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"decide"

What Does Spontaneous Compassion Look Like?

by Ron Potter August 27, 2018

We recently discussed that compassion can involve challenging others to attain high-quality results on projects that stretch them. Compassion is also a compelling conviction to care enough to become involved and help others by taking some action that will improve their lives or set them on a fresh course. Effective leaders act spontaneously with a true heart of compassion, caring for the person regardless of the consequences.

So what does that look like?

I observed a great instance of this very thing with a client. I was preparing for a webcast. While setting up the presentation, the IT expert helping set up the equipment and handling the technical details received a telephone call from one of his employees who was troubleshooting at another location. I learned that this employee was working on a crisis situation of great importance to her company.

Hearing just half of his conversation, I picked up that she was reporting on her progress in solving the problem. Later, when my technical helper gave me the details of the conversation, I learned that almost in passing she mentioned, “I have to check on my father. I think he had a heart attack or stroke or something.”

The man interrupted the conversation right then and said bluntly, “You need to go to your father.” He didn’t even ask, “Do you need to go to your father?” He just said, “You need to go to your father.”

The employee protested, “No, I’m not going to go until this is fixed.” Her boss just kept saying, “Get off the phone, get on a plane, and go to your father.”

I knew that this man might get into trouble for making that kind of decision; his employee was trying to solve a serious problem. But he insisted, and she went home.

I reached several conclusions from this leader’s act of spontaneous compassion: First, this woman will be one of his most loyal and productive employees from now on. Second, he did the right thing even though painful consequences might follow. A trusted leader acts like that. Finally, he showed a true heart of compassion. He decided to care for the person. In that moment when he had to make a choice, he understood and responded to the needs of the person, not just a valued cog in the company machine.

That’s what compassion is all about.

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Caring in Action: Confrontation

by Ron Potter August 6, 2018

Caring becomes real to another person only when some action occurs. I believe that communication, confrontation, and challenge are three of the best ways a leader puts “feet” to true caring.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll unpack each of these aspects of caring and will continue this week with confrontation.

Confrontation

Confrontation does not involve giving a report on another person’s behavior. It means offering feedback on the other’s role or response. Its goal, in the business environment, is to bring the employee, boss, or peer face to face with issues (behavior, emotions, achievement) that are being avoided.

For us to be effective in confrontation, we need to focus on four things:

Balanced truth

You cannot confront someone on hearsay alone. Get the facts. Investigate the matter; check it out. There are always two sides to every story. What are they? Neither one is likely to be the “complete” truth. Look for the balanced story.

Right timing

I once witnessed a near catastrophe. A client of ours was going to confront a customer. The customer had called the day before and verbally leveled several people on our friend’s staff. My client was going to call the customer and confront him with some brutal truth: “Everyone in the office is afraid of you and doesn’t want to talk to you because of your aggressive style and attitude.” Just before our client was to make the call, someone in the office discovered that the customer’s wife had colon cancer and possibly multiple sclerosis. The customer was suffering right along with his wife, in addition to trying to be both Dad and Mom to the kids, coaching a sports team, and running a tough business. Instead of calling to confront the customer with the brutal facts, our client decided to confront him with care and sympathy.

Many situations will not be this clear-cut. The right timing may be harder to gauge. For sure, though, it is best to deal with a situation when the heat of the moment has passed. Having the courage and taking the time to come back to it after emotions have subsided is actually quite difficult. There never seems to be the same urgency later, but good leaders force themselves to pick up the issue at a better moment. When it is the right time to confront, the green lights will be flashing. Until then, hold on.

Wise wording

I suggest that you carefully plan what you will say when you confront someone. A proverb says, “Timely advice is as lovely as golden apples in a silver basket. Valid criticism is as treasured by the one who heeds it as jewelry made from finest gold.” Words have the power to destroy or heal. Choose them carefully when confronting.

Fearless courage

Don’t fall back in fear when you need to confront someone. If you have assembled the truth, believe it is the right moment, and have carefully prepared what you will say, move forward and confront. As Roger Clemens did with Curt Schilling, press on: “How can I help this person be better, regardless of how I feel?” It may mean finding a more productive or satisfying place for the person—even if it’s with another company. In the end this option is better for the organization and, in most cases, for the other person. What is worse is allowing a person to continue in a harmful behavior or self-destructive attitude.

Next week we’ll continue our discussion by unpacking caring through challenge.

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Blog Trust Me

Team Time Management

by Ron Potter June 18, 2018

While consulting with one of a client organization on leadership matters, I kept hearing from the high-level executive team that they were all averaging more than eighty hours a week. During the training with this group, the topic of the heavy work schedule kept surfacing.

I decided to put what we were doing on pause and take a closer look. Some questions needed answering: First, how could these executives keep up this schedule without destroying themselves, their families, and their teams? Second, with such demands on their time, how would they be able to change ingrained habits and actually start doing this “leadership thing” that they knew was important, but they never seemed able to focus on long enough to accomplish? Would our recommendations, if followed, now cause them to have to work ninety hours per week?

To get hard data on how these executives were allocating their time resources, we decided to use the Stephen Covey view of time management found in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s Time Management Matrix shows four categories of activities:

I asked the team to spend two weeks tracking their time and scrupulously recording what they were doing during these 80-hour marathons. I tallied the results and created a page on a flip chart for each person, cataloging that 8 of their 80 hours went to task A, 6 hours went to task B, and so on. All 160 hours were accounted for in this way.

Time Management Matrix from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The group assembled to hear the results. I wish there was a videotape of the assorted jaw-dropping responses I observed as I first revealed individual patterns and then moved on through a discussion process for the entire group. It was interesting and a bit entertaining when one person would identify an item as Quadrant III (urgent, but not important) and someone else would say, “Time out! If you don’t do that task for me, I can’t get my work done (Quadrant I)!” It took a great deal of negotiation to reach a team consensus on which activities belonged in which quadrants. However, through those negotiations, we discovered just exactly what each person needed.

In many cases one person or team was generating an entire report that took a great deal of time, while the person who needed the data might use only a single crucial piece of data from the entire report. Once we determined that the one piece of data could be generated easily and, in many cases, could be retrieved on demand by the recipient from a database, a gigantic amount of busywork was eliminated.

After completing the negotiations over quadrant assignments, we added up all the hours and determined that about 20 percent of the hours fell in Quadrants I and II (the categories that really matter if you want to focus the team), while 80 percent fell in the less important Quadrant III.

You can imagine the stunned silence that settled like a black cloud in the room. Finally one executive said, “You mean we accomplished all of our important work in sixteen hours and the other sixty-four hours each week were spent on busywork?” The answer was yes. More silence followed.

How had this bright, talented, and obviously hard working “band” gotten so out of tune, so unbalanced? For one thing, they had never sat down together for this kind of discussion and negotiation. The positive result was that they eliminated a tremendous amount of busywork right on the spot. As a team, they came to grips with the focus-destroying enemy called “the tyranny of the urgent.”

If I stopped by your place of business and did the same exercise, what might the results be? Have you and your team identified the important versus the urgent? Do you spend your time and energy on the important?

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Blog Culture

ABC or DEF. Which Grade do you receive?

by Ron Potter June 7, 2018

Based on our grades from school most of us are going to think that ABC is probably the place we want to be. However, that does not apply to this set of circumstances. In this case, I define ABC as Always Blaming and Complaining.

ABC.

What do you hear from the ABC crowd? Blaming.

blaming others
blaming circumstances
blaming family situations
blaming traffic situations.

Plenty of blame to go around. They never seem to hold themselves unaccountable.

Along with blaming, complaining is a very close relative. Complaining about the circumstances that they seem to have no control over.

One of my favorite adages through the years is something called The Serenity Prayer.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

With the complainers, everything seems to fall into the “I cannot change” category but there is no serenity. There is a lack of courage to identify and change the things that are possible to change.

In many cases, they seem to want to accomplish great things or tackle some new entrepreneurial endeavor. But the first thing out of their mouth is complaining about why that’s not going to happen.

Government regulations are going to keep them from succeeding
Nobody will listen to them
Investors won’t invest in them

Always blaming and complaining is not where you want to be.

DEF.

DEF stands for Dependable, Effective, and Friendly.

Being dependable means doing the things that you have committed to do. It has as much to do with integrity as it does anything else.

When you commit to something
When you agree to something
When you say you will do something

Do it!

Can people depend on you? People figure that out quickly. If they can’t depend on you:

They’ll stop turning to you
You’ll do less and less work over the time (becoming expendable)
Those who are dependable get more and more assigned to them because they can be counted on.
Over time, this causes great disruption within organizations.

Are you effective? We all tackle our work, both individually and in teams, but how effective are you?

All kinds of issues can come into play here. One is perfectionism.

Do you have to have everything absolutely perfect? Does everything have to be perfect before you release it? Perfectionism usually gets to a self-esteem issue and really doesn’t do the organization any good. Do the work that you need to do. Figure out what’s important. Stay focused on those key important issues and be effective at what you accomplish.

Friendly. This may sound a little out of place here, but one interesting experiment I run with teams is titled The Perception Exercise.

I share one list of characteristics with half the team and another list with the other half. Once they’ve each observed their list, and understood it, I start asking them about the characteristics of this individual.

Are they dependable?
Are they effective?
Are they honest?
Are they trustworthy?
Will they be successful in life?
Do you want them on your team?

And one half of the team typically scores that individual much lower than the other half. The interesting difference is that the lists are identical in terms of characteristics, except for one word.

One list contains the word warm. “This tends to be a warm individual.”

The other list contains the word cold. “This tends to be a cold individual.”

Those two words, whether we perceive the person to be warm or cold, friendly or not, shapes our whole view of their performance, contribution and future success. We even decide if we want them as part of our team or not. Psychologists tell us that we will make a warm or cold judgment in the first 15 seconds of meeting a person.

Sometimes it’s very difficult to figure out where we are ourselves, and we need to get some feedback on this. But quite honestly, I believe that if you are very thoughtful, intentful and honest with yourself, you can decide whether you fall more on the ABC side or the DEF side. Keep in mind that if you fall on the ABC, always blaming and complaining, you may be attempting to avoid some immediate pain, but in the long term, none of that will lead to success or happiness in your life. However, if you’re one of those people who fall on the DEF side of the scale, dependable, effective, friendly, we can predict with good accuracy much more long-term happiness and success and productivity in your life.

Give yourself a grade, see where you come out on this one.

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Blog Leadership

Innovation: hovering for takeoff or collapsed?

by Ron Potter May 24, 2018

Current Excitement

Three months ago, she had been excited. This was the opportunity she had been working toward since she joined the company three years ago. Meaningful work is one of the more joyous things you can experience. She didn’t want this job because of its prestige or high pay. She wanted this job because it was meaningful to her, her colleagues and clients.

How it Started

When I talked with her three months ago she was riding high. She explained that when she joined the company she had been hired for her skill set and outstanding success in her last assignment. But before she even joined the company she explained to the CEO that this was not her dream job. She would certainly do the job and do it well but in the end, she wanted a different assignment that was more meaningful to her.

Over the three years, she did indeed do the job well. She built a great team and was recognized beyond her company as an outstanding contributor to the industry. And while she enjoyed the work and found great satisfaction in building and growing a great team, she continued to remind the CEO on an annual basis that she was still interested in the job that was more meaningful to her. And now she had it.

Takeoff

She was filled with new energy and new excitement and explained all the things she wanted to accomplish in the new role. Many of them had never even been tried by the company. The breadth and depth of her vision were overwhelming when she explained all the things she wanted to build. I was wondering how any superhuman could possibly accomplish that much.

Collapsed

But now! Have you ever seen a large hot air balloon being deflated? The beautiful, magnificent structure stories high into the sky with a buoyancy that leaves it hovering just above the earth defying gravity. But an instant later the entire structure has gone cold, collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud and lies there motionless and useless on the ground. That was what today’s phone call felt like.

She had just come out of a budget meeting where it was clear the company was not going to meet next year’s goals and drastic cuts needed to be made. In an instant, her carefully crafted team and the multiple goals that had been hovering above the ground, ready for takeoff were now lying on the ground with no visible means of support. Deflated!

Lean Times Require Focus and Innovation

Times of plenty can destroy one of the greatest assets of leadership teams: good decision making. We’ve discussed this in other blog posts, but the concept is always worth reinforcing. The word decide (de-cide) means figure out what to kill or stop doing. In times of plenty, leaders seldom have the spirit or inclination to say “no”. Good deciding means to be clear about what you’re saying “no” to.

The other concept we began to talk about in her time of deflation was innovation and creativity. It has been well documented that the best innovation takes place when the boundaries are the tightest. Again, in times of plenty, it’s much easier to throw some ideas up on the board, try them all and see if any of them produce fruit. Not innovative! Innovation is about simplicity. Doing the most with the least. It’s those times when budget, time or resources are in extremely short supply when the best innovation happens. This was her time of opportunity. The budget was not just going to be tight, it was going to be slashed. She was going to be forced to say no to save that part that absolutely required a yes. And even the items that received the yes would need to be accomplished in the highest quality and the most elegantly simple way possible. Now was the time for true innovation.

Have you figured out how to say no? Have you absolutely insisted that things get accomplish in the most elegant, simple form possible? At some point, you will likely be forced to accomplish those tasks. You might as well get started now. Learn to say no. Do everything as elegantly as possible.

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Blog Trust Me

How Focused is Your Energy?

by Ron Potter May 7, 2018

The sun is a powerful source of light as well as energy. Every hour of every day the sun showers the earth with millions, if not billions, of kilowatts of energy. We can, however, actually tame the sun’s power. With sunglasses and sunscreen, the sun’s power is diffused, and we can be out in it with little or no negative effects.

A laser, by contrast, is a weak source of light and energy. A laser takes a few watts of energy and focuses them into a stream of light. This light, however, can cut through steel or perform microsurgery on our eyes. A laser light is a powerful tool when it is correctly focused.

Leaders cease to be powerful tools when they are out of focus and their energy is dispersed rather than targeted.

Rather than resembling a laser, too often we seem like the sun, just going up and down, splashing our energy anywhere and everywhere.

David Allen, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on personal productivity, argues that the challenge is not managing our time, but managing our focus. He believes that with all that is being thrown at leaders, they lose their ability to respond. However, he is quick to add that most leaders create the speed of it all because we allow all that stuff to enter into our lives.

What happens to our energy? Allen says,

If you allow too much dross to accumulate in your “10 acres”—in other words, if you allow too many things that represent undecided, untracked, unmanaged agreements with yourself and with others to gather in your personal space—that will start to weigh on you. It will dull your effectiveness.

Not only will your effectiveness be dulled but so will your power. Instead of being like a steel-cutting laser, you will be like the sun, putting out energy with no focus. There needs to be focus because life is not just about running faster or putting out more energy.

With so much going on around leaders, focus may seem impossible or improbable to achieve. Employees, phones, pagers, e-mail, cell phones, problems, crises, home, family, boards of directors, and other people or things demand so much. We tend to spend our time managing the tyranny of the urgent rather than concentrating our efforts on the relevant and important things that make or break an organization.

So what should we do? Is it possible to better focus your focus?

I have found that two personal qualities combine optimally to create a leader of highly developed focus: passion and achievement. These form the boundaries of focus.

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Blog Culture

Balancing Act

by Ron Potter February 8, 2018

My first job right out of college was working on large engineering projects. When I showed up for my first day of work I was given my assignment… my excitement quickly faded. The project I was working on was in the early stages of construction. The concrete foundation was complete and the majority of the structural steel was in place. My assignment? Make sure the structural frame was straight and plumb and then mark every column at every level so that the coming equipment could be placed properly and would align with all the other equipment to be installed in the plant. Oh, did I mention that the structural steel rose over 200 feet in the air. That’s roughly the height of a 20-story building.

Off I went, riding the construction elevator to the top of the building to begin the several week’s process of working my way down through the building marking columns as I went. Each floor was nothing more than structural steel beams, 6 to 10 inches wide depending on their location and generally 20 feet apart. Nothing else. No floors. No walls. Nothing. Just open air, empty skies, and 200 feet straight down. This was also the days before safety equipment. No nets. Not belts. No safety harnesses.

Focused on a goal

I slowly developed a technique that allowed me to walk across that 20-foot span from one column to the next, step by step on my 6” wide structural beam “sidewalk.” I would stand with my back tightly pressed against a column as I studied the column that was my goal. I would search and search my goal until I could find a visible flaw or mark in the steel where I could lock my eyes. Looking down was death. Once I spotted my goal I would begin to slow my breathing and my heart rate so that I could maintain my focus on that distant spot. When everything seemed to be under control, step one. Followed by step two, three and however many steps it took until I reached that far goal. Never looking down, just staying focused as I moved forward.

After my first couple of days, I thought I had learned a valuable lesson. Picture your goal, stay focused and move forward. But that was just the beginning.

Up in that structural steel with this rookie engineer were veteran and seasoned ironworkers. They would run around up there like they really were on sidewalks. And they were often bored while waiting for the next structural member to be lifted to them by the nearby crane. Bored people look for entertainment. I was entertainment!

Noticing that I had gained a little bit of confidence in my approach to walking steel, they decided to shake up my world a bit. One day as I had completed my routine and was about a third of the way across the beam, an ironworker slid down the column I had targeted and began walking toward me. Now I stood about halfway across the beam, facing a smiling, unshaven, cigar-chomping ironworker with my target column nowhere in sight.

Before going up in the steel I had been taught how to pass someone in these circumstances but certainly never thought I would be using the teaching. The technique required us to get toe-to-toe on the beam, lock each other’s wrists, lean back until our weights were perfectly balanced and then begin a slow swivel keeping our toes on the beam until we were now on opposite sides. In the middle of that process, each of our bodies is suspended over nothingness, 200 feet in the air.

Once we completed our maneuver, the ironworker bid me a good day and walked off laughing in the other direction. I was left with racing breath, heartbeat and a need to find a new focal point so I could make it back to the column. The wrong column because I was now facing in the opposite direction.

Trust your teammates

After I gained some confidence in the maneuver, I thought I had learned the real lesson, trust your teammate. If at any time during that maneuver either one of us had lost trust in the other and tried to take control, the result would have been death for both of us. It amazes me even more now that the ironworker put his life in my hands!

Balance

After all these years I think the real lesson is balance. It doesn’t stand alone: you must be focused on a goal and without trust, you’ll always fall short but my real goal in those situations was to maintain balance. I’m going to start a series on balance and how important it is in many aspects of teams, leadership and culture but I wanted to share my personal journey with you first.

Balance, Balance, Balance.

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Blog Culture

The Number One Habit You Should Drop to be Successful

by Ron Potter January 18, 2018

Success.com recently published a list entitled “10 ‘Harmless’ Habits to Drop If You Want to Be Successful.”

Based on the experience I’ve had with successful teams the last several years, I would say just being successful at dropping the first habit will get you a long way toward success.

Number One: Saying Yes When You Want to Say No!

I’ve taught many teams recently the true meaning of the word decide. Top corporate teams are filled with high achievers. They have all been getting things done since an early age. They’ve been rewarded in academics, sports, arts, and business for getting things done. Getting them done faster and in more volume than anyone else. They’re “doers”!

So, it’s very natural to believe that when corporate leadership teams get together they should decide what to do!

But that’s not what the word means. The “cide” part of the word means to cut off, put to death, publicly execute. Think for a minute about the words pesticide or homicide. The one habit that is keeping most teams and leaders from success is concluding that they should be doing more and more. Corporations and individuals don’t have the resources, energy, time or fortitude to keep doing more and more. Successful teams and leaders decide what to kill, what to stop doing.

There are so many variables related to success and failure in the auto industry that I honestly don’t know if this one issue will spell success or failure for General Motors (GM). But, I need to applaud their courage in shifting their measure of success from being the number one car maker in the world by volume. That seemed to be the driving force in GM for decades. But today, they’ve decided to stop producing vehicles in many parts of the world. That takes courage. Will it be successful? I don’t know. As I said, there are many factors to success and failure. But I do believe that deciding where to stop putting your resources is a big factor.

Saying No is Difficult

I really don’t know many leaders who reward and praise their people for not doing something. But they should. Research and my direct experience with many great leaders validate that focusing on the top three issues you face is the best route to success. Rewarding your people for not doing the 10^th item on their priority list (and 9, 8, 7, …) will lead to more success than you can imagine. Leaders and organizations never have enough resources to do everything. The assumption is they just need more resources or more productivity out of the resources they have. That’s the wrong assumption. The real answer is assuming you’re trying to do too many things. Deciding not to do the low priority items will help you realize that you have all the resources you need to accomplish your top priorities. And it will lead to greater success as well.

Figure out how to say No!

The Power of a Positive No by William Ury is a great resource. Deciding to say no will be one of the most productive practices you ever learn.

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Blog

Top 10 Books of 2017 – Part II

by Ron Potter December 21, 2017

Today we continue our books of 2017 recap. Today we recap my top 5 picks. If you missed it, you can check out books 10-6 here.

5. Leadership Step by Step

Can you develop leadership? Josh sheds some light on the age-old question of “Are leaders made or born”. In a very practical way he identifies exercises that will work you through the process of Understanding Yourself, Leading Yourself, Understanding Others, Leading Others.

Get Your Copy

4. Power of Positive No

The word “Decide” actually means to figure out what you’re going to say “No” to. This book helps you figure out how to do a great job saying No.

Get Your Copy

3. How Good People make Tough Decisions

This is the book to help you deal with Right vs Right decisions. Most business decisions are Right vs Right but we frame them as Right vs Wrong which makes them impossible to solve. This one should stay on the bookshelf.

Get Your Copy

2. Deep Work

This book changed my habit of getting meaningful work done. I have carved out time every month to isolate myself and my thinking on particular projects. The productivity improvement has been astounding.

Get Your Copy

1. Conversational Intelligence

If you are a leader or hope to become a good leader, this is a must read. When I finished I had over 50 pages of notes!

Get Your Copy

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Blog Culture

Walk away from Productivity Blocks

by Ron Potter November 2, 2017

I was at my computer at 6:00 am this morning. Three and one-half hours later I was stuck! I was facing a difficult client meeting and it was requiring extreme concentration and creativity to deal with the issue in a constructive way. But, I just got stuck. So, I got up and took a long walk.

Fortunately, I was in a location where I could walk in solitude on a very quiet path through the woods. I took a 45-minute walk. Let me break that walk into thirds for you.

Conscious of my surroundings.

The first third of the walk I was totally conscious of the sounds of my steps, the slight breeze rustling through the trees and the few jays that loudly proclaimed my presence. Nothing else. All my work thoughts were subconscious.

Deep Understanding

Over the next 15 minutes, the concentrated work I had done that morning began to blend with the solitude of my walk. I can’t fully explain it other than my mind began to produce some very high-level understandings. In that 15 minutes, it became clear how I should organize, structure and present the materials.

Blended Experience – Organized Plan

The last 15 minutes of the walk was spent enjoying a little bit of both. I once again became conscious of the sound of my footsteps and jays, but at the same time, I began to see the structure for the meeting, the key points to be emphasized and the steps to success.

High Productivity

Upon returning to my computer the next half hour of work was just incredibly productive. I took all of that thought process from that deep 15 minutes of understanding, put the structure together and began filling in all the pieces. Moving from being stuck to a very satisfying completion with some deep work in between.

Getting past Stuck

When we find ourselves stuck after 3-1/2 hours of concentrated work, most of us will stick with it, stay at the computer, keep hacking away, work until we get at least what feels like a conclusion. And yet, walking away is likely to be the most productive approach. Not to our email. Not to the break room. Not to our news feeds. Just getting up and walking out. Walking through nature in complete silence for 30-45 minutes. That’s when the deep work happens.

Word of Caution

Please understand. I did not decide to spend 15 minutes on each phase of that walk. What I’m sharing with you is my reflection on how I moved from being stuck to some very satisfying work. I didn’t plan to take a walk to solve my problems. I planned to take a walk. Taking a walk lead to some very satisfying productivity.

Deep Work

Deep work! That’s the key. A good walk in the woods. (Note: the book Deep Work by Cal Newport is a great resource.)

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Blog Team

Are you headed back to the office?

by Ron Potter September 7, 2017

Years ago, I named my company Team Leadership Culture. To me, that described exactly what needs to happen in corporations to get things humming.

Building great teams is the foundation to success
Developing Leaders to grow and direct the teams and create more great leaders
Both lead to a culture that will sustain the success over the ups and downs of daily business

Without the trust and respect that it takes to build teams, you never develop great leaders and have no hope of creating a positive culture.

Decades ago, Alvin Toffler wrote an amazing book titled Future Shock. Wikipedia describes the context of the book like this. “He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked.

I’m not technology averse. In fact, quite the opposite. My grandson was laughing at me the other day as I explained how I carried my 35 pound Osborne portable computer through airports in the 80’s. I purchased my first Blackberry “smartphone” three months after they hit the market in 1999. I’ve been riding the wave of technology advancement since the day Toffler published his book.

But, with this advancement of connected technology, I’ve also seen the deterioration of teams.

Every year teams seem to become more remote and global. Without the technology available to them today they couldn’t function at all. But, the one sentence that remains stuck in my head from Toffler’s book is “High Tech. High Touch.” His point was that as technology took over, it would require even greater human connection to make it all work.

From a very practical standpoint, I have observed remote and global teams that get together face-to-face at least twice a year to talk about the human side of their team work seem to advance faster and farther than any other team.

Some teams try for more times a year and few of them make it but scheduling often makes that difficult.

Other teams either commit to twice a year and don’t make it or are so deceived by the need to accomplish “real” work while they’re together that they give insufficient time to building team. These teams never advance and often deteriorate.

A recent Wall Street Journal article really caught my attention because of this experience. “IBM, a Pioneer of Remote work, Calls Workers back to the Office.” Even though IBM has been a leader in remote work throughout this century, workers were given 30 days to decide. Move to a company-maintained office or seek employment elsewhere.

Why would the leader of remote work decide to lay down such a stark edict? High Tech. High Touch.

They had accomplished the High Tech portion of the formula. They even marketed their services as “the anytime, anywhere workforce.” But they missed the High Touch portion.

Teams simply don’t work if there is low trust. Trust makes it all work. You can’t develop trust electronically. You need to:

Look people in the eye
Shake their hand
Put an arm around their shoulder
Laugh some
Cry some

Without High Touch, it just doesn’t work.

Are you going back to the office? IBM workers are. You should be also. At least on a regular enough basis to build Trust. It’s the foundation for all collaborative efforts.

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Short Book Reviews

The Power of a Positive No

by Ron Potter August 1, 2017

Ron’s Short Review: The word “Decide” actually means to figure out what you’re going to say “No” to. This book helps you figure out how to do a great job saying No.

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