Are You Living in Groundhog Day? #WisdomWednesday #MML #Leadership

Like in the Bill Murray movie, do you get up each day, fall into the same routine day in and day out with little to no change?  So many leaders live in Groundhog Day, forcing their people to do the same.

What was the last book or learning experience you invested your time and resources with to become a better leader…truly investing in you?   If you have invested in you and your team’s learning in the last month, congratulations you are in elite company.  Only 1% of people read or invest in their professional learning on a monthly basis. Sad but true fact!

In Monday Morning Leadership Interactive, the final session focuses on the need to consistently enter into the “Learning Zone”.  This month please invest time and efforts into enhancing these three key leadership skill sets:

• Listening – Start today to listen for intent. Begin by limiting distractions and truly listen to your people. 
• Reading/Experiencing – Invest in new thinking, new experiences and gain new perspectives. Read and learn at least 15 minutes each day.
• Giving – Giving back to others, your time, your knowledge, and your resources.  There is a reason why hearse’s don’t come with luggage racks.  Your legacy is what you teach and give back today!

This week enter into and never leave the “Learning Zone”!

Hire Tough #WisdomWednesday #MML #Leadership

Take one minute to write your answers to these two questions - What is the greatest asset of any organization?  What is the greatest liability of any organization?

Most will answer “people” to the first question and a variety of answers from operational failures to poor customer service and everything in between for the greatest liability of any organization.

Let me first say “people” are not your greatest asset!  The RIGHT people are!  And the greatest liability to any organization are the WRONG people in your organization.  Hiring and or tolerating the wrong people can do immeasurable damage to an organization.

In Monday Morning Leadership Interactive, it discusses that we can never lower the bar in hiring the best people.  If we choose to settle for less than the best, then we are setting ourselves up for difficult situations and discussions in the future.

To that end, how effective is your hiring process and does it consistently deliver the most qualified, best “fit” employees?  Do your interview questions get to the real essence of the person you are interviewing? For example, is one of your interview questions, “Please describe the culture at the last 2 organizations you have worked for." And then ask, “What culture do you feel best fits you and allows you to perform at your best”? 

These two questions are rarely asked but when answered by a candidate can reveal a lot about what motivates that individual, as well as if can they thrive at your organization.

Begin to hire tough today so you can manage easy, because if you hire easy, trust me, at some point you will be forced to manage tough!  

The choice is yours!

The Do Right Leadership Rule #WisdomWednesday #Leadership #MML

As we continue to preview the upcoming MMLI program, the fourth Monday introduces us to the “Do Right Rule”.  Do what is right even when no one is watching.

Of course doing the right thing isn’t always easy, in fact at times it is very difficult.  Your shadow as a leader casts far and wide, farther and wider than you will ever know.  In fact, you can never not lead!

When my son Ryan was 7 or 8 years old and in Little League baseball, his team had just finished playing and all the boys were in the dugout doing what 7-8 year old boys do…messing around!  I was putting away equipment and packing up to head out when I noticed the boys were all glued to the chain link fence of the dugout staring out at two of our team fathers face to face at the pitcher's mound about to get into a fight.

I immediately left the dugout to break up the action (the boys were sorely disappointed).  Both father’s happen to be high level executives in their respective organizations.  I asked them, if they were to act this way in their workplaces, what would happen.  Both said major discipline actions or even fired.

I then pointed over to the dugout where all the boys were still plastered again the fence, still holding out hope for some action.  I said we have been teaching our sons the fundamentals of baseball all season long and now the only thing they will remember after the season was over is the scene playing out at the pitcher’s mound and two fathers' childish actions.

Ok point made!  Do you guard your leadership legacy and integrity even in the most difficult situations? Always remembering to do the right thing?

Escape From Management Land #WisdomWednesday #Leadership #MML

In the third Monday session of Monday Morning Leadership Interactive, Tony Pearce (your virtual executive mentor), talks about escaping from what he calls “Management Land,” where simple things often become complex and people easily lose perspective.

It is easy to fall into a daily routine of dealing with the urgent and never getting around to the important.  Your people and their development is important, but for much of the time when we are in management land, we don’t have time to invest in growing our people.  And since we have such limited ‘people’ time, where we invest that very valuable time is even more important.  

To ensure you are investing in the right areas, look at your team objectively and identify who are your rising stars, your middle stars and those on your team that might be falling stars.  Then pull past performance reviews for each individual and review the comments.  Also think about your daily interactions and where and how you spend your time developing each person.  Do the reviews look very similar for each person? And are you spending an inordinate amount of time with your falling stars rather than with your rising stars?

If you are treating your rising stars just like your falling stars, and your actions don’t reflect how important it is to coach your middle stars, then you might be stuck in “Management Land”.  This week start investing your time and attention in your rising and middle stars. This will be an investment that will pay huge dividends now and into the future.

Don’t treat everyone the same because they don’t deserve the same. Certainly treat everyone fairly, but if you treat everyone the same you will pull the top performers down, the middle just exist, and you accept less than acceptable performance or behaviors from the bottom and all you create is a chasm of mediocrity!

Escape Management Land today by investing in, leading and developing you and your organizations future - the rising stars of today!

A Main Thing Focus #WisdomWednesday #MainThing #Leadership

Do you know what the “main thing” is?  Equally important, do your people know what your main thing is?  Crystal clear clarity is important to ensure alignment and focus on the main thing.  This focus in turn allows your people to know what is important, not just what is urgent.

For example, ask any FedEx employee what their main thing is and this is what they will say, “People-Service-Profit, all we do aligns to and enhances those three things."

At Harley Davidson, every employee goes into work with a goal to “fulfill dreams of personal freedom”.  So what they do has a greater sense of purpose to make that happen.

Those working at Facebook are focused on giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.  Doesn’t matter the department, that is what they do. 

Successful organizations have a keen awareness of their competitive advantages and ensure a nearly myopic focus on clarifying and connecting the main thing to everyone no matter where they reside in the organization.

So this week find out the following:

• What is your organization’s main thing and how clear is it?
• Ask your team at your next team meeting, “What is the main thing”?  List their answers and discuss with the group what can we do to better clarify and align to our main thing?
• What is your managers main thing?

The key to this exercise is to fully understand if and where any disconnects might exist.  Is there clarity and alignment in the message and do our goals, actions, and behaviors support the main thing.  If not, you know what next week’s priority is…..identify and keep “the main thing the main thing”!

A New Launch #WisdomWednesday #MML

I am excited to announce the launch date of Monday Morning Leadership Interactive on October 1st.  This next generation, online interactive program has been under development for the last 6 months, so to have a final date for introduction is an exciting time for all of us at CornerStone.

I will be highlighting content from each of the 8 interactive modules over the next few weeks.  With over a 1.5 million copies sold of the book, we look forward to a whole new generation of leaders and future leaders participating in a completely new and revamped version of Monday Morning Leadership.  Personally, it is a tremendous milestone and extremely rewarding to see the future of CornerStone Leadership and CornerStone Learning House clearly ahead of us….....thank you for making this possible.

-Ken