization into pieces too inconsequential to fail?
• How would you change if you HAD TO get 10x better/ bigger in the next 12 months?
• What do you have to do less of, to achieve more in your company?

Bonus Question

“For true success ask yourself these four questions:

Why?

Why not?

Why not me?

Why not now?”

James Allen

By no means are the above questions exhaustive.  In fact, they barely scratch the surface.

What provocative questions can you ask within your organization to build stronger strategic thinking capacity?

Share your own provocative strategic thinking questions and we will add them to this list with your name.

The post 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

As a leader, how often do you find yourself …

• 

  Thinking Behind Strategic Thinking

  Overwhelmed by an overload of demands, not knowing what to respond to first?

• Continually fighting for certainty, paralyzed by fear of the unknown?
• Blind sighted by unforseen events that jeopardize your company’s stability and bottomline?

I’m guessing what you really want is to stop your perpetual busyness.  You want to focus on the critical few.   You want to navigate your company, amidst constant change, to its ultimate destination.

In my decades of working with leaders, I have found that the above are symptoms that a leader lacks the capacity to think strategically.  Let’s look at how to turn those symptoms around.

The 3 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Strategic Thinking:  What It Is AND Is Not

1. Strategic thinking is an exercise of the brain muscle, not the wrist muscle.

Despite what many leaders believe, strategic thinking is NOT quantitative analysis – eg, generating sales forecasts – nor quantitative goals – eg,  $100 million in revenues.

While numbers are important in planning, true strategic thinking is qualitative.  It is about HOW you think as a leader, and less about the contents of your thinking.

 2. Strategic thinking is NOT the same thing as strategic planning.  In fact, many strategic plans have little strategic thinking behind them.

For most companies, strategic planning focuses on breaking down a goal into action steps and connecting those steps to resources, timelines and budgets.

While strategic planning is an important activity for implementation, a plan, without strategic thinking preceding it, has little chance of success.  While strategic planning defines the steps to move up the ladder, strategic thinking (in the words of Covey) defines whether your ladder is against the right wall.

 3. Strategic thinking is more about the structure of one’s thinking, NOT the content of one’s thinking.

While most strategy development efforts focus on content – or what one thinks, strategic thinking is driven by how one thinks – ie., the thinking behind the thinking.   We call this metacognition.

For example, assessing a competitor’s strengths focuses on content.    While the structure of your thinking may view competition at a higher elevation, such as the changing forces in one’s industry and impact on the competitive landscape.

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think:  The 6 Core Characteristics

Essentially, strategic thinking is a mindset.  It is the art of making the right decisions for attaining future success in a complex, uncertain world.   

Although there are many books about strategic thinking, my focus for this article is on the structure of strategic thinking … the Core 6 characteristics.

To uncover a leader’s strategic thinking capacity, I utilize a tool called the Inventory of Workplace Attitude and Motivations (IWAM) to assess a leader’s strength in the Core 6, as well as dominant mental patterns blocking a leader from thinking strategically.

Below are my Core 6 characteristics of strategic thinking.

Global (or Holistic) Thinking

Global or holistic thinking combines the cognitive abilities of:

• Big picture thinking (ie, seeing the overall landscape from a 10,000 foot level … such as your organization or industry. 
• Systems thinking (ie., ability to see the interrelationships between elements … such as, how decisions made in engineering impact other functions)
• Patterns recognition (ie., seeing cause and effect patterns within your environment, peoples’ behaviors and even within yourself  … such as “when I take 5 minutes to plan daily, I have a more productive, focused day.”)

The purpose of holistic thinking is not to accumulate knowledge, but to create new mental maps that unleash greater thinking possibilities for the future.

Example of Holistic Thinking:  Bill Gates and Paul Allen did not invent anything to start Microsoft. The personal computer revolution was started by putting together existing technologies in a way never done before. They could see from a 10,000 foot elevation how seemingly unrelated technology trends intersected, eventually disrupting the computer industry in a completely new direction.

Future Oriented

Strategic thinking leaders view their company’s past and present through the eyes of the future.  Strategic thinking requires strategic foresight and asking such questions as …

• What new emerging trends will shape our company’s future?
• What new possibilities may exist 10 years from now that don’t exist today?
• What unmet needs will our customers have in the future, not even visible on their radar screen today?

Strategic thinking requires a mindset that anticipates rather than reacts.  A strategic minded leader is seeking out opportunities through a “future” lens rather than merely responding to today’s problems and customer needs.

Example of Future-oriented Thinking:  According to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, management expert, the “principle of anticipation and innovation — driven by the producer, not the customer — is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

Henry Ford, a leader with great strategic foresight, understood that principle.  He said if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would’ve asked for a faster horse.

Options Thinking

Options thinking is nothing new.  Our whole lives consist of endless options –  what will we eat for dinner, where will we invest our money and so on. The same is true for organizations.

To achieve strategic success, leaders must develop their options thinking capabilities on two levels:

1. Defining multiple options for reaching goals and choosing the “best”;
2. Identifying a wide range of possible future states (aka environmental scenarios) to uncover and exploit emerging opportunities.

To understand why, imagine, if you picked a random path up a mountain – rather than finding the easiest among multiple alternatives.  Or that you did not consider various conditions in your climb – like snow, dangerous animals or equipment failure.  What would be your chances of success?

In a similar fashion, many strategic plans fail within organizations due to lack of options thinking.

Example of Options Thinking:  In 2006, Mike Jackson, CEO, AutoNation, challenged industry assumptions by asking “what if buyers replaced cars every 5 years, not 3 years?”  By looking at a low probability, high consequence event, AutoNation experienced profitability and positive cash flow, while many dealers went out of business.  That’s the advantage of options-thinking.

Differences–Oriented

When a leader is a high differences-thinking person, it tells me two things:

1.  His/her brain is wired to sort for differences. These leaders are innovators.  They love to change the rules of the game.  Think Steve Jobs as a “high differences-oriented” leader.
2. They thrive on change.  Not only can these individuals respond easily to change.  They can “see” possible changes in the future that others may dismiss or think impossible.

Such leaders have the ability to see and capitalize on hidden opportunities that others don’t have the thinking capacity to spot.

Example of Differences-Thinking:  Billy Beane, General Manager, Oakland A’s, shattered conventional baseball beliefs that big payrolls translate into big wins. His unconventional use of statistics in identifying undervalued players led the A’s — one of the worst teams in baseball with one of the lowest payrolls — to three American League West division titles.  This is hallmark of a differences-oriented thinker.

Achievement/Success Thinking

An achievement-thinking leader is an individual who is motivated by success and by being the best.  Achievement-thinking leaders choose strategies that exploit an advantage. Their only goal is to win.

To develop this thinking muscle, leaders must address fundamental achievement-oriented questions, such as …

• What defines success?
• What are the factors that drive success?
• How will we measure success?

Example of Achievement-Thinking:  Olympic athletes are the quintessence of achievement-oriented thinkers.  Their whole focus is on winning the gold medal.  For many, even a silver or bronze medal is considered failure.  They seek every possible strategy to get the advantage: the choice of a coach, equipment, mastering the fine points of technique, etc.

Proactive Balanced with Reflection

Most leaders by nature are highly proactive and take little time for reflecting.  Yet, to solve the increasing unfamiliar problems facing businesses today, a leader must learn to balance (proactive) action with reflection for new insights to problems with no precedence.

This balance requires leaders to take regular time for reflection and cultivate a sense of right timing for action guided by one’s own intuition.

True reflection is not about thinking hard, but rather a presence of mind.  A state of mind in which you view a situation from not knowing … a beginner’s mind.  (see Strategic Intuition, William Duggan)

Example of Proactive Balanced With Reflection:  Napolean was a master at strategic insight.  What he lacked in size of army, he made up in precision and reaction rate. Napoleon said it best: “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.”

Building your own strategic thinking muscle

A small amount of consistent time and practice is all it takes to build your own strategic thinking muscle.  For example …

1. Learn chess.  It is one of the best ways to develop the strategic thinking characteristics described above.
2. Subscribe to the Futurist magazine published by the World Future Society.
3. Track the BIG, new things the smartest people & organizations (regardless of industry) are doing.  Then adapt them in your company.

If that seems too much now, just remember …

Do less.  Reflect more.

Problems less.  Possibilities more.

“Play not to lose” less.  “Play to win” more.

The post How Great Strategic Thinking Leaders Think. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

“Leading From Guts” drives extraordinary organizations and a company’s distinctive edge in the marketplace.

The inspiration for this article was the movie “The Rosa Parks Story” – a story about a simple seamstress and civil rights activist with unwavering toughness of character that, in 1955, changed the course of history and segregation in the U.S.

Her unwillingness to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus to a white person set in motion a whole chain of catalyzing events – including imprisonment, a boycott of the Montgomery Bus, a new civil rights organization led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a repealing of the segregation law on buses in Montgomery.

This movie – and Rosa Park’s story in general — brought to light the power of “leading from guts,” regardless of one’s role or circumstances in business.

Leading From Guts:  The One Thing That Can Change Everything in Your Organization

For the purposes of this article, I deliberately chose the title Leading From Guts  (rather than Lead With Guts) for a reason.

Leading From Guts implies you already possess the traits and mindset of having guts.  Those traits and mindset make up the core of who you are and how you define yourself as a leader.

Leading With Guts implies that courage is secondary to your leadership role rather than the driving force of how you lead.  While it may sound like a subtle difference, to your employees who seek to follow gutsy leaders, it makes every difference.

Rosa Parks did not lead with guts, she led from guts.  Guts defined how she lived life.  Regardless of the threats on her life, loss of work resulting in lifelong hardship, the ongoing tensions in her marriage, etc., her unstoppable fight for civil rights defined her legacy and her leadership ability to create a movement that altered history.

While your cause may be different as a business leader, the underlying characteristics of leading from guts are the same.  Let’s take a look at those underlying characteristics.

Leaders Who Lead From  Guts …

1.     Are game-changers.  They thrive on doing the “seemingly” impossible.

Rosa Parks fought for a cause no one else thought possible. Even top civil rights activists (including Martin Luther King, Jr.) sought to achieve their goals the “safe” way … to play along with the established segregation rules in Montgomery at the time.  Rosa Parks was not willing to play that game.

Gutsy leaders in today’s business world embody the same spirit as Rosa Parks.  They provoke change by going against outdated norms that prevent them from playing a bigger game and realizing their cause.

• What small thinking in your company do you need to challenge to change the game in your organization?
• When was the last time you attempted to do something that seemed impossible?  
• How will doing so change the game you are playing?

2.     Are crusaders.  They are passionate about their cause and have the guts to act according to their convictions.

With all the injustices that Rosa Parks encountered due to her convictions, she never ran way from conflict, criticism nor condescension.  She stood her ground with composure, sensitivity and a fighting spirit to her cause of civil rights.  Her tenacity to lead from guts resulted in a history-altering movement.

Gutsy leaders know and commit to the driving “cause” of their organization.  For these leaders, their cause transcends goals and plans.  It is visceral.  Their cause becomes an unwavering heroic crusade.  What follows is a evangelistic movement within their organization.

• What’s the crusade your organization stands for?
• How do you help your employees see how their work as “heroic” and connected to your greater cause?

3.     Are fearless, despite being fearful. 

Fearless does not mean without fear (despite the dictionary’s definition). In fact, it’s impossible for any human being to be 100% without fear, as our brains are wired for fear for a reason.

Rosa Parks had fears, just as any other human being.  Yet, she transcended those fears because she was so committed to her cause.

Those leaders who lead from guts have the same scary moments and concerns as you do.  Yet they handle fear differently than other leaders.

They recognize that fear presents them with a choice.  Either they can step up to the opportunity or they can back down and let the fear run them.  As leaders choose the former, so will their employees.

• What gives you the guts as a leader to move beyond your fears?  A well-thought out plan?  Support?  Minimizing risks?
• If fear were not an option, what new bold actions would you take next?

4.     Are rule-breakers and challenge the status quo. 

Rosa Parks deliberately broke the law, despite knowing she would be arrested for not giving her seat to a white male.  Rosa challenged the status quo, not as an end in itself, but rather to make a statement – in her case, for justice.

In the business world, gutsy leaders are motivated to challenge “business as usual.”   They thrive on operating on the fringes and go against the tide because they know the edge is where breakthroughs reside.

As innovators of their industry, their courage and passion to try new things ignites the spark in others to think big and act boldly.  It takes GUTS and thick skin in a business world of followers to take the road less travelled.

• As a leader, what can you do to disrupt status quo thinking and encourage new ideas in your organization?  In your industry? 
• What rules in your organization are obsolete and holding you back?  
• How can you go against your own tide to breakthrough the barriers of what’s possible?

5.     Are movers and shakers.  They “stir up the pot” intentionally to create a revolution in thinking.

Just from one simple act of not giving her bus seat to a white person, Rosa Parks stirred up the pot in a complacent, compliant Afro-American community.  Her willingness to risk her life “stirred up the emotional pot” and one by one the community stood united in boycotting the Montgomery busses for an entire year.

Gutsy leaders agitate the thinking in their organizations and industries on purpose.  They know that complacency, routine and mediocrity are deadly to any company’s future growth and innovation.

They stir the pot to reinvigorate creative thinking, raise the bar and prime their organization for serious growth and market leadership.

• To what extent has complacency, routine and/or mediocrity stagnated the innovation and growth of your organization? 
• How can you intentionally stir up thinking by focusing on opportunity-driven change rather than merely putting out the fires?

6.     Are warriors.  They go the distance no matter what.

Despite her quiet voice and modest manners, Rosa Parks had the moral toughness and mental courage of a true warrior – a human rights warrior.  Her rebellious spirit and dissatisfaction with the Southern way of life sparked a movement for change in the U.S. and beyond.

Those who lead from guts have a will to win for the sake of their cause.  They don’t just want to win; they fight for it.  Yet they understand that change threatens those who value safety at all costs.

A leader’s warrior spirit must overcome the resistance and inertia amongst the troops within their organization – their employees.  Not by force, but through their own belief, passion and confidence backed by actions.

• As a leader, are you willing to fight for your convictions no matter what?
• What resistance must you overcome along the way within yourself?  Within your employees?
• What inner resources must you tap into, to strengthen your will to win?

7.     Are sure-fire decision-makers.  They put their stake in the ground and charge forward with confidence.

Rosa Parks made tough steadfast decisions, even when challenged by authority figures, friends/families and community leaders.  Yet it was her decisiveness that eventually won over others to her cause.

When it comes to decision making, gutsy leaders are a rare breed.  They have developed the chops to make real-time tough decisions with imperfect information and confidently move forward as though their decisions will prove to be correct.

Many business leaders falter in this area.  They fear putting their stake in the ground and keep waiting for more information, without realizing that delay is costly to their organization.

• In your own decision making, how much information is enough  to put your stake in the ground and move on?
• How do you sort for the most important data and filter out the rest to strengthen your decision making muscle?
• What lessons have you learned from past decisions to be better in the future?

Leading from guts starts with believing that you can make a difference, then having the guts to take action based on that conviction.

Even an ordinary individual, like Rosa Parks, demonstrated that courage, tenacity and conviction inspires others to boldly step up and become a part of your bigger cause.  Her life reminds us that a single person can make a profound difference of unimaginable magnitude and change the course of events forever.

What choice will you make?  Will you lead from guts or will you let fear lead you?

Other Related Links

How To Rise To the Top of Your Leadership Game Through Emotional Mastery

Be Rigorous About Your Fears … Otherwise They Will Drive Your Company into the Ground

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post Leading From Guts Builds Gutsy Organizations appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Has the obsession to create a happy, engaged workforce gone toxic in your company?

Is over-emphasizing positive thinking in your company’s culture, actually creating negativity without you even knowing it?

Is having 0% employee turnover actually a good thing to sing high praises about, or is it overshadowing another truth?

These are just a few examples of how companies, even with great cultures, can go to the dark side.

The REAL Truth About Your Company Culture & Its Hidden Shadow Side

Most great cultures are driven by handful of sacred values.  They have the clarity, discipline and consistency to make those values deeply embedded into their organizations, often outperforming in growth and profitability by  as much as 150%.

Yet many great cultures have also gone toxic AND the leaders don’t even realize it.  The factors that drive a company’s greatness – when taken to an extreme or at the expense of other factors – can actually become the organization’s hidden “shadow” side.  When that shadow is not brought to light, it can actually lead to the downward spiral or a company’s demise.

A past client company with a strong people-oriented culture – one that I deeply admired when I first started working with them – is one such example.  That strong people culture ignited rapid growth and became their competitive advantage in a high commodity industry.  However, when the recession hit, financial fear took over, its once strong culture went toxic and revenues and profits plummeted.

How is it possible for a great culture, like that, to go to the dark side and not realize it?

7 Blindspots That Can and Will Drive Your Company’s Culture to the Dark Side

Below are 7 blind spots and clues that your organization’s culture – no matter how successful in the past – is possibly headed in the wrong direction.  Be rigorously honest how these blind spots are relevant to your organization.  Otherwise, your company’s future could be in jeopardy.

Blindspot 1:  You fight for your espoused values at all costs, without realizing the unintended consequences on your organization and business results.

Any value taken to an extreme actually becomes a company liability.  A good example is the obsession with positive thinking within organizations.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am in favor of developing a mindset and culture that focuses on positivity, as long as it is authentic.

Yet being in blissful denial of the “real” emotional climate, politics or stress levels within your organization only creates a culture that hides its deepest worries and avoids the cold hard truth that can cost your company dearly.  Excessive positive thinking also results in artificial company behaviors and attitudes, triggering employee resentment, resistance and frustration.

Remember … any value – even the seemingly positive – taken to an extreme in your organization becomes your liability and “shadow” side.

Blindspot 2:  You focus mostly on the overt, tangible aspects of culture, while ignoring the covert drivers of your culture.

A company’s culture consists of overt and covert factors.   Overt factors involve what is tangible and observable – such as, strategic processes and behaviors within an organization.  Overt aspects of culture often utilize the reasoning, intellectual parts of our brain — the dominant focus of today’s leadership teams.

Covert aspects relate to the intangible, unconscious (ie., below your ordinary awareness) assumptions, social, emotional and political patterns, organizational taboos, etc.  Every organization has covert aspects driving its culture – such as, fears, insecurities, friendships, trust, jealousy, ambition and many more.

These hidden aspects of your company’s culture are driven by the emotional parts of our brain – that is, the underlying motivations, beliefs and “actual” values — determining your actual culture.

For example, one of my company clients has a strong “respect” value — an asset in many work relationships.  Taken it to an extreme, however, prevented them from speaking their truth and having honest conversations about critical organizational problems.

Their covert “agreed upon” behaviors for respect were translated into a belief that conflict or disagreement were to be avoided at all costs.  This covert aspect of their culture drove unintended behavioral consequences for which they paid a high price, till we eliminated the unhealthy aspects of this value.

Blindspot 3:  As a leader, you have a strong internal bias how well your culture is doing that does not match reality.

It has been found in behavior-related studies, that human beings think they are better than they really are.  This phenomenon is called in psychology a “self-serving bias.”

The same is true in the world of leadership and culture.  My term for this is “cultural inflation.”  There are many ways this self serving bias can blind you into thinking your culture is doing better than it is.

For example, when a company grows and changes, it is not unusual for its culture to erode at the bottom levels of the organization.   The leadership team is no longer involved lower levels and often becomes oblivious to the atrophy now monopolizing its culture.

Even when a leadership team recognizes issues within their culture, such leaders often don’t see themselves as “part of the problem.”  They don’t recognize that their actual behaviors, decision-making, communications, etc. are a major contributing factor to the dysfunctionality in their culture.

Blindspot 4:  Your strategy and culture are working at cross purposes with each other.

A common issue at a leadership level is not understanding the interplay between strategy and organizational culture.   As a company, you cannot sustain growth, profitability and your competitive edge without harmony and alignment between business strategy and culture.

So many companies fall short in their goals because they overemphasize strategy with little/no attention to the cultural aspects that drive it.  The most ingenious strategy in the world will never come to fruition without creating the right culture to drive it.

Strategy can be imitated by your competitors.  Your unique, well-entrenched culture cannot.

Blindspot 5:  You put too much weight on the strength of your company’s culture, not its fit.

There is the mistaken notion that great company cultures are the byproduct of its strength.  That is, the more entrenched an organization’s core values, the greater the culture.

While there are advantages to strong cultures over weak ones, the danger is assuming that it is the “right” culture, given your organization’s environment. 

The best cultures are those that continuously adapt to succeed in their market and competitive environments.

A manufacturing company in a price competitive environment may do best with an efficiency-based culture.  While a service business may do best with a people-oriented or customer service driven culture.

On the other hand, as your company’s environment experiences disruptive change, your culture must change accordingly to succeed.  When a company’s culture does not fit and/or adapt itself to its own environment, employees will have a hard time knowing how to respond to and serve the needs of its marketplace.

Ignoring the importance of culture fit and adaptability is one of the biggest reasons why great cultures go bad.

Blindspot 6:  Your organization is plagued with double binds, conflicting values and competing demands.

A hidden threat to great cultures are unresolved double binds and conflicting values.  A double bind, by definition, is an unresolved dilemma where the victim feels trapped, no matter the course of action.  That is, the victim deems the situation as lose-lose.

For example, a leader may be put into a double bind situation about the future status of a loyal, although under-performing, employee.  If he/she fires the employee, the leader is giving an unspoken message that loyalty is not valued.  If he/she keeps the employee, the unspoken message is that underperformance is tolerated, which impacts morale and demotivates your best performing employees.

Conflicting values are 2 or more values in conflict – perceived or real — with each other.  That is, either-or thinking. For example, growth driven companies often over-emphasize growth at the expense of other critical  factors, such as profitability.  A company will never be able to sustain growth until the underlying values and assumption conflicts are identified and resolved.

When either double binds or conflicting values go unresolved, the end result is paralysis, a polarized culture, victim thinking and compromised performance.

Blindspot 7:  You fail to assess the health and fit of your current culture and any possible signs of erosion or dysfunctionality … from the outside.

Because so many aspects of a company’s culture exist “below the radar screen,” it’s easy for business leaders to have a skewed perception about the health of their actual company culture.

Or they rely on their own internal assessment of culture which can be just as misleading.  In my experience of assessing company culture, employees rarely tell all for fear of consequences, so the real truth never fully comes out.

What are the alternatives?

• Use an outside culture assessment tested for high validity and significance … AND only use it as a starting point, not the end all.

• Find an outside consultant that can facilitate open-ended interviews and discovery processes to uncover a leadership team’s understanding of culture, its relationship to strategy and how well the two are aligned.  It is also important for the outside expert to observe your “culture in action” in meetings, everyday activities and through casual interaction with employees to uncover your actual culture.

Why such an indepth assessment?  Because company cultures, even the best, can become lulled by their past success and ignore the warning signs of a culture gone bad.  Some of the most once admired companies in history – Enron, Worldcomm and Arthur Andersen just to name a few – have been unfortunate proof that even purported great cultures can go to the dark side.

For low cost tools to assess your actual culture landscape, click here.

The key is not to fear or avoid the shadow or dark side of your company’s culture.  Rather to learn from it. Your culture’s shadow side actually holds the gift of transformation for your organization’s future growth, success and distinctive advantage in the marketplace.

What warning signs or blindspots do you need to heed from your culture’s shadow side?  What will it cost your organization if you don’t?

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post When Great Company Cultures Go to the Dark Side appeared first on The Empowered Business.

It’s that time of the year!  Most business leaders are preparing for an executive off-site to define their company’s future direction for the new year.

Yet, in my 30 years experience of working with leadership teams and companies, the terms “vision,” “mission” and “values” are THE most overused, misunderstood and abused words in the business community today.

Vision statements, mission statements and strategic plans in many companies reduce to mere academic exercises with no real value in driving an organization forward.  Why?  Let’s take a look.

Why Most Company Visions Get an “F”:  The Big 3

1. Your company’s vision lacks the necessary specificity and inspiration to pull your company forward.That is, your vision lacks intentionality, concreteness and emotional teeth on a gut level in what you really want to achieve and who you need to become in the process.Powerful visions grab and motivate people toward your desired future. Weak visions are meaningless superlatives or vague language that have no energy and fall flat on your organization.  How would you rate your vision?
2. Your vision lacks commitment and “ownership.”There is a big difference between wanting vs. deciding a desired future.One is built on hope and maybe’s. The other is backed by 100% commitment to the outcome.The word decide in its Latin root form means to cut off all other possibilities.  While none of us can guarantee our future, owning your future will make it a reality.  Have you chosen to go the distance, no matter the obstacles?
3. Your vision lacks the necessary leadership capacity and infrastructure to drive that vision into everyday activities.While passion, specificity and commitment are all prerequisites for a successful vision, your leadership and organizational capabilities must be at the necessary level to drive it.In the words of Thoreau, “For things to change, we must change.”   The leader and organization you are today cannot take you to where you want to be tomorrow. This often missed piece is why most companies’ visions fail.

Examples of Poorly Designed Company Visions  —  Can you guess the company?

 Before we address the essential ingredients to a well-designed vision, let’s first look at examples of what not to do.

 Example 1:  “To be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve.”

This vision is generic, lacks specificity, is loaded with meaningless puff words, that it could be any company in the computer industry.

Who is this mystery company?    Dell Computers.

Example 2:  “Undisputed Marketplace Leadership.”

Yes, a well known company has adopted this vision statement to drive its future direction.   While it may sound nice as a tagline, it gets the award for pointless generic buzzwords that really say nothing.  The company?  Hershey.

Both of these visions are sadly bland and generic that they could have been thought of by high school students as a homework exercise for their economics project.  It is not what you would expect from experienced senior leaders of well known companies. 

The “Secret Sauce” to Highly Successful Visions:  7 Essential Ingredients How

A company’s vision is like a beautiful work of art.  It’s personal and it connects with you and everyone in your organization deeply. 

The capability to create such a vision is THE single most important responsibility of a leader and a leadership team. 

For your company’s vision to succeed, however, it requires more than a good feeling.  What you need in addition is:

Secret 1:  A compelling vision that wins the hearts and minds of employees, resulting in buy-in and commitment.

According to the dictionary, the word compelling means urgently requiring attention; arousing interest in an irresistible manner.

Compelling visions move employees to action with a sense of urgency, change their behaviors, give meaning to their work and inspire them to reach new levels in their own potential.

Secret 2:  A clear vision that ignites your senses – ie., a vision you can see, hear and feel – to internalize and make it real.


A clear vision should ignite the imagination.  Generating passion about your company’s vision is a right brain activity, igniting the emotional center of your brain.

Most companies’ visions are defined in intellectual, abstract and/or quantifiable terms   While quantifiable outcomes are important later, they don’t motivate people to action.

In order for your vision to excite employees and pull your company forward, it must be described in clear sensory language.  The question to ask yourself is …

As you imagine your company’s new future, what do you see, hear and feel in your mind’s eye that tells you that new future has been realized?

Secret 3:  A big vision that challenges you to bold heights.

Big, bold goals are actually easier, more fulfilling and a heck more exciting to achieve than small goals.

Yet most business leaders get stuck in small thinking because:

• They lack confidence.
• They focus on today and what’s not working, rather than on the future and what can be.
• They have no experience with big and can’t even imagine how to conceive a big bold vision.
• They are overwhelmed with short term demands at the expense of long term possibilities.

The reasons why big visions are easier?  Because they challenge status quo thinking.  They force you to go beyond your comfort zone.  They stir passions and motivations.  Bold visions also catalyze new creative thinking.  And, most importantly, thinking big actually eliminates impossibilities.

Secret 4:  A shared vision that creates synergies, buy-in and cohesion.


Failed visions are usually created by a few leaders at the top.  A successful vision represents the entire voice of your company.  Your employees want to participate in a bigger cause and be involved in the creation and execution process.

The big challenge for business leaders is to create a vision that incorporates the wants, needs and aspirations of those who will be tasked with achieving it — your employees.  Your company’s vision must articulate … what’s in it for them?

Despite what many leaders think, the collaborative process of envisioning with your employees is more important than the actual vision product.  If you hear your employees saying “That’s my vision too” or at least feel like they influenced it, only then do you have a shared vision. 

Secret 5: A concrete vision aligned with your values and purpose.


Your vision is only one stepping stone to a new future.  Your values are your compass of how to get there.  Your purpose articulates the bigger cause or why your business exist.

While having a vision, purpose and clearly articulated values are the first step, the alignment of these 3 foundational elements is what determines success or failure of your vision.

 As best selling author, Jim Collins, notes: There is a big difference between being an organization with a vision statement and being a truly visionary company.

The difference lies in alignment.  The best use of an executive retreat at this time of the year is to look at alignment issues and your plan for eliminating them.

Secret 6: A concrete vision with “feet.”


Strong visions must also be strategically sound.  They must be concrete, tangible and have a clear proof of success.

When I work with executive teams in formulating their vision, I ask them to address critical strategic questions as part of their vision to give it “feet.”  Such as …

• What obstacles and challenges did your company have to overcome to achieve your vision?  What did you have to do extraordinarily well?
• What “enemies” (external or internal) did you have to defeat along the way?
• What do your competitors now envy the most about you?
• What new boundaries … ie, what you said ‘yes’ and what you said ‘no’ … did you need to have in place?

Secret 7:  A memorable vision that tells a story.

To create a powerful vision, you must articulate it as an unfolding story – both about the destination and the journey.

Why a story, not a statement?  Most visioning and vision statements miss the pathos element, or emotional connection. If I got $5 each time a company’s vision declared becoming the employer of choice or a talent magnet, I would have retired a long time ago :).

Vision stories, however, unite, create trust, are easy to remember and are transformative.  Great vision stories reveal the hero within us all. 

What is the future vision story that your leadership team will write that ignites the energy and the emotion to sustain action  on days even when nothing seems worth it?

Contact me for specific resources to get started on your memorable vision story.

As your leadership team gets ready for 2014, may you get started writing your magnum opus company’s future story.  May your visions allow you and your company to become larger than what you ever thought was possible.  Happy 2014!

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post Creating a Vision That Pulls Your Company Forward appeared first on The Empowered Business.