Orchestrating Success

This session today is key. I am going to give you my five pillars of success. Each of these pillars is essential. Leave out one of them, and you are limiting your success by at least 50%. Over the 50 years of working with social entrepreneurs, I have found that there are many gaps. The series “Orchestrating Success” is about identifying those gaps, finding the missing elements that are limiting success for each one of us, and filling those gaps with knowledge, systems, and competent team members. Today, five pillars of success. I am going to give the five in a quick overview, talk about each of the five, and then summarize at the end what to do about it.

Here are the five pillars. Number one is strategy, the absolute essential foundation of any organization, any business, any charity, any church. There must be a road map. I call it a solution map. Where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there? Pillar number one is strategy. We will talk more about it later. There was a session on it earlier, and we will go into detail on different elements.

Number two is leadership. That is us. That is you; that is me. It won’t happen unless we equip ourselves to make it happen. Transform the idea. Transform the organization. It begins with transforming the self.

Three is team. Surrounding yourself with highly competent people and getting out of their way.

Four, financial. We must have somebody that understands finances, that is external to the organization or to our brain, somebody whom we pay to watch the dollars. I have seen lots of people raise lots of money and go bankrupt because they didn’t have somebody on the team with this expertise planning, evaluating, and monitoring the financial aspects of what we are doing.

The last one is a support system. Every successful businessperson, performer, athlete, every successful person has a coach, a mentor, a support system around them, a combination of those.

Let’s get started. Strategy. If you didn’t listen to it earlier, go back and listen to the session on strategy. Strategy is what we are going to do, when we are going to do it. It unlocks the key for team performance. People know when to be engaged when they have a strategy. They know what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it and what the result looks like. The strategy is your road map from here to where you want to be. Strategy is a plan that you develop. It’s not a business plan; it’s an operational plan. In my world, a business plan is a financial document that you share with a bank or an investor. That is just a footprint, an overview, a snapshot of what your business looks like. A strategic plan includes strategy; it is an operational plan. There is a quantifiable difference. Understand the difference. Build your strategy. Plan your work, work your plan. That is the only way.

Strategy talks about your long-term strategic objectives. That is 3-5 years out. What is your target? Where will you be? Define the future in the present tense. One year, short-term goal. Define the future in present tense. One-month milestones. Those are 12 accomplishments during the year. Weekly to-dos. Everything so far has been defining the future in present tense. The weekly to-dos are tactical. Many leaders start here. Here is the tactical part. We have not got the long-term vision, the mid-term vision, or the short-term vision in place. All we are doing is tactics. We have so many tactics that they ultimately have the risk of cancelling each other out. We duplicate efforts and have to repeat actions because we didn’t do them in order. Sequence is key. These tactics are in sequence. You have a linear plan. The secret sauce for me is DVDs, Daily Value Deliverables. I suggest three goals as the limit for most organizations. Most leaders can manage three. I think there are three areas: financial, operational, and what you are delivering.

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Hey, it’s Hugh. Thanks for joining me today. Today’s topic is how to build a high-functioning culture. I spent 40 years as a musical conductor. I will use musical analogies; I can’t help it. I know how to build a high-functioning culture. I worked 40 years building choirs, hiring great orchestras, and putting them together to create great ensemble. The name of my companies is based on the combination of the words “synergy” and “vision.” Synervision represents, in a non-musical situation, that sense of ensemble, which defines a higher functioning culture.

Although these very competent musicians don’t give up their skill to be in a group, they enhance that skill with paying attention and performing together at a much higher level. The conductor doesn’t make it happen; the conductor inspires it and gives the space, just like a leader of a charity, a corporation, a non-profit, a church, or a business creates the space for people to function. I find that the biggest limit to high-functioning cultures is the autocratic leader that says, “Do this and do it this way.” That just pours cold water on human initiative and enthusiasm.

I call myself the transformational leadership strategist because I am not a coach nor a consultant. I represent the integration of strategy and performance. We have a piece of music as a conductor that is just a piece of paper with dots. Nothing happens until we make it happen. The performance mode is key. We are only as good as the team around us. If your team is not functioning, if your team is not representing your principles and values, we are in trouble. Assimilating a high-performing team is an art.

Let me give you my four steps. This is a surefire way to make sure you have the right people in the right seat on the right bus. Building a high-functioning culture in the organization you are leading is very intentional. We talked in the last session about creating a strategy, and I gave you some beginning thinking points. Certainly it is a lot more complex than I can give you in a podcast. I can give you some of the fundamental principles in the place I sent you before, thedefinitiveleader.com. There are some leadership lessons there, and there is a free report there called “Building a Sustainable Enterprise.”

It’s not by accident. We must create the strategy. Out of the strategy we define the competencies we are going to need in our organization: on our board, on our staff, the collaborators, affiliates, joint venture partners, it’s a culture of high performance. We as the leader define that culture. Transformational leadership is a leadership system that is a high functioning, high-performing culture. The culture responds to every nuance of the leader, just like a very skilled orchestra responds to every nuance of the conductor. It’s no accident. We influence and empower people, and we limit people.

After we have worked on ourselves, which is the first step, followed by the strategy, and now, only now, can we find the right people to fit the values and the principles we have defined in our culture and the strategy.

Here are the four steps. By the way, when you go to hughballoupodcast.com, you get the link where you can print out the lesson if you can’t write it down or are driving. Hughballoupodcast.com will take you to the landing page that lists all of these podcasts and the transcription of what I am talking about. We don’t expect you to remember it all, so we have written it out for you. If there is a download, it will be linked on that page.

1) Competency: You want to make sure you have defined the competencies for the people you want on your team. We have done this in the strategy. You sit down and make a list. Here are all the people I need, and here is the sequence. Your strategy defines what you need when. When do you need this competency? Do you have the resources to pay them?

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Welcome to session number three. I am excited about this one. I have been teaching leadership for 30+ years with social entrepreneurs. I am in the middle of watching the Olympics in Rio in 2016 while recording this podcast, and I came to the realization that I am addicted to these games. I also came to the realization that all of these American athletes have worked very hard. They have trained very hard. They have really good coaches. I meet people every day launching an enterprise, and they are just going to go do it, no coaching, no training. They are going to run a marathon and die on the road.

This session is about equipping yourself for success. It’s a session about transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is the model for growing your business, and it’s infinitely scalable. It is about transforming your idea into results. It is about converting your passion to profit. It is about building your high-functioning team. It is about creating the life that you want.

People say to me, “What does a musical conductor know about leadership?”

I respond, “I am a musical conductor. I know about leadership.” Through 40 years of my career, I brought people together who were singers. I transformed them into a choir, and then I transformed them into an ensemble. Same thing with instrumentalists. Formed an orchestra, transformed them into this high-functioning team we call an ensemble. It is where the sum of the parts is not it; it’s greater than the sum of the parts. We have 50 players, 200 singers. It’s not about that. It’s about the culture of high performance to achieve that high standard of excellence. That culture is a reflection of the conductor, just like your team is a reflection of your leadership. When we want to complain about our team, it’s good to look in the mirror and understand why they are functioning that way.

This session is about creating the culture of high performance. High-performing teams are a culture of excellence, and that is the point of transformational leadership. It was developed in the 1980’s by two authors Burns and Bass. Burns wanted to reform our political system, and his book was titled Transforming Leadership. We are still in that transforming phase. It has been adopted and moved into a style of leadership that is extremely powerful. As I said earlier, it is infinitely scalable.

It is not about you; it is about the vision. It is not that we are the boss. We do what we want other people to do: we model excellence, commitment, and passion. Whatever we model, people will reflect to us. The leader sets the standard. The transformational leader builds leaders on teams, builds a high-functioning culture, mentors others, avoids micromanaging, learns to delegate, and first and foremost, influences others by power of influence, not power of position. It is not the boss, which by the way, is double s-o-b. We are not the boss; we don’t have to approve everything. We have defined a culture of high performance with the standards of excellence defined as guiding principles.

By the way, if you go to my website thedefinitiveleader.com, you can get my free report on this. It gives you videos on these four principles I am going to talk about. It gives you a report about leadership, about how important this is to the excellence that you see and the vision that is in your brain. The session coming up next is going to be creating your strategy. It is important to begin with equipping ourselves for the journey, equipping ourselves to develop and implement the strategy. In this podcast, I am going to give you my four principles of leadership. If you can master these four principles, you can lead any organization anywhere. It will make you a better leader starting now.

Four principles, number one: When a conductor steps on the podium, they know the score. Principle one is about foundations.

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This session of Orchestrating Success is about forecasting the future and then making it happen. Orchestrating Success: Converting Your Passion to Profit. Don’t misunderstand this as being all about profit, all about money, all about the green back. It is an important commodity that helps us. It’s sort of like the gas. You get a car, which is sort of like building your business. You learn to drive it sometimes. Now you need to put gas in the car. It’s the fuel that runs your organization, the enterprise that you have been charged with leading.

Effective leaders live in the future. We forecast what is going to happen. I remember somebody talking about a famous hockey player one time. They noted that he skated where the puck was going to go. He was there ahead of time. Think about visionary leaders. They are paying attention, looking at the future. That is part of it. Let’s envision the future in this podcast.

Looking ahead: envision the future. When Napoleon Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie introduced him to the most successful business leaders of his time: Ford, Woolworth, Wanamaker, Edison, five presidents, amazing people with amazing success. What Napoleon Hill found out is that every one of them saw the future and could see it in present tense. Definiteness of purpose is what he called that. We as leaders are charged with a vision. The vision is what takes us to where we want to go. Does it? No. The vision is the target. We take us where we want to go. There is a whole lot that needs to happen between the visioning and the arrival point.

I’m watching the Olympics, and the track and field is this week. I really love it. I used to run in high school, and I still do; well, we call it running. It is equipping our bodies to do what our brains think we want to do. I have run several half-marathons and lots and lots of shorter races, and I don’t just get up one day and decide to run a road race. However, I meet lots of people, visionary leaders, who want to start a charity, a church, a business. They have an idea and are going to make it happen. Wait a minute, did you train for this marathon? Did you learn to fly the plane before you take off? Flying the plane might not be too hard; it’s the landing part that is tricky. Starting a business, a lot of people do that. Mark Twain used to say, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing I have ever done. As a matter of fact, I have done it hundreds of times.” Sometimes serial entrepreneurs keep starting businesses because they don’t succeed. We read about the ones who start successful businesses, sell them, and then move on. We don’t read as much about the ones who start and don’t make it. Therefore, let’s equip ourselves for success before we start. Let’s envision the future. Then let’s create a pathway to get there. Envisioning the future, that is an art in itself.

Let’s talk about leadership. There are many styles of leadership. Autocratic, charismatic leaders, we read about those. Those people are up there saying, “Do this, do this.” They are called the boss. They give all the orders. They manage. They create anxiety, which we call energy. They create all the stress for themselves. They are always in charge, and they are always giving orders. If that is the way you want to live, that’s okay; however, you might want to take a day off, you might want to go somewhere. We are going to talk in the upcoming sessions about building a system that is going to be the underlying foundation for your enterprise. It’s going to make money in several ways: make money while you are sleeping, make money with your team, your projects, your events, your products, and your personal activities.

Before we get there, we have to look at the future. Now,

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Welcome to Orchestrating Success: Converting Passions to Profits, Session 1. This is my brand-new podcast. The recurring themes that have come up over my 30+ years of working with leaders leading businesses, churches, synagogues, charities, and all kinds of organizations are themes that I am going to weave through this podcast over the different sessions. I have already interviewed some really great people with some powerful wisdom. In the next series of podcasts, I will be uncovering things like my four universal principles that will make you a better leader no matter where you are leading, and my five pillars of success: one, two, three, four, five, here is my pathway to success.

I meet leaders doing all kinds of different things. I go to events. I keynote at meetings, conferences, workshops, symposiums, summits. I meet people at all kinds of gatherings where they are sharing information and improving their future. I commend people for studying.

Many times, people come looking for the secrets outside of themselves. They are looking for secrets to come from someone else when in fact the secrets are inside. As a matter of fact, some of the secrets inside are the secrets that are holding us back. The barriers we create to success often are those barriers that we hold inside of us. They are those negative scripts, those things that we have been compromised with over the years, the things we don’t know about ourselves. There are the mistakes that we’ve made. It’s time to forgive ourselves and let go of those mistakes. Say, “It’s time to let go. I have done the best I can.” Those mistakes have been reframed from mistakes and redefined as learning opportunities. I have had many, many, many learning opportunities.

This foundational podcast is about equipping self, unbinding self, releasing the barriers, discovering what is holding us back. It is the shadow that is inside of us that repels money, repels team members, repels customers, when we really want to attract those. Those are the people we need because we have something they need.

I don’t know about you, but I listen to lots of podcasts. I learn lots of things from many people. Many people are very successful, and many of these successful people have a niche. This is what I do. I have been bombarded with people selling me, “This is the program that is going to make you rich.” Yes, we do need to make money. It’s not about the money; it’s about me making a difference in people’s lives and building a sustainable profit and income for myself and my business. We need to make money to make sure that we achieve the vision and mission that we see so clearly in our minds.

Over this series of podcasts, we will look at some of these shadows, these barriers, these fears and obstacles that are holding us back. Let’s look at defining the life that we want, and then we create the enterprise that will support the life we want. When I meet people at different gatherings, they have great ideas, and out of every 100 people who have a great idea, only three people will do something about it and follow through. Out of those three people that do something about it, 90% will fail because they have not worked on their skill.

One of the people I read and listen to is John Maxwell. John Maxwell talks about the different laws of success. One of those is the Law of the Lid. It says that our organization that we are charged with leading can only develop as far as our ability to lead. I tell people that, and I talk about the Dun & Bradstreet study that says 90% of businesses fail because the leaders can’t lead the business. People nod at me, tell me it’s interesting information but it doesn’t apply to them, and move on,

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