Breaking Through

Taking the Calculated Risk

Entrepreneurs are by their nature a pretty risk-tolerant group. They have to be - setting off on their own to do something no one else has done, or at least that no one else has done in quite the same way, in the same place, that they are doing.

However, taking risks doesn't have to be the same as being reckless. For most businesses, there is a logical set of steps in researching the market, the customer, the competition, in order to assess the level of risk, and manage it.

I often work with entrepreneurs, and one of the most common things I find is that serial entrepreneurs can be victims of their own success. What does that mean? Well, many entrepreneurs did well by doing one or two things right, and then getting extraordinarily lucky. They hit a market at the right time, with the right product or service, and in spite of doing little or no "traditional" business management, and bucking the models, they were successful. What do you learn from this? Well, many of them believe in the power of their own success, and that the models are useless and that they can succeed at anything based on the sheer power of their personality and acumen.

Surely you can see the flaw in this logic, but also why it is so seductive. It is not unusual for these successful people to go on to start one or more additional businesses - and fail. They take the lesson of success and continue to disdain traditional management, planning, strategy and organization. Occasionally they will again get lucky, but far more often I see them fail and wonder why the magic didn't work again.

Those who overcome this learn that hard work and smart management of a company is a surer path to success than the force of personality or luck. They begin to do more research, and look at more data. They begin to track their failures and identify root causes. They begin to learn more about motivating people, creating great organizations, channel marketing, sales strategies, partnering, product development, and many other management topics. In other words, they evolve into great leaders and business people.

When you look at your business or group, are you using the best tools available to maximize your chances of success? Have you discarded management tools and theories because they aren't perfect and others have succeeded without them? Do you have a coach or consultant helping you find the best out there and applying it to your business problems? Are you tapping into the creativity of your team to build on best practices and create new innovations in running a business, or are you repeating mistakes made by many others before you?

I invite you to look at how you are working and running your business and how you could build a sturdier foundation for the growth you can achieve.

Executive Coaching, Personal Development

Building an Environment that Supports You

In the coaching world, we talk about environmental design as a way of supporting personal change. What does that really mean?

Have you ever been to a training where you learned about a new exciting tool and came back ready to kick off a new way of working, interacting or planning, only to find that enthusiasm dampened by day 2, and the training forgotten within a few weeks? This is a result of poor environmental design.

You have a new tool or skill, but you come back to the same office, same desk, same tasks, same co-workers - all of which supported the old set of habits and skills. Without support and an environment that actively and passively encourages the use of new skills, the old patterns re-emerge quickly.

So what can you do to really look at your environment and how it impacts your ability to implement change? Here are 5 ways to look around and see what is supported in your environment:   

1. Physical Environment. Look around and see what is in your immediate work environment. Is it neat and organized or cluttered and messy? Where do new items land? Where do "important" projects and tasks land? Do you face colleagues or a wall or window? What can you hear in your environment? When you look at your physical environment, does it encourage you to take the actions you need? Is it more conducive to collaborative work or solitary research/writing and thinking? Does it help you focus? Does it keep you abreast of what everyone in the team is doing? What is important to you and your progress, and does the physical environment support that? How could you make it more supportive of your goals?
2. Social Environment. What do you get from the people in your work, home and social environment? Do they encourage you to reach your goals? Do they have compatible goals? Are they prone to sabotaging your efforts, or are they excited to see you change? If they aren't supportive, who could you recruit to spend more time with who would be more encouraging?
3. Temporal Environment. How do you structure your time during the day and over the course of a week, and how does that impact your ability to make changes and achieve your goals? Are you able to use your most productive hours on the most difficult tasks? Are you actively managing your energy levels and scheduling tasks when the right energy is there to support them?
4. Intellectual Environment. What kinds of intellectual stimulation do you get from your environment? Do you have challenging people with new ideas in your environment? What kinds of reading material, news, radio and other media do you keep in your environment and how does that impact your goals? What changes might improve your motivation and ability to stay on track with new behaviors and skills?
5. Measurement Environment. What is tracked and measured in your environment? How is progress noted and how often? Are the things being measured encourage you to make change? If not, what kinds of measures might make more sense? How often are they measured?

In order to effectively make a change or build new behaviors, you can make it infinitely easier by designing the right environment. Think about someone trying to start a new diet. One of the first changes is to take "forbidden" food out of the kitchen, maybe join a support group or begin the diet with a friend or spouse, to get new recipes supporting the new diet and setting up a measurement and tracking system to see daily progress and understand any setbacks.

All changes are similar in many ways. They are hard, and can only be tackled when the motivation is there, but that is rarely enough. In order to create success, you need to carefully examine your environment and create stimuli and support for changes, new behaviors and new skills.

Executive Coaching, Personal Development

Building a High Performing Management Team

In my line of work, I get up close and personal with the people running businesses, starting businesses and growing businesses. I have tremendous respect for the entrepreneurial spirit that motivates people to take the personal and financial risks associated with starting a business, and I love my clients. They inspire me, they teach me, they challenge me and they allow me to feel useful.

When my clients struggle, one of the most common areas of struggle is managing within their own organizations. Particularly difficult for founders, but certainly common in lots of other places in organizations, is a struggle over responsibility, accountability and the ability to commit the company (or part of it) to a course of action. When you start something, it is natural to want to guarantee success. For many people, this means managing the details, cutting off "interference" or "distraction" from others, or sometimes just shouting loud enough to "motivate" others.

Organizations with walls and lack of trust build up when the people running them resort to any of these behaviors, and walls mean lack of efficiency, insufficient communication, and resentment. If you think you are "protecting" your organization from distraction or interference, or driving performance by building fear, make sure you are not ignoring good business ideas from the rest of the company, allowing lack of direct and honest communication to foster distrust and suspicion, or pursuing goals that are not commonly shared.

Here are six signs you have trust issues:

1. The major issues for the business are not subject to open discussion. You may hear phrases like, "we've been over this, and we're not talking about it again," or "that decision's been made. end of discussion," or "that's my problem, leave me alone with it." Are there questions that can't be asked? Sacred cows in your organization that are beyond examination? Is there an group in the organization that is held less accountable for their deliverables than others?

2. Problem-solving is done by the fewest number of people possible. Do groups "hide" issues, and try to manage them without letting anyone know there is an issue? Is a critical function (like production, or IT) frequently left out of problem-solving that will affect them?

3. Any layer of management "reaches through" another on a regular basis to get status reports. Does "the boss" skip through layers of management to talk to the "field" and measure their performance directly on a regular basis? Does regular reporting ignore the management structure in place?

4. Planning is done in isolated groups, and not for the entire organization. Do you have a "plan" for each group in the organizaton (i.e. an R&D plan, a marketing plan, a sales plan, a production plan, a finance plan), and lack an overall plan that defines common goals? Do you establish strategic goals before creating the organizational ones, or the reverse?

5. There are no processes for getting new ideas aired, or the processes are ignored. Do new ideas, processes, products, services seem to materialize from thin air, and it isn't clear who approved them or how they got the green light to be implemented? Do you have management processes for reviewing new ideas, but no one has ever seen them in action? Do you ignore the processes you have because they are too cumbersome or don't lead to good discussion and decisions?

6. Any group blames another group for the organization's problems. Do you find members of one team constantly pointing out the faults of other teams rather than addressing their own shortcomings? Is there a scapegoat team in your organization? a team beyond reproach?

All of these are signs that your organization is behaving dysfunctionally, often due to personal conflicts in your management team. The key to improving performance is building trust and breaking down those "silos" of responsibility to get everyone behind a common vision of where you are going and how you are going to get there.

Building trust and building a common vision and plan are not easy, short processes. A management team has to invest time, money and energy in hashing out issues with the current business, developing a vision for the future, and agreeing on what it is going to take to get there. Points of view have to be articulated, understood, and incorporated into the plan. Compromises must be made, and everyone must be committed to the final result, have an action plan, accountability and regular mutual review.

Without this, organizations can flail without significant progress as individuals and organizations work at cross-purposes and the benefits of teamwork are not realized.

How can you start? I recommend that you begin with the team at the top, with team-building exercises, and strategic planning based on industry trends, SWOT analysis, definition of a source of competitive advantage and a 3-5 year plan based on realistic expectations of the organization. Agree on where you are going, how you are going to get there, and who is going to do what, and get back together to review progress on the plan. Adjust it if necessary. Discuss how it's going. Don't be afraid to share information, good or bad. Repeat the whole process annually at least. Once it's working, consider rolling it out to the next level of management down... rinse and repeat!

Executive Coaching

The Power of Quitting

I just heard Seth Godin speak about his new book "The Dip". His book isn't really about quitting, but about building mastery, but part of the path to mastery is about knowing when to quit. As an expert at quitting, or rather designing my own career path, I thought I'd add my thoughts about how this has worked for me and what some of the critical steps in recognizing dips are.

Seth describes the "Dip" as the moment when something gets hard. Sometimes this dip is a sign that what you are currently doing isn't right for you, you're not motivated to do it, and you don't have the skills or temperament to really succeed and attain mastery at what you are doing - then it's really a cul-de-sac. Or it can also be the sign that you are just hitting the barrier that keeps others from attaining mastery, and if you perservere, and push through that dip, you will emerge with a truly unique skill and level of success that matches.

How can you tell whether it is just the moment before mastery or a cul-de-sac? If you can envision the goal beyond the dip, and feel motivated and excited to get back to the hard stuff, you may be experiencing the "Dip". If you envision the goal, and you feel less than motivated, excited and energized to get there, you may be in a cul-de-sac, rather than a dip. Recognizing the cul-de-sac, you can move on to other goals and paths that allow you that chance at mastery and great success.

From my own experience, I learned this lesson early on. I was a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in physical chemistry. Everything seemed to be going just fine, except that I was miserable. This could have been a dip, but as I contemplated getting my PhD, and going on into academia or corporate research, I felt even worse, and less motivated than ever. I really dug deep within myself to determine why I wasn't energized by this path, and realized that the scientific research environment I was in wasn't very "warm", and required too much time alone in a lab to satisfy my need to connect with other people. Intellectually, I loved it, but as a significant part of my daily life, I felt too isolated and didn't gain enough energy from being in the lab. For me, it was a cul-de-sac.

My peers from those days have gone on to do great things and taken wonderful professorships at great institutions. They are happy, successful, and have "broken through" the dip to achieve mastery in their fields. It is a good fit for them - they have the skills, temperament and drive to be very successful. I can't be sure what would have happened if I had pushed on and finished my PhD, but I doubt I would have achieved the kind of mastery my peers who had the passion for the lab did.

As I left the PhD program, I felt a great sense of relief, and I went on to pursue a career in strategy consulting in Japan and achieved mastery in Japanese language and culture, and strategic thinking. I leveraged that into brand marketing with big consumer companies, polishing strategy with implementation and adding coaching and organizational development. Transcend (www.transcendllc.biz) has been the culmination of that experience, which I now leverage for my clients.

In finding a way to combine my analytical and strategic thinking with softer people skills and mentoring, I identified a career path that is building mastery. What I have done is unique to me, and not done in the same way by anyone else - and the courage to quit something that made me unhappy has been critical to finding the path that motivates and stretches me.

Recognition of your own strengths and weaknesses, and finding those fields that allow your strengths to shine is one milestone on that path to success. You may stumble across them by accident, but self-knowledge allows you to make more conscious choices for your life and career path.

What motivates you? What skills and strengths do you have? How could you leverage that in a career and life path that lets you shine?

Executive Coaching