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Kevin and I had lunch a few weeks ago. I always enjoy getting together with Kevin because he thinks about things most people don’t think about and he thinks about them differently. So it’s always interesting. This time the creative juices started flowing about what conference workshop we’d most like to attend but have never seen offered.
I’m not sure what we’d call it. Maybe something like: creative destruction; eliminating the extra; decommissioning the dumb; stopping the silliness; terminating the terrible; out damn spot!
Organizations are enamoured with initiating, starting, beginning, installing: new projects, practices, or processes. The issue isn’t that something new is starting – the problem is continuously starting something new without clearing out the old to make room for it. Neither people nor organizations have infinite capacity. Sooner or later you need to clear out the old, outdated policies, practices and perspectives that are no longer fitting, to make room for the new.
All things natural have some kind of elimination function: trees drop leaves, dogs shed their coat, dead grass composts. You wouldn’t last long if your body didn’t keep eliminating what no longer served you well. Organizations don’t have an equivalent elimination function. They become bloated and constipated and the whole system becomes sluggish.
I think there’s a new C-suite job here; the CCEO (Chief Crap Elimination Officer). The key measure for the job is to keep the ratio of Initiation/Elimination close to 1. When initiation gets too far ahead of elimination the system bogs down. On the other hand, too much elimination and insufficient initiation renders an organization degenerating into chaos and stuck in the past.
Do you have a CCEO? Do you need one?
Do you know what a high I/E is costing you?
The co-founders of an organization recently asked me to make an anniversary presentation and acknowledge their contribution with a gift of two of my images (I’m a reasonably accomplished amateur photographer).
After carefully selecting and fine-tuning the images, I had them printed and framed and took them to a large organization that ships packages all over the world and offers to get them to their destination on time (think brown).
I took the framed prints to them on a Monday. The presentation was on Saturday night. There were lots of delivery options: overnight, two days, three days, by ground, etc. They wrapped and boxed the framed prints and recommended their three-day option. That would schedule the prints to arrive on Thursday, leaving an extra day in case something unforeseen happened.
However, the prints did not arrive in three days. I called to find out where the package was and what would be done to get it delivered on time. After hearing, “Sorry, you’ll have to call this number,” I explained that on Saturday, I was standing up in front of 100 people to make a presentation of the contents of the package that they had in their possession. The first person I talked with at their call centre said there was nothing she could do. She might as well have said, “It sure sucks to be you. Too bad you chose to do business with us.” Her supervisor sounded more helpful, but he referred me to someone else, who asked me to call another location. It went on and on.
While listening to yet another employee tell me “We’ll see what we can do,” I imagined myself empty-handed in front of 100 people. I didn’t want the shipper “seeing” — I needed them to be “doing.” There is a world of difference between “seeing what you can do” and “doing what it takes.” From the beginning, seeing what you can do builds in an excuse. You absolve yourself from all responsibility for delivering on a commitment and from expecting that commitment to mean something. If you say “We’ll see what we can do” fast, you can pretend that it means something other than “I took a look and saw that I couldn’t do anything.”
Eventually, the manager at the depot in Dallas called me, got a description of the package — its size, color, weight, fragile stickers — and did what it took. He went out and searched through as many 18-wheeler trailers in his yard as it took to find the package, and delivered it personally to the front desk of the hotel at 8 p.m. on Friday night. Thanks for doing what it took.
Are you willing to “do what it takes” or are you just “seeing what you can do”? Which world are you living in?
Send us your examples of people who did what it took and we will highlight them here.
Photos: Armstrong images
An executive I know, who excels at accomplishment, recently told me: “I want to charge right into action but I’m forcing myself to just listen.” Since this guy is still developing his ability to develop others, his way of “just listening” is to try to suppress the urge to tell others what to do. Do you ever feel like you have to force yourself “just to listen”?
Suppression never works. It doesn’t free people to bring out their strengths. Development is a much better bet. What strength of yours, if you developed it to another level, would replace what you are trying to suppress? What capability, if developed, would displace a blind urge to act?
First, be intentional about what you listen for. Intention, plus attention and interest, shapes your listening. Think of the radio antenna in your car: although it receives everything broadcast in your area, you can choose which station you want to listen to. Therefore, rather than just listening, you can listen for an opportunity to appreciate your small accomplishments or good starts and those of others.
You can also listen for others’ strengths and their possible next steps, providing guidance and encouragement in that direction. For instance, if you have a natural gift in writing or editing, you might find it easy to create an engaging document without errors, while others consider the task a challenge and will miss their own mistakes. You can help others develop themselves in an area through conversations that help them see how to capitalize on their unique strengths. This would readily surround you with people capable of accomplishing more of the right things with ease.
It takes intention to listen for how people have developed. If you watch carefully and openly, you can notice when they are seeing things differently or when they are faking it. However, many people miss such opportunities. Some of them are so stuck with their image of “already knowing” who someone “is,” they wouldn’t notice if this person transformed from a caterpillar into a butterfly in front of their face. It astounds me how often I see this.
Start with your own strengths: pick one to develop. This could be anything from listening to collaboration. Stick with it for a month, then fine-tune how you can focus your intentional listening. That way, you will lead more people to fulfilling, sustainable accomplishment, the kind that creates the authentic engagement that so many organizations are struggling to find these days. Rather than suppressing yourself by “just listening”, you will boost your own power and make things easier for everyone.
Photo: iStock
Here’s the short version of the story. Find people who are very good at what they do but don’t worry that they won’t know what they actually do, how they do it or why they do it. Go ahead and ask them to describe it anyway. They will do their best to provide a plausible description and explanation. Then use this description and explanation — which may in fact be the opposite of what they actually do — as the basis for training others and in some cases paying others. Smart! Why didn’t I think of that!
It’s no wonder that despite all the latest and greatest ideas of the month, fads and apparent short cuts to success that things don’t improve or improve sustainably. It really does pay to get at what’s fundamental: fundamental strengths; the first principles of communication and what really fuels accomplishment.
Here’s the longer version:
In September 2007 , I wrote about some of the problems when organizations try to describe leadership competencies — one the favorite corporate flavors of the month that unfortunately still isn’t past its “best before” date.
I must apologize for misleading you. It is way, way worse than I thought at the time. Now I’m definitely a little late getting to this but I just finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell . His insights into the unconscious mind seriously undermine a fundamental basis on which competencies rest: consulting experts to determine what they do and how they do it.
Gladwell cites an example of Vic Braden, one of the world’s top tennis coaches. Braden, he says, hasn’t found a single pro tennis player in the world who is consistent in “knowing and explaining exactly what he does.” All the pros say that they use their wrist to roll their racquet over the ball. Amazingly, when you slow down the high speed action and examine it in minute detail — that is not what they do. A digitized analysis of Andre Agassi’s swing, for example, shows that he doesn’t move his wrist until long after the ball has been hit.
Now this is significant for a couple of reasons. First, when we’re talking with a pro about his or her tennis swing it is something physical — something that can be observed, recorded, slowed down and analyzed. And the analysis shows they don’t actually know what they are doing. They know the effect they create but they do not actually know what they are doing that creates that effect.
Now take something like leadership. Leadership does not happen on the outside, it happens on the inside. From the outside, leadership looks like any other human interaction. There is some talking, there is some listening and there is some silence. Sometimes the talking and listening is in big groups, sometimes small groups, sometime one on one. What’s the big deal? Talking and listening.
But what’s going on inside the leader: what is the leader thinking about; how are they thinking about it; why are they thinking about these things and not others? How do they determine who to talk with, who to talk with first, next, next? One at a time, in small groups or as a large group? How often — once certainly won’t be enough. How do they determine who to encourage and who to disrupt? When to take a hard line or when to take some more time? And all these considerations — plus many more — are just a thin slice in time and most of the choices occur on an unconscious level.
While the evidence of leadership shows up in what gets accomplished there is scant evidence available about how the leader orients to the world inside her and the world outside her. What is really going on — the myriad choices and decisions is completely invisible to the high speed cameras that could actually tell us whether she is rolling her wrist before or after the shot.
Not only is there no evidence available to the external observer; we do not even have reliable access to our own thinking. Gladwell describes an experiment by the psychologist Norman Maier in which the subjects needed to solve a problem by swinging a rope back and forth. There were three other solutions but swinging the ropes wasn’t obvious. None of the subjects discovered this solution on their own. At some point the experimenter would walk past one of the ropes in a way that created a very subtle movement in the rope. After that, most people suddenly came up with the solution of swinging one of the ropes. The most interesting part is that when they were asked how they came up with the solution only one person could say that they were helped by the subtle hint provided by the experimenter when he walked past the rope. Everyone else came up with some explanation — and some of them very elaborate explanations — that were not true!
So now we have an interesting situation. The experts we would want to rely on as our best examples to emulate are unreliable for describing what they do or how they do it. However, either because of the way our human brains work or the culture we live in; or perhaps some combination of both, we seem to be compelled to offer explanations. It’s just that those explanations cannot be relied on as true!
Best Practices have considerable undeserved cachet. There is an embarrassment of unexamined assumptions embedded in the myths surrounding best practices.
There is no clear, common understanding of what is meant by “best practices”. Does it refer to the practices of the “best” companies; or to practices of some of the best known companies, or the best known publicly traded companies? Or is it the most common practices of a selected set of some of the best known, you get the point.
And who says those practices are the “best”? Or even that they are the specific practices that have led to that companies (presumed) success?
America’s Test Kitchen is an organization that tests kitchen equipment and recipes. The point here is that they test them — they have a panel of people who test them. They don’t publish the “best” recipes without having their panel test them at home and then rate them for the results they produce. Often, the “best” kitchen equipment does not come from the best manufacturer (biggest market cap) or the best known brand. And, it’s seldom the most expensive.
The best practice for scrambling eggs is determined by people scrambling eggs in different ways and tasting the results. The best chocolate cake practice is determined in a taste-test bake-off.
Nobody bets millions on the best way to scramble eggs and those practices are tested! Organizations bet tens and hundreds of millions on best practices all the time without any testing! With scant evidence of the effectiveness of the practices — without a bake-off that determines that some particular practice is best for them.
And of course, there’s the rub. How would you know if some practice — some way of doing things — is best for your organization? Let’s bring just a dash of thoughtfulness to this issue before running off half-baked to the next conference or workshop purporting to tell you about the best practices in some particular area.
AN EFFECTIVE DISTRACTION
Best Practices are an effective distraction from the real source of power in creating competitive advantage. That’s why smart organizations are so willing to share them! They distract others from noticing what really makes the difference. Distraction — the best magicians have mastered the art. They tell you what to keep your eye on to keep you from noticing what they are really doing.
Think about what it would take for a practice to be “best” for you and your organization. First, it would have to integrate with other practices. Even the most simplistic thinkers would be hard pressed to suggest that there is any one practice in an organization that has no relation to other practices: that the part of the organization employing that practice has no effect on the rest of the organization and the rest of the organization has no effect on that part. Impossible! Separate and disconnected is the primary source of organizational difficulty; not a solution.
The organization that develops a particular practice does it in some particular circumstances, at some particular time, to address an issue that those people, at that time, saw needed to be addressed and who determined an effective way for them to address it given their unique strengths, background and relationships with each other.
Well of course that practice ought to work for you and your organization! You’re just like them! Or more insidiously as the thinking goes, if we act like them in this particular area we can become as successful as them.
Rubbish! Your thinking; your orientation is a more fundamental source of power for improving organizational performance than your practices ever will be. What is required for your organization to be successful at this point in time, facing these challenges with these people? Did you make this up or discern it from listening deeply for something fundamental that is missing and available?
Develop practices that fit what is called for now and evolve them as your organization develops and as circumstances change.
COOKING UP BEST PRACTICES FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION
(An untested recipe but that shouldn’t matter)
Gently mix several “good eggs” until integrated. Do not separate. Be careful; we just want them folded together, not beaten.
Place over high heat and stir gently with a significant accomplishment required by a specific deadline.
Add the spice of fresh thinking; whip up inspiration, listen for practical solutions bubbling up.
Reduce over the inescapable heat of reality.
Serve developmentally.
