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.

If you are a sucker for great leadership movies like I am — Invictus, Coach Carter and Moneyball just to name a few, it’s easy to assume that all leaders embody the same qualities as those in the movies.

Afterall, who hasn’t idealized business leaders to be strong, confident, make tough decisions and stand their ground no matter what?

While those leaders do exist, they are a minority.  In working with leaders for 30 years, I have found that the reality is shockingly different.

Most leaders take on their roles with the greatest of positive intentions.  Yet, along the way, they get lost.  Not by conscious choice.  Rather they are derailed by an underlying dysfunctional pattern called Codependency.

Codependency is a set of beliefs and behaviors that prevent individuals from having healthy, mutually beneficial relationships.  At first glance, the term “co-dependent leader” seems like an oxymoron, yet this dysfunctional behavioral pattern is rampant within the business world.

The question is …

Why does leadership codependency go undetected?

Let’s look at the top 3 reasons why.

1.     Codependent behaviors get masked by a company’s values and practices. 

The post Are You Addicted to Codependent Leadership? appeared first on The Empowered Business.

In July of this past year, I had the honor of meeting Mike Gustafsen, CEO, Virident Systems Technology with seasoned experience in growth driven companies/divsions at the C-level.  His story as part of a panel discussion at a networking event – The Path to the C-Level – left such a strong impression that I asked him for an interview to share his secrets.

In my view, Mike embodies the essence of a great leader – a visionary, strategist, big thinker, leader of leaders, great team and culture builder, global thinker yet down to earth, authentic and the list goes on.  Prior to his current CEO position, Mike has worked as SVP & General Manager, Hitachi; CEO, BlueArc; and other senior executive positions at McData and IBM.

Leadership Defining Moments, Pitfalls and Triumphs:  What you will learn in this 30 minute audio

In this content rich, 30 minute audio interview, you will learn:

• Common themes and threads of his leadership storyline – including pivotal and defining moments in his leadership journey

• His sense of personal mission as a leader and the BIG WHY of his company, Virident Systems

• His C-level experience and lessons learned, including the pitfalls, during rapid company growth and his recommendations to other leaders of growth driven companies

• As CEO, how he has developed the leadership capacity to drive and sustain company growth

• How he and his leadership team have built a strong company culture and the role of culture in driving company growth

Caveat:  For some unknown technological reason, there was background noise on my end in the original recording of this interview.  Much of that noise has been edited out, although not completely.  We will be working on the sound quality in the future.

P.S.  Be on the lookout for future interviews with CEOs who, in their own way, have changed the game of leadership, growth and culture as their path to leadership greatness.  While many CEO interviews scrutinize strategic successes and fumbles, I have chosen to focus on personal qualities, inner drives, greatest learnings and toughest decisions as a leader in creating extraordinary organizations and companies.

___________________________________

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 the Way to Greatness and Growth appeared first on The Empowered Business.

One costly hiring mistake that I have observed with leaders is the unconscious avoidance, denial and/or toleration of under-performing employees.

Shocking costs of hiring mistakes

More commonly known as the cost of a mis-hire.

According to Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos, hiring mistakes have cost his company as much as $100 million!  That’s alot of dollars immediately subtracted from the bottomline.

For many companies, that one mistake can make the difference between surviving and thriving, between mediocrity and high performance.  Mis-hires and under-performing employees are the #1 profit leak in companies today.

Why Does This Issue Perpetuate Unknowingly in Many Companies?

For one, few companies actually take the time to calculate the hard and soft costs of even a single mis-hire.  Ignorance is not bliss in this case.  The higher the level of the position, the quicker the cost of a mis-hire increases exponentially.

To understand why such a large number, let’s look closely at the long list of direct, indirect and long-term opportunity costs of a mis-hire:

• costs associated with your time, your team’s time and any outside recruiting help in finding, screening and interviewing the pool of possible candidates
• costs associated with reference checking
• hard and soft costs associated with training a new employee
• costs associated with manager’s time to get a new employee up to speed
• costs associated with the lost productivity of a new employee for at least first 3-6 months
• long-term opportunity costs – seldom considered – with a mis-hire

-   substandard service

-   lowered employee morale and the resulting substandard performance in other employees

-   missed deadlines

-   customer dissatisfaction with product quality, customer service and/or lost trust/faith in the company

-   missed sales opportunities

-   and so much more

According to Guy Kawasaki, best selling author and former Chief Evangelist at Apple, there is another hidden high cost of mis-hires. “’A’ players tend to hire ‘A’ players; ‘B’ players tend to hire ‘C’ players and so forth.”   How does that translate to you and your organization?

If you are hiring anything less than “A” performing leaders, your leaders will hire mediocre employees that are not as good as they are, due to their own insecurities.  Perpetuating that under-performing cycle throughout the organization, your “B” and “C” leaders will cost you many times more than the $6 million we quoted above.

Can your bottomline afford that?

Why Is the High Cost of Mis-Hires Rampant?

Below are the 4 most common reason for hiring mistakes I have found in working with companies for over 30 years:

• Hiring decisions are at least 80% made as “gut feeling” or “based on appearances”  — such as, “I liked the person,” “they seemed honest and hard working,” etc.

• Scarcity and/or urgency mindset — a belief that few candidates have the skills you need or you are driven by outside pressures to fill the spot immediately and settle for mediocre candidates.
• As a hiring manager, you are dazzled by first impressions, how good the person looks on paper, credentials, advanced degrees, well-prepared interview responses, etc. In addition, the highly competitive job market has triggered an increase in exaggerated claims, embellished resumes and “half truths” often missed in the hiring process.
• Not understanding the difference between and/or having the needed tools to discern top talent vs. best fit talent.  With all the buzz about hiring top talent, many companies seek the most impressive backgrounds, past successes and prestigious credentials in their pursuit of top talent without any regard to best fit talent.

Past success and experience are often an unreliable predictor of future performance.  Why?  Because different people are motivated by and excel in different work environments, organizational cultures, job opportunities, etc.  Competencies and skills only account for 20% of future performance.  The right attitudes, motivations, values and goals for a given role and company predict 80% of performance.

What are the 5 Best Secrets to Avoiding Costly Hiring Mistakes and Finding Best Fit Employees?

Secret #1:  Shift your mindset from hiring employees to hiring partners.

Your employees are your most important partners and stakeholders.  Hiring employees is like finding the best marriage partner or close circle of friends.

You seek those who have similar values, will make you a better person and provide synergies for both of you to create something bigger than you can individually.  While you may value their past accomplishments and expertise, it’s what’s on the inside and the synergies between you that will make that partnership fly.

Secret #2:  Hire those with the capacity to excel and exceed you.

I emphasize finding those with the best capacity to excel and outperform others, including yourself.  Capacity not only includes current capabilities.

Capacity also includes the right mindset, motivational drivers and thinking necessary to ignite future potential.  It takes extraordinary self-confidence, soul searching and inner security for leaders to recognize when they hire those that exceed them, everyone wins.

Secret #3:  Hire “A+” players based on attitude, motivation and culture fit.

How you assess best talent fit for your company and for each role is the single most important ingredient to successful hiring and maximizing employee performance.

The best tool I have found to help clients assess attitude and motivation fit is an online assessment tool (IWAM), uncovering 48 unique attitude and motivation drivers that best predict future performance.  Although all patterns are important in varying degrees, there are usually 6-8 drivers most critical for company/culture fit and a handful of other drivers important to A performance in a given role/function.  For more info about how IWAM can help you hire best fit talent, go HERE!

In addition, to further assess culture fit, it is important that leaders learn scenario building interviewing skills, or hypothetical “what if” questions for assessing values and traits, without the candidate’s awareness or ability to prepare for such questions.

Secret #4:  Develop a mission statement, results-oriented job description and list of non-negotiable traits before you start the hiring process.

You can’t know how to assess a best fit candidate unless you know why you are hiring someone, how will their contributions impact company goals and be measured and what traits are needed to excel in that specific role. 

Most job descriptions are long laundry list of tasks and responsibilities without justification why the position exists or a scorecard how to evaluate success and performance.  Without this information, the probability of finding those with greatest chance to succeed and raise the game is very low.

Secret #5:  Stop relying on intuition; start relying on unbiased, objective due diligence.

I’ve have heard too many leaders’ hiring regret stories.  Examples of when they were convinced a candidate would work based on feelings and impressions, only to find after a year of frustration, procrastination and endless coaching, that they made a mistake.  A million dollar (or more) mistake, at that.

To avoid this pitfall, develop a rigorous hiring process.  Develop screening criteria and use objective data to eliminate candidates right away.

Examples could include driving history check, credit check, drug tests if necessary, etc.  What you are seeking are personal records that reflect a candidate’s character.  Also check character references, asking truth-telling questions, like … on a scale 1-10, how well did the candidate get along with co-workers?  And, why that #? 

After 1-2 stages of screening, have a team of individuals from a variety of positions interview candidates with list of prepared questions and hands-on problem solving scenarios of common role/company issues.  To ensure a candidate is aligned with company purpose, you should also ask “purpose based” questions such as, “what do you want to be remembered for?  Or “when in your life have you been so passionately focused on an activity that you lost track of time and what were you doing?”

Hiring, by no means, is a science.  Even with the best hiring systems, mistakes will be made.  The key is to hire slowly, fire quickly.  Your credibility and reputation as a leader, inside and outside, depend on it.  Be rigorously honest about your past hiring mistakes, your own hiring blindspots and the changes you will make to start hiring your best employees.

Let’s keep the conversation going.   Visit our blog to share your comments, biggest hiring mistakes, stories of regret, burning questions and valuable resources for finding and hiring best fit employees.  We want to hear from you!

___________________

The post Shocking Costs of Hiring Mistakes appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Photo Credit: David Niblack

This final part of our accountable leader series addresses my top 10 leadership and culture practices for a strong accountability organization.

Keep in mind that the 6 internal drivers, addressed in parts 1 and parts 2, account for as much as 90% of your performance and results, including accountability.  Practices by themselves, can’t drive accountability.  They can only reinforce and support a healthy accountability mindset.

From Accountability to High Performance: Top 10 Leadership and Culture Practices To Make That Giant Leap

To build a high performance organization, a strong accountability mindset and practices must be embedded into your company’s DNA.  The two combined catalyze your organization to move from struggle to thriving, from crises to momentum, from inertia to growth.

Below are my top 10 most important leadership and culture practices necessary to make that leap.

1.  Set goals that truly motivate and excite your employees.The first step to a strong accountability culture is to set goals across the entire organization. However, nice sounding goals on paper does not guarantee achieving them.  Most leaders overlook the missing ingredient that drives achievement — MOTIVATION. Employees must be motivated to “want” to achieve their goals.

Below are a few ways to help your employees set goals that they want to achieve.

• Establish goals that challenge them.  Studies have shown that difficult goals result in higher levels of performance than easy goals.

• Elicit each employee’s personal goals and find a way to help them achieve personal aspirations in conjunction with their workplace goals.

• Help employees identify their jobs’ essence – ie: the higher purpose of why that role exists – to appeal to their fulfillment needs.
  

2.  Define outcome or results-based job descriptions that align with company goals.

‘Old style’ skills and competencies job descriptions are poor predictors (or motivators) of future success.  To truly drive results though your people, every leader and employee should have a results-driven job description that identifies their top 3 -5 outcomes, along with clearly defined success measures to be tracked throughout the year.

I also include a more comprehensive set of important factors, when working with leaders, such as: critical success factors; connection to company goals, resources needed; shared vs. sole responsibility; action plan; and what factors could derail achieving the outcomes.

3.  Hire for attitude and motivation; teach the skills.

A recent study showed that almost 50% of new hires left in the first 18 months.  Of those, 89% left because of ‘attitude fit’ issues, while only 11% left because of lack of skills.

The below table illustrates the tradeoff of hiring for motivations vs. competencies and the level of performance you can expect. Hiring for motivation and attitudes over skills is critical to build strong accountability and high performance.

                                         From Under-Performing to Top Performing:

                                         The Motivation vs. Competency Relationship

4.  Make sure your employees have the necessary skills/competencies, tools and resources to succeed in their role.

While the predominant drive of performance is motivation, having the necessary competencies and tools are essential for an employee to act on his/her motivation.

If a role is “too big” for an employee – ie: they lack the skills to succeed, then it is essential to teach, coach and train your employee so they can achieve their goals.

In your employee’s outcome based job description, identify the skills to succeed, where the gaps are and a development plan to eliminate those gaps.

5.   Set clear expectations that your employees understand and agree to.

While leaders often understand the need for clear expectations, many overrate their ability to deliver on the level of clarity needed.  Because of differences in perceptions, language and the meaning given to it, too often a leader’s intended communication is not received or interpreted by their employees in the same way. This is the #1 reason for unmet expectations.

To avoid such a breakdown, at a minimum,

• Communicate expectations in concrete terms – ie: answer all calls within 3 rings.

• Ask employees to repeat back what expectations they heard.

6.  Elicit employee’s emotional buy-in for trust and commitment.

For many leaders, developing a strong accountability organization can be harder than it seems.  The common blind spot is not getting your employees’ emotional buy-in about the importance of accountability.

Buy-in involves capturing the hearts and minds of your employees to take ownership of their roles AND to take ownership of company results.

According to a study done by Partners in Leadership, executives reported that …

…only 10% of their employees fell into the “Buy-in” category, while 84% were seen as either “Comply and concede” or “Exempt and excuse” in terms of owning organizational results.

When employees buy-in, they act as though your company is their company.  They go beyond the expectations of their role and do whatever it takes for the company to succeed.

How many of your employees would fall into the “Buy-in” category and take ownership of your company’s results?

7.  Reward your employees — on their terms — to increase motivation, drive and commitment.

There are 2 kinds of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic.  Most companies attempt to motivate employees extrinsically – ie: compensation, bonuses and benefits.

Yet Herzberg – top motivation theory expert – found that extrinsic motivators fall into the category of “hygiene” factors and can only eliminate employee dissatisfaction.  They don’t increase motivation.

On the other hand, intrinsic motivators – such as, achievement, meaningful work and recognition – cost little and have the greatest impact on employee commitment.

As a leader, do you know what the intrinsic motivators for each of your employees are?  How much time do you focus on increasing those motivators?

8.   Be firm and let go of consistent under-performers. 

Consistent under-performers lower the entire organization’s performance. They become a de-motivating factor to other employees.  They consume more of a leader’s/manager’s time when it can be better spent on your high potentials and future leaders.

The first step to improving this situation is to realize that you, as a leader, are part of the problem by avoiding the truth. Do what you can for a defined period of time to coach your under-performers to achieve success.

If improvement is not achieved, the second step is to help the employee to transition to a better suited role or another employer.

9.  Create a daily environment and culture of self-responsibility, self leadership and self-learning.

Self-responsibility is the ultimate trait of a high performing organization.  You can’t have a strong accountability culture without every leader and employee taking responsibility for themselves, behaviors and outcomes.

Self-responsible people are the do-ers of the world, not the “done to.” They refuse to see themselves as victims. They believe that they are in charge of their own destiny.  They are the creators of opportunity, rather than believing they are entitled to it.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to go into “how,” to create a culture of self-responsibility, the 4 mindset and behavioral traits essential for self-responsibility are:

• Commitment – a willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed.

• Ownership — taking ownership for all your results.

• Resilience – ability to bounce back and rise above adversity, crises and failures

• Continuous learning – learning from past experiences and mistakes, always seeking to grow and evolve.

10.  Expand your internal locus of control to drive bigger and better outcomes.

A person has either an internal or external locus of control, depending on to whom or what they assign responsibility for what happens.

External locus equates to a “victim” mindset.  Such people believe that everything happens to them.  They are masters of blame, helplessness and low self esteem.  Nothing is their fault.

Internal locus equates to “the accountable person.”  Such people believe they can control or influence the outcomes in their lives.  Even when events are beyond their control, they know they have options how to respond to such events.  They have self-confidence and a learning mindset.

To increase your internal locus, recognize the fact you always have choice.  Brainstorm other options, take small actions and, most importantly, pay attention to and change your negative self talk.

Summary: 

The goal of this 3 part series is to increase your awareness about the one thing.  In this crazy busy world of business, I know the one thing that makes the biggest difference in you and your organization is the level of your game.

Becoming an accountable leader is the catalyst for transforming your untapped potential into hard-core business results. You can only change the level of your game if you are rigorously honest with yourself about the strength (or lack) of accountability, within your organization.

Use the principles and practices in this series to get started. For more personal feedback about building a strong accountability culture, request our complimentary Leadership Strategy Session to define next steps, given your goals and challenges.  However you proceed, take the next step now!

The post The Accountable Leader: Developing the Right Practices That Ignite Performance (Part 3) appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Accountable Leader

Today’s most successful companies all have one trait in common.  Their high performance organizations are driven by a strong accountability culture.  Yet despite many companies’ well-intentioned efforts to create strong accountability, leaders still struggle to make it a reality.  Mediocrity, lack of execution and operational breakdowns are hallmarks of poor accountability and an out of control, under-performing organization.

The REAL Truth Why Your Leaders are Struggling with Accountability and Under-performing Teams:

• As a leader, you can’t develop strong results-driven accountability with your team unless you have strong personal accountability with YOURSELF.  This capability is part of self leadership.  You can’t hold others accountable if you don’t take responsibility for your own actions, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, choices and results.  Because employees model what leaders do, a leader’s weak personal accountability perpetuates a cycle of poor  organizational performance.
• As a leader, you lack critical “soft,” people skills — such as addressing interpersonal conflict, and engaging and motivating employees — that drive organizational accountability and performance.
 Employees follow you and are motivated to perform for their reasons, not yours.  For this reason, weak leadership “soft” skills cripple employee engagement and performance and is a costly epidemic in today’s business world.
• Most leaders lack the necessary mindset, capabilities and practices to drive strong accountability – a “must” for high achieving organizations.  Strong accountability starts first with the right mindset.  No performance system, set of metrics or people practices by themselves can make up for a lack of understanding what healthy accountability is and is not.  Lacking the right mindset perpetuates accountability breakdowns and a low performing organization.

The Accountability Mindset Your Leaders and Employees Need Instead to Drive Growth and Profitability

Your mindset is your mental map, cognitive filters and internal glasses that color your view of yourself and the world.   These mental filters drive your thoughts, feelings, motivations, behaviors, communications and, ultimately, results …  without your conscious awareness.

From a leadership standpoint, I call these mental filters your inner leadership game.   As a leader, the most important game you will ever play is the game within your mind. 

Let’s look at the components of your inner leadership game for building strong accountability and a high performance organization.

Grand Purpose/Vision

Often organizations treat accountability as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. Such organizations narrowly focus on the how of accountability and forget the why. 

Grand Mission

Accountability means more than achieving performance goals.  To motivate your employees to deliver results, accountability requires a profoundly deep understanding why and for whom your employees perform.

Zappos credits its multi-billion dollar success and organizational passion because every employee knows his/her significant role in keeping the Zappos vision alive.

• As a leader, for what grand purpose does your organization exist?  
• To what extent do your employees know that purpose?  
• To what extent are you reinforcing  each employee’s vital role to that purpose?

Values

Values are the qualities and principles you most value.  Your top 3 values drive 90% of our focus, decision-making, time usage, behaviors and outcomes.  If accountability is not amongst those, your attempts will be undermined and lack sustainability.

Important values considerations as a leader for cultivating a strong accountability culture  include:

•  Is accountability an explicit core or operational value for your organization?  is it a top personal value for you?
•  Do you have an agreed upon definition as to what healthy accountability is and what critical behaviors will drive it?
• Are there other values that are perceived by you or your employees as conflicting or competing with accountability in your organization?  If so, how will you resolve that conflict?

If any of the above are not addressed, accountability efforts will suffer.

Beliefs

Beliefs are thought patterns, convictions or judgments about yourself, others and the world around you.  They make up the boundary conditions of your thinking and the parameters of your inner game rule book. 

Most organizations struggle with accountability because of the unconscious negative beliefs their leaders and employees hold about accountability. Those beliefs are often the byproduct  of past negative experiences with accountability during upbringing, with a former employer, etc.  To assess the impact of these beliefs on accountability, ask yourself:

• When you think of  accountability, what associations, emotional reactions or thoughs come up?  Are these associations positive, negative or neutral? 
•  If any negative associations about accountability, how can you redefine it so there is emotional buy-in, organizational alignment and it motivates employees to drive their own results?

This article covered 3 out of the 6 factors of your inner game and its relationship to accountability.  Part 2 will cover the remaining 3 factors: your leadership identity, motivational patterns and emotional state.  Part 3 will cover leadership practices and culture changes critical for a strong accountability organization.

The single most important takeaway is to understand that your inner leadership games drives 90% of your performance and results, including accountability.

If you would like more details about your inner leadership game, I invite you to download a complimentary report:  Wired to Win Big;  7 Inner Game Leadership Strategies for Rising to the Top and Staying There.

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 orwww.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post The Accountable Leader: Developing the Right Mindset That Ignite Performance (Part 1) appeared first on The Empowered Business.