Extraordinary always stands out in a sea of ordinary. Where ordinary requires minimal commitment, achieving extraordinary demands 100% dedication to doing whatever it takes to get to the top. Many people, and companies, are OK with being ordinary and performing just good enough to get by. In business, achieving extraordinary is one thing – but maintaining it is where the real work of leadership, accountability, systems, culture building, and refinement are put to the test. It's comparable to an Olympic athlete who trains for years to achieve peak performance for that one moment on the world stage. Once training stops, peak performance diminishes. Being the best and staying the best demands discipline, commitment, and tenacity.

Most people today have heard of the concept of “lean,” the continuous improvement system pioneered by the automaker Toyota. Organizations like GE have since applied similar concepts to create other system like Six Sigma. The basic idea is to eliminate waste wherever and whenever possible inside a production system. The rub, however, is that while most organizations that embrace lean see short-term results, they also struggle to sustain those gains over the long haul. The lean effort becomes frustrating for many organizations as they realize a culture of continuous improvement is never achieved.

At SRC, we just wrapped up yet another sales-and-marketing meeting, something we hold twice a year as part of our High-Involvement Planning (HIP) process. The whole thing blew me away. Not only was I amazed at how much information we can generate about our business through this process, I was also struck by how good our folks have become at presenting and articulating the reality of their businesses.

*Excerpted from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves As much as we may not want them to, the reality of every workplace is that the staff is watching our behaviors very closely. They watch how we deal with customers, how we handle money, how well we meet our commitments. They look at little things and big things alike. They see it all. They hear it all. And, through our vibrational energy, they actually feel it all too. What that means for workplace leadership is that we need to mindfully manage our own behavior in order to set the tone we desire on all fronts. Certainly, just leading by example won’t insure that our organizations are successful. But it always improves the odds. And there is absolutely no down side to modeling the behaviors you want your staff to pick up on.

My involvement with the concept of creating a culture of character and competence began with a discussion with Tom Hill, the CEO and Chairman of Kimray, Inc. and founder of Character First. Kimray is an Oklahoma City based manufacturer of oil and gas control valves. Founded in 1948, they continue to be a leader in their industry and are a profitable and generous company. At the time, I was the vice-president of a local university and was trying to understand how to motivate my team to consider a new approach to some of the challenges we were facing. Tom listened to some of my concerns and then asked an important question. He said, “When you look back over the past year, how many of the challenges you had with your team were character based and how many were competency based?”

The High-Involvement Method for Improving Financial Performance Assuring that the time and money spent on Forward Forecasting yields greatly improved financial performance is certainly one of the primary results expected from this process. A key element of financial Forecasting success is the involvement of the right people regardless of functional area, organizational position or geography.

When I think about all of the times I’ve been hired for various jobs over the course of my life, I have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight to see the enormous impact that training had on my success (or failure) in each job. Although I’ve now worked for Zingerman’s almost seven years, I still remember going through the hiring and orientation process, most particularly as a seasonal, temporary employee at Zingerman’s Mail Order. In fact, my experience at Mail Order is a big part of the reason that I wanted to stick around after that fast-paced, fun, and all-too-brief holiday season!

Playing The Great Game of Business can be a real rush, especially in the beginning. It’s a new concept for most people, so there’s an initial excitement when everyone is first figuring out how this all works. But the romance can fade, and if it does, The Game can become just another routine office chore. How can you tell if the romance is fading? There are four obvious danger signs. Individually, they can just be one or two people being grumpy, but collectively, they can signal that people are starting to take The Game for granted. So here’s what you need to be wary of:

Leading a meeting where everyone in your company is present doesn’t have to be an overwhelming, dreaded experience. Company-wide meetings or Huddles, can be engaging, educational and even interesting…if you format them in the right way. Here are four tips to make your company-wide Huddle a success:

You know from our last few posts that the Huddle Cycle is a series of meetings where financial and operational numbers are shared (and forecast) at a series of meetings. We’ve already explained the format of the first two parts of the process: The Pre-Huddle and the Management Huddle. The third and final part of the Huddle Cycle is the company-wide Huddle; or what most people think of as “the Huddle”.