Never Waste a Crisis - Great Article

From Forbes.com

The Third Opinion

Never Waste A Crisis

Saj-nicole A. Joni, 11.24.08, 01:35 PM EST

Great leaders know that significant opportunity lies in a world turned upside down. Here are ways to grasp them.

Over the past months, as I've crisscrossed continents, speaking to top executives in many different industries, I've witnessed firsthand just how far-reaching and interdependent the current economic downturn is. Never have I seen so many thoughtful strategic plans suddenly shelved as we face a new set of economic conditions combined with an uncertain financial system, with unclear rules and no proven models for success.

Despite all the different issues that top leaders are facing, there is a commonality to great leaders in times like these. It can be summed up in the phrase "Never waste a crisis." When Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Barack Obama's chief of staff, was quoted saying this in The New York Times, he articulated what is on the minds of many of the global business leaders I've recently seen.

We don't yet know how hard this crisis is going to be, but there is a shared sense that beyond the current events lies significant opportunity. What steps can executives take to move on the opportunities, while at the same time paying attention to all the demands of the moment? What can great leaders do to move decisively forward in a world turned upside down?

First, figure out how to survive. So many of the executives I have spoken to remark on the speed with which the current crisis came upon them.

Given that, do you have a plan that allows you to move fast, faster than before? Many companies either didn't see or didn't believe common metrics of economic and financial distress before the recent crash and crisis. What metrics are you looking at now? Which ones from the past still give useful leading indicators? What else might you need to look at?

Be systematic and transparent about balancing optimism with realism In your current plan for survival. You must increase your forums for listening at the edges, for creative dissent. Ensure that you have in your inner circle people who will never allow you to fall into the destructive cycle of hubris and denial that led Dick Fuld to destroy Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEHMQ - news - people ), a company he had built and loved.

Take the steps necessary now to get your organization onto dry ground, and far enough from the storm surge that you can evaluate your current state with critical clarity.

Second, ask yourself what you can do now that you couldn't do before. This is the crux of successfully taking advantage of a world turned upside down. How can you position yourself now, so that you will be better off than you were, once the crisis is over?

For example, at the end of 2007, the Detroit automotive industry had to worry about destroying $40 billion in shareholder value if it transformed itself into a manufacturer of ''green'' cars and trucks. Now, with stock prices trending toward zero, this barrier is gone. The current ineffective leadership will be replaced by people committed to creating an industry designed for the 21st century, instead of one focused on protecting a past that no longer is viable. This opens possibilities to take the bold steps it has long been avoiding.

John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ), has often spoken about listening for "market transitions"--that is, subtle but big shifts in social, economic or technological conditions. There is no doubt that the Internet and global communications have been setting up market transitions that will ultimately disrupt many conventional channels

We've recently seen the Obama campaign successfully build direct channels to citizens that most did not believe possible. How about in your markets? Does the current crisis accelerate and even necessitate major shifts in your channels in the next 12 months--shifts that better position your company but would have been impossible to execute just six months ago?

Does this crisis allow you to dramatically improve brand loyalty? Are there things your company can do that will make a difference to people caught in these difficult times? Might you redeploy marketing dollars to this? Might you tap the power of purpose in your employees' desire to help others, and make it clear what your brand stands for beyond the day-to-day business of consumption?

And within your own organizations, are you facing squarely how quickly the dynamics of talent retention have changed? What might you do differently to increase your talent base? Ask yourself: Might this be a time to promote some of your best high potential employees, without worrying if someone else feels passed by? This is an opportunity to reorient your organization around value, in terms of roles and responsibilities, as well as compensation.

Finally, no whining. You may find yourself thinking, more than once, "I didn't create this crisis. Why me? Why should I be stuck with dealing with it?" It's very tempting to feel aggrieved, but, instead, step back and ask yourself, "Why not me?"

Leaders in crisis put aside that very understandable anger and instead are glad, even honored, that they are in a position to respond to a once-in-a-lifetime set of circumstances. Remember that the people around you may be dealing with the fallout of the crisis in many ways that may not be visible. Have compassion for them, and mitigate their hardships with opportunity, inspiration and the call to hard work.

Beyond this crisis is a new landscape, one that will define the arcs of opportunity and prosperity for decades to come. Find the opportunities that reach beyond survival, guide your organizations to get there and extend a helping hand to as many as you can along the way. The costs of this crisis are high--way too high to go to waste.

Dr. Saj-nicole Joni, chief executive of Cambridge International Group, is the author of The Third Opinion: How Successful Leaders Use Outside Insight to Create Superior Results and an adviser to executives worldwide.

The One Thing Part IV: Sustained Individual Success

Sustained Invidivual Success: the 20 Percenters

20 percent of people are able to continually do activities that are successful, time after time. They are able to transform the friction of life into a perpetual machine of success and fulfillment. This may be quite intimadating to the rest of us 80 percenters. Surrounding yourself with a few 20 percenters provides inspiration that life can be engaged in both a predictably positive and fulfilling way. Their Secret?

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

Your strengths are not only activities for which you have talent, but they are activities which strengthen you. When you use them you feel powerful, creative, and authentic, confident and challenged. Your weaknesses are activities that weaken you - drag the recovery out of you and leave you unsatisfied and depleted, maybe bored. They leave you struggling, unfulfilled, and empty.

The early contenders that lost out and did not correlate with sustained success are talent, interest, personality, extroversion, risk taking, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Sustained success means the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time.

You must apply your enthusiasm, energy and talent to something you enjoy. You must learn role specific skills enough to be labeled good at something. "Something special must leave the room when you leave the room." (Peter Drucker) The more of a commodity you are the less of an impact you will have over time. To be deemed good at something then, you must be better relative to others in the field. And over time, you must continue to get better over time through eras of progress, change and evolution. These demands that you be resilient, innovative, flexible, and sufficiently devoid of stress to maintain your energy for the long haul.

Three Contenders to keep you in the game

"Find the right tactics and employ them." Faster recovery between times of stress improves ones ability to rebound and increase performance for the next sprint. This applies to all forms of energy (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual). The body works best in 90 minute increments, so taking a stretch, resting break in those intervals. Some other tactics - "go blue chip early" to avoid the permission paradox (can't get the job without experience, can't get experience without the job); "build your personal brand", manage your boss with loyalty, good advice, and an employee that will never make himself look good at his expense. Make friends in high places to avoid a self-serving boss taking credit for your work. "It's always showtime", no matter what is going on they are making a decision about you. "Find the right tactics" is good, but will not help you avoid becoming a commodity.

"Find your weaknesses and fix them." Helpful, but in the end not as fulfilling. Negative experiences do more than just give you a negative mood, but activate a negative view of oneself. If you really want to make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, ruminate on your past failings for awhile.

"Find your strengths and cultivate them." Positive experiences active positive views of oneself. If you want to energize yourself, ponder all the things that have gone well for you, and the successful times you've had.

What to do if . .
You're Bored
You're Unfulfilled
You're Frustrated
You're Drained

Try to rework your environment to capitalize on your strengths more, and stop doing the things that you don't like to do. :) Quit the role, tweak the role, find the right partner to strenghten you and do the things you don't like to do, or find aspects of the job that strengthen you. Act quickly, the longer you put up with things you don't like to do, the less likely to be successful you will be.

The One Thing Part IIII: Great Leading

Great Leading: 3 keys
-- Discover what is universal and capitalize on it
-- Clarity of mission is essential to great leading
-- a great leader rallies people toward a better future

Brown described 5 fears we all share in common:

5 Fears of Human Nature
1. Fear of Death (our own and family's)- The Need for Security
2. Fear of the Outsider - The Need for Community
3. Fear of the Future - The Need for Clarity
4. Fear of Chaos - The Need for Authority
5. Fear of Insignificance - The Need for Respect

Which one demands the most of the Great Leader's attention? Not the last one. The Need for Respect is usually handled by an intermediary in our society, the clergy. The priest can tell you that you might be low on the earthly totem, but by adhering to precepts you would have the chance for prestige and respect. Today in the world of work this intermediary is handled by an intermediary, the Manager. Not everyone can become the CEO, but each can achieve nobility in their role. Managers provide avenues to earn respect by enlarging our roles and building on our strengths.
The need for authority doesn't help describe what you are leading toward, so that doesn't help you much.
The three that remain are all up for grabs - the need for Clarity, Community or Security can be trumpeted as a leaders vision. The need for Security and Community are static, they may achieve some leadership, but great leadership comes by neutralizing our fear of the future. This is huge. If you can make the future positive, then you really will have done something for all of us. Engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. How? Not by being passionate. Passion is temporary. People tend not to trust them. Not by being consistent. Consistency is good, but we all know situations change and we want you to change too. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear; to define the future in such vivid terms through your actions, words, images, pictures, heroes and scores that we can all see where you, and thus we, are headed. Tweak your vision of the future to accommodate unforeseen circumstances, these tweaks and adjustments must always be accompanied with great vividness. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader.


The Points of Clarity

#1.) Who do we serve?
Wal-mart states "we serve people who live paycheck to paycheck." Take great care to tell them who their audience is and they will adapt to all audiences better! Wal-marts ripple effect allowed them to hit their audience and many others. Best Buy decided to respect their audience and serve "the smart shopper confused by the products we sell" and so bundled things more easy for them to understand. Sales fluorished.

SREC audience: Patients and doctors with timely, helpful, and organzied customer service. We are there smartest best friend in eyecare, willing to do what it takes to get the result they want.

#2.) What is our core strength?
Is it efficiency? partnering? Technology? Better service? Best marketing? Our economic engine can be improved if we know what it is. But also -- engage our fear of the future and tell us why we will win? Why are we the best? Why will we overcome our obstacles? The answer does not have to reflect present reality, it doesn't have to be right, it just has to be clear. The act of clarity is a constructive act - if you are clear, we your followers will make you right. Best Buy told their employees by strengthening the front line, they would win. They told each department to prepare the smartest, friendliest employees possible and they would win. They clarified the goal for everyone and things cut through to a more efficient and productive outcomes for everyone.

SREC core strength: tell us exactly why we will prevail, pick your favorite Clarity Voice
-- we are always improving, learning (dave), and caring :)
-- quality of care and caring (rob)
-- we provide an excellent place to work (Bev)
-- providing the best quality enhancement to every patient possible
-- safety and quality
-- customer service and quality

#3). What is our Core Score?
Example: Great prisons prisons was number of escapees. But then it changed to number or returnees or repeat offenders, and fluorished as a better system. Some truisms: "What gets measured gets managed". "You get what you inspect." "You cannot improve what you cannot measure." If you want us to follow you you should tell us the core score where we are going, the forest is dark and deep and we want to know where you are leading us. The balanced scorecard with many metrics satisfies the neurotic leader who wants imposed order, but it doesn't help the masses to mount followership in a cohesive and effective direction. It saps our strength and undermines our confidence. It's okay to use a balanced scorecard, but only broadcast the one metric. Quantify the one strength we possess and help us improve it, and we will follow you.

Best Buy uses several questions to evaluate their core strength, "employee engagement". They use - "does someone at work care about you?", and "at work do you have time to work on what you do best?". The 12 question survey found in "First Break all the Rules" outlines 12 questions that show if an employee is being superbly managed, and hence fully engaged.
Mayor Guiliani picked crime reduction as his core metric, and by reducing crime, brought clarity and perspective to all other areas. Including improving tourism, etc. What matters is that its clear.

SREC: number of internal referrals for cataract or LASIK surgery, or glasses.
-- consider a quantity survey of customers regarding core metric: glasses, cataract, LASIK
-- consider a quality survey of employee engagement, quality of their being managed.
-- be clear, pick one thing.

#4) What action must I take?
Like a player shooting a basketball, leaders take action. Action is unambiguous and is clear to those that are watching you. Symbolic actions define your intentions and focus vision but are unintrusive (improving the cabdrivers, the graffitti, or the squeegee men in NYC). Systematic actions refocus daily activities, are more intrusive, and have more direct effect good or bad. When Giuliani forced twice weekly CompStat Crime meetings from the manager of every bureau, he forced transparency, idea sharing, and focused on bureau data now from every manager. While these were management outcomes, the leadership effect was one of clarity and powerful.

SREC leadership actions
-- Frame drive is new, innovative, affordable, grassroots and local
-- Survey would constantly hone in on our core audience evaluation and report our strength
-- a managers meeting on the survey would also clarity our goal - better customer satisfaction.


Virtually every excellent leader excels and symbolic and systematic action. In todays barrage of goals, you must take the time to distil down the clutter to the key to your organizations success and who you serve. Your talent for distillation and piercing complexity will determine your success as a leader here. Here are 3 practices or disciplines a leader can use to improve his/her clarity:

1. Take Time to Reflect: upon your critical function toward group success. Ruminate on the requirements for excellence, success, what the future holds
2. Select your Heroes with Great Care: Pick your hero (Dr. Sonntag) and clarify why they are your hero (because they possess your core strength: great caring and great customer service, great learning and improving, etc.) The heroes you pick reveal the future you are trying to create.
3. Practice. Great leaders try out and refine their speeches, MLK fell back on his stump speech instead of his written speech in "I have a dream" because he knew it worked. Practice and try out your core audience, core strength, core metric and refine them.

Effective leaders don't have to be passionate, or charming, or brilliant, or have the common touch, or be great speakers. But the have to be clear. They never forget our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, for respect -- and our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, resilience, and creativity.
Show us clearly whom we should seek to serve, where our core strength lies, which score we should focus on, and which actions we should take today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

The One Thing Part III: Great Managing

-- Hiring a person is like hiring a fixed set of predictable patterns of emotion, learning, memory and behavior. Changing these will take tremendous effort if you do not like them, hence it will serve you will to take extreme care when inviting a new person onto your team.
--Time finding the right person is nonnegotiable. You will spend the time on the front end looking or on the back end desperately trying to transform the person who you wished he was in the first place.
--Know the talents you are looking for: competitive or altruistic, focused or entrepeneurial, creative or analytical?
--Spontaneous responses to open-ended questions reveal the persons



Basics of Good Management
1) Select good people - know their frequent past behavior well to predict future behavior
-- ask open ended questions looking for specific examples, "how have you organized your life to make it more efficient?" "What is the best day you've had at work and why?" ". . The worst day you've had at work and why?" "What boss have you gotten along with well and why?"

2) Define clear expectations. Managers do this constantly or not at all -- and requires they meet often with their people (4-5x per year). Ask, "What do you think you get paid to do?" and then continue to refine expectations in virtually every meeting.

3) Praise and recognition - most positive rewards for behavior are certain, positive, and immediate.

4) show care for your people: warm and fuzzy. Humans are herd animals, caring is what we do. After we bond good things happen, we feel secure, share more confidences, more trusting, more willing to take risks, and support one another. A good manager makes bonds on his or her own, and wants these good things to happen. Caring for people requires one to intervene early when not performing and a visceral reaction when someone fails.

Doing these 4 things makes you unlikely to fail but doing two more things helps guarantee success.

1) Good managers play chess. -- They discover what is unique about each type of person and capitalize on it. They don't mold their personalities, the match their skills to a job. It is often worth shuffling the organization for a persons idiosyncracies if they are making a significant contribution to the company. If they are not, then it is not. Individualization of employees skills can help to produce more with the same number of employees. The point is to help anyone contribute their utmost, if they're not move them out.

gut-check your own interest and talent as a manager by asking yourself:
-what is the best way to motivate an employee?
-how often should you check in with an employee?
-what is the best way to praise an employee?
-what is the best way to teach an employee?
If your answer is, "It depends on the employee . . . " that is a good sign.

The 3 Levers to understanding your Employee
- learn his strengths & weaknesses
- learn his triggers
- learn his unique style of learning

Managing Strengths:
Key here is that self-assurance is the real driver of performance, not self-awareness - contrary to many peoples convention. Improving performance means building someone up on their strengths! . . and building up the importance and size of their task which you know they have the special talents to do! :) On overoptimistic view of oneself will actually drive someone to possess the skills they imagine they have! This is repeated over and over in kids born in the slum against impossible odds, etc. You've got to get people to believe the tasks they are doing are challenging if you are ever going to get them to knuckle down and do real work. Once you've built up the impossibility of the job before them, gotten the best out of them, and they succeed, praise their unique strengths to continue their self-assurance spiral upward (as opposed to praising their hard work). Failure is always due to "a lack of effort" as this will avoid the pit of self-doubt. And if they repeatedly fail? Assess if this is due to lack of knowledge or skills - and provide them to the person. If they improve, problem solved. If not, then it might be talent which you won't be able to fix easily - you'll have to manage around this weakness and neutralize it. Find him a partner with complementary strengths, "the secret of the successful" not the crutch of the imperfect. If skills-training, a partner, and no nifty trick is found then you'll rearrange roles and neutralize it. If he won't try the new role, he should start looking for other opportunities.

Triggers:
People respond to voice and relationship as a main source of their trigger. Others might like being checked on often, or not at all, or work at night, or work with friends, or be numbers oriented, or whatever - but find their trigger and squeeze it right because otherwise they might turn off if you keep pulling a trigger they don't like. Some people like to set their own goals, some like it when you think they can't achieve the goal and they prove you wrong. Some like the analytical approach and they will take themselves in the right direction.

The recognition trigger is one of the most powerful. HSBC gives out their employees Dream Awards. Their top performers receive what they request for their great performance and are given a lucite trophy and their dream - college tuition for their child, a Harley, etc. Because its their dream, the impact is tremendous!

Unique Style of Learning: Analyzers vs Doers vs Watchers.
Doers learn the fastest when they are thrown into things, but make some mistakes as they figure things out on the fly. Analyzers try to prevent mistakes the most and are the most careful up front. Watchers take the longest to blossom and ultimately can perform well when coached alot up front.


How can you learn these Levers? (Strengths, Triggers, and Learning Style) Interview Q's:
Strengths
1. What was the best day you've had at work the last 3 months?
- what were you doing? - why did you enjoy it so much?
Weaknesses
2. What was the worst day you've had at work the last 3 months? Why did it grate on you so much?
Triggers:
3. What was the best relationship you've ever had with a manager? What made it work so well?
4. What was the best praise or recognition you've ever received? What made it so good?
Unique Style of Learning:
5. When in your career do you think you were learning the most? Why? What's the best way for you to learn?

The One Thing You Need to Know, Part II

I liked this book so much by Marcus Buckingham that I wanted to re-blog it with a different approach. I felt it helped crystallize a few key concepts on life in general as well an management.

"Get me to the core" means there is one concept that will determine ones success or failure in a certain endeavor - one primary insight anyone could employ that transcends the methods required to get there. It will focus groups of people accomplish a difficult talk in a streamlined way. It is the difference between putting on a great performance and teaching the core concept that can transform a company because it will help everyone get to transformational success. Find the broad pattern in the data that predicts success of the elite performers. What makes people so good at their role? Maybe it is their strength, in action, positioned to yield its highest return -- because they are fit for the role with their passions, personality, and skills traits aligned in synergy.

What are the controlling insights of success? organizational? personal?
The two roles that underline organizational success are great managing, and great leading.
The core insight to individual success is building on your strengths/your passions and saying no to things you don't enjoy/your areas of miserable weakness

1 Corinthians 13:13 -- "And now faith, hope, and love, abide these three, but the greatest of these is love." Wow, love is the greatest!

The discovery of a core concept for a happy marriage is very interesting - a broad swath of studies showed results that when pooled together showed a common theme that the most enduring and happiest marriages had spouses which chose the most generous explanation for eachothers actions. These spouses ranked eachother strong in areas where the spouse self-ranked their weaknesses. Now, how could this be? Are these people unintelligent? Can only people who are not accurate in their assessments have an enduring and happy marriage? Not truly. Rather, these were intelligent people who faced a dichotomy of choice. When one creates positive illusions of love, one is able and willing to risk and commit a great deal in the hopes of a lifelong relationship. The commitment one makes gives one security in the relationship decision. Security fosters intimacy. Intimacy leads to stronger love. The trade off is generosity in assessment in exchange for security. Find the most generous explanation for eachothers behavior and believe it.

Mr. Buckingham mentions some other interesting and astounding controlling insights to natural phenomena ~ the tides are best explained by the presence and position of the moon, and his stuttering speech due to higher levels of testosterone exposure in utero (also with his ring finger is longer than his index finger in these cases), and the theory of natural selection to explain biological diversity, and . . . on and on!

The One Thing you are looking for must pass a few tests . .
-- it must explain a wide variety of circumstances
-- it must serve as a multiplier of success rather than just a strong correlator - the greatest return on your efforts and energy.
-- it must guide action

Properly armed, these controlling insights can help one to excell at filtering the world, cut through clutter with laser-like precision, place less value on all that you can remember, and move on to the things that you must never forget.

Sonntag-Reeve: We can never forget that we are nothing without great customer service!!

Part I: Core Concept to Great Managing
--Build on the strengths of your employees in their assignments
--utilize individualization to accomplish more for the common good
--have an inherent ability and desire to help others succeed, give them tips for growth, confront and improve static employees, and s

Part II: Core Concepts to Great Leading
-- Great Leaders Rally people to a better future
-- Great Leader have CLARITY of purpose - their message is CLEAR (key feature!)
their patrons demand it, groups will not grant you success without it - it is your obligation to them.
-- The "I am not satisfied" mantra burns deep in a leader because he cannot rest with the conflict between what is and what his vision of what it should be . . . .
-- leaders have an overwhelming belief they can overcome the challenges and forge ahead, to rally people to a better future, to do better, to reach their vision.
--"The effective leader takes his self-belief, his self-assurance, his self-confidence and presses them into service of an enterprise bigger than himself. For the egomaniac, the self is the enterprise."


"The managers starting point is the individual employee. He looks at her palette of talents, skills, knowledge, experience, and goals, then uses these to design a specific future in which the individual can be successful. That person's success is his focus.
"The leader sees things differently. He starts with his image of the future. This better future is what he talks about, thinks about, ruminates on, designs and refines. Only with this image clear in his mind does he turn his attention to persuading other people that they can be successful in the future he envisions. But through it all, the future remains his focus.
"You can play both roles, of course, but if you do, you must know when to change gears. When you want to manage, begin with the person. When you want to lead, begin with the picture of where you are headed.