3 Ways to Ensure Your Business Grows at the Right Pace (guest post)

Excerpted from Pacing for Growth: Why Intelligent Restraint Drives Long-term Success, by Alison Eyring (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017)

3 Ways to Ensure Your Business Grows at the Right Pace

It’s difficult to know what the “right” amount of restraint is for a business. Sometimes, leaders lead with too little restraint, sometimes with too much. What’s clear is that it’s really, really hard to get it just right.

One reason it’s so hard is because we are leading organizations, and an organization is a complex combination of many interconnected systems. An organization is like the human body, which is an amazing structure of 11 different, interconnected systems. Take the respiratory and circulatory systems, for example. The respiratory system brings air into the body and removes carbon dioxide. The circulatory system picks up oxygen in the lungs and works like a transportation system moving blood filled with oxygen throughout the body and then taking waste in the form of carbon dioxide back to the lungs to be exhaled. These two systems have to collaborate and have clear touchstones. One interfaces with the external environment and the other is an internal system. If the air quality is very poor, both suffer. If the body is sick, they are both impacted. If the body is very healthy and strong, they work better, together.

Endurance training systematically increases the capacity of our complex body to withstand the stress of training without breaking down. Just as bodies are impacted by the external environment and the health of the body itself, organizations also are impacted by external forces like government regulations, new technologies, competitor activity, and consumer preferences as well as the overall culture and health of the organization.

A company that anticipates external changes and effectively adapts is more likely to survive over the long term. This is why endurance training is an excellent parallel for how to increase a company’s growth capacity. Leaders who act like endurance athletes can systematically increase the capacity of their organization to execute their day-to-day business as they build capacity for the future— without damaging people and the business itself. Part 1 of this book builds off the endurance training metaphor to explore how leaders can push their capacity to the limit, but no further.

Principle One: Capacity Determines How Far and Fast You Can Go

Maximum capacity is the highest level of performance at which a system can perform without breaking down. It’s more than the sum of individual skills or attitudes, or the physical capability of a building or piece of equipment. When we understand the gaps between performance and capacity, and how maximum capacity in the future will be different from today, we can create a program to build capabilities that increase capacity. In turn, this process allows us to avoid “boom-splat” cycles of growth. When we break that painful pattern, we conserve human and organizational energy and resources to spend on building a base for sustained growth in the future.

Principle Two: The Right Capabilities Increase Capacity Capabilities are the power and practical ability to perform or execute a given task. To build capacity for growth, we need to master a few critical capabilities at the individual, team, and organizational level. Each business will have a small number of unique capabilities required by its strategy. In addition, our own and others’ research shows that there also are certain capabilities that predict growth. In this book, I focus on two capabilities that help to increase adaptability and speed: outside-in thinking and customer-aligned innovation. Building the right capabilities for growth allows leaders to increase capacity to execute the day-to-day business as it also builds capacity for the future.

Principle Three: The Right Pace Wins the Race

Pace is the speed at which we can perform for a given distance or period of time. As business leaders, we can push our organizations and people to go really fast for a short period of time, but if we go too fast for too long, we burn out our people and burn through our cash and other resources. In a race, we need to conserve some energy to maintain a fast pace and we need perseverance to sustain this pace even when it becomes uncomfortable. On the other hand, in training, we vary pace significantly because this triggers different development outcomes like strength or cardiovascular fitness. When you can train at “race pace” and can recognize “maximum effort,” you can pace yourself, your team, and the business to execute your strategies—and at the same time build new capabilities for the future.

Intelligent Restraint helps us manage the complexity that growth brings.

Where can you release more capacity for growth?

Alison Eyring is a global thought leader on building organizational capacity for growth. Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Organisation Solutions, Alison has 25 years of experience in large-scale organization design and change and executive development. She works closely with global leaders and their organizations, including Royal/Dutch Shell, BHP Billiton, Chubb Group of Companies, NEC, and Thomson Reuters. She also serves as an adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her book, Pacing for Growth, will be released in early 2017. 

Can Leaders Really Inspire People? (Guest Post)

This post was originally published on www.susanfowler.com on 2/2/2015.

Can Leaders Really Inspire People?

Are you as confounded by the idea of inspirational leadership as I am? After reading more than a dozen blogs, books, and articles on this topic, I am going to be highly presumptuous and propose a different approach to “inspirational leadership.” First, I ask you to consider typical recommendations for inspiring people culled from a variety of sources:

• Earn people’s trust
• Be enthusiastic
• Have and share a vision
• Know what excites you
• Clarify your values
• Have a unique point of view
• Focus on what others want
• Pull; don’t push
• Ask; don’t tell
• Have an uncommon composition of skill, experience, and time-proven personal perspective

I could keep going, but the items on this list have one or two things in common: they don’t tell you either how or why. How do you earn trust or be enthusiastic? Why does it matter if you clarify values or have a unique point of view? Why focus on what others want if they don’t really understand what they want? Writers pull together a commonsense list of nice-to-have leadership qualities, characteristics, behaviors, and best practices to describe inspirational leadership, but provide little, if any, understanding of how to do them or why they work.

What I find missing from the “10 Ways to Inspire People You Lead” attempts is an underlying framework of what we mean by “inspiring.” Dictionaries define “inspiring” or “inspirational” broadly as influencing, moving, animating, impelling, spurring, or motivating. All of this begs questions that don’t seem to be addressed in most attempts to describe inspirational leadership:

• What is it that people find stimulating and motivating?
• What is it that impels people to thrive?
• How do leaders tap into it?

There is a field of research that has asked these questions, conducting thousands of scientific studies to finally demonstrate why people are motivated and thrive. Self-Determination Theory has validated three fundamental and universal psychological needs shared by all human beings on the planet regardless of culture, generation, gender, or race. These needs are for Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence (ARC). When these psychological needs are satisfied, they lead to positive and sustainable energy, vitality, and well-being; when they are undermined, they result in less creative, innovative, productive, and mentally and physically healthy people.

When leaders understand the true nature of human motivation, they are better equipped to be inspirational. For example …

• Trust is a by-product of people’s needs for ARC being satisfied.
• A clearly articulated vision gives people the Autonomy to choose whether they want to share that vision.
• A noble purpose gives people a sense of contributing to the whole and serving the greater good—components of Relatedness.
• Both asking and telling are necessary depending on an individual’s development level—understanding how to be a situational leader who gives people the direction and support they need when they need it, builds Competence over time.

When individuals understand the true nature of their own motivation, they are better equipped to ask for what they really need. People can’t ask for what they don’t know they need. People interpret the longing they have into traditional and, unfortunately, less effective, “asks.” Thus, instead of asking for Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence, they ask for more money, power, and status as substitutes for what will really help them thrive.

My proposition is this: When leaders focus on helping people satisfy their three basic psychological needs, people will respond with, “That’s inspirational leadership.”

*****

Susan Fowler implores leaders to stop trying to motivate people. In her latest bestselling book, she explains WHY MOTIVATING PEOPLE DOESN’T WORK… AND WHAT DOES: The New Science of Leading, Engaging, and Energizing. She is the author of by-lined articles, peer-reviewed research, and six books, including the bestselling Self Leadership and the One Minute Manager with Ken Blanchard. Tens of thousands of people worldwide have learned from her ideas through training programs such as the Situational Self Leadership and Optimal Motivation product lines. For more resources, including a free Motivational Outlook Assessment with immediate results, visit www.susanfowler.com

The Leader's Path (Guest Post)

Someone once asked me how the heart is connected to a leader’s path? Honestly, I hadn’t given much thought to a leader’s path. But I’ve now begun to do so.

I’m familiar with some work that others have done on the question regarding a leader’s path. However, I’ve reached a different conclusion – or at least a different way to describe it. Here’s my summary at this point:

I’ve long believed the hardest part of leadership is self-leadership. If you and I can’t figure out how to do this well, leading others will be difficult at best, if not impossible.

So, I guess the leaders’ path is a journey that begins with self-leadership and then moves to lead teams and perhaps organizations. However, I don’t think “path” is the right metaphor. Path implies a linear journey. One in which a point is crossed as you move to another. This is not my picture of a leader’s progression.

The picture that comes to mind for me is a Spirograph. Most of you are too young to remember this fascinating toy. I had one as a child. It was a device that helped you create amazing images – like the one featured on this post. Here’s why this picture works for me to describe a leader’s journey…

It always comes back to the center.

The same is true for our leadership. It always comes back to our center – our heart. You can think of each of the points furthest from the center of the image as a chance to lead. Maybe, we’ll have the opportunity to expand our influence and create an even larger more elaborate picture. Who knows, maybe we’ll even be given more colors to use. But even in those circumstances, the picture returns to the same pattern – our leadership influence revolves around who we are at our core – our heart.

Leadership, at the highest level, has two components: your leadership skills and your leadership character. If your heart is not right, no one cares about your skills. Consider these five attributes of leadership character:

Hunger for Wisdom

Expect the Best

Accept Responsibility

Respond with Courage

Think Others First

The good news for all of us is that we can cultivate and nurture these behaviors in our daily lives.

In short, that’s my answer to how The Heart of Leadership impacts our “path.” Our leadership not only starts with our heart, it is at the center of all we do. If you and I can cultivate solid leadership character traits, we can literally change our heart and our leadership.

Where does the leader’s path begin and end? Everything you do as a leader is connected to your HEART.

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Mark Miller is the best-selling author of 6 books, an in-demand speaker and the Vice President of High-Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. His latest book, Leaders Made Here, describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from the front lines to the executive ranks and outlines a clear and replicable approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.