Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • 4 Steps to the Motivation to Run and to Lead

    4 Steps to the Motivation to Run and to Lead

    Week 1

    Week 1 mileage: 22 miles

    Long run distance: 9 miles

    I’ve set out with my husband, my bestie, my dad and his bestie (my dad and I don’t actually call them our “bestie”, but it has a nice ring to it) to run the Philadelphia marathon in November.  All five of us just completed the first official week of training.  Fifteen more to go.

    Except for two brief hiatuses when I was too big and too pregnant to run, running has been a part of my regular routine for about ten years. It’s my sanity; it keeps me from having to take a crazy pill.

    As I reflect on running and look forward to this training season, I realize there are so many parallels found in the lessons of running and leading.  So with this, I’ll be writing each week for sixteen weeks about the parallels of learning, enjoying and struggling as a runner and as someone who works to build leadership in the workplace.

    First, before embarking on any endeavor, motivation has to be present.  Running and leading are no different.  And although I will honestly say that part of my motivation to run has always come from thinking I might be able to eat (and drink- I love a good glass of wine… or two) more of whatever I want, I’ve found these four motivating techniques help me with the follow-through to learn and grow as a runner and leader:

    1.Reading about running and leading can help put fuel in the tank to then do both. And to do both better.

    For running motivation check out these reads:

    Runner’s World

    What I Talk about When I Talk About Running

    Running: A Love Story

    First Marathons

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    And for leading, check out the top 10 leadership books.

     

    2. Podcasts have become something that is easy to tune in to in the car and on a run or during any activity where you want to engage your brain in some learning but can’t actually be reading.  Here are some of my favorites that provide ideas on running and on leading and workplace engagement:

    HR Happy Hour

    EntreLeadership

    Smart Passive Income

    And I’ve just added Innovation and Leadership to this line up

    For running:

    The Runner’s World Show

    Marathon Training Academy

    The Human Race

    And we are fortunate to have the Olympics on as our training starts. Actually watching world-class athletes perform can be extremely motivating (or maybe terribly demotivating depending on how you look at it).  Tune into the women’s marathon Sunday morning (August 14) and the men’s marathon the next Sunday morning (August 21).

     

    3. Visualize and Track. Silly as it may be (and you better believe my husband has told me how “stupid” it is several times- yet he does it- go figure) we have a calendar with our training schedule and smiley face stickers we use to indicate if we have accomplished the prescribed run that day or not.

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    I’m on a four day a week plan with one or two cross training days and, Drew, my husband, is on a three day a week running and one to two days of a strength training routine.

    I’ve found that the smiley faces can provide motivation beyond the running very quickly.  Our five year old has a “chore” to feed the dog each morning and evening.  If he does it without being asked, a quarter goes in his savings jar.  With the stickers on the fridge, he now asks for a sticker on the outside of his jar instead of a quarter.   Trade your cash in for stickers, parents and leaders.  They actually work.

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    Have you created a visual workplace?  What “smiley faces” do you need to hang in your office or workplace to motivate yourself and your people towards positive results?  Can you see your progress and can your team?

     

    4. At the end of the day, you just gotta run and you just got to lead to get better through learning and experience.  You’ll hate some days and love some days, but the doing is where most of the results come.

    If you are saying to yourself that aren’t in a formal leadership role at work, seek out opportunities to lead informally at work, in your home and in the community.  We can be and are all leaders.  Most of the people I see that are promoted into formal leadership roles have indicated through their doing that they had the skill and the will to lead long before given the title.  Where can you step up today to do so?

    What gives you the motivation to challenge yourself in whatever it is you are pursuing now?

     

    Like this post? You may also like:

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  • 8 Inspirations from the Kindergartener

    8 Inspirations from the Kindergartener

     

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    My baby started kindergarten yesterday.   Actually, he’s not the baby, he’s the oldest. But sending the first one off to “real” school, though exciting, causes a momma to reflect on how quickly the first five years of his life have gone.

    And I realized that many of those first five years have been captured in the inspiration he has created in the way of blog posts.  So here’s to Andrew and all the lessons he helped inspire before he even launched his formal school learning….

    Do you want to go to timeout?

    M&Ms or Timeout?

    Leadership Lessons from a 4 year old

    Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    Where have all the Good Boys Gone?

     

    What lessons have your kids taught you?

     

  • Do you need a spin off? How innovation and entrepreneurship prevail

    Do you need a spin off? How innovation and entrepreneurship prevail

    Is there such thing as too big in business?  Can a company become too big and therefore too bureaucratic, thus limiting its ability to innovative entirely?   To address this question, the easy answer is to just point you to reading The Innovator’s Dilemma. It answers this question thoroughly. But for the sake of this blog post, I’ll tell you, it depends.

    The book will tell you it depends on whether or not what you are creating is a disruptive technology or a sustaining technology.  The best way I can describe the difference in the two is that sustaining technologies improve upon something already accepted in the market.  Disruptive technologies are just that, disruptive, in other words, they rock the market – and quite often the companies that play in that market’s- world.

    Sustaining technologies prevail precisely because of good management practices (that big and bureaucratic at times can help foster) revolving around listening to customers and therefore allocating resources to pursue the best bets. However, the process of creating disruptive technologies can suffer from good management.  As the author Clayton Christensen says, “The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies.”

    Those companies that succeeded in disruptive technologies, “created different ways of working within an organization whose values and cost structure turned to the disruptive task at hand.”

    With the fast-paced nature of most marketplaces now, its imperative for companies to be in the business of disruption.   Many companies are realizing the need for different structures to create different outcomes, having both the structure that fosters good decision making for sustaining and the structure for disruption.

    If you’re thinking your organization needs room for disruptive technologies to emerge in order to stay in the game, here are some ideas for you from the least to most drastic:

    1. Create reward systems for those to innovate within your structure. I wrote about last week how one best place to work and leader in innovation asks people to bring up ideas/designs that help meet a customer need they have identified.  If the idea is patented and goes to market, the employee gets a share of the royalties.
    2. Create an internal incubator. A good post on this can be found here: Worried About Your Best Employees Starting Their Own Businesses? Trap Them With An Internal Incubator…  This also goes to show that the best way to innovation is to have innovative people.  Reward and create structures that keep your innovators in-house.
    3. Spin off a whole new division/company. Google recently reorganized under the name “Alphabet”  in an effort to “separate it’s money making businesses from its moonshot ones.”  I imagine the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma when heard about this one. One separated company is GoogleX, which has been around for a while, but acts somewhat like an internal incubator focusing on those “moonshots” like driverless cars. “The change is an effort to keep Google innovative,” says the New York Times article announcing the change.

    HR can and should help companies understand what organizational structures best support the goals at hand.  If disruptive innovation is your target, you may need a new game plan.

    Do you need a spin-off to stay competitive?

  • Rules to preserve freedom and culture: How innovative companies go about rule-making

    Rules to preserve freedom and culture: How innovative companies go about rule-making

    “We have rules.” Was one of the first things a CEO of a highly innovative company that has also won several best place to work awards, said to me when I asked him what the secret sauce was for a best place to work.

    Honestly, at first thought, I wanted to say, “Really?”

    He went on to site some examples, but it took me a while to digest and understand, in my please-throw-out-the-employee-handbook type mindset, what he meant and why he was right.

    And rules don’t have to contradict the need for a certain amount of freedom that is necessary for innovation to take place.

    Let’s rely again on the analogy of America. Despite the political rhetoric these days that says we are all going to you know where in a hand-basket, America has a rule book, the Constitution, that governs the land and seems to work pretty well.   (I’m making the assumption as I made in an earlier post that the USA is the most innovative country in the world as measured by producing goods and services that people value as measured by GDP.)

    The rules we find in the Constitution are designed to uphold core values/culture.  Because of this imperative the rules are:

    1. For the most part, timeless and
    2. Non-negotiable
    3. Few (7591 words and 27 amendments, or rules, to be exact)
    4. Above all, written to preserve freedom and autonomy of all, not just a select few, which pushes power down to all

    So what do you do if you want to foster a rulebook for innovation in your organization? Take some cues from the Constitution that are also upheld in other literature on innovation by asking yourself two questions:

    1. “Can I directly tie this rule back to one of our company’s core values that creates our competitive advantage?” What my intelligent and wildly successful business owner friend told me about his company’s rule book is there are processes and “rules” that they follow. And they are non-negotiable.  They are needed to the extent that they align with the company values that allow them to create value for the customer.

    For example, many manufacturers we work for have a core value of safety.  Makes lots of sense.  Therefore, there are rules that govern working safe.  In this case, dress code, such as wearing steel toed boots and other PPE (personal protective equipment) is a rule and it a non-negotiable one.   Dress code in another industry and in another company may not be needed in your rule book at all.  Remember, is it helping you create value?

    2. “Does this rule push authority down, treating people with a sense of freedom over their work?” My friend told me that his company has policies and procedures that encourage people to create.  They do this by giving them the freedom to come up with ideas, on the company’s time, that will help meet customer needs.  There is a “rule” that if you do this, and the idea goes to market, you get a share of the royalties.   Pretty cool.

    In the book Work Rules! Laszlo Bock spends a good portion of the book describing Google’s rules to ensure that dictators can’t arise, or as he describes it, in one chapter titled, “Let the Inmates Run the Asylum: Take power away from your managers and trust your people to run things.” Here’s a list of things managers at Google can’t do on their own: hire, fire, rate someone’s performance, determine compensation adjustments, determine who wins an award, promotion decisions, final design of a product and when to launch it, and determining if code is sufficient in quality.  Man that’s a lot, but it mirrors the checks and balances system our founding fathers put in place when they created our nation, hmm…

    While America isn’t perfect (just turn on the TV and you can get an earful on that these days), its structure provides some insights into two things companies desire in today’s business climate in order to create competitive advantage:  1) innovation and 2) attractiveness.  While I’ve heard some people say they are moving someplace else given the two presidential candidate options, they and I both know they aren’t being serious.   And they aren’t because they know that no president, even the one elected in the still most powerful land in the world, can single-handedly take a way two things- the core values that govern this nation and their freedom.

     

    What questions do you ask yourself when you want to create a new policy or rule?

  • The name of the game is FREEDOM: How innovative companies motivate, get, and retain the best…

    The name of the game is FREEDOM: How innovative companies motivate, get, and retain the best…

    “The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility (freedom) to their employees will have the edge in this area.” Bill Gates

    I can’t neglect (since I missed the window over the 4th) to make sure to make a point about freedom during our nation’s birthday month. And as by coincidence or actually, by what really makes a whole lot of sense, you can’t talk about what drives innovation without talking about freedom. America is a country that was built around the concept of freedom.

    Despite a presidential campaign grounded on “Making America Great Again,” it is the most innovative country in the world as measured by producing goods and services that people value (as measured by GDP). It is also still a country where many desire to immigrate, and though I’m not citing fact now, I will venture to say that many of them desire to come here precisely because they will have freedom, including the freedom to innovate.

    And, since I can’t resist the urge to make a slight political commentary here, a country grounded in freedom is what gives Mr. Trump the freedom to say that America needs to be great again and gives citizens the right to show their support of this by their vote. This is precisely what makes America great. Not the idea of building a wall.

    And freedom is what grounds innovative organizations.

    Why? Because giving people freedom leads to this cycle:

    1. Trust. Freedom is the way you behaviorally demonstrate to people that you trust them.  When people are trusted, they feel free to:
    2. Experiment. A/B or split testing is something the most innovative companies do all the time.  Because everything can’t be known, trying it more than one way and seeing what works better- what the customer prefers- leads to better results.
    3. Fail (more often than not). If I saw anything across the literature that was vital to innovation it was room to fail because it leads people to:
    4. Learn. As the Innovator’s Dilemma emphasizes over and over again –  “The strategies and plans that managers formulate for confronting disruptive technological change, therefore, should be plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for execution.” Learning can also come from getting it right instead of failing, but often the biggest breakthroughs come through some kind of failure in the beginning.
    5. Grow. Growth occurs at the individual level and then collectively at the organizational level in terms of profits.

     

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    Much of the literature uses the word “autonomy” or “flexibility” for “freedom” and this autonomy, as you see in Drive couples with finding mastery and purpose in the workplace to create motivation.

    So how do we create this freedom in the workplace that allows for this cycle to take place, leading to innovation?

    Here are some ideas to create freedom from some of the best innovation hubs:

     

    How do you allow for freedom in the workplace?  What results have you seen?

    What scares you about giving people freedom in the workplace?  Why?