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In this blog post, I’m going to reveal the 3 leadership secrets of a high performing company. Have you ever wondered why some leaders have all the luck? You know the one that always gets the best clients, somehow attracts the best employees, and are in the media for their overall exceptionality. 

The 1st leadership secret of a high performing company is having a shared purpose and shared goals

So what does that mean?

Purpose is the reason for your being in business. 

What is the overarching purpose your organization fulfills. Why are you in business?

Simon Sinek talked about this topic in his famous Ted Talk back in 2009 and has since written several spinoff books about it. I’ll link to the video below. If you haven’t watched it, please do so as soon as you’re done here.

In my years of observing high performing companies and what their leaders do differently, I’ve found this:

The company and its employees have a shared purpose AND goals

These leaders do an incredible job of getting clear on the main purpose and goals of the company and that every single person in the company works towards that goal.

These leaders share this purpose, mission and WHY with their employees.

Consider Starbucks purpose: Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time. If you’ve ever been inside a Starbucks, you can see this in every single thing you encounter in one of their restaurants. From the menu selection, to the baristas, to the layout of the place. 

This doesn’t happen organically. This is systematic effort of the leaders in the company to continuously talk about and instill this purpose and mission in everything. This purpose gives way to a shared goal that every employee is aware of and working towards. 

Consider Southwest’s purpose: Connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. If you’ve flown Southwest, you see this in every interaction with their ground staff to flight staff and everything in between.

So, here are 3 takeaways for you:

• Go watch or rewatch Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk
• Share your purpose with your employees
• Re-examine your business operations (from people processes) to embed that purpose

The 2nd leadership secret of a high performing company is permitting creativity and innovation

Now, creativity might seem like a very subjective term and heaven knows that the subject of innovation has been beaten to death, but hear me out. I’m not here to define creativity and innovation. I am here to tell you how I’ve seen these two things play out in a high performing company. 

One of the easiest and quickest ways to see creativity and innovation in an organization is to have a collective mindset of “CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT”

That’s right, creativity and innovation don’t have to be some fancy, illusive thing that you have to throw millions of dollars and years of time to. Innovation and creativity can simply be seen when there’s a culture of continuous improvement. Let me explain

I’ve coached many, many leaders over the years and so many of them put immense pressure on themselves to solve problems for their people. For example, when an employee gives an update and says that they’re stuck on something, most leaders immediately jump in and give the employee the answer. The employee goes away and executes and things are balanced again.

Here’s why solving problems and giving your employees the answers is the worst thing you can do:

1. You’re not allowing the employee to exercise their creative brains to brainstorm and solve the problem themselves. You’re training them to come to you to get direction when they’re stuck
2. You’re constantly being pulled back into the day to day and not freeing up your time to focus on strategy and the big picture. This leads to your time being wasted on “can I have a minute” type conversations
3. You’re not spending your 1:1 time with your employees on coaching, but on advising. There’s a really good book called the Advice Trap by Michael Stanier that talks about this in greater detail. Btw, it’s free if you have an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription
4. You giving your advice and solutions actually limits the growth of your company because your answers might not actually be the best answers

So what do you do instead?

When employees come to you with questions, put it back to them to come back to you with a solution. Then help them make decisions in a logical way by tying the solution back to your shared goals and objectives

This helps them:

• get creative with their problem solving
• Find innovative solutions that perhaps even you might not have thought of
• Have an eye to continuously improving the business

The 3rd leadership secret is fostering a sense of collaboration and cooperation on your team

The most high performing companies’ leaders create a culture of cooperation among their teams. Because of their shared goals, everyone is on the same page and it becomes easy for teams to work together to solve problems and come up with innovative ways of doing business.

Here are some tips for fostering collaboration and cooperation in your company:

• Ask them to come up with solutions that involve others in the company. Instead of senior leadership working together to solve problems, put the onus on employees to pull together and find solutions
• Position yourself as the last point of contact when coming up with a solution or end result for a project. The team should come to you with a singular recommendation and not involve you in discussing or brainstorming solutions. When you are involved in brainstorming solutions, it should only be for high level, strategic initiatives.
• Compensate employees for working together as a team. When you compensate people for their own performance and goals only, there’s a “me first” mentality. When you compensate them for team results, people work together

Ok, question time… drop a comment and tell me what you think the difference is between collaboration and cooperation. And let me know if you’d like me to do a blog post about this in the future.

If you’re ready to take your organization to the next level by maximizing the performance and potential of your people, let’s chat.

And be sure to comment below on what your biggest challenge is as you build your high performance culture. I promise to do a blog post just for you.

In this video I talk about how to lead a high performance team and what you as a leader can do to develop a high performance team.

I’ve been speaking with a number of leaders of high performing teams and there are a few innate behaviours that they all demonstrate as a leader. Today I wanted to share those with you.

Give autonomy to lead a high performance team

You’ve hired professionals

Success doesn’t only rest on you, the team contributes to

Coach vs. do to lead a high performance team

New leaders may struggle with this

Coaching is asking questions to uncover the way so the employee can figure things out for themselves

Doing is taking responsibility away from people

Allow mistakes on a high performance team

This depends on your industry. If you’re in a highly regulated industry, mistakes can be costly. However, most of us aren’t in super highly regulated industries and so making mistakes should be encouraged. People learn best from mistakes.

Share best practices

What has worked for you and what hasn’t. Share your best practices with your team so they can learn from your experience and from your mistakes.

Share industry best practices or best practices related to their jobs. You can also encourage your team to share things they’ve heard at conferences, webinars, from peers and articles online.

Focus on self improvement

How are you improving as a leader? Share your experience and growth as a leader with your team. It’s useful for them to see and learn from what you have been through and what you continue to struggle with. Being vulnerable with your team will benefit them more than you trying to put on a perfect persona in front of them. 

Do you have a coach? If not, it’s always a good idea to get a coach to help you become a better leader. Plus, it sets an excellent example for your team to know you care about self improvement.

If you want to know how to define the type of high performance team you want, check out my blog post on how to create an aspirational culture. If you found this helpful, please share with your peers and come back next week for another live discussion on culture, strategy and leadership. In the meantime if you’re ready to take another look at your culture, send me an email at info@carasconsulting.com and let’s get on a call.

In today’s video I talk about the 5 ways to communicate your company culture and keep the conversation alive around your company culture. This video is really for any leader, but particularly CEOs and business owners of small and medium sized businesses.

So, picture this. You’ve designed your aspirational culture and things are in motion. You model the behaviour you want to see in your employees and you’re seeing examples of a high performance culture when you do your walkarounds, in meetings and in casual conversations. 

Here’s the hitch and I see this happen so often. The leader comes out with a new initiative: a new strategy, a new plan, a new system they want to implement. Everyone gets onboard, they’re excited, they’re revved up. Things are humming along just great and then….. Life takes over. 

Things start to get busy, you encounter some setbacks and slowly the energy and drive that people had for the new initiative starts to fade. People go back to their old habits and behaviours. And then a year later, you’re in the exact same place and nothing has changed. 

So, needless to say communication has to be at the top of a leader’s to do list.

I’ve talked about this before on my blog posts and in previous videos, but I’ll say it again: There is no such thing as over communicating. Period.

There’s a popular statistic that it takes 7-21 touch points for someone to “buy” a message. That’s a marketing stat but I think it applies to almost everything. When I coach leaders, this stat comes up a lot. If you have children, then you know EXACTLY what I mean. Actually for teenagers it takes closer to 100 repetitions of the same message haha.

But I get the hesitation. After all, we’re dealing with adults in our workplaces, not children. And some leaders believe that if a message is good, that in and of itself should make it stick. Unfortunately, human behaviour and psychology dictate something different. The other thing I hear from leaders is their hesitancy to say the same thing over and over again, sounding like a broken record.

So, in today’s video, I thought I’d outline some of the ways leaders can communicate their vision for the new culture without it seeming tedious or repetitive.

Demonstrate the behaviours that communicate your company culture

I remember one CEO I was working with abhorred disrespect. If he saw it in meetings, he would call the person out on it. He would tell people that he hated it, that there was no room for disrespect and belittling comments in the workplace. 

Yet, in private, he would dress down his people in the most degrading way. He would be sarcastic, dismissive, would interrupt people as they were making a point. 

I had gone in for a cultural assessment at this company and several people told me about this behaviour, but I hadn’t seen it myself. Typically in cultural assessments, I meet with the executive team and at least 50% of the organization. And when more than 25% of that population tells me something I listen. 

So, I asked to observe an executive team meeting which the CEO led. I was invited to present my preliminary findings of the cultural assessment and I asked if I could stay to learn more about the business. The CEO agreed.

I was observing the CEO, but also the rest of the executive team. And the behaviour was exactly what the employees had told me. Like all of it, people talking over each other, debating in an unhealthy way, dismissing each other’s comments. Two of the executives NEVER spoke up. Not once. And I could understand why not. I wouldn’t speak at such a meeting either.

Of course, I had to go back to the CEO and tell him what I’d observed. Long story short, he attempted to justify it, saying his exec team was a safe place and private. After I told him that a significant amount of employees had felt this too, he sat back. 

Leaders, your behaviour matters. You have to walk the talk and you have to demonstrate what good behaviour and good attitudes look like. In this leader’s case, we put an action plan in place to help him stop the damaging behaviour. 

Showcase employees’ behaviour that communicate your company culture

This one is an often overlooked method to communicate culture. 

When you see or hear of an employee demonstrating the behaviour and attitude you want to see, showcase that. And showcase it publicly.

If your current culture is one of every person for themselves type of culture, and an employee goes out of their way to help another employee, showcase that.

If your current culture is one where leaders hoard credit, and a leader highlights the achievements of one of their employees, then broadcast that leader’s behaviour too. It’s important for people to have real, tangible examples of what your new culture looks like.

Now, sometimes employees don’t like to get called out, so that leads me to the next point.

Reward teams collectively

Showcase how teams work well together and when they embody your new cultural behaviours and attitudes. 

If your aspirational culture is to be one of continuous improvement for example, talk about the team that thought about a problem in an innovative way and came up with a cost-saving or time-saving method.

Talk about what you’re doing as an executive team to cut costs, time or unnecessary resources.

Build in the attributes that communicate your company culture into marketing messages

Be mindful of the message you convey in your marketing. Ads should reflect your company culture and that includes the people you have inside your ads.

Get your sales teams onboard

This one is a little controversial, but worth the effort.

Your sales team is the face of your organization. Reflect any culture change or new behaviour expectations right into their compensation plans.

If you want to learn how to define your aspirational culture, check out this video. If you found this helpful, please share with your peers and come back next week for another live discussion on culture, strategy and leadership. In the meantime if you’re ready to embark on this journey, send me a message at info@carasconsulting.com.

Covid-19 is far from over. What started out as a 2-week pause has ended up being a 4-month long struggle for most companies. As the economy starts to reopen, businesses are now faced with a new challenge: how to lead in this new era. Leading post-covid will bring about its own challenges. This blog post will explore how leaders can stay connected with employees in a remote-work environment and how to maintain culture in this new era.

The office, as we know it, has changed. And while it likely won’t stay that way forever, remote working will be here forever. Leaders who are used to gathering their teams physically to hold meetings, now have to adapt to creating teamwork, harmony and maintaining culture while people are at different corners of the city.

Best-selling author, Simon Sinek posted a video a few days ago talking about where he sees the office going. In the video, he mentions managing his own 100% remote team and says it is absolutely possible but takes a lot more time than managing a team that’s physically in the same space. 

In fact, Simon is not alone; there are thousands of companies who operate 100% remote and only get together a couple of times a year in person. The difference between those companies and perhaps your company that was forced to shut its doors after covid hit, is that your employees didn’t sign up for a 100% remote work environment. Staying connected to those employees needs to be a leaders’ significant focus.

 

Challenges of leading post-covid

Before diving into maintaining culture, it’s useful to look at some of the challenges leaders face with managing remote teams. These challenges are universal. If you’re leading post-covid, then you’ve likely experienced at least a few of these.

 

Feeling isolated

Feelings of isolation come from being apart from peers, being unable to talk to others to bounce ideas off them and have casual conversations. Those are personal feelings that leaders are rarely allowed to talk about or even consider. The more senior you are in the organization, the fewer people you have to talk to. That’s normal. When you’re at home, wondering whether you can call Larry on his cell to “just talk” about something, and you start second guessing whether it’s really important to interrupt his day, feeling isolated is natural.

Also, there’s a misconception that introverts are having a great time during this lock down. If you’re an introvert then you know nothing could be farther from the truth. Introverts still crave human connection especially at work.

 

Decreased bonding moments

Bonding moments at work are a funny thing. Laughing over a shared experience, or having a vent session about a project or meeting, or a quick brainstorming session to get an idea are all moments where we connect with our colleagues and team members. When you’re a senior leader, bonding keeps us sane. Without those moments, we feel spent; they’re a requirement for our mental health. When you’re working remotely, those impromptu interactions become rare and you have to make a concerted effort to reach out to people.

 

Missing out on building relationships

I put this in here reluctantly because I don’t necessarily agree with it, however, there is enough written about this that I thought it worth mentioning. Building relationships at work can happen in many different ways, and the phone is still alive and well. What is missing in a remote work environment is those lunches and coffees and drinks after work that we took for granted pre-covid. Building relationships doesn’t come from working on projects together. It comes from learning about the whole person you’re working with, and that knowledge comes from spending time with them outside traditional work settings. 

 

Depowering face-to-face interactions

This is for leaders who placed high stock on facetime and visibility in the office. Yes, I’m talking to you! I know because I was (am?) one of them. And the reason I placed such high value on facetime in the office was because I loved those impromptu conversations with my team. After the conference call ended, as we walked out of the room, those 2-minute sound bites – those are the things I felt created relationships and bonding moments. Now, though, those don’t exist anymore, so they need to be rethought. We (you and I) have to depower face-to-face interactions.

 

Leading post-covid – Keeping the culture alive

Keeping the culture alive is possible the biggest obstacle for senior leaders as they begin leading post-covid. With more people away from the office at any given point in time, and no end in sight for when offices will reopen, it’s easy to focus on the here and now and forget about the business of culture.

Creating and maintaining culture is a concerted effort. If you missed my blog posts from last week where I talked about why and how to define an aspirational culture, check it out. You’ll see that defining an aspirational culture is hard work and takes a lot of thought and reflection. Creating and maintaining that culture becomes even harder.

There are a few things you can do to keep culture alive as you’re leading post-covid.

 

Show vulnerability

In this context, vulnerability means admitting when you don’t have all the answers. We’re leading through a period when no one has the answers. It’s ok to tell your employees that you don’t know what the future holds and that you don’t know whether something is going to work. It’s ok to experiment with new methods, new tactics, and new thoughts. Employees respect leaders who are genuinely truthful about how they’re leading and telling people that you’re trying something new with no expectations of success, is perfectly ok.

 

Communicate your vision more often

Most leaders have some method for conveying their vision. Some use quarterly meetings, some use emails, some use a cascade method of communication. When your teams are spread across multiple locations, it becomes all the more important to communicate your vision. Chances are your ultimate vision and mission hasn’t changed. Your tactics have changed, but your destination is static. 

Now is not the time to hold back on communicating that vision. When you reiterate your vision (and there’s no such thing as over communicating), people feel a sense of connectedness. They know they’re all working together for the same common purpose and goal. So, if you only had quarterly meetings, send out emails too. If you only sent emails, consider a daily (short) video blog that you can share with the entire organization. The objective is to remind employees of the end goal and how the company is tracking.

 

Show how to adapt values in a remote work environment

It’s one thing to talk about your vision and your goals; it’s another thing to live your values on a daily basis when the team is dispersed. In last week’s facebook live session, I talked about the importance of values on culture. If values are critical to your culture, then living your values in different work environments is even more important. And living your values when you’re working remotely could look different from working in the office. 

For example, if one of your values is “Treat people fairly”, consider how meetings are scheduled and conducted in your workplace. Does everyone have a fair shot at participating in and contributing at meetings? If not, tell people how those values adapt to a remote work environment.

 

Focus on recognition

Leaders should take time for recognition on a regular basis anyway, but recognition takes on a whole new meaning when your team is working remotely. Now’s not the time to skimp on words. Now, more than ever, employees need to hear from you and be celebrated. 

This is especially important for employees who don’t like working from home (yes, there are a few of those). They may appreciate not having to commute to work, but for some people working away from an office is a real struggle, and it’s important to acknowledge that struggle. Some employees face distractions in the form of other family members at home, and focusing on work takes double effort. Praise people for pushing through hard things.

Just like there’s no such thing as over communicating, there’s no such thing as over recognizing people. Everyone wants to be appreciated and the best appreciation is for the things that are generally taken for granted. If you’re like me and you forget to recognize, put it in your calendar. When you’re a high performing leader, it’s easy to just focus on the work and let celebrations take a back seat. I’ve put in reminders to celebrate after large projects, my team’s birthdays, special anniversaries, and periodic “job well done” recognitions.

 

Pay attention to new employees

If you’re like most companies, hiring hasn’t stopped. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have started new jobs this lockdown and they have all unanimously expressed that the onboarding experience was lacking in some way. That’s not necessarily a reflection on the leader, but the situation. It’s tough starting a new role and especially tough when you don’t know anyone in the company.

Take time out of your week to offer one on one support to your new leaders. More check-ins, more opportunities to talk through situations, more hand holding. If you’re a C-suite executive, don’t assume your direct reports don’t need support and coaching. Everyone needs support and coaching, and, arguably, senior leaders need it more. Especially in those first few weeks on the job.

 

To sum it up

Leading post-covid is going to look very different from leading through regular times. Regular times may never come back, and your style and approach needs to adapt as well. Your broader organization needs to know you’re thinking of them, that you appreciate them, that you acknowledge things are different, and that you’re all still working towards the same common goal.

How have you adapted your approach as you’re leading post-covid?