Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

vision

How to Instantly Influence Others and Make a Difference

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How to Instantly Influence Others and Make a Difference
Image Credit: Shutterstock

“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
Image Credit: Shutterstock

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?

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?

3 Reasons Your SWOT Analysis Won’t Work

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Previously, I shared a 5-step power tool to help you and other executives finish your year strong. If you didn’t have a chance to see it, click here.

In the article, I mentioned in step 3 that you would want to do a “quick analysis of priorities and projects.” When most executives see this, they immediately think of going through what we call a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).

In the world of business, SWOT analysis taught us a lot. But over time, those of us who lead and support leadership in their strategic planning process have recognized that this exercise may do more harm than good.

In fact, there are 3 main reasons why SWOT analysis can actually be counter-productive, and hold your enterprise back from reaching its full potential.

1. You lead with the analysis instead of leading with vision.

Beginning with looking back keeps us from effectively looking forward.

Leading with such an analysis roots the planning in today – reactive mode instead of proactive mode. Instead, if you start by reverse-engineering from your desired future by beginning with the end in mind, then you will step out of current perceptions and into the “what’s possible.”

Stepping into vision first will allow you to leave preconceptions and biases more easily behind, making the mental space for more creativity and innovation.

2. You focus on the weaknesses instead of the opportunities.

This, too, is rooted in past principles of leading by focusing on fixing what’s wrong. Language is powerful, and the very word “weakness” intimates that you must get better, improve, repair.

Instead of locking you and your strategic planning team into that kind of Titanic mindset, begin by reviewing your strengths. Remember first what you do well and the unique value you bring to the marketplace.

In addition, consider that what some call “weakness” may actually be reworded as a partnership opportunity. By reframing the term, we actually reframe the thinking of those involved in the process to more positive possibilities to explore.

3. You put the analysis results on the shelf.

Many enterprises don’t do anything with the information from the analysis they have performed. It sits on a shelf for a while, and then someone suggests doing one again, because the marketplace has changed. And these days, that could be a matter of months.

An unused analysis can be because there was no accountability determined with next steps, or leadership didn’t really have a sound strategic planning process that helped to move the team forward to take action. Or it may be for other reasons. But all limiting scenarios can be overcome with the right process, if you are committed.

The SWOT analysis was a first good beta for answering the question, “How are we doing?”

But there’s a better way to ask…well, better questions. I’ll be sharing that with you in my next article.

Meanwhile, whether you are about to undertake a strategic planning process, or you simply want to do a “spot check” with your team to see how well you are doing, remember to make the experience a motivating and enjoyable one – and then do something with it!