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- Dan McCarthy
Guest post from Sarah Rozenthuler:
With deeper presence, a leader is able to remain centred when facing unexpected disruptions, be open to new directions and build trusting relationships. People follow people. Leaders who are grounded in who they are, what they stand for and what really matters take others with them.
What leadership presence is
When was a time that you became so immersed in what you were doing that you lost a sense of time? You might have been reading a novel, talking with a colleague or writing a report; any activity that requires focused concentration can take us there. Already you’ve had a taste of this capacity.
When we operate from a sense of our presence, we are in a state of absorbed relaxation. There is a feeling of spaciousness or ‘flow’ inside us. Afterwards, when we look back, we realise that we’d been totally ‘there’ and in touch with our best self.
When we are present, we are right here, right now. All our attention is focused in this moment. If we’re in a meeting, we’re attentive; we’re not thinking about our emails, ‘to do’ list or other distractions. We stay in contact with what’s happening in the room, as well as what’s going on inside us. We don’t try to control or manipulate others but allow them space to be themselves, just as we are being ourselves. Other people are attracted by this expansive energy and want to draw closer.
Why developing presence matters
There are several benefits to cultivating presence and building trusting relationships is chief among them.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, attributes the sustained success of the company to its operating principle of ‘values create value’. In an interview for Fortune, Benioff states: ‘If trust isn’t your highest value, the employees will walk out… Customers will walk out, investors will walk out and leaders will walk out, and you’re seeing more of that everyday.’[1]
Deepening presence reduces the risk of ‘acting out.’ When a leader yells at others or humiliates them, it damages relationships. Retrenchment after the event can lead to feelings of shame or, at the other extreme, stubbornness that “I was right!” Wasted energy and lost potential are the result.
Dealing with reactivity is key. Whilst lashing out at others provides a short-term release of pent-up energy, it pollutes the atmosphere. No one wants to work for a leader who ‘throws their toys out of the pram’ or withdraws into a sulky silence. When a button inside of us gets pushed, it’s an opportunity to pause, reflect and search inside ourselves so that the button loses its charge.
How to become more present
With the intensity of working online, it is particularly important to find ways of consciously managing your attention. Here are some things to try (whether on Zoom or in person) so that you stay energised as well as engage your co-workers.
1. Before a meeting
Take a few moments to become present. Find a quiet space where you can close your eyes, scan your body and notice what you’re feeling. Pay particular attention to any signs of stress that you sense. Breathe into this part of your body to help to release any tension.
Put away your phone (unless you need it to be logged onto a meeting or for a call.) Keep it out of sight so that you’re less likely to swivel your attention in its direction. The people you’re with will feel more valued if they’re not competing for your attention.
2. During a meeting
Stay in touch with your own body as you interact
with others. Feel your feet on the ground, your backside in the chair and your
spine sitting upright.
Notice yourself breathing in and out. If you’re able to, lightly place your hand on your stomach to help you to stay connected with this “belly breath.” When you notice that you’ve “jumped” out of yourself or lost touch with you sense of self, focus again on your breathing.
Maintain eye contact when another person is speaking. On screen, move your eye gaze between looking directly at the camera (so that the other person feels you’re looking directly at them) and looking at their image on the screen. This conscious ‘shuttling’ helps to keep your mind from wandering. It communicates to the other that they have your full attention.
If you’re not able to give other people your full attention, say so. It is better to say, “I know you need to talk with me and I’m interested, but I want to give you my undivided attention” than to be in a semi-distracted state. Take care of what you need to and then return to the conversation.
3. After a meeting
Carve out whatever space you can between meetings rather than rushing from one to the next. Even a short break of a few minutes helps to clear your mind and reduce “attention residue” (continuing to think about one issue when you need to pivot to the next.)
If it’s possible to stand outside or open a window, even for a few seconds, the fresh air will help to keep your attention focused in the here-and-now.
At the end of a meeting, jot down any actions or decisions that were taken so that these don’t remain as ‘open loops’ in your mind, which have been shown to consume a disproportionate amount of energy. Close your ‘loops’ from one meeting before you head to or log into the next.
In closing
When we are present, we see opportunities and identify risks that we miss when we’re only half there. In a state of presence, we are open to fresh insights and ‘action impulses’ that take us forward.
Our presence – so simple, so basic and yet so rare – is what creates the most impact when someone walks into the room, whether in person or on Zoom. Great leaders have it and you can too. Presence is available to us each moment. Cultivating presence will greatly enhance the quality of your leadership and life.
As the author of How to Have Meaningful Conversations: Seven Strategies for Talking About What Matters Most (Watkins, 2012), Sarah’s work has been widely featured in the media including the Huffington Post, the Sunday Times, the FT, Guardian, Psychologies Magazine and the BBC Business online.
Sarah works with CEOs and leaders who want to create positive change by having the conversations that matter most. Increasingly these conversations are all about purpose. She founded Bridgework Consulting Ltd in 2007 to enable leaders to engage and energize their people around great work, with the intention of transforming organisations to become a force for good in the world.
Guest post from Ruth King:
Employees must be personally responsible for their work. This is one of the toughest things to teach employees because most of them have grown up not taking personal responsibility for anything…and the media promotes this!
In addition to employees not taking personal responsibility for their actions, managers being friends with employees also drives me nuts.
Welcome to the world of management. Here are six things managers MUST remember and manage by:
1. You can’t be friends with the employees who work with you.
This is probably the toughest lesson to learn. If you’ve promoted from within or a new manager is hired from outside the company, the manager must be friendly but he can’t be friends. If he goes to lunch with an employee, he has to go to lunch with all of the employees on his team. No favorites.
Managers must be objective and once fellow employees see that someone is promoted they will treat him differently. This former friend has hiring and firing authority over him. They won’t tell this person the mistakes they’ve made or complain to him anymore.
New managers, if they are working for the same company, often have to develop a whole new group of friends. And, it is very lonely at first.
2. Bad news doesn’t go away.
Many times, people do not like to deal with the difficult things. They think by ignoring it, the problem will go away. A new manager must learn that he has to deal with the problems immediately. If he ignores them, they usually get worse. So, he has to deal with the tough issues first.
When you give a person the responsibility, authority, and accountability, the accountability is the tough part…many times there are negative things to deal with in accountability. He has to learn to confront the issues quickly and resolve them!
3. You don’t have to be nice. You just have to be fair.
A manager has to do things that are fair for everyone. Some people will like the actions. Some will not. However, your decisions must be good for the group as a whole. A manager cannot make a decision that will favor one person over another. For example, if a good employee demands a raise and says that he will quit if he doesn’t get one, many times it is better to let that person quit. If he gets a raise, everyone will know that they can threaten to quit if they want a raise. This is not the environment you want.
4. You have to return telephone calls.
If you have an unhappy customer, you must deal with it and resolve the issue. Letting messages sit only makes an unhappy customer even more unhappy. An issue that was small could escalate into a major problem.
Make sure that the customers are taken care of and solve their problems. Try to return telephone calls immediately and resolve problems within 24 hours. After all, customers write your paychecks.
5. You have to make the hard decisions…which are sometimes unpopular.
Managers and owners get the privilege of seeing the whole picture. If things aren’t going well, then they get the privilege of dealing with them. So, it is important that managers and owners see the total picture so they can make informed decisions. If this means no overtime for a while, shorter hours, layoffs, etc. then they make and implement those choices. If it means firing someone who isn’t doing their job, then they have to do it.
6. Behaviors don’t change by wishing they would change.
If you need to change someone’s behavior (or a group’s behavior), then you have to clearly communicate the desired end result and the rewards for changing (or consequences if they don’t change). Often this is a slow, long term process. However, with patience and continuous follow up, changes in behavior can be made. If someone absolutely refuses to make the desired changes, maybe that person doesn’t need to be working for your company. This is one of those unpopular decisions that you have to make at times.
These are six things that all managers must manage by. If you don’t, the great employees won’t put up with poor management. They will leave and find other jobs. You will be stuck with bad employees who will stay.
Guest post from Beth Miller:
Focus
I remember many years ago going to visit a new client. Upon entering the lobby, I couldn’t help but notice the very large poster with a listing of company values, in fact there were 18 of them! When we got back to his office, I asked him with curiosity “I noticed your list of values out in the lobby. I’m curious can you name all of your values?” The fact is that he couldn’t, and neither could his employees.
So, if you have more than 7 values, it’s time to bring your team together and narrow your values down to the top 7 or less of your most important values. One technique I recommend is from the book Traction, by Gino Wickman. Identify the 3 people in your organization you would want to clone and then start describing the characteristics and behaviors which make them special. This will provide you with an initial list you can narrow down.
Meaning
In recent years companies have realized they should focus on the important values which make their company standout from the crowd of their competitors. Company values are your company’s DNA. They are the beliefs and principles which drive your decision making and actions for your business, and your values impact the experience your employees, customers, and partners will have with your company.
But what do your values mean? Values are abstract while behaviors can be observed and explained with more clarity. The specific actions and behaviors that demonstrate your company values need to be defined. The best way to define your values is to revisit those 3 people you want to clone. Identify 3-5 behaviors for each of your values you observe with these 3 employees.
Here’s an example of the value “Working Together”. The behaviors which you observe with your 3 employees on a consistent basis are:
1. Works with and supports other team members to drive results
2. Builds two-way relationships with employees and customers
3. Understands and respects other people’s priorities
You now have
behaviors that you can use in your hiring and performance management.
Hiring
Since you now have a definition of each value and the specific behaviors and actions an employee should be demonstrating for a value, you need to integrate this information into your hiring process.
Start by creating behavioral interview questions to uncover a candidate’s values. Do they align with your values? You don’t want someone joining your team who won’t live your values. Values misalignment is a deal breaker when it comes to hiring.
Behavioral questions are designed to uncover past actions and behavior and determine both culture and values fit. Here are tips to design behavioral interview questions:
1. A good behavioral interview question should first be open ended starting with “What” or “How”. Open ended questions encourage discussion and require people to think and reflect, they aren’t recall questions. And the very best questions are really a request, “Tell me about a time…” “Share an example of…”
2. The question/request should be designed to not “lead the witness”
3. Understand what a good answer sounds like. Listen for the pronoun “I”. If you hear “we” being used, you will need to clarify what exactly the job candidate’s role was.
For example, let’s use the behavior “Works with and supports other team members to drive results”. A good behavioral interview question would be:
“Tell me about a time that you had to deal with a difficult team member on a project.”
If I had adjusted the question “Tell me about a time that you had to deal with a difficult team member to successfully complete a project”, I would have been leading the witness and assuming that the project was completed successfully. Instead, give the candidate the opportunity to share how the project turned out.
Performance Management
The behaviors and actions of your employees should be part of the performance conversation. Too often I see managers focused on goals and results i.e. what needs to get done. When you include how a result was accomplished you are measuring against your company values.
The first step to take is to make sure the behaviors which support your values are part of all job descriptions. These behaviors can be measured as part of your performance conversations and can serve as the foundation for your ongoing 1-1 conversations with your employees. The more you relate an employee’s behaviors to their results, the more you will reinforce to the employee what you value.
You can also use a 360 assessment to measure performance. The 360° assessment uses collected anonymous feedback from direct reports, managers, peers, and sometimes business partners, as well as a self-assessment, to identify areas where employees can strengthen their skills in order to progress effectively. It is designed to measure the core competencies (behaviors and skills) associated with a person’s position.
Make sure that your company is living your values by understanding the behaviors behind your values, hiring the right people, and measuring their performance through both their behaviors and results.
Beth Miller is an accomplished author, speaker, and solution provider; her insight and expertise make her a sought-after leadership influencer. A serial entrepreneur and executive coach as well as a former Vistage Chair of 13 years, Beth is featured in numerous industry blogs and publications including Entrepreneur, Leadercast, and TalentCulture.com. Her book, “Are You Talent Obsessed?,” compiles her best practices for business leaders.
Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds
Most people pay attention to what’s right in front of them. We track performance data, customer satisfaction, and the like. As leaders, we pay attention to what’s right in front of you. So, you need to put the right stuff in front of you.
What Do You Pay Attention To?
In my work with senior leaders and executive teams across a wide variety of industries, one of the most important questions I ask is to learn what those leaders pay attention to. Most of them tell me that they spend most of their time looking at performance indicators
- Summaries of key metrics
- Spreadsheet data
- Other dashboard tools.
Monitoring performance metrics is a good thing. Yet sometimes internal systems present metrics that are easy for us to monitor but aren’t the right things for us to monitor.
Here’s an example. A few years ago a printing plant client installed a new $20M high-technology press which could deliver speeds of 50,000 impressions an hour. The dashboard built into the press software kept careful track of impressions per hour.
However, if the color scheme was off by just 2%, the printed matter would not meet their customer’s standards. The press’ dashboard did not monitor color requirements perfectly – only a human could do that.
A run of one million pages/impressions wasn’t uncommon. Every job was easy to monitor with the dashboard metrics. Systems and incentives were created to meet a certain target of average impressions per hour. Yet if the color balance was off, the job would have to be run again (creating waste and higher costs for the job)! It was vital to monitor – and incent – both impressions per hour AND adherence to the customer’s color palette.
You can see that what is easy to measure might not give you an accurate picture of reality.
Here’s What Leaders Must Pay Attention To
1. Strategic Clarity – leaders must constantly assess how well their organization’s strategy is understood across operations staff. Communication and reinforcement of the declared strategy will lead to a clear understanding by all staff.
2. Goal Alignment – Once strategic clarity is reached, leaders must constantly assess the degree to which projects, goals, tasks are aligned to your organization’s declared strategy.
3. Expectations Clarity – Next, leaders must ensure that everyone in the organization has formalized end goals (performance standards) and means goals (values defined in behavioral terms). Also, leaders must ensure that all staff proactively commit to their performance and values goals.
4. Consistent Accountability – leaders must hold all staff accountable, day in and day out, for meeting performance expectations and values expectations. Accountability means the prompt application of POSITIVE consequences (when folks do the right things the right way) and NEGATIVE consequences (when they don’t).
S. Chris Edmonds is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. After a 15-year career leading successful teams, Chris founded his consulting company, The Purposeful Culture Group, in 1990. Chris has also served as a senior consultant with The Ken Blanchard Companies since 1995. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Amazon best sellers The Culture Engine and Leading at a Higher Level with Ken Blanchard. Learn from his blog posts, podcasts, assessments, research, and videos at http://drivingresultsthroughculture.com. Get free resources plus weekly updates from Chris by subscribing here.
Guest post from Thomas Steding:
Slowly, almost inexorably, culture has big become almost top of mind as a key factor in effective leadership. From the Harvard Business Review “Strategy and culture are among the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness.” In the high tech industry, the emergence of culture as a critical factor has been greeted with a sense of relief, a respite from the reductionistic venture investor sole focus on numbers. As a result, Peter Drucker's alleged comment that “Culture eats strategy for lunch” has become popular in our collective memory.To understand an effective culture you need to start in a different place. If you define the Cultural Layer as the de facto patterns of behavior between members on the team you can define the Mindset Layer as the de facto patterns of thought between the ears of the key leadership. The Mindset Layer, therefore, sits below the Cultural Layer and determines its outcome. We have defined the four archetypal (“original model or prototype”) dimensions of the Mindset Layer. These are the underlying, universal factors driving mindset. Over more than a decade, we have found that understanding where an organization resides along these dimensions provides a powerful predictor of organizational outcome and is critical to establishing an effective underlying culture.
The
four dimensions are Courage, Relatedness, Awareness, and Agility. Each of these
dimensions has a dual, or complementary, aspect, typically along intellectual
versus emotional dimensions. Courage is facing danger and fear with confidence
and resolution. Courage includes the capacity to take bold and fearless action
in the marketplace, but also to be willing to hear and process unwelcome input
from the team that could have a redeeming effect on organizational outcome.
Relatedness implies an intellectual understanding of staying connected with
customers, but also insists on respecting the emotional connections across the
team. Awareness implies a thorough understanding of the company’s markets,
technologies, and strategies. It also implies a close understanding of the
emotional life of the team. Agility is nimbleness of thought and action. It means
the ability to change direction and turn on a time due to changing conditions
in the market or industry conditions. Emotional agility, on the other hand,
means the ability to hear and consider another person's perspective even in the
case that you hold an opposing point of view ex ante.
A
balanced state among these four Mindset dimensions provides a defense against
organizational dysfunction. The inferior Mindset dimension is the gateway for
dysfunctionality to penetrate. At the same time, it can offer an effective
roadmap for organization improvement. For example, a team was stuck in the
process of making a fundamental product development decision for six months.
Clearly, their inferior dimension was Courage—in this case, courage to make a
product decision, get the product out, and determine its viability. The lack of
team courage lead to dysfunctional behavior, such as gossip, blame shifting,
and, obviously, schedule slippage. Their dysfunctional behavior cost their firm
market leadership.
Hence
any conversation, or program, addressing culture has to start with the Mindset
Layer. Misalignment between mindset and culture leads to the all-too- frequent
case where the behavior in the room bears no resemblance to the code of ethics
on the wall. Authentic culture must reflect who the company and its personnel
are authentically. Going through the intellectual process of specifying the
culture without understanding underlying mindset is like building a structure
starting on the second floor. So, we add: “Mindset eats culture for breakfast.”
Dr.
Thomas Steding is a senior corporate executive
with an excellent track record in founding and growing successful businesses
based on complex, leading edge technologies. He has been CEO of over 12
high tech companies and active chairman of several others. His new book is
called Real
Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need To Know About Achieving Performance.
Guest post from Susanna Camp and Jonathan Littman
Entrepreneurs, corporate executives and managers know from experience that the best teams sport a rare mixture of friction, freedom and alignment. Diversity and complementary skill sets are key. So how do you assemble a great team?
We spent many years interviewing and writing about talented people and teams for our new book The Entrepreneur’s Faces: How Makers, Visionaries and Outsiders Succeed. Our biggest takeaway? Talent comes in many different flavors, and the best startups and companies recognize the benefits of building a kind of superhuman tensile strength in their teams.
We call these talents archetypes. We’ve met so many entrepreneurs that we can usually identify someone’s type in a few minutes. How do we know? They master challenges with a characteristic approach, and echo the habits of renowned innovators and entrepreneurs. What’s perhaps most valuable about understanding someone’s type is how their behavior plays out in the dynamics of a team. We all know the conflicts that upend teams. Dueling leaders or visionaries throw obstacles in the path to success. The opposite happens when you achieve superior compatibility. A human-centric approach to designing high achieving teams begins with filling out your squad with a healthy cross-section of talent and mindsets. And that starts with learning to recognize patterns.
In The Entrepreneur’s Faces, we present ten archetypes. When you build your team, make sure you have a good mix. Here are the top seven types leaders need to know.
Step One: Start with the idea generators
2. The Visionary: The future is coming, and it helps to have someone on your team who sees its first. This type brings a different kind of focus, based on their uncanny ability to see months and years ahead. What makes them so valuable is that they are practical. They map “from now to then.” They understand how the future will build on present realities, and start taking key steps to get there.
3. The Accidental: This may sound surprising, but you want someone on your team who will run with ideas that seem long shots. Google and many other firms have officially recognized this entrepreneurial type with a 20 percent or 10 percent rule, allowing staffers to pursue their own project ideas on company time (this has led to Gmail, Google Maps, and Google AdSense, among other G-Suite products). Accidentals bring passion to your company and that energy can be contagious. The Accidental infuses a project or company with authenticity.
Step Two: Round out the team with the problem solvers and doers
4. The Maker. It’s key that your team has someone with an aptitude at finding new ideas and opportunities. But you need Makers to put them to the test. Makers dive right in. They find a way to do an experiment or a test. They’re great at designing prototypes to provide quick feedback. And they learn fast from small, inexpensive failures.
5. The Collaborator. Every leader could use a few Collaborators. They excel at analyzing how everyone and everything fits together. Collaborators keep their own ego in check, knowing they’ll rise farther by connecting others and bridging ideas. They are the glue connecting the whole team.
6. The Evangelist: Even the best of products and services need a story to catch fire. Evangelists bring an uncanny ability to fan interest. They’re naturals at creating the story behind the product, and know how to strike just the right points to touch hearts and move minds.
7. The Athlete: This is the type that loves a contest and a challenge. Athletes relish preparing for the... unexpected. During tough times you couldn’t ask for a more robust, versatile staffer. They love to work. Adapt, recover, pivot is their mantra. Athletes figure out the connections between seemingly diverse activities, building new processes and opportunities on the fly.
Who you choose depends a lot on the kind of team you want to create. There can be a world of difference between a startup of four or five individuals and a corporate squad of ten or more. You’ll also want to consider where you stand on the seven-stage journey we call the Entrepreneur’s Arc. Are you just getting started at the Awakening and Shift? Midstream, approaching the Launch, or hitting do-or-die time, at the Test.
We think you’ll find these archetypes and this team question of diversity and compatibility valuable. Building out your team starts with self-awareness. To learn more about all ten types and take our diagnostic quiz, please visit our website at theentrepreneursfaces.com.
Of course, share the results with your friends and networks!
Guest post from Barbara Bruno:
Technology has changed the way we communicate however a combined high-tech and high-touch communication style is most effective. Nurturing plays a significant role when it comes to a new employees’ view on the leadership and vision of their new employer. Nurturing helps them adapt to their new role, feel comfortable, essential, and appreciated in their new workplace.
As new hires understand the significance of your vision, it allows them to develop working strategies which align with your vision. It also helps build self-confidence, knowledge, and the drive to succeed. By helping smooth the transition to their new role, you deepen your relationship with your employee that continues well beyond your onboarding process.
To assist your nurturing efforts, consider the value of mentorship on new hires as well as your current employees. Mentorship is also extremely effective for employees who may be working remote. Modern mentorship programs are designed to support both the mentor and the mentee with a high-touch approach. A strong mentor-mentee relationship will help new hires learn from an experienced employee. It also provides solutions and approaches to accomplish objectives from the fresh perspective of your new employee.
Mentoring also demonstrates to the new hire the benefits of an open culture where employees share knowledge, generate ideas and work together to build a successful company. Benefits of being a mentor include development of leadership and management qualities, increased recognition, a sense of fulfillment and personal growth.
Another benefit of nurturing is increased referrals of top talent. When your new and current employees have a great experience working for you, they are more likely to refer others. Nurturing is an important element to your internal employee referral program and can dramatically reduce your cost per hire.
Take time to review the new hires you have made in the past twelve months. If a majority were not the result of referrals, it may be time to upgrade your onboarding, nurturing, mentorship, or employee engagement efforts. Your employees are either your army of recruiters enticing others to work for you, or they are being recruited away.
Too often employees are only interviewed twice, their initial job interview and their exit interview, when it is too late to resolve their issues. Consider conducting regularly scheduled stay interviews, where you ask your current employees why they enjoy working for you and your company. A stay interview will reveal what you are doing well but, will also identify areas that may need improvement.
Stay interviews are much more effective than the high-tech approach of utilizing online employee satisfaction surveys. They are a high-touch conversation where both you and your employee can ask questions and then set a specific date to follow up on any action items discussed.
When your employees are happy, they become more engaged, productive and will help you attain your goals and objectives. In any type of relationship people want the answers to three question: Do you care about me? Can I trust you? Will you do what you promise? When you nurture your team members throughout their career, the answers to all three questions will be yes.
Guest post from Eileen McDargh:
Indeed, the global statistics in 2019 were enough to consider burnout a global pandemic. From massive stress-related losses in North America ranging between $120 to $300 billion; to European countries revealing high burnout rates among health professionals and educators; to Chinese media reporting that about 600,000 Chinese citizens a year die from working too hard; to Australia reporting some $34 billion being spent on burnout incidents. The list is almost endless.
And then COVID-19. Everything we thought we knew about workplace engagement, stress management, and on-site health and wellness programs vanished. In its place, leaders now struggle with managing remote teams, developing widely different strategies for disrupted marketplaces, and dealing with uncertain economics.
Ironically, the oft-reported desire to have some flexibility to work on occasion from home has been smashed. Employees are feeling more burnout than they did prior to COVID-19. Lines are blurred between work time and home time. Output to prove productivity has skyrocketed, leaving employees exhausted and tense. A feeling of being estranged from the organization and team members results in loneliness. Job uncertainty haunts many dreams.
The process of moving from burnout into the breakthrough that allows employees to recharge and handle these emotions can be greatly aided by a wise, compassionate manager who employs these practices:
This is by no means an exhaustive list. The single thread that consistently runs through these actions is that a leader has empathy, a keen ability to listen deeply, a desire to help their team grow and flourish amid disruptive times. The leader themself acknowledges their own journey and insights in moving from burnout to breakthrough. In these more-than-crazy times, the burnout flame will come again. But with practice, it will no longer be a massive bonfire but rather a spark from a match.
Eileen McDargh has been called a hope merchant although she says she has been put on earth for comic relief. She’s an internationally recognized keynote speaker, master facilitator, and award-winning author with expertise in resiliency and leadership. In 2020 Global Gurus International, a British-based provider of resources for leadership, communication and sales training, also ranked her 5th of the World’s Top 30 COMMUNICATION Gurus following a global survey of 22,000 business professionals. Her articles have appeared in countless publications and two of her seven books have been awarded national recognition. Her latest book, Burnout to Breakthrough: Building Resilience to Refuel, Recharge, and Reclaim What Matters, launches in August 2020. To learn more Eileen, you can visit her website here.
Guest post from Brendan P. Keegan, CEO, Merchants Fleet
By asking ourselves “How can we do this better?” we were able to build upon many of the old habits and traits that had worked in the past to quickly transform into the fastest-growing company in our industry. To make this happen, we put a system in place with six key focus areas:
1. Create a Clear Vision, Strategic Direction and Communicate It Constantly. In my years serving as CEO I have made it a priority to build a living, breathing strategic plan. A big part of that is having a simple vision that teams can rally around and a strategic direction that leaders can buy into and articulate easily throughout the organization. At Merchants we have a simple yet powerful vision—to enable the movement of people, goods & services freely—and a well-documented strategic direction that we revisit regularly and communicate to the broader organization on a constant basis so that everyone understands their part in achieving it.
2. Align and Refine Core Values. Employees want to be part of something meaningful, and it’s the leader’s job to articulate the values of the organization and hire people who align to them. At companies I have led, we did exhaustive exercises to uncover the values of the organization. Sometimes, it was refining what the company already had, and other times we built them from scratch. The values are in the company already, you just have to listen for them. At Merchants, through our FleetIQ program, we seek individuals who align to our values and have strong industry backgrounds. Our values are also widely visible—on the walls and printed on employee ID cards—so that everyone is reminded on a daily basis to live and breathe them.
3. Organize Around the Client and Simplify the Offerings. After developing a clear strategy and setting its direction throughout the organization, we quickly evaluated our operations and moved to reorganize around the client into one company. Merchants, to its credit, has always been an extremely entrepreneurial company. Because of this, there were a number of “micro-businesses” throughout the organization that had been created to answer a need but had not been fully integrated. Through our strategic approach, we aligned the micro businesses into the larger business to provide the best experience for clients.
4. Involve Everyone and Encourage Collaboration. Setting a lofty strategic direction and pursuing a truly synergistic experience across our whole company required collaboration. Previously, the leadership team had only met on a monthly basis. We established a weekly standing meeting and during the pandemic have had daily team meetings at some points—focused meetings with real decisions and tangible action items. Establishing a culture of feedback and collaboration has inspired shared learnings and led to new opportunities. Moreover, this approach has cascaded down through the entire organization, which means we are collaborating more and driving more value.
5. Drive Culture from the Top. Most companies have accidental cultures. Culture is one of those things that you can’t really put on a piece of paper, but you know it when you’re in it. We can consciously build culture, but it requires investment and commitment from the top. First, I had to align our leadership team to drive the service-oriented, flexible and innovative culture. Next, we implemented formal and informal leadership development for our most influential leaders to instill the culture and teach others the way. Finally, I believe in fun—fun drives culture. So we celebrate all kinds of wins, we reward our employees, hold events on a regular basis, and make sure our employees have a transparent understanding of what we are doing.
6. Make Innovation Everyone’s Job. For most organizations, innovation sits as a separate entity in the makeup of the org chart—or it doesn’t exist at all. As a leader, I think innovation is a fundamental skillset that should permeate the entire organization, and not be locked into one particular area or group. It’s about giving employees the tools and training to innovate for themselves, while also having a process designed for the larger innovations. We call the little innovations “Little i’s” and the big innovations “Big I’s”. By providing the communication and tools, we have seen employees across all areas of the business implementing highly successful innovative ideas, and we reward those ideas on a quarterly basis.
I’m an engineer by training, and through my experience have seen that systems work, when practiced regularly and planned purposefully. The best practices I have listed above are one of the many systems that I have developed and implemented over my career as a CEO. If you find yourself in a transformation situation—one where you are implementing quite a bit of change or experiencing rapid growth—these six steps can be extremely powerful and help guide your thinking and the organization at large. Systems work because they keep us organized, give us a playbook to run from, and provide a starting point from which we can be creative. Sometimes having a playbook is all it takes to remove the fear of leading and inspire you and your teams to incredible heights.
Brendan P. Keegan is Chief Executive Officer at Merchants Fleet. Under Brendan’s leadership Merchants has become the fastest-growing fleet management company in North America, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list. An award-winning, six-time President & CEO of companies ranging in size from 500 to over 10,000 employees, Brendan is the author of more than a hundred articles on leadership, strategy, and technology. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences across the financial services and technology sectors.
