It is all in the Wording

The package from the supermarket says “Gourmet Dried Plums”. I wondered if there was a difference between “Gourmet Dried Plums” and “Prunes”. What I have learned is that all prunes are plums, but not all plums can be dried to make prunes. A plum that can be dried without fermenting is a prune. Therefore my “Gourmet Dried Plums” are indeed prunes. Now in this case, I suspect that the dried plums are part of a marketing campaign to make them more attractive than prunes, but it points out the significance of naming things.
In healthcare, we have moved to calling our patients our customers. The intent as I understand it is to help all of us understand the significant position of control our “customers” have to choose. They maybe customers, but as John Nance points out in “Hospitals Should Fly”, they are patients. They come to hospitals to get better and get home safely, in improved condition.
Do your employees work for you or with you or along side you. While I suspect there is more than one appropriate answer, the behaviors that one exhibits based on your understanding of the answer to that question will impact significantly the results you get.
Take the word “Aspire” synonyms listed include ambitious, be eager, crave, desire, dream, hanker, long, pursue, seek, strive, struggle, try, want, wish, yearn. Each of those words have to me a different feel and would convey a slightly different meaning when used.
How often do you think about the meanings of the words you are using and the impact that it might have on the message those you are communicating with? Have you taken time to notice the words that others use, and the impact they have on you and then your interaction and communication. Words can be powerful and being intentional about the words you use may more closely align your results with your intended results.

 

Grabbing Low Hanging Fruit

I received a notice today from the supervisor of my town detailing how over the past three years, under her direction, the town has regained its financial footing by cost cutting, innovative management practices, and shared sacrifices that have led to success and a recent tax cut. The letter went on to detail that the town now has the financial measures in place that are well within the state Comptroller’s recommendations for municipalities. This is a good thing, and I am grateful for that, as I live in one of highest taxed towns in one of the highest taxed counties in the country. I cannot help to contrast that with what I have seen each weekday for the last two weeks. A caravan of trucks, directly from the town department of public works gathers at the end of my road. It seems that they are attending to a couple of large holes that they dug. Now, it may just be my bad timing, but it seems that I never pass by when they are actually doing anything related to the holes. And since I have no idea what their project is, no understanding of what they are hoping to accomplish, I suppose they could be doing everything in a very efficient and effective manner. My perception is different though.
It makes me think of many times we miss the “low hanging fruit” that is right in front of us to improve effectiveness. Right now in hospitals that might be reducing readmissions, for professional services improving accounts receivables, for a group of not-for-profits sharing space or staff and for a bank improving customer loyalty.
Take a look around you and see where you might get some quick wins in terms of efficiencies and effectiveness. Better yet, ask your employees where the low hanging fruit lie and let them help you and your company grab some of it!

 

Steps to Overcoming Fears

Do you know people who are so afraid of things that those things significantly impact their lives? I know a few. Some with larger and some with smaller fears.
I have a friend who is afraid of driving on highways. Living in a metropolitan area, this has caused her to alter or cancel plans many times. I also know someone who has such an overpowering fear of heights that he has forgone many opportunities to climb to heights and see the world from a different angle.

Almost t as crippling for many of us can be the fear of failure. It is the fear that stops us from pursuing dreams, the fear that may stop us from succeeding in the work we do, or with the people we love.
We often refer to fear as” False Expectations Appearing Real”. It is so powerful that it sets off physiological reactions. I have heard people talk about being nauseas when walking into a meeting, or sweating just thinking about making a phone call they perceive to be important.
To concur your fears consider these things:
What is the likelihood that your greatest fear will come true?
What information are you basing that expectation on?
What experience are you basing that experience on and how long ago was that experience?
Practice an affirmation that reinforces your strength and overcoming the fear “I enjoy the experience of educating others about the work I do”
Take small steps, and ask others to support you. Instead of trying to talk to a large group, start small, and pad the audience with your friends.
With patience and efforts many fears in business can be overcome. Soon you will begin to see fear as the opportunity to Focus Everything on Action and Results, and the outcomes that you achieve will slowly and surely move towards improved results.

 

Top Performing Organizations

A colleague passed on an interesting article from the Healthcare sector: “Cost Reduction in Health Systems; Lessons from Analysis of $200 million saved by top performing Organizations” By Chip Caldwell, Greg Butler, and Nancy Poston
Of most interest to me was the difference between the characteristics of senior leaders in “Top performers” as compared to “non-starters”.
Non-starters spent too much focus on analysis, looking for the perfect answer, which most importantly frustrated their best managers, and did not allow for implementation. Non-starters also are slower to adapt to change and seem to fear it more than top performers. This was often fear of physician reactions, criticism from the board or community, or nursing resistance. Supporting their hesitancy to change was thinking that it was not the right time (and it never would be), a new regulation was pending, JCAHO was coming, a key leadership position was just about to start. Non- starters were more likely to say no to almost anything. They were looking outside for help in terms of higher reimbursement, and always felt that they were different from any benchmark that came up.
On the other hand, top performers value speed in thought and implementation. They interpret data, until they have “enough” critical information. Top performers, set goals related to that data, and implement the needed changes. Top performers also build their managers self-confidence rather than criticize. In both, one on one and group meetings, Senior leaders looked for the positive in new ideas put forth by their managers.
Other important behaviors of top performing organizations include collaboration cross functionally and departmentally, recognition of the critical role of nursing, recognition that the status quo is not satisfactory, relationships built, and recognition of the manager level as key to supporting and implementing change.
Non- starters can quickly move to among the better performers by building a clear accountability structure, define, align and communicate goals, meet regularly so that senior leaders can support the attainment of the goals and play the important role of removing barriers and obstacles, also informally check in and provide support, and develop their managers and let them work

 

Failure Towards Excellence

A few weeks ago I was began a search for an answer to the question “How do you hold people accountable without blaming? What is the difference between accountability and responsibility and where does acceptable failure come in? “, and threw out some ideas about failure more often being an opportunity to improve than a chance to blame.
We know that accountability is strong in the most successful companies. Individuals accept it, in fact they look for clarity in accountability to support them in their job, and mangers and leaders hold others accountable to perform as part of the company. This ties back to the consistent belief that change is ongoing in top performers and accountability for and to that change is a must. It also ties back to the primary role that managers play in promoting and supporting change and accountability.
Tom Smith and Roger Connors highlight four steps to achieving an accountable organization: Seeing it, being alert and flexible enough to recognize what needs to be done, even as that changes; Owning it, aligning your work with what the company needs; Solving it, especially when this requires cross functional activities and Doing it, focus on what needs to be done, what is a priority for now, and sustain an environment for change.
Amy Edmonson offers the following steps to creating a safe environment for taking advantage of failures and reframing them in light of true opportunities to learn: Accurately describe failure and that it can be expected to occur in your environment; embrace the messengers, modeling the understanding that we each have limits of our knowledge and asking for assistance; invite the participation of others to detect and analyze failure, and identify the opportunity to promote intelligent experimentation and set boundaries. There are times, albeit a few, that accountability includes consequences because of true mal intent or inability despite the best of efforts of manages and leaders. In these instances, the reasons for the consequences must be made clear. This allows others to continue forward in a safe environment.
How else might you answer the question of accountability, blame and acceptable failure in a culture that is required to change?

 

What Makes Good Bosses Better?

What makes some leaders highly successful with less formal or technical “intelligence” while others who would be off the charts in terms of their formal or technical “intelligence” cannot lead their teams to even small amounts of success.
Emotional intelligence (EI), as defined by Daniel Goleman might hold the key. He defines EI as the ability to understand and manage both your own emotions, and those of the people around you. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence usually know what they’re feeling, what this means, and how their emotions can affect other people.
According to Goleman, an American psychologist who helped make the idea of EI popular, there are five main elements of emotional intelligence:
1. Self-awareness. People with high levels of self-awareness are aware of their emotions, in control of them, therefore confident, and in control.
2. Self-regulation. People who self-regulate are also in control. They think before they speak, they do not become too angry or jealous. They are thoughtful and comfortable with change.
3. Motivation. People who are motivated are highly productive, love a challenge and will trade short term for long term success.
4. Empathy. Those with a high degree of empathy are truly able to feel and understand what others are feeling and understanding. They are good listeners and good at managing relationships.
5. Social skills. Those with good social skills are willing to help others develop and shine. They are great team players and good at managing relationships.

Emotional Intelligence is the innate potential to feel, use, communication, recognize, remember, describe, identify, learn from, manage, understand and explain emotions.
Think back to those great bosses you had, and those not so great bosses. What skills did they possess related to emotional intelligence and what were they lacking? How are you as a leader, be it within work, home or community environment, and what can you do to become more “emotionally competent?”

 

Failure and Innovation

This has been a hot topic for our customers lately. How do you hold people accountable without blaming? What is the difference between accountability and responsibility and where does acceptable failure come in? We have been raised in a culture that believes failure is generally bad, and learning from it is easy. There is a belief that embracing failure as part of a change model would mean an organization that runs wild, losing focus on its success.
In an article in the Harvard Business Review by Amy Edmonson, she proposes a spectrum of the reasons for failure, ranging from defiance to task challenge and ultimately exploratory testing. When executives were interviewed about the spectrum, they agreed that it made sense and that 3% to 5 % of the failures were actually blame worthy. When asked what percentages of failures were typically treated as blameworthy, the answers were closer to 70% to 90%.
Ms. Edmonson goes on to differentiate types of failure: preventable failure in predictable organizations, unavoidable failure in complex organizations, and intelligent failure at the frontier. Ultimately, she concludes that only leaders can build a culture that “counteracts the blame game, makes people feel both comfortable with and responsible for surfacing and learning from failures.” In studies, the manager level is most able to support this mind shift. Organizational leaders should focus on gaining a greater understanding of what happened, not of who did it. That means reporting small and large failures, searching for the opportunities to learn and applying that learning across the organization, and also proactively searching for opportunities to experiment intelligently.
The highest performing organizations look for early signs of failures in products, and relationships. They know that having impact early exponentially improves both the product or relationship down the road and also saves them money, improving the bottom line. They analyze failure in detail, not superficially and they promote systematic, thoughtful experimentation as a component of being on the leading edge of work.
I would love to hear how you and your company are promoting this type of culture and the impact it has on the organization, your work, your employees and stakeholders.

 

Collaborating for Improved Results

I was meeting with a group of teens last week and the topic of collaboration came up. We went to the dictionary to determine the difference between cooperation and collaboration.

This is what we found:
Collaboration: to work with one another
Cooperate: to work together

This was unsatisfactory to describe what we were trying to understand. We all instinctivley knew that cooperation is part of collaboration. So is strong communication and intentional coordination.

Collaboration as we define it is the process of people working together to discover ways to solve problems, address complex or cross functional issues, improve process, products or products or invent new ones. It includes having a shared work space, a common well understood goal and tangible outcomes. Those are the easy parts. Harder are the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the collaborators must learn and embrace.

The first is abundance thinking rather than scarcity thinking. Each collaborator much approach the work understanding that through the shared knowledge their piece of the pie will get bigger, not by taking from others, but by creating a larger pie through the innovation and creativity that will drive the process. We have been raised in a society that is tilted more towards a win-lose mentality, here a win-win mentality is needed.
Second, each collaborator should learn to share what they know with the group through effective communication.
Third and possibly the most difficult is that each collaborator must be biased towards inquiry rather than towards convincing others that their way is correct. This curiosity will open up communication lines. Each should seek first to understand. Many times we will not let go of what we think is right long enough to hear what others are saying that may add to and improve our thoughts and ideas.

Collaboration has the potential to improve products or services, provide better results in a shorter time frame, and decreases bottlenecks that lead to higher levels of productivity that contributes to profitability.

 

Spring Forward and Reinvigorate

I am looking around me and seeing signs of spring, of growth, and reemergence. It is quite an amazing thing. I saw my first rabbit of the spring the other morning. The sun is warm and inviting enough that I leave my door open when home. The plants in my house are sprouting new growth; even turnips left in a bag seemed to know it was spring as they started growing tops and root systems.

As I understand it, the longer days give the plants what they need in terms of light. The winter hibernation ends. The root systems begin to move the rain and nutrients into the trees. Flowers and leaves open. Photosynthesis occurs and the plants receive nutrition and grow further.

Although most of us do not hibernate, why not use the signs of spring to look around and see what we can nurture. What areas we can grow for ourselves, our relationships, and our businesses.

Might you consider using this as a season of renewal?

Clean old files to make room for new; reorganize your office so your current customers, clients, and prospects are top of mind; donate clothes that you might not wear again to make room for new. Sort through your basement boxes; throw out or donate what you do not need, and create a fresh space.

Plant seeds, literally and figuratively. Sow seeds intentionally reconnect with prospects languishing in your funnel, till the ground by focusing on moving from prospect to customer, reignite your current clients with the information of your new knowledge and ways you can help them. Fertilize. Find people you know who know you but have not worked with you or referred others. Let your blooms grow and find new prospects and customers who have not known you before, and bring forth the best of your mature growth combined with the new attitude, skills and knowledge.

Ultimately, let your best shine fresh in the new light. Look for ways to reinvigorate what and how you do what you do. Look to prosper and grow anew. Have a great spring season!

 

Doing Things on Purpose

Over the last few years, I have developed a different understanding for this common phrase. Purpose either was a noun “the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used” or a verb “to set as an aim, intention” It has moved from meaning something that exists, or I am intentionally doing, to something that is aligned with my life’s work, my purpose. It is the answer to the question I ask myself “why am I here” or “why do I exist”. It is my personal vision.

It has been a thoughtful road and an interesting journey to come up with my answer to that question. I am confident that I have it for now. The beauty of understanding your main purpose in life is that combined with your personal values, it can help guide your activities.
I am fortunate that my work is intentionally, directly aligned with my purpose. Is yours? If it is not, are there parts of your work that are more aligned with your purpose? Is there a way that you can do more of that?

How about your time outside work? What volunteer activities do you participate in? Certainly when you are offering up one of the most precious commodities we have, our time, we want to be doing things that we feel we are meant to, and therefore are good at and love doing. Are the organizations or groups values and vision in some ways aligned with yours? What committees or functions do you participate in for them? Are you and the company getting the most from your efforts? If not, where might you volunteer instead?

When you are with your family and closest friends or in the supermarket or on an airplane, do you look for ways to act in accordance with your values and personal vision. My experience has told me that when I do just that, look for opportunities, I have great days, and believe that I in small ways make others days better as well.