i believe that everyone is motivated by something. i’d say that most accountants have a natural love of working with numbers. i’m sure that stock brokers get a special kind of high out of making the deal that nets their clients big returns. and i’m sure that if you spent even just a little time with three of my colleagues as they talked about solving linear programs and differential equations you’d be amazed at how much they can geek out over it. but when was the last time, as a manager or leader, that you had a discussion with your employees to find out what drives them?

some of you might answer — if you’re being honest with yourself — “the job interview”. how long ago was that? people change over time, and so you must be willing to spend the time to really watch and track how your people are changing and the kinds of people they’re changing into. you might have someone with a modeling and simulation background whom either suddenly or even gradually falls in love with data visualization. you might have a history teacher whom has a newfound love of english literature. but you’ll never know any of this unless you take the time to know your people.

do you have carrots (bonus structures, awards systems) or sticks (hard deadlines, performance reviews) in place because they actually work? or is it just because it makes your job simpler?

everyone is motivated to do something.

find out what that is. then have them do that.

bill mccreary image from nhl.com

some nights in hockey — especially if your team has a reputation — referees will blow the whistle a little more than usual. it just happens that other games are merely called tight with little room to interpret the rules. whatever the cause, you never want to have your players cutting ruts to the penalty box.

on the bench during those kinds of games, there’s a common saying that gets passed around among coaches and players: “don’t give them an excuse to put you in the box.” it’s a simple message. even if what would normally not be called an infraction earns you a 2 minute trip to the sin bin, as a player you have to be smarter than that and adapt. you can’t give the referees any excuse to call you for it. keep the sticks down, keep both hands on your stick, and watch the play along the boards.

business can be much the same with clients instead of referees. some might love everything you develop for them or the kinds of services you provide, but others may be insatiable still and find flaws with anything you bring to bear. if you know you’re dealing with the latter, follow the same simple rule: don’t give them an excuse.

don’t give your clients a reason to question the validity of your statements; be sure to practice each and every one of your presentations and always perform the proper amount of due diligence in defining answers to their questions.

don’t give your clients a reason to believe that your products are broken; test, retest, and test some more until you’re absolutely certain that your products or services are programmed properly, or mathematically sound, or have multiple research studies to support them.

don’t give your clients a reason to feel like they can go elsewhere and get the same service; go out of your way to prove your organization’s commitment to them by answering their phone calls promptly, replying to their emails the same day, and generally making them feel like you give a damn about them as customers.

if you’re dealing with a difficult client, don’t complain if they’re bitchy or a hard-ass or they’re calling bad penalties. just don’t give them an excuse to call one in the first place.

make sure you’re not caught on the wrong side of that line.

image by vittonettophoto, flickr artist

it’s true. every team needs a superstar.

balance is important to a winning formula, and i think we all know that. people have to complement each other, make up for each others faults, and bring a certain set of skills to the table — even if those skills aren’t going to make many people stand up and take notice. you hear it many times, “someone has to do the work.”

but there is such a thing as having too much balance.

we’ve become enamored with utility players in our businesses. people that we feel we can take and throw into any situation and they’ll still produce dividends for us (and for our shareholders). we want everyone to be able to do everything. we’re even groomed as such, going all the way back into our childhoods and early adult lives.

we’re told as kids to be well-rounded or we won’t get into a good college, and in college we’re told to be well-rounded or we won’t get a good job. art history anyone? the problem being that very few focus on any one thing long enough or hard enough to become really good at it. but even among it all, somehow true superstars still emerge.

so how do you know who the superstars are in your organization? on your team? they’re the people who never fail you. they’re the ones who do uncommon work. they’re the ones driving the conversations. they’re the ones pushing themselves and their peers to be better than they already are. but it’s not enough to just recognize your superstars; as a leader, you need to ask yourself, “am i doing everything that i can to make sure that my superstars are happy?” in addition to that, on an even broader scale, as an organization you need to be thinking, “are our processes set up to reward these people? are we doing everything that we can to guarantee that they don’t leave our organization for another?”

don’t let your teams become too balanced. you need people who you can depend on to really get the job done — true professionals who excel at their craft. good enough to get by shouldn’t be good enough.

every team needs a superstar. what are you doing to keep yours around?

image by billy v, flickr artist

when you’re working on a project — of any scale — you’re going to have to accept risk at some point in time. the client is going to make demands that seem unreasonable. you’re going to burn through the wiggle room that you’ve built into your project schedules. you’re going to be doing work that no one has ever done before.

it’s in these times that leaders really need to answer the call.

“there’s only one outcome here: we’re going to succeed. that’s the bottom line. we’re absolutely going to get this done, and we’re going to do it the very best way we know how. i don’t care how difficult it is or how difficult it is going to be; look at everything we’ve accomplished to date. why would you believe in any other outcome? we’re going to do this.

“now… what do you need to knock this thing out of the park? because i’m going to go out and get it for you.”

the phone’s ringing. you might want to answer that one.

image by NHLFlyers, official twitter handle of the philadelphia flyers

when your favorite sports team finds issues to work on, they spend more time on it in practice.

powerplay numbers down? you can bet that your favorite hockey team is going to spend more time in the umbrella during practice.

not winning the battles along the boards? eat your wheaties and have yourself a powerbar before you hit the ice, because we’re doing nothing but 2-on-2′s for a solid 15 minutes down in the corners.

sloppy line changes in the second period? get ready to play a lot of dump and chase and listen for your line to be called.

i think we’ve got the individual training down pretty well in industry. we have one day training events to introduce people to new concepts. we have 2 and 3 day seminars to teach solid fundamentals of what makes a good consultant. we have week long “boot camps” for certification training and exams. but what about the rest of your team?

granted, there’s no way you can take an entire 30-40 person project team and send them all to the same PMP boot camp for an entire week. but why don’t we practice as a team on other things, like email communication? or developing presentations? or leading effective meetings? i think you’ll hear people expressing this need often enough (“hey guys, we really need to be doing a better job of sharing information.”), but we don’t ever seem to follow up on that? how come?

here are three things that should help you practice as a team:

1. set a benchmark and a goal.
   you need to know what your current ability level is first. it’s going to be hard to quantify certain things — like effective communication — but try as best as you can to keep from giving yourself an arbitrary ‘poor, average, good, awesome’ rating scale. once you know where you’re at, set a goal for where you want to be. “hey gang, our email strings are on average 6-8 messages long. let’s start using wikis and cut this number down to 3-4 messages by next month.”
2. focus on the bright spots.
   you can’t all be terrible at everything.. or maybe you are. either way, someone somewhere has to be doing things the right way, or at least closer to the way you’d like to be doing things. focus on what these people are doing and learn from them. “the client has always been impressed with julie’s presentations. let’s try to be more like julie.”
3. forgive, forgive, and then forgive again.
   people are going to make mistakes, but you should never hold this against them. how many times do you see a running back in football fumble only to have his head coach call a running play the very next series out on the field to build his confidence? forgive mistakes, use them as learning experiences, and then give that person another opportunity. “hey, trish, you were pretty shaky in speaking with the client today; you’re doing alright on your own, but you’re not there yet. we have another meeting coming up on tuesday, and i’m going to need you to be on your A-game. before the presentation, spend at least one more hour reviewing the materials and practicing than you did last time.”

use these three principles to shape your project team’s practice playbook. rather than individuals returning from training courses to a project team that isn’t fertile enough for their newly acquired abilities to incubate, you’ll see improvements across the board if your whole team focuses on that same thing. change always works best when done in groups.

it doesn’t make sense to practice your 5-on-4 powerplay one player at a time — so why do it with your project teams?

when going in one direction, it usually takes less effort to keep moving in that direction than it takes to make any adjustments. we all enjoy when our life is made easier, that’s a part of being human.

but that’s why, however, some people end up being more successful than others — they have an innate feeling that whatever is easy to do isn’t worth doing. we call these people adventurous. we call them troublemakers. we call them leaders. but whatever you call them, one thing remains true: these people get things done.

we like to think that change happens because it makes sense. we like to think that discussions were had, plans were made, and the change was carried out because after all the details are looked at, one decision stood alone as the right one. but that’s hardly ever how changes occur. there’s more to it than that.

change happens when we decide that it’s going to happen. for all the talk and planning and analysis that we may go through, it all means nothing if there’s no action. it all means nothing if there’s no sustained action.

you’ll come across some villains — people that try to make things difficult. people whose inertia is taking them in a direction opposite of yours. others because they don’t like you, some because they don’t like what you stand for, and even more because they don’t like the fact that you might accomplish what it is they’ve been unable to do. some of these people may even be your friends. ignore them.

change takes effort. it takes motivation. it takes conviction and a relentless spirit. it takes doing.

if you can communicate to people why change is important, if you can inspire people to change, and if you can grow a following, if you can show people what to do — you’ll have a chance.

but only if you try.

image by ortizmj12, flickr artist

one of the higher-ranking members at booz allen has an internal blog titled, “lead, or get out of the way!”

i certainly appreciate his willingness to to pass on the knowledge that he has learned over his distinguished career — and in such a contemporary form — but i have to say that i think it’s wrong.

at least in the innovation age it is.

i’d like to change my colleague’s statement to become “lead, then get out of the way!” and here’s why…

the old notions of what leadership is all about work for the old notions of what business is all about: well defined, well documented, and well understood challenges that are solved through controlled, repeatable processes. but increasingly, the challenges we face in business are open-ended ones that we’ve never faced before. there are no blueprints for solving these problems. there are no repeatable processes. in order to meet these challenges, it’s going to take some ingenuity from a lot of free-thinking, self-motivated individuals.

to lead in such an environment, it’s going to take a different kind of approach from the generally understood form of leadership which is “get behind me, and i’ll take you there“. the ideas and approaches to solving today’s issues don’t come from the top, but rather they bubble up from the bottom. a true leader in the innovation age understands this new dynamic.

leaders will always be responsible for putting their people in the right positions to succeed; that much will always be true. leaders will still be responsible for setting the strategic direction for an organization, and they’ll need to build their organizations to support that vision. this is the crux of leadership in the innovation age: filling your organization with the right people.

but once you’ve articulated your vision and built your organization, it’s time to step away from it all. your job — from here on out — isn’t to lead, but to support. provide the necessary tools for success — be it training, capital, mentorship, or even just lending an ear — and try your very best to not get in the way.

don’t tell people that they have to work on something else other than what they want to be working on. don’t tell people that they can’t use a certain set of tools or technologies. don’t ever balk at an idea because of whom or where it came from. don’t get too focused on what your current strategy is (it might be obsolete now). don’t let yourself, your plan, or your project become bigger or more important than the overall success of your organization.

forget your previous notions of what leadership is because they don’t work anymore. get out of the way! people are going to do some amazing things, if only you’ll let them do it.

don’t spoil it.

image by wolfsavard, flickr artist

elephants are extremely interesting creatures. they can grow up to weigh 15,000 lbs, but still be afraid of a mouse. they’re massive creatures, and anything that large — you’d imagine — can have quite a bit of influence. they’ll shape their surroundings and modify their environment to suit them. if the fruit is too high, they’ll knock over the tree. if the water’s gone, they’ll dig a hole to find some more.

circuses are interesting in their own right. a collection of sights, sounds, and smells that you can’t find any place else. and with so many different performance acts, everything has to be perfectly choreographed — and the ringmaster is in charge of it all.

so what happens when the ringmaster comes in contact with the elephants? certainly one person isn’t going to be able to move a whole troop of 8,000 lb creatures without a couple of peanuts.

leadership is all about getting the elephants to play along. so whether it’s your own team members or if you’re trying to win over clients, every ringmaster should know that you’re going to have to pack a lot of peanuts. give your employees a reason to do exceptional work… give them dozens of reasons, actually. let your clients see and feel the benefits as quickly as you can. sell them a clear vision, and guide them along the way. make it easy for people to follow your direction.

it doesn’t matter how strong-willed the ringmaster may be, or even how great a performance is in store for the audience. one simple fact remains true: if you don’t motivate the elephants, your circus isn’t going anywhere.

image by steve.grosbois, flickr artist

you work for 32 hours from monday through thursday.  you wake up on friday morning with an extra spring in your step, looking forward to the upcoming weekend.  but today isn’t your ‘normal’ friday; today is different.

instead of working on client deliverables, or manning the grill at a local restaurant, or waiting tables down at the pub, you get 8 hours to do whatever you’d like to do.

what would you do with it?

would you start work on that big idea you’ve always had?  would you enroll in a culinary course in your area?  would you learn how to brew your own beer? … or would you play farmville on facebook?  or sleep in until noon?  or drink some free cold ones that your friends bring you out back behind the bar?

if you’re an employer, why not give your employees 8 hours a week and see what they do with it?  trust me, you’ll recognize the ones who are worthwhile and the ones who aren’t very quickly.

then, invest heavily in the ones that are because they’re going to take your organization places.  they’re natural born world-shakers.