Be Different or be dead

July 26, 2021

10 simple ways to find out if you’re an amazing standout leader

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10 simple ways to find out if you’re an amazing standout leader

How do you see yourself as a leader?

Do you think that you’re well on your way to becoming one who stands apart from the rest?

Here are 10 roles which, based on my 4+ decades of leadership experience, point to the ones who are actually serious about becoming a standout leader.

If you ‘AGREE’ that you regularly perform 6 or more of the Standout leader roles described, then you are a serious Standout contender; anything less and you still have a way to go to reach your goal, so focus your efforts and build an action plan to change your ways.

Let’s begin.

1. The customer moment

The Standout leader takes personal ownership of architecting the customer moment; the ‘picture’ of what it looks like to serve customers in a way that takes their breath away.
This work is done by the Standout leader alone and is never delegated to anyone else in the organization.

The detailed strokes of service — the behaviours expected of every employee when they are engaging with a customer — can only be described by the one who owns the vision for service. And this extends to the look, feel and functionality of the online experience as well and personal contact moments.

The Standout leader is the artist who paints a vivid picture of what a ‘dazzling’ customer moment looks like for all to see.
As a leader, are you actively engaged with designing the customer moment in your organization? If your role doesn’t include direct customer contact, you can still be involved by looking at how your staff treats your internal customers.

2. Serving around

The Standout leader is a master at Leadership by Serving Around— LBSA—the next generation of leadership. LBSA is a leadership imperative to help people have meaningful and rewarding careers and to build an organization to stand apart from their competitors and achieve remarkable levels of performance.

The Standout leader purposefully goes through the workplace with a strategic purpose, looking for serving moments or opportunities to help someone perform their job more effectively.

Managers ask: “What’s going on?”; Serving Leaders ask: “What can I do to help you?”

The Serving leader’s agenda is to offer personal help to employees, recognizing that if someone’s individual problems are solved, performance enhancement follows. If you take care of the person, performance takes care of itself.
How much time do you spend out of your office among your teams? Do you have regular LBSA time on your calendar?

3. The one and ONLY

The Standout leader is possessed to answer the question posed by discerning customers: “Why should I do business with your organization and not your competition?” It is the killer question that decides whether or not you have a ‘special sauce’ that makes you different and a winner.

Most competitive claims rely on overused clap-trap to position themselves against their competitors. They use words like ‘better’, ‘best’, ‘number one’ and ‘market leader’ which have little value in declaring their competitive advantage. Claims that employ these types of words are merely vague aspirations that most don’t believe.
The Standout leader, on the other hand, uses ’The ONLY statement’ to define their organization’s uniqueness and shout out their competitive advantage.

‘We are the only ones that….’

This is the claim they use to cut through the usual claptrap and make it clear why they should be chosen among their competitors.
How does your organization state its competitive advantage? Is it clap-trap, or does it harbour the ONLY notion? How can you help add ONLY-thinking in your business planning process?
Are you a binary thinker when it comes to expressing how you or your business is different from others?

4. 360 feedback

The Standout leader is always looking for feedback on their performance and on ways to improve it.
360 feedback is not new, but it is one of the most effective methods of assessing how someone performs their current responsibilities and what they need to do to improve for future opportunities.

360 feedback provides performance assessment from not only someone’s boss, but also from their peers and others in the organization they interact with on a regular basis (including frontline managers who rely on support to serve customers.)
The Standout leader uses 360 feedback to ensure they are actively practising their serving leadership role.
Do you use 360 feedback as a way to hone your skills or do you just care about what your boss says?

5. Line of sight

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruence between what its strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis. The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they all do different things out of sync with the strategy, with inconsistency and dysfunction resulting.
This is a failure of leadership who place more focus on perfecting the business plan rather than on how it will be executed.

The Standout leader knows that superlative performance depends on strategy execution, and their priority is to translate the strategy into what it means to each function and person involved in delivering it.
They focus on ensuring that each employee has a direct line of sight to the strategy from their position, and that they understand what they specifically need to do to contribute to its implementation.

Do you translate the organization’s priorities to each one of your team members in specific terms so they clearly understand what actions they need to take to execute its business plan?

6. The Strategy Hawk

The Standout leader personally owns the execution of the strategic game plan of the organization. Generally, since many functions share in the responsibility to execute the plan, it rests with the collective executive team.

But that’s not good enough; it needs a specific owner. It needs single finger accountability to ensure that the job gets done.
Shared responsibility, however noble, is simply not up to the task.

The Standout leader puts their hand up and wants to be the voice for execution—the Strategy Hawk—in the organization to ride herd on execution. To monitor progress. To kick ass when things are not proceeding as planned.
The Strategy Hawk has an abundance of currency in the organization, who is tenacious and has a high tolerance for ‘pain’.
The Standout leader is the voice of execution.
Do you jump into the implementation process or are you content to stay at the intellectual planning stage?

7. Frontline management

The Standout leader makes room in their busy schedule to interview potential frontline managers because effective strategy execution depends on the performance of the frontline and their managers are key to making it happen.

How else can the leader be sure that customer moments in particular are being handled the right way by frontline staff? If frontline managers don’t get it, their frontline employees won’t get it either.

My personal approach was to have heavy involvement in interviewing when I started the process and gradually reduce the amount of time I dedicated to this work over time after I was satisfied that my managers learned
how I wanted the interviews handled.

The Standout leader takes personal ownership in ensuring the right people are put into frontline positions.
Do you get involved in ‘skip level’ interviews for junior level positions in your organization?

8. Goosebumps

The Standout leader is on a mission to recruit people who are born to serve others and one way to tell if a prospect candidate fulfils this criteria is to find out if they leave you with goosebumps when they tell their story in answer to the challenge:

“Tell me a story that will prove to me that you ‘love’ other people.”

If they are the real deal, their story is rich with detail and the threads that bind the story together emphasize the importance of connecting with people on an emotional level; their authenticity pours out with every word. The unauthentic ones’ stories lack any passionate element; they were ushered out the door.

The amazing storytellers found their way into higher level positions in the customer service organization to provide the leadership necessary to sustain this strategy that was extremely effective in gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage for our organization.

The Standout leader, driven to achieve a service strategy based on remarkable and memorable customer experiences, hires the ‘People Lover’ who leaves them with goosebumps.
Do you probe the emotional side of people when you interview them, or do you just focus on their academic pedigree and the projects they’ve completed?

9. Planning

A standout leader believes that ‘heading slightly west’ is a valid strategy despite the fact that the experts try to get them to believe that if they follow the precise process ascribed by the planning pundits they will create the “perfect” plan.
They determine an imprecise view of the direction that should be taken, and make modifications ’on the run’ based on what is learned through execution.

In addition, they believe that the more tries made, the greater the likelihood of success. Their mindset is that if they get lucky and hit a home run on the first try, GREAT! but never count on it.
The odds of getting it right the first time are too low given the uncertainty and unpredictability of the markets we serve.

The Standout leader believes that iterating oneself to a successful end state by making more tries than the rest of the crowd is the only viable planning model in a turbulent world.
Do you push for the perfect solution when you are given a challenge?

10. Benchmarking

The Standout leader knows that benchmarking best in class won’t make an organization special and differentiate it from its competition.
They understand that copying has no strategic value in moving an organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY they occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about reinventing their business plan but this benchmarking process adds zero space between them and their competitors.

Furthermore the Standout leader knows that benchmarking is the enemy of innovation; you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator.
Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which are critical values that organizations want in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

The Standout leader’s end game is for their organization to be remarkable, an objective which isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, and that this is achieved by being different than everyone else not by copying them.
When given a project to do, is your first instinct to research how others have done it and to follow their lead?

There you have it.

How well did you do? Whatever your result, the good news is you’re focused on the right attributes that will make you a great leader who stands apart from everyone else.

Congratulations!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.26.21 at 01:16 am by Roy Osing
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July 19, 2021

Why the ‘Internal Report Card’ will get you the most amazing teamwork

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Creating highly proficient teams is a challenge for most leaders who recognize that unless synchronicity among work groups is systematically established in the organization, performance and results suffer.

I’ve looked at teamwork from a number of angles in past blog articles and suggested a number of ways to improve the effectiveness of people working in solidarity towards a single purpose.

These are a few sound bites:

Strategy — ensure everyone understands the strategic game plan of the organization for without shared understanding of where the organization wants to go, harmonious activity with needed results simply don’t happen.

Line of sight — establish a direct line of sight between the strategy and every function in the organization; if every person doesn’t act in accordance with the specific outcomes expected of them dysfunction results as divergent outcomes throughout the organization are produced.

Translation — leadership must take on a translator role to break the organization’s objectives down for everyone; if individuals are left to figure out what the strategic intent means to them, more erratic behaviour occurs and inconsistent performance results.

Cross-functional measures — since systems and processes across the organization among departments typically produce results (as opposed to a ‘vertical’ process operating in a single function producing the final good or service the customer receives), metrics must be introduced that measure the effectiveness of cross functional activities.

Handoff improvement — internal customer-supplier relationships must be improved to eliminate inefficient and mistake-ridden handoffs, because eventually these fumbles damage ‘real’ external customer dissatisfaction with waning market performance.

If you can make internal handoffs seamless on ‘the inside’, amazing service is delivered on ‘the outside’.

I would like to pivot off the last point because I believe there are substantial improvements to teamwork that stem from the fact that inside an organization, people—internal suppliers—deliver results for other people—internal customers and if somehow those connections could be made more seamless and effective, overall teamwork and performance would follow suit.

Internal quality

Organizations rarely set up a system to measure ‘internal quality’; the value of what internal suppliers deliver to their internal customers.
For example, sales expects marketing to develop a training program for a new product but marketing is not held accountable for the result they deliver.
— Was the training program delivered when it was promised?
— Did it cover all the elements that sales expected?
— Did it provide a unique value proposition that sales could use in competitive selling encounters?
— Did it include selling aids the salesperson can use in front of the customer?

The few organizations that do systematically measure internal customer-supplier transactions, rely on internally generated statistics; data on such topics as:
— delivery times.
— % defects.
— amount of rework required to remediate defects.

This type of internal quality measurement system is a good first step but it needs to go further if the desired outcome is high performing teams that consistently deliver expected results.

Perception measurement

The measurement system needs to be expanded to include perception measures, how the internal customer ‘feels’ about the service provided by the internal supplier.
— How does sales feel about the quality of the training program marketing delivered to them?
— Did it meet their expectations?
— Did it fall below what they expected?
— Did it go beyond what they expected?

These are subjective qualitative measures, but they are so important in helping improve team performance because if someone feels the service they were delivered is below what they expected, it’s their reality.
In a way, it really doesn’t matter if the internal stats say that there were a mere 2% defects (and it’s somehow ok to screw up 2% of the time) if the internal customer feels the service they were delivered doesn’t measure up to what they expected.

Perception is the reality. It really doesn’t matter what the data says.

Internal Report Card

The simple way of getting perception measurement going is to introduce the ‘Internal Report Card’, where an internal customer gives their internal supplier a report card rating on the service they provided.

Here’s how to do it.

1. The internal supplier asks each of their internal customers what handful of service elements—no more than 6—are critically important to them.

2. The internal service elements are discussed and mutually agreed upon between customer and supplier.

The sales Report Card on marketing, for example, could have these internal service elements:
▪️New products are introduced in a timely manner to keep sales competitive.
▪️Product prices are acceptable to our customers.
▪️Marketing staff are responsive to our concerns. They connect with us regularly and act on the help we need from them.
▪️Product training programs are valuable and help us stand out among our competitors.
▪️Advertising and customer communications programs give us the ‘air cover’ support we need in the marketplace to give us a competitive advantage.
▪️We have sufficient input to product sales forecasts produced by marketing.

3. Every month or at some other agreed-upon interval, marketing asks sales to complete the report card using the classic ‘A’ for amazing service; ‘B’ for good service; ‘C’ for average service and ‘D’ for below average service.

In the report card, sufficient room should be provided for comments on why a particular rating has been given. This is extremely important as it points the service supplier in the right direction to improve.

4. Sales posts their report card results for the marketing team and develops an improvement plan to deal with problem areas. This normally follows a ‘whining and snivelling’ period for marketers to go to their cave and get over the results those unreasonable sales people gave them!

5. Marketing meets with sales to discuss their improvement plan and gets their sign-off that their intended action plan will address the shortfalls sales identified and will continue to build on the marketing strengths that were identified.

6. Sales share the results with their teams and openly support the efforts taken by marketing to improve teamwork.

Reverse Internal Report Card

So what does sales do if marketing doesn’t initiate the report card process? Let’s face it, marketing may not want or care to know how sales feels about the service they provide to them.

This is where the Reverse Report Card comes into play. If marketing won’t ask for input, sales can give it to them regardless.
Consider it an unsolicited sales report on how well marketing supports the sales effort.

If your internal supplier doesn’t care to initiate the report card process with you, do it to them.

This is achieved by sales architecting their own report card and sending it to their marketing colleagues. And hopefully (after the shock wears off) it will encourage marketing to take the initiative to begin the formal process by asking for details behind the Report Card, what the results mean and what they need to do differently to improve sales’ perception of marketing support.

The simplest ideas are often the most effective. As kids our Moms encouraged us to reach for A’s as a measure of our learning competence; let’s now use this tool to build height effective teams in our organizations.

If you’re interested in establishing a Report Card process among your teams, connect with me. I would be pleased to help in any way I can.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

And ‘Audacious’ is coming soon…

• Posted 7.19.21 at 01:52 am by Roy Osing
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July 12, 2021

Why being different is key to career and business success

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Why being different is key to career and business success.

If you are not different from others in some meaningful way, you will likely achieve no more than 50% of your potential; you leave 50% of your net worth on the table.

This is what young professionals face today as they begin their journey to fulfill their career dreams and be successful.

There are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs.

And the people in the crowd approaching organizations for an opportunity look the same.

When being interviewed, members of the job hunting herd are literally indistinguishable from one another.

— They have a boilerplate CV they downloaded from the internet;

— They talk mostly about their academic credentials and the marks they earned;

— They exhibit a superficial understanding of the organization they are speaking to and the challenges it faces;

— They don’t ask meaningful penetrating questions about the company and the markets it serves;

— Their answers to interview questions rely more on what they’ve been taught in school rather than from a practical perspective;

— The conversation is replete with standard cliches: “My strength is dealing with people”; “I understand new technologies”; “My weakness is trying to do too much, or I’m impatient at times” and on it goes.

When they cannot demonstrate something unique about themselves, they unfortunately provide hiring organizations no compelling reason to pay attention to them over others and to consider them high for employment potential.

Some say that it is ok to possess skills and competencies similar to others; that there is a limit on how people can be different.

Not true! That’s like saying there is no way you can turn a commodity into a differentiated product and we all know that is absolute rubbish.

Products can be made to be special in a myriad of ways and all it takes is imagination and creativity to create something different and unmatched in the marketplace - ever heard of The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas?

It’s no different with people.

Each and every one of us can be distinct from every other person in some special way if we are motivated to discover our specialness.

The problem is we have never been led to think that being different was expected. Rather, ‘the system’ imposes on us conformance and compliance expectations and has brainwashed us to believe that fitting in was the only acceptable outcome.

The school system is all about grinding our students who have all mastered the same stuff in the same way.

Being different is not driven into young people; it’s frowned upon.

So the consequences of not being different are:

▪️first, young people have an extremely tough time getting a job and launching their career;

▪️organizations are robbed of the creativity they need to survive and thrive in our unpredictable and chaotic world.

Double jeopardy with very unfortunate outcomes.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is coming soon…

• Posted 7.12.21 at 02:47 am by Roy Osing
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July 5, 2021

8 proven ways to beat the competition for the job you want

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8 proven ways to beat the competition for the job you want.

There are more people out there today competing for scarce jobs; people competing for careers are more educated and the urgency to be successful is huge with the severe economic pressures facing everyone.

To win a job in this type of environment requires that you be the best at what you choose to do; that you be the topic of conversation; that you and only you deliver unique results that matter.

These 8 proven and practical actions will enable you to be unmatched in the crowd of people hungry for success in their career and you will handily beat the competition for the jobs you seek.

1. Be visible to others

If you’re not noticed, how can you be judged among your peers? Recognition for achieving results can only come when the career decision makers are aware of what you are doing and the value you are creating.

Manage your activity with this in mind. Don’t force it — like ‘Hey! Look at me!’ — but ensure that people know you and are able to compare you to your colleagues.

This will also get you top of the list of high potential people who should be given greater opportunities to prove their worth.

2. Be a niche player

Try and be a player in a strategic area where the need is greatest as opposed to trying to be a generalist who aspires to be all things to all people — you need to be focussed.

For example if your organization is suffering from the lack of marketing skills to differentiate itself from competitors (and you are a competent marketer), focus your brand building efforts there.

The people who win jobs are recognized as individuals who provide the unique leadership required to achieve strategic success. They focus their energy and use their competencies in the specific areas that will deliver superlative performance for their organization.

3. Be different than everyone around you

It always amazes me that everyone wants to copy what works for others.

When confronted with a problem to solve, it seems a natural tendency to consult best practices and employ the tactics and game plan that others have successfully implemented.

Whereas benchmarking what others do may result in improvements, it will never give you a strategic advantage over your competitors.

Successful job winners don’t copy; they set the standard that others aspire to achieve. And they do it by being different in some meaningful way that resonates with their audience.

4. Keep your promises

A simple thing really, but one that so often is missing in action when it comes to peoples’ integrity. It shouldn’t be an advantage to someone but it is; many are great with the words and rhetoric but fall short on the action and results.

Someone who has a strong brand around doing what they say will surpass those who rely on words alone to set them apart.

Winners don’t just aspire, they do.

5. Forget your degree

The truth is, the consistent job winners don’t come from being the most well educated; there are too many people that are likely to have degrees and marks better than yours. Furthermore academic credentials are not a reliable predictor of success.

In the real world success comes from achieving results faster than others — from being more nimble than the crowd.

Being the best at winning jobs is achieved by getting stuff done better than anyone else, not by outthinking them. You DO need a good knowledge foundation to even play the career game, but it’s the actions you take that make a difference.

6. Go beyond what is asked of you

Most of my career competitors did the minimum amount to meet the given objective.

My view was always to meet the minimum expectation and look for an opportunity to go beyond it; to create work that was more original and insightful than what others did. Sure, it took extra time to do it, but it was worth it in the long run.

Look for opportunities to:
▪️make your work broader and richer than expected by engaging more experts and opinion leaders in your analysis.
▪️provide a greater level of detail in your reports. Don’t just skim the surface; do a ‘deep dive’ into your material and provide the granularity your readers don’t expect.
▪️package your work differently than what others do; make your work compelling for your audience to study.

The required minimum satisfies expectations; going beyond what is asked of you will attract attention and make you unmatchable among your competitors.

7. Give ‘em what they don’t expect

Most people approach a problem they have been asked to solve in the same way. They do a SWOT analysis, set a goal and then develop a list of objectives to achieve it. This process is the pedantic way that your competitors will generally use to problem solve. It’s predictable and it’s boring.

Being the best person for a job opportunity requires breaking away from the way everyone else approaches a challenge and doing it in a way that surprises people.

If you can surprise people, they will remember you and what you’ve done.

Some simple ways of coming at this:
▪️ask someone who is affected by the problem how THEY would solve it. People closest to the problem often don’t get invited to help solve it; those looking in are surprised when they are.
▪️abbreviate the formal analysis; get to a solution fast, implement it and tweak it on the run. Spending most of your time to figure out how to implement a solution is almost never done; when you do you just might attract a “WOW!”
▪️go in the opposite direction implied by the traditional problem solving approach. Doing a 180 on how a problem is typically addressed is often a great inertia breaker and will attract attention.

8. Change the playing field

It’s all about context — the ‘bigger picture’ — and most people don’t think this way.

Push the narrative to a higher level than the issue on the table. For example, rather give an opinion on civic leadership ethics, raise the level of the conversation to discuss civic leadership accountability — a broader topic which includes ethics.

I am constantly asked my opinion, for example, on specific advertising campaigns, and personal brands, and I refuse to comment until I clearly understand the strategy that each intends to fulfil.

Unless you have strategic context, your views are merely personal biases and add little strategic value to the issues at hand.

The job winners avoid getting drawn into a debate on a narrow topic; they create a more holistic frame of reference and go there to present their views.

They don’t conform; they don’t comply; they don’t rely on their schooling and they don’t copy what others do.

They look for niche opportunities and rely on ‘doing it’  to achieve results that others are incapable of delivering.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.5.21 at 01:41 am by Roy Osing
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