Following up on my promise from the last issue, this month I am skimming a bit further below the surface of ways to work smarter.

1. Don’t just say that you are going to think and act strategically, actually schedule time for it, just as you would a commitment to someone else.

2. Replace habits that are no longer serving you well. Why not set an appointment to check your email at 10am, rather first thing in the morning when it can distracting you from your day before it even gets started?

3. Step back from the tasks at hand and identify the process that it is part of. These seemingly spontaneous tasks that arrive are probably highly predictable if you look over the walls to see what is triggering them.

4. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity when everything will be just right. Instead, get started and improve it from there.

5. Remember my saying “Don’t fire Bob, or by a tool. Instead, begin by improving the process.” Anything else is just treating the symptoms.

6. Motivate others by making measurable progress achievable. Punishing anything less than perfection demotivates and causes people to shut down.

7. Focus strategically on value and outcomes, not tasks and inputs.

8. Don’t make investment decisions on behalf of the customer. Instead, provide them with options.

9. Recognize that your true value is not in the tasks that you perform, but in the results that you achieve.


…And another thing
Anyone can cut your grass or clean your house, but only you can bring your unique value to the people that care about you. Make sure you target results that are sufficiently high value.

Sometimes potential clients meet me and tell me they want me to deliver a report. I ask them how thick? You can buy 500 pages from business depot for just a few bucks, and that is double sided. All you need to do is apply a staple.

They quickly realize that they don’t need a report. What they usually need is help making a decision or influencing others.

What are you doing to maximize your value? 

© Wayne McKinnon 2012. All rights reserved.

Alan Weiss interviews Wayne McKinnon in this third book in the new Million Dollar series by Alan Weiss. The book is published by McGraw-Hill and endorsed by the renowned uber-coach Marshall Goldsmith

MillionDollarCoaching

Alan Weiss: What is the most difficult aspect of coaching executives and senior people?

Wayne McKinnon: Ironically, or perhaps as expected, the people that can benefit the most from coaching are also the ones who make the least time for it or treat it as a quick hit that will have lasting results without taking the time to deal with their thoughts. These people tend to be more difficult to coach.

They move from meeting to meeting without leaving time in their schedule to contemplate what is going on around them, their role in the organization and the input they have received. This should not be confused with the type of person who has a quick mind, is extremely decisive, makes consistently good decisions and yet still values input from others. This second type of person consumes very little of the coaches time but seems to derive the greatest benefit.

The first type of person needs to separate the activities that require their actions or simply their presence, from those activities where their judgment and influence is really needed and is highly valuable. Almost anyone in the organization should be capable of word-smithing, grammar checking and ensuring meetings run and finish on time. Ensuring that the right things are being discussed, written about, implemented, delivered or reported on requires someone with the greater perspective and clear judgment of the senior person.

Being honest with themselves as well as with the coach about why they are not making progress can also be a challenge that is often masked by the “I have been too busy” response. If change is required and the person wants to avoid that change, keeping busy in meetings and tasks that could easily be delegated to staff seems to be a common diversionary tactic.

Sometimes the way the person is measured contributes to this behavior. The person they report to delegate to them tasks that they in turn should delegate, but the language used or the measures in place may appear to say, “this task must be done by you.” In my experience this type of misinterpretation represents a small but important subset of people. They tend to take requests and commands too literally and fail to translate it into the true intent, which goes more like “ here is a tasks I am trusting you to have your team take care of.”

Often the person simply does not have the personal or team capacity to do everything they are currently trying to do, either because they have not been decisive and strategic enough to develop the team; the fortitude to focus on the best things to do versus all the things they can try to do; or the willingness to push back when they are clear on what they can and cannot do and something has to give. This is the paradox of coaching executives who can benefit the most from coaching yet tend to be difficult to coach to the level befitting an executive.
 

Alan Weiss has coached over 2,000 executives and entrepreneurs all over the world. 

• The focus should be on the service, and the value that it provides, not the system or tools, nor the cost.

• Costs should be considered as part of calculating ROI, but really have no bearing on value. (Sometimes cost exceeds value resulting in a negative ROI which is not good, and a warning that you should not proceed, and some services are extremely cheap, but provide little or no value).

• Cost should include fixed + variable as well as one time + ongoing.

• You should also consider how quickly the benefits will be realized.

• Defining the market means looking at who is and is not your type of customer, as well as where your potential value sits in terms of commodity vs. strategic, or low value vs. high.

• Value is not always strictly monetary, and may be tangible as well as intangible. (Increasing revenues while also keeping you out of jail for example).

Every winter a group of coyotes make their way along the river, and at first glance this looked like their footprints but it wasn’t, but what was it?

Perhaps it was some prehistoric life form climbing out of the primordial ooze, something forced to adapt to its environment that has suddenly changed. If I had only arrived a few minutes earlier would I have witnessed a change so dramatic that it defies the laws of natural evolution as hypothesized by paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould?

Gould postulated that while most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, it is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. Just as I have observed in my own work with corporations, real change is a result of rapid bursts of change at irregular (punctuated) intervals. Trusting natural evolution to create necessary change can take forever. Further, if change does begin, it is not unusual for those creatures who have not changed, to reject it, and squash it before it gains a foothold in the environment, thus maintaining the status quo. In corporate environments that change has to be nurtured, supported and in many cases, valiantly protected.

As for my back yard, the question remains: What was the sudden change that caused this creature to leave evidence of its own rapid evolution?
 

You can decide for yourself based on the evidence that I have provided, however, a better question that you "otter" consider is what will your own evolution look like, and what direction will it take you?

The start of a new year is a good time to start new habits.

How many times have you heard the phrase "work smarter not harder?" How many people really know what smarter looks like? I believe the desire is there, but many people either don’t know how to improve in ways specific enough to their situation, or lack the time to figure it out.

Here are some suggestions to help you get started:

1. Invest the very first part of your day in yourself.
Concentrate on improvements that will make your days more satisfying while benefitting both you and your employer. If you are a manager, take this time for some strategic planning. If you are staff, use this time to strategically streamline the way you do things, or look for the cause of those fires you have to keep putting out.

2. Trim back the busy work. People don’t need meetings or reports; what they need are the results meetings provide. Many meetings provide no results at all. Do you really need a report, or do you need to make an informed decision?

3. Create forms and templates for repeat activities. Stop reinventing the wheel.

4. If you do have to chair a meeting or even attend one, arrive with an agenda and stick to the topic rather than drifting in another direction. The task of completing a meeting is not valuable. Producing or improving business results is. Stop leaving the conversations in the room.

This list just skims the surface. Next issue will provide additional techniques for working even smarter.

What are you doing to move to work of higher value?

© Wayne McKinnon 2012. All rights reserved.

In my opinion, any discussion of servers or smartphones is a prime example of low value thinking. The Blackberry handsets or the servers do not represent the higher value. The value exists within the services that those technology components support.

While RIM’s competitors relegate the blackberry device to status of a commodity item as far as smart phones go, this ignores the true value that RIM provides. Unlike the Google Android, or the Apple IPhone that simply allow cel phone users to make calls and send email, RIM also provides a secure message transfer service, enabled by its handsets, BES servers and subscriber services.

In my opinion, RIM should be trumpeting the utility of their secure messaging service, rather than focusing on promoting products (even servers) that are being viewed as commodity items. After all, many corporate clients buy blackberries, BES servers, and Blackberry service subscriptions for this specific reason, rather than relying on internet email which was never designed to be secure, or even provide authentication that the sender is who they say they are.
 

Kingston, located on Lake Ontario where it meets the mighty Saint Laurence River, was the capital of Canada at the time. The route from By-Town (now Ottawa) was constructed as a supply route to Kingston. (The route was identified as a good idea during the war of 1812 between Canada and the United States).

Cargo could travel from Montreal, up the Ottawa River, down the canal systems of lakes and rivers, and in to Kingston. This was to be a much safer route than taking the Saint Lawrence River, with American shooting at the steam vessels during the war.

The Canal system was not finished (in fact, not even begun) until after the war.

Our stretch of river has been the home of a water ski club since the 1970s or earlier. It was a perfect place to move to and raise our kids.

This year we found out that our enjoyment of the waterway is threatened. Parks Canada is proposing a no-wake zone for our stretch of the river. No more skiing off of our dock.

The majority of the homeowners that I have spoken to in this area have commented that they enjoy seeing the boats and kids enjoying themselves on the river. There are also a few who do not. This issue has pitted the swimmers, the canoers, the boaters the kayakers and the fishermen against each other. People who have never been in a kayak complain that the boats are disturbing the kayakers. We have canoed and kayaked here for years. In a canoe boat waves are a nuisance. In a kayak the waves are a non-issue.

Kids tubing

There is a lot of mis-information around this issue, and my fear is that we will see another law in place as yet another example of a knee jerk reaction to a perceived situation that could be resolved other ways. There are already laws. There is also common sense that could be applied.

While many boaters are responsible and alert, a simple swim buoy anchored by a home owner at a reasonable distance from shore is a simple way to protect swimmers from the few careless boaters, just like swim areas have been using for years.

People also complain about big off shore style race boats. In my experience, they come by once a year, usually around Canada Day on their way back from the down town festivities. Some find this troublesome, while others find this once a year event exiting.

One of my roles in my consulting business is to advise senior management on how to assess risk. Let's be clear, this is a separate discussion from personal likes and dislikes.

The two primary factors in risk management are likelihood and impact.

Risk Quadrants

So what can be done?

The two primary options for dealing with risk are not just elimination, but also simply risk reduction. In other words reducing the likelihood or the impact to an acceptable level. Too many times total elimination is seen as the only way, and one person’s personal preference is often regarded as more important than tolerance for each other.

As for the tools, enforcement is often seen as the only way, when awareness could be used as a tool to provide positive results.

One example

In order to reduce the risk of a canoe being disturbed by a boat, here are some potential ways of mitigating that risk:

Options

• Eliminate the boats
• Eliminate the canoes
• Force people with green canoes to paint them safety orange for better visibility
• Educate the boaters and the people with canoes of existing regulations, common sense and courtesy 

This is just one example, but the same approach can be applied to any issue, weather those issues are on the river, the shop floor, or the executive suite.

Kids getting along and working together

It is performed by Laura Baron, the wife of my good friend Seth Kahn. (BTW, Seth and Laura became new parents this year, congratulations!)

LauraBaronMusic.com

Apple has embodied the philosophy of "instantly productive" in their products, designed with their intuitive interfaces.

Siemens also embraced this almost 15 years ago by designing their new employee process in such a way that from The H.R. meeting, to the employee’s desk, each step triggered the next. By the time the employee sat down to work, their employment records were filed, the payroll tracking had begun, their building pass was issued and their network and email accounts had been provisioned.

That’s what I mean by instantly productive!

What are you doing to contribute to the removal of productivity roadblocks in your organization?

learning session

I saw this sign on a recent trip to the Eaton shopping centre in Toronto.

Behind me, the Apple store was overflowing with Iphone enthusiasts who didn’t feel the need for any sort of training.