The Business Sensei

That’s An Amazing Serve!

One of those little tricks known to certain expert tennis players is saying to an opponent, “That’s an amazing serve! However do you do it?”

They’ll typically do this as they switch sides of the net, and suddenly the opponent’s amazing serve fizzles. By making the other player think about what he’s doing and focus on his body, instead of on the ball, that one question can completely change the course of a game.

Many practitioners of jujitsu and aikido learn the unbendable arm: they are told to extend their arm and imagine water jetting out at high pressure. Their arm becomes incredibly hard to bend. If they try to focus on the muscles, the arm is relatively easy to bend.

A similar trick is used by proponents of medical magnets and various other magic therapies: they’ll ask you hold your thumb and forefinger together on your right hand, and really focus on keeping those fingers together. They’ll then grab your fingers and pull them apart. Next, they have you hold the magnet or the magic herb packet in your other hand, and imagine the strength it’s giving you. Suddenly, your fingers can’t be pulled apart.

It’s a cool trick. I do it regularly by claiming my MIT class ring is magnetic and having the other person hold it in their off hand. Even though people know there’s obviously a trick, it works virtually every time.

So what’s going on? It turns out that when you focus someone on the mechanics of how their body moves, it scrambles their ability to do it. On the other hand, when you focus someone on a particular effect, be that a good serve, an unbendable arm, or keeping your fingers together, the body figures out the best way to achieve the desired result.

To put this another way, we become less capable when we attempt to micromanage ourselves. We become more capable when we learn to trust ourselves to exercise our skills in the ways that make the most sense for us. We do best when we have the freedom to focus on what we want to accomplish and discover the best way of accomplishing it, instead of being locked into one way of doing it.

What is even more interesting is that the behavior of teams mimics the behavior of individuals. The more a manager attempts to control the details of how the team is doing its job, the less capable the team becomes. The expert leader knows how to trust his team and gets out of their way.

The beginning jujitsu player attempts to make every piece of the move perfect: they try to turn their arm at just the right angle, step to just the right spot, and so forth. They are stiff and awkward. The master knows the result she wants and produces it, confident that her body will do the right thing. What is the difference between the novice and the master? Correct practice. Obvious though this point may be, if you practice the wrong things, you’ll do the wrong things.

The team is no different:  a leader learns to trust his team and the members learn to trust the team and the leader through constant practice. Like jujitsu, however, it must be correct practice. The novice who practices incorrectly improves slowly, if at all. He may do more advanced techniques, but he does them with the same awkwardness and wasted energy of a beginner. The team which focuses on the wrong skills may be given more difficult projects, but it does them with the same lack of coordination and poor use of resources as it did when it first got together.

When teams come together and attempt to leap straight into project definition and problem solving, they are focusing on the wrong skills. They haven’t yet learned how to be a team. Before they can define the project or solve problems they have to learn how to make decisions that they can all support. That doesn’t mean they all have to agree with the decision, but every team member must be able to enthusiastically implement whatever the team decides. That won’t happen if the team doesn’t know how to settle disputes and achieve consensus without splitting itself into factions.

Unfortunately, when teams focus on the wrong skills, leaders are unable to trust those teams to make good decisions. The leader, therefore, takes it upon herself to make all the decisions. While this may be a great way to get started, it starts to break down as the problems become more complex. This causes the leader to attempt ever tighter control of the team, with increasingly poor results.

At one major manufacturing firm I worked with, a certain engineering director was the go-to guy. He could solve every problem, and the team knew it. The director often complained that if he was stuck in a meeting, work came to a screeching halt, assuming it ever got moving fast enough to screech as it halted! The idea of taking a vacation wasn’t even in the cards.

The solution was to help him back off and let go of his control. Instead of solving their problems, he started walking the team through his problem solving process. Instead of answering questions, he showed them how he found the answers to those questions. Instead of making the decisions, he helped them develop effective decision making skills. It was pretty uncomfortable at first: the team got it wrong a lot, and he kept imagining what his boss was going to say to him if things didn’t work out. After a while, though, the team started to get the idea. Their problem-solving and decision making skills improved.

One of the very difficult transitions for jujitsu practitioners is discovering that doing very little yields the biggest response. Focusing on what should happen to their partner allows the technique to become effortless. This director had the equivalent experience:  although he felt like he was doing less and less, his team was accomplishing more and more. The less he focused them on the details of getting things done, the more they were able to do. Eventually, he was able to focus his time and energy on long-term strategic thinking, instead of day-to-day minutia.

Trusting yourself, or your team, to do the right thing isn’t magic. It’s the result of hard work and correct practice. The more you control the details, the harder the task becomes. The more you enable your team to deal with the details, the easier it is for everyone, and the higher the quality of the results.

Sometimes less really is more.

What You See is Why You Do

I’m frequently asked for help motivating employees. The fact is, motivation is not that hard… provided you’ve built the right foundation!

When someone tells me that his department has a motivation problem, my first question is, “What’s your vision?”

The most common response is a blank look. Vision? Isn’t that some silly psychobabble or convenient buzzword?

Unfortunately, the concept of vision is often treated that way. Your vision, however, and your enthusiasm for it, are what make the difference between people who just show up and do their jobs and people who are excited and determined to excel.

People are motivated by their hopes and dreams, by causes, by being part of something that matters beyond the next paycheck. If you are the CEO, your enthusiasm is what brings the vision to life. If you are a manager, VP, department head, etc, then your enthusiasm in how you communicate the vision is what brings it to life for your team. If they see that you don’t care, why should they care?

I was recently listening to an Old Time Radio Science Fiction podcast of the classic Fritz Lieber sotry, “A Pail of Air.” At the end of the story, they played John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in which he vowed that the United States would land a man on the moon and bring him back again. Even now, 50 years later, it is still a powerful speech. Listening to him, it’s easy to see how his vision galvanized a nation.

The good news is that you don’t need to be John Kennedy to galvanize a company.  People devote hours to charities and hobbies because they have a vision of making a difference or achieving something significant. The key is to craft an exciting vision and then let your enthusiasm show.

I’ve often observed that the apparently unmotivated person at the office is the same person whom you’d find outside each evening training for a marathon or a hundred-mile bike ride (aka a “century”): it’s all a question of where they find meaning. I figured the concept was pretty clear, even though I’ve never run a marathon or ridden a century. I could never convince myself that it was worth the time and the pain involved in training for one of those endurance events.

Last summer, my father-in-law, Ira Yermish, died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was 64 and a serious endurance athlete, with seven Iron Man competitions and innumerable marathons and bike centuries under his belt.

This coming August, my wife, daughter, and I will be riding the Philly Livestrong Challenge in his memory. Livestrong raises money to help improve the lives of people with cancer, making this event even more significant: my mother died of cancer 13 years ago. Suddenly I have a cause, so training for a bike century just doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming.

Whom do you know who has died of cancer, or is living with it today? Please help make people’s lives better by donating to the Livestrong Foundation.

That vision thing? Yeah, it works.

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

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.” 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.

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

It’s barely the start of the new year, and I’ve already received half a dozen identical articles touting the benefits of SMART goals as the solution to all my New Year’s resolutions.

Now, to be fair, they have a point as far as it goes: New Year’s resolutions have a shorter half-life than champagne at a New Year’s party. However, that’s about as useful as these articles get.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, SMART goals are often touted as the secret to personal and business success. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of these goals will go the way of all New Year’s resolutions. Why? Because none of these articles actually tell you how to make SMART goals work. In fact, most people who try the SMART approach for any but small and relatively easy goals frequently find themselves frustrated and disillusioned.

Well-constructed goals are extremely powerful tools for getting things done, increasing concentration and motivation. Successfully completing a well-constructed goal builds self-confidence. Unfortunately, creating a well-constructed SMART goal is not quite so simple as the average article makes it out to be.

To begin with, a specific goal is only useful if it’s something you can control. Although this may seem obvious, the fact is that far too many people set goals that appear to be under their control, but really are not. For example, consider the athlete who sets the goal of winning an upcoming tournament: it’s specific, it’s measurable, it has a time of completion associated with it, and presumably it’s highly relevant to the athlete. Is it achievable? Depending on the athlete’s level of skill, very possibly. However, the athlete has no control over the difficulty of the competition. He may simply be outplayed by a more skilled opponent.

Furthermore, although the goal is measurable, in that the athlete will know whether or not he accomplishes it, the measurement is not particularly useful. At no time will he know how close he is to accomplishing the goal, where he needs to focus his energies, or what else needs to be accomplished. The athlete is far better served by setting the goal of exercising certain key skills in the competition, skills that have a high probability of leading to a victory. Not only will he gain the self-confidence boost of accomplishing his goal, he may just win the tournament. Whether your goal is winning a competition, selling a product to a particular customer, or getting a specific job, focusing mainly on outcomes only gets you in trouble.

Another problem is that a goal may simply be too big. If a goal takes years to accomplish, it can be extremely difficult to maintain motivation. Big, ambitious goals are wonderful, but they need to be carefully structured. It is vital to break them down into subgoals that can be accomplished in a much shorter period of time. The perception of progress is critical to maintaining motivation, whether for an individual or a team.

Having too many goals is another common problem. Well constructed goals are great, but if you have too many of them at once, they become a distraction. Many people can focus on three to five unrelated goals without a problem, but not ten or twenty. Keeping in mind that each goal might generate numerous subgoals along the way, it’s easy to see how having more than a few key goals can easily balloon out of control.

Is the goal something you really care about? Many people have goals that they don’t really care about. Perhaps they’ve been told it’s something they ought to do or they believe they should do, but they don’t really care about the outcome. If you don’t care whether or not you accomplish a goal, it’s hard to find the motivation to do it.

Used properly, SMART goals can be a very powerful and effective tool. Well-constructed goals can increase motivation, improve focus, and build self-confidence. Used improperly, they can decrease motivation, and destroy self-confidence. If you’re using SMART goals, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

Is my goal too big? How can I break it up?

Do I have too many goals? Is there enough time in the day/week/month to work on each one?

When will I work on each piece of my goal? How will they chain together?

Do I really care about my goal? Is this something I genuinely want to accomplish?

Good luck!

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

Originally published in Corp! Magazine

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety.  A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

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.” 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.

What Are You Really Asking For?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The names have been changed to protect the silly…

History teacher Norman Conquest had a very difficult student, Sasha Pandiaz. Sasha was constantly disruptive in class, driving Norman up the wall. Finally, Norman decided on a simple solution: when Sasha misbehaved, he would be sent out into the hall for five minutes. If he misbehaved three times, he spent the entire class sitting in the hall.

Inside of a week, Sasha was spending the entirety of each class in the hall. Sasha, it turns out, didn’t like the class. Although Norman thought he was punishing Sasha, apparently no one bothered to inform Sasha of that. As a result, Sasha was quite happy to miss each class; the long-term negative of a bad grade in the class was simply too far off and abstract to change Sasha’s behavior.

Fred was the VP of Engineering at Root-2 Systems. Fred had the habit of indicating his displeasure with engineers in his department by assigning them projects that were not particularly fun or interesting. At least, Fred didn’t find them particularly fun or interesting. Unfortunately, the engineers did. Rather than feeling punished, they thought they were being rewarded! As one engineer put it, “I thought Fred was ready to kill me, but then he gave me this really cool project.”

Thus, for example, instead of realizing that Fred was punishing them for blowing off a meeting, engineers believed he was rewarding them for skipping a meeting that they thought would be a waste of time. As a result, they kept repeating the behaviors that were infuriating Fred. By the time he figured out what was going on, Fred was bald.

At Mandragora Systems, Joe took over a key product team. He regularly exhorted his employees to work together: “We’re a team!” Joe cried loudly and often. But when it came time to evaluate performance, the song was a bit different:

“What were you doing with your time?”

“I was helping Bob.”

“If you’d finished your work, why didn’t you come to me for more?”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“Then why were you helping Bob?”

“It was something I could do quickly and would have taken him all night.”

“If Bob can’t do his job, that’s his problem. Worry about your own work.”

Astute employees soon realized that the key to a good review was to focus on their own work and devil take the hindmost. While Joe won points with his boss for his aggressive, no-nonsense style, and for his success in identifying weak players and eliminating them, something rather unexpected occurred: team performance declined on his watch. Instead of a team working together and combining their strengths, he ended up with a group of individuals out for themselves and exploiting one another’s weaknesses. The fact that this was damaging to the company in the long-run didn’t really matter as it was very definitely beneficial to the employees in the short-run.

There are several lessons to be drawn from these experiences.

First, it doesn’t matter whether you think you’re rewarding or punishing someone. What matters is what they think. If they think they’re being rewarded, they will naturally attempt to continue to get those rewards. If that means you lose your hair, so be it. If, on the other hand, they think they’re being punished, or at least not rewarded for their efforts, they will change their behavior no matter what you might say. Your actions really do speak louder than your words.

Second, no matter how much we might tell employees to think about the long-term rewards and delayed gratification, short-term rewards offer an almost irresistible lure. If you create a contradiction between the short-term and the long-term, most people will go for the short-term.

Third, if you want a strong team, you must reward team-oriented behaviors. If you only reward individualism, you’ll get a collection of individuals. For some jobs, that really is all you need. For many other jobs, though, it’s virtually impossible to succeed without a team.

In the end, people will do whatever they hear you telling them to do. It pays to make sure that what they are hearing is what you think you are saying.

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.

Psychology of branding

I was interviewed recently on the psychology of branding and creating personal brands. Since this question comes up a lot, I’m posting my thoughts here.

Let’s start by looking at what a brand is. At the most basic level, your brand is what people think of when you’re not there. IBM, for example, built a brand of service and dependability in the 1940s-1970s. Then their brand became overpriced and stodgy before they took control back in the 1990s and rebranded themselves.

Broadly speaking, a company’s brand is the shorthand for what they do and what’s exciting about them. A given brand won’t interest everyone; the goal is to create a brand that appeals to the people to whom you want to appeal: your target market if you’re selling products/services, your potential employees if you’re hiring, and so on.

Creating brand loyalty as early as possible and reinforcing whenever possible thus does two things: it builds your potential customer base and it builds a pool of people who start to connect themselves to the brand, who start to think of themselves as representing the brand. This is one of the easiest ways to attract potential  employees because they self-select: they’re already interested and at least passively loyal to the ideal of the company. Hiring people who are already bought into the ideal of the company saves a lot of effort convincing them to buy in later, and those employees are also the easiest to motivate.

Individuals, however, do not have the reach of a corporation. Corporations are also abstract entities, whereas individuals are, well, individual. Thus, individual brands need to focus more around personal attributes and what the brand means to others. For an employee, this usually means branding yourself as someone who produces results for the company. Specific details will vary according to the industry: a software engineer might build a brand as someone who writes bug-free code or who always delivers ahead of deadlines, etc. A salesman might build a brand around closing the most difficult clients, around rapid closure, around rescuing faltering deals, etc.

One of the reasons why candidates may stand out in an interview but fail to make a mark on the job is that they saw the interview and landing the job as the goal, instead of as a stepping stone. Another problem is that after a candidate lands the job, they often aren’t quite sure what to do next to stand out. If a candidate wants to establish their brand during the interview and then hit the ground running, I advise asking the interviewer(s) the following question: “If you hired me and in six months thought I’d done an excellent job, what would I have done to make you feel that way?”

Take notes when the interviewer answers! Not only does this question help the interviewer convince himself to hire you, you are also identifying your initial most critical goals. Hitting those goals establishes you as someone who produces results. Once you’ve established that brand, not only do better assignments come your way, you are also more likely to be forgiven if something does go wrong (and the fact is, sooner or later something always goes wrong).

What Big Picture?

As published in The CEO Refresher