Month: July 2012

the paradox of letting go

Jason Lauritsen did a post on the idea of letting go that really resonated for me. I strongly recommend dropping by his blog and reading it. He did a great bringing to the forefront some ideas and issues that have been kicking around in my own mind for quite a while. This post is a result of the ideas Jason sparked.

I can’t control everything. I know this. I mean, I know this in an intellectual sort of way. I have a much more difficult time knowing it on an emotional level. I “know”, but I don’t always “do”. I can explain, but I don’t always act accordingly.

Four decades and a couple of years of life lessons have taught me that the more I try to control, the smaller I must play. Playing bigger means going out beyond my comfort zones into the fields of the unproven, unknown, and uncertain. Scary stuff out there. To stay out there very long I’d have to accept a lack of control – to feel out of control – and trust beyond myself. To stay inside the mental fences I’ve staked out and patrolled and have complete control over is very, very comfortable. Yet, I can never play bigger. And playing bigger is really, really important to me.

I read a quote the other day. I can’t remember who said it, but the gist was: If you know how to accomplish your dreams, you’re not dreaming big enough. That’s it! Control reins my dreams in because it forces them to be small enough to understand and plan out.

Playing bigger, bigger, bigger requires letting go. It means accepting and allowing the freakingscary sized dream and committing to it and taking it on anyway. No detailed planning. Not even a full understanding of what the dream can grow to be yet. Only a direction.

*          *          *

The lesson I keep coming back to and re-learning has been said by many people in many ways. It is simply to focus on purpose rather than outcome. Outcome is about control. It’s holding on tight. It’s about insisting on results that I may not have total control over. It is actually debilitating, because it limits me to what I think I’m capable of rather than opening me up to the potential I’m truly capable of.

Think of it this way. It would be focusing on results if I were to enter a marathon with the goal of winning. And it would be ridiculous and frustrating. But I’ve got to have goals, you say? There’s no way I can control or even influence the drive, genetics, training, and experience of other runners. But I can choose to focus on purpose. I can choose to focus on being the best runner I can be; being prepared, rested, having fun, and pushing beyond my previous times.

No matter how much it looks like it, the race is never against others. Only with myself. I can never be the world’s best writer, speaker, facilitator, husband, dad, etc. But I can be the best writer, speaker, facilitator, husband, dad, etc I can possibly be today. I can pour my heart into everything, not knowing where it is going but seeing where it takes me.

Everyday.

imperfect action beats perfect inaction

“I can’t remember how it begins.” My six-almost-seven year old son was warming up for his first martial arts tournament and he was pretty nervous. He had been practicing a form – a pattern of movements – for a couple of months, but he went completely blank.

One of his instructors pulled him aside and said, “When you get out in front of the judges, if you can’t remember what to do, just make it up. Just do some moves until you get to a part you remember. That’s better than freezing up.”

Great advice for life. You can stay frozen, not starting until you can do it perfect. Or, you can jump in, get moving, do what you think is right (or close), and correct on the fly. There are very, very few situations where doing nothing is better than doing something and improving as you go.

Words to live by: imperfect action beats perfect inaction.

your customers know, do you?

I was recently reminded (yet again) of the importance of experiencing our systems and processes from the customer’s perspective. Of really understanding the customer experience.

We think we know what our customer goes through, we design our processes and systems to serve them. After all, we use the process all the time. The challenge is that we know how it is supposed to work, we know all its subtleties and nuances, AND we know the shortcuts. In many cases, we never experience the systems and processes we require our customers to use.

A quick example from my own life. A minor part of my job is overseeing a small company library. Employees can find a book on our computer system, check it out, and it will be sent to them via interoffice mail.

So here’s my embarrassing confession. For all my harping on the world about the need for great customer service, I have apparently never actually used the system to check out a book. As the library is 20 feet from my office it almost seems silly to go through the whole process. Instead of going through the whole process, I’d just go grab a book and mark it checked out in the system..

Then, while fixing a minor glitch, I decided to see the whole process from the customer’s point of view. I discovered that the automated emails they received when checking out a book made absolutely no sense. The emails were based on templates used to sign up for classes so they had statements like: Your supervisor has approved you to attend The Strategy Book. Ugh! Their supervisor had nothing to do with it and they weren’t going to attend a book. Fail.

It has been corrected, but it really bothers me because I know better. I know to routinely test processes. But I didn’t. It’s an important reminder that the little things really, really matter.

Think about it:

  • When was the last time you applied at your company, set up benefits, tried to change important personal information? Not using your administrator rights, but the way an actual applicant or employee would?
  • When was the last time you experienced the sales process from start to finish? Not just your part, but right up to when the customer has it in hand. Have you ever tried dealing with your own customer service or returns departments?
  • When was the last time you tried to become a customer of your company? What barriers made it more difficult than it should be?

The only way to find the roadblocks, weirdness, and hassles is to go experience it ourselves. My own situation was minor, but served as a reminder that the only way you’re really going to discover the little things is to experience the process, not as the customer is supposed to, but how the customer actually does.

 

leadership tune up

Are your standards slipping? What’s the overall feel in your department or business? How’s the energy on a daily basis – good, bad, ok but a little low? Are you proud of the work your folks put out, concerned, or hoping and waiting for it to turn around and get better?

Once things start to slip a little, they generally continue to slip. Over time we tend to adjust. We stop striving, we coast a little, we put our attention on something else. We don’t notice it at first, but after a while we realize things are really out of sync and we wonder how it got so bad so quickly.

Well, it didn’t. People don’t suddenly stop caring either. They don’t just wake up one day and decide to never again give their full effort. But us humans will give 99% effort of the day before. Think about that. A difference of only 1% less effort, less energy, less engagement. That’s barely noticeable. In fact, if it went right back up to 100% the following day, we’d never even notice the blip. Likewise, if it drops another 1%, we’ll likely never feel it. Until we do…

My car started running rough a month or two ago. It started off intermittently. I thought it was just a bad tank of gas at first. It would hesitate, idle roughly, or even die at stoplights. Then it would be fine for a few weeks. But the gaps between kept getting closer and closer until, one day out of the blue (not really) it started to run poorly all the time.

At 80,000 miles I figured it was due for a tune up. The manufacture says it goes 100,000 miles before it needs spark plugs. The forums say real world is more like 60-80,000 miles. Theoretical is nice, but it doesn’t help my car run better. $20 worth of spark plugs and 30 minutes of effort and it’s running great again.

Most striking wasn’t that it was idling and accelerating smoothly again – I expected that. No, the biggest surprise was how much better it runs. It accelerates quicker and revs more freely. Going from bad to acceptable was expected. But the subtle yet noticeable difference between acceptable and really good was actually a bit astonishing.

It was that 1% difference. I never noticed when it slipped from great to good, but I did notice good to poor. That has me really wondering about my own leadership. I would notice if my area suddenly performed poorly, but would it really catch my attention if it gradually declined to acceptable?

Would I notice if the energy was consistently getting a little worse? Would I notice if overall customer service slipped a little? Could I tell the difference if my team had tapered over time to being mostly engaged?

I’m not so sure I could and that has me worried. Tuning up our leadership is not quite as easy as changing spark plugs, but probably needs to be done regularly. So what can I, you, or any leader do about it? Hmmm. A few thoughts come to mind and I’d love to get your perspective:

Discuss your vision and ideals. A lot. More than you think your need to. Your vision should excite you, so use that enthusiasm to get others on board and understand your expectations. They don’t have to have your passion (it’s nice if they do) but they do need to be completely clear on where you stand and the level of performance you want.

Be straight forward and tell the team your concerns that standards could slip over time. Tell them that you’ll be more involved and have more feedback. Not to be nitpicky or a micromanager, but because you care. You want them to be at their best. You want the team at its best. You want to be at your best.

Ask for feedback from the team about your own performance. Do you seem different lately? Do you have less energy or seem less engaged? Maybe they’ll tell you and maybe they won’t, but you owe it to them and yourself to ask. [Quick caveat: never ask for feedback if you are not 100% willing to consider it and do something about it.]

Shatter isolation by getting the team involved in cross-functional projects, both within the team and throughout the organization. It helps prevent a narrowing view and helps invigorate things with new ideas.

Ask the questions about what’s going great and what could improve regularly. Don’t expect people to come to you. Go to them.

What else?

technology has changed, humanity hasn’t… part 3

“Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal. Anything created between birth and the age of 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it. But whatever is invented after you’re turned 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it – until it’s been around for about 10 years, when it gradually turns out to be all right really.”

~ Douglas Adams

 

“Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1) It’s completely impossible. 2) It’s possible, but not worth doing. 3) I said it was a good idea all along.”

~ Arthur C. Clarke

technology has changed, humanity hasn’t… part 2

“The world is too big for us. There is too much doing, too many crimes, casualties, violence, and excitements. Try as you will, you get behind the race in spite of your self. It is an incessant strain to keep pace and still you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The policical world witnesses new scenes so rapidly that you are out of breath tryingto keep up with them. Everything is high pressure. Human nature cannot endure much more.”

~ From the Atlantic Journal in 1837