I was walking in the woods this morning to a symphony of birdsong, with the occasional waft of bluebells, and came across this tree, felled by the hurricane in 1987. It was left to its own devices lying in this valley. Did it wither and die, did it lay there and think “My purpose is done… It’s all over!”? Apparently not! It’s roots were still functioning, and it began to grow once more, not just a single trunk but a veritable thicket.

Life deals us rough blows, in much the same way as the weather does, and we have a choice, adapt and grow or wither and die. I am on my way to a funeral today, the church will be filled with many living bodies and one dead one. I can choose where I focus. Two years ago I faced just this choice and despite being buffeted and blown over, I’m glad I chose to move on and am just beginning to see those fresh green leaves bursting forth.

“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting.”   Buddha

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”  Seneca

I was in reflective mood this morning, so I went for a stroll this morning.  The birds were singing gloriously and the squirrels were chittering angry at me for crashing their party.  I looked up at the clouds and I have truly never seen such 3D images.  They seemed to be an advancing armada of space craft, at least to me.  There is a long history of people looking skywards and seeing patterns, pictures and portents in both the clouds and the stars.

Then it occurred to me that we do much the same thing with other people’s actions and words.  We see, or think we see something and we interpret it, often in a self-referential way, so that the story pivots about us and how it impacts us.  As a race, and as a species, we have got quite good at interpreting signs and nuance, but an awful lot of the time we are just plain wrong.  We see a person grimace when they look our way and think they don’t like us or are angry but don’t know that they have a back problem. 

We can’t stop making these interpretations, it is part of our nature to do so, and to scan our environment for threats, but how often has someone close to you said something like “I know you are cross with me”, when you are neither cross nor even thinking about them?  If we can’t stop drawing conclusions from incomplete data the least we need to do is to check our assumptions, in an open, non-accusatory way, by saying something like “How are you feeling?” or “What are you thinking?”, simple open questions.  This can help avoid an awful lot of hurt and needless upset, and in business, can prevent wasted energy and poor decisions.

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”  George Eliot

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”   Friedrich Nietzsche

It occurred to me today that in the graveyard the memorials refer to people in terms of their relations, “Beloved Mother”, “Father”, “Son” etc.  I don’t recall ever seeing someone remembered as MD of Such-and-Such Corp, or HR Manager.  I think it is because these relationships place us in a context and to some degree define us.  I’m a brother to three people, a father to three more and a son of two.

The things I accomplish might have value, but I suspect, even on my best day, I’m unlikely to be remembered for anything I’ve done that I was paid for.  Work is a means of earning a living and a way we can challenge and express ourselves but it is also a set or relationships, and a place where we touch others lives, for better or worse.  The higher up the greasy pole we climb, the more people we impact with our behaviour and our decisions.  I wonder how much more successful businesses are that consider decisions in terms of relationships rather than just profit? 

What defines you and are you putting your attention to the things you really value?

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”   Frederick Buechner

“Present your family and friends with their eulogies now – they won’t be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from inside the coffin.”   Anonymous

I was walking yesterday and heard my first cuckoos. At first there was just one in the distance, and I thought “How perfect!”, spring sunshine and birdsong. We walked a little further then heard him again, only clearer, he seemed to have moved closer. Then I realised the song was different; a moment later it was clear there were two males, both singing their distinctive version of the familiar call, both proclaiming the efficacy of their wares to all the females nearby.

It occurred to me later, on reading a familiar online network’s blogs that we are like these cuckoos, puffing out our chests and singing to the world, hoping someone is noticing… We know the cuckoos strategy works, but does ours?! Its highly distinctive call serves two purposes; firstly it is claiming a territory and is highly recognisable, but its second purpose is the pay- off, it is seeking to attract a mate.

How do we ensure that we are offering something not just distinctive, but also something our audience really wants, or are we just making a lot of noise and achieving very little?

Someone raised the question the other day “How do you stand out from all the other coaches?“. A very good question but one which applies just as well to many, if not all businesses. I think in this area especially, the answer is ‘dare to be different’. If you are a ‘me too’ coach offering basically a generic service you’ll deliver a certain service and value but you will always be vulnerable to being undercut or replaced. If, however, you follow your own light and are able to harness your own unique talents and insights, you won’t fit everyone, but you will always be authentic and no one can ever be quite the same, so you will have an inherent advantage. Sometimes the best way to stand out in a crowd is just to be you.

I don’t tell my clients what to do, or very often, how to do it, but tend to just offer another way of looking at things, or a different perspective, that allows them to have more and different options. This is often all it takes to ‘unstick’ someone and allow them to once more flow down their path. If at the end of the conversation I hear “Thank you, that was very useful!” I know I’ve done my job.

If you have a large garden, especially one with an irregular shape you’ll be familiar with the dilemma of “how do you mow it?”. If you have a ride-on, you can’t do simple stripes, as the thing has to be manoeuvred. The challenge is to come up with a pattern that cuts all of the grass once, with as little possible being cut more than once, and minimising any ned for reversing. It sounds simple, but really isn’t; come up with the right pattern and you move in a smooth flow, that is both satisfying and efficient, saving time and effort. There is a zen-like quality to being one with the flow.

In the midst of my meditative mowing, it occurred to me that there is a similarity between the use of good strategy for mowing and for business. Finding the way to get the most done for the least input, by seeing the relationship between shapes and then flowing smoothly from one to the next. When you are doing things well you are not working so much as dancing. All very fanciful you may say, but I suggest that if everything you do is taking vast effort, and only achieved by dint of hard work, then you are perhaps missing this sense of how these things relate to each other and you to them.

Could Life be easier? Sometimes, just sometimes, mow is less…

Yesterday roughly 70% of the Greek voters said “No!” to austerity (despite same same proportion still wishing to remain within the Europe!)  At the same time the French voters voted for Hollande and his anti-austerity platform.  So both sets of people want to get better, economically speaking, but refused to take their ‘medicine’.  This is another interesting example of people having to see their needs being met in order to accept Change.  I’m not saying that the previous regimes necessarily had all the answers but the idea of spending your way out of this debt crisis seems madness.  The incumbent’s errors lay in the fact that they were unable to persuade their electorates that the vile tasting medicine was going to make them better, economically speaking.  If the amount of pain the ‘cure’ is delivering is equal to that you are currently suffering, or about to suffer, then you are unlikely to take the medicine.  If people have to choose between pain today or pain tomorrow, they will always, always choose the latter.

 

“Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.”  José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

“An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”  George Eliot

Today, the second guest Blog from Maurice de Castro, leadership expert and speaker, telling the rest of his personal story:

In yesterday’s blog I referred to a time when I faced the challenge of playing my part in helping to turn a business around that was on a slippery slope to nowhere. I used the Yes BUT story as a means of expressing the power and impact of just a couple of words. Well here’s another powerful example.

During that same period in that same business I made another huge mistake which I learned from and has served me well for many years since in both my professional and personal life.

Here is the mistake.  As the business was in such bad shape when I arrived I spent a ridiculous amount of time asking people “WHY?”

1. “Why do we have to lowest sales performance in the country?”
2. “Why do we have the highest cost base?”
3. “Why is morale so low?”
4. “Why is customer service so poor?”
5. Etc., etc., etc.

That seemed a good place to start and made sense at the time but it just didn’t work. I realised after a while that every time I asked the question there were no shortage of answers. Everyone had an answer, every answer was different and every answer became a personal belief.

As you know it’s not that easy to change a belief.  It occurred to me that everyone had a story and I had done nothing but get them to focus on that story and replay it to me. Whilst many of those stories made sense the fact that there were so many made it impossible to identify what the real issues were and more importantly get people to think past them.

I realised that people love a good story.  After a while I worked out that I had to change tact completely as the WHY was only pushing us back even further. So I changed the question.  The new question was.

1. “WHAT will we do to have the highest sales performance in the country?”
2. “WHAT will we do to be cost leaders in this business?”
3. “WHAT will we do to raise morale?”
4. “WHAT will we do to make our customers love us?”

A simple word and a simple blog I know and many readers will be way ahead of the game and say well of course that’s just common sense. Well as they say common sense doesn’t seem to be that common any more.  It wasn’t for me back then but it is now.  By the way, with Yes AND together with WHAT, everything changed.

Today, a guest blog from Maurice de Castro, leadership expert and speaker, talking about his personal experience in leadership:

From a leadership perspective one of the most crippling environments you can ever find yourself in is the Yes BUT culture. Those two small yet devastatingly powerful words only serve to maintain the status quo and deprive innovation, creativity and imagination of the fuel it needs to see a company thrive. A number of years ago I was asked to lead a particular business through a rather dark time. Terribly low morale, very high costs, poor sales performance, low customer satisfaction and so on.

The business had created its own debilitating web of Yes BUT’s” so that nothing could or would ever change. It was full of good people working extremely hard but trapped in their own creation. Have you ever watched a fly try to free itself from a spider’s web?  Well it’s a little like me trying to stop my wife buying yet another pair of shoes, it ranks on the impossible list. The fly has to be freed.

After many months of sleepless nights I finally found the solution. I asked a toy manufacturer to provide me with 1000 plain white round squeezy stress balls. On each ball I had the words Yes BUT printed on one side with a big red cross struck right through the middle of the words. On the other side of the ball I had the words “Yes AND” printed. I invited every member of staff to join me at a large local theatre where I very clearly presented our Yes BUT dilemma and gave everyone their own ball. I asked them to take theirs ball with them everywhere they went in the business and if they EVER heard the words “Yes BUT” used I asked them to throw their ball at that person as hard as they could regardless of their position. For the next 3 months balls were flying everywhere and I mean everywhere, it was like a war zone. Within 12 months everything changed. Everything! Two small words made the massive difference between success and failure.

A client of mine has been working with Amazon, and shared some very interesting things about the company culture.  It is definitively American.  People are told when they are taken on that their work will be measured and assessed, and the if they fall in the top 10% then they will be promoted.  Conversely, if they are in the bottom 10% they will be fired.  If they are fired they are eligible to try again another time.  There is no ceiling on those who rise through the ranks.  You may feel this is a fairly brutal system, but the clarity of the message and the precision of the measuring means that it tends to be well accepted.  It isn’t personal, it is just the system and applies to everyone. 

If I had the power to make this kind of decision, and the systems to back them up, I don’t know if I’d do this, but the there are a number of valuable lessons on culture:-

1. Be clear
2. Be predictable
3. Be consistent
4. Be universal (in other words, treat everyone the same)