Three Critical Steps To Telling Your Leadership Story

The first time I learned about the power of a good story I was fourteen years old. My high school counselor, Billie James, wrote me a five-page letter entitled, Prizing Hugh. Billie told me a story about how she struggled in school the same way I was, how she overcame her struggles and how I could also. Billie’s letter built a connection between us that inspired me to try new ways of being successful at school.

Today, with the proliferation of email, text messaging and the now expanded 280-character tweet, storytelling has fallen out of favor. Many leaders have become minimalist communicators, and by doing so have lost the ability to craft a leadership narrative that compels them as leaders as well as propels their employees to action.

When a leader neglects to communicate a personal leadership story, customers and employees fill the void with their own story about what’s important to the leader and the organization. Seldom is this story the most beneficial to the leaders credibility and the organizations performance.

If you want a leadership story that galvanizes employees around a compelling future and increases performance, follow this three-step leadership storytelling formula.

Name Your What

Not unlike Billie James, one of my clients; a senior nurse leader, recounted a story of being at the bedside of a patient when negative news about their health was delivered without regard for the mental well being of the patient. This leader watched negative news delivered poorly eliminate a patient’s resolve to fight their illness. Every leader has a what happened experience that shapes their leadership in powerful and long-lasting ways.

Claim Your Why

Every compelling story answers the question why was the experience important and by doing so carries with it the hopes of a desired future. For my nurse leader client, why this experience was important was that words proved to have the power to heal as well as harm. This insight affirmed for them that nursing has the capacity to not only care for a patients physical well-being, but for their mental well-being also. When nurses do this well, patients heal better, faster and have better clinical outcomes.

Articulate The How

Listeners listen to stories through the filter of how the story impacts them, what they can learn and how they will use the story and its insights to make their life better. While a leaders story may be compelling and filled with insights, listeners are anxious to answer the key question; how will I use this information moving forward?

When leaders craft a story about what is important, why it’s important and how best to use the information moving forward, they have a significantly greater likelihood of winning the hearts and minds of the people who can do work that matters.

Do you have a key leadership story? If not, take the Monday Morning Mindset Challenge.

Monday Morning Mindset Challenge

1. Identify one event in your career that shaped your leadership. What happened and how did it positively or negatively impact you?

2. Identify one to three key insights from your story. Why was the story important to you and why does it matter that you share the story with others?

3. What suggestions do you have for leveraging how your story and insights can change the world of work for the better?

7 Principles of Transformational Leadership

This week we are launching my new book, The 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership: create a mindset of passion, innovation, and growth. I’m excited for two reasons. The first is that the people who have read the book so far have said that it is approachable, practical, and inspirational. For these compliments I am really honored.

I’m also excited because this book was eight years in the making. It took a long time for me to write it. Not because I didn’t have something to say, but because I was tentative and uncertain. But, when I leveraged the content from my Mastering Your Mindset and integrated it with the 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership, I got transformational results. Specifically, I went from the idea of the book to a book proposal, an agent, to a commercial publisher and a completed manuscript in five months.

There are three benefits you’ll receive from reading my book and one thing that you’ll commit to doing in order to get transformational results. The three benefits are:

1. A way to live your life with unbridled purpose and passion.

2. You’ll execute on your strategic priorities faster and with greater results.

3. You will cascade excellence throughout your entire organization.

That’s great, Hugh, but what do I have to do in order to get these benefits?

You’ll need to articulate your leadership purpose. Leadership purpose is a game changer. It changes the game with regards to the value you provide to your customer and employees. It is the catalyst for living your life purposefully and passionately, executing with greater effectiveness and greater results, and cascading excellence throughout your entire organization.

Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of the book is to show you how to achieve these types of results. If you’d like to experience the same types of results I did, there is a link at the bottom of this blog post and it will take you to the landing page where there are three offers about how you and I can engage with this content. We can engage with you as an individual or with you as a team or organization. Check out the landing page. I am very proud of this book and believe it can be a game changer for you personally, organizationally, and professionally.

Have a flourishing week and I’ll see you again next week.

Click here to go to the book landing page

Three Questions That Give You A Competitive advantage

What Is Your Competitive Advantage?

No doubt you want a competitive advantage over your competition. A competitive advantage can come in different forms for different people. For example, if you’re a leader you’re competing for the mind-share of the individuals you lead. What will give you an advantage in influencing others behavior? If you’re selling a product or service you are competing with the budgetary requirements of the customer as well as with other vendors. What gives you an advantage?

If you want to position yourself in ways that give you an advantage over your competition I’m going to share one bold statement and three questions that will help you have a competitive advantage. Answer these three questions and you can have a competitive advantage.

Bold statement:
Your competitive advantage needs to be that you give a competitive advantage to your customer for having done business with you.

It’s really quite simple. By giving a competitive advantage to someone you will have a competitive advantage.

Three Questions:

1. What is it that you do extraordinarily well that is highly beneficial to your customer?

2. What are your customers strategic initiatives, and how are you helping them accomplish them in unparalleled ways?

3. What problem / issue are you addressing that it is a game changer for your customer?

When you answer these questions you will have a competitive advantage. But before you check this exercise off your to-do list, take one important and highly valuable next step. Confirm your answers with your customer.

If your answers to what makes you unique and distinctive are compelling for you but not for your customer you do not have a competitive advantage, but rather a performance disadvantage and all bets are off.

If you want to have a competitive advantage provide a competitive advantage to your customers. You’ll know you have done so when customers say, “we cannot imagine doing business without you.” When you hear that, you’re going to have a fabulous week filled with a competitive advantage.

Dispelling the Myth: The Time is Not Right

Video Notes

This week I want to dispel a myth. The myth is: the time is not right.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is absolutely a myth.

Now you have certainly heard this if you are in a sales position and a management or leadership position. If you’re in a leadership position you’ve had people come and say, “that is a wonderful idea, but the time is not right.” If you ever hear that, I want you to say these words to the people that say that: “My overwhelming experience is that those who say that ‘the time is not right’ never find the right time.” the people who are extraordinary in their organizations, the leaders who are extraordinary, the organizations that create overwhelming value for their customers, for their employees, start immediately. They start immediately and they are totally open to mid course corrections.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ve ever heard, “the time is not right,” if you’ve ever uttered the words, “the time is not right,” stop it. Don’t accept it. My recommendation to you is: take immediate action. Do something to move towards that which you want to accomplish and be completely open to mid course corrections, but don’t wait. Eradicate, just annihilate this notion that ‘the time is not right.’ The time is always right. It just requires bold action.

That ladies and gentlemen is the Monday Morning Minute. I hope you have a fabulous week, and I’ll see you here again next week. Take care.

High Performance Cultures: What every leader can learn from Ferrari, Bentley and Lamborghini

It was one of the most thrilling moments in my life. I was doing 187 miles per hour at the Porsche Driving School in what is best described as a rocket ship built on four wheels. The engine, only a few inches from my head, pounded in my chest as if I was receiving CPR, and the trees flew by so fast that they were no longer trees, but more a blurry green swatch of color out of the corner of my right eye.

I came to learn how to drive fast. Not to race you from one traffic light to the next down main street, but to become a more educated and safer driver in all types of circumstances. Learning the subtle nuances of when and how to shift gears, when to accelerate and when to brake, I left with a vastly improved lap time as well as greatly enhanced mindset behind the wheel.

High performance cars are very similar to high performance cultures. You have a choice as to whether to drive one or not. You can choose to drive a car that is purely functional transportation. Or, you can choose to drive a car that is one part engineering masterpiece, one part handcrafted artwork, and one part a catalyst for supreme exhilaration.

Here is good news. Whether you are a university, healthcare institution, a financial services organization or a technology department, you have a Ferrari sitting in your driveway and the keys are in your hand. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people who own a Ferrari, the level of intimidation about the power, torque and performance of the Ferrari has the car parked in the driveway looking good but not being driven. Their owners are not experiencing the acceleration, the cornering and the ability for the car to transport you to an unparalleled more compelling driving experience.

In my consulting work I’ve found that driving a culture that is the equivalent of a finely tuned sports car requires embracing five high performance cultural mindset shifts. Not unlike a manual transmission in a car, making these mindset shifts allows you to trade in your functional transportation for a finely tuned, hand-built work of art that accelerates you to the finish line before your competition. I call these Hugh Blane’s Cultural Accelerators. They are:

1.Cultures are hand built. Not unlike Ferraris, Bentleys and Lamborghinis, cultures are made with painstaking attention to detail by master craftspeople. Automobile engineers pour over specifications in the hopes of eliminating tiny imperfections, and marketing and customer care representatives create experiences that are exhilarating and rewarding.

The same holds true for your organizational culture. It is handcrafted and not an off the shelf idea culled from the most touted leadership book of the quarter. It is crafted with an uncompromising and meticulous passion for a compelling future. A future that outperforms your competition, builds customer loyalty and commitment, and leaves you in a category of one. In all races between you and your competitors, the race to customer loyalty and commitment will always be won by the most committed and passionate culture.

2. Cultures are customer centric. All of the car manufacturers I’ve mentioned know their customers inside and out. They have painstakingly thought through every aspect of the purchase process and engineered it to adhere to the automotive admonition “the thrill of the wheel seals the deal.” Once a prospective car-buyer has been thrilled by an automobile, the likelihood of them being converted from a prospective customer to a loyal customer increases exponentially.

Cultures that strive to thrill their customers, as well as to thrill the employees who work directly with them, will have customers’ speed toward them. If you are not thrilling the customers that matter most to you they will jump in their car and drive toward your competitors.

3. Cultures need to perform at higher speeds. Regardless of whether you agree that a Bentley Continental GT needs to hit tops speeds of 197 mph is irrelevant. What is important is that the automobile has been designed to achieve these speeds with an amazing amount of composure and safety.

Cultures are the same. Your culture can be designed to travel from a complete standstill to sixty miles per hour faster than your competitors and it can be designed to achieve a higher top speed with composure and safety. But the important question all leaders need to ask is, are we traveling on the Autobahn in Germany at top speed? Or, are we on a two-lane highway in Shreveport Mississippi with a governor holding us to fifty-five miles per hour?

In today’s world of work where hyper connectivity and access to information is expected in seconds, traveling fifty-five miles an hour will leave you obsolete and surpassed by newer and faster competitors. It’s time to speed up.

4. Cultures require better car handling skills. Creating a handcrafted culture that thrills customers and accelerates performance requires better car handling skills by drivers at every level of an organization. Specifically, every leader in the organization must embrace the admonition from racecar driver Mario Andretti who said, “If everything feels like it’s under control you’re simply not going fast enough.”

Gone are the days of having everything under control. The race for accelerated performance requires you to build a culture that is capable of balancing itself on the safe edge of the known and predictable along with the unknown and uncharted. This will leave some leaders on the edge of their seats proclaiming they’re going too fast. If you’re not hearing this, you’re not going fast enough.

5. Cultures cannot be purchased on the cheap. High-performance sports cars as well as high-performance cultures require you pay a premium. You cannot take a Chrysler minivan to the racetrack and expect to be competitive. You have to invest a premium either in purchasing a car designed for the racetrack, or to convert your current car into a competitor. If you’re not willing to make the investment into creating a high-performance culture then you will be resigned to being at the back of the pack and not being competitive.

Creating a high performance culture does not require you buy a Bentley. It does require that you buy-in to the five mindset shifts above and to move toward the same belief that W.O. Bentley had when he started Bentley automobiles. He said: “we will build a fast car, a good car, the best in its class.” Here’s to fast, good and best in class cars and cultures.