Great Leaders Break The Status Quo

Five Crippling Habits
That Inhibit Change and Agility

We all have excuses for not changing, and you’d better believe that companies are full of excuses. The following phrases may sound familiar to you: “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.” “I didn’t make my numbers because . . .” “Here are all the things that could go wrong.” “I can’t get everything done.” “It’s not my job. It wasn’t my fault.” “I wish management would stop changing their minds.”

Excuses signal systemic problems that are deeply embedded in the corporate culture. And while some hostile economic events are unavoidable, I find that many companies suffer from the same five crippling habits that inhibit change, progress and growth. To break this cycle requires strong leadership.

Crippling Habit 1: Absence of Clear Directives
If you’re hearing or saying any of the following, then your company or organization suffers from an absence of clear directives: “I can’t get anything done.” “Everything is a priority.” “I wish management would quit changing their minds.” “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”

As a leader, you must make sure everyone who reports to you understands and stays focused on achieving the company’s most important objectives, the things that matter most and must get done. Listen for what’s keeping people from doing what’s important. Have you set goals that are specific and measurable? Can everyone in your company articulate those goals? Do they understand how their jobs directly support those goals?

It’s easy to discover the answers to these important questions. When I’m working with a company to improve operating results and profitability, one of the first things I do is walk around and ask people at all levels what the company’s goals are. If they can tell me, pull it up on a computer screen, or point to a sign in their office or a break room and then describe how their work fits into the company’s top objectives, my job is going to be a lot easier.

Most of the time employees don’t know their employer’s top objectives, and they struggle to directly connect their work to desired outcomes. Sometimes I don’t even have to ask the questions, all I have to do is listen and observe. Are heads down and focused? Are people having action- and goal-oriented conversations, or are they surfing the Internet or reliving their weekends?

Effective leaders put the objectives front and center on meeting agendas, in ongoing written and verbal communications, and in marketing collateral. Make them come to life in everything the company does.

Crippling Habit 2: Lack of Accountability
If you’re hearing “I would have done it but . . .” or “It’s not my job,” around your company, then your business is suffering from a lack of accountability.

When I find a culture of blame or a victim mentality, it often points to a lack of clear ownership and the fact that the company’s reward system isn’t linked to results. People need to know what they’re responsible for delivering. They’ll know this if you tell them directly and unambiguously. You must also reward results, and to do that you have to measure performance against clearly defined goals.

When I visit a company, I ask people what they’re doing and if they know how their job fits into the company’s top directives. I then ask, “How well are you performing, and how do you know?”

To be effective you must measure results against goals—not just quarterly or at year’s end, but often weekly or even daily. While “meeting mania” is certainly unproductive, frequent meetings that focus on performance against those goals are absolutely necessary—and absolutely productive. Leaders, along with everyone else in the company, must be held accountable. If you don’t make your goals, there must be a penalty.

The best carrot and the strongest stick are often compensation. I can’t believe how frequently I find that year after year workers who don’t meet their objectives continue to get pay raises. If there are no consequences for poor performance, you can’t expect improvement. What you can expect is a company full of poor performers.

Crippling Habit 3:
Rationalizing Inferior Performance
Whenever you hear “they,” as in, “If only they would do their jobs,” and “I work hard, why are they complaining?” instead of “I” in a conversation about meeting goals, you can bet someone is rationalizing by creating a defense mechanism that justifies inferior performance.

When people in a company aren’t meeting their goals, but they take ownership by communicating what they require to succeed, how much it will cost, and who needs to help them, that’s an example of an organization committed to results. Leaders capable of changing the focus from excuses and rationalization to removing the roadblocks that inhibit great performance should be held out as role models.

When the most productive leaders hear someone rationalizing inferior performance, they switch the conversation from negative to positive. Instead of asking why an individual hasn’t met a goal, ask what he’s doing to get there. Does he need help? What stands in the way? During these conversations, make certain ownership and accountability is maintained while you focus on actions required to achieve the desired outcome.

Crippling Habit 4: Planning in Lieu of Action
If only I had a nickel for every time I heard one of the following: “That’s not in the plan.” “We missed the plan and need a revised forecast.”

When companies don’t meet their profit objectives quarter after quarter, all too often everyone eventually blames the plan. Leaders then blame the employees and downsize the company. It’s a vicious, disastrous, and expensive cycle.

The problem is that companies too often don’t invest an equal amount of time, energy, and resources on achieving the results the plan targets. Instead they go through several quarters before realizing that they’re not achieving the results they’d planned for, and so they say, “Let’s revise the plan again.”

The most effective plans are those with specific, measurable goals that are evaluated monthly. Long-range plans covering three to five years are useful for setting and communicating direction and should be restricted to senior management. Short range plans covering twelve to eighteen months are what leaders need most to remain on course and manage results.

Plans and associated measurements must focus on simple-to articulate goals owned by specific people. The measurement system has to be visible weekly, or in some cases even daily, so that everyone knows the results and understands the deviations. When deviations occur—and they will—a company must act immediately to remedy the situation. Problems never get better without action. They only grow worse.

Crippling Habit 5: Aversion to Risk and Change
How do you like this excuse: You’re new to a company, you have some great ideas for improvements, you share them, and then you get shot down with, “Once you know what we’re facing, you’ll understand why we do things this way.”

In other words, once you become a part of the problem, you won’t want to shake things up.

It’s true we’re all creatures of habit. We’d much rather navigate familiar territory and clutch the belief that if we just keep doing what we’ve done that produced good results, those outcomes will continue in perpetuity. Of course, that theory is ridiculous, because the world around us is in constant flux.

What’s even more ridiculous is that many businesses just keep doing things that have produced bad results, always expecting a different outcome. They become expert at rationalization and maintain that way of thinking until something dramatic happens to the business. Sometimes the higher up you go in an organization, the more prevalent this behavior becomes. Why? Because senior people believe they have more to protect, so they don’t want to risk losing anything.

For change to occur—the pain of change must be perceived as less than the pain of maintaining the status quo. Until this condition is met, little will change. Most company’s wait too long to change. They delay until there is no other choice. We see it every day. Companies are taking high write-offs, reducing their workforces, cutting benefits, dividends, and earnings expectations, then finally resorting to change because their competition has beaten them or they are facing a financial crisis.

People want to work for leaders who have the guts to make a decision and stick with it. If your company holds meetings with lots of people to gain broad political consensus, then a leader is trying to ensure that if something goes wrong, there will be plenty of people to blame.

Instead, management must encourage calculated risk taking and truly demonstrate that people who take risks and occasionally miss the mark will live to try again. A culture of blame, fear, and meeting mania can’t flourish in that healthy environment. Gains in productivity alone are reason enough to put a halt to unnecessary meetings.

How’s your leadership?

For more information on leadership and how to become an exceptional leader read Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company. Hit #1 on Amazon for best-selling management and investment book, and was awarded the USA Book News Best Books Award for Best Management Book, Silver medalist by the Independent Publishers Association and Foreword Magazine’s Silver award for Book of the Year.

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When I train folks I frequently am asked about poor performance issues or handling performance-based challenges. Leaders capable of changing the focus from excuses and rationalization to removing the roadblocks that inhibit great performance should be held out as role models.

Here are some questions you can ask when you hear someone rationalizing inferior performance:

1. Instead of asking why someone has not met a goal, ask what they are doing to get there.

2. Ask, “Do you need help?”

3. Ask, “What stands in your way?”

And here are six questions leaders must ask themselves in terms of performance:

1. Are you tolerant of excuses?

2. Is there clear ownership of objectives?

3. Are you focusing on what’s most important - the significant few - or the important many?

4. Is compensation tied to results or activity?

5. Have you established the systems and culture to support your people in attaining their goals?

6. Are you hiring people who are smarter than you, who can evaluate situations and offer wisdom and experience to narrow the performance gap and acclerate the attainment of objectives?

The goal as a leader and employee is to deliver on results not activity.

This whole week was customer service service week and I just wanted to give some tips to keep in mind when it comes to customers and keeping them loyal.

Here are some key questions you want to ask:

1. What can we do to better serve you?

2. What do you want more of?

3. What do we need to do to win more of your business?

To strengthen loyalty and gain quality introductions and testimonials, your company must do the following six things well:

1. Sell reliable products and services

2. Make and meet committments

3. Underpromise and overdeliver

4. Resolve problems quickly

5. Minimize surprises

6. Follow up.

Holding everyone accountable for improving customer loyalty is key because it takes the entire company to solidify customer loyalty.

Here are nine statements I use in training with leaders and managers to evaluate the effectiveness of the leadership team. All of these should be in place at your company as well and you as a leader should be able to answer a resounding YES to these.

1. The top objectives of my company have been clearly defined and articulated.

2. Everyone in my company knows the top objectives and understands what is expected of them.

3. There are appropriate incenties for producing results and penalties for not producing results.

4. We have regular performance reviews.

5. I consistently hire and surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.

6. We consistently achieve our business and profitability objectives.

7. There is ample time to plan.

8. We only have meetings when they make sense - when we have clearly defined objectives that are tied to the company’s top objectives.

9. We consistently meet committments without follow-up.

Email me and tell me if you have more to add to this list!

Here’s an interview I did recently with Peter Clayton of TotalPicture.com . I’d love to hear your feedback on it, and please post a vote at the site too.

Peter does an amazing job with interviewing!

In light of all the recent news around companies not serving their customers in terms of providing the support and service customers should expect, I thought I’d post seven key questions you can use to measure how your customer service is on track.

Do we:

1. Consistently underpromise and overdeliver?

2. Resolve customer problems quickly?

3. Take all customer feedback seriously?

4. Have a process in place to reduce problem recurrence?

5. Consistently measure customer loyalty and improve results?

6. Know what each person at the company must do to maintain a loyal customer base?

7. Continually explain ongoing value to existing customers?

If you’ve answered no to any of the above questions, then you have some work to do.

Here are eight pro-active steps you can take to ensure your customer service success.

1. Test your customer service and support process often.

2. Link key customers with senior executives to deepen relationships.

3. Be proud of your service and charge accordingly.

4. Communicate effectively and fulfill comments.

5. Keep in touch.

6. Strive to have 100 percent of your customers refereancable.

7. Overcommunicate in times of trouble

8. Don’t become a bank for your customers. Collect outstanding receivables aggressively.

And remember at least once yearly take time to conduct a formal survey of all your customers and truly listen to the feedback you receive.

Hi Folks,

We’re back from Book Expo and are happy to report a Book of the Year award from Foreword Magazine and a Silver IPPY from the Independent Publisher’s Association. Book Expo was fantastic and there was wonderful response to the book and our message.

We also did a short podcast interview at the event with many other esteemed individuals and I wanted to put a link to that interview on the blog. I hope you’ll take a moment and listen to the interview.

Hi Folks,

I’m in New York at Book Expo and Foreword Magazine just announced their Book awards! I’m proud to say “Kiss Theory Good Bye” won the Silver Award for Business/Economic category. We are thrilled!!!!

This is just a fantastic event in New York and I’ve met so many amazing business leaders, authors and wonderful folks.

We’re excited that Kiss Theory Good Bye will soon be out in Portuguese and we appreciate all the folks that continue to talk about the book.

And I’m grateful to be doing the work I love and connect with so many fantastic people along the way. We’re having a ball at Book Expo! Come by and see us at Booth 1641!

You would be surprised how many CEOs and leaders don’t feel it’s important to efffectively track and learn from complaints during the good times as well as the downtimes. My take is that every complaint you listen to and learn from is one complaint or problem less that you’ll have to deal with further down the road.

Your customers are absolutely key to your long-term success, keep them loyal and happy and be responsive to them and they’ll stick by you.

I believe that profitability in and of itself is not the ultimate objective. It’s only the enabler. The real goal is to have choices and profitability enables organizations to have the freedom of choice.

Choices ensure in our lives, that we’re all doing what we really want to do. One of my favorite professors during grad school at Georgia State told our class something that I relate in my book and that I try to continue to bring up when I collaborate with companies in training.

The professor said, “There are two great things that can happen to you in life. The first is to find what it is you really love to do. The second is to have the courage to go and do it.”

My whole focus is to help people work harder, not smarter so they can have a work and life balance and feel great enthusiasm for both work and their personal life.

Have courage and you will achieve greatness.