teams

The Power of Story to Inspire Employees

February 10, 2021 by Dustin

I never met my grandfather on my father’s side. At least not that I remember. He and grandma were killed by a drunk driver when I was one year old. I have no memories of them other than those created by pictures I see and stories I hear.

Last week, when mom had a fuzzy recollection that grandad had earned a patent, a couple of us dug in to find it. Sure enough there it was. In 1940, he filed and then sold a patent for a unique new fast opening and closing door and compartment on the sides of delivery trucks. Grandpa worked a milk route back in the days before milk tanker trucks when the job called for loading heavy containers of milk into the truck. Here he was trying to make his job easier and trying to solve a practical problem.

For me, the story spoke to where my dad got his own sense that he, too, could solve any practical problem as well as his own ability to work with his hands. Those were skills my father had somehow passed on to his own five children and I had never quite understood how. I had never quite understood where our universal assumption that we can solve anything had come from, or where our naïve matter-of-fact expectation that we can fix anything our hands can touch came from.

Now at just three years old, my firstborn already knows, “Daddy can fix it!” Even my one year old brings me broken toys exclaiming, “This! This!” The question on my mind isn’t how to fix the broken thing, but how to keep passing through example the tradition that they, too, can achieve whatever they set their mind to because it will never occur to them they can’t.

We All Want to Leave a Legacy

It’s not just me with my kids. Your employees care about their impact and the legacy they leave behind. (Even as I write that, I can hear somebody choke on their coffee… “My employees??” Yep, even them.)

Your employees want to know that they’re part of something bigger. They want to see that they are fulfilling a bigger purpose. Yes, they want to collect a paycheck. But they also want the opportunity to grow and use their skills, and they want to know that the role they play has an impact on their company and on the world around them.

If you doubt this, write up a little one or two question “pulse survey” and ask them things like:

It is important to me that I understand how my work impacts our end customers.
My co-workers and my company make me feel like I am part of something bigger than myself.

Ask for a rating on a scale of 1 to 5 from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” and see what happens.

As social creatures, we want to know that what we do matters and we get a little twitchy when we doubt that it does.

Find and Tell Your Stories

Chances are you formed at least one or two incredibly strong, vivid images in your mind from the story I told in the opener above. If you’ve read this far, you know I care about family and helping people succeed, and you have an incredibly strong story to know I’m telling the truth.

Now it’s your turn. I used a personal story. Your challenge is to find business stories.

You have your mission. (Right? You do, right?) What stories do you have about fulfilling your mission? I’m not even talking about big stories. I’m talking about any stories, preferably from your customers, about fulfilling your mission.

Find and tell stories about fulfilling your mission, and do it often. Tell it to your employees. Tell it to your customers and people who you want to be your customers.

Unlike the empty-sounding promises of most marketing, stories are real. Stories are powerful because they help us see, feel, and virtually experience a positive outcome without going through it ourselves.

Another time, we’ll talk about how to find those stories.

The One Thing You’re Doing That Alienates Your Team

February 8, 2021 by Dustin

I was Dan and Laura’s new manager and I knew perfectly well what they didn’t. I knew that their first assignment with me was really risky. It was a project for which there was no guaranteed outcome. There was, in fact, a nearly 100% chance I would have to order considerable re-work, and a better than 50% chance their project would be canceled and they would be transferred to another project. None of this would be due to any fault of theirs. This was simply how this type of project ran: It was a proactive project to position the business for an opportunity that might never materialize, and so it might be changed or ended suddenly.

Here was my challenge…

Dan and Laura were very vocal that they were fed up and frustrated with Bill, their previous manager. They made no bones about the fact that they considered Bill to be “random” bordering on “thoughtless.” I believe the word “capricious” even came up, along with a complaint that “management always fails to plan.” Dan and Laura were fed up because Bill had canceled what they were working on and it seemed to them like the cancellation was random and seemingly without reason.

So here I was, with a team clearly alienated by their previous manager who had “randomly” canceled their work. And there was easily a better than 50% chance that I would have to either radically change or cancel their first project with me, too, risking alienating them even further.

The fact of the matter is managers and workers often have opposing interests at risk of alienating each other. It’s a matter of how you handle it.

Managers and Workers Work Toward Opposite Interests

Here’s the challenge with this situation and many like it. Very, very often – and often without realizing it – managers and employees are working toward opposite or at least very different interests. This can cause very interesting perceptions of each by the other.

For example, the higher you go in management (or as an owner) the less your day is about your own tasks and the more it is about decision making with imperfect information, managing risk, and reducing uncertainty. This often means making decisions “for now,” and changing your mind later when more information presents itself.

That sort of “mind changing” is the type of thing that can show up to workers as “random” and as a symptom of “lack of planning.” You know that’s not true, and you know there’s often no such thing as “certainty.” But quite generally, a worker working to deliver against goals perceives those goals and plans as both real and stable. And who can blame them: We generally talk about plans and goals not only as though they are real, but as things for which our workers are accountable.

As a result, the natural conflict is some managers think workers are inflexible or unreasonable, and some workers think managers are flakey, random, or lack planning skills. It’s the classic “in-group / out-group” conflict that has existed between managers and workers since….forever.

How to Manage Uncertainty and Not Alienate Your Team

With Dan and Laura, we managed this situation by sitting together and doing basic planning together. The truth was the exact work to be done wasn’t yet planned and there were lots of things to decide about the work. By talking openly and honestly about the situation and determining what work to invest in together, we achieved a couple of super important things.

It let us share the uncertainty and ambiguity.
Most folks can actually handle a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty, but only if they know about it, and preferably if they know about it in advance. By talking about how uncertain the project was upfront, Laura, Dan, and I were all on the same page going in as to what might happen with the project and it helped us choose our work better. Simply seeing and sharing in the uncertainty can really help.
It let Dan and Laura buy-in and take ownership.
By having a hand in planning, Dan and Laura felt bought in. There was actually a pretty narrow band of outcomes to choose from in this case. But still, when you have a chance to participate, you naturally feel more bought in.

The simple act of planning work together, sharing in the ambiguity, and sharing buy-in goes amazingly far in uniting the teams together.

So What Happened?

Sure enough, the project did get canceled. But because we had planned together and scoped out a suitable initial phase and knew it was an initial phase, any disappointment was just that – just a little disappointment. It wasn’t a judgment about management in general, or any person (ahem… me!), or anyone or anything else.

People just want some form of certainty, even if it’s certainty manufactured from solid, respectful communication.

The Five Fastest Ways to Turn Around Any Business

November 27, 2020 by Dustin

In my work with small to medium businesses over the years, my work has been couched in terms of helping teams maximize performance, helping them excel, being the best they can be, and so on. It’s a positive message that resonates well: everybody likes to see themselves successful.

However, to some degree stated or unstated, the feeling across the leadership team is much more pointed. It’s the bottom of the 7th inning. The game definitely isn’t over but we’re worn out from pitching. We’re already a couple runs down, and we’re not sure what to throw next. If we don’t get this game figured out – and soon – we’re going to lose.

We can’t lose.

The term “turnaround” doesn’t always fit because my clients aren’t usually on their last legs, deep in debt, and struggling to breathe. “Pivot” is a better word. We’re not looking to pivot the entire business model, but we definitely need to have a watershed moment in the business. We have to discover whatever it is that’s “wrong” and “make it right” so that it’s easier to make a buck and once again more fun to get out of the bed in the morning.

Here are the five fastest, most impactful ways I get my clients over that line.

Ask the Customers

You’ve heard the old saying, “In real estate, it’s location, location, location.” But that’s only partly true. It’s really “price, price, price.” It doesn’t matter what you think the price should be. It only matters what the market things the price should be.

Also, it seldom matters what you think your customers need, should pay, or will want. It only matters what you think. Almost none of the businesses I work with have an established channel / forum / mechanism / pick-your-word for a way to communicate with their customers to discover their most critical needs and how to solve them.

I focus an entire module of effort on this question as it is so critical to flipping the script from a relationship where you’re chasing elusive customers to creating a space where clients trust you, seek you out, and ask more of you.

Kill the Demons

“Business isn’t personal.” Lies, and more damn lies. It’s very personal, and it’s a mental game. How are you at it as a mental game? Be honest for a moment about your internal (or external… you know who you are…) monologue?

If I were to challenge you to count your positive vs. negative thoughts, statement, and actions, do you think your balance would be 80% positive to no more than 20% negative? I’ll be the first to admit that’s really hard to maintain! But I ask that goal not because I’m some Pollyannish tree hugger, but because our thoughts tie out to actual brain chemistry that impact critical thinking, creativity, relationship management and much more that is so critical in business.

So, how do we get there? I cover specific techniques in other articles and in my work, but for the moment…

Focus. Really Focus

Pop quiz. What is your method for cleaning out a milk jug? I mean getting it really super duper extra clean and free of soap?

Add a little soap, hot water, swish and dump? Yeah, that’s not going to work. You can’t get all the soap out through multiple rinses. Go try – I’ll wait.

The only way to truly get all the soap out is to keep adding water until the jug overflows and flushes every last bit of soap out.

Are you picturing this milk jug? The water is focus and positive thoughts. This milk jug is your brain on focus and positive thoughts. Any questions? (Ok, I’m no Nancy Reagan but hopefully you got the 1980s reference…)

It is so critical that you have a clear, crystalized focus in front of you at all times so that you can “fill yourself back up” with that whenever challenges do arise.

Kick it Up a Notch

So what does that look like? You need to kick it up a notch. I mean WAY up.

The clients I work with rarely believe when we begin how serious I am about how specific we’re going to get.

I want to see a really specific picture of what you’re building. Some people call that a “vision.” But I’m not interested in “vision statements.” I’m interested in precisely what are you building, what phase are you in, how much are you going to sell, to whom, etc. Really specific.

I’m also interested in your execution plan. What are you going to do this week? Next week? This month?

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of method I use to make it easy to break a business down into bite-sized 1-week and 2-week action plans that doesn’t fit well in an article like this. But if you can create a task list like that for yourself, you will be amazed at just how much more “doable” your business feels.

Find an Outside Partner

Having a partner is like striking gold. The diversity of thought and experience you gain is incredible.

This can be a professional like an attorney, an accountant / CPA, or a business consultant like me. It can also be an experienced and trusted business owner or leader in a non-competitive space who may have experience to lend.

The key to success here is to have a partner who, through their insight is able to lift you up and help you along through the challenging times. It also provides a sense of accountability to meet, review, and take action when things aren’t going well.

Wrapping Up

I can – and often do! – go on about how to help teams rapidly turn around their performance and business ventures as there are lots of options. However, these are truly some of the five most common that I lean on with my clients.

Let me know what you found valuable about these tips.