Strategic Discipline Blog

One of your team has had an unfavorable experience at work. They share it with you.

You respond negatively to them.

When this happens, Robert Glazer, author of Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others, offers, it’s the last time you’ll hear this person share it with anyone, unless it's with their peers in the company.

Their failed efforts to give feedback reduce everyone else on your team’s willingness to provide observations you need to improve your business. You just turned off the flow of information with your response. It may appear small on the surface, yet it inhibits growth.

Glazer sprinkled great ideas for building a team culture like he was a pastry chef with an unlimited supply of candy!

His most important points:

1. Lead with Values
2. Be A Team that Builds People
3. Focus Your Team on the Right Outcomes

These ideas were showered upon the leaders attending Metronome’s Tip Top Summit 2023 throughout his presentation. (Please forgive some of the pictures here as they were taken over the heads of the people attending Tip Top.)

Four Elements of Capacity Building

Capacity building is the method by which individuals seek, acquire, and develop the skills and abilities to consistently perform at a higher level in pursuit of their innate potential.

It’s not about doing more; it’s doing more of the right things. Capacity-building is knowing where you need to invest your energy and where you need to pull away.

Glazer identified four essential elements of capacity building: spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional.

• Spiritual capacity is about understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you want to live by each day.
• Intellectual capacity is about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline.
• Physical capacity is your health, well-being, and physical performance.
• Emotional capacity is how you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset, and the quality of your relationships.

Building physical capacity offers a concrete example of increased effort and improved outcomes. Similar to Gary Keller’s The One Thing, when you improve one area, you begin to improve in all. One of the most important outcomes of capacity building is the exponential effect it has on others, including friends, family, and those whom you lead. It has the effect of lifting while you climb—as you build your own capacity and achieve more, you develop the ability to help others do the same.

It’s a virtuous cycle and benefits everyone involved.

Leadership

Like the Leadership Circle and their assessment, Glazer believes Leadership is an Inner Journey, which begins with your spiritual capacity. It begins with self-awareness, starting with values and strengths. At its core, spiritual capacity is about understanding who you are and what you want most for your life.

Glazer emphasizes core values and playing to your strengths. It’s the motor driving you, either unconsciously or consciously.

When you do things aligned with your values, you feel energized. (Your energy is contagious!)

He warned, “If you can’t clearly articulate your own personal core values, you are navigating life without a GPS.”

Glazer shared Simon Sinek’s Why principle, providing a list of Why Archetypes to help identify a purpose to help achieve the extra effort great companies with an inspiring purpose do. Like Brand Ideals - A 400% ROI - Identify Your Competitive Advantage, Glazer recognizes the power of purpose in reaching success most companies only dream of attaining.

Build Your Intellectual Capacity

Glazer’s emphasis on Intellectual Capacity affirms what Scaling Up and Metronomics preaches, Leaders are Learners.

The greater your intellectual capacity, the greater your level of achievement with the same or less expenditure of energy.

The first step to increasing your intellectual capacity is believing you can. Intellectual capacity is highly correlated with a commitment to lifelong learning.

Achievement relies on having clarity about what is most important and making decisions accordingly.

Glazer shared how to provide effective feedback. Never criticize a person’s character, rather focus on their behavior.

Perhaps the biggest reinforcement this offered is Shannon Susko's affirmation, “1% Plan, 99% Behavior.”

The most successful companies, like Glazer’s Acceleration Partners, focus on behavior to drive performance.

Build a company your son or daughter or grandchildren would be proud to be part of. This vision inspires Glazer’s dream.

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Alex Osterwalder, CEO of Strategyzer, and Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challenger’s author provided 3 elements to build an Invincible Company, recommending leadership invest 40% of their time on the future. We’ll share how he put this into practice in my next blog.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Create an Invincible Company, Alex Osterwalder – Metronome’s Tip Top Summit 2023