Getting Great Results: Turning Talent Into Performance
The definition of leadership
Someone following someone because he wants to, not because he has to.
Do you want to be right or effective?
Have you ever been so right that no one would talk to you? If you criticize others’ ideas, they will almost never use yours, no matter how good they are.
Effective leaders drop their judgments
Everybody knows something you don’t. “I disagree, but I am willing to listen.” Thinking you know everything is proof that you don’t.
Listening skills
You motivate people by listening to them; compassion and attention create dedication. When people feel heard and not judged, they will do more than just the minimum.
Managing difficult personality styles
A high percentage of employees with difficult behavior may be getting unintentional negative consequences for doing a good job. Don’t reward an effective employee with someone else’s work.
What great managers know
People don’t change that much. Look for the value they have now. Don’t manage for the miracle; just because you found one diamond in the rough does not mean you are a magic manager. Some people just suck!
Hiring for talent
Look for the naturally recurring patterns that are needed to do the job. Some people are very articulate and experienced and yet have no ability. If they ask you to further explain the question you just asked them in an interview, tell them it’s their interpretation that’s important. You will now find out who they really are.
You turn talent into performance by aligning goals with talents.
Everybody is motivated to do something. Some people are motivated to just lie on the couch and eat ice cream.
Let’s face it: We have all heard that if we just try hard enough, we can do anything. The problem is we don’t all have the willingness to put forth the extra effort. In fact, we seem to have a consistent unwillingness to be willing — and it takes a high level of motivation to achieve that lack of drive!
Wynn Solutions’ interviews with top performers indicate a natural sense of urgency to take action and do the next right thing. These top performers extemporaneously move forward and complete the tasks that will lead them to success. “So how does that work?” you might wonder. “Why is this person sitting next to me so driven to succeed when I feel like I need a nap after breakfast? (Heck, I get winded sleeping!)”
When I speak at conventions, I talk about how our belief systems create our experience. If we hold a belief strongly, we go through life looking for reasons that prove it’s true. So if we believe that our supervisors do not have our best interests at heart, then we perceive it in everything they do. We confirm our favorite negative prophecy at every turn. On the other hand, if we believe good things are likely to come our way, we tend to spin mediocre events into “the beginning of something great” and end up investing the effort to make it a reality.
Having said all that, is it possible that we have willingness that is blocked
by a belief?
It’s kind of like wanting to eat a salad so you can avoid having to wear prescription pants, but believing that one double-bacon cheeseburger (with extra bacon) will be OK just this once.
Could we be working very hard to motivate ourselves into doing something we think can’t be done?
Or at least not done by us? If so, it means we can try with maximum effort and receive minimal results. I think the key to motivating the severely unmotivated is examining what they really believe.
Ask this question of yourself or of your staff: What is it that I believe strongly that may not be true?
Look for the answer to that question and you may find out why the merger is not working, why the sales force cannot hit their targets, and why you keep thinking about a new career.
Our studies of the most effective people in corporate America show that the top 1 percent are effective not because they executed best practices well. They did not make the most phone calls or have the best processes. They simply understood the truth about trust:
People do business with people they like.
They like people they trust.
They trust people who have a detectable level of compassion and competence.
Does it take time to build trust? The truth is that you have known people for five years who still don’t trust you, and you’ve known some for five minutes who do. Our research shows that trust is usually created by showing a detectable level of concern. When people truly believe you are concerned for them, they tend to think you possess good judgment. After all, if you care about them, you must know what you are doing.
So what is the fastest and most effective way to show people that you care and you’re competent? Make sure they feel heard, which is more than just listening. I call it listening like a leader.
You are not a leader unless you have followers; a leader without followers is called a failure. Regardless of your skills, if your staff doesn’t feel heard and doesn’t trust you, they will always do the minimum. They will watch the clock and be ready to leave at 4:45 every afternoon. They will do just enough each day to avoid getting fired, and they will hope the idea you came up with without their input fails. That’s right—you can spend your life delegating to people who want your projects to fail. How smart is that?
OK, you have to listen; I am sure you already know that. The issue is, how well do people really listen? Most studies show that 75 percent of the world’s population does not listen well.
Here is an insight that you won’t find in many books, keynote speeches or training programs. As a whole, we don’t listen very well and it’s not our fault! That’s right, I am sure you are used to hearing and reading that all of our communication problems are of our making. However, most experts agree that from birth to 5 years of age, we learn more than we will for the rest of our lives.
Even if you earn 15 doctorate degrees in your lifetime, you still acquired most of your knowledge in early childhood. In those formative years, if a child does not feel heard by the adults in its life, it does not possess good listening skills. The bottom line is that it’s hard to listen when no one ever listened to you.
Listening is not hereditary.
It’s an acquired skill.
Are we going to blame the parents? No! It’s difficult to listen to young children when we are trying to look out for their welfare. When my stepdaughter was five, she asked me if Dracula drives a taxi cab. I said, “Well…, I guess if it’s a night job. Uh, wait a minute! What kind of question is that?”
She also asked me if she could have a tattoo—not a fake, stick-on tattoo from an ice cream parlor vending machine, but a real one. I said, “No because you’re in kindergarten—and I’m taking the TV out of your room just for asking that question.”
People are more likely to follow your example than to follow your advice. We create better listeners by being better listeners.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence of people returning from communication training programs as better listeners. It doesn’t take a lot of research to figure out that poor listeners get very little from seminars on listening.
So we don’t listen and it prevents us from being effective leaders. If we can’t do much to improve our listening skills, we have to focus on what we can do in the condition we are in.
The key, then, is to focus on making sure people feel heard. And the first step requires recognizing and recovering from distractions.
One day, as I listened to an employee talk about his wants and needs, my mind started to wander. There he was, sharing his core issues, and I’m thinking to myself, “Look at the size of this guy’s head!” It was hard to focus. Once I was trying to listen to a prospect on a sales call when I noticed he had red hair, blonde eyebrows, and a black mustache. I remember thinking, “It’s Mr. Potato Face! Something has to be a stick-on; that’s not all him.”
After we recover from our own distractions, we have to deal with the real issues at hand. The first of these issues is what I refer to as “the pitch in your head.” It can be anything from a preconceived idea that a manager has about an employee, to a practiced presentation that you are dying to spew on your unsuspecting sales victims (prospects, I mean).
Sure, you ask a question just as you were taught to do in your sales or management training program—you know, a question like “Based on what criteria are your decisions made?” As they talk and you diligently pretend to listen, the pitch in your head starts to play; and when the prospect says something that strikes a chord in you, triggering how much you know, your pitch finds the pause it was looking for and off you go.
“I know exactly what you are talking about because I have had many people just like you with this exact same situation. As a matter of fact, it was this time last year and they even looked a lot like you.”
You then project your opinion, experience or spiel onto the person as a solution to his or her problem.
Instead of feeling heard, the person feels quickly judged, and communication does not take place. It was dead before the spew was finished.
The problem with this scenario is that you rob people of their uniqueness. When you tell them you know exactly what the problem is, they tend to want to show you how unique they are. You actually create your own resistance and prevent your skills and even your empathy from making their mark.
When people are talking, you are thinking about you or about what you can do to help them help you. It’s a natural thing for us to do, and it forces us to pitch hard and focus on convincing rather than on gaining agreement.
So what do the most effective people do differently?
They make sure the people they are dealing with feel heard and can retain their uniqueness. If you make people feel important, you will be important to them!
But an even bigger realization comes from all of this.
When you focus on how people feel about what they are saying, you increase the level of true concern you have for others. You actually start to become the person you thought you were pretending to be: A true leader!
Do you have the best service, product, or skills in your area, yet for some reason you still are not getting the results you know you deserve? Hey! I thought if you were the best, you were supposed to eventually win. Let’s address the reality of why your products, services, or leadership styles–or those of your competitors–are selected.
Think of the top-selling hamburgers in the world. Are they the best hamburgers? No! So why are they chosen? Because there is more to success than being the best! Is that special sauce really special? No! It’s actually pretty gross! I’m not trying to criticize the fast food industry; it has combined two of the most desired things on the planet: Fast and Food.
The point is, success is more than being really good at what you do, it’s about being consistently chosen to do it. We like fast food because it meets a specific need. Some people under certain circumstances will trade quality for speed and if you can put a little special sauce on it even better.
Here’s an idea I’d like you to consider: There is no such thing as The Best! If the world agreed on what’s best, everybody would choose the best and nothing else would even be considered. Decision-making doesn’t work that way! People don’t necessarily choose what’s best… they choose what they are the most comfortable with whether it’s the best or not.
People will choose what they feel is the best. That’s right, I used the F word: Feel! People will buy into anything that they feel will serve them best. In business, that means people. People don’t buy or rent from companies or hire and promote a discrete skill set. People buy or rent from people and they hire and promote people. So what is it that everybody really wants?
Interviews off the record with top performing, business owners, managers, and sales people show something very different from just best practices.
Best practices tend to focus on the method, the tactics, and the knowledge. I want to make it very clear that we should be as good as we possibly can at what we do and get all the skills training we can get our hands on. It’s just that skill and knowledge are not enough in today’s world. Being sharp and good at what you do is just the price of admission. If someone is going to rent a chocolate fountain and a cement mixer (hopefully not for the same event) they expect you to be knowledgeable and the equipment to work.
The consistently chosen focus on the mindset, the approach, and the agenda we all have in common. Everybody wants the same three things: Love, Money, and Prestige. They want to be cared about, have some security and get credit for their efforts. So you have to ask yourself three questions:
Love
How detectable is my care and concern in a business transaction?
Money/value
Do I have multiple solutions for a single problem?
Prestige
Will they look good to others by doing business with me?
I wish I could tell you that our research of thousands of top performers showed that the most skilled and knowledgeable were consistently the most successful. It did not indicate that at all.
The research showed that people make choices based on what they feel is best for them. It may not be the lowest price, the latest model, or the ideal career; but for some reason, they are sticking with it no matter what!
