Top Performance

by Zig Ziglar

  This had a big impact on me. I was offering something that my sales rep didn’t want. I assumed that I knew John’s goals. This is a big mistake that managers too often make.

  This leads us to the value of conducting an “inner view.” The purpose of the “inner view” is to gain insights into your teammates so that you can assist them in reaching their goals and objectives. This requires time and dedication. It requires that you invest time getting to know your people as people and not as units of production! It requires that you dedicate yourself to understanding their needs, their issues, and their concerns.

  Let me issue a caution. This process is not to be used in the place of a performance review or appraisal. It is also not to be used as a reprimand process. It is to be used to gain insights into your people so that you can provide feedback and encouragement. It works like this. There are three stages. First, you should schedule time with the individual. This can be done off site—at a coffee shop, at lunch, or at a neutral location in the office. Second, during the meeting you must condition yourself to ask open-ended questions and listen to the responses. You must turn your full attention on the other person for this process to be effective. The core of the meeting is to ask a focusing question: What are your goals? Third, you must use the information in a helpful way to provide feedback. Let’s take these stages one at a time.

  Schedule the Meeting

  This process is effective with a new hire or with people who have worked with you for a period of time. If you’ve not conducted a meeting like this in the past, the individual may be a bit skeptical at first. Therefore, when you request this meeting, you must declare your “helpful intent.” That is, you must relate to the other person and relax him or her. You may want to outline what you would like to achieve at this meeting.

  As an example: “Ralph, you’ve been with us for almost a year now. You know, we’ve never sat down and talked for any period of time. I’d like to get to know you better so I can help you reach your goals. Can we go to lunch sometime this week? I’d really like to get to know more about Ralph. Is Thursday good for you?”

  If this is done in a genuine manner, he will look forward to the lunch.

  During the Meeting

  If you really don’t know this individual very well, you need to engage in preliminary conversation that will give you insights into him or her as an individual. You may want to ask where he lived, where he grew up, why he chose to attend his university, what activities he is involved in away from work, etc.

  Once you complete the preliminaries, you need to restate your helpful intent. You may want to say something like, “Ralph, as I said on Monday, I’d like to get to know you better. If I can better understand your goals, I can do a better job of contributing to your reaching those goals.”

  Once you’ve established your helpful intent, you need to identify his goals. You do this by asking a focusing question—a question in which you focus on a specific theme or subject. In this case, you are focusing on the goals. For example: “I know your job description and your performance standards for the coming year. Yet we’ve never talked about things above and beyond those elements. What are your goals here at our organization? In other words, what do you really want to achieve?”

  This is essential to the “inner view.” If you don’t know the other person’s goals, you can’t help him or her achieve those goals. By asking open-ended questions, you can gather information. You want to gather as much information as you can on the goals of this individual, because you will use this information in later interactions.

  After the Meeting Provide Feedback

  Once you have gathered the information, you must use the information. This is the key to the “inner view” concept. You must provide feedback in order to help keep the person on track to attain his or her goals.

  Suppose the individual states that he wants to move into a managerial position within your organization. This is a worthwhile goal for this person, and it is attainable. He has the qualities necessary to move into a management position. You notice that he is engaged in activity that is moving him away from the goal. It could be tardiness, overly long lunch breaks or personal phone calls, missed deadlines, etc. However, it is not an offense that needs reprimanding. This situation calls for a correction in the behavior. This is your chance to use the information gained at the “inner view” to help him make adjustments to correct those negative activities.

  For example, let’s pretend that you and I are astronauts and we are headed toward the moon on the latest space exploration. About halfway to our goal, we hear from Houston Ground Control. Ground Control speaks over the intercom and says, “Hey, hello, attention. You are a bit off course. You are 3 percent off to the left, and if you continue in that direction, you will miss your goal.”

  You aren’t going to grab the microphone and yell back, “Hey! Don’t tell us how to do our jobs. We are fully trained astronauts, and we know what we are doing. In fact, Tom Hanks is going to play me in the next movie!” You aren’t going to do that. You are going to grab the microphone and speak very plainly as you ask for specific directions.

  “Is it 3 percent or 4 percent? Should we adjust to the left or to the right?” You are going to make those adjustments, and the last thing you’ll say is “Thank you!” You can now correct your course, and you will have the chance to hit your target.

  The same is true for the individuals you manage or lead. If they truly are in pursuit of an advancement, they will appreciate your input, make the necessary changes, and even say thank you. However, if you have discussed what they need to do to advance, and then you observe that they are not following the game plan, it is your responsibility to find out why. Perhaps they are not taking advantage of the training courses your organization provides for employees. The involvement in these courses will tell other managers that they are putting forth the effort in an attempt to prepare for a management position. You notice this and bring it to their attention.

  “Ralph, I notice that you are not enrolled in the course on reading financial statements for the nonfinancial manager. Didn’t you say you needed that to move into a management position?” He may say, “Well, my goals have changed.” Now, this is important. In order to contribute to this person’s growth and development, you need to know this. You need to know if his goals have changed. You don’t want to give feedback on something that is not important or not going to be valuable to him.

  If this is the case, if his goals have changed, you must return to the stage of the “inner view” process where you asked, “What are your goals?” It is certainly permissible for a person’s goals to change. However, for you to assist in helping him reach those goals, you must identify them.

  Well, there you have it. The “inner view” provides you with a method to identify a teammate’s goals and assist in helping him or her reach those goals. It provides a starting point in knowing your staff as people and not as units of production. It provides you with a reason for giving feedback and intervening when your teammate is getting off track.

  Will this technique work? Only if you do!

  PERFORMANCE PRINCIPLES

  * * *

  Assumptions are the cornerstone for miscommunication.

  Don’t assume that people are units of production, wanting what you want. Ask—get the “inner view.”

  15

  Education to Overcome Management Paralysis

  Only the educated are free.

  Epictetus

  Awareness

  Assumptions

  Analysis

  Action

  The third A in our Four-A Formula is Analysis. When I’m talking about analysis, I’m talking about education. There are three great immobilizers that keep you from succeeding and, as a matter of fact, keep all of us from accomplishing what we are capable of. The only way to overcome these immobilizers is through analysis and education. The immobilizers are fear, doubt, and worry. These are three negative uses of our imagi
nation.

  Let’s take a closer look at this concept of FEAR—False Evidence Appearing Real. Using a piece of cloth and my finger, chances are good I could come into your town and rob your bank. I could use the piece of cloth as a handkerchief to cover my face. Then I could put my finger in my coat pocket, giving it the appearance of a gun when I point it at a person. If I aimed it at the teller and said, “Give me your money!” I can guarantee you her palms would get sweaty and her heart would beat faster. At that point, she would give me the money. All the evidence would be false, but because it would appear to be real, the teller would act as if it were real.

  You might have read about the young Cuban who years ago hijacked a plane to Cuba with nothing but a bar of soap. He placed the soap in a shoebox, went up to the flight attendant, and said, “Hey, I’ve got a bomb in here.” She said, “Ooooooohhhh, you need to see the pilot!” He went to see the pilot and said, “Hey, I’ve got a bomb in here and I’d like to go to Cuba.” They went to Cuba. All the evidence was false, but because it appeared to be real, the captain acted as if it were real.

  A Challenge for You

  I want to challenge you to write down your ten greatest fears, doubts, and worries. Now some of you might say, “But I have more than ten fears, doubts, and worries!” Relax, I said your ten greatest fears, doubts, and worries. If you have the courage to write them down, here is what you will find: Out of the ten items you listed, seven or eight will already have happened or cannot happen. Of the remaining items, you have absolutely no control over one or two of them. And you will find that only one or two items are within your control.

  Question: Does it make sense to dissipate your energies over a long list of things you cannot control instead of focusing your energies on the one or two things you can effectively handle? Since the answer is obviously no, why do we fail to focus our energies on solvable problems? Answer: Because we are creatures of habit. We have an everyday routine that we are involved in, and if the routine is changed, it upsets us and can even spoil our whole day.

  Unfortunately for our society, one of our most destructive habits is griping, complaining, and moaning. Or, as Bryan Flanagan says, “We become members of the moan, groan, and carry on club!” Do you realize that some people would rather complain than succeed? If that sounds absurd to you, prove me wrong. Try eliminating the complaining and see if it doesn’t help you move toward success more quickly. We live in a society that is used to being negative more than positive. For example, as my speaker friend Don Hutson says, economists have predicted eighteen of the last two recessions! People find fault as if there were a reward for it! Too many people look for the worst and never pass up the chance to cut down or criticize others.

  Negative Use of the Imagination

  As a general rule, I board an airplane from two to ten times each week. Obviously, I know that from time to time there are airplane crashes, so I recognize there is danger for me when I get aboard that aircraft. But realistically there is even more danger for the airplane, because when airplanes come down faster than they go up, their trade-in value drops to virtually nothing. I mean, you just can’t swap them at all!

  Interestingly enough, however, though there is danger when the plane leaves the ground, there is even more danger if the plane remains on the ground. Engineers will quickly tell you that the plane will rust out sitting on the runway faster than it will wear out flying in the sky—which is what airplanes are built for. When the ship leaves the harbor, there is certainly danger involved because, from time to time, ships do sink. But there’s even more danger if the ship stays in the harbor. Again, the experts tell us that if it stays at anchor in the harbor, it will collect barnacles and become unseaworthy faster than if it is sailing the high seas—which is why the ship was built in the first place.

  If you rent out your home, you take a chance that the person you rent it to will damage it. In some cases, renters simply do not have pride of ownership and will not take as good care of your home as you would. However, my real estate friends assure me the house is in greater danger if you leave it empty. They tell me it will deteriorate faster standing empty than it will if someone is living in it, and besides, homes are built to be lived in.

  Obviously, there is a certain amount of danger in doing anything, but in management there is generally even more danger in doing nothing. Humans and nature are exact opposites in at least one respect: We deplete nature’s resources by using them up. We deplete our human resources by not using them at all.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes was right when he said the great tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. He said the truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them. This tragedy is compounded when those of us in leadership positions do not utilize our abilities to properly direct and inspire those in our sphere of influence to become all they are capable of becoming.

  Our corporate purpose, our reason for being in business, is to help people recognize, develop, and use their abilities. One of the vehicles we use to accomplish this is the I CAN course I mentioned earlier. It has positively affected over three million students and thousands of teachers all over the United States and Canada.

  Several years ago in Rockford, Illinois, a young lady named Marcie Lemaree was taking the I CAN class. I say “taking the class,” but actually she literally had to be almost dragged into the classroom, screaming and kicking. She was such a disruption that the teacher finally said, “Marcie, if you will go to the library and listen to the tapes that go along with the I CAN course, I won’t turn you in to the principal.” Well, that sounded a lot better than sitting in class, so she listened to the tapes, and as she listened, some things started to make sense to her. Gradually her attitude changed. Marcie became involved in her school; she became aware of why her attitude was so important; she analyzed and got instruction on how she could be more effective; she became a manager of the basketball team and lettered in girls’ track. She also placed fourth out of seven on the rifle team.

  Now that might not sound like a big deal to you, but when I share with you (as Paul Harvey would say) “the rest of the story,” it might make a difference. Marcie is legally blind. She had difficulty telling darkness from light. When she fired the rifle for the rifle team, someone would say, “No, Marcie, you’re a little low and to the left, you need to come up and to the right.” Did Marcie have reason to fear, doubt, and worry? You bet she did! Did she overcome those fears, doubts, and worries? You bet she did! How? The same way you and I overcome our fears, doubts, and worries—through analysis and education! Needless to say, she changed her input, which dramatically changed her output.

  Managing Motivation Education

  Most management books spend some time looking at behavioral scientists’ view of motivation, and this can be so technical that it is difficult to understand. My approach will seem to some an oversimplification, but as I have often said, some of the greatest truths in life are the simplest. For that reason, I generally speak and write at the seventh-grade, third-month level. I’ve also found that if I keep it at this level, even college professors will be able to keep up with me. But as my good friend Dr. Steve Franklin, who was a college professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says, “The great truths in life are the simple ones. You don’t need three moving parts or four syllables for something to be significant.”

  Steve pointed out to me that there are only three pure colors—but look at what Michelangelo did with those three colors! There are only seven notes, but look what Chopin, Beethoven, and Vivaldi did with those seven notes. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contained only 262 words, and 202 of them were one syllable. Think of the impact those simple, direct words have had on our society! I know many of our problems are complex, but I believe a simple (not simplistic), direct approach, worded in simple, understandable term
s is the best and most effective way to get results.

  A Top Performer with Real Education

  After reading this much of Top Performance, it might not surprise you that when I think of one of the smartest and most educated people I have ever known, I think of a person with a fifth-grade education. My mother.

  I will never forget an incident that took place when I was a small boy in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Periodically I was given a chance to do a few odd jobs for an elderly couple who lived several blocks from us. They ran a small dairy and were probably in their late sixties or early seventies. The man was blind. We needed the extra money because finances were desperately tight in the ’30s.

  I have forgotten some of the details of the incident, but the bottom line is that something went astray. The lady berated me unmercifully and said I had not done what I had said I was going to do and therefore she was not going to pay me for the considerable amount of work I had done.

  When I went home in tears to tell my mother I was not going to be paid for what I had done, she was understandably unhappy. However, my mother was the most loving, wise, and gentle person I’ve ever known (the epitome of a Top Performer and the symbol of all the positive management skills taught in this book). She also had great faith and was most supportive and loyal. When I finished my story, she calmly took off her apron and said, “Let’s go and talk with them, son.”

  My mother was a small lady. She was nearly fifty years old, and all the years of her hard work had taken their toll. When we approached the couple, the lady proceeded to tell my mother in no uncertain terms that I had not done what she’d expected me to do, that I was not dependable, that I had lied to her, and any number of other things. My mother, as all good managers do, patiently heard her out, listening very, very carefully and quietly until the woman had finally finished.