The First Step to Success
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
—Nelson Mandela
There isn’t much more I can tell you here except to go out and start working.
You’ve got all the strategies, you know how to implement them at each level of your organization, and you understand that, rather than just introducing new protocol, you need to change the way you and your workers think. The only question you might be asking yourself is, “Where do I start?”
Like Every Significant Undertaking, the Key Is to Start Small and Commit
The last thing you want to do is to announce an overambitious game plan, inspire your staff, and then dash their hopes when your organization bites off more than it can chew. Not only will you disappoint your employees, but they’ll also lose faith in you as a driver of change.
You should begin by outlining your first step and by selecting the “low-hanging fruit.” Set a couple of different goals for challenges or opportunities you know are within your organization’s reach. Next, pick one long-term goal. This goal-setting will ensure that you’re garnering momentum and making progress, but not just subsisting on the adrenaline rush of being productive in the short term.
Once your company starts making substantial progress with these first couple of commitments, you can begin to add more to your plate. Be sure to stay consistent with those high-level discussions, too, so you can continue to keep your internal and external strategies aligned.
The speaker and writer Simon Sinek offers a pertinent nugget of advice here. It’s a critical insight on why modern business practices are particularly unbalanced, and what can be done to correct the situation. His advice distinguishes intensity from consistency.1 He explains that modern business practices praise working fast and hard to ensure you see results as quickly as possible. In other words, there’s a massive amount of value assigned to intensity. But while it’s true that an enthusiastic and determined work ethic is a step in the right direction, you can’t have lasting or sustainable impact simply through intensity. You also need consistency.
Sinek puts it quite elegantly, “You can’t get into shape by going to the gym for 9 hours. It won’t work. But if you work out every single day for 20 minutes, you will absolutely get into shape.” You have to ensure you’re working on your goals consistently, not only intensely. It may be less exciting, but if you treat your work as an investment in your organization’s future, it’ll be easier to stay disciplined.
A frustrating example of this comes up in many sales organizations. Each year, the senior sales leader brings in a new trainer with a novel methodology to teach the same sales force. The trainer puts on an exciting little seminar and the staff walk away feeling energized, and maybe they even try some of their newly learned skills. But within a few weeks, everyone is back to functioning like they had in the past.
The problem? It’s all just intensity! There’s no emphasis put on consistency. The real breakthroughs will happen when you can get your sales force to concentrate on developing a small set of skills. You will see much better results if you can get your teams really good at one or two methodologies, rather than stay mediocre with five or six.
Set Your Goals and Free Up Resources by Prioritizing
We all have an overflowing list of “to-dos,” and it’s hard to know which deserve your attention now rather than later. Maybe you have several short-term goals that are easy to attain, but they’re not core components of your success. Or perhaps you need to be spending much more time working toward that long-term agenda item.
Here’s the Eisenhower Matrix, a straightforward 2 × 2 matrix to help mitigate some of the stress that emerges from prioritizing. It was designed by the one and only Dwight Eisenhower to help craft a hyperproductive life. In addition to being the 34th president of the United States, he worked in a variety of other top-tier political positions, served in high-ranking military roles, and even was able to pursue oil painting, aided by this framework.
All you need to do is ask yourself: is the task at hand important or unimportant, and urgent or not urgent? Asking yourself these questions will allow you to decide exactly what kind of action is required and when: now or later (Figure 9.1).
Figure 9.1 The Eisenhower box
Source: https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box
If you’re dealing with an agenda item that’s urgent and important, it should make sense that it demands your immediate attention. You may convene a meeting with your team to address next steps and outline a game plan as soon as possible. Whereas if it’s important but not urgent, you should find a useful way to create time in your schedule, acknowledging that it must be dealt with effectively, just not at this time. These will be agenda items that are not time-sensitive, so you can take your time making thoughtful and strategic decisions about how to move forward.
If a to-do arises that is urgent but unimportant, it is worth delegating. Is there a specific team, department, or lower-level staff member who can take care of this for you? These tasks may require supervision, but it will be in your interest if you can devote your attention to other more pressing issues. Finally, an agenda item that is unimportant and not urgent should be eliminated. If there’s a task that’s not serving you and it’s taking up lots of your time, you may need to walk away from it.
Prioritizing is a useful tool if you’ve outlined several low-hanging fruit, but don’t know which ones to go after first. Consider using this matrix as a launch pad for more in-depth discussion about the payoffs of various trajectories and how you would like to divide responsibilities.
The matrix can also help you to shift your focus from immediate goals to long-term objectives. Tasks that fall into the “important and not urgent” box can serve as an entry point to levitating and discussing your organization’s broader agenda—in other words, operating in the meta zone.
Stay Accountable
No matter what the scale or impact of the project you’re taking on, you want to ensure follow through. Your follow-up can be done on an individual level or cross-organizationally.
Many of my clients come to me in dire need of course correction—but sometimes all that means is holding people to their word. As a consultant, this is one of my functions. It can be as simple as a weekly call with a COO to check up on operations. What matters is that those drivers of change feel personally responsible for their actions.
Those who are closer to the ground level should also feel personally responsible. By this, I mean your workers should understand their impact. A great way to grow accountability within your workforce is to shift the focus from the results you’re getting to the process by which you’re getting them. Emphasizing on the how of success will allow staff to feel valued and needed.
Focusing on the how will also help you identify what is working and what isn’t. It’s great to praise your team for closing a large deal, but it’s even more fruitful to recognize the processes that got you to that contract so you’re able to recreate the same success next time—or, better yet, so you’re able to seal an even larger one next time.
This kind of shift in behavior can have a profound impact on your organization’s growth. It’s also a great reason to debrief regularly, whether with your senior team or your staff. You can ensure accountability from others. In the same way, I ensure accountability from my clients.
Feeling unsure about how accountable you and your organization are? Take a look at another 2 × 2 matrix. This matrix is one I devised to help my clients understand the harm that comes from working with unaccountable people and the accelerated success that can come from working with those who are highly accountable (Figure 9.2).
Figure 9.2 Four quadrants of accountability
If you find that you and your team are unreliable, your organization will flounder, as no productivity is guaranteed. If you hold yourself accountable, while your colleagues don’t, you’ll find yourself in a fragile position because your output will be promised while their results will not.
However, if your team is accountable but you aren’t, you’ll be fearful, struggling to please those with whom you work. And finally—the quadrant everyone should strive to embody—if both you and your colleagues are being held accountable, then the odds are increased that you will all flourish because of the added support for your team to meet its goals.
But remember, how are you to expect your fellow leaders and staff to put in the work to rewire their behavior and create new habits, if you won’t?
Marshall Goldsmith’s and Mark Reiter’s book, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be, gives a detailed account of what informs both conscious and unconscious behavior and offers techniques to reengineer this behavior actively.2 There is a lot of research out there about how our brains and bodies work to reinforce patterns and dismantle others. Like I’ve said before, the kind of change I’ve discussed throughout this book depends significantly on your ability to change your schemas and skills.
Remind Yourself Who’s Holding the Reins Here
As a senior leader, you and your team wield the most power in your organization (or, possess the most responsibility). When compared with any other group or position in your business, you have the most influence and the best chance of success.
Your ability to lead is both a privilege and responsibility—there’s no one else who’s going to remind you to stay agile, function like a utility, or operate in the meta zone.
If disruption is wreaking havoc on your organization, your team is the last line of defense. If there’s a brilliant opportunity waiting for you to leverage, your team must be the one that takes-and-leads action.
If you read this whole book and had your interest piqued by a few interesting concepts, don’t nod your head and go back to business as usual. Pull out that legal pad or open up that mind mapping app, and begin brainstorming how you’re going to get the attention of your senior team. Schedule a meeting right now. Make that call. Many organizations have already started applying these strategies and have seen enormous success. Not addressing internal and external misalignments puts your organization at a severe disadvantage, which may or may not be fatal.
But if you are ready, if you feel equipped, and want to dive headfirst into radical organizational change, you should have everything you need in your toolkit.
These five strategies were not selected because they’re simple or easy to explain. I chose them because they’ve been the most useful and accessible to organizations of all kinds in a variety of different industries. I decided they were worth synthesizing into a book because I’ve seen them get the best results.
The final ingredient here should be obvious—a willingness to try, to fail, to get back up, and do better. I joined Compaq in my mid-20s; I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto? They had families and careers. They walked away from senior management positions in other well-established firms to leap into work that required every last bit of their time and energy.
It wasn’t just a matter of strategy. Launching Compaq took a significant dose of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and aligned intentions. But before all that, it required bravery and a decision to challenge the status quo. So ask yourself, did you pick up this book out of fear? What might you accomplish if you instead operate from a place of courage and conviction? Rather than settling for what you know, what if you venture to explore what’s possible?
1Z. Thompson. September 22, 2017. “Let’s Talk About the Difference Between Intensity and Consistency,” Huffington Post.
2M. Goldsmith and M. Reiter. 2015. Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be (New York: Crown Business).