A Monkey Tale

Some cultural anthropologists did an experiment with ten monkeys. They were all in a big observation room a with pole in the middle and a stash of ten bananas at the top. When a monkey would climb the pole after the bananas, they would get blasted with a stream of water strong enough to knock them down. The monkeys quickly learned that the bananas weren’t worth the cold shower and stopped climbing the pole. One at a time, the scientists replaced the monkeys in the room. The new monkey would be thrilled to see the bananas and immediately climb the pole. To protect the new monkey (and themselves) from the cold blast, the other nine would pull the newcomer down over and over – preventing him from snagging the banana prize. That new monkey would soon learn that for whatever reason, the bananas were off limits…even though he never got wet. The monkeys repeated this behavior nearly exactly for each of the subsequent nine new animals until none of the ten monkeys were part of the original band of wet pets. None of them had ever felt the water, but they were all afraid of getting wet.

So the bananas rotted at the top of the pole and the monkeys settled for a daily, boring ration of food.

This is the power of culture.

What kind of culture are you cultivating?

What fears are you transferring to your fresh team members that are preventing them from the prize they have their sights on?

Are you limited by old threats that may or may not be present currently?

What parts of your organization are stagnant and boring because you are unwilling to take risks?

Are you, though well-intentioned, holding others back because you are afraid of something another told you MAY happen?

Every conversation defines culture.

Every interaction.

Every consequence.

Every lunch date.

Every ignored phone call.

Every review.

Every smile.

Every word of encouragement.

Every monkey.

Be intentional about the culture you are defining. 

Lean Forward, 

Bekka 

You

Leadership involves pressure. It involves a higher level of stress simply because of the responsibility involved. This fact is part of the package and no leader will argue that. So…

How do you de-stress?

We know a laundry list of nasty physical, emotional and mental effects stress brings to the human body. How are you mitigating that? You know you’re a leader. You know leaders have a high level of stress. You know stress is killing us slowly if we don’t have good and consistent strategies to alleviate it. So what are you doing about that? Part of being a leader is taking care of yourself so you can lead others. It’s also the part we most frequently overlook. It’s not a badge of honor to repeatedly ignore your own needs in favor of “taking care of others”. We obviously put others first as a general rule but this has to happen in balance or we will be of no use to anyone.

I release that stress valve through yoga, walking, scheduled times of connection with good and positive relationships, setting clear boundaries around my sleep, and making sure that my work stays in the work hours I set for myself. We must get good at identifying what we need and then finding ways to make that happen. Whether it means finding a babysitter, asking for several hours alone from your spouse or significant other, or just simply being intentional about eating things that will fuel us instead of empty us.

This may seem like a simplistic post but I think an honest review of our input/output ratio will leave most of us looking at a deficit in our mental, emotional and physical resources. It takes a lot of courage to look at yourself and be real about what you can and can’t do. It takes even more courage to draw boundaries around your time and energy so you can be the most effective as possible over the long term. I want to be around, be encouraging, and be a resource for others for a very long time. In order to do that, I must prioritize taking care of myself by reducing my stress level overall in addition to effectively managing the inevitable stress life brings.

Lean Forward,

Bekka

Five Things

I had the privilege of hearing John Maxwell present at my company’s yearly convention last month. I’ve read John’s books and seen several simulcasts but this was the first time I saw him in person. I was impressed, to say the least. I took 5 pages of notes during his hour presentation. He had no PowerPoint, no handout, no outline, no flashy videos or #’s. He just sat at a table on the stage, got up and down a few times, but mostly just talked to the 9,000 member audience like he was in each of our living rooms…proof that you don’t need to be flashy and technologically impressive to be relevant and cutting edge. But that’s another blog ;)

Of all the things he said, one concept struck me in a deeper way. He knows he is supposed to write books. Since he was 21 years old, he’s done the same Five Things every day that support this goal. He explained them very simply:

“I read. I write. I think. I file. I ask questions.”

Every day.

Every holiday.

Every weekend.

Every birthday.

Every day.

He said sometimes he writes twenty words and sometimes he writes twenty pages but every day, he writes - the same for the other four.

The point is to be consistent with daily behaviors that champion your own personal goals. In this blog, I’ve discussed the importance of small, daily steps required to attain big goals. This is exactly what John was touching on - 5 simple things he does every day that support his goals. He said this, “The secret to success is doing today right. You exaggerate yesterday, you over-emphasize tomorrow, but you under-estimate today.” He said he has material for more books than he could ever write because he has been collecting it every day for the last 16,000 days straight. That blows my mind.

This is called discipline – that’s why so few people do it.

I’ve been thinking for the last several weeks about what my Five Things are. What 5 little things can I do each day to help me become what I know I’m called to be? I have big goals – what are the daily disciplines I need to prioritize in order to make them a reality?

What are yours?

Lean forward,

Bekka

Cats, Beware!

I’ve always been disturbed by the saying,

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

I don’t even really like cats – but still.

Though the visual is a bit messier than I prefer, the concept is one that every leader must be both aware of and comfortable with in order to lead a group with varying personalities and methodologies. I recognize that in leadership, we are responsible for skinning many cats on a given day – even though we may not be the ones doing all the messy work. Keeping our hands dirty on the ground level of our organizations is key to staying in touch with how things are really functioning but, if we are doing things correctly, we will have many more cats than we have time to take care of. This means that inevitably, cats will be skinned in ways that you didn’t see coming, wouldn’t do yourself, or are generally just foreign to the way you think. Take a deep breath. And let’s do a little, high level history lesson together…

Almost a century ago, Henry Ford transformed the auto industry by introducing the concept of an assembly line. He made a lot of cars quite cost effectively and started a trend of process standardization that would revolutionize how business operations would run for the next 100 years. Process standardization (every cat getting skinned the exact same way) raises quality of production, increases output quantity and allows for a large measure of what every manager desperately craves – CONTROL OF THE DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION PROCESS.

Every accountant, engineer and manager loves Henry Ford because he gave us the ability to control basically everything.

Here’s the problem…process standardization is so 1900’s.

Electricity, automation, robotics, and computers make process standardization a given. We don’t even need people for that anymore. The leaders of this century must get over our craving for control. Here’s why…our greatest resource is not in getting every process to look the same. It’s in leveraging HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CAPITAL to think differently. We can either spend our energies trying to get everyone to do things the same way or we can spend our energies releasing people to get to the desired result in the way they excel. Less control; exponentially higher potential.

The last ten years of leadership research screams at us, “Let people work from their strengths and your business will explode!” And here we are, still clinging to Henry and his standardization because we love the way it makes us feel. We have robots to pacify our need for control. Let’s take a few risks and invest in our people power, our human intelligence capital that can do what the robots can’t – come up with new ways to skin cats. 

Every person thinks differently. This is such a huge opportunity for those willing to loosen their grip on the metrics just a bit and watch their teams really come alive with innovation and discovery. Don’t worry accountants, engineers and managers…there are plenty of people whose strengths are in your “safe and quantifiable zone”. It won’t devolve into complete chaos.

As leaders, let’s follow Henry’s example and be willing to do things differently than ever before. Who knows, we might end up with 100 years of history to tell our success story, too.

Lean Forward,

Bekka