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Leadership … It’s All in Your Head!

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The theme of SOBCon this year, The New Leaderrship and Loyalty Businesss, has me thinking, why do we work so hard to do what we do? … and how much of our success and leadership is in how we see ourselves?

It can’t be solely economic. We could find easier ways to put in a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.

It’s not just political. We can raise our station in life and our job roles by trying less visible, more traditional ways.

It’s a reaching out to leadership. Leaders are givers. Leaders give their learning, their loyalty, their love to build something lasting and solid with others that no one person can build alone.

Why do we choose the road less traveled, the rockier road that’s bound to be just that much harder if only because it’s not paved? In the end does that make us leaders or victims of the route we’ve chosen to take? At it’s core, it’s the “what” or even the “how” of what we do that makes a leader, but the “why.”

Leadership … It’s All In Your Head

Still, the calling to build something lasting and solid is simply a calling without the leadership thinking to fuel the “what” and “how” of making that vision a reality. To attract those other someones who help build that solid something a leader has to have the right “why” working. the right “why” is leadership thinking. Leadership is really all in our heads.

Did you ever notice that what people value most is what they give away?

Leaders understand that giving to others won’t get us what we not given to ourselves.

I have a friend who is a promiscuous truster. He extends his trust almost immediately to everyone he meets. He NEEDS to trust other people in order to get their trust back. His need to feel trusted gets filled that way. He’s often the victim of untrustworthy types find him attractive and find it easy to take advantage. He often burned, sometimes badly. My friend’s problem is that he doesn’t trust himself first.

The “why” he’s doing it is because he NEEDS to be trusted that is what undercuts his leadership.

Suppose that he decided (killed off all other options) to find himself trustworthy first?

That would simply be a change in thinking — all in his head.

He would move from possible victim to leadership.

If he found himself trustworthy, he wouldn’t NEED to trust other people almost immediately but he still could.
Now he would be doing it from a position of strength. Now he could trust almost everyone until he got to the untrustworthy takers. Now, because he didn’t NEED their trust (which he wasn’t getting anyway) he could smile and leave them alone.

Leaders own what they give away.

Doing that is all inside our heads. How is the leadership inside your head going?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

See also:
Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

Get Your Leadership ON … Before You Get Folks “on the Bus”

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10-Point Plan: Building a Team

Bringing Irresistible High Performers Into Your Brand

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Whether you’re a solopreneur in Ladd, Illinois or a C-suite executive at a Fortune 100 corporation, leadership — building a business — means you aren’t doing what you’re doing alone. It’s tried, true, and almost tired wisdom that getting the right folks on the bus is the first step in the process of building a great business. Every advocate of Jim Collins knows that you need the right team to take a business from good to great.

Seems simple. Enlist a great team and win.

Yet when the time comes to get other folks to board the bus, we can so get busy filling seats, much that we could consider about who joins us is left back on the curb long after the bus has already taken off.

In a strange way, we sometimes don’t let our leadership kick in fully until we see a team in front of us and at best that’s a little late. You see at the moment we need someone to help with our business, our brand, or our quest, we often get focused on the task we need with and lose sight of the person who will be doing the task.

Here’s how the process often works.

  • We have a job that needs doing. Someone has left the team or the business is growing and it’s time to add another someone to the group.
  • We determine the nature and scope of the tasks, the level of work, and the skills and time required to fill that gap.
  • We find an old job description. We edit that to construct a new one.
  • We share that new job notice with people who know great people and in places where appropriate candidates will see it and respond. Then we review submissions for experience and expertise.
  • We invite people to interview for the position and select the candidate we feel most likely to be qualified, committed to the work, and a good fit for the team.

Yet, a few months later we often find that we have a whiner, slacker, complainer, an under-performer, or a person who’s personality doesn’t fit the work or the people with whom that person regularly interacts. .

Somewhere between process and performance we’ve left a leadership gap.

Get Your Leadership On … Before You Build the Team

When I worked in publishing, I watched and worried over the variation in performance in freelancers and employees and from employee to employee. With some serious thinking and calculated tweaking, I found the process by which a person was enlisted could get the right people to stay with it to “get on the bus” and the bad fits to decide to pass on that opportunity. What it took was a willingness to go a little deeper – and to leave the “driver’s seat.”

It starts by shifting priorities from those of a boss or a manager to those of a leader building a team.

  • A great boss hires great employees who can get the work done.
  • A manager enlists great people who have the individual expertise and team skills to execute collaborative projects to successful outcome.
  • A leader attracts and chooses other great leaders who have the abilities, motivation, and complementary skills to become a team that can build something outstanding and lasting that no single member could build alone.

A leader spends more reflection on what’s missing and what’s needed to fill out the team — focusing strategically on a longer view and stronger growth rather than on the tactical response to a present need. A leader sets the standards higher. Leaders expand the thinking from not just what we need — someone to do a job — to what will attract true leaders who will grow with the company and even more than that fill in the gaps of the team.

With our leadership ON our priority becomes “all good people” to build the strongest team possible. And we apply that standard to every role that interacts with our team — employee, volunteer, vendor, partner, customer, friend. The key to “all good people” is to develop a process that attracts the kind of people we want and is such that the people who don’t want to be outstanding employees and volunteers just don’t come.

As I describe this leadership matrix, you’ll see how the process can do just that for you.

The Leadership Matrix for Choosing Outstanding Employees and Volunteers

Strauss Leadership Matriix for Choosing Winning Employees and Volunteers
Strauss Leadership Matriix for Choosing Winning Employees and Volunteers

Here’s how the process changes when we have our leadership on before we build the team:

  • We have a job that needs doing. Someone has left the team or the business is growing and it’s time to add another someone to the group.
  • Not just the job. We analyze the situation, conditions, and opportunities. We look first at the people currently doing those tasks. We ask those people what they could be doing more of and should be doing less of in order to be bringing their best game to the business.
  • Not just the expertise. We look for the expertise to that’s missing from the team. Some of what the current team could be doing less of to perform higher are tasks that they’ve outgrown. Some of what they could be doing less of are skills that aren’t their strengths. If we build a job description to the team, rather to the immediate set of tasks, we’ll gain new skill sets that aren’t currently available. For example, if the team is great at people skills, but weak on data skills, we can look for someone who also brings that.
  • We share that new job notice with people who know great people and in places where appropriate candidates will see it and respond.
  • Not just the desire or potential. We build a short-answer values and potential survey rather than a submission form. Each question might allow only 100 words. The questions might be …
    • What led you to apply for this position?
    • How do your values align with the values of our business?
    • How do you see your contribution in helping the business grow?
    • What in your life or work experience proves to you that we’d be successful working together?
    • How would you describe the optimal working relationship we might have now and moving forward?
  • We invite people to interview for the position and select the candidate we feel most likely to be qualified, committed to the work, and a good fit for the team.
  • During the interview, we introduce the candidate to the business, to members of the team, and to the employee or volunteer who last joined the business.
  • Not just a fit. We ask the newest employee or volunteer to assign the candidate a small task. The task might be writing a blog post or a proposal for a new idea. The task is chosen to fit the skills needed by the team. The newest team member is asked to give the candidate this slightly ambiguous guidance.
    • This is not a test. It’s so that we have something of a project nature to talk about.
    • It’s not expected that it will be a final, executable idea.
    • When you (the candidate) are ready, please call to set up a meeting to discuss what you bring.
  • Not just leadership. The candidates who set up meetings show up with a project and ready to share their thinking. . The meetings allow you and the team to discuss how the candidate makes decisions and what he or she valued in developing the meeting project.

The task sorts the candidates with leadership qualities, initiative, and motivation. Those who set up a return date are the ones can deal with ambiguity and have the ego strength to bring their ideas with clients and colleagues with confidence. The people who don’t want to invest or risk in that way sort themselves out of the process.

The meeting itself allows everyone — candidate and the team — to try on the fit and by discussing “real work.” The team can see the candidate’s ability to trust in him- or herself, the work, and the group comes out. The candidate can experience how the team discusses ideas and relates to each other as a group.

I used this process for 18+ years and only once did a candidate make who set up the meeting turn out to be one who didn’t belong on the bus. All of the others were high-performers who fit the team.

How do you get your leadership ON before you build a team?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Too Forgiving? You Aren’t Doing Your Staff or Yourself a Favor

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A Guest Post by
Rahil Muzafar

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Clarity Can Be Kind

Not very long ago, I used to work in an advertising agency, as the supervisor of a team of content and copywriters. We were a small advertising firm that catered to even smaller businesses. My department was responsible for writing copy for both online and offline ads, churning out blog posts for our corporate blog, and occasionally writing press releases. The overall workload was quite manageable and the procedure fairly simple … products and clients’ requirements were allocated to different writers, they’d write a copy and forward it to me. I’d take a look, make necessary changes and send the work to the concerned department. Being the supervisor, I was in charge of proofreading before the content was finalized and processed.

Now, some writers I had were quite a misfit (and I am trying to be polite when I say “misfit”). Some of them were not even recruited as the writers; instead they had been drafted from other departments because they had demonstrated a good comprehension of English grammar. That wasn’t my decision of course, because for me, English comprehension comes at the very end of the list of requisites for the job of copywriting. Common sense and creativity is what I’d like to see in a writer by default, since neither common sense nor the creativity can be taught, oh and good research skills are a plus.

Anyway, going back to our story …

the copy these writers produced mostly ended up as some desperate attempts to be creative, and the worse part is, these attempts fell flat nine times out of ten. The copy hardly made any sense and most were far off the mark.

I never told them in clear words that what they should be looking for another career because creative writing is beyond their ken. But because I didn’t have much to do (and also because I couldn’t think of a polite way to show them the door) I would rewrite their entire work in the name of reviewing. Note that I m not trying to brag about my instant copywriting skills, the thing is that most of our clients were small sized businesses operating in the local market, so they were not looking for the extraordinary, therefore it was pretty easy for me to transform the wayward into something of quality.

Occasionally, I’d call one of the writers to say he or she had failed to write anything sensible, following the information with a motivational speech encouraging the writer to pull out all stops to improve. I wanted to give them some time to learn (even though my acumen kept telling me that they didn’t have the “thing” needed for this job).

Months went by, and it turned out that I was right, none showed any considerable improvement, the nonsense-ness in their written pieces was as obvious as the first day, and there was hardly an instance when I didn’t follow reading their copies with a frown.

Then, it got a little ugly. Owing to the worsening business conditions; the company (and its staff) was pushed out of its comfort zone. After an aggressive marketing campaign, and a stream of new clients, we found ourselves in the middle of a hell lot more work, and tougher deadlines. It didn’t take long before my customary frowns turned into ferocious hair-pullings. More clients and more work meant that I didn’t have the kind of time for working on their substandard copy to meet requirements. Occasional call-ups turned into frequent warnings. Fast forward a few months, and one by one, most of them had been drafted back to their old departments or discharged from their duties.

Only a couple of them survived and even then, they seemed totally out of place whenever we were brainstorming new ideas to work on.

That was my first challenge as a manager, and I learned one very important lesson, which has helped me later on my entrepreneurial ventures, and that’s … being too lenient or too forgiving to your staff/workers/employees is actually a disfavor to your company, to you, to other workers, and to them.

That doesn’t mean you should go on a sacking spree as soon as you feel some of your staff is not up to the scratch, but being too lenient will eventually have following consequences.

The company suffers:

Being the owner (or the manager) you must make sure that the organization or your department is performing at the optimum level, and that the business is utilizing the available resources in the most efficient manner. Therefore, even when the business is doing exceedingly well, doesn’t mean that you should start accommodating some incompetent workers, if you are keen to help out some needy persons, there are other ways of doing that.

Generally speaking, an incompetent person’s gain is a competent person’s loss. If you are feeling remorse when sacking an incompetent worker because the job market is saturated, remember that out there, in the market, there might be a qualified person sitting jobless and waiting desperately for an opportunity.

You suffer:

Being an entrepreneur, all your efforts, plans, and strategies will miss the target if you’ve got weak links working at any position. Besides, it will create enormous pressure when you have to watch over each and everything because you cannot trust your workers.

Other employees suffer:

When a department or a team consists of some inept members, the entire department has to put up with their lack of ability and clumsiness. And that’s not all, slowly but surely, it will start transmitting a demoralizing effect on the entire workforce.

Even they are going to suffer:

It’s far better to be honest with your employees as compared to being unnecessarily nice. If some of your workers are going amiss, let them know that they are not good enough. Otherwise, the sudden sacking will be even more devastating.

Give up being too forgiving and get better at matching people to what they do well instead.

Rahil Muzafar

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This post was contributed by Rahil, but these tips are not the only thing that he can offer. You may find coupon for norton and go daddy voucher at his website.

Thanks! Rahil!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Be Irresistible: Want to Own Your Space? Own Up to Your Highest Standards!

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10-Point Plan in Action

What’s It Mean to Own It?

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Going back down to SxSW reminds me of a conversation I had with @copyblogger, Brian Clark at SxSW 2008. It was in the early hours. We were at a club and found a place where we could talk for a minute or two. We were talking about SOBCon and how it had grown. We were talking about how people were coming because of the people who were in the room who were coming because of the people who were in the room.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Brian doesn’t remember what he said that night, but I do.

He said: “You and Terry are doing something important.

I said: “i know.”

Then he said: “But you gotta OWN it! Because without it where would I be?”

I replied something flippant like: “Still running the stealth intelligence network of the universe?”

He ignored my attempt at humor and continued with: “You gotta OWN it seriously.”

That advice stayed with me. I told Terry about it.

“Gotta OWN it! We own it, don’t we?”

But for the next year that idea became a mantra, “I’m OWNING it.”
Now I know what that simple sentence means.

Want to Own Your Space? Own Up to Your Own Standards

A few months later, I was at SOBCon 2008 with Brian’s words ringing in my ears. The thought kept running through my mind, “What am I not owning here?”
And as I opened my eyes, I realized that, in an effort to be “easy to work with,” I’d been holding back my best. My job is the content design an execution and we’ve always delivered more, different, and better than the rest, but not as well as I was capable of delivering. I’d let speakers slide just a little, then felt they could’ve shined more for themselves and for the audience. I’d been nice to sponsors and let them be less engaging than they might.

I realized then and there that companies make that mistake all of the time. We lower our price, change our offer, compromise for a vendor. We don’t own what we’re doing, instead we give away what we own.

What we should be doing instead is building trust and proving we’re the best at doing what we do to attract the people who recognize excellence and want to work be in a space that we own.

Every teacher, saloonkeeper, consultant, great business of one or corporation has a responsibility to own our role as a leader, to set the standards of our business so that the people who are in it with us know why and how to reach their greatest potential and so that the business can thrive and grow.

Here’s what I learned about how to do that:

  • Have a vision that is huge, powerful, and worth working toward to building. No smaller vision is worth owning or asking people to take part in. No lesser quest will bring you to put your heart, mind, hands and soul behind it.
  • Set goals that are worth reaching. If you want commitment and high performance, give everyone something to go for that feels like a massive win when they achieve it.
  • Invite only the best to participate in what you’re doing. Own the potential of your investment in the people you ask to come along. Friends are fun to play with, but owning a business requires that you own the responsibility of giving folks a team that they want to work with and for.
  • Make the vision and the goals far bigger than you can control, but the outcome and your belief in it so inspiring that everyone is drawn to work in the same direction . That way people can bring their own best potential to the building, but be building one vision that you protect for them.
  • Be a model of your version of the standard of ethics and excellence. Then layout the challenge for everyone to bring their own version of how they might add value to same standard with their own talents in ways that show their own excellence.

Owning our role, our values, our standards and our value proposition makes it easier for everyone else to own their role with the same values, standards, and value proposition. Like a great bartender or a community manager, we keep the space safe for people to be extraordinary without fear that they will lose by winning.

Own it. Don’t telephone it in.
Make a space, a place where people can show you what their best is and feel that you’ll notice, celebrate it, and protect it.

Do that and they’ll think of your business as owning the space you’re in, because to them it will be better than home.

That’s irresistible.

How do what you do, hold it up to the highest standards, so that the people who work with and for you can know they are working with the best in the business?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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5 Critical Questions for Your High Performing Team of Volunteers or Employees

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10-Point Plan: A High Performance Team

Keeping the Focus Is Fun

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Whether we work for huge enterprise or help build the economy from your home, leaders know that we can only do so much on our own. To build a business that thrives, we need to rely on employees, partners, vendors, volunteers, and customer who pitch in to help us grow. It takes a team, a community to build anything that resembles a business. A great team can build a great business.

Anyone who’s assembled a great team knows that when you get the right people on the bus you make amazing things happen. And if you’ve been part of a team like that you probably also know that money isn’t what moves a team to greatness. As Peter Drucker realized, “money is a disincentive.” People notice when there’s not enough and it brings them down, but more doesn’t improve their performance in any predictable wya.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do more …
more of the things that work,
more of the things they do well,
more of the things that get more done well,
more of the things that put meaning into what they do.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do less …
less of the things that don’t work,
less of the things that they don’t do well.
less of the things that get in the way of great work — the meaningless work-like, useless,
out-of-date, without purpose, policy-driven, time-wasting, relationship-breaking, stupid tasks — in other words, things that make work rather than get work done.

Getting the right team going in the right direction is challenge in time when time is at a premium. It takes more than just telling everyone “Do what you do well. Delegate to others what they do better. And don’t do what we don’t need to do.” Still, if we can get that kind of focus and momentum going, we’re well on our way to business that is responsive to customers, highly performing, and structurally sound.

Nothing beats reflection, checking in regularly as benchmark test to be sure we’re moving in the right direction. Here are five questions you, your team, and your business should be asking and answering at least once a week.

  1. What is the goal? What are we trying to do or say this week?
  2. What is the strategy that drives us? Where do we want to be by the end of the week?
  3. What’s missing from the team? Have we got the right people doing the right things? Do we have too much of one skill set and not enough of another? Do we need to rearrange things?
  4. What’s right / wrong with the process / structure / culture? Who needs resources, room, or support to do their best work? Who’s doing the wrong work?
  5. What rewards are ours to claim? How can we leverage them? Do we define, measure, and reward the outcomes we seek?

People, teams, and businesses can get off track in big leaps, but we usually lose our way incrementally by losing focus while doing what worked in the past. If you use the five questions to keep challenging your direction, you’ll find that the team soon will see every decision strategically.

How do you keep the focus to grow the high-performance business you want?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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21 Tweeters and What’s Wrong with Viral Marketing

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Last week, I was invited to speak at an interdepartmental off-site. People from product, IT, marketing, sales, research, design, and PR were involved. The SVP who designed the event set up the room in teams in which one person from each department was represented. She arranged the day to be filled with interactive information and conversation so that ideas could grow.

The week before the event, I’d had lunch with that SVP to talk about what her goals were for my presentation. She talked about how rumors spread and how people connect. She also used the word “viral” in the proposed title of my talk. I asked if she minded if we edited that word out.

Communicating the nature of viral marketing, was going to be an important goal of my day.

What Is Viral Marketing?

The morning of the off-site I checked into Twitter before I left and thought, Here’s an opportunity to bring social media in action and authority other than my own into the room.

So, I tweeted this question.

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I favorited the responses, pulled them up in my @mentions list, took two screen shots, and made a two-page handout to share. The folks who responded are people I follow on Twitter and after you read what they said I’m betting you’ll want to follow them too, so I’m including links to their Twitter accounts. Top down the tweets are in the order I received them. [Thank you all for making my quest easier, faster, and more meaningful for me and the folks I’d soon be talking to.]

  1. @michaelport I’d say if I knew the “secret” I wouldn’t be here today.
  2. @steveplunkett “being in the right place at the right time, with the right thought” or “controlled manipulation of people online”
  3. @shivya You can’t call it viral until it is viral. The secret is engaging, entertaining, informational, sharable content.
  4. @egculbertson be authentic, be humble, be relevant to your audience, and be funny or approachable. then, hope for a stroke of good luck.
  5. @ElysiaBrooker in the (paraphrased) words of
    @unmarketing : MAKE AWESOME CONTENT and the rest will happen naturally.
  6. @RobPene a video of cute cats dancing to Snoop Dog lol 🙂
  7. @jenniferwindrum I would tell them the only thing that could potentially “go viral” is their stupidity. No secret there. 🙂
  8. @tbains That there’s no way to predict or manipulate what goes viral. Instead, focus on quality first. Lame but true
  9. @chris_c_lucas Do cool sh*t and do it consistently. Then let other people talk about it. It’s simple 🙂
  10. @TheStudioNH Viral marketing makes me get an anti-buy-otic.
  11. @_Signalfire_ like a virus spreading, the right conditions must exist with the right host. It’s all up to the community it’s introduced into.
  12. @DeniseWBarreto Be authentic and have a real desire to better the lives of your target otherwise clever, cool but false intentions #fail
  13. @EOC_jmello Viral Marketing does not actually exist. It’s about having the right content, right audience, at the right time.
    It goes along with agencies that tell clients they can make something go viral. BS! Sometimes luck plays into it too.
  14. @katyboog123 humour is a good one, also shock value.
  15. @minormusic Viral mktg is not a substitute for quality face time w influential ppl in your market. Ur reputation still proceeds u.
  16. @mikecassidyAZ enlighten, enrage, engross, or make ’em smile.
  17. @scotmckee Secret to viral is remembering that the crowd decides what goes viral – not you. 🙂
  18. @DavidFord83 Absolutely true! RT @MinorMusic: @lizstrauss Viral mktg is not a substitute for quality face time w influential ppl in your market.
  19. @AWomansWork Forget viral & think what’s relevant & interesting to your audience. That, or leprechauns.
  20. @TourismCurrents Yesterday we tweeted that the term “viral campaign” needs to be taken out and shot. No change in our position. 🙂
  21. @jason_baker Is it just me or is “creating viral campaigns” in a job description a bit off?! 😉

The problem with viral marketing is that it focuses on the product and the message and not the people we want to share that message. If we want people to listen, engage, and share what we’re doing, we have to make it about them.

What invitation, reminder, or question might you offer to help us all stay focused more on the people and less on the message?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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