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You want what you want. There are traits and characteristics that matter to you. And there are some other qualities you don’t much care about one way or the other. Every top leader has preferences.

Sometimes it’s personality. It may be a certain communication style. It could even be a specific university credential you find more valuable than another.

Biases. Preferences. Inclinations. Tendencies. I don’t much care what you call them because we’ve all got them. And they transfer up and down the chain of our organization when it comes to our expectations of our leaders, too. We prefer what we prefer and we want what we want. Often without giving it too much thought.

You’d Better Think

Aretha’s big hit, RESPECT, started with that admonition and it’s wise for every leader to follow it. We’d better stop and think about what we expect and the ways we’re measuring leadership in our organizations.

I intentionally call them “performance metrics” for a reason – they should be based on actual performance instead of simply our personal preferences. The military leaders have an expectation of their leaders. Drill sergeants are expected to produce a specific outcome – soldiers prepared to defend the country. But they’re also expected to produce those results in a specific way, with a certain demeanor and persona. I suspect the branches of the military don’t allow much wiggle room for a drill sergeant tasked with training new recruits much latitude in devising his own program. Strict, regimented protocol is the order of the day, every day. They do what they do because inherently they believe it’s the best approach. History and performance show military what works. They value what they value and who can argue with it?

Now look inside your organization or team. Part of thinking involves figuring out what you most value. The military mostly values compliance and obeying orders, especially in new recruits. If you can’t accept being told what to do, there’s no place for you in the military. By the way, that may be true in many other endeavors, too. The military needs men and women devoted to learning and getting it right 100% of the time. Errors can result in death. Instinctively knowing what to do and when to do it is crucial in their world. The training is designed to bring that about in the men and women who serve. It’s for the welfare of each team and each team member. As a result, the performance of the entire military hinges on it.

What’s most important in your organization?

That’s entirely up to who you are and what you do. And how you want to do it. For example, there’s a new online video streaming social media platform called Blab. You can check out my profile at RandyCantrell.com/blab. The other day they did a live streaming tour of their 25,000 square foot headquarters in San Francisco. This is a start up that’s been live for a matter of months. They have under 20 people working for them. They operate like many tech startup’s. It’s a holocracy kind of set up, with people coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Everybody is working a ton of hours, so the traditional work environment doesn’t work for them. Instead, this small team of people is doing the work of a much larger staff because they’re working almost non-stop, round the clock, but they do it from their offices, from home, from little nooks and sofas around the office, from the park — or anywhere else they happen to be (or want to be). The work is more important to them than having butts in seats at desks in the office.

Blab, like many of their technology counterparts, have a trust in their small team. They trust the team to dive in and do what must be done regardless of what the clock or calendar says. Their top leader said the only important thing to him and to Blab is that people get their work done. The tour is about an hour long. It’s recorded at Blab and you can watch it here.

Other organizations operate very differently. Some want all their employees at their desks promptly by 8am. They view butts in chairs as a performance metric. If somebody isn’t where they’re supposed to be by 8am leaders see it as slothfulness, lethargy or worse. They believe that people need to be at a certain place in order to do the work. Blab doesn’t. I’m not judging the rightness or wrongness of either – it just displays the vast difference between two cultures based on their beliefs. And those beliefs determine what gets measured and how performance gets judged.

We need to start with our own thinking because, as with many things, we can fall into traps thinking we’re judging the right things when we’re really not. The company that judges butts in chairs assumes two basic things: 1) people can only do their work from their desks and 2) people can’t be slothful while at their desk. Sure, we all know both assumptions are faulty. To be fair, I guess that first assumption could be correct if the person’s job is data entry, speed dialing prospects or answering phones in a call center, but most tasks aren’t just restricted to a single desk. And even those who are restricted to a single desk can certainly be abused with lethargy, poor work habits and distractions that cause poor performance. It’s just not as simple as making sure people are where you think they belong.

What’s Most Important To You?

Let’s start here instead of diving headlong into specific behaviors because it’s important for us to think about WHY we do what we do, and why we want what we want. Blab wants exponential growth and user adoption. They want high user engagement. And they’re getting all of those things because they’re out front listening and responding to user feedback. They’re engaging the early adopters of the platform because they know these are the people who will fuel their growth. They also clearly want technical proficiency in the platform. That is, they want Blab to work and well.

There are currently about 316 million active Twitter users monthly, according to Twitter. In order to log onto Blab you need a Twitter account. I don’t know how many people are on Blab currently, but I suspect it’s changing every second. I’m sure it’s well into the millions and yet their team is under 20 people. Blab isn’t the first small team to show us how effective and efficient very few people can be. People speculate (I don’t know for sure how to find out) that the US military SEAL teams consist of 16-man platoons. A small group of highly trained, well equipped, highly disciplined and highly motivated people can do big, big things!

Are sales and acquiring new customers the most important thing to you? How about serving existing customers better, maybe that’s the most important thing to you? Is doing world-class work (it could be anything from managing an entire city government and all the moving parts that entails, or it could building skyscrappers) the most important thing? What matters the most?

This is where people often misstep by saying, “All of it is important.” In essence, they say, “We don’t have ANY priorities.”

Yet, I’ve never seen an organization that didn’t have priorities. Some may not think about it as clearly as they could, but when you press hard enough you find out every team, every organization has A priority. They have one thing that matters more than anything else. The problem is they don’t talk of it often enough. They don’t focus on it often enough. They allow themselves to be distracted with all the other stuff that may be involved in the pursuit of the priority.

I began my career as a hi-fi sales guy because I loved listening to music. My priority was the music though, not the gear. Without the music, I wouldn’t have cared one thing about the gear. As a sales guy I mostly want to connect people with the right gear to enhance their experience with the music they wanted to hear. Not everybody had my taste in music. No problem. I was well versed in what the gear could do and I developed the skill to help a person who loved classical music get the best system his budget would allow. Then, I could do the same thing for the guy who mostly listened to metal. Different set up in all likelihood, but same exact goal and purpose – to give the customer the system that would best suit their listening preferences.

I could have been distracted with the specifics of every piece of gear just for the sake of loving the gear, but the gear had a purpose. To deliver the listening experience most suitable to the customer. What specifics are you getting caught up in that are distracting you from the primary purpose or objective of the work? Think about it. Carefully.

One thing. Narrow it down to one thing.

This needs to be the one thing that everybody on your team knows to be true…so you can’t fake it. Here are some examples, but these are generic for our purposes in this conversation. However, each one has a more specific goal based on the organization.

• Customer acquisition (this is about leading the space by having the most customers)
• World-class design (Apple is an example, focusing their design on the best user experience possible)
• Low cost provider (think Wal-Mart)
• Fastest service (a local plumber who claims 2-hour response time day or night)
• Best selection (Whole Foods takes pride in having a great selection of organic items)
• Remarkable client service (Nordstrom’s has crafted legendary service)

It’s not a mission statement or a statement of philosophies. It’s the over-arching thing you want to get done! It’s what you want to be known for.

You need everybody in your organization to be on board with chasing it as hard as they can. You can’t afford people to lose sight of the priority. Sure, Apple, Blab and other technology companies need crack engineers to make the technology work, but Apple’s commitment to design is world-class because they focus on user experience. That means Apple doesn’t just care about the feature, but they care about how the feature works and feels to the user. Everybody and everything in your organization should be able to point back to the one thing that matters most. The whole team pulls in the direction of that one thing – and that’s what makes your organization unique, remarkable and special. It’s your edge!

How Are We Going To Get It Done?

There are many paths toward a single thing. Whole Foods isn’t interested in having the biggest selection of just anything. They’re known for organic, hence the name, “Whole Foods.” They pander to a specific shopper willing to pay premium prices for the best organic foods available without driving to a farmer’s market. Convenience, nice, clean, well-organized and well-lit are all part of the Whole Foods’ experience, but those aren’t their ONE thing — those are ways they accomplish their ONE thing. Your organization will need these details in place, too. It’s your answer to the question, “HOW?”

It’s not possible to chase your one thing without caring how it gets done. Lots of teams stumble here as people wonder (often aloud), “Why do they care how we do it? Shouldn’t it be good enough to just get it done?”

It does matter how things are done because they need to be congruent with the ONE thing. Apple engineers could likely incorporate some features customers might want, but until they can do it in a way that delivers superior user experience, Apple isn’t going to incorporate them. World-class design is the ONE thing, but killer user experience and interface are mandatory. You’ve got your own mandatory things, too. It’s important that your entire organization embrace the methodologies that are important to your ONE thing.

Every member of your team needs to be taught why HOW matters. You do that by helping them see how their work contributes to the number one, most important thing. From the top, most highly compensated to the seemingly lowest, menial job on your team – everybody’s work must be seen in light of the biggest priority. Without that, you’ll never be able to duly impress on people why HOW matters.

Again, when you consider Apple, it’s the HOW that makes all the difference. Apple may “think different” but they execute different, too. They don’t do it the way others do it. They produce the most intuitive technology on the planet because their big thing is driven hard by how they accomplish it. Your organization needs proper focus on HOW in order to make the work remarkable. Remarkable work is the goal of every high performing – or would be high performing – organization I’ve ever worked with. And because you’re reading this or listening to this, it must mean you’re interested in growth and improvement. It’s the sign of a top performer, constant learning.

Take something as mundane as budgets. Every organization creates a budget. Some small organizations may just have an Excel spreadsheet consisting of a single sheet. Others can produce a massive document with hundreds of pages and a fully indexed appendix. “Just prepare the budget,” is a bad order for any leader to give. What’s included, how it is included, where does it belong, how much is enough, how much is too much, where to put resources, where to remove or lessen resources — these are important issues that speak to HOW the budget will be crafted. Budgets can be done poorly or they can be done well. HOW determines the outcome. It can’t be a “just get it done” ordeal.

Sometimes I encounter people who oppose a designated HOW approach to leadership and measuring performance. They may cite how McDonald’s has processes and procedures for every little thing, but they have no creativity or innovation. First off, I can’t speak with any authority that McDonald’s doesn’t allow creativity or innovation. Do they allow people to craft burgers any way they’d like? No. It’s regimented. Likewise with all the other things they prepare. They have a precise way of doing things and the demand – much like our military – is that it be done that way each and every time. Delivering predictable, successfully replicated food time after time is what McDonald’s does. They don’t claim to have the best hamburger in the world. They just promise that you’ll get what you’ve come to expect. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Shawnee, Oklahoma or London, England – you’re going to get what you expect because they follow a process (their HOW). When you visit McDonald’s you’re happy about that, too.

That doesn’t mean that McDonald’s isn’t listening to their people who may have suggestions on ways to get better. It doesn’t mean they’re not innovative in finding new items their customers might want. It just means in the context of delivering products to customers, they take no chances. They do what they know works. It’s not so much a lack of innovation or creativity as it is about proper time and place. When I’m in the drive through waiting on my McDonald’s burger and fries, I don’t want somebody trying to trick it up with an innovative idea. I came there with an expectation. I want that expectation met. I don’t go to McDonald’s for a speciality meal. Nobody does.

A common question I’m asked is, “How can we focus on HOW and predictable results and still have innovation?” Easy. You have to separate some things, namely the moments in time when innovation is allowed or fostered and the times that it’s completely inappropriate. Depending on your organization it can be easy or hard.

I had to visit the Apple store a few months back for a technical problem with some hardware. I made an appointment online through their website, then went to the store at the appointed time. I’ve done this before. I know the drill and how it works. When I arrived at the store I gave them my name. They explained that their computer system was down. They asked me the time of my appointment, trusting me to tell them the truth. I did. They made note of it and directed me to a line back toward the Genius Bar. It went just like it would have done had their system been up, except they were having to improvise. They were having to innovate on the fly due to a technical glitch. But I’m sure they huddled or pre-prepared what to do when this sort of thing happened. It was out the norm, but they did what they had to do. It worked because they were all on the same page, executing the same plan. If the guy who greeted me at the door had decided he’d innovate and do things differently, my experience would have been less than stellar. Wrong time to innovate. The time to innovate was whenever they got together to craft an emergency plan on how to handle incoming customers when the computer system goes down.

How is your organization any different? It’s not. There are times to embrace and foster creativity and innovation. For most of us, it’s not during execution — especially execution with customers. Protocol, processes and workflows require creativity and innovation. Make sure you have times and places built in to let the best ideas bubble to the top. After the decision is made, demand faithful execution to the product or service delivered is always spot on.

Judging The Performance

You want what you want. That priority – your ONE thing – and how you get it done is entirely up to you if you’re the top leader. It’s your responsibility to teach it, train it and expect it (which means holding people accountable for it). Whenever I’m serving a client I’m in no position to architect these things. My job is to serve the leader by helping them elevate their own leadership performance and the performance of their team or organization. Sure, my work mostly is done with organizations congruent with my view of leadership, but all these specifics of the work aren’t my responsibility. Yes, sometimes I’m asked – in fact, I’m often asked – to offer my opinion to a top leader, but I would never contradict what top leadership wants. Rather, it’s my role to ensure that top leaders grow in their effectiveness to establish their priorities, set up how they want things done and hold their people properly accountable for getting the work done.

Leaders have to judge the performance of the people on their team. How will you know if they’re getting these things right? Well, it hinges on how they value things – and what they value.

I focus on performance. That’s why that word is part of the title of the podcast. It doesn’t diminish the importance of the HOW, but it does put the emphasis where I think it belongs – the quality of the work done. So much of my work is concentrated on what the world calls “soft skills.” People skills. They matter because there are people capable of produced high quality work, but they can’t get along with others. Just recently a team leader told me about being short a person because he parted with a high achiever. Fully expecting to hear about how it was putting him behind schedule or some other constraint brought about the loss of a valued team member…instead he told me how much more his short-handed team was accomplishing. When I asked how that worked, he went on to tell me how disruptive the high achiever was. Turns out this person did good, even great work, on his own, but he brought down the productivity of everybody who had to interact with him. He was suppressive, even oppressive to the rest of the team. Now, with him gone, the rest of the team was happier and vastly more productive. So how would YOU judge that high achiever? Based solely on his own performance or based on his overall impact on the team’s performance? I agree with his leader.

Stepping over dollars for dimes is common place in many organization, especially those who can’t seem to focus on their ONE thing. But the rest of us can be prone to do it, too. Something can irk us that may have little or nothing to do with performance. We like what we like. We believe what we believe. Maybe it’s based on evidence. Maybe not. Go back and listen to the last episode about evidence-based leadership (#281). Let me encourage you to lose whatever biases or world views you’ve got that aren’t based in evidence. I do that because I know it can destroy your performance measurements. You can’t establish good metrics for performance if they hinge mostly on what you like or dislike. Those can swing wildly like a person’s mood. And they ruin people who are trying desperately to figure out how to please you, and do good work.

But be careful about measurements that don’t take into account the things that really matter to you. For example, our high achiever who destroyed the productivity of the entire team could have passed an annual review with flying colors. He could have been scored using a dashboard that viewed mostly what he got done and be seen as an A+ player. But such a scorecard wouldn’t have been accurate. It wouldn’t have told the entire story. So craft your dashboards with care. Make sure you weight the actions and activities that properly depict what you want done, how you want it done and when you want it done! See the big picture and all the details, too.

Some Final Tips

1. Carefully craft your number one priority – your ONE big deal. What do you most want to accomplish?
2. Figure out HOW you want to get it done. Embrace creativity and innovation to come up with the most efficient, compelling way to get the work done.
3. Don’t ignore onboarding new team members, and don’t neglect to train and indoctrinate the current staff. They need to fully embrace the one big priority and how you’re going to get it done. They also have to be trained to understand your expectations.
4. Set and expect high performance standards. Create dashboards or scorecards that give you the most accurate (evidence) picture of how well people are performing. Make sure you’re measuring the things that will accomplish what you want, when you want and how you want.
5. Coach it up. When people fail, make sure they really understand how to deliver the results you want. If they don’t, retrain them. If they do, don’t tolerate any lack of willingness to do what you want done (that includes doing it how you want it done). Compliance, once the system is built, is a must.
6. Foster input and feedback, but don’t ignore the established workflows. And don’t allow deviations from the agreed upon processes unless that deviation is due to extraordinary circumstances AND it takes the organization forward with dazzling customer experiences (i.e. Apple’s behavior when their system is down in the store).
7. Reward all the best performers. Focus on the people doing the very best work. Give them what they need to do even better.
8. Correct poor performers. Coach them, train them and correct them. Don’t live with them if their status quo isn’t cutting it. You can’t soar by leading to the lowest common denominator. You win with star players!
9. Celebrate victories. Reward the performance you most want to achieve. You can train dogs with treats, not with beatings.

Your performance metrics are the ones that best serve YOU and your organization. Just make sure they are serving you and not distracting you from the primary objectives you’ve established. Measure the stuff that really matters. Don’t sweat the stuff that has no bearing on the objectives you’ve established on your organization, keeping in mind that “no bearing” means stuff that doesn’t negatively impact your work, your culture or your processes.

* Photo courtesy Flicker users H. Michael Karshis

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Quantum Leap was a TV series in the late 80’s and early 90’s staring Scott Bakula who is now the star on NCIS: New Orleans. I didn’t watch it, but I know people who acknowledge that it was their introduction to the phrase, “quantum leap.” My earliest recollection of the idea came when a business owner I was working for wanted to see what I thought was a small increase in sales for a particular month. I did some quick math in my head and realized the goal could be met with just an extra sale or two from each member of the sales team. No big deal. I was a teenager.

Early in my sales career I learned how deceptive it could be to calculate an increase based on an “if we only sell a few more of this and a few more of that” strategy. But that’s exactly how some companies target quantum leap sales growth. Sales is just one area of growth – likely the most important area for businesses. But it’s something different when you’re running a city government or some other organization whose work isn’t based on revenue or profit generation. It’s about getting things done efficiently and effectively. It’s about winning friends and positively influencing along the way, too. Those can be much harder to measure.

Ask the sales manager with a product list about elevating sales. It’s easy to grab an account list and ask the troops to increase the sale of each SKU just a few units per month. Sounds reasonable. In fact, it can sound ridiculously reasonable. I mean, if a company is buying 10 of one SKU a month, how hard can it be to sell them 12 instead of 10. Come on! We just need them to sell 2 more. That’s nothing.

Now, do that across the board with a list of 36 SKU’s and suddenly you may have taken a client from a $1 million a year level to $2 million. How did THAT happen? Man, alive. We only increased each SKU by 1 or 2 units. But those dollars add up. As reasonable as it seems, it’s completely unreasonable because your 36 SKU’s aren’t the only SKU’s sold by your client. They may or may not have the capacity for increasing the unit sales of your products. Maybe you’ve got a competitor who is selling better among some (or many) of those SKU’s. There’s more to it than merely asking a client to buy a few more of them, and a few more of that.

Incremental increases in purchases by unit can result in quantum leap increases in dollars. It’d be great if our clients would just comply with our desires. Unfortunately, clients have their own needs and constraints. They’re not coming to work each day to make our dreams come true. They’re busy chasing dreams of their own.

Some organizations overestimate managing all the moving parts. They spend an extraordinary amount of effort and time on tracking the measurables they think matter the most. I’m a big fan of data. The more, the better. Provided it’s accurate and provided the conclusions drawn are true. But asking a sales team to sell just a few more of each SKU is not only naive, it’s unreasonable. It shows a lack of leadership.

We manage work and processes. We lead people.

People get things done. Processes provide the vehicle to help people get things done. But a process sans the people isn’t productive. Even in robotics and manufacturing, people are the brains behind the process performed by the robots.

Leadership addresses the why and how of it all. Why are we going to do whatever it is we’re planning? How are we going to do it?

The fact that McDonald’s crafted a process to deliver fast food in a predictable, reliable way time after time was leadership. Leadership is also part of training people to follow that process religiously so the delivery is consistent all the time. Management ensures that the process remains intact. If the french fry machine is broken, the process breaks down. Management has to kick in to fix that problem. If the process isn’t broken, but an employee is failing to follow the process, leadership has to kick in to fix that problem.

The People Side Of Things

I’ve seen sales manager task their team with selling more. Do better. We need to increase sales 10% this month. We’re missing our projections. All the usual stuff of hard charging sales managers!

No examination of the sales process. No leadership in answering the big questions of why and how. Just the admonition to do more. Do better!

In my work to help leaders and executives become more productive I’m unable to detach people from the process. I’ve experienced more than my share of economic downturns, including the oil embargo of the 1970’s and the recent sub-prime mortgage debacle. When times turn hard, it’s common for organizations to look at cutting payroll. People are often the first thing to go when the going gets hard. For good reason. People are expensive. Especially in a day when benefits comprise 30.5% of total wages (US Dept of Labor numbers). That means if you shave 70 cents in payroll, you basically automatically shave another 30 cents in expenses for benefits. And if you don’t have to look people in the eye, it’s easy. What’s hard is generating another buck! Harder still, dropping another dollar to the bottom line profits! Even harder is finding ways to save money in processes, but the great companies learn how. See Southwest Airlines who for years have hedged their bets with fuel costs savings. It’s that whole putting things on trial for their life that I talked about in episode 266.

The people side of enterprise is commonly referred to as “soft skills,” but I think it’s anything but. It’s hard. Sometimes it’s hard because it’s tough to measure. Harder still for some to be objective. And it’s personal. It’s not some inanimate thing like a procedure or a process. You can sell an asset – like a truck or a building or equipment. Easy. You can lower inventory by not spending as much (but you may risk lowering sales, too). But people? It’s anything but easy or soft. But people can be among the most profitable resources available to you. Because people make decisions, have ideas and solve problems. They make THE difference.

That’s why I emphasize leadership without minimizing management. Both are important, but people are the ones who dream up, create and implement the ideas and processes. And when things break – as they are wont to do in every organization – it’s people who fix it. Sometimes the “it” they fix is themselves and their own performances. I know I promised an episode on evidence-based leadership with this episode, but frequent discussions about leadership in recent weeks have compelled me to postpone it only so I could set the stage with how importantly I view people. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle when we’re sitting down at the kitchen table to assemble the 100,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that is LEADERSHIP.

Data cravers want to dissect numbers and measurable metrics. Don’t misunderstand. I love the measurables, but I’m suspect of those who claim, “The numbers don’t lie.” People don’t always interpret the numbers or data correctly. Conclusions aren’t always accurate. Watch any NFL game and you’ll see numerous instances of replay that are still subject to rule interpretations. The quality of the people – the officials reviewing the replay – make all the difference.

I suspect the same is so in your organization. The best performers increase knowledge and wisdom. Their experiences serve to make the organization better, provided they’re committed to learning. Always learning. That’s the key to improvement.

What can we do to be better?

How can our organization improve?

The answers aren’t easy, or simple. But they’re doable.

Every product, process and workflow can be improved. Sometimes things just get too complicated and we overthink it. Have you ever looked at something your organization is doing and thought, “That’s just more sophisticated than it needs to be?” I’m guessing we all have. Sometimes smart people just worry too much about looking smart. Effective and efficient are frequently just plain simple.

About 10 years ago I purchased a Dyson vacuum cleaner for my wife. Yeah, I’m that kind of a husband. A real romantic!

Well, I bought into the marketing that was (and still is) Dyson. I didn’t do much shopping. They looked cool. The marketing sold me on the technology. So I bought one. No complaints.

The thing had more contraptions and attachments than the NASA space shuttle. It was magnificent. She was happy. It’s served us well for a decade now. But recently it started giving us some problems. Suction wasn’t good. Multiple little issues nagged us. So I set about to find her a new one. Unlike before, I decided this time I’d rely on some expert opinions. I visited with cleaning professionals. I visited websites filled with reviews. I looked at dozens of different models. In the end, those cleaning professionals – the people who vacuum for a living – persuaded me to take a look at Oreck.

The odd thing is I didn’t give Oreck a second glance a decade ago because of what I perceived was hype. Talk about a contradiction. I bought Dyson purely because of marketing, but I avoided Oreck because of perceived hype. And I’m a logical, smart guy. Proof that any of us can be goofed up in our quest to make an evidence-based decision.

How could the Oreck be as good, or better, than a Dyson. The Oreck costs half as much. It’s got no attachments. It’s so old-school. Besides, you have to replace the bag and it’s got a belt drive. Isn’t baglesss and no belt a better way to go? No, said the professionals I talked with. No, said the vacuum repair shops.

The Oreck is basic. Simple. Straight-forward. The beater bar spins at 4000 to 6500 RPM, driving by a belt. The distance between the beater bar and the bag is mere inches. It’s a straight shot. The thing is minimal. It weighs 8 pounds. The Dyson feels like you’re pushing a car once you’ve pushed the Oreck. Brand new, the Dyson never cleaned the floors half as well as the Oreck. Who’d a thunk it? All the fancy circular dust swirling around the Dyson bagless dust container. So many pieces and parts and all that sophistication. Well, scrap all that. How about we make something lightweight, simple and easy. Something that just happens to cleans floors as well as anything you could fly in space! Hello, Oreck. I’m talking to YOU.

Don’t confuse sophistication with effectiveness, or efficiency. I’m sitting across a business leader not long ago and we’re talking about some of his people problems including finding great talent. Talk turns to performance and getting things done. At some point we chuckle at how simple we both view the problem of some existing team members. “Is it really any more complicated than just doing your job well?” I ask. He agrees that that about sums it up. Easier said than done though.

Do your job well.

If you do your job well it’s no guarantee you’ll have a successful career. It could be your job will become obsolete. It could be the job will be replaced by a machine or some lower cost talent. But it could also be that your job needs to re-engineered. The process needs to be revamped. You doing the job well doesn’t mean the process – the actual work you perform – is best done the way you’ve been told, or the way your performance is judged. The blacksmith may have been the best on the planet, but obsolescence took away his opportunity. So just doing your job well isn’t really enough. It’s also about improving the job, finding ways to get better or ways to make things better. It’s that human touch that makes YOU valuable.

Dyson may be taking a backseat only to Hoover in marketshare (last I looked), but Oreck is the new market leader in my house. Maybe it’s about doing your job well (Oreck) or maybe it’s also being able to tell your story better (Dyson). Bells and whistles often trump doing the job well though. It’s true in vacuum cleaners. It’s also sometimes true in the workplace.

That’s just another reason why evidence-based leadership is important. Things aren’t always as they appear. The person who claims credit for the idea may not be the person responsible. They just might be the boss, better poised to claim credit.

The person doing their job well may be viewed unfavorably because the direction given was bad. But they were being the good, dutiful soldier intent on doing their best even if they disagreed with the marching orders. They marched. And well.

See, it’s a dirty, nasty business – this business of leading people. How can we determine who those best people are, and what seats on the bus they should occupy so we get the bus where we want to go?

These are difficult challenges made more difficult by the murky water we’re often caught swimming in. Budgets, committees, customers, vendors, financial partners, corporate politics, culture, competitiveness, cooperation, demographics — these are just a few of the many variables facing us every day when we arrive at the office. We don’t do our work in a vacuum. Even our vacuum cleaners are subject to the elements.

Doing our job well, as leaders, isn’t about being right all the time. That’s impossible. It’s about getting it right more often than not. It’s about seeing when we get it wrong faster than others. It’s about our willingness to own it, fix it and get on with it. It’s also about making sure we focus on the people doing the work because I’ve still never been able to uncover a reason for leadership’s existence if you remove the people. That’s when we just need pure managers. People need leaders. Processes need managers.

Quantum Leap Performance

The speed with which In N Out serves food is largely dependent on the process. They have a workflow. It’s important that employees are trained and held accountable to maintain that workflow. Can the workflow be improved? Of course. Things can always be improved. But people have to execute the process or customers get angry. And if the process is going to be improved, it’s likely going to come from the people working the current process. They’re going to figure out some slight tweak, or maybe some large revamp. Somebody is going to come up with something.

The process will make the difference, but the people will improve the process. That’s where the quantum leap will happen. Figuring out a better way happens when people engage their brains and think. Brain power. Creativity. Problem solving.

That’s why my work focuses on people. Because they’re the catalyst behind improvement. People fix the problems. They find better ways. Great leadership fosters all the qualities we most need in our organizations. Great leaders make a big difference not because of their own work product, but because of the work product of the people they lead. They knock down roadblocks and speed bumps that prevent their people from doing their best work. They remove the bureaucracy and other constraints that bog down their people. They fight to free their people to do their very best work. So rare are these opportunities that even the novice workers recognize when leaders are letting them soar with the wind of innovation and good thinking.

Nothing trumps great leadership for employee engagement. Nothing.

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Digital technology introduced even non-mathematicians and engineers to the term, binary. Ones or zeroes. On or off.

In 1987 Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book entitled Time Wars. He observed the difference in digital watches and analog, and the impact they have in our sense of time. It’s bigger than that though. It speaks to the black and white nature of digital versus the various shades of gray apparent in the analog domain. Look at any traditional clock with an hour, minute and second hand and you have some sense of not just the current time, but the past and the future time. Now, stare down at your cell phone – which likely serves as your daily time piece. You can see what time it is. The current time. That’s it. Just the current time and nothing more.

Unfortunately, executives can be prone to approach leadership in the same way. Black and white, absent of any shades of gray. The reality is our organizations and our leadership is realistically filled with gray. If we refuse or fail to see it, acknowledge it and lead comfortably in the gray then we’ll fail to be the evidence-based leaders capable of propelling our organizations higher.

When You’re A Hammer, Every Problem Is A Nail

Sadly, that’s how some leaders lead. One size force fits all. They are the way they are and it’s incumbent on the troops to adjust. Black or white. Those are the only options. You either please them or you don’t. And in most cases, even if you please them…it won’t last. You’ll eventually find yourself in their doghouse because everybody does. Employees, for these leaders, are just part of the big bag of nails that vex their daily life.

I bring this up because I’ve observed that shades of gray encompass lots of facets of leadership. It’s not just how leaders view things, but it’s how they choose to respond to thing. People. Situations. Circumstances. Opportunities. Leaders with an elevated ability to embrace the gray have learned to adapt to what they believe is most warranted at the time. Sometimes it requires a stylistic change. Watch a leader hold forth with a small group of upper executives and pay attention to the language, the body language and the candor. Then watch that same leader deliver the message to the troops and it’s a different performance because the stage and the audience require it. Great leaders recognize their responsibility to provide the right fit at the right time. That’s a big part of seeing and managing the gray.

Embracing the gray isn’t merely stylistic though. Problem solving is another area where effective leaders understand the benefits of seeing the gray. Some of the better solutions are born from investigating possibilities we may not initially gravitate toward. Embracing the gray is refraining from drawing a quick conclusion until you have sufficient evidence. Warning: It can be much tougher than it sounds.

Know if you’re a hammer. Or any other tool that can’t perform multiple tasks. Leaders who embrace the gray have learned to be Swiss Army knives in assessing and problem-solving. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Other times you need pliers. It’s requires training yourself to be patient, open-minded and receptive to possibilities or ideas.

Patience. Silence. Contemplation. Investigation. Verification. These are a few of the things you need so you can embrace the gray.

The goal isn’t to brag about how into the gray you can be…it’s about being smarter, wiser and making better decisions. It’s about drawing the correct conclusion while avoiding the knee-jerk reaction (and getting it wrong). Not because you’re afraid of being wrong, but because getting it right best serves your people and organization.

The Problems Of Being Binary

“He wears his idealism on his sleeve and it makes him very judgmental,” says an executive. He’s talking about a direct report, Bernard. He goes on to talk about all the times that this mid-level manager has created problems because he refuses to see any gray. Bernard sees right or wrong, good or evil, crooked or straight. No middle ground. Ever. The boss is vexed and almost out of his mind in what to do.

The boss describes Bernard as a guy with such a high degree of self-righteousness that people now don’t want to work with Bernard. The boss has only tolerated it because Bernard’s work is top-notch. But these people issues are now beginning to have a crippling effect. The boss is looking for input on what might be done to help Bernard. I want to offer the boss some hope, but the big challenge is whether or not the organization wants to devote the time, energy, money and effort into Bernard. It might not be the wisest use of resources if the boss has spent considerable time (years) attempting to coach Bernard to see the possibility of gray. These aren’t decisions I make – not any more. Not as a coach or consultant. My job is to serve the leader who hires me, but I’m not prone to urge any investment in a lost cause. I tell the executive that it sounds like he already knows what he needs to do after spending years doing everything he could to help Bernard “see things differently.” Altering how people see the world – and others – is a very hard thing when you’re Bernard. It’s just how Bernard sees things. All things. All the time. Besides, Bernard has proven resistant to change, even in the face of constant coaching from his boss. Such binary behavior foils the career progress of high performers like Bernard. He’s shooting himself in the head without even knowing it.

Bernard suffers a common type of binary behavior. He has standards of ethical behavior that few others seem to match. Bernard is harsh in his judgment of others. The slightest deviation from what he thinks is proper is viewed as a low integrity action. Bernard just can’t seem to bring himself to the possibility that people just don’t always share his knowledge, convictions or world view. People in Bernard’s world are either right or wrong. No middle ground. Ever.

You can see how such behavior would grow increasingly problematic for Bernard’s boss and co-workers. Strife and tension kept escalating. Bernard thought he was always right. The problem was everybody else. Repeated efforts to help Bernard see gray failed. Ultimately, Bernard was given a binary choice: resign or be fired.

Everyone Is Ignorant In Some Way Or Another

A key to embracing the gray is to acknowledge our ignorance. It can start with the mere confession that we might be ignorant about some things. If you can start with the sheer possibility of ignorance, then you can migrate to the reality. Sadly, people with a binary point of view refuse to even consider the possibility that they’re wrong about anything.

Ignorance isn’t stupidity.

stupidity = behavior that shows a lack of good sense or judgment

ignorance = lack of knowledge or information

You need to learn and grow if you want to become a great leader. That can’t happen if you think you already know everything.

“But why should he be open-minded when he thinks he’s right?” -Johnny Rich, The Human Script

You can be right much of the time – maybe even most of the time – but you’re not right all the time. The sooner you willingly acknowledge that with your team, the better. But the head trash of “I’m the boss; I have to always be right” can clutter things up nicely. Cliches fill our heads with notions that leadership demands an appearance of superiority.

Never let ’em see you sweat.

Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.

There are too many of these idiotic “truisms.” In preparation for episode 280 – the one I’ve been promising about evidence-based leadership – we need to get our leadership tiller out and break up the hard, dry ground of ignorance. If we don’t, then the seeds of evidence-based leadership won’t be able to take root. Must I convince you that embracing a gray scale in your leadership will benefit you and your team? I can do that, but only if you value the truth, accuracy and making a positive difference in your organization.

3 BIG Reasons Why Embracing The Gray Will Make You A More Effective Leader

Reason #1: Competence – your own and the competence of your team – hinges on it.

Competence is defined as the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Of course you want that. Yes, you want it in your people, too.

We don’t come to work every day trying to fail. Nobody does. Everybody wants to feel that they’re making a positive difference. We all need to feel valued. That’s best accomplished with our performance. Bernard proves that we also need to get along and have a reasonable degree of likeability, but if our work product is poor…nothing else matters.

Competence encompasses our skill (maybe even our natural aptitude), our opportunities and our ability to seize those opportunities. If your leadership is binary, devoid of seeing shades of gray, then you’re not able to see skills or opportunities as clearly as you should. The blinders that help you focus only on black or white prevent you from seeing other things. That lack of vision stops you from seeing the possibilities in yourself and your people.

When I was in my 20’s I was running a relatively new start up retailing company, a consumer electronics outfit. I was an experienced commissioned sales guy and merchandiser. With almost a decade of experience I found myself needing salespeople who were comfortable with a commission-based compensation program AND who were comfortable educating shoppers in things unfamiliar to them. Technology was moving fast and home video was beginning to take off. The VCR was less than 10 years old and now portable video recording was available. Additionally, stereo TV and stereo VCR’s were hitting the market. Big screen TV’s were also gaining strength. But all these things were unfamiliar to most homes in America at the time. I needed salespeople capable of making these technologies more easily understood.

Where could I find salespeople capable of this? A binary approach would be to find experienced consumer electronics people, but I had a third consideration (in addition to commission-based compensation and capable of educating shoppers). I wanted people fanatical about customer experience and service. I already had experience with people who had worked for other consumer electronics outfits and most of them had bad habits that demanded fixing. I was ready to do something more positive. I embraced my own level of gray.

The bedding industry was experiencing a new trend. Maybe it was a fad, but it was something so completely different than the traditional mattress it required some salesmanship qualities I sought. Waterbed stores were popping up all over the place. I went to a few of them to see how the salespeople would sell me a waterbed. I quickly learned they were paid a commission. I also learned they had to explain things most shoppers had no experience with – I’d never slept on a waterbed. I didn’t know how they even worked. And like every sales field – some were very attentive to shoppers and others were apathetic, but I saw what I thought was a disproportionate number of excited, enthusiastic salespeople.

So I recruited a few. They had no consumer electronics background. Instead of breaking bad habits we had to teach them the terms and technology of the products we sold, but that’s a very different activity than correcting bad habits. It was positive all the way around. Brought about because we refused to be binary in our approach to building the business.

Our competence as leaders and the competence of our sales team rose because we realized there might be a better solution to our people problem. It’s not always about seeing if a round peg might fit into a square hole. It’s really about opening your mind to look for patterns that might fit the problem you’re trying to solve. Sometimes the dots don’t connect from point A to point B without going through points C and D. Having that flexibility will propel competence forward.

Reason #2: It’s attractive to your team.

Nobody finds the knee-jerk leader attractive. Even the knee-jerk reactors on your team don’t appreciate that trait in YOU, or any leader.

Talk to impulsive, emotional people and they’ll tell you they appreciate a leader who is deliberate, intentional and purposeful, but who also takes the time to “get it right.” People don’t want to follow leaders whose decisions aren’t impacted by more information – especially when they’re the ones trying to provide that added intelligence. Think about the times you tried to present additional information to your boss, but felt it wasn’t given any consideration. How did that make YOU feel?

People don’t enjoy that feeling. Instead, they want to give information that is being given some consideration. It fosters them to provide more information.

I know what you’re saying, “I don’t care about being attractive to my people.” Tap the brakes on that thought. You should care.

If you don’t like the word attractive, then pick another one, but I’m sticking with attractive. It’s pompous to think you don’t want that. You wanted to be attractive when you were dating. You wanted to be attractive when you got hired. You’ve spent a big part of your life wanting – needing – to be attractive so you could accomplish what you most wanted. Don’t sit there and tell me that now you don’t care about it. Sure you do. See, you’re being binary again. 😉

Every salesperson learns that people buy from friends – or people who are friendly. It’s that trite “know, like and trust” model. Trite, but true. Your leadership is greatly impacted by your ability to influence the people in your organization. Be unattractive and see how influential you are, or how persuasive you are. Flies and honey and all that. Stop resisting it. Stop telling yourself that it doesn’t matter. It does matter. A lot.

Your attractiveness is greatly determined by your willingness to see and appreciate shades of gray. Those shades are often provided by input from your team.

Try something for me. Make a decision before you gather information from your team. Just figure out what you want to do, then have a meeting with your team. In that meeting give them the problem. Tell them this is why you’ve called the meeting so you can discuss the problem. Then tell them, “But I’ve already decided what I want to do and nothing you say is going to change my mind.” Now, shut up and watch the room. See how every single person shuts down.

Binary leadership shuts people down. It shuts down their attraction to leaders. And leaders without followers or supporters are just lone wolves waiting to get killed in the wild.

Reason #3: Embracing gray will foster your own personal growth and the growth of your entire team.

It won’t guarantee it, but it will foster it. I’ll go you one better – if you remain a binary leader you won’t grow and neither will your team. You must embrace the gray in order to grow even though embracing it won’t solely guarantee it. It’s just one – albeit a very important – part of the equation.

You only know what you know. The hard thing is to figure out what you don’t know, or to open yourself up to the prospect of what you don’t know. That’s easier to do with specific skills. It’s much harder when it’s leadership.

Do you know how to speak Spanish? Can you write php code? Do you know how to install a tile back splash?

These are specific skills that you either know or you don’t. You instantly were able to give a binary answer to those questions. Yes or no. Sure, maybe your ability or inability to do any of those things has a range of competence, but you have a pretty clear idea of your proficiency. Maybe you can understand a little bit of Spanish, but you can’t speak it or write it. You have a realistic view of your Spanish deficiency.

Leadership doesn’t work like that. It’s like communication and other soft skills. That also makes it prone to delusion. We can think we’re better at it than we really are because there’s no binary measurement – like speaking Spanish, or coding php or installing tile. If you want to learn any of those skills you’ll figure out what to do. It begins with your desire to learn something you don’t yet know how to do. Or it begins with your desire to get better at it. Learning presupposes some degree of willingness to know, or a willingness to know more.

Can you lead? Can you communicate?

You likely said, “Yes.” You gave a binary answer. And I’m betting you gave an affirmative answer. Even non-leaders often tell me they know how. The poorest communicators tell me they’re pretty good at it. And this is where the truly great leaders tower above the rest — they’re busy working to get better. They’re anxious to figure out what they may not know. They want to discover the gaps in their knowledge or skill that they may not even yet recognize. Great leaders are driven by what they may not have yet figured out because they know those may be the very things preventing them from being their best.

To open up yourself to the notion that you may not have it all figured out is the mark of a truly capable learner. It can even be profitable when it comes to world views, personal philosophies and other intensely personal notions. For example, my personal philosophy is steeped in the notion of serving others. Through the years I’ve seen some people elevate their performance when led by a tyrant, while I’ve seen their performance slip when led by a more compassionate, service-driven leader. I’m unwilling to embrace tyranny as a way of leadership, but my willingness to see the gray scale opened up my mind to the possibility that in some cases, and at some level, tyranny can work. Unwilling to just leave it there, I’ve gone on to wrestle with my own leadership to figure out if there are tactics, strategies and techniques used by the tyrant that I might incorporate into my own leadership whenever I encounter a person who may be best served by such behaviors. Much of that learning happened for me years ago when my children were still small. And it made sense to me because I could sometimes garner cooperation from my kids when I calmly, politely asked. But other times that wouldn’t work, no matter how hard I tried. Instead, I could bark and growl and I’d get instant compliance. I learned that it’s not just a people issue, but sometimes it’s a circumstance issue. For me, it was eye-opening to figure out that sometimes, with some people, you need to behave one way to solicit their best performance. On a different day, in a different circumstance, with that same person…I might have to behave differently to get their best. Instead of viewing that as “their problem” I saw it as “my opportunity” or “my challenge.”

Your people learn, too.

Think about it. You’re the leader. Your organization or team mirrors you. You set the tone and culture for your team. In most cases, your people will behave like you do. They’ll repeat the stories you tell. They’ll talk like you do. They’ll think like you do. You may not recognize it, but I promise you the signs are evident. Your resistance to embrace gray will become their resistance, too.

Because you’re the boss, you have an impact. Some of your influence is simply because you have the power and authority, not because you have their respect. Don’t fight it or squander it. Use it to the benefit of your organization, your leadership and your people. Growth and improvement are the goals. Don’t urge your people to improve without showing them of your commitment to it your own work. Get better all the time and let people in on it. Confess or admit the weaknesses you’re trying to shore up. Don’t stoically go about your business in a binary way if you want to become a more effective leader. Embrace the gray so you can give yourself and your team the opportunity to keep growing.

Getting Closer To The Truth

I’ll tease you a bit for the next episode. Getting closer to truth – in any area – will make you more effective. That’s the whole point of evidence-based leadership…to move you closer to the truth. Why? So you can make the best decisions possible. I continue to preach the message of your role as a leader: to solve problems and to make the best decisions possible. But there is another aspect to your leadership: to help your team do their very best work. Together, those 3 things are the legs of the stool upon which your career is built.

a. Solve problems
b. Make sound decisions
c. Execute the work (a + b)

Quite a few leaders (a ‘hem “managers”) neglect getting to the truth in these areas. It hampers their leadership. As a result, their solutions aren’t as good as they should be. Their decisions aren’t either. Even stellar execution of a poor plan has poor results!

The problems facing you right now deserve the best solutions possible. Hole up in your office. Accept no input from others. Think it through all by yourself and approach a solution like you would a coin flip. Heads or tails? Binary. Your only choice is THIS or THAT. There is no option for ANOTHER.

Question: What if you could have more information?

Ameriquest Mortgage created some clever TV spots that fully illustrate how horrible it can be to draw the wrong conclusion. Ironically, in 2007 Ameriquest shut down because of unscrupulous lending practices. They were a major player in the subprime mortgage crisis. See, things aren’t always what they seem.

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