As a leader it’s my job to shine a light on what’s going on around me, interpret it and influence others in a positive direction.
Using my sight, I notice what’s important to benefit my team, my organization and our world.
Sometimes, just like when a light image is projected on my retina, I’m upside-down in my view. Other times, I’m blind in one particular spot like where the optical nerve connects to the retina. (What can I say, I’ve spent a lot of time with Optometrists).
It’s only through noticing my upside-downness or blindness that I can process it through my nervous and emotional system to connect with the full picture.
Throughout my career, I’ve recruited and coached diverse business teams of talented individuals. Diversity of skill, viewpoint and relationship is critical as we create services for the complex needs of human beings. I could tell you that I started building diverse teams because it offered a way for everyone’s voice to be heard, and to connect to the humanity in each person, but that wouldn’t be true.
The truth for me lacked emotional and idealistic content. I believe in diverse teams because they outperform homogeneous groups. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top 25% for management ethnic and racial diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns beyond the mean for their industry.
I led these diverse teams with “can-do” attitude and optimism. And with this optimism, I strode into action. I was ready to do something about a challenge, but not really connecting to the problem.
The problem was racism, yet I didn’t see it even when I was so close.
I shrugged my shoulders, remained positive and continued to move ahead. When I noticed racism, it was mostly in video news clips including reprehensible words of those looking to incite fear.
But racism was around me, and I was shamefully ignoring it.
A friend helped me realize just how blind I had been, like the spot on my retina.
“Imagine if you were kidnapped,” she said, “brought to another country, raped, beaten and owned as property. And if that wasn’t enough, your collective history was erased and replaced by white European culture, the culture of your oppressors.”
“Essentially, my identity was suppressed by the people who were supposed to be my neighbors, and I struggled in this life to find it.” She added.
Racism is real and alive every day in this country. For many, authority figures such as business leaders and police are oppressors instead of protectors.
These are not just beliefs. There are many verifiable facts about this. Facts that, up until recently, I have filtered out in my naïve, optimistic, and disconnected efforts to build diverse teams.
Let’s bring a real reason for diverse teams into the light – because racism exists and must be overcome at every level. I get to (not have to) see my team through empathy. And I get to put that into action. I get to feel the pain and responsibility too.
There is no room to hide the bigotry I have ignored, those who only want to work with “their kind”. I am ready to have that conversation more directly now.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to see and eradicate racism and bigotry. First by education, and if that doesn’t work, we cut it out like the cancer it is. The majority I am in has a moral obligation to serve and protect the minority.
A few articles ago, I challenged leaders to exercise ownership thinking – asking “What could go wrong?” I invite you now to look through your own unconscious bias and answer these questions:
What is upside down or in my blind spot?
What has gone wrong for so long that I might not even notice most days?
What can I do right now, tomorrow and for our future?
As leaders, it’s up to us. #BlackLivesMatter
How are you shining a light on racism, shameful acts and deeply disturbing elements of our society?
A colleague of mine told me about a recent Zoom meeting. This Zoom was with the CFO of a successful distribution company, calling from his mobile line instead of joining via video.
She asked him, “What do you worry about?”
The CFO talked about the slowness of his team to adapt to changing market conditions, and that he was disappointed.
‘Curious response from a senior business leader’ I thought.
After a few other follow-up questions, my colleague then asked “What are you looking forward to?” The CFO responded, “I can’t wait until we are back together again in the office so we can get some real work done.”
My curiosity began shifting to queasiness.
“How has the team responded when you’re talking with them face to face on Zoom?” her final question.
“Well, my set-up doesn’t have a camera, so we have frequent one-on-one calls.”
My queasiness shifted to full blown discomfort!
I’m sure you’re following this, but let me summarize anyway.
This CFO is unhappy with the performance of his team, but has not invested $100 in a camera to upgrade his technology so that he can more effectively lead his team.
I’m reminded of advice that my Stryker mentor, Jeff Paulsen, gave me:
“The speed of the leader equals the speed of the team.”
Jeff is a very, very smart person who provided lots of good advice. But this phrase I have repeated more than any other.
When my team isn’t getting the urgency of the situation. I look in the mirror. My sense of urgency (or lack) must be setting the pace for the team.
When my team isn’t adopting new processes or technology. I look in the mirror.
When my team isn’t finding problems, instead, hoping everything is ok. I look in the mirror.
How am I showing my team that all of this poor performance is ok? What example am I setting?
When I figure out how I am challenged in a specific area, and change my approach, the team usually follows.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I always know HOW to change my approach. That’s where colleagues, coaching, mentors and experts come in.
In order to make an effective change, I must know where I’m heading – what “great” looks like.
And then I start with “good”.
Because I also believe that “great” can sometimes be the enemy of “good”.
I’ve seldom gone from no experience in a particular skill, to “great” immediately. So I shouldn’t expect my team to get there instantaneously either.
Let’s go back to that CFO leading a virtual team. If he were interested in creating a great virtual team, he would purchase a good video camera, and he would reach out to thought leaders.
We happen to have a great thought leader here in South Florida – Nina Segura from Super Virtual Teams.
Nina has taught me literally everything I know about creating and leading virtual teams. It’s not something that I have been naturally inclined to do. When working in an office environment, I’m voted most likely to walk over and knock on a door before even calling.
So, virtual teams were initially a big stretch for me. Now my consulting business depends on them.
I wasn’t much different than the CFO we met earlier. Except, I was willing to seek out experts and learn, so that I could move faster.
Speed of the leader equals the speed of the team.
How are your business reopening plans progressing?
How are your teams moving to capitalize on market opportunities?
What’s your speed making these critical changes?
Are you actively demolishing roadblocks that stand in their way, or are YOU the roadblock?
You and I can be both the problem and the solution. We’ve created roadblocks, and we also get to clear them.
Please share your speed with me. I look forward to hearing from you!
Twice weekly, I head to the gym to challenge myself with Octavio Cifuentes, a South Florida trainer for world class athletes, who graciously agreed to work with me. He has a process and method, often not readily apparent, building my strength to be both durable and explosive.
Durable and explosive… that sounds like a great business attribute. We’ll discuss that in a moment.
In my third session, after dragging a 250lb sled up and down the gym floor, I caught my breath long enough to ask – “Octavio, why all this sled dragging?” He paused, looked up from his energy drink and said. “I know you can’t see it now, we’re building your core. A strong core is essential to overall health, strength and agility. Without building a strong core first, building anything else would only lead to injury.” Then, he said. “Rest time is over, twenty push-ups please.”
17, 18 , 19… and 20. Breathless once again, I looked down at my still extant gut. Octavio was watching. “Also, I want you to remember this hard work when you decide what to feed your core.”
Your business has a core. Is it durable and explosive, or flabby and indulgent?
Do you feed it healthy fuel, and exercise it? Or do you binge on junk food and work super hard in spurts to try to create the appearance of health? Does a business core workout leave you breathless and panting to recover? Is your business injured because you ignored the core? Do you know where your core is?
We’ve found that there are three actions key to a strong core, and resulting strong business results.
Action #1: Define Your Core
In this action, it is important to describe your basic business activities and their tie to profitability. Look for the twenty percent of the actions that contribute eighty percent of the profitability. Know how you measure these key activities. Are your mission, vision and values consistent with these activities? Which skills and processes are essential to creating these services and products for your customers?
Please also note that just as your personal core includes the gut, your business core will also include the ability to go with “gut” calls, pivoting and aligning quickly. Cores can change too. Make sure you’re revisiting your business core and appropriately changing or expanding it.
Collecting cash by managing accounts receivable is an example of a core skill and process. Without cashflow, companies will suffer serious injury possibly leading to death.
Action #2: Feed and Exercise Your Core
Time to get real here. How much focus do you put on your business core? Building your business can feel a lot like dragging that 250lb sled – a painful slog. Are you feeding it with nutritious and clean burning energy in the form of the right leadership, skills training, process and employee development? Do you have a continuous feedback loop with your customers? Are the basic functions of your company people or process dependent?
When you look at your company, do you see a bunch of heroes? Do you observe shouting, running, extreme last-minute adrenaline-fueled efforts? While this is interesting in a Marvel Comics sort of way, it shows me that more feeding and exercising of the business core is needed. In a company with a well fed and exercised core, it often looks like not much is going on.
Action #3: Notice the results. Be patient, they’re often just under the surface.
Companies with a strong core can be a bit stealthy with Action #3. Competitors may see a gut, when the real strength and power lie just below the surface, and at first you might only see a gut too. Just know that muscles are being exercised, teams are forming, skills are being built, profitable business results are supporting company financial health and agility. And when the time is right, the time that you decide, these results will show up in the market with explosive strength and durability.
Tesla is a terrific example of that latent core, ready to burst forth. For years, the company was a custom manufacturer of funky electric roadsters. Then over a few years, stepped into the light as the world’s leading maker of electric cars.
I’m reminded of the words of coach Gabriella Goddard,
“Connect with your core and you’ll find strength. Act from your core and you’ll move mountains.”
What’s your core? How to you measure it? Do your customers and competitors know it, or is it an industry secret?
Do you have an expert coach like Octavio supporting you on the path to building it? Let’s start a dialog.
“Email is dead”. That’s what I hear from the plethora of marketing/seo companies who show up in email accounts that I seldom use. Instead of attempting to build a relationship with me, they’re looking for a marketing spend “booty call”.
I have passed on the booty calls, but I was buying the message that email is dead. My email marketing had been, in a word, irrelevant. Impersonal, infrequent communication about topics that weren’t interesting.
Until…a few days ago when my view on email started to shift in a more positive direction. Why? I attended a course on effective email marketing and communication – LeeAnn Webster’s Lead Machine Weekend.
What I began to see was that email isn’t dead at all. It’s actually a timeless skill that has been relegated to the back row of communication methods, pushed out by emojis and omnipresent social media. As a result, our ability to write an email with heart and clarity has declined, especially over the last ten years. That’s sad.
So now when it comes to email, I more closely resemble a Mark Twain quote: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
I’ve begun to revamp my email marketing communication using the following best practices. According to LeeAnn at Lead Machine, an effective marketing email has five components:
Engaging content– interesting, relevant to the reader and likely to elicit a response
Authentic voice– is written like the business or author would talk
Regularity– delivered on a routine basis – not too frequently or infrequently
Delivered with seamless technology– like a good friend, just shows up without any hassle
Contains valuable information (lead magnet)– this is free information that supports the reader.
Let’s compare these five best practices to a recent email that landed in my personal inbox on March 14, 2020.
It was a “Dear Family” email from a restaurant 200 miles from my home where I had cancelled a dinner reservation sometime in 2017. Since I apparently was “family”, they went on to tell me about their approach to cleaning their restaurant and that they were “closely monitoring the situation.”
Engaging content– “we’re cleaning our restaurant”
Authentic voice – if this is how they talk to their family, I imagine there are some strained relationships
Regularity – once since 2017
Delivered with seamless technology– like a narcissist friend showing up
Contains valuable information – none
The “Dear Family” email is a total miss on all five points. My response to this less than heartfelt communication was “unsubscribe”.
Since learning these best practices, I’ve been critiquing marketing emails – including ones that I have generated in the past. This disappointing result is not unusual. Most are a total miss.
Ok, now for the timeless part of email. Writing a great email precisely tracks the creation process of something that is quite uncommon these days – the letter. Illustrating this point, let’s review a typical letter that I received from my Grandparents, Honey and Poppa, circa 1982.
Engaging content– gave me a glimpse into their life in that moment and that they wish I were there too
Authentic voice– 100% authenticity, 100% of the time, they didn’t know anything different. Being a social influencer meant doing the right thing in the neighborhood
Regularity– every holiday, birthday and once a month in between
Delivered with seamless technology – just put a stamp on it, drop it in the mailbox, and it would arrive like clockwork two days later
Contains valuable information – telling me about their plans for our next celebration, which were always great
Kudos to LeeAnn Webster for using timeless concepts to bring email into a modern, relevant discussion.
How does your email marketing stack up against these best practices? Do you have heartfelt and relevant emails to share? Have you written a letter recently?
Recently, I met with an experienced CEO, Ray* who is a former client. He’s had a great record of business growth and value creation at his company, with a string of twenty consecutive years of profit increases. That string will likely end in 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic.
While talking about the changes he expected to make at his company, I asked him “How ready do you think your organization is for this change?”
“Well, they need to be ready, because it’s going to happen one way or the other!” was his sharp response.
My body twitched a bit with anxiety that was familiar, and my stomach started churning. I’ve been a CEO, so I recognize this comment as something that I’ve also said. To put it bluntly, ego was talking when I said it, thinking that I could speak change into existence, due to my leadership position, instead of looking for evidence of my organization’s real ability to create change. Thankfully this time, after hearing this from Ray, I paused, took a deep breath, and then he and I got into a long discussion on best practices leading change.
According to Nina Segura, CEO of Metaspire Consulting and Change Expert, over 80% of business changes fail. That’s a dismal result, and a stat that many leaders fail to consider when creating plans for change. So how do the 20% who are successful do it? They leave their ego aside, put away the bluster, and take a measured, thoughtful approach to change.
They use three steps to lead change in their company:
Get a frank assessment of the company’s current ability to make a change
Create a plan for the change
Focus on what’s in it for me (WIIFM) for employees and customers
Each of these steps have a number of attributes to consider. I will highlight a few.
A frank assessment is created by talking by talking with employees across a wide area of responsibility. The important thing to remember here is that you must seek feedback beyond those who report directly to you. Enlist allies to get this feedback, especially those whose natural way of thinking is contrary to yours. It’s also a good idea to tap informal leaders in your company, those who have influence among their peers, but perhaps don’t have the title. This step takes time, consider leverage experts in this area to accelerate efforts.
The first element of a plan for change is a vision of the company after the change, illustrating the impact of the result. Other essential elements include a structured approach on how leaders will communicate and support the change, resources required and for how long, and whether outside expertise is needed. This plan is initially created with the best information we have at the moment, then iterated as new information becomes available. Our initial plan never survives contact with the market. Expect it to pivot and evolve.
The focus on WIIFM is important when things do go wrong, or the path is harder than imagined. Employees need to know why they’re change their routine, and are being asked to learn new things. Openness and directness are key when communicating in this phase. Employees have very well-developed BS detectors, and will often feel unexpressed doubts that you may have. Customers are a little less connected to you but also need to also understand why, and how long should they expect to see these changes?
In our current business climate, we are required to make changes. How are your changes progressing?
Happy to support you as you consider a new change for your team or organization. Please comment here, call, text or email.
In our consulting business practice, we work with many successful, entrepreneurial business owners and also long-term employees who acquire equity in the business and seek to grow into a senior leadership role.
A foundational element of our coaching is that one essential mind shift is necessary to move from employee to owner. As luck would have it, this is also an essential skill to exercise in your business to ensure that it survives the COVID-19 crisis, and best illustrated in a story.
Much earlier in my career, I was a mid-level manager at a fine china manufacturing company, a company that took pride in the fact that it provided china service for the White House for over a hundred years. The company had a sound distribution model with excellent relationships in the retail space. The corporate owner of this fine china company, full of artisans including painters, silversmiths and porcelain designers, demanded that profitability improve year over year. What could the management team do, none of whom were owners, to increasing profitability? Well, they did what many employees do in their roles. They made the best decision they could and “hoped” there weren’t any problems. In this case, the decision was to expand from two outlet stores to over one hundred, thereby increasing sales tremendously! A brilliant plan, right? Brilliant except for one thing, no one on the team that came up with this idea thought like an owner.
What do I mean “think like an owner?” Through my experience working with successful owners of many companies, plus, owning and leading a company myself, an owner asks: “What could go wrong?” and intentionally and persistently looks for problems inside their own business. While employees are “hoping” something works so they don’t get into trouble, owners are looking for trouble, heck they’re inviting trouble into their day by looking for problems. And after these problems are uncovered, then and only then can they be resolved.
Back to the fine china company. The outlet plan was a huge success for a few years. Until…problems began – the demand at the outlets outpaced production at the factory. Inferior goods were brought in to cover the supply shortfall, customers started returning more of their purchases because they didn’t match the 1st quality china they had at home. The brand reputation was tarnished. Ten years of this cycle put the company in a very bad place and the corporate parent sold this once proud fine china company at a loss.
I’ve thought about this decline many times over the years. Had there been even one leader in a position of influence who thought like an owner, could this fine china company still be impressing us with its American handcrafted products?
So how does this apply to the business environment now around COVID-19?
I hear some people in companies talking like employees, saying things like…”When things come back” or “When we are back to normal.” These are two statements firmly anchored in hope, but not anchored in an owner approach of looking for problems. Owners looking for problems are asking questions including:
“What may never be the same about my business?”
“What if key employees that I’ve furloughed don’t come back?”
“What if key customers don’t come back?”
“What if my line of credit from the bank is withdrawn?”
“What are all of the expenses that I can cut now?”
“What could go wrong after social distancing ends?”
How have you talked about your business today? Did your remarks come from an owner or employee perspective?
Thanks for reading this article and please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
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