Photo by j | t

(This post is dedicated to my father. Much love Dad, always, and thanks for passing along that half-full glass)

I was 14 years old, and growing up in Wisconsin.  During this particular summer my dad, who on his days off from the county sheriff’s department was a very good carpenter, asked me to help him build a garage, basically from scratch.

Truth be told, I was much more interested in playing baseball and hanging out with my friends, but I said yes anyway (although I’m quite sure I would have still helped him if I said no!).

It was a two week project, and it was one of the longest two weeks of my life.  I have absolutely no aptitude for carpentry.  In my hands, a hammer was a dangerous tool capable of putting holes where holes shouldn’t be, and bashing fingers into submission.   A drill was a mysterious electric implement that was incapable of creating a straight hole.

Although I was of very little help to my dad, he kept on trying to teach me what he knew (which was plenty). He was well versed in the “measure twice, cut once” school of carpentry, and it was actually fun to watch him work.  Unfortunately, that’s what I preferred to do – watch.

His patience with me, in looking back at these two weeks, was actually quite remarkable.  He tolerated my mistakes, always spent time with me in trying to correct them and never really got mad at me.

I think what happened eventually is the lesson in this piece – that sometimes, you really can’t teach somebody something, and the lesson is in knowing when it is a lost cause.    My dad probably realized early on that I just wasn’t going to catch on, and didn’t push me as hard as he could have.

I just wasn’t going to be “Mr. Handyman”.  And my dad accepted that.

As you would guess, he never asked me again to help him on any of his carpentry jobs.   Luckily, he knew I had other talents that would eventually help me make a living, and encouraged and supported me as I finished high school and got an accounting degree in college.

Because numbers I could work with.  I didn’t need a hammer!  Just a 10-key (at least then).

As I’ve developed as a manager and teacher these past 26 years after graduation I’ve always remembered that garage, and the lesson it passed along – part of being a good teacher is figuring out right at the outset the student’s capacity to learn the material.

By the way, miraculously that garage is still standing, 34 years later.   I bet my dad straightened out a bunch of those nails when I wasn’t looking!

(Note: This is the third selection of my “Joyful Jubilant Learning – The Reprise” series. This post originally appeared on JJL on June 26, 2008)

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In early 1997, its stock price was $4.

This once proud company had taken a bunch of body blows, and was staggering – badly.

Its CEO at the time was great at cutting costs and preserving capital, but investors weren’t buying it.  Plus, his communication skills were sub-par, and at about the company’s lowest point, he delivered a speech at a major trade show that was considered a rambling, unfocused, “unmitigated disaster“.

Something had to change. And change it did,  because the new CEO had a vision that went beyond product, and costs, and overhead, and costs of capital.

It was about passion.  And about people who have it.

Thirteen years later, the stock price is now above $240, and it has a market cap bigger than Microsoft.

That company is Apple.  And that CEO is Steve Jobs.

Jobs returned to Apple full-time in 1997 and quickly put together a brand new marketing campaign that he presented in a speech that summer.

A video of that speech has surfaced again recently, and it is nothing more than an absolutely essential case study in how a leader must present a company’s values, vision, and purpose, BEFORE a company can march forward with its products.

Which brings us back to passion. Jobs, in that speech, declares that “Marketing is about values”.  He added that companies “have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us“.

Then, he says “we’re not about making boxes for people to get their jobs done“.   It’s not about the product.

With that stage set, Jobs delivers Apple’s “core value”:  “We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better”.

That’s about as far away from product as anyone could get.  But yet, this statement, and the resulting “Think Different” ad campaign, set a tone that resulted in the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and Apple’s domination of the technological “cool factor”.

Not to mention that $240 share price.

So does a vision matter? Do core beliefs matter? Can a passion for change translate to nuts and bolts success?

Oh, yeah.  Ask Steve Jobs. Or better yet, watch the video yourself. Several times.  And remember that line from the commercial:

“The ones that are crazy enough to want to change the world are the ones that actually do”

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As someone who is always trying to “deal with the literal world in a positive way“, I have come to really appreciate the mistakes I’ve made (and there have been plenty).

Now I’m sure your reaction to that is – “appreciate mistakes??” Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

In my half-full world, the ability to take positive things out of the errors I make is critical to making my life’s journey a fulfilling one (and, in a more “ground level” way, my business career a successful one).  I’ve found that there are four important steps I need to make to leverage those mistakes properly:

1. Acknowledgment
2. Correction
3. Learning
4. Rear View Mirror

Let’s take a closer look at these steps – first, there’s acknowledgment.   The simple admission, to others and most importantly to yourself, that you made a mistake.

I remember back in 1999 and 2000 when I thought I was the best stock day trader in the world. I had an E-trade account and was wheeling and dealing like a Wall Street pro – or so I thought.   When the tech bubble burst around that time I refused to believe I had erred by taking so many positions in risky dot-com companies.   I didn’t bail out in time because I didn’t acknowledge my mistake. I was too proud to admit that day trading was something I shouldn’t be doing. I learned a valuable lesson from this - you have to have the self-awareness to know when you’ve made an error.

Next comes correction.   After you’ve admitted a mistake it needs to be fixed.   This one is most important in my business world.   We provide a service, and sometimes we don’t get it right the first time.   We have to quickly respond and get the customer happy.   There’s a great silver lining to this, one that really contributes to the ultimate benefit of errors – it’s a documented fact that a customer who had a bad experience but it was fixed to their satisfaction is much more likely to be a loyal customer than someone who never had a problem.

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons!  So once you know you’ve gone wrong, correct it as soon as you can.

Then there’s the learning that comes from mistakes.   This always reminds me of that great saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by George Santayana.  The lessons I’ve taken from my errors have been without a doubt the most valuable of my life.

The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career, for example, was to decide to make a cross-country move to work for someone I was just not compatible with from a leader/manager standpoint.   I’ve written in my blog about how I had to pull myself out of that situation to get my “mojo” back, but the other thing I took away from it were two great lessons -  I was never going to put myself in that kind of work situation again, and better still, because of the mistake I now knew exactly the kind of leader I wanted to be and the kind of business environment I wanted to be in.

Yes, we have to learn from those mistakes we make, or we will indeed repeat them.

Lastly, while we need to take the time to reflect on the lessons from our mistakes, once that is done and we’ve absorbed the learning, we must let the mistake itself go, or what I call “put it in the rear view mirror“.  Why?  because if we don’t we can become paralyzed because of the fear of making another mistake.  This isn’t the easiest thing to do sometimes – there have been occasions for me where I would be poised to do something and all of a sudden the memory of a past error (and its consequences) would flash in my head, and I would hesitate.   Most of the time I can stifle it, but there are still occasions when I can’t.

But I try to learn from that too – it’s a constant and consistent desire that keeps driving me forward.  I need to learn. I HAVE to learn.

I hope that this 4-step approach that’s come from my life experiences can help you with your learning too, and as you use them, be joyful, jubilant and brave!

(Note: This is the second selection of my “Joyful Jubilant Learning – The Reprise” series. This post originally appeared on JJL on August 9, 2007)

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Leaders get tested every day.  Decisions must be made, problems must be solved, and action must be taken.

Of all the tests we face, however, the most critical to success revolve around the people we lead, and how we lead them.

And there are plenty of trap doors that lurk around every corner.  I call them the seven deadly sins of leadership.   Commit one, and we lose a key element of our team dynamic.   If we commit them all, the team completely falls apart. Therefore we must diligently heed each one of them.

Wrath – If we are quick to anger, and take that anger out on our teammates, they cannot learn. They will only fear.   And you will lose their best work in the dust bin of impatience.

Greed – If you want more out of your teammates than they can give, and compound the sin by failing to reach out and help, they will burn out.  And you will lose them to resentment and exhaustion.

Sloth  - If we are not diligent in assuring that the work is done right, and all the pertinent details are being addressed, then they will stagnate, and the errors will multiply. And you will lose them to mediocrity.

Pride – If we stubbornly persist in keeping substandard performers, or believe we can change people that cannot be changed, then the results will surely suffer.  And you will lose your best people to frustration.

Lust – If we continually wish to be where we think the grass is greener, at the expense of where we are, then that desire will poison your team dynamic, and you will lose them to ambivalence.

Envy – If we suppress the great talent below us in matching or surpassing us, then they will seek other opportunities.  And you will lose them to another company.

Gluttony – If we take on too many things ourselves and multitask too often with our Blackberrys, our focus will be impaired, and we will miss great opportunities to teach and inspire.  And you will lose them to disrespect.

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Don’t forget to download my FREE e-book, “Leadership From a Glass Half-Full – The 5 Lessons You Need To Learn Before You Jump Into The Pool”

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While I was in college 30 years ago I spent my summers working for my hometown department of public works.

My job?  Sanitation Engineer, more affectionately known as a “Garbage Man”.

From 7AM to 3PM, five days a week, my teammates and I went up and down the alleys and streets of our town, collecting the trash, putting it into the back of  large compactor truck, and then taking it to a “transfer center”.  On average we collected about 13,000 pounds of garbage a day.

Nothing glamorous here, to be sure.  And it was hard work.  But it taught me a lot about life, and the value of work itself.

Here are the Top 10 things I learned from collecting garbage:

• Contrary to what you might think, grass is heavy.  Fill a container full of it, try to lift it up, and you’ll see what I mean.
• In order to make a policy a success, you must enforce the policy religiously.   Our city had a rule that the garbage had to be in a certain place at a certain time.  We found that if we skipped that house because they didn’t follow the rule, the next week they followed the rule.  If we let them slide and picked it up anyway, they would continue to violate the rule.
• Always wear comfortable clothes. While it’s really tempting, you can’t try to be a fashion plate and collect garbage at the same time.
• You can tell a lot about a person’s personality by the way they arrange their garbage. Sure enough, if we needed to chat with a customer about their mess we had to clean up, they were not easy to deal with. Conversely, there were multiple occasions where the neatniks brought out lemonade for us poor tired workers.
• The adage “One man’s garbage is another man’s gold” is absolutely true.  I snagged a lot of interesting stuff that other people threw out, including some vintage LP’s and 45s.  Thank you, whoever you were!
• Respect your body and use proper technique to lift things. Even a 20-year old back figured this one out pretty darn quickly lifting 13,000 pounds a day
• Sunscreen is a wonderful invention. No, you do not get “bronzed” spending 5 days a week in the sun.  You get burned. Badly.
• It’s always a good idea to be nice to your supervisor. Because I observed this rule, my supervisor always let me take a break and drive the garbage truck every now and then.   Those breakfast buys really paid off!
• Pace Yourself – most things are marathons, not sprints. There was nothing worse than trying to rush through the first third of our day trying to finish early. By noon we were exhausted, and ended up actually finishing late. Ah, youth.
• It’s not proper to be singing “My Sharona” at the top of your lungs in an alley at 7AM. Nuff said on that one.

(Note:   This is the first post in a series I will be presenting here, called, “Joyful Jubilant Learning – The Reprise”.  I wrote a number of posts between 2006 and 2009  for a blog that is no longer active called Joyful Jubilant Learning, led by Rosa Say.   It was a collaborative exercise featuring many other wonderful people, dedicated to learning.   It was a great experience, and I wanted to share with you a sampling of what this group inspired me to write and create.  This post originally appeared on JJL on 8/20/09.  Thanks!)

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Is from yourself.

There comes a time after you’ve gone to school, read the books,  found a mentor, attended the seminars, and/or bought the DVD, when you just have to step up, and lead.

And HOW you lead- that course you set- is entirely determined by YOU.

More specifically, your inner compass, commonly known as your gut.

It’s that little voice that tells you it’s too much, or too little.

That feeling that compels you to reach out, or pull back.

The whisper that compels you to take a risk, or stay the course.

It can’t come from anywhere else than within.  That self-awareness, that “true north“, is your guiding light..

And you HAVE to rely on it.

Otherwise, you’ll come off as a mish-mosh of all those outside sources telling you what they think a leader should look like or act like.

Which just doesn’t work.  It comes off forced, or worse, false.

Your personality, your values and your basic beliefs about right and wrong need be part of the picture.

The critical element to effective leadership is to be believed and trusted, and the best way to earn both of those things is to believe and trust in yourself.

Trusting that what you see, what you hear, and what you feel will be processed by your heart and mind in a way that will generate the best response, and one that comes from a human place.

All that education is valuable, no doubt,  but leadership advisers, mentors, teachers and gurus cannot make decisions for you.

At that those critical moments, all you have is YOU, and that voice.

Don’t forget to listen to it.

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By now I’m sure you’ve heard or read about the Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater - his actions have caused quite a disturbance in the Social Media universe.

While the interesting part of all this is the intense debate as to whether or not his behavior should be notable or celebrated in the first place, that’s not what I want to write about today.

Rather, I’d like to talk about the flip side of all this.

That is, the many thousands of people out there serving customers who have the audacity of professionalism.

This Jet Blue incident is far from the first time a customer acted in an inconsiderate and cruel way.

It happens quite a bit, unfortunately.   And in response to those actions, these particular customer service people are biting their lips, summoning up all the courage, control, and grace they can muster, and acting like professionals.

They don’t lash back.  They use their guile and their common sense to stay calm and diffuse the anger,  despite whatever harm that may have come their way.

And more often than not, this professionalism carries the day, and the situation is controlled.  In some cases, their actions can even totally turn the situation around, creating a loyal customer for life.

Hopefully, within the organizations that employ them, this professional behavior is rewarded and celebrated.  But usually, that’s as far as it goes.

No viral Facebook campaigns.  No Twitter avalanches.  No press conferences. No 15 minutes of fame.

Well today, that’s not good enough for me.  I want to offer my heartfelt salute to all of those service professionals who have the audacity to be just that – a professional.

What this whole Steven Slater brouhaha demonstrates, and the real lesson here , is how difficult it really can be to hold it together when that kind of customer behavior takes place.

It is SO easy to lose it.   We’ve all been there.

The next time you see someone display their professionalism in such an extraordinary way,  send their boss a note. Or just say “thank you”.

For they deserve our recognition, even in that small way.

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“If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing
To it” -
Leslie Bricusse / Anthony Newley

Lately I’ve been thinking about Willy Wonka.  Yes, that Willy Wonka.  The guy with the Chocolate Factory.   A month ago it entered my subconscious courtesy of that AT&T commercial that features the song “Pure Imagination“, sung by the first movie Wonka, Gene Wilder.   This past week it moved to the forefront after a visit to a candy store (Powell’s, in Boulder CO) that had an entire Willy Wonka “shrine” (with more things to attack your sweet tooth than you could ever imagine).

Why Willy, and why now?  It’s that power of the imagination, and while it can create a magical (and admittedly sometimes scary) candy factory, it can also create a similarly wondrous  “idea factory” that can drive leadership success, and long-term profitability.

Ideas are the lifeblood of any organization, and how they are generated, harvested, and turned into action is critical to continuous improvement.

How can a leader build an effective idea factory?

There are five important elements:

• A leader’s open mind. It has to start with you.  If your mind is closed off to new ideas, or different ways of thinking, the rest of the organization will take your lead.
  
• An atmosphere of trust. Fear is one of the biggest impediments to idea generation.   If someone fears that their suggestions will be summarily shot down in nearly every instance, that person will simply stop trying.    A leader must be trusted with the ideas and dreams of their teammates, no matter how “off the wall” they may be.
• EVERYBODY is involved in idea generation.  That’s right, everybody.   Every single person in the organization possesses “pure imagination”, and a leader would be remiss not to encourage, and then tap into, that collective brain power.  (A personal example: I’ve lost count of the ideas we’ve implemented from teammate suggestions across our entire employee base).
• “Dreaming by example”.   The leader needs to stimulate the idea generation by throwing out ideas of their own, not as final decisions, but as more of a way to get the ideas flowing from their teammates.   It calls for a lot of “What if” ,  “Have we ever thought of” or “What do you think of” kind of questions.
• Never lose the wonder and whimsy.    I’ve written that the “secret of life” is never growing up, and indeed,  that child’s sense of wonder is an element of idea generation that just HAS to be there if an organization is going to swing for the fences with big changes, or to go after those “BHAGs” (big, hairy and audacious goals).  And a little whimsy doesn’t hurt either (lighthearted humor can loosen up the idea muscles better than anything I know).
  

In other words, everybody needs a little Wonka in them.   With no limits to their pure imagination.

Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.

Build your idea factory, and believe.

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As always, thanks for stopping by, and while you’re here don’t forget to download my FREE e-book, “Leadership From a Glass Half-Full – The 5 Lessons You Need To Learn Before You Jump Into The Pool”

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I was stumped.

It had to be just the right adjective.   The one that would launch a thousand retweets.

The one that would make the headline bark out “READ ME”!!!

I thought, and thought, and thought.

“Enduring”?  Nah, I didn’t want the wrong connotation (i.e. “to endure the post”)

“Lasting”?   Nope.  It just didn’t look good.

“Rock Solid”?  Negative.   Been there, done that.

I finally settled on “sustainable”, and then hit “publish”.

As I prepped the post for later broadcasting on Twitter, I looked at the headline again.

Omigod.

I had fiddled around so much with a single word that I forgot about the rest of it.

Reading it out loud, it gave off the exact opposite connotation than I intended.

I had to change it, again, and by doing so I had fallen prey to something I swore I’d never succumb to.

The “Obsessive-Compulsive Headline Writing Disorder”.

That is, in a nutshell, putting the cart before the horse.  I cared more about the headline than the content itself.  And worse, I way over-thought it,  and it still didn’t end up being a very good headline. That’s where this disorder starts to hurt.

Now, don’t get me wrong here – I know headlines are important in a world where everything is shrinking to 140 character bursts.

Of course I want you to read my stuff, so I need to draw you in.  However, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if I dazzle you with a headline, you click through, and then read something that doesn’t live up to its promise.

In that case, I may have won a click, but I probably lost a reader.

Nonetheless, that perfectly good logic can get tossed aside when your ego starts flaring up.

“I want more! More visits! Higher rankings! Massive Twitter followers!  Yes, Yes, Yes!!!”

Bad, bad, and more bad.

The minute I hit “send” on that post, after all that dithering,   I realized that quantity was creeping up dangerously to quality, fueled by the ego and their old and dear companions, fear and envy.

As I write this, it is several days after that post, and rather than let this disorder fester, I had to come to terms with it, and by doing so, share what I’ve learned with you.

It’s all about putting what I’m doing here in the proper perspective.   It’s about going back and re-reading my “about this blog” page (and in hindsight, what a great idea that was Joanna, thank you) .

I want to help people (and myself) and build relationships.  There’s nothing in there about writing the perfect headline that will get 100,000 hits.

There’s the big lesson.  It’s going back to why I started doing this in the first place.  Instead of thinking  “What headline  (and thus content)  can I write that will be the most popular”,  it just has to be “What can I write today that can help my readers and perhaps, help me?”

Writing a good headline is still part of the deal, as well as any other SEO strategy designed to get your post noticed – but it cannot take precedence over the content.

I know, you’re thinking, “Well golly Terry, isn’t that obvious?”  Yes it is, when you are thinking rationally, as I’m sure you are as you are reading this post, and as I usually am when I’m not obsessing over a headline.

However, consider those situations where you are sitting in front of your screen, fresh from a few hours on Twitter marveling at the creative power of those “rock stars” drawing hundreds of retweets and tens of thousands of hits,  subconsciously envious,  tapping into a supposedly long-gone childhood need for acceptance,  and fearing that cannot happen unless you too get that kind of attention.

Ah, you’ve been there too?

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“How did you do that”?

He had just spent several days reviewing our business operations, and after absorbing our successes and industry-leading metrics, he couldn’t figure it out on his own.

So he was compelled to ask me that question, perhaps hoping I would reply with some magic formula that he could take back home with him.

But alas, it wasn’t magic.  It was 7 years of hard work.  By many, many people.

I hesitated for several beats before I attempted to answer the question,  because nobody had ever just flat out put it that way.  I thought, “how in the world could I possibly summarize all that we did to be successful in 30 seconds?”

Then, it hit me.    All that math training I got in high school finally paid off, because the mental image that flashed in my head was an equation of sorts:

The first part of the equation summarized the qualities needed in every single employee.

“Pr” is Pride.  Doing a good job has to be a personal feeling that it’s just the right thing to do – it just can’t be “because someone told me to“

“Pa” is Passion.   Everyone has to like what they do to excel at it.  There’s no getting around this one.

“CS” is Common Sense.   It’s not all in the employee handbook and instruction manuals  – everybody, and especially customer facing teammates, must be able to make those daily practical judgments that make a huge difference between greatness and mediocrity

These qualities are great, but they need to be amplified by a supervisor or manager.

“Fc”  is Focus.  The manager needs to make sure that the company’s short and long-term objectives are always in the front of everyone’s mind, as well as make sure that every individual clearly understands what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis.  Nobody should ever take their eye off the ball.

“Pe” is Persistence We all make mistakes.  We all come off the rails on occasion.  Or make the wrong decision. The businesses that prevail are the ones that relentlessly keep pushing forward while learning well from the setbacks along the way.

Finally, the top leaders need to apply the most powerful multipliers of them all.

“Vi” is Vision.  What’s the overarching goal?  The “big, hairy, and audacious” goal? Why are we doing what we’re doing, and why is it important to every single person in the organization?  What are our shared values?  The top leaders, by effectively articulating the answers to these questions, can inject a booster shot into the momentum already created by the lower part of the equation.

“PI” is Positive Inspiration.  I’ve always remembered this quote by Colin Powell - “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier”. I fervently believe that injecting a “can do” spirit and a positive, “up” energy is an absolutely essential part of any success equation.

So, after hashing this equation out in my mind, I was able to answer the “how did you do that” question. We did it with pride, passion, common sense, focus, persistence, vision, and positive inspiration.

And that’s how you can do it too, with no magic required.  Just a lot of hard work.  Ready?

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