Let’s build respect the old-fashioned way: by showing you’re really good at what you do. Being the youngest on your team, don’t even try to demonstrate the highest technical expertise. Even if you are the best technically, people won’t feel great about being out-performed at their own game by someone half their age. They will feel great, however, at having their own strengths magnified by someone who’s becoming a really good leader. Build respect by demonstrating excellence at leading.

Ask for help

First things first. Address what no one’s talking about: your age. People trust you when they believe you understand them. When you say what everyone is thinking but afraid to say, you’ll build trust rapidly. Done well, admitting when you’re in over your head can be the foundation for strong relationships. “I’m younger than the rest of the team, yet I’m the manager. We have a job to do as a group. I don’t have your industry experience, and I’m counting on you for our success. My job is doing what I can to help you create that success. If we all do our part, we’ll make a superb team.”

You’re laying the issue on the table and using it to frame a mutual working relationship. Yes, you’re young. And that’s just a fact. The team can either get over it, pull together, and get the work done, or they can turn it into a problem and stonewall. Either way, once you’ve had this conversation, you can talk about the choice they’ve made, rather than silently accepting their implicit reaction.

A big part of your job is keeping people aware of the mission. Many new leaders assume that once the team knows what it’s supposed to do, all will be well. Nope. Daily work sucks people in and they gradually lose sight of the goal. Remind them often. Use the mission to introduce weekly status meetings, and ask the team to relate their status reports to the team’s larger objective.

Figuring out team dynamics

Once you have a common goal, you’re ready to enlist the team in crafting their working relationship. Take the time to understand each person’s unique strengths and blind spots. For each person, challenge the group to ask:

• What are that person’s strengths?
• How can that person’s strengths contribute to the group?
• What support will that person need from the group to use his strengths most effectively and to compensate for weaker areas?

Include yourself in the discussion. You’ll be contributing direction, facilitation, and management. You’ve already said that your strengths don’t include decades of industry experience, so the team can expect you to bring them questions only experience can answer. Likewise, invite them to tell you when their experience contradicts your plans or decisions. With a roadmap of skills and needs, the team provides mutual support towards a common end.

Your job description as a leader is simple: Support your team in whatever they need to meet their goals. Your goal—telling the truth, framing the relationship as mutual support, setting direction, and aligning team members’ strengths—builds culture and working relationships. In the day-to-day, your team’s need for additional support will change. You’ll find yourself acquiring resources, scheduling projects, and shielding people from organizational politics. By occasionally asking, “How can I help you do your job better?” you’ll quickly learn how you can help your people succeed.

The more you demonstrate true commitment and honesty, the more people will trust you. The better you do your job, the more the team will respect you. You’re doing your job well by honestly addressing the status quo and having the group design working relationships that bring out their best. You may be the only manager in your team members’ careers who has taken this approach. They’ll respect and trust you for doing what it takes to make them successful, and won’t care for a moment that you’re twenty years their junior.

 
As the author of this column, I receive a number of questions each month on the topic of leadership. Manu asks how young men and women in India can be taught to think about leadership. A pharmacy director in the U.S. is having difficulty firing up a small number of workers who are not engaged in their work. Linda wants tips on being more decisive. An executive leading a crossfunctional team asks: “How can I motivate them to stay committed to the team and focused on our goals when they have their day-to-day work responsibilities?”
The answers to these questions begin with the very basics. What is the definition of leadership?

 
In my experience, “business leadership” is often associated with a CEO of a company who made a lot of money and got rich in the process. Yet when clients tell me their company needs leadership, impressive job titles and large salaries aren’t what they’re after.

We say, “So-and-so is a born leader.” No such thing. Leadership is a relationship between a person and a group plus the skills to guide the group to success. As with any relationship, success depends on both parties. One group’s stellar leader may fail utterly when leading another group. The lack of competent leadership is the number one complaint I hear from non-CEOs.

Rather than just study leaders (thousands of books on leadership cover that ground), I’ve asked hundreds of people who they follow and why. They say leadership is emotional; it’s about inspiration, motivation, and connection. Unlike management, it doesn’t lend itself to systems, structure, and traditional classroom teaching. What inspires people to follow is surprisingly consistent, and surprisingly simple. But be forewarned: Simple doesn’t mean easy!

Establishing the leadership relationship

Call it “vision,” or “mission,” but it all boils down to one thing: First and foremost, people look to leaders for direction. Only by knowing their organization’s direction can people apply themselves to achieve their goals. It needn’t be formally stated; the leader’s actions and decisions convey the direction to the company. The direction needs to pervade every decision and conversation within the company, and it’s the leader who makes that happen. Providing direction for others is a key to creating a leadership relationship.

Even with direction, people must trust a leader. Trust is built on honesty and integrity. People want the truth from their leaders. Outrage from Watergate, the Monica Lewinsky affair, Enron, and many other public scandals were fueled less by the events than by the accused parties’ cover-ups and lies. When Salomon Brothers covered up improper trading in an early-1990s scandal, it fueled the flight of a billion-dollars’ worth of customers as people lost trust in the organization. Warren Buffett rescued the company by using complete and total candor with Wall Street and regulators as a way of restoring trust. Far from being a disaster, telling the truth proved astonishingly effective in quickly restoring the company’s integrity, with a minimum of fines.

Leaders must have integrity, establishing clear values and living those values. One of my clients worked for a newly public company whose CEO urged employees to hold their shares to keep investor confidence high. He then sold several million-dollars’ worth of his own shares. He responded to his employees’ feelings of betrayal saying, “It was just a small percentage of my holdings.” But that didn’t matter! He contradicted himself by selling shares while exhorting his employees to hold theirs. It killed his leadership.

Interestingly, the key is having actions match values, more so than what those values are. If one leader values quality and another values speed-to-market, they will simply attract different people to their organizations. But in either case, they must live their values consistently.

Consistency is another vital leadership element. When a leader changes direction with the market fad-of-the-day, or when his or her values shift according to the latest public opinion polls, people stop following. People want dependable leaders who provide a touchstone in times of change. You may ask: In a world of constant change, don’t we need to shift and adapt? Of course. But you must choose a direction and values that stay stable even while adapting your tactics.

A software company once had a company vision, “We will produce the best ABC widget for DOS the world has every seen.” It was a great vision statement, until Windows squashed the company out of existence. The software maker’s vision was so narrow it couldn’t adapt to change. A mission of, “We will solve the ABC problem for computers worldwide” would have been flexible enough to keep the vision while adapting to technological evolution.

Lastly, followers need to feel connected to their leaders. Leaders almost always connect through shared values; that’s one reason followers leave when a leader doesn’t live his or her values. Helping people feel they are part of something much greater—giving them a personal vision—is another strong tactic. For instance a leader in the healthcare industry may say, “You’re not just joining our company, you’re becoming part of transforming the world of healthcare.” Recognizing and rewarding employee achievement helps cement the connection. On the other hand, taking credit for others’ work is a powerful connection destroyer.

I was surprised by this framework’s simplicity—direction, integrity, consistency, and connection. But its simplicity hides how difficult it is to pull off. It’s difficult because these qualities can’t be faked for long. Creating a direction is easy. Integrating it into every breath and decision is not. Choosing values is easy. Aligning behavior, decision making, policies, and organization around those values is not. Consistency is easy … until things don’t go quite as planned. And connection is easy until things get busy and instinct tells us to stop all this fluffy foolishness and just get down to work.

Building the organization

Direction, integrity, consistency, and connection create the leadership relationship. That’s a first step in building an organization, but it doesn’t address the issue of how leaders make their organizations successful. History is littered with great leaders who didn’t have a clue how to turn their leadership into an enduring business. Let me share some of the highlights:

• Focus, focus, focus. Know what the organization should be doing and ruthlessly say “no” to anything that would be a distraction.

• Play to individual strengths. Understand the abilities of everyone you hire and make sure their job plays to their strengths. Don’t spend too much time developing weak areas. If someone can go from good-to-great in their strength, that’s more valuable to the organization than taking someone from poor-to-acceptable. Build organizational competence by teaming up complementary skill sets. Ditto for yourself; know what you’re good at and can do well, and spend most of your time doing that.
• Play to organizational strengths. Stick to what you’re good at as a company, and get very good at it. If you’re a great software company, opening a chain of high-end fashion clothing stores won’t build a strong organization.
• You can train people for skills, but it’s much harder to hire attitude. Most companies hire for specific job history or resume keywords, which is precisely the wrong way to go about it.
• Bring out the best in your people. Hire the best, give them a common direction, and let them do their job. You’ll have a much stronger organization than if you make yourself too important. Remember: Every time you hire someone who isn’t as smart as you, you lower the average IQ of the company.

My favorite books on building organizations are Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (it also touches on the “Level 5″ leadership character qualities that correlate with success), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization by Peter Senge, with Bryan Smigh, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, and First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. All are research-based, easy to read, and have enough great material to keep you building organizations well into the next century.

Most of this column has concentrated on the “soft” skills. When it comes to leadership, I remember what the COO of a multibillion-dollar company once told me: “At the end of the day the financial and strategic issues are there but they are reducible largely by analytics…the people and process issues are not.” If your goal is to become a successful business leader, your route will be smoother if you spend some time working on relationship skills and “softer” aspects of leading. Because at its heart, leadership is nothing more and nothing less than inspiring others to follow your dream and doing what it takes to make possible their success.

 
I am establishing a publishing house in Africa, and have put together a team with great potential. What strategies and skills must I employ to make the most of this potential? What is the best way to lead a crop of great people?

 
By assembling a great team, you’ve already put yourself ahead of the game. Rather than jump-starting the company on your own, you’ll have the easiest time, the most fun, and probably the most success by developing the team and letting the team develop the business. You just have to organize them and point them in the right direction.

Have you ever worked in a really high-functioning team? In great teams, each member brings their best to the party. They only do the things they’re best at, and they do them superbly. The work gets divided to play to each person’s strengths.

Identify your team’s strengths

Get the team together and explore each other’s backgrounds, expertise, likes, and dislikes. Match your discoveries to the work, so tasks go to whoever is most likely to finish them well and quickly.

Does a team member have contacts, industry experience, or experience in specific companies that will be valuable to the group? Put them on related tasks. Experience in a functional area or two can make a resident expert in those areas. Those with great people skills should be doing people work, while those who prefer to work behind the scenes can do research and build infrastructure.

Don’t limit yourself to obvious business strengths. Mental traits can be even more valuable over time: long-term thinking, short-term thinking, idea orientation, data orientation, comfort with stress, technological comfort, people skills, strategic thinking, ability to challenge assumptions. There are hundreds of ways to slice mental traits, but whatever your framework, know that mental traits become great strengths when matched with the right challenge.

For example, some people prefer to follow established procedures. The business press worships “innovation,” “disruption,” and “destroying old paradigms.” Well, guess what? “Out-of-the-box” disruption is great for occasional big conceptual leaps, but it’s the established procedures that drive a successful business. And when boarding a plane, who really wants a disruptive, out-of-the-box pilot, anyway? Give me a pilot who loves completing their sixty-point safety checklist today with the same precision and care they used the first time they went through it.

A strength is nothing more—and nothing less—than a skill so well matched to a task that the results are stellar. Know your team’s skills, and you can all begin turning those skills into strengths.

Use your team to hone direction

Once you have the right “who,” the team can pool resources to choose the “what.” You’ve chosen a business, and your team can hone the strategy and tactics you’ll use to make it successful. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that a team choose a single concept—your “hedgehog concept” —to unite the business. The hedgehog does only one thing: roll into an ironclad ball. But the strategy works so well that it’s invincible on its own turf. Your hedgehog concept comes from a brew of your individual values, skills, competencies, and a healthy dose of business sense.

Passion. Rally your company around something you can be passionate about. If you’re all deeply devoted to children, youngsters, and family, for goodness sake, don’t concentrate on publishing HTML reference manuals. Publish books for teens, young adults, and families. Choose a strategy that unleashes your collective inspiration!

Being the best. Your hedgehog concept should be something at which you can be the best in the world. It doesn’t mean you are the best, just that you can become the best. This can be trickier than it seems. Your team members and their skills will contribute to deciding where you can excel. Competition can also affect your choices. Even if you have the perfect team, existing players may have locked up areas of opportunity. If I were starting a grocery store, for instance, I’d be careful about hedgehog concepts that put me head-to-head with Wal-Mart. “Huge stores with great service” is a concept that’s taken. Even a superb team probably couldn’t be best in a world dominated by Wal-Mart.

Using Your Team’s Strengths

Economic viability. Your hedgehog concept should make money. You should also be able to identify your economic drivers in the form of a measurable “profit-per-x.” Often, the “x” is not obvious. For your strategy to make sense, you may choose a subtle “x.” Collins relates the story of a company whose strategy was to cluster stores in one geographic area to be most convenient for customers. Rather than measuring profit per store, the company realized that profit per neighborhood was the key to driving operations, compensation systems, and organizational learning in pursuit of convenience for their customers.

Monitor the commitments your team makes

As you begin implementing your strategy, pay close attention to the commitments you make. Commitments provide flexibility and focus, but can also bind you to a long-term course of action. Since your venture is quite young, you don’t have a lot of operating knowledge to choose commitments wisely. So keep yourself as flexible as possible until you’re fairly sure of your course of action.

Commitments come in all shapes and sizes, but some of the most powerful are the agreements you make on how to frame the world. Your beliefs about what customers want and how they behave, if propagated throughout your company, are a very powerful frame. Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, was famous for rejecting IBM’s frame that computers meant room-sized boxes that were only useful to large corporations. He built DEC and revolutionized the industry by inventing the minicomputer. Unfortunately, he got caught in his frame of the minicomputer being The Answer. Oops. In the late 1990s, his once-leading company was acquired by upstart PC maker Compaq.

Supplier and distributor relationships can become commitments. Decisions to vertically integrate (or not) can become commitments. Deeply held cultural values can become commitments. Large capital expenditures can become commitments. One entrepreneur recently told me his company had perfected the ability to open a new market and quickly achieve a 25 percent-plus profit margin. Unfortunately, while going up their learning curve, they built factories several times their optimal size. The company’s survival is still touch-and-go—not because it’s a bad business, but because early commitments have saddled the company with unproductive, expensive assets.

Become a leader, not a manager

Finally, spend regular time leading rather than managing. You’ve got a good team, and you’ve jointly chosen a direction. Now your job is keeping the company on track. Keep your team working well together, and make sure you’re building a company where everyone plays to their strengths. Know your hedgehog concept, discuss it regularly, and make sure it guides the company’s daily decisions. Spend time thinking strategically with your management team. Have them project the hedgehog concept out one, three, or five years into the future, and steer the company and its commitments towards that reality.

Your job is creating an environment where your employees can do their best. Give them all the credit. Recognize and celebrate their accomplishments. When they screw up, lead an “after action review” to help them learn. Remember that you’re building a culture that brings out and amplifies everyone’s strengths, so use mistakes as an opportunity to reexamine the strengths of the team and change your tactics, your assumptions, or your organization.

For now, focus on getting your company off the ground. You’ve hired the crew; together you’ve charted the course. Now stand back and let them bring the dream to fruition.

A leader can be brought down by a single follower’s actions. How can a leader reduce the risk?

 
We dream great dreams and set goals so huge we need organizations to achieve them. Where people organize, leaders emerge. We want to be those leaders.

Leaders become the focus of an organization’s results. When things go right, leaders get the credit, glory, and money. Jack Welch receives the praise, but his accomplishments took 305,000 employees twenty years to produce.

When things go wrong, leaders can take the fall. The Middle East peace process is regularly derailed by disgruntled people largely acting alone, and it sets back the efforts—and eventually credibility—of the leaders by decades.

Good decisions minimize risk

One way to decrease downside risk is by helping your people make good decisions about what and what not to do. Sales programs teach that decisions are made with emotion. Logic is only used to justify the decision. So you’ll have to work with the emotions of your organization. (By the way, this is why I believe the current compliance fad won’t stem unethical business behavior. Compliance is about setting up and following rules. Rules are left-brain, logical thinking. Without addressing the underlying emotional drives, the pressure to win by any means possible will eventually resurface.)

People take emotional cues by watching their leaders. They don’t listen to speeches. They don’t read laminated wallet-cards espousing values. They learn how to act by watching you, especially when you’re off-balance and your guard is down.

So first off, give your own values a good spring cleaning. The last few years have shown us business leaders who have acted immorally, unethically, and sometimes illegally to succeed in business. If you set a bad example, people will follow, you’ll get into trouble, and frankly, you’ll deserve it.

Do you charge occasional personal expenses to the business? Do you develop a blind spot when your company violates a little regulation here or there? “After all,” you’ll say at your arraignment, “it’s no big deal. Everyone does it.” Beware! Your organization will be watching and magnifying the values you demonstrate. So clean up your act now. You don’t want John Grisham turning your story into a best-selling novel.

You want your company infused with clear, consistent values that people can use to make decisions. Johnson & Johnson’s credo clearly spells out J&J’s values: customer well-being, employee well-being, community well-being, and shareholder well-being. In that order. It’s so clear that every employee can use the credo to know when to act, and when to stop. Given the credo, J&J’s famous Tylenol recall makes complete sense.

Propagate values via stories

People learn values through stories. The way a story’s hero behaves tells listeners what values are Good. The Evil Villain demonstrates Bad Values.

Businesses develop myths that illustrate their values. Nordstrom’s devotion to their customer return policy shines in the story of an employee giving a customer a refund for returning tires, even though Nordstrom’s is a clothing store. A FedEx employee made good on the overnight promise by renting a helicopter in a storm to deliver a single package on time. These are the legends that convey the important values.

Telling stories isn’t enough. Watch for people who embody good, values-based decisions and give them public recognition. Celebrate not only their results, but the values they’ve shown while getting the results.

On the other side, come down quick and hard when someone knowingly crosses the line. If it’s bad, it’s a firing offense. And don’t reward the right outcome when it’s reached by doing the wrong thing. If a salesperson makes quota by lying to customers, don’t say, “Shame shame” and still pay their bonus. That’s a mixed message, and a mixed message sends no message. Your salesperson—and everyone else—will notice the bonus and ignore the shame. Only pay them for the sales they brought in ethically. If they quit, celebrate; that’s one unethical salesperson who won’t be landing you in jail. If they shape up, celebrate; you’ve made a difference. Either way, you’ve sent a powerful message that doing things right is important.

Discuss decisions to surface values

Of course, you’d rather just hire good people to begin with, people who act with integrity once they’re on board. You can’t just ask someone in a job interview what their values are and expect an accurate answer. Most people don’t know their values. But decisions are where values kick into action. So ask candidates open-ended questions about past decisions (recent past behavior predicts future behavior fairly well). Their answers will imply values. If they don’t have relevant past experience, hypothetical questions are next-best. “There’s a regulation that is keeping you from doing your job. Everyone knows the regulation is there for historical reasons only, breaking it won’t hurt anyone, and it will result in great profits for the firm. What do you do? How do you justify your decision to your manager?”

These are process questions; they ask for reflection on how things get done. Encourage regular process discussions. They get people used to thinking about what’s OK and what’s not. If business is fast-paced or requires big risks, openly questioning how business is happening make it more likely to bring outside-the-bounds schemes to light early.

Ignoring process and focusing solely on outcomes is dangerous. It’s one way to encourage deliberate tomfoolery. In reports of Enron’s collapse, Jeff Skilling never told employees to act unethically. He simply demanded extreme results and made it clear any behavior was acceptable to produce them. In the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the alleged command to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation turned into torture. A simple process comment could have avoided the scandals: “By the way, here’s a copy of the Geneva Convention. Stay within these bounds.”

Your goal is to get people feeling accountable for their own actions and making value-aligned judgments. Trader Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank through ongoing fraud. In his book, he’s amazed that his bosses didn’t stop him. Yes, their oversight was shoddy. But their preparation was even worse. Those bosses never cultivated Leeson’s feeling of personal accountability for his actions. Even after serving prison time and writing his book, he was still looking to them to be his conscience.

You grow personal accountability by treating people as adults. Discuss their decisions frankly. Make them understand you’re counting on their good judgment. Give them authority, but only when you’re confident they can use it responsibly. If things go wrong, hold them accountable for recovery and learning from the mistakes. And beware of micro-management! Telling people every detail of how things must get done lets them run on automatic, rather than take responsibility for making the right choices.

If you haven’t the luxury of being sure of people before handing them the reins, try surprise “decision audits” from time to time. Drop by a project, ask about recent decisions, and discuss how those decisions were made. Don’t micro-manage, but simply take in information to understand how values are playing out. Have your managers hold similar audits, and as long as they’re taken seriously, you’ll build a culture that expresses your values.

Ultimately, that’s the best you can do. A leader will always be responsible for the sins of the followers. Alas, that’s the nature of the job. We can tell people the rules, but we minimize our risk through values as well as rules. By modeling clear values, discussing them, and incorporating them into the way decisions get made, we can make it much more likely our organization will do the right things.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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All of the talk about “leadership” often ignores the fact that leadership is powerful at any and all levels—and that you do not need to be heading up an organization to be an effective leader. Some of the most effective business people that I know are in roles that are not supervisory. But they can move teams and individuals better than some (most) managers—precisely because they know when it’s appropriate to lead and when it’s appropriate to follow. Many so-called “leaders” have not mastered this! How would you respond?

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”—Anonymous

If you have ever been on a team with more than one self-styled leader, you have seen dysfunction at its finest. In-fighting, lack of agreement, sneakiness, and outright sabotage cause things to crash and burn. But is anyone surprised? If you’re a “leader” on a team, asking how you can lead or follow, you may have already failed. “Lead or follow” makes it sound like the two are mutually exclusive. Not so. The confusion comes because we don’t know what it means to lead.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.” It happens mainly when everyone is trying to tell everyone else what to do. That isn’t leading; that’s micromanaging, and it’s not part of the leader’s job.

A leader’s job is to ensure the success of the organization—no matter who reports to whom in any given group. At every moment she should be asking, “Is what I’m doing helping the group to succeed?” Sometimes we think we are helping, but we are just raising the group’s blood pressure with our behavior. You might even ask the group, in addition to yourself. If the answer is yes, you are doing the right thing; keep doing it. If the answer is no, stop! Decide you’ll start being part of the solution, and find a way to bring your basic leadership skills to the fore.

Setting the course

Your basic job is setting direction, not giving directions. If it’s your organization you are working with, by all means make sure to assert yourself in determining the highest-level goals of the group. But if you are in a group where it’s not your responsibility to set direction, then don’t. Only do it if the team has no charter and the team has not previously agreed on direction.

The group was presumably assembled for a reason—that’s the charter. Help remind the group why it exists, but don’t go changing its reason. If the basic charter must change, that’s the job of the group’s sponsor. Of course, in the extremely unlikely event you run across the group with no clear charter and no clear owner, consider it an invite for a land grab. Cram your direction down the team’s throat, and enlarge your empire just a bit more.

Ducks in a row

Another aspect of your job is aligning teams. Usually you align your own team, but nothing says you can’t spread the love when working with others. Once the goals are clear, help everyone match their part of the job. Offer your help to the group, but don’t force yourself on them. If you see someone screwing up big time, ask them questions to explore the link between their actions and their goals. Be humble! Ask with genuine curiosity, “Could you help me understand the link between the insanity you’re engaged in and what you believe to be the goal?”

Sometimes you’ll learn the insanity makes sense, and you’re wrong. They’re doing something you never thought of. Other times, you will find you must ask further questions to help them understand where their plans need shoring up. If they remain dead set on the wrong course, it’s your call: Let them learn or make a stink. In my experience, if someone is smart, it’s usually safest to give them the benefit of the doubt. They may surprise you. If you decide to battle, think carefully. Choose battles wisely, as they’re a poor use of time and, often, issues that seem earth-shattering now just aren’t in the long run.

Is this leading or following? You are certainly following the group charter. You are certainly helping group members figure out how to support the group. And as long as you are committed to the success of the group, you are leading. Even if you aren’t the one giving directions.

Support your mates

The other leadership skill you can bring to any group is support. Toss out the image of leader as someone in the 37th floor office, aloof from the teeming masses. When work is getting done, the leader is the least important team member. Your job is to make it easy for everyone else to get their jobs done. If that means taking out the trash and picking up low fat, low carb, organic pizza for the team so they can work straight through, then so be it. And you can really go the extra mile and (don’t faint) support a team even if it isn’t yours! If that’s what is needed to help the business succeed, go for it. It’s a much needed, often hyped, but rarely practiced virtue called teamwork.
Is taking out the trash leading or following? It doesn’t matter. It’s getting the job done.

So you like control. Get over it. When you’re in a team, don’t ask whether or not you’re leading it; ask whether or not you’re contributing to its success. Stop being dazzled by your own brilliance. Spend your time helping people know where they are going, link their actions to the goals, and support them as they get there. You’ll be perceived as a leader, regardless of title. The team will succeed, the business will succeed, and you can say, “I helped.”

“But wait,” you say, “how will I make sure I’m making a difference that matters if I’m just taking out the trash?” That’s the point. Sometimes, taking out the trash is the most powerful way to lead. Remember, two billion years from now, we’ll all be a frozen hunk of ice, so don’t sweat the small stuff, and fighting over leading a team is small stuff.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Eighteen months after starting this column, business leadership still hasn’t reached perfection. Haven’t they been reading? Why is good leadership still so rare?

Maybe it’s because we use a whacked-out definition of leadership. “Leader” has become code for “rich guy with an impressive title who orders others around.” But leading by giving orders left and right with no accountability doesn’t work. We’re living in a world of low loyalty, high mobility, and extreme uncertainty. “Push” leadership will push people right out the door. We need leaders who inspire others to follow, who engender loyalty. We need leaders who practice “pull” leadership.

Pull leaders don’t give orders; they create social systems that inspire people to join

They do it using principles that many people in official leadership positions wouldn’t follow if their lives depended on it.

Pull leaders take responsibility for the success of their organization and their people

Responsibility isn’t given; it’s taken. The loss of faith in American business starting earlier this decade has been driven by a batch of CEOs who have chosen not to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, even when the responsibility was required by law. Pull leaders take responsibility voluntarily, even when it’s optional. You want to change how your company does business, but you’re too junior to have an effect? So what! A corporate trainer saw students struggle with the company’s product, so he wrote up the shortcomings, proposed solutions, and sent the CEO a weekly dispatch. He took responsibility for leading a product quality effort, despite being a twenty-three-year-old new hire.

Pull leaders believe that success of the organization is their responsibility, no matter what their job titles are. They don’t have to do all the work themselves, but they have to make it possible for everyone else to succeed. They lose sleep worrying if they’ve done enough for their people to be great in their jobs. They hope they’ve provided the right tools and training. They ask constantly how they can create a culture that helps others achieve.

Because organizational success isn’t enough for them, pull leaders also take responsibility for helping their people succeed as individuals. They learn enough to encourage and support each person reach their goals, even goals that aren’t necessarily about work. Think about it for a minute. If you dream of attending a Red Sox game in box seats and your boss arranges it as a holiday present, wouldn’t you be inclined to be more loyal than if your boss gave out the usual all-expenses-paid trip to the annual cow tipping contest?

Pull leaders work to become attractive to others

In taking responsibility, pull leaders realize their greatest tool is themselves. So they work hard at perfecting that tool! You’d think Michelle LaBrosse of Cheetah Learning would be relaxing on a tropical island after building a highly successful multimillion-dollar business in less than five years. Nope. She reads constantly, attends top-level executive education programs, and is constantly asking how she can get better. Her people love her and she has no problem finding employees.

Becoming attractive isn’t just a matter of reading up on business. Pull leaders work on their interpersonal skills. They get their own lives in order, knowing full well that if they aren’t successful in their own lives, they don’t have the emotional well to draw from to be there for their people. Much to my surprise, in one Harvard Business School panel discussion, several highly successful CEOs mentioned that they meditate for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. They also advocated being socially involved and giving back to the community. By working to become better people, they became better leaders as well.

Pull leaders align and inspire with values

Values are the second most powerful force for bringing people together to achieve great things. Pull leaders know their own values, and demonstrate them when they act. And I’m not talking about impressive balcony speeches on “quality” or “competitiveness” or “valuing people.” Politicians give those speeches and aren’t exactly at the top of most people’s most-respected list. What matters to pull leaders are their values in action. They examine their own actions honestly and without judgment, discover what values they embody, and either change their behavior or choose to stand for the values they already embody.

The most powerful values message is sent when the pull leader is clearly taking a risk to stay true to his or her values. An engineer cared enough about quality to stand up in a department meeting and tell the development team that the decision to ship a low-quality product to meet a deadline was a betrayal of their commitment to quality. Risky? Sure. He could have gotten fired. But once word spread, he received great underground support as a steward of closely-held values.

Pull leaders are stewards of their organizations and employees

Stewardship is a key element of pull leaders. A steward is a caretaker of another’s property. A pull leader takes care of their organization and employees, without stepping over the line into behaving like the owner—even if they own 100 percent of the stock. Stewardship recognizes that organizations are created and maintained by everyone who works there. No matter who owns the stock, if everyone quits, there’s nothing left but an empty room.

In stewardship, a pull leader exhibits humility and appreciation for the organization they’ve started. Robert Cavett, founder of the several-thousand-person National Speakers Association, arrived at his annual conference banquet without his ticket. The new NSA member at the door refused him entrance. Rather than make a fuss with a melodramatic “Do you know who I am?” he returned to his room to get his ticket. His graceful handling of the situation turned the door guard into a lifelong devotee when she later found out (much to her horror) that she had turned away the organization’s founder.

Stewards don’t own the organization, nor do they own its results. Part of their humility is giving credit where credit is due: to the people in the organization who made success possible. You won’t find a pull leader trumpeting his own horn, but you will find him highlighting the hard work and dedication of his team.

Giving recognition is just one way pull leaders take care of their people. Did you catch that four-letter word? Yes, care. It’s a concept we don’t hear much about in business. Emotions are considered somehow undiscussable. Get over it, and start caring. Good stewards want people to succeed easily, not struggle. And they demonstrate their care however they can, maybe just with a birthday card or present. Maybe in much bigger ways. The head of a large nonprofit was also on the board of a local hospital. Employees needing medical care found themselves in a private room, receiving the best medical care available, and get well flowers by their bedside. He was a lousy leader in other areas, but people forgave his shortcomings and remained fiercely loyal when he showed he cared.

Pull leaders architect their social and organizational space

Pull leaders don’t just let space and culture happen. They actively shape the environment in which people act. The most obvious shaping is physical. They decide if an office will be all cubicles, all offices, or a mix of both. They choose whether to kept the walls a pleasant beige—a color that offends no one and everyone at the same time—or take a risk with artwork, edgy furniture, and exposed brickwork in a loft. They pay attention to whether the space promotes the kind of interaction people need to be successful. For engineers, it may mean large open areas for collaborative brainstorming. For personal financial planners, it may mean quiet offices where they can meet their clients in private. Internet bubble companies were famous for foosball tables in funky spaces that attracted the best and brightest employees available. The bubble burst, but the principle remains: space matters. It powerfully shapes culture, and pull leaders use it deliberately.

Actually, I’ve lied just a bit: Pull leaders shape the cultural space as well as the physical space. A critical part of culture is how decisions get made. If a pull leader truly believes in people, there’s no better way to show it than to let those people take the lead in shaping the organization. Let them design the environment, set space requirements, and create the work world that will best lead them to success.

This is where we find the fundamental paradox of pull leadership: People most want to follow leaders who don’t order them around, but rather give them the freedom and opportunity to be an active part in shaping their own lives.

Pull leadership isn’t easy

Not many leaders practice pull leadership because, at its heart, it’s about recognizing that the leader isn’t perfect, and that an organization’s power comes from everyone who comprises it. This flies in the face of America’s deepest cultural image: the Wild West pioneer, staking out uncharted territory and holding it single-handedly. But rugged individualism is nothing more than a romantic myth in a world as complex as ours. If you doubt it, try living with a broken water main or no power for a week.

We can still look to the pioneer for inspiration, however. The pioneer’s greatest quality is the courage to face the unknown—and that we still need in great measure. Developing pull leadership skills demands as much courage as that pioneer had, only this time the territory is mental. Develop the courage to admit you don’t have the answers; the courage to admit your success depends more on others than on what you can do yourself; the courage to trust them; the courage to stand for your values even when it means making unpopular decisions; and the courage to rely on attraction rather than giving orders.

None of this is easy. But it’s how the world works today, and the rewards of becoming a leader who can inspire will be well worth the journey.

Acknowledgements: My thinking about “pull leadership” has been shaped in part by the work of Peter Senge’s systems thinking; Peter Block’s Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest; and Jim Collins’s Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Most people are not in official positions of leadership and yet we wish to do all we can to help the organization succeed. Bringing leadership skills to the table would benefit all. Since we aren’t responsible for setting the “vision” for the company, where do we fit in? Should we just be extensions of the real leader or is vision something beyond our concern? Should we just focus on issues at our level and perhaps one level above? I loved your example of the fellow who found fault with his company’s product and worked to change it, but I think where I’ve worked that kind of behavior would just get you fired. Is there something a bit more tamed down that you could offer?

You caught me. Sure, you can lead from anywhere in an organization; it’s probably the most common way organizations are led. (Sadly, many CEOs aren’t perceived as leaders by their own organizations.) With command-and-control leadership, it’s all about giving orders, so you need the title. But in most companies, you can be a powerful leader anywhere in an organization by adapting the “pull leadership” principles of responsibility, stewardship, and values.

Pull leaders take responsibility for an organization and the people who make it up

The key to leadership at any level is writing a new job description: My job is making the company, and its people, successful.

Taking responsibility for success is first on your agenda. Don’t confuse responsibility with authority! Responsibility is totally different; it’s an attitude. Want proof? Just watch Ken Lay, who had absolute authority at Enron, abused it, and wholly declines to take responsibility. You can do better than that. Mentally, decide to start acting as a leader rather than waiting for permission or direction.

Believe it or not, this can be leadership’s greatest challenge. The CEO of a company where I was President said (yelled, actually) that I was acting too much like a consultant. After two days in denial, I admitted it was true and asked: “What would I do differently if I owned this company?” The answer flashed up in an instant: fire an incompetent staffer and build a “quick and dirty” system to move us forward. The attitude made all the difference.

Acquire the attitude by asking what you’d do if you were in charge. Imagine yourself in the corner office, writing out paychecks and company expenditures from your personal bank account. With an attitude of responsibility, you’ll be asking if you’re getting your money’s worth? Is the company working on the right projects? Is the culture functional? Just taking the attitude of “I can be responsible for the group’s success” will start to pervade your presence.

If you’re going to take responsibility for the organization, you must take responsibility for the people as well. This is super important if you’re leading from below. A CEO can grind people down and no one calls her on it. She can’t be fired. You can. But you won’t, if you’re taking responsibility for the success of the people, as well as the organization. Decide you’ll start looking out for your co-workers, your boss, and yourself.

Pull leaders are stewards for their organizations and people

Here’s where responsibility becomes action. Take care of your organization. Unlike a CEO or President, you can’t set company direction. But you can take the direction top management sets and make it your job to turn that direction into reality.

Start figuring out how your business works. Read business books. Talk to people from other functions in your spare time. Learn what they do and why. You’ll get a sense for how it needs to be nudged going forward. As the low person on the totem pole, start by making suggestions here and there and offering to help. Do a small project on your own time that benefits the company in a visible way. If people know you’re genuinely curious and concerned about helping things get better, they’ll be inclined to work with you. More importantly, they’ll start looking to you as someone who drives success.

Become steward of your group

Every team you’re on is a chance to be a steward. The teams have a charter or a goal they’re supposed to reach. You can’t set the goal, but you can make sure you understand it and then become the “go-to guy” for keeping things moving. If the team stalls, figure out why and offer to help the team leader restart it. Some people just attend to their own work, and they’re viewed (rightly) as good technical contributors who must be managed to be valuable.

Sample Values to Consider When Matching Yourself to Your Organization

A sales team was not making sales. The more time went by, the more sales weren’t happening. One member of the team finally interviewed everyone on the team and realized that half the team was stalled waiting for input from the other half, while the other half was stalled waiting for input from the first half! He got everyone in a room, had them exchange information, and three weeks later, calls were again being made and the pipeline was starting to fill.

If you attend to everyone’s work, and help the entire team be successful, you’re acting as a leader in a tangible way.

Become steward of your co-workers

It’s not enough to care about the group. Your co-workers’ success is important, even if you don’t like them! What are their hot buttons? What are their strengths? When do they best shine in their jobs? Once you know, start watching out for them. Do you hear of a project perfectly suited for a teammate’s career aspirations? Help them apply and become a champion for them. If they’re running into problems, show concern. Share ideas for how they can overcome their obstacles.

Keep people going by helping them make their job part of a larger success. After all, group goals only matter if they further the company’s overall goals. Keep the connection in mind, and help others “get” the connection. Even a janitor enables a company’s success by freeing people to work without the distraction of maintaining their space. There’s pride to be taken; help them take it!

When you help people find their pride and become more successful, they’ll start supporting you in return. Over time, you’ll find more people taking you seriously. You’ll have the support to make audacious suggestions, have people nod in agreement, and get the attention of the people who can make your ideas happen.

Remember that the boss and the boss’s boss are important co-workers! Know their motivations, hot buttons, and goals. Read your company’s annual report. Be able to talk their language. When your ideas start making it higher in the organization, you want them to be hearing their own success in your words. Without this groundwork, you risk triggering territory wars — not a pleasant prospect.

If you keep a strong link to the company’s success and the success of the people involved, you may find yourself with the authority to match your responsibility sooner than you think.

Lead by living the company’s values

You’ll succeed as a leader only if you’re a living example of your values. What causes do you champion? How do you behave with others? What decisions do you make? Now ask yourself what values your answers demonstrate. If those values don’t align with your organization, change yourself, change organizations, or tone down your leadership aspirations. Values, if clear and consistent in behavior, are a powerful glue that holds an organization together.

It may be tricky to identify your organization’s true values. Values are often unstated, and when they are discussed, the “espoused values” may not match how people really behave. The important values in the workplace often cluster around people, product, and organizational health. See the sidebar for sample values to consider when matching yourself to your organization.

Ethical values are the easiest to identify, make the most powerful statement, and carry the greatest risk. At Stanford Graduate School of Business last week, incoming MBAs were discussing their experiences with ethical issues on the job. Two of the group had taken major ethical stands at their companies as junior employees. One had championed workplace safety, while the other had asked her company to forgo investing in an ethically dubious company. Fortunately, both had been successful in their causes.

That isn’t always true. “Whistle-blowers” may get tremendous respect from our private selves, but they’re rarely appreciated by society at large or in the organization whose secrets they reveal. There’s a fine line between championing values by living them and stepping over the line and “betraying” your company. Oddly, people react more intensely to an employee “betraying” their company than a company betraying its employees (or society!). I don’t know when companies became more important to us, emotionally, than our people and communities, but that’s how we react.

You have to decide where your line is in stepping up with your values. Personally, I’ve taken several ethical stands in my career that haven’t won me brownie points with management. Those stands have, however, led me to be perceived as a powerful leader by the people around me. Was it worth it? Yes. I’m proud of the person I’ve become. But in terms of career growth at those companies? Well… I’m not working there any more.

Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about behavior. If you live your values, take care of your organization and its people, and step up to the plate with responsibility, you’ll be a leader in the true sense of the word. Your title won’t matter. Your influence, the respect you garner, and the success you bring will be the true proof of your leadership.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Most founders of a successful family business sell their business to an outside third party. The 39 percent of family businesses passed to a second generation fail. Why don’t these owners plan better for one of the most important events of their lives?

If only it were just family businesses that didn’t plan well for the future. Most businesses woefully neglect the long term. And it’s not just the top executives who fail at farsightedness—few of us anywhere plan ahead. Before we jump into succession planning, there are some intriguing things to know about how we factor time into our decision making.

Think about some future plans you have. Notice how far out “the future” is for you. Are your plans for fifty years from now? Next week? Tomorrow? We all have certain time frames we naturally use when making decisions or thinking about the future. Those time frames drastically affect your decisions.

I awoke at sunrise on a Caribbean cruise and strolled up to the deck to behold row upon row of beach chairs, each with cup holder and ashtray. My first thought: “Great! Everything I need for a tan. Then perhaps a martini, and maybe a cigar. It’s the good life!” But if I took a thirty-year time horizon I might view this deck set-up as skin cancer, liver failure, or an emphysema station. Maybe it’s time to visit the casino, where I’ll lose 52 percent of my money on average at the blackjack table over the long term. The same situation looks very different depending on your time horizon.

Your decisions, your planning, and even how you look back and learn (or don’t) from the past are all affected by your time frame habits. If your time frame is brief, you probably spend a lot of your life in perpetual emergencies and fire-fighting, since, in a brief time frame, consequences of short-term emergencies are more real than the far-off consequences of creating permanent solutions. One of my best friends has such a short time horizon that he can be leaving for an appointment, spot the daily newspaper as he’s putting on his shoes, and spend twenty minutes reading it before realizing he’s just missed his appointment.

Being overwhelmed has driven us to ever-shorter time horizons. With more to do than we can even think about, we attend to the most urgent. That usually means the immediate emergencies. In a world demanding ever-faster results, we compress our time horizons more and more.

Rarer, but just as dysfunctional, is the opposite: a naturally long time horizon. Thinking ahead thirty years is great for insuring long-term success, but you’ve got to solve all the problems between here and there for it to matter. The Perfect Ten Year Plan is useless if you go bankrupt in the first year by not managing the day-to-day cash flow.

We are scared to plan for succession

Most people just don’t have a time horizon long enough to think about succession. If they do look ahead, they don’t like what they see: the day when they’re no longer here. And it’s not just in work; my estate planner tells me most people procrastinate writing their will for years. We avoid it, because in American culture, we’re just not taught to deal with our own mortality. (He’s been nagging me for a couple of years to get my estate plans in order. And I’ll do it—as soon as I’m done writing this article.)

Aside from mortality, there’s ego at stake. Does a founder really want to admit the company can survive without him? Come to think of it, does a founder really want to admit a legacy so fragile that it can’t survive without him? Quite a conundrum. It’s much easier to ignore succession altogether and concentrate on the next six months.

You might be thinking that it’s a leader’s job to do that planning, for the health of the business. Think again—and look in the mirror. It’s everyone’s job to do that planning. None of us want to admit that our companies/teams/families/communities can survive without us. But they can. It’s up to us to make sure that when we leave—and we will leave someday—the transition goes smoothly.

Start planning for succession long, long before you move on. Consider your first job responsibility to be training someone else to take over what you’re doing, so you can put your mind to learning the job above you before you’re promoted. Then when promotion time comes, you can step up with confidence that you have a head start and that your current job is in good hands.

Creating your succession plan

You can’t groom heirs unless you know what you’re grooming them for. Start by identifying all the responsibilities of your current job. Requests are your key to identifying your responsibilities. List all the requests anyone makes of you—customers, suppliers, bosses, employees, the public, even yourself. Each of those requests is a responsibility. Also, list all the requests you make of others. Ask yourself why you make each request. Your answers will be another list of responsibilities.
Now you have it: your real job description (formal job descriptions rarely reflect reality). For each responsibility, list the skills you use to meet the challenge. List the mindsets and attitudes you have, and any specific knowledge you use to fulfill that request.

Now you have a blueprint for bringing a successor—or several—up to speed. You use your real job description to identify who has many of the attributes needed to take over. Discuss the real job description with them, and get their input. Their ideas may differ on how the job can be done. Those differences might suggest alternate skills or approaches that can broaden how you do the job. More alternatives can also broaden the pool of potential successors.
Once you’ve chosen your people, start developing them. In their semi-annual learning and development review (of course you have semi-annual learning and development reviews, even if it’s not mandated by the company), help them choose assignments and experiences that will develop the skills you’ve identified to allow them to step into your shoes.

Juggle many replacements

There’s no reason to settle for a single successor. You can develop several people at once, especially since you can’t count on everyone staying put until you move on. One Fortune 500 company builds succession planning into every job above a certain level. They look for inside and outside candidates, and strive for a 3:1 ratio—three replacements in the pipeline for every job.

Furthermore, don’t assume you’ll be replaced by a single person. When you move on, your responsibilities may be distributed throughout a group, or may be taken over by a team. We all fantasize about being so valuable it’ll take a team to replace us; indulge the fantasy. You can develop some skills in some group members, and other skills in others. Of course, you’ll need to insure the team can work together when it’s time.

One caveat to choosing multiple replacements: Manage the situation delicately. If you tell five people that they’ll all be your replacement, you’ve just introduced competition that might cause four to quit when the fifth gets promoted someday. Simply help them develop, and make it clear to folks that the best way to succeed at any level is ongoing achievement and growth; specific jobs aren’t guaranteed.

Once you’ve got your succession plan under way, start working on your boss’s…with you as the successor. Profile your boss’s job and voila! You have your own development plan. It won’t guarantee you get the job, but you’ll be better and more effective as you move forward, and you’ll have a whole cadre of people able to step into your job when you move up to Chairman.

© 2005 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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You’re so proud of your new vision statement. It sounds nice. Inspiring, even. But the vision is useless unless it can direct action.

Your vision lays out a destination; your destination guides your strategy; and strategy chooses action. It’s action that leads to success. In those moments of action, having clear direction is crucial for building momentum. If your organization is like most, you spent weeks debating every word crafting your vision, mission, strategy, and goals. But no matter how lofty, if they aren’t created in a way that provides direction, those statements are little more than high-priced indulgences.

Every company means something different by the words “vision” and “strategy.” One person insists that “Provide our customers the highest possible quality widgets” is a vision. A friend takes one look and assures him, “That’s a strategy.” Here are some useful definitions that will help you decide if you’ve set a direction that can truly get traction.

Envisioning the future

Vision is timeless. It’s based on who/what you want to do. It’s why you’ve got an organization in the first place. It must be specific enough that everyone can use it to decide if their work is moving the company forward. Progress towards the vision must be measurable. A vision is independent of specific competition, and while it may mention the customer, it must guide even someone who doesn’t know the customers’ mind. The best visions imply whom the company serves, what it provides, and what distinguishes it from other companies providing the same products and services. Vision sets the broad direction. It says, “Go west, young man.”

Wrong: We will provide exceptional products and services that our customers value.

This vision requires knowing the customers’ mind in order to understand what the company provides. It doesn’t distinguish what is unique about the company, since presumably everyone in the market produces something customers value.

Right: We will help boat owners everywhere navigate new seas with geographically based directional products and services.

This vision tells us the market, the product (navigation products and services), the distinguisher (geographically based), and the progress measurement (delight).

The strategy thing

Strategy links the destination (vision) with current reality. Strategy applies to the whole company, and answers the question “How will we reach our vision, given current market conditions, competitive scenario, regulatory environment, etc.?” Strategy is narrower than vision, but broad enough to guide companywide organization structure, hiring, capabilities that must be developed, and so on. Strategy says, “We’re going west, but we ran into this grand canyon. We can go around to the north or south. Let’s choose south.”

For example, a company may have a vision to “provide scientifically proven technology to solve the medical needs of consumers and hospitals.” In the 1950s, the strategy may be doing in-house research, hiring and developing scientists, and a compensation program based on discovery. In the 1990s, the same company may have a strategy of acquiring small drug-making companies and buying and protecting patents from other companies. Both strategies will reach the vision, but they are appropriate for different competitive environments, and they have different organization structures, different financing options, and different operational characteristics.

You know you have a strategy if you chose your current path from many alternatives, all of which would have reached your vision, each of which would have required hiring different people and building different systems. If you didn’t consider many alternatives, or you didn’t choose your alternative considering your competition, your vision, and your current market conditions, then you probably have a tactic, not a strategy. If you can execute your strategy with your current people, reward systems, and organization structure, then it’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic.

The tactics

Tactics are limited in scope, typically just to a part of the company. They’re shorter term than a strategy. They involve executing given the existing capabilities and resources of the company. Unlike strategy, tactics generally work within the current organization structure, rather than changing the organization. Tactics say, “We’re on the south path. Let’s travel two miles today.” Your tactics probably won’t work unless they’re generated from a strategy that lays out a consistent philosophy for how your company will compete/win/attract customers in today’s market.

My article on giving your organization serious traction

“Flashpoints” are those moments in time when traction and momentum are built. For example, a flashpoint in creating a quality-driven organization might be when the CEO refuses to ship a poor-quality product, even though it will hurt quarterly numbers. Flashpoints always happen during a tactical action. That’s why you need a vision and strategy—without them, people at the flashpoint won’t have the guidance to ensure they can move the company forward in that moment of traction.

Your strategy also helps you find flashpoints. If your strategy involves locking up important distributor relationships, your flashpoints will involve reputation and relationship building, creating the perception of value to the distributors, and establishing negotiating leverage to capture an exclusive relationship. If your strategy is to be a low-cost provider, your flashpoints might be times when opportunities for efficiencies arise, or incidents where you can encourage a “continuous improvement” mindset in your team.

At the end of the day, your vision and strategy only exist to drive tactics. And often, the most significant tactics are those flashpoints whose effects are far-reaching. When your vision sets direction and your strategy ties it to your current situation, they provide a compass for everyone in your organization to follow for years to come.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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When we’re getting traction on something new, we typically have a week’s worth of work to do, and an hour to do it. The International Labor Organization says Americans win the prize for the most overworked people in the world.1 We’re productive, not because we work well (Europe matches our hourly efficiency) but because . . . we just work more hours. That means we’re working hard, but not smart. By working smart, we can still produce and also have a life.2 The challenge is pouring time and energy strictly into what really matters by exploiting your moments of truth.

Begin at the end

Most of our time at work is wasted. Only some of what we do moves the business forward. The rest is plain, old-fashioned bureaucracy. But you can’t know what moves the business forward unless you know where “forward” is.

In your search for moments that matter, keep your highest end goal—your vision—constantly in mind. Think golf—the secret to a good golf game (so they tell me) is not aiming at the ball; it’s aiming past the ball. Be guided by the direction, not the specific next step. We often get caught up in aiming at the ball. For example, many executives aim for shareholder wealth. Bad idea. Shareholders get wealthy when customers pay good money for products that solve real problems. Aim for that. Your vision proclaims how you plan to satisfy customers. Do that well and the money will follow.

The measurement moments

Some of your most important moments are when you have the chance to gather key information. A trip to a competitor’s plant, for example, can be an excellent opportunity to spot best practices and gather competitive intelligence. For a financial analyst, the critical moment may be the chance to hear a CEO speak on his or her company’s future plans.

As you prepare for measurement moments, know what information you’ll ignore. Then ignore it. We’re so awash in information that it’s tempting to collect it believing that any knowledge is useful. Nothing could be less true. Lots of access to the wrong information obscures what really matters. Financial markets are a great example. Tracking a company’s stock price—a common pastime—is often a source of bad information. The stock’s daily rise and fall promotes emotional decisions that are better made with careful thought and deliberation.

You need to know what information is critical and also how you’ll use it when you get it. Then when your Moment arrives, you’ll know what to look for, you can go for it, and then spring into action. I’ve seen marketing departments get a critical chance to talk to customers. They wanted information about a customer’s buying behavior, but didn’t think about how their questions would gather that information. So they asked about brand recognition instead. Is brand recognition important? Probably so. But they missed the chance to gather and use the information that was really critical.

The decision moments

Often, a decision will be a Moment of Truth. In the moment that something triggers the need for a decision, you must to be ready to move.

Decisions are rich events. Your values get expressed through your decisions. Decisions communicate your priorities to everyone (including you!). Depending on who’s involved, the decision can also be building political capital among those who take part.

Taking the best advantage of a moment of decision demands that you have the information you need for the decision, the people involved, and the means to communicate and act on the decision. You also need to know when to trigger the decision.

Shell Oil’s famous scenario planning of the early 1980s is a great example of identifying and acting on moments of truth. One of Shell’s scenarios was exploring the fall of the Soviet Union. Early on, they identified Mikhail Gorbachev as a pivotal player in the USSR’s future. When he rose to power that triggered Shell to act on its scenario to prepare for the opening of the country. Thinking through their strategic decisions ahead of time gave them a huge lead when the time came to make those decisions.

Your critical decisions will change over time, which makes preparation an ongoing project. A young software company was deciding how to spend far-higher-than-expected profits. One manager asked if higher sales figures came from growing market share or from losing share in a market that was growing overall. Alas, the marketing manager hadn’t prepared that information. Product plans were made without that information, and the company didn’t get traction in the evolving market. If you’re going to be prepared for your decision “moments of truth,” know what information you’ll need to make the decisions and arrange to have it at your fingertips.

Future moments

Shell’s scenario group wasn’t just finding triggers; at a deeper level, they were finding issues with long lead times and addressing them soon enough to do something smart. Do you know what you need in place this time next year? Five years from now? Two weeks from now? Sometimes you need concentrated efforts now to prepare for crucial events much later.

Relationship building is a long-lead-time activity that can be crucial. If you’re going to be entering a new market in a year, now is the time to start getting to know the key influencers, industry reporters, and main distributors. When the time comes to enter the market, you’ll be able to jump right in with credibility, having already started building the relationships you need.

SoftSoap’s rise to market dominance is a great example of a long-term moment. The SoftSoap creators realized that competitive products would need plastic pumps for the liquid soap. So SoftSoap bought up the world’s supply of plastic pumps, forcing competitors to wait a year until more pumps could be made. By imagining the future and understanding the long-lead-time issues, a single purchase event became the moment that gave them a year’s head start in their market.

Infrastructure investments are moments that lock in commitments that can make or break your future. A CEO recently confided that his company can enter a new market and hit 26 percent profit margins within three months. Unfortunately, the company overinvested in too-large plants early in the game—assets that are such a drag the company may still fail. When you have a moment of decision or implementation with huge long-term consequences, it’s worth the time to focus on making the right decision.

Look across all business areas

When you’re searching for your most important moments, remember to consider the entire business. We often think first of areas we know well, and forget others. But the best leverage points rarely cluster in one functional place. Sometimes you may focus efforts on finishing development for a trade show. Then, emphasis shifts to landing a key distribution contract. Next, your most important moment may be when your first reviewer receives and uses your product. Your job is aligning all your efforts behind each moment so you squeeze every bit of value from your significant events and decisions.

Moments that don’t matter

Your goal here is really to tease out the moments when your actions really matter, and concentrate on those. That’s only half the battle, however. The biggest challenge can be in dropping efforts on the moments that don’t matter.

Human beings have a weird habit of creating projects and initiatives that never die. Once something is under way, we want to keep it alive no matter how useless it is. Resist! As important as it may seem to create that great new logo for the product, don’t do it! Face facts: The logo won’t make or break a product launch. A product that doesn’t solve the problem, will. Be ruthless about putting limited resources—including your time—into only those moments linked directly to success.

Concentrate on high-leverage moments

Remember our goal is achieving more by doing less. You may identify more moments of truth than you possibly have time to pursue. Choose between them by putting your efforts where the leverage is greatest, where you get the biggest bang for the buck.

Leverage is simply the biggest return for your effort. If you have three public events you can speak at, one to a group of customers, one to a group of the most influential industry distributors, and one to your local bridge club, chances are that the distributors will be your best bet. Why? Because if ten distributors are impressed, they can help you reach thousands of others.

At the end of the day, results matter—not efforts. When an important initiative isn’t gaining traction, or when you’re starting something new, the secret lies in “micro-focusing” on the moments that make a difference. If you know where you’re going, you can put your effort into just the measurements, decisions, and long-term important initiatives that will let you move ahead with results and not merely hard work.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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