Thought Patrol Podcast

The marketplace is moving at a staggering rate, digital disruption is everywhere. Your business model is under duress regardless of your industry. Business models used to fail every ten to twenty years now it’s every three to four years; sometimes less. Recently Spotify disrupted iTunes, the iconic disruptor of the music industry. “No innovation no business!”

To move fast enough organisations and their leadership have to be inherently agile, encouraging innovation to be in their DNA. Only in agility and innovation is there the likelihood of sustainability.  If you don’t innovate, you die. Look at Nokia, absolute global dominance gone in less than a decade. They ignored the smartphone revolution and became irrelevant very quickly. Their response was to defend the status quo. This is a very natural reaction. Defend what you know, but now we have to embrace what will kill us.

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Cutting costs is a simple way to improve profitability, in theory at least. However in the real world of a dynamic marketplace, imperfect people, unforeseen circumstances, collateral damage and unintended consequences, the spreadsheet seems to lie.

No one has ever cut their way to sustainable profitability. Then when the result isn’t met, a new round of cost cutting and the inevitable and perennial restructuring continues. The axe is not your friend.

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Is it hard to implement strategies and get alignment in your organisation? Are your team not engaged in your strategic direction and lack passion? Perhaps they lack ownership; and there may be a reason for that. “People own what they help to create.”

How inclusive are you when you plan, create ideas and establish direction? I have found that almost universally in our Stragile planning sessions, we have high involvement and engagement, and subsequently implementation is a breeze in comparison to traditional strategic planning. Check out Stragile.co if you want to know more.

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Do you find that small things slow you or your team down? Do you get dragged into issues that are really inconsequential in the scheme of things? What you need in momentum and lots of it! Momentum crushes problems.

John Maxwell has a great metaphor that I’m going to borrow, because it’s a great one. John talks about a train being in a station waiting for passengers. When it’s ready to go, a log of wood is placed in front of it. This seemingly small obstacle will make the train unable to depart; spinning its wheels, unable to move. Yet, if the same log were placed on a track when the train was moving at full speed, it would provide no resistance at all. Probably not even noticed, as the momentum of the train overcomes the resistance, of a now insignificant obstacle.

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I want to challenge a cultural phenomenon; when asked how we are, especially in a work or business context, our positive response is that we’re busy. Now whilst the complete opposite of that is a problem, being busy may not be our most effective state. Being busy is not necessarily good.

Recently the World Health Organisation added burnout to its official list of diseases. The term was first applied as a psychological diagnosis in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger. Which is a splendid name.

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Do you feel like you are always working working working, with little or underwhelming fruit? Does your workday leave you feeling tired, ineffective and unfulfilled? This is actually very common in leaders and their teams.

Sometimes we have to slow down to speed up; and build some white space into our hectic schedules. We are not wired for a sprint; we’re built for a marathon. Like all good runners we have to pace ourselves if we want to win. As the great piece of racing advice says, “to finish first, first you have to finish”.

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I mentor and train a lot of leaders, a number note that their teams don’t take responsibility, won’t make decisions and don’t think for themselves. Often this frustration is driven from a desire to control them?

“I love to be micro-managed,” said no one ever. Whether we like it or not, control is an illusion. Even if we think all is under control, it seldom is.VIEW MORE HERE

Is your team not operating well? Do you seem to have ongoing people issues in your business? Here’s some bad news, that may turn out to be good news. Often your team is a reflection of you?

Leaders set the tone and a team will take their standards and even their ethics from you. The standard you walk by will become the team standard.

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We're talking about transparency and you can't talk about transparency without talking about Openness and Trust.

It's really the core. It's really the definition of being transparent. It's that willingness to be vulnerable and to be open and, ultimately, I think transparency, and I'm a great believer in this, transparency builds trust. If you want to have a high-performing team, if you want to have an environment where people do well and things happen, you have to create a culture of trust, an environment of trust where people genuinely believe that you have their best in mind, and transparency is a great way of doing that. So, be open. Be open to listening to people, be open to their ideas, and that's your responsibility, really, to remain the student and not the critic.

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Today, we're going to talk about values.

I sometimes think that when we talk about values, we tend to think of that group of words sitting on a wall and yes, they're values. However, if they're not activated, they're not really true values.

And a word that hasn't been used a lot recently is Virtues.

It's kind of gone out of vogue, but if you think about values as virtues, those things that drive us and our personal way of doing things, it's a lot more personal.

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