Be Different or be dead

June 28, 2020

Why excellent leaders don’t walk around, they ‘serve’ around

Source: Pexels

Why excellent leaders don’t walk around, they ‘serve’ around.

‘Serving around’ leadership is replacing ‘walking around’ as the most effective way to lead others.

Tom Peters has always been an advocate of managing by wandering around (MBWA) as a tool for managers to promote excellence in their organization.

I’m a fan of MBWA but I think the idea needs to be refreshed and more directly connected to the principle of serving and servant leadership. I think the principle of leadership by serving around (LBSA) is more relevant in terms of the role we need leaders to play.

MBWA needs a purpose for it to be strategically effective.

Its not about aimlessly wandering around chatting people up and listening to their issues. Rather its about exploring the nooks and cranny’s of the organization looking for an opportunity to serve people in ways that will enable the organization’s strategic game plan to be executed.

What does LBSA look like?

—leaders wander with the objective of spotting a serving moment. An opportunity to SERVE someone. To help them in some way that will allow them to get on with their job more easily.
Removing roadblocks. Bashing barriers. Destroying Dumb Rules. Enabling people to do what they know is required to do a good job.

—leaders allocate significant calendar time to this ritual. You can’t spot a serving moment if you are in your office. Get the hell out of it and do something strategic!

—LISTENING.

—LISTENING.

—LISTENING.

—Leaders serve well by receiving information, processing it and then acting on it. The process begins with really listening.

—INTERRUPTING is verboten. Give people time to tell their story. Allow them freedom to express their issues on their terms.

—ASKING QUESTIONS is the tool the leader uses to understand, to engage and to connect with the individual in the discussion.
They question relentlessly until the leader is satisfied they clearly understand the matter being raised by the employee.

—the specific question “How can I help?” is the theme of the conversation.

Leadership success depends on moving beyond MBWA to LBSA

It is a critical strategic change that leaders must make.

Business plan execution depends on it.

Frontline success depends on it.

What else is more important?

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

• Posted 6.28.20 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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June 15, 2020

How to make your business plan better with COVID-19

Source: Pexels

How to make your business plan better with COVID-19.

Take a look at your strategic planning documents. I will wager that the vast majority of them are based on a 5 year period — YIKES! I’ve even seen 10-year plans as well.

The 5-year plan pervades our planning paradigms and quite frankly it’s nonsense in today’s world of chaos, unpredictability and uncertainty.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the destruction it’s had on businesses and other organizations worldwide is the extreme example of the fact that a long planning horizon is a ridiculous notion.
I doubt that many businesses contemplated they would be struggling for survival in just 8 short weeks after the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11, 2020.
So much for the value of having a 60-month view of your business.

I wonder how many 5-year plans are sitting on the shelf right now? How many are being consulted to help businesses through this difficult time?
I would say ZERO, which really declares the value they are to any organization being ravished by an unexpected event.

The investment made in having a planning view 3, 4, and 5 years out is delivering a negligible return on investment in the current environment.

The truth is, the fifth year of a 5-year plan never shows up so what is the purpose of planning for it?

Every year the plan is revised to reflect new information that changes the complexion of the plan and in particular the latter years which end up to be an extrapolation of current trends with absolutely no influence on the actions needed to be taken today to raise performance.

If we take this thinking to its logical conclusion, it suggests that the shorter the planning period, the more accurate it is in terms of expressing the real challenges an organization will likely face and the actions they will have to take to face them.

If you can’t survive the short term, the long term never shows up.

COVID-19 reality — perhaps the extreme way to think of it — would suggest a “planning period” of 24 hours because that’s how rapidly things are changing at the moment as I write this post.

I know (and hope) COVID won’t last forever but its short term survival imperative should guide our thinking about how to create a meaningful plan for our organizations.

My conclusion — and it’s a view I’ve had for many years, but certainly emphasized and reinforced by the current pandemic — is that strategic plans must have a short term executional focus if they are to be meaningful and useful at all.

I believe that to survive the forces of an ever changing environment, executional tactics within a notional context of your organization’s long term endgame should define your strategic plan.

The sum of pristinely executing every tactical element of the plan should define your strategy because it recognizes that chaotic change is the new normal that must be successfully met by the leadership team.

The execution plan should replace the strategic plan nomenclature to give us the clarity we need to determine the success every organization covets.

I’ve suggested that the execution planning time horizon should be 24 months, but that was before COVID. I think realistically we need to think about figuring out what we need to do over the next 12 months to try and improve our chances for survival.

The new execution plan process should look like this:
- Declare your 12-month goals
- EXECUTE
- Track the results
- Learn from what you’ve accomplished
- Adjust the plan
- Go back to EXECUTE

The result of this process is that your plan suddenly morphs to a living document rather than the inert 5-year view. It’s an organic action compilation and changes with the environment as one learns what works and what doesn’t through execution.

And the actual plan document — if it exists at all — takes on a dual role of being both a description of strategic intent and a repository of learning.

It’s a messy document. It’s written on. It has coffee stains on the pages of which many are earmarked for specific reference.
And, it may possess the odd blood stain from an unwanted paper cut!

It is used, unlike many planning documents that I have seen which look like their original pristine ironed form (perched ever so elegantly on a bookshelf where one can hand gesture its presence but never violate its binding).

The strategic planning community will take issue with my approach. After all I suppose it is somewhat gratifying to believe that pristine appearance and a long term perspective somehow defines its worth.

But it doesn’t.

At best this view gives the organization the perception that it has a plan that will be good 5 years out; at worst it prevents the organization from building short term defences to prepare for the unexpected forces that will threaten its survival.

COVID presents n opportunity to make your business plan better. Seize it…

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

• Posted 6.15.20 at 05:02 am by Roy Osing
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June 1, 2020

Why the best teacher on how to beat the unexpected is COVID-19

Source: Pexels

Why the best teacher on how to beat the unexpected is COVID-19.

My reader will recall that I believe success comes from the ability to react to a body blow, an unexpected threat that rocks you to your very soul.
It’s easy to achieve your objectives when things are playing out the way you expected them to, but that rarely happens.

It’s not that you don’t have the intellect to put together a good plan, it’s about the fact that the universe intercedes with random unexpected forces rendering your original plan irrelevant.

Recovery is the ability to not only respond to a body blow, but also to absorb its energy to do something remarkable in its face.
Making use of the energy of a random chaotic event to reach even greater heights is a bizarre notion, but a truism for those who understand it and who know how to use the force.

COVID is an unexpected event and it’s chaotic to say the least. It kills if it isn’t responded to in the right way. But on the other side of the coin, because of its extreme outcomes, it’s an incredible teacher for those who want to survive in the face of such pressure.

For organizations and individuals alike, here are 5 recovery tactics to be learned from this pandemic.

#1. Deal with the next 30 days

When a crisis hits, trying to develop a long term strategy to deal with it is a futile exercise. You have immediate things to do, and if you don’t, the longer term never shows up.
Survival tactics require that you do what is necessary NOW to get you through today, then repeat for tomorrow, then again for the next day…

Priority setting is important for your 30-day calendar, but I wouldn’t go overboard on it. Let your feelings, emotions and your gut lead you in terms of what’s really important to get on with in the moment.

And keep a journal of what you’ve done and the results you’ve achieved so you can learn from this recovery event the next time you have to do it again. And you will be in the recovery mode at some point in the future. Perhaps (hopefully) not a coronavirus response but something else unexpected will rock you eventually.

#2. Speed is the essence

Effective recovery needs speed not perfection. First of all, perfection doesn’t exist anyways, and even if it did, you don’t have the time to seek it. The clock is ticking when you’re in recovery mode, and every second you spend trying to discover the perfect response you’re survival is in jeopardy — btw, something is characterized as “perfect” only in retrospect when you look back on what you did and results. In the moment action is what it is, and can have no attribute characterization.

Pondering and tinkering are not your friends when you’re trying to stay alive, so forget about the grand plan intellectualizing that we’ve been taught in school.
Act NOW and learn as you go.

#3. Focus on the frontline

Survival demands that you figure out a way to keep delivering your products or services to people. Whether you’re in health provision, telecommunications, retail or food services it’s life-saving for you that customers continue to be served in one way or another. If you can’t figure out how to continue in a different way, government support will eventually run out and your business will die.

Your frontline people are the key to your survival. THEY are the connection between what you aspire to do and whether or not you’re able to do it. Frontline healthcare workers have proven the point in the most extreme sense, but the same principle is at play in every other type of organization.

When the body blow strikes, you don’t need employees with an impressive set of academic credentials, you need people who are able to effectively engage with others to carry your business forward.
The ONLY employees who carry survival on their shoulders are the frontline, so keep them safe and double their pay.

#4. Listen and learn

Surviving on the run requires a healthy dose of learning along the way. Spontaneity will result in mistakes or suboptimal results, that’s just the way it is when you’re focussed on speed and driven by what “feels” like the right thing to do.

So make sure your spider senses are fully activated to see the results of every action you take. And, as I mentioned earlier, record in a journal what’s working and what’s not with a view to making real time adjustments to what your doing.
Use the frontline as the primary source of learning and use THEM to decide on what needs to be changed.

#5. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate

When smitten by a pandemic-type event, it’s extremely important to communicate — no, over communicate — with everyone affected by what’s being done and the results achieved.

Reaction tactics need continuous feedback on actions taken TODAY in order to make the best decisions on the adjustments and tweaks that will be required TOMORROW.

On-the-run planning can only work if performance in the moment is clearly understood. And it can’t be a vague “things are going well but there are a few things we need to do differently”. It needs to be as specific as possible, pointing to the precise mechanisms that are working and those that are not.

This is a leadership issue. Leaders must hyper-communicate with employees on actions being taken and must be open and welcoming to honest opinions on whether they’re on the right track.

The COVID journey is an amazing teacher. Quite apart from the sad outcomes for many of our family and friends, COVID is instructive in painting a picture of what responding to an unanticipated event should look like.

We should take notice of how the pandemic emphasizes the criticality of communications, caring for the frontline, listening and learning, speed and a 30-day tactical plan.

Take all the good you can from the unfortunate set of circumstances we find ourselves in because we don’t have to look very far for the downside.

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

• Posted 6.1.20 at 05:39 am by Roy Osing
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May 25, 2020

Why copying weird people is necessary for a winning career

Source: Unsplash

Why copying weird people is necessary for a winning career.

The world today revolves around benchmarking; determine who does something really well (as judged by the experts) — call them best in class — and copy them.

The objective of benchmarking: to improve some aspect of your organization or your life based on the experience of others.

In business, benchmarking has been useful in improving process related issue — billing, ordering, fulfilment, human resource methods and the like. In one’s personal life, benchmarking might help in matters such as physical fitness routines, yoga practices and school courses to take.

But at the end of the day, although benchmarking may result in productivity or efficiency improvements, it does little to help either the organization or individual stand out from the crowd.

If everyone copies best in class how can specialness ever be created? All you get is a crowd of bench-markers who all share something in common.

Creating something that is unique and unmatched by others can’t be done by copying anything or anyone. Strategic advantage can’t be achieved by doing what other organizations do; a unique persona cannot be created by copying how others conduct their lives.

The lure of benchmarking is that it’s relatively easy and generally humans like easy stuff. And we also like to fool ourselves into believing that what is easy to do will somehow make us special.

The truth is that copycats are not special; they are their own herd.

I know this sounds axiomatic, but uniqueness is not spawned by copying what other do. The source of innovation and creativity to stand out is the incessant — almost subconscious and involuntary — drive to do things differently than everyone else.

Here are some descriptors of individuals who spend their life trying to be the ONLY ones that do what they do: crazy, delirious, contrarian, edgy, weird, borderline, careless, risky, absurd, eccentric, freaky, funky, creepy and eerie.

The point is, highly creative people don’t attract standard adjectives explaining who they are and how they approach problem solving.

If you’re a normal person and want to be abnormal because it will help make you more creative, here are 5 things you can do.

Never benchmark anything again

You need to dispel the notion that is the antithesis of being different, and that is copying. This means never asking “What do they do?” as a means to doing something creative.

Copying is the straight jacket that will forever prevent you from coming up with something truly new and different.

Bury the copycat. Have a funeral for it and say goodbye.

If you can’t rid yourself of the copycat beast you will NEVER be capable of generating an original thought.

Try doing a 180

A simple way to deviate from what everyone else is doing is to ask:  “What if I were to go in the opposite direction to common belief?”.
This essentially declares that whatever the crowd does you will do the opposite. If you start out with a contrarian view, you are at least able to moderate it to something less extreme — but still different.
The 180 starting point is critical to a creative mindset; without it, crowd forces will suck you in to their mediocre and commonness.

This is one of my favourite examples of going against the flow with an outrageous proposition for customers. I’m not advocating it, but it is one example of a thought process that bucks the trend.
In this scenario let “What if I were to go in the opposite direction?” guide your ways.

Hang around weirdos

Not everyone has the same take on stepping out of the crowd; creative people have their own fingerprint on an approach they find that separates them from those around them.

To find your BE DiFFERENT signature, venture out and discover people who live on the spectrum between “normal” and special; between people who are average and those who are unlike no other. They’re around us if only we pay attention.

If you’re going to benchmark anything, benchmark weird because I guarantee that in the process of following their ways you will discover a sliver of what they do that you can twist to make it your own.

Follow your feelings

The world operates more on feelings than ever before. People buy things on the basis of how they feel about a supplier and the engagement experience they have with them.

They actually expect the product to work the way the manual says; the actual product or service is a commodity where generally price separates competitors in the short run.
The reason to choose one supplier over another doesn’t depend on their product portfolio.

The only thing that differentiates competitors in the long run is their brand — the value they consistently provide which, in the case of major market leaders who perform consistently, is a feelings oriented attribute.

So use how people would feel as the main criteria for deciding whether one of your new ideas might work. Let your intuition trump your logic.

Do stuff with no end game in mind

Activity rather than purpose may be the best guide to follow.

The problem with having a specific destination in mind, is that you engage your logic to try and figure out how to reach it.  And as we all know, once our left brain is engaged, it doesn’t like to consider a myriad of possibilities once it lands on its primary route to achieve the goal.

I was infatuated with The Inner Game of Tennis at one point in my past.

The premise offered by the author was that it is almost impossible to be a good tennis player if you allow your mind to control how you play the game.
Trying to return a ground stroke to your backhand has a high probability of not succeeding if you think “Rats, here comes another shot to my backhand! I know I’m going to screw it up!”

Well guess what? Your control side acknowledges your weakness and gets in the way of your body reacting to the shot and indeed your mind’s prediction comes true!

If you can unhook from your controlling left brain and let your body do what it is naturally equipped to do, your performance will improve immeasurably.
So, focus on the activity not the end game and follow your gut.

These 5 proven ways will help you be a member of the abnormal herd.

They will guide your ways to a highly successful career. Give ‘em a try. They worked for me!

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

• Posted 5.25.20 at 05:31 am by Roy Osing
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