Today’s guest post is from Bob Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Corporation and author of What’s Holding You Back: 10 Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders (CLICK HERE to buy your copy). You can read more about Bob at the end of this post.

We read a lot last month about the shameful leadership of Francesco Schettino, the Costa Concordia cruise ship captain who steered his vessel into risky, uncharted waters and then abandoned ship when it ran aground. The saga continued to play out last week when a group of survivors filed a hefty lawsuit claiming gross negligence and fraud. The defendants “acted in a severely reckless and willful, wanton manner, with complete disregard for the safety, lives and well-being of the plaintiffs,” said Marc Bern, a lawyer representing the passengers.

I’ve spent all of my life working in industry, first at Procter & Gamble, then as COO at Microsoft, and for the last ten years as a consultant. Along the way, I’ve met hundreds of high-level business leaders and I’m here to tell you, this captain’s behavior mirrors failures I’ve witnessed on a first-hand basis far too often over the course of my career.

Let’s take a look at three major leadership gaffs on the part of the ship’s captain and a few corporate examples that I find equally embarrassing:

Making a Risky Move with Inadequate Knowledge of or Protection Against the Risks: The captain admits there were no charts showing the reefs but he went ahead anyway. In fact, it seems he was on an ego trip, intentionally deviating from the standard route to “showboat.” Not too long ago we learned that the leader of MF Global may have been on his own ego trip, trying to achieve fame via a financial home run: he put his entire company at risk buying euro bonds with no protection on the downside to avoid a big loss. Strong leaders at times take risks, but only after understanding all facts and opinions, and putting appropriate safety nets in place.

When the Ship is Sinking, Failing to Quickly Develop and Implement a Plan to Deal with It: The captain was nowhere to be found when the ship hit the reef. Apparently the crew followed the behavior of the captain, since reports indicate the passengers were loading the lifeboats themselves. For the past three years the leadership at RIM, who markets the Blackberry, has been missing in action (sinking) as the iPhone and Android phones emerged with easy to use touchscreens and lots of apps that turn the smartphone into a powerful personal information center. The good news is that before the company actually sunk, the RIM board finally recognized the problem and recently inserted a new CEO. At all times, good leaders make sure the troops know the game plan and stand on the front line to make sure that plan is implemented. Yes, even when the ship is sinking.

Accepting No Responsibility for the Welfare of the Folks Who He or She is Supposed to Lead: The captain simply sailed off in a life raft and left the ship and passengers. From 1975 up until its recent bankruptcy, General Motors saw its U.S. market share go from 50% to 18%. Throughout this period, the leaders of GM demonstrated very little sense of responsibility to the shareholders. They did virtually nothing as the business press constantly pointed out the manufacturing cost disadvantage versus Japanese competition, the boring and look-alike styling of GM models, and the weak marketing. They now seem to be bouncing back, but could their financial fiasco have been avoided with better leadership? Strong leaders thrive on challenges, responsibility and getting things accomplished. They also realize that as the person at the top, they have a responsibility for those whose livelihoods depend on their insight, judgement, know-how and sticktoitiveness.

In looking at these example, we do find a common thread. Like the cruise ship captain, these corporate leaders each lacked gutsy, courageous leadership. At its core, gutsy leadership is about repeatedly doing the following: facing reality, meticulously assembling the facts, developing a plan and communicating and implementing it, and modifying the plan on the fly as new information is available.

Most importantly, gutsy leadership is about making the people you serve your top priority, even if it means putting your own self and – at times – your well-being in jeopardy.

- Bob Herbold is the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Corporation and the author of the recently released book What’s Holding You Back: 10 Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders. More on the book and Bob’s blog on leadership can be found at www.bobherbold.com.

The following is an excerpt from One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (you can get your copy here).  This post focuses on the difference between management and leadership.  I would love to hear your thoughts on how the two are different so please share your ideas in the comments at the end of the post.

You are a leader. Management and leadership are not the same thing. The difference is simple: you manage things; you lead people. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper coined this elegant, clear distinction. Yet there is still a lot of confusion on this point.

Management is task-focused. It is short term. It is a series of checklists and to do’s that ensure the work gets done. It is taking actions to hit a budget number or deliver a project on time. Management is how we execute tasks to achieve a specific desired outcome. Said simply, it is the movement of personnel, materiel, and tasks with an exact set of measurable results in mind.

Managing things consumes a large portion of our time. It requires forms, reports, meetings, analyses, and documentation. If left unchecked, such tasks will consume every available moment in the day. Sometimes it seems all we do is work on tasks related to managing the organization. When that happens we can easily mistake management for leadership. The logic underpinning that confusion goes like this:

Fact 1: We are leaders.

Fact 2: Leadership is the most important thing we do.

Fact 3: Because we are leaders we only spend our time on the most important things.

Fact 4: All our time is spent working on meetings, reports, forms, and analyses.

Conclusion: Meetings, reports, forms, and analyses must be leadership because if they are not, we are not spending our time on the most important things.

The flaws in that logic are obvious when those points are presented starkly in black and white. During the workday, however, it is difficult to differentiate between management and leadership because the world is moving at such a dizzying pace. If those things are not leadership, what is?

Leadership is people-focused. It is the words spoken and actions performed that inspire something deep within another person which leads that person to act independently to advance the interests of the team. Leadership is inspiring and influencing people to act in ways they ordinarily would not.

Inspiration is the key. Great leaders have a keen ability to inspire others to tap into their own pools of energy in a way that unleashes their innate potential. For someone to be properly inspired, the leader must help that individual see how special they are to those around them.

Leadership is demonstrating that you put others before yourself and that your primary interest is their best interest. Leading entails articulating a vision of something larger than the individuals involved, helping those involved understand their role in achieving it and inspiring them to take on seemingly insurmountable challenges because they believe in your vision to the core of their being. Leadership and management work hand in hand but truly are fundamentally different concepts.

- If you’re serious about doing less managing and more leading, grab yourself a copy of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. There are plenty of suggestions in there for how you can make leadership a much larger part of your job than management. CLICK HERE to get your copy.

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Today’s post is by John Spence – author of

As global markets become increasingly more competitive and financial turmoil worldwide continues to put pressure on nearly every type of business, I have had more and more organizations approach me to assist them in finding ways to be more competitive and successful in today’s economy. Although there is absolutely no “one size fits all” solution, to me the absolute most powerful strategy is to make sure that the core elements of your business are running so incredibly well that your customers absolutely love doing business with you and are eager to tell their friends, family and colleagues about your products and services. All the marketing tricks, ads and social media efforts in the world simply cannot overcome poor quality or lackluster customer service.

That is why for the past 19 years my career has focused exclusively on studying the fundamental elements of business success. Traveling worldwide at upwards of 200 days a year, I have worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the best (and worst) business leaders of our generation. I’ve also maintained a strict regimen of reading a minimum of 100 business books a year since 1989.

In preparation for writing my book Awesomely Simple, I compiled all of my research and reading down to a single page that I called my “Strategy Map.” This single piece of paper represented more than 175,000 pages of reading on business excellence and an additional 5,000 pages of interview notes and survey results from my work as a consultant and trainer. I then took all of that information and tried to uncover the pattern… the formula for business success. Well, here is what I came up with:

 (T+C+ECF) x DE = Business Success

Let me take you step-by-step through the elements of this equation.

Talent

You need the brightest, most talented, values-based people you can possibly get on your team. Here is the truth: “The success of your organization is directly proportional to the quality of the talent you can attract and keep in your organization.” I recently had the great honor of having lunch with one of America’s wealthiest and most successful entrepreneurs, a man who started with nothing and built it into a multi-billion-dollar company. When I asked him what the single most important piece of business advice he could give me was, he smiled and said, “It’s all about people, people, people. You can kid yourself about a lot of things in your business, but at the end of the day it’s always going to come down to the quality of your people.” A blinding flash of the obvious perhaps, but too few companies take this sage advice to heart and make the acquisition, growth and care of absolutely superior talent a true strategic objective.

Culture

Many people used to feel that “culture” was sort of a touchy-feely issue, a “nice-to-have” but not a strategic issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the success of your business is truly tied to the quality of the talent you can attract your team… culture is key because highly talented people want to work with other great people, doing cool and meaningful work at a company that treats them with respect. Trust me; you cannot have a winning company without a winning culture. So, what are the elements of a winning culture? Here are what I believe are the top three (of a fairly long list):

Safety: People want a safe working environment where their ideas and values are safe and where they feel that their career is safe as long as they deliver the required results.

Belongingness:  Everyone wants to feel like they are part of something bigger then themselves, part of a team, a family, a tribe… where people truly care about them and are glad they are in the group.

Appreciation: I cannot possibly overstate how important it is to show people that you genuinely appreciate them and the work they do. A major key to success is creating a culture where you focus on catching people doing something right and thank them honestly for it.

These are three of the strongest human needs and flooding your organization with these elements will have a profound impact on employee satisfaction and productivity.

Extreme Customer Focus

Let’s face it, about the only sustainable competitive differentiators left to most businesses today are the quality of your people and the quality of your customer service. Competitors can copy your products, they can beat your price (there’s always someone willing to go out of business faster than you), they can copy your distribution channels, they can reverse engineer your technology, they can put a location directly across the street… they can copy just about everything but who you have on your team and how your team treats the customer. Therefore, building a culture of extreme customer focus, where your organization “owns the voice of the customer,” is one of the surest ways to control the marketplace.

Disciplined Execution

Lastly, you combine the first three elements: Talent + Culture + Extreme Customer Focus… and then you work like crazy to get your entire team to execute with discipline. For the past seven years I have taught a class on strategic thinking at the Wharton school of business at the University of Pennsylvania. Each year I have about 140 senior executives attend my class, and every year I asked the same question: “What percentage of companies that know how to succeed in the marketplace, that have a great strategic plan… effectively execute their plan?”

Year after year the answer is the same: 10 to 15%. It does you no good whatsoever to hire great people, create an amazing culture, and do a superior job of listening to your customers – if you cannot instill a high level of disciplined execution so that your great ideas are turned into effective action. Therefore it is critical to create the systems and processes necessary to ensure that people clearly understand what their roles and responsibilities are, and specifically what they will be held accountable for.

Because (and I LOVE this quote) Ambiguity Breeds Mediocrity, the final step in creating a culture of disciplined execution is to broadly communicate progress on all essential goals and objectives so that everyone in the organization knows exactly how things are moving forward and what they can do to keep everything on track.

So there you have it, 19 years and nearly 200,000 pages of business information boiled down to a clear formula for business excellence. I know that this formula does not cover everything needed to build a highly successful company, but it is my firm belief that if you take this equation and follow it with vigor and commitment, you will definitely see a strong positive impact on your business.

John Spence is the author of Awesomely Simple – Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action. He is an award-wining professional speaker and corporate trainer, and has twice been recognized as one of the Top 100 Business Thought Leaders in America.

There. I said it.

Why is it that so many entrepreneurs believe the tech is the be-all, end-all?  Where did the notion come from that if you have nothing more than a killer application, website, algorithm, or any other combo of 01001010101110110 that you can build a multibillion dollar company? (I probably just dropped an f-bomb with that combo of digits).

Wrong.

It’s about executing, people (note the comma in this sentence is *very* important).

Sure, you need good tech.  It must solve a problem.  But once it’s built, you have to execute.  That’s a whole different skill set than writing code and drawing wiring diagrams.  Think about how many awesome technologies went the way of the dodo because the company simply failed to execute.  Lots of them.

So how can you get better at execution?  Here are a few thoughts:

Define a strategy

Know your market.  Know the problem you’re solving.  Know what differentiates you from competitors.  And stay focused.  Many entrepreneurial ventures and small businesses implode due to lack of focus and meandering strategy.  Strategy is about saying “no.”  Define your approach to the market and stick to it until the market tells you you’re fundamentally wrong and need to change.

GIVE UP EQUITY AND BUILD A TEAM!

I’ve seen the “I need to own it all” dynamic cripple many a business.  News flash oh budding captain of industry: yes – you own 100% but it’s 100% of ZILCH!  If you can’t pay cash, share the equity.  Bring on talented people earlier rather than later and have them help you build the business – fast!  The best defense against competitors is scale and market penetration.  That requires speed.  Speed requires bandwidth.  Bandwidth requires people.  People require compensation.  This isn’t hard to wrap your head around.  Do it.  You’re in bootstrapping mode!

Sell. Sell. Sell.

Don’t give me this “if we just get 0.05% of the quadrillion dollar market we’ll be billionaires” crap.  Sure, that works at a high level.  But from the bottom up, you have to sell EVERY customer.  That means build a pipeline relentlessly and push it forward every day.  You will not convert every lead.  That means you need a ton of leads to turn them into revenue.  Always look to advance the sale and drive toward contracts at every turn.  As Giovanni Ribisi says in Boiler Room “ABC – Always be closing.”  If you pull the “x% of a huge market” thing, you’re demonstrating one of the five reasons your idea pitch sucks.

Focus

Personally, I suck at this.  I take on too much and spread myself too thin.  That has implications for my businesses – I can’t build them as quickly as I would like.  At the time I’m writing this I’m the Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS, author of One Piece of Paper, CEO of TiXIT, Principal at weBuild, founder of FreakJet, and founder of SimpleMile.  Yeah. FOCUS!  I know all of those would be much further along if I focused my efforts better.  The same holds true for any business you run.  Even within a single business, ruthless focus is critical.

Quit being a control freak

If you bring people on to do a job, LET THEM DO THEIR JOB!  Yes, you started the company.  No, that doesn’t mean you have to do every task.  Give people freedom to operate.  Get some leverage.  Use them as a force multiplier.  If you’re paying them to do work, let them do work.  They *want* to do work.  Stop being a micromanaging control freak.

Again, once the tech is built, you’ve got to sell it.  You need to build a team.  You need to hire operators and sales people.  You need to get out of their way and let them do their jobs.  If you want to have a shot at building the next great company (either tech-related or not) you would do well to heed these principles.  Yes – I need to do a better job of heeding them as well.  We all do.

- If you enjoyed this post, I encourage you to subscribe to the blog so you never miss an article like this one.  We write 1-2 times per week.  You can afford to take 10 minutes a week on your own development, right?

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

The people in my professional network are awesome. Occasionally one of them is gracious enough to let me grill them on the subject of leadership. John Petrucci is one of those guys. He’s one of the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet and that’s part of what makes him an exemplary leader. You can read all about his accomplishments at the end of the post. Here’s my conversation with John about leadership. All of us can learn a thing or five from him!

Mike Figliuolo: What’s the most rewarding part of leading people?

John Petrucci: The most rewarding part is derived from supporting them. Supporting associates gives them the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. To know folks you support have grown to be better, more productive associates, citizens and human beings is tremendously satisfying to a leader.

When someone asks me what my greatest professional accomplishment has been, I always respond with the name of an agent I supported while an agency manager at Allstate. I was able to help her see what she could become, and then was privileged to watch her become that person. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Mike: What’s the biggest mistake you see leaders make and how can they avoid it or recover from it?

John: I truly believe in servant leadership. The organizational chart we have for our department has me at the bottom. We as leaders can’t talk about servant leadership and then put the leader at the top of the chart. That’s counter to what we’re ‘saying.’ We have to walk the talk, if you will. Along that line, a focus on ‘me’ as the leader is the biggest mistake a ‘leader’ can make.

Too many managers who think they are leaders seem almost exclusively focused on themselves. “I’m the manager, so de facto I’m the leader. Now that I have your attention, here’s what you’ll do for me.” That’s not what leadership is – that’s merely controlling the bully-pulpit (and we know why that pulpit got its name!). Leadership is a direct function of followership. People want to follow leaders who bring them into the fold; who use the “we” word versus the “I” word; who share visions and not dictates.

People have to work for managers – it’s the nature of the beast. People have a choice on whether or not they will follow a “leader.” If you support folks the right way, they will choose to follow you. That’s what servant leadership is all about. If you keep that in mind from day one, you won’t make the “me” mistake!

Mike: If you could go back in time, what piece of leadership advice that you know now would you give to yourself when you had your first leadership role?

John: That it’s not about the mind, it’s about the heart. I assumed, in my first professional leadership role, that everyone would want to follow what I did. So, all I had to do was to ‘show’ them what to emulate, and they would do so. Boy was I wrong! Until I figured out you had to win their hearts – to get them to want to do what you know they needed to do to be successful – they wouldn’t flourish. That has been the key to whatever success I’ve had as a leader.

Mike: What are the top three skills you think a leader needs to have and what’s the best way to build them?

John: The top three skills a leader needs to be successful are interpersonal skills, communication skills and negotiation skills. If a leader can’t ‘sense’ what the issues are among the folks they support, they won’t know how to fully support them.

Getting out as much as possible (MBWA) with the folks they support allows a leader to see and hear how things are progressing on the front line. There’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation with someone to get a ‘feel’ on where they are in life. Getting to know the folks you support for who they are – mother, father, wife, husband, animal lover, sports fanatic, etc. – is how you win their hearts.

People buy based on emotions, and justify the buying decision based on logic. Managers ‘direct’ folks to take action, while leaders ‘move’ their followers to want to act. If a leader can’t effectively communicate their vision to the folks they support, they won’t be a leader for long. As I mentioned earlier in our interview, leadership is a direct function of followership. You can have the greatest ideas in the world on how to support individuals and units, ground-breaking ideas on where to take your team and revolutionary ideas on what your organization can become, but if you can’t effectively communicate those visions, no one will follow you. Of course, you have to be able to effectively communicate that same vision to others outside your immediate sphere of influence as well.

Negotiation skills allow a leader to effectively secure and distribute resources. Every organization has limited resources. A leader knows which resources their followers need – and works to secure them. In addition, a leader knows what results they need from their followers, and is able to negotiate with them to secure their help. A leader with poor negotiation skills isn’t long for this world.

Mike: What’s your view on what makes for effective leadership training and development?

John: Follow-up. I think we’ve all been to any number of training programs that got us fired up while we were participating. We may have even been on a ‘program-high’ for a few weeks after the program, weakly attempting to change, before settling-in to our old routines. Having someone follow-up with you on your commitment to making changes is what allows changes to take root and grow.

Mike: How important is it to have a leadership philosophy and how can a leader best put that philosophy into practice?

John: From my perspective, you can’t be a leader without a philosophy. Leaders have to have a foundation from which to work from, and their philosophy is that foundation. You wrote a great book, Mike, that synthesized your leadership principles onto one piece of paper. Good for you. Most folks like simplicity. If you don’t believe that, then you missed the ‘Apple’ revolution. Simple is in.

My leadership philosophy is even shorter – it’s basically two words – consistency and accountability. If I tell you I’ll get something done, you can rest assured it will get done. If you say you’ll get something done, then it should get done as well. Accountability should be across the enterprise. I have a certain job to do. If someone I support doesn’t think I’m fulfilling my role, they have every right to hold me accountable. If I don’t think they’re holding up their end of the bargain, I have a right to challenge them as well. It isn’t about stripes on the shoulder; it’s about getting things done for your stakeholders. Keep your word – every time – and you won’t have a problem as a leader.

- John Petrucci is a 26-year veteran of the insurance industry. He has experience in claims as an adjuster and manager; in sales as an agent and agency manager; and administration as a branch manager and vice president of sales. In addition, John has worked for both a captive agency company and an independent agency company. His blended experience gives him a unique perspective on the insurance industry. John has a total of ten professional designations, showing his commitment to the insurance industry and his own professional development.

You do everything you can to put your best foot forward.  You get your suit pressed.  You make your hair look nice.  You remove spelling errors from your resume (you *do* do that, don’t you?), and you pop some Altoids before interviewing.

You meet with a dozen or so great people who act like they’d love to have you as their colleague.  At the end of the process, you’re super duper excited to get that offer for the new role.

Then the call comes.

Rejected.

Then they tell you the “reasons” you didn’t get the role but you can’t help but question them…

“Oh we thought you were great but we’ve changed the role requirements.”

“You were a perfect fit and we had a hard choice between two great candidates”

“You’re overqualified for the role and we didn’t want you to be bored.”

“Your urinalysis came back positive for weed and PCP.” (okay… so this one is kinda legit)

Wanna know the real reasons you didn’t get the role?  Here they are.

You rubbed someone the wrong way. Your personality clashed with one of your interviewers and they black balled you.  It happens.  Nothing you can do about your personality.  And candidly, if you clashed with a couple of people, I can guarantee you wouldn’t have been happy working there.

You said something stupid.  You may not have done your homework on the company or its industry.  You may have inadvertently insulted someone culturally, racially, religiously, or some other way.  Feet go in mouths.  It happens.  Replay all the conversations and facial expressions in your head.  Remember any furrowed brows?  Did any conversations go from warm to icy and clipped in the blink of an eye?  Yeah.  That.

You have unreasonable expectations. You asked for too much money, too much vacation, or too much accommodation of personal needs (do you *really* need a refrigerator fully stocked with Evian at all times?).  If you come across as high maintenance or overly-entitled in the interview, they don’t want to deal with your diva-dom on a daily basis.  Adjust your expectations.  Make no requests or demands until they’ve fallen in love with you and are falling all over themselves to hire you.

Another candidate kicked your butt.  You were good.  The other candidate was a 55 gallon drum of Awesomesauce.  Not much you can do about this.  There are some very talented people out there.  You’re going to lose sometimes.  More often than not, you’ll hear “it was a tough choice.”  Sometimes it was.  Sometimes it wasn’t.  If you have good relationships at the company, gently find out who got the role and try to understand what they have that you don’t.  That’s your development plan for the coming year.  Just don’t get all creeper on them and stalk the person to learn about them.  That’s disturbing.

There was never really a job.  Yes, some employers are sick enough to interview candidates without really having an opening.  I know – it’s messed up.  They’re trying to fill their talent pipeline for when they actually do have openings.  There’s nothing you can do about this one after the fact.  To avoid this situation, ask who the hiring manager is, ask to meet coworkers, etc.  You can get a sense of “phantom jobs” that way.

They were only interviewing you as a courtesy/formality.  If some big shot called in a favor to get you the interview, the company feels obligated to at least speak to you but they feel *no* obligation to hire you.  Sure they waste time doing it but they avoid the risk of pissing off a board member, customer, or senior executive.

The job was already taken but they had to interview other candidates.  Sometimes hiring managers write a requisition such that their pet person is the only person who could ever fit the role.  By default they’ve given the role to that person but HR and Talent Acquisition departments are pretty adamant about all requisitions going through the proper process.  You’ve just got to accept that sometimes the deck is stacked against you.

There you go.  Those are some of the real reasons you didn’t land that job.  Some are self-inflicted.  Some are structural.  Some you can do something about.  Some you simply have to accept that the world isn’t always fair.  Take this as a public service announcement for naivete prevention.

The best advice I can offer given the above is research the company and role rigorously, be low maintenance, put your best foot forward, and move on with life when you don’t land the job.  Usually it’s for the best if you didn’t because the next role that pops up might be the dream job you’ve always wished for.

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Yongho Shin is a peak performance advisor and former member of the official TEDx Team of TED Conferences who has attracted audiences of over 35,000 people in seminars and over 225,000 through online events and programs.  He regularly interviews the world’s top experts on peak performance and living your best life.  You can learn more about Yongho and listen to other interviews he’s conducted on his website.

Also, please leave your thoughts in the comments below if you’d like more of these audio and video posts.  Happy to post more things like this as they come about but I want to make sure it’s something you readers want.  Let me know what you think.

So for your listening enjoyment, here’s my interview with Yongho.  Click the microphone to listen.

Mike Figliuolo interview by Yongho Shin

- If you want to learn more about leadership and decision making, grab yourself a copy of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. There are plenty of suggestions in there for how you can be a more decisive leader. CLICK HERE to get your copy.

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

The following is an excerpt from One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (you can get your copy here).  This post focuses on having a balanced life and the importance of keeping things in perspective.  If you’re burned out, you’re worthless.  Here’s an example of how I keep myself in balance and the obvious question to you is “how do you keep yourself in balance?”

It is easy to get wrapped up in your work. If you have chosen your profession well, you are darn good at what you do and take a great deal of satisfaction away from doing it well. Unfortunately it is easy to forget that there are other people out there who want some of your time. Your family and friends need your attention. There are also other passions worth pursuing outside the office. Taking part in activities you enjoy will keep you centered and add meaning and fulfillment to your life.

Unless you have a mechanism to tear yourself away from the office you might find yourself trapped in the mindset of “I’ll do (insert enjoyable thing here) this weekend when I’m off work” or “I’ll do that when I retire” or “I’ll get to that someday.” Someone who reads my blog shared a great maxim on this point: “Someday is not a day of the week.” We would all do well to keep this in mind and act accordingly.

My great-grandfather adopted a quote as his maxim to remind him to live life. He always said “Enjoy life now because you’ll be a long time dead.” He did not coin the phrase but he used it frequently. The saying has made its way through a few generations of my family as something we say on a semi-regular basis. Regardless of how it is phrased, the key point is we must have balance in our lives which entails living our lives while there is still breath in our lungs.

Without a frequent reminder to do what you truly enjoy and have passion for, you might not notice your life slipping by.

This reminder will help you balance your choices between work and life. Failing to have that reminder and abide by it has profound consequences. You run the risk of waking up one day only to find you have missed hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities to be happy. The sooner you write a maxim to remind you to keep balance in your life and pursue your passions, the less likely it is that you will miss those opportunities and the more likely it is you will enjoy your life.

My maxim for reminding me to enjoy my time away from the office is “A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.” Sure, I read it on a bumper sticker somewhere a long time ago. It is not original but it does have a significant emotional effect on me like all good maxims should.

I love to fish. It is not about whether or not I catch something. The act of being on the water and taking in the natural world around me is what I enjoy. Fishing helps me decompress from the stresses at work and reminds me to appreciate my time away from the office.

I have not only applied this maxim at the end of the work day – I have applied it during the work day. On one occasion, it had been a particularly harrowing week. It was filled with progress reviews, steering committees, meetings, and ridiculous “reply all” emails. By Friday afternoon I was close to my wit’s end.

It was a beautiful April day. My work was “done” by all rights. It was time to catch my breath. I went out for lunch and when I returned to the office, I realized I had my fishing pole in my car. As I looked at my tackle, I remembered “a bad day of fishing is better than a good day at work.” I grabbed my fishing pole and my tackle box and walked to the lake on our office campus.

The lake was surrounded by several buildings containing my colleagues. I started fishing. I began catching fish – nice ones. I lost myself in the afternoon sun and breeze. I was out there a solid two hours. I finally took a break from fishing and looked at our offices. Many of my colleagues were lining the windows watching me with incredulous looks on their faces.

I packed up my stuff and went inside. One individual who saw me fishing said “Are you crazy? You’re going to get fired.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You were fishing! It’s Friday afternoon!”

“Yeah. So? My work is done. I’m ahead of schedule on most things. I needed a little time to decompress.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Am I? Let me ask this. . . I was outside recharging my batteries, basking in the beautiful weather, and enjoying a great afternoon of fishing. You were in here answering email and working on spreadsheets. Who’s the crazy one?” He didn’t say another word.

Then it happened. A few people packed up early. They said they were going to head out and spend time with their kids, with friends, or at the gym. The perspective on what was important spread quickly. In this instance my maxim not only changed my behavior but the behavior of those around me. I like to think I helped put the world back in balance that day if even only a tiny bit.

How do you keep yourself in balance?  What are your reminders to get out of the office and go do what you love?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

- If you’re serious about achieving more balance in your life, grab yourself a copy of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. There are plenty of suggestions in there for how you can make living a balanced life part of your personal leadership philosophy. CLICK HERE to get your copy.

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Today’s post is by Marty Stanley, author of Get Out of B.E.D. and the newest member of the thoughtLEADERS team.

“We got it done, but it was ugly,” the manager said, shaking his head in disbelief. Miscommunications, lack of communication, an inexperienced team leader and management on vacation resulted in cost over-runs exceeding $50,000, delayed implementation and loss of customer respect and confidence. The manager lamented that this was not an unusual experience. It happened more often than he wanted to admit.

We’ve all experienced these “ugly” scenarios at one time or another. But it seems that there’s a breeding ground for ugly outcomes in many organizations. People are going a hundred miles an hour, multi-tasking and taking on more as a result of reduced staffs. People are trying to cope with downsized environments and a sluggish economy. The demands and expectations are high and resources and clear communication are often scarce. A lot of things can slip through the cracks in this kind of culture.

Being in B.E.D. is the Breeding Ground

An environment like this can become toxic and counter productive. When a workplace is in B.E.D. (Blame, Excuses and Denial), people often react impulsively with each misstep, and more mistakes happen. Mistakes are like rabbits… they multiply! No wonder things turn out “ugly.”

As the mistakes multiply, people spend their time fighting fires. Some people complain about how thing are a mess and ask “when will ‘they’ ever learn?” Others wish they had the tools and information so they could do a good job the first time. Still others pat themselves on the back for being a good fire fighter.

When asked what happened and what could have been done differently, people will say they don’t have time – or they think don’t have time – or won’t take the time…to step back and assess so it won’t happen again. That’s just more Blame, Excuses and Denial.

Taking Your O.A.R. Will Alter Your Outcomes

The flip side of Blame, Excuses and Denial is when there is an environment of Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility.

The first thing is to have a person who is responsible for the overall process or project to assure successful completion. In addition, each person on the team must take full ownership for their role in the project or process implementation.

In the opening scenario, when things became “ugly,” each person thought someone else would handle it or they “didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes” or overstep their bounds. In a culture where people are in B.E.D., there’s a “not my job” mentality. There’s no ownership for the results produced.

So next thing that is needed is clear accountabilities. In this era of doing more with less and matrix reporting structures, clear accountabilities are essential. There needs to be a hand-off process so people know who is responsible for doing what and by when.

The choice of an inexperienced team leader in the first example wasn’t necessarily a bad decision, but in this scenario, accountabilities were unclear. He lacked ownership of both the process and the results and there was no one overseeing the rookie. Now that’s a bad combination.

In a healthy and successful work environment, there is clear and ongoing communication about project goals, accountabilities expectations and outcomes. There are established benchmarks for monitoring the people and project, as well as a defined communication process. If something is missing or unclear, members of the team are expected to be responsible for asking for clarification.

It’s been said that for every hour spent in planning, you will save three hours in implementation. When leaders and teams take ownership, accountability and responsibility for planning a project or implementation of a new process, it will save time, money and employee morale.

- Marty is a Senior Instructor with thoughtLEADERS. She focuses on teaching people how to be more accountable for themselves, motivate themselves more effectively, and communicate better with others.

We hate change. Heck, most of us hate getting change at the grocery store because all those coins just weigh down our pockets and purses.

As a leader, though, your job is to get others to want to change.

Getting other leaders to open up to change is hard. You have to help them understand what’s in it for them, because invariably you are changing something in their very comfortable lives. They are not going to like you when you do that. They are going to resist and find every reason to point out that your conclusions and recommendations for change are wrong.

If you want change to happen, you have got to help others understand that change is in their best interest. Show them you are trying to drive metrics they care about (I will dive into an example here in a minute). Help them understand that they stand to benefit from the changes you are recommending.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

When I was running call centers back in my credit card days, there were very different sets of metrics that people received incentives on. There was the call center, which was receiving incentives based on operational efficiency. They were rewarded for how many calls they were handling an hour, their abandon rate, their customer service scores, and how many dollars were they collecting while they were on the phone (it was a credit card collections call center).

On the other side of the fence, there were folks like me who were looking longer term at the economics and profitability of individual accounts. Sometimes we were advocating for treatments in the call center that were great for long-term metrics, but really, really bad for the short-term operational ones.

The leaders in the call center wanted their teams to get you on the phone and say “you owe us $100. Please pay now.” All they wanted to do (and what they received incentives for) was to get you to say “yes, I will pay you,” take a payment, and then get off the phone and move on to the next one as quickly as possible.

What we were concluding drove long-term value was building a relationship with the customer and understanding his financial situation. If we better understood how we could help the customer and what his long-term goals were, we found those accounts were more profitable than others. The operational effect of this approach, however, was that those phone calls started getting longer and longer and longer.

In the short-term we were messing up the call center’s metrics, but long-term building a more profitable relationship with the customer. What we had to do was sit down with those call center folks, help them understand the long-term behavior we were trying to drive. We had to explain why it was in the best interest of the broader organization and of the company as a whole.

We were pretty up front with those call center leaders and we told them we understood how we were going to mess up their metrics. We knew if we wanted to achieve the long-term changes that drove profitability we had to blow up our call center operating efficiency metrics.

We as leaders knew if we wanted to make those changes happen, we had to be willing to stand side-by-side with that call center leader in front of their boss and ask that boss for relief on those operating metrics. He had to say “if you want to make a change that’s good for the long-term business, this is going to be bad for the short-term for operating metrics. We need you to change the operating metrics incentive plan.”

As soon as those call center leaders knew we were willing to go to bat for them and they weren’t going to get hosed on their personal incentives, they were much more willing to support the changes. In the end, we made the changes, changed the incentive plan, and improved the overall profitability of the business.

If you want to get other leaders to change, you have got to be willing to stand side-by-side with them. You have to help make their case for change and do what you can to protect their interests while simultaneously pursuing your own. When you partner with others in change, change can actually happen.

- Leading change starts with leadership. One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership is a helpful start toward strengthening your own leadership style. There are plenty of suggestions in there for how you can lead your teams more effectively. CLICK HERE to get your copy.

- Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC