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Category: Leadership
How do you want to be remembered?
“The rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand, and even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies”
-Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People
For many years I was a training facilitator for The Dale Carnegie Course. The above quote was one of my favorites. It encapsulates what I believe is the most important thing to know when building relationships and leading others: Making the other person feel important.
Once I worked with a fellow named Don. He had a way of making people feel special. He would greet people with a warm, sincere smile, and immediately begin to ask questions that enabled them to talk about themselves. Remember, that is everyone’s favorite subject!
Don was an avid fisherman, and one time he went on a trip way up north in the Canadian wilderness. In his experience, he interacted with the guides and staff at the lodge. As usual, he showed his genuine interest, and was able to find out things about people that were very informative and entertaining. The conversations Don had with them was one of the highlights of his trip. When Don checked out, the host said, “I keep hearing from my staff members about you. They want to know when you will be coming back. They have never done that before!”
What Don did was what many of us don’t feel we have time to do: Find out what makes others feel important and listen to their story. If we do, we will brighten people’s day and make them feel important. We may never know what a difference that will make.
Rule #1 in problem-solving
You may have noticed a couple of pervasive buzz words going around in the business world today: Synergy and/or collaboration. It means teams getting out of their silos, putting all their heads together, and solving problems. The first and most important step is defining the problem. By defining a problem, it means that you have simply stated the situation in a factual, non-blameful way.
As simple as this sounds, I find that people struggle with this step. Too often in problem-solving team members start out with blame or just a symptom of the problem.
Several years ago, I was teaching a management class, Ralph was one of the class participants, and he decided to apply this fundamental with his team. He asked for a statement of the problem, and he heard comments like, “Sam didn’t do the quality check in time”, or “the belts were not changed in time and the machine broke down”. Ralph stopped them right there by saying, “That’s not the problem”. He stuck with it, and they finally came up with a simple statement they could all agree on: “The problem is we had a late delivery to a key customer”. Now we are cooking! Instead of getting into blame and finger-pointing, we can work through the next three steps of the problem solving process.
2. What are the causes of the problem?
3. What are the possible solutions?
4. What is the best possible solution?
The team agreed on the best solution, laid out their action steps, and were well on their way to making the changes to improve delivery time. Ralph said that had he not insisted they define the problem, they would have gone round and round. Remember, if you have a problem to solve, begin by defining it. Consider the old maxim, “A problem defined is a problem half solved”
Be slow to hire…quick to fire
A good leader cares about his team. Who would want to work for someone who didn’t care?
I have a good friend who is a caring leader and a successful businessman. I was talking with Jim a couple months ago, and he talked about a challenge he accepted a month before while attending a trade convention. The challenge was this:
“Imagine that someone contacted you, and wanted to buy your business. They made you an offer that was hard to refuse. You quickly realized that you could retire early if you accepted this offer. It was in cash, and you accepted.
After about a year, you received a call from the same person, and things weren’t going well. They were desperate, and wanted you to know if you would be willing to buy the business back for 10 cents on the dollar. You were twitching to get back to work, and you took the offer. Here is the question: Now that you own the business again, who would you hire back? Is there anyone you would not hire back? If so, why is this person still working for you?”
It was a day of reckoning for Jim. He did have a manager that he would not hire back in that scenario. He knew what he had to do. He let him go. The person who has since replaced the dismissed manager is doing very well, and the business is doing much better. Jim, like many I know, said the same thing after he let a sub-performer go: “I wished I had done it sooner”. If he had, it would have saved him a lot of grief and money.
Here is the message: If someone is consistently under-performing, and he or she has been given ample opportunity to improve, it is usually wise to part company. It can actually turn out to be a “win-win” rather than a “lose-lose”
Keep the “I” out of the word “Team”
Last week the Wall Street Journal featured an article by Joanne Lublin entitled, “To get ahead, rivals get along.” In the column Ms. Lublin pointed out that 73% of the heads of S&P 500 companies who were selected last year came from within, compared with 69% in 2017. Along with this rise, candidates with exceptional people skills are most desirable. “Employers now prefer to elevate highly collaborative executives.” Here is an example of just how important this quality can be:
Two years ago I was working with a company that had two internal candidates named Jim and Bob. They were applying for the same position. They like, trusted, and respected each other, and were willing to be a good sport about it if they weren’t selected. After one was selected, these two continued to work together and keep their relationship solid. Two years later, the candidate who was passed by was offered a management position at another location. It was just what he wanted. He has since excelled at the position, and has now been given another promotion. Jim and Bob both have a position in the company at a corporate level, and their ability to work together is exceptional. As the classic rule of synergy goes, Jim and Bob together are greater than the sum of the two.
If you are playing in sports, you play to beat the other team. That only makes sense. When it comes to competing with people on your own team, try competing against yourself. Like Bethoven and Shakespeare, strive to compete against yourself and your own record. Your team will be a combination of strengths.
Building an Innovative Culture
Have you ever water skied? I have done so about a half-dozen times. With a few misfires in the beginning, I got up and stayed up. When I was skiing, the most prevalent thought I had was to avoid falling. As I result, I stayed in the wake and made no attempt to risk crossing it.
I have a friend who is an expert water skier. Not only would he cross the wake, he can do it barefoot! He loves to ski and finds it to be a never-ending adventure. He is also a very successful business owner, and as you might expect, he likes his employees to enjoy themselves in their work, and always rise to a challenge.
Now let’s talk about the opposite: There are companies I have seen where the team member’s main thought is to not do or say anything that would rock the boat. If they have an idea that they think would help the company, they hold back for fear of being shot down. In other words, like me on skis, they are afraid to cross the wake.
When we think of the companies that have become successful and stayed that way, names like “Disney” or “Apple” come to mind. Where would these great companies be without the input and engagement of their staff? These companies are smart, and they have learned that creating a culture with idea fluency is vital to continued healthy growth.
Let’s consider our own team. When someone comes up with an idea, do we suspend judgment and hear them out? Are they confident “crossing the wake”? If we sense not, this may be a good time practice more encouragement and better listening. It will pay!