The Art of Accomplishment
Table of Content: Spectrum of Modern Leadership
Driving the change, your dream or an idea to success is an art, because the reality often catches up on you. People dragging you down, you are failing multiple times or doing mistakes, …
I hope the following 5 steps are able to help you to push things forward and to accomplish your dream.
5 Steps that help you to make things happen
1: Create inner pictures
You must reflect on the problem you want to solve and what is the given opportunity. It’s important to envision these goals and define KPIs to be capable of measuring the success. Especially, in bigger organizations you should always refine your vision with some key stakeholders. Finally, try to visualize the success scenario by creating inner pictures. It will help you and others to adjust oneself to the challenge.
2: Share your Vision
Fascinate, invite and encourage the people within your organization to take the great challenge and inspire them on their way. Don’t tell them how to do things, tell them what you want to achieve. This rule became one of my main personal management principals, inspired by the great visionary neuroscientist Prof. Gerald Hüther (book: Führen mit Hirn).
3: Be part of the execution
I’ve often seen managers starting a change process by sharing their vision a couple of times and then it’s up to the teams to drive it further. If you want that things become true you have to pay attention. Show up and ask for the status, sometimes you need to push people and you definitely must support the teams in recognizing and eliminating the obstacles. Be aware of the following hints during the execution phase.
- Think big but always start small
Always do little steps forward, otherwise you risk overstraining the organization. Furthermore, you need to convince people and by taking smaller steps it’s easier to proof that you are on the right path. - Fight hard for the goal, become soft on the path
Never ever dictate your team the final solution. You can make suggestions, you can challenge the concept but the team must be convinced of their product. At the same time fight hard for your goal. If somebody is not taken the goal serious make sure in front of everybody that he understands why it is so important. - Reward the little success
If you see the first behavioral change or the first positive results you must honor it. Celebrate and praise it in reviews, make a party, whatever keep your people motivated to keep on track. - Look for allies and supporters
You need supporters from different parts of the organization, from the upper management level as well as key players within the operative team. Don’t waste too much time in the negative skeptics that drag you down and drain your energy. Watch out for the positive characters that are willing to share your vision and have the potential to become evangelists. - Look for inspiring examples
Sometimes it’s hard for people to imagine an idea in real life. It could be a lack of empathy on both sides or you are not able to express your vision precisely. This often happens at the beginning, when everything is rather fuzzy. By showing examples it becomes much easier to convince people. For example, when I explained that we need a process where teams decide what to do in order to reach a certain goal tracked by KPIs, people where telling me, “Holacracy is not working out”. After some research, I found the OKR process used by Google, Uber, and Twitter. Given this example, it was much easier for the skeptics to give it a try.
4: Act despite fear and don’t limit yourself
There will be moments within your career, when a change is a great opportunity and at the same time the risk to fail can be very high. Especially, if you have a lot of skeptics within the organization the personal pressure can hold you back from doing the important things.
It is very important to create a company culture of taking challenges as it is the only way to grow, individually as well as from the organizational perspective. Growing is one of our very early natural born personal needs. We want to gain experiences to learn, to grow, to become stronger and to create something really great.
In the first run, it is important to recognize the fear, as you may start unconsciously to make excuses.
- You have always other things to do,
- It is not your responsibility,
- I don’t have the right skills,
- …
Don’t limit yourself by making excuses!
But how to become more stress resistent, there are some psychological tricks to overcome your fear. In that moment, you are truly convinced of something and you are blocking yourself to move on, try the following:
- Be always ready to quit
Be ready to quit and don’t think there will be no better opportunities. Be ready to leave equips with a lot of power to push things forward. - Get inspired by heroes
Think about the visionary and brave heroes in history. The positive examples will encourage you to believe in your power and to stay optimistic. Furthermore, think about your contribution in history as it will help you to focus on the important things of work and life. - It’s just a game
When pressure feels very high, stop and think what really matters in life. You will recognize that you are able to relax if you don’t take work too serious. - Trust
You need to gain positive reference experience. Remember some great success stories of your life, of which you are very proud. These will help you to believe that you can solve the next challenge:
Trust in yourself - Believe in your power that you can make it happen,
Trust in your team - Believe that there is always somebody who is going to help you,
Trust in a happy end - Believe that there is always a solution to move forward. - Do what’s best for the organization
One of my mentors told me: “Always watch out what is the best for the company not for yourself. The overall success will also fall back upon you.”
In big companies, you’ll find a lot of politics within the daily business. People make stupid decisions to promote themselves or to hold back the necessary change. I believe it is the worst thing to do as a manager, the organization is not developing further and people start to mistrust each other and will act similarly.
The best feedback I’ve received was at a management offsite, when all managers separately told me, that I’m often so annoying but they never can be angry with me as they know I always do it with a good intention.
5: Be disciplined and persistent
All that may sounds kind of trivial but in real live it’s tough. It often feels like a rollercoaster, sometimes you have a successful day and then you have these sleepless nights on the coach and you want to quit. Discipline and endurance are crucial, as you need to go a long distance to drive things to success.
Steve Jobs: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do“.
The best way to beat those bad feelings is passion and confidence. You must be convinced and intrinsically motivated about what you are doing. If this is not the case and the challenge is really hard, you are probably going to quit.
“All things are easy that are done willingly”, became one of my main management attitudes. Often you must work so hard for a long time, but it’s so much easier to sit down, do the work and get things done, if you just love it.
