In today’s world, there are constant demands vying for your attention. It’s more important than ever to learn how to effectively manage your focus, as well as distribute responsibility to people you believe in. Franklin-Covey certified instructor Pete Manglaviti will help you understand where to invest your valuable time, attention, and energy to make high-impact changes in your organization.
Kristina: Okay, hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m Kristina Coons and I’m the marketing and event coordinator here at JMARK. This is another one of our business builder webinars and they’re designed to help you as business decision makers just answer some of the questions that you have day to day. So today, we have Five Choices And Leader, leader, a Path to Extraordinary Success and this should take about 45 minutes.
Kristina: After that our next webinar coming up will actually be specific to the accounting industry and it’s called Saving Money Doing More, an Analysis of IT and Accounting. So if you’re interested in that one just visit our events page at JMARK.com/events and you can get all the information there as far as date, and time, and how to register and all of that good stuff. So, today we’re very excited to have Pete Manglaviti, he is the director of learning here at JMARK. And Pete has been involved in IT for 21 years, specializing in Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and Linux infrastructure. His background includes holding positions ranging from software developer, director of technology, network systems administrator, and chief information officer. Pete believes it’s important to recreate the IT challenges in the classroom that employees will face in their day to day work environment. In addition to his strong focus on technical maturity, Pete is focused on helping employees mature to upper levels of leadership through the idea of servant leadership. So, thank you so much for presenting today Pete, and I’ll hand it to you.
Pete: Great thank you so much. Good morning everyone thank you so much for joining me. Two things so, I had three overall goals for this course today, the webinar. The first thing is talk to about the idea of balance wins. How do you balance your time within the organization. How do you balance [inaudible 00:01:54] profession. Next I want to speak a bit about leadership ladder. This deals with the idea of servant leadership and how do you get your folks to level up. Without having to force them to do something. And finally I want to talk about developing a language of culture within the organization. I’m sure many of you face all kinds of challenges as your numbers grow within the organization, culture often times becomes more difficult to hold on to. So I want to speak a bit about some ways that you can immediately take this information and put it into effect fairly quickly, within your own organizations.
Pete: Real quick, that’s my background, please by all means if you’d like … if you have a question or a comment about the webinar, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email, I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible. I don’t pretend to know it all so id love feedback and other ideas to bounce off each other. So, by all means look forward to hearing from you. Alright so before we get into the core of the webinar, just a bit of background about my experience with leadership type seminars and books. Like probably many of you, I’ve been to all the different major seminars for leadership. I’ve read all the books. And you know often times you’d find a couple nuggets here and there. And the remainder of the time you sit there and you go “You know what? I know this already, I’m doing this already.” So what my goal is is to just give you some nuggets that you can take into your organizations right away to make an impact. I’m not expecting to reinvent the wheel. But if we can find one or two things that could optimize, I feel like it’s a good ROI.
Pete: So, we’re first going to dig into Five Choices. This is a Franklin Covey product. Can anybody relate to this? Emails in the middle of the night. You know there was a time when I could … I remember there was a time that I always had my phone on me, right? So if it’s 11:00 at night or 1:00 in the morning, or 2:00 in the morning, if I get that beep, that Outlook beep there I am checking my email. And you know what I felt was … although I felt productive I don’t think it was necessarily the best time to do that. Meaning, by doing this and integrate into this culture of always connected. I was tired in the morning.
Pete: I was exhausted, I felt like “Hey, I’m answering emails. I’ve already been working all night long. And I’m going back to work again.” And I found that that wasn’t productive. In fact, our company does not want us to do that. The idea at JMARK and one of the ideas that we really push culturally is once you’re finished with the day, once you get your tasks done, you move the company forward, the minute you walk out the door we want you to relax. Now, there is some special situations such as on call, where someone might need a phone. But in general what we want folks to do is when they leave our organization we want them to spend time with friends and family. Now that might seem obvious but what I recommend is if you’re not specifically saying that your employees, I feel like you’re almost implicitly saying “Look, you’re always connected.” You might say “Well, no, that’s not our intention.” But my suggestion is is to make sure that folks are getting a good night sleep. That they are celebrating the wins before they leave work.
Pete: One thing I do personally, and this is something I recommend to any organization, is have your folks ask themselves this one question. Not what did I do today, not that I stayed busy, no that’s fine. But the one question I would challenge you to ask your folks or have them ask themselves is this “What did I do today that moved my career and my team and the company forward?” What did I do today specifically that actually helped the company and my career level up, that hit the next level. And if they’re not able to say that if they’re having challenges expressing … they might say “Well, I’ve been busy today. I worked real hard. I did what I was told.” And that’s fine. But I think that next step, well Five Choices teaches us is have that employee really look in and say “What am I doing each day to drive the company forward? And if I can’t articulate that. I need to speak to somebody. I’m not going to wait for a manager to talk to me. I’m going to proactively talk to my manager and say “Look I need some help to understand how the things I do today are pushing my career or team of the company forward.””
Pete: That opens up some really fantastic conversations that often do not happen if you wait for the manager to engage the employee that way. Can’t relate to this one? Sleeping at the desk. You’re like “No, no.” What’s happening. Why in today’s culture, work culture, folks are getting tired around 2:00 or 3:00PM? Is it that the work is so difficult, is it that they’re not getting enough sleep? Is it that they’re juggling too many tasks? We’re going to get back to this. But I’d like you to think about that. That why is it that there’s always a group of folks that are burnt out by the end of the day. Or in certain time crunches they’re burnt out.
Pete: How about this one … Now I’m in my forties so this still drives me insane when I go to a restaurant. You see a group of people and they’re not communicating, or they’re not talking necessarily with each other. Heck, they might be texting back and forth, I don’t know. And why Covey brings this up, why Five Choices brings this up is as leaders within organizations we have to understand that when they leave our walls when they go out, when folks go out and have their personal time this is becoming the norm. We see challenges with this when folks that are … I don’t want to pick on millennials, I know everyone likes to pick on the millennials, I don’t because we have some really bright folks here.
Pete: But the culture it’s different, we have to be prepared that when they come into our organization they might opt for text message instead of an in person call, or a phone call. Or in person meeting. What I see often times in organizations is difficult conversations happen through email. And we all know what happens there. It’s misconstrued it’s hard to really express the emotion. Because folks are used to it. If you’re seeing that within your organization what we challenge you to do is to talk about that need for that one on one communication. Especially when delivering bad or challenging news. One thing we say around JMARK is “Hey so and so, I’d like to spend a few minutes to meet. I feel like we have a difficult conversation ahead and I’d just like to get your input.” Not “You suck, you failed me, I want to meet later today and tell you how bad you are.” We encourage to say “Hey look, we might need to have a difficult conversation about blah, blah, blah, blah. I look forward to meeting with you at that time.” And then during that conversation really focus in on what went wrong. How it was resolved. And how it’s never going to happen again. Rather than making people feel bad.
Pete: Ever feel buried alive Monday mornings? I thought this was a fun little venture. Yeah. For example in our business you can’t get around that. Often times, Monday morning everything kind of falls on you. What we’ll talk about in Five Choices is how to do we sort through this gravel coming in. How do we go ahead and accept the fact that this is how a morning might look and that’s fine. In fact, I’m happy that this work comes in. If I wasn’t busy, if I didn’t have things to do there’d be no need for me at the company. So I know it’s easy for employees to be like “Uh, it’s Monday. I’ve got so much to do.” I’d flip that around and say “Thankfully, we have so much to do, we’re that good people want our services. And that allows us to build a career and help support our families.” Now this is for business owners here. This I would say of any take away, this is the big one folks. This is the one you really want to start talking with your managers about and kind of sort through it.
Pete: So the paradox in this survey. Franklin Covey interviewed 350,000 people ages, I think it was 18-49, I think was the range. And this as a business owner would scare me to death. 60% of those folks reported that the things that they work on they don’t consider relevant for the company. Meaning, of my eight hour day what I’m saying is “Hey boss, of my eight hours, five hours of my day eh, not really that relevant. But wow, those three, three and a half hours they’re fantastic.” So, think about that for a moment. If your employees came to you with that information. 60% say what they’re working on is not relevant, in their opinion. So what’s going on with that? Well from the research that we’ve done at JMARK and some of the research that I’ve read with Covey, two or three things are happening.
Pete: Number one is when your folks are looking at what their day looks like do they understand the why? Do they understand why they are doing it? And what if they don’t do it, what would the impact be higher up on the chain, or across the different departments. You see, they might be working on a hundred percent of relevant information from your perspective but if they don’t understand the why, it’s real easy for them to say “Well, you know half my day, I don’t know why I fill this form out. I guess it might apply to something but I don’t understand why I’m doing it.” And the problem with that is when they don’t understand the why, one you lack that commitment. They might get the work done, but you lack the passion. For example, if Kristina who you heard from earlier if I knew something I worked on was going to mess her up if I don’t get it done, I’m going to have a deeper conversation with her. I’m going to look deeper into my work to figure out how do I set her up for success?
Pete: How do I make her day easier. Now, it’s relevant. Now, I know I’m helping other people in the organization, which ultimately should help my career as well. So that’s the first thing. Do your folks understand why they’re doing it and the second thing is with the Five Choices environment that idea of servant leadership, where the leader serve those who do the work. Which is very much a JMARK philosophy. What we would say is this, is not just to understand why you’re doing it but if there’s anything on that list that is not driving the company forward in your mind I would recommend having your folks speak up. Give them that safety, that environment where they can go to their manager and say “Look, I know I’m scheduled for this meeting at 2:00 every week but I don’t understand why I’m in it. Could you please help me understand the relevance.” And without fear of them being looked at as a troublemaker within the organization or fear that their manager’s going to look down at them.
Pete: If you really want to take these principles and run with it. They should be looking at their work and challenging everything they’re working on. If they can’t explain to you why it’s relevant, you’ve got to look at it again and figure out how you make the adjustments. Because when your folks are the ones looking at the relevancy when they’re looking at why I should be doing it, it opens up some fantastic conversations. It helps build alignment within the organization. So for example, if a meeting, we’ve had a ton of examples here at JMARK over the last couple of years where this has been to effect. We’ve reduced meetings, I can tell you we had a meeting that used to happen once a week the folks spent 90 minutes meeting. And because they started really asking questions on the relevance, they trimmed it down to 25 minutes. We have most our folks look now at their daily schedules and look at it weekly and challenge their supervisor and their team mates, going “Hey guys, and gals, why are we doing this? What exactly is going to be the net benefit of it?”
Pete: So again, this paradox in survey should frighten you, first of all that’s 350,000 people saying that over half their day is not relevant but I think it’s a learning opportunity to figure out how to get your folks engaged. How do you have them take responsibility for in asking the questions. And again, once they tie it into their idea where they’re challenging their work load, it’s that ownership. They’re going to own it, they’re going to do much better with it.
Pete: So the Five Topics of Franklin Covey, it’s a book about the choices. One is act on the important, don’t react to the urgent. React to the urgent. Two go for the extraordinary don’t settle for the ordinary. And those are the two topics I’m going to focus on in this lecture. Believe me if I had a couple of hours, I’d love to go through the entire thing with you folks. Time constraints, you know how that works.
Pete: Choice three is schedule the big rocks. Don’t sort gravel. Choice four is rule your technology. Talking about things like … well heres a tidbit, if you have folks in your organization that talk about how much they hate all the email coming in right? And believe me we’re in the same position in terms of trying limiting, limit the amount of email that constantly comes in. And we have some ways to get around that. But what I would challenge you to do is ask those folks what kind of outlook rules do they have set up? What kind of filter rules do they have. Again, I can’t speak for every single person. But more from the not, when I hear people really get into how much they hate all the emails coming in, is because they have a box full, like one inbox full of just nonsense.
Pete: They’re not creating rules to sort it. So for example, when my manager, Kevin messages me. I get a ding in a special folder. When HR needs something from me, I have a dig in a special folder. Where a CEO needs me for something when I get an email, I have a special folder, a special sound for that. Because I need to make sure that when those type of emails come in, I’m immediately alerted. Now there are some things I get emails on where I still don’t know why I’m getting it but okay. If we don’t want to get rid of the report, I’ll create a folder to store all that stuff for later. And then I can parse it when I need to. But my inbox is clean. That’s I think the first major step to really ruling your technology.
Pete: If you’re using Outlook specifically, what filters do you have in place. If you don’t you might want to talk to your tech folks there and devise a plan. Because everyone I know here at JMARK I feel like really has their act together as an organization. They have that. They have rules in place.
Pete: And finally Choice Five which I really wish we had time to cover today is fuel your fire don’t burn out. How do you keep your folks engaged, and I’ll speak a bit about this. How do you keep them moving forward? How do you make sure that they’re happy with what they’re doing? And they have the right amount of energy throughout the day. I’m finding that energy management is really becoming a much more important topic, especially when demands become more and more.
Pete: Cool so let’s get in to some of the meat of it. Act on the important, don’t react to the urgent. Choice one, well here’s something that I believe you can take right away. And if you have folks that get stressed out in your organizations and they feel overwhelmed and you feel it hurts their productivity. I think this little exercise is going to do quite a bit for you. So we talk about the brain, we’re talking about prefrontal cortex and the emotional brain. The prefrontal cortex, you can see it from the slide. This is all the long term planning, the self control, the choices. The things we really want to spend our day at work, at least I believe, is that’s where I want most of my time spent.
Pete: The emotional brain is more as you can see here, reflexes, instincts, emotions, reactions, impulses. Let me go back. Say “Oh great, that’s fantastic Pete, what does that mean? How does that benefit me?” Well let me tell you a bit about test takers and then I want to go ahead and translate that into just general business. So I have a really good history, Southwest Missouri helping folks pass certification exams. From everything from Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, so on and so forth. It’s not that I’m so good at this as much as I understand why people fail. And what happens is this and this is kind of a quick little summary but have you ever had the situation where you shake someone’s hand at a conference for example, and the minute you let go of their handshake you’re like “What was their name again?”
Pete: Yeah, me. In fact, when I go to things when I can bring my wife, she’s the one that keeps track of all this because I just quickly forget. It’s not that it’s not important to me, it’s just I start stressing about remembering their name and sure enough I eventually forget the name if I’m not careful. But here’s what happens and then later on that night you go home, you’re in the shower, you’re having dinner, you’re in bed and you wake up and you go “Bob. His name is Bob.” Hopefully everyone can relate to that experience. Or how about test taking. Whether it’s in high school, college, certification, any kind of exams, you knew the material. You studied and studied and studied and then when you go into that test and whether it’s yourself or your folks that you manage they go in to take that exam and they’re doing fine and they don’t know an answer. And then they don’t know another answer and by the time they get to the third question, it doesn’t matter what it’s asking, they’re done.
Pete: And the second they leave that exam, they walk outside, you know what happens right? It all comes back. Why is that? And how can you guys use that as an advantage within your organization today. Here’s what happens. And again, I’m not a medical doctor I can only tell you from case studies but what happens is when you exhibit stress. When you start getting stressed out over things, right the emotional brain’s really taking over, cortisone is released within the body with some other chemicals. And why it’s not a bad thing, often times these chemicals are used to repair muscle for example. They have a really interesting effect on recall. So what happens is as you get stressed out and these chemicals increase, think about a wall being built up to long term memory. So I’m stressed, I’m in a test, I’m stressed. I can’t remember the answer so now more chemicals are released, my wall is built. I’m having trouble recalling long term memory.
Pete: I’m now stressed because I can’t access long term memory, guess what happens, yep. Stress goes up more, now becomes even more difficult. It becomes a loop to eventually you flat out don’t have access to the information. And then once you get out of the exam what happens, your stress decreases, the chemicals dissipate, and now you have access to the memory. Isn’t that interesting? I can tell you first hand, I know that’s a fact because my wife has said things in the past like I’m so mad at you right now I can’t even think straight. And I used to be, you know I heard her say that I’d be like yeah okay really? But no what happened was she was stressed out it was a repeating cycle and sure enough that’s why we take a break, you walk away for a few minutes. That’s why when couples argue generally walk away. Stress is reduced, you come back, and now you can have a great prefrontal cortex type conversation.
Pete: So how can you use this in your organization? Well one thing is this, just on the testing side is you want to make sure that your folks know that when they go into test they have to keep as a relaxed posture as possible. Meaning if they did the work to prepare for the exam there’s nothing more they’re going to learn from that moment. So they have to go in there confident knowing you know what? This is kind of a waste of my time, I’m going to pass anyway but okay if I have to click a couple of buttons, so be it. Now, you got to do the study too you can’t just go in confident, but you have to keep cool. You have to learn that for example, when they don’t know something it’s fine. If you can go back to it later, go back to it if not move on. Because if you fix it in that problem, you’re going to have issues.
Pete: Now how about your workplace? Think about any position within your company. You have an accounting person and they’re looking at the screen and they’re staring at the numbers for the last 20 minutes and they’re getting more and more stressed out because they can’t see it. Do you really think spending another 10 minutes in front of that computer’s really going to help them at all? No, in fact the longer they sit there, that cycle continues. So the best thing for them to do is to get up. Get some water, go talk to somebody. Get your mind off that problem. Get that stress down to where it needs to be. And then come on back later and sure enough you’ll get a fresh perspective.
Pete: So what does that take from the business? It’s not just telling folks that, it’s encouraging the culture to understand that. It’s okay to get off your desk. It’s okay to shoot darts at your dart boards in your cubby. It’s okay to socialize. Don’t be afraid to get up. Nobody wants to be seen as that person that’s not working. I’ve been in many positions before where I’m outside walking around the buildings because I need that moment to clarify.
Pete: So here’s the language, and again, I strongly recommend getting the Five Choices book by Franklin Covey but this is a structure, a way to communicate with folks within the organization and it works absolutely fantastic with supervisors. So if you look at the important and the non important, right? Top to bottom and then you see left to right urgent and non urgent. So to make sure we’re on the same page if I said that this was a queue what issue? You’d tell me that it is important and urgent. If I told you it was a queue three issue, it’s not important but urgent. So what does this mean? So queue one is both important and urgent. These are crisis’s within your company that you can’t avoid. They are emergency meetings, something crashes for one of your clients. Something has to be filled out today. These are things that are just they have to be done within the organization.
Pete: As a man of service provider, companies pay us to deal with their queue one issues. But what I challenge you to do in this frame work is to challenge anything that is a queue one that didn’t have to be. Meaning, let’s say for example, you have a policy where if somebody wants to travel they have to fill out a form for their hotel, their airfare, their car, food, and so forth. And they knew about it three weeks prior but they decide to do it last minute. Do you see how that now puts the company in a queue one state that they didn’t have to be in. And if the person would’ve planned ahead of time it wouldn’t be a queue one. Or let’s say for example, with Kristina, I owe her a report and I had two weeks to do it and I knew I was going to be late on it but I didn’t communicate that with her. And I let her know last minute. Do you see how what could’ve been an easy thing for her I know put her in an artificial queue one state.
Pete: So after this meeting, after this webinar I challenge you to look at yours and your subordinates and ask yourself what are the queue ones within our business that we can’t avoid and what are the queue ones in our life whether it’s you personally or within your teams that are half of these were not managing their time correctly. Because there’s the deal, here’s the truth, when it comes to queue one, if somebody is in a queue one state for too long, they will burn out. What we’ll talk about quadrant four in a moment. If somebody comes to work everyday and all they feel like is they’re not doing all that proactive work we spoke about. Long term goals and vision. But they are only putting out fires, what’s going to happen is either they’re going to burn out … as far as performance goes or somebody else is going to give them that phone call, another business and offer them greener pastures.
Pete: Easiest way to recruit somebody from another company is focus on their queue ones. Ask them about their day, what their day looks like. If they are constantly having to put out fires, it’s a real easy way to pull people out. So as a company in leadership we are always looking at not just individual queue ones but what is the queue one of the company feel like. And are we mitigating those as much as possible. So for example, sometimes someone turns in something late to me, I’ll use the language say “Look I’ll be happy to get it done but man you’ve put me in a queue one state. If you would’ve let me know a couple of days earlier I could’ve been in queue two on this.” And when your entire company understands that language, it becomes less emotional and just more to the point.
Pete: Someone else goes “Oh hey, I’m so sorry.” “No, problem, I’m in queue one right now just to let you know.” Que three not important but urgent. This is the quadrant of distraction and everyone here is listening knows exactly what I’m talking about. Unnecessary reports, unnecessary meetings, other people’s queue ones that don’t relate to you. My challenge to you is this. Anything you identify inside cue three, like I gave an example earlier, there’s a meeting that you don’t think you belong in. The rule is nothing stays in queue three. You have to challenge it. Meaning, you have to either dump it into what’s called queue four which is waste or you have to find a way to move it into queue two which is productivity. But it just can’t sit there. You can’t just sit there and go “It is what it is.” It is not. Speak to somebody. Needless interruptions, reports. I mentioned that there’s a report that I get, I don’t think I should. I asked to be taken off it. And if somebody says I need it, great I create a rule, put it in another folder, look at it in my time.
Pete: So again, anything in queue three that you list find a way to either dump it, or reclassify in queue two. Que four is waste, that’s both not urgent and not important. It mentions things like trivial work, excessive activities watching ten cat videos instead of three. I’m a cat guy so three might cut it, ten maybe not so much. But I would guess in your organizations, it’s not really queue four in terms of people are lazy. What I would challenge you to do is this, if you find folks that are not performing like they did. That you find that they are in this excessive relaxation mode and not quite pushing things forward, what does their queue one look like? Because if they’re a good employee, if you made a good choice on the employee, I don’t think it’s the laziness. I bet you what’s happening is at least in their mind their day is full of fires.
Pete: And what happens is subconsciously if your day is full of fire you’re going to find ways to try and mitigate that. And you’re going to find yourself in queue four. Oh goodness, I’ve found myself doing that last week. I have a couple of things due before the end of the month, the close out of the year. And I’m sitting there that’s watched a couple of videos and I’m like why am I feeling so lethargic, this is true, why am I feeling this way? And then I looked in my queue one and said you know what? I don’t really have to be doing those right now, I’m just forcing myself to do it and now I’m forcing myself to have to waste time. Again, in a servant leadership environment, our goal is to have the employee treat them the right way but have the employee notice this before the manager ever does.
Pete: Meaning, I noticed that I was slacking off in some areas before my manager even knew it. That allows me to correct it beforehand. And finally, oh goodness, I wish I had more time. Last one is queue two. This is important but not urgent because we spent the time to be able to do things like creative thinking, and planning, and prevention. Dreaming about what is our company, in a servant leadership model, the idea is it is our company. I have a say in it. What are the things I want to be working on to help drive the company forward. See that’s where the excitement comes in. Anytime you can minimize queue ones and get folks working in queue two you see a very different approach to the work. As I have joked, I haven’t worked in like 20 years. They pay me to do what I love doing. Because I get to spend a lot of my time in the queue two area like this seminar.
Pete: And I go a little bit faster here. So I mentioned that these quadrants are a great way to talk within your teams and I love it for managers. Because I can say to RCO, “Look, I know you feel this is queue two but to me it feels like queue three because of these reasons. Can you help me understand the value.” Or you know what, to my boss Kevin, “Hey Kevin, I’m in queue one all these tasks are queue one. Can we maybe take these two off of it so I can focus on one queue two item for this quarter and then backtrack on these maybe in a couple of weeks.” Those are the kind of conversations when you start following this Five Choices methodology that happen within the organization. The common language. It’s a real easy way, especially for your folks that maybe a little bit more shy, to communicate within their teams and their managers. Because it’s a framework built. Everybody knows in this company what a queue four looks like. Everybody knows when I tell them you put my in queue one they know what that means.
Pete: Clarifying questions. This is a biggie. And it might seem obvious but I’m in charge of also new hire training and I find that is not as obvious as I thought it would be. Meaning that when something is asked of us, let’s say for example my manager has a couple of projects she would like me to work on, I’ll certainly get them done but I’m going to ask a lot of clarifying questions to make sure that I’m on the same page. So I’ll ask things like “So, when is it really need to be done?” You’re like what? Manager assigned it. Yeah, that’s fine but when does it really need to be done? And then what happens if I don’t get it done in time. Is this something that’s going to hurt us internally, is this something with a client, is this some type of regulation? Is it something that you would like done right now but really doesn’t have to be done until next month. The reason I ask is that is to balance my time correctly. It’s to look at my tasks. My work for the day, for the week, and say are all of those items as efficient as possible?
Pete: Which of my priorities is most important to do now? I love that one. When I’m asked to do multiple things at once from different people, leadership in the organization, I’ll ask that. I’ll go to my boss and say “All these items, which one do you believe is most important now?” And then “What’s the impact?” If your folks are not asking those kinds of questions and just doing it, doing the work, you might face that challenge we spoke about earlier where they feel like 60% of their work is not relevant because they don’t know why they do it. They just do it because boss said to do it. Yep, boss said to do it. And I’m not saying to tell your folks to challenge everything that’s asked of them. But again, from servant leadership standpoint, from a JMARK standpoint, if you don’t know why you’re working on it it’s your responsibility to speak up. It’s not a we hope you do it, we make it a requirement within our company.
Pete: Oh goodness, I got about ten minutes. I’m going to have to get through a little of this a little bit quicker. I hope you guys find some value in this webinar. Some things you can take back to your organization immediately. I highly recommend picking up the Five Choices by Franklin Covey book. They’re only about $10 dollars on Amazon. It’ll be the best ten bucks you’ve spent in your life. With in terms of work. My personal opinion.
Pete: So, I’m going to go through this really quick but this is something I would really like you to explore is when we describe ourselves in terms of roles that way. So “Hey, nice to meet you.” “Yeah, I’m Bob, I’m an artist. I coach little league. I’m a husband, I have kids.” It’s pretty typical if we describe ourselves in roles. I love this thing by the way, it’s one of my favorite things to do is what I challenge you to do is to create a wheel. It’ll look just like this like, like a carving out a pizza. And what I’d like you to do is I’d like you to place the different roles that are important to your life within this wheel.
Pete: So this could be business roles, it could be personal roles, it could be a mix. So in this case here, this person did manager colleague team member or community leader, friend, career. The roles that matter the most to them. And then what we ask you to do is to rank where you believe you are. So, the closer to the center is the lower rating. So a zero means I’m not doing anything in this area. And a ten is saying you’re rocking it. So for each of these roles what we ask you to do is to put a point. So for example, a partner you see the dot’s a little bit above a five, so that’s a six. Mother/Father’s a five. Manager’s an eight. And then what we ask you to do is connect the dots. And what this does and this is really fun to do in families, talk about that in just a second. But we want you to connect the dots and just take a look specifically at how your life is balanced and ask yourself is that how it’s supposed to be?
Pete: In other words, are you content with those numbers the way that they are? And if not, what you want to do is you want to identify the areas that you want to work on by creating goals around it. So looking at this person’s balance wheel, it looks like they’ve been spending a lot of time on their health and a lot of time in sports, which makes sense, and they really try to kick butt as a manager but man look what’s happening as a mother and father. Look what’s happening with their relationships with their friends. So you can see where they’re spending their time. And like for me, I might say you know what, I want to spend more time with my friends so maybe I need to allocate one or two hours less on my manager responsibilities, maybe stuff I take at home and focus on going out with my friends maybe once or twice a week. And maybe I can cut down on the sports a little bit because I really want to spend more time in my community leadership role. And so that’s what we do, we identify the different roles, we rate where we’re at, and then we create action plans … sorry I have to go a little bit fast here.
Pete: But we create smart goals around that. For example, smart goals … specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So let’s say on my balance wheel I had health at a four. So in order to make a change I might create a smart goal that I will work out two times a week for 45 minutes, 25 minutes of cardio, 20 minutes of lifting weights. And then reevaluate where I believe I’m at in three more months. So, I create a specific goal, I can measure it because I’m not attending two times a week I’m failing. It’s achievable, that’s within my realm of time. It’s relevant because if I don’t do this my health’s going to deteriorate even further. And there’s a time bound. There’s a time sensitivity to it.
Pete: Because again, you don’t just move one item up and everything else goes with it. It’s sacrifices, meaning that if I spend the time on my health … or here’s a good example for me, I made a big deal about my health this last year. My doctor made it clear to me, my doctor said basically in not too less of words, if you don’t make a change you will die. Maybe a year and a half ago, I was way overweight, I wasn’t working out. I was eating Snickers’ bars for dinner. Well health became more important. So I started working out more, I started eating better but that also took an impact on my financial. Although my health was going up by eating healthy and making the right decisions in the grocery store. I’ll tell you what a Snicker’s bar and peaches, very different costs involved. So I had to be willing to say I’m going to move my health forward by also accepting the fact I have to lower my financial. That it’s going to take an impact on that.
Pete: Why do most goals fail? Okay, I’ll wrap it up with this piece right here. I’m sorry I couldn’t get through everything. It’s because … it’s like okay I’m assigned a goal at work. Great. And you know, that’s great, might move the company forward, allows me to keep my position, provide for my family and so forth. But there’s not a lot of energy behind it. What most folks are missing when creating goals and I would strongly recommend you look into this is role statements. Remember that queue two that productivity those long term plans. You have to create a role statement that allows you to align the specific tasks to get the job done.
Pete: So check this one out. For example, I’m helping my wife Alice and with her side business. She’s a counselor and she doesn’t want to work for someone the rest of her life. So I’m not just Alice’s husband, no I’m going to make it more personal. As Alice’s best friend, now with that that’s a bit more emotional, as your best friend I feel like I have a different level of accountability than just being her husband. As your best friend I will show my unconditional love and support, how are you going to do it? Through regularly communicating my feelings in helping her achieve her life goals. Helping her achieve her life goals. Doesn’t it make sense with that role statement creating my action plan. Creating my smart goals is fairly easy. If I know specifically not only what I’m doing, but why I’m doing it. Why am I trying to make this the best possible. Because I’m trying to help her achieve her life goals.
Pete: And the last thing I’m going to mention is another book, another ten bucks I strongly recommend is Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet. David talks a bit about the Navy and how he went into some kind of authoritarian leader to taking this servant leadership type approach. How do you push down decisions at a lower level? So folks at those levels can not only get it done but you’re training them to become leaders themselves. Right? How do we make it in such a way that we take a look at what level that person’s at and rather than just always giving them the answer, we’re building the servant leadership mentality to help them work their way up the ladder. So not only decisions are being able to handle at lower levels, people have more power over the outcomes, and then your leaders can focus on other things than micromanaging. It’s not about micromanaging. What I want all the [ears 00:41:49] to do, as my boss, our CEO and my boss, to look at new opportunities for us. I want them to look at new buildings, new profit sharing programs. I want them to be focused on that not the areas that I’d be handling myself.
Pete: I’m trying to protect their time. And that’s a whole deep dive into servant leadership. Alright. Well, any way. Thank you so much for joining me today. You have my email address by all means, if you have any questions, thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. I really enjoyed our time this morning. Thank you so much.
Kristina: Awesome. Thank you so much Pete for presenting today. I love hearing you talk about that stuff. And it was a really good refresher for me as well. Thank you audience for listening in today. As a reminder our next webinar is specific to the accounting industry and it’s called Saving Money, Doing More, an Analysis of IT and Accounting. So you can get more information about that one on our events page JMARK.com/events. And if you’d like any more information on today’s content like Pete said you can reach out to him. We also have a recording available so if you’d like that just let us know and we’ll be happy to send it to you. And again, thank you everyone so much. And have a great rest of your week.
Pete: Alright, see you folks, bye bye.
