Celebrating Success and the Accomplishments of Your People
We all know that positivity is contagious, and gratitude is heartwarming.
Most of us who are driven to create amazing things in our companies and in our lives often don't truly celebrate. We forget to soak up the great things that are happening around us, along the way.
Sometimes, when winning organizations hit a rough patch, they get caught up in what's not working. A black cloud forms overhead, and then people feel as if they’re not winning or can never do enough right.
Celebrating the little things is a big deal.
I’ve seen organizations that focus on what’s not working and challenging people to improve too much. I've also experienced organizations that seem to celebrate success too much, without focusing on what needs to improve.
There’s no right formula. Different organizations, in different stages, have different things going on. It’s about a constant recalibration of making sure you are both celebrating success and challenging the status quo.
The organizations we work with that are the best at this continually celebrate the accomplishments of people, both personally and at work.
And they often celebrate things that exemplify alignment with or progress towards their purpose or the next big mountain they are going to climb (Jim Collins’ BHAG). They take the time to acknowledge the behaviours that define their core values.
Celebration is motivation to do more good things that we know are good and challenge forces us to look at what we can do differently or better.
The Challenge
- Do you have the right balance between celebrating and challenging?
- What could you and your team do to better celebrate this week?
- What can you and your team do to challenge and focus on what needs to be improved this week?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Packard’s Law
“No company can consistently grow revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth.” - Dave Packard, co-founder of Hewlett Packard
I'm very grateful to have spent more than 25 years working with amazing CEOs and entrepreneurs. I've been able to witness as they scale their businesses towards achieving their big goals and visions.
After being down this path of growth with so many different organizations you begin noticing themes and patterns. Also, you recognize the core things that can make massive differences in a company's ability to either scale or to stay stuck.
One of the most consistent themes we find is the level of unneeded turbulence due to not having enough right people in key leadership roles. This results in the inability to take them where they want to go next.
The people in those roles have got them to where they are now. But to be able to take a company from an inspiration to $20 million or $50 million in revenue takes a very specific skill set. And to take that business and scale it to $100 million or $500 million often requires different insights, understandings and been-there-done-that experience. (I’m not saying that measuring your success based on revenue is a good idea. It’s just a common way of illustrating scale this particular idea. I prefer scaling up profits.)
This is where Packard’s Law comes in: that companies can't grow faster than the ability for people and systems to manage that growth.
The Right People
When young engineers Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their company in 1937, they knew they were going to manufacture innovative electronic products. However they put off deciding exactly what until they had hired people who shared their values and standards. They knew that with the right people in place they would always generate opportunity. Without them, their growth would always be constrained. They would even hire great people without knowing exactly what they were going to do! And if they hired the wrong person, they were quickly terminated.
While there will always be challenges and systems that need to be revised, the right people in leadership are really what makes the biggest difference.
Lead with Strength
When we work with organizations we focus (with the CEO) on their direct reports. Subsequently, moving to their direct reports to make sure they have the right people in the right roles.
For example, promoting your best performing salesperson to head of sales without confirming their leadership skill set. Do they have the competence or appetite to be the leader? Will they coach and mentor their salespeople instead of closing the deals themselves?
So, how do you get the right people in those key roles? And, in keeping with Packard’s Law, have additional strength and capability to keep your company growing?
How can you add people to the team, change their roles - and sometimes make tough decisions - so you can continue to lead with the strength of your people versus having people scramble to keep up and hang on by their fingernails?
Keep in mind, when your team doesn’t have the existing capabilities, you can further invest in their education to build them or bring in experts/consultants, as a short-term way to help build that capability, into the organization.
The Challenge
When was the last time you evaluated the performance of your direct reports and their direct reports to:
- Make decisions about how you're going to help the strong ones stay or get stronger?
- Get into a position where those who aren't making the mark can be at their best?
- Help find a graceful way for those who are in the wrong organization to find the right home?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
What Makes You Happy?
Ever notice what makes you happy and how you have fun changes as you get older?
When I was a kid, building things and playing with my friends made me happy. As a teen, it was having fun and getting into trouble with friends and my early entrepreneurial adventures.
Early in my career, it was all about the drive to achieve, the hustle and the wins.
Now, it’s about how I can help other people so that they can achieve what they want in work and life.
But as my kids become more independent and my business matures - and I’ve learned a few lessons about the physical and mental costs of a driven life - I notice that what makes me happy is changing and expanding, and I’m making more of a point of making sure they happen.
Like spending time with my family and friends, and racing cars keeps me happier and healthier.
For Bill Gates, fun in his teens and 20s was all about software. In his 30s, about the drive to put “a computer on every desk and in every home.”
Now in his 60s, with his big goals achieved, he talks about what makes him happy now, in this recent Inc. article. And just like doing your Resilience Rituals to strengthen your mind, body and spirit, making happiness happen is intentional – something to think about at any age.
“When I was in my 30s, I didn't think people in their 60s were very smart or had much fun. Now I have had a counter-revelation. Ask me in 20 years and I will tell you how smart 80-year-olds are." - Bill Gates
Bill’s Happiness Breakdown
- Follow through on your commitments. Intentionally choose and follow through on what matters most. Don’t allow yourself to live permanently in feeling stuck or unmotivated. If you want to change, do it. Ask yourself, “Am I doing what I want – what most matters to me?” Listen to your voice of truth and commit wholeheartedly.
- Have a mindset of giving. It’s scientifically proven that giving to others is good for our wellbeing. That generosity can be money, time, mentoring, or paying it forward. Contribute to better someone or something.
- Treat your body like a temple. Exercise - no matter how long or how intense - is an antidote for depression, anxiety and stress. Find something you love, do it regularly - and you might just have fun, too.
- Put family first. Set your non-negotiable family priorities and boundaries first. Then do the same at work. Within those boundaries, you are free to focus and participate fully. Your family will love you even more for it – and you may just live longer.
The Challenge
- Where do you need to put priorities and, potentially, boundaries in place to experience what you want in Self, Work and Life?
- In order to max your own happiness, what adjustments could you make?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Why are You Saving People from Themselves?
Excellence in leadership and parenting are both very hard.
Our deep desire to support and help people, and to do what we can to prevent them experiencing massive pain or injury is hardwired into who we are.
At the same time, the School of Hard Knocks can be one of the best sources of accelerated education.
Whether a toddler, a teenager or a junior manager, sometimes we can actually speed up people’s learning and growth by stepping back and letting them fall. That’s better than being a helicopter leader who swoops in too early, and too often, saving people from themselves. And sometimes you can’t prevent it, anyway.
Now, some of us are pretty good at falling and getting mud on our faces. I’m one of those. In fact, have a guideline that I need to make a couple of big mistakes every month; otherwise, I'm holding back too much.
That said, I still notice I sometimes want to hold people back from learning some of their own lessons. As a coach and a leader, there are things that I know and see that that are valuable discussions to have with people when they're heading down a wrong road.
And sometimes, people are determined to try something that may seem illogical to us. So, we need to accept their need to test the idea, and to learn their lessons, firsthand.
And sometimes things we don't believe can work can actually work out amazingly well.
“Failure is not when you make a mistake. That’s falling. Failure is when something doesn’t go right, and you give up forever.”
Saving People from Themselves is Bad for Growth
Not learning to fail, I think, can be bad for the soul and bad for growth. When people are afraid to take a risk – to fall or fail (temporarily) and to make mistakes:
- They are less likely to have accountability for their own actions
- They won't have confidence that they can bounce back
- They always look for someone to save them or bail them out.
From all the CEOs and executives that I’ve worked with, over the years, I learned that they learn a little from succeeding and a lot from failing.
They learned more from working their way out of really challenging situations, and then reflecting on why something didn’t work. This helps them to do better next time.
The Challenge
- Are you a helicopter leader saving people from themselves or are you a leader who is more likely to let people fall?
- What can you do to create an environment where people learn accountability for their own decisions – where they continually build more confidence, competence and grow as an individual or leader?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Guardrails Support Autonomy in the Workplace
Most people love to have a sense of control in their lives. They like to have autonomy in the workplace and the freedom to make their own choices.
Contrary to popular belief, one of the best ways for people to be successful is to give them rules or guardrails.
And sometimes in many organizations that move very quickly, there aren't enough of these guardrails in place.
Like the company we worked with where accountability for a very important process wasn’t crystal clear between two different departments. The driven leader of one department simply took charge. This was with the well-intentioned desire to improve it and to help the company be successful.
Understandably, this created conflict with the other department. They had a different view of how the process should be carried out and thought they should be driving it.
Both were just trying to do their best, but after a lot of friction for a year, the executive team had to step in and found that, ideally, accountability should have been with the other department.
All this could have been avoided with defined accountability and clear guardrails, at the beginning. Without them, people are just going to do what they think is best – and, sometimes, the loudest voice or the most ambitious person in room takes charge, which might not always be the right thing to do.
Guardrails allow people to pre-filter a bunch of decisions, within a process, rather than having to make a whole bunch of ad hoc decisions and constantly going to their manager for approval on every little thing.
Some Examples
- In sales environments. Some organizations allow salespeople to negotiate a final price of a product or service. Others say that every deal must be signed off by the sales leader. And some others give people a range, with a target margin or sales price to achieve; and if the deal is within these parameters, salespeople can proceed. Anything outside those parameters needs to get approval.
- Customer satisfaction. One company focuses on improving customer satisfaction by shipping orders on time. If operations saw that there was going to be a late shipment they were free to manage it as per normal. However, if there was a delay with a top-20 customer, there was a guardrail in place. They needed to have a discussion and get approval from the head of operations.
- Investment criteria. Established, agreed-to principles that we would consider. For example, minimum profitability as a percentage, minimum profitability as a value within three years, minimum return on capital and a threshold of the impact on cash flow.
The Challenge
- Where can you offer your team more autonomy in the workplace by setting up guardrails to guide their decisions?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
No, No, No to Yes, Yes, Yes - Getting Your Team to Embrace Change
When there's a massive crisis and the building is burning down it's quite easy to get people to embrace change. But, when the need isn’t urgent, proactive change is really hard to make happen.
I just finished teaching a module in our Leadership Education program about this with a simple little book that has an incredible impact on leadership effectiveness during change.
Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is a story about penguins whose iceberg home is melting away and the need to get them to move to a new place.
A short read, this book gives you a real understanding of why people resist change. In addition, it offers up an eight-step process to practically and emotionally get people on side.
Reading the book, you can see why so many people (including ourselves) resist change. They constantly say no no no, either with their mouths, their actions or with passive resistance. One of the characters in the book is actually called Nono – the penguin who criticizes ideas.
During the debate phase, Nono’s are absolutely valuable but many leaders try to dismiss them or quiet their voices early in the process, which can take things backwards. But, if you handle Nono resistors right, they can switch to yes yes yes and embrace change. It's a high bar and hard to do but, as leaders, that is our role.
Not Just the Facts
When I read the book I was struck by how much we underestimate the idea that getting people to change is based on emotion, not facts. We always talk to leaders and executives about making fact-based decisions. However, the true secret to unlocking the ability to make change is understanding people’s emotional reactions, fears and anxieties.
All those practical spreadsheets and logical presentations are useless until people emotionally feel the need to change for themselves.
The Challenge
- If you and your team haven't read it yet, Our Iceberg is Melting is a great book to understand change.
- Where do you notice resistance to change that, in the end, could be very positive?
About Kevin:
CEOs typically place their first call to Coach Kevin with a crisis to solve. They stay because of his business acumen and no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is style.
Kevin’s career spans 20 years, over a dozen countries and four continents. He’s worked with hundreds of CEOs and executives, helping them to break through business challenges, grow their companies and find personal success along the way.
These experiences inspired Kevin’s book, Your Oxygen Mask First, in which he reveals the 17 habits every leader must know to transcend the perils of success, and achieve even more.
About Lawrence & Co:
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.