You’re now at the beginning of a process that I started as the CEO of my own companies in the 1990s and then continued with other CEOs and business leaders in 2001.
As I started working with them to understand their problems, I realized that most managers are not working on the real issues or their true underlying problems; instead, they’re merely tackling the symptoms of these problems.
I can relate.
I, too, had spent years addressing symptoms in my businesses: turnover, strategies that didn’t work as we intended them, employees who didn’t keep their promises to follow through, clients who became disappointed in our solutions to their pressing problems; issues that raised their ugly head just as we thought we were on the right path. All were symptoms of a much deeper, larger issue than most of us are trained to address. Until now that is.
I remember when things didn’t go as planned; the first thing I would do is back up and re-strategize. I would look at our strategy to try to find flaws and come up with a new approach that I was sure would work this time. I took my employees through this strategy process time and time again, always thinking we would land on the perfect solution and that would be our golden ticket to the future we had in mind. I’ll be honest with you; my employees got sick of this.
As I began to realize how my approach wasn’t getting us anywhere, I also came to understand that solutions weren’t going to be found in changing what we did or even changing the way we did it. Revising the strategy would never have provided the solutions we were looking for, because the strategy was not the source of our problems.
Our problems had their source in several things: the way we viewed our business and our thinking that resulted from the perspectives we created; the way we related to and focused on the irresolvable circumstances we faced; and the kinds of conversations we engaged in with each other that undermined and sabotaged our intentions. All of that was why we, too, were among the 87 percent of companies that struggled and failed to execute their strategy. Before we could become one of the other 13 percent, we needed to ask ourselves some pretty tough questions.
The rest of this book is about helping you, as the leader responsible for building your company, to see what is possible when you are willing to take a stand for a seemingly impossible future and then shift three critical distinctions in your business. I call these distinctions the Breakthrough Solutions Framework™. This is the structure around which I’ve developed the process for recovering your company and transforming not only its performance but also transforming you and the way you and your employees think about and relate to each other.
Transformation of anything or anyone does not happen by looking outside ourselves for insights. Transformation—true transformation—happens internally first and is then reflected externally. What you’re looking for is not out there. Instead, your work needs to focus on who you are being for yourself, your employees, your clients, and for your family.
THE PROCESS
The Breakthrough Solutions Framework™
All transformation happens inside of a framework, a structure that needs to be created for a new way of thinking. It doesn’t happen by chance or by osmosis. You can’t read about transformation and be transformed. You have to experience it. You have to go through the process. You have to do the work.
The process I created (first for myself and then to use with clients) is designed around a simple-to-understand system—a Breakthrough Solutions Framework, a framework for transformation. This framework can be learned and applied by anyone in any organization whether he or she is a solo micro-entrepreneur or part of a giant conglomerate. The principles are the same.
At the core of the Breakthrough Solutions Framework is the recognition by an organization’s leaders that they cannot close the execution gap until they:
Embrace a new perspective of the world and their future in it;
Examine their relationship to the circumstances facing them, focusing on the right challenges and letting go of those that cannot be humanly altered; and,
Begin to effectively manage the conversations that generate connectedness and action.
It’s easy to understand isn’t it? If your business is suffering from lack of strategy execution, then your current framework isn’t giving you the structure you need for breaking through.
To put it slightly differently, if you change the way you look at your business, the business you’re looking at will change. Just by changing where you’re standing, you will begin to see things that weren’t visible and available to you before.
If you stop working on avoiding the circumstances that you can’t change and give up trying to avoid things like failure from happening, then you will have the energy you need to focus on causing what you do want to happen. You’ll also naturally be working on the right things, those you can impact.
Finally, if you change the way you think, the way you speak will automatically begin to alter, too. We’ve already made clear that the conversations that you are currently engaged in and that you consistently manage—yes, manage—have a significant impact on your current results.
Add your values, beliefs, behaviors, and principles to that, and you have the overall framework for a breakthrough organization.
How Do We Get There?
Establishing a successful framework in your company requires a system, an effective process. I want to begin by helping you understand the critical principles required to be successful in the implementation of the framework.
Then, in Section 4 of this book I will teach you the process I call the “ConnectionPoints™ Promise-Based Strategy and Execution Management System.” Promise-based systems are not a new concept. I first learned about them, after I had been using my own approach for some time, from the works of Professor Donald Sull at the London School of Business and business visionary Charles Spinosa.
The following chart presents these points in a more graphic format.
Five Things Missing in Most Companies
New Perspective An enduring Breakthrough Vision of the future that puts everyone on the exact same page, an invented future that empowers people, can’t be forgotten, and won’t disappear or go out of existence.
A Revelation in Awareness of the conversations and beliefs that undermine and sabotage Breakthrough Performance and a new Awareness of what is truly possible once the essential truth has been told.
A New Relationship to Circumstances A Breakthrough Strategy that eliminates the performance gaps and the need for survival tactics and that empowers employees and other stakeholders to take responsibility for causing breakthrough results.
Conversations that Manage Connectedness and Action A future-based Culture of Connectedness that gets the constraints left by past performance out of the way of having what you say you want and that creates the connections people need with each other and to the activities (roles/goals/responsibilities) that are consistent with the breakthrough vision.
A Breakthrough Accountability system that gives people back their power to produce “real measurable results” using a new framework for boosting accountability to support what the organization is committed to.
“A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown”
— Denis Waitley
The Basic Model for a Thriving Business: Connectedness
As I struggled during my early years of business ownership, a new awareness stopped me in my tracks: I realized that all business is formed by conversations, and the conversations that interested me most existed inside a framework of connectedness. At the time I had actually created a framework of disconnectedness that was working against me, undermining and sabotaging my performance and that of my employees. These networks were effective at holding me back because I was totally unaware of how they worked. I knew I had to change that—and I did.
For you to gain the best results in your workpla
ce, you, too, will need to become consciously aware of the network of conversations in your organization that impacts your employees’ ability to connect and perform.
Visualize the Network
To start, it might help to visualize this network as an electrical circuit. If your organization is fully connected, power can flow through the entire network of conversations. If not, the network will cease to operate, like an electrical device with a short circuit. In the workplace, a lack of connectedness prevents the organization from creating and utilizing the power it needs to achieve its strategic plan. Even worse, the wrong connections can destroy the enterprise’s ability to function properly, just as you can ruin or destroy a component with electrical power. It’s the connectedness that makes the network work; this is the physics of your organization.
I used to think this idea of connectedness was just mumbo jumbo. But I eventually learned that most ancient disciplines assert that everything in the world—even things outside the physical world—is connected. It’s an idea that reaches back thousands of years in Eastern thought.
When Albert Einstein came along with his theory of relativity, people in the West began to pay attention. It was about that same time that a group of European scientists—Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and others—started looking at micro-forces and objects smaller than we can see with the naked eye. They found that what we consider to be objects in fact were not. They discovered that everything is energy; things were defined only in the act of observation. (I’m grossly oversimplifying their theories because you probably didn’t buy this book to learn quantum mechanics from me.)
Then, in 1964, two physicists rocked the boat by proposing that there was something even smaller than the energy and particles that the other scientists had been studying—a “God particle,” as it was called in a 1993 book.5 In March 2013 Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of what’s now known as the Higgs boson or Higgs particle.
What does all this mean to you and to me? Well, to me it suggests that we are all connected to everything and everyone at a deep, deep level, a level of energy never before imagined. And also that connectedness is the basic common denominator for us all.
If that is even remotely true—and I believe it is—then perhaps we could consider a new view of the way the world works and its impact on our relationships, especially those in the workplace.
I attribute many of the outcomes in business to the degree of connectedness that exists between people. Can I prove it? Not scientifically. But there are enough people who accept this view of the way the world works to make it worth talking about. Even more, it’s important to implement it in our organizations so that we might realize our possibilities and so our employees can experience a level of relatedness that brings them satisfaction.
I can certainly point to my own results and the results of my clients: We have experienced incredible breakthroughs in our lives and businesses by becoming consciously aware of our connectedness to others.
Building the Connection Circuits of Your Organization
Once you can visualize your business’s network of conversations as an electrical network, you can understand that several of the components operate in similar fashion. Consider that in organizations, just as within an electrical circuit, there are conductors, capacitors, resistors, and insulators.
Conductors are the power generators, the leaders who cause vital conversations to flow freely throughout the organization, knowing that the right conversation will alter the behavior of individuals and teams. Conductors might even be the champions or managers of those conversations.
Capacitors are the regulators, the leaders who gather and control the energy. They know when to compensate if the energy gets too elevated and the system is in jeopardy of overloading.
Then there are the capacitor conductors, leaders who exhibit both qualities. These are the great leaders in your organization because they understand how to make processes flow smoothly. They know when the right conversations are missing and when the wrong conversations have entered the system.
Resistors stand in the way of energy moving in your organization. They are the employees who become overpowered by cynicism or apathy and who struggle to adopt and adapt to the right kinds of conversations. As a result of their negative impact, they can divert energy into areas where it cannot further the strategy.
Insulators are the employees with their guard up. They are threatened by the notion that connectedness is the basic model for business and want very little to do with all this mumbo jumbo. I know this type of person well. They will prevent the right conversations from flowing through the organization. Insulators will often leave the organization when the energy is turned up, because they cannot cope with the change in the organization’s direction or the demands put on them to connect and perform accountably.
Describe a time when you have been a Conductor or a Capacitor, or both. What was the result for the organization? For you?
Describe a time when you were a Resistor or an Insulator. What was the result for the organization? For you?
The ConnectionPoints™
So here’s what I have boiled it all down to:
Business is a network of conversations and a framework for connectedness.
There are conversations in which you say how things will be. These are the conversations in which you state your vision, your purpose, what you avow as your values, and what you declare for the business you are in.
There are also conversations that undermine and sabotage performance.
When I first became interested in the phenomenon of Best Place to Work companies, I discovered that while most companies talk about all the things they do that distinguishes them from others, that’s not what makes the real difference with their clients and their employees.
What all of these Best Place to Work companies have in common is the ability to connect with the essence of what is important to their employees. These employees feel connected to each other, to their company’s vision, to their common purpose, and to the company’s strategy, which they can envision themselves participating in and contributing to.
Moreover, I discovered that most of these companies weren’t fully aware of what made them so great. The attributes they credited for their good fortune were, for the most part, merely the symptoms of a great organization. The leadership had evidently adopted a natural “way of being” in their relationships with their employees that were much deeper and broader than they were aware of.
They were so close to the issue they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But once I understood what I thought was at the core of these organizations’ success, I tested these components of workplace behavior to see if they indeed powered success. It turns out that they do.
What Is Connectedness?
It might help to make doubly sure we are on the same page about connectedness. As I’ve begun to share with you, who you are as an organization is largely determined by how you connect with people, both internally and externally. But how do you experience the reality of connectedness? The psychiatrist Dr. Edward M. Hallowell offers the following distinction:
[Connectedness] is a sense of being a part of something larger than oneself. It is a sense of belonging, or a sense of accompaniment. It is that feeling in your bones that you are not alone. It is a sense that, no matter how scary things may become, there is a hand for you in the dark.
While ambition drives us to achieve, connectedness is my word for the force that urges us to ally, to affiliate, to enter into mutual relationships, to take strength and to grow through cooperative behavior.6
What makes us want to enter into mutual relationships? I think it is similar to what you find in a marriage. Dr. Harville Hendrix and his wife and partner, Dr. Helen LaKelly-Hunt, have spent well over a quarter century researching this topic and have discovered that the ability to successfully create intimate
partnerships goes far beyond simply wanting togetherness. The critical component is the ability to create connectedness, which supports an individual’s needs to safely affiliate with others. This is true in the workplace as well. When we feel safe and passionate about our surroundings, it’s then possible for fear, anxiety, and stress to be replaced by connectedness.
Similarly to the way Hendrix and LaKelly-Hunt envision marriage relationships, we can re-vision our organizations, creating safety and passion and the organization of our dreams.
Connectedness and Conflict
Hendrix and LaKelly-Hunt state that conflict in marriage is natural and expected. “Incompatibility is actually the foundation of a successful marriage,” they say. The same is true for organizations. Without conflict, we become accustomed to equilibrium and try not to “rock the boat,” yet without conflict (or chaos), a complex, evolving system—whether it’s a marriage or an organization—withers and dies.
Diversity of opinion leads to the innovation that increases the asset value of an organization. Finding new ways to relate to each other in the workplace results in a more conscious workplace and lets us engage in conversations that weren’t possible before, because we had stifled creative conflict in the past.
It’s the natural inclination of the members of an organization to want to lessen or remove conflict, thinking that conflict impairs the ability of the organization to achieve its desired goals. However, eliminating constructive conflict from the workplace in an attempt to find balance and equilibrium actually destroys the possibility of finding new and innovative ways of solving problems. Please be assured that I’m not proposing heated battles in the office. Instead, I’m proposing that if you want to build an unstoppable organization, one that produces amazing breakthroughs, it’s necessary to engage in debate and the defense of ideas. That is the Socratic method. Yet civil debate is only possible in an organization where people are authentically committed to making that debate safe for all others—where they are connected.
Thirteeners Page 4