Be Different or be dead

May 29, 2017

The first time leader must take these 7 actions to win

The first time leader must take these 7 actions to win.

You have always reported to another manager or leader. Your life up to now has always been doing stuff; delivering what your job description dictated and your boss demanded.

Suddenly you find that your life has changed. You have competed and won the contest to assume a leadership position.

It may be a promotion or it may not be; what’s important, however, is that the existence you have known in the organization is gone forever.

My advice to you is..

▪️Don’t assume that what got you here will serve you well going forward. Proficiency in your past endeavours foreshadows very little in terms of what you will achieve going forward.

Past success is simply that - the past. Leave it there and learn what it takes to achieve today and tomorrow.

▪️Ask yourself The Magic Question to let go of the past and focus on the things you must do to be successful in your new position.

It’s a simple question: “Now that I am in this new position, what do I have to do differently?”. Being a member of a team is not very helpful in telling you what you need to do when you are a team leader.

▪️Never forget your roots. You are leaving a history where executing direction supplied from leadership above you played a critical role in what you were responsible for and probably consumed over 90% of your time.
As a leader, your performance will continue to be judged by what you get done, not what you plan to do — remarkable leaders execute brilliantly.

▪️Find a mentor immediately! Yes you can figure some of it out on your own, but to increase your chances of success ask someone who has been there and done it.

When you walk through a new door, best have someone on the other side who can show you the way. And don’t look for someone who is a friend or colleague; they are of little use to you because they are part of your past. Search for someone who you think can play a role in helping you discover your future.

▪️Spend your first 100 days learning the issues of your team. Ask them “If you were me, what single action would you take to make it easier to get the job done?” Don’t accept a grocery list of items; make them think about priorities since you won’t be able to do everything.
You want to boil it down to the critical few things that concern most people in your organization.

▪️Get intimate with the business plan of the organization. Learn it at the most granular level you can; translate it to what it means for your team. What exactly does your team have to do in order to “serve” the strategy? The connection between what the strategy says and what your team members do be clear and direct.

▪️Ask your internal customer how your team is performing; use their input along with your team members to decide what to focus on to improve.
This builds your currency with your internal network and will prove invaluable in getting stuff done as you move forward.

The tipping point in everyone’s career is caused by motion; moving from one position to another.

Make sure you do the right new thing.

Let go of what defined you in the past; discover what will define you tomorrow.

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

• Posted 5.29.17 at 05:49 am by Roy Osing
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May 8, 2017

Why successful leaders are outstanding at ‘lighting fires’ in people

Why successful leaders are outstanding at ‘lighting fires’ in people.

What does it take to be a remarkable leader; one who stands apart from the rest; who attracts attention and admiration for not just what they achieve but how they achieve it?

The emotional ingredient to brilliant leadership often goes missing-in-action when the pundits and other leadership experts describe the skills and competencies inherent in the great ones.

The emphasis seems to be on the cognitive capability of the leader rather than the raw feelings element of the leader’s make up.

Memorable leaders light fires in every theatre they find themselves; fires that generate excitement for each audience member by igniting their passion and stimulating their emotions.

They stimulate interest in their company through the power of their persona. Because of the rich images they create though their communication skills, people have a natural affinity to their organization; it is viewed as a natural extension of the leader.

The fire-lighting leader

Fire lighting leaders intentionally appeal to the right brain in their audience; they plan to trigger an emotional response from people and hook them

Their sense of humour is infectious; drawing people close to them and gaining their trust.

Because of the sheer energy they exude, this leader attracts the best and brightest with a value proposition for their organization too compelling for most career-seekers to ignore.

People are attracted to them and what their organization stands for.

With every audience, they raise eyebrows over where their organization is going and how they plan to get there.

They have the unbeatable combination of both a mesmerizing vision for their team and a way to sell it that makes it impossible for individuals on the career hunt to look away.

They attract the emotionally strong person who identifies with the leader and their modus operandi. And candidates that are attracted typically have off the chart “AQ’s” - achievement quotients - who loyally serve and enhance the performance of the organization. They are keepers.

My advice to any leader looking to make their mark and standout from the leader herd is to make the commitment to appeal to the feelings and emotions of people; that’s where the loyalty and active support emanates.

But if you want to play the ‘Supreme Commander’ card as a leader and rest on your intellect, logic and academic pedigree to drive your success you will be sorrily disappointed.

You may ultimately be a ‘floating apex’ - at the top of the organization with no one below who cares about what you do and who is willing to go to war with you to achieve your lofty goals.

Feelings are lit with fires; fires compel people to act.

Go light fires.

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

• Posted 5.8.17 at 06:26 am by Roy Osing
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April 19, 2017

4 proven ways to execute your business plan better

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4 proven ways to execute your business plan better.

With so many experts around, running a successful business is complicated.

There are finance experts who promulgate principles for having a healthy balance sheet; sales wizards who describe what an effective sales funnel looks like; inventory management specialists who define the level of product turnover required to drive optimum operating margins and leadership pundits who prescribe the fundamentals necessary to maximize employee engagement and loyalty.

Each discipline brings their own specific area of expertise to the table to help organizations enhance their performance, but how does leadership determine which specific tools are key to improving their organization?

It’s too complicated.

There are numerous moving parts involved in how an organization operates, and determining how each component part should be synchronized to optimize overall effectiveness is an extremely difficult challenge.

It’s like a golfer trying to improve their game.

There are lessons in how to address the ball, grip the club; the backswing; the ball impact; shifting body weight; and the follow through. The golfer focuses on the grip and can’t assimilate the rest of the swing fundamentals; their game doesn’t improve to the level they expect. They are frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Business can be simplified; it can be boiled down to a single crucial focus that drives sustaining levels of remarkable performance and growth.

Leaders should be building organizations to execute brilliantly; building execution as a core competency and applying it to any strategy they create

And if they do, they will outperform their peers and outpace their competitors.

Pay attention to these four execution fundamentals.

1. Planning — Ease up on planning. The most critical element of performance is how well the strategy is carried out.

The biggest challenge for most businesses is executing well - not devising helium-filled plans for reaching the next level. — Peter Drucker

Yes, a meaningful plan with a sensible direction for the organization is required but if execution falters the plan is worthless.
An average plan brilliantly executed produces far better performance than what people might consider to be a brilliant strategy with mediocre execution.

Invest 80% of your time on planning to execute and 20% on strategic planning

2. Serving — Lead by serving those in the trenches. Serving leadership cultures unleash individual executional effort and lead to unexpected and amazing results. Leadership presence in the workplace engaging with frontline people is an incredible motivator to execute better.

“What can I do to help?” is the question serving leaders pose to reduce the grunge employees face when trying to do their job, and to eliminate internal barriers — rules and policies for example — that prevent things from getting done in a smoothie efficient way.

3. Recruiting — Recruit people ’lovers’. Customers are loyal to an organization when they feel cared for by employees who invest honest emotional energy in taking care of their wants and needs.
Execution prowess demands that millions of mind blowing moments of truth occur seamlessly between an organization and its customers 24X7X365.

This happens only when employees have the innate desire to serve another human, so your hiring plan needs to be driven to discover these folks who serve in their DNA.
And remember you can’t train people to love people; you can train ‘em to grin but that’s about it.

If your employees don’t love one another, they can’t possibly love the customer

4. Selling — Stop selling; start serving. Flogging products and services tries to advance the organization’s agenda, not the customer’s.
This one-sided dynamic may result in a single short term transaction but does nothing to create an annuity stream of revenue over the long haul.

Execution genius looks out to the horizon, so organizations need to be mindless about building and deepening rich customer relationships by serving them; marching to their agenda; subordinating the interests of the business to their interests.

Remarkable execution is vital to grow a business, so build an execution machine first and then fuel it with each strategy you have.

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

• Posted 4.19.17 at 12:06 pm by Roy Osing
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April 3, 2017

9 easy ways to be a successful Change Leader

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9 easy ways to be a successful Change Leader.

Standout leaders are proactively adaptive who thirst for change; they drive change as opposed to letting change drive them.

They enthusiastically embrace the change process and treat it as an opportunity for the organization and themselves as opposed to treating change as a threat and something that can be avoided.

They are good at anticipating how things will unfold but are brilliant reaction agents, reacting to an unforeseen event when it occurs. When Plan A is in jeopardy they move to Plan B in a heartbeat.

They are Change Leaders, as opposed to their more traditional organizational cousin, the Change Manager.

Change Managers

Change Managers want to perpetuate the momentum of the business, and reluctantly move into the change mode when the forces on them leave no other option.

The Change Manager isn’t particularly adept at reacting; they are limp reaction agents, reluctant to change and get dragged into it kicking and screaming with the real motive to keep the status quo for as long as possible.

They act from the belief that change can be affected in a controlled and organized fashion and tend to look to incremental improvements to address the challenges of the day.

Change Managers are students of the softer more evolutionary methods of organizational change.

Incremental thinkers drive incremental change which often falls short of what is required.

Don’t look to Change Managers to be proactive and initiate required changes in your organization; to have an adrenalin-rushed reaction to move in a different direction as a result of unanticipated events.

They simply will not do it. And don’t look for an out of the box alternative to the current way of operating your business; they will always be governed at best by modest incremental changes to the current operating model.

Change Leaders

Change Leaders, on the other hand, understand that real change with breakthrough benefits for the organization is the result of introducing discontinuities to the current business model.

They are proactive and are constantly on the lookout for operating models for running the business so that revolutionary break-through changes can be achieved. And in the face of unexpected events challenging the performance of their organization, expect Change Leaders to enthusiastically react with a sense of urgency to determine the appropriate life-saving course of action to take.

Change Leaders will present your organization with tough decisions because their proposals will require taking higher risks to yield greater rewards. Expect them to make your organization uncomfortable with the inherent risks associated with the order of magnitude changes they bring forward.

You must develop a plan to be a Change Leader; it won’t happen by serendipity. You will discover that most of your colleagues will fall into the change manager category and that differentiating yourself is very achievable and will get you the kind of currency in your organization that will highlight you for future opportunities.

These 9 steps will help you be a change leader.

▪️Use your personal network to discover the most critical issues the organization is facing. You can’t lead change unless you have an intimate understanding of the threats and opportunities likely to impact your business future.

▪️Focus on the critical few things that will deliver the maximum number of benefits to the organization. Beware of the long action plan list; you have neither the time nor the energy to do ten or twelve things really well nor will they be equally important in terms of the positive impact they produce.
Look for 20% of the actions — your critical few list — that will deliver 80% of the needed results and get going.

The long action plan list - pursuing numerous tactics - is a symptom of sloppy strategic thinking; a lack of appreciating the few actions required to produce the greatest impact.
Chasing numerous tactics may make you feel good about how busy you are, but it can be deadly in terms of achieving real progress. 

▪️Be anal about executing your top priorities. Don’t get mesmerized by the brilliance of your idea; it’s worthless until you do something about it and achieve positive results.

▪️Take on a ‘let’s do it differently’ attitude and way of working. Avoid linear thinking. Be a lateral thinker and look for out-of-the-box solutions to problems in the organization.

▪️Purge your vocabulary of words like evolutionary change and incremental change in favor of breakthrough and revolutionary change.

▪️Get on the internal speaking circuit. Talk up the importance of creating discontinuity for your organization as the way to meet the challenges your organization is facing and generate economic opportunity.

▪️Increase your depth and breadth of experience and expertise. Look for job opportunities throughout the organization; don’t get pigeonholed in one specialist role.

▪️Read insatiably, and develop a portfolio of new concepts and ideas that could be applied to solve your pressing business problems or lead your organization in new directions.

▪️Seek out others in the organization others who aspire to be Change Leaders. Encourage them. Mentor them. Support them in their day to day activities. And be seen to be doing it.

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

• Posted 4.3.17 at 07:34 am by Roy Osing
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