I caught this interview with Kaki King on CNN today. I’ve never heard of Kaki King, so I was barely paying attention when she said something that just blew me away:

I play guitar for a living, and this guitar is way smarter than me. I know that, and I say this a lot, but I really mean it from the bottom of my heart. I am a guitar student, and I will be for the rest of my life. There is just too much to learn in a lifetime. There is something beautiful and challenging and humbling about that that I don’t want to let go of.

This is a woman that Rolling Stone magazine named a “Guitar God” in 2006, yet instead of considering herself a master, she embraces the role of life-long learner. Although the art of the music is interdependent on both her and her guitar, she exalts the potential of the instrument over her own strengths and accomplishments.

Gosh, I wish more leaders would view the people they’ve been given the privilege to lead that way. Our attitudes as leaders should be “these employees of mine are way smarter than me. I am a student of the potential of their behavior, and I could spend a lifetime learning how to better partner with them to create an organization where we, our customers, and our community can all thrive. I am humbled by the challenge of what our interdependence can achieve.”

Kaki’s comments about her music remind me that the art of leadership is in mastering the discipline and joy of continual learning. Kaki might disagree, but I think people are more fascinatingly complex than any musical instrument. There is just too much to learn in a lifetime about how to work well with others.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I had the great pleasure of delivering this presentation on “The Progress Principle” to a group of folks at Arvato Digital Services here in Reno last week. I spoke to them in June this year with a presentation entitled “Empowering Work Relationships.”

They are getting ready to go through some pretty significant organizational change, but instead of talking about how to deal with change or stress, I decided to talk about the concept of inner work life from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s fantastic new evidence-based management book. I think we all realized that we can’t stop change, but the best way to “manage” it might be to make sure we take care of each other by choosing to focus on helping others make daily progress in meaningful work and to be catalysts for our organization and nourishers to our colleagues.

I also stressed my strong belief that there is no substitute for either performance or caring. At the end of every day, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you gave your best effort to perform your given responsibilities, that you tried to improve the work that you do, that you demonstrated good citizenship by helping others as needed, and that you sincerely cared about what you did, who you did it with, and who you did it for. If you ever reach the point where you can no longer do that in your current job, then it’s time to either change your behavior or change jobs.

Helping others make daily progress in meaningful work that they care about can’t insulate us from the mess of change, but it might be able to inoculate us from it’s most harmful effects. Change might make us sick sometimes, but it can’t kill us without our complicity.

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If you ask someone to make an exception for you, make sure it’s because you are delivering exceptional performance. If a policy, procedure, or rule is impeding your ability to perform, help team members succeed, or impress customers, then it’s your responsibility to suggest viable solutions and expect an exception.

photo credit: Fields of View

Never ask for or accept an exception for any reason other than exceptional performance. Reversion to the mean is the reward for those that believe they are entitled to exceptions.

The only reason people so routinely ask for exceptions is that they’ve learned either directly or vicariously that almost any personal inconvenience can be justified as an exceptional circumstance. A culture of exceptions is bad for the reputation and performance of your organization, and that’s bad for your career. It’s deceptively easy to become part of the mediocre mass of folks that put daily pressure on leaders to lower standards to their own lackluster levels of comfort.

I have tremendous respect for people that can say in a matter-of-fact way “I dropped the ball on that one, but it’s my bad, I know what I did wrong, and I’ll try very hard to keep it from happening again.” Falling short does not make the sincere quest for excellence any less virtuous. Setting high standards for yourself and refusing to make excuses when you struggle to meet those standards guarantees you will be exceptional, because the majority of your peers have compared themselves among themselves and would rather ask for exceptions than assume full personal responsibility when things don’t go exactly the way they want.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I stopped by the Port-of-Subs (POS) restaurant on Sharlands yesterday at 9:02 AM hoping to by one of their breakfast grillers. I ate one a week ago and thought it was a great value, so POS was in the right place at the right time yesterday when I was hungry.

Unfortunately, even though this store advertises opening at 9 am, the doors were still locked at 9:02 and as I stood peering into the restaurant I did not see any sign of life. I got back in my car and drove a half mile down the road to Subway to give their breakfast sandwich a try. I’d seen them advertise serving breakfast sandwiches but had never tried one.

It was a winner. For just $3 I got a decent sandwich and a cup of coffee. That’s hard to beat.

If POS had simply done what they advertised they would do – open at 9 am – I would today still have no reason to ever eat breakfast at Subway. Because they were not open to serve me, I now know that Subway offers a similar quality product cheaper and faster. Oops.

If your business is in a competitive market segment, you simply must sweat the small stuff. By design, you need to intend to impress every single customer, every single time. Sure you will fail sometimes, but don’t lose because you got sloppy on a simple detail that was totally under your control – like hours of operation. When you do fail, make sure you have a system to learn how you failed and a system both to recover impressively and to fix the root cause of the failure.

Why help your competitors clean your clock? Wake up and spend your time retraining their customers that you are serious about earning the privilege to exceed their expectations.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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The fall semester starts today. I am teaching my regular organizational behavior class to MBA students, and for the first time ever I’m teaching a version of that same course entirely online in our new Executive MBA program.  I’m also teaching my first semester long course in personal branding to undergraduate students (I’ve been teaching this in the summer only for several years). I taught a version of that class for the first time in the spring to MBA students.

I’ve offered advice to students in two previous posts that you can find by clicking here and here. My new piece of advice is this: set high standards for yourself.

Don’t compare yourself to others. That is a recipe for complacency and mediocrity. Don’t set your standards based on explicit requirements, with a goal of doing just enough work to “pass”. When you get feedback that your effort was not good enough, you will be very unhappy. Instead of seeing yourself as the source of your own discomfort and displeasure, you will probably find someone else to blame (e.g. me).

Expect more than the norm from yourself and you simply won’t have anything to worry about – ever. External standards and expectations become irrelevant when you operate above them.

I framed this post as advice for student success, but setting high personal standards is a recipe for success in all aspects of work and life. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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The 2011 Global Leadership Summit was the best event I’ve ever attended. I signed up just to see Seth Godin speak, and he was very good, but folks like Henry Cloud, John Dickson,  Corey Booker and Patrick Lencioni were to my surprise even better. Every speaker in the line-up delivered exceptional content.

Then there was Mama Maggie Gobran. She was not a master orator like Booker or Lencioni, and her content was very simple. While I may soon forget even the best of the speakers at this event, I will never forget the image of what Mama Maggie Gobran did during her time with us.

Mama Maggie Gogran was introduced with a short video showing her work among the children of Garbage City, Cairo, Egypt through Stephen’s Children Ministry. She has given her life to serve the poor, desperate, and vulnerable among us. These people and the leaders that serve them are to most of us, including me, practically invisible.

After the moving video about her work, Mama Maggie Gogran appeared on stage and was greeted with a standing ovation from the live audience. What she did next was something I feel privileged to have witnessed.

She wept. Then she dropped to her knees and kissed the stage. She spoke volumes before she uttered a single word.

Unlike the powerful oration of Booker, Lencioni, and the other speakers, we all knew that this act was not part of the theatrics of effective speaking. Mama Maggie Gobran’s behavior was a natural expression of her life, and it was a powerful testimonial that the leadership and service she sacrifices her life to provide those that can never reward her is radically different than the leadership most of us know. All of us admire what she does, but few of us would ever aspire to walk even a day in her shoes.

More than any other speaker at the conference, the simplicity, humility, and authenticity of Mama Maggie Gobran’s presence is challenging me to rethink everything I believe about my own behavior as a follower and a leader.

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I was back in my local running store, Eclipse Running, a few days ago to buy a water bottle and a pair of socks. I brought my new Nike SportWatch GPS that I purchased at Eclipse last month with me because I could not figure out how to set the time and I knew they would be able to help.

I described the problem I was having with my watch to the owner and he told me that to fix it, I needed to download the software from the Nike website and connect my watch. I told him I had tried to find the software on the Nike site when I first bought the watch but could not find it. I found the Nike site to be a navigation nightmare; however, I told him I would try again and continued my shopping. The fact that Nike forces you to download their software to set the time on your watch is just plain stupid.

The owner’s son was at the cash register when I checked out. He wears the Nike watch, so I told him my sad story of not understanding how to get the time to display correctly. He also told me I needed to download the software to make it work, and I told him the same thing I told his dad – I tried that once, could not figure it out, but would give it another try.

At that point he asked for my name and phone number and told me he would call me to make sure I got it to work. No one ever asks for permission to call me at home to make sure products work properly, so I figured “yea, OK.”

Guess what? Two days later he called to follow-up.

That, my friends, is impressive customer service.

Exceeding your customers’ expectations does not have to be big deal. Many times it’s as simple as caring enough to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and standing behind the products you sell as if you had purchased them yourself. Look for simple opportunities to be more relational and less transactional. Earn my loyalty by giving me a reason to trust you. Give me the chance to do for you what you can’t do for yourself – tell my friends with shareable social objects that you are the best in town at what you do.

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What’s the most urgent priority of your business? Many of you would say making a profit is your top priority. It’s hard to argue the fact that your business can’t survive if it can’t sustain a healthy bottom line.

OK, so you want to make a profit; then what’s the single most important thing your business needs to grow the bottom line? Revenue. Money that does not hit the top line never has an opportunity to hit the bottom line. Growth, more than anything else, constrains profit.Too many leaders focus their people on line item costs instead of focusing them on the single line that matters the most – the top line. This is not a law of the universe, but if your business is not growing, it’s probably dying.

If growth is the most urgent priority of your business, have you made it everyone’s responsibility? Everyone needs to understand how their daily performance and behavior either helps or hurts the growth of the business.

Please take a few minutes to watch this brief video, then please share your thoughts in the comment section below.  Stay tuned, because my next post will cover the single most important thing you need to focus on daily if you want to grow your business.

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My daughter needed a new pair of running shoes, so we went to Eclipse Running earlier this week to try on a few pairs. National Running Center, an online store, was having a great sale, so my intent was to find the shoes she liked at Eclipse and then go home and order them online from the other retailer.

The owner’s son was working the floor that day, and he did a great job helping my daughter find the proper running shoe for her He was very knowledgeable and sincerely friendly. She found the shoes she liked, and I figured Eclipse Running earned the sale because of their great service. I also bought her three pairs of socks and a pair of socks for myself. At checkout, the guy gave me another pair of socks free – something they have done for me before.

While he was helping my daughter with her shoes, I noticed the new Nike GPS watch the owner’s son was wearing. He enthusiastically told me all the details about the watch and how much he loved it. I hate my Garmin, so I went home and did some research on the Nike watch and decided I had to have one. I priced them online, but decided I’d give Eclipse Running a shot at the sale before I ordered.

When I returned to Eclipse to buy the watch, I learned that their price was competitive, but they were out of stock. I talked to the owner, Chuck, and told me he expected a shipment soon. He took my name and number, and promised me a 10% discount on the watch when it arrived. The watch arrived the next day, and Chuck had “10% discount” written on the box when I came in to pick it up.

That’s how it’s done, folks. Let me summarize: I visited Eclipse on Monday with no intent to buy anything from them, and by Wednesday I had purchased about $300 worth of merchandise.

Impressive service can provide a reliable stream of revenue from delighted customers and the friends in their social networks, which is especially important when your product is essentially a commodity. I will continue to give Chuck and Eclipse Running the first shot at every running related purchase I need to make because they earned it. As long as they continue to provide good service and competitive prices, I’ll be a loyal customer.

Does your business have to provide impressive service to every customer every time? No, but keep in mind that a simply satisfied customer is an indifferent customer. Why would I visit your business if I expected you to piss me off? Delighted, impressed customers are loyal because they have a reason to behave toward you and your business differently than they do other businesses. If you don’t make sure I have a compelling reason to return, you have no reason to expect that I will.

Impressive service has to be a business priority supported by real systems (e.g. staffing, training, resources), not rhetoric. If you leave impressive service to chance, then chances are you will never know how many customers leave your business unimpressed, never to return again.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I would love to spend a few days on an aircraft carrier at sea. The thrill of landing on its deck, observing its crew at work, and then taking off again would be an experience of a lifetime. That’s exactly what Donna Sturgess had the opportunity to do, and I’m envious.

Donna writes about her experiences on the aircraft carrier USS Stennis in her book Eyeballs Out. I received my copy of the book free from her publicist. It’s not a great book, but it does have some unique aspects, so I am going to recommend it.

Donna uses her experience on the USS Stennis to frame the major themes of her suggested strategy to renew business excellence: thrill, sacrifice, pride, and immersion. I can’t recall ever reading about immersion in a business book, so I found this very intriguing:

Part of the value of an immersion is returning to the experience of being a beginner. When we learn something new, our thinking slows down and we absorb information differently. The brain has a relaxation response that allows for insight and the emergence of other options. New connections are made during this time because we are sifting and sorting information differently as a beginner than we do as a professional. Our whole body is involved in the experience – it’s not just a mental exercise like activities at work. The new stimulus bumps and rattles our operating assumptions as we seek to put the learning into context: these new relationships start to rearrange our existing stores of information into novel patterns to produce new thoughts. This is where original idea float free and opportunities are discovered. (p. 98)

That’s cool. The ability to continually learn how to learn is a key aspect of our core performance technology, and I learned from Donna that seeking immersion experiences is one way we can enhance our ability to learn more effectively than our competitors.

For example, I think learning the full power of social business requires an immersion experience if you want to lead rather than lag your competition. You can never really understand what people are doing on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebeook and why they are doing it unless you jump in and do it yourself. Its only when you understand why we are living through a fundamental paradigm shift in the way people communicate that you can create a unique social business experience for those you’ve been given the privilege to lead.

One thing I really appreciated about Donna’s book was how frequently she referenced the work of other authors, the sources for her own learning. Several times during the book she even referenced peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals, which I found impressive. Although extremely accomplished, Donna does not write as if she thinks she is or even wants to be another leadership guru. Her writing left me the clear impression that she is more interesting in sincerely helping than in selling her services.

Eyeballs Out is a good book, not a great one, and it is a quick and engaging read. I think you might like it, so I am happy to recommend it.

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