| Insights From Kevin | July 11, 2017 |
Here’s the harsh reality: 70% of strategic initiatives fail in implementation. These are the large, “critically important” programs that leaders champion. They launch such campaigns to great fanfare, but most die a silent death, fading away with barely a mention (or sometimes crash).
According to Ram Charan, author of Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, “70% of strategic failures are due to poor execution… it’s rarely for lack of smarts or visions.”
But five fundamental actions can turn this situation around. In our experience, 70-80% of such initiatives succeed when a company follows these principles:
1. Explain your vision until employees actually understand it
Most programs fail for the simple reason that employees don’t understand what their leaders are trying to do. Stating your vision is not the same as making sure employees understand and absorb it.
People need to fully comprehend the vision. You need to give others a picture, both literally and figuratively. Show them: this is where we are going, and this is how we are going to get there (many leaders skip the second part). For example, you might explain that “we are going to invest in our sales force, put in a much more robust CRM, and increase our marketing.”
Finally, explain why you are doing this and why there is a sense of urgency. Show all what you are asking them to do.
2. Get people aligned
Posters, speeches, and company-wide email blasts are not nearly enough. Connect with your people, face-to-face. Get them to see that this is possible, that together you can actually achieve or surpass your goals.
Together, address questions such as:
- What would it look like if we were successful in this initiative?
- How would people act differently?
- What would each of us change?
For example, what does it look like when you raise the level of customer satisfaction? It looks like National car rental, where every employee asks, “How was your car? How was the service?” when you return it… and they actually listen to your answer.
3. Explain their role in delivering the vision
Every person and department should understand the roles and responsibilities that they own. They also need to understand the plan through which they will deliver the promised results.
In the absence of clarity, people tend to make stuff up. When this happens, chaos and inconsistency seeps into your business. Your description needs to be specific and vivid.
The more general the explanation, the greater the odds that things will go south. Companies like to skip training and explanations, but this is where you can cut chaos and confusion off at the pass.
4. Have a scorecard!
Walk into a well-run paper mill and you’ll see a sign that shows how many safe workdays that plant has operated in a row. It should also have daily and weekly production results on a whiteboard.
Well-run businesses are filled with employees who know how they are doing, both collectively as well as individually.
For example, the old Continental Airlines once set out to improve customer satisfaction. They decided that achieving more on-time departures was the single best way to impact customer satisfaction. One way they did this was by installing countdown clocks at each airport gate to track how much time remained before the plane needed to pull away from the gate on time, and the clocks publicly documented how the gate crew was doing.
5. Hold people accountable
When things don’t happen as planned, you need to have a culture that figures out what happened and holds people accountable for the results, or lack thereof. This doesn’t mean being overly harsh; it simply means recognizing that a problem exists and fixing it.
In failed projects, accountability often slowly fades away. People just stop trying, until eventually everyone does.
Summary
When you apply these five principles, you will start making solid progress. But it’s not magic. It’s a product of taking effective and consistent effort. If you go to the gym every day and follow what the trainer tells you, in not much time you will gain muscle mass and lose weight.
None of the above principles are a secret, but collectively they represent a healthy discipline.
Kevin Cullen is President of Leadera Consulting Group, specializing in producing breakthrough business results. If you want more on this conversation or the firm, contact us at Leadera Consulting Group.
Kevin Cullen: kcullen@leaderacg.com, cc: acook@leaderacg.com
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| Insights From Kevin Cullen |
From a very early age I was curious about the world and its places. Without a question my favorite subjects in school were history and geography because they revealed stories and mysteries about humanity and what had taken place from the very beginning of time. I recall reading about the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, which they referred to as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and about the Pharaohs. These stories left me in wonder. I dreamed of one day visiting these magical places, so it was bound to happen eventually. Recently I fulfilled this dream by traveling on an exciting adventure to Africa. On this trip I visited South Africa, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Egypt. If you’ve never been to Africa, I highly recommend it. It will change your life. As you can imagine, while in Tanzania we visited the Serengeti Plains and got to see all the animals you would imagine in their natural habitat. There are no words to describe how amazing this is to experience in person.
Next on the itinerary was the country of Rwanda, where I discovered something both profound and simple at the same time. As most people know, a horrible genocide took place there in 1994. Over two million people were murdered in the span of about three months basically over tribal categories assigned by the government. What happened there is chronicled in the award winning movie “Hotel Rwanda” ~ here’s the trailer to the film where you’ll learn what happened in 1994:
I was visiting Rwanda so that I could trek into the mountains to see the mountain gorillas. It was in these mountains that Dian Fossey did her famous research on behalf of these precious mountain gorillas. A film, “Gorillas in the Mist”, (https://youtu.be/-PPSIwe7sb8) depicts her journey and her commitment that ultimately cost her life. At the time she started her work in 1960, those gorillas were in grave danger of becoming extinct because of poaching. The population of these mountain gorillas had diminished to about 200. There are over 1000 gorillas today and poaching has been eliminated.
Despite the tragedies in the 90’s Rwanda today is a thriving, building, and inspiring country. The President of that country, Paul Kagame, took over the country after the genocide and began to aggressively set the country back on the right track. He was able to eliminate corruption, and under his leadership he has inspired the citizens of Rwanda to rebuild and grow in a unique and extraordinary way. Kegame was able to institute some remarkable things. One of his commitments was to begin a practice of cleaning up the country and keeping it clean. He urged the citizens to take on being proud of their country and having their country be totally free of litter, garbage and waste. The citizens took this on and they instituted a practice. On every last Saturday of the month, the entire country spends the morning from 8 AM to Noon in an activity called “Cleaning Day” in which every citizen spends those 4 hours cleaning up the cities, streets, fields, and the forests. Everyone is required to do this, including the President. And if for some reason you are not participating on any given Saturday morning and are seen driving down the street, you would get pulled over and handed a shovel or a broom, along with a small fine for violating the sacred pact they have as citizens.
When I arrived in Rwanda in the capital city of Kigali we had a three and half hour drive up to the staging hotel where we would stay before we went up to the mountain gorillas. After hearing about this cleanliness practice, I found it hard to believe so I made it my mission to find trash on the ground as we drove through the countryside. We traveled several hundred miles through the mountainous paths and brush. Now I really want you to imagine this ~ in three and a half hours over several hundred miles I could not find one piece of trash in that country. Not one piece. This was so unbelievable to me that I began wondering aloud what would happen if I did a little experiment and put a piece of trash on the road. Our driver and guide on the journey, Afrika, assured me that within 30 minutes whatever I put down would be cleaned up. He laughed at me ~ “You’d be wasting your time.” I wondered, “How do you know?” to which he replied, “Because I would pick it up!” “That’s just the way it is in our country.”
On the other hand, I would challenge anyone in the USA to conduct a similar experiment here. I think we can agree it wouldn’t go too far (we are not structured as a society or infrastructure to even seriously consider such a project. But I digress). It probably seems like a small thing, but I assure you that way of being has infiltrated the culture in many extraordinary ways, but first and foremost what’s apparent is the level of pride the citizens have. They take it very seriously. If you ever have a chance to visit the country, you will feel it immediately when you arrive. So what I learned on my way to see the gorillas is that real transformation is, indeed, possible in any circumstance or environment if you have a leader who takes a stand for the future, and provides the leadership required to bring that stand and vision to fruition.
Kevin Cullen is President of Leadera Consulting Group, specializing in producing breakthrough business results. If you want more on this conversation or the firm, contact us at Leadera Consulting Group.
Kevin Cullen: kcullen@leaderacg.com, cc: acook@leaderacg.com
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| Insights From Kevin | January 14, 2019 |
Each of us who occupies a leadership role wants to be an effective leader. We want to take actions that are meaningful, inspire others to action, and to fulfill on a vision for the future. That’s our job. However, direct action often doesn’t happen without having a few things in place first. To move a team, a company, or even a person for that matter, the leader has to establish a relationship with that person or group in which their constituents have a stake in the matter. More than ever, and especially today, “giving orders” does not work, except in rare circumstances which we’ll address later. We have found that what is most effective in developing this background of relatedness is having a relationship with a person or group that develops and fosters affinity, respect, admiration, and being connected. It is a leader’s job to establish this background of relatedness.
What is a background of relatedness? It’s the first step in moving something to action in a process we call “enrollment”. It begins with establishing a relationship in which two parties discover mutually shared goals or commitments. This can be anything from ‘we both have kids attending the same school, so we want to support the school’, to ‘we both are working on a research and development project in a biotech company to create a cure for a disease’.
Here is a simple example ~ Imagine that you arrive at an airport. You go outside to get a taxi. And as you’re standing there waiting, you’re next to someone also waiting and you begin to “chit chat” about this, that, and the other thing. And in the moment, you both discover that there are no taxis. One of you asks the other, “Where are you going?” “Midtown”. “Oh, I’m going to midtown too, would you like to share a cab?” “That would be great!”, and off you go together.
What allowed for the collaborative conversation was what had happened right before. It began as “casual banter”, the friendly exchange that took place that set the stage for discovering they were both going to the same place and both parties had the same goal and predicament. They discovered how they could solve the problem by solving it together. This simple example illustrates how a background of relatedness works.
One of the challenges a leader has is getting people on board or getting them to buy into a vision and to execute the strategy. This is a common and typical challenge for most leaders ~ how to articulate it. What do you say? How do you say it? And what medium do you use to be effective in getting people on board? I have asked over 10,000 professionals what they consider the worst method for communication and their unanimous response, “It’s email!” Yet I still see many leaders trying to get their people to implement difficult and complex strategies by sending out emails, essentially giving instructions. THIS NEVER WORKS ~ EVER.
Why? Because people fundamentally don’t like being told what to do and therefore, they resist it. One exception is in the military where the rules of the game are very different, as is the background of relatedness. Yet you would be surprised at how often people try to get away with it. Getting people on board requires a bit of a courtship, cultivating the conversation so that they see the sense of it and the value of what it is you’re going to ask them to do. It starts with a background of relatedness.
When a leader is initiating a new project the first step is gathering a key group of people to take them through a set of steps toward fulfillment. For this to be successful, that conversation must be grounded in a strong background of relatedness. Before asking for anything, a thoughtful leader starts by recognizing and appreciating several things about their team. This creates a certain relatedness. The leader might begin by thanking people for coming to the meeting, recognizing recent hard work and success, as well as validating and highlighting recent wins.
It could go like this ~ “Good morning everybody. Thank you for being here. I know we’re really busy trying to get third quarter results in and I want to appreciate how hard everybody has been working. Be clear, that’s paying off with some exceptional results, particularly this quarter. I can’t thank you enough.”
Once the stage is set by establishing a background of relatedness, and not until then, one can introduce what’s next – including asking people to get on board for the next phase of work or strategic initiative. At that point they can initiate a sense of urgency, but not until they have established that in “the listening” of their people. In our work we refer to that as the background of relatedness and it is the key ingredient in a set of conversations that lead to breakthrough results.
Kevin Cullen is President of Leadera Consulting Group, specializing in producing breakthrough business results. If you want more on this conversation or the firm, contact us at Leadera Consulting Group.
Kevin Cullen: kcullen@leaderacg.com, cc: acook@leaderacg.com
Read More| Insights From Kevin | November 15, 2017 |
I’ll bet if you’re like me you try to get the important things done first. They seem important because there’s usually a benefit for getting them done or some kind of pain for not getting them done. So, in one sense they occur like they have to be done. However, we often don’t relate to things on our plate with any sense of urgency. In fact, we often procrastinate particularly about the things we don’t want to confront.
Being effective at producing results is directly correlated to the speed with which we move things into action and get them complete. It has been said that power is defined by the rate at which you translate intention into reality. A person’s power is a function of being able to produce results with velocity. To do that, the task has to exist in time. Here’s something I’ve learned that I have burned into my DNA and it has changed everything: “if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist and it’s not going to happen.
There is an obvious benefit for getting things done and acting with priorities, so why don’t we approach things this way? There are three things that account for our tendency to put things off. The first is having no sense of urgency. Certainly, there are challenges that happen in life that we resolve with speed. However, usually those things often have some kind of consequence attached and the pain of not doing it occurs as greater than doing it ~ so we act. Absent the external consequence we often don’t act with a sense of urgency. Secondly, we fall in the trap of “someday”. You know those things that we’ll get to later. We put those things on the list of what there is “to do” and that keeps them in existence, but they exist only on the list ~ not as if they will actually get our attention for action. We don’t have time for those things now. We may never get to those things, in fact. And thirdly, complacency which stops us from taking any action. There are many situations in our lives to which we have become numb. We’ve learned to tolerate those things. We’ve developed an ability to live with those things ~ even those things that initially we would never tolerate. We have become complacent.
There’s an interesting metaphor about a frog and a person. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out of that water immediately. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and then turn the burner on and slowly increase the flame to heat the water up the frog will boil to death. It will keep adjusting to the ever-slight increases in temperature which will eventually kill the frog. People are sometimes like those frogs. We will allow ourselves to adapt to and tolerate things that don’t work even when the consequences are dire.
Most people divide their tasks into two categories. One, what’s important, and two, what’s not important. Ideally, they go to work on the ones they’ve decided are important and pay less attention to the unimportant tasks. Consider the possibility that there is a third category. It’s a category that most of us don’t think about because it’s not “important”. We call that category “what makes a difference”. The items that fit in that third category may not even fit into important or not important. However, they are distinct and make a big difference.
Here’s an example ~ The other day I received a communication from one of our clients that was an internal document that she had cc’ed me on so that I was aware of what was going on in their company. It was about the company’s core values. She didn’t ask for any feedback about it. But after I read the document, I realized that there were things that I might be able to say about it that would make a difference. I asked her if she was interested in and willing to discuss the document. She responded immediately with an unquestionable “yes”. We had the conversation and I shared what I noticed about the document and how it landed for me I shared what I thought would make a difference in the document and made some suggestions on how to make it better. She loved what I suggested, and we produced a second version of the document which then led to a third version that she is very happy with. The day after our call she sent me a note thanking me for having the conversation and told me it was very valuable and had opened up her thinking to take action on something that would elevate that area or the organization to a new level. Clearly, my input came from that third category ~ the “what makes a difference category”. Maybe the “what makes a difference category” is the most important of all.
Kevin Cullen is President of Leadera Consulting Group, specializing in producing breakthrough business results. If you want more on this conversation or the firm, contact us at Leadera Consulting Group.
Kevin Cullen: kcullen@leaderacg.com, cc: acook@leaderacg.com
Read More| Insights From Kevin | April 23, 2019 |
Overwhelm is something everyone deals with. There will always be many, many tasks for us to resolve. The list of tasks doesn’t get smaller, it grows and it’s infinite. And we all know that it’s not possible to get all of the tasks done. Sometimes we find ourselves with too much on our plates, and we begin to feel overwhelmed. In those moments we see no way of getting any of it done. When we become overwhelmed, we are ineffective. The feeling of overwhelm has its own inertia. It becomes larger than life, halting all action. It becomes a condition in which you never get anything done, and you’re upset about it. You are stuck. And while you’re busy being stuck you will surely fail. It’s like trying to move forward while running on a circular track.
You can handle and manage the demand on your capacity until you reach one more unit that puts you in a state of overwhelm. In the second diagram below the demand has exceeded your capacity ~ that’s when overwhelm takes over, and when you’re in a state of overwhelm you’re never going to get it all done.
Before that point your available capacity is manageable. When that one more item is added you hit the overload, overwhelm condition that puts you over the top and beyond your ability, your capacity, to manage the tasks at hand. The definition of overwhelm is: “bury or drown beneath a huge mass.”
How can you be powerful in the face of overwhelm? What are you doing to get out of that condition? American soldier Creighton Abrams first said,
“How you eat an elephant is one bite at a time”.
And it’s true. Everything we have to do can be broken down into manageable and finite units. Until you break the mass apart into these units you will never get anything done, because you will be buried in the mass of the story about what you can’t get done.
You either delegate some of the tasks or cancel them. What’s essential is to get things to a level that is confrontable. Overwhelm is a psychological phenomenon. It is not “real”. All that is are the tasks that you will do and the tasks you will not do. It’s our psychology that has us believing that we have to get all of the tasks done.
Once we prioritize the importance of each item, get each item into your calendar, in real time to deal with it. In fact, when you consider the whole list of things to do, you’re going to see something really interesting ~ there are things you are committed to doing, and there are things that you’re really not committed to doing. You may find some things you may want to get to at a later time, so create a way of keeping those things in existence. You’ll also find there are some things you really will never get to. Eliminate them. Keep in mind that life occurs in units of time ~ you have the capacity to fill only so many units of time. You either have to stop doing one of the things you’re already doing or give away ~ outsource ~ some things. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Is it a good investment to outsource any given item?” If it is, and you find the right person to outsource to, you are left with time to work on the things that you should be working on, while experiencing relief knowing that the other things are being done by someone you trust. This then leaves you stress free, effective, confident, and productive.
Kevin Cullen is President of Leadera Consulting Group, specializing in producing breakthrough business results. If you want more on this conversation or the firm, contact us at Leadera Consulting Group.
Kevin Cullen: kcullen@leaderacg.com, cc: acook@leaderacg.com
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