When I was in 8th grade, my friends and I saw a Saturday movie at the mall about a scientist who accidentally discovered a powerful potion. Rub it on, and you become invisible. After it wore off, you became visible again. How exciting! We chattered away the rest of the day talking about the pranks we’d pull if we had a bottle of that potion. In our teenage excitement, we came up with ideas that involved whoopee cushions, moving furniture just before people sat on it, and spying on the girl’s locker room, as you can imagine. It was hilarious fun for 13-year-olds.
What isn’t so funny is when businesses become invisible to their prospects. It isn’t deliberate. They are not hiding, necessarily. They’ve just fallen off the radar. In a turbulent economy, business leaders need to be more vigilant to changes in the market, not less so.
A few years ago, US-based businesses were faced with reduced marketing budgets and the focus became on how to find the leverage points so that we were investing in the promotions that had the highest payoffs. Now, as several firms I’ve been working with have set more ambitious goals for the coming year than in the past, we’ve noticed that it is easier for mid-market companies to take commanding positions in the marketplace than expected, in industry after industry, from IT integrators to green tech firms to media companies.
Some firms in the last two years chartered a clear course, have moved ahead, and grown predictably. Some have scaled back their ambitions deliberately for strategic or practical reasons. Then there are some firms that think they have held ground or – worse – don’t know where they stand, when they’ve actually fallen into a crack. Why has it become dangerous to stand still, even in an uneven economy? [click to continue…]
John was a top IT project manager who had just become an operations VP in a new company, and we were sitting down to discuss growth goals for both the organization and John in his new role.
“This week has been another whirlwind of activity. It feels like I have a sign on my back that says ‘Ask me to solve your problem — anytime. Really, I wasn’t planning on doing anything important.’ It’s good to have people lean on me, but it’s a little too much at the moment.” John explained.
I chuckled and said, “Yes, welcome to the next level of leadership, where you’re focused on solving people problems more than project issues. The hardest thing about this for new executives, and even for some who have been at this awhile, is the balancing act. It’s sharing your situation and perspective with your peers and managers in a helpful way without sounding like – or actually – complaining or gossiping, while also being accessible to your team in appropriate ways. Who do you feel has more control over how you spend your work time right now, you or your people?”
“I’d love to be able to say it’s me, but I have to fight to carve out time to work on my initiatives and areas of responsibility,” John said. “Take yesterday for instance, I had a morning staff meeting and a site visit planned. Beforehand, I had e-mail to wade through catching me up on various projects and asking for my input. Sarah stopped by 30 minutes before the meeting and needed to talk about an issue related to her client. Then, the meeting wasn’t quite on track, so I had to bring them back to the core issues and that took longer than planned. Not only that, but I left with more on my to do list than I expected or wanted before I made it out the door to the site visit.” [click to continue…]
As I approached the modern, glass-walled conference room, I could see Chris speaking on the phone, though his back was mostly to the hallway. He took a few steps in one direction, then turned and put both his big hands on the table, with his left shoulder pressing the phone to his ear. I stepped up my pace to reach him and as I entered the conference room, he had sunk into a chair, still on the phone. His navy pinstripe suit looked sharp and neatly pressed, but his expression looked like someone had flavored his coffee with the elixar of despair. I tapped him on the shoulder and said firmly, “Get up. Let’s go.” His face changed from upset with a slightly lost look in his eyes to angry and indignant in a flash.
“What?” he demanded.
I pushed the conference room door closed and deliberately kept my grip on the handle as I replied, “Whatever important news we have to discuss this morning needs to be done off-site. You have employees, clients, and guests walking these halls and it’s not appropriate for them to see you broadcasting bad news with your body language. Do you need to grab your coat before we go?” It was similar to the way I’d hold a junior tennis player accountable for showing bad behavior on court: own it, correct it, and move on. Fortunately, Chris responded in the best way: no drama, no denial, no discussion.
My son and I were recognized as the #1 Father-Son tennis team in the Middle States section of the USTA for last year.
When people asked, “What’s my secret?” I explained that years ago, Peter Fleming taught me the most important decision to make for winning in doubles is who you pick as your partner. (Peter and John McEnroe, Mr. You Can’t Be Serious,” won 50 professional doubles tournaments together, including seven Grand Slam titles –Wimbledon (1979, 1981, 1983 and 1984), and US Open: (1979, 1981 and 1983).
Good communications, mutual respect, knowledge of each other’s strengths and weaknesses all go building a winning team after you pick a great partner.
I believe that insights and lessons learned in sports, as well as business, are valuable. What lessons have you learned recently?
Meet John. John set up a meeting to discuss why his custom applications and integration business was getting such poor results with lead generation. “After all,” he explained as we sat down at the conference table, “we are on every social network our guys could find.” John went on to describe, in somewhat dizzying detail, the extent of his efforts and how they were in total SEO/SEM compliance.
While technically sophisticated and even precise, the net result of the marketing efforts produced little in the way of new business leads. In essence, John was confusing activity with progress. I asked him if we could shift gears and talk about what had actually worked.
I asked John what sporting event he had seen recently and he said he loved watching pool tournaments on cable. When pressed to describe what made that so much fun, he replied that he loved the angles, the trajectories, and essentially the physics lessons in every shot. The discussion we had next about how good pool players were like good business developers helped him not only improve his business lead generation, but helped him appreciate one of his favorite pastimes on a much richer and more strategic level, as well. The systemic changes initiated in that conversation produced effective lead generation in less than 18 days. It’s gratifying to see how adding a strategic focus to a high level of outbound marketing can lead to measurable business results. Take this lesson into your business and watch the frequency of your “lucky breaks” improve.
“It’s the New Year, so I’m going to get into the best shape of my life,” say so many as they rush to the new health club and peddle or push or pump with gusto on unfamiliar apparatus. They wake up in such pain in so many places the next morning, wondering if the mad urge that overtook them the other day has truly passed or whether they will muster the will to return to the gym.
The desire to get into shape is a good one with truly great benefits on physical, emotional, and social levels. In the short term, exercising burns calories far better than clicking a mouse or tapping a keyboard. When you’re at the gym, you connect with new people and have a chance to see friends and colleagues in a different context that deepens your relationships. However, sensible people like you and I can agree that you can no more reverse the effects of years of bad habits in a single workout than you can take seven showers on Sunday and be set for the week.
Amanda sat at the conference table and had the five documents with her that members of my top end Business Owner Growth Program are asked to prepare in advance of their first 1:1 coaching session.
As we were evaluating the strategies she had used to grow her business, she shared that referrals were one of her top three ways of getting project leads. I asked her about her best projects in the last year and where they originated. Many did come from referrals. What was even more surprising to her was how many of those referrals kept coming from a few really good sources.
“Without knowing it, you’ve done a great job creating strong referral chains,” I said. The quizzical look on her face invited elaboration.
“A referral chain is created by simply asking someone you know to introduce you to someone else for a specific purpose, then repeating the process over time,” I explained. “When it happens naturally, it’s serendipity. By cultivating more of these relationships, you can skyrocket your business growth.”
Have you ever taken the time to look back on what you’ve learned and how you’ve benefited from the places you’ve worked?
Here is one example from my experience.
In 1989, When Chris Swisher hired me to lead a team that was responsible for 200 computers and to develop curriculum and consulting programs that supported 13,000 academic and administrative end users at Drexel University, I not only deepened my knowledge base, but also gained my first experiences as a manager, spoke on the local news stations as a computer expert, and began building my professional network that extended from the president’s office to incoming freshmen. As I was doing the work, I valued the problems I was able to solve for the faculty, students, administrators, and staff. At that point in time, it was a fabulous exercise in building problem solving skills and communicating solutions on a fairly large scale, with a wide variety of new challenges each day. In short, I got paid to geek out.
Meet Paula. Paula ran a successful events management company until she sold it, and now works as a solo management consultant. She explained that she had had a few tough years with the economy, but was now ready to make some big things happen and increase her earnings. Paula met a coach who said he could help her grow her business. Within a few coaching sessions, Paula had a clear idea of who she needed to reach out to, what she needed to say, and how to track her progress.
After a few weeks, Paula had more leads for project work with good clients than she had in the previous year. Marketing was working and work felt fun again. But there was a small problem: Paula wasn’t getting any new contracts. Instead of following up with a lead, Paula went to a book club meeting one morning, because she was “already committed to going.” Instead of making time for an important conference call, Paula postponed it so she wouldn’t miss her yoga class that she enjoyed so much. Following a client meeting Paula planned to return to her office, write a proposal, and have her coach review it before sending it off to the prospect. Instead, she got a call from a friend who asked her for a ride home from the airport which then expanded into a longer visit. Paula missed her window of opportunity and lost the momentum with several prospects. All of her plans to grow were being undermined by one crucial factor: other things were getting in the way of what Paula knew she needed to do. But it wasn’t really “other things” that were responsible for Paula’s plans running afoul, as you well know. It is all about the choices that Paula made.
In this excerpt, Malcolm is relaying Vic Braden’s observations about how the best tennis players in the world are unaware or have an inaccurate story in their mind about how they do what they do, such as hit a topspin forehand, and generalizes that to how many expert performers in other domains might be the last people to ask about how they accomplished a complex, difficult, or sophisticated goal.
Gladwell does a great job of finding the gaps and raising the flag when he learns that something seems off base, like the notion of asking an expert to describe what he does. In this case, he’s pulled back the curtain on behavioral modeling and revealed the idea that it requires a different skillset to teach a great thing than to do it. That’s a great distinction, but it shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Think about it for a moment and you’ll see how obvious it is in this example: The best basketball coaches (e.g. Wooden) weren’t the best players, and the best players (e.g. Jordan) wouldn’t make the best coaches. Here are three additional insights you can get from the idea of behavioral modeling, based on my own research and application in business and in sports:
Go to the source and observe. Like Braden did with using high speed video cameras to capture how top players hit high speed forehands, he went to find people who were already producing the result he wanted to understand. I contend that he missed his mark, though, because the people who produced the result he wanted were the coaches of the top pros, not the pros themselves (and those coaches might have done their work with the pros many years ago).
Know what your goal is and ask good questions. You get a construct when you ask, “What should I do?” (advice). You get a recipe when you ask, “What did you do first in this particular situation? What next? And the next step after that?” Experts have made these steps largely unconscious and automatic, so it takes some skilled probing to deconstruct.
Accomplishment is as much about state of mind as it is technique, if not more. When people ask, “How did [successful icon] do that?” what they are often really wondering is how they can follow in their footsteps and repeat the success. And while using proven models, techniques, and systems is foundational, improving one’s outlook, expectation for succeeding, and pride in accomplishment is the real X factor.
When I was in 8th grade, my friends and I saw a Saturday movie at the mall about a scientist who accidentally discovered a powerful potion. Rub it on, and you become invisible. After it wore off, you became visible again. How exciting! We chattered away the rest of the day talking about the pranks we’d pull if we had a bottle of that potion. In our teenage excitement, we came up with ideas that involved whoopee cushions, moving furniture just before people sat on it, and spying on the girl’s locker room, as you can imagine. It was hilarious fun for 13-year-olds.
Amanda sat at the conference table and had the five documents with her that members of my top end Business Owner Growth Program are asked to prepare in advance of their first 1:1 coaching session.
In 1989, When Chris Swisher hired me to lead a team that was responsible for 200 computers and to develop curriculum and consulting programs that supported 13,000 academic and administrative end users at Drexel University, I not only deepened my knowledge base, but also gained my first experiences as a manager, spoke on the local news stations as a computer expert, and began building my professional network that extended from the president’s office to incoming freshmen. As I was doing the work, I valued the problems I was able to solve for the faculty, students, administrators, and staff. At that point in time, it was a fabulous exercise in building problem solving skills and communicating solutions on a fairly large scale, with a wide variety of new challenges each day. In short, I got paid to geek out.