Is Hard Work Enough?

You've met them - the colleagues and friends who are dedicated to their job. They spend 12 hours a day, nights and weekends meeting with customers, solving problems, researching alternatives, writing reports, making presentations, delivering results; yet others get the opportunities and promotions. They are as smart (or possibly smarter) than their bosses. They can see the problems and solutions. They know what should be done. And look at the work they continue to deliver. Maybe if they just work a bit harder?

In their book, Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan talk about the "doer" - "the person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives". The doer doesn't hang his or her hat on the right answer, the right solution, the correct and detailed report. The doers are the ones "who energize people, are decisive on tough issues, get things done through others, and follow through as second nature."

Energizing Others

Energy starts with a vision and direction; yet the leaders who create, rather than drain energy from their colleagues and teams, are the ones who turn that picture of success into short-term accomplishments, increased capabilities and increased confidence. Think of the coaches who stand on the sidelines yelling at their teams, where the players operate from fear of failure. Now think of the coaches who keep the focus on the next play, point on the good moves, identify what should be done differently next time, and push the players to prepare well physically and mentally for each game. It's not just the rhetoric, it's not the vision of a winning game, it's the focus on each step toward the winning game.

Being Decisive

Being decisive and being right are too often confused in the minds of those colleagues working all hours. Being right can lead to over-analysis. It can lead to an answer that is optimal but too radical. It can lead to rigidity when flexibility is required.

By contrast, "decisiveness is the ability to make difficult decisions swiftly and well, and act on them", according to Bossidy and Charan. It is the combination of the ability to confront a tough situation, make a sound decision,and lead others forward, that can separate the good thinker from the doer.

Achieving Through and With Others

Yet as pointed out above, the good decision, well-articulated, is insufficient for true success. It is only through developing and using influence skills that the doer accomplishes the necessary outcomes. The successful doer builds a social network that enables her to stay on top of shifting organizational priorities and maintain valuable relationships. He knows how much support to ask for, and when. She knows where she can count on support and where she has something of value that will help to gain support. He knows that communication up, down and sideways on the objectives, key steps, milestones, challenges, and achievements is key for keeping an initiative on track and people supportive of the outcomes. She has learned that organizations are made of interdependent people, and only by developing in herself, and in others, new and better ways to work together will success be achieved.

When you see your colleagues with their head down, working all hours, striving for the best, and wondering why they seem to be passed over time and time again, ask them to consider the following:

• What portion of your time is spent getting to the right answer compared to making sure you understand whether you are working on the current priorities? Compare that picture with others. What might be the benefits of shifting your time allocation?
• What portion of your time is spent on task vs relationship? How does that compare to the people being promoted?
• What is your energy like on a daily basis? Are you creating or draining the energy of the people around you?
• Are you making decisions on issues at the right level for your job, neither too detailed, nor too high-level?
• What systems do you have in place to keep informed about shifting organizational (and personal) priorities?
• Do you adjust your approach to meet the needs of the people around you?
• How can you learn more about the needs and wants of the people who work above, along side, and for you? What can you do with that information that supports both their success and your own?
• How do you handle conflict in ways that advance your cause?
• What ways do you have of getting clear and effective feedback and of continually developing yourself?
  

Strong skills, talents, and hard work are prerequisites to success, yet they are insufficient in most organizations. Working up, down and sideways; knowing your own and other's motivators; enhancing energy; being decisive at the right level; and knowing how to influence others, frequently outweigh working hard to find the correct answer. Most often, a range of solutions will work - the win then goes to the one who can bring about the results, while building capability and energy for the next challenge in the people around them.

If you'd like to learn more about how to develop behaviors in your organization that deliver results while building capability and energy, please contact me.

Sharing Success

When projects succeed, when proposals are accepted, when businesses exceed their targets, do you take the credit? When things go wrong, do you blame the team, blame the economy, blame some undefined others?

How do you feel when your leadership brags to the shareholders about the business success ... and blames you when the results don't meet the plan?

When we blame others for failures, we lose the ability to look at our own behaviors and contributions to the failures. When we blame others for the failures, we lose their support, commitment and engagement with future efforts. When we bask in the light of success, without sharing it, we run the risk of undermining future support and lose the opportunity to develop and highlight the talent in our organizations.

John C. Maxwell says "Let those you lead outshine you. If they shine brightly enough, it's reflected on you." Organizations today look to their leaders to deliver results in an effective manner and to develop the talent in the organization. By privately and publicly acknowledging the contributions and results of others, you strengthen the network that will enable your success in future situations, you encourage continued contributions from others, and you motivate others to excel.

The next time there's a problem or a success, pay attention to language. Problem's are best handled with "I" statements that accept responsibility for the situation and subsequent action items. When there's a success to be discussed, it's best in terms of "We / He / She / the team".

Finally, consider all of the possible forms of acknowledgment that you can use. David Rock in his book, Quiet Leadership, outlines six forms of verbal recognition that serve as a good reminder to the ways that we can acknowledge, coach, motivate and recognize others.

• Appreciation - I really appreciate you completing that report on time.
• Validation - I can see you’ve given this report a lot of thought and attention.
• Recognition - It’s clear you are a very talented writer.
• Affirmation - I think you deserve all the credit for this project.
  
• Confirmation - It’s great you took on this project; it suits your style.
• Thanking - Thanks for taking the time to focus 100% on this project.

When you cultivate a solutions focus to problems and failures, and combine that with praising efforts and rewarding results, you will find your team making the extra effort to deliver the results that will reflect well on you.

Read Solutions Group works with organizations and leaders to develop an understanding of the business and organizational challenges, develop the direction appropriate for the culture and size of the organization, provide focused targeted training and/or facilitated workshops, and support the delivery of a solution. Whether one-on-one with key leaders or working hand-in-hand with your leadership team, Sherry Read will stimulate the creative thought processes to generate a wider range of practical, value-adding solutions to business, managerial and human resource issues.

Is Hard Work Enough?

You've met them - the colleagues and friends who are dedicated to their job. They spend 12 hours a day, nights and weekends meeting with customers, solving problems, researching alternatives, writing reports, making presentations, delivering results; yet others get the opportunities and promotions. They are as smart (or possibly smarter) than their bosses. They can see the problems and solutions. They know what should be done. And look at the work they continue to deliver. Maybe if they just work a bit harder?

In their book, Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan talk about the "doer" - "the person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives". The doer doesn't hang his or her hat on the right answer, the right solution, the correct and detailed report. The doers are the ones "who energize people, are decisive on tough issues, get things done through others, and follow through as second nature."


Energizing Others


Energy starts with a vision and direction; yet the leaders who create, rather than drain energy from their colleagues and teams, are the ones who turn that picture of success into short-term accomplishments, increased capabilities and increased confidence. Think of the coaches who stand on the sidelines yelling at their teams, where the players operate from fear of failure. Now think of the coaches who keep the focus on the next play, point on the good moves, identify what should be done differently next time, and push the players to prepare well physically and mentally for each game. It's not just the rhetoric, it's not the vision of a winning game, it's the focus on each step toward the winning game.


Being Decisive


Being decisive and being right are too often confused in the minds of those colleagues working all hours. Being right can lead to over-analysis. It can lead to an answer that is optimal but too radical. It can lead to rigidity when flexibility is required.

By contrast, "decisiveness is the ability to make difficult decisions swiftly and well, and act on them", according to Bossidy and Charan. It is the combination of the ability to confront a tough situation, make a sound decision,and lead others forward, that can separate the good thinker from the doer.


Achieving Through and With Others


Yet as pointed out above, the good decision, well-articulated, is insufficient for true success. It is only through developing and using influence skills that the doer accomplishes the necessary outcomes. The successful doer builds a social network that enables her to stay on top of shifting organizational priorities and maintain valuable relationships. He knows how much support to ask for, and when. She knows where she can count on support and where she has something of value that will help to gain support. He knows that communication up, down and sideways on the objectives, key steps, milestones, challenges, and achievements is key for keeping an initiative on track and people supportive of the outcomes. She has learned that organizations are made of interdependent people, and only by developing in herself, and in others, new and better ways to work together will success be achieved.


When you see your colleagues with their head down, working all hours, striving for the best, and wondering why they seem to be passed over time and time again, ask them to consider the following:

• What portion of your time is spent getting to the right answer compared to making sure you understand whether you are working on the current priorities? Compare that picture with others. What might be the benefits of shifting your time allocation?
• What portion of your time is spent on task vs relationship? How does that compare to the people being promoted?
• What is your energy like on a daily basis? Are you creating or draining the energy of the people around you?
• Are you making decisions on issues at the right level for your job, neither too detailed, nor too high-level?
• What systems do you have in place to keep informed about shifting organizational (and personal) priorities?
• Do you adjust your approach to meet the needs of the people around you?
• How can you learn more about the needs and wants of the people who work above, along side, and for you? What can you do with that information that supports both their success and your own?
• How do you handle conflict in ways that advance your cause?
• What ways do you have of getting clear and effective feedback and of continually developing yourself?

Strong skills, talents, and hard work are prerequisites to success, yet they are insufficient in most organizations. Working up, down and sideways; knowing your own and other's motivators; enhancing energy; being decisive at the right level; and knowing how to influence others, frequently outweigh working hard to find the correct answer. Most often, a range of solutions will work - the win then goes to the one who can bring about the results, while building capability and energy for the next challenge in the people around them.





If you'd like to learn more about how to develop behaviors in your organization that deliver results while building capability and energy, please contact me through my website.

90% in the top 10% of performers?

Business Week just published a survey of 2000 American middle managers and above, over the age of 25, and found that an astonishing 90% believed themselves to be in the top 10% of performers.

While just a couple of days before this publication, Marshall Goldsmith on his blog entry, The Success Delusion, writes:

Without even being aware of it, we often:

• Overestimate our contribution to a project;
• Have an elevated opinion of our skills and standing among our peers;
• Conveniently ignore the costs of time-consuming dead-ends that we have created;
• Exaggerate our projects’ impact on profitability by discounting real and hidden costs (the costs are their issue – the success is ours).

Many of our delusions can come from our association with success, not failure. Since we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, we think that they are predictive of great things to come in our future.

Self-esteem and confidence are powerful tools in driving success. Yet how best to temper those with a bit of humility? Picking one thing to work on, practice the art of reflection (what will I do differently when I next encounter this situation?) and watching for skills in others that you may want, all will help you to keep a learning mind. You may still believe that you're a top 10% performer, but there's always more to learn.

Three signs of a miserable job

Do you hate your job? While Gallup finds that 77% of Americans hate their jobs, a University of Chicago survey shows satisfaction at 86%. Let's see, they were either talking to vastly different survey samples, or the questions were wildly different.

The reality is that there are a lot of people who feel trapped in their jobs for financial reasons, who feel unappreciated by their bosses, and who face each day's work as another day of drudgery. There are a lot of self-help gurus out there who would suggest that you should find your passion, and the money and satisfaction will follow. Easier said than done when financial security is shaky and others are depending on your earnings.

Another school of thought is that the job is about the money. If you want satisfaction, you should seek it in another area of your life. Certainly more practical, and worth factoring into job choices; but this denies the reality that work takes up a very large portion of our waking hours.

Nash and Stevenson in their book, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life, suggest that success has four components:

• Happiness – feeling about pleasure and contentment about your life
• Achievement – accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for
• Significance – the sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about
• Legacy – a way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to help others find future success.

In an ideal world, maybe our job can give fulfill needs in all four of these areas; but most people live in less than idea worlds. Rather than seeking everything from one aspect of our lives, perhaps it would be more useful to find happiness in hobbies, family and community work; to find significance with your friends and in service to others; and to find legacy through your families and other creations from your heart. Who knows, maybe in looking for satisfaction out of the job, it will be easier to get out of bed in the mornings.

For more on the three signs of a miserable job and what managers aren't doing about it, see Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's blog through the title link.

Remote Leadership: When you can't just walk down the hall and see how things are going

Whenever you are in the world, more likely than not, you lead people or teams that are not located in the same office as you. Or if this isn't the case, you may well be dealing with a remote leader or manager. So if you can't walk down the hall and see how things are going, what are some of the keys to successful remote leadership?

In this article, we'll look at three elements:

• What is different about remote and face-to-face leadership?
• What structures support remote leadership?
• What are the actions you should take as a remote leader?

Are there really any differences between remote and face-to-face leadership or isn't good leadership just good leadership?
Strong leaders are skilled in establishing a vision, motivation, engagement, goal setting, performance management and continuous improvement, among other things. In principle then, there is no difference between remote and face-to-face leadership skills. In practice, both the leader and team members lose information about the subtle messages. In their article, "Virtual line management: The competitive advantage", Bente Thomassen and Henrik Villumsen of The Danish Leadership Institute argue that the crucial difference is the leader's lack of access to the atmosphere or tone of the workplace. There are more clues when you can see, hear, and feel a person's tone or a group's atmosphere. The messages that surround you as a leader provide information on productivity and morale. Distance makes many of these messages and clues harder to spot and read.

Leadership becomes even more challenging when you have a mix of local and remote team members. It is extraordinarily easy to assume that the remote team members are facing the same challenges and opportunities as the local team; and perhaps more importantly, to assume that the remote team members have the same needs as the local team. In fact, the remote team members work in a different environment, and as with any group of people, have individual needs. Michael Watkins, in a recent Harvard Business Review Online article give s recommendations to remote team members in "Remote Leadership: Meeting the Challenge of Working for a Virtual Boss" by Michael Watkins.

What are the structures supporting good leadership?
All leaders need to establish structures to support goal alignment and the achievement of desired results. A remote leader should look particularly at these areas.

1. Do the remote team members have supported technology that will enable communication, collaboration and access to information? Technology solutions can include web-based scheduling software, teleconferences, videoconferencing, groupware, and webconferencing.
   
2. Do your remote team members understand their limits of authority? Build a decision tree with your team members that outlines the kinds of decisions that can be taken independently, the extent of input you need to have, and the level of communication required (approval needed, advice sought, informed, part of regular updates).
   
3. Does the format of your regularly scheduled team meetings enable clear two-way communication and a sense of involvement? Conscious efforts must be made to include remote team members if there is a sizeable local group; jokes, side discussions, visuals are often lost over the conference lines, leading to a sense of disconnection, rather than inclusion.
   
4. Are you choosing the appropriate forms of communication for each message? Formal follow up and discussion can occur over email. Satisfying your curiousity about an issue may best be done over the phone to avoid a sense of micromanagement, and to ensure your team members are chasing your questions, rather than achieving results. Balance your knowledge and control needs against the pitfalls of micromanagement.
5. Have you established a pattern of individual interactions tailored to the needs of the individual team member? Some employees relish a brief interaction daily; some do better with a formal weekly update call. Also ensure that your employees know the best way, and the best times to reach you with more urgent updates.
   

What actions do you need to routinely employ to be a successful remote leader?
Structures enable communication. Your actions as a remote leader within and outside those structures are the elements that lead to success.

1. Your ability to manage the subtle messages from yourself and the work place are correlated with remote leadership success. Quoting Thomassen and Villumsen, "the further away, the clearer, explicit and unambiguous the message" must be. Whether your team members are on opposite coasts of N. America or separated by 12 time zones, context, jargon, and differences in cultural directness can dramatically effective the understanding of your messages. Simplifying your message, frequently repeating key messages and seeking understanding are key steps to establishing a clear direction.
2. The effective remote leader watches closely for the unsaid messages to gain keep a firm grasp on the atmosphere. Be aware of the number or frequency of phone calls or emails, length of messages, changes in tone or words employed, breakdown in interactions between team members, and hints of problems. Be sensitive to what your people are telling you, and what they are not disclosing.
   
3. Know who the thought leaders and social leaders are within a remote group. Deputize them to signal you when problems arise and need your intervention or presence.
4. Set aside time for social interactions, both face to face and through your normal means of team communication. Employee engagement is strongly linked to a sense that the boss cares. Building a depth of relationship remotely is more challenging, and more necessary.
5. Gallup research documented in "The Fourth Element of Great Managing" reminds leaders of the need for frequent recognition. Gallup recommends recognition be given at least every 7 days. Frequent recognition in a remote situation quells the question, "do they even know what we are doing?" The remote leader who consciously reaches out to every employee on a weekly or more frequent basis to acknowledge and support work, will enhance employee engagement and productivity.

The remote leader faces many challenges. He must establish values from a distant, communicate a shared vision for the future, build trust with individuals and teams, balance the need for control against micromanagement, and ensure that employees feel engaged, productive and supported, all at a distance. She must be spend additional energy attuned to subtle hints and changes in the workplace. He must know how and when to intervene. Those who successfully take on the challenges of remote team members find their overall leadership skills greatly enhanced.

- What have you found to improve remote leadership? What impact has remote leadership had on your overall leadership skills? -

Linking Strategy to Personal Performance

In their Harvard Business Review article, Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance, Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steele give seven rules for successful strategy execution for an organization.

The same rules can be applied to a professional career to improve your personal performance.

1. Keep it simple.

• Know who you are, where your contributions lie and be able to articulate them in a crafted and honed one minute "elevator speech.

2. Challenge assumptions.

• Evaluate for yourself the prevailing thoughts on who is difficult to work with, on whether the idea was tried before and failed, on what the market needs, and build a compelling case for trying something new.
  

3. Speak the same language.

• Define what success means to you and align your work with your goals; whether the work is a means to an income, a source of personal satisfaction, a place to grow and enjoy power.

4. Discuss resource deployments early.

• Know what it will take to meet the goals you lay out for yourself and put a structure in place to ensure that your time and emotional commitment are allocated appropriately.
  

5. Identify priorities.

• Meeting your objectives requires the identification and execution of key actions. Are you taking the steps every day that move you closer to your goal.
  

6. Continuously monitor performance.

• Whether it's how many times you exercise a week, how many networking calls you make, how many customer problems you resolve or how many days you make quality time for your family, tracking your measures of personal performance will keep you on track to your personal success.
  

7. Develop execution ability.

• Plans, goals, measures and "I shoulds" are easy to create. The challenge lies in developing the plans and structures one goal at a time, and then developing the habits that support achieving success.
  

Organizations require immense amounts of communication and coordination to meet their strategic objectives. While the referenced HBR article is based on the premise that companies deliver on average only 63% of their stated financial value, given the complexities, perhaps that is a testament to all of the employees who devote so much to their work.

My question is what could be achieved for the individual and the organizations if some of that commitment and those skills were turned toward developing individual success.

The Will to Win

Are mental workouts what you need to help you win?

Sports psychologists have been working with athletes for more than 30 years to give top competitors their winning edge. According to The Will to Win, Scientific American Mind April 2005, the key techniques are visualization, confidence and self-talk.

Purveyors of "The Secret", aka the Law of Positive Attraction suggest that we can draw into our life that upon which we place our dominant thoughts. See yourself winning, think only about successful execution, think about dominating the game, and ... well, it's not quite that easy. The question perhaps is how much of this can be used.

In my earlier posting, Performance Anxiety or Energy, I noted that John Eliot, Ph.D. in his book “Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More”, argues that top performers understand that they perform best under pressure. Rather than seeking to relax, they use the natural physical reaction before a performance to increase their focus and move into the process of performance.

Beyond finding the balance between strain and relaxation, many athletes employ visualization techniques. Repeated visualization can make the real motion easier to perform. Brain researchers have found the imagining a movement activates the same motor regions of the brain that light up during the actual movement. Repeated attention to this area of the brain is believed to increase the strength of the neural connections.

However, some studies, and the work of John Eliot, suggest practice is one thing, performance is another. Breaking the motion into pieces at the time of performance can hinder the results. "The alternative is to imagine the outcome" with great focus.

Brain research points to compelling evidence that visualization enhances physical performance, that neural connections are strengthened to repetition. Awareness is drawn to that which we most think about. So when we are positively focusing on the will to win, do we draw toward ourselves that which we most think about, or do we, perhaps, draw ourselves toward the goal?

Science of Team Success

"What team members think, feel and do provide strong predictors of team success" and give insights into the design, training and leadership of team, according to "The Science of Success" in the June 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind. In a review of 50 years of research on teams, the authors found a few interesting points.

Is a team needed? Not surprisingly, we need to start with the crucial question of whether a team is even needed; can an individual easily complete the team working independently? This type of team is liable to slow progress.

The collective mind. Various experiments have shown that team members can benefit from the combined knowledge and skills of the team beyond that of individual learning. Further, team turnover hampers the ability to produce. Development of the ability to use the distributed information in a team is enhanced through face-to-face interaction.

Team climate. A shared mission or purpose has a significant effect on the impact of teams. Climate is enhanced through social interactions and positive relationships with the leader or boss of the team.

Disruptions. The emotions of the team members tend to move together. Consequently, an underperformer or an unpleasant or negative person can change the emotions of the entire team. Addressing these disruptions quickly and restoring a positive attitude to the team is a key role for the leader.

Feedback. As teams cycle through projects, their performance can be improved through interventions as above and feedback on the process. Research suggests that feedback aimed at individuals will improve individual performance at a cost of team performance. Conversely, team feedback enhances team performance to the detriment of individual performance. In the development of ongoing teams, leaders need to carefully consider the elements of feedback and whether they should be delivered to the individual or the team.

Training. Teamwork skills can be taught and improved, whether in the classroom, in simulations, or on the job.

Research continues to provide insights into the dynamics of teamwork and team performance. While giving credence to the wisdom of the years, the role of the leader stays the same - be clear on the direction, provide the correct resources, ensure the team has the necessary skill sets (individually and collectively), motivate team performance, enable social interactions, intervene when issues arise, and celebrate positive results.

For more details, see the Scientific American Mind: The Science of Team Success.

Celebrating

Everyday, we take steps forward. Sometimes they are as large as a promotion, as useful as paying the bills or as significant as spending focused time with a loved one. What might be the outcome of celebrating a daily win?

When we celebrate,

• the negative is diminished, the positive is magnified


• successful behaviors are reinforced


• dopamines, released in the brain, bring calm and enhance our emotional well-being


• our perspective is focused on more, rather than less


• neural connections build and strengthen in support of the new ways of thinking and acting

Here are simple ways to increase the celebration in your life.

1. Start a routine of sharing a win within your family or team everyday. Cheering, clapping and a few "whoo-hoo's" will improve everyone's sense of well-being.


2. Keep a daily reflection journal including that which you are grateful for, along with the win for the day.


3. Set aside a few minutes to reflect on what you have achieved each day.
   
   
4. Include rewards and celebrations for each step along the path to a major goal.


5. Be sure to involve others in acknowledging your big wins.

Rewards do not need to be big - a 5 minute break in the sun, a fresh cup of coffee, a call to a friend, a piece of cake, or a cheer. Taking the step, making progress, celebrating each success keeps you focused and energized on the bigger goal.

So what's your win and how can we help you celebrate?

Please post a comment on your win today and join us in celebrating others!

My win? I have completed all of the requirements for Certified Professional Coach status from International Coach Academy. A big accomplishment gets a big celebration! Mine was traveling in Yunnan for 5 days with a friend and then exploring new parts of Shanghai with her.

Enduring Success

Research done at the Harvard Business School has shown that enduring success is seen across four areas :

• Achievement: Do you measure accomplishments against an external goal, e.g., for example, power, wealth, recognition, competition against others?
• Happiness: Is there contentment or pleasure with and about your life?
• Significance: Do you have a valued impact on others whom you choose?
• Legacy: Have you infused your values and your accomplishments into the lives of others to leave something behind?

Stevenson and Nash contend that in fact, all four areas are required to achieve enduring success. Achievement or what we often see as success often arrives in the business world without balance across the personal, spiritual and service spectrums. The research points out conflict often arises across these areas, as they compete for your attention and resources.

As we move into the Year of the Golden Pig - year destined for prosperity - consider whether your success is balanced.

Achievement: What measures of success have you established for your work life? What have you achieved in your life? What challenging goals have you set for the future? Are you progressing toward your goals? Is there a way this could or should be accelerated?

Happiness: Is there contentment or pleasure in your life? Have you surrounded yourself with people and things that bring you enjoyment? Where are your sources of frustrations? Are there actions you could take today to reduce them? What small step could you take that would bring you a smile? Can you make it last?

Significance: When you look at the people that you interact with in your personal and professional life, are you added positive value to their lives? Consider your spouse/significant other, your children, your co-workers, your subordinates, your clients, and your friends. Are you adding to their achievement? to their happiness? to their development? What more could you do? What are your aims as you consider your impact on others?

Legacy: What impact will you leave behind you, whether small (influencing the life of one person) or large (improving the world)? What impact would you like to leave? What could you do today that would begin to use your success in other areas in a way that leaves positively influences the world?

Consider the words of Robin S. Sharma, from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari,

...the purpose of life is a life on purpose. Those who are truly enlightened know what they want out of life, emotionally, materially, physically and spiritually. Clearly defined priorities and goals for every aspect of your life will serve a role similar to that played by a lighthouse, offering you guidance and refuge when the seas become rough".

Have you set goals and priorities that will lead you to enduring success and a life on purpose?

Lagace, Martha. “Four Keys of Enduring Success: How High Achievers Win”, June 24, 2002, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2990.html. HBS professor Howard Stevenson offers insights from research he and HBS senior research fellow Laura Nash are conducting on the meaning of success for high achievers.

Sharma, Robin S. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, 1997, New York: HarperTorch.

Measures of Success

What happens to a business or life when you change the measure of success?

When I was establishing my business, I struck upon targets that defined success for me. This was not a simple task and required a fair amount of soul-searching. I set goals for 6 months, 12 months and 36 months. The timeline was a bit loose, but I knew that I would be able to achieve the 6 month target; I figured that I would be able to achieve the 12 month target; and I had no idea how I would achieve the 36 month target, but it would come. I was not wedded to the timeline; in fact, I was not at all sure that the targets were achievable in those timeframes. Nonetheless, I wrote down the targets; I shared them with people central to the business. I was on my way.

The targets were defined in terms of business revenue – money. Yet, whether I talked with people about what I was doing, I frequently commented that the money was not that important. More than one close friend challenged me, “is money why you’re doing this?” The answer was no, but the money represented a level of achievement; and so, I continued on my merry way; noticing that as the money did not flow, I was feeling disappointment and dissatisfaction, rather than relishing the success I was achieving.

One of the advantages of having a coach is that they do not let inconsistencies pass, at least not for long. My coach challenged me to consider whether there were other possible measures of success that better aligned with why I am in this business. As all good coaching questions are, this was thought provoking. If I attest to having defined why I am here – my purpose in life – and it does not have any emphasis on money, why is that the measure of success for my business?

Looking at what I gain from this business besides revenue, it is the satisfaction and joy of helping people; of being a part of people improving their lives. It was easy then to restate the goals around the number of people I can help through my coaching.

Which leads us back to the question, “what happens to a business or life when you change the measure of success?” In this case, the focus shifted from an uncontrollable outcome (the revenue) to controllable events. The focus shifts from the outcome to the process (and the former statistician in me says “duh!”). Let us get more concrete. A trial session may not result in immediate or any revenue, but it does help someone if I have done my job well. The trial session that does not convert to a paying client is a small part of my success; rather than a $0 income failure. And that session may lead to a coaching agreement in the future. The blogs and newsletter do not generate any revenue, but they do, I hope, help someone.

Ah, but the businessperson says, that is fine, but you need to make money; it is an important measure. Well, like the manufacturing or quality engineer, perhaps what I need to do is to trust in the process. The process says that I need to establish a fair price for my work. The process says that I need to develop credibility and a base level of clients that can lead to subsequent referrals. The process says I need to have a structure for getting, conducting and following up from trial sessions. The process says I need to have structures around the coaching practice. If I succeed in the processes, can I trust the outcome (eventually money) will follow?

Only time will tell. In the meantime, it is much more fulfilling to look at every step as a success; to evaluate the business building in terms of helping people improve lives, rather than how much money I made today.

Do you have any examples where changes in your measures of success had an impact in the conduct of your business or life?