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Producing powerful business results with NLP

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Using NLP at an organizational level

NLP business applications often suck. Well, maybe they’re not that bad, but all you hear about is rapport skills, predicate matching, and sometimes meta-programs. At best, they’re applied to getting people to play nice together, helping customers who call for help feel better, and convincing people to feel good buying stuff they don’t really need or want. NLP is a universal tool that can be used much more widely. It’s a tool for understanding, and a tool for making changes. Using an NLP mindset can lead to powerful business results, just as it leads to powerful personal results.

NLP Thinking Helps Fix Business Problems

NLP provides Practitioners techniques like Change History and Anchoring. As your skill increases, you start thinking in processes. You ask, “How does this person get their current results?” You elicit strategies and states, identify triggers, and choose interventions that change a person’s process.

Process thinking is like gold in business; few people do it well. Applying NLP thinking to business helps find the root cause of business problems. While a person is conveniently self-contained, a business is made of many people, so you’ll be doing your strategy elicitation by working with people and the relationships between them.

Imagine Miss Anne’s Department Store is losing business. Elicit MADS’s strategy for making money by asking, “What’s MADS’s strategy for getting a customer to buy?” Then trace the process step-by-step to find out where it fails. Your strategy elicitation will lead you through the entire organization:

First, MADS must get customers. This leads you to marketing. You ask customers how they heard of MADS. Everyone says, “on MADS’s 5 p.m. radio ad,” even though MADS advertises in 5 different places.

Next, customers visit the store, try on clothes, and buy or don’t buy. You notice people who try on the clothes return most of what they try on when they return from the fluorescent-lit dressing room.

Then, customers approach the cash register to pay. They walk up to an empty register, look around in puzzlement, and hunt through 3 departments to find the on-duty cashier. After a 10-minute wait, they reach the register.

Finally, customers pay. You notice that several want to pay by credit card, and are dismayed by MADS “cash-only” policy. Without sufficient cash, some customers return clothes to the racks.

We’ve just seen the business-equivalent of a strategy. Just as NLP strategies lead you to the intervention (“you’re yelling at yourself? Let’s turn the volume down!”), business strategies also suggest their own interventions. In this case, help the marketing department do a better job of attracting customers, replace the dressing room light bulbs with full-spectrum lighting, make sure cash registers are fully staffed, and accept credit cards.

NLP Helps Understand the Link Between Individuals and the Business

Once you’ve found the critical organizational process moments at the business level, you can search for the people at the heart of organizational issues. When people make decisions that set policy, those decisions get magnified into organizational behavior. For example, I worked with a COO candidate who made decisions too slowly for his CEO’s comfort. He liked making fully-informed decisions. Really fully-informed. Jam-packed-fully-informed. He could spend months gathering and analyzing data. Thus, the organization itself would slow until he made up his mind.

This executive’s personal decision-making strategy determined the entire organization’s speed! At this point, we could shift to “typical” NLP with the individual. Here, NLP came into play unpacking and revising his decision-making process. His decisions sped up, his organization’s decisions sped up, and he was eventually promoted to COO.

You’ll find this is not uncommon. Individual NLP skills can, indeed, help people in an organization get better at what they do. But when you combine individual NLP skills with NLP process thinking at an organizational level, you can find the organizational leverage points where a single change in the business or in a person can create lasting, significant business value.

The Joys of Overhead (why overhead isn't necessarily bad)

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Why Overhead isn’t necessarily bad.

Click here to listen to this article as a podcast.

I never thought I’d be able to grow up and say, “Mom, I’m not just a productive businessperson, I’m overhead!” Many people think overhead is a bad thing. Well, maybe. Maybe not. Overhead’s an essential part of business.

Overhead is the time, effort, money and manpower you spend on parts of the business that don’t directly make money. The cleaning service that keeps your desk so shiny you can see yourself? Overhead. Your office rent? Overhead. That cool new Blackberry? Overhead. The wonderful people who work in your accounts receivable department? Also overhead. And brace yourself: if you’re a manager, you just might be overhead, too.

We talk as if overhead’s a bad thing. That’s just silly. Building and maintaining the support systems to do our job, that’s overhead, but it’s also necessary. In today’s office environment, I’ve had executive clients who hunt-and-peck type their own letters and fill out their own expense reports. They don’t want the overhead of an assistant, they say. Harumph, I say. If they’re high-powered folks (and they people I work with are!), they can do more for the business by concentrating on their jobs, not their expense report. If they could spend 100% of their brainpower on their job, they would build so much great business that the so-called overhead of an assistant is peanuts.

One place the world is very confused about overhead is with non-profits. Many people think the better a non-profit is, the less overhead it will have. “Only 2% of every dollar goes to overhead!” non-profits proudly claim.

What they’re not claiming, probably because most non-profits don’t know how to educate donors, is that with only 2% money available for overhead, they’re not likely to ever build the talented staff, tight business systems, and focused delivery to make a big impact in the world. We routinely accept that businesses may need 30-40% overhead just to get the job done well. The same is true of non-profits.

The way to think about overhead is to ask whether the organization gets better results with the overhead than without. For for-profit companies, it becomes the most fundamental management question: does a dollar spent on overhead turn into more than a dollar of profit. If the answer is Yes, then it’s useful overhead. (Note that I’m not saying a word about CEO salaries here.)

For a non-profit, the bottom line isn’t money, it’s impact. You need to ask: can the non-profit have greater impact with its overhead than without. Consider a Non-Profit Co, a third-world hospital. They could have low overhead by taking donations, buying and distributing medicine. But if they increased overhead by spending money educating hospital staff in public health, they could educate communities to prevent many diseases in the first place. The training costs increase overhead, but increase the positive impact of the hospital even more than if the money were spent directly on medical care.

Personally, I incorporated last month. My last two weeks have been spent filing incorporation stuff, navigating government websites, arranging payroll deposits, transitioning merchant accounts, and doing lots and lots of stuff that is all overhead. I decided to write this article to convince myself that the overhead was time well-spent. And it was, because overhead is only a bad thing if it doesn’t help the business move forward. And in this case, the overhead inspired an article and a podcast. And that, my friends, moves my business forward.

So don’t reject your overhead. Embrace it! Because like it or not, it’s here to stay.

Profit and Cash Flow Explained

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What’s the difference between profit and cash flow?

Often, it’s the difference between success and bankruptcy.

Before we begin, let’s use clear language. I won’t say “income” because different people mean different things by that word. I’ll say “revenue” to mean money that comes in from selling a product or service.

Imagine two kids who want to start a lemonade stand. They plan to charge 50 cents per cup. If they sell 100 cups, they will make 100 times 50 cents, or $50 of revenue. Of course, they know it takes money to make money. They figure each cup costs 13 cents to make: 10 cents for ingredients, and 3 cents to pay protection money to the neighborhood bully. Their expenses will be 13 cents times 100 cups, or $13. They will have revenue of $50, expenses of $13, and their profit–revenue minus expenses–is $37.

Profit is the money left once expenses are paid. Some people think business owners can take profit to the bank. If only! Profit is used to pay for any new equipment or materials needed for the business to grow. And unless you buy a politician or two, you pay taxes out of profits as well. (Sometimes, profit is given as “pre-tax profit” and “after-tax profit,” so you know what the business produced on its own.) Only after paying for growth and taxes do owners get to take money home.

Our kids are ready to go! They needn’t buy equipment or pay taxes, so they’re eager to start their business and bank their $37.

But wait! If only this story were so simple. There’s a dastardly twist!

On the very first day, the kids go to the store to buy lemons … only to find out neither of them has any allowance money left. The store won’t loan them the lemons, so they can’t even get started. They’re out of business before they begin, thanks to cash flow.

Cash flow refers to when a business needs money. Often, businesses spend money on salary, utility bills, and lemons before they bring in any revenue. By plotting out when cash will come in and when it needs to be paid out, a business can identify when it needs cash on hand, and can do what it takes to make the cash available.

Companies often take out loans to survive until revenue comes in. If our kids must pay the grocery store $5 for lemons today in order to make $50 by selling lemonade this weekend, they can ask Mom or Dad for a loan, to be paid back once the lemonade sales come pouring in. They borrow $5 today, make and sell their lemonade, and then pay back the loan next week.

(What about the protection money for neighborhood bullies?, you ask. Well, the bullies are kind, generous people who understand cash flow. They’re willing to let our entrepreneurs pay after the revenues come in, avoiding a cash flow crunch.)

Cash flow and profit don’t always match up.

A company can be profitable and still go bankrupt from cash flow problems. If they must pay for materials in January but don’t get paid by their customers until June, they need a loan to survive until June. If they don’t get that loan—even if they have guaranteed sales in June—then they will go out of business. Sometimes customers themselves will pay in advance, effectively giving an interest-free loan to a company to help cover cash flow.

A company can have great cash flow, but not be profitable. Amazon.com raised so much money by selling stock in the mid-1990s, that they had $2,000,000,000 in the bank. Every year, they spent more money than they made, so their yearly profit was negative. But because they had so much money saved up, they could afford to make up the difference out of their bank account. The big stock market cash inflows made up for the continual losses. Only after a decade did Amazon actually start making a profit as a company, so they now have good cash flow and are profitable.

So remember: profit is how much money you have left after you get your revenue and pay your expenses. Cash flow is when you actually get and pay the cash. In the long-term, you must eventually get profitable or find someone like stock investors to keep giving you cash to make up for your losses. In the short-term, even if you’re profitable, you survive or fail based on whether you have cash to pay the bills. That’s why they say Cash Flow is King.

What does a CIO do, anyway?

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A CIO job description

For a CEO job description, see my article on CEO job descriptions.

For a podcast of this article, see my Podcast entry.

What does a Chief Information Officer do, anyway? Most of the descriptions I’ve heard make them sound like a glorified purchaser. “They make sure our systems are up to date.” Mega-yawn. CIOs fill a very important role, it’s just no one knows what. Well, today’s podcast will outline the four things you want from your CIO (and probably don’t get).
read more…

Promises, Promotions, and Trust: Building relationships

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Click here to listen to this article as a Podcast.

In mid-2004, I won a free 1000-CD pressing as a prize in a raffle. I was thrilled; I didn’t yet have a product, but the prize would make it that much easier to create one. The company added me to their mailing list, occasionally sending emails to persuade me to buy CD duplication.

Finally, late last year, it was time! I eagerly contacted the man who had sent the emails … and he said my prize expired. Duplication would cost money going forward. The tag line in his email: “We create relationships.”

Wow. Talk about a disconnect between words and actions. Relationships are built on trust, fulfilled expectations, shared commitments, and mutual support. If you give a promotional prize, hoping to attract a customer, don’t kill the trust on day one by reneging on the prize. Even if you include an expiration date (though I didn’t remember one), enforcing it starts the relationship with a refusal. That’s hardly a great way to create relationships. In this case, I’ve replied courteously, and politely hinted that this treatment has me disinclined to do business. He hasn’t taken the hint.

When you make a promise, follow through. If you don’t, you’ll undermine trust and damage the relationship. This is true for explicit promises and also true for implied promises. If someone thinks you’ve agreed, the relationship will depend on your fulfilling the agreement[1].

How many of these lines have you heard, or maybe even used yourself?

  • We promised you a promotion, but circumstances have changed. Next year. Promise.
  • We’ll never have layoffs. Ever.
  • You’ll have the report in your hands by Thursday.
  • I’ll come see your play/ballgame/art opening tomorrow evening.
  • We care about you as a customer. (Please hold.)

If you break a promise, it really doesn’t matter why. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t under your control. Or maybe you had other priorities. But why should the other person care? When you say things like this, it’s important that you realize the listener thinks you’re being sincere. If you don’t follow through, all they know is that you’re undependable. So if there’s doubt, say so. “I don’t know if I can have the report in your hands by Thursday, but I’ll give it my best shot.” You just might be surprised when they reply, “Oh, that’s OK. I don’t need it until next week, anyway.”

For the next week, practice being honest when you make promises. Be honest with your co-workers, your customers, your family, and your friends. Be honest with yourself. Only promise what you’re sure you’ll deliver. Tell the truth. Have your company do the same. Then and only then, will you be able to say:

We create relationships.

[1] Like every rule, this one has its exceptions. When your spouse asks you to tell the truth about how good their new outfit looks, the answer is always “I’m telling the truth. You’ve never been more lovely.”back

Stumbling on Beauty: Creating Passionate Devotion

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Click here to listen to this article as a Podcast.

“I’ve stumbled on beauty.” The ground was gray, the horizon melding seamlessly with a velvety black sky. Reflecting in the plain beneath us, four beautiful icons gazed out, happily rotating in a graceful dance. I held my breath, reached out, and pressed a key. The wrong key. The icons faded down, and in the distance, my screen reappeared and swooped towards me. I was back in reality.

It was the day after I switched to the Mac, six weeks ago. My fingers, trained by 15 years of Windows use, typed some magical incantation and took me somewhere … beautiful. It took three days of searching to figure out what I’d done.[1]. In my search, I became a convert, wishing dearly to recapture that moment.

Stumbling on beauty. What a great experience for a customer. Disney knows it, too. Where else can you stumble on a candlelit dinner for two overlooking the Caribbean…in the heart of Orlando. It’s the little things that grab people’s hearts and keep them coming back.

How do people use your product or service? Can you arrange for them to stumble on a delightful surprise? Perhaps hauntingly nice music at an unexpected moment. Beautiful artwork. Or (gasp) full-service at self-serve prices. It needn’t be expensive, just fun and unexpected.

But why stop at work? It works with friends, too. Send a “thank you for being my friend” card to your best friend. Or watch your cuddle bunny wander around the house at night, finding a little poem hidden in a favorite before-bed snack. Maybe a quiet love song as they fall asleep. Or your kids…what if they stumbled on a free concert ticket beneath their pillow for no reason at all—just because.

We get so wrapped up in the daily grind that we often forget it’s the truly exceptional moments that make the biggest impression. It works in business, it works in your home life. Plan some exceptional moments for the people around you and watch what happens. Nothing compares to Stumbling on Beauty.

P.S. If you haven’t spent time with a Mac recently, run to your nearest Apple store. They’re really quite something!

[1] Command-escape in OS 10.4.8 starts the Front Row media center. Don’t tell Windows users, though. They must buy a whole special edition of Windows to get a decent media center experience. back

Dealing with a difficult ex-boss

Elements of a difficult conversation

Q I worked for a lousy boss during a turnaround situation. I performed well, but he treated me poorly and never told me how I could improve. We’ve moved on, and he called to catch-up. We should get along fabulously, and during our call, I told him how much I admired his skills and accomplishments. Again, he had no feedback for me. It was all one-way. Should I cut him out of my life because of how he treated me? I want to understand what motivated his behavior.

A This could be a communication issue and nothing personal. Some people just don’t compliment others or give positive feedback. They don’t consider their impact on others. There can also be weird power struggles between managers that undermine relationships. Given you were in a turnaround, maybe he was so stressed he wasn’t at his best. So maybe he’s a great guy, you simply misunderstood, and you should be friends going forward.

But you’re still having real conflicts around this, however. Maybe he had real reasons he acted as he did. First and foremost, take care of yourself. Stop thinking of him as your “boss,” and think of him as a peer, who’s doing the best he knows how to do.

Then forgive him. Not for any spiritual reason (though that can’t hurt), and not for his sake. Forgive him for your sake. He may be doing his best, and that “best” might not be what you need. But he is who he is—problems and all—and you are who you are. And both of you are just fine, even if you don’t mix well together. Forgiveness is what helps you lot go of the emotion and make the rest of this easy. Once it’s easy, you’ll be in a better mental place to choose your next action.

What do you want? If you want a friendship (professional or otherwise) with this man, you need to fix the relationship. Talk. Tell him what’s going on, and ask for his side of the story. He’s not your boss; he’s your peer. You have nothing to lose. “I would like a continued relationship with you, but I feel apprehensive about our past relationship and would like to understand your perspective. Would that be OK?”

Have a discovery conversation. Get both your perceptions of the facts of what happened. Share your feelings about it, in an inquiring way. And also (this is the hard part) discuss the impact it has on your sense of identity. Did you feel threatened? Did he? Keep the tone light–keep it an exploration.

Check out the book “Difficult Conversations” for a great framework for such conversations. At best, you might discover it’s all a misunderstanding. At worst, you still won’t connect and you’ll go your separate ways. My own experience is that some of my greatest friends and colleagues have started out with misunderstandings and personality clashes.

If you want to cut the ties now, I would simply stop returning his calls and emails. Be too busy to talk for more than a few minutes. Don’t get personal or attacking, just let him drift back out of your life.

I hope this helps!

Putting it to work:

  • Choose an ambiguous or incomplete relationship that is weighing you down.
  • Forgive the person, so you can move on with resolving the relationship.
  • If you want to break it off, commit to yourself that you’ll do so and stop engaging with the person.
  • If you want to continue, have a “difficult conversation” in which you share your perception of what happened, how you felt about it, and what that meant to you about who you are. Inquire to understand their perceptions, feelings, and identity as well.

Make Everything Easy! (Especially during the holidays)

Hello!

A client of mine makes everything hard. Instead of just going after the job she wants, she maps out a 10 year plan the requires 15 key skill development efforts, seven essential relationships to be built, and a critical mass of completed projects. Then she decides it’s not doable, and settles for less, for MUCH less. We all do this. You should see me agonizing over every word of an article. Absurdity! This month’s article is on making things easy, instead.

This month:

  • Brief peek into the future
  • Article: Making things easy (especially during the holidays!)
  • Please send questions!

========== Brief peek into the future

Starting in January, I will be developing and launching CDs on leadership, management, and entrepreneurial topics. Stay tuned!

========== Article: Making things easy (especially during the holidays)

Make it Easy!

Have you ever noticed how hard we make things for ourselves? A client of mine was holding back on her dream of working in pro sports. “I don’t have the background,” she said, “so I’ll settle for banking.” (Not as my client, you won’t!) We picked up the phone. Five minutes later, she had an interview with the CEO of a major sports franchise. It wasn’t so hard after all; we just had to call and ask.

We all make things hard. It’s weird. We’re scared to let things be easy. We have lots of reasons. If something is easy, we tell ourselves it must not be worth much. My job can’t be easy … how would I justify my salary?

It’s easier to believe something is hard than face our real motivations, like fear of failure. If something’s easy, we have no excuse but to try. If we try and fail at something easy, that says bad things about us. Better to make things hard, so if we ever try and fail, we can blame the task, not ourselves.

Lastly, we make things hard so we have jobs! We’ve created huge corporations and bureaucracies in part to employ people. If things were simple, we might be out of a job. (My favorite is receipts. How much of our economy is devote to nothing more than tracking receipts and expenses, for tax and accounting purposes?)

So how do we make things easy again?

Stop solving the solution! We often start solving a problem and the solution becomes worse than the problem. A startup’s IT department needed a new laser printer. Concerned about costs, the management team met to discuss the purchase. They met three times, for an hour each time. By the time they decided not to buy the $500 printer, they had wasted thousands of dollars of management time, and distracted the managers from really moving the company forward.

Settle for 80% quality. This is my Achilles heel. A perfectionist, I like things to be perfect. But that last 20% towards perfection often takes as much work as the first 80%. When you find yourself worrying about whether the font on your weekly status report uses small capitals correctly, you’ve traveled far into the land of absurdity. Let yourself settle for 80%, you’ll be happier when you do.

At the end of the day, “hard” is our story, it’s not the truth. We can make something hard in our minds, or we can let it be easy.

The experiment for the holiday season:

You’ll have lots to do in the next week. Make it easy. When you catch yourself thinking, “This will be a hassle,” stop and chuckle. Then decide you’ll make it easy, and do it. Stop solving the problem. Settle for less. You’ll be surprised how much you get done. And when you discover you have more free time than you thought, don’t tell anybody. Just give it to yourself as a Holiday present.

See you in the New Year!

[Send your questions to Stever at: inquire@SteverRobbins.com]

========== Please send questions!

I like to base newsletters on your questions. Send questions to:

inquire@steverrobbins.com

I’ll answer the best in my newsletter and BLOG.

========== Want to exceed your own expectations in your business or career? Call 617-491-7638!

When you’re ready to start doing seriously better, give me a call and I’ll help you make it happen. Just call +1-617-491-7638. Whether it’s becoming the best executive possible, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, or having a successful business and fulfilling home life, some dreams _should_ come true. I coach high-performing leaders to help them further their skills, careers, and lives.

========== Become a better leader in a Fun, Provocative Read!

Looking for new ideas you can implement immediately to be a more effective leader? Pick up a ‘It Takes a Lot More than Attitude … to Lead a Stellar Organization.’ This collection of essays explores with what it takes to be a great leader, in an engaging, no-nonsense conversation that keeps you turning the pages. It also makes a perfect gift for the person with the leadership title who just doesn’t get it.

Buy it now at http://www.alotmorethanattitude.com

(The only book on leadership that starts by discussing the responsibilities of leadership, and goes on to reveal all the secrets the great leadership pundits never discuss. Like when and why you can wear a feather boa to staff meetings…)

====

Do Great Things!

– Stever

Innovate, Compete, Win: pierce your belly button

Just be prepared to get your belly button pierced…

No one should take themselves so seriously
With many years ahead to fall in line
Why would you wish that on me?
I never want to act my age
What’s my age again?
What’s my age again?
   —Blink 182, “What’s my age again?”

Heck, everyone’s saying we must innovate to stay a competitive nation. So the government is throwing money at high-tech businesses. But that only takes care of funding, and frankly, money’s easy to come by if you have a good idea. Once we have the money, we businesses have to use the money to Do New Things.

The hard part is finding the people. We need people who can push the boundaries. Who can go beyond the ordinary. Who can think new thoughts. A lot of those thoughts will be wrong and won’t work. But hopefully, enough will work so we can keep pushing forward. There’s a reason high-tech growth seems to be pushed by 20-somethings—they don’t know what’s impossible, and they haven’t yet been beaten back into conformist thinking.

A Fable that Starts True: Extraordinary People Producing Ordinary Results

A young man—college student—with a goatee and headphones sat across from me on the subway. Hunched over a book, he was wearing cargo pants, a T-shirt, several bracelets, and many necklaces. The knapsack in his lap proclaimed (in hand-written magic marker), “Life is a verb, not a noun.” A button on the knapsack: “Reading is Sexy.”

I looked around. Everyone else was wearing sensible clothes. Khakis. Button-down shirts. Gap shorts. Me? Khaki shorts and a generic polo shirt. Clothes, happily devoid of personality. The young man had more personality in his little finger than the rest of us had together. Pondering, I wondered if he would ever end up as Boring as the rest of us(1).

Step-by-step, he’s molded into Everyman

It would begin on the first day at work. “Wearing a goatee isn’t really appropriate for this office,” he would be told with a smile by the kindly secretary who wants to see him succeed. The next day, he’s cleanshaven. Bracelets, she informs him, aren’t really right for work. And why not leave the necklaces at home, too.

The next day, he shows up, feeling a bit less like himself, feeling like he’s holding back. But, eager to do a good job, he cuts his hair. He shoves the backpack under his desk and buys a smart, leather folio. He shows up “dressed for work.” A colleague sees his old knapsack under his desk, smiles condescendingly, and offers helpful advice, “As an expert at copy-writing I can assure you that technically, ‘life’ is a noun. The verb form would be ‘live.'”

A few weeks later, he finds his childhood hero is speaking in a nearby town. He wants to take a day off and go. “Sorry, kid. You haven’t accrued enough vacation time, yet.” He sighs, understandingly … and in that moment, his Life really does begin to transform from a verb into a noun.

Next comes his yearly review. His best idea saved the company a cool million, but some of his ideas are a bit … out there. We helpfully give him the Tried-and-True industry handbooks, so he can tone down the wacko ideas. He learns quickly what is and isn’t possible. And since he did a good job, we give a whopping 5% raise. (That is $1,750 given his $35K salary. We’re glad he’s not a $200K person; we’d be shelling out ten grand. He doesn’t notice that his raise amount has far more to do with his age than with the value of his idea. We don’t notice, either.)

Within a couple of years, our young friend fits right in. He wears the right clothes. He cancels his dinner dates for Oh-so-important client meetings. He knows the conventional wisdom, and can self-censor his wacko ideas in the bud. He spends his time working, attending industry conventions, and absorbing the Status Quo. He’s a success. And he’s quite unlikely to be an agent of innovation, creativity, or newness. Mission accomplished!

Conformity is our boon and our curse

The problem is conformity. We love it. We like people who look like us, who dress like us, who care about the same things, who live similar lives. It’s hard-wired, you know. Given two identical college applications with different candidate names and pictures, we prefer the one who looks and sounds like us. And never mind the Internet “revolution.” We’ve now made it possible to read only news that agrees with our existing beliefs, communicate mostly with people we know will agree, and read commentary that comes straight from our comfort zone.

Conformity has its good side, of course. It’s very easy to manage. You only need to learn one way of dealing with people, and, well, that’s that. You can pretend everyone’s the same, and since we all agree dress, emotion, purpose, and rewards in the workplace are pretty much standard, we’ll play along enough for us all to happily work together…limiting ourselves to the lowest common denominator of our uniqueness.

But we innovate, create, and find new ideas come people interact who think differently. People nudge each other outside their comfort zones, and if the environment is right, they can end up breaking existing molds and creating Great New Things. But innovation means helping people cultivate their differences and then bringing them together in ways that spark creativity.

When we all wear the same work uniform, we send the message: differences in expression aren’t allowed here. When we all work in identical cubicles, we send the message: individuality is limited to two 8×10″ pictures above your keyboard tray. When our idea of flex-time is letting someone come in at 8:15 instead of 8, we send the message: no matter what your own rhythms, they matter less than having your body here.

And guess what’s the worst of all? Hiring for “fit.” You know what happens when you hire only people you feel comfortable with? You get yet another carbon copy of the Standard Employee you already have way too many of. The candidate who makes you feel a little uncomfortable, who thinks a bit off-the-wall, will bring you genius, if you treat them right.

So bring some extraordinary results into being by bringing together ordinary people, just not your definition of ordinary. Practice stepping outside your comfort zone. Wear some clothes that you’d never normally wear. Don’t be my friend who, at age 60, confided that the only thing he can wear comfortably is a suit and tie (even at home). Go someplace new. Try a new cuisine. Stretch yourself. Find out what happens. Learn from it. Meet some people outside your normal sphere. Go to Burning Man.

But why stop there? Instead of looking oddly at the young man in your office who pierced his nose, go get something pierced yourself. Your belly button is a good choice; you can always tuck in your shirt when you want to be discrete. But above all, remember that conforming to the norm leads you nowhere but the norm. It makes for boring business and a boring life. If you’re going to dream big dreams, matter to the people around you, and create breakthroughs whereever you go, start by piercing your belly button. Khakis and a polo shirt in a gray cubicle just aren’t going to take you anywhere extraordinary.

(1) In a twist of fate, I ended up in line next to this young man several months later. His name is Phil. I’m giving him a copy of this article in the hopes that it will make a difference… back

The most powerful kind of power

Power. As I discussed in my Working Knowledge article (archived here), power is one of the prime motivators for many people on the planet. Yet it comes in many flavors, and the most popular form isn’t necessarily the most effective.

This month:

Stever sightings

New York Times, Sunday September 17, 2006
“Taking a Rain Check on a Promotion”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/jobs/17advi.html

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Article: The Most Powerful Kind of Power

[Send your questions to Stever at: inquire@SteverRobbins.com]

Wouldn’t it be great if you had power, so people would do anything you wanted? That’s why many people want to be leaders; they want to give orders. There’s just one problem: most people don’t want to be told what to do. If you have teenagers (or were one, once), you know that commanding is the quickest road to resistance.

“But,” you say craftily, “If I’m the boss, they have to do what I say!” Yup. Which means that the group’s performance is solely a reflection on you and your abilities. If you dictate their every action, then it’s your fault when things fail.

The Weakest Power is Coercion

The common view of power is Being Boss, telling people what to do. You limit their choices, so their only choice is to do what you want. That’s the power to restrict by coercion. With this kind of power, you’ve gotta be the smartest one around, since no one else’s ideas matter. And I have news for you: if you’re reading this, chances are you’re NOT the smartest one around. The smartest one around is retired on a tropical island right now, enjoying a fruit-flavored drink.

So even if you get all the coercive power you want, you’ll likely use it to make your life petty, and the lives of everyone around you miserable.

The Strongest Power is Engagement

Another source of power is engaging people. Connecting to their values and calling them to use their strengths in service of something meaningful. While only authority figures can use coercive power (who would put up with it unless forced?), anyone can use engaging power.

Remember your best mentor, boss, coach, Uncle, Aunt, parent, teacher. The ones who made you believe in yourself, find what was important, and really go for it. For me, it was 10th grade Geometry teacher Beth Schlesinger. She loved all us kids, even the goof-offs. She made math fun, added stories and songs, and had faith that we would rise to the challenge. Twenty two years later, we invited her to our reunion, and told her how vital she was in shaping our lives.

Mrs. S had all the keys: she helped us know our goal–we were there to learn Geometry, at the end of the day. And she made the work fun. She kept us creative with puzzles and games. She expected our best, and believed we were up to the challenge. When someone believes in you like that, you dream bigger dreams. You make yourself larger-than-life, and then you live up to it.

Start Engaging Everyone Around You

Start bringing out the best in the people around you. Learn what their goals are, and help them stay on track when they get side-tracked. Learn what they enjoy, and help make their work life fun. Learn about their hopes and dreams, and encourage them to take steps to achieve them. And above all, have faith in them and expect them to live up to that faith.

You’ll find that people want to be around you. When you lay out your vision, they want to sign up. They know that by becoming part of your mission, they’ll become more of who they want to be. You’ll discover that you’ve built the kind of loyalty that no amount of money or title can buy. And best of all, you can start now, with everyone around you. I know you’re up to the challenge; I have faith.

[Send your questions to Stever at: inquire@SteverRobbins.com]

Want to exceed your own expectations in your business or career? Call 617-491-7638!

When you’re ready to start doing seriously better, give me a call and I’ll help you make it happen. Just call +1-617-491-7638. Whether it’s becoming the best executive possible, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, or having a successful business and fulfilling home life, some dreams _should_ come true. I coach high-performing leaders to help them further their skills, careers, and lives.

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Do Great Things!

– Stever