Acting like a normal human being is not a bad way to do business

A few years ago I was the keynote speaker at a leadership conference.  I was scheduled to speak twice and lead three workshops during the three day event.  There were a number of excellent speakers for the plenary sessions, and I was honored to begin the event with my first message.  On the final day I found my seat to hear the person scheduled to speak before me when one of the organizers came to me thanking me for being there and being so good to work with.  I thought he was just being gracious until he said that one of the comments he was hearing from a lot of the attendees was how much they appreciated me attending the sessions when I was not scheduled to speak.  He said that most of their previous keynote speakers only attended the sessions where they were scheduled to speak and spent the rest of their time in their rooms.  I never dreamed that people were noticing that I was at all the sessions and had even less of an idea that they were talking about that.  The fact was that I felt that I could learn from each of the speakers at that conference (and I did) and had no desire to miss any of the plenary sessions.  They were scheduled apart from the workshops I was leading so there was no reason not to attend the larger group meetings.  Besides, I felt that since I was being paid to be there I had somewhat of an obligation to my hosts to be available to the people who were attending the conference, and who can do that if they remain holed up in a motel room?

I had forgot about that until I began reading Jon Acuff's new book Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters.  In one chapter he talks about how people who want to be awesome in what they do should not be jerks.  He relates a number of backstage conversations he's had with various organizers who have told him about some of the speakers and musicians they've worked with who were jerks.  They show up, do the minimum their contract requires, often treat people rather poorly, and retreat to the privacy of their rooms.  Reading that reminded me of the conversation I had with the organizers of the event referred to above.  It also reminded me of a large outdoor Christian concert I attended several years ago.

The concert featured some of the top names in contemporary Christian music.  It was being held in a large outdoor facility in a nearby city.  The individual who was the main attraction was one of my favorite Christian performers so some friends of mine bought me a ticket and went with me to this event.  The day was going great until it was announced the main attraction would not be performing.  It seemed he was upset that the stage was not the size he had requested so he was refusing to sing.  Up to that day I had purchased every cassette he made; I never purchased another one.  It had been a long time since I had been so disappointed in a human being.

It doesn't matter if you are a speaker, a musician, or a small business owner, it's OK to act like a normal human being.  It's OK to be nice to people.  I get tired of trying to do business with people who act like they are doing me a favor taking my money.  I was in a business recently and saw the sign "No public restrooms."  I left, not because I needed to use the restroom but because I see a sign like that and think "Jerk!  What if a mother comes in with a small child that needs a restroom NOW?  Are you going to send her away with her kid dribbling down the sidewalk?  According to that sign you are, so you don't need my business."  My wife and I walked into a local store some months ago.  the owner never left the security of her little cubicle, but she never took her eyes off of us while we were in the store.  She also never spoke a word although we were the only people in the store.  I think I understand why we were the only ones there and why that business soon closed. 

I have owned a business and know how difficult some people can be to satisfy.  Some you will never please.  They are jerks, but that doesn't mean you have to be one.  This doesn't mean you have to let people walk over you.  There may be times you have to stand firm, but even then you can be nice about it.  I have often said that I do not want to be the person who needs to apologize.

One of my first speaking engagements was for an organization that contacted me several months before the scheduled event.  I would lead three conferences over the course of a week in three different cities.  We agreed upon the fee and that they would cover all my expenses.  We shared several communications before the event.  About three weeks before the first conference I received an e-mail telling me that they had made the decision that they would cover my expenses only up to a certain limit, one that I knew would be surpassed.  My first thought was to cancel my appearance when they refused to reconsider.  However, I did not do that.  A lot of publicity had gone into promoting the three conferences I would be leading for them.  I felt if I refused to appear the people who planned to attend would not be told the reason for my decision and would be upset with me.  I went as planned, gave them the best presentations I could give, and covered the expenses they would not pay with the fee I earned.  I also will not speak for that organization again.

You can be a jerk once and get by with it, but eventually it will destroy your credibility as a business owner and eventually it will cost you.  In business, as in all areas of life, the Golden Rule is still the best way to conduct yourself.  If we would all strive to treat one another as we would like to be treated the world would be a better place, and you would probably find your business would be more profitable.

Home grown leadership

One of the many findings in Jason Jennings' book Think Big, Act Small: How America's Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive was that "The companies that do the best job of consistently growing revenues grow their own leaders.  Period!"  They do not hire their top people from outside the company but hire the people from within who have already proven themselves capable and who have bought into the company culture.  Such home-grown talent often results in long-term growth for the company.  Although such growth may be slow it is steady and certainly preferable to the hiring of someone outside the company who comes in with a magical formula that will produce quick results for a quarter or two but in the meantime destroys the culture of the business.  One of the things this means for owners and managers of small businesses is they must constantly be producing quality leaders within their organizations if they want their business to grow.

Jennings studied companies that had double-digit growth in revenues and profits between 1995 and 2005.  What was fascinating to me in reading the book was how each of these companies were doing pretty much the same things such as developing leaders within their organizations.  When someone in the corner office was ready to retire they already had people in the pipeline to replace them.  When the company was ready to expand and open new stores they had people ready to manage them.  There was little concern about whether or not this person would fit in with the company's culture because they had already been operating within that culture for a number of years.  There was also little doubt they could handle the position they were being offered because they had been groomed for that position and had already proven they were ready for it.

The book shares a number of ways a business can identify and develop future leaders, but we'll only address two of them in this post.  Once an individual has been identified as a potential future leader it is essential that this person is constantly evaluated and coached.  He or she must be given broad responsibilities and cross-trained in various aspects of the business followed by regular evaluations and coaching.  An annual performance review isn't enough.  It's also not enough to just evaluate performance.  Attitudes and behaviors must also be looked at.  A business committed to integrity will be just as focused on the values of the potential leader as it will on his or her results.

A second thing businesses must do if they want to successfully grow talent is to make people want to stay.  Many businesses talk about how they value their team members but actually treat them as commodities and not people.  It's very hard to raise talent from within a business if it has high employee turn-over.  If a business wants people to stay they must show by their actions how they value those individuals.  The business must help their team members become excited about the growth and long-term prospects of the company and be shown how they can benefit from that growth.  Jennings illustrates in his book how several of the companies he studied does that, and the actions these companies took are doable for most small businesses.

Few things a leader does is more important than identifying and developing future leaders for the business.  It takes a commitment of time and resources, but when it's done right it will pay huge benefits in the future.

Leadership failure

 FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My last post looked at the importance of character in a leader's life.  I want to continue that thought today by looking at how a lack of character caused well known leaders to fail.  These character flaws were not morality issues, but they were character issues all the same.  There are four primary areas of leadership in which many leaders fail to exercise character: authenticity, self-management, humility, and courage.  Tim Irwin, in his excellent book Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership (NelsonFree), addresses these in detail and looks at the failures of well known leaders such as Robert Nardelli, Carly Fiorina, Durk Jager, Steven Heyer, Frank Raines, and Dick Fuld as examples of how these leaders failed as a result of one of those four character issues.  It is a sobering book as one realizes how, if these leaders at the top of their game, could fail it is very arrogant of us to believe it could never happen to us.

Irwin explains that derailment doesn't happen all at once.  It's a process that involves making one wrong decision after another.  It may be that one's arrogance prevents him from listening to the warnings of others.  It may be that a leader lacked courage to make a critical decision.  The problem could be that team members saw a lack of authenticity in their leader and refused to follow her.  Anyone can have an off day without it resulting in failure, but when such character issues are dominent in a leader's life it is almost a certainity that failure will eventually occur.

To counteract the possibility of such failure Irwin recommends five habits of the heart.  They are

1. The habit of openness - A willingness to receive feedback from others
2. The habit of self-other/awareness - An examination of one's strengths and weaknesses
3. The habit of listening to early warning systems - Paying attention to the stresses in your company
4. The habit of accountability - A willingness to be accountable to others for our actions
5. The habit of reliliency - The ability to bounce back from adversity

Each of these habits are critical to the success of entrepreneurs and small business owners.  Lacking any of them can lead to failure as Irwin demonstrates by studying the failures of the business leaders mentioned above.  If these individuals can fail due to a lack of character, so can any of us.  A habit is something that is developed by consistently and intentionally focusing on something.  It is not something we can do once, cross off our to-do list, and move on.  We must examine our actions, our attitudes, and our words on a continual basis to ensure that we are developing each of these five habits.  To learn more about how these other leaders failed and how to develop these five habits in your life you should read Irwin's book.

Character and leadership

 FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

There are two things required of someone who seeks leadership:  competence and character.  While both are important the character of a person is often a better predictor of long term success than competence.  Robert Clinton, professor of leadership at Fuller Theological  Seminary believes that approximately 70 percent of leaders do not finish well.  He agrees that leaders can do rather well for themselves through their skills alone, but the leader whose skills are greater than his or her character will eventually falter.

As a small business owner you create the environment in which your company conducts its business.  Every business, like every other organization, has a culture, and the owner of small businesses determine what that culture will be.  We do not have the luxury of hiding behind "company policy."  We created that policy.  We cannot blame some faceless "they" because "they" are us.  We model the type of behavior and character that we expect from others on our team, and that becomes an important part of our brand.

The phone rang one day in our shop, and as I started to answer it one of my employees said, "If it's my wife I'm not here."  The two of them had an argument that morning before he came to work, and he didn't want to talk to her.  It so happened that it was her, and when she asked if he was there I said he was and told him to pick up the line.  When he later hung up he was not very happy with me.  He said, "I told you to tell her I wasn't here."  I looked at him and said, "If I'll lie for you, I'll lie to you.  Is that the type of company you want to work for?"  He looked at me for a moment and walked off.  I wanted him, and everyone else on our team, to know that they could expect the truth from me even when it wasn't pleasant, and I expected the same from them.

As some of you know, during the years I ran our business I was also the pastor of a small church in our community.  We did some work for another pastor who was very slow to pay us.  He was well past 90 days late paying his bill, and some wanted me to take him to small claims court for payment.  I refused to do so on biblical grounds.  The Bible teaches that Christians are not to take other Christians to court.  I know that is a teaching that many Christian business people ignore as not a good business practice, but I felt strongly that it would be wrong for me to sue him for the money he owed.  Probably two or three more months went by before he came in and paid his bill in full.  We received our money, my relationship with my fellow pastor remained intact, and I did not violate a biblical principle.  I realize this would be not a recommended business practice, but I felt that it was part of the climate I wanted for our company.

The Golden Rule is always the safe option when one is confronted with an issue in his or her business.  If you were on the other side, how would you want to be treated?   Then that is how you should treat others.  If you would want grace, you must extend grace.  If you want people to be honest with you, you must be honest in your words and actions.  If you want respect, you must be respectful to others.  This is how one demonstrates character in his or her life and is how a culture of honesty and integrity is created in a business.  Such character will allow you to enjoy genuine success over the long term and make your small business a good place to work and with which to do business.

For an in-depth look at this issue I would highly recommend The Ascent of a Leader: How Ordinary Relationships Develop Extraordinary Character and Influence.  This very uplifting book explains how character enables you to have greater influence in your business, your home, and every other area of your life.

Learning from the failure of others

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Some of the cheapest lessons small business owners can learn come from the mistakes of other people in leadership positions.  Even CEOs of major corporations can make mistakes despite all the resources at their disposal.  Tim Irwin, in his book Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership (NelsonFree), profiles six CEOs of major corporations who derailed in their leadership and ended up being removed from their positions.  These were very sharp people who made some serious misjudgements that cost their companies great sums of money and eventually cost them their jobs.  The one thing their failures had in common is that they came about because of a failure of character.  Irwin points out that it was not a character issue such as dishonesty but of being dismissive of others and hubris.  Their stories make interesting reading of how really sharp people can take the wrong road in their leadership and derail.  The second half of the book warns the reader how easily we can take the same wrong turns and how to avoid them.

One of the lessons Irwin points out is that "Derailment occurs over time - it really happens before the crash.  An ignored warning signal...the inattention to feedback, and one wrong turn leads to another."  I can relate to that because that is exactly what happened to me.  I failed to pay attention to the warning signals that could have helped me avoid having to close our business.  Too often, we think that failure is an event that happens, but failure is really the end result of a long list of issues we ignore over a period of time.

Another lesson we should take from this book is that most derailments are self-inflicted.  As I point out in my book Mistakes we can't blame anyone or anything but ourselves for our failures.  If your business fails you can't blame the economy unless every business failed.  We can't blame government because government never bailed out any small business.  It's not high interest rates, customers who won't pay their bills on time, the price of gasoline, or any other excuse people often give when a business fails.  While that business is failing thousands of others are prospering under the same conditions.  None of these things may have helped our situation, but the problems we are facing are nearly always due to our own decisions and habits.

As the author wraps the book up he points out that "While competence is absolutely essential, our character ultimately makes a greater impact on what we accomplish in our work and in our lives.  Character as expressed in authenticity, wisdom, humility, and courage must ultimately form the substance of who we are if we want to have great impact."  He ends the book by listing five critical habits every small business owner must develop to avoid derailment.

It is fascinating to read how six corporate giants could make such huge mistakes in their leadership, but it is humbling to realize how many of them we make in our own leadership.  This book provides you with an excellent opportunity to learn from the mistakes of other leaders so you might avoid them in your own business, and for the price of the book that is pretty cheap learning.