The Business Sensei

Who Needs Strategy?

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.”

“Our goal is to succeed!”

“Our goal is simple: we will build a winning product.”

“Joe’s goal is to get his work done on schedule 75% of the time.”

“Billy’s goal? He should cross the street safely 75% of the time.”

I’ve heard each of these so-called goals presented with a straight face. They sound good; well, at least the first three sound good. The fourth? Well, isn’t it just like the third?

Goals are an interesting beast. We talk about them all the time, put them down on paper, hang banners with goals written on them, and exhort people to stay focused on the goal. Despite all that effort, a great many of these goals never come to pass. Most of them are little more than wishful thinking or downright fantasy.

The goal problem is two-fold.

First, setting a goal does not make it happen. You can set a goal of finding a pony under your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t magically cause a pony to appear. For a goal to succeed, there needs to be a plan to accomplish it. That planning process, sometimes known as the strategy, is critical. It doesn’t matter how much you want to succeed if you aren’t willing to plan you aren’t going to get there.

Now, I frequently hear that planning is pointless since no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That may be true, but seeing the plan not survive is at least giving you feedback that you’ve encountered the enemy. Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy.

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.

Interestingly enough, the beginner usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working.

I said earlier that there are two big problems with goals. The second is failing to fail correctly.

Sometimes failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. It is Edison’s proverbial, “I learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.” Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do you tell the two apart?

Check out the strategy around the goal. If there is a strategy and the possibilities of failure are being considered and managed, then odds are good that if you fail, you’re failing successfully. If there is no strategy or failure is not being considered as a possibility, turn and run away. All you’re doing is rolling the dice, and if that’s your game, Vegas is a better bet.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Paradox of Perfection

This article was originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”– Michael Jordan

Ask practically any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never considers alternatives, who refuses to take decisive action, who has never challenged themselves, and the answer will be, “No.”

The odd thing is, however, that those same managers are hiring exactly those people they said they’d never hire. Of course, they say they’re hiring people with strong track records, who don’t have a history of failure, who have never been responsible for something going wrong; the people, in short, with the perfect job histories.

But what they don’t do is take the time to understand just why that person looks so perfect. After all, isn’t it always better to hire someone who has never failed than to hire someone whose background includes unsuccessful projects?

Imagine if Michael Jordan’s coach had said, back when he first missed a game winning shot, “Hey Mikey, you missed that shot! You’re done.”

Far too often, the people who look so perfect are only perfect because they’ve never allowed themselves to attempt anything that would damage their image of perfection. They carefully choose their projects to make sure they’ll be successful, and they never challenge themselves or expose themselves to risk. Unfortunately, when something does go wrong, they also have no ability to cope.

Twelve years ago, I worked with someone who was telling me how he failed his black belt test in the martial art he studied. “It was the first test I’d ever failed,” he told me. “It was devastating.”

“How long ago did that happen?” I asked him.

“Two years.”

“So I assume you passed the second time.”

“What second time?” he asked.

After two years, his failure was still so overwhelming that he hadn’t gotten back on that metaphorical horse. As an engineer, he was not easy to work with because he had to be right all the time.

I was once called in to work with a manager who had a stellar track record, until something went wrong. He couldn’t cope. He kept telling me, “I’m not the sort of manager who allows something like that to happen.”

The resulting disconnect between his (mis)perception of himself and reality was overwhelming. The fellow was so stressed out that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and couldn’t think straight. The fact that he had never failed meant that he had no resilience. The mere possibility of failure was enough to send him into panic and make the odds of failure more likely. Yes, we did turn things around, and he’s a much more capable manager now than he ever was before.

When you want someone to embark on a risky project or take bold, decisive action, don’t look to the person with the perfect record who has never failed. If they haven’t taken risks or been bold before, why would they change just for you? Clearly what they’ve been doing worked for them—it got them praise, promotions and financial rewards.

Paradoxically, perhaps that person with the checkered past is exactly who you’re looking for. The person who misses that game-winning shot one day, improves their skills, and nails it the next time is the real winner. Success is about trying over and over and accepting the bobbles along the way. Unfortunately, the tendency on the part of many people is to view a mistake as total failure. This deprives them, and their managers, of the chance to improve and seek greater challenges.

Who would you rather trust when the stakes are high? The person with the perfect record, or the one who is the equivalent of Michael Jordan?

Less Than a Duck

Some years ago, I had the rather dubious pleasure of watching an organization implode. Arguments, recriminations, people leaving, the works. What had happened? Well, it seems that salary information for a certain employee, let’s call him Fred, got out. Now Fred was a decent enough employee but, at least in the opinion of the rest of the department, he didn’t deserve to be paid significantly more than the rest of them. Unfortunately, he was being paid significantly more, for no clear reasons. There was Fred and then there was everyone else. The general feeling by everyone else was that Fred’s work simply didn’t deserve the greater pay despite his having the word “Senior” as part of his title.

This perception of unfairness caused no end of problems. Management’s response didn’t help. While they did make some attempt to deal with the facts of the situation, they failed to address the real problem: a great many employees no longer felt that the system was fair. That lack of fairness, in turn, undermined trust and things went down hill from there.

Now, the fact is, all organizations need to have metrics for determining raises, deciding whom to promote or punish, resolve conflicts, give awards, and on. Sometimes the methodology is crystal clear, sometimes not so much. Either approach can work, provided that the process appears to be fair. At IBM under Tom Watson Jr., while the guy with the PhD might get a higher starting salary than the guy without one, if they did the same quality of work then after a couple of years they’d be getting paid approximately the same amount. Whether or not this is literally true, certainly IBMers at the time believed it to be true. The process was perceived to be fair.

Fairness, of course, is itself a funny thing. What is fair? Well, most Americans consider a trial to be fair provided evidence is presented and the accused has the right to face her accusers. Justice that appears arbitrary or capricious will generally evoke reactions ranging from discomfort to outrage. Of course, sometimes an outcome that doesn’t match our perceptions of justice will also trigger such reactions, as in the OJ Simpson trial. Most often, though, we expect the process to be fair even if it occasionally fails to deliver the results we want: if the process by which raises are given is perceived to be fair, then we know that over time our pay will be commensurate with our work, even if we didn’t get a raise this particular time around.

In the classic comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is a scene early in the movie where a woman is accused of being a witch. Now, as everyone knows, you determine if someone is really a witch by throwing them in the water: if they drown, they’re innocent and if they float they’re guilty. Sir Bedevere then launches into a bit of brilliant logic in which he determines that since witches float and ducks float, if the woman weighs less than a duck, she must be a witch. When they put her on the scales with a duck, she does, indeed, weigh less than the duck (possibly due to an appropriately placed thumb). This may not be a particularly fair system of justice, but at least the Python version was funny.

Of course, Holy Grail is a movie. It’s not reality. Fortunately, we don’t have to look very hard to find a real life example of a process that many people perceive to be unfair: the recent USADA claim that Lance Armstrong doped and the recommendation that he be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

Now, before I go any further, I should make it clear that I’m not a competitive cyclist, I don’t know Lance Armstrong personally, and I have no inside knowledge of whether or not he doped. My concern here is with the process, not the outcome. My analysis is based purely on the information provided in the newspaper articles I’ve been reading about the case.

The system appears unfair exactly because it violates the maxims of how many people are conditioned to think about justice: for one, there is no physical evidence. Lance Armstrong has never failed a drug test. Although USADA claims to have physical evidence, they also won’t let anyone see it. Since they are a private organization, they aren’t bound by legal rules of evidence; however, the fact that they have the right to withhold the evidence doesn’t mean that the perception of such behavior is favorable.

It’s worth noting that the US government recently concluded a two year investigation into the doping allegations leveled against Armstrong and ended up dropping the case due to lack of evidence. This makes USADA’s claim seem even more baseless. Even the argument that Armstrong made so much money riding his bike that he could afford to fool the government is hard to swallow: professional baseball players make just a tiny bit more than professional cyclists and the government was able to find plenty of evidence in those cases.

One of the conversations that, sadly, happens all too frequently in many businesses goes something like this:

Manager: I hear you haven’t been a good team player.

Employee: What are you talking about? I’m constantly helping the team. Who said that?

Manager: That’s what people say.

Employee: Which people?

Manager: I can’t tell you.

Employee: What was the situation?

Manager: It’s not important. What matters is that they say you aren’t a good team player.

This is particularly frustrating for the employee who may have no clue what the claims are about and certainly cannot address the specific issues. In fact, in the situations I’ve dealt with, the most common reason for the complaint is a misunderstanding that could have been easily resolved if the two people had spoken. Less common, but hardly unheard of, is someone making a complaint in order to bring down a high flyer or to advance a personal agenda. At one Massachusetts company, employees figured out that if there was even a hint of disagreement with another employee, file a complaint with management. The first complainer always won.

Going back to the USADA example, one of the points I’ve seen mentioned over and over is that much of their case is based on hearsay evidence from riders whom USADA threatened to ban if they didn’t testify against Armstrong. Exactly who those riders are, however, is unclear since USADA won’t release the names. While they may have perfectly valid reasons for having secret witnesses, the behavior is one that is easily perceived to violate cultural norms of fairness.

In a situation such as a professional sport, the perception of fairness in administering drug claims may not be all that important. It’s not impossible to make a reasonable argument that what matters is getting the cheaters, just as some people might argue that a trial is unnecessary when we know someone is guilty. Of course, this begs the question of what happens when you make a mistake (as an aside, while I’ve met many people who seriously support the maxim of guilty when accused, those who have subsequently been the target of an accusation always seem to feel they should be the exception to that rule). In a business, mistakes of this nature can lead to expensive litigation or to difficulties retaining and hiring top people. When there is a perception that your career can be derailed by a disgruntled coworker passed over for promotion or by a petty bureaucrat whose highest accomplishment is destroying others to advance his own career, it’s hard to be loyal to that organization or to trust your coworkers. Lack of loyalty decreases performance and job satisfaction, which leads to reduced revenue for the business, higher turnover, and a more expensive recruiting process. The perception of organizational justice has far reaching implications for the success of the business.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Flawed Execution — Don’t Lose Your Head Over It

I’m pleased to announce that my next book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” will be published by Springer in 2013.

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

There’s an old joke about a lawyer, a priest, and an engineer being sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The lawyer goes first. He kneels, and the blade comes swishing down. Suddenly, it stops just before it hits his neck. The crowd gasps. After a hurried discussion, the executioner announces that since the lawyer survived, it wouldn’t be legal to try again. He’s released.

The priest goes next. Once again, the blade stops just before it severs his head. The executioner declares that clearly it was the divine hand of providence at work, and so the priest is released.

Now it’s the engineer’s turn. Just as he’s about to kneel down, he looked up at the blade and says, “Hey, I see the problem.”

Leaving the engineer aside for the moment, what we have here is a classic case of flawed execution. It’s a fairly common, though less dramatic, event in many businesses. Unlike this particular example of flawed execution, however, when it happens in a business heads often end up rolling.

This, of course, is exactly the problem.

Now, it may seem like flawed execution is a bad thing. In fact, though, what is more important than the execution itself is how the company responds to its success or failure. This is particularly true in organizations that claim to promote innovation or organizational learning.

When a leader takes the view that mistakes mean that heads will role, that sends a very clear message to the rest of the organization: mistakes are something terrible. They are to be avoided at all costs. In other words, always play it safe because if you make a mistake, you’re in trouble. It also means never experiment because your experiment might not work out. In fact, most experiments don’t work; we conduct them to find out what will work.

To put this in perspective, at one software company the engineers on one project had to make some decisions about how users would interact with the program. They had several possible designs, but could not choose between them. Eventually, they made the logical decision to pick one and conduct some user tests. The first few rounds of tests did not go well, but eventually they hit on a design that the users liked. The response from the department head was, “That’s great, but why didn’t you get it right the first time? Your errors cost us a lot of time and money.”

On the next product cycle, the engineers simply picked one alternative and when it didn’t work blamed marketing for not providing them sufficient information. Naturally, marketing responded by blaming engineering, and so it went. Once heads start to roll, the most important thing is to make sure that someone else’s head is the one that goes. This rapidly undermines trust and teamwork.

Conversely, in highly innovative organizations, mistakes are accepted as a necessary part of the game. Indeed, these organizations try to avoid simply jumping to an answer. They recognize, as the engineer in our little joke did not, that jumping to a solution can have fatal consequences. Palm Computing, for example, conducted numerous user tests before releasing the first Palm Pilot. Many of those tests simply involved people walking around with pieces of wood in order to find the right form factor for the Palm devices.

The trick with both innovation and organizational learning is recognizing that you often don’t exactly know what you’re going to build or learn. Learning in particular is a product of making mistakes; when you don’t allow mistakes, you also don’t allow learning. As for innovation, well, it’s very hard to pick the right answer when you’re exploring unknown territory. Rather, getting to a right answer is a process of exploration and experimentation. That process of collaborating with your team, sharing successes and failures along the way, is what truly builds a strong and resilient team, as well as high quality products and services.

In the end, it’s the flawed execution that really gets you what you want, while jumping to the apparently correct answer too quickly can be fatal. No joke.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck, and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Eye of the Hurricane

I was lying on my back. Standing around me were four people who, only two weeks before, had been teaching a class on appropriate emergency response in jujitsu.

The fact that I was flat on my back on the ground was not, in one sense, unusual. A friend of mine was taking his black belt exam and I had volunteered to let him demonstrate his throws on me. Things went slightly off the rails when he threw me, lost his balance, and ended up kicking me in the head.

The “thwock!” echoed through the gym.

One of the instructors was supposed to take charge. They stared down at me. I stared up at them. Eventually, I said, “Someone get me an ice pack.”

One of the men jumped slightly, turned, and ran out of the room. A moment later, he ran back in with one of those first aid kid chemical cold packs in his right hand.

“It’s not cold,” he yelled.

“You have to squeeze it,” came a voice from somewhere in the room.

In case you were ever curious, yes, it is possible to squeeze one of those cold packs too hard.

For such a small cold pack, the contents covered a remarkably large area.

I looked at my now soaking gi. I got to my feet.

“I’m fine now. Please don’t help me any more.”

Fortunately, in this situation, there was no permanent harm done and the fact that several people froze at the moment of crisis was merely embarrassing. My gi wasn’t even stained.

Unfortunately, many businesses are not so lucky. Even more unfortunately, it’s not the actual disasters that freeze them: handling the rare fire or power failure is barely a blip in the proverbial routine. Rather, the “disasters” that throw everything off balance and freeze decision making in its tracks are those that could have been anticipated or for which management thought that they had prepared.

Despite all their training, when the accident occurred, the four jujitsu instructors metaphorically lost their balance by focusing on the image of how bad it could be. That prevented them from acting immediately to determine how bad it actually was.

At Lacunae Software, the ship date was two days off when QA found a major bug in the software. Rather than stop, investigate the severity, and determine an appropriate course of action, the CEO announced that delaying the ship would clearly doom the company. He castigated QA for disloyalty and ordered the product to ship on schedule. Customers were not happy, costing the company more than the delay would have. Acting out of fear of how bad it could have been made the situation worse.

When things are going well and something suddenly goes wrong, it can be very easy to focus on all the potential negatives. That doesn’t help. Successful companies have the habit of focusing on what can go right. Developing that mindset takes practice:

Take a deep breathe and recognize that you have more time than you think. This is quite probably the hardest step.

• Remind yourself of the vision for your product and company (you do have a vision, right?).
• Review the steps necessary to manifest that vision. It can help to write them down as you go through them.
• List the things that can go right to move you forward from where you are. Be realistic, and also optimistic.
• Any time you find yourself focusing on what can go wrong, stop and shift back to what can go right. Evaluate the problems later.

Far too many companies never define their vision nor do they map out the path to success. The secret to success is staying on balance. The secret to not losing balance is knowing where you’re going, reminding yourself how you’ll get there, and focusing on the positive.

Don’t over commit to start the new year!

Why do so many people end up overcommitted at work, in volunteer activities, or socially?

The tendency to say “yes” to any request stems from several sources.

First, most of us like to think of ourselves as the type of person who helps others. Thus, when a friend or colleague (or boss) asks for help, that request immediately triggers us to think, “But if I don’t help, what does that say about me? I’m not <selfish/mean/self-centered/uncaring/etc.” So, we agree to help in order to protect our self-image.

Second, and related, is what’s known as social theater: in certain environments, there are certain role expectations that are taken for granted. Helping others is often one of those expectations. Therefore, when someone asks, we agree almost automatically, without really thinking through the consequences, or even the wisdom, of the decision. Essentially, behaviors that we learned at some point in our lives without really thinking about them become automatic behaviors later when the right trigger presents itself.

Third, many businesses foster a culture of obedience and pressure to always get more done in less time. Although this cultural baggage is ultimately destructive to the business, as it leads to burnout and corner-cutting, in the short-term it appears to be very rewarding. Thus, it gets repeated and hailed as an emblem of the dedication and productivity of the employees. It is, in reality, a sign of a company with relatively low functioning teams: high performance teams know their limits and are willing to stand up for them. Low functioning teams, and the members thereof, routinely bite off more than they can chew.

Fourth, when we over promise and fail to deliver, we frequently assume that the problem lies within us: if we’d just worked harder, if we were just a little more skilled, if we just a little smarter, and so forth. Thus, we become even more determined to “get it right” the next time around. In truth, the problem was not that we weren’t working hard enough, or weren’t smart enough, etc. The problem was that we simply tried to do too much, not some personal failing that can be corrected by working harder.

So how do you prevent this from happening?

There are several techniques, which can be used singly or in combination.

One trick is to identify the thought or image that pops into your head the moment someone asks you for help. It can be hard to catch this, but with a little effort, most people will discover that some image flashed across their brain and that they are reacting to that image instead of the request for help. That image might be a thought about how important it is to help others, or a belief that other person can’t succeed without your help, or an image of being fired for not helping, etc. This is one of those situations where if you ask 99 people to describe their image, you’ll get 99 responses :). Once you catch the image, you can look at it and ask yourself if it’s actually realistic. Do they really need your help that badly? If you’re a productive employee, do you honestly think you’ll get fired for saying “no?”

Another thing to recognize is that boundary testing is a normal part of all relationships: we instinctively attempt to understand our environment, and that includes understanding what we can and cannot expect from the people around us. Not knowing the boundaries is anxiety producing. Children do this sort of boundary testing all the time, and when they don’t find a boundary their behavior only gets worse until they get a reaction. Adults are different only the sophistication (and even that is arguable!) of their boundary testing. Thus, saying “no” is a form of setting boundaries. Setting boundaries actually helps make other people feel more secure because they now know what to expect from you, and also establishes you as a peer of the person making the request. Consider, the only people who are, in our society, nominally prohibited from setting boundaries are children. Children are typically expected to comply with most adult requests (how often did you hear, “When your mother asks, it’s not a request!” when you were growing up?). Thus, it’s important to recognize boundary testing and also recognize that setting limits is beneficial for everyone.

Another approach is to reverse the question: “I’d love to help you, and I’m not sure how I can fit this into my schedule. Let me go through with you what I have to get done over the <time> and you can help me figure it out.” Frequently, people ask for help without realizing the degree of imposition. Going through your constraints and asking them to help you figure out how to fit in their request is often a good technique to get them to realize just how much they are asking of you. If, in the end, you still decide to accept the request, you’ve at least enabled them to recognize just how big a favor they’re asking.

Note that if your boss is making the request, you can still apply this approach, with a slight modification: “I would love to do this, and I’m concerned that if I agree, these other projects will suffer. Please let me know your thoughts on how I should prioritize these different tasks.”

By the way, it can help to block out chunks of time on the calendar representing the total amount of time you expect a task to take (when you estimate how long a task should take, add 25%… most of us underestimate!). Tasks never seem that big when you’re thinking about them abstractly, but when you create a visual representation, you’ll be amazed how much time you’ve allocated.

All right, so  you’re already over-committed, what do you do? The best thing is to take an honest look at your tasks, prioritize, and then start contacting people. You can start with either your lowest priorities or your most recent “Of course I’ll do that!” Either way, you need to say, “I’m sorry. I know I told you I would help you, and I’ve discovered that these prior commitments are going to take much longer than expected.”

No, the other person won’t be happy. However, they will be a lot happier that you told them early on, not at the last minute. The longer you wait, the more painful the conversation becomes, the angrier they’ll be, and the worse you’ll feel. Moreover, you’ll be that much more likely to give in when they start complaining, leaving you feeling overworked and bullied.

What do you really stand for?

Knowing where you are going as a company, and having a simple, clear, exciting vision that you can communicate well to your employees can improve performance dramatically. So why doesn’t it work more often?

The key to having a powerful vision is to be consistent across all aspects of your corporate behavior. If you want people to care, they have to feel that they are caring about something that matters up and down the company.

Take, for example, the recent debacle at Lowe’s. As several articles in the NY Times discussed,  Lowe’s decided to fund a reality show called “All-American Muslim.” This show committed the unforgivable sin of revealing that Muslim Americans are much like every other American as opposed to being terrorists. In response to complaints from one group, Lowe’s then pulled out of the show, triggering a great deal more complaints, this time from almost everyone else.

Now, Lowe’s might claim to support diversity and oppose racism, as quoted in another Times article:  “In a statement on its Facebook page, Lowe’s said it had ‘a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion’ but had pulled its spots from the show because it ‘became a lightning rod’ for’individuals and groups’ with ‘strong political and social views.’ ”

In other words, it appears that Lowe’s feels strongly about supporting anything that no one argues with. Unfortunately, this does not exactly send a message about strong commitment to your own values. One has to wonder how an employee at Lowe’s will feel about the corporate vision going forward from here.

By comparison, let’s look at the employees of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. As discussed in a recent news story, when gunman attacked the city three years ago, employees risked their own lives to protect guests at the hotel. This can be directly attributed to the Taj’s consistent vision of providing outstanding customer service no matter what, a vision that is carried out at all levels of the organization and reinforced at every opportunity.

As I discuss in my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” a vision needs to answer some key questions, including:

• “Where are we going?”
• “Why do we care?”
• “Why does anyone else care?”
• How will the world change, even a little, if we accomplish our vision?”

These are all important and necessary questions to address, but they are not sufficient to make your vision work. You also have to believe in the vision, and you have to demonstrate that you will stand up for what you believe in. Otherwise, you shouldn’t waste your time with a vision: you’re better off not standing for anything at all than demonstrating that you won’t stand up for what you claim to care about.

How to Use Sports to Advance Leadership and Organizational Development – Steve Balzac with James Rick

Here’s the blurb from my appearance on the Full Potential Show. For the actual show, click here.

Can sports be used for more than just fun and pleasure? You bet!  The same disciplines or character development, leadership and team based skills applies to almost every other domain in life.

Steve Balzac is a man of many talents. He is a consultant, speaker, and author of 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development. He is a popular speaker on such topics as leadership, team building, interviewing skills, and sports performance. In this interview, he shares the lessons he has learned from the sports he excels in – Jiu Jitsu and fencing – and how they tie-in with the honing of leadership and organizational development potential.

THE TIE IN

a)    Use the other person’s force against him (as in Jiu Jitsu)
b)    Meet and go with the force of the other person in order to take him to where you want him to go
c)    In a difficult situation, attract the other person to where you want to take him
d)    Don’t be afraid to try different techniques, even if you have to look like an idiot sometimes
e)    Explore and practice the fundamentals well (as in fencing)
f)    Build yourself to a point where you can stay focused for long periods of time
g)    When you’re up there, you should not care whether you win or lose. If you focus on the outcome, you doubt yourself and hesitate
h)    After preparing your team, give them permission to go off and achieve what they need to
i)    Look at mistakes as the cornerstone of innovation and as a part of the process of evolution
j)    Determine if mistakes repeatedly committed is due to a flaw in the system
k)    Don’t do all your research ahead of time – it’s impossible to know everything ahead of time
l)    Develop a culture where it’s acceptable of everybody to commit mistakes, including you
m)    Consult with your followers to show them you’re interested in listening to their ideas

FINAL POINTERS ON LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT:

1)    Tell your own story – what you’re trying to do and why you care about it
2)    While you should have an outcome, dwelling on it during show time can actually hinder performance
3)    Walk your way backwards through the steps from the outcome – this will make the first step very easy
4)    Don’t be afraid to ask someone to show you the way (no team makes it to the Olympics without a coach). This will shorten your learning curve.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “Experiment” is synonymous with mistakes and breakthroughs.

Who Betrays One Master

A nervous looking man in a suit slips furtively through the streets of an unnamed city. He comes to an office building and, checking to make sure that he isn’t being watched, slips inside. There, another man greets him.

“Do you have the plans?” the second man asks.

“Do you have the money?” replies the first.

Perhaps they haggle for a moment, but then the second man hands over the money and the first man hands over an envelope. The second man glances into the envelope.

“I see you kept your word.”

“You earned it,” replies the first man as he turns to leave.

“No,” says the second, as he pulls a gun and shoots the first man, “I bought it.”

“I betrayed my company for you! I proved my loyalty.” gasps the first man, as he falls to the floor.

The second man looks down at the body on the floor and says, “The man who betrays one master will assuredly betray another.”

If this scene sounds familiar, it probably is. Some variation of it appears in hundreds of movies, from James Bond to WWII action films to fantasy adventure. The trope is a simple one: a man betrays his country, company, organization, or teacher. The person to whom he sells out reaps the rewards, but never believes the traitor’s protestations of loyalty to his new masters. Eventually, it ends badly for the traitor.

Now, if this scenario were only a work of fiction, there would be little more to say. Unfortunately, the fictional part is the end: in real life the disloyal person is rewarded and given every opportunity to betray his new masters.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

A Tale of Two Light Bulbs

As published in the CEO Refresher