beBetter 

In previous blogs I’ve written about moving from good to great, to become the Wise Firm, to accomplish smart, sustainable growth. This requires an uncommon discipline to become knowledge leaders, engage our clients face-to-face on future challenges and deliver services that leave their businesses better than we found them.

Do you ever stop getting brain freeze? Gosh a brain freeze hurts! My grandson and I both got one eating ice cream recently. He handled it better than me. Unfortunately, this is not my first brain freeze. In fact, my career is sprinkled with them.

Client meeting with the price tag still on my new blazer...brain freeze.

The brand new navy blue blazer (never even worn) still flying the friendly skies since I left it on the plane right before my presentation at a national conference...brain freeze. (Good opening joke though)

An organization’s strategic focus is similar to the sharpness of a knife. A knife is sharp because energy has been focused at the blade. So, the more focused the energy is at the blade, the sharper the knife, the higher the cutting power, and the stronger the knife. If energy is not focused at the blade, we end up with a dull knife, with diminished cutting power – a weaker knife. A dull knife may be good for spreading butter, but if our goal is to cut something tough, then we are going to experience a lot of frustration.

When we try to do too much, it is as if we are trying to sharpen too many knives in our limited time. We juggle between the sharpening of all the different knives, and in the end, not one knife is sharp enough to be useful. We can be much more effective if we spend our time and focused energy sharpening just a few key knives. The more we focus our energy on a few important things, the sharper our knives become.  

Our clients, prospects and teams want more proactive interactions from us. They want to hear your point of view, your thought leadership and your advice. Not only do we want to be their first call, they actually want us proactively reaching out to them to provide guidance and create that safe haven they need to succeed. We may even need to help them understand when they are wrong. In my experience, they respect a point of view even if they might not agree.  

One of my favorite things as a leader has always been the joy of working with and visiting with team members. I love to learn more about each person, both personally and professionally. It’s also a great time for me to answer questions or help with a problem. As leaders, we must realize that it takes each of us doing our part to make a great firm.

Team members need to know that we understand and believe that they are each important, and we demonstrate our understanding by initiating feedback sessions with them. 

An easy intro, for me, is to ask, “How’s it going?” That is my signal that I would really like to know what a team member is thinking. Additional, specific questions might be: What are you working on? What advice do you have for me? What can I help you with? What do you think I should know? If we don’t initiate the conversation, how are we going to know anything that is going on?

The high energy, meaningful dialogue, and engaging personal visits I get from deliberate face-to-face time pumps me up beyond description. These meetings remind me of the importance of face-to-face time and how critical it is to building high-performing teams and establishing strong relationships with clients and one another. 

Today, we have some awesome technology tools, including web access, social media apps, and video capabilities, that make it convenient to skip or question the face-to-face meetings. I realize how important all of these tools are to our future, to our innovation, to improving our processes and effectiveness, and to making it easy for our clients to communicate with us. I know being “connected” is the “in” thing.

But have you ever noticed how difficult it is to joke or really experience the fun stuff unless we are face-to-face? We miss out on those joys when we fail to make face-to-face time a priority.

A team member recently shared a compliment that he received from a client. What really struck me was he said, “You know, Joey, a client compliment never grows old.”  These words rang true to me and helped me to realize how closely client compliments should tie to living the mission of our organizations.

I think it’s time we focus on earning more compliments as leaders by focusing on living our mission statements. And I think it’s time we celebrate them with our teams when they come.

I can remember early in my career, one of the things that motivated me was a team effort. I liked seeing how my results made a difference for our team and clients. I liked being close to the action.  
 
I have been at HORNE for 30 years, and I have had a sense of belonging that has grown stronger with time. I have been rewarded for my growth and proactive leadership on teams. Only later in my career did I also realize how much self-satisfaction I get when I help others reach their full potential, or do things that they did not have the confidence to do.

The terms The Naysayer, The Skinner, The Backhand & The Dumper are not originals of mine, but I am unsure of who to give proper credit. Once I read them, the terms just stuck with me as I identified very quickly that these are situations that slow me down.   
 
Some things just really weigh me down. I call them anchors, because they cause my forward momentum to stop. Now, I am not sure why some things bother me more than others, but they do. I try to recognize these pet peeves and respond in a manner that is appropriate, but also honest. Sometimes I do a pretty good job, and sometimes I don’t. My wife is especially good at letting me know when I don’t. I might as well have dropped an anchor on my toe when that happens.  
 
What are some of these anchors for me?
 

Yes, I am a college football junkie. I love it. I am also a very loyal fan of the Ole Miss Rebels. In some ways, only an Ole Miss fan can appreciate or understand how painful that can be. There have been years that I have had to work hard not to let my frustration with the Rebels ruin my Saturday, or my entire weekend. Sometimes, I’ve had to focus on being an SEC fan, instead. As my wife says, she loves to see college football come, but she also loves when it’s over. 

As I reflect on years when my Rebel football teams have struggled or taking a deep dive, it’s never really clear what the root problems were. What is abundantly clear in those painful years is the unrest within the Rebel Nation which leads to a lot of finger pointing. 

As I move up in leadership, I am confronted with more and more things that I just don’t have a lot of experience with. I find myself wanting to make sure that I ask very direct questions and make fewer and fewer assumptions. 

On some matters, I want to know what the norm is. What is the "rule of thumb," so to speak? I hear some leaders express various financial metrics as our rule of thumb. I guess that helps, but unless I ask the right questions, I really never know if that "norm" fits our situation or not, and it really can leave me questioning myself. 

Ross Perot made the saying, “Kill the Snake,” popular during his run for president. He used a story to relay how organizations and government get so consumed by bureaucracy and red tape that they can’t accomplish the simplest tasks that are critical to the mission. 

For our illustration, since I love to fish, we will use the example of killing the snake in reference to us being in a boat. If suddenly a snake drops into the boat with us, what do we do? Kill the snake! However, if we were in the wrong boat, it might require organizing a committee to study the snake. What kind is it? What color? What are our other options to killing the snake? Who are our best snake killers? When should we kill the snake? What should we do with the snake after we kill it? How should we kill it? Is this the environmentally correct solution?