Pausing For Advantage

Some things in life and work can be done in two steps, instruction and execution. If you have ever tried meals kits like Hello Fresh, you follow the instructions to unpack, mix, cook and assemble a meal. Hello Fresh has created the recipe, determined all ingredients and nutrition, and pre-packed it all together with an instruction card. It’s not quite a “just add water” level of simplicity but it certainly does not require much thinking, learning, or discussion.

What about more nuanced or complex situations where jumping from instruction to action does not quite allow for the deeper and well-designed response needed. Some circumstances require a pause. Not a pause to do nothing, but a pause to prevent jumping right into taking actions in reaction to a problem, need or even an opportunity. A pause that allows you to assess, look at the situation from various perspectives, collect a set of viable paths, and form the right solutions or response.  It’s easy to feel the drop in anxiety by taking action and doing something immediately, yet often we fumble around with missteps and misfires and choose poor solution paths or even extend or amplify the situation we are working to address.

As an example, one day I walk into the kitchen, and I put something away in a cabinet to later go looking for it, but I don’t recall where exactly. Option one is to start flinging doors open, rummaging around frantically, and simply resort to a search and destroy approach. In about 2.5 minutes I have found what I was looking for, but the collateral damage is 360 degrees with a side of elevated frustration. Option two is when I step into the kitchen to locate my item, but I pause, I take a moment to think through where I might have logically placed it or think back to where I remember being in the kitchen, or what I saw in the cabinet when I opened it to place my item. In this second approach I might find my item in less than half the time and likely locate it behind the first door or two, without the dramatic commotion of urgency without a useful purpose.

It takes some intention and restraint to resist our action bias and not jump first and think later. Choosing a pause is its own productivity hack with better results, most of the time. In organizations if you come across a problem the next step is a solution to work it. If you run into a risk the expectation is to immediately de-risk by taking some kind of action. We lean into thinking that speed and velocity is life or death sometimes when it’s not. It is usually a factor but usually not valuable when at the expense of chasing conclusion or outcome in an urgent rush. Even in a mass casualty event, the entire protocol around triage is about taking a pause or a moment to organize the chaos to maximize success in saving lives.

In business it is necessasry to consider that idea that taking a pause can save a project, retain a great employee, or serve a customer beyond their expectations.  Often our urgency with a pause does the opposite. A pause has a purpose. A pause is not paralysis. A pause is creating a space for identifying the right actions and setup success for taking those actions. Sometimes the pause affords us something else we need for success, the facilitation of pondering, thinking, walking through, or discussing things to some conclusion of an approach to a situation. It enables an intentional, measured, and considered formulation leading into eventual action.

Think of the classic “crossing guard” scenario. Their entire job is to create pause to facilitate children walking to school safely when crossing the street. They stand, the blow a whistle, they raise a hand to communicate and que drivers in cars what is happening next. Its codified behavior built on a pause. Can you imagine if a crossing guard took a no-pause approach? You would see the crossing guard randomly grabbing kids by the arm and dragging them and weaving through traffic while blowing their whistle. It would look like playing the classic Frogger arcade game to get to the other side. That kind of crossing guard would not be employed long, and the degree of chaos and risk would be off the charts.

Do yourself and those you lead a favor and give a nod to the pause. It’s a tool to leverage for not only better outcomes but it also keeps your projects and your people out of moving traffic. Though very underestimated, pausing is one of your best behavior-driven advantages. Taking time to pause and consider is the advantage not a liability. Teach it, model it, do it.

Counting Things vs. Things That Count

The measurements of value in any organization can lean heavily into counting things. Maybe it’s the number of products coming off the production line in the factory, the number of customers acquired each month, or counting the dollars reflecting the cost of operating a business and comparing it to the money received over a given time period. When we can’t count explicit physical objects or the dollar count in the bank account, we can also look at measures related to percentage of increases or decreases in any target of interest. These are based on numbers as well, but are more of an indirect indicator of value. These variations are valid measures. They help create location signals that indicate where you have been on the “map” and partially indicate next steps towards an objective, but are largely trailing indicators.

When it comes to counting, we learn the value of counting at a very early age.  We could easter eggs found after an easter egg hunt as kids. We count gifts received on birthdays and other holidays. We count how many minutes before we need to go to sleep. We value counting! Usually, the bigger the number the better, unless playing golf or paying taxes, but even then, it’s a “counters” game.

For example, a hamburger joint will produce a given number of burgers a day. McDonalds makes over 6.5 million burgers a day while In-N-Out burger makes around 475,000 a day with a small local shop producing 100 to 200 burgers a day. All scenarios are “countable” but also have attributed meaning based on their given context which informs expectations. Meaning, a McDonalds producing In-N-Out numbers would be business devastation. Numbers are indicators, not intrinsically good or bad as a set of numeric values but context provides the interpretation backdrop. What about the things that you can’t count, at least not in that direct cause and effect kind of way?

Think of the functional areas of any organization and the definition of success for their operation. A sales organization is counting sales targets and related metrics. Production and execution teams count completion of tasks, deliverables, budgets, timelines, and completed milestones. We assign “leaders” to groups like this and essentially set the expectation that their job is to “lead” people to the desired results that are being counted. In addition, compensation and promotional incentive are usually based on these numbers. So leaders are dispatched and inserted in organizations to make these things happen, get it done, and “achieve”. This is valid to a point but frequently left out of the equation are a few characteristics that are hard to equate because they are not numbers. I am referencing the “other” parts of leading that can be easily neglected, poorly understood, and difficult to identify and quantify.

Leading can be a function in service to things you don’t count. These seemingly opposing expectations to count or to not count are problematic. It may be that the most impactful attribute of performant leadership is one we are least aware of and least equipped to exercise. A leader should not only be able to set a tactical performance target, like a sales number, but beyond that, a leader should be able to set the more significant destination down the line. Ticking off near term milestones while forgoing the primary direction you need to be heading to achieve the larger goal, can leave teams and organizations careening off course in dramatic fashion or more subtlety one degree at a time.

Setting the larger vision and strategically aligning and sequencing the milestones to get to the destination, is the compass. Leaders, above all else, are the compass bearer. How is your compass working? Leaders determine the destination for the future, they communicate the direction to take to get to that destination, and they map and guide the path to get there. This is not as counting-centric in practice as tactical measurements. The job of moving groups of people who are diverse at every level in how they see, hear, and interpret communications and behaviors, adds up to being a significantly non-numeric exercise that becomes an art form of interpersonal interactions. The skills and abilities of a leader are primarily to generate clarity, guide, and enable adaptability for managing ongoing change. These characteristics of leadership are not things you can count, yet they are the key qualities that organizations absolutely must count on for performance and success.

Up and Out

It is fairly standard that professionals in any field understand the nature of promotion. You fulfill a role successfully for a period and you are rewarded with a new role. The new role is typically “up a level” in terms of responsibilities, compensation, status, and presumably positive impact. Professionals make the climb incrementally over years, often switching organizations to keep the movement and momentum going. This narrative is what most understand as upward mobility, career progression, success, and vertical progress. As the life and work of professionals continue to evolve in a growing high-change and high-velocity world, the way in which people can learn, grow, and fill out the required competency and proficiency demands are having to evolve.

A new kind of “vertical” progression is beginning to make its way into organizations and the professional development models used by leaders. In contrast to what is known as “horizontal development”, which entails consuming standard training, stacking up certifications, and explicit skill building, “vertical development” has arrived. Vertical development has a focus on thinking, mindset, navigating complexity and ambiguity with its attention on cognitive and emotional integration to enhance agility, sustainability, performance and resilience. In short, mental maturity.

After a long and useful discussion with a friend and colleague a few days ago about how, over years of careers, we have seen the people we have worked with authentically develop and grow, a few concepts crystalize for me. Vertical development enables positive impact. Here are some of the concepts that spawned from that dialogue.

Showing Up – It enables you to show up for things you might not have otherwise been able to contribute to. It increases the number of contribution targets available to you. It also changes how you show up, giving you opportunity for deeper and wider EQ and IQ which can be integrated to amplify performance, creating and increasing your “Performance Quotient” … “PQ”.

Future Change – It equips you to lead the change needed for the future and necessary transformation and arrive in the future better enabled.

Guide – It allows you to become a guide for other participants and member on the journey. Guiding in direction, clarity, trust, learning, identity, and moving from point A to point B with more meaning and impact.

Artist – It makes you a transformation artist, craftsman/craftswoman, and practitioner. You become a guide in organizations where there is a high degree of confusion, lack of clarity or paralyzing inertia.

There has always been “vertical” in a conventional sense, and some of it will and should remain. Moving forward, the new vertical is not just about up but more about up and out. Vertical development means something different, and it will at some level, go against the long prevailing current of factory models rooted in the industrial age but still ever present in today’s professional work landscape. Preparing for future needs in organizations and professional careers needs to happen now, not later. It can be a tough commitment to make as it breaks away from well-established thinking and incentives. As the cheese moves and you find you can’t get to it from here, there will be vast opportunity to jump the barriers and realize new paths. Everyone will need a good guide.

New Things

Here are some following thoughts that occurred to me after the previous post.

When establishing any form of a “new thing”, it may be helpful to recognize what might be going on at a deeper level. Change is most frequently addressed through communication or process changes. We “tell” others we are not doing Red-Blue-Green any longer but will doing a new and better thing moving to Blue-Yellow-Green-Red. Often new directions are given with the expectation of “telling” and then “doing” is to follow. We have all seen “change” where we created a plan, communicated the change plan, and then expect new things to begin happening only to discover inaction, confusion, paralysis, or the outright appearance resistance. A commonly used developmental learning model is “Tell-Show-Do”. This model is simple and somewhat self-explanatory but can often be missed as an effective tool in organizations. “TSD” is very effective because it accommodates learning styles, different levels of understanding and provided strong feedback and reinforcement loops.

Simply outlined, here are the three core stages of TSD:

“Tell”

Knowledge: Provide a clear explanation of a concept, process, or skill. This is the knowledge component with a focus at providing the needed information and key context.

“Show”

Demonstration: Exercise the process or skill with examples, often visually, related to what is expected and how something should work or operate. This should make use of supporting artifacts, tools, props, or models to support the learner in acquiring deep familiarity and understanding.  

“Do”

Practice: Active repetitions by the learner with developmental feedback along the way to strengthen understand, confidence, and competency. This impact will be progressive over time and practice cycles.

A couple observations over years of talent development and coaching that highlight risks that can develop gaps in the developmental success of organizations.  The first observation is that much instruction and training in organization can heavily miss the mark on the “show” stage. Sometimes this is because it can be easy to mistake “tell” activities as “show” activities. Sometimes investments are too light in providing deeper “show” lift due to lack of trainers and coaches or allowable time for meaningful repetitions. This can happen when orientation, training, onboarding, and professional development rely too heavily on self-serve or DIY developmental resources and models.

The second observation is a frequently forgotten fourth stage to accomplishing the developmental performance cycle organizations are looking for and needing. This stage is sometimes called “apply” or “perform”. The reality is that tell-show-do mostly gets your through pre-game but live execution of newly acquired competency is something the transitions from practice to warm-up to game time. This means it becomes an active and steady part of how you do what you do in role work execution. It’s important to not skip over “show” and important to realize that getting to a final action, desired outcome, and performance is progressive. Jumping over the “developmental middle” or rushing to outcomes without the practice time will make flipping form an old pattern to a new one very high risk in terms of success.

Going way beyond broadcasting information and taking action with an expectation of moving from point A to point B in one step, doing new things means becoming a practitioner of something new. This requires a mature and complete approach for developing any competency. Two short stories to really beat this up before we wrap this up.

Story 1 – What A Grind

After college I had a job working for a custom cabinet and countertop maker. He was a true craftsman with over 40 years of hard-earned experience. On day one of my new summer job I was told to pick up a belt sander and take down some high spots on a large one-piece countertop made from a special composite. I was way less than a novice on day one, but I did recall some beginner guidance from my eighth-grade shop teacher.  With some experimentation, being accomplished with a belt sander takes practice, practice, practice. You must get a feel for it, develop some nuanced sense of control and cooperation with a motor grinding belted sandpaper at thousands of surface feet per minute. I paused and looked at my new master craftsman employer and suggested, “I don’t think you want me to do that.” He insisted and the result was as expected. He responded with over half a dozen harshly marked penciled circles all over the countertop and very poignantly telling my where I pretty much scarred the surface. I’m not sure but I suspect I had just increased the project time in a few short moments. The only thought in my head, which I did not say out loud was, “I tried to warn you.” But when you are the new guy on the job on day one, you are never as right as the boss. This experience is representative of what we get if we skip the “show” followed by appropriate practice to arrive at “do”.

Story 2 – Practice Saves Lives

I once watched a documentary on the Navy’s Blue Angels. I have also seen them in real life, and they are very impressive. The Blue Angels are an extreme example of the tell-show-do-perform approach. Every season begins with a mix of veteran pilots and new pilots. Keep in mind that even the new pilots have thousands of hours of experienced flight time before being invited for an opportunity to join the Blue Angles. Regardless of the decades of experience flying the F/A 18 Super Hornet fighter jet, every performance season for the Blue Angels begins in the classroom. Weeks of instruction, questions, and conversation directed at creating familiarity, visualization, communication, trust, and confidence before setting foot on the flight apron. Even once they are in the air, the practices start in a slow, controlled, and widened stance. Only as the repetitions increase and confidence and competence increase do they tighten up formations from feet to inches of separation. If they went from “tell” to “do”, the consequences would be catastrophic.

If you are facing a “change rut” or stuck in some limbo trying to escape the gravitation pull of point A and not achieving escape velocity to propel you  to point B, consider this simple model and worse case “dial a friend”. Or in today’s reality, drop me an email.

Transformation Tolerance

Definition: Transformation is a significant change in form, appearance, or structure. 

When it comes to most any kind of growth, development, or movement for individuals, teams, and organizations it only happened through change. Transformation is a significant change from one state to a different state, going from point A to point B. There is a popular cartoon that depicts a man asking a crowd, “Who wants change?” and the entire crowd raises their hands. Then the man asks, “Who wants to change” and all the hands go down.  It’s classic. We all want the benefits of a change, especially the move from something not great to something better. We love the positive results of change but the act of changing ourselves is less popular. It can be quite uncomfortable. So, what is the deal with this paradox?

When we start off in a current state, even if not perfect, at some point it has become familiar to us, and we have likely adapted and figured out how to manage it and make it work. There is comfort in what we know. It’s predictable, clear, and provides cognitive and emotional certainty.

Then on the other side of the room, transformation and the future it represents stands there looking like it’s going to come for us. Why do we meet this new visitor on the scene with such distinct anxiety and concern? Don’t we want better things in the future? From a current state position change looks like a threat because it is. It is looking to change something in the now to pull us forward to what’s next. That means the introduction of something different if not opposite of what we are holding onto now. Transformation is going to mean walking away from what we know, what is familiar and predictable, and it ushers in less clarity and certainty. Transformation means wading through some ambiguity and some level of confusion until we sort things out.

The truth is that these two states, current and future, are cousins. They are related and live in a necessary tension with one another. They are both required for the journey and the act of transformation. Changing mindsets, behaviors, familiar processes and modifying any pattern brings uncertainty. What I have found is that individuals, teams, and organizations can have varying level of what I call “Transformation Tolerance”. The higher the transformation tolerance for living in this tension the more effective and deeply change and transformation occur. The lower the transformation tolerance, the slower and less impactful that change is facilitated.

The friction from change has two facets. First, resistance or reluctance to change is rooted in strongly held beliefs and deep emotional responses. This kind of friction is about self-preservation, or current state preservation, and these are often synonymous. Second, movement to a new state by transformation is partly facilitated by the traction created using the friction created in resistance.  This may seem confusing, but transformation is not only about arriving at a new state, it is about the journey between point A and point B. This is the step-by-step growth zone between them.

Transformation can be a lot of effort as well as scary, exciting, and future anchoring all at once. Yes, it can be quite complicated at times and often challenges arise out of not fully appreciating the time, attention, and care transformation will require. More than a project plan, due dates, workflows, and RACI charts, transformation is a very human centric experience impacting changes in how people work, move in the world, and how they define who they are in terms of their personal and professional identities.  

When preparing for change and impactful transformation take time to appreciate the breadth and depth of what it may require making that transformation happen successfully. Take account of the present but purposeful tension that sits in the middle and be aware of the transformation tolerance in play. The tolerance level is like a knob that sets the appetite and functional skills for navigating the journey. Most any transformations will require some degree of caretaking and orchestration to be successful and mastering use of transformation tolerance will increase your ability and success as a transformation practitioner.

“Red Light-Green-Light”

In business, sports, or even car racing, performance is often focused on “more” of something. More productivity, more efficiency, more wins, more speed, more downforce. Then again, sometimes “less” of something does pop up now and again. Things like less swing count in a golf game, less drag on a race car, less accidents on a job site, less turbulence on your flight.  “More” and “less” live in a bit of contention, somewhat binary, and they can find themselves in opposition.  Typically, you want one or the other depending on the specific context.

These are very helpful concepts but sometimes when we consider the performance of people, and the ways in which people serve as the actual engine of organizations, we can fall into a people performance thinking trap.  People are not as binary as we think they are and that can lead to “people work”, like leading and managing talent, becoming very messy.

A popular dichotomy in business, life, love, and war is the framework of “zero-sum” thinking. This means that there is always a “winner” and a “loser”. This works well for the team playing in a championship game or an Olympic competitor swimming the 1500 Freestyle. These are competitions designed to reward first place, and maybe second and third place, but not last place. You make that second date or sometimes you don’t. You win the battle that helps win a war. These variations are all about control and execution with a finite outcome that goes one way or the other. This practice often becomes an anti-pattern to collaboration, effective communication, and ironically, the kind of actual productivity that teams and organizations want and need.

I want to offer another perspective on a performance mindset for consideration when it comes to leading, managing, and especially developing people. How do we architect the success of people, teams, and the cumulative benefits to entire organizations? Most organization face real challenges each year during performance reviews because they typically target raking and classifying people for compensation and bonus distributions. A common and widely accepted practice but experience and research highlight that this process has little impact on developmental and professional success. You are either ranked “Ok” or “Not OK” with some falling on the fence of “OK Enough”. This is great for tagging people with labels but does not offer any leverage toward growth other than indicating a “red light” or “green light” to do less of a thing or do more of a thing. I’ve never seen a leader hold a mentoring or coaching conversation on how to turn red lights into green lights.

Performance rankings are lagging indicators pointing backwards. They tell you more about a manager’s subjective, observational, historical experience, and perception of value and much less about actual developmental potential, movement, or drive role growth looking forward. We frequently reward talent based on “the more” of something or “the less” of something else.  It may be an unintended consequence, but we put people in competition for limited resources. This makes most performance reviews a competition fostering event not a competency and growth fostering event.

In people development terms, performance is not about "winning" or “losing” in a competition. People performance is more authentically about becoming better and improving in terms of personal and professional growth, development, opportunity realization, and value contribution. Performance is not a zero-sum game. Performance should be about amplifying existing strengths and making great use of them in new and impactful ways.

Agency is a priority over efficiency. Meaningful impact is a priority over productivity. Performance is the outcome of a dedicated focus on BEING more, not simply doing more. A performance approach free of the common action bias will become the oxygen for a people-first performance architecture.  It will enable the release of maximized talent impact that likely falls outside the bell curve of averages and norms. Becoming better is a different definition of success that is a fundamental requirement for the future development and growth of individuals, teams, and organizations.

Invisible Greatness

I recently read a post by Chris Butler titled “You can be a great designer and can be completely unknown”. Chris is a graphic designer with experience in interaction design, product design, and design leadership and training. His post hit on a perspective I appreciated about designers and creators. It framed a parallel to my own observations in organizations and their accepted talent development and management practices. The core parallel idea is that organizations are, in fact, full of great creativity and high-value work product but that broad recognition of it can be rare. Here is a key excerpt from Chris’s post that really outlined the idea for me.

“We live in an attention economy that equates visibility with value. Social media follower counts, speaking engagements, press mentions, and industry awards have become the measuring sticks of design success. This creates a distorted picture of what greatness in design actually means. The truth is far simpler and more liberating: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown.”

This is also true of other domains and tradecraft in many organizations regardless of the industry it is in . Organization carry built-in incentives that heavily reward action and visibly, often even when actions may not hit exactly the right target.  Show-and-tell theatre can pull organizational energy and momentum off balance from generating increasingly beneficial and higher impact behaviors.  

The irony can be palpable. Typically, organizational intent is to enable their talent to create the best of an organization but often fosters patterns that unintentionally limit the value generation and contribution of their talent. For instance, it’s easy for organizations to be developmentally constrained by its own prescriptive standardization in the pursuit of predictability and efficiency. This often creates average outcomes leading to somewhat mediocre and non-competitive ecosystems. This is never the desired intent, but organizations can find themselves victimized by their own unintended consequences if they can’t follow the through-line to what effectively raises the individual, team, and organizational performance.

The result is that organizations can end up painting themselves into a performance limiting corner. A common example of this is when there is an open role in an organization and management insists on placing an available but unqualified person be placed in that role and hope for the unlikely best. The incentive for keeping the workforce fully assigned to any available work, outweighing the increased risk of failure and creating an impact that lowers performance on a given team or within the organization. 

In today’s attention deficit and social media conditioned environment, organizations have a heavy bias toward action and are especially tuned to activity driven cultures with incentives organized around task or initiative completion. It’s common to hear leaders offer one variation or another of the productivity quote, “What gets measured gets managed (or done).” and attributed to Peter Drucker. An interesting fact is that this quote was never uttered by Drucker. Sometimes quotes or ideas get popular because we want to believe they are true. Why do we want them to be true? Because they confirm our own belief system, filters, and mental models so they make us feel comfortable and help us make sense of things even if not entirely correct.

One of most effective counters to this challenge is to ask some illuminating questions for those who dare to foster a little organizational introspection.

1. Can you see value around or beyond the activities that are at center-stage and under the spotlight?  For every leading character there is a much larger supporting cast. Can you see the full cast of contributing characters and identify their importance?

2. Are recognition behavior patterns in place that hold and foster the less visible extended value that is holding your organization together and enabling broader success?

3. Are there low-visibility activities, initiatives, design, or even foundational thinking that should be given some sustaining oxygen?

As Butler indicates, every organization is “scattered with the artifacts of unrecognized ingenuity”.  Sometimes, excellent performance and contributions are great because they don’t call attention to themselves at all, like a well-oiled wheel that does not squeak. High impact design or high-performance contribution can be invisible greatness.

When visibility commands all the attention, there is risk that being noticed is the priority over being meaningfully useful to the organization. Benefit to the larger organization should be a clear target. The popularity or visibility of an activity can be important, but it does not always equate to the best outcomes or competencies. The larger “greatness” within organizations is likely significantly facilitated by more than what you think you can see. Look around for that invisible greatness right next to you and say “hello” and offer it some recognition.

Presidential Service

Have you ever been the president of something? Your local stamp collecting club or maybe the much-loved president of the HOA? Or possibly you have held a higher profile opportunity such as the president of the local city council or a national organization. Regardless of type or prestige level, the daily role of president is the central function of serving the organization at hand.  

This enabling of success takes the form of vision, mission, and execution towards the organizational purpose. Leaders are orchestrators of people and an array of departments and functions so that others will arrive at their appropriate “success destinations” facilitated through the leaders’ actions and example.

The “top” leader is the leader of leaders, also knowns as the president, and sometimes the CEO in many companies. This service-oriented leadership drives integration, builds community, and amplifies the power and impact of all the collective capabilities applied to a diverse set of objectives.

Don’t be deceived by grifters who sell a leadership approach based on fear, self-preservation, or bait others with self-indulgence and servitude. The best leaders understand and demonstrate humility in knowing that leading is the privilege of carrying responsibility for the greater good and greater success. This will be demonstrated by actions and very few words in authentic leaders. If you observe anything other than these characteristics you may be bearing witness to a toxic or fraudulent leader.

Organizations full of people helping one another succeed is an organization full of leaders who serve. In those organizations the president is the top servant.