Recommended Reading: May 2021

As a part of our continued commitment to providing the best resources for leaders to better themselves and thrive, for our May Reading List, we recommend these two books: Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results by Josh Linkner, and The Extraordinary Power of Leader Humility: Thriving Organizations – Great Results by Marilyn Gist, PhD.

Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results - Josh Linkner

A surprisingly simple approach to help everyday people become everyday innovators.

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up.

Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs—small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

How did a convicted drug dealer launch and scale a massively successful fitness company? What core mindset drove LEGO to become the largest toy company in the world? How did a Pakistani couple challenge the global athletic shoe industry? What simple habits led Lady Gaga, Banksy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda to their remarkable success?

Big Little Breakthroughs isn’t just for propeller-head inventors, fancy-pants CEOs, or hoodie-donning tech billionaires. Rather, it’s a surpassingly simple system to help everyday people become everyday innovators.

The Extraordinary Power of Leader Humility: Thriving Organizations – Great Results - Marilyn Gist, PhD

“This inspiring book belongs on the desk of every CEO and politician. With eye-opening case studies and recommended behaviors in every chapter, it's an indispensable user guide for servant leaders.”
—Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager and coeditor of
Servant Leadership in Action

On the most fundamental level, leaders must bring divergent groups together and forge a consensus on a path forward. But what makes that possible? Humility—a deep regard for the dignity of others—is the key, says distinguished leadership educator Marilyn Gist.

Leadership is a relationship, and humility is the foundation for all healthy relationships. Leader humility can increase engagement and retention. It inspires and motivates. Gist offers a model of leader humility derived from three questions people ask of their leaders: Who are you? Where are we going? Do you see me? She explores each of these questions in depth, as well as the six key qualities of leader humility: a balanced ego, integrity, a compelling vision, ethical strategies, generous inclusion, and a developmental focus.

Much of this book is based on Gist's interviews with a dozen distinguished leaders of organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Costco, REI, Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, and others. And the foreword and a guest chapter are written by Alan Mulally, the legendary leader who brought Ford back from the brink of bankruptcy after the 2008 financial collapse and whose work is an exemplar of leader humility.

Your Team Can Make or Break your Business. Let’s Talk about Your Talent Strategy.

As senior leaders, we have all experienced the devastating consequences of one bad hire. Whether this person is outwardly toxic, or they just don’t understand the importance of the company’s culture, the results of a mishire can be devastating. In my position as a strategic coach who has worked with companies in a diverse set of industries with diverse teams, I’ve seen mishires in key senior roles cost companies hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars in lost revenue. Further than that, some of these mishires have even driven outstanding team members away from the company, adding insult to injury. Conversely, the right hire can be a force multiplier – giving your team energy, creatively solving problems, and exercising enthusiasm for what your business is aiming to achieve. Regardless of what type of business you’re in, your people, especially the people in key roles, really make a difference to your success.

So, we know how critical the hiring process is to get right, but we also know that this process can be extraordinarily challenging. In our coaching experience, when businesses don’t have a talent strategy, we’ve seen about a 50% success rate in hiring. This process is crucial, and yet most businesses don’t even know where to begin in creating an effective and reliable strategy to find and recruit the right talent. So, let’s talk about it.

There are four elements that should be present in a strong talent recruitment strategy:

1. Strong Cultural Foundation

2. Clear recruitment timeline and clear expectations for roles

3. Always be recruiting

4. Rigorous Hiring process

Let’s discuss more in-depth as to what these elements mean.

Strong Cultural Foundation

As senior leaders, we must be able to envision and clearly communicate to our organizations where our companies are going and the steadfast values to which we hold on to get there. What’s more, our teams need to know the values so that they know what behaviors are acceptable, and they need to buy into the long-term goal of the company. This is accomplished with our cultural foundation, and it is critical that everyone in our company buys into and lives out of it. Our cultural foundation includes: BHAG, core values, and core purpose.

BHAG

According to the creator Jim Collins, the BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and it is a compelling mission for the company – an inspiring, unifying focal point that stimulates and energizes the team to make vast progress. Getting to your BHAG is a long and arduous process, and it is therefore incredibly important that your team is aligned, otherwise you won’t get there. At PFD, our BHAG is to steward a movement that, no matter where you are born, anything is possible.

Core Values

 Your core values ask this question: what are the consistent, accepted behaviors of your team members? The key to core values to drive behavior, and they are utterly meaningless if CEO isn’t protecting and stewarding them. These core values drive everything that we do, and the communicate to the world – including our prospective talent, what we stand for. At PFD, our core values are grow to give, create client value, communicate proactively, invest in team and community, and be the confidant.

Core Purpose 

Your core purpose answers one very specific question: why does your company exist? It’s a very simple concept, but it is critical that everyone in your organization knows the answer to it. If everyone knows what your core purpose is, you are able to keep on track with your strategic vision, because it creates alignment toward your way of being. At PFD, our core purpose is to steward lives

Clear recruitment timeline and Clear expectations for roles

After you establish your strong cultural foundation, you will need to do some creative thinking and prep work to make sure you understand who you need, and what exactly they will need to do to be successful in their role. We have two tools that will be helpful for this: the Strategic Functional Accountability Chart, and the Job Scorecard. We will get into these tools in a moment, but let’s first talk about how to create an effective strategy that will spur on progress towards your BHAG.

At PFD, we recommend that you align your strategy to a 3-year timeline. This line of thinking comes from thought leader and serial entrepreneur Shannon Susko, who created the 3HAG methodology. The 3HAG is built on the concept of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), and it breaks down this massive goal into 3-year Highly Achievable Goals (3HAG). Three years tends to be this magic number for a timeline – it is just far enough away that you can create a real, tangible strategy towards your BHAG, but it is short enough that you can translate that short-term strategy into a strategic process. Your 3HAG will ignite immense team spirit and serves powerful tool for visionary companies to stimulate progress. From your 3HAG, you can create your 1-year Highly Achievable Goal (1HAG) (encapsulating your annual priorities), as well as your 90-Day Plans (your quarterly priorities) 

If you would like to learn more about 3HAG, as well as talent recruitment, make sure to check out our FREE virtual workshop on May 13th, 2021 from 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM MT. Shannon Susko will be joining us that day and we will be giving you personalized feedback on your strategy.

The FACe and SFACe

Now that we have the timeline with which you can align your overall strategy to, let’s talk about our current team and what they are accountable for. There is one tool created by Verne Harnish from Scaling Up that helps determine this:  the Function Accountability Chart (FACe). We recommend filling out the FACe in a strategy session with the senior team in the room.

Let’s break down the FACe, starting with defining what a function– the “F” is. A function is a key action someone in your organization must take so that your business can grow to meet your 3HAG. It isn’t their title, rather their actions that directly contribute to business health. This is why there is “treasury” and not “CFO” on the chart above. Next, accountability – the “A”- means that there is ONE person that is making sure that progress on that function happens, that progress is tracked. In this column, we are asked to write a name of a person on our team (someone who is able to take on the challenge of making progress in that role. The next two columns then ask us to identify the Key Performance Indicators and Outcomes that they need to Drive.

So, we have our strategy with our 3HAG, 1HAG, and 90-Day-Plan and we have clarity into our people and execution in our company today with our FACe. Here’s what we’re missing to combine the two: if we truly want to achieve our 3HAG, our company needs to look much different than it does today, in terms of our people and their functional roles. Think about it: you as a CEO likely have your name as accountable for several of these functions. With all that you are accountable for, do you truly have time to drive the growth in your 3HAG? You’re already so busy, and you’re just going to get busier. In the next three years, your goal is clear: get your name off any function that isn’t the head of company and fill those functions with extraordinary people that fit your culture to free up your time. See the Strategic Function Accountability Chart:

This tool highlights the people in the key roles in your organization, and who you need to fill what roles and when. For example, perhaps your organization today does little research and development or innovation today. However, you’ve gone through a strategy session with your team, and you have discovered there is a significant gap in the market in your industry for bold innovation, and a strong emphasis for R&D / Innovation is a key differentiator that you have identified as a part of your 3HAG – you know that you need to be moving towards R&D on a 3-Year Timeline, and you will want to fill in that functional role. Then, you will want to fill out the names of who is responsible for what today. Then, with your senior team, consulting your 3HAG, you will want to fill out who will be responsible for what in three years’ time, making sure that every senior member is simplifying their functional role as much as possible. You will want to then work backwards – going through your 1HAG and finally to your 90-Day Plan.

 The gaps in your 90-Day Plan reveal your most crucial hires – the role, by the end of the quarter you need filled.

The Job Scorecard

Further than knowing what roles need to be filled, we also need to determine what success looks like in those roles. For that, we recommend creating a Job Scorecard per the Topgrading Methodology. The Job Scorecard isn’t a vague job description, rather it is a detailed, accurate description of what a person’s job is and what their standards of success are, so that any prospective talent will understand exactly their role will be. At PFD, our job scorecards consist of four sections that drive standards of success: their competencies, functional competencies, metrics, and whether or not they exhibit core values.

When you create a Job Scorecard, you should list and accurately define the competencies that you are looking for that will make a person successful at their jobs. Because there are so many competencies, it is a rigorous standard – and we suggest you don’t hire a person that ranks poorly in even one of these competencies.

Always be recruiting

 The next critical element of having an effective talent and recruitment pipeline is to quite simply, always be recruiting. If you wait to try to recruit people until you need someone, you won’t have the time you need to go through a rigorous hiring process to properly vet that person. Instead, you need to always be on the lookout for creative and brilliant talent. Consider these four strategies to always have a pipeline of people:

1. Ask for employee referrals. Your best people will have talented friends, and if you ask, they might have some people in their network that will fill roles that you need. Critically, if you do receive a referral and job application, you absolutely need to make sure that you follow up. If you do not follow up on the referrals, you run the risk of creating a disconnect in trust with your employees, as you are telling them one thing is a priority, and you are acting as though that is not true.

2. Create community partnerships. With the right community partners, your network vastly opens up, and you might be surprised at the amount of talent that is out there. At PFD, we connect with professors who have similar values to us, and we ask them to refer their best students for internships.

3. Connect with talent recruitment agencies. Don’t overlook obvious solution to a talent problem, just because it is obvious. As senior leaders, our time and energy are our most precious resources, so if we can take some cash and outsource recruitment activities that are burning up these resources, do it! Find a recruiter who is right for your company (they believe in and live out of your cultural foundation), and let the professionals do their job.

4.   Be opportunistic. Sometimes, we can’t plan when we meet extraordinary talent – but we need to be prepared to recruit them when we do. Always have an understanding of your recruitment needs (per your SFACe) as well as a business card to give out. In the past, I have hired restaurant wait staff into operations roles, and that person excelled in that position.

Rigorous Hiring Process

The last crucial element to a talent recruitment strategy is having a rigorous hiring process. Again, at PFD, we recommend the Topgrading Methodology. 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%.

I recommend reading the book Topgrading by Brad and Geoff Smart for more information on this process.

With these four elements, you should vastly improve your talent and recruitment strategy – being able to hire the right people in the right roles at the right time.

If you would like to talk more in-depth about any of the concepts listed here, as well as your overall business strategy, we would be happy to chat with you at the FREE May 13th, 2021 Virtual Workshop with Shannon Susko.

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.

Recommended Reading: April 2021

As a part of our continued commitment to providing the best resources for leaders to better themselves and thrive, for our April Reading List, we recommend these three books: Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It by Richard Koch, Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential by Greg Crabtree, and Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr.

Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It - Richard Koch

Can We Map Success?

Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies which are shortcuts to success, and latch onto them. Events hand them opportunities they could not have anticipated. Often their peers with equal or greater talent fail while they succeed. It is too easy to attribute success to inherent, unstoppable genius.


Bestselling author and serial entrepreneur Richard Koch charts a map of success, identifying the nine key attitudes and strategies can propel anyone to new heights of accomplishment:

1. Self-belief

2. Olympian Expectations

3. Transforming Experiences

4. One Breakthrough Achievement

5. Make Your Own Trail

6. Find and Drive Your Personal Vehicle

7. Thrive on Setbacks

8. Acquire Unique Intuition

9. Distort Reality
   
   With this book, you can embark on a journey towards a new, unreasonably successful future.

Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential - Greg Crabtree

Simple Numbers can guide you to increased business profitability!

Take the mystery out of small business finance with this no-frills guide to understanding the numbers that will guide your business out of any financial black hole. Author Greg Crabtree, a successful accountant, small business advisor, and popular presenter, shows you how to use your firm's key financial indicators as a basis for smart business decisions as you grow your firm from startup to $5 million (and, more!) in annual revenue.

Jargon free, and presented in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step format, with plenty of real-world examples, Crabtree's down-to-earth discussion highlights the most common financial errors committed by small businesses, and how to avoid them. You'll be fascinated to learn:

• Why your numbers are lying to you (and why you are the cause!)

• How labor productivity is the key to profitability and simplifying human resource decisions

• Why the amount of tax you pay is your #1 key performance indicator

Take advantage of Crabtree's years of experience teaching clients how to build successful businesses by ''seeing beyond numbers'' with this step-by-step guide to increasing your businesses profitability.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - John Doerr

In this #1 New York Times Bestseller, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered.

Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

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?

Recommended Reading: March 2021

As a part of our continued commitment to providing the best resources for leaders to better themselves and thrive, for our March Reading List, we recommend these two books: Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) by Verne Harnish and 3HAG WAY: The Strategic Execution System that ensures your strategy is not a Wild-Ass-Guess! by Shannon Byrne Susko.

Our theme this month: getting back to the basics.

We know 2020 and the beginning of 2021 has been challenging. We firmly believe that the tools and wisdom found in these books will help us to not only get through the last months of the pandemic, but to also take advantage of the ample opportunities in front of us so we can effectively scale our companies again.

Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) - Verne Harnish

This book was the winner of the International Book Awards for General Business and the winner of the Readers' Favorite International Book Award for Non-Fiction Business

It’s been over a decade since Verne Harnish’s best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) is the first major revision of this business classic which details practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. This book is written so everyone ― from frontline employees to senior executives ― can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully ― many to $10 million, $100 million, and $1 billion and beyond – while enjoying the climb!

3HAG WAY: The Strategic Execution System that ensures your strategy is not a Wild-Ass-Guess! - Shannon Byrne Susko

Every company needs a 3HAG—a 3 Year Highly Achievable Goal! The 3HAG WAY is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures that you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. It breaks your strategy down into a clear and simple picture—so clear and simple that the whole team will be able to see where the company is going and where it will end up in three years’ time. This strategic clarity will align, engage, and empower your team to make confident decisions in order to achieve your 3HAG.

You’ll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals. The core purpose of this book is to have a significant impact on CEOs, leaders, and their companies and enable them to confidently realize their goals more quickly than they thought possible. And by achieving these goals they will positively impact their families and their communities.

Whether you run a team of four, forty or 40,000, the tools and framework in this book will help you articulate your company’s strategy in simple terms and create a Strategic Execution System that works. We’re going to take each step of the strategy and break it down for you so that you know exactly how to take these steps and why they’re critical to achieving your goal.

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.

Life Planning in Uncertainty

In my last post, I provided an overview of a Vision Board and the benefits in seeing your dreams on a board that you develop. Vision Boards provide personal motivation and make each day purpose-driven -  even the difficult days. In turbulent times, life dreaming and planning may feel empty. We might feel like planning our long-term future is futile when the next few weeks are unpredictable. However, in times like we are all currently facing, this sort of life planning is more important than ever. This life planning gives us a “North Star” to always be aligning to, to make progress on, and to give us hope, regardless of the immediate difficulties we are facing.

Below are a few helpful reminders that should guide you as you dive into life planning in times of uncertainty:

Facts over feelings. 

Whether it is a global pandemic or a personal hardship, we tend to focus on the immediate feelings and make decisions based on that immediacy. Unfortunately, those feelings tend to be anxiety and fear based. Life planning allows us to focus on facts, future, and hope - taking a step back from our current circumstances that are causing us to fear. When we take a step back, we can contextualize those circumstances so we can make wise decisions. 

Focus on short term wins.

In turbulent times, it can be difficult to feel like we are making any progress on our goals, when we are consistently dealing with little emergencies that arise. So, to make sure we are indeed moving forward, we need to focus on the “little wins” that will eventually add up to larger wins, and eventually into your goals being accomplished. During a particularly difficult time in my life, I had a friend tell me that if “day by day” was too big, focus on “minute by minute”. In times of stress and overwhelm, Vision Boards, or any type of life planning can feel too big. We encourage you not to turn away from those big dreams, but instead focus on what you can “win” at in the short-term. A great place to start is with self-care goals like eating properly, drinking enough water, daily journaling, reading positive content. Those short-term wins will propel your desire and ability to achieve more.

Build new life skills.

“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”

― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Life will always throw curve balls at us. It is how we handle those times and what we learn from it, that will determine our future. Learning how to deal with challenges will make the next challenge easier to overcome. Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is an excellent book that focuses on cultivation of tenacity. If you truly want to accomplish your big-picture life goals, you will need to learn new life skills. The person who has accomplished those goals (the person who you will be) is wiser, more experienced, more tenacious, and has more skills than you. It will take grit and tenacity through challenges to become that person, and you will need to persevere through your circumstances and challenges to get there.

With these three reminders in mind, I encourage you to take a step back from the present uncertainty of the world and either create or revisit your life plan. It is critical that you continue to engage with this plan to give yourself hope and something to work towards to effectively navigate this challenging time.

If you need some direction into your life planning, check out our blog post on vision boarding here.

Purpose at the Center of a Competitive Business Strategy

Model for the Triple Bottom Line

In this day and age, we are coming to understand that the social impact we have as businesses affect our ability to be functioning and profitable businesses. The idea of social responsibility when it comes to business is not new – in fact the idea of corporate social responsibility was created in 1953 by American Economist Howard Bowen, and thus was born the idea that businesses had a social contract with the society around them, and they therefore have an obligation to serve the needs of that society. In the 1980’s, R. Edward Freeman furthered this idea and created stakeholder theory, which modeled out the specific stakeholders and groups (e.g. employees, investors, government, community) to which companies should give regard when it comes to making decisions. In the 1990’s, another thought leader like John Elkington created the idea of the Triple Bottom Line that specifically looks at a business’ impact on people, profit and planet. This means that a company’s financial, social, and environmental performance is intentionally measured over time, to truly account for the full cost of doing business and to understand how we can improve our business functioning. Long story short: we’ve known about our companies’ responsibilities to the community and world around us for nearly seventy years, at the time this book is being written. We have made continual improvements and advancements to our understanding of these ideas of social responsibility, and it is becoming a necessary consideration to how we operate our companies.

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 Krippendorf

In my quest to understand how love and service can impact business strategy and operations, am presently inspired by new research coming out of Oxford in partnership with Mars, Incorporated on the Economics of Mutuality (EoM). I would argue EoM is a better, more advanced version of the stakeholder model.

A Simplified Model for the Economics of Mutuality - with purpose at the center

In Economics of Mutuality, a key question that is asked is, “what is the right amount of profit for a business to make?”, and it contends that maximum profits are not the “right amount of profits. This aligns with the stakeholder model, and it goes one step further. According to Dr. Jay Jakub, the Senior Client Advisor, Chief Advocacy Officer at EoM, Incorporated and pioneer in research regarding the economics of mutuality, the purpose of business is to create profitable solutions for the problems of people and the planet. In my understanding, this model differs from the stakeholder model in one key aspect: instead of viewing various stakeholders in relation to the firm, the company views itself as one of the many stakeholders.

Essentially, in this model it is not the business that is central, rather, the larger, societal purpose that the business hopes to advance is central.

This means that the business itself exists to do societal good, and it is a core part of the strategy and day-to-day operations, rather than Corporate Social Responsibility being one of the considerations a business makes in its overall strategy. In this movement, many stakeholder pain-points and motivations are evaluated, and non-fiscal performance metrics are emphasized to ensure that the social good that is being done is measurable. This approach is remarkable because it works. There have been several case studies that have come out of the EoM that have shown that regardless of the market or industry, companies have found success investing in the relationships of employees and the community at large, and this yielded greater financial returns for the business, as well as impressive results across human and social capital metrics. This human-centric approach worked for the distribution of Wrigley products in East Africa, where a new business model was developed to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the region, meet unique market conditions, and develop trust in the community. This approach also worked in Panama, where a construction company called Conservatorio was able to engage in projects of urban revitalization without a normal gentrification process, instead helping low-income residents take advantage of the revitalization process while keeping cultural centers intact. This approach also worked for SAP, the ERP system company, where an integrated strategy that focused on economic, social, and ecological consequences of their actions within a larger ecosystem contributed to a better financial performance and more trust in senior leadership.

As it turns out, developing meaningful relationships and being a positive force for good in the lives of your employees and your community is a viable business strategy – regardless of the industry we are in or the market we have.

When we take the time to truly humble ourselves, to understand how our actions impact the broader society in which we operate, and to actively choose to love and serve people around us, people will notice, and they will want to see us succeed.