Thirteeners

by Daniel F Prosser

  Finally, make sure all employees understand that if you can’t count on them to do what they said they’d do, you don’t need them. We hold on to some employees longer than we should. There’s no reason to keep employees who have no intention of keeping their word. But if employees aren’t keeping their word, the first place we need to look is at our relationship to our own word. If what we say and what we do don’t match, people begin to believe it’s not important for them to keep their word, either.

  You’ll know you have a problem in this area when you notice employees breaking agreements with clients.

  When we think we don’t have to keep our word because of our position or rank, we breed the Entitlement Virus, which spreads rapidly and is hard to knock out, even with our best strategies. An entitlement mentality exists, to one degree or another, in every organization. To neutralize it requires that people be put in charge of themselves and be allowed to choose how they will perform. With those privileges come responsibility, accountability, and a purposeful alignment with the vision and mission. However, that presumes that the purpose is well communicated and well understood.

  Replacing the Entitlement Virus with the Empowerment Virus

  When employees are put in charge of themselves, are told clearly what the purpose of the company is and their purpose within the company, when they are allowed to choose how they will perform, and are told that they and their leaders will be held accountable for their actions, they become empowered. They are responsible for their own future.

  That creates an Empowerment Virus that employees can transmit and replicate among themselves and that serves as the best counteragent to the Entitlement Virus. Those who won’t commit to empowerment and accountability tend to self-select out when it’s clear they aren’t on the same path as everyone else.

  As a leader, your only choices are to take responsibility for performance and continue to enjoy the benefits of behaving like a conscious leader—or not. Choosing not to perform as promised means you’ll have to accept the consequences of your actions. The Entitlement Virus has the power to prevent any organization from reaching its objectives. When you as the leader can grasp the notion that it begins with you and you are squarely at the source of this issue, you can examine your own conversations around entitlement.

  To summarize, when managers believe their own sacrifices entitle them to the special benefits of a privileged class, the Entitlement Virus, and feelings of entitlement will show up among the employees. Only by creating awareness of the Entitlement Virus will you be in a position to transform it into the positive Empowerment Virus.

  Key Points and Preparing for What’s Next

  Before we get into the process of how to transform your company into a THIRTEENER company, let’s review what we’ve covered in Sections 1 and 2:

  Business is a network of consciously connecting or unconsciously disconnecting conversations. Some conversations support conscious connection, a state of being in which employees feel that they belong and can contribute to the company’s success and in which the power of the Breakthrough Strategy can flow throughout the organization and be executed. Other conversations create unconscious disconnection, a state of being in which many employees feel disempowered and in which employees struggle and often fail to execute the organization’s strategy. Transforming your business into a consciously connected company requires transforming the conversations that constitute your business. If you can transform those conversations, then you’ll get to say how your future will be.

  There are ten positive, consciously connecting conversations that produce connectedness within an organization. I call these the ConnectionPoints™, and they help you powerfully and consciously lead an organization using the conversations for contribution, acknowledgment and appreciation, alignment, accountability, communication, relatedness, responsibility, integrity, possibility, and fun.

  There are many types of negative, disconnecting conversations that create disconnected companies. These mostly take the form of viral memes, which show up in the form of hidden monologues that employees transmit between themselves to create the “genetic code” of your organization. One type of negative viral meme is what I call an Execution Virus. Examples include “It’s their strategy (not ours),” “They’re always making excuses,” “We’ve always done it this way,” and “The boss is watching, so just don’t screw up.” Another kind of negative viral meme is the Entitlement Virus. This virus, which mainly infects management, is best encapsulated in the meme, “The employees’ needs are more important than the business.”

  Once a viral meme is in your company (and remember, all companies have memes), you can’t overpower it, but you can replace it with a positive viral meme that you generate. To do so you need to:

  a. Tell the truth about past transgressions, behavior, and results.

  b. Declare an affirmative future in the form of a positive meme that will take the place of the negative meme.

  c. Adopt a promise-based execution management and feedback system to keep the positive meme in existence, alive, and reinforced within your organization.

  d. Institute transparent dialogue with and between your employees to prevent new negative viral memes from forming.

  Here Be Dragons: Real and Imagined Dangers

  In the chapters ahead you’ll find new insights for your leadership, new ways to think that will prepare you to take your organization into a previously undreamed of future.

  What your company desperately needs to succeed is for you to take responsibility for providing authentic leadership, not the pretense of leadership. That means uncovering what’s available to you that your employees and others possess and can express in ways that you never thought of.

  As an authentic leader, you must be willing to not always play it safe. In fact, you must be willing to be vulnerable and open to recognize your own fears and weaknesses. And that’s the first thing we’re going to tackle in Section 3, starting with the process of authentic leadership.

  Risking What You Have … To Have What You Want

  Leadership is about stepping out of your comfort zone, and the instructions for getting out of your comfort zone are themselves outside your comfort zone. I’ve begun the process by making you ask yourself some tough questions about whether you’re leading or just pretending to lead and also by showing you how pretending to lead is creating the Entitlement Virus in your company. Now it’s time to take the second step: getting both feet out of your comfort zone and into the unknown.

  I know that’s a scary thought. As the iconic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”14 But fear is what’s holding you back, and only by facing that fear and mastering it will you be able to get your company out of its proverbial rut and take it where you want it to go.

  Terra Incognita: Exploring Unknown Territory

  It’s said that cartographers once labeled unexplored or unknown territory on their maps with the phrase “Here be dragons.” The idea was to denote allegedly dangerous places, where sea serpents and other mythological creatures might lurk. Myths like this have always played a part in our lives, and that includes business.

  As we’ve discovered, your business is made up of the thinking and conversations that go on undetected yet have great power over results, and the primary—and most destructive—meme that operates in the background is fear. Fear is the source of the Execution Virus and a mind-set that stifles individuals and groups. Those who are infected fear looking bad to others or being negatively judged or assessed. That prevents your organization from executing your strategy.

  Fears like these originate in the kind of prelogical thinking that’s common to preteens who are beginning to break away from parents or primary caretakers and are coping with the feeling of not belonging. That doesn’t necessarily mean that organizations are staffed by employees who think like preteens, but under stress and
confronted by something that disrupts their feeling of belonging, employees often revert to preteen reactions. They may behave in ways that might appear childish.

  Prelogical thinking often concerns myths, legends, limiting beliefs, and fears—all kinds of stuff that humans make up. However, prelogical thinking is not a very useful tool in the workplace, and employees who think this way are very difficult to motivate.

  We all have a tendency to reject anything new and instead to stay with what is known or comfortable. This is how prelogical thinking hinders our ability to use rational thought to solve a problem. Our emotional ties to the past prevent us from seeing the real problem and push us to merely address the symptoms.

  As I’ve said before, 87 percent of all companies with a strategic plan will fail to execute it. That’s because those companies are pursuing the simplest yet most damaging strategy: the strategy to avoid failure.

  You might ask, “Are you saying my strategy causes failure because I’m focused on making sure I don’t fail?” Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying! Most people are invested in not failing, and they’ve taught all their employees to value that course of over taking any kind of risks that have the potential to pay off. Everyone’s doing it, and it’s costing them on a grand scale.

  What kinds of failure make you most anxious?

  How do you work to avoid failure?

  I believe the leading causes of failure to execute business strategy are: (a) the unwillingness of business leaders and their followers to change their thinking from “avoiding failure” to “standing for something that seems to be impossible to achieve” and (b) the invention of conversations that support that avoidance-of-failure thinking.

  In teaching others to let go of their fears about what might happen if they take risks, I’ve seen miracles happen. A professional services firm had an unprecedented 60 percent leap in performance in five months, for example. A creative services group went from a loss of tens of thousands of dollars in one year to a place on the Inc. 500/5,000 list and a more than 40,000 percent increase in net profit during the following years.

  How Is That Possible? What Changed?

  No one was fired. A few people left on their own when they decided they didn’t want to let go of their accustomed ways of working. But nothing was altered in the businesses’ overall strategies. All that changed was the willingness to let go of, past-based thinking. In a few short months, three things happened:

  The leaders discovered the viral thinking that was preventing them and their employees from keeping promises and executing strategy.

  All employees, including the leaders, changed their personal perspective of the core business.

  All employees altered their relationship to the circumstances that had always left them feeling fear about failing, loss, or scarcity.

  When management learned that their thinking was getting in their way, they were able to invent a new place to stand and lead from. That’s the magic of understanding and uncovering the Execution Virus. When you uncover the specific viral meme that plagues your organization and then expose it to the light of day, the meme loses its power to drive your organization in the wrong direction, and you recover your power to have what you really want.

  It sounds simple, and it is—unless you are unwilling to give up the past that runs you, your employees, and your business. Sometimes you have to be willing to get off the map before you can see where you’ve been on it.

  Rowers and Growers

  Over time, I have observed that all business strategies fall into two basic categories:

  1. Rower Strategy: Operating from the past or reacting in ways that are based on fear of failure. I call this the Rower Strategy, because it reminds me of someone who’s working hard but getting nowhere fast because he’s rowing upstream, trying to get away from the dangerous rapids downstream. And he’s all by himself in the boat. I know a lot of people who operate like this—and they’re failing.

  2. Grower Strategy: Focusing on building and generating from a perspective of the future—a view that is declared by saying how it’s going to be. I call this the Grower Strategy.

  Whenever I work with an organization, once I hear the conversations that are running their strategy, I can tell whether I’m dealing with a dysfunctional organization that’s rooted in the past (the Rower Strategy) or a focused and functional organization that is building from a perspective of the future (a Grower Strategy). Believe me, there are more of the first than the second.

  It’s impossible to use both strategies at the same time, though infrequently an organization can move back and forth between the two. But the Rower Strategy usually prevails, because the past has a more powerful grip on people and their behavior than does the future, which has to be invented into existence.

  The first sign of a Rower Strategy is management’s attitude toward an outsider being brought into the company to work with them. The first reaction is, “Oh, gawd, here we go again. Now what are we going to do?”

  If you want breakthrough results, you will need to move your organization away from “Here we go again” thoughts and into a place where people connect with each other and to the vision and mission of the company. That’s a Grower Strategy, and that’s where you will come into your own as a leader. But you don’t just move your organization there; you must move yourself there first!

  You must venture into unknown territory. You have to embrace your own fears, the myths you have made up, and whatever you’re resisting before you can truly lead others. Otherwise your employees will see right through your pretense.

  Some of my clients have tried to bring change to their employees so they wouldn’t have to confront the dragons of their own past, but as they found out when employees resigned, that rarely works very well. However, once you follow a Grower Strategy, you can do just about anything because you won’t have Rower Strategy results.

  Don’t Look Back. You Don’t Know What’s Ahead, So Say How It Will Be!

  In a Grower Strategy, you enter the world of the unknown. The moment you look back for some kind of certainty that you are on the right path, you’re right back in a Rower Strategy. But it’s the adventure and not the destination that we are working toward here. You don’t know—and you don’t know what you don’t know—that awaits you. You have to discover it.

  Grower Strategy is about inventing something from nothing. That means if you think you already have the answer to your strategy execution issues, you are stuck in Rower Strategy, and the Execution Virus is determining your future. Instead you need to be investigating what’s possible at all times. Grower Strategy is not about your knowing the answers—it’s about discovering the future you want. It’s the quest for something worth pursuing, where you and your team can declare it to be and then have it be that way.

  Why approach it this way? Because, either way, it’s all made up. You can make it up to escalate results (Grower Strategy), or you can hang on to what you’ve made up that brings performance down (Rower Strategy).

  Why not generate a radical and revolutionary innovation for a future that does not represent your fears of repeating the past? You let go of how you think it has to be and trust the process, allowing others to contribute innovative ideas and get connected to your vision. You’ll never know how talented your employees are if you think you have to have all the answers.

  Letting Go

  In 2001, after I sold my software business to a competitor, I agreed to stay on, but I also had to confront the truth that my heart really wasn’t in it. I knew that it was going to be “their way or the highway” so ultimately I headed on down the highway.

  To do that, I had to let go of my view that I, as the former CEO, was bringing a solution to the new company’s problems, that they needed my valuable insight to succeed, and that I even knew what was needed and wanted in the newly merged company.

  It wasn’t my business any longer; I had only a partial stake. I had to face the reality that they really wanted to d
o it their way, without my input. Confronting my own arrogance was painful, but the end result was a personal breakthrough: I took myself out of the equation, and I found my freedom.

  I discovered that it’s only when you are finally willing to risk all that you have—to let it all go, forfeit it—that you can actually have it. It’s only then that you can invent a new future for yourself.

  The past has your future in its grip, and when you have no awareness of the strength of that grip, you have few choices available. You are bound to the past, and the past owns your future.

  I’ve been there, too, and much of the rest of this book is about why it doesn’t have to be that way for you and what you can do about it. Section 4 deals with that transformative process, but you can’t begin until you make an unconventional shift in your perspective—in the way you relate to circumstances of the past and the notion of a future-based organization.

  The Failure to Embrace Chaos

  As I’ve discovered for myself, the fundamental reason why so many leaders don’t lead their teams to the finish line in executing their strategy is that they can’t tolerate the discomfort that comes with the chaos when things aren’t happening as planned.

  Staying the course in the face of disorder, disequilibrium, or confusion is difficult. Most people can’t do it. This is where the Rower Strategy—the avoidance of failure—plays a big part. Chaos is not an issue most organizations are keen to address; it’s easier to address the crisis of the moment than to address the feeling of disequilibrium that comes along with the feeling of chaos. Instead of just accepting that a feeling of disequilibrium is natural in chaotic situations, most leaders want to look for a way to create the pretense of balance.