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Andy Stanley - Building Resilient Organizations The Power of Analyzing Success and Failure · Andy Stanley Sermons

0:06
Morning. It's so good to be here. I live here in Atlanta.
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I said this was great. No planes, no heartsfield, just drive on
0:12
over. For all those of you at our host sites, we're so glad
0:15
that you're here. And again, if this is your first Leader cast,
0:18
you are going to drink today from a fire hydrant. There is going to
0:22
be so much good content. You're going to have such a good time.
0:25
You're going to meet some incredible people. And I do want to jump right
0:28
in, and I want to just give your heads up. The best way
0:31
to take notes on my talk is not to write anything down. It's to
0:34
actually take pictures of the screen. Now, the problem with taking pictures of
0:38
the screen or the screens is that you're going to get me in the picture.
0:41
So you have my provision ahead of time to crop me out later when
0:44
you're picking the notes that you want to keep versus the notes that you want
0:48
to delete. I love this topic because you know, the whole idea of
0:54
building healthy teams is way different than hiring employees. And that's where I want
0:58
to start. Then, we want to jump right in, and I want
1:00
to give you a framework for what you're going to hear for the rest of
1:03
the day. So hiring staff is not the same as building a team.
1:07
If you are simply doing something that is of marginal importance, you can just
1:11
hire staff and not build a team. But if you are doing something that's
1:14
extraordinarily important, then obviously you need to build a team. And everybody that's
1:18
building a team wants to build a healthy team. And not just a healthy
1:21
team. We want to build high performance, healthy teams because high performance people
1:26
on high performance teams do high performance things. And if you're in business,
1:30
and especially if you're a leader cast you care about your product, you care
1:34
about your company, you care about your people. So this is a big
1:37
deal for you, and it's not anything anybody needs to convince you is important.
1:41
The challenge is how to do it. Any leader that's consumed by a
1:46
desire to move the needle in his or her industry, this is a big,
1:49
big deal. Any of you who've ever worked on a healthy team in
1:52
the past and find yourself leading a team that's not so healthy, you understand
1:56
the importance of this. Anybody that's worked somewhere that you dreaded going to work
2:00
and now you love to go to work, you understand the contrast But the
2:02
question and the mystery is how do you do this? And what makes a
2:07
healthy team healthy? Now, while many things contribute to the development of a
2:13
high performance, healthy team, I've come to the conclusion there are four essential
2:16
and ingredients and that's what I want to spend my time talking about. And
2:19
I want to tell you real quickly how I stumbled upon these. As many
2:23
of you know, I'm a pastor. We've got a whole bunch of churches
2:25
spread all over the place, and about three years ago, I showed up
2:29
on a Sunday when I didn't have anything I had to do, and I
2:31
just wandered around watching this extraordinary organization do its extraordinary thing, and I thought
2:37
to myself, I'm not sure. As strange as it sounds, I found
2:40
myself thinking, I'm not sure why this works as well as it does.
2:45
And I'm overwhelmed with the fact that it works so well. And we're at
2:46
primarily a volunteer driven organization with about six hundred employees scattered around the city and
2:53
outside the city of Atlanta. But I found myself not quite panicking, but
2:57
almost panicking, to the point of, you know, what if this thing
3:00
broke, I'm not sure I would know how to fix it because I'm not
3:04
even sure why it works as well as it did. So here's a tip
3:07
for you. If you don't know why it's working when it's working, you
3:10
won't know how to fix it when it breaks. If you don't know why
3:15
it's working when it's working, you won't know how to fix it when it
3:16
breaks. And one of the problems in leadership is because we're so consumed with
3:21
progress and we're so consumed with moving forward, which is part of what it
3:23
means to be a leader, we rarely do autopsies on our success. Now,
3:29
when something breaks, you know, we stop everything and we explore we
3:31
don't want to make the same mistake twice, But rarely do we ask the
3:36
question, why is it working so well when it's working. So, if
3:39
you are in an organization and you're like, you know, I'm not even
3:43
sure I need this conference because I have high performance teams, I have healthy
3:46
teams, one of the best things you could do is to spend a little
3:50
bit of time doing an autopsy on your success, because if it's working,
3:53
you need to understand why it's working so that if it breaks, you'll know
3:58
what to do to fix it. So I spend several months taking notes talking
4:01
to our leadership team, refining, refining, refining, refining, because I
4:05
wanted to be able to turn around and teach the folks in our organization what
4:10
we do intuitively, put some words around it, because intuition only goes so
4:15
far. And if your current leadership team is leading well intuitively, but you
4:19
don't document what you're doing intuitively, the next generation of leaders or the next
4:25
layer in your organization who lacks that same leadership intuition is going to have a
4:30
hard time sustaining the success that you're currently experiencing. At the same time,
4:35
if you're in an organization that it's not running efficiently, you need some outside
4:40
information. You need to be able to listen to some people who have documented
4:44
what they do when they're doing what they do well. So I spend a
4:46
bunch of time narrow this down to what I think are the four essentials to
4:50
high performance healthy teams. And again, I want to give these four things
4:54
to you as a structure for what you're going to hear about the rest of
4:57
the day. But first of all, here was the macro conclusion. So
5:00
if you lose answerest fall asleep, have to leave early. Here's kind of
5:03
the bottom line for what I discovered when it comes to healthy, high performing
5:09
teams. Heinn it's a little bit long. You may want to take a
5:11
picture of this. High performance teams are comprised of people with extraordinary clarity.
5:18
We're going to come back to that. With extraordinary clarity around what, why,
5:24
and how? What? What are we doing? Why are we doing
5:27
it? How do we do it here? What are we doing? Why
5:30
are we doing it? How do we do it here? What are we
5:32
doing? Why are we doing it? How do we do it here?
5:36
And in an extraordinary team anywhere in an organization has an answer to those three
5:41
questions, regardless of where they are in the organization, with a predisposition toward
5:47
execution, with a predisposition toward execution. So I want to break this down,
5:53
divide it into four statements, and again give you a skeleton upon which
5:56
to hang everything else you hear today as we talk talk about this super important
6:00
topic. So number one of the four, select performance oriented people and position
6:06
them for maximum impact. Select not just hire, select performance oriented people and
6:13
position them for maximum impact. Recruit and again this is a bit industry specific.
6:18
I'll admit that recruit doers over thinkers. Recruit doers overthinkers. If you
6:26
want a healthy, high performance team, you have to hire or you have
6:29
to put people on your team who are doers. And I get in trouble
6:31
sometimes when I make the following statement, and maybe it's a bit of exaggeration,
6:36
but I'm convinced there's a lot of truth to this. It is easier
6:40
to educate a doer than to activate a thinker. It is easier to educate
6:46
a doer than to activate a thinker. In my experience, hiring people who
6:53
get things done and then educating them along the way is a lot easier than
6:57
hiring someone who's already educated and loves to think about things and come up with
7:01
intangible concepts, but isn't wired and geared to do things. So one of
7:06
the most important questions you can ask in the hiring process when you're assembling a
7:11
high performance, healthy team, or if you're trying to put together a healthy
7:14
team, is ask this question. And I learned this from my admin assistant.
7:17
This was something that they did in the company she worked with before she
7:19
came to work with me. Ask this question, what have you done?
7:26
Now? I know where you've worked, and I know where you went to
7:28
school, and you know, I know you know. I've got your resume,
7:30
I got all that. But tell me what you've done. What have
7:33
you done in your previous with your previous eployees, What did you do with
7:38
your not your job description? Tell me something you got done. And odds
7:43
are if they can't come up with something they got done before, they're probably
7:46
not going to get a lot done working for you. So you need to
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ask this question, what did you tell me something you initiated? Tell me
7:53
a project you came up with and you got it to the finish line.
7:56
Because in high performance, healthy teams, we need to hire or surround round
8:00
ourselves or put on our team doers, not just thinkers. Jim Collins many
8:03
of you have read his books, but he gives us an extraordinary snapshot around
8:07
this idea. Here's what he wrote in Good to Great. If you have
8:11
the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage
8:16
people largely goes away because the right people don't need to be tightly managed or
8:22
fired up. And this is his whole idea of who before what who before
8:26
what? Who before what then? In terms of creating a high performance,
8:31
healthy team, you need to think about who before what, and when you
8:35
have the right people, the whole idea of motivating people goes away because the
8:39
right people have internal motivation. Why, because they're doers. They're not simply
8:43
thinkers. So select performance oriented people and then here's the second part of that
8:48
statement, position them for maximum impact. This is important. The right person
8:56
in the wrong place feels like the wrong person. The right person in the
9:01
wrong place, or they used Jim Collins analogy, the wrong seat on the
9:05
bus, the right person in the wrong place. Over time begins to feel
9:09
like the wrong person. Put people where they make their greatest contribution, because
9:13
again, we're not playing checkers, we're playing chess. Everybody is uniquely designed
9:18
to do something specific, and the quicker you get people in the place where
9:22
they can make their maximum contribution to the organization, the better things go.
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I love this quote. It's contribute. It's attributed to Albert Einstein. There's
9:31
some question as to whether he said it, but if I were him,
9:35
I'd be happy to be strapped to have this strapped onto my reputation. Here's
9:39
the quote. You may have heard this before. Everybody is a genius.
9:41
But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it
9:45
will spend it live its whole life believing that it's stupid. Everybody's a genius,
9:50
but if you expect somebody to do what they're not designed and wired to
9:52
do, they'll fill to spend the rest of their life feeling like there's stupid.
9:56
This is why the right person in the wrong place feels like the wrong
9:58
person. So part of the magic of this formula is not simply choosing the
10:03
right people. It's working hard to make sure they are where they need to
10:05
be in the organization for maximum impact. And in this way, your organizational
10:13
chart is not your friend. Your ORG chart is not your friend. And
10:16
when we think in terms of I mean org charts are necessary, but in
10:20
terms of positioning people for maximum impact, when we think about the traditional top
10:24
down chart, it gets in the way because oftentimes hiring people up through the
10:30
ranks of the org chart is not the best way to get the right people
10:33
in the right place. I suggest to leaders that they use what I call
10:37
the Pharaoh principle. And I made this up so if you don't like this,
10:41
you can write it off. But if you grow up going to synagogue
10:43
or church. You may be familiar with this, with this ancient story about
10:48
this Hebrew kid named Joseph and his brothers are jealous and they sell him into
10:52
slavery, and the Amalekites take him and they take him to Egypt, and
10:54
he gets sold to Potiphar's household. In Potiphar is the captain of the guard
10:58
for and then he gets in trouble. He gets thrown into the dungeon,
11:03
and he finds himself in prison with two gentlemen who used to work for Pharaoh.
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And both of these guys have dreams and they don't have anything else to
11:11
do. So Joseph says, I, I'm pretty good at interpreting dreams.
11:15
Tell me your dreams. So he interprets their dreams, and lo and behold,
11:18
both of their dreams come true, just the way that you know,
11:22
Joseph predicted. One guy lives a very short life. The other guy is
11:26
giving his job back working for Pharaoh. Two years go by, Pharaoh has
11:30
some dreams, two dreams back to back. He wakes up very disturbed.
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He's telling everybody around him, have had these disturbing dreams. I think they
11:37
mean something, and his wine taste or his butler says, Oh, Pharaoh,
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I probably shouldn't bring this up, but a couple of years ago,
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you and I had a little falling out. We worked it out. We
11:48
had a little falling out, and I spent some time in your dungeon and
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I met this Hebrew kid who was pretty good at interpreting dreams. I'm sorry
11:52
I brought this up, but I'm just thinking. I don't even know if
11:56
the kid's still alive, but he may be somebody you need to check in
11:58
with. So find Joseph, the clean him up, shave him up,
12:01
get him smelling good, looking, walking and talking like an Egyptian. They
12:05
bring him into the palace, you know, and there's Pharaoh, and Pharaoh
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tells him the dreams and Daniel's like, I mean, Joseph's like, we
12:13
got this. And Joseph tells Pharaoh what the dreams mean. He says,
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this is what it means. You're about to have seven extraordinary years here in
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Pharaoh in Egypt. Then you're about to have seven extraordinarily bad years. You're
12:26
gonna have so much grain. The first seven years you're gonna swim in it.
12:28
The second seven years everybody's gonna starve to death unless and then he goes
12:33
a little bit further than he should have, and he starts telling Pharaoh what
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to do. He says, this is what you need to do. You
12:39
need to hire somebody who wakes up every single day thinking about this problem.
12:43
This is going to be their focus. And they need to appoint commissioners all
12:46
over the nation. And during these seven years of plenty, they need to
12:48
tax twenty percent of the grain, so that you end up owning twenty percent
12:52
of the grain during the surplus years. Then in the seven years when nobody
12:56
has any grain, once they run out of grain, you start selling the
12:58
grain all over the country. And this is gonna work. How great for
13:00
you, Pharaoh. Everybody's like wow. Pharaoh's like, well, then I
13:05
need to find somebody and to point them and put them in charge. Somebody
13:07
needs to wake up every single day thinking about this problem. And he looks
13:11
around at all the people he's been working with and he goes nah, and
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he ignores the org chart and he says to the Hebrew kid doesn't even know
13:18
his name, you're in charge. You had the idea, you had the
13:24
insight, You're in charge. And I'm sure everybody in Pharaoh's court was like,
13:26
wait a minute. We just met this kid. We've known him an
13:30
hour, we've known him forty five minutes, and you're putting him in charge
13:33
of the most important project that you know could sink or you know, make
13:37
the nation sink or swim. I mean, this is like the biggest thing
13:39
we've ever dealt with before. Pharaoh's like, yeah, the org chart is
13:43
not my friend. This is the kid with the insight. We'll put him
13:46
in charge. Put your best people on your most important projects. That's how
13:52
you develop an extraordinary team. The org chart is necessary, but when it
13:58
comes to getting things done, sometimes it gets in the way. So Number
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one, select performance oriented people and position them for maximum impact. Number two,
14:05
clarify what and why. Most leaders don't do this because of two reasons.
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It's two time consuming, and they don't think they can reduce the nature
14:16
of what they're doing as a department, a division, or organization down to
14:20
one thing. But when you spend the time answering the question what are we
14:26
doing as an organization, as a division, as a department, whatever,
14:30
your you know, your realm of responsibility. When you could answer the question
14:33
this is what we've come to work to do, and this is why we've
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come to work to do it. You have struck gold. And here is
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why this is so extraordinarily important. What and why are the fuel for high
14:48
performance teams? And I can prove it this is not a trick question.
14:52
What do teams like to do? When exactly the front row. That's why
14:58
you got these good seats because you knew the answer to that. That's right,
15:01
this is what teams like to do. Listen, what and why positions
15:07
your team in such a way that they know what the win is. If
15:13
your team doesn't know what the win is, they don't know when they're winning,
15:16
and they don't know when they've won, and high performance get it done.
15:20
People want to win. But if the win, if the finished line,
15:24
if the goal line is a blur, or if all six of them
15:26
have different ideas of what it means to win, it's very difficult to celebrate
15:31
a win because nobody knows what the win is. And here's the thing.
15:35
Extraordinary people will figure out a win that suits them and they will figure out
15:39
how to win. But when you can harness the energy of a team and
15:43
you predefine the win and you line them up to win. Extraordinary things happen
15:48
because people like to win. So years ago in our organization, I had
15:52
every single department and division identify, you know, what's the win, what's
15:56
the win? And write it down when you hire people, when you get
15:58
your volunteers, to get whether every single division department has a single statement,
16:03
this is this is the win when this weekend's over, this is what we
16:06
want to celebrate, when this year is over. This is what we want
16:08
to celebrate. When we get together and decide how we're doing, we're all
16:11
working off the same page. We all have identified the win. High performance
16:18
energy, I mean healthy teams understand what the win, and when you answer
16:22
the question what are we doing it and why are we doing it, you've
16:25
taken a huge step in identifying the win for your team. If everybody on
16:29
your team can't answer those questions the same way, then you don't know if
16:33
everybody's working toward the same goal or the same win or not. What provides
16:40
direction? We talk about what and why and why provides inspiration, What provides
16:45
the information in the direction, this is what we're setting out to do.
16:48
And then when you take a few minutes to answer the question why is this
16:52
important? Why is account important? Why is getting these things? Why it's
16:56
getting these things delivered on time important? Why is customer service important? Why
17:00
is this company important? Why is our product important? What happens if we
17:04
go away? What happens in our industry if we disappear? Answering the why
17:08
question is what brings emotion and inspiration to your organization, regardless of what you
17:12
do, regardless of what you manufacture, regardless of what service you provide.
17:18
Pat macmillan in his book The Performance Factor. It's a great book, it's
17:22
been out for many, many many years, he says, this a clear,
17:26
common compelling task that is important. Look at this that is important to
17:30
the individual team members. Have you made what you're doing important to individual team
17:37
members? He says, a clear, common compelling task that is important to
17:40
the individual team members is the single biggest factor in team success. In other
17:45
words, everybody on my team needs to feel like what we are doing is
17:48
important. And it's my job as a leader to craft what we're doing in
17:55
terms that make it feel important and to so narrow what the win is that
17:59
ever, everybody knows when we're winning and when we're not winning, and what
18:03
we need to do to win, So clarify what and why now the other
18:08
there are two or three other big advantages to this, and I don't want
18:11
to spend a lot of time on in fat We talked a little bit about
18:14
this two years ago at Leader cast clarity around what and why focuses energy and
18:19
resources and it quickly spots life is quickly spotlights off purpose projects and initiatives.
18:29
But when you when you narrow the focus to here's what we've come together to
18:32
do, and here's what here's why we've come to do it. Resources follow
18:36
vision, Passion follows vision, Energy follows an answer to the question what have
18:41
we come together to do? And almost immediately anything that's off purpose is so
18:47
highlighted people immediately recognize that and begin to ask questions about it. So one
18:52
of the things that we did in an organization way back is we've when you
18:56
come to work for us, after three months, you get a list of
18:59
questions from my office. After you've been with us for a year, you
19:00
get another list of questions. And this is the opportunity for new employees to
19:04
evaluate our organization. Because the longer you are in an organization, the less
19:10
aware you are of the organization. The longer you are in a culture,
19:14
the less aware you are of the culture. It's just a principle. So
19:17
we want people with fresh eyes and fresh ears to evaluate us. After a
19:22
year they're one of us. They don't see it, they don't smell it
19:25
anymore. Right, the longer you're in an organization, the less aware of
19:29
the culture you are. So we want fresh eyes. We want the inside
19:32
of the people, the fresh eyes. And one of the questions we ask
19:33
people after they've been with us three months, is there anything you see that
19:37
we're doing, any initiative that we're chasing or pursuing that seems off purpose to
19:41
you when you think about the what that we're trying to accomplish as an organization.
19:45
And almost every evaluation, somebody will say, well, you know,
19:49
I know what we're doing, but why are we doing that? And why
19:52
are we have that department? And how long have they been around and how
19:55
does this fit? And sometimes it's a matter of us clarifying why we're doing
19:59
some of the things we're doing. But every once in a while we scratch
20:00
our heads and say, that's a good question. That's an old couch we
20:04
just been moving that old couch from house to house to house to house.
20:07
I think we need to put that old couch on the street. And you
20:11
all know what I mean by old couches. That's that couch. You decide
20:14
to move and you know you don't love it, and you get to your
20:15
new house and it doesn't fit. But you know it's still got somewhere,
20:18
it's still got some life. So you put it in the basement and it
20:21
lives in your basement for five or eight years. Then you move, and
20:23
you move it again, and you move it again. You know, anybody
20:26
else that comes to your home and sees that old couch, they they think
20:29
to themselves, why in the world do they have that old couch. But
20:30
you've you've kind of fallen in love with that old couch. You have memories.
20:36
But every organization has some old couches. And the people that are going
20:38
to recognize your old couches the quickest or the newest people in the organization.
20:42
So giving them an opportunity to speak into whether or not you really are lined
20:47
up on the what and the why is super important. The other thing that
20:51
understanding what and why does is it gives us clarity. It'll give you clarity
20:55
around laying the groundwork for organizational change, Clarity around what and why lays the
21:00
roundwork for organizational change. The best place to begin a conversation about change.
21:04
The best place to begin a conversation about change, whether this is raising your
21:08
kids, in your marriage and your your nonprofit and your forepart profit. The
21:14
best place to begin a conversation about change is not about the thing that needs
21:18
to change. You begin a conversation about change by talking about the future,
21:22
what could be and what should be, what could be and what should be.
21:27
And when you make people hungry enough about a preferred future, they begin
21:32
to let go of the present. If letting go of the present is a
21:34
means to an end of embracing a preferred future. So when you get locked
21:40
in on here's what we've come together to do, and here's why we need
21:42
to do it, it sets people up to let go of anything that is
21:47
in the way of accomplishing what the organization needs to accomplish. But if you
21:51
never define the win, you don't give people a reason to let go of
21:55
anything. And people don't like to let go of things because they're comfortable.
22:00
You grew up seeing that old couch in my house, right, People resist
22:03
letting go until you clarify where you want them to go. People always resist
22:08
letting go until you clarify where you want them to go. And when your
22:12
division, your department, your business, maybe your industry defines the what and
22:17
the why, you have set them up to embrace change much quicker than otherwise
22:22
they may be willing to do. Number three. To create high performance teams,
22:27
you have to organize then to the what. And this is tough.
22:33
Once you decide your division, your department, you know what are your franchise,
22:37
you know your site, your location, whatever it might be. Once
22:40
you decide here's what we've come together to do, then you have to ask
22:42
the hard question, are we really organized to the what? Now? You
22:48
say, what in the world does this have to do with, you know,
22:49
healthy high performance teams everything? Because high performance people, healthy people want
22:53
to get things done, and they don't want to waste time, and they
22:56
don't want to mess with any side waste energy, and they don't want things
23:00
to get in the way of what they've come to work to do. So
23:03
every once in a while we have to ask the question, as we look
23:06
at our budget, as we look at our hiring. As we look at
23:07
our staffing, are we really organized to and are we really channeling our energy
23:14
toward the what? Or are we just doing what we've always done and just
23:18
changed the words on the wall to create an organization where the lion share of
23:22
the time and resources are allocated to the what you are doing. If you
23:26
don't, you will force people to work around the organization. I would imagine
23:33
every single one of you has worked somewhere where you had to work around the
23:36
organization. You were hired to do a job, and you just kept bumping
23:40
into obstacle after obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, and you think, I don't
23:44
get this. You've hired me to do this. You've told me what you
23:45
want me to sell, You've given me a quota, you've told me how
23:48
you want me to do customer service, You've told me. And at the
23:51
same time, I feel like the organization is in the way of me doing
23:56
what you've hired me to do. And if you let that go so for
24:00
too long, your best people will leave. Your progress oriented people will leave,
24:04
Your healthy people will leave. Your dysfunctional people will stay because they're not
24:08
motivated by progress anyway. They just want a job. And it's okay to
24:14
just want a job, but you can't build a great team with people who
24:17
just want a job. So you got to make sure, and this is
24:19
so hard that your organization is actually organized to the what. And as a
24:26
leader, you are the only person that can make the changes or appeal to
24:30
the board or appeal to your boss to get permission to change the way things
24:33
are running in order to streamline things to the what. But this is a
24:37
waste of time until you've answered the question what are we here to accomplish?
24:42
As a team? This create when you when you're not organized to what,
24:47
it creates enormous sideways energy. You will end up with more people than you
24:51
need doing less than you hired them to do. Leaders will leave the productive
24:56
people will be frustrated. So here's a question for you. And this is
24:57
just going to bother you. And that' okay. Every time I teach this,
25:00
it bothers me. This is why I love to teach this to our
25:03
staff every other year, and so why I loved talking about it today.
25:07
Does your organization get in the way of the win? Is your organization the
25:14
way you're organized, the way you operate is there anything about it that is
25:17
in the way of the progress that you've established and you've called people to embrace.
25:21
And if so, as the leader, you are responsible for cleaning up
25:25
and clearing out the clutter. And when you do, your high performance people
25:29
will be even more high performance and you will find more high performance people that
25:33
want to be a part of your organization because high performance people love to win,
25:38
because teams love to win. Moving on last thing, The fourth part
25:45
of this is orchestrate and evaluate everything. Orchestrate and evaluate everything by orchestrate orchestrate
25:52
answers the question, this is how we do it here until further notified.
25:56
This is how we do it here until further notified. Every great team,
26:00
every great organization, has some sense of orchestration. This is why you love
26:04
Disney World. It's predictable. This is why you love your favorite restaurant.
26:08
It's predictable. You show up and it's orchestrated, and you don't feel like
26:14
you're getting impersonal service because it's orchestrated. You feel like you're getting more personal
26:18
service because it's orchestrated. Orchestrate and evaluate everything. I stole this language from
26:26
Michael Gerber. Some of you read The e Myth or The e Myth Revisited.
26:29
It's one of the first books we read as an organization, and we
26:32
just did everything he said to do. It's a book about franchising. For
26:36
those of you haven't read it. One of the assignments he gives in the
26:38
book because he says, you need to create an org chart with a for
26:42
a large organization, and then you put your initials in every single box,
26:45
and then you work your way up out of the boxes. And we did
26:48
that twenty three years ago. We came up with an org chart for a
26:51
really large nonprofit organization, and the four of us put our initials in every
26:56
single box, and we worked our way out of it and it worked.
26:57
But one of the other things he talks about in that book that so helpful
27:00
is this idea of orchestration. And here's his definition. He says, orchestration
27:06
is the elimination of discretion. And this will bother some of us. That's
27:10
okay. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion. But when you go to your
27:14
favorite restaurant, you don't want to cook back there being creative. You want
27:18
the cook to provide what you're hoping. There are menu says that they're going
27:22
to provide. You want it to taste like it did last time you came,
27:23
and now you brought your friends and you said, hey, I'm going
27:26
to order for you. Trust me, and you want it to be the
27:29
way that you know you ordered it and what it tasted like last time,
27:32
right. So, Orchestration is the elimination of discretion or choice at the operational
27:36
level of your business. Orchestration serves as the playbook for the team. This
27:42
is how we do it here. It brings consistency and predictability to all of
27:47
your processes in environments, but orchestration alone leaves things stale. The reason organizations
27:56
go out of business is because they orchestrate but don't do the second half of
27:59
the equation. High performance. Healthy teams understand this rhythm. In fact,
28:03
this may be the most important rhythm in any organization. Orchestration evaluation orchestration evaluation.
28:11
This is how we do it here. This is how we make it
28:12
better. This is how we do it here. Predictability brand, this is
28:15
how we make it better. That you know we're going to keep improving new,
28:18
improved and improving new and improved and improving. Orchestrate and evaluate everything.
28:23
If orchestration defines your culture, which it does, evaluation is how you refine
28:30
your culture. Orchestration evaluation refines your culture. Evaluation is how you make things
28:36
better and how to make sure things are continuing to get better because action oriented
28:41
people, healthy people and extraordinary team want to win and you can only win
28:45
in your industry if you're getting better now. Evaluation, Like, really,
28:52
everything I've talked about is very industry specific. So I can't sit up here
28:56
and tell you how to evaluate because it depends on what you're manufacturing, on
29:00
what you're selling. Is in terms of you know how you evaluate evaluate,
29:03
But I do want to give you one tip that I think is relevant to
29:07
every organization and every industry. And this is a little bit long, so
29:11
you may want to take a picture of this. And I've learned this the
29:14
hard way, and I've learned this from others. You must create feedback loops
29:18
that keep you closely connected and emotionally preoccupied with the mission critical events in your
29:29
organization. You must create feedback loops that keep you closely connected to and emotionally
29:34
preoccupied with the mission critical events. Success distances us from the mission critical events
29:41
in our industry our organization. The higher up you move in the organization,
29:45
the further away you move from the mission critical events in your organization. So,
29:51
as a leader who's creating a high performance, healthy team, you have
29:55
to make sure that you have created a feedback loop that keeps you directly involved
29:59
and connect to the critical events in your organization and emotionally preoccupied. And here's
30:04
what I mean by that. I love Andy Groves or Andrew Groves book that
30:08
he wrote years before he passed away called Only the Paranoid Survive. I love
30:14
the title of that book, Only the Paranoid Survive. And this was his
30:18
point, is that every leader needs to have a healthy sense of paranoia,
30:22
which means they are emotionally engaged with whether or not the critical events in the
30:26
organization are actually taking place. So one of the most important things you can
30:32
do to create a healthy team is to make sure you have identified the mission
30:37
critical events in your organization and make sure you are emotionally tied to those events.
30:41
I'll give you an example. I have a leadership podcast. I didn't
30:45
title it or name it. It's called the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. I
30:48
know that's so original, and it's actually you can find that in the management
30:52
leadership section of podcasts with on iTunes now, which is kind of cool.
30:56
They moved us into that category. But years ago I interviewed Frank Blake,
30:59
who was eight year seven or eight years was the CEO of home Depot on
31:02
my podcast and we talked about this. He said, the mission critical event
31:06
for home Depot doesn't take place at headquarters. It takes place on the floor
31:10
of the stores. He said. So, when I became CEO, he
31:14
had never been a point leader for any organization. He said, I didn't
31:15
really know what to do, but I knew this. What happens at headquarters
31:18
is irrelevant. What happens on the floor of the stores is everything, he
31:22
said. So I spent so much of my time flying around the country putting
31:26
on an orange apron, just walking the floors of the stores, because if
31:30
that don't work, it doesn't matter what we're doing at headquarters. Chick fil
31:33
A Dan Cathy flies as operators all over the country to walk the floors of
31:37
the Chick fil A's around the country. Why because if it ain't happening there,
31:41
it doesn't matter what's happening at headquarters in Atlanta. Now there's some parallel
31:45
in all of our organizations. And as a leader, to create a healthy
31:48
team, you have to make sure that team feels the pressure of the critical
31:52
events. And the critical events probably aren't related or happening directly at headquarters,
31:56
depending again on what kind of industry you're in. So orchestrate and evaluate everything
32:01
and answer this question. What are that? This is another great question to
32:05
talk about over lunch. What are the mission critical events in your organization?
32:09
Every team has a playing field. The mission critical events are your field.
32:15
How often are you on the field? How often are you in that field?
32:19
So, in conclusion, high performance teams are comprised of extraordinary or comprised
32:25
the people with extraordinary clarity around what, why and how, along with a
32:30
predisposition toward execution. So you need to decide what's what and what's the why.
32:36
You need to hire and make sure you are surrounded with execution and oriented
32:38
people. You need to get in the rhythm of orchestrating and evaluating, orchestrating
32:43
and evaluating, and if you do, you will have a high performance,
32:47
healthy team and you will win. And people like to win, and I
32:52
hope you win. And the fact that you're here today means you want to
32:55
win. Thanks for having me. Your next speaker up is extraordinary. We'll
33:00
see you next year. Thank you,