Are you a 5 star performer?
It doesn’t matter your role or position in the company, from the very top to the most entry level, this week rate your performance as if you were an UBER or Lyft driver. At the end of every one-on-one interaction, group meeting, board or sales presentation, customer service call, etc., put down a rating for yourself on a scale from 1 (poor performance) to 5-star (exceptional performance). Make the rating from others' perspective, not yours, and be honest with yourself. If they had an app that could immediately rate you, are you producing 5-star performances where others are gaining tremendous value from you and want to interact with you? If you have a low 1-3 one time performance rating in a meeting or phone call, that is your call to action to make the next 4 interactions 5-star performances. Your goal this week is to achieve a 4.8 to 5-star average rating for all your performance impact opportunities. Good luck!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The LeaderShifts
There is a shift going on with leadership today. In fact there are two shifts underway; both are evolutionary and require time and support to cultivate. In the first shift occurring, everyone must develop as a leader and lead where they are no matter where they reside in the organization. Leadership can’t be limited to a select few in organizations any longer. With intense competition, true globalization, and the rapid advances in disruptive technologies, waiting for formal leaders to build a plan, make hierarchical decisions, and manage people and outcomes is a business model that time and competition is rapidly passing by.
Every individual in the organization must take a leadership role in planning, executing, and owning their performance activities and results. Everyone should be trained and expected to lead change instead of reactively managing it. They should see possibilities for change and positive disruption in everything, instead of obstacles and barriers. And finally they should take a leadership role in displaying personal and team accountability even on teams and in organizations that seem to always lack accountability. So LeaderShift one – Everyone developing as a leader.
The second Leadershift is in the management model for leading those people. To lead a team of individual leaders requires new leadership skills and behaviors to be effective. The old management model that has been around prior to WWII of planning, directing, controlling and managing is quickly losing its impact. For instance, no one wants to be managed any longer, just ask them. The most effective leaders of people in the future will be making the shift to leading by inspiring, energizing, facilitating, and developing the leader in everyone.
There are major shifts occurring in leadership whether we like it or not. Are you and your organization planning for and developing the leader in everyone and enhancing the effectiveness of your organizations leadership to take advantage of these powerful LeaderShifts? If not start today!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Sustained Success - These two organizations know how to enable it!
By any standard of measure two of the most successful organizations that consistently show excellence year in and year out are the Pittsburg Steelers and the New England Patriots. And if you get past the fan passion and get down to the undeniable success on the field and how that is accomplished, I think you can gain real insight on sustaining success by reading this ESPN article.
Bottom line, each organization enables their success with C.A.R.E. Senior leadership is visible and connected with their C.A.R.E. They define their culture and they live their culture. Leaders support the culture and the players lead it on the field. If you want sustained success that stands the time of time, then how effective is your organization at C.A.R.E?
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The Power of the ELO Model Realized
Over the last few weeks we have explored an employee-led, leader supported, organization enabled (ELO) performance model. Now let’s explore the tale of two organizations and the power behind an ELO performance based model.
We don’t have to go any further back than last week and to an organization that for the last 108 years suffered through one losing baseball season after another. The Chicago Cubs last won the coveted World Series back in 1908. But in 2016 they were looked at in the beginning of the year as a contender for the title and unlike past years they realized a century old dream. So what changed?
The Cubs owners and organization enabled the success. They first brought in Theo Epstein, a 42-year-old baseball executive, as President of Baseball Operations. Prior to the Cubs position, Epstein was youngest General Manager in baseball at the time and led the Boston Red Sox in 2004 to their first World Series title since 1918. So what Theo Epstein brought to the Cubs organization was inspiration, energy and a long-term vision of player and organization development. He inherited a team in 2011 with a record of 71-91 and would bottom out in 2012 with a 61-101 losing record and would finish last in the following two seasons. Then in 2015 his vision started coming together and the goal was realized in 2016. But the Cubs organization enabled a feeling of hope again in the team and the city of Chicago by his hiring.
Theo began a massive rebuild of the organization bringing in a mix of experienced talent with young prospects and a new manager in Joe Maddon with the leadership style and experience required to support a turnaround and a team built like this. Joe Maddon doesn’t manage his players, he supports them. He creates an environment where players stay loose and feel empowered. If something had to be said, he would say it, but as he has been quoted “I’d much rather the peers carry my message” and that leadership style and confidence in his team paid off in game seven when everything was on the line and seemed to be falling apart and the game getting away from them. With only four outs standing between them and winning the World Series, the Cubs let a three-run lead disappear. A miscalculation by Maddon on the capability of the relief pitchers to throw so many pitches the night before and come back in the final game as strong was catching up to him.
After the ninth inning ended and heading into extra innings the skies opened up and the tarps came out on the field and the teams retreated to their clubhouses. Maddon said he walked into the clubhouse and saw his team having a meeting. He went upstairs to check on the weather. The meeting was led by a veteran player, Jason Heyward. That meeting, according to many of the players, is what changed Cubs history. Management didn’t need to call the meeting; it was player (employee) led. In fact, as a manager that supports and doesn’t manage often, Maddon said “I hate meetings, I am not a meetings guy. I love when players have meetings, I hate when I do. So they had their meeting and the big part of it was, we don’t quit. We don’t quit.”
You can attribute what you want to that meeting, but the Cubs came out of the rain delay and put up two runs in the 10th to give them what turned out to be their margin of victory to claim the 2016 World Series trophy.
Now with an organization that enables success by providing clarity, alignment and the resources to win, a manager that supports and develops the leader in every player, and with players embracing and thriving as leaders, the Chicago Cubs have an opportunity to be good for a very long time.
The Chicago Cubs, 2016 World Series Champions, the power of the ELO model.
Next week the power of the ELO but with a completely different outcome.
Reimagining the Performance Model pt. 4
What Does Your Organization and Culture Enable?
Organizational culture and norms become key enablers to performance (both positive and negative).
Look no further than past and current headlines from any news source and see how culture drives performance. Wells Fargo, ENRON, AIG, sports teams and associations like Penn State, Baylor, FIFA and unfortunately thousands of other organizations like these can claim they have cultures of value and can even point to well-worded values and vision statements. But somewhere along the path to success each organization veered and took a different direction that enabled lies, deceit and ultimately failure in so many ways to occur. (More on this in upcoming blogs)
But no legal, well-intentioned organization starts with a culture like these. Most evolve slowly over time, letting certain actions and behaviors that don’t seem too bad in the beginning to become the norm, permeating the entire organization and ending up with people saying “How did this ever happen?”.
In our work with clients we see organizations every day with consistently low to mediocre organizational performance and asking for help to improve it. We then look at the collective past performance reviews of individuals at all levels of the organization we often find that over 90% of the reviews reflect outstanding to exceptional performance. So how can that be? As one client put it, “We don’t pull weeds around here we just replant them!”.
If you have an organization that is often defined by blame, justification and excuses, then look no further than a few well placed, influential individuals in the organization that often lead by fear and intimidation and go looking for blame instead of solutions. You know it only takes one or two individuals with the right influence behaving in the wrong way to poison an entire organization.
However, if an organization truly C.A.R.E’s about delivering the right results in the right way and focuses daily on doing so, the once unimaginable and impossible becomes reality. Organizations need to C.A.R.E more! Providing more Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enablement are how successful cultures that do it the right way achieve long term, sustainable success.
Look to the U.S Space Agency, N.A.S.A, in the 1960’s. Given a clear vision and mission to reach the moon, with an entire organization and country aligned to achieving that success, and provided with the best and brightest people, resources and technology available to accomplish the unthinkable, John F. Kennedy enabled the impossible to become possible when Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, July 21, 1969.
So we challenge you to look at your culture and the norms that you and the organization are cultivating. Does your organization have the courage to C.A.R.E enough to not just replant weeds but enable success by expecting and developing the leader in everyone, and shifting your leadership model from planning, directly, controlling and managing to inspiring, energizing, facilitating and developing? Culture by design, not default!