Soft Leadership

This past week I shook a lot of hands. I attended several planning meetings, went to an economic summit for my county and last Saturday I weighed and tagged dozens of lambs and hogs for my 4H Livestock Program. 

I had the opportunity to meet so many nice people. But then I got sick and couldn't hold a thing down for 12 hours. I don't regret meeting new people because folks from Southern Utah are the salt of the Earth in my opinion. Nevertheless, I feel obligated to report on my day's accomplishments.

It's rare when I actually get so sick that I'm stuck in bed, but I was able to spend my sick day becoming further enlightened by listening to TED Talks, one after the other all day long. If you're ever in a situation (like being ill) where you can't do much and you have Internet access, I highly reccomend listening to as many TED Talks as possible.

Here are a several that I enjoyed:

While I was listening to these talks, I still felt somewhat unproductive so I decided to crochet (yes I crochet, and I'm really freaking good at it too!) this cool beanie for my ski trip on Friday. It required 2688 stitches and took me about 6 hours.

This week a lot has come at me all at once. The looming question I always seem to have on my mind is, "What's the most important thing should I do next?"

Would you agree that this is not the most the most important decision of your day, but your career even?

I've learned that "What next?" used to be a question your boss or your clients would answer for you.

Today we have a multitude of opportunities, we also have so many constraints. Successfully deciding what to do next will be your moment of highest leverage. Would you agree that it deserves more time and attention than most people give it?

I really liked this thought by Seth Godin: If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

What am I going to do next? Well I'm going to do a lot of things, I'm starting my day organizing 2000 fourth graders so they can learn that their food comes from a farm, not a supermarket. I'm going to lead, serve and have fun doing it.

When making a decision about what to do next. Think about this:

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

-William Faulkner

If I understand it correctly, leadership is fundamentally about designing a way for people to contribute in making something remarkable happen. Therefore, it would be wise to study up on some ways to get work done effectively.

So you've got big plans for the future...Great, so do I! A year or so ago, while I was reading  Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, I realized that I wanted to have a career sharing leadership and business principles. I think it would be fun and I like learning. I recognized that this dream was a long way down the road, but I had better get started doing something now.

So I follwed Gary's advice on branding yourself and started this blog writing about the things that I am interested in. I enjoy it, it's fun, and I'm learning.

I'm sure someday I will look back on this and be embarrassed. However, I've learned that if you're not launching too soon, you're launching too late. Or better put, if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you've launched too late.

In this video, Derek Sivers teaches that "Version 0.1" is the thing you can do right now to get started because "Version 4.8" will come eventually after much trial, error, and refining. The important concept to realize is that you'll never begin if you're trying to start with "Version 2.0". Apple launched the first iPad even though deep in the basement of their R&D Dept. they had a prototype of the iPad 6. The point is, you'll never launch if you're waiting until the product is perfect.

The landscape of business is ever changing. 2011 is halfway over and already so much has gone down. I imagine most management professionals out there would agree that the first two quarters have felt like a roller coaster. 

It's been on my mind to revaluate my company's business plan amid all the changes as of late and create a new plan, budget, goals etc. 

But then I got to thinking about the last plan I wrote...it was a great plan but in the middle of following it the economy drastically changed! Some competitors dropped off, many old customers disappeared, we gained new ones and had to learn how to serve their needs, our vendors tightened lines of credit, some of them disappeared too. It felt like we were running a totally different organization.

I've come to realize that business planning and forecasting (especially over the long-run) is really just guessing. There are way too many variables outside of what you can actually control, like: market conditions, your competition, your customers, the wonderful economy and so on. Throughout my years in business school and in almost all the classical publications I've read, managers are advised to write "business plans." 

It sounds responsible, yes. But now I ask, "What’s the point?!"

Recently I read this article by Eric Markowitz,  where he writes about Araceli Camargo's notion that planning is actually bad for business. Here's an excerpt:

Some research supports this claim. In 2007, The Wall Street Journal reported that “budding entrepreneurs can spend months, sometimes years, polishing elaborate 50- to 100-page business plans that include financial projections, market research, and intricate details on day-to-day planning and organization…But skeptics say there's little concrete evidence that extensive planning is highly correlated to success." Two years later, in 2009, The Journal clarified further, noting that "researchers found no evidence (emphasis added) that either the content or presentation of the plan influences venture capital-funding decisions."

Now I'm a HUGE planner. I'm constantly making plans in my life's personal pursuits -  planning events, projects, and things you have control over is a great way to be a productive individual. But the problem I see with planning in the business world is this:

Writing a business plan makes you feel in control of things you really can’t control.

I've come to realize that business is all about improvising. You have to be able to take on an opportunity when it presents itself. I've also learned that you have the most information about a situation when you’re right in the thick of it. Planning before you’ve actually done it doesn’t make any sense; before is the worst time to make an important decision. This is often the reason why you feel incredibly overwhelmed after a long planning meeting. 

I'm always thinking about the future and how I should solve problems that I see on the horizon. But I no longer feel like I need to write it down and obsess over it. I use to stress about keeping to business plans, financial projections, and stratagem…but it was a waste of energy because these are all just guesses! When you start to think about it like that, it's really not so serious.

I've decided I'm going to quit guessing. I'm just going to decide what I'll do this week and stop worrying about the rest of 2011. I'll start with the most important thing I can think of and move on from there. This sounds much better than following a plan blindly that has no correlation with reality.

Developing a culture of safety awareness that is focused on decreasing workplace injuries will reduce medical costs and worker compensation claims. Other side affects include: evading legal responsibility for negligence, increasing morale and productivity, as well as curtailing truancies. Sounds completely positive to me! Any HR professional would agree that a serious focus on safety is the right direction to head. So why aren’t most companies in a hurry to develop such a culture? Well, because it’s hard and you won’t see things change immediately.

Training employees to be safety conscious does not happen overnight, or even in a quarter. It’s a process that is built over the long term (start thinking in terms of ‘years’). It requires helping employees to keep safety on their minds at all times—which in turn requires continuous reinforcement and recognition of basic human psychology.

Safety has to be put into practice and not just talked about. The most effective way to communicate the significance of safety from management to employees is by swiftly responding once a safety issue arises. By doing nothing, or by being slow to respond, sends the message that “this whole safety initiative is not really as big of a deal as management says it is.”

Organizations learn very well from significant accidents. Of course when something significantly wrong happens, a task force is assigned and they get all over it. The mess gets cleaned up and everyone goes back to doing their normal jobs. But what about when the mishap is something small? Maybe something that could be swept under the rug and hidden? Well, organizations aren’t so good at learning from those mistakes, much less acknowledging them.

If the objective is to create a culture of safety awareness, then even the smallest accidents need to be addressed formally. Managers should be asking employees: How could this have been prevented? How should we handle this differently so it does not happen again?

A great way to increase safety and awareness of it is by collecting data (we’ve all seen the sign: “Insert number here” Days Without an Accident). In order to create a safe workplace there needs to be rewards for reporting. If there’s an incentive to report, you’re going to get a lot of input. This will make things seem like they’re getting worse, but they’re not…you’re just starting to learn about it. The positive side of providing rewards for reporting is that employees start to become engaged in the culture of safety awareness.

The essential idea in cultivating a culture of safety awareness in the workplace involves consistency and dedication to true change. If management really cares about safety, then when someone reports a problem, they pay attention, offer feedback and publicize it throughout the workplace.

Firing on all cylinders all of the time is not healthy. Giving 110% is not sustainable, even during times of rapid growth - which is also not sustainable. Maximum capacity is not a good thing for your psyche, just like 0% unemployment would not be a good thing for our economy. In my opinion, sometimes it's quite alright to be completely unproductive (of course one needs to earn that right first).