Be Different or be dead

July 6, 2020

7 outstanding things to look for in a great mentor

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7 outstanding things to look for in a great mentor.

As a young professional, one of your main challenges is to find a mentor who can guide you in your career.

It’s virtually impossible to launch and navigate your career in this complicated world and make the right decisions without insights from someone with experience who can help you maximize your potential.
It’s a tough challenge; the right choice can accelerate your success and the wrong choice can hold you back. What’s the best way forward?

The ‘mentor market’ is burgeoning with many people promulgating a variety of ideas on what it takes to have a successful career; the airwaves are cluttered with opinions and advice. Subject-matter experts abound on every topic.

Given this message barrage, to whom do you listen? Who do you believe? Who do you trust? Who do you follow? In whom do you invest your time?
And how do you recognize when someone is blowing smoke at you and feeding their own ego rather than providing you with quality advice?

The reality that young people face is that those with impressive academic pedigrees seem to get the attention and respect that appeals to those seeking career guidance.
Professionals who publish papers, give expert seminars and write books get tagged as good mentor material, so naturally you look to them for help.

I urge young professionals to be wary of these common types of mentors.

Amazing mentors are not found in the halls of academia and publishing but in the trenches of organizations where the work actually gets done and results get delivered.

#1. Find a mentor who has done stuff

My counsel is to find and listen to people who have had a rich and long career of actually doing stuff – lots of stuff – and who have demonstrated achievements in the areas that intrigue you.

If your ambition, for example, is marketing, find a marketing practitioner who has a strong track record of achievement in implementing new products, launching successful advertising programs and managing pricing in a highly competitive marketplace.

And shy away from marketing pundits that may be knowledgeable in marketing theory but lack the credentials in applying what they know.
Theory and academic principles are not trustworthy beacons for what works and what doesn’t work in the real world, which is replete with bias, uncertainty and unpredictability. Just because theory says it is the right thing to do doesn’t mean it will work – there are simply too many variables in play.

#2. Find a person who has a doctorate in messiness

Find people who have implemented successful strategies in an environment of organizational politics, cultural impediments and the wars of competition — where achieving anything worthwhile is messy, inelegant and often painful.
It’s not always easy to find these individuals to recruit as mentors because they are always heads-down in the swamp getting things done and not always receiving public acknowledgment and recognition.

Look for the people who have learned that a minor portion of theory with a major dose of practicality is the formula for success.

#3. Discover operators not thinkers

Find your way into groups of operations leaders in your organization and get insights on individuals they admire and respect because of what they’ve achieved; find people with a different type of MBA experience — ‘masters in business achievement’.

#4. Let frontline people guide you

Talk to frontline people about who they think are effective at getting stuff done. People engaged in execution are in a great position to identify supervisors and managers who excelled at supporting the execution process.

#5. Look to small business leaders

These people have to achieve things everyday to stay alive, so they are excellent mentor candidates. Find a successful small business and you will have, in its leader, a prime prospect.

Develop relationships with associations such as boards of trade whose members are typically small-business leaders and whose daily bread is produced by what they do, not by what they plan. Focus on members who get media recognition because of their consistent, sterling results.

#6. Find a failure

Rarely does a plan turn out the way it was originally conceived. Unpredictable events come into play which renders your original intent unachievable, so it’s mandatory to take an alternative course and salvage what you can to still describe your plan as a success. So what you need in a mentor is someone who has experience in failing and recovering from the ‘body blow’ they took.

The guidance you will receive from individuals who have failed a few times will be invaluable. The media is a good source to discover business failures and the people who were involved. Failures rarely happen because the idea was completely worthless; they happen because a brave idea could not be implemented for reasons beyond their control.

#7. Study execution cultures

Research other organizations and find those that have a culture of execution rather than one that tends to a lot of discussion and thinks that knowledge alone will produce brilliant results. Probe for leaders who have achieved noteworthy results and who may not be spectacular on the ‘know’ factor but are accomplished on the ‘do’ scale.

Doing it is 10 times better than talking about it, and I suggest you find a mentor that walks that talk.

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

• Posted 7.6.20 at 06:56 am by Roy Osing
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June 28, 2020

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

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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

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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

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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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