There is no longer such a thing as common sense. Get over it. So, the clearer you are about your expectations, the clearer you are. I recommend you be resolutely clear. Although you believe what you’re thinking is obvious, it’s not. You want high performance? You’d better define what high performance means. And by the way, you’d better be explicit!
“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” - Peter Drucker
At a time when we’re all being called to move faster, make quicker decisions, one of the most courageous acts I experience these days is my clients making the conscious choice to slow down to speed up. “Anytime we hear anything smacking of jargon we hit the pause button,” says Chicago land restaurateur, Nick Sarillo. “For us, jargon means words like “professional”, “excellent”, “great”, “clean”, “great attitude.” Nick continues, “My team’s trained now to stop when ever someone tosses out an adjective or noun as a “truth.” For example, in any given situation, what does “excellent” mean? Excellence is redefined hundreds of times in our company. Excellence is explicit, rather than implicit in each task. This act of definition, challenging as it is, has created an outcome for us of shared definitions. Ownership attitude develops within our company as “I” statements and becomes “we” statements. We actually create common sense by working from multiple definitions to one shared definition.” The outcome of all this effort on the part of Nick and his team is an explicit Culture internally and an explicit Brand Experience focused externally, for customers. Instead of employees sitting waiting to be told what to do, team members take an active role in actions that improve guest experience and profitability all at the same time.
The outcome I’ve seen at Nick’s and over the years in hundreds of cases, is the nuance between Figure 1., struggling with performance due to “what ought to be common sense” and Figure 2. Working with shared definitions of excellence that are explicit!
Figure 1. Depending on Common Sense
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Figure 2. Shifting from common sense to explicit shared definitions of excellence!
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“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!” - Goethe
Goethe’s famous quote is one of my favorites. Thus, supporting clients to turn dreams into achieved goals in a milieu of industries and industry segments has been a wild and amazing ride. At the same time, I’ve not experienced the process (dream to tangible goal to measurable success) to be so urgent, so tangible or more pragmatic than in the last two and half years thanks to the horrific economy in which we’re all in the midst.
From experience then, Figure 2 integrates powerfully with Figure 3. Being explicit with attitudes and actions, choices made and behaviors observed, A+ performance evolves and grows. What would have been an A+ candidate a year ago wouldn’t even be even make the team this year. Let’s go deeper.
As you look at Figure 3, the leader and leadership team are on display! If common sense is dead, so too is the old leadership axiom, “Do as I say, not as I do.” From all I can tell these days, behavior is everything and talk is cheap. And, “Behavior is everything” seems to be more-true all the time.
Here’s how Figure 3 works: The decision is made, “We’re going left!” (note the direction of the horizontal arrows). The 1% column at the left of the bell curve is that segment of your work force that simply and resolutely follow, “Yes Ma’am, I’m headed left!” If tomorrow you said, “We’re headed right,” these folks would be at your side.
The next column over, 14% of your work force are typically what would be called, your “players.” With shared, clear reasoning, they are with you, moving clearly and doing all they can to support you moving “left” as diligently as possible. The clearer YOU are, the more effective their work and focus. (This is where figure 3 aligns with figure 2 strongly.) At column 3 you have 35% of your work force. These folks are watching you closely, ready to go into drama because you switched course or didn’t do what you said you would. This 35% of your team are what my colleagues and I call, “wind checkers”. “Wind checkers” are exactly that. Where the wind blows is where they’ll go. And if you said you’re headed left and you go right, you’ll hear about it from this 35% of the staff. Note that with this 35% you have critical mass, 50% of your work force at any given time. And from here this model gets interesting.
On the backside of the critical mass line is another 35% of your staff. If the column left 35% is checking the wind for a couple weeks to see if you’re really serious about what you said you were going to do, this group is watching diligently for months. They are checking for the slightest wind movement in any other direction and they’re ready to pounce on any miss step. Usually these folks are not looking in a mirror, that is, they don’t really pay attention to themselves, these participants are ready to blame anyone or anything else for any possibility of disbelief that “We’re going left!”
Move over another column, 14% are actively plotting, never really satisfied you’re changing anything… they’ve been with you for years or have been doing the same job for years and “know how its done.” You have nothing to tell them they don’t already know. This segment of your staff is likely digging heels in as you work to shift performance. Last column right is a bomb building 1% that is still around, really, I’m not sure why? Are you? If wind checkers are the middle columns of varying degrees and equal +/- 70% of your team, this extreme right 1% is actively encouraging drama on a daily basis. Most anything other than positive energy and you have this 1%.
The ultimate irony, even in bad times, is that most of your managers are spending time trying to coach and convince the 15 – 50% on the right hand side of the bell curve to please join in the new direction.
Let’s tie the beginning and end of this column together. If I and we are resolutely clear about where we’re headed AND in slowing down to define excellence in each step along the way three things happen:
1. The process of definition becomes a skill set in itself and the process gets faster and more efficient. So two outcomes occur: we have common definition AND we get to definition faster. To use a high-speed metaphor, we learn to build the plane as we’re flying it safely.
2. Performance becomes exponential figure 2 comes alive. At the same time, we are so clear about our performance that the wind checkers and bomb makers in figure 3 opt out on their own, because we are so clear about what excellence is and is NOT, those players on the right of figure 3 have no energy, they simply drop off.
I invite you to pay attention to jargon and define what you mean by excellence or professional. When you find yourself using the term common sense for something you’re thinking write down the phrase, thought or action. Take the time to experiment and actually find out if you have shared definitions. My bet is that you will not as often as you do. Getting to a shared definition of “excellence” (or any other term you want to explore) will sharpen the tip of your “arrow” no matter which direction you’re headed!
Figure 3. Clear performance expectations, leadership behavior: Beware the role of the “wind makers” and the “wind checkers”
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