Greg's Right FIT #450

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Destinations
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Destinations

• Seneca: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Toiling away at a task is easier when a clear destination is in mind. 
• A clear destination is important, but how it's described gets buy in. Logic justifies decisions, but emotion moves the mountains and shakes the trees. Describe what it will feel like when you get to the destination to get more followers.
• Buy-in to your destination is the reason some team members join the journey. Some get attracted to the audience you serve. Others are attracted to their co-workers enthusiasm for reaching the goal. The thing they all have in common is a clear destination, a port to sail to.
• Next week, get with your creative wordsmiths (or ask "Chad Gippity" as my nephew calls open.ai) and describe your destination as best you can. Ask them to give you some emotionally charged images and words, then share it with staff. Tell me what happens. 

Being Human - Employee communication

"True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes." – Daniel Kahneman

Communication is the key to success in business. It’s the foundation. Knowing this, it makes sense to consider improving/increasing employee feedback helps you grow faster. The reason it works is it helps you get the behaviors you want from your people, not just results. A good month or a bad month are less important than how we get there. This focus on behaviors builds momentum, which leads to consistent results over time. 

In a growing company, there’s a good chance your managers are managing too many people. It's a challenge for effective communication.  Especially for employee feedback. Good feedback takes time and when you have too many people to talk to, it's easy to skip it and press for results. Most problems I consult on can be traced back to this push for results versus behavior feedback. Results may be good, but if how we get there isn't "how we do things around here," future growth stalls. I call it behavior drift.  

Behavior drift is culture drift. 

Your future growth depends on the behaviors your people put in place today. Regular feedback is how your managers affect these behaviors. Feedback is a very specific kind of communication. When managers hear they should be giving more feedback they say, I talk to my people all the time. Digging into the specifics I find they've been knocking crises down, answering questions, dealing with personnel concerns, and checking in. This isn't the employee feedback you want them to focus on. 

You want feedback aligned with the strategy of the company. 

Employee feedback relies on repetition. The same questions asked over and over again. Listening to an interview with author Michael Lewis ("Moneyball", "The Blind Side" etc) he was asked about how he got to know the subject of his book so well. He told the story of one book character who told him, "you [Lewis] don't seem to have a process. You just show up and take occasional notes and ask the same questions over and over." Lewis said he needs to ask the same questions because each time he gets a slightly different answer. This variety of answers is where his detailed profiles come from. 

Your managers have to get comfortable with repetition. There is power in asking the same questions over and over again until an understanding is reached. Not just a verbal understanding, but a behavioral understanding. Managers know they're getting through when they see behaviors line up with expectations. 

Teach your managers about great feedback. 

Random Stuff

". . .how is it that a prudish, narrow-minded person like Dorothy can make such obscenely good rhubarb pie. . .?" – "Rhubarb"

Do you remember, or did you ever hear the radio show "A Prairie Home Companion"? The host, Garrison Kellior, had regular segments. One of them was The News from Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” This week I was lucky enough to spend some time with family from other states. One of them said she reads my little notes, keeping up with the news, and I thought, "uh-oh, I should re-read a few of these." 

Running through a few of the 449 issues, there is a bit of "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average," in there. Kind of like seeing someone's curated Instagram. It can't be real, can it? 

It is. Very real. My women are strong, my men are good-looking, and my children are above average. 

And there is an island in Door County, WI they named after me. 

As seen from Egg Harbor, that's Chambers Island in the distance. Although there are no permanent residents of the island, I'm just know their women are strong, their men are good-looking, and their children are above average, because that's how we Chambers roll.  

The other thing we do is consume pies. Yesterday's lunch was a cherry crumble pie from Sweetie Pies. It was delicious. It reminded me of a favorite Garrison Kellior Lake Wobegon story about a rhubarb pie. In it he goes off on another pie: "Pumpkin pie is a synonym for mediocrity. The worst pumpkin pie you ever ate wasn't that much worse than the best pumpkin pie you ever ate. Pumpkin pie is just an excuse to eat nutmeg."

Funny stuff. Worth a listen. "Rhubarb"