Anything is Possible

I was in Washington last week when the NBA Finals concluded with Boston beating Los Angeles in six games. I didn't see it live, but ESPN showed me what happened. After the game, on the parquet floor in Boston, Kevin Garnett said how hype he was. He paused and then screamed an exhilarating, “Anything is Possible….!!!” The sinewy seven-footer held the last syllable as long as his breath would allow.

His celebration was the culmination of a 12 year journey in the league. He always played with the passion of a lion, which I enjoyed watching, but he had never been to the Finals before, better yet win it. He was at the pinnacle of his career.

When I got home form the innovation house tonight, I sat on the beach with my aunt, uncle and cousin. It was my aunt and uncle’s 31st anniversary. They headed off to dinner and Kyle and I battled in a game of Ladderball, a new beach game with a slight horseshoe spin to it. This matters because I ate a late dinner, finishing at 10ish. After washing my plates, I cozied into the recliner and flipped. I stopped at ESPN and the 9th inning of the College Baseball National Championship Game. It was Game 3 of the series, the deciding game, between Georgia and Fresno State.

I can get into baseball in person, when my peeps are playing, or when my buddy Josh Whetzel is doing the radio play by play (someone get this talent a MLB gig already). But on TV, I can't do it. I flip between pitches. I forget about it between innings and pitcher changes. But I had read about Fresno State making it to the Championship Series. They said it was like a 16 seed in March Madness making to the finals, so I was interested. I knew Fresno State had blown a lead in Game 1 to lose 7-6 and then roared back from a 5-0 deficit in Game 2 to win 19-10.
So it is the 9th inning of Game 3 and most of the drama had occurred. Fresno was up 6-1. One guy had driven in all 6 runs for the Bulldogs. Both teams are Bulldogs, but one guy did in fact drive all 6 in for Fresno State. The point is, Fresno State did it. They won.

The TV said they were the lowest seed ever to win a national championship in any sport. The underdog of underdogs won the NCAA baseball title. I watched the college kids pour onto the field in euphoria, jumping into a huge pile. I watched the favored Georgia team with stunned looks from the dugout. I also watched Erin Andrews interview some of the players. That distracted me for a moment, but then the mix of KG (Garnett) and the Bulldogs played in my brain.

Garnett was on the best team throughout the year. They had the best record. They were somewhat favored to win it all.

Fresno State started the season 8-12. Fresno State has the most losses of any baseball champion. They were the first No. 4 regional seed to reach the CWS since the tournament expanded in 1999 (I don’t really know what that means, but it is a first.) And what paints the picture the most is they would equate to a 16 seed in March Madness.

This is why sports can be so great. You don’t have to be the best, possess the most talent, or carry the ideal skill. If you have a team that bands together, your chemistry, momentum and passion can propel you to uncharted accomplishments.

Many times we try and Terrell Owens it. Meaning, we try and do it in our own. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a student, part of a work group, or part of an athletic group, this shows the power of team. Are you solo on the road? Find some teammates to maximize your strengths and leverage your weaknesses. Find some teammates to push you when the going gets tough. Find people to help you when your passion cell is spent and needs a recharge.

Lesson Three in my book says you are the one that will make it happen. This is true, but you can make it happen faster with a team. And the celebration will be that much sweeter.

Congrats to Fresno State. This will go down in the record books. Learn from their championship. Not this game, but the run up to get to this game. Awesome stuff. And in my final sports mix of the evening, as they said in the rerun of Hoosiers I watched last night, “Team!”

Atmosphere

Last night I spent five hours with a local branch of a national company. They had a husband and wife speaker team come in from Charleston, SC. They had people drive from over 2 ½ hours away to attend the meeting. And in all of the companies I’ve been with in my work career and now in the research of this book, none had the fire, energy, and passion that I felt last night. Standing ovations. People sharing and almost coming to tears. People afraid of public speaking overcoming their fears and getting up in front of 100 people. As I told my host when I left, “That is how business is supposed to be.”

There was an incredible feeling of teaching and growing others that radiated in all of the leader’s words and actions. The feeling of making a difference and making money. The feeling of growing your own and other peoples’ personalities. If every business could offer that same empowerment and connection to goals, our job satisfaction and economy would be booming.

The main speaker talked most of the night about how others helped him to get to where he was. And because of that, he would do whatever he could to pay that help forward. You can’t put a price on that type of motivation and leadership.

The big thing I took from last night was the incredible atmosphere that the group created. They did it by being interested in the development of others. It was an atmosphere of learning, sharing, and growing. It started at the top and funneled all the way down to someone who just walked in the door. As a leader said last night, if you let other peoples success be your success, great things will happen.

Trust

I just got back from book research interviews around the northeast. The companies I sat down with ranged in size from 16,000 to 50 employees and in scope from energy, manufacturing, to software development. Even with the different types of companies I learned from, there was a definitive common theme from my trip. They allow their people to make decisions. This makes them feel like part of something bigger than their job.

From what I’ve seen, you can look at employees in one of two ways:

1. Employees are lazy and don’t care about their company, their results, and their success. The only way to motivate them is to intimidate them. The only way to get them to produce is to regiment their day so it takes all the guess work out of it.

a. This style of management is prevalent in our country. And successful to a degree. With some ups and downs, people eventually do the work they are told to do. Yet, this management style is the reason so many people are zombies at work. They come in, do just enough to collect their paycheck, and go home. This style creates clock punchers.

2. The other way to look at employees is that they naturally want to be successful at what they do. That it feels good to perform, to contribute, and to make a difference.

a. Obviously, this is the methodology I subscribe to. And that is the style that company after company I’ve talked with for this book live by. And that is why their people perform above and beyond the job description. That is why these companies have grown to 250 or to 16,000 employees. Because motivated people produce creativity, quality, innovation, and most importantly, results.

Trust is the most important (and the hardest) thing executives and managers can give their people. I’ve seen small business owners’ companies hit the performance ceiling because they don’t trust their people. I’ve seen managers pull their hair out at the dismal performance of their team, but when I ask them what decisions their people are allowed to make on their own, the answer shadows their engagement level, zero.

Trusting people in any size business is difficult. If you’ve grown your business from 1 to 20 to 100 people, you have years and years of blood, sweat, and tears in the business. You don’t want someone else screwing up your baby. If you’re a manager, someone else’s mistake can make you look bad. But the best way to sustain your growth, profitability, or performance is to tap into the people you have on the road with you and let them do what they do best. Micromanaging leads to lack of motivation, which leads to lack of performance, which leads to bad things for all parties involved.

The goal for today is sit back and analyze yourself and your company. Do your people enjoy working for you? Do you trust your people to make decisions? Do they think you trust them to make decisions?

Goals

I attended a business after hours hosted by one of the counties in New York last night. It is always fun to mingle with business leaders and hear their opinions on things. The networking was good for all involved, but me being me, I analyzed particular conversations.

The focus of the night was trying to grow and bring business to this particular county. As some of you may know, the local economies of the upstate New York region have taken a beating over the past few years. Taxes have increased. Manufacturing has moved south or overseas. Young people have left for warmer climates, taking their education and brain power with them. Retirees have left the high property taxes. And the businesses that at one time made the northeast the most powerful part of the country have diminished. Growing up in Rochester, NY, I have seen the aftermath firsthand by the evolutions at Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, and numerous GM subsidiaries.

One of the attendees last night was a local state assemblyman. At one point I spent a better part of an hour in a discussion with him and a business owner I’m friends with. From my talk last night and over previous conversations with other business people in the state, there seems to be a common theme: New York is not business friendly.

Now, the point of this post is not to talk politics or slam my home state. The point is to share what happened when we asked the assemblyman what was being done to fix the problem. He carried on with a few points, but I asked him what I ask all of my clients, “What are the goals?” Even though this issue has been going on for years, he didn’t have any definitive answers or action plan.

And that is not his fault. Goals start at the top. In any organization, the goals come from above. If you don’t have company goals, you’re in trouble. If your managers don’t know the goals, don’t believe in the goals, or don’t know how to achieve the goals, you are in trouble. If your doers aren’t on board with the goals and if they don’t see how their job impacts the goals, sayonara.

When you are setting goals, some questions to ask are:

• Are the goals clearly defined?
• Do the goals make sense?
• Do managers understand the goals and know how to explain them to others?
• Have we informed every person on what the goals are and why they are important?
• Can employees of all levels and educational backgrounds understand the goals?
• Does each employee know how their job impacts the goals?

In any government, organization, business, or team, if you have common goals, it will be much easier to get on the road to success. Put everyone on the same page and watch your results move in the desired direction.

Jerry of Ben and Jerry's

I went to a talk at the University of Rochester last night where the speaker was Jerry Greenfield, one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. The subject of the talk was Social Responsibility, and that is interesting, but I really went because I wanted to hear how a company who always seemed pretty cool, or as cool as a company can be, came to be. Ben and Jerry’s evolution to huge success was always built on having fun and being innovative. They weren’t afraid to try new things and differentiate themselves. Start an ice cream shop in frigid Burlington, VT? Probably not what the MBA’s would say was wise. Chunks of flavors in ice cream? Never been done before. A stock offering to state residents? Nope, no one had done that either.

The success of Ben and Jerry’s can be attributed to a lot of things, but leadership, creativity and willingness to let others creativity flourish are the main reasons why Jerry stood before hundreds of students and a few locals talking about giving back as a company. He talked about being a values based business, he talked about spirituality, and he talked about making money while making things better. I can sum up the main theme of the night, if you give, you will get. That can be applied on a corporate level, on a team level, and on an individual level.

Note, I didn't go for the free ice cream after the talk, but the chocolate chip cookie dough brought me back to some late night chow sessions from my high school and college days.

I was about to close this post when I looked back over Jerry’s bio. Because of who I am, this stood out to me. “Jerry created the Ben & Jerry’s Joy Gang: a group of employees dedicated to bringing more joy into the workplace through fun activities.” Ben and Jerry’s has grown immensely, made a lot of people a lot of money, and done a lot of good for the world. Not a bad way for a company to be.

Talent doesn’t always trump heart

I am a big sports fan and as I watched the opening weekend of college football, a plain as day lesson on the importance of passion and determination played out in Ann Arbor, MI. The home and #5 ranked team in the country, the University of Michigan Wolverines, charged out onto the field in front of 110,000 frenzied fans dressed in maize and blue.

On the opposing sideline was Appalachian State, a team from Boone, NC. If you were to open up a sports magazine and look for the App State Mountaineers amongst the 119 college football teams, you wouldn’t find them. That is because they are in the lower Division 1-AA system.

The Wolverines paid the visitors $400,000 to suit up for what was supposed to be a home opening yawner. I won’t go into the play by play, but if I’m writing about it, things didn’t go exactly as planned.

7-0 Michigan. 14-7 Michigan. 28-14 App State. 32-31 Michigan. Final Score: 34-32 App State!

The team that had no chance, the team that was supposed to be a cupcake warm-up for the real season, came into a hostile environment and beat the #5 team in the country. The Michigan team boasted a running back and offensive lineman rated as top three in the nation and a quarterback who started all four years and would’ve been drafted by the NFL last year. Michigan’s higher paid coaches, highly recruited players, superior training facilities, and a home crowd did not matter to App State. They came in and proved that if you mix teamwork, brains, and passion, you can run with the big boys.

Note that no Division I-AA team had beaten a team ranked in The Associated Press poll from 1989-2006. That is why the headlines asked, “Biggest upset ever?”

I write about this story in a business blog because it shows the power of team. Michigan had the bigger named talent, but they were underprepared, complacent, and overlooked the little guys. Well, your company might just be the little guy.

Big or small, to get to where you want to go, it will take all of the things App State showcased last Saturday.

Perceptions

In just about any relationship we are a part of there tends to be a difference between our perceptions and reality. In the business world the discrepancy is even greater. Typically, management thinks theirs employees think and feel a certain way. But when you ask the employees how they are feeling, management’s eyebrows raise at the answers. “Really? I didn’t know they thought that!” My response is, “Of course they feel differently than you, did you ever ask them?” If management can avoid this disconnect, it will reap huge dividends.

An example of this disconnect comes from a company not currently known for their employee engagement, Sears. This story comes from the early 1990’s, but it paints a great picture of perceptions in the workplace.

In 1992 Sears had their worst year in history and wanted to know why. They undertook a huge task, surveying more than 70,000 employees. Here is the disconnect between what management wanted employees to think and what employees actually thought.

Two survey questions:

What do you think is the primary thing you get paid to do every day?
More than 50% responded - “Protect the assets of the company.”
Hoped for Answer – “I get paid to satisfy the customer.”

If you are Sears and you have more than half of your employees trying to make sure people aren’t stealing rather than making sure the customer shopping experience is a pleasant one, you are in trouble.

How much profit do you suppose Sears keeps on every dollar of revenue from the register?
Median response – 45 cents
Actual – 2 cents

If you are Sears and the majority of employees are thinking that they are making a relatively small wage but the company is raking in 45 cents for every dollar spent, the motivation level will not be there. “They are making all this money, why aren’t I seeing any of it?”

Sears knew they had issues and they did research to find out why. In response to the disconnect, they held employee town hall meetings across the country explaining the survey results and clearing up the stigmas. And it helped (for a while).

In your business, my guess is there are disconnects between perception and reality. The good news is you can do something about it. Ask your people what they are thinking and feeling (surveys are easily accessible). Then take action on what they say. You’ll be amazed at the results.