How winning works

June 20, 2012

I know a lot of tough people but Robyn Benincasa has to be one of the toughest.

She’s a member of the only all-female firefighting crew in the country and when she’s not saving people’s lives, she is a world champion adventure racer, a Guinness world record kayaker.  Oh yeah, and she started a non-profit called Project Athena, which helps women who have survived a medical challenge like cancer by taking them on a dream adventure (like climbing a mountain) as part of their recovery.

Robyn is a remarkable human being.  She’s also an incredible leader and knows how to win – and what is worth fighting for.  So I was thrilled that she captured her expertise in a book that outlines how each of us can climb to new levels of professional and personal success.  In her book, How Winning Works, (click here to buy*) she shares the eight essential elements of teamwork that she believes is responsible for her own successful and fulfilling life.

Here are Robyn’s eight elements of winning and teamwork:

Total commitment:  There are four P’s of commitment – preparation, planning, purpose and perseverance.

Empathy and awareness:  Do you care about your teammates as much as you care about yourself?  Can you truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes so you know what they need from you?

Adversity management:  Something is going to go wrong.  That’s a given.  How do you deal with things when something goes awry?  Winning at business and in life is really recognizing that the road ahead is filled with problems to solve and is never going to be the easy straightaway you’d hoped for.  How you deal with those setbacks, frustrations, surprises and challenges will determine if you win.

Mutual respect: On any winning team, there’s a high level of mutual trust, respect and loyalty.   You have to be able to recognize what each person contributes and celebrate that at the same time you’re minimizing the elements you aren’t crazy about.

We thinking:  You have to constantly be looking for ways to utilize your collective resources for the best possible outcome.   This is the lesson glory hounds have the toughest time with.   This is about finishing strong as a team – not racing across the finish line first and then waiting for your teammates.

Ownership of the project: For a person or a team to be successful – you need to be able to absolutely immerse yourself in the mission.  You need to see the goals as your goals.  See the outcome as your responsibility and attach a significant amount of emotion to accomplishing that desired outcome.

Relinquishment of ego: Every successful person realizes they come equipped with both strengths and weaknesses.  Every team member will be both the strongest and the weakest link somewhere along the way.  You need to be able to recognize your strengths so you can offer those to the effort but you also need to know your weaknesses, so you can expose them to your team – so they can help overcome them.

Kinetic leadership: Leadership, on the best teams, revolves among the teammates.  That requires that everyone on the team can both step up to the role but even more important – step away from the role, when they’re not the one best suited to lead at that given moment.

What I loved about this book is that it goes beyond listing the eight elements.  Robyn tells amazing, impossible to forget stories, offers pragmatic exercises and what she calls synergy starters – ways to actually put the teaching into practice.

If you’ve already achieved success and want to make sure that you, your family and your co-workers experience even more or if you’re just starting out and are hungry for success – grab this book and enjoy your adventure with Robyn.

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How to be creative on purpose

July 31, 2011

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…Do you need to be creative on demand?

My job is to be creative on demand.

The demands come in all forms.  It might be a strategy session for a client’s marketing plan, writing a print ad that will generate action or keeping the content on my blog, newspaper column or enewsletter fresh and worthwhile.

I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a muse to strike.  I’m always on deadline for something.  Which is why I was eager to pick up Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative* (click here to buy) and learn as he promises in his subtitle…how to be brilliant at a moment’s notice.

There’s this myth out there that suggests that creativity comes from total freedom.  Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t know any professional today who lives in a world of complete freedom.  Instead, we’re called upon to be creative within the many constraints of life, world and our own habits, fears and obligations.

Todd explains that we all need to adopt the goal of being prolific, brilliant, and healthy. He explains why you need all three succinctly:

  • Prolific + Brilliant – Healthy = Burnout
  • Brilliant + Healthy – Prolific = Unreliable
  • Healthy + Prolific – Brilliant = Fired
  • Prolific + Brilliant + Healthy = Producing great work consistently

According to Henry’s book (and my own life experiences) there exists a creative rhythm deep in the heart of every individual, that is, “independent of the pressures and expectations you face each day.”

Establishing this rhythm will unlock your creative potential, provide you with the stability and clarity to tackle challenges, create and let your best thinking flow.

Your creative rhythm is set by how you structure and manage five key elements, the acronym for which is “FRESH.”

1. Focus

Most waste comes not from not doing the right work, but from doing the right work inefficiently. Clarity around objectives, separating the urgent from the important, is the springboard to effective creativity.

2. Relationships

Engaging with others is a powerful source of creative inspiration. Intentionally forging the right relationships with others gets you focused outwardly and frees you up creatively.

3. Energy

Think energy management, not time management. According to Henry, “it does you no good to micromanage your time down to the last second if you don’t have the energy to remain fully engaged for that time…you need to establish practices around energy management.”

4. Stimuli

Like any process, the output of the creative process depends on the input. Consistent brilliance demands that you be purposeful about what you’re feeding your brain.

5. Hours

Time is the currency of productivity. You must ensure that the practices that make you a more effective creative are making in onto your calendar.

It’s dandy to discuss all of this in theory but Henry really won my confidence when he provided practical weekly, monthly, and quarterly checkpoints at the end of the book to help put the five elements into practice.

Here are a few other key takeaways from the book:

  • How books should not be read as pure information but conversations like social media
  • The concept of the “Big Three” to allow you to focus on your critical creative goals
  • How to send messages to your brain to look for solutions

If you are involved in work that requires you to think and create for a living, The Accidental Creative will help you form and build your best ideas and manage the creative process and work that comes from it.

*Yup, it’s an Amazon Affiliate link.
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Can your brand co-exist with your company’s brand?

July 28, 2011

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…How do you balance your personal & company brand?

Earlier this week, we explored the idea of how your personal brand influences and sometimes becomes your company’s brand.  If you are an author, solo consultant or solopreneur that can actually work to your advantage, as we discussed.

On the flip side, if you’ve got an entire organization behind you (whether it’s 4 employees or 400) then having a very prominent brand can be problematic.

Why?

Because you get into the sticky situation of people wanting to hire YOU not your firm.  Which means your company can only grow to the peak of your own capacity.   And potential customers will be disappointed if they get assigned to one of your co-workers rather than being excited to be connected with an organization as smart as yours.

So how do you combat that?  You certainly don’t want to douse your own brand and when pointed in the right direction, your brand’s reach can extend to serve your entire company.  But how do you make sure your personal brand doesn’t overshadow the entire team?

Only the best: If you’re in the position to influence or control the hiring, you’re going to have to guard against settling.  You will need strong individuals who perform at the top of their game every day.  They also have to be ready to stand in tide of your brand and hold their own.   Be candid about the situation and help them define and build their own brands that compliment yours and the company’s.

You’re also going to have to recruit people who are committed to always bettering themselves: And part of your role is going to need to be coach/mentor.  We give a lot of lip service to the idea of hiring people who are smarter than ourselves, but you’re really going to have to walk that out.  How can you truly motivate and support them getting even better?

Celebrate your team: Get out of the spotlight when you can.  If you can turn it to one of your teammates, all the better.  You’re the team’s biggest and most vocal cheerleader.  Do it internally and do it with clients and prospects.    Encourage them to take leadership positions in the community, especially in areas where you have not already been.  Let them carve out their own path and be on the sidelines applauding the entire time.

Think differently about your products/services: Odds are your strong personal brand was borne out of you being very good at something.  And you probably built your company around that core competency, as well you should.

Let’s say you are the best cupcake maker in the world.  Your cupcakes make grown men weep.   And maybe there’s no way any of your very able bakers are going to be able to duplicate your cupcakes.  That’s okay….you keep making the cupcakes.  And if you want — your business can only sell cupcakes.  But that means you have to always be in the kitchen.  And your team can’t grow and enjoy basking in their own light.

Why not examine both what your customers need and where you team has some unique talents.  Perhaps there are some complimentary offerings that they could own.  Maybe one of your staff makes killer expresso or quiches.

Even within a niched company like a law firm specializing in taxes, there are nuances or levels that are worth exploring.    Help them find their own niche that can flourish alongside yours.

In the end, it’s a balancing act.

Every company would like to have a charismatic leader who is well known and well respected.  So you don’t want to do anything to diminish that.  But you do want to elevate the rest of your crew so that all of you can build a company that exists and succeeds beyond your own sphere of influence and your 24 hours in a day.

For those of you who have a strong presence or brand — how do you create the balance for your organization?

 

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Need some one-on-one direction?

April 19, 2011

An Eight Week Jumpstart To Exploding Your Business

Note: In almost five years of blogging, I’ve never done anything like this before.  And I probably won’t do it again for quite awhile after today.  But I keep getting requests and thought this was the best way to serve the need.

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……. Is this your opportunity?

Every single week I get dozens of emails from people asking questions about marketing, building their brand and motivating their employees.

I would love to answer them all.  But, that’s all I’d do every day.

So in broad terms, I try to answer some of them on the blog – thinking others may be wondering the same thing.  No, I can’t get specific about someone’s business or precise problem, but it feels like I am helping a little.

As you know, I have a day job – running my agency, traveling to speaking gigs and spending time with my daughter before she heads off to college in August.

Those priorities don’t leave much time to answer all the questions I get via email.  Which is frustrating because I don’t want to say no when someone asks for help. And I love watching that light bulb go on in someone’s eyes.  It’s awesome to be a small part of helping grow someone’s business.

So I’ve got an experiment I’m calling Direction… from Drew.

I want to spend eight weeks intensely mentoring, coaching and consulting with three people who need direction and advice in their business.

These three people will get complete access to me and I’ll support you in every way possible.  We’ll spend time setting goals for your business and working backwards to create a plan that guarantees you’ll reach them.

Every other week for eight weeks we will spend an hour together on Skype discussing the unique aspects of your business and reviewing the work we’ve been doing/discussing via e-mail in between calls. At the end, you will have an action plan customized specifically for you to market your business, build your brand and motivate your employees.

You won’t even have to think.  All you have to do is take action on the ideas we discuss together.  And because we’re doing this over the next 8 weeks – we’ll have time to try some things and test some waters, to see what’s going to get you the biggest bang for your buck.

I’m looking for three people who are committed and willing to invest in themselves to make massive amounts of change in their businesses quickly.

I’ll be there watching over your shoulder and guiding you as long as you’re willing to take action.

Interested? Click on this link and I’ll tell you how to apply.

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There’s actually a person on the other side

March 24, 2011

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You can’t do it all from the box

It’s incredible that you can now do business with anyone on the globe.  It opens up amazing possibilities for all of us.

It also creates some new challenges.

We launched a very complex and challenging project with a new vendor recently.  It was complicated by the fact that it’s outside our area of expertise — but we still needed to drive it from a project management and brand perspective.

What we needed was very specialized and there aren’t too many proven choices out there.  So we selected a vendor who clearly had the skills we needed.  We contracted with them and the work began.  Then, this sequence of events happened.

  1. They sent us an e-mail, outlining what they needed from us.
  2. I sent an e-mail back, admitting that I was nervous about the project due to our lack of knowledge — and could we please talk it through on the phone.
  3. They wrote back and said they preferred to do everything via e-mail so there was a record and no details would be missed.
  4. I said… I was all for capturing the details but I have some overarching questions and want to give them a better sense of what we’re trying to do, big picture.
  5. They wrote back — great, e-mail us your questions and tell us about the big picture.
  6. I did this to the best of my ability — which I believe wasn’t all that hot.  I just didn’t know enough.
  7. They asked us how we wanted to handle a technical issue.  I said…I have no idea.  We need your recommendation.
  8. They gave us a recommendation and we took it.
  9. 2 weeks later — it turns out their recommendation was wrong.  Had we talked on the phone and explored the project together — they would have made a different recommendation.
  10. We have to make a change, based on a new recommendation.
  11. Oops…turns out their 2nd recommendation was also not quite right, because they didn’t know enough about what we were trying to do — and I didn’t know enough to tell them what they really needed to know.
  12. 3rd recommendation is fine.  Project is complete.  But…they had to do a lot of extra work and take a lot of extra time that they could have saved — if we’d had that initial phone call.

Every project should begin with a phone conversation.  I don’t care how tech savvy you are.  I don’t care how simple the project.

Do not hide behind your computer with the excuse of capturing details or efficiency.  I don’t care how much you prefer e-mail — when a client asks to talk to you on the phone — talk to them.  They are no more interested in chatting than you are.  You will learn so much more in a phone conversation — because you can ask questions, and based on those answers — ask more questions.

Even if it’s just because the client is worried — talk to them.

It sounds pretty basic doesn’t it?  But it’s happening more and more.   I can hear you in the comments section now — “duh, Drew.  When they wouldn’t talk to you on the phone — big red flag.”

I know it.  I knew it then.  But, I kept trusting their process rather than that nagging voice in my head.

My mistake is your marketing lesson.  Don’t do this to your clients and don’t do business with anyone who does it to you.

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