Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

Patti Cotton

How to Instantly Influence Others and Make a Difference

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How to Instantly Influence Others and Make a Difference
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“Be the change you want to see in the world.” ~ Gandhi

Recently, I worked with a group of new managers to help them make change at their company. Eager to learn and grow, people of all ages and backgrounds filled the room.

It was heartwarming to be with them and witness lot of candor, laughter, and strengthening bonds as they shared. These people were committed.

Here is one thing I never heard: a disparaging remark. I didn’t hear about a lack of resources or time. I never heard things like, “Oh, those Millennials/Boomers/Leadership/Others – I don’t know how to work with them.”

What I heard, instead, was a desire to make change. “How can I be at my very best? How can I grow in my leadership so I can make a bigger difference?”

Now, that’s a room full of people that anyone would be privileged to work with!

Here are the three questions I asked them in return. I shared that the answers to these questions are what would make or break their ability to influence and make a difference.

How are you doing in these three areas?

  1. Are you walking your talk?

Are there places in your leadership where you are preaching, but not practicing?

Maybe you are asking others to go the extra mile, produce more without overtime pay, take better care of themselves, produce top quality work on time – fill in the blank!

But you yourself secretly lack being able to meet success in that area. This is not uncommon – the very thing we want to see in ourselves is what we ask others to do well. If this is you, you are responsible for course-correcting this so that you are the change you want to see.

  1. Are you modeling to others by taking the first step?

Are you great at delegating work to others, but not as good at jumping in to roll up your own sleeves in times of stress?

I remember delegating very well during a huge event, and walking around at a tense moment to see how things were progressing. I looked across the room to see the company president unloading boxes with one of my reports. That was a humbling moment that shifted my understanding of true leadership.

  1. Are you taking ownership of how you contribute?

When was the last time you sat down with a colleague or report and asked the question, “How am I doing?”

This should be a regular conversation. “What can I do more of or less of, in order to do a better job of working with you?”

My clients report that this conversation has brought forward valuable information they might never have uncovered otherwise. “It has shifted the way I am able to work with others,” said one business owner. “We are a team now – not just a group of people in a room.” That’s a change!

As you look at these three areas, which one speaks most to you? What is the one shift you are committing to make so that you can influence others to a larger extent and make a greater difference?

How to Fall In Love with Metrics

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How to Fall In Love with Metrics
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I hear a lot of people talk about metrics and bench-marking as though this is beneath them.

“I’m a big picture person,” I hear people say. “I like to set vision and leave it to others to get into the weeds.”

That’s a mistake.

If you keep your eyes to the horizon without having the right dashboard with the right metrics to help you monitor your progress, you may get lost in the big picture.

My grandfather got lost like that because he didn’t like paying attention to details. And it almost killed him.

Grandpa was an enterprising young man. His father was an alcoholic and didn’t treat the family well. Because of this, Grandpa wound up caring for his siblings and blind mother at an early age. With only a third-grade education, his mind was so keen that he went on to invent some amazing things that you might recognize today (another story!).

But Grandpa always flew by the seat of his pants.

Now, this served him well as he grew up to build two multi-million dollar businesses in the 1920’s and 1930’s. But if you have read my column before, you may know that he also lost these two businesses because he found it easy to build a business and run it for awhile, but he couldn’t keep one going in the long run. And this was because he didn’t like to pay attention to details.

The losses were devastating.

After these severe losses, my grandmother then founded and grew a third business with Grandpa. This third business helped them to become very successful, and it not only kept the family afloat, but a lot of other young people had jobs and were able to attend school during the Great Depression because of the Cotton family business.

This success was because Grandma did pay attention to details, and partnering with Grandpa in this way worked well.

However, the story I want to share with you today is an earlier time before Grandpa learned his lesson – when he almost lost his life because he was set on the big picture and didn’t pay attention.

On the way to a huge goal, he neglected to monitor his progress to make sure he was on target to get there.

At the time this occurred, my father was 15 years old, and had just gotten his pilot’s license. Not to be outdone, Grandpa also took flying lessons. One day, Grandpa got into the two-seater and took off for a local town. It was a beautiful day. Big white puffy clouds and deep blue sky. He noticed a particularly large cloud and decided to play through it – emerging from this to enter such vast blue space can be exhilarating. And it was. He did it again with the next cloud. And the next.

After a few more of these and a lovely morning up in the air, he came out of one huge puff of white and suddenly noticed that he was over the ocean.

“I didn’t head for the ocean,” he thought. “Where am I?!” It was then that he looked down – to discover that he was almost out of fuel. He had traveled about an hour into the middle of nowhere (and over a body of water), and knew he would go down quickly if he didn’t find a safe place to land.

Banking steeply as he turned, he prayed that he could make it to some piece of land. What if he landed where no one could find him? What if he crashed? What if…

A few moments later, he miraculously made it back over land and spotted a small town with fields around it. Heading for the fields, he landed just in time before the final sputter of the engine.

Grandpa was shaken. He could have been swimming with fishes if he had continued to allow distraction to rule. And now, he didn’t even know where he was, or how he would get back home. And then, there was the question of the plane that wasn’t his. And so many other thoughts.

All because he hadn’t been monitoring the dashboard.

If he had, he would have seen whether he was on target. He would have been checking his magnetic direction indicator, which is a kind of compass, to make sure he was on course. He would have been watching the altimeter to see how high he was, and his airspeed indicator, so that he could gauge the speed at which he was covering ground.

In short, if Grandpa had been monitoring the dashboard as he enjoyed the view (because you can do both!), he would have known he was veering off course before he got lost. And he certainly would have seen the gas gauge.

A narrow escape and a big lesson.

Leading is like that. Think about it – a pilot has a big- picture view as he or she sits in the cockpit, but is surrounded by the dashboard with all the metrics, as well. The setup is so that the pilot can monitor while surveying the horizon.

The implication is rather obvious – someone leading needs to do both to arrive at the intended destination safely and well.

What does your dashboard look like in order for you to know you are on track?

How to Quit Holding Your Own Company Back

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How to Quit Holding Your Own Company Back
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Are you holding your own company back?

It’s easy to blame a stagnant or waning business on external factors, but one thing is sure: a CEO’s ability to flex with changing conditions isn’t enough.

It is important to get out ahead of the pack and remain in front. How do you do this?

First, it’s necessary to admit that things that affect your business change daily. They always have, and they always will. Disruptive technologies, a fluctuating economy, and many other factors that affect customer demand and the ability to do business surface constantly. This is not new – it’s simply uncomfortable.

The only variable is you, the CEO. Because even though the world witnesses many failed businesses, there are many others that survive and thrive.

How can you be sure you are not holding your own company back? That is a book in itself.

Here are the top three reasons CEO’s keep their businesses from flourishing, and how you can get out of your company’s way.

1. Step outside limiting biases.

Are you operating your company in the same way with the same information and taking the same approach to your business that you did just a handful of years ago? These days, companies staying in front are asking what needs to shift and change, and they do a spot-check assessment every six to nine months.

This one thing can change the entire trajectory of a business’s lifespan. If you are operating off a strategic plan that is more than 18 months old, you’re in trouble. It is time to re-evaluate. You may be meeting your objectives, but these objectives and their strategies may already be second-best in a changing marketplace. If your strategic plan isn’t being translated into correlating action, it is…

Time to review.

2. Stop limping along with that under-performing employee.

Do you have an under-performing employee who has been there for decades, but holding back the future? Are you feeling high-jacked because of the perceived loyalty this person carries by their longevity with the company?

This is a tough one, especially for family-owned businesses. If you are on the fence about someone in your own company, ask yourself how this is affecting your other employees and company outcomes. If you think about it, by holding onto this person, you are damaging not only his or her immediate area and the work, but hurting the morale of an entire employee base, the product or service your customers enjoy, and the future of what you are able to do.

Time to reassess.

3. Step ahead of the curve instead of riding with it.

If you think reading the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and trade magazines are feeding you the information you need in order to stay ahead of the competition, think again.

Reading these are great for staying on top of what is currently happening, but taking in reported information that has already occurred will not help you to develop the foresight you need in order to get out in front.

Are you ready to flex your visionary skills? Change the conversations you are having with other business owners. You may still ask the question, “What are you seeing and what are you doing about it?”

But you need to push farther in the discussion. Questions like, “What do you think might happen because of it?” are vital to stretching your ability to survey the horizon. And taking time to play this out is important.

A follow-up question is, “If we couldn’t deliver services ‘this way,’ how might delivery look to reach the end consumer?”

Time to stretch.

How might you be holding your own company back?

Three Reasons to Stop Focusing on Your Strengths and Weaknesses

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Three Reasons to Stop Focusing on Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Are you focusing too much on your weaknesses – or just as bad, are you focusing too much on your strengths?

You can actually arrest your own leadership development by doing so.

Here’s why:

Before the rising of the popular strengths-based coaching approach, workplace mentoring and coaching focused on helping its workforce to strengthen identified weaknesses. But we discovered after some time that the results were poor. In fact, employees were showing negative outcomes.

Focusing on weaknesses in leadership development can result in the following:

  • It can give a false sense of ineptitude and negative self-image. By giving weaknesses too much attention, the executive in question may begin to feel inept. Little discussion is made about what is going well, and so a negative self-image may begin to form, diminishing confidence.
  • By neglecting to bring strengths into the process, an imbalanced approach to getting the work done may actually result in an even poorer performance.
  • The weakness in question needs to be relative to the role the executive plays. Is the weakness in question hindering performance or hampering company goals? Or is it simply a result of a list that has no relevance to the job?

Face it – it’s more fun to focus on strengths! But there’s a drawback to swinging over to focusing on strengths, as well.

Focusing on strengths in leadership development can result in the following:

  • It can give the executive a false sense of competence, paving the way to neglect what might be hampering his or her best work.
  • By neglecting to address what is not working, focusing on strengths can give just as imbalanced an approach as focusing on weaknesses. In fact, focusing too much on developing a strength can actually render that strength a weakness. For example, if an executive has great ambition, developing that to the point of exaggeration can actually send wrong messages and behaviors and derail a career.
  • The strength in question needs to be relative to the role an executive plays, or it doesn’t matter how special that strength is! Is the strength key to performance? Is it aligned with company goals?

A balanced approach to your personal and professional leadership development with methodologies that are evidence-based – proven to work – is the first step.

If you are working on this to improve your performance and your career trajectory, make sure that what you are doing is actually relevant and supportive of where you are – and where you want to go!

Why Your Values Are Not Working for You

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Why Your Values Are Not Working for You

You are a purpose-driven professional. And you have a big vision.

But life and work don’t feel congruent. In fact, things are hard.

Is being purpose-driven overrated?

That depends.

You may not know how to use your values to guide your purpose. Here are three reasons why this might be happening:

1. You don’t know your values.

You have set your vision and your “why,” but you haven’t identified your core values – the GPS by which you will guide your purpose. Without this, your efforts can become misaligned. If you haven’t done this yet, click here for the exercise I use with my private clients.

2. Your values are in conflict with each other, and you don’t know how to reconcile this.

When values conflict, this means your priorities are competing with each other. This means sitting down and writing out what is important to you, and making some tough decisions. As they say, you can have it all – just not all at once.

3. You aren’t using your values to fuel your purpose.

You’ve gotten busy, and let distractions take over. You’ve neglected to check in regularly on all areas of your life to see if your priorities align with your values. Don’t feel guilty – get going. Start today.

Where in your life do you need to realign? What is your first step?