The 5 Challenges Leaders Face

April 30, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Coaching, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Leadership Development, Management, Management Development

What are the top 5 challenges for leaders globally, and how can you deal with them?

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Leaders are under increasing pressure having to deal with more, with less, whilst having to handle the 5 challenges of the modern business world.

This article looks at each of the five major challenges in turn and identifies the key strategies that leaders need to develop to meet these challenges and, in doing so, become great leaders in turn and to develop leaders within the business at all levels.

Andrew’s 5 Challenges for Leaders

1. Dealing with the New Business Reality

2. Paradoxes Moving from “Either/Or” to “And”

3.Restore Confidence & Trust

4. To Collaborate & Empower

5. Building Individual & Organizational Resilience

Challenge 1: Dealing with the New Business Reality

The world for leaders is changing, and the rate at which this is occurring is increasing exponentially whilst its effects are being seen, and compounded, in 4 different areas:

Volatility – the increasing rate, amount, and magnitude of change
Uncertainty – the amount of unpredictability inherent in issues and events
Complexity – the increasing amount of dependency and interactive effects between multiple factors and driver.
Ambiguity – the degree to which information, situations, and events can be interpreted in multiple ways.

For further information on this see How to Manage Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – Part 1

To deal with these factors, leaders need to develop on an integrated basis, the following:

Vision – having a clear picture of the purpose of your business and where you are going.
Understanding – the leader takes the time to stop, look and listen to what is happen, this is beyond their functional expertise and beyond just their business.
Clarity – the leader needs to spend the time and effort in deliberately working to make sense of the chaos that exists.
Agility – the ability to communicate openly across the organization and to move quickly to apply solutions, the rapid prototyping of ideas & actions to develop solutions.

For further information on this see How to Manage Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – Part 2.

Challenge 2: Paradoxes Moving from “Either/Or” to “And”

Leaders are having to make decisions and deal with increasingly juxtaposed areas: for example, do we mass produce or customise our offerings, do we focus on the short-term or the long-term etcetera. Usually this has been treated as an either/or choice or, at best, achieving a blend between the two and effecting a compromise. Either of these two ways are often sub-optimal and limit the future opportunities.

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Leaders need to manage these paradoxical situations and to meet both sets of demands simultaneously to survive and thrive. Leaders need to achieve a balance between multiple sets of demands, requiring them to be able to quickly weigh and evaluate the situation and to obtain multiple perspectives from others to incorporate in the development and execution of the appropriate strategy.

Challenge 3: Restore Confidence & Trust

Research from Sirota has shown a steady decline over the last 5-6 years in the level of people’s confidence in their business, their leaders, and the future.

This is reflected in the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, with nearly two-thirds of people only believing what is said by companies having heard it three to five times. This reflects both the high level of skepticism and the fact that messages need repeating to get through the ‘noise’ of the environment.

Leaders need to restore confidence and trust in themselves, the business and the future. This needs to extend to include the external stakeholders, not just the only internal stakeholders (e.g. employees). In doing this leader need to provide clear direction, clear and consistently understood the message, and that everyone is aligned with this by ensuring the core values are commonly understood and applied throughout the business. This needs to ensure that the systems & processes and reward systems actively support this.

Challenge 4: To Collaborate & Empower

To lead in an increasingly challenging environment requires leaders, counter-intuitively, to loosen controls to gain more control. Being able to adapt and anticipate to the new business reality requires leaders to review and refine their goals, and to create an inspiring vision which is clearly articulated and understood to all levels of the business internally, and to external stakeholders. In doing these leaders need to be open to new ideas and perspectives, and to extend their networks of relationships. They also need to ensure that the business has the right core values and that these are actively supported and built into how business is done. This creates a strong, pervading culture that aligns people and what they do.

To drive better communication and coordination between departments, and to reduce internal turf-fights and conflicting objectives, the vision needs to be shared and cascaded appropriately at each level. Furthermore, in doing this, leaders across the business and at all levels need to be empowered with the responsibility and authority to achieve their goals, to be equipped with the necessary skills and capabilities to carry them out, and enable them to perform by providing the necessary support to actively developing both their skills and potential as leaders and those of their reports.

Challenge 5: Building Individual & Organisational Resilience

In dealing with new business reality leaders need to help their people and their organization to build resilience and agility. This includes the ability to move quickly, decisively. effectively and proactively whilst capitalizing on existing strengths, developing new strengths and identifying current strengths which may become weaknesses or liabilities as the business and market environments change,

The importance of developing people resilience, including engaging people emotionally whilst growing and developing them, and providing them with a sense of purpose and belonging, is reflected in the findings of the 2012 American Psychological Association Workplace Survey reported. In this, it reported that 41% (over two out of every five employees) of employed adults feel stressed out during the workday.

The top 5 sources of stress were identified as:

Low salaries
Lack of opportunity or growth or advancement
Too heavy of a workload
Long hours
Uncertain or undefined job expectations

Furthermore, less than half of employees reported:

Being satisfied with the growth and development opportunities offered by their employer (46%)
Being satisfied with the employee recognition practices of their employer (48%).
Feeling they are receiving adequate monetary compensation (48%).

The importance of having employees who feel valued is also important:

Employed adults who report feeling valued by their employer are significantly more likely to report they are motivated to do their very best for their employer (93% vs. 33%).
They are also more likely to report they would recommend their workplace to others (85% vs. 19%).
On the other hand, those who do not feel valued are significantly more likely to report that they intend to seek employment outside of their company next year (50% vs. 21%).

Summary

In dealing with these five challenges leaders need to have an integrated and disciplined approach. At its essence is the ability to empower, enable and equip people and leaders at all levels in the organization. Critical to doing this is building the necessary skills and capabilities into their day to day work.

To develop the necessary individual, team and organizational agility and flexibility leaders need to develop and embed the skills into how they work, allowing experiential learning to occur as they learn and apply the new skills in addressing and gaining traction with key challenges and opportunities. Providing the on-going support to help the teams and individuals is essential to this, and by enabling people to teach what they have learned to their peers, team members and reports they can gain mastery and continue to deliver sustainable results. This produces not only in-house skills and capabilities but creates leadership bench strength and an on-going leadership pipeline on which the organization can draw to meet current and future needs.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Why the Work-Life Balance Doesn’t Exist

April 25, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke GPS, Growth and Profit Solutions, Management, Uncategorized, Work life balance

Considerable effort has been devoted to discussing and developing “work-life balance” – the ability to achieve all that you want in both your personal and professional lives.

The problem with this is that “work-life balance” doesn’t exist!

Let me explain. Work-life balance is an artificial construct developed by people, it is not “real” and you find it nowhere in the natural world. When I started work some 30 years ago the concept of “work-life balance” did not exist, nor was it in the common parlance. Nor had it been for hundreds of years previously. The fact of the matter was that you lived and worked as did everyone else. So what has happened to result in the rise of the “work-life balance” construct.

Personally, I attribute it to two factors:

1. People’s expectations and

2. People’s mindsets

People’s expectations have changed over time. People want and expect as a basic human right the ability to have a work life which will not impinge on their personal life but which, at the same time, will also support their desired lifestyle.

Secondly, people’s mindsets have changed towards that of a fixed mentality in which the size of the pie is fixed, so the only way you can increase your piece of the pie is by taking more. As regards work-life balance this means that to improve your personal life you can only do so by reducing your efforts in your working life. This is reflected in people’s expectations.

The Flawed Assumptions

Why the work-life balance is a fallacy is because it is based on two key assumptions which are essentially flawed.

Firstly, the fixed mindset not only limits your choices, but it diminishes the individual as it reduces opportunities. Rather, there should be a growth or abundance mindset – not “either/or” in work/life but “and”, work and life. This provides you with a wealth of opportunities which you can create and select from, allowing you alternatives that you are otherwise excluded from. Here the size of the pie can be increased, allowing you to obtain more without having to diminish the remaining part of the pie.

Secondly, you only have one life not two. Tell me, do you never think or do things related to your work life when you are in your personal life, or that you never think or do things related to your personal life when you are in your work life? Exactly. So why create arbitrary lines of delineation when they actually don’t exist, and all they do is cause you stress because you never get “work-life balance”.

Life is for living, live it – don’t spend all your time wishing “I will be happy when…”. It is like trying to reach the horizon – no matter what you do you never reach or achieve it.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

How to Find People with the Right Fit

April 23, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Attitude, Behavior, Behaviour, GPS, Growth, Growth and Profit Solutions, Growth Solutions, Management, Management Development, New Managers, Survey, Uncategorized

How attitude is a good predictor of prospective employee success, and how you can identify those with the right attitude for your business.

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

The top challenge for CEOs according to a survey from the Conference Board (January 2013) is Human Capital – the ability to develop and acquire the right people, with the right skills needed to take to the business to the next level. But skills alone are not enough.

“Hire for Attitude, Train for Aptitude”

This is an old mantra which, if ignored, can be costly. Companies I have worked with have found that recruiting people with the right skills can be costly if they do not have the right ‘attitude’, where there is a lack of ‘fit’. This is reflected in a study by Leadership IQ of over 20,000 new hires over 3 years which found that 46% of the people about to be hired will fail within the first 18 months on the job. And they won’t fail for lack of skills but rather for lack of attitude.

Top 5 Reasons for Why New Hires Failed

The following are the top areas of failure (i.e., were terminated, left under pressure, received disciplinary action or significantly negative performance reviews):

1. Coachability (26%): the lack of ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers and others.

2. Emotional Intelligence (23%): the lack of ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions, and accurately assess others’ emotions.

3. Motivation (17%): insufficient drive to achieve one’s full potential and excel in the job.

4. Temperament (15%): attitude and personality not suited to the particular job and work environment.

5. Technical Competence (11%): functional or technical skills required to do the job.

The key point from this is that when new hires fail, and 46% of them will, 89% of the time it’s because of attitude and only 11% of the time because of skill.

As such, the key predictor of a new hire’s success or failure is their attitude, not their skills. As such we need to be clear on what attitude we are hiring for. To do this requires two steps:

Define the Specific Attitudes – what are the attitudes that make your business different from the rest. This is both in terms of what is good (which you want) and what is bad (which you want to avoid).

Adapting the Hiring & Interviewing Process – you need to makes sure that you focus on these attitudes, so adapt how you do this as appropriate.

How Do We Do This?

1. Define the Specific Attitudes

Attitudes in themselves are not visible or tangible. Where they are made apparent is in people’s behaviours. How people behave is an active display of their attitudes. Their behavior should also be a reflection of the business’ core values which provides guidance to people in the business. A good example of how the core values are made tangible, and the expected behavior (and hence attitudes) is shown below.

The US Marine Corp

The US Marine Corps has Core Values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment. The concept of these core values runs throughout all aspects of Marine life, beginning in recruit training and continuing into combat. These “warrior ethos” provide guidance to Marines in difficult ethics situations and as a reminder to provide good order and discipline. These values are defined as:

Honor – integrity, responsibility and accountability.
Courage – do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.
Commitment – devotion to the Corps and my fellow Marines.

2. Adapting the Hiring & Interviewing Process

Too often, when interviewing, we focus on prospective employees’ technical skills and competencies. Why? They are the easiest to assess but, as we have seen, they are a very poor predictor of the success or failure of a new employee.

When you look at jobs being advertised the experience, skills and qualification that are detailed it can be seen that the business advertising the position has the expectation that a perfect candidate will apply. This is about as far from reality as you can get. Realistically, there is no ‘perfect candidate’ and, as such, there can only be attitudes that are right for your business – they will never be perfect.

Tests for Finding the ‘Right’ Attitudes

1. High Performers’ Test – what are the distinguishing attitudinal characteristics of your top performers. List up to 10 responses that reflect your business. For example:

They own the problem.
They always see problems as opportunities.
They are great listeners and communicators.
Etcetera.

2. Low Performers’ Test – what are the distinguishing attitudinal characteristics of your low performers. List up to 10 responses that reflect your business. These are not just the opposite of the attitudinal characteristics that make a high performer. For example:

They avoid responsibility and are quick to blame.
They focus on themselves rather than others.
They do the bare minimum work required.
Etcetera.

Once you’ve got your two lists, conduct a quick assessment to make sure every point is on target. This can be done by asking yourself the following two questions about each attitude listed:

How does this attitude add value or competitive advantage to this organization? (If the attitude brings no benefit to the organization, it doesn’t belong on the list).

Who cares about this attitude? (If the attitude doesn’t bring benefit to your customers, it doesn’t belong on the list)

Doing this provides insight into both what you want and what you don’t want in the terms of attitudes and the associated behaviours. It then helps you to prepare for the interview by focusing on how they respond to questions around both these areas. However, how the questions are phrased is just as important as what the question is. You need to develop the question with the kind of response that you are looking for in mind. But that is a separate article.

Summary

In summary, be clear on what values, attitudes and behaviours you want in your business, and which you want your new employees to exemplify in what they do and how they do it. Get clarity by distinguishing the attitudinal characteristics of both your top and low performers – this helps you to identify what you want from a potential employee, and what you don’t want. Around this then adapt your interview and hiring process to ask the kind of questions that will help you elicit answers which will help you determine the prospective employee’s values, attitudes and behaviours. Take this into account when you look at their technical skills, as it is their attitude that is a predictor of their skills – not their technical skills and competencies.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Which Would You Rather Be – Efficient or Effective?

April 18, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Efficiency, GPS, Growth and Profit Solutions, Performance, Productivity, Tool, Uncategorized

Which would you rather be – efficient or effective?

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

The focus for many businesses today is on the short-run, getting more for their dollar and squeezing more out of their resources. Productivity is the name of the game. Although this is laudable it has focused businesses on the short-term and distracted them from the long-term.

Efficiency & Effectiveness

Efficiency and Effectiveness are two competing yet complementary approaches to business. For the purpose of this article these are defined as:

Efficiency

This is ‘doing things right’ and concentrates on tactics focusing on achieving short-term results. It means doing things better and quicker.

Effectiveness

This is ‘doing the right things’ which is critical to the success or survival of any organisation. Strategy is the key, not just any strategy, but one that is well constructed and then executed.

How these two factors interact impact the business and an overview of these interactions can be seen in the Efficiency/Effectiveness matrix below.

Efficiency/Effectiveness Matrix

THRIVE: Highly Effective & Highly Efficient

Businesses that pursue the right strategy efficiently thrive. They can meet strategic targets earlier than anticipated, and can go on to meet more challenging strategic targets, so as to sustain their ability to thrive.

SURVIVE: Highly Effective & Inefficient

Many businesses ‘survive’, they show potential but never attain the growth that they should be capable of. This can be due poor management or inefficient practices.

DIE SLOWLY: Ineffective & Inefficient

The business lacks a clear vision of what it is trying to achieve, and so lacks the right strategies or has weak strategies on which to execute. The lack of clear strategies means that the short-term plans and tactics are lacking. As such the business delivers poor results for several years and are in a state of steady decline before the business eventually ‘dies’.

DIE QUICKLY: Ineffective & Highly Efficient

Here the business is executing very well, but on the wrong strategies which drive it into a state of rapid decline. The business leaders are not learning from their mistakes, or are not aligned with the market’s realities, and by doing so negatively compound the effects of their wrong strategies.
What Do You Do Next?

For businesses to thrive they need to get both their efficiencies (tactics) and effectiveness (strategies) aligned – have the right direction and the right actions to help you bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Look at what you are doing and where you are going – review your assumptions, get an objective perspective, and continually review and improve to reflect the realities of your business, marketplace and the business environment.

So what are you going to do? And will it take you in the right direction? And are you effective and efficient in what you do?

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Answer At Your Own Risk!

April 16, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Leadership Development, Management, Management Development, Uncategorized

How executive coaching can help you in your business

Leaders and managers often need to give feedback to their teams and staff. Usually it is in the form of advice rather than feedback. Why is this? Advice can be packaged more easily, especially when you are dealing with a sensitive situation and/or individual, rather than feedback which is often perceived as being more critical in its nature. So how can we improve.

The Pixar Story

Virtually everyone knows Pixar , the animation studio that made Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars, A Bug’s Life, and which grossed more than $6 billion, and has won 24 Academy Awards. Here is the question for you – how many flops has Pixar produced? The answer is none!

One reason for it is that within Pixar they give brutally honest feedback.

Brutally honest feedback

At Pixar, when a director hits a snag on a film, they immediately call in the “brain trust.” This is a group of brilliant senior filmmakers who come in, look at the film in progress and give brutally honest feedback for about two hours.

Normally this is an uncomfortable process and, at best, only partially effective. But it works for two reasons:

No authority – the “brains trust” has no authority over the person to whom they are giving feedback. It is up to the recipient of the feedback to do something or not. As such they are not under any obligation to take the feedback, and because of that they often do.
No advice – people do not tell others what to do, they don’t offer advice; they offer experience. As such the recipient can learn from others, and can choose what to do or not.

As such, the less authority and power you have the greater the influence you can bring to bear. And the lower the requirement to act on the experience shared, the more likely people are to do so. This creates the opportunity for learning, development and innovation. Counter-intuitive? Yes, but it works. Share your experience – but remember we don’t have to learn from it, but then we probably will!

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

4 Ways to Manage for Long-Term Results (& Its Not About Profit!)

April 11, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Business Growth, Efficiency, Employee Development, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management, Performance, Profit, Uncategorized

Managing for profit can be detrimental to your business in the longer-term. Discover the 4 guidelines to help your business thrive, not just survive.

We are in uncomfortable times. Europe is facing a myriad of difficulties, China’s growth is looking to slow-down (albeit continuing), competition is more intense and customers are more demanding and better-informed. Yet amongst these difficulties there are companies who are not just surviving but thriving.

How are they managing to do this and what can we learn and apply from them? Here are four guidelines for thriving, not surviving.

1. Manage for Value, Not For Profit.

You can’t manage profit – profit is an outcome of your revenues and costs. You can manage your revenues and your costs, but you cannot directly manage your profit..

Successful companies look at managing value – they ascertain whether what they do creates and provides value both to them and their customers, or not. You need to create value for both parties in order to be able to capture value for yourself. Too many companies look at their relationship with their customers as a zero-sum game or as a win-lose opportunity i.e. we are dealing with a pie of a set size, so if I want a larger slice of the pie then the other has to have less and vice-versa. This is a weak mind-set which immediately puts you in conflict with your customer.

Rather, look at your customer relationships as a win-win opportunity – the opportunity to create and grow value with each other. This mindset allows the size of the pie to be increased, allowing you to capture more value, even if the split remains the same. This enables you to collaborate with your customers and create long-term opportunities and relationships, rather than short-term gains at the cost of your customer relationships.

As such value is a driver of profit – the greater the value, the greater the opportunity to drive profitable outcomes.

2. Manage for the Long-Term

Too many businesses are driven by short-term considerations and take actions which, although they may provide relief in the short-term, destroy value in the long-term. For example, investment in R&D may be cut now to save money and improve short-term profit – but it destroys value in the mid-to long-term as those assets which can create future value in the years to come are weakened, undermined or even destroyed.

3. Manage the Development of Your People

Every company claims that “people are our most important asset,” but few mean it. Frequently business’ investment in leadership development is cut during hard times – at exactly the time when it is needed most to enable and empower high-potential managers to lead the business to success and through these hard times.

In a recent survey of leadership globally, it was found that many of those countries with strong supplies of leaders today are facing a shortfall in the future – this includes countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada. As such, business leadership is an important issue not only now but in the future (for further information see the blog “The Ticking Talent Timebomb”).

4. Manage your Focus – Be Customer-Centric

Business needs to understand their customers in terms of what they need, what the business can offer, and how this translates into value for both parties. As such you need to be able to properly address and craft your offerings to meet their needs.

Furthermore, you need to know not only what business you are in – but what business you are not in. I have seen many companies grow and expand their offerings beyond what is their core business in response to meet their customers’ demands. However, this has come at a cost. As a result, management focus and attention is dispersed, scarce resources are allocated ineffectively and inefficiently, the business lacks the necessary skills to operate in these new areas, costs increase and margins reduce, and the business grows in an unstructured and ad hoc manner which is difficult or impossible to consolidate. All of which increases the level and range of risks to which the business is exposed, often beyond the gain that they might realise from this unstructured growth.

Summary

Don’t focus on profit – focus on value and you will achieve profit. However, this requires discipline, courage and the willingness to invest in the long-term and in developing your people to ensure that you deliver what the customer needs and values.

What are you doing to grow your ability to create, share and realise value? What has been stopping you and how have you overcome these barriers?

Share your thoughts and comments here.

Share the knowledge, share the wealth!

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

How to Thrive on Your Costs

April 9, 2019November 23, 2018 Andrew Cooke Growth and Profit Solutions, Management, Management Development, Uncategorized

How to avoid being a cost-cutter and create a thriving business from managing your costs.

When times are hard the knee-jerk reaction for many businesses is to cut costs. Don’t do it! Or to put it another way – don’t do it!

Before we get into this I want to give you an operational definition of costs for the purpose of this article.

Costs have several relevant definitions, costs are:

a payment before something can be done or acquired
an effort, loss or sacrifice necessary to achieve something
a loss or unpleasant consequence

When we look at cost-cutting we are generally looking to reduce the first, to try to avoid the second, but we often end up with the third! Why is this? Especially when we are looking for an opposite outcome?

Cutting costs have only one direction, that is downwards, and this gives you a very limited set of opportunities. A cost-cutting mindset is that of seeing the issue of costs as a problem – you are responding to external events outside your control and not fully taking on responsibility. Here the individual will continue to cut the grass, even if he or she will kill off the lawn in doing so.

A successful company thrives on costs. This is not to say it incurs costs without any consideration or thought, quite the opposite, it actually understands that you need to incur the right costs in order to grow, thrive and survive. As such you need to be able to manage your costs.

Managing costs are about seeing potential opportunities and searching for a solution. To manage your costs you need to understand why you incur them, what they are for, and the relationships between different costs and the business outcomes you are looking to achieve, and when their impact takes place.3

So how do we manage costs? Here are six powerful tips.

Andrew’s 6 Powerful Tips for Managing Costs

Have a strategic focus – not operational

Decisions made on how to manage costs are strategic. They are decided at the top and then cascaded appropriately. It is a long-term and considered process. A cost-cutter will look at the level of costs to be reduced and then look for where these cuts can be made without any guiding strategy. It is a short-term, knee-jerk reflexive action.

Be targeted

Managing costs require you to be targeted as to where your cost management efforts will be focused and implemented. This follows on from being strategic. A cost-cutter will look at the 15% reduction they are looking to realize and apply it across the board to all divisions and departments without consideration of how the contribution made, or the consequences.

Be prepared to be brutal

Too often insufficient costs are removed, the decision is a compromise and this is often due to weak leadership and their not wanting to be seen as the instigator of cost-cutting. So they try to soften the blow to make themselves feel better, and so that people won’t think so poorly of them.

If you are managing costs you need to brutal when necessary. It is better to make a single amputation, cleanly, quickly and fast rather than inflicting the pain of a thousand cuts on the business.

Make people accountable

Those who are managing costs are good at making people accountable, they hold them responsible for doing the necessary work in the right way. Cost-cutting occurs when there is a lack of accountability – there is a lack of transparency and commitment, games are played with budgets, allocations and the transferring of money between different budgets.

Establish & enforce consequences

A lack of clear and enforceable consequences is one of the reasons that managing costs does not happen, and people engage in cost-cutting. People need to know that if costs are not managed, not just in the short-run but on an on-going basis, then they will face repercussions – even with being fired – and that these will occur if they fail. Too many businesses have accountability creating a toothless lion with the associated consequences.

Lock up profit & dividends

When you are managing your costs you need to work back from your dividends and profit goals and identify what you need to do in terms of costs and revenue to achieve them. In doing this the goals need to be sacrosanct. A cost-cutter will move the goals to suit the cost reductions – this undermines the whole process.

Are you a cost-cutter or a cost manager? What are you going to do to be an ongoing cost manager? How will you use this six tips? How have you successfully managed your costs? Share your ideas here.

For further information on managing costs and steps to optimize the impact of your cost management program click here. Remember, share the knowledge – share the wealth!

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here.

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

9 Things Successful People Do Differently

April 4, 2019November 22, 2018 Andrew Cooke Employee Development, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management Development, Performance, Psychology, Uncategorized

9 tips on how to meet your goals and grow your capabilities

In Part 1 of this article, we identified why we are our own worst enemy when it comes to identifying how to improve ourselves. Here we look at what we can do to help us, given the fact that we are not always the best person to do so.

Psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, recently studied the science of success asking – Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do. As such, in her ebook – “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently” – she identified the following:

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. This gives you a clear idea of what success looks like and helps to keep you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities to work on our goals before they slip through your fingers. To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible. Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believe you can get the ability to reach your goals is important. , but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won’t improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Research suggests that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.

6. Have grit – the willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Again, you can develop your ‘grit ability’.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur. It is hard in the beginning, but it gets easier. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don’t tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don’t try to take on two challenging tasks at once, or over-expose yourself to temptation.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken. If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead?

So what does this all mean?

To achieve your goals overcome the common mistakes above; build, develop and apply your abilities; and use this knowledge to your advantage from now on.

What has worked for you to help you reach your goals? Have you tips or ideas of your own that you would like to share?

Share your ideas, insights, and experience – and share the wealth!

About Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions (“GPS”)

Who Knows You Best?

April 2, 2019November 22, 2018 Andrew Cooke Employee Development, Growth and Profit Solutions, Leadership, Management, Performance, Psychology, Uncategorized

Can you tell how good your performance is or how you can improve? Read on to find out, you might be surprised…

Those of you who are Pink Floyd fans will immediately recognize the lyrics from the song, “Wish You Were Here”. The first part of the song, for those of you not familiar with it are below:

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Let’s be honest – yes we can! The difference between them is immediate and obvious, and we can all do this easily. Here is another question:

“Do you think you can tell who knows you best?”

If I was to ask you that then you would probably see one word – “Me!” Yet you would be wrong. How you see yourself and how other people see you are only weakly correlated.

The research suggests that other people’s assessment of your personality predicts your behaviour, on average, better than your assessment does. The truth is, we don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think we do. When it comes to performance, our surprising self-ignorance makes understanding where we went right and where we went wrong difficult, to say the least.

If you want to be more successful — at anything — than you are right now, you need to know yourself and your skills. And when you fall short of your goals, you need to know why. This should be no problem; after all, who knows you better than you do?

Why is this?

The problem is our brain. Just because its our doesn’t mean we know what it’s doing – most of what happens is below our consciousness awareness, it’s not directly accessible to us at all. As psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson described it our unconscious mind is like a Cray supercomputer processing everything at high speed, whereas our conscious brain has the power of a Post-It note – unable to handle much and when too much is asked of it, it starts dropping things. This means when things start going wrong we often have difficulty in understanding why.

When you fail to reach a goal you try to establish why(for example, lack of innate ability, lack of effort, poor preparation, using the wrong strategy, bad luck, etc). Of all of these possible culprits, it’s lack of innate ability we most frequently hold responsible. As such, innate ability is the go-to explanation for all of our successes and our failures.

Research shows that this is rarely the case – for either succeeding or falling short. If we need to improve performance we need to know where to place blame. As we can’t find it ourselves, we need to help to find the right answers.

How do we do this – we focus not on who people are, but what they do.

To find out more, and to read the second part of this article then “Do You Think You Can Tell?” – Part 2 at growthandprofit.wordpress.com

What have been your experiences? What works for you? Share your ideas and thoughts, and share the wealth!

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Blue Sky GPS Executive Insights

Insights for succcessful leaders to become more successful!

Month: April 2019

The 5 Challenges Leaders Face

Why the Work-Life Balance Doesn’t Exist

How to Find People with the Right Fit

Which Would You Rather Be – Efficient or Effective?

Answer At Your Own Risk!

4 Ways to Manage for Long-Term Results (& Its Not About Profit!)

How to Thrive on Your Costs

9 Things Successful People Do Differently

Who Knows You Best?