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5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

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A Good Wheel Already Exists.

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I had a problem with my computer. The operating systems wouldn’t recognize the CD-DVD player. Every time I tried to reinstall the drivers, I received an error stating that my attempt to install the drivers was unsuccessful. I put to work my problem-solving skills. I tried various and sundry fixes. I approached it from every direction I knew.

The situation went on for a few days — or was it weeks — until a day came that I needed to use the CD-DVD for a project. I was serious now. Again I tried in my usual problem solving approach. Then, when I’d decided the whole endeavor was taking too much time, I turned to Google asked the question. Found an answer. It worked. I did a victory dance and moved on.

The I remembered something I already knew. The kind of common sense that we commonly forget.

The answer had been waiting while I suffered though all if my testing and trials. I’d been thinking that I had to do everything alone, solve every problem myself. I’d ignored perfectly good answers.

Never let a good thing pass you by. Charlize Theron.

I’d been letting those good answers pass me by, because they weren’t my own.

5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not proposing that we shift the burden of doing our own work to someone else. When other people hand us their work, we don’t learn. Rather, I’m suggesting that we take advantage of work that’s available to help yourself. Leverage the success of other people to reach success of your own.

Many people have discovered answers to the problems we’re facing, with a little creativity in our thinking we can save time and get to successful solutions by finding out what they did. When we find their solutions and apply them to our problems we still learn, but with fewer random guesses along the way.

Here are 5 Ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel victories of your own .

  1. use Google to find an established model or solution. See who’s solved the problem or built a process already.
  2. Ask your networks, including Linkedin, Quora, and Twitter, WWhat’s your best advice for doing this?

    3. When people answer be sure to explore what doesn’t work too.

  3. Look at how the “big guys” do it. Email several people who are more experienced than you are. Ask each to answer the same question — one that gets to the solution you’re trying to find. Compile and publish their answers into a single blog post so that others looking for that solution find you.
  4. Look at how it’s done in other domains and other industries. Ask yourself, How would a mathematician, a scientist, a painter, a dancer, a chef approach this problem? What other industries
  5. Find a mentor, join a community, or take a class. Experience is hard won and valued by those who’ve earned it. It’s hard to top the feeling of being asked to share what we’ve learned. Give someone that great feeling by choosing an experienced teacher, mentor, or friend and Inviting him or her to asking them the

Time IS money. Knowing how is good. Knowing how to find the answer quickly save time. When we need an answer to what we might never need to know again it’s time to leverage other people’s success to fuel our own victories. Getting help with problems that are peripheral can keep us focused on what we truly need to learn. Getting help with what we truly need to learn can keep us moving forward toward our most important goals.

Put the two together — focus on what we need to learn and moving forward is powerful fuel for a business, a career, and a life.
Leveraging other people’s success can make our work easier, faster, and more meaningful. And you know those are keys to unliking the irresistible.

Bet you know more ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel your own. Will you share them?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to not get burned out

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by Patty Azzarello

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Business is Hard

Sometimes business opportunities, challenges, activities, and responsiblities become overwhelming. You get tired.

And as your business grows, things don’t tend to get easier or less busy!

Pick your pace

It’s important to find a pace that you can maintain, so you can keep making forward progress and not get burned out.

I am a cyclist.Â

There are some tough hills that can challenge a rider to the point of total system failure — you can’t breath, your heart races, your legs are on fire.  The only problem is that that happens after 10 minutes, and it may take 30-60 minutes to ride up the thing!

“I can do this all day”

So I force myself to pick a pace, one where even though it is still really hard, I can say to myself “I can do this all day”.Â

When I get my thinking, my legs, and my heart rate and lungs calibrated to “all day”, when I finally reach the top I have accomplished the task, and I am still not at the absolute end of my energy.Â

If you know the how long the hill is, you can push yourself to get to the top faster. But you don’t always know how long the hill is.

So you need a strategy to make sure you don’t burn out on the way.

What is your pace that you “can do all day”

If there is no end in sight to the craziness or turmoil, how much physical and mental energy can you invest over an indefinite amount of time so that you can make it to the top no matter how long the hill is? and still have energy to go forward after you get there?

Get ahead of the competition

When the market gets easier and there are more opportunities, you want to have the energy and the resources to use another cycling term “jump”— to go really fast, right away — while the competition has burned out, given up, or failed along the way.Â

Don’t let you head give up before your legs

Part of the “I could do this all day pace” it to make sure you don’t talk yourself into stopping before you really need to.

I compare this to miserable tough jobs I have had. It is always interesting to note how much of the misery I put on myself, compared to that which was strictly imposed or required by the job.Â

You can actually make a pretty big change in how you feel about your job, by deciding how YOU will manage your energy, and not letting your head give in.

Some ways to get up the hill:

It is your job to keep making forward progress in uncertain and challenging times.  Otherwise you end up just working really hard, and not really moving the business forward, or getting anywhere personally.Â

  • List all the things you are worried about.  Are they all equally worthy of worry?  Budget your worry.  Don’t burn yourself out worrying about things that are not worth it.
  • Stop something. Identify at least one thing you will negotiate “away” and stop doing.
  • Pick a single area to ensure success. Choose one thing that you won’t fail at no matter what – and don’t let the uncertainty throw you off course.  Complete that, then do the next one.
  • Talk to your team. Let them tell you what they think is hard about the current state.  Don’t underestimate the value of letting them talk about this.  Acknowledge the difficulty openly, then focus everyone on something they feel they can control and do well.
  • Build your Personal Brand.  How you act in difficult times does a lot to show the world your brand.  Are you positive and in control, or are you changing your mind all the time, uncertain, all over the place? When you are stressed, are you treating people with respect or are you nasty?
  • Don’t give up on your aggressive brilliant plans.  I do some of my best problem solving on a long hill.  Keep learning, keep thinking, keep building so that you are ready to jump when the obstacles clear.
  • Think. No matter how over-scheduled you may be, schedule some time to think every day.

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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Help, I’m a workhorse and I’m stuck…

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by Patty Azzarello

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I recently received some input from a reader that defined the perfect storm of being stuck in the workhorse trap. Here it is…

I’m the workhorse for our volunteer emergency communicator group. There are 4 of us, but here lately I’ve been the only one answering the calls from the City for severe weather (tornadoes, severe hailstorms, etc.) even in the middle of the night. Problem is, by the time the City gets to me, they’ve already tried the other members with no luck. I’ve said something, but so far no results.

Since lives and property may be at stake, I feel it’s important to have someone doing the job. So, I do it—

But I say something to the rest of the group every time since the 5th time in a 3 day period– now, it’s been 13 times in a week that we’ve been called and I’m the only one who would answer the call. Okay one guy had surgery twice this week, first on his eye and again on his foot so he gets a pass. But the other 2? One is a definite flake and the other… well, I really don’t know.

I’m tired, and we still have more shots at being called again in the next 2 days. I feel bad saying “NO, SORRY– I can’t” when it’s the City Office of Emergency Management or the National Weather Service, but I might just have to, and tell them that I’m exhausted. After all, we’re VOLUNTEERS!

First, let’s look at the situation

1. THANK YOU. The world is a better place because of people like you that are willing to make personal sacrifice and step up when others need them.

2. Many people in their jobs feel like this. They feel they are the only one capable or available to the work. The work must get done, so they do it. Even though lives are typically not at stake, their values won’t let them drop the work.

3. In your case, lives are actually at stake! Truly, the work must get done.

4. Because you are all volunteers, there is no official way to insist that people do the work.

5. You have tried to raise the issue to get the rest of the team to step up to no avail – so you are stuck being the workhorse.
What can be done?

The first point to remember is that even if you can order people around, you are much better off if you can persuade them to be emotionally committed to doing the work. This makes everything better.

Second, it’s important to note that when I talk about getting out of workhorse mode, it is never about abandoning the work. The trick is to figure out how to get the critical work done without doing it all personally.

Sure, sometimes you need to work 24X7 when there is a crisis, a deadline, a big opportunity. The problem arises when that becomes a steady-state way of working.

If you want to get out of work-horse mode, don’t expect your manager or business partner to make it better.

YOU need to be the one to invent a new approach to make it better. Stick to your instincts that this is not right. Devise a plan to change it.

Here are some suggestions to improve the situation:

Your desired outcome:  Have other people to share the workload with.

There are two basic ways to achieve that outcome:

1. Get the people on the team to step up?
2. Get new people

Get People on the Team to Step Up

1. Record the data about what has happened. Data is not opinion or emotion. It can’t be argued with. Keep a record of all the phone calls that were made and what the response was from each team member.

Call a meeting of the whole team and share the data. Ask everyone to comment on it.

2. Discuss the team’s desired outcome. What does successful service look like? What will it require? Ask everyone to contribute to the definition of the process and the required commitment and responsibility.

Be really clear what the responsibilities are. Ask everyone on the team to talk about their ability to respond to their share of responsibilities.

3. Create an actual calendar for who is on call each day. Set an expectation that if you commit to be on call that you WILL ANSWER. Have everyone sign off on the schedule as a group commitment to one another.

4. Be super clear that there are only two choices, sign and commit or leave the group. There is no room for broken commitments when it is a matter of life or death.

If you are afraid of losing people on the team by doing this, remember that the people who are NOT answering the phone on a regular basis are not part of the team anyway. (They shouldn’t get to talk big and pretend they are a volunteer if they don’t do the work.)

They are not helping. Ask them to leave. Get new people who will be committed members of the team.

Get new people

A critical factor of getting out of workhorse mode is making sure that you have a team that is capable of doing the job.

No matter how vital the work is, staying in work-horse mode long term is the wrong answer.

You need to take it upon yourself to create a team or a process that can get the work done that really matters, without burning up your time personally.

If your current team can’t cut it, you have to change the team.

If you are an individual, you need to influence. You need re-negotiate the work to focus on the most critical outcomes, and recommend a new, better process that achieves the desired outcome in a different way.

In any organization, volunteer or business, people get burned out, leave, or have other priorities come up in life. It is important that you are always cultivating a pipeline of new people that can (and want to do) the job.

When you look at the people who are not performing, decide “Can’t or Won’t”.

Can’t you can work with, Won’t is not worth the trouble.

Cut them loose. Get people who are motivated to help. That will be your only way out of workhorse mode long term whether you are in a group of volunteers or leading a business team.

Also, there are lots more ideas about workhorse traps and escape routes in Chapter 3 of my book, Rise… They Shoot Workhorses, Don’t they?
What do you think?

IF you have any other ideas for this generous and tired emergency response volunteer, please share them in the comment box below!

Delegate…and relax

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by Patty Azzarello

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How well do you delegate?

Most people inherently know that they should delegate more, and delegate better, but one big obstacle keeps them from doing it…

It will be better if I do it myself.

Who’s at fault?

It it doesn’t come out right, the uncomfortable question this raises is – did this person fail to do a good job because:

1. They are not good enough at the job or
2. I am not good enough at delegating?

You don’t need to get comfortable with worry!

The real secret of successful delegating is not to learn how to deal with the emotional discomfort of letting go, and learning to live with being worried about the outcome, or accepting bad outcomes…

It’s about preventing reasons to worry

Your job is to delegate, let go, NOT micromanage… AND create structure, support and processes so you ensure that it is going to get done right.
You don’t deal with the worrying, you ensure it’s not necessary.

Ways to build comfort and insurance into the project

(without micro-managing)

1. Let the person create the timeline, define the deliverables and how you will measure them.  The encouragement and trust goes a long way, and you either get the pleasant surprise of a better plan than you would have come up with, or you get an early warning that this person needs more support.

2. Tighten the Outcomes.  If you are concerned that the person is not capable enough to run with the project, Instead of a 6 month outcome, discuss outcomes that occur every two weeks.

3. Focus on the outcome, not the activity. No two humans will do a task exactly the same way.  If they deliver the outcome, it shouldn’t matter how they do it.  Let them worry about how and what.  You worry about WHY, and what needs to be true when it is done.

4. Create an actual process and tracking system for long term or repetitive tasks – a software development lifecycle with checkpoints is a good example.  But why not define a project lifecycle with checkpoints for a quarterly analyst presentation, a press release, or a marketing campaign?

5. Third party reviews. Get yourself out of the position of always being the one to judge whether a deliverable is good enough or not.  Get the actual consumers of the deliverable to review and provide feedback.  Your employees will learn far more this way.

6. Don’t forget to inspect and measure things along the way.  If you set up a timeline with review steps along the way, you must follow up.  A great deal of your comfort comes from the fact that people take you seriously and actually do the committed work.  A long time mentor of mine always put it “You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect”.

7. Teach. When you are delegating things you are personally good at, always think of delegating as a teaching opportunity. If you need to sometimes jump down and do the work yourself, make sure someone is watching and learning.

Bottom line…

You need to delegate effectively if you want to get anything significant done, get anywhere in your career, and save yourself from an un-doable workload.

If you are either doing the work yourself, or worried about the work not getting done, you need to change your strategy.

You can delegate and feel comfortable that the work is getting done as long as you do the higher level work of setting up the systems, processes and measures that ensure the right things are happening along the way.

What has worked for you?

Please share your ideas about how you got better (and more comfortable) with delegating. Let’s discuss in the comment box below!
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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

WHEN do you think?

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by Patty Azzarello

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time-to-think

The big idea…

If I could offer one idea that will have a huge impact on your success and your satisfaction with work, it would be that you give yourself time to think on purpose.

(you can stop reading here if you accept that point!)

Time to think

I work with so many executives that tell me they would be so much better at their job if they had more time to think.

Think about a typical day, week or month in your work.  How much time to you spend in uninterrupted, quality thinking time?

I know when I was a corporate executive I had the same problem.  My calendar was fully booked.

If I tried to schedule time for myself it would get over-ridden with urgent customer problems, staff crises, or emergencies from my boss to deliver something to his boss.

My personal, thinking time got wiped out.

So I needed to work differently.  I have written much on the topics of defending your time and energy, making more time, delegating better, and many other topics which help you use your time more strategically.

But today I just want to focus on this one idea:

Give yourself time to think.  Schedule it.  Protect it.

This will have a bigger impact on your success than almost anything you can do.  If you are giving yourself this time, don’t ever feel guilty about it.  If you are not, start taking it.

Key point: Remember, your job as a leader is to build capability underneath you, so your team can handle more work, and so you can apply yourself to solving higher order problems.

Enable your team to do the work

  • Let your team handle the customer escalations, you need to create the quality program that reduces them.
  • Let your team handle the marketing events and deliverables, you need to create the market-changing strategy.
  • Let your team handle the product development.  You need to create better processes to deliver more, faster.

You will never do any of this if you don’t give yourself time to think.  You will get caught up in a sea of activity and reacting.
Think about it this way:  If you stay overwhelmed with activity you are not doing a good job.

Schedule time to think and HIDE

Try it for 2 hours.  Tell everyone you are at the dentist.  The world will not come to an end.  Hide. The hiding part is important. The activity knows where to find you.

Think about how you can improve all of this chaotic, reactive, repetitive activity and do something better.
Then give yourself 2 hours a week to think.

Don’t feel guilty

I can’t tell you how many teams I work with where they all live in fear of their instant message window saying “unavailable” for a second.  It’s fascinating that no one holds it against anyone else, but each person feels this huge pressure to always be available.

I know people who work at home who are afraid to go to the bathroom because they think their company will think they are not working if they don’t answer IM’s instantly.  This is crazy.

Why not put your IM status for an hour or two as “working on a deadline” or “on a call” or “be back at 2pm”?

If you tell people to expect that you will be away from IM working on strategic projects a few times a week, no one will hold it against you.

Being over-available can backfire

If instead you stay infinitely available, but never do anything strategic, you will fail to do your job well.

I hear upper managers talking about their workhorses… “Oh yeah, we can throw anything at him,  he’ll work round the clock, he’ll travel anywhere, we can always count on him… “

Notice they are not saying, “he is someone we should promote.”

If you work tirelessly 24×7 to accomplish a goal or meet a deadline once in awhile that is OK, and sometimes necessary.  But if you work tireless 24×7 for 5 years you will be stuck.

If you never give yourself time to think about how to work better or more strategically, and just keep doing all the work as it comes at you, you will never be as successful as if you figure out how to rise above it.

How do you defend your time to think?

Tell us how you’ve been successful in the comment box below.

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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Make More Time

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by Patty Azzarello

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Make More Time

If you had 20 percent more time magically appear in your work week — a full uncommitted, unscheduled work day, every week — what would you do with it?

Would you do more email? Would you go to more meetings? Would you do even more of what you are already doing?

Or would you do something different? And Better?

Is being over-busy Valuable?

Think about being over-busy is a low-value way of working.

In fact you could even think of staying over-busy as a form of laziness — not getting the real job done, because you have failed to apply the hard, strategic thinking to prioritize your workload for the highest impact.

But why is it so hard to do this?  Why do we get stuck?  Why can’t we let stuff go?

You might feel like you’re dropping the ball, letting someone down, risking your job.  You might be one of those people that feels good when you are constantly busy, and you get recognition for working hard. 

Consider a Values change. 

You  need to see getting less busy as more valuable than having your time consumed by your work. 

You need to recognize that the more strategic work you could be doing instead of the endless activity, would deliver more value to your team and your company.

Make the Container Smaller

It’s like the Ideal Gas Law:  A gas will expand to fill the size of its container – no matter how big the container.  Likewise, the amount of activity in any job will always expand to fill your time – no matter what the job, and no matter how much time you allow.

It’s up to you to contain it – make your container of time for your current activities smaller. 

Here’s how to get started:

1. Give yourself permission

2. Realize you are not merely allowed to be less busy, it’s a requirement of your job, especially if you want to create value and stand out.

3. Then take some time back. 

Just take it. 

For a start, schedule 2 hours per week and HIDE. 

The hiding part is important.  It won’t work otherwise — the activity knows where to find you…

This time is just for you – to think, to plan, to focus on what’s most critical, re-prioritize, delegate, create processes.  Remember: It’s not stealing from the company. 

It’s not dropping the ball.  It’s not getting less done. 
It’s getting more of the right things done better — it’s creating value.

But it’s up to you to take back the time.

You’ll find that you can make even more Time.

For example, if you take two hours to improve a process or clarify an outcome or a delegated task, you could gain another five hours in saved time.

Then you use those five hours to communicate more effectively, and re-assess priorities and outcomes for your team. When those efforts then take hold you have created even more time. And so on…

It is a core trait of the most successful people to rise above being over-busy.  And it’s important to remember that the most successful people are not the ones who were less busy along the way.  They are the ones who dealt with it. 
If there are any secrets to what really successful people do – this is one of them. 

They make more time.

What about you?

What do you struggle with that saps your time? How do you fight it? Leave you ideas in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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