Along with team building and listening to your players, coaches and leaders should seek to create an environment where everyone can learn how to go at game speed both individually and as a unit.  A leader needs to have a plan and a correlating structure for going all-out together because power without control can get you off the rails and, in the ditch, quickly.

The cauldron of controlled conflict will allow your team to trust each other more as they see that others can match their best and that you can even get the sum of the parts to add up to more when the active ingredients of trust, precision and planned adaptability are inserted into your practices. Your best performers are going to want to push their limits, and you will need hard practices to allow everyone to improve together.

As Tom Hanks so perfectly said in his role as the washed-up Jimmy Dugan in “A League of Their Own,” It is the hard that makes it worth it.

Why do you need trust?

Sports teams give us great examples of this and while the correlations to work are not 100% they are close enough. The team that doesn’t trust each other when under duress will stop sharing the ball and a form of “hero ball” will ensue. Bill Belichick of New England Patriots fame has been known to try and force this on his opposition by taking away one key player from the other side and seeing if the other team can adapt. Adaptability is another key ingredient, but before you can adapt you need to be able to trust each other.
In a work context this could come up if a colleague who normally plays a key role leaves your company or is out sick. Who else can step into their shoes and be ready for the big presentation to a prospect or provide an internal report?

Our magic formula for building trust is SE=C=T=Success

SE stands for Shared Experiences, C stands for window into your Character, and T stands for Trust.
Going full speed in practice or in a conference room and being hard on the idea or ball and kind to each other is a fantastic, shared experience. With enough of these shared experiences everyone on the team starts to understand the character and commitment of all involved and this organically builds a trust that is experience born.

Why do you need precision?

To manage is to think for, with, or through something by yourself or with others. In this situation a good manager is thinking through the process of running an effective all-out practice or meeting where everyone is committed to being hard on the idea or ball while still being respectful of others.
The precision comes in the form of the constraints you will put the team in before you release them to perform. In a sales context you could create a scenario where you are up against company B for an RFP and the buyer is saying that they are offering a similar product but for 20% less. What questions should you ask and how should you respond?

In a sports context you can create drills where you are giving one side an advantage and then teaching through the constraint to help the players adapt.

The best in business and sport identify moments of maximum influence (MOMI’s) and train their teams to be aware of them and how to react and perform with great fundamentals.

The prior preparation of the leader is crucial to leveraging the effort that assertive play is asking of your team. Don’t ask them to go 100% if you haven’t prepared for everyone to receive at least that much in return for the effort.
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Why do you need adaptability?

The final triangle in John Wooden’s pyramid of success is Competitive Greatness. "To be at your best when it is needed. Take enjoyment of a difficult challenge."

It has been decades since Wooden's UCLA teams dominated college basketball but even then, it was a highly competitive sport with hundreds of great players on different teams all of whom were striving to win the NCAA title.

Wooden won nine titles, including seven in a row, and for most of the games would be seated on the bench. This is in stark contrast to his fellow coaches at the time and more obviously in the present. Watch any game on TV and the second a big play is made the camera goes straight to the coach’s reaction, where there is must-see TV as they gyrate and turn into a three-year-old with no filter on their feelings.

Wooden was quoted as saying that the work had been done in practice by the coaches and the players and that the job of adapting to the game itself was in the hands of the players. Wooden knew that if his players could not recognize the tactics of the other team and then adapt that he could never call enough time-outs to do it for them.
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Changing up the practices and altering the way you practice by adding constraints to enhance your team’s adaptability all can build a mental elasticity that will matter in the biggest moments.

We created the Leaders Compass years ago and continue to notice that as people lead themselves and others, they are moving on several axes with one of them being the ability to persevere balanced by the need to adapt.

On its first day Basketball was more like Indoor Rugby - A great example of adapting.

James Naismith is credited with inventing the game of basketball when faced with an upcoming rainy season in Springfield, Massachusetts. He brought the boys inside and put up a couple of peach baskets on the wall and gave them a soccer ball. He told them that a point was scored when the ball went into the basket. The boys went all out and soon enough the injuries piled up as the boys ran with the ball and tackled each other on the hard gym floor. Regardless, the boys were happy and wanted to keep playing the next day.
Naismith used all three principles we have discussed and added some constraints to allow the boys to keep playing and stay healthy enough to play. Rules were assigned (like no running with the ball and no tackling)  which took precision and adaptability and trust was given and received by the players and Naismith.
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Going all out…. that was the easy part as players love to play!

We are finishing up the first half of 2022 with our 4th post on the Eight Essential Elements of a Close Knit Team which appears fitting as we head into the "half time" of the year. Defining what is fair and the differences between leadership and management are crucial for any unit that wants to adapt quickly on their path to this year's championship.

Sport and work teams correlate easily and yet the tension that exists around playing time and who has the ball at the end of the game seems to be unique to sport. What is fair, how people lead themselves and how they allow themselves to be directed are foundational issues on a sports team. Understanding how the best teams have dealt with this tension could afford the business leader some transitory insights.

Fairness and Roles

Warming the bench or getting garbage minutes can really challenge a person’s commitment to putting in the extra effort in practice. The great arbiter of sport is playing time on a team that is competing to win a championship. The coaches control playing time and they need players who are ready to perform their best inside the system they have designed and taught in practice. It is very challenging to create an intense practice environment with players who know they have different amounts of playing time during the game.

Sometimes the starters want to take it easy and rest up for the big game and sometimes the back up players aren’t sure the effort is worth it. Why hustle to just watch the game from the bench? The coach has the whistle and can change practice from the fun of scrimmaging to the drudgery of conditioning, but most don’t want to go that well too often.

John Wooden, who was voted the coach of the 20th Century by ESPN deployed a tactic and a methodology to address these issues. He communicated individually with each of his players the role he anticipated them playing on the team as early as he could. This declaration was based on what he knew at that time, and he made sure to balance the reality of the present with the possibility of a better future. 

In business Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha wrote “The Alliance” where they introduce the concept of meeting individually every 45 days during an 18-month tour of duty for key employees in an effort to have their best performers feel that the company’s mission and their personal contribution were connected. Importantly the meeting was focused on the employee first and the company second and proved to greatly increase retention rates.

In both settings, knowing your role and understanding how that role helps the team succeed goes a long way to maximizing the daily contributions everyone chooses to bring which enables the leaders to build a high-performance team.

Wooden’s methodology for fairness is also a piece of timeless treasure that many young coaches and managers fail to implement. Discipline and compliance to small details have become hallmarks of championship lore. Nothing spreads faster than when someone breaks a hard and fast rule of being late to practice or another rule that is in place to keep a large number of people in order. For some reason we all take solace when somebody else gets some time in the penalty box. 

Zero tolerance can really catch a leader off guard late in the season and potentially having the team distracted at precisely the moment you need them focused on a championship performance. Wooden established early that fairness was not a horizontal line, rather introduced the concept that fairness was earned and deserved based upon past contributions or performances. This subtle change gave him room to have strict rules that enabled buy in by all to prioritize the team above other distractions and yet to not allow small infractions to get in the way of allowing everyone on the team to accomplish the goal of winning the championship. Swen Nater & Ronald Gallimore go into more detail on this methodology in their book “You Haven’t Taught Until They Have Learned.” Swen is a great resource as he was Bill Walton’s back up for three years at UCLA under John Wooden and hardly saw the floor and yet was a first-round draft pick and had a successful 11-year pro career.

Defining what is fair and then connecting people to how their role maximizes the contribution they can make to the unit’s success is something a leader should do early and when consistently administered should give everyone the latitude they need to adapt to outside issues that inevitably arise.

Leadership and Management

Over the last 10 years leadership and management have seen a blending of their definitions and management has been taking it in the teeth with meme after meme declaring the benefits of leadership and the horrors of management.

However, when looked at through the lens of competing to win a championship the players and coaches need to work in consensual interdependence and both management and leadership should be clearly defined and differentiated. Understanding and honoring the differences can be a key contributor to the unit’s success.

Peter Drucker liked to say that to manage was to think with someone and if necessary to think for someone while they were learning the task. Jack Clark of University of California Rugby fame has a YouTube talk on the differences between leadership and management and how he defines them on his teams. From Clark’s perspective he requires that every player lead themselves and adhere to the values that make up their culture. They accomplish this by having a series of questions they ask themselves and by answering in the affirmative they show their fealty to the unit.

Clark further outlines that within the team they need to waste as little time as possible on contextual matters that can be delegated to a small subset of the team, the captains.  Everyone on the team consents to being managed and directed by the leaders so they can focus on playing the highly adaptive game of rugby where the coach hardly speaks to the players during the game and only the captains can speak to an official. As an aside, wouldn’t the NBA be a more enjoyable game to watch if they had the same rule?

Companies may appear to have some advantages over sports teams when it comes to establishing questions that allow their people to lead themselves, yet we seldom come across them. Identifying your teams most valued values is something you can learn in about two hours with this DIY worksheet. We have found that it really brings people together and allows you a starting point to building out the questions that empower your people to bring their best which is ultimately what they want to do.
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As a coach or a business leader please consider learning from these dedicated practitioners of unit cohesion. We all know how hard it is to keep it fair and not lose your team’s commitment while you are competing. These greats dealt with the same issues of human nature, and we hope they help you as you are building your best teams in the future.

Our goal for 2022 was to write eight editions of Branches & Roots and share key elements of not only winning teams, but tight teams, the types of teams where everyone shows up to the reunion. We started with the importance of people feeling like they belong which was wonderfully articulated in Owen Eastwood’s book “Belonging.”

Our second edition explored how important verbal communication can be in large groups that are trying to evolve into a team. Recently deceased author Trevor Mowad had some fantastic examples of how the Alabama football team turned its attention to this issue early in Nick Saban’s tenure. With Mowad’s encouragement Saban convinced the players that they didn’t have to be super positive all the time, they just had to stop sharing negative sentiments even while they were going through the dog days of summer training.

Most recently we covered how important it is when turning a group into a team that you have a language created for having hard conversations and how much it matters that the lowest power people are empowered to speak up. A great image that comes to mind here is a worker at a car manufacturer being able to stop the line because she sees something wrong. This is a great sign of a culture that is making it safe to bring up the uncomfortable realities that come with humans working together. Our research shows it’s better to talk it out than wait around for people to act it out.

Looking ahead, here are the eight essential elements for building a close-knit unit that we think improves your chances of winning.

1.      Belonging
2.      Curb negative communication
3.      Create a language for truth
4.      Identify roles and the difference between leadership and management
5.      Use internal conflict properly
6.      Humor, team chemistry, and gelling
7.      Championship adaptability and performance
8.      Ceremony and the fly wheel of doing it right

Our next post will dive into how some of the best teams have created cultures where fair treatment does not mean equal treatment, along with some important distinctions between leadership and management. Nailing these two team disruptors can make a huge difference in building buy in from both those that are on the field and those that want to be on the field.

Now that you know where we are headed for the balance of the year, please share any element you think we are missing and insights about the topics we have identified.

Thank you for your readership and friendship.
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Drew & Sara

"Now would be fine" is the answer we preach and teach.

Of course this is an easy answer for someone who has authority or position power.

But what about at the other end of the spectrum?

Our experiences suggest the answer is often...."NEVER is just fine by me!"

So how do we bridge this gap?

It starts with organizing and prioritizing your own schedule and continues in how you share your choices with others.

Geoffrey Moore who has successfully advised Marc Benioff at Salesforce and Satya Nadella at Microsoft recently wrote about how the word "priority" entered our language in only the singular form. He is suggesting that the CEO needs to set THE PRIORITY and that the team should either buy in or leave.

Talk about a hard conversation.

If you are leading a smaller team, like a Jeffrey Bezos "two pizza" team, or in military parlance a sub unit you may have a very clear directive from above, but there is still the challenge of managing the disparate tasks.

The team at www.thearmyleader.co.uk have a series of excellent posts about small unit cohesion and execution. The articles are current and written by those who have recently been in active military service.
No matter where you sit on the power curve when you organize and prioritize your tasks and share them with your superior you are having a hard conversation with yourself first, this is a habit worth honing.
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We use the following template as a constraint to develop our planning abilities.

DEALING WITH THE "YEAH BUT"

Right about now, you, the reader may have already had an internal dialogue that is the mother of all "keep it the same" traps.

You said, "yeah but in my case it's different" and you moved on from seriously considering changing or adapting your actions or behaviors.

Guess what, your people might be saying that to themselves when YOU are talking!
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"Yeah But" is what creates the conversational graveyard between people on a team.

Inside of tribes all over the world one of the first things leaders do after they control the dress code is they control who talks and what they say.

It is this command and control style that starts and feeds the conversational graveyard that starts to undermine the teams ability to trust each other and effectively execute the leaders plans.

In our last post "Stop Saying Stupid Sh*t Outloud" Trevor Mowad described how culture is built or destroyed by words and phrases shared out loud and the 7 to 10x impact of negative language on a team.

Three phrases that can help anyone who is challenged by hard conversations.

Here are three phrases that low power people can employ to help them engage in having hard conversations early and to help clean out their teams conversational graveyard.

"That is interesting, can you say more about that."

Say this when a statement is made, like "There is no way, we are going to win that business".

The response to your question will typically be the "why" behind the statement.

Once you have the why, you can get a window into the logic or emotion that the other person is carrying into that topic.

"I hear you."

This is another conversational enabler and is often best used when someone is being dramatic or dogmatic in making a point.

Conversational graveyards can create a great deal of tension for certain people and then instead of talking things out, they act them out or worse yet, they blurt them out.

Your empathetically stated "I hear you" can really land and take the air out of the balloon. Frustrated people sometimes don't need agreement as much as they need to feel heard.

"That's the easy part, can we talk about the hard part?"

This phrase is a lane changer, or kind of like putting the clutch in so you can shift gears.

It is best delivered slowly and then you should pause for a few seconds to let the other side know you are going to bring up something that may not be agreed to yet.

Understanding these phrases and then putting them into your conversational tool belt take time and practice. If you are looking to learn more about these topics we have two book recommendations.

The first is the gold standard going back decades by the team at Vital Smarts Inc. "Crucial Conversations, Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High" has sold millions of copies over the decades and is still as relevant as ever.

A more recent offering from retired FBI negotiator Chris Voss is "Never Split the Difference" and while the title connotates that you will learn negotiating tips, the first thing you learn is a mindset and tool kit for entering into a conversation where the outcome is in doubt and therefore could be unsafe or hard.
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Regardless of your role as leader or follower we hope that we have enabled you with a few more tools to answer our title's question with a resilient and patient...NOW WOULD BE FINE.

I really love watching football, particularly the passing game where two elite and quick athlete's battle as the quarterback's pass spirals towards them.

The TV commentators have recently started using the term "In Phase" to describe when the defensive back is in the correct position while guarding the receiver. A quick google search shows that being In Phase is different depending on the route the receiver is running, but that typically the DB is positioned on the field side hip of the receiver.

Enterprise sales professionals are like DB's in that they "cover" accounts on behalf of their company and in an recent situation we broke down their job as really only being in four phases.

Enterprise sales is anything but simple with all of the nuances that come with managing the relationship between two very large companies, however the first thing you need your sales professional to recognize is what phase of the sales process are we in currently?

Embedded inside the phase recognition is the subtle change that goes on in your conversations with the buyers as you work from being curious about a match to rigorous in your pursuit of aligning the clients priorities with the solution you are providing.

If you lose track of the priorities and don't get the buyers to continually reiterate what matters most, you could be setting yourself up for a late stage disappointment.

Here is how we have described the four stages of Enterprise Sales (with some humor injected) and how to pay attention to matching the buyers priorities with their companies top initiatives.

Team,
As we continue to wage the battle of the new(us) vs the old(the competition) I wanted to outline what I think are maybe some obvious concepts that hopefully keep us fired up and focused as we leap into April.

There are really only four phases for our top Enterprise Prospects.

They are unaware of our services and therefore are lost in the wilderness of want and despair.

They are aware of our services but not engaged in a buying process because other issues are keeping them occupied and so they are losing out on all the $$ we can make them.

They are engaged in a buying process with us and most likely others so they are close to seeing the light, but sadly our competitors are out their like Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings and so we must remain vigilant in our pursuit of truth in the context that our prospect has declared in the discovery call. This is why we get them to prioritize the issues and make sure they remain true to those priorities all the way through the RFP process.

They have picked us and are rolling out our solution and are on their way to the promised land or they have been bamboozled by our competition and must suffer for another 3 years in the land of mediocrity.
The fun in this is that these poor lost souls think that nothing is going to change the game.....and yet, we have references who were just as lost and are now willing to go on record and tell others that our solution is a "GAME CHANGER."

The key is to know how to reveal our solution and to do it in the context of the client's current reality.

Our failure to do so can and will lead to other vendors winning with lesser solutions.

Thus we must always be willing to be curiously optimistic when speaking with our grumpy buyers early and then as things develop continue to accuse the idea that our solution is the only solution as it is clearly not.

The winning solution is the one that matches the priorities that the prospect shared in the discovery call and verifies all the way through the buying process and importantly we need to tie our category to the BIG 3 issues that the prospect is focused on from the CEO on down.

Learning how our prospects prioritize our category and then tying it into the BIG 3 is a one two punch that helps us and helps our buyer look good internally which is really what they care about.

So like the good and hungry hunters that we all are, let us go into the conversations early with curiosity and finish them with rigor.

Fired up to be on your team!
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Drew

Last month we talked about helping your team feel like they belong through the Māori term Whakapapa.

For many of you it resonated but led to the question, it feels great to belong, now how do we win?

Belonging and winning….now that is like peanut butter and chocolate!

Mental Strength Coach Trevor Mowad worked with the football teams at Georgia and Alabama and job #1 was getting the players to “SSSSO!”

This may sound simple enough, but when you are going to build the best college football team in some of the hottest parts of the country during the summer, putting a lid on the complaining and negative self-talk is no small task. In this three minute video the recently deceased Mowad discussed how they convinced a very young and diverse group of players to “SSSSO!”

If you don’t have time for the video here are the cliff notes.

1.      What you say galvanizes what you and others think by 10X.

2.      Negative communication is 4 to 7x more impactful than positive communication.

3.      Instead of worrying about always being up, just don’t verbalize the down.

4.      These claims are supported by research from Georgetown professor Christine Porath.

The cumulative work of Mowad has been outlined in two books, “It Takes What it Takes” and “Getting to Neutral.”

The new idea is to not fight negative with positive but to focus on a neutral framework that allows the real awful to be dealt with efficiently and to not worry about having to always spin things to a positive. At the same time it keeps a lid on the negativity taking over and controlling the vibe.

We don’t think you should waste a single crisis to build a team that has a mental framework to:
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• Get to the brutal truth.
• Identify the next most important tasks.
• Establish a cadence of action and iteration.

You may not get a degree or certification to show what you have accomplished in the last three years, but you have been building the mental muscle to deal with the increased severity and frequency of a globally connected world that is grumpy.

Thank you for your readership, next month we will be writing on how to help your team handle hard conversations and how to organize and prioritize their tasks. 

​​Whakapapa is a Maori term that has several meanings, the first being how a person is connected to the Maori lineage and all things in the world, in short, their genealogy.

An additional meaning that might be relevant for you and your teams in 2022 is a "deep connection to land and the roots of one's ancestry."

The words "deep connection" and "ancestry" are of particular interest right now because these feelings lead to a strong sense of collective trust. It is our view that teams only move as fast as their collective trust will allow them. We have shortened this concept up over the years into the phrase "teams move at the speed of trust."

We learned about Whakapapa in a new book by Owen Eastwood called Belonging, the Ancient Code of Togetherness and we think it is timely given the significant headwinds we are facing with respect to trust within our teams and communities.

Eastwood is part Maori and part Englishman and works with professional sports teams around the world on building out current and authentic origin stories for teams like the New Zealand All Blacks and the South African Proteas. He helps teams create and define their own Whakapapa, and then build out processes for enabling their efforts to honor it.

Part of his process is to make sure that all members of the team feel like their past is honored and respected as they start to build a new collective vision for the team each season. This is in stark contrast to the past dominant cultures of sports teams where the new players are hazed and are not respected until they perform on the field. It is a fundamental shift away from a fear based culture. 

Sports teams are not work teams, but in some ways they are actually more dynamic or brutal on human capital than the fastest growing tech company. If you can't impact the game, you won't see the field let alone be on the team. So why should the sports teams care about connection when everyone is just one injury away from being out for the season? Why go through all the hassle on the "soft stuff"?

The answer according to Eastwood's book is that creating a sense of belonging is the fastest way to get a group of people to volunteer to climb into the physical and emotional pain cave of practice and games which are table stakes in professional sport.

Another insight is that once you create a culture of high achievement and an "all in" attitude the positive endorphins that come from being elite are being heavily researched and scientifically proven. This is why many of the best runners run with other runners, and the best swimmers swim with other swimmers. To get from good to great involves pain management which starts in the brain. A great way to trick the brain to volunteer for future pain is to be around other people who are climbing the "hard fun hill."

Our aim in sharing this is to empower you with current ideas to help your teams adapt as efficiently as possible amidst the constraint which is the pandemic. As the disconnection rises all around them, your teammates will be more likely to contribute all they have to your team when they feel connected to each other.
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Now is the time to create an environment where people feel like they belong.

Thank you for your readership and friendship,
Drew & Sara

It seems like Aaron Rodgers is just the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to personally motivated antics that are wrapped up inside what is supposed to be a team sport. His latest dance with ambiguity is whether or not he has a broken toe or Covid Toe. You can read all about the story in the Wall Street Journal.
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We think the Covid Toe story of Aaron Rodgers is similar to a tell in a poker game. As a leader of others, do you have an equivalent tell you can listen for like Covid Toe?

Covid Toe is the body's extremely painful reaction to fighting the virus. It comes from your body making excess interferon which can turn toes reddish or even purple. It gets worse in cold climates and the best way to avoid getting Covid Toe….is wait for it….to get VACCINATED.

Yes the irony is thick for this apparently very intelligent quarterback who continues to look more like Scrooge as he ages, especially in comparison to Tom Brady who has seven titles to Rodgers one. What type of signs or tells can you be on the lookout for in your organization? What are the signs that someone is leading an individualistic countermovement inside your team?

It takes a special type of listening and observing to notice the signs, but unlocking the hidden productivity inside your people comes from creating the right situations and moments where those with low power are empowered to communicate what they see and how they feel. 

Michael Useem of the Wharton School of Business wrote a book called "The Leadership Moment" about nine different leadership moments from recent history that make for great case studies. Himalayan explorer, Arlene Blum’s historic all female ascent of Annapurna is potentially relevant as she faced a great deal of silence from her highly competent team in the first third of their expedition. Silence did not equal compliance in that setting, and as is often the case there isn’t always enough time to obtain consensus. The apparent opposing forces of command and control and consensus are a leader’s challenge. Constructive and frequent dialogue are key tools to unlock the contributions from the entire team that are needed. Blum’s story is well told by Useem and the tragic loss of two of the team who sought personal glory highlights the consequences of what would be an extreme case of Covid Toe.

Collective human systems can fluctuate between group and team behaviors quickly based upon the positive benefits of being together. The parity of talent in the NFL makes the difference between winning and losing a game of inches and split seconds. Hiking the tallest mountains in the world presents life and death perils.

Thankfully most of us aren’t operating in either of these situations, yet our competitive advantages may not have large moats, our margins may be shrinking and our employees need their jobs. You can’t afford any Covid Toe moments that will disrupt your team chemistry. Managing the expectations of your base and keeping their roles dynamic increases your chances of staying in the team state where accountability to each other is paramount. Groups run slowly on norms, while teams move at the speed of trust that is collectively felt by the unit. 

Are the Packers still a team that can move with the pace that is needed to succeed?

Thank you for your readership and friendship and have a great thanksgiving weekend and joyful Christmas season!
Drew & Sara

The Tokyo Olympic Games were a treat to watch, the athletes commitment and energy was contagious as were the emotions pre and post competition.

We came out of the games with a question.

Why is it that the most talented team doesn't always win, and if you are in charge of a heavily favored or talented team how can you make sure you deliver on the premise of all that talent?

It appears that talented teams face their own special challenges and it's often because they don’t want to focus on the fundamentals, just outcomes. Other issues get in the way as well like style and ego.

The point of many games is to get the other team to yield or quit. This starts in their mind, moves to their face, and ends up quickly in their shoulders and feet. This makes many of these contests about not just talent but about effort and grit and persistence.

Adding to the challenge the talented team will face lower competition that will not be able to compete at the same level. The accompanying win creates a false sense of security that can lead to large let downs later in the season when other talented teams who have better practice habits show up. Suddenly and predictably your team's talent is not enough.

Some coaches use their force of personality and power to counteract the talent malaise. They seek to take charge. We have noticed some more subtle choices and outline the three conversations with three types of players that you may consider in your future leadership roles.

Your Effort Leaders

Who shows up early and stays late on your team? In his deep dive into the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team author James Kerr identified that the leaders swept the sheds after every practice and game. These players are often not your high scorers, but they set a tone of action and pride that becomes contagious inside the locker room. This culture keeper can be a coach's best friend in out flanking the dreaded "lazy middle" that can exist early in the season when conditioning and pushing the boundaries of fitness matter so much. These effort leaders are some of your most courageous people, because they want to stand for something that may go unseen by the fans or outsiders. Make sure you take these players aside and praise them for their honor and effort, they often don't need a lot of public praise, but they will really want to know that you see it.

Your Communication Leader

It is so hard to not just talk about Draymond Green when writing about this type of player. However it is not just the loud communicators that you need to cultivate when working to hone in on your talented team's best efforts. Finding a player who has the courage and the capacity to effectively communicate and not over communicate is difficult, but as a coach you can nurture and grow people into this role if the right player isn't on your team. We have watched Steve Kerr work magic with Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and would lay odds that in certain rooms, they are communicating important messages to the team and Draymond is listening. Early in the season grab the players you are going to need to carry some of the communication duties and outline how and when you are looking for their help.

Your Performance Leader

Everyone knows who can ball, play, deal and close. This is part of the problem. The player knows it, can get drunk on it, and then not have the focus to perform at their highest level late in the season when other great performers are on the opposite team. Jimmy Chitwood hits the game winner at the end of the 1986 movie "Hoosiers", yet early in the season the coach let's him know that the ball is the only special thing on the team. How you surround your performance leaders from the very beginning of the season can define how far the team will go at the end of the year. You will be communicating with this player or players constantly as they will be running the plays you design, yet having a cadence of communication about their role beyond just impacting the game is also crucial. 

What if I have a Michael Jordan on my hands?

Weaving these conversations together with the different players should allow you to create some bonds that can become quite strong. The ESPN documentary "The Last Dance" showed that in some cases, a lone figure will come along like Michael Jordan who may seek to take on all three roles, and yet players like Steve Kerr and Bill Cartwright were proven to be instrumental in building the culture that coach Phil Jackson sought to create and maintain. 

Aren't These Just Captains?

These conversations, the antidotes might seem like obvious communication with what most people would call a captain. However we didn't want to give them the label of authority on our own, your labels and roles are what matter in your cultures. Sam Walker wrote a great book by the name of The Captain Class where he outlines that the key to the best teams is to have great captains. On the other hand, Jack Clark gives an excellent talk about building culture for the Cal Rugby Team and goes to great lengths to identify that authority and leadership in a group can be different. Clark articulates that authority is tied to process and protocol, but leadership is tied to values that are honored by all on the team. Every member of that tribe should be called to lead themselves to embody those values regardless of performance in the competition. 

Whether you are running a fall team or are setting up a team for next year we are curious how your conversations will go with your team as you create another unique tapestry that is this season.

Please share with us your insights and perspectives and thank you for your readership and friendship.

​April of 2021 has us noticing that not only has spring, sprung, but that many have an extra spring in their step.

Could it be the vaccine, the year of isolation, the passing of loved ones or just the beauty of life reborn, but the flowers are full of color and even our oak leaves are vibrant in their adolescent state.

We find that this time of year is one bursting with action and so will keep this email short and hopefully impactful for where you are as a leader right now.

In almost any setting, adding the right amount of conflict can be a challenge and yet in many situations, just like the right spice, it can activate other elements and "make the soup."

As leaders of ourselves and others we are given the responsibility to create an atmosphere that optimizes getting the job done.

What we have noticed recently is that much of the conflict tied to the pandemic is relationally based, as in, these people are bad, wrong, or stupid because of X.

This is the type of conflict that kills cultures at work, on teams, and inside of families and if anyone were to observe an elementary school playground we appear to acquire the ability to have relational conflict early in life.

Where conflict can be accretive is when we create constraints or games to work with the tension that is conflicts byproduct to hone what we discussed last time which is trust. 

Sport when positioned correctly allows the ball to be under duress, not the people who handle the ball, building a fence in the backyard can put the project under stress, not the people who are building it.

We coined this process "being hard on the ball and kind to each other."

You probably are doing something like this intuitively already, but we wanted to share a few insights on what we are noticing right now and based on some mistakes we have made while adapting to the distance the pandemic has put between so many of us. 

The first is that once you have set up your tension or conflict points inside your system, make sure to listen for remarks or comments that would signify that your team is struggling with the pressure.

Under pressure your adults will turn to children quickly and your conflict will lose its impact, take a page from John Wooden's book and correct these lapses quickly and with the language that focuses the conflict on the task. 

The second is that when taking your "tension" process on the road and into new environments make sure the room is safe first or your words may be misinterpreted and your firmness on the ball might be perceived to be an attack on a person. 

People who feel attacked seldom recover fully. 

Our formula for creating the right environment to add conflict his is SE = C = T = Success

• SE = Shared Experience 
• C = Window into another's Character which can be quite permanent and highly portable
• T = Trust which can be little or big based upon the significance of the shared experience

​Conflict and tension are in abundance currently, and much of it is below the line and relationally destructive, we hope our observations will allow you and your team to move the tension above the line and focus on the tasks that are most important to accomplish your stated goals within the frameworks of your teams principles.

Your team needs your leadership more now than ever as we all collectively navigate this pandemic period.

Thank you for your readership and friendship,

Drew & Sara

My father John Roy Sanders was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in June of 2020 and succumbed to the disease 7 months later. 

Along with so many changes that came with 2020 our family has been navigating the pending and alarmingly immediate loss of a happy and kind patriarch.

In keeping with our V2 theme I would like to share a few lessons learned from my father as we leap into 2021 with the hope of Covid free world but the experience to know that more storms lurk.

John Sanders (Oil man by day, builder and family man by night) 

• Riverdale High School, North Dakota
• Iowa State Class of 1959 Electrical Engineer
• Chevron Corporation 1959-1995 
• Married to Carolyn Smith Sanders 1959-2020

A Sanders - "Can Do Anything" 

• Work the problem, and trust the process 
• If the pandemic has shown us anything it is that we need to be able to use the constraints of having things taken away from us as a way to develop our abilities and skills.
• Being ready to adapt and not have all the pieces of a puzzle is a mindset and I received weekly training for this in the backyard as we tackled whatever project that was next.
• It wasn't arrogance that a Sanders could do anything, it was a commitment to stay with a problem and where a process was known to stay with that process and see it through.
• CURIOSITY and PERSISTENCE were hand in glove 
• We imagine that for most of you 2020 provided countless situations where you applied these skills and are preparing for 2021 to not be as smooth as everyone seems to think it will be. 

School is a means to an end 

• Skills vs Habits 
• When struggling with a class in school my father would repeat the phrase, "School is a means to an end"
• It was lost on me what that meant for a long time but I got the point, he cared about more than my grades and a work ethic with a good attitude were at the top of the list.
• What he knew was that in life it didn't matter if you had skills in all areas but that you had the habits to build upon the areas that you had strengths.
• What we have noticed as well is that desire and drive are sometimes developed out of struggles and mistakes and lower grades than one hopes.
• Sir Ken Robinson's book "The Element" with the accompanying Ted Talk (70 Million Views and Counting) really nails what my dad was driving at.
• Observe where a person loses track of time, build around that a series of constraints to develop your abilities and then get your hands bloody in the pursuit and practice of improvement. 

Show up to work days and enjoy the work

• Piedmont Community Church had a work day in 1978 and as an 8 year old I tagged along with my dad and we were given the task of weeding a hillside and trimming some ivy.
• We were new to town having moved from Alaska the year prior but yard work was nothing new for us.
• The people we worked alongside became friends for all of us and the shared experience of giving back to our community was unique.
• Fast forward to 2020 my son Ryan has been helping me in the yard for years and was looking to earn some gas money now that he was 16.
• I told him to make a flier and knock on 30 doors in the surrounding area offering to mow lawns and do general yard work and he would be just fine.
• How will this work? He asked. 
• "Because you have been working next to me for years and we know how to work and when you take that same level of energy to their yard, word will spread".
• 8 months later he has a nice business going and his confidence is soaring.
• 2021 is going to ask all of us to pitch in to help the community again and again and most of the tools we will bring will be either John Sanders tools or the tools John Sanders gave us. 

Looking forward we imagine that you are champing at the bit to get going in 2021, these first 105 days appear primed for great activity especially since the lock downs happened in Q1 last year. 

Our aim is to work our plans hard but to also have another Plan B and Plan C in the drawer for when the next curve ball comes our way and when it does we will be emulating John Roy Sanders often.
​

This is a series of articles from emails that we were sending out to clients and friends as the CV Crisis evolves. Hope it is helpful for others and also provides a historical context as we all reacted and learned about the seriousness of this virus.




​

June was another month of adapting and learning how to decipher the signal from the wall of noise that was building.

Now that we are past the midpoint of 2020 it seems natural to focus on where we should be by year's end, yet somehow it feels like we need to go further out.

My question for you to ponder is this:
​
Where do you want to be 1/1/2022? 

• Think through this from a personal, familial, and work point of view.
• Break the 18 months into 3 sections and then further break it into 45 day periods.
• This will give you 12 gates to go through between now and 1/1/2022.

In your planning consider thinking through what you can control and what you can not.
Do your best to not waste energy or time on things you can't control, like whether we will have college sports on TV.

You can't control if online school means you have children at home, but you shouldn't be surprised by it, allocate time to having a plan to help your kids thrive.

It is very easy to envision the Covid Crisis costing the world billions and 2 years of disruption.

What is also easy to envision is that the victors will say this period was where they honed their vision and adapted to become their best self and team.

You won't hear much about these people on the news, the media will focus on the victims.
As a leader of yourself and others, the choice is yours, Victim, or Victor.

Let me know if you need any help setting up a 18 month plan, the first checkpoint is August 15th.

Onward,
Drew

p.s. Way back in March we wrote about "Endurance" and as we start our journey to 1/1/2022 it appears Admiral Jim Stockdale's words are more helpful than ever: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cv-crisis-chronicle-march-29-implementing-principles-drew-sanders/

​One of the first things that can come to mind when making a plan is how long things are going to be this way. How long are you asking people to make sacrifices, how long until we get back to normal? How long is basically another way of asking WHEN?

Getting things wrong by predicting a quick turn around on the when and how fronts seems to undermine your leadership in your own mind. In addition, many leaders don’t want to be wrong with too dire a prediction. We get caught in thinking that our adult employees are like a young child, and that we can’t scare them with the real information. 

Right now, all leaders are caught in the WHEN trap and this is why we think you should punt on the timelines but still have a PLAN. A great way to do this is to get the team focused on the daily key actions that lead to the long-term benefits of endurance as a competitive advantage. 

If your wondering what we know about endurance, we have unknowingly been acquiring some personal knowledge for decades and had a crash course the last 10 years due to some unforeseen medical emergencies. 

Our professional golf backgrounds highly correlate with endurance. I also have completed open water swims in Lake Tahoe and the Maui Channel where the duration of the competition is such that endurance, as a quality for continuing for a long time, is paramount. 

Our crash course has been on the medical front where within an 18-month period Sara was diagnosed with a bi-cuspid aortic heart valve that would require open heart surgery and both of Sara’s parents would be diagnosed with incurable cancers. 

The prescription you get with a bicuspid valve when you are in your late 30’s is to be as healthy as you can but to wait for as long as you can because post-surgery you may be on blood thinners for the rest of your life and a second surgery may not be possible. 

Sara’s parents were immediately put into surgery and then aggressive chemotherapy. Random numbers on charts become the norm, Google searches not very comforting, and seldom found is a doctor who got a minor in empathy.  

What happens when so many family members are in need of care is that you start to shorten up the time frames by which you plan. You go from thinking where your life might be in ten years to realizing that every 90 days or less you are going to be making new plans. You also start to understand that the PLAN now gets an asterisk next to it. The asterisk is then explained at the bottom of the page and it reads: 

“Plans subject to change.”

Endurance, and the benefits of having a recipe for endurance (back to the definition at the top of the quality of continuing for a long time) started to become our constant companions. We also learned to be very aware of a mindset that can appear when the duration of a condition is considered to be unknown. That mindset is COPE. For the purposes of this nonscientific publication we are going to consider COPE to be something to avoid. 

“When you COPE you lose hope” is one of our taglines. 

This is not to paint coping as the enemy in all settings, in some rooms it is vital. However, for the purposes of this situation and the leadership challenge that is in front of us know, we are going to want to avoid allowing the team to get comfortable with COPING. 

We are prescribing the positive principles of Endurance with the aim that you will be able to use these to lead your team at time when you can’t give them an answer to when things will get back to normal. We will share a story from history of endurance and then offer some key lessons learned from that story. 

The stories can serve as inspiration to your team and then you will be equipped to share why your team will endure and then can use the questions we have provided to help the team navigate the upcoming week.  

Endurance and the Stockdale Paradox

James Stockdale was a POW for seven years in Vietnam with a significant amount of that time being in horrific and solitary confinement at the infamous Hanoi Hilton. In an interview he gave for Jim Collins bestselling book “Good to Great” he shared the dual mentality they formed to allow them to endure their situation and the indeterminate period that they were to be held captive.  
 
Here is a snippet from the book and the interview between Jim Collins and James Stockdale.
 
“I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
 
“Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
 
Stockdale then added:

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
 
Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.
 
What a great line. “Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”  What are the brutal facts of today as you see them?  Could we see the basic confidence in the public stock markets shrink to historic lows? Do you have a plan in place to function as a business with the market at those levels? Do you have a plan for a key sales manager or a front-line manager to be sick and not able to work from home?
 
It appears that this is a time for leaders to pull the team together and visit some emergency preparedness plans with more clarity and focus. Have a plan for things getting worse from here so that if that happens the team has practiced recently, and they will know that someone was thinking through this before and not just making it up as they go along.
 
It is also a time to avail the unwanted fears of your clients and share with them what you are doing to serve their needs and the processes you have in place to keep them properly allocated.
 
Your business will endure with certain habits and it is important to have your clients be mentally prepared to endure with you. It seems like if Admiral Stockdale was alive today, he would say:
 

•  Believe strongly that you will get through this.
•  See it as a defining period in your life.
•  Grow in the process of your adaption.
•  Communicate frequently with your team.
•  Don’t set dates for miracle returns to normal.
•  Focus on daily habits that build resolve and address your current reality.

 
These points of view give us courage and we hope that by passing this example of endurance on to you that you will be able to effectively lead your employees and advise your clients at this crucial time in our country’s history.
 
We view your work as being essential to our country’s well-being.

Thank you,

Drew​

Your Leader Playbook for the Week

Here is your leader playbook for the week:
​

• Meet on your regular cadence and address the challenges of “when” planning right now.
• Triage what is most important for this week.
• Help your team remove as much red tape on processes that you can.
• Ask your team to bring up the brutal reality that is present currently.
• Keep the communication lines open and get to work.

​Hello and welcome to a year that will have the Olympics in Tokyo and almost 150,000 hours of sports for you to watch on TV!

Many of those hours will include close-ups on the coaches as they react to the play of their teams. In some cases the narrative of the coach is now longer and more compelling than the endless line of players who make it on the court of field.

Who doesn't like a good Jon Gruden Smirk or Mike Krzyzewski squirm? It's similar to what we are doing as fans.

In this edition of SIWT we take a quick look at the challenge the coaches face each season on the topic of gaining player buy-in and the unique choices a coach has between using their power or influence.

Help Us Help Coaches - We Need Your FeedbackSara and I have supported coach development through a non-profit we formed 16 years ago, recently that non-profit was hired by a high school to work with over 100 coaches on building out a team why and an individual WHY for their season and helping tie the two apparently opposed agendas together. 

In preparation we are seeking answers from people to the following question: 

In high school, how should the academic and athletic classrooms be the same and how should they be different?

We are seeking as many answers to this question as we can so please give it some thought and respond with your perspective here. 

The Challenger

Back in February of this year we highlighted a book by Sam Walker by the name of The Captain Class that identified the captain as a key element to long term team success. 

While digging deeper on the topic for our clients we noticed that the correlation of Walker’s captains with Glenn Parker’s work on team player styles and the most volatile team player style, “the challenger.” 

Parker's work was mostly inside large corporations in the 70’s through early 90’s but his book Team Players and Teamwork is still relevant today. His research lays out four traits for how people will behave when working with others: Contributor, Communicator, Collaborator and Challenger. Everyone exhibits all four traits when interacting with others, however, it’s the order they prioritize them that impacts the group.  The group that prioritizes being a challenger is the smallest, and his perspective about how to work with and advise this group has been of prescient. 
 

Why you want Challengers on your team:
“Challengers push the team to talk openly about problems and things getting in their way of success.” 

How others can react to a Challenger:
“Ironically, many Challengers are accused of not being team players because they raise objections to team decisions.”
 
What a coach needs to share with their Challenger:
“The real mark of an effective Challenger is their knowing when to stop pushing.”

Sports teams can be great places for challengers, the rules and boundaries allow them to flourish as they can focus their drive to excel and not be distracted by some of the constant changes of life. In work or family settings the challenger can be a bit exhausting to those with contribution or collaboration as dominant traits.

Our key learning when combining Walker’s and Parker’s work is to empower the challengers to call the team higher while making sure they realize others will have different needs. If one of your highest performers is also a challenger consider having the team take the Parker Team Player survey so the rest of the members will have a better understanding of these traits. This can lead to mutual respect being maintained over the course of a season or year when tensions rise due to losses or setbacks in goal obtainment.

As a leader or coach, establishing a common language for your team in some key areas is a big part of defining who is “on” the team. How people naturally want to act when with others is something you can leverage to help the group become a team. We hope Walker’s and Parker’s efforts will allow you to effectively identify your team’s traits so you can manage and lead them to challenge each other to find their best collective self.

Interested in other posts on similar topics?  Check out our blog.

The Banyan Book

We are excited to announce coming in the first quarter of 2020 will be the Banyan Book, a compilation of our best practices, writings, and tools in a handbook for business owners and managers. As always, we welcome the chance to speak with you.

​Profits, Culture & Threats
​
Hello and welcome to the final 45 days of the 2019, we hope it has been a good year for you. The team at Banyan is thankful for the contributions we have been asked to make. Business owners and managers are constantly thinking about profits, culture and threats. This time of year can be one of reflection and projection in all these areas and we have a few thoughts for you in each category. 

Profits

Are your people used to being pushed to have goals? Do you tell them what they need to hit to achieve a mythical number that most think is made to line your pocketbooks and not theirs? Do they understand how and why the goals are put together? If you would like a fresh look at goals and how they can help motivate your team, consider this post:  

Culture

Can you outline how you build culture? Most cannot. It’s a gut thing for many and a “I know it when I see it” response for others. 

Andressen Horowitz’s founding partner Ben Horowitz has another book out that is a worthy read for any leader. What You Do is Who You Are addresses the issue of how to build a culture. His first book The Hard Thing About Hard Things laid out that there is no recipe to building a culture or a company.  His latest book takes on the root stock needed to make a culture soup and he does so with some historical reviews that will shock you. 

Our biggest takeaway is that sometimes you need rules that stand out so much they show off what actions will define your culture. Like fining NFL Football players for being two minutes early like Tom Coughlin did when he was shaping the culture of the New York Giants. The reason, the rule was all meetings started five minutes early…

This book reminded  us of Jack Clark’s talk a few years back about establishing values and then having questions that activate those values into actions that can be seen and felt by everyone on the team. They define who is not on the team as much as they show who is on the team. 

Threats
 
We have two essays on this topic for you. One is about how you are using innovation and the threats you will face if you don’t understand what type you are fighting against, the other is more subtle and is tied to an internal threat you may face from your own people.  If your people are always telling you what you want to hear and you don’t have an established way of getting in and out of hard conversations, then there is a really good chance they are also telling your customers what they want to hear.  This is most likely hurting the company. 

Essay #1: The Difference Between Early and Late Stage Innovation
Early stage innovation is what Keith Krach talks about with his concept of finding a beach head: Big enough to eat off of and small enough to defend. He should know, he has created four category-killers in his career and is now the Under Secretary of Economic Growth.  Here is his point on beach heads:
 
When you are seeking to be an early stage innovator you need adventurous capital that will be patient while you disrupt an industry.

Late stage innovation is what Mike Maddock likes to talk about when he holds up an IPhone and asks, what can you do with this device to further surprise and delight your customers?  
 
You need less capital and more curiosity here.

Most business owners are not in early stage innovation mode.  They are in long-stage business cycles and earning a good profit margin which they control. The key in a long stage business cycle is to gain control of the profit. As a business owner it is important that you understand the game you are playing.

Some examples of late stage innovation:
•    Professional Services
•    Law
•    Medicine
•    Financial Services
•    Insurance Services
•    Telecommunication Services
•    IT Services
•    Manufacturing
•    Software as a Service

Examples of early stage innovation
•    Docusign (the world didn’t have a way to securely sign for things digitally)
•    Apple's IPhone (the world didn’t have access to email, text, phone and camera that they couldn’t be without)
•    Facebook (the world didn’t have access to their friends experiences that they couldn’t be without)
•    UBER (the world didn’t have a way to share cars that were personally owned)
•    Amazon (the world didn’t have a way buy almost anything and have it show up in less than two days)

Mike Maddock asks us, how are you using the benefits of these early stage innovators to create a more pleasing and delightful experience for your customers? When you stay curious to the new while delivering the old, you may find that what you own and control improves in its financial fundamentals through customer satisfaction and new customers acquisition through the holy grail of “word of mouth.”

Essay #2: When is the right time to have a hard conversation?
Ask anyone in the C-suite and you will get something close to: Now is as good as time as any.

Ask anyone further down the org chart and you are more likely to eventually here: Never is fine with me.

This spectrum of answers reflects a common culture issue tied to power and influence and safety. Those with low power avoid conflict and those with power don’t understand why others are afraid of it.

We always have fun with owners who have lots of power at work and ask them how it feels at home with their spouse…it usually gets the point across.

The issue this difference creates is that the people solving the problems for customers, building products and services, and acquiring new customers are the ones that really need to have the tools to have hard conversations - and win those conversations - on behalf of the company.

Innovating Like a Virus

The fast fall finish is here, and after a quick inventory of the issues facing our clients right now we will outline a few and what we are doing to solve them. We think you will be able to relate and hope we have a solution or two that will help.  If you have an insight of your own please pass along your thoughts here.

Current Issues Business Owners Are Facing

The Issue:  We are innovating and have a few of the right customers, but getting more of the right customers can be slog. 
 
“They treat us like a virus until they take the time to really look at it and then we are the cure.”
 
We thought this quote from a sales rep really nailed it. Your offering is treated by the buyer like a virus until it’s the cure. The enterprise buyers really have a lot on the line when they are making a decision and the switching costs can be significant. They are right to be thorough, the stakes are high.

Consider a three point solution that is working now:
1. Write about the pain the customer could be experiencing now in a manner which fits their attention span when first learning about something new. Don’t drop War and Peace on them when all they want is the 411. They should able to get the gist of what you do in less than 30 seconds and then have the ability to review for up to three minutes with your writing or video content.

2. Give them an example of a current customer similar to them and how it is working. The Case Study example can be a challenge if your solution is not focused, but start with three typical customers and walk them through the experience. This should be no more than a three to five minute commitment for the buyer and it will help them relate to your other customers.

3.  Make the first dialogue option as short and sweet as possible while still having enough in it for you. Unless you are in charge of acquiring thousands of customers a year you really don’t need to be too concerned about tracking the first two data points in this example. You should be aware of the numbers but your first real leading indicator to track religiously are first time dialogues with a prospect. We suggest you use a 30 minute discovery call and really focus on the needs and outcomes desired by your buyer before you launch into your solutions. 

You should be updating your writing on points one and two at least twice a year, tracking your first time calls and asking the team why is this working or why isn’t this working on a regular cadence.

No Thanks, We Got This Taken Care of In-House

The Issue:  When your job is on the line, sometimes you would rather have an employee working for you than a contractor.  The doing it yourself vs outsourcing it tension is very real in today’s economy.
 
Employees are expensive, and yet the “at-will” contract creates the ability for the best to turn the table on the employer and leave on a whim. This often leaves only the average to poor employees who want to stick around to handle mission critical tasks.

If the boss has their bonus or job on the line, sometimes they deal with attrition issues and building the team internally because they feel like they are more in control.

These biases mean that if your company's offering is in any way reducing head count and outsourcing a service or skill, you had better be the A team. 

A SOLUTION
Part of getting someone to let go of control is to help them understand where their time could be better spent if they didn’t have to worry about the problem you solve for. You can accomplish this by asking them to list out the top 10 things they deal with at work on a weekly basis, and then ask them which one has the biggest impact on their P&L. 

Chances are they are spending time doing and overseeing a series of low value-add objectives. When you can take those off their plate and allow them to refocus on their high ROE objectives you are making a different case for your joint success.

For more on this topic click on the graphic or click here for a case study article from Distillery Tech.

Is It Time To Buy or Sell?

The Issue: Should we stay or should we go?
 
Business transactions are a big part of the reason we are hired. Sometimes it’s to guide the company to an exit and other times it’s to help them with an acquisition. 

In the age of disruption, the size of your balance sheet and a clear understanding of how long you can protect your margins can help you answer the question of whether you should be a buyer or a seller. An additional factor is the age and motivation of the ownership. 

Can’t get your customers’ attention?
CONSIDER SELLING
​
A big challenge for many companies is the attention span of their buyers: it’s really short and they struggle to keep it. Going back to our earlier example, the people who might do business with you think you are marketing a virus, while your customers know you have the cure.

The largest player in your space doesn’t have this problem, their brand gets them in the door. This can become a significant competitive advantage. If the amount of time that the buyer has is limited, it is, and they are already doing business with that company, which they probably are, then you might want to consider locking up a couple of key accounts and then taking it to that larger player and allowing them to monetize it for you. 

John Chambers started at Cisco in 1991 and led one of the strongest sales cultures in the world. Cisco then took its sizable balance sheet and has purchased over 200 companies to feed its sales force and their customer base. Here is a white paper from the company on their acquisition process.
 
Does your industry have an aging set of owners and no clear dominant players?
CONSIDER BUYING

If so and you are between 30 and 50 years of age, you might consider becoming an acquirer of these businesses. A great example of this is in the financial services industry. The wealth in the United States has typically been advised through either banks or brokerage firms. In the last 15 years the rise of the independent Registered Investment Advisory firm has fragmented the industry while it has continued to grow in line with the wealth of the country.  

High Net Worth individuals and medium sized nonprofits will attribute trust to an individual easily and this has allowed yesterday’s Morgan Stanley advisor to become today’s Registered Investment Advisory business owner.  With most companies offering similar services to their clients, and the clients’ reticence to discuss their wealth with multiple people, turnover remains low. The term “client for life” is often used in this industry. 

However, the advisor does end up retiring, lives do end, and the assets and their associated fees and revenues leave. Some advisors don’t plan for this and they wait until the last minute. Others plan ahead. If you are in the middle of your career it can be a great way to grow your customer base.

This is especially true if you are struggling to acquire new customers of your own. Your revenue per customer will be lower as you will be sharing that with the seller for a period of time, but if you establish trust with the customers and their dependents the life time value of the customer should make the cost to acquire that customer worth it.

The Lesson: when growth is slow, acquire older players and recruit young service professionals.
 


2019 has been an extremely active year for our clients and their businesses, if you need help solving for any of these issues or feel like you might benefit from an outside voice, we welcome the chance to speak with you.

Secret Sauce of Enterprise Sales

Summer has arrived and the first half of the year for your business was either great, good, or just OK. As the leader you know that revenue is a form of a lagging indicator, and so for many businesses the third quarter is a time where your leading indicator (first time sales calls with prospects) can drop off a cliff. While you still have the marketing and sales teams working on the top of the funnel this natural drop can afford you a time to revisit your sales habits and processes. 

We recently worked on this exact issue for a company, and below is a window into what we built for them. Feel free to share it with your company and tweak it as you see fit. There isn't much intellectual property in sales processes, however, dedicated practice on the right actions of listening and communicating appears to be a timeless pursuit for the best. 

Just like Steph Curry's pregame workout and his practice sessions, they are re-mark-able.

The very best pursue all types and forms of practice and they are re-lent-less in that pursuit.

If your company wants a customized practice plan or a practice partner, just let us know.

Our General Bias to Take Into Enterprise Sales CallsYou (our prospect) have been specifically selected:

• This isn't a shotgun talk-to-everyone exercise.
• We have spent years working on this innovation.
• It is our mission to serve people and company's like you. 
• We have done a lot of research about the typical needs of a company like yours, and are here to see how your individual needs may be similar or different to others.
• We have a series of questions to ask you at the beginning.

What is the outcome that your company really really cares about?

• What are the most important flags that everyone in your company has to salute?
• What are you telling the world you are all about?
• How are you getting to that point?
• What are the obstacles getting in your way to getting to that point?
• Is it possible that our solution can help you get far down the road of obtaining the outcome that your company has stated is most important?
• It's not enough to identify pain, you have to identify and solve for a really really big important pain and be able to measure it relative to other pains or they will not move in your direction in the time frames needed to be successful.
• Most deals die here and we are more than happy to identify a big problem for them, put a bow on it and leave them sitting by the side of the road with that problem because it helps us keep our margins up, especially when we are innovating.
• Our Worksheet is used here to clearly spell out the $$ benefits and that can also be socialized inside the customers C-Suite to validate the decision to align with us and stop aligning with the chemical companies.

If we can't kill this idea....then you should move forward with it....the key issue is how many and over what time period (WHEN)

• We make machines.
• Machines take time to build.
• We like to time it right for both of our benefits so.....LET's PUT ON OUR PLANNING HATS.
• When are we making them and when are you receiving them and when are you paying us for this?
• We also have a training and protocol timeline that we share with you that insures proper use of the equipment for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. 

The four legs under our platform are:

• The $$ it saves you over a 5 year period. (THE WORKSHEET SHOWS THIS IN DETAIL)
• The efficiency it gives you in XYZ 
• The leverage it gives you in the marketplace as a ABC
• The reduction in employee lawsuit exposure you gain by DEF 

The secret sauce behind the process

• We use the questions at the beginning to get them talking and to feel like they are special with a unique problem that we care a lot about and focused on (picture being sick and meeting the right doctor).
• We use the worksheet to formalize the amount of pain they are in and the amount of benefit we can deliver and to pivot to the WHEN conversation.
• We use the flank of making the machine to get them to talk to us about timelines and budgets so we can efficiently plan as two businesses in alignment towards their stated goal early in the call.
• We are now brothers in arms fighting a common foe together and not vendor/customer. We need alignment to carry the day to get through all the hassles of making, delivering and maintaining the equipment and hitting their goals. 

Why/What/When White Paper

The above outlined process is an adaptation of our WHY/HOW/WHEN white paper on customer acquisition which you can access by clicking on the document or find it and other white papers on our website CONTENT page.

Enjoy the summer!

Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams (SIWT)

The shorter duration of sports teams seasons allow for more efficient research and we also find they correlate well with companies, non-profits, and families.

Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams (SIWT) is leading to the creation of a management process for coaches and businesses to implement. 

SIWT is for coaches and owners who believe the best teams are made when both the individual's and the team's needs are met. This dual goal takes leadership and management to a higher level, it's not for the lazy coach or boss.

Our first edition focused on Vulnerability. This edition we turn our focus to Following.

Secret Ingredient: Following

If the leader is an intermediary to a vision, then a follower in a team context is someone who agrees with that vision, and subjects themselves to the needs of others in order to reach the agreed upon target. This sounds easy, yet a series of subtle forces are at work undermining group success. Individuals are efficient at calculating their own cost benefit analysis of their time, level of engagement, and compensation needs as they seek to optimize their return on effort. 

The act of following while still thinking is a critical component that turns a group of people into a team. Today’s group efforts demand a fully engaged collective body where every person is thinking while they are following. Gone are the days of being able to blindly follow, now at a moment’s notice any member of the team may be called upon to lead. If they don’t have the vision in their mind, the outcomes will suffer. 

Great Following Trait #1: Stay close and Observe

Google may have replaced mentors as the best source of knowledge in general, but on a team the subtle needs and tricks to great performance are still passed on human to human. The closer you can stay to your immediate leader, the more they will pass along in either word or deed.  First year cadets at West Point are taught to observe and adapt as they start the tightly manicured 4-year matriculation. There will be distractions everywhere at work, from coworkers, to trade shows, to all-hands meetings.  Navigate all these with discretion and observe how your boss behaves and mirror it.

Great Following Trait #2: Anticipate

Some of the best teams in the world come in pairs, and seldom is that pair splitting each task 50/50. They often deploy a divide and conquer strategy with each one owning a series of duties and relying on the other to deliver on their stack. As the team builds beyond a pair, a collaborate-to-innovate strategy can start to evolve. It is at this point that the ability to anticipate the needs of others plays a key role in how great followers enable successful teams.  At the root of anticipation is empathy.  Empathy requires setting aside your thoughts and seeing the world through the eyes of another. New members of work teams who seek to serve the needs of the group first will not stay at the bottom of the totem pole for long. 

Great Following Trait #3: Be Comfortable with Conflict

Universities may talk a tough game when it comes to deadlines, but ultimately the student is paying for the knowledge. In recent decades the school administrators have a consistent record of caving to student and parent demands. The workplace is a different story, the customer is a fickle and petulant king, and this can turn even the nicest boss into a frustrated time-constrained leader with very challenging demands.

“Stop what you’re doing and get this done today!  It has to get done now!”

What happened to:  “How are you, is everything OK in your world? When you get a minute could you step in my office to discuss our latest cool project that you will love?”

Anyone who has worked for even six months knows tension and conflict arrive via phone, email, and text at a moment’s notice. Having a series of communication tools to work with others during times of duress is a game changer. Being able to work with conflict when you are in a low power situation starts with being able to frame what you are hearing, and then nailing what you can offer to the solution. When people disagree on the solution it is key for the good follower to grab the similarities that exist amid the differences, and then look for a good moment to share your findings. Master this trait as a follower, and your leaders will take note and your responsibilities will increase.

A View into Our Future

Tomorrow’s leaders will be challenged to get a population of individuals to buy into the need to follow as we have defined it. Those that can sell the benefits of supplanting the self for the group and create outcomes that feed the entire team will find that word of mouth among the members will keep a steady stream of applicants at their door. Very few enterprises scale without more people, and people having a good time while winning is contagious. We all want to be on that team. The question being asked is are you willing to follow long enough to get there?

The New Employee

We would like to highlight a specific moment when the individual is new to a team or company.  One's ability to assimilate quickly appears to have a strong correlation with later success. 

Here is a quick guide for you or a friend to use when they are new:

Are You a Pirate or a Cowboy?

There was a romantic comedy that had a bit of a cult following in the early 90’s by the name of “The Princess Bride” with a mythical character that was known as the Dread Pirate Roberts.  He had a habit of telling his captives, “good night, sleep well for I will most likely kill you in the morning.”  It was all an act, but he later explained that establishing a healthy sense of fear in people was the easiest way to lead them.

Another movie that included people using a long journey to learn a little about themselves and leadership was "City Slickers" with Billy Crystal and Jack Palance. Palance is the sage cowboy who leads Crystal and his pals through a search for their one thing while managing a cattle drive. He used a group effort to help each individual find their role, and in the process the group became a team.

Which leads us back to our question: which one are you and which environment do you prefer? A pirate ship or a cattle drive? Both are journeys, both have codes, and both have success that they can point to as validation for their way of life. 

Yet the two environments have stark differences. The pirate ship is a cauldron for bullies and the chief bully is the captain. On a pirate ship you are waging war both internally and externally at all times. There is blood everywhere and the sea is full of losers who have walked the plank. 

The funny thing about our work environments is that many people will tolerate bully behavior at work from a high functioning a..hole. The crazy designer, the coder who treats people poorly, or the sales person who crushes quota and everyone that comes in her path. Worse yet is the CEO who uses the term “radical candor” as a smoke screen to berate and belittle people who aren’t “all-in” at the company.

The Hard Thing About Innovating

Geoffrey Moore is a best selling author of books that focus on disruptive innovations and technology. His best seller is "Crossing the Chasm" and it addresses the issue of going from the early adopter category of customers to the bigger section of buyers labeled “pragmatists.” Recently, he posted a short piece on LinkedIn about this still pressing issue for all innovative companies. I posted a question to his post and as fortune would have it, he responded with an answer. Our interaction and his post is compiled here in a PDF.   To read directly on LinkedIn click here.

The interchange gave us confidence that we are in alignment with a great thinker and adviser to the CEO’s of companies like Microsoft and Salesforce. It also allowed for some reflection on just how much the phrase “sales and marketing” is out of date. Professionals used to call the category of customer acquisition Sales and Marketing.  Sales was first and Marketing was next, second, or last depending on the company.  Sales and its people were the heroes.

​In the past ten years the script has flipped and we now live in a world of marketing and sales. In our world the word marketing really means Thought Leadership Marketing (TLM). TLM for some is crazy, because their marketing is all about sounds and movies and clicks and moving a human through a process like a sheep about to be sheered. Those processes matter mostly for very small dollar purchases.

Our clients provide goods and services to enterprise customers with multiple decision makers who all have different professional biases and disciplines that they own in their roles as CFO, General Counsel, or COO. These professionals don’t make decisions based on catchy headlines and short videos, they read and analyze data and facts. They want to see case studies and interviews with people like them who are faced with similar issues.

These C-level buyers respond to thought leadership, and it is through this medium that you can then earn an audience and begin your sales process. The two processes are different, but they fit nicely with each other when designed correctly. It starts with a thought leadership marketing story-line that your company produces and it moves to an enterprise sales process which focuses on alignment, belief, and urgency.

If you know of a company that is innovating and struggling with the chasm as Moore describes we have a Thought Leadership Customer Acquisition Program that is made for building the bridge that leads your products and services into the large pool of customers that are the pragmatists. 

Questions That Have Been Making an Impact

One of the benefits of being a consultant is that we are in a lot of different “team” rooms and, like the honey bee, pick up lots of different pollen/ideas from each team. We have noticed that the right question can really stimulate engagement, creativity, and accountability. Here are a few questions that stood out as being particularly effective.
​

• What are we telling ourselves that is true, that might not be true?
  
  • This helps you get to the bottom of some confirmation bias and helps you contingency plan.
• What came to you while you were away?
  
  • This helps people who are recreating (which is vital) reflect on their reflections and then helps you study how that reflection might be helpful to the unit.
• What could be true in one year?
  
  • This is a vision casting question that seeks to flush out doubt and also call a group of people higher.

We hope they help stimulate and foster dialogue that leads to positive actions.