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“Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. After you become a leader, success is about growing others.”

This quote from Jack Welch describes the shift in mindset you need to take, as you move into the role of a leader – and that is to focus on growing your team, the people around you.

A Higher Level of Leader

John Maxwell has famously written about leadership for more than 20 years. In his “5 Levels of Leadership,” he describes what it takes to be at the top tiers as a leader. One of the biggest things that comes up time and time again is the ability to grow the people around you – to focus on them and help them become more than they are.

In fact, the great leaders will often see more potential in people than they see in themselves, and then they will go about helping them unlock it, helping them grow, and helping them get better.

Jack Welch was made the youngest CEO of General Electric in 1981.

And he didn’t get there by being flaky or unreliable. He got there by first growing his own skills, and then building up the people around him.

When you grow the people around you, it also makes your job easier.  When you’re working with smart and collaborative team members, they will help you get what you need much faster and with less friction.  It sure beats working with people who don’t have the skills and don’t have the ability to get them.

– David McLachlan

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“It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between 9 and 5. It’s whether or not our work fulfils us.”

This is a great quote from Malcolm Gladwell, a bestselling author and researcher.  Do you know the key to fulfilling work, and the benefits it can bring?

Meaning and Fulfilment 

Did you know that a recent study by Gallup business journal found nearly 50% of employees were not clear on what was expected of them at work?  They did not have clear objectives, and they were 34% more likely to be disengaged as a result, costing their business time, money, rework and mistakes.

Researchers Jaqueline and Milton Mayfield also found that making things extremely clear for your staff (a clear objective, with a clear path to get there) and tying it to a higher meaning had the largest effect in improving the results of those teams.

Doing Your Favorite Thing as a Job Still Becomes “Work”

I have seen many friends who want to do something they love as a job – maybe it’s graphic design, web development, speaking engagements, working with animals.  All those things sound like fun things to do, until you have to do them, and do them by somebody else’s rules.  Now you might have to put a puppy down at a shelter, or tend to unhappy customers, or work with a boss’ needs that don’t make sense to you.  That task you loved now looks a lot more like… work.

Contrast that to doing any old job, but where:

• You have a very clear objective, with real meaning behind it (there is a greater good)
• Your team checks in regularly once a day to see how you are going, help remove any blockers, and make sure you know they care about you and the work you do.
• You are given free reign in helping improve the task and your broader skills – working towards becoming great at it.

Giving people growth, clarity, and checking in ticks a lot of boxes on their way to “Meaning”, even when the work might initially seem dull.

The good news is, you can design your work, and engineer these things within your teams to improve their meaning and seriously increase their engagement.  And one of the fastest ways there is with the Lean CX framework, which goes through these things step-by-step.

– David McLachlan

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“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

This is a great quote from Peter Drucker, who was one of the great modern management consultants and a man who helped shape modern business management.

Working on Wasteful Things

Have you ever worked on something you knew was going to end up in the waste basket? It sort of changes how you look at your work, if you know it’s ultimately a useless activity.  Many companies end up doing things “because that is the way we’ve always done it,” and are losing time, productivity, and a big one – employee engagement as a result.

Worse still are the managers who micromanage every aspect of a person’s life or task, when a small amount of investigation would show that the task itself was not required.

What can we do?

Using Lean CX as a management framework, we can easily see the things that “should not be done at all.”  First of all, value is determined by the customer. Does this task add value to your customers (either internal stakeholders, or external paying customers)? Would they be willing to pay for it? Can you add 100 times the value you are charging for, and guarantee the outcome?

When we are sure that our outcomes bring value to our customers and we have a clear, repeatable process to get there, then we can remove the wasteful steps that surround it. Luckily, Lean CX has outlined that waste for you already, so all you have to do is match it up.

Continue reading Leadership Quote – Doing Something Efficiently →

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Leadership Quote by Marcel Telles

“A company can seize extra-ordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the ordinary operations.”

Have you ever heard this quote? It is similar to the idea that “Luck” is the combination of preparedness and opportunity.

Getting The Fundamentals Right

Hall of fame basketball coach John Wooden famously had his team dribble basketballs up and down the court for hours at a time – a seemingly simple operation for highly paid and highly skilled sports people, isn’t it?

No.

You see these highly paid and highly skilled people are exactly that way because they have mastered the fundamentals – they have mastered the boring parts of their role. And they have mastered them because they do them day in, day out, training their muscle memory so they react in a split second, subconsciously, in the right way.  They knew every inch of the basketball court because they went up and down it thousands of times.

In fact the story goes when Larry Bird was acting in a commercial where he was asked to miss a shot, he made seven baskets in a row before one missed – his automatic reflexes just wouldn’t allow him to shoot a ball that missed.

It’s The Same With Operations

Good operations are the lifeblood of your business – after cashflow of course but operations is what drives cashflow. It’s the day in, day out things our people do that drive profit, customer retention, and growth.

Because of this here’s a key lesson in business – money hides most problems.

When a company is flush with money, for whatever reason (a stock IPO, new borrowing, maybe a good quarter) it naturally hides any problems with its operations and cashflow. Executives might say – “Cash is flowing, so why do we need to keep costs under control?  Why do we need to focus on our processes, our governance, our quality assurance, our… customers?”

But when the money disappears, most problems are revealed.  All of a sudden a company can’t make a payment or growth slips slightly and that reckless spending becomes the focus.  Warren Buffett famously said: “When the tide goes out, you can tell who has been swimming naked.” Which means the tide of money (and in some cases the markets and those who’ve borrowed).  When the tide goes out, those people are revealed.

Luck is Preparedness and Opportunity

Really good opportunities don’t come around every day, but they do eventually come around. If your normal, day to day operations are sloppy and your company takes over another company (or hires 300 more staff, or releases more key products etc) they are more likely to fall over, be managed badly, struggle with the change and eventually disappear.

But get the fundamentals right, like dribbling a basketball, and you can do the great things better, and for longer too.

– David McLachlan

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