One of my best friends from college, Scot, used to talk about how he wished he had a soundtrack for his life that would play as he meandered through. Before digital music, that was a bit of an impossibility, but now, you could almost cobble together some version of that if you liked…
We are working with a company on the back end of cleaning up an incredible mess. Unknown to them, two key employees seem to have “quiet quit” many months before they actually left. Like a college student going through the motions for an entire semester, fooling everyone but themselves, the report card at the end of the term was a sobering reality to those who didn’t know…
I met with a leader of a large company before their annual offsite. We were scripting the event, and I wanted to help him create an introductory statement of where he felt they were and how he thought they were doing. He struggled mightily to say much good…
Sometimes when we work with a senior leader with a struggling area of their business, they are forced to make a leadership change. They level all their efforts on getting a proper replacement. But rather than hastily making the new hire, we often ask them to embody the role of the exiting leader for a season as a first step…
It might not surprise you that some companies we talk to simply want a strategic plan. They feel like that is the ultimate solution to all their problems. We couldn’t disagree more. That, in a vacuum, will not solve your problems. In our extensive experience and research, if you don’t walk through the essential steps necessary to get to this kind of strategic plan, the plan won’t be…
As we prayed through how we are to offer proper stewardship over all these processes, exercises, and tools that lead organizations down a transformation journey, we were left with a very clear conclusion, we are supposed to make it available to everyone.
We defined 3 different paths that lead to the same destination:
This resolve gets tested sometimes.
My friend Jeff played piano with Tim McGraw for almost two decades. When he started to look into recording on his own, he met with some industry types to talk about getting singed to a record deal. They told him they had to figure out his potential commercial viability by calculating the strength of his following as an artist.
Believe it or not Facebook follows, Twitter traffic, number of likes, fan emails to his artist website, etc. all had a numerical value. But the thing that was worth the most… many, many order of magnitude beyond all the rest… was hand written (snail mail) letters from fans.
Someone taking the time to bypass all the convenience and impersonality of the much easier technological methods of communication, reflected a depth of feeling and interest that dwarfed the others.
I stopped at a convenience store just down the street from the golf course where I would be speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon. I was a little behind schedule, but needed to stop for some aspirin due to a piercing headache. I never expected I would find a line six people deep at this time of day.
I’ve been working on being more patient with some success, but given the circumstances there was a good chance I wasn’t going to pass this test. There was a young girl checking people out and another employee standing beside her watching and giving her instructions.
Speech helped me gain confidence, taught me to better frame up my thoughts, and gave me a place to belong. As you might imagine, as a thick-tongued boy lacking confidence, they kept chiding me to speak louder and enunciate. It wasn’t until I felt like I was almost screaming and articulating every syllable as an individual word, that they felt like I was actually speaking in an appropriate manner. Sometimes when you are not used to speaking up or having anyone care about what you have to say, you have to exaggerate in the other direction. You have to do what feels like shouting, just to be heard.
I call that “fighting your tendency.” It is a concept that seems to show up in conversations all the time. It is the simple idea that you have go against the grain of your default behavior to get decidedly different results.
We’ve observed something in the teams we work with. Once they get really clear on their desired culture (Values, Purpose and Vision), the herd starts to thin itself. The inconsistency with the now clearly defined culture makes it difficult to remain on the team. Also, the rest of the team buying into and operating under the powerfully embodied culture won’t allow others who don’t fit, to remain.
