Finding Game-Changing Talent with a Creative Sourcing Plan

If there is one thing that I know to be true about business, it is that the people on your senior team and in your company are the deciding factors in whether or not your company can scale effectively. I can not tell you the number of times that one of my clients has brought on a new team member and been absolutely awed by how game-changing that addition became. For example, just recently, one of our clients brought on a new human resources head and was stunned by the positive transformation she generated in the company. 

When I tell partners and colleagues about stories such as this, I’m always met with the same question: how exactly can I attract that type of game-changing talent? In the business climate we live in today, attracting top talent can be challenging: now more than ever, individuals have the option to apply to and work for companies all over the world. However, this shouldn’t scare you. With a creative and regimented talent sourcing plan, you too can put your company in a position to attract great talent. 

A good creative sourcing plan should leverage three resources: community partnerships, talent recruitment agencies, and being opportunistic: 

1. Community partnerships: Oftentimes amazing talent will be right in your backyard; you just need to know where to look. Community partnerships can be a powerful way to find that talent. Are there local universities, nonprofits organizations or boards that could connect you with potential employees? Once you identify individuals or organizations that may have potential employees, you can begin to build consistent partnerships with them. For example, I used to work closely with a professor at the University of Denver to find interns. This partnership gave me access to students that the professor thought were good fits instead of me trying to go through the school’s career center, which dozens of other companies were doing.

2. Talent recruitment agencies: Although this isn’t necessarily the most creative, talent recruitment agencies can be helpful. Your time and energy are valuable resources, so if you can afford to spend cash on recruitment agencies, it could be a worthwhile investment. 

3. Being Opportunistic: As a leader, you should always be keeping an eye out for potential talent. What this means is that if you meet someone amazing as you are going through your day-to-day-life, recruit them. You can’t plan to meet people like this, but you should be prepared to. To be prepared, you should be able to communicate your mission, speak to why you provide a valuable experience and have business cards on hand. 

These three avenues are each a viable way to find great talent and ones that I have personally used in the past. If you would like to discuss your sourcing plan further, feel free to reach out to me at emartin@pfd-group.com.

The Importance of Personal Life Planning

It’s often easy to ignore your personal life when you begin laying out your quarterly and yearly business goals. It goes without saying that as a leader you are always thinking strategically about your business: you set up benchmarks for success, discuss your goals and plan for the future business that you’d like to grow. While business planning is second nature to many great leaders, personal life planning is often undervalued and ignored. 

Personal life planning refers to taking the time to think holistically about your life and set up goals and priorities for each area of your life. Business can be one of those areas, but if you are doing personal life planning, it should not be the only area that you plan around. For example, a significant part of my life is family. When I plan for the future that I am working to build, they are an important aspect of that future. To ensure that I am properly building them into my planning, I have to take time to ask questions such as, “how much time do I want to be spending with my family on a day-to-day basis?” and “what resources do I want to be able to provide my children?” 

By asking these questions, I ensure that the work I am doing will help me to build a thriving life and not just a thriving business. Too often, I’ve come across individuals who have built amazing businesses but who, in the process, ignored other aspects of their lives. Personal life planning is a way to ensure that you do not ignore those critical parts of your life.

“You can’t be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.”

— Zig Ziglar

One way to make personal life planning a practice is to create a personal vision for yourself. Above, you will see some images from our team member’s vision boards. If you would like to learn more about vision boarding, and the powerful role it can play in personal life planning, click here.

Another powerful exercise to envision a future that you want to create is to go through what we call the Legacy Vision tool. This tool captures all that you want to be and do on a ten-to-thirty year timeline, and it will ask you to transport yourself into that future and answer questions such as: 

1. Who do you serve with your business? Who do you serve in other areas of your life?

2. What is your impact? How do you want to be remembered?

3. How long are you working? How much time do you spend with family and friends? What is your relationship with your family and friends like? 

For a complete set of exercises and questions, feel free to download our Legacy Vision Tool. Once you answer the questions and reflect on your future, you will have the information you need to draft a vision for your future. This vision can be one that you create with prose, bullet points or even with diagrams. The point of the vision is to have open space to envision what a thriving life looks like for you.

The Market Advantage of Authenticity in Purpose

As business owners, we know it is quite disappointing when companies with promise prove themselves to be untrustworthy. We know the feeling – opening up our news apps to see a front-page headline of a company with great potential get caught up in a scandal. The large , public scandals, combined with mass layoffs in the pandemic, have created a more hesitant and market that is more distrustful of the business landscape overall.

A photo of PFD team members, and key partners, enjoying a hike in Colorado

How does your company stand out in such a market? Authenticity in purpose. Find out how you want to serve the community, authentically and wholeheartedly pursue that mission, and consider all stakeholders in decisions. Consider this quote:

“The idea has been that corporations exist to maximize shareholder value, but corporations are starting to realize that if you only focus on [financial returns], you create resistance for your growth, and that diminishes shareholder value over the long run. A smarter strategy is one that creates wealth by benefiting other stakeholders. When your growth is good for the community, employees, customers, government, the country, environment, the world, and thereby good for shareholders, that is the ultimate strategy, because everybody wants you to win.”

— Kaihan Krippendorff

Genuinely investing in a purpose and mission, and authentically serving others, is a way you can build trust and loyalty with customers. However, cultivating authenticity is not easy – it takes real, disciplined work and intentional thought.

To cultivate authenticity in your business, you will need to:

Decide what’s most important to you.

While the needs of all stakeholders should be taken into consideration, every business can focus on a specific core purpose and cause. For example, while every business can take strides to reduce their carbon footprint, and source ecofriendly products, Patagonia has taken environmental conservation to heart, making their activism and ecofriendly practices a central part of their day-to-day operations. Conversely, another wonderful company, Capital III, leverages their portfolio companies to transform the lives of prisoners – employing them with good jobs, conducting leadership and skills training, and helping to ensure successful reentry. Both companies excel in their respective missions – contributing positively to the world that we live in. To help you understand where you want your business to make the most impact, check out our Legacy Vision tool.

Create accountability.

The next step in cultivating authenticity is to create systems of accountability, both in your personal leadership development and in your business.

1. Accountability in Personal Leadership Development.

   The most effective way to cultivate accountability in personal leadership development is to get yourself into a peer group of similar business leaders. This peer group (also called a cohort or mastermind group) should consist of people who share the same experiences to mentor one another. These people should have similar goals of service as you, who will support you in your challenges, and who keep you in check to your moral obligations. They are the people who will candidly share their experiences and wisdom, to not only help you learn quicker, but also give input to make more holistic well-rounded decisions.

2. Invite relevant stakeholders to the table for decision making.

   In creating systems of accountability for your business, it is important that you give the people that are impacted by your decisions a chance to voice their opinion. For example, Monty Moran, when he was Co-CEO of Chipotle, made it a priority to visit as many restaurant locations as possible, talk to the workers there, and from that develop his priorities. With consideration of his employees, Monty then developed a managerial pipeline, creating better opportunities for employees to advance with Chipotle. This simple act of having real, authentic conversations about the needs of employees, and following through with programs to benefit them, creates a level of trust and shows authenticity in caring.

Own up to past mistakes and learn from them

Companies are run by humans. As such, no leadership team will produce 100% perfect decisions. Perhaps, before the Covid-19 pandemic, your team was pursuing an aggressive investment strategy, reducing your cash on hand, so when the recession hit you had to terminate the employment of some people. If your company really cares about your employees, and you found yourself in this situation, let the employees impacted know that you recognize your mistake, and that you apologize for the way that mistake affected them. Then, you could put genuine effort into helping them in finding a new position. Chances are that the candor with which you approach this situation will soften the frustration and hurt the employee may feel. In the future then, you could potentially learn to make sure to have more cash on hand to mitigate risk, or not overextend on payroll. While we will inevitably make mistakes, it is important that we learn from them and strive to be better in the future.

With these three considerations, we can strive to create better, more authentic businesses that our customers, communities, and employees can trust.

In Your Corner: Cultivating Leadership Growth with Others

The phrase “It’s lonely at the top” rings painfully true for some of us business leaders. If you are a CEO, you have likely experienced isolation that tends to come with the job. As a CEO, you are responsible for the livelihoods of the people in your entire organization, as well as their families, and your own family. That’s a lot of pressure. Further, if you are not careful, you also might be subject to an echo chamber of your senior leadership team only corroborating your ideas (rather than coming up with novel strategies to reach your goals) – leaving you to solely do the creative work. The point: as CEOs, we can become very isolated and stressed, very quickly. What we need is to develop a network of people around us – people who are in our corner – to confide in, garner creative ideas, invest in, and ultimately give us the confidence and clarity to make decisions in our business.

A good guide for developing such a network is the “Three Cs”: Coach, Cohort, and Community.

The first kind of key relationship in the network you cultivate should be a strategic coach. While we are a biased source with this recommendation, we have seen first-hand the transformation a coach can have on your organization. With professional sports, we would never expect our favorite teams to win games without a good coach. A great coach, like John Wooden, can propel teams to extraordinary success. Such is true with business professionals as professional athletes – a great business coach can act as a trusted guide to propel you to higher levels of success. They can be your confidant, helping to address your challenges by providing an impartial perspective. Further, coaches can bring a deep knowledge of proven tools and execution rhythms as well as reduce stress by helping you to cultivate simplicity in your business. 

The second kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a cohort. For reference, a cohort is a group of people who share the same experiences to mentor one another. They are the people in your corner – who know your experiences (also CEOs), who have a similar mission to you, who will support you in your challenges, and who keep you in check to your moral obligations. They are the people who will share with you openly, so you can learn from them to reach your goals more quickly. In these cohorts, everyone is mutually invested in each other’s growth, and it is a place to gain wisdom and insight from your peers. Modern Psychology and Sociology backs the benefits of these sorts of relationships – terming them “strong ties” – nurturing ourselves and our ability as leaders.  Many CEOs participate in cohorts already, calling them mastermind groups.

The third kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a community. In the context in which we are speaking, a community encapsulates the broader reach into the world that you have – the acquaintances in your network from all over. These connections, per a Sociological and Psychological framework, are termed “weak ties”, and they are valuable because they give you broad access to people and resources that can help you further your mission (and you can do the same for them as well). Essentially, these are the people in your rolodex. These are the people that will welcome you into their neighborhoods, partner with you with their organizations and associations, and create mutually beneficial relationships that allows your impact to have a far reach. These are the people to call upon to source talent, strike deals, and organize philanthropic efforts.  With a strong community, you will never have a shortage of people to call upon to solve problems and strategize a better shared future.

With a coach, a cohort, and a community, you will have both the strong personal connections that foster growth, and the access to broader networks (with people and resources) that make your impact possible.

The Ethics of Hiring Well

A teammate (right) and me (left) at Ethics Bowl at the Regional High School Championships, 2016

In college, my friends used to tease me for being an ethics nerd. My love for ethics began back in high school, where I was a part of my school’s inaugural ethics bowl team – even placing at our regional competition in Utah. After high school, I reached out to the staff advisor to join my collegiate ethics bowl team before I even arrived on campus. In ethics bowl, we discussed a multitude of topics, from the ethicality of using beta testing when developing software in self-driving cars, to the treatment of children born with anencephaly, even to the ethics of colonizing Mars. Being a part of these teams and these conversations profoundly shaped my outlook on my life and career and has jumpstarted my curiosity of how to live out as an ethical business leader.

In fact, the ethics of business decisions have been a hot topic on everyone’s mind lately – from discussions on stakeholder theory, to the triple bottom line, to the conscious capitalism movement. Within these broader movements towards business ethics, there are countless topics within day-to-day business activities that need to be explored from an ethical standpoint. One such topic is hiring.

What does it mean to hire well? What are the impacts of hiring well?

Hiring well doesn’t necessarily mean you hire the top graduates from Ivy League schools, nor does it mean requiring experience for entry level positions. What hiring well means is that you answer “yes” to this one question: Knowing what you know now (after a person has been working at your company) would you enthusiastically rehire them? These applicants can come from diverse backgrounds, but they must be a core value fit and do their job well. If someone isn’t a good fit for their job, you can create stress for yourself and other employees who will need to pick up the slack, as well as lost revenue. If someone is not a good core value fit, you run the risk of devaluing your culture, creating frustration, and even driving away some of your employees who are good fits.

 With so much on the line, hiring well is extraordinarily important, both for your business success and to better the quality of life for your employees. At PFD, we recommend the Topgrading Methodology for hiring. The idea behind Topgrading is simple. Most companies hire fast and fire slow, and by doing this, they are hiring and keeping people in their organizations who they wouldn’t “rehire” if given the opportunity. Topgrading adds rigor – it allows those who are making the hiring decisions to truly take their time and consider their candidates. By adding this rigor, we are ensuring that we truly are hiring the right people in the right roles – vastly increasing the success rate hiring from 50% to 90%.  We recommend reading the book Topgrading by Brad and Geoff Smart for more information on this process. 

We’ve talked about the impacts of hiring well, and the process we recommend using for hiring. Now, for those of you who are ethics nerds like me, let’s discuss some ethical theories as applied to hiring.  

Utilitarianism

Quite simply, Utilitarianism asks: what creates the greatest good for the most people, while minimizing suffering? It is also called Consequentialism, because it looks at the consequences of an action to determine its morality.

Under a utilitarian lens, it is a moral imperative to hire well. Taking time to hire well – to have the right people who fit the culture and excel at their jobs – will result in the greatest good for the most amount of people, both in the company and out. As we have described above, hiring poorly can result in stress and frustration to the employees, thus causing harm. Further, assuming the company has some involvement in the community, a mishire can result in lost revenue, thus reducing the number of resources the business has to give back to causes. Conversely, a good hire who fits the culture can add to the quality of life of fellow employees, and can increase our resources to give back to our communities.

Kantianism

According to Kantianism, determining morality means asking ourselves, “if we were to imagine a world where everyone was to do this action, would it still be viable?”  If the action is not viable if everyone were to do it, we have a duty to behave differently. For example, if a manufacturing company were heavily polluting a local river, their actions would be unethical, because everyone polluting a river would make the environment surrounding uninhabitable. Additionally, under this ethical theory, we have a moral duty to treat people with respect, because they are rational thinkers, and never as a means to an end. So, in this theory, it would be unethical for an employer to hire somebody and intentionally grossly underpay their starting salary to save money. That would not be treating them with respect to themselves as rational actors, and they would be using that employee as a means to an end (saving cash).

Under a Kantian lens, it is also an ethical duty of ours to take the time to hire well. We might know a great salesperson who could bring some deals to the company, but doesn’t fit the core values, and according to this theory, we shouldn’t hire them. This is because making exceptions to our hiring process would undermine the duty we had to our other employees, who both fit the culture and do well in their roles. Further, to hire someone into a position or culture that they cannot do well in, is not respectful to them or their time that they spent with you at your company.

 Ethics of Care

Contrasted with the first two theories, this third theory holds that morality is centered on interpersonal relationships, as well as benevolence (or care) is a virtue. Under this theory, the interpersonal relationships that you have with people matter. For example, if you have a long-standing relationship with a supplier (assuming this supplier also acts ethically), this theory contends that you should not switch suppliers just to save a couple of bucks on the cost of goods sold.

Under an ethics of care lens, it is especially important to take the time and effort to hire candidates who fit the culture, and who excel in their jobs. When we hire people, we are making a commitment to their longer-term success. When we hire someone, we can build relationships with them over time, and to create a culture where our employees’ relationships with one another can thrive. To mishire someone can dissolve culture and trust quickly, thereby eroding these relationships.

Of course, we can’t always get the right hires in the right roles 100% of the time, but it is important that we take the time to create hiring strategies and processes in place to maximize our chances of success. If you would like to talk about your hiring process and strategy, we would be happy to talk with you.

What is my Role as CEO?

As CEO, our roles aren’t necessarily as clearly defined as other senior roles. When we think of other roles, like Chief Financial Officer or Chief Marketing Officer, we have a better idea of what that means. Chief Financial Officers are clearly responsible for the financial health of the organization, making sure that we have plenty of cash, that we aren’t over-leveraging debt, etc, and Chief Marketing Officers control the marketing strategy and execution, using their expertise to understand the tactics that will further awareness and best support the overall brand identity. But what is the Chief “Executive” function? For this role, what we are responsible for, are not as clear-cut. With this lack of clarity, we can find ourselves taking on far too much - not effectively delegating key functions to our team so we can optimize our time with the highest-priority activities.

As CEO, we should rethink our roles to be three things: Chief Vision Officer (CVO), Chief Relationship Officer (CRO), and Chief Mentorship Officer (CMO). What this means is we are in charge of our company’s strategic vision, as well as building a community, relationships, and culture that will allow is to realize that vision.

As the Chief Vision Officer, we are in charge of creating the strategic and creative vision for our companies, and for communicating it throughout the organization and beyond. The best talent out there will want to be a part of something special and something inspiring, and they won’t want to come into an organization that doesn’t have a vision for a better future. Why? They want to be a part of creating that better future. As the CVO, we must consistently be looking at our vision, and allowing our leaders to see themselves in and shape that vision. If you need help clarifying your vision for your company, download your Legacy Vision Tool below.

As the Chief Relationship Officer, we are in charge of creating key relationships in our communities that will propel the company to success. This means not only finding great industry partners and mastermind groups that will help you realize the vision of our company, but to intentionally use your time to give back to the community. The best talent will want to be a part of a company that cares about how they make a difference in the community that immediately surrounds them. Further, this sort of outreach will connect you with amazing people that will help you source your future talent.

As the Chief Mentorship Officer, we are in charge of stewarding a mentoring and learning culture in our organization. This is so critical to talent development, because we want our employees to always be growing and learning, and we must create the culture in which that is valued. We also must take charge to mentor great leaders into their roles and to create opportunities for them to continue growing in their leadership. After all, why should our employees stay if they don’t see themselves professionally growing in their job? The best employees will want to create new challenges for themselves to be able to professionally grow and reap those benefits. Our job is to make sure we challenge our employees with new things to learn, but also give them the support to be able to thrive in that environment.

With these three key roles in mind, we are able to drive forward into the future of our organization while creating a team and culture that supports growth.

It’s Time to Strategize Self-Care. Your Leadership depends on it.

We are living in an era where stress is the norm. At PFD, we recognize that there are numerous stressors in our own lives, including but not limited to political, social, and cultural upheaval, the continued economic hardship, as well as our own individual challenges. At PFD, we are also deeply saddened by the terrible acts of violence that have happened across the country, as well as in our own community in Boulder, Colorado. To add extra pressure, we know business leaders feel continual and immense pressure to lead well in order to be able take care of the people they employ, as well as the broader community. These stressors accumulate fast – in the past couple of months, 84% of adults said they experienced at least one emotion tied to prolonged stress – like anxiety (at 47%) sadness  (at 44%) and anger (at 39%). Further, 67% of people in the United States said that the challenges they face are overwhelming. There’s no way around it – we are facing an inordinate number of stressors that affect our ability to lead and live stable, healthy lives.

 As leaders, we are also prone to sacrificing our mental and emotional well-being to try to serve those around us. We do this because we know what’s at stake – we put in the extra hours and take the personal sacrifice to protect our team. While this quality is admirable, we are at risk for depleting our time and energy at unsustainable rates. We know that we cannot to pour from an empty cup, without taking time and refill it. In the past year, we have gone through so much, collectively and individually. This being said, there are definitive ways that we can refill and rejuvenate ourselves to be able to bring our best selves to our leadership positions.

Plan on sleeping

A third of your day should be dedicated to resting. It may sound simple, but we often neglect our sleep in favor of other activities; however, sleep is extraordinarily important. Consider these facts:

• Good sleep can improve concentration and productivity

• Sleep is important to regulating mental wellness. Mental health issues, like depression are strongly linked to poor sleep quality and sleeping disorders.

• Sleep is important to regulating health. Poor sleep is linked to increased inflammation (like Chron’s disease), a greater risk of heart disease and stroke, and even a greater risk for type 2 diabetes.

• Sleep is important to your emotional and social interactions –poor sleep can reduce your social skills and ability to recognize emotional expressions in others.

Try these strategies for setting yourself up to sleep well:    

• Go to sleep and get up at the same time every day – this will help set your body’s circadian rhythm.

• Control your technology and light exposure. Using bright screens within 1-2 hours of your bedtime, can negatively impact your ability to fall asleep

• Exercise during the day – even light exercise can improve sleep quality

• Be mindful about what you eat and drink – caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, sugary foods, as well as eating big meals before bedtime can all disrupt sleep

• Wind down at night. Creating a nighttime routine can help you calm down at night more effectively.

Create mindfulness around media consumption 

We as people tend to have a desire to be informed. When we turn to the news or our social media feeds, we are tuning into the lives of the people we care about or admire, or the major events in our community and the world at large. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it doesn’t take an expert to understand that an excess of media is detrimental. For several years now, we have been coming to understand the adverse impacts of social media, in that it is deliberately designed to be addictive, with features like the ‘like’ button, consistent alerts, and the ‘infinite scroll’, and heavy social media use is linked to increased stress, anxiety, depression, isolation, and feelings of loneliness. Similarly, constant access to negative and alarmist news media can take a similar toll. When our bodies sense a threat, our brain activates our flight or fight response – even if the threat is being relayed to us through our televisions and news applications.  Consuming news can cause our brains to release stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, and prolonged exposure can lead to an increase in fatigue, anxiety, depression, and sleep loss.

            Because we should be informed, but overconsumption can cause harm, we should employ strategies to moderate our exposure to media. These strategies could be:

• Limit your time on news each day. Rather than having the news be background noise, take no more than 30 minutes each day to catch up with what has been happening in the media and on social media.

• Create list of “purposes” around your different media outlets. When you define a purpose for each piece of media, limit your consumption of that media to that purpose. If your main goal for using Facebook is to catch up with close friends and family, edit your notification settings to just to see when they post, rather than aimlessly scrolling around the site. If your main goal for going to a news site is to get business-related news and economic forecasts, but you find yourself mindlessly frequenting the celebrity gossip columns, create the intention to change your consumption habits.

• Acknowledge your emotions when consuming media. If you are feeling particularly pessimistic or angry one day, it might be a better strategy to avoid the news that day.

• Subscribe to a reputable newsletter or podcast. Rather than flipping through different news channels and sites, a newsletter or podcast that summarizes the large news stories for that day inherently limits your time and contact.

• Do something healthy after you watch the news. Because the news can be a stressor, following your news consumption with healthy action can reduce your stress and the adverse impacts of the news. These activities could be exercising, taking a walk, talking to a friend, or working on a hobby.

Schedule your routines

            At PFD, we are proponents of routine. As leaders, we often face unpredictable situations that require creative action and solutions. Because these situations can be energy-depleting, we encourage you to create structure in your day to replenish your energy and mental wellness. Routines have been linked to better stress levels, sleep, health, and self-esteem.

Try these strategies to improve routine in your life:

• Write out the specific steps in your routine and schedule those routines in your day. By writing down the steps, you are taking the first steps to making these routines an actionable part of your day.

• Begin your day with an intentional routine. For more information on an effective routine that sets the tone of your day, check out this blog.

• Make sure you include getting outside and exercise into your routines. These activities have been linked to decreased stress and overall improved health, and are therefore crucial to maintaining resiliency in our lives.

• Cultivate mindfulness as a part of your routine. Taking time out of your day to meditate or engage in another mindfulness activity can help relieve stress and improve focus and productivity.

In a world of continued stress, it is crucial we continue to engage in self-care activities so we have the bandwidth to lead our teams and communities well.

Cultivating a Coaching Organization: How to Consider an Action-Oriented Approach to Coaching Employees

Quite obviously, one of the most important things that our employees can do is finish their work.  This being said, one of the things we fail to account for when we coach our employees is the way they get work done. The Conative approach is built on a psychological model of understanding of human attitudes and behavior, that includes how they think (their cognitive function), how they feel (their affective function), and finally, how they get things done (their conative function). The idea behind understanding the conative approach is that we can create understanding and harmony in our productivity. We assume that people get things done in a similar way to us, so when we coach them on projects, we may be taking them through a process that is, at the very least unhelpful, and at the very worst a hinderance to how they are able to get work done.

There are two types of approaches we should consider when coaching our employees in how they do their work: 

1. Coaching specific processes that require uniformity across the company

2. Coaching for projects that require employees to take creative and productive action.

Specific Processes that Require Uniformity Across the Company

For very specific and set processes that need uniformity, we should coach our employees to get things done the same way every time. To illustrate this type of work, imagine if a large restaurant chain left each location and each employee to their own devices to figure out how to cook, clean, stock the kitchen, run the counter, and run the drive thru – on one location, you might get a manager that is exceptional and competent in all these areas, and another, you might get a manager who is inept – leading to wildly different experiences. Typically, these are processes that are necessary and require a specific set of tasks to be carried out in a certain order. They take time, and take practice to get right, but don’t take a lot of brain power to understand. They are the core of your operational excellence. These processes could be creating expense reports, following up with a customer on their order, or filling out paperwork to be in government compliance.

To be effective in coaching:

1. Anyone coaching these processes in your organization (if not you, your COO or managers) should have a good understanding what these processes entail, and why they need to be uniform, so you can explain the importance of precision.

2. These processes are thoroughly taught during an onboarding experience, so your employees have an understanding of them from the onset.

3. Documentation of these processes are easily accessed for employees to refer to. A task-management software might be helpful here to ensure consistency.

4.   These processes have enough detail to make them clear, but not so much detail that they are overengineered. If your process is simple, keep it simple to retain its efficacy.

5. Employees are given consistent and candid feedback – it is better to make small corrections throughout time than having to completely coach someone all over again.

 So those are the processes that require uniformity, what about the projects that have no one right way to get them done? How can you best navigate coaching your employees as they go through these projects? That’s what the next section is about.

Projects that Require Creative and Productive Action

For the projects with no clear answer of how to get them done, coaching get a little bit trickier. These projects really could be anything, like developing a year-long marketing plan, coming up with and testing a new product, or adjusting the client experience and journey. We often assume that, when we are leads on projects, that our employees get stuff done the way that we do. We might not literally believe that, but we tend to act as though it is true.

For example, I have an employee, Emmalee, who has been working for me for several years. The way that we start and complete projects is completely different. The differences in how we work can be extremely valuable, if we are aware of it. If we are not aware of it, we can slip into modes of work that are counterproductive for the other.  For me, an extraordinary amount of my energy naturally goes into innovating. I am constantly looking at the world and coming up with new creative solutions to be able to move our company mission and BHAG forward.  Then, I tend to evaluate what we have, and look for any shortcuts to solutions to avoid eating up valuable time. What I then tend to communicate to my team are bottom-line statements of the big-picture ideas and innovations that I am thinking. Quite clearly, not everybody thinks the same way that I do. Not everybody even begins their creative process with brainstorming, and not many people naturally have their energy going into creating new innovations and ideas. Further, I don’t really care to get too into the details, if I can help it. I just want the overview of what my employees are working on, and I tend to give them very few details when giving them strategic direction for projects.

Now Emmalee, on the other hand, has a more structured approach to her projects. She always begins with creating an outline and / or a plan of attack. She then reviews all of the present data that is available to her – conducting academic research as well as referencing top business books to make sure there is a solid basis for our claims and adjusting to any changes she might find from her original plan. Finally, she’ll review the project to make sure all of the materials therein hold up well.

Now, where can this get tricky? When I give her feedback on her projects, sometimes it involves brainstorming whole new ideas that don’t fit her original plan for her project. Sometimes, that’s helpful, because the new ideas could be better, provide a different prospective, and lead to a better outcome of the project. Other times, that’s unhelpful, because it causes her to go back to the beginning of her productive process, wholly recreating her plan of attack, that didn’t necessarily need to be recreated. If I am unaware of how Emmalee and I work, I have the potential to throw off her productive rhythm by inserting ideas that are challenging to adjust to. If Emmalee is unaware of how we work, because they don’t necessarily fit her plan of attack, she can find herself limiting innovations and ideas, not incorporating them even when they are helpful. If we do not take care to understand each other, there is legitimately a high potential for conflict or unnecessary stress. But, if we do take care to understand how the other gets work done, making small adjustments accordingly, what was once a conflict becomes a superpower. Because we have such different skillsets and modes of working, we can be much more productive, using each other’s strengths to get things done.

For example, while Emmalee is great at creating structure for projects, conducting research and synthesizing information from many different sources, she doesn’t particularly like starting from a blank page. For me, I get energy from starting from a blank page. When we work together, we tend to brainstorm together, and then she synthesizes what we say into an outline from which she can carry the project forward. From then on, I keep in mind the outline she created, so that she can more easily adjust to the changes and new ideas and get her projects done quickly, while still bearing in mind the feedback that I give her.

By taking the time to understand how my employee gets things done, I am able to effectively communicate and provide feedback and direction on their projects that is both helpful and conducive to how my employees do their best work.

To be effective in coaching:

1. Invest in assessment tools that help you and your employees assess their conative approach to getting work done. At PFD, we recommend the Kolbe A Report from Ware Withal.

2. Take time to review the tools with your employees. Your employees better understanding how they naturally get things done will only serve them. Ask them:  How do you deal with information? How do you organize? How do you deal with uncertainty? How do you use your time and energy?

3. Share your conative approach with your employees. Discuss: where might conflicts be? How have differences in the conative approach manifested in the past? Can we use our new understanding of the conative approach to resolve conflicts and better support the employee on projects?

4. Give your employees projects that they are interested in that best suit their conative method.

5. When employees are assigned to projects, their distinct conative approach should be incorporated into the project plans.

As you consider coaching to your employees’ conative abilities, take five minutes to ask yourself and write down:

1. Do I currently try to understand my employees’ conative approach to how they get things done? Do I try to micromanage projects to get done in a certain way? How do I adapt to my employees getting their projects done?

2. What are some tangible things that I can do to steward development in the conative approach my organization?

How Cautious Should I Be in Running My Business?

Undoubtedly, the pandemic and other various economic shocks have been leaving CEOs apprehensive and stressed about running their businesses. On the other end of the spectrum, with the vaccine rollout, economists are expecting the economy to take off this year. Considering these extremes and uncertainty, it can be challenging to make business decisions.  We don’t want to miss out on opportunities that inherently involve risk, but we also don’t want to shut down due to a series of bad decisions. As we move forward, the question on many business owners’ minds is: how much caution should I use when making business decisions?

 We know, as this past year pointed out, that we should be fairly cautious. Before the pandemic, the economy was doing well – unemployment was at record lows and there was increased household wealth and spending. As we know, when Covid hit our shores, that growth was reversed, the stock market tanked and unemployment skyrocketed. For many industries, the market froze, people couldn’t come in to stores to do their shopping, or supply chains were disrupted. We know from this past year that we should exercise a fair amount of caution to prepare for catastrophic events.

So, we know that, as business leaders, we should exercise a fair amount of caution. This seems obvious. Perhaps a more helpful and revealing question than the one above would be: how should I exercise caution in running my business?

The first question - how much caution – uses caution as a limiter in strategic decisions. It asks confident we can expect to be in our environment – and if we can’t be confident, makes decisions accordingly. This is fundamentally a fair question to ask – we should consider our environment and making decisions accordingly. It is especially relevant considering we are entering into an age where technological, social, political, ecological, and economic disruption will be common. The second question – how should I exercise caution -  uses caution productively as a key part of strategy. It is understanding that caution is not just something that limits action that would be taken otherwise, but it is used at the heart of strategy to keep the business alive.

There is a concept from Jim Collins called Productive Paranoia that is useful when making decisions on how to use caution in our business. According to Jim Collins:

Productive Paranoia is a concept developed in the book Great by Choice. The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive. Leaders who stave off decline and navigate turbulence assume that conditions can unexpectedly change, violently and fast. They obsessively ask, What if? By preparing ahead of time, building reserves, preserving a margin of safety, bounding risk, and honing their disciplines in good times and bad, they handle disruptions from a position of strength and flexibility. 

Basically, Productive Paranoia identifies how, when things go badly, we can stay in the game.

Consider this example from WWII with Winston Churchill.  

When Germany invaded France, Churchill had to strategize how to best help their allies. He needed to send squadrons of men to France to aid them. Even though Churchill entered the battle to help France, Churchill knew that strategically, he needed twenty-five squadrons of men to defend England should France fall and Germany would turn on them next. No matter what happened in France, Churchill was not willing to risk those twenty-five squadrons. As we know now that decision to keep twenty-five squadrons was strategic and spot-on.

 The primary question for Churchill wasn’t, “how risky should I be when entering into battle?” He probably asked himself that later, but his primary question was, “what do I need, in case this all goes south, to survive?” His strategy was one that considered what was needed to survive, and made actions involving risk accordingly.

In business, we need to understand what our twenty-five squadrons are – what it is we absolutely need to survive in the event of a crisis, and strategically protect that. That way, we can confidently move in the market when times are good, garnering a greater understanding what we can and can’t risk, and when times are bad, we have what we need to make it through.