TM Solutions works with clients to define what’s important to them and help them stay focused and committed to achieving both their short and long-term professional goals.  We work with individuals to assess their strengths and potential liabilities, and we identify their personal style and resources that are unique to each of them.  No two people are alike, and we all need customized development in order to maximize our potential and realize success in business.

As we work with people, we devise strategies to improve personal effectiveness, strengthen relationships and leadership, as well as help them overcome potential obstacles and challenges that they may face.  Our Path to Excellence program, a TM Solutions exclusive, which includes individual coaching, group workshops and our web-based Mobile Manager application, will assist in developing new capabilities for sustained excellence over time.  The Path to Excellence includes a 12-step process beginning with purpose, awareness, personal branding and taking action.

In today’s post, we will explore these first four steps along the Path to Excellence.

Establishing a Foundation & Purpose

Successful people are persistent. They focus on what is important to them and their organization, keep these ambitions in parallel, and work consistently to achieve their personal and professional goals.  To accomplish these goals, individuals must be firmly grounded and committed to a sense of purpose. 

We help our clients define and strengthen their sense of purpose. Having a strong sense of purpose, and understanding the foundation—whether it’s meaningful personal motivation or the organization’s stated aims—allows them to think in terms of opportunities, instead of filtering important decisions based on obstacles.  Facing challenges and obstacles is an unavoidable part of life and business, and thinking solely in terms of overcoming negatives is exhausting. Combining the challenge of work with a foundation and sense of purpose keeps us reminded of why we’re all really at work in the first place:  maximizing our potential, achieving our goals, and doing so for the team and organization as well.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

How do I define success?  Is this defined by me or someone else?

In the past 12 months, was my time and energy devoted to what’s important to me?

Building Awareness & Understanding

Working together with our clients on the Path to Excellence, we gain insight and awareness about the individual’s unique abilities, natural strengths and potential liabilities based on environmental and interpersonal context. As we use self-reported and 360 feedback to clearly define these strengths and personal style attributes, we develop a targeted action plan full of strategies for workplace implementation. We teach our clients how to adapt styles, leverage strengths and minimize weaknesses. There’s a phrase used, in terms of physical prowess—“he doesn’t know his own strength.” When we understand our own strengths, and weaknesses, for that matter, we can work to change outcomes that dictate professional success.

Coaching is really all about bringing the best out of someone over time, whether it’s on the football field or in the corporate office. Just as All-Star athletes are neither born the best nor made so overnight, we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations that we ourselves become Hall of Fame employees or managers overnight.  Thus, as we work with our clients in a professional coaching framework, we look at ways to continuously challenge them to grow and improve based on their specific learning preferences, goals, interests, and needs.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Where was I most successful over the past two years?  Why?

Do I understand my hidden strengths and blind spots?

Creating a Personal Brand & Strategy

Our third step on the Path to Excellence is helping our clients create a clear marketing strategy based on their personal mission, values and goals.  By creating a personal brand and clear strategy, they will become an invaluable asset to their peers, professional network, clients, friends and family.  With a clear strategy, they will build self-confidence and become the go-to-person for their specific focus area. 

In the first two steps, we look within ourselves to find our own purpose, the foundation of all of the work we do—an existential exercise, if you will. We also look within to define and understand our strengths, talents, attitudes, and weaknesses. In creating a personal brand and strategy, we must now align how we see ourselves with how others perceive us.  This alignment can unify our sense of purpose, leverage strengths and talents, and mitigate weaknesses.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Am I an invaluable asset to my peers, clients, organization?  Am I the “go-to-person” for something?

Is my current personal brand different from what I want it to be?

Focusing on Continuous Improvement & Taking Action

Having armed our clients with purpose and strategy, we help them to create an actionable and practical plan to keep them engaged and on the right path—their own chosen paths to excellence in their professional lives.  In our coaching sessions, we continuously challenge them to grow, improve and break out of their comfort zones.

Purpose and strategy are nothing in and of themselves—all of these concepts are ultimately in the service of the work we seek to do as individuals. It’s only in the application of a plan—taking action—that we help them realize their vision.  In following a plan, demanding action of themselves each day, our clients improve themselves and impact others, fueled by our encouragement.

Remember the following keys to success along the Path to Excellence.  First, take personal responsibility for the development of your personal effectiveness.  Next, stay focused on your priorities, ensuring that you align them with those of your organization.  Try to implement something new, each and every day you’re at work, to develop yourself.

Finally realize that nothing is impossible—our human potential is limitless, so don’t impose unnecessary limits on your own personal effectiveness. As you take this realization on board, also remember that failure is the best teacher. Be fearless in pursuing your own development.

Next week, we’ll explore four more steps on the Path to Excellence, the exclusive coaching framework from TM Solutions.

People ask quite often, “What’s the single-most important aspect of organizational strength?”  While our first instinct is to answer, “It’s products, customer service, or it’s people,” when it comes down to it, leadership  is no doubt the biggest driver of a company’s success with regard to managing profitability and maximizing productivity.

A Harvard Business School study identified the four greatest drivers of personal and professional success:   attitude, knowledge, intelligence, and skill. The study’s leaders concluded that attitude was the single greatest driver, accounting for 93 percent of an individual’s success. What exactly is attitude?  Attitude is what drives the leader and employees along the spectrum of bad to great, things like commitment to the cause, common purpose, organizational fit, personal values and interests, and relationships with their teams.  And while many managers are good  at managing process and systems, and even some are pretty decent at knowledge and skill transfer, their greatest impact lies in their ability to shape the contributions and attitudes of their people through leading them.

Managers lead in many  ways and there are multiple leadership styles, but what it comes down to are four key components of leadership – building trust, expanding their influence, effective communication, and motivating others.  Let’s first talk about the foundation of leadership – trust. Trust is one of the fundamental virtues of great leaders and influences the amount of discretionary effort your talent will expend to meet business goals.  If you expect your team to go above and beyond, they have to believe you would do the same for them.  It’s that simple.

Leaders build trust in several ways.  As we’ve discussed previously in this space, managers must be sincere and understanding in their dealings with others. Also, they must be open and honest, and keep their promises. Being predictable is key—your people should always know where you stand, even if they don’t agree with you.

Other ways that leaders build trust include keeping the confidence of those who reach out to them in sensitive situations, and be open and accessible to their people.  These two concepts obviously go hand in hand. Finally, managers forge trust through setting high performance standards for themselves and those on their team, and, in turn, demonstrating character and concern for others along the road to high performance.

Managers exert their influence in a variety of ways, and for many people, they taken on a manager’s influence by seeing that person as leading by example.  Having a willingness to roll up your sleeves and dig in to the work alongside your people is a great way to influence them by showing instead of telling. 

Managers also build their influence in other ways, such as finding out what others need from them and providing it, in addition to making a concerted effort to take interest in their team members.  Leaders should seek to understand the differences in all of their people, and this understanding should promote more empathy and less judgmental behavior. Furthermore, leaders should work extra hard to understand their audience and reach them where they are, monitoring the tone and pace of conversations, in addition to body language.  And just as they need to be predictable in where they take their stands, managers should be consistent and keep their commitments.

Communicating is, of course, incredibly important for leaders.  Managers who want to become great leaders should focus on three simple components—honesty, openness and understanding. We’ve talked quite a bit about this subject in other articles on this blog, but you can’t discount the importance of effective communication. When people know that you are steadfast—consistently open and honest—so that they always know where you stand, you have a high level of trust driven by their best interests and what’s important to them—they can’t help but have better attitudes about you and what the company is trying to accomplish.

Having the ability to motivate others to maximize discretionary effort is very important for you, your team and the business.   However, before you can motivate others, you must have a high level of trust, understand what factors are most important to them, and adapt your communication style to them.  Without trust and understanding, you cannot effectively influence, motivate or lead.  (Work on linking this paragraph with the previous) But most people do have some external drivers of their own motivation. Some need recognition, while others need reward.  Still others need you to constantly feed their fire, by adding personal development, continuing education, or greater responsibility in future tasks. And when you know a person’s greatest motivational drivers, you simply act upon these with that same honesty and integrity, with their best interests in mind.  It’s quite rare to see a highly-motivated person with a bad attitude.

In conclusion, if companies want to effectively manage profitability and maximize productivity, they can look no further than leadership development. When managers become leaders, they transform employees into followers who, in turn, become leaders themselves.  Investment in leadership development, when executed properly, can create an ongoing cycle of excellence, feeding into so many other successful aspects of a business.

We like to share some of the wisdom we’ve gleaned from working with dozens of high-performing companies through our best practices consultation, leadership development, talent management, and talent acquisition services.  Some of the traits that we commonly observe in teams that drive the successful companies are effective communication, trust, and openness.

Recently, we ran across a large company outside of our family of clients that serves as a living example of how shifting from old management structures and workplace frameworks and embracing a few key principles for internal and external relationship development can drive a business to runaway success.  That company is Zappos.

Zappos is a well-known internet retailer founded in 1999, with an initial specialty in shoes that expanded to include all manner of men’s and women’s apparel. By 2009, after just 10 years in business, the company reached annual sales of $1 billion and was acquired by internet giant Amazon in a deal valued at $1.2 billion.

The external hallmarks of Zappos are a commitment to exhaustive inventory—carrying every make and model imaginable in the world of shoes and clothing—and a well-documented commitment to what the company calls WOW.  And while the company’s commitment to its employees and its customers to routinely go above and beyond in service is certainly remarkable, we believe that the real secret to success lies in its stated core value for building open and honest relationships with communication.

While all of the company’s stated core values are inspirational, this commitment by executive leadership at Zappos to internal relationship building is to be commended.  This commitment has taken Zappos to the leading edge of its marketplace, transforming the company into sets of high-performing teams.

In a recent piece, we discussed the seven keys to effective communication at work.  The seventh key is perhaps most critical to an organization with the highest aspirations, the challenge to every employee to always be open, honest and accountable. This is a very tough challenge for many people, due in most part to the fact that they have been oriented to the business world by companies clinging to the old ways of “need-to-know” communications by secretive, politically-driven management teams.

But once people open up their communications in an environment without punishment or penalty, they open their teams to many possibilities for success. A key to this concept of openness is not only an open-mindedness to the ideas of others, but also a real appreciation for diversity of backgrounds and the perspectives that ultimately drive those ideas and shape their creators.

While most of us consider ourselves to be honest people, it’s funny how we can become less-than-honest in the workplace by simply withholding information from others, shifting our positions on issues that arise, and closed-door maneuvering with perceived allies to achieve our ambitions. In the new way of building high-performing teams, we must reject these urges that have been almost encouraged by companies in the old order.

We must strive for honesty by being forthright with others—up-front in the positions we take and staying true to them. People should know where you stand, so that they can count on your honesty and give you respect, even if they don’t necessarily agree with you on a particular strategy or solution to a problem.

Remember, too, that relationships are a two-way street. You must not only remain consistent in your own communications, but you must also appreciate the commitment of others in your organization to be open and honest with you. Sometimes, your ego will tell you that all of this openness and honesty isn’t a good thing, especially when you receive criticism. You must resist the urge to retaliate against constructive criticism, since this damages the relationship and closes an opportunity for your own improvement.

When we embrace openness and honesty, we build trust. And when we build trust, we build engagement and effort to unforeseen levels that drive greater success. It’s a winning formula that we’ve seen over and over again, and Zappos is a great example of a company committed to the right principles.

On Tuesday, August 21, 2012, TM Solutions is offering a workshop on Communicating Effectively.  The workshop, hosted by Parata Systems, is a 90-minute program that will begin running at 9 am.  During the workshop, we will explore concepts such as active listening, open and direct interactions with others, and strengthening your reputation, image, and personal brand.

For more information and to register as our special guest, please visit our website at this link.

There are many ways to achieve success in business, and there are many models to follow, as you can see from the seventy-five thousand search results from amazon.com.  At TM Solutions, we believe that the core of any company’s success or failure is how they link strategy with their people.

What we’ve found in our many years of experience in analyzing what companies are doing right, as well as what they’re doing wrong, is that companies build a culture of excellence  by focusing on  four key areas:  strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.

Strategy and Planning

Whether you’re a start-up, in growth mode, or mature, you should always act in a strategic manner and plan your success through your planning around your human resources—the people who drive your company’s success or cause it to lag in failure.  In order to plan effectively, you must take an introspective view of your company, asking the right questions to determine where you need change, what you need to start doing, stop doing, do more of, do less of. 

Do you understand what success factors drive performance excellence, as well as what factors are stagnating the organization?  Do your culture, values, and management objectives align with your overall business strategy? Are you attracting top talent consistently—as an “employer of choice”—or is your turnover at unacceptable levels?  Are your employees fully engaged in your business?  Do you understand why they join your organization, and more importantly, do you understand why they would leave? 

These are all questions that deserve some deep, inward searching in order to plan effectively for improvement over the near term as well as the next multi-year phase of your business.

Managing Profitability

Just as there are questions that can help to drive your company’s strategy and planning, ensuring that your people objectives are aligned with the overall strategic objectives of the business, there is a set of questions that can help to determine if your company is managing profitability  correctly.

With regard to your human capacity to meet your business objectives and customer needs, are you over capacity or under capacity?  Are there strategies in place to manage the costs of human resources? Does our talent management strategy allow you to scale up or down, as needed, to meet customer needs?  Is the organization maximizing employee productivity?  Are your company’s employees completely engaged with the company and its mission, driving productivity and customer satisfaction to highest possible levels?

The idea here is that companies should measure their performance not on the number of employees they have—often, the ones that do are incredibly bloated, inefficient, and, obviously, much less profitable—but rather how well they are meeting their main business objectives around revenues, expenses, and profitability, while ensuring to maintain the highest levels of employee engagement and productivity.  This balancing act creates a formula for long-term success—an operation that’s lean and mean in achieving results.

Minimizing Risk

Running a business, both large and small today, in today’s complex environment with limited or no focus on compliance and insurance presents significant risks in both time and money.  In addition to the potential costs, it can also distract key resources away from core business objectives. 

Do you understand what employment laws and regulations apply to your size business?  Are you fully compliant with current employment laws and regulations?  Are you compliant with all federal, state and local reporting and posting requirements?  Are your employees and independent contractors properly classified?  Do your policies align with organizational culture and strategy, and more importantly, are they up-to-date?  Do you currently have corporate legal counsel?

Conduct a basic compliance review to identify appropriate boundaries within employment law based on your organization’s size, industry and growth phase.  Additionally, an effective review evaluates how current management practices stack up to major risk areas as well as identify opportunities for improvement with your day-to-day-activities.  Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Expertise and Capabilities

A final foundational area for taking a look at how well your business is poised for future success is in the questioning and analysis of the aggregate and individual expertise and capabilities of your human capital.  You must question your company’s context within its competitive industry landscape, as well as take internal stock of your priorities with regard to your people.

Do you have the right talent in place to compete in today’s marketplace?  If so, how do you feel about your capabilities to meet challenges and customer demands in the years to come? Are you adequately staffed to execute operational and strategic plans?

A critical set of questions concerns your company’s ability, as mentioned in strategy and planning above, to be an “employer of choice” in order to have the highest levels of expertise and capabilities in its human capital. Do you have the ability to attract top talent?  If so, are you then actually hiring from the top 10 percent among available talent when you bring new people into the company?

Growing your expertise and capabilities isn’t just an external exercise in attracting top talent. It’s also about growing from within, ensuring that prioritizing and investing in professional development for your in-house talent. Are you utilizing professional development programs to maximize your leadership and coaching capabilities at executive and management levels?  Are your front-line people able to add to their expertise with continuing education in their respective skill areas, or flex into management positions by adding coaching skills to their already considerable capabilities in core job functions?

Conclusion

To arrive at the answers that are unique for your business, with regard to where you are with building a performance model for success, you need to ask the right questions. The truth is that there are a lot of right answers, based on the organizational culture and values, as well as your strategic goals and vision. In short, people define success in lots of different ways.

But once you have your own definition for success in place, you need to periodically ask yourself these questions around strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.  What these questions, and their ongoing relevance in the life of a business, should illustrate to you is that your human capital needs are very fluid. Today’s highly competitive team can be too large and unequipped in its capabilities to meet tomorrow’s marketplace needs. Sometimes, you’re accomplishing much more with fewer people—obviously a desired outcome—and sometimes, trying to do too much without having enough or the right people on board to solve problems and achieve results is a fool’s errand.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, and the first thing you can do to walk on the right side of the line is to revisit these questions.