Schooley Mitchell - The Pulse - If You Don't Make Waves

Don’t be a wimp. Instead of taking polls to see what people think, lead from the front. Hold people accountable for their actual results achieved, not just their good intentions.

A “wimp” is defined in the dictionary as someone who is weak, feeble or ineffective. Obviously, this is not something to aspire to, and yet in today’s business climate of political correctness, many business leaders are afraid to speak or act bluntly for fear of offending others.

The greatest leaders in history were never afraid to speak out. History lauds gutsy leaders who set audacious goals and then moved heaven and earth to achieve them.

To do likewise:

Discriminate openly – give your best to your highest achievers.
Take some risks – and forget trying to emulate someone else’s “best practices”.
Hold your people accountable for their results – starting with yourself.
Keep everyone out of the gray areas – so they don’t have to guess what you’re thinking.

2. Forget Entitlements - Build a Vibrant Meritocracy

Entitlements are the result of PC thinking. Forget that. Instead, build a meritocracy where everyone earns what they get. This is the best way to leverage your strengths and weed out weaknesses. If you don’t do this, your best people will leave.

If you tolerate your poor performers, you waste your organization’s resources. Your top performers will first take note of this, then stagnate and ultimately leave to go somewhere where exceptional performance is lauded and sought after. You can’t strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

The funny thing is people usually don’t set out to treat everyone the same. This thinking just creeps in gradually over time until it reaches a disastrous stage. As little lapses occur, people gradually become desensitized and the problems just keep snowballing. Eventually, they reach a stage where a major commitment of financial and human resources is required to get everything back on track.

To avoid this:

Set the performance bar high – make certain everyone knows what is expected of them.
Look at your own role as being that of a thermostat rather than a thermometer.
Be open about your creation of a meritocracy.
Be prepared to fire those who are stuck in their entitlement thinking.
Pay your top people exceptionally well.
Don't give out across-the-board bonuses or raises each year.

The idea here is to use these rewards to encourage even greater performance in the future. That requires everyone to have a fair idea what’s going on rather than waiting until the end of the period to be told how they’re doing.

3. Don't Confuse the Scoreboard for The Game

Always dig beneath the surface and find out how people are producing the results they clock up. This will show what you can expect in the future. If you don’t do this, you may find corners are being cut in the name of expediency, which is not good.

Accounting scandals and such result from people deluding themselves into thinking the ends justify any means required, whether ethical or not. It’s important that you know your organization’s people are getting results in a sustainable way. This helps avoid burnout and the possibility something unethical has been done.

A mind-set of doing “whatever it takes to win” can be dangerous. Instead, you want your organization to win by:

Setting clear and ambitious goals.
Providing your people with the training they will require.
Giving regular feedback about progress.
Leading from the trenches of your business.
Treating people like assets rather than expenses.
Holding your people accountable for their results.
Building a strong team who can function without you.

4. Give Honest Feedback - Even if it Ticks People Off

Challenge conventional thinking and force every dogma you believe to prove itself in practice. Refuse to do something just because you think everyone else is doing it. If you fall prey to group-think and embrace the myths of conventional thinking, problems lie ahead. Do your own thinking rather than blindly accepting the general business myths. In particular, there are three conventional business wisdom beliefs you should avoid:

Business Myth #1 - The most effective CEOs are charismatic and commanding larger-than-life figures.

Business Myth #2 - Bigger is better – meaning the higher our sales revenues, the more successful we’ve become as an organization.

Business Myth #3 - Everyone who gets appointed to a team will turn out to want what’s best for the team.

6. Forget Diversity - Go for Results

Politically correct organizations pursue diversity with a passion. That’s crazy. Replace diversity with a passionate quest for results. Nothing else matters. Many corporations run their own versions of “affirmative action” programs under which people get promoted or rewarded on the basis of gender, ethnicity or simply long service rather than solely on the merits of their accomplishments. This is crazy. It demeans the recipient and creates an organizational tolerance for shoddy work.

Affirmative action is the classic case of unintended consequences coming to the fore. When you reward people on the basis of who they are rather than the quality of their results, you dilute the possibility of a meritocracy developing in your own organization. Even though your original intentions may have been good, the ultimate results of doing this turn out to be bad as poor performance gets ignored. Affirmative action ends up destroying the fairness it was originally intended to create.

Nepotism is another form of affirmative action. It allows people to get something on the basis of who they are rather than what they’ve accomplished. There is nothing at all wrong with having family members working in a family-owned business as long as those family members are held to the same standards of performance, work ethic, values and expectations of results as everyone else. When there is one standard by which the family members are evaluated and another by which everyone else is evaluated, then there are serious problems.

7. Don't Play to Win - Play to Dominate Your Market

Don’t just try and get your fair share of the market. Get more. Stack the odds in your favor by maintaining a killer instinct so you can outwork, outsmart and out-think your competition.

In business, it’s impossible to compromise your way to greatness. You have to earn it by outperforming everyone else. You also have to stand for something definitive and make a conscious decision to excel in your area of specialization rather than trying to be good at anything and everything. In short, market domination goes to those who refuse to compromise and who perform exceptionally well.

You can’t change someone’s behavior by holding your breath and hoping for the best. Be direct. When people go off-track, let them know of the consequences without any ambiguity.

To change people’s behaviors, you have to change their consequences for their current actions. To take a simple example, if people come late to work and nothing happens as a result, they get the message it’s alright to be late. To change that, you need to create some serious consequences for being late, and apply them. Perhaps employees could lose one hour’s pay if they are more than five minutes late to work, or whatever is appropriate. It isn’t until the consequences of an action are changed that behavior will change.

Your challenge as a leader is to earn your people’s respect first and foremost. If you can also become popular, that’s fine, but it doesn’t change the fact your main job is to make people better.

You simply can’t strengthen the weak in your organization by diluting the effectiveness of your best performers. It can’t be done, and even worse, it’s unimportant. Your central challenge as a business leader is to make your people better and if that can’t be done, to bring in new people who will grow and improve. You need to be intolerant of poor performance. To be direct, this means:

You can and should use your business to support the causes and movements which reflect your values. You need to lead by example and make the world a better place.

Do all you can to please your customers but keep in mind sometimes it is necessary to fire some of them. If a customer is more trouble than their business is worth, encourage them to take their business elsewhere. You don’t have to be rude or disrespectful in the way this is handled, just direct and honest.

“Building a meritocracy is laborious while burdened with today’s hypertolerance, ‘it’s not my fault’ losers’ limps, and undisciplined workforce. But my guess is that you already work long and hard, that you care deeply about your business, and that you are up to the task. And if you’re going to put forth a sincere effort each day to build a better life for your employees, your family and yourself, you deserve to gain a greater return on your blood, sweat, and tears. But that means you’ll have to make some waves while you’re at work, because personal and corporate greatness will not just happen by doing more of what you’ve always done. In fact, the weakening effects of political correctness on culture, your employee’s work ethic, and your own mind-set can seduce you into doing the easy, cheap, popular, or convenient thing, rather than what’s right – and often difficult. In the absence of accountability, political correctness creates a culture of entitlement that breeds mass mediocrity and saps passion from your best employees. You can still win – but you’re going to have to toughen up, make some waves, and lead it.”