Leadership | Elisa K. Spain

The Life Changing Value of Choosing

March 18, 2018March 15, 2018 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Working with CEOs over the last dozen or so years, I observed several common traits in those who successfully grow their businesses. I have written in the past about the importance of having a vision, having the right people, and having strong execution. Another more subtle characteristic shared by successful leaders… They seem to have an incredible “capacity”.

Webster defines capacity as…

the potential or suitability for holding, storing, or accommodating
an individual’s mental or physical ability
the faculty or potential for treating, experiencing, or appreciating
the facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy: maximum output

It’s this facility for maximum output that I am referring to. The ability to take on more, to handle more stress, to be present regardless of outside circumstances, to simply do more. It’s more than ability, it’s well, capacity.

And, here’s what I observe… while these leaders may very well be able to handle more and do more than others, it is also their ability to choose. To make a choice, to say no more often than they say yes; and most importantly, they accept that when they choose, they may disappoint someone. And, they allow themselves to be okay with that.

Which Kind of Leadership?

February 11, 2018January 24, 2018 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Some situations require a general to inspire us to “take the hill”.
Some situations require someone from the group to lead, an informal leader.
Some situations simply require wisdom; the wisdom of Socrates, to simply ask the right question.

So easy to default to Option 1 and assume all situations require this. After all, so much of what we have learned about leadership comes from command and control training. Historically we idealized and idolized military leaders. While much can be learned from these great leaders of history, the world today is more nuanced.

And with that nuance, comes the opportunity to choose Option 2 and/or Option 3. Each move progressively toward the true meaning of empowerment, depending on the situation.

Our challenge is to read the situation and decide.

Change is Coming..

October 15, 2017October 13, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Vistage economist, Alan Beaulieu, CEO of ITR, issued a simple warning in recent days “It’s been a good year, but there is a change coming,” he said. “Things are going to slow down.”

For those of us who follow ITR, we know the recession Beaulieu expects next year is one that he’s been forecasting for some time. To be clear, he is forecasting a normal cyclical downturn, not a deep recession.

Beaulieu expects the modestly improving economic climate will continue until February, but, he expects the U.S. industrial production index to peak in the second month of 2018. When that happens, look for things to taper off the rest of the year before turning more sharply downward in 2019.

And, here is Beulieu’s most important message, “When the downturn happens, smart company executives will use the slowdown to invest in your business, from equipment to ERP systems, from talent to technology.”

“Leadership is becoming more critical,” Beaulieu said. “Forget the noise. Lead your company with confidence. Don’t hunker down in the slowdown because that’s when it’s time to be aggressive.”

Hard advice to follow when margin and cash tighten. And, if we reflect back, we can all point to examples of leaders who followed Beaulieu’s advice during the great recession. Perhaps at the time, we questioned their wisdom, yet today we can see how they reaped the benefits during the last 10 years of prosperity.

Who are the UNSUNG heroes working for you?

July 16, 2017July 14, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

We worship winners—especially those who demonstrate leadership, confront a crisis and prevail. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the hero did not create the crisis in the first place.

But what about those who keep crises from erupting at all?

Who are the UNSUNG heroes working for you (and helping you avoid the ditch)?

Are you only recognizing the “heroes” in your company, and ignoring those who help you avoid the storms altogether?

This article by John Kay in the Financial Times, “No One Remembers a Cautious Captain of Industry,” explores our sometimes foolish preference for the heroic over the prudent and for the bold over the wise.

How Do You Know When to Go With the Flow?

June 18, 2017June 16, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Option 1 _ Sometimes, the best thing to do is to go with the flow and let things play out.

Option 2 _ Sometimes, the best thing to do is to choose a desired outcome and lead others toward that outcome.

How do you decide?

In my experience, business owners have the tendency to choose Option 2. Owners get to decide the outcome they want and when passionate about that outcome, they choose to lead others toward it.

Similarly, professional CEOs, especially those leading PE owned companies, generally choose Option 2. They have a clear mission from the PE board, have incentives that are aligned with the board, and therefore choose to lead others toward their desired outcome, leaving as little to chance as possible.

On the other hand, my experience with executives is, it varies. And, since executives have both their careers to think about and their business to think about, they have two situations for which this choice must be made.

Some executives are willing, and actually prefer, to go with the flow, letting their owners or their boards, or their CEO decide the direction. This works best when the decision makers are in fact choosing Option 2, i.e. they are clear about the desired outcome.

But, what happens when the decision maker and those charged with implementing the decision are simply going with the flow? Is there even a direction, or simply a flow?
And, what happens when going with the flow provides financial rewards, but not psychic rewards. What then?

Everyone needs a purpose, a “why”. Some of us are comfortable deriving that purpose from others. Some of us need to set our own course.

The challenge for each of us is becoming clear which choice works for us and then putting ourselves into situations where we can be aligned with our choice.

Not Asking Has a Price Tag

June 11, 2017June 10, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

We Vistage chairs often talk about the importance of staying curious, of asking questions. Often as leaders we tell ourselves that the only “cost” of being directive vs. asking questions are soft costs. For example, we make assumptions that are wrong and have to start over when we learn we are headed in the wrong direction.

What about the hard costs of heading in the wrong direction?

What about when we as leaders, march into a new area, or start a new initiative, everyone follows, and we are headed in the wrong direction? Money is invested and then we have to start over. If only we had asked a few questions up front, we tell ourselves afterwards, the price tag associated with the failure might have been avoided.

This TED talk, titled simply, “If you want to help someone, shut up and listen!”, by Ernesto Sirolli, brings this point home in a global way. Ernesto Sirolli is a noted authority in the field of sustainable economic development and is the Founder of the Sirolli Institute, an international non-profit organization that teaches community leaders how to establish and maintain Enterprise Facilitation projects in their community.

What does this talk have to do with leadership? A lot.

What does it have to do with business? I’ll let you decide that.

What If That’s Not How I See it?

May 21, 2017May 19, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

How often are we in situations where what we want and what others want are not aligned? We make assumptions daily, mostly about other people. These assumptions enable us to take shortcuts and at the same time, they cause disagreement that perhaps wasn’t there to begin with.

We assume a person attended or didn’t attend an event because…
We assume a person responded to us a certain way, because…
We assume a person took an action or didn’t take an action because…

What if instead of assuming, we paused and asked:

What is the reason you made this choice or took this action?
When your customer complains about “service”, do you probe to understand what is really going on?
When we see something, as the TSA reminds us, do we say something?
When an employee behaves a certain way, do we ask what is going on?

And when what we want seems far from what “they” want, what if we asked and explored the possibilities..

As We Search For What Matters, Must We Choose?

May 14, 2017May 12, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

William Butler Yeats, 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939

I came across this poem some time ago and was reminded of it in a recent discussion in my Vistage groups about “what matters”. Today we constantly talk about achieving balance; we perceive that it is the stress of modern times that creates this challenge. Yet this poem was written in the early 20th century. A reminder that this quest is the human condition, a daily challenge of choice. Here are the questions that come to mind:

Must we choose between success in life and work?
Or is it the search for perfection of one or the other that forces the choice? e.g. Albert Einstein was portrayed by his biographers as a poor husband and father. Was he, or was this the judgement of the biographers?
As we search for meaning in our lives, must we distinguish between what defines “life” and what defines “work” or is it possible to simply pursue what matters to us?
On this day devoted to mothers, what are you telling or demonstrating to your children about this question?

Care, Attention, Competency

May 7, 2017May 6, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Care, Attention and Competency (CAC), these are the watchwords of the client service model for one of my Vistage member’s business. This business is in the construction industry and as he explains, bottom line of what they deliver is service, not construction.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the progression (regression) from Better, Faster, Cheaper to simply faster and cheaper. So where does CAC come in? Perhaps as several of my readers responded, the bifurcation is already happening, certainly in the consumer world (think airlines premium seats/status vs. economy/discount seats), and beginning in the B2B world. If this is so, then in order to deliver better, CAC must become the standard.

What exactly does this mean? For me it means, we meet the customer where they are, we provide care, in the manner they want us to show it. We give them our attention when they ask, and not wait until they demand it. And, we remind ourselves that competency, while the baseline, isn’t enough. In fact, studies show that customers who receive care and attention are more tolerant of errors, because they trust we will resolve them.

In short, CAC begins with the Golden Rule, and reaches it’s full value with the Platinum Rule. The Golden Rule implies the basic assumption that other people would like to be treated the way that you would like to be treated. The alternative to the Golden Rule is the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

Here are the questions I leave you with:

Assuming the bifurcation is happening, where is your business on the continuum?
Are you focused on Faster/Cheaper or are you seeking to differentiate by offering Better?
How might CAC apply, or not, to your service delivery? And are you delivering by the Golden Rule or the Platinum Rule?

Better, Faster, Cheaper

April 23, 2017April 21, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

For many years, the adage was “do you want it right, on-time or cheap, pick two”. And then somewhere in the 80’s and 90’s, perhaps associated with the dot.com era, marginal costs moved close to zero in some industries. Because of this, we began to expect all three. In fact the new adage became “better, faster, cheaper”. And, some believed we had moved to an era where all three were in fact possible.

Or did we?

I wonder if instead, more and more businesses, driven by customer unwillingness to pay for quality, have simply picked two on our behalf, with the two being cheap and fast. We see this happening in B2B, B2C and B2Self (i.e. w/internal corporate customers) three examples:

Amazon delivers using their own drivers because they are cheap. Amazon made this choice because they believe what we consumers want from them is fast and free delivery and when quality of logistics suffers (packages left in strange places, in the rain, etc.), we are willing to accept that cost.
Airlines overbook and sometimes have to deny boarding to passengers or in a recent highly profiled United airlines case, remove passengers to accommodate crew. This recent scandal with United brought attention to the consequences of this (and while this particular situation captured on video was awful, we all know it isn’t just United Airlines that overbooks and removes passengers).
HR support and IT support is outsourced in many, perhaps most?, large corporations. Ask any employee or user of IT which 2 of the three choices they are getting?

In an article entitled “Why Flying in America Keeps Getting More Miserable” Matthew Yglesias of Vox news sums this up well when he says, decades’ worth of evidence suggests we prefer cheap and safe to pleasant. Pleasant, defined as available seats all the time combined with higher prices to cover the costs, is a price we pretty clearly could bear as a society if we chose to, but as consumers we have collectively and repeatedly chosen not to. Instead, wherever competition has reared its head in the industry, the mass market has aimed for low prices above all else, followed by a vigorous culture of collective complaining when something goes wrong.

Where will this take us in the future…

Will this trend toward faster and cheaper continue to drive most products and services?
If it does, will there be exceptions where quality is the driver? The obvious exception is medical products and medical care, or is it?
Will some markets bifurcate such that parallel services will develop where consumers are willing to pay for quality?

What are the implications for your business?