Category Archives: Teamwork

Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent

Posted on by
Reply

Are you selling vanilla ice cream? Most likely you aren’t literally selling it, but do you sell a product that’s basically like your competitor’s – a plain, basic commodity?

Book summaries are our vanilla ice cream. Although we have distinguished our summaries from those of our competitors by the selection of titles, quality of writing, and thoroughness of the summary, some people still consider all book summaries alike. This is why we’ve gone further to separate ourselves from the competition.

We have brought together talented staff to help us provide subscribers greater access to the authors and their work through hosting weekly webinars with book authors, interviews with the authors to gain clearer insight into their lives and ideas, and launched our Executive Insights series to also provide video interviews with executives who are putting these new ideas into practice. In addition, we provide a customized library for each subscriber to search and use this content, while providing access through apps as well.

This is the basic concept behind Steve Van Remortel’s book Stop Selling Vanilla ice Cream. In order to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need the right talent and strategy to make it happen. Van Remortel goes so far as to say that “there is no difficulty any viable enterprise can confront that that cannot be surmounted by improving its strategy and optimizing its talent.”

He provides five fundamentals to help define an organization’s route from where they are today all the way to greater prosperity and effectiveness.

  1. Differentiation – deliver a competence that creates a clear differentiation for your organization.
  2. Tangible Value – don’t just say you’re the best – prove it.
  3. Talent Management – implement a talent management system that enables your organization to identify, select, develop and retain talent.
  4. Tactical Department Plans – develop and execute action plans that work “on” the business in each department of your organization.
  5. Plan Execution – institute a plan execution program to insure an organizational culture of discipline that focuses on accountability.

If you’re tired of selling vanilla ice cream and would like to work out a differentiation plan, please join us on April 23rd to hear Steve’s Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process in detail and to ask your questions throughout the presentation. Register now for Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent.

Making Work Worth It

Posted on by
Reply

THE COMMITMENT ENGINE

MAKE YOUR COMPANY A COMMUNITY

A business cannot succeed if its leaders and employees are not fully committed to that success. John Jantsch, the author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine, lays down a manual for total commitment within companies and organizations in his newest book, The Commitment Engine. This manual is based on three elements that the author calls the clarity path, the culture patron and the community promise. As Jantsch explains: “Businesses that run so smoothly as to seem self-managed aren’t normal. In fact, they are terribly counterintuitive, but terribly simple as it turns out. The key is to focus all your energy on only three things: clarity, culture and community.”

The Clarity Path

Commitment begins with clarity, Jantsch writes. You have to be clear on what your business does better than anybody else and why you have a passion for your business. Jantsch suggests first developing a passion mantra — a succinct statement of purpose — based on three questions: What do you want in your life? What don’t you want in your life? What are you willing to give up in order to have what you want? Once a mantra is developed, he writes, you must stay “connected to the words in the mantra, carrying it into every business situation and using it as a filter for decision-making.” Jantsch himself has a mantra that he uses whenever he starts to feel tired or unmotivated. The mantra: “My life is an amazing adventure; my business is an amazing adventure.”

Clarity of purpose not only applies to the individual, but to the business as well. The purpose of a business, Jantsch writes, is to have a “higher purpose.” Companies such as Southwest or Zappos are successful because they each have a higher purpose — Southwest intends to make flying fun; Zappos sells happiness as well as shoes.

Finally, Jantsch writes, a “fully alive” corporation will have a clear personality. The value proposition of a company is how you deliver on purpose, but personality, he notes, “is how the world experiences your purpose.” Every fully alive business will have the following seven personality traits, according to Jantsch: inspiration, innovation, play, community, convenience, simplicity and surprise.

The Culture Patron

After being clear about your own purpose and the purpose of your company, and how that purpose translates into strategy, the next part of the commitment engine is what Jantsch calls the Culture Patron — that is, how leaders of an organization or business create a culture of shared commitment among management, staff and customers. A system of shared commitment, according to Jantsch, consists of elements including:

  • Shared stories. Great leaders use stories to inspire and unite their people.
  • Shared beliefs. People want to work for something that they believe in and for those who share those beliefs.
  • Shared purpose. Leaders must bring to life the purpose of the company for their staff.

The Community Promise

The final piece of the author’s commitment “engine” is the Community Promise. As with building a culture of commitment, telling stories is also a key practice for building a committed community. While the culture stories were intended to help motivate internal staff, Jantsch writes, “we now need to turn our attention to the story building that you use publicly as a vehicle for attracting like-minded community members and customers.”

Another important practice for building a community is to turn your business into a platform — to position your business so that it can be “a system that helps people create products, services, profits, businesses, communities, and networks of their own,” Jantsch writes. Thus, through Amazon Web Services, the retailer enables thousands of businesses to build on Amazon’s innovative and extraordinarily efficient framework.

The Commitment Engine is a compelling and comprehensive framework that will guide business leaders in keeping the entire community of their enterprise focused on a single-minded, value-creating higher purpose of the business.

What Does the Future Hold for HR?

Posted on by
Reply

If you work in the editorial department, your focus is generally on content, deadlines and publishing the best information possible. If you’re in the marketing department, then you tend to focus on the brand, marketing strategies, and ROI. And if you’re part of human resources, you’re all about hiring and training the best.

In their extensive research, the team at RBL Group has found that this is the case with the human resources department. In their latest book HR from the Outside In, the authors from RBL point out that HR people tend to define “business” as “HR business.” But to be of greatest value to the organization, they need to radically change their inward-focused viewpoint to that of the company as a whole.

From the book: “The real business is external: the context and setting in which the business operates, the expectations of key stake­holders, and the strategies that give a company a unique competitive advantage. If HR professionals are truly to contribute to business performance, then their mindset must center on the goals of the business. They must take that outside reality and bring it into everything they do, practicing their craft with an eye to the business as a whole and not just their own department. Focusing on the business of the business enables HR profes­sionals to add meaningful and sustainable value.”

These are areas where HR needs to re-focus:

Placement and promotion from the outside in: Rather than be the employer of choice, we want to be the employer of choice of employees our customers want to work with.

Training from the outside in: Customers, suppliers, investors, and regula­tors are invited to help design the content of training to make sure that what is taught meets external expectations.

Rewards from the outside in: Customers help determine which employees are rewarded for their efforts.

Performance management from the outside in: The department gives key customers the opportunity to assess its performance review standards and tell the company if those standards are consistent with their expectations.

Leadership from the outside in: HR helps the company focus on developing a leadership brand, where external customer expectations translate to internal leadership be­haviors.

Communication from the outside in: HR makes sure that messages presented to employees are also shared with customers and investors, and vice versa.

Culture from the outside in: We like to define culture as the identity of the organization in the mind of key customers, made real to every employee every day.

If your HR department needs realignment to focus from the outside in, join us on December 18th, when co-author and RBL principal Jon Younger will be joining us for our Soundview Live webinar, The Future of Human Resources. You can invite your whole HR department to listen in on one registration.

How to Create Leadership at Every Level

Posted on by
Reply

21 January 1999, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (159 days to deployment)

“Conn, maneuvering, reactor scram!” The reactor had just shut down. The engineer inserted the shutdown deliberately, testing his department’s ability to find and repair a simulated fault.

The Officer of the Deck was my senior department head, Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene, and he was doing all the right things. We had shifted propulsion from the main engines to an auxiliary electric motor, the EPM, to turn the propeller. The EPM can only power the ship at low speed and draws down the battery.

The ship was coming shallow in order to use its diesel engine to provide electrical power and keep the battery charged until the reactor was restarted. During the long troubleshooting period while the nuclear electronics technicians were isolating the fault, I started to get bored. I fiddled with my flashlight, turning it on and off. Things were going too smoothly. I couldn’t let the crew think their new captain was easy!

I nudged Bill and suggested we increase speed from “ahead 1/3” to “ahead 2/3” on the EPM to give the nuclear-trained enlisted men a sense of urgency. This would significantly increase the rate of battery discharge and put pressure on the troubleshooters to find and correct the fault quickly. At “ahead 2/3,” there is a near continuous click-click-click on the battery amp-hour meter. An audible reminder that time is running out, it’s physically unnerving!

“Ahead 2/3,” he ordered.

Nothing happened.

The helmsman should have reached over and rung up ahead 2/3. Instead, I could see him squirming in his chair. No one said anything and several awkward seconds passed. Astutely noting that the order hadn’t been carried out, I asked the helmsman what was going on. He was facing his panel but reported over his shoulder, “Captain, there is no ahead 2/3 on the EPM!”

I had made a mistake. I’d been shifted to command Santa Fe at the last minute and unlike every other submarine I’d been on, there was only a 1/3 on the EPM.

I applauded the helmsman and grabbed Bill, the OOD. In the corner of the control room, I asked him if he knew there was no ahead 2/3 on the EPM.

“Yes, Captain, I did.”

“Well, why did you order it?” I asked, astounded.

“Because you told me to.”

He was being perfectly honest. By giving that order, I took the crew right back to the top-down command and control leadership model. That my most senior, experienced OOD would repeat it was a giant wake-up call about the perils of that model for something as complicated as a submarine. What happens when the leader is wrong in a top-down culture? Everyone goes over the cliff. I vowed henceforth never to give an order, any order. Instead, subordinates would say “I intend to….”

Mechanism: Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders

Although it may seem like a minor trick of language, we found “I intend to…” profoundly shifted ownership of the plan to the officers.

“I intend to . . .” didn’t take long to catch on. The officers and crew loved it.

A year later, I was standing on the bridge of the Santa Fe with Dr. Stephen Covey. He’d heard what we were doing and was interested in riding a submarine. By this point, the crew had fully embraced our initiatives for control, and “I intend to . . .” was prominently visible. Throughout the day the officers approached me with “I intend to.”

“Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water we own, water depth has been checked and is 400 feet, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.”

I’d reply “Very well” and off we’d go.

This is just one example of the principles that David Marquet teaches through stories in his new book Turn the Ship Around. His conclusion to this story: How proactive are senior managers and employees in your organization? Rewording our speech dramatically changed our level of proactivity.

Turn the Ship Around! is the gripping story of how David Marquet took the USS Santa Fe from worst to first by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach and instead implementing his own framework of leader-leader.

We are fortunate to have Marquet joining us on December 6th for our Soundview Live webinar How to Create Leadership at Every Level. He will explain how he struggled against his own instincts to “take control, attract followers” in order to achieve the vastly more powerful “give control, create leaders.” Join us for this sure-to-be entertaining and stimulating webinar.

Turning Around Your Team

Posted on by
Reply

In Team Turnaround, Dan Leidl and Joe Frontiera introduce their concepts in part by telling the story of the turnaround of The Philadelphia Eagles by the then new owner Jeffrey Lurie, who purchased the team back in 1994.

Although he knew their record, he bought the team sight-unseen for $185 million. Once he began to tour the facilities and talk to the people, he realized just how much work needed to be done. Although the facilities were in rough shape, the dynamics of the team and staff were even worse. He found that the Eagles were fighting an illness that had permeated the whole organization, and the dysfunctional interactions were symptoms of an unhealthy culture.

The principles he used to turn around the team, and that have been used by many teams, companies and organizations are captured by Leidl and Frontiera under their six stage model of team turnaround.

Stage 1 – Leading past losing

Stage 2 – Committing to growth

Stage 3 – Changing behaviors

Stage 4 – Embracing adversity

Stage 5 – Achieving success

Stage 6 – Nurturing a culture of excellence

If you’d like to hear what Lurie did to turn around the Eagles, plus success stories from many other teams and companies, we invite you to join us on July 24th for our Free Soundview Live webinar Transforming Underperforming Teams. You can also ask your questions of Dan and Joe during the webinar.