Author: TimSchneider

Never really took the time or had the chance to tell my dad that he was one of my leadership heroes.  Was not the right time or I thought he would always be around to tell.

The one unwavering leadership characteristic that my dad modeled consistently was work ethic.  When there was work to be done, he did it.  Day of week, time of day, personal plans; none of that mattered.  The work had to be done.  You could never guarantee the work would be there tomorrow.  Used a mantra about crops in the field.  I use that to this day.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating becoming a workaholic or anything close.  As a kid, I resented my dad not being around much and missing much of life.  It probably contributed significantly to his demise.  What I am advocating is a single-mindedness of purpose and focus towards significant work events and projects.  That passionate application of purpose and vocation is a powerful force when connected to life balance and understanding of the need for overall health (physical, mental, spiritual and emotional).

Effective and successful leaders in the modern working environment share this singularity of focus and purpose.  They work a project and push things until they are done.  There is no giving up.  There is no calling it a day.  There is the recognition that tomorrow might not bring the same opportunity and that there is a crop in the field.  If you have ever seen the face of someone fire walking, you have seen the face of singular focus and drive to completion.

This focus and passionate pursuit can also not be sustained indefinitely.  Rest, fun, personal balance, attention to learning, self-examination and soul restoring activities must also be mixed in but effective leaders will do so gracefully and without much thought.  It is a part of their routine and their being as a leader.

To create higher levels of the Git Er Done type of focus and work ethic, consider:

1. Removing, eliminating and delegating routine tasks that don’t mean much to the overall success of the organization.
   Challenge your own commitment level to the mission, vision and values of the organization.
2. Reconcile how your project or other work products contribute to your legacy as a leader or team member.
3. Build systems of task shifting (30 minute changeovers) to insure freshness and passion renewal.
4. Watch your work, life, emotional, spiritual, physical and mental balance. Listen to your mind, body and heart for signals that you need to walk away for a bit.

Today I have the great luxury of celebrating one of our own.

Katie Meeks is a rule breaker.  Not even sure she acknowledges that rules exist.  Not the kind of rule breaker that will end up in front of a judge for bad driving but the kind that challenges paradigms and boundaries associated with how work is done and how value is created.

She works outside.  Sometimes in a chair.  Many times in a hammock.  Regularly takes play breaks with her kids.  Pets her dog when there is a bit of down time.  Her office space looks a bit more like a personal retreat than a traditional office.  Katie’s hours are when she wakes to when she is done for the night.

But beyond the methods, there is extreme value.  Innovation and creativity is at an off-the-charts level.  Productivity is high.  Quality of work rocks.  And all for the singular purpose of inspiring others and helping other people learn and grow.  It is truly a scene of a rebel with a cause.  A very good cause.

The point of this is not to celebrate Katie but to point out that the bounds of traditional working policies and practices don’t always fit.  In fact, they rarely fit.  The best leaders are those that will consistently challenge policies for the benefit of people.  When they do that, engagement, production, quality, service and overall performance soar.  Without it, it will be the same old and tired performance of yesterday.

For further proof, take a serious look at the organizations that embrace this philosophy.  Zappos is a big rule breaker.  They have corporately challenged every traditional paradigm about working policies and it has paid off in spectacular fashion.  Google is the same way.  Nordstrom’s was the pioneer in this area by allowing and encouraging policy breaking when a customer would benefit.

As a leader you can stir some of your inner rebel by:

1. Ask about your organization’s policies that don’t make much sense or provide any benefit to people. Propose substitutes and changes.
2. Use your discretion in policy enforcement to help others achieve flexibility and higher levels of satisfaction.
3. Throw away the damn policy manual (or delete it from the shared drive/welcome to 2015) and trust your very talented people to do the right thing.

One of our very first customers back in the mid-1990’s was Cashman Cadillac.

A family owned luxury automobile dealer that was run by Tim Cashman.  He ran a tight ship and one that was highly engaged before engaged was a thing.  They were successful and highly respected in the community and by customers.

But Tim had a dream and a vision.  He wanted to have the world’s largest Harley Davidson dealer that would become a destination of sorts.  Motorcycles, clothing, accessories, repair and evening dining.  From Cadillacs to Harleys.  Do you suppose people gave him a little grief about his vision?

Tim converted his vision to action.  Not overnight and not alone and not without input and assistance from others.  He took on a partner in the venture.  He ceded control of the Cadillac operations to a trusted leader.  He listened.  He learned about the Harley product.

That pre-work then turned into buying land, building a magnificent building, partnering with the manufacturer, hiring team members with shared vision and eventually opening his visionary location.

Effective leaders like Tim are able to not only have a vision but to turn it into action and result.  Perhaps not perfect and not as quickly as desired but the action and the end result came and came spectacularly.

I would make the case, to some people chagrin, that visions are cheap.  The real value comes when input is sought, planning occurs and the visions become real.

As a leader, you can turn your visions into reality by:

1.  Documenting what you see and sense. This is a huge reason many visions never see fruition.  Write down, in any form, what you want to do.
2. Begin slowly to bring others into the vision. Seek input, ideas and guidance from a small circle of trusted people.
3. Note the largest milestones and actions. Avoid getting into the weeds and minutiae as those will change a hundred times over.  There is time to deal with the details and now is not it.

In 1990, I moved my family from Phoenix to Las Vegas to work for Kenny Guinn at PriMerit Bank.  Dr. Guinn had a great reputation as a good man and a good leader.  I didn’t really know how great of a leader until much later.

We both left the bank after just a few years.  It was the run and shoot offense of mergers and we were one of hundreds consumed by a megabank.  Dr. Guinn went on to run a major utility, lead UNLV as their president, serve as interim school district superintendent and serve two terms as governor of the State of Nevada.  I started a small training company.

Somewhere near the end of his second term as governor, I ran into him in the Reno airport.  I was waiting for a flight to depart and he had just arrived.

He remembered me.  Called me Timmy.  One of just a couple of people allowed that latitude.  We talked for over thirty minutes.  He asked about my boys.  Said he had read about my business.  He made me feel like the most important thing he had going on for that half hour.

I would bet you have had a similar experience with someone.  That rare leader that makes it all about you and not about them.  It’s not that they don’t speak.  They respond but they also redirect the subject to you.  To them, you feeling important is how they feel important.

As a leadership characteristic, nothing could be more engaging.  It generates a deeply rooted personal loyalty that cannot be measured or valued.  People remember those moments when you made it about them and their view of you skyrockets.

Can any leader make someone else feel important?

Absolutely and you should and here is how:

1.  Ask about others.
2. Remember important details about your team members.
3. Don’t spend a lot of time talking about yourself.
4. If it is important to them, make it important to you.

You have seen it, probably dozens of times, if not more.

The leadership “it” factor.  Some leaders just have “it”, use “it” and we can’t really ever describe what “it” is or how to describe “it”.

This set of articles will delve into ten traits that great leaders display that set them apart from other leaders.  It is a set of skills, characteristics and competencies that go beyond the standard learnings and move into a symbiosis of leadership, heart and soul.

The leaders that are cited and mentioned are real people with great success stories.  None of them are perfect but each project and use a set of characteristics that make them exceptional and successful.  They also are very genuine and caring people that do not use these skills because someone told them to.  They use them because they are the right thing to do and they fit each of them perfectly.

So we get to look at some successful leaders and their ways to success who we can’t possibly relate to or emulate?  No, each of the characteristics are easily modeled and can be added to anyone’s leadership tool kit.  These people are famous generals, athletes or rap stars.  They started out just like me and you and used these skills to build their success.

First out of the gate, we will examine making people feel important, encouraging and praising others and converting vision to action.  From there, valuing people, persistence, mentoring others and taking care of themselves will be center stage.

Please take a look at each of these characteristics and see how you can begin to add them to your leadership skill set.  Each of them works and works well.  It will be up to you to start working them into your already solid set of skills.

10 Things Effective Leaders Do Differently:

1. Make People Feel Important
2. Convert Vision to Action
3. Value People Above Policies
4. Work Until Its Done
5. Mentor and Grow Others
6. Take Care of Themselves
7. Encourage, Praise and Appreciate
8. Talk Not Write
9. Continue to Learn
10. Challenge Themselves and Others

Thank you.

Simple words.  Powerful words.

There may well be no more important words ever uttered to our customers than thank you.  When we are able to deliver a sincere thank you to our customers we are telling them that we truly want their business.  We are acknowledging their role as the most important facet of our operation and the reason that we exist.  At the absolute base level, we are thanking them for our paychecks.

Science will also conclude that the thank you delivered in the customer interaction also provides a subtle, non-spoken message.  In addition to the appreciation, the customer also translates the thank you message to include please come again.  They were appreciated and invited back with two simple words.

One of the most frustrating interactions that is seen by many people during the course of the day involves the local convenience store.  You pay for your Big Gulp, Mentos and Twinkie and who usually says thank you?  If you answered anything but the convenience store clerk, isn’t there something wrong with that?  Ultimately, the salary of that store clerk and the economic viability of the entire operation is dependent on your transaction and many just like it.

This brings us to the first absolute rule associated with thank you.  If the customer says it first, you have failed.  If you say it first and the customer echoes it back in a variety of ways, that is terrific.  But above all else, the customer must hear it from your mouth first.

Speaking thank you can have moments of challenge.  If a customer has been especially prickly, demanding or down right rude, saying thank you often sticks in our wind pipes somewhere.  When a customer calls to complain, thank you is the farthest thing from many of our minds.

When you critically analyze these types of customer interactions, aren’t these the types of customers that need to hear appreciation the most?  Are these the customers, that if not returned to happy and satisfied status, can ruin your reputation and talk horribly about your business?  One other element to consider is the probability that a simple thank you can start a dissatisfied customer on the road to repair.

The second absolute associated with appreciation and thank you is to close each customer interaction with those words.  Whether a typical transaction or a complaining customer, thank you should always be our closing words.  If you struggle with this application, remember that it is not about you, it is about our customers and how they feel and not how comfortable you feel.  Take a look at your written correspondence and email with customers.  How many of those are closed with appreciation statements?

The final absolute of appreciation is a little harder to get your hands around.  It is about how thank you and appreciation statements are delivered.  It is about being sincere and genuine.  A thank you delivered in a mechanical, scripted or sarcastic manner has no value.  Appreciation that is your own words, your own genuine feelings, will be absolutely invaluable.

For reading this article, thank you.

Commitment is a powerful driver of success in business and in life.  Those people that are more than casual participants, the ones truly locked in and committed to the cause, will be much more successful and much more valued in the working environment.

The hair-pulling key is how to get team members or anyone else for that matter, committed to something.

The answer is you can’t.  You can’t buy commitment.  You can’t threaten commitment or else and you can’t incent anyone to be committed either (for the record, splashy animated MS PowerPoint presentations won’t get you much in the way of commitment).

This leadership challenge sounds daunting but you must create an environment where commitment can be nurtured and you must recruit team members that have a high propensity for commitment.

The Environment Piece

Successful leaders will always connect commitment with a team member’s desire to be there.  Commitment, engagement and satisfaction are strongly connected.  Engaged team members are more likely to demonstrate a situational commitment to a mission, idea or project.  Conversely, disengaged team members will demonstrate a significant lack of commitment.  You must create a highly engaged environment with a satisfied team to achieve commitment.

Another driver of commitment will be input and voice.  Does the team member believe that their ideas are valued and encouraged.  Nothing will jump –start commitment in a team member when his or her idea is valued and supported.  An additional angle of this piece is if there is negotiation room from a team member’s needs and position and the position and needs of the organization.  This level of input and voice will dramatically raise commitment.

The Nurturing Component

Commitment does not happen like a revival tent meeting.  There are no instant conversions and huge “I’m committed” come to the altar moments.

Rather commitment grows (and sadly wanes) over time.  As the environment continues to support team member needs, voice and provides high levels of engagement, commitment will grow.  Leaders recognize that commitment needs room to grow and provides hefty doses of praise and encouragement to help this process.  Those same leaders also intervene when commitment seems to waiver or when clouds appear on the horizon.

Finding the Potential for Commitment

The last piece of the commitment puzzle is finding those team members where the potential for commitment is highest.

Here is the first clue; if they are more interested in what they will be making or their days off, you might want to consider someone else.

The one key for finding commitment is to discover mission and vision congruence.  What that means is does the potential candidate get excited about what you do, how you do it and where the organization is going?  If so, the potential for their commitment will be high.  Without that excitement about your mission and direction, you will struggle obtaining commitment from that potential team member.  Quite simply, do they want to be with you and by your side or is it just a job?

Team member commitment remains elusive in many working environment but those organizations and individual leaders who have discovered how to unlock it are reaping the rewards of those efforts and will ultimately be labeled as successful.