A Plan to Master 2019: Work, Self and Life
“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now”. - Alan Lakein, Author of How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life
As you stand in the last couple of weeks of 2018, it’s the perfect time to create your Master Plan for 2019. Yes, I know how busy this time of year can be but it’s really important to assess and reflect on the goals you set for this year, your accomplishments and projects in progress; and to make some choices about where to put your focus in the year ahead – for your work, self and life.
What do you want to achieve?
What experiences would you like to have?
What legacy do you want to leave, and how can you make progress towards it?
How can you make this year effective and memorable within the life you want to live?
You’ll find a copy of Annual Review and Master Plan documents here, to help you to get clear on how much of your energy you want to dedicate to each area of your life. (Chapter 1 of my book – Living an Amazing Life - is a great refresher on this).
And then complete on your goals for the 1st Quarter.
Good luck – and let me know if you need any help.
The Challenge
- Dedicate some time to reflect and create your Master Plan, and your 1st Quarter plan – to do this properly
- Connect with a coach, advisor or mentor if you need help
- Review your plans with people you care about in business and life, to make sure your thinking and plans align with theirs.
Here to Help
For more than 20 years people have asked me if I want to build a practice and replicate myself by having other coaches working with me. Up to about four years ago, my answer was ‘no’ because I had a hard time finding other great coaches to add to my team.
Then, an executive with a company I worked with - a phenomenal leader who had mastered the Rockefeller Habits – told me he wanted to make a career change and become a coach. He actually did it and, after his training, approached me about doing some work. I confess I was reluctant, but we tried it out. That was four years ago, and he’s been with me, ever since.
Dean Ritchey does amazing work with my clients on strategic planning, executive education and facilitating sensitive meetings. Feedback from clients has been consistently spectacular and I’m thrilled to have him on the team.
Because he did so well, I changed my mind about expanding my team, and other advisors have since joined me at Lawrence & Co. So, I’m happy to update you on the team of coaches at Lawrence and Company:
- Dean Ritchey Executive education and coaching, strategic planning, team building, leadership development
- Timothy Schokking Executive education and coaching, strategic planning, team building, innovation, leadership development
- Kristin Hazzard Executive education and coaching, team building, leadership development
In addition to this strong team of coaches available to you, we have built a great network of other experts, around the world – in Australia, the Middle East, Europe, North and South America.
So, as we go into a new year, if you’re looking for someone to help you with strategic planning for your company - including creating your Master and Quarterly plans, meeting facilitation, strategic planning, and leadership development and education - or personal planning and your own growth, using Your Oxygen Mask First as a framework, please let us know if we can be of service.
Oxygen Masks from Ireland to Australia
"All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives." - Steven Spielberg
I recently was invited to speak about Your Oxygen Mask First at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and was excited, honoured and deeply humbled to visit a campus so rich in history and deep traditions. It was an incredible experience to meet and speak to their senior leaders and other executives from the area. I was particularly struck, as I spoke with COO Geraldine Ruane, of their innovative programs and drive to get better and better and to add more value - not to rest on the laurels of the past.
This opportunity was one of many invitations I’ve received – in the Middle East, India, the UK and US - to speak about the 17 habits in my book, and it’s been very interesting to review the results of the Self-Assessment (to determine the habit they most need to master, in that moment) completed by participants around the world.
“The only thing that is constant is change.” ― Heraclitus
When we polled the audience about their #1 habit, the results were quite evenly distributed, across all the habits. It’s a reminder that we all have different things going on in our worlds, at different times - and even though we may have mastered one habit, that helps to address an issue in one particular time, we often need to master different ones, to help us handle different circumstances, at other times.
And that’s why I wrote the book – to read and re-visit, as a toolkit to deal with whatever life brings you, in any given moment. If you’d like to complete – or re-do - the Self-Assessment click here.
upcoming speaking engagements:
Australia
The Growth Faculty - Building High Performance Teams, with me, Patrick Lencioni (Author, Founder of The Table Group) and Whitney Johnsen (Innovation and Disruption Theorist, Author, Coach).
- March 13, 2019 - Sydney in The Event Centre, The Star, Sydney
- March 15, 2019 - Melbourne Convention Centre, Melbourne
Canada
Gravitas Impact Premium Leadership Event with Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business
November 16-18, 2018 - Marriott Pinnacle Downtown Hotel, Vancouver, BC
Acetech Summit, BC's best tech leadership conference
- April 3 to 5, 2019 - Whistler, BC
Speak Volumes
If you know of any company or industry event that would appreciate an energetic, practical and straight-talking presentation, let me know. We may even have a few laughs…
Click here to find out more.
Bottom Line Thinking
It’s stimulating to talk about strategy, the possibility of dominating a market, or adding value for your customers.
It’s exciting to explore opportunities and improvements to existing parts of your business, and very rewarding to develop new programs and innovations that you believe will enhance the business.
The problem is that most people evaluate ideas, opportunities and strategies without confirming and fully understanding the bottom line (net income or EBITDA) impact of those decisions.
"The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his eye on the horizon." - Warren Bennis, Founding Chairman, The Leadership Institute at USC
In meeting after meeting, and conversation after conversation, I’ve seen many leaders excited about ideas they genuinely believe - in their heart of hearts - are going to be successful, who then see no improvement after three, six, or eighteen months.
That’s because they didn’t start with bottom line thinking.
As simple and obvious as it sounds, most people aren’t in the habit of doing this. We just can’t make the right decisions about the best places to allocate our capital, and human capital, to make our businesses grow and prosper.
Example: Minimum Impact
I was in a strategic planning meeting, recently, setting annual priorities for a company, and a couple of ideas sounded absolutely phenomenal until I took people through an exercise to calculate the actual impact on the bottom line. One of the ideas had a bottom line impact of $100,000. That’s not insignificant, but for a company doing $250M a year in revenue, it doesn’t deserve thinking about it for more than a couple of hours. To make the list of the company’s annual priorities, the idea should have an impact of at least $1 to $2M to be even considered.
When you apply this commercial thinking to strategic ideas and opportunities, it provides a better filter to be able to prioritize – and ensures that they have really been thought all the way through. People must become conditioned to always think about not what they think is good, but to justify the resources it takes to bring them to life and truly have an impact on the company.
Example: What's the true cost?
A consultant was hired to revamp a company’s organizational structure. While it looked good and made sense, no one had run the mathematics, and when they implemented the structure, they realized they’d added 3% to their SG&A costs. For those of you who aren’t accountants, it means that if the company was making a 10% profit, they’d instantly knocked it down to 7% - all because no one had calculated the cost of this “brilliant” new structure.
It’s not that you can run perfect math on every decision – and some decisions don’t increase profits or decrease costs – sometimes they just reduce risks, or impact something intangible. The most important thing is to try and run some real numbers to understand the real impact rather than generally thinking this is a good idea.
Example: Will it increase sales?
You want to implement a new software system - like Salesforce - to help manage leads. Many executives get excited about these software platforms (which can have tremendous potential) so they spend a lot of money, over-build and over-complicate the system, without showing how they can increase sales. They might, but they could also be more useful as an admin or reporting tool – and not worth the expense - unless you run bottom-line thinking, first.
When a new idea, opportunity or investment arises, it’s important it be presented by the leader of that part of the business and a senior person on the finance team. If they are both excited and convinced about the numbers and the impact on the business, then you likely have a fairly good case, ready to evaluate against other opportunities.
While you can’t always predict everything, you do need that discipline and rigour in your thinking.
It’s not that every decision has to impact the bottom line – for example, you may choose to improve your culture to attract amazing talent - but, at a minimum, you need to think about it and analyze it from that point of view.
Practice Like a Pro to Build Strong Team Skills
"Practice puts brains in your muscles." - Sam Snead, professional golfer
One of the people I have the great fortune to work with is Andrew Limouris, CEOs of Medix, a leading provider of workforce solutions for clients and candidates across the Healthcare, Scientific and IT industries. Medix has been featured on such prestigious lists as Inc. magazine's "Inc. 5000 Honor Roll," Inavero's "Best of Staffing" Talent Award, and Best and Brightest Companies to Work for in the US. Last year, Andrew was honored as a Midwest Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of The Year® in Technology and Talent Services.
Andrew also wrote Won with Purpose: Positively Impacting Lives On and Off the Field, about cultivating a deeper purpose in business, to bring success to a company and to every person on every team. And he does coach a football team.
I’d heard about this amazing football team of 14- and 15-year-old boys but had never seen them in person until early September, at an executive retreat, when we participated in their team practice. And I mean full-on participated!
At one point in the practice, in a blocking drill, I was up against a 14-year old kid in full gear. It was my job to stop him, holding only a big pad - wearing no other gear. I took a helmet to the bridge of my nose and to the back of my head, and had an absolute riot, with the sore muscles and bruises to prove it.
I was struck by how, for young kids, how well organized and dynamic the practice was: the discipline, the calling down of the drills – 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…switch! - to lining up their helmets when coach called a water break. Not normal teen boy behaviour.
They rotated through six different stations, drill after drill. Of the many sports practices I’ve seen, over the years, I have never seen one this organized or effective. The coaches were involved, teaching and running the drills with the boys, running the practice with the incredible intensity and focus you’d expect on a pro team. Unbelievable!
And it really made me think that if we all practiced with that kind of focus and intensity, how could we not do incredibly well?
"An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching". - Mahatma Gandhi
Practice, perfect
If in your businesses, a weekly meeting included training at this intensity - with ‘coaches’, showing your team the way to higher level of achievement - you’d likely build strong team skills and have great performances from your people.
Most companies are so busy doing the job that they lose that rigour to train. They don’t do enough practice and rehearsal, in order to do the job that much better.
Sales meetings should have some component of sales training on a regular basis – not just the reading of reports: role play, run scenarios again and again, and get feedback.
The Challenge
- Do your meetings include training or skill development as part of the agenda?
- Does your training incorporate the rigour of a pro team – or do you expect people to get better and stronger on their own?
Master the Math of Predicting Human Behavior
If you want to understand – and manage – people well, you need to become a mathematician.
“The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.” - Galileo
Recently, I was sitting with a young guy in his late 20s who had just received a big promotion to run an aggregate plant in northern England. He was excited! Although he’d worked there for 12 years, and had managed a couple of people, he knew running a full facility would be much harder. He asked for my advice.
I shared with him that most people are like a math problem you need to solve – that there are a few basic principles he could learn to master, over time, to manage and get the best from people. It’s quite straight forward, like variables in a math formula. Once you learn enough about those variables - what people need, their motivations, and the environment they are in - you can generally understand and begin getting better at predicting human behavior.
Love Languages and Learning
This young man happened to be on his honeymoon, so I talked to him about the concept of ‘love languages’ - the idea that different people feel appreciated in very different ways. His challenge was to understand which unique "language" resonates most with each person on his team.
He needed to learn - to read 10, 12, 15 books - about business, management, sociology and psychology. If you continue to learn about people and try to understand human behavior, you’re able to more easily recognize what’s at play and what can work.
At the end of the day, it’s just math.
The Challenge
- What variables of human behavior do you need to learn more about?
- How close are you to truly grasping the key issues that will help you understand the people you work with?
Confront the Brutal Facts and Expel the Elephants
Companies can unwittingly be a safe haven for problems, personalities, belief systems or behaviors that are so obvious yet no one wants to address them. These elephants in the room are detrimental to business performance if they are not purged from the organization.
Are you harboring elephants in your hallways and boardrooms? If so, confront the brutal facts, identify them and begin methodically expelling them from your business. This may involve difficult decisions but harboring elephants will only hold you back while simultaneously frustrating talented employees who will simply come to believe that substandard performance is acceptable.
Ask yourself, does it make sense to keep this product, person, belief system or behavior if they are really not adding value and contributing to the success of your company? If the answer is “no,” why keep barriers to progress, performance and results in place?
Identify The Elephants
Organizational elephants can take many forms. They could be:
- A person who has been in the company far too long; it could even be one of the first employees
- Unprofitable products or lines of business that everyone knows are failing but they do not want to eliminate; it could even be the product that started it all for your company but is no longer a hot seller in the market
- Processes or systems that have a loyal following despite the clear lack of value they contribute to the organization
- An acquisition or investment that really does not fit with your core business strategy
- Partnerships or joint ventures that are in name only
- Suppliers that no longer add value
In every quarterly meeting, ensure the executive team talks about the biggest elephants in the room, or as Jim Collins says “confront the brutal facts.” Initially there are never any, but after an awkward 30 second silence, there are always one or two.
What are your elephants?