It’s a mistake to think that today’s actions created today’s results. There is a natural lag between action and outcome.
Where we are today is a result of yesterday’s decisions and actions. Yesterday’s actions are today’s results.
Where we will be tomorrow will be a result of today’s decisions and actions. Today’s actions are tomorrow’s results.
What tomorrow are you creating? Where will today’s choices take you in five years? Where do you want to be?
My dad sent me a picture of a tree we planted in our new front yard when we first moved into my hometown. That was way back in the mid-70s when I was about six. We moved on to another house when I was eight, and then another and another, and the tree continued on without us.
I left my home town for college and then moved across the country, returning for a few years in my early 30s. In between, my parents also moved far away, returned a few years later and have been in the town since. And the tree continued on regardless.
In the coming years none of us will be in the same job. We’ll be promoted, transferred, our duties will change, the job will evolve, we’ll be working at another company, or maybe we’ll retire and move on. When we think of legacies we tend to think big, we think of legends and dynasties, but legacies can be minor.
The fact is, whether we realize it or not, we are always creating legacies. Some are good, some are bad, some are indifferent. But our actions live on past us. The cool thing is we can get real conscious and intentional about it. When we do, we start to think different. We approach our relationships in a more meaningful way. We move from tasks and duties to outcomes and impacts.
What are you creating today that you hope will live on beyond you?
What can you do to interact with others in a way that is building them up, championing them, helping them be their best?
Five years from now, how will today’s work have impacted others?
You will move on from today’s role. How do you want to be remembered?
If you were to return to a previous employer to visit, how would you be greeted?
If you were to quit your job today would people be upset, relieved, or thrilled?
If you returned to a previous job, what signs of your efforts would still exist? What things would you hope are still living on?
That tree is still there and thriving some 36 years later. It’s now one of the big old trees on the street. For at least two of us it serves as a common landmark to a very different point in our lives, a guidepost through the passage of time, and a reminder that we can create things that carry on long past us.
Want a great career? Looking to get ahead? It’s actually pretty simple. Understand that everyone gets paid to solve problems, not to complete tasks and approach your job accordingly.
People stall out when they think they get paid for a certain number of hours or to check off to-do’s. Their careers tend to accelerate when they connect the minor tasks to the big picture, understand the outcomes all the tasks are creating, and focus on making that outcome happen.
The value you create for the company – the value you get paid for – is based on the level of problems you are able to solve. Bigger problems have bigger potential consequences and those who can effectively solve them bring more value to the company and get paid more. My boss is paid more than me because she solves tougher problems with bigger consequences than I do. Her boss gets paid more than her for the same reason.
If your boss has to solve problems that you should be able to handle, you aren’t very useful and are probably easily replaceable. If you’re taking on and solving things above your boss’ expectations you are probably difficult to replace and will soon be moving ahead.
Want more money? Want a promotion? Learn to love solving problems and moving solutions forward. Problem spotting doesn’t pay very well (anyone can do it), ignoring problems pays even less. All the money, responsibility, and glory is in solving problems.
“Today is a new day. Time to put the plan to work. Generate the new way. Whoa, I hope it works!” ~ from the Crumbsuckers’ song ‘Rejuvenate’
A simple question: Is your career exactly where you want it to be? Are you consistently getting the results and outcomes you want?
If you can confidently answer ‘yes’, then carry on doing what you’re doing. If you gave any other answer, it’s probably time to change something. If you keep doing what you’re doing you will always keep getting what you’re getting.
It’s been said that there are three types of people:
1. Those who make things happen.
2. Those who watch things happen.
3. Those who ask, “Wh-wh-what happened?”
I used to think that those in the third category were just lazy, but lately I’ve come to realize that they are just not paying attention. They have hopes and dreams, can be hard working, well liked people, but continually get blindsided by life. They lack introspection and don’t understand why they never get promoted, why they get stuck in one bad relationship after another, why they just can’t seem to create the results they want despite all their good intentions. A quick example:
A friend was telling me about an employee at his company. This employee has been with the company for several years, is friendly and well-liked by customers and co-workers, and does a decent job. My friend was at an all-day training with him and he expressed a strong desire to get promoted into a front-line leadership role. He was also consistently late. He was ten minutes late to the training, late coming back from breaks, late and disruptive coming back from lunch. He had an apology and an excuse every time. My friend later found out that tardiness is a very consistent pattern for him. This person apparently sees no connection between his behavior and lack of career advancement. He’s asking, “What happened?”
I once had a co-worker who worked hard and did pretty good work, but never took the time to think ahead. He relied on his boss to do all the thinking. Work stopped whenever he encountered a roadblock and would not move forward until his boss solved the problem. He was really good at spotting problems and miserable poor at solving them. He enjoyed watching things happen. And his career stalled out accordingly.
Those in the first category are simplifiers. They look for solutions to make processes easier, they resolve issues, they fix stuff. They look for ways to move forward rather than finding reasons to stay stuck. When they are not sure of the best path, they bring several possible solutions to their boss with an understanding of the pros and cons of each. When they screw up (we all do) they fix it, learn from it, and keep moving forward. They don’t spend much time worrying about what they can do because they’re too focused on thinking about what they can do. These folks get stuff done and make the rest of us look stuck in slow motion by comparison. I love these people because they inspire me to raise my game.
So what category are you consistently in? Actually, forget I asked that. The real question is what category do you want to be in? If you’re happy with your results, stay where you are. If you want more, aim hard at being in the first category. The good news is that we’re not trapped in any category. As the song said, “Rejuvenation can still be found.” All it takes is you.
Want more engagement and less knee-jerk decisions? Eliminate nontroversies.
A nontorversy is a controversy that isn’t. It’s artificial, manufactured, or falsely amplified. It’s a non-issue that is given more time and energy than is due. It’s making mountains out of molehills.
Nontorversies are easily seen in the political arena and talk radio. They are used as daily distraction and attempt to discredit opponents over non-issues.
Nontroversies are created in the workplace by the rumor mills, passive-aggressive people, complainers, people who create unnecessary drama as a hobby, or those who play cutthroat corporate politics. Some common examples:
Continual complaining about issues they don’t really care about.
Inflating the severity of other people’s mistakes so it goes several levels up the chain of command before everyone discovers it was very minor.
Creating new rules and policies before investigating how prevalent and persistent an issue is.
Over-reaction to pending legislation. Panicking before even knowing what it’s going to look like in real life.
Focusing on the fad and buzzword of the day.
Continually positioning oneself (or department) as the hero whenever anything goes wrong, no matter how minor.
Two faced complaining and finger pointing.
Finding flaws in other’s work to make oneself look better.
Over-labeling events. Forever referring to that time five people got laid off as “Black Tuesday.”
Harboring anger and resentment for issues that happened years ago and have long since been resolved.
Trauma and drama sell. People seem to love to gripe and find flaws and complain about any change. Nontroversies thrive wherever there is a lack of transparent, authentic, honest communication but they can pop up anywhere. That is their nature. Yesterday’s nontroversy is today’s old (yawn) news. Today’s nontraversy will be replaced with another tomorrow. Nontraversies don’t need substance. They don’t need logic. They don’t have to have a long shelf-life. They just need to give us something to overact to today.
High performing teams and companies can’t (and don’t) waste time and energy on non-issues. What are you doing to eliminate drama ? How do you keep the nontroversies at bay?
You want your employees to do well, right? Of course, and you know that you can’t manage what you can’t measure so you set up some way of measuring their performance. And then you discover that you truly get what you measure, regardless of whether that’s what you actually wanted or not.
A salesperson recently revealed the disconnect between measured and desired outcomes when a co-worker purchased a car a couple of weeks ago. The salesperson’s parent company has a big focus on customer service and providing an outstanding experience. Each customer is surveyed after the sale and any rating lower than a 10 (the highest possible) drew negative attention for both the sales person and the dealer.
On the surface this sounds great. You can just imagine the company saying that they want every customer to have a 10 experience so that’s what they will measure and reward for. The problem – for this salesperson, at least – is that the focus shifted from providing an 10 experience to getting a 10. This is key: the focus shifted from the customer’s experience to the salesperson’s ratings.
This sounds similar, but it is very different. Because the salesperson was so worried about his ratings, he never bothered to provide service worth rating. I need to mention that she is one of the kindest, non-confrontational, charitable people one could hope to meet. She does not gripe or complain maliciously, yet had little good to say about the salesperson. Some highlights of my co-worker’s experience:
The car was being shipped because what she wanted wasn’t in stock the day it was purchased. Rather than keeping her posted, she had to constantly hunt down and badger the salesperson to find out the status of her order.
Whenever she pointed out his poor efforts, he blamed other people. In fact, it sounded like he spent the entire time saying, “You are going to give me a 10, aren’t you? It was never my fault things went wrong. You need to give me a 10.”
She was told that if she gave the salesperson and the dealer a 10 on the survey they would give her a free oil change.
The salesperson said that if she wasn’t going to give him a 10 it would probably be best if she didn’t do the survey at all.
She had to endure a bunch of whining about just how hard his life is and why she really needed to give him a 10.
He was so obsessed with getting a 10 that she hesitates to give less out of a mild concern of some type of retribution.
The whole thing sounded boring, repetitive, insulting, and possibly immoral. If you want a 10, do 10 work. If you can’t do 10 work and your career hinges on it, find another career.
I wonder if the company knows how much their dealers and salespeople are aggressively gaming the system? Punishing for anything less than a 10 seems counterproductive because if forces people to be short-sighted and silly and ultimately creates an experience that discourages repeat sales. People make mistakes, things go wrong, customers can be unreasonable, some people will never give a top rating except at gunpoint, etc. Insisting on continuous very, very high performance is fine, but it places much greater emphasis on outstanding hiring and very thorough training.
A top performer will still stand out and rise above when things go bad and try to make it right because they are focused on delivering a great experience, regardless of the circumstances. Marginal performers will retreat into fear and self-preservation. Their well-meaning system forces these extremes.
How would you set it up differently if you were the parent company?
Hiring people – especially if you really do it right – takes a lot of time and effort. It’s hard work getting your processes to world class and training all the hiring managers. And any selection system worth its salt is going to be a involved multi-step process, never mind all the scheduling and follow up.
I get it. So I’ll let you off the hook. Below are ten quick reasons you don’t need to make hiring a top priority or spend any time improving your selection processes.
1. You need to free up time for disciplines and terminations. Who has time to hire right when you’re too busy firing?
2. Your company lives and dies by the philosophy that “there’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”
3. You enjoy turnover. The revolving door approach is a great way to meet new people.
4. Hiring top quality people would intimidate current employees. It’s best to keep standards low and keep people happy.
5. Your competition also has lousy hiring practices. Why be better than you have to?
6. Lawsuits are fun.
7. You see no direct connection between the people doing the work and the company’s business results. You probably also see no connection between the food you eat and your current weight. Time to buy stock in your competition.
8. You assume all people are the same so one is as good as any other. A cog’s a cog, right? Why spend a lot of time looking when any warm body will do?
9. You are so worried about today, you don’t have time to worry about tomorrow.
10. You hate the company and are currently looking for your next job, so who cares about the quality of employees at this company. It’s not your problem.
What did I miss?
I have tried to train myself to view feeling comfortable in my job as a big warning sign. The flashing red lights start going off when I catch myself thinking, “You know, I’m actually pretty good at this.” Hubris is a dangerous thing that leaves us blinded to reality. It feels great, but it’s a dangerous place to be.
It was bicycling that tipped me off to the dangers and often re-reminds me of it:
A couple of times a year, I’ll be out on my road bike pedaling along and just be flying. Beautiful day, landscape rolling past, feeling great, and thinking I’m in much better shape than I thought. Then I’ll turn around to head home and realize that I had a strong tailwind. I wasn’t in great shape, I just didn’t notice how much I was being helped along.
I regularly mountain bike on a pretty challenging set of trails and it’s easy to start thinking I’m pretty good. Well, no. I just know my trails really well and that’s very different from being good. I recently rode a different set of trails and got my hiney kicked. Turns out I’m not quite as good, fast, or strong as I fooled myself into thinking. A painful lesson, but necessary.
Success is the product of good thinking and hard working. It’s important to celebrate our accomplishments, but it’s easy to over-congratulate ourselves for our successes. Yes, we have quite a bit to do with our triumphs, but sometimes they are helped by additional factors that we don’t notice and can’t control. The tailwind, familiarity, being a big fish in a small pond, a lack of real competition, staying within our comfort zones all help us think we’re doing better than we actually are.
Consider some of the key places we see this show up:
People often have a hard time making the jump to the next level of whatever they’re good at. For example, athletes who are superstars at the regional level, are just another decent player at the national level. Another example is MBA programs, where people who were the standouts as undergrads are just another face in the crowd, surrounded by lots of equally smart, aggressive, and talented people. That’s a humbling experience. Some relish the challenge and love being surrounded by people who push them to bring out their best. Others struggle to come to terms with the idea that they are just average in their new peer group.
When hiring, how do you determine that an applicant’s previous successes will translate to your company? We’ve probably all seen people with impressive resumes not do well because the new environment was too different and didn’t mesh.
Or what about the rising star employees who flame out when they are promoted too soon. They show some promise, have some early successes, and then get pushed to a level they are not yet ready for. Something unexpected happens that they don’t have the experience or luck to deal with and it all caves in. Worse, they start believing their own hype and because of their past successes they are given a lot of rope to hang themselves. When it all catches up with them it catches up hard.
This is also an issue with employee development: how do you develop people fast enough to keep them engaged, but slow enough that they can really, truly learn what they need to know? How do you acknowledge and applaud them without instilling a false sense of confidence?
In our own jobs, we want continuous and never-ending improvement, but how do we push ourselves beyond our comfort levels when it’s so, well, uncomfortable? We want success, but easy success fool us into thinking we’re better than we are. If we don’t consciously try new things, experiment, and sometimes feel like we’re failing, it can prevent the growth that leads to bigger, long-term success.
Where are you feeling confident in your job? What would you need to do to make your job feel challenging? Where is the edge of your skills and what can you attempt that is slightly beyond the boundary? What new settings, projects, or tasks can you take on that might push you just a bit?
Some days I’d love to just tweak the workplace a bit. Do less of some things and more of others. Little stuff to improve things. Below is a wish list of what the workplace really needs right now. Wouldn’t it be great if we could each do our part and contribute to creating a workplace where there’s:
Less doing, more talking.
Fewer problem solvers, more problem spotters.
Less direct feedback, more gossip.
Less honesty, more passive-aggressiveness.
More “I tried” and less “I did”.
Less personal responsibility, more entitlement.
Less guidance, more rigid rules.
Fewer innovators, more bureaucrats.
More doom, gloom, and threats and less optimism and celebration.
More blame, less accountability.
More talk about generational differences, less consideration for individual differences.
Less reward for merit, more reward for gut-it-out longevity.
Less team, more hierarchy.
More time spent figuring out what we can sell to customers, less time spent figuring out what our customers want and value.
More subjectivity, less objectivity.
Fewer facts, more rumors.
Less communication, more silos.
More personal fiefdoms, less big picture integration.
Less time spent studying how the world and consumers are changing, more time spent copying the competition.
Less concern about authenticity, more focus on branding.
More using social media for one-way information dumps, less two-way conversations.
Less asking customers, employees, etc. what they want, more guessing.
More jargon and buzzwords, less communication.
Less unity, more schisms.
Less focus on long-term issues, more focus on management fads.
Far less emphasis on helping people be their authentic best and far more emphasis on helping people create a plastic façade.
More yelling, less development.
More micromanaging (please!) and less leading.
More tantrums, fewer attempts to work out issues.
More learned helplessness, less empowerment.
Less training, more sink or swim learning.
Less planning, more last minute emergencies.
More talking at each other, less talking to each other.
More surprises, less strategy.
Less focus on getting things done, more focus on why we can’t.
More emphasis on personal glory, less concern for the team’s success.
Oh sure, we could do it the other way and reverse all of these, but it’s much easier to continue down the current paths. Reversing things would take vision, persistence, and continuous effort.
And that’s what the workplace really needs now.
fool (with a plan) 