Great leaders surround themselves with solution oriented people who take action to achieve brilliant results even in the most difficult circumstances. They recognize a successful business environment is not the place where people blame, rationalize or make excuses.
Week 1: Listen carefully and make notes about what is being communicated in your workplace – what words do you and others use. What is the tone and even the body language when people interact with each other?
Do you hear people:
· Making excuses why they didn’t attain their goals
· Rationalizing why the project is over budget
· Blaming something or someone for poor sales projections
Be rigorously thorough with writing down your observations. Avoid justifying or making excuses for what you hear. Your assignment is to listen – listen - listen and make lots of notes.
Week 2: Review your notes with a critical eye to discover how blaming, making excuses and rationalizing occur in your business. Notice how those behaviors allow people to be the victim of a situation or of another person. Then, analyze each event to understand how the business suffers as a result of excuses, rationalizing and blaming.
Next comes the most critical step. You must decide if you are willing to take action to stop pretending that these behaviors create a “poor me” victim atmosphere and erode a break through empowering business environment.
Week 3 and 4: Take action to share your observations, establish new workplace norms and implement systems/procedures to support a powerful organizational change.
A favorite example of great leadership is the story Jack Canfield tells in The Success Principles about a Lexus dealership. A serious downturn in the economy resulted in fewer people coming to the dealership and sales started to decline.
The owner decided this was not the time for blaming the economy or the political situation. It was not the time to rationalize the sales were down because more advertising was needed. Nor was it the time for complaining and making excuses that Lexus wasn’t doing enough to support local dealerships.
Instead this dealership decided to go where the money was and look for new customers. They broke the norm and started going to wealthy country clubs and offered the members test drives. The result was successful – while other car dealership sales were down, this Lexus dealership achieved increased sales.
Great leaders face what needs improvement and take action to provide an environment where everyone is 100% accountable for their performance results.
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