Ole Carlson has launched The Internal Leadership Forum, a program designed make your employees better business people. This program is devoted to developing the talent in the organization, not to save chronic under-performers. It is intended to make your best and brightest in getter better and brighter.
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The 12-month curriculum is comprised of monthly one-day sessions. The morning sessions focus on leadership, strategic thinking and planning, meeting facilitation and personal and professional transformation.
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The afternoon sessions focus on presenting and solving individual, group and company issues, and real and role play situations for learning and implementing effective facilitation techniques.
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You can learn more about this innovative new program here.
When offered a choice, people usually choose what they know, even if it is not necessarily what they want. Many times, it is because they don’t perceive that they do, indeed, have a choice.
For many people the choice concept is new or unfamiliar. Victimization, martyrdom, and being stuck in an unfulfilling role are seldom mentioned in the same breath with making intentional, conscious, life-enhancing choices. If it is your choice to remain stuck, then accept your decision and go about your business.
It is ultimately up to you to take ownership for your life, to make the choices necessarily to begin creating - and then maintaining - the life that you desire. It is ultimately up to you to see the choices before you and make them for yourself, and not abdicate that responsibility because you think the best choice is no choice.
In sports, when a team is put together, there is a decision-making process. You start out with several options, some clearly better than others, some not so much. So, you hold try outs, you run the options through some basic measurements, then make first cuts.
Those who make it through the first cuts make it on to the next set of tryouts, where different skills are tested. Then there are the second cuts. The ones remaining after that have one last chance to prove their value before the final cuts are made, and the team is put together.
Your principles should be your first cut when making choices or decisions in your business. Principles should always precede strategic, economic, synergistic, logistic and all other considerations.
Roy Disney suggests, “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” Are your decisions hard to make? If they are, it is time to define your values, and do it quickly so you can use them as a filter in your decision making process.
It is your values that create the crucible where the work takes place. The crucible must be stable, solid, able to hold up under stress, endure and, above all else, provide safe and predictable boundaries for people to do the work that you hired them to do.
You do not want to doubt your decisions down the road, but by using your principles to make those decisions you won’t have to. It is like the minimal skill level those athletes must reach to make it to the second round. If something does not fly with your principles, do not let it past that first round. Cut it lose and let it go.
No matter how big or small, how significant or seemingly insignificant your decision is, if you use your values and principles as a filter, and let them guide you, you can’t go wrong.
We have in the one-to-one a perfect venue for facilitating transformation. We can make dreams visible for our employees who are blinded by repetitious, too familiar and comfortable tasks.
Mahatma Gandhi reminds us, “A friend is someone who knows the songs in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”
Peter Drucker puts it this way: “Leadership is not magnetic personality - that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people - that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
Conversations with your managers should be more than just an exchange of meaningless clichés or a habitual and mindless slapping of high fives. Sing the songs back to your stars. Challenge them to get involved with their own personal and professional evolution.
Ultimately, these encounters should conclude with you having learned something new, and your employees having received a challenging assignment, as well as feedback, that will propel them forward or correct ineffective behavior. And, above all, they should leave wanting to come back for more.
Be intentional with your conversations. It is an opportunity and responsibility that you must not take lightly. You have an obligation to grow the human currency along with the actual dollars in your business. Keep your people growing. You are positioned perfectly for this task. You are the leader. You might even learn something useful for yourself.
Look at every interchange with your key people as an opportunity to move them beyond where they currently stand or are stuck. You can work to transform your people. If you work to transform your people you will be a more successful business leader.
As you mentor and teach your top people, they will become hot commodities. Aggressive recruiters will be taking them out to expensive, expense account dinners, offering them more money than you can or will pay and making offers of position and possibility that they will find difficult to refuse.
Many won’t refuse. However, do not think of this as a bad thing. While it would be nice to keep all of the best and the brightest under your wing, it is unrealistic.
It is somewhat of a Catch 22. You are investing money, time, experience and wisdom into developing your top people, and one day off they go to start their own business, and possibly even become your competition. You may ask yourself, why even bother? You might be thinking your time and money would be better spent elsewhere, or that maybe you should not share your secrets and tricks of the trade as they may eventually use them in competition with you. That is both a negative, and debilitating view.
Never forget the following: While you have them they may accelerate your company to heights you never considered or otherwise had the capability to accomplish. So do not dread the day they leave and hold back on teaching. Instead, enjoy them while you can. Take advantage of the time you have, and the possibilities of what they have to offer and add to your company.
Most people only have a limited view of what they can accomplish. While you business leaders may being reaching levels that only a few imagine reaching, it may not be as high as you could reach. So why are you not reaching for even higher levels?
Some of the common excuses I hear on a daily basis include:
- “This is all I want out of life.”
- “I got tired”
- “I didn’t know that those other parts of me existed.”
- “I’ve done better than most people.”
- “I settled into a comfort zone.”
- “I ran out of money, time, and energy.”
- “I don’t deserve more.”
- “I’m an imposter”
- “I just lucked out.”
- “I do not know how to take my life to the next level.”
For most people, while these reasons (or excuses) are valid, the real reason they did not go further was that they did not transfer the things that brought them success in their business life to their personal life.
If you never took risks and got a little uncomfortable, would you be where you are today? What if you started out with those negative excuses listed above? Would you be the successful business leader you are now? No. So why limit yourself now that you have reached this position? Do you think there is nowhere left to go? Well, if you do, you are wrong.
You have achieved a level only a few can imagine…or perhaps it is better to say, many don’t imagine. It is not that they do not have the potential to be a successful business leader, it is that instead of stretching and going beyond their comfort zone, they limit themselves.
Your potential is only as high as you think it is. It is certainly impossible for anyone to get past where their mental block stops them. You can be where ever and who ever you want. So stretch, take some risks, think better of yourself. You deserve it.
Do not let yourself be fooled by the ever optimistic who say that you can get extraordinary results out of ordinary people. This is nonsense. To be a successful business leader it is important to understand that only extraordinary people manufacture predictably and consistently excellent business results.
The ultimate success in any business depends upon the quality of the human currency within the walls of the organization and by sitting the right butts in the right seats at the right time. A great plan, strategy, vision or clever and brilliant leadership seldom survives an ultimate head-on collision with a low DNA factor. Mangled strategic plans, loss of bottom-line profits, frustration and wasted, unproductive time fill that intersection.
I will admit that seemingly ordinary people rise to the occasion to produce unbelievable and unanticipated outcomes. But these are either flukes or extraordinary people who heretofore had not been given the training or opportunity to show their full and true capabilities.
The problem you are facing is that the most talented people available in your market place are not lined up outside your HR department. So make it your priority to recruit, hire, train and retain the best. That way you can get your extraordinary results because you have extraordinary people on staff.
The role of a strategic-thinking management team and their designated leader is to intelligently strategize and implement the following four activities:
- Evaluate continually the present and future needs of your customers. (If you don’t evaluate the needs, and act proactively to solve and prevent future problems, you won’t have customers very long.)
- Satisfy those needs profitably. (You are in business to make money, so work hard to make sure you can satisfy those needs profitably.)
- Continually monitor your competition. (If you don’t know what your competition is doing, then how can you be better than them?)
- Keep your competitive advantage appropriate. (Be ethical. Never do anything that you would not like to see on the front page news.)
When you do your hiring and recruiting keep these things in mind. Find people that will be able to intelligently implement the above activities. Look for experience and track records that indicate their ability.
You want to find people that have the best attributes to move your company forward. If you have top people with good strategic abilities you will be the top competition for others in your field, and you will be the most successful.
Too many business leaders feel that they cannot get enough information to meet their customer’s future needs without having an endless budget. This is entirely false. Even if you have limited resources, you are still able to collect data that when gathered and analyzed will provide you with an educated peek into your customer’s future needs.
Do the following:
- Always debrief your salespeople when they come in from the cold.
- Make CEO-to-CEO sales calls on your best customers.
- Check out your customers’ and competitors’ Web sites. (What do they have or need that you don’t have or don’t offer?)
- Attend your customers’ and your own industry’s trade shows. (The more you can learn about your customer’s industry, the better equipped you are to provide what they need.)
- Subscribe to and read you market’s publications, looking for trends.
- Create a focus group with your best customers and ASK THEM what they need from you.
- Warehouse all this information, and with objective external input, analyze the data.
All of these activities are minimal cost items providing low-hanging fruit for you to pick, digest, and use to make appropriate choices regarding your customers’ needs and direction. So why not do it? It can mean you meet their needs better and in doing so make more money.
So, do something. Do not be squandering your time hanging out on some familiar street corner waiting for your market to sucker punch you squarely on your nose because you are too busy, looking one inch in front of you, doing what you have always done in the manner that you have always done it.
Markets change, so your methods must change too if you are going to meet customer needs and be successful. Do not let any one satisfy your customers better than you, or you will lose them.
It is easy to make a change when you are not very far into something. But once you have spent hours, days, weeks, or months, no one wants to go back and fix a problem that would have been minor at one point, but has escalated, and is now unfixable. At least it is if you want to get your desired results.
Think of it this way: If you were building a house, and you poured the foundation, and saw that it had a crack in it, when would you want to fix that crack? Right away, or after you frame, drywall, dry in, roof, paint, and do all the finishing work?
If you fix the problem right after you pour the foundation, it might set you back a little time wise, and it will cost some money, but it will be fixed. If you wait, the problem is still the same - the foundation is cracked - but it is no longer simple to fix. Suddenly, if you attempt to fix the problem, you have to start over, it will take even longer, and cost so much more, that you likely won’t do it at all.
So, a critical step step in becoming a successful business leader is learning to intervene early.
If you find yourself or others are off track, you need to intervene at this early, easy stage. You can usually get back on track from there. If you do not intervene early, if you allow matters to slide past the easy stage to the crisis stage, you will be facing a long and nasty journey back to your original expectations. Your odds of getting there are slim, slight, or not at all.
So, how can you avoid letting things slide past the easy stage? First you can recognize what caused the slide. Typically, the slide is caused by indecisiveness, a lack of enthusiasm, and a limited inventory of the appropriate tools to confront the issue.
Lack of confrontation is generally the reason behind not addressing an issue at the early stage. So, learn how to appropriately confront an issue and intervene early, so you don’t have to rebuild your whole house, but simply lay a new foundation.
