As you probably know by now, the story involves a group of flawed but powerful people (more or less) who have to find a way to work together to defeat a greedy, narcissistic demigod who is determined to own the earth and subjugate the human race – to “make them kneel,” because to Loki (the Norse god and villain), that is all humans are good for.

The metaphor for the debate about our current business and social climate is too easy – but that’s not what really struck me during this scene.

 Loki is about to open a portal to Asgard to let in a marauding army of Frost Giants. The Avengers are struggling to figure out where he is so they can stop him.  Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) tries to reason it out, thinking of what Loki could be after – and describes Loki as a narcissistic, power-mad individual who wants to have his name plastered all over some monument to himself….and Stark stops cold, realizing that Loki is at the Stark Industries building -  which has his name plastered all over it. And he realizes the irony (sorry). He looks in the mirror, and sees Loki looking back at him. He sees his enemy in himself.  And then he knows how to win, and he ends up taking the biggest risk, not for himself, but on behalf of the world.

How many of us have the courage to look in that mirror? Or, having looked, can accept what we see? And further, once we see it, do something about it?  That is personal, transformational change. Tony Stark did it in the movie, and Robert Downey Jr. did it in real life. Downey was written off, but had the courage to come back and has now exceeded even the best estimates of his potential that people were putting forward when he was down.

And he is not the only one. Our world is full of heroes, and stories of redemption, if we choose to look at them.

I think organizational development exists to help leadership build a climate in which people can develop and use their strengths to achieve great things for themselves and their organizations. And I realize today that I had been defining that in terms of setting expectations and goals, assessing capability gaps, and working to close them through learning and development. But there is something more fundamental, which I’ve assumed but never articulated.

Sooner or later, everyone will reach the level of their game, and they will need the support of those around them to get to the next level.  You’ve been there.  So have I.  At some point, each of us fails. The lesson of Tony Stark for me is one of redemption – he was willing to do whatever it takes to recover from his mistakes, and the structure around him allowed him to do just that. And in his recovery, he saved the world. And in Downey’s recovery, in the same way, he saved his own life.

 Right now, there are people in organizations who are in the midst of a “performance plan” designed to get them to improve their results. Like Stark’s epiphany, these are opportunities for belief, potential, forgiveness, and redemption, not just numbers on a spreadsheet or a performance review. Because one little known fact about performance plans is that they often result in turning things around.  The variable? The focused time, attention, and support of the leader.

So let’s stretch our metaphor a little more.  Loki stands in contrast to Thor, the true son of Odin, who has chosen to live on earth as its protector. He believes in the goodness, strength, and beauty of humanity. At one point, Loki points out our tendency to kill, maim, and abuse each other, and Thor stands up for us as imperfect but having great potential.

So, when faced with underperforming people, or a difficult relationship, do you lead like Thor, or like Loki?

We’d all like to answer “Thor.” But for a leader who doesn’t believe struggling people are capable of redemption, the mirror may hold a different answer. And if Loki looks back at you, the solution is to see it, accept what you see, and use what you learn to serve something larger than yourself.

Here are the introductory paragraphs from our article in the Spring edition of the Insights newsletter published by the Center for Leadership Formation, Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University.  The full newsletter is here and our article starts  on page 3. My colleague, Mike Stafford, is the Managing Member of Management Performance Solutions, LLC, and former SVP of  Talent Management for Starbucks. The article is based on our learning from our own experience and what many of our colleagues have shared about what makes leadership learning stick.

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Countless stories fill the news about the obvious and tangible financial and material impact of the recession. Home foreclosures, unemployment, and massive federal debt are serious impacts and need to continue to be addressed and quickly resolved.

However, the intangible negative consequences of the recession on employee engagement and the employee/employer contract have not received nearly as much popular attention. As the economy improves, there may be a high cost in employee loyalty and commitment, and organizations could possibly experience an exodus of top talent who have been waiting to leave until the job market strengthened.  This is potentially bad news for company bench strength charts, as retaining your future leaders is a key element in building leadership continuity.

Even without a talent exodus, the forecasted need for leadership talent is high. Deloitte has just published the latest findings in their longitudinal study “Talent Edge 2020: Redrafting talent strategies for the uneven recovery.” They state: “Approximately one-third (30%) of executives surveyed ranked developing leaders and succession planning as today’s top talent priority—the highest of any response in the survey.” Yet, they also report “Corporate talent programs are falling short on performance and investment.”[1]

 So what’s the answer?

The best companies do not change their stripes when things get tough. They commit to staying the course and maintain a positive culture and climate as they work through their financial and operational issues. They may cut activities, but they stay true to their foundational development values.

• Leadership can be learned, and continuously improved over time.
• People continually grow and develop, personally and professionally, over their lifetimes.
• There are times our intentions do not match our actions, and the only way we know about that gap is through regular feedback.
• The gap matters.

In multiple organizations, I’ve heard:

• “Nope, leaders are born, not made, and you either have it or you don’t.”

• “Yes, but I want to see what my return will be on any development investment I make.”

The ROI demand is completely fair. Corporate leadership learning must be linked to strategy, it must be relevant to running the business, and it has to affect either revenue or cost.

But what kind of “return” would convince you to construct a leadership development capability that includes the right mix of experience, coaching, and learning events with accountability built into the process?

A colleague told me today that he and his company were able to put a development process in place that increased internal promotions by 50%. That meant hiring significantly fewer leaders from the outside, which saved big recruiting expenses.

The intangible benefit is obvious to many – it also avoided the cost of failure among external leadership hires, and the cultural damage that can be done by a bad fit.

Proof: noun, 1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.
– Dictonary.com

If you believe at your core that leadership can be learned, that people are learning organisms, and that interacting with others is a valuable learning process, then you will believe an ROI presentation that forecasts impact. If you do not believe it, the evidence will never be sufficient to convince you.

So what?

According to Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, small companies tend to be resource challenged and so have to be creative and think out of the box – and therefore demonstrate more openness to new ideas – while large companies are resource rich, learn to focus on control to maintain and grow those resources, and find themselves aspiration challenged. If you have enough to run the business without leaving your comfort zone, and things seem to be going well, you are more likely to cut or choose not to engage in uncomfortable activities even though they may add tangible and intangible benefits. And this works fine, as long as things are stable. When things change, you may suddenly find yourself in need of talent you don’t have.

First Opportunity Cost: If you don’t invest in capability before you need it, it won’t be there when you do. This is the lesson of  The Three Little Pigs – a house of stone was more costly in the short term, but it paid big dividends in the end.

Human interaction follows certain principles. Ignoring them is akin to ignoring gravity. If you lose your grip on a glass of water, it falls, spills, and probably breaks. You don’t get to negotiate with it on the way down.

Unfortunately, it’s not that obvious or immediate with people. A leader can wreck a trusting relationship and fail to recognize it because people will say and do the right things to protect their income for the sake of their families – kind of like the glass stopping in mid-air. And you’ll think all is well, but it’s still on the way down. You can lean pretty hard on your most committed people and they won’t leave in a bad economy.

Second Opportunity Cost: Unskilled leadership leads to turnover and loss of capability – and the evidence (not the “proof”) suggests that it is the individual’s leader who determines the engagement level of your best people, and whether they stay with the company (Here).

It can be tempting to place accountability for talent gaps and turnover of high performers elsewhere. But leadership is the key to retaining your best people.

Leadership can be learned. And you’ll see that when you believe it.

I thought, “So, why would they choose to remember that?” Here’s where I landed.

You can feel it when the intention shifts from profit as the natural result of serving the customer and running a great company to profit as the point and customers as market segments; from too small to take anything for granted  to too big to fail.

In my opinion, if you’re not a good company for the employee, the customer will feel it. If you’re not a good company for the customer, you won’t be good for the shareholder for very long.

• Small company thinking focuses on the customer and the people who serve them.
• Big company thinking focuses on Wall Street.

You’ve got to find a way to do both.

For years, this “organizational life cycle” from startup to stable enterprise to bureaucracy seemed inevitable, but I think there’s a difference between an immutable law and the path of least resistance. I think McLeod is correct that thinking like a small company is a choice.

As we have celebrated the life of Steve Jobs over the past few weeks, there have been lots of tales of the scrappy, creative beginnings of Apple Computer – one of hundreds of startup stories characterized by extreme commitment, intense focus, extraordinary joy, and drama.

Stop for a moment and think about the energy generated in that environment. Who wouldn’t want some of that on their team?

It can be hard for leaders in large companies to engage in scrappy, creative, fully present, small company thinking. It’s not enough to demand more  with less – when everyone in the company knows the coffers are full, it only generates cynicism when resources are deliberately constrained in the hope of forcing innovation and scrappiness. Whatever you do has to be authentic and make logical sense.

So I’m starting a list of elements of small company thinking:

Focus on the customer – Not the market, not the demographic trend, not the generation – the actual customer clearing her throat to get your attention as she holds out the shoe she wants to try on. Even if you’re in IT, HR, Finance, or Legal and you generate reports for managers and rarely see an actual customer, you probably live with or hang out with one. You are creating solutions and making decisions that affect the quality of that person’s relationship with the company.

Build an incredible team – Help people enroll in your mission by making it and the values you stand for crystal clear. Deliver all necessary resources, make sure everyone knows what to do and how, and define roles that provide structure but are semi-permeable when the customer needs something new. Declare all turf community property, outlaw silos. Select people who believe with you, and let others follow their own path.

Max out leadership, minimize management – Describe the destination, the rules of the road, and point out the guard rails. Then, turn people loose. Executive coach Peggy Gilmer teaches the principal of “minimum essential influence” – the key to John Kotter’s definition of leadership – getting people to want to do what you want them to do.

Micromanaging a committed, energized, engaged employee will lead to  performance that meets your expectations, not their potential. Interaction Associates emphasizes the principle of “maximum appropriate involvement” in innovation, problem solving and decision making, recognizing that people are more committed to implementing a solution they help design, but “help” is role- and expertise-specific.

Celebrate results – Celebrate accomplishments that support your core values, so  people see them in action. Focus on current business results, and also recognize actions that build long-term value.

What would you change? What would you add?

Empathy.

The President, the Vice President, the Chairman of the Fed, even some corporate executives have been expressing understanding of how people feel and why they feel that way. I mean, this is outright active listening. And hearing it from Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner just warmed my humanistic, organizational development heart.

On the other hand, we have Tony Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” and Jeff Immelt’s 2010 comment (defending Goldman Sachs) that inferred people upset about unemployment and foreclosures are engaging in “misguided populism.”

All of which made me think about emotional intelligence, and the comment that Dr. Goleman makes in a virtual whisper that a high degree of emotional intelligence – a combination of self awareness and the ability to be aware of and show compassion for the needs and travails of others – may be a matter of maturity and development rather than skill.

Given that, in the case of President Obama and Vice President Biden, not much is changing despite the active listening and in the case of the CEOs, not much is changing with no pretense to actually listen, it makes me wonder if decades of human relations training, feedback, and coaching has done nothing more than install a veneer of EQ behavior – that fundamental, visceral change has yet to take place.

What do you think? Have we made progress or not? Any examples of true empathy vs. saying the right things?

But, we discover what to learn and the concepts and principles behind it through structured learning.  And we learn to get better over time through coaching.

In the past, I’ve spent a fair amount of effort to stop training that was being used when coaching or experience would better serve the learning need. Now I find myself on the other side of the argument, defending structured learning as critical to building organizational capability when efficiency and productivity goals suggest it should be curtailed, and it feels somewhat familiar.

Remember Learning Organizations?

There was complete alignment on the idea that a great deal of information, knowledge, and experience lived in the minds of the workforce. Everyone agreed this resource could benefit the corporation if it could be captured and easily accessed by others, creating a new baseline from which to take thinking and innovation to new levels. Peter Senge and others brought systems thinking and dialogue tools into the mainstream conversation, and it looked like some banner years for innovation were ahead.

In short order, organizational learning strategies split into two predictable categories:

• Technology and tools that enabled an individual to create a professional journal of knowledge and experience that could be accessed by others. Consulting firms, for example, found great value in being able to create client knowledge bases that could be shared among team members serving those clients around the world.
• Behavioral science solutions and interpersonal tools for deep dialogue and exploration of knowledge and ideas. Since organizations are made up of human beings, authentic human interaction would be the best means to accomplish this sharing of knowledge.

The best possible answer is when the tools enable the dialogue.

In the late 1990’s, “human capital” entered the lexicon – the notion that what was between the ears of the work force was the property of organizations. In the 2000’s, human capital led to integrated talent management.  And again, there’s agreement on a key principle: There is a compelling need to build capability to do business in a time of perpetual change and transformation. And, there are two approaches which should be complementary:

• Build systems for selecting, rating, ranking, and measuring people’s performance throughout the organization and use the numbers to manage the inventory of talent.
• Build programs and processes that enhance organizational capability through the growth and development of the people themselves.

I believe it’s time to focus as much on talent development as we do on talent management

The 70% rule is not new.  It was first espoused by Lao Tzu (around 500 BCE), who also originated another statement now attributed to modern management consultants – “Go slow to go fast.” And in general, we like the “go fast” part.

Many who use the rule to support the efficiency argument may not be aware that the 70-20-10 are averages based on learning research. Like most rules of thumb, the 70% rule works extremely well when someone stretches out one arm and squints. It is best not applied to individual human beings without a careful assessment of learning needs.

Each learning strategy has value, properly applied, to help the learner succeed.

The Value of Experience:

A big part of learning from experience is being completely accountable for results. But a “developmental experience,” is just another job assignment without a clear understanding of what the leader is supposed to learn, periodic evaluation of whether they are learning it, and support to get over dangerous rough spots. The pressure to perform without a clear understanding of the new frame of reference required can lead to survival by using strengths gained in former positions, not growth.

The term for experience without structured learning and coaching is work. Without a focused learning process, it’s just performance management – necessary, but not development.

The Value of Coaching:

The main value of coaching lies in helping a learner understand when their impact is not matching their intent, figuring out why, deciding what to do about, and following through. All of this presumes the skill to implement whatever action is required.

Coaching is a very time consuming and, frankly, inefficient approach to skill building. A high potential leader who has never built a marketing strategy would be better off going to a short executive program on that subject and then getting coaching to help them build their own plan, and align their people’s thinking with it. Once the fundamentals are mastered, coaching is a great way to hone capability in action.

The Value of Structured Learning:

A 10-year high potential employee can lack key competencies if they are new or newly expected. For example, think of a newly promoted senior leader with a great track record who has to prepare and deliver their first capital budget request to the executive committee.  Too often, we expect them to master the process and know how to communicate with that team without sufficient support.

In the absence of a structured learning of the fundamentals, the “sink or swim” approach leading to “survival of the fittest” proves only that they survived – or not.

Stop Grading on a Curve

A skilled teacher/coach/mentor/leader should be striving to help everyone of their people get an “A.” While it may not be possible, it’s a mindset that puts the focus on what the learner needs, not just the organizational criteria for promotion. And it’s likely they’ll raise the average GPA by thinking and acting this way.

I’ve seen this play out in situations where manager assessments and performance evaluations have led people to assume that some folks just “don’t get it” – see “Testing the Truth of a Succession Plan,” here.

When preparing a stretch assignment, it’s important to confirm the developing leader’s knowledge of fundamentals.  If they have them, they don’t need training. Focus on coaching to improve performance and gradually increase the complexity of experiences.

Similarly, if they have successfully completed a difficult assignment, and you are confident it wasn’t just luck, back off on the coaching and let them have the experience of working on their own. At least then you know they understand how to be successful, and they are working toward sustaining their own performance.

Developing talent is more than managing performance and entering the data in the talent  management system. If developing leaders are a company’s high potential talent that will fill critical positions, organizations should do everything possible to set them up for success by applying 100% of the learning formula.

Generally, you can’t “do” a vision. It is the outcome of your effort over time. A vision is big, a picture in your mind of what it will look like, feel like, what the results will be when you get where you most want to go.

There is an apocryphal story about real estate developers resolving the issue of where to put the sidewalks connecting newly built complexes by planting grass, and waiting to see where the residents wear down the best paths among the buildings. This, of course, brings planning back to the question of purpose – what is a sidewalk for?

No matter how passionately a vision is held, it can be difficult to know where to start. You need something more tangible – some call it a mission, some call it a purpose, but it is a combination of what you need to accomplish to realize your vision and the reasons why. The “what” gives you direction and makes your task tangible and clear – we need walkways. The “why” tells you how to proceed – make it easy for people to get where they want to go.

If you are like most experienced professionals, there’s a lot you can do. The prerequisites are deciding what you should do – what’s most important – and answering the question – “In service to….what?”

Recently, I worked with a leadership team that was looking for ways to improve results. The company uses a scorecard to rank division performance, and the senior leader wanted to finish first in the ranking in 2011. He asked each of his 10 managers to select something for which they would commit to being seen and talked about as “great” by the end of the year. He challenged them to envision standing up at the annual awards meeting and being applauded for achieving outstanding results, and asked them to set that goal.

Goals included dramatic increases in opening new accounts, driving individual productivity, improving service levels, and other business metrics.

This was not new. They had done something similar before, and only seen incremental gains.

As we worked through the issues, it became clear that in the past, the managers would own the goal personally and try to inspire the team with periodic speeches, signs, and slogans. To succeed this time, they had to get their people to own the goal – to be infused with their own sense of purpose.

The challenge for these managers: How do I get my team to buy into this with the same personal passion and commitment for what is, at the moment, my “greatness goal?”

Share the Big Picture

In a prior post, I talked about getting people to see the way you see rather than telling them what to do. Paint a clear picture of the destination.

Turn Employees Into Owners

Make sure people can see themselves in your vision – what’s in it for them, what they will achieve. Make the goal tangibly useful and personally relevant to each of your people. Make it real.

Help your people understand how their work contributes to results – how they are a key part of achieving the “greatness goal.” And help them build their own plan. (see Try This Now)

Lead By Example

Back in the 1980’s Tom Peters commented “If you say something is your number one priority, and you are not …spending 50% of your time on it, then you do not care about it.” Thirty years later, I think we would all still agree that that people look at our actions and hear our words, and if they don’t match, they assume that what we do reflects our true belief no matter what we say.

Fast forward to 2008, and Jim Loehr, in The Power of Story, promises that you will be extraordinary in the areas that get your full and best energy.

If you’re a leader, every interaction with your people should get your full and best energy. If you set a “greatness goal” that you can’t achieve with your own initiative alone, energizing others means establishing a rhythm of action and communication.

Stay the Course

Reinforce the desired behavior. Publicly recognize progress, achievement of steps along the way. Notice people doing new and challenging things to try to achieve the goal. Find out what’s blocking people, and move it out of the way.

Leaders help their people translate vision into purpose, dreams into goals, and intentions into action.

Last month, I had the opportunity to talk with about 80 HR professionals about “Strategic Relationship Management: the Power of Persuasion” at the Second Annual Strategic Conference of the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) Washington State Council.

Taking apart the title, we discussed the fact that everyone had at some point successfully created and executed on a strategy, plan, or initiative, had built and maintained successful relationships, and had persuaded someone of something.

The workshop focused on how to use those abilities in our leadership roles, and how to make a compelling business case for our most important people priorities.

Strategic

We discussed a working definition of “strategic” for HR – “Be a business partner who provides the unique contribution of HR to the organization; making decisions and deploying resources in service to the company’s mission and strategy.” Then, we exchanged “partner” for “leader.” We expect leaders to deliver three things to the company:

• Results
• Strategic direction
• A climate that encourages productivity

For the past couple of decades, HR executives have been striving for “a place at the table” and to be seen as  “credible business partners.” In her keynote presentation, Alexis Herman (Chair and CEO of New Ventures, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor), told the HR executives in the room: You’re at “the table”, and you are a business partner.  And it’s time to get on with it.

So, the first question is: What is the unique way HR leaders deliver those three things – the unique HR contribution to your company’s success?

Relationship Management

If you don’t get the resources you need, it usually isn’t personal, but it is about relationships.  A productive working relationship is one in which decisions get made, agreements are kept, and problems get solved. No matter how much we like each other, if we can’t do those three things, we won’t have a good working relationship.

But relationships and persuasion at work are complicated by levels of control over resources, which means we need to present a value proposition that makes clear the benefit of doing, or the risk of not doing, the project, initiative, or program for which we want some of those resources.

HR

What are the deliverables which, if HR doesn’t provide them, no one else will?  IT can run the systems. Finance can run the numbers.

There’s a reason we’ve been talking so much about engagement and productivity. We’ve known for a long time that productivity is delivered by people, and is the direct result of motivation, which is the direct result of organizational climate (See Litwin and Stringer, 1968). Climate is like the actual weather – it’s what it feels like to work in your company, and it’s the result of culture, which is “the way we do things around here” – the way we hire, review, develop, recognize, and reward people.  And more.

Persuasion

Rather than go directly to how to persuade others, take a moment to consider “what do people do that persuades you?” Participants’ answers fell into three categories:

Trust

What constitutes trust in the workplace? At the most basic level, if you keep your promises and provide solid information others can use to get results, they will learn to rely on you. Emotionally, that translates to acting authentically and being open and truthful. You deliver, and you tell the truth.

Credibility

You build credibility through a track record of achievement, the ability to generate insight from information and both fluency and creative ability in your field.  In short, you’re credible when you know what you’re talking about, and you project that.

Audience understanding (not your presentation)

In The Art of the Solo Performer, singer-songwriter Steve Rapson says:

“A good performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, ‘Here I am!’  A great performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, ‘There you are!’”

You’re persuasive if you can link your idea to a genuine need and business outcome your audience cares about.  If you do that and they have confidence you know what you’re talking about (credible) and that you will deliver (trust), there’s a good chance you’ll get what you want.

But, it’s also possible that you may give it all you’ve got and your sponsor and stakeholders still say “no.” Maybe it’s because they simply do not believe in that way of doing business, or you haven’t successfully translated your idea into their language.  It happens, and it’s a great opportunity to make them partners in designing the outcome.

Don’t make a presentation.  Tell a story.

A quick search of your favorite online book store will reveal upwards of 30 titles on how effective leaders use stories to communicate what success looks like.

Most of us develop a proposal by identifying a need, doing research and collecting data, developing our point of view, and devising a solution or approach to solve the problem or meet the need.

Turning it into a story that is relevant to your sponsor, stakeholder, or client means reversing that thought process. Start with the solution, and what has happened that makes it necessary. Then you can support your conclusion with information relevant to your audience.

So for HR professionals, being seen as a credible business leader is much more likely if you understand:

• Your company’s strategy and your unique contribution to it
• How your people priorities support results, direction, and climate.
• The priorities and needs of your key stakeholders, and how to speak their language.
• How to build a compelling story for any proposal that addresses those priorities and needs and supports company strategy.

A few years ago, I was in one of those philosophical discussions about leadership and management. Everyone was sharing their views of the ten things all great leaders do, and the traits that separate the best from the rest. Of course, everyone in the discussion had a different list of ten, and “the key traits” varied by, among other things, obvious behavioral evidence of psychological type.

Then a guy named Jim (a senior leader with a decades-long track record of outstanding results) provided a short, complete vision of leadership, saying “The best leaders teach you to see the way they see rather than telling you what to do.”

*crickets*

Everyone stopped and thought about that simple comment, which contained so much.

First, of course, a leader needs to see where they’re going. She or he needs a clear and vivid picture in their mind of the end game, how things will be working and what will be accomplished when their vision is realized.

Second, they need to share it. Not just in words and PowerPoint decks, but with vivid story and imagery that tells people what will be accomplished, what it will mean for them, and how they can contribute if they choose to sign up.

Third, since everyone now knows where the end zone is and what game they’re playing, the leader creates a climate in which each individual can use their own unique, idiosyncratic strengths and style to get results – “rather than telling them what to do.”

The assumption, of course, is that this kind of climate will create more innovation, creativity, and better results. Why? Because if the leader is the gatekeeper for the team’s ideas, the entire team will be limited to only the things the leader can think of.

Another interesting word in Jim’s sentence is “teach.” It presumes that if an employee is hearing about a goal, an initiative, a strategy for the first time, they need complete and unambiguous communication of what it is, how it’s supposed to work, what the end game is, and how they fit in. And, if there are new skills or knowledge required, those are provided.

Then they can be coached.

Too often, leaders will deliver the message and turn people loose, assuming they will be “coached” to success. Coaching only works when the individual on the receiving end has the fundamentals and some experience trying to put them into practice. Then, the combination of observation, feedback, and support that constitutes effective coaching can take performance to another level.

But the best part about Jim’s comment for me was that it wasn’t about him – it was about the people being led. Sure, the vision is his – he’s the senior person, accountable for setting direction. But he understood the importance of having a team whose thinking was aligned with his, and who were ready to put their unique talents to work in the service of his vision.

So the best leaders develop a clear picture of ultimate success, think about how to get you to see it the way they do, and know they have to provide the climate in which you can bring your best to making it real.

If you just tell people what to do and how, exactly, to do it, you’re just the boss. The best leaders develop a clear picture of ultimate success, think about how to get their people to see it the way they do, and know they have to provide the climate to make it possible.

Yes. Kind of. (And you should re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)

But this isn’t a tale of mid-life epiphanies. This is about the simple technique I use to keep my butt in the saddle, which is a good theme to explore in the first blog post for a newly launched business.

Every time I ride, I sit for a minute in the driveway and think about how I want the experience to end.  I take a deep breath, in, out, and think several times:

“The bike stays up today.”

This is nothing new – thousands of pages have been written about the power of affirmations.  But let’s think about how affirmations work.

I want the bike to stay up for the obvious reasons – and more subtle ones. If the bike stays up, I have read the road and the traffic. I have strategically placed myself in the flow to make sure I can see and be seen.  Now I will spot the unexpected as soon as it begins: it will stand out as an exception to the flow.  And because I am confident I can identify and deal with the unexpected, I can love the ride.

Which is why I’m on the bike in the first place.

Here are three things I’ve learned that apply to everything I do.

1. You hit what you aim at.

If there is a pothole in the road, and you stare at it, you will run over it.  If you look to the side of it – where you want to go – and aim there, you’ll go around it.  Wayne Gretzky saw the ice like this. He shot where the goalie wasn’t and passed where his teammate was going.

If you have a vision for your business, a strategy for the coming year, a place you want your career to go, then aim at that.  Obsessing about problems, obstacles, and issues will give you a checklist of things to address and fill up your calendar – and you will encounter them and spend your time with them.  Focusing on your destination will help you include the most affirmative things in your journey.

2. Everyone else on the road is paying attention to themselves.

I knew a superbly creative singer/songwriter during the 1990’s Boston coffeehouse scene named Jim Infantino who wrote a hilarious song called “Stress.”  The refrain ended with, “Everybody’s thinkin’ ‘bout me.”

No.  That roofing contractor on the cell phone merging onto the highway doesn’t even know I’m there.  So I’m movin’ over a couple of lanes.

On the bike, I am accountable for my own survival: for safely completing the ride.  In my work, I am accountable for managing my commitments: keeping them, and bringing my best to everything I do.

3. You can improvise when you have mastered the fundamentals.

Calculated risk lives at the intersection of challenge and capability.  The more I have confidence in my ability to deal with whatever I encounter, the more risk I can accept.  Mastering the fundamentals and the disciplines of your work or craft is like building a bike with great brakes – they allow you to go very fast, confident you can respond to the unexpected.

The safest way for you to deal with the motorcycle is not to ride it. The safest way for you to approach an innovative project is not to start it. The surest way to avoid criticism of your art is not to create it.

I don’t even know you, and I would grieve for that choice.

So how are you thinking about the thing you want most?  Are you thinking of all the obstacles in your way?  If you are, then you’ll hit them.  Are you listening to, even seeking out all the people who will tell you the risks in the hope you can eliminate them?  If you are, then you’ll spend your time building walls instead of doors.  And you will be safe behind them.

It is far better to approach innovation with energy and curiosity and a vision of what’s possible. It is far better to approach the canvas or the project with the visceral, heart-felt belief that something beautiful or new or astounding is about to emerge.

As I embark on my next big professional ride, I am choosing to tell it like this:

• Something new begins today.
• Something beautiful and uplifting is born today.

The bike stays up today.