Every organization should have guidelines and standards that shape and define its culture and move it towards peak performance. Here are a few that can add value to your organization:
1. The Speed of the Leader is the Speed of the Pack. Leaders who stop growing, learning, and changing personally will suffocate their followers. Organizations they lead will plateau, then decline. Growing leaders grow people. Stop putting live eggs under dead chickens. What is your organization's growth plan for leaders? If you can't be specific, you don't have one. If you don't grow, you should go.
2. Be a Thermostat, not a Thermometer. Leaders set the climate in their organization, like a thermostat; managers react to it and record it like a thermometer. Whether the climate is positive, ethical, focused, and productive depends solely upon the leadership. The best leaders intimidate followers: not with fear, but by engendering an unwavering respect for the person they are, the standards they set and enforce.
3. Don't Settle for Success. It's not your job to make the organization or its people merely successful. Your job is to create a climate where everyone and the organization as a whole reaches their fullest potential. The difference between being "successful" and reaching your full potential is staggering.
4. The More You Sweat in Training, the Less You Bleed in Battle. Leaders train their staffs hard and often. There are so many "average" salespeople in the business only because there are so many average leaders leading them. Training takes time, dollars, and commitment, but if you think training's expensive, try ignorance. The only thing worse than training your people and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.
5. Don't Send Ducks to Eagle School. On a scale of 1 to 10, when hiring, go with 6's and up. You can realistically develop a 6 into a 7 or 8 with solid training. Occasionally you'll even get a 9 or 10. But if you hire 2's and make them twice as good as they were, you'll still only have 4's. If you have, or seek to have, a peak performance organization, don't send ducks to eagle school.
6. Add Value or Get Out of the Way. Focus on results, not "best efforts." If you or your people cannot get results, then there is no value being added to the organization. If you can't create a results orientation with the people you have, make changes. Get people better or get better people.
7. Make Today a Masterpiece. Stop waiting to have better days and bragging about what tomorrow will bring. Approach each day as if it will be your best day ever. Why can't it be? Create an intense mind-set that today is not a dress rehearsal for tomorrow. Expect peak performance results from each day. Create a savage intensity that today is the day.
8. Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing. You receive 80% of your results from 20% of your activities, and so do your people. Identify those areas and make sure they are being addressed first. Don't just prioritize your schedule; schedule your priorities. Don't waste time and energy getting caught up in the thick of thin things.
9. Make More Mistakes; Don't Repeat Them. Don't fear failure, fear standing still. You and your people can learn more from failures than success. Encourage an environment where failure is rewarded over sitting still, risk taking preferred over protecting the status quo. Genuine breakthroughs don't take place in "safe" environments.
10. Initiate Change, Don't Just Manage It. Create a climate and mind-set where change is actively sought, not merely managed. If you are merely "managing" change, you're acting too slowly and will be run over in today's marketplace. Take your eyes off the bottom line long enough to glance at the horizon. A key to peak performance is changing before you have to.
11. Develop a Bold Vision. You can't expect your people to be inspired or work harder if where they are going is covered in fog. Develop a bold and compelling vision for your organization. Whether you are a General Manager trying to transform managers into leaders or a AutoNationUSA trying to change the way the world buys a car, know that a bold vision will be shot at and misunderstood. Remember the words of Einstein, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." Getting shot at and shot down are two different things completely. Push towards your vision as conditions permit. If conditions don't permit, create those conditions.
12. Implement a Real Strategy. Stop putting good people in bad systems. Process must come before people or the people will fail. A system creates its own crises. Evaluate your strategy for reaching your vision and do so often. Stop reducing your vision to the comfort zone of others. Get a real strategy instead and make the vision happen.
13. Don't Just Cooperate, Collaborate. Get rid of "turfs" and "little kingdoms" in your organization. Get rid of people with the "disease of me" and who subscribe to the unholy trinity of "me, myself and I." Bring people together from different backgrounds, departments, and expertise to collaborate on problems and opportunities and create the energy to lift your organization to peak performance. Seek out input from all sectors. Treat your employees as partners. Stop letting them bring their hands to work while checking their brains and hearts at the door. Build bridges, not walls.
14. Stop Managing, Start Leading. People don't want to be "managed." You manage assets and lead people. Develop an organization of leaders, not followers. Developing more leaders will transform your results from addition to multiplication. Assets make things possible; people make things happen. Lead people by being a coach, not a cop, by providing vision, not confusion, and by treating people like stakeholders, not driven stakes.
15. Go On "Red Alert." Get rid of the defenders of the status quo. Create a level of expectation that pushes everyone to the limit every day. Raise the bar high and often. Run a meritocracy. Everyone should have to prove themselves over again each day.
Attain peak performance in your organization by defining and communicating tough, demanding standards and holding people accountable for results. If your organization doesn't stand for something specific, it will fall for anything in general.
Dave Anderson has been a car salesman, GSM, GM, and Director of Training for Joe Verde Sales and Management Training. He currently works as Director of Training and Front-End Operations Manager for the Anderson Dealership Group in Palo Alto, CA. He is the author of over 50 sales and leadership programs. For information on these programs or his new book, Selling Above The Crowd: 365 Strategies For Sales Excellence, check the appropriate box on the reader response form on page 3. danderson@dealeronline.com