If you missed my appearance on MYOB Radio on Sunday (or if you heard it and can’t wait to hear it again 🙂 ), you can listen to my interview on what makes successful leadership here.
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“Mind your Own Business”
A Radio Show for Entrepreneurs by Entrepreneurs |
I will be appearing on the “Mind your Own Business” Radio Show this week. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Sunday between 9-11 AM to hear my segment!
Local Stations:
WBNW 1120 AM – Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA
WSMN 1590 AM – Nashua, NH
or stream online @ MYOBTheRadioShow.com
Last Friday, I was on Business Insanity Talk Radio speaking on the five components of effective leadership. If I’ve done this right, here’s the segment I was in:
SteveOnBusinessInsanityRadio20August
I just got the word from McGraw-Hill: My book, The 36-Hour Course on Organizational Development, went to the printer today! Although the official release date isn’t until mid-October, pre-orders should start shipping by the end of September.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
Why Are They So Unmotivated?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about some “impossible to motivate” employee who is busily training for a marathon or something else that requires a tremendous amount of dedication, focus, energy, and, you guessed it, motivation.
What you’re looking for are those employees who approach their jobs with the same level of dedication and focus that they approach training for a marathon or other activity. It’s very hard to find those employees. It’s easier to create them.
Motivation comes from many sources. It starts with the culture you’ve built, the vision you’ve created for your company, the goals you set, and your hiring process. Those elements make up your foundation.
Ultimately, motivation is a strong desire to do (or sometimes not do) something. That desire can be imposed from without, or it can come from within and be supported from without. You want the second.
Remember, no one becomes an Olympic athlete for the money, although some Olympians might end up making a great deal of money. Top athletes succeed because they are driven to perform at a high level. The money and the adulation only reinforce that drive. The ones who are out solely for the money are the ones who are most likely to give up.
Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way
In the Japanese martial art of jujitsu, the practitioner learns to not respond to a push with a push or a pull with a pull. Meeting force with force only creates opposition. While you might be strong enough to win some conflicts, eventually they take their toll. When someone pulls, you push. When someone pushes, you pull or you get out of the way. You don’t oppose.
In jujitsu, the harder you make it for someone to stay on his feet, the harder it is for you to make him fall down. The goal is not to make it hard for your opponent to remain standing; the goal is to make it easy for him to fall down. The workplace is not all that different. Force creates opposition. Threats, fear, even many incentives, only lead to resistance. The very act of trying to force people to do something causes them to become suspicious and reduces their willingness to do it. It doesn’t matter how much they might want to do it.
To be fair, I do hear from managers who insist that force works: they make sure their employees know who is boss and what will happen if they don’t toe the line. There are problems with this approach. Constantly pushing people means that you can’t see where you’re going. All of your effort is going into the act of pushing. Sometimes they’ll feel like you’re going too fast. Sometimes they’ll mistake an attempt to change course as a shove and resist, or they’ll go too far and step to one side, leaving you to fall on your nose. The more you push, the harder it is to hit that moving target.
You want the employees who know where to go and why they should go there—and who understand how to get to their destination without you constantly having to force them to do it. You want a team so dedicated that if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run you over.
Understanding motivation is the first step to getting such a team.
Here’s an interesting article on the British study about how working long hours can be detrimental to your health.
Of course, I’ll confess that a big part of why I like it is that I was extensively quoted… 🙂
I’ll be doing a webinar on Feb 1 on the topic of “Cartesian Splits and Chinese Splits.” The webinar will focus on mental side of sport performance. Here’s the description:
Many gifted children tend to focus the greater part of their energies on intellectual pursuits. When they participate in sports, they often find themselves frustrated by the experience of “getting it” intellectually, but being unable to execute the techniques being taught, or finding that their body just does not appear to respond the way their mind does. Gifted children will often respond by increasing their focus on their intellectual skills, neglecting or dismissing the value of the physical. Mental training techniques such as relaxation and visualization combined with integrated mind/body activities in a mastery setting, such as martial arts, can provide gifted children the opportunity to developtheir physical skills in a fun and supportive environment. This seminar will draw upon current research in the field of sport psychology as well as the instructor’s own experiences in both competitive and non-competitive sports.
More information and a registration link is available at http://giftedonlineconferences.ning.com/
I was interviewed recently on Youth Sport Psychology Radio on how to succeed by imagining success. You can listen to it here:
“We need to take our time and carefully evaluate the situation.”
“We don’t have a lot of time and we need to move forward.”
Both of these statements were made about the same project by different sets of people. The first was made by a representative of a large company, the second by a representative of a much smaller company with which the larger company was working. The folks from the large company wanted to plan everything out to the last detail, avoid any possible errors, guarantee a perfect product, and not move forward until success was assured. The members of the smaller company, not having the financial resources of the larger company and being more personally invested, wanted to get the project started.
In any project, it’s important to evaluate the situation and determine the best way to move forward. However, in any non-trivial project, it’s impossible at the beginning to foresee every eventuality. When leaving on a trip, one attempts to plan for various contingencies such as traffic, weather, flight delays, and so forth; however, some things cannot be predicted either because they are too far off to see clearly or because changing conditions make long-term prediction unreliable. On the other hand, it’s foolish to set forth on a journey without making some effort to predict the possible pitfalls and plan for how to deal with them.
There’s an old saying that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” While true, how, and when, the battle plan fails can provide valuable information about what is going wrong and how to fix it. That’s assuming, of course, that the plan is designed correctly in the first place.
When planning a project, be it a battle, software development, a sales campaign, or just about anything else, the first step is always to understand how you’ll know when you’re at your destination. If you don’t know what success looks like in terms of the results you expect to achieve, it’s all too easy to take the wrong turn. Once you know what success is, only then can you identify what failure looks like.
Of course, success or failure is still a long way off. That means that your descriptions will, of necessity, be more or less vague. In order to sharpen your focus, you need to identify several stopping points between where you are now and where you want to end up. When doing this exercise, it often helps to work backward from the end point. Those stopping points become your initial milestones and should be sharper the closer they are to your starting point. A secondary goal of your milestones is to identify resources and dependencies and make sure they will be available or met at appropriate times.
For each milestone you must once again repeat the process of understanding where you are and how you’ll know if you didn’t get there. Your goal is not to avoid all possible errors, but to make sure you can identify errors as quickly as possible and be willing to cut your losses before you’ve invested too many resources down a non-functional path. When you’re uncertain which way to go, it often helps to explore several possibilities simultaneously. Some will be wrong, but if you cut your losses well, then you can save a great deal of time and may develop some novel or unexpected solutions. Walt Disney liked to have a dozen movies in production at once: he knew that half of them would flop, just not which half.
Once you have your milestones, you can get started. At each milestone, you need to evaluate your progress and adjust as necessary. What worked and what did not? Have unexpected problems cropped up? Are their external dependencies that may become a problem? It’s not about fixing blame but about understanding how to best allocate your resources and move forward. Mistakes are part of the game and initial guesses about how difficult tasks are or how long they might take are often wrong.
Once you’ve done all that, you’re still not ready to move forward to the next milestone. It’s important to take a little time and see what you’ve learned about your upcoming milestones. Have they come into sharper focus? Do they need to change? Have you discovered new dependencies that need to be taken into account or are there old dependencies that are no longer relevant?
While this may seem like a lot of work, with a little practice it becomes surprisingly easy. Once you understand your route and know how you’ll adjust it as necessary, cutting loose the anchors and moving forward is remarkably simple and even relaxing. You’ll reach your destination faster than if you rush forward without considering or planning for potential obstacles and much faster than if you never start.
I was just quoted on how to embrace your competition. No, it doesn’t involve a knife in the other hand 🙂
http://bit.ly/EmbraceCompetition
In the end, if you can make the pie bigger, you both win.
I was recently interviewed on Youth Sport Radio on how to build confidence in young athletes. Funny thing… the same techniques work for older athletes and, with a very little modification, in a business setting as well.
