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Success Simplified
Simple Solutions Measurable Results
Copyright © 2011
Published in the United States by Insight Publishing Company 707 West
Main Street, Suite 5 Sevierville, TN 37862 800-987-7771
www.insightpublishing.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any means without prior written permission from the publisher except for
brief quotations embodied in critical essay, article, or review. These articles
and/or reviews must state the correct title and contributing authors of this book
by name.
Disclaimer: This book is a compilation of ideas from numerous experts
who have each contributed a chapter. As such, the views expressed in each
chapter are of those who were interviewed and not necessarily of the
interviewer or Insight Publishing.
ISBN-978-1-60013-745-7
10 9 87 6 54 321
MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLISHER
The interviews found in this book are conducted by
David Wright, President of ISN Works and Insight
Publishing.
Achieving success is serious business, or so it
would seem. So many people are striving for this
nebulous concept known as “success.” I’ve asked
many people what their definition of success is and
I’ve heard different answers from just about all of
them.
Some people appear successful and on the surface it seems that they should be
very happy about what they’ve accomplished. But often they are not. Their
lives have become so complicated that they feel harried and on a treadmill of
endless thing gs to do to keep their hard-won success.
Can’t success be simple? I wondered if anyone else had ever thought about
this, so I searched for speakers and authors who would give me some answers.
In this book, Success Simplified, the successful business people I found gave
several different answers to my question. The answers were very insightful, in
my opinion. I think they will give you a new perspective on success and how
to make it simple.
DAVID E. WRIGHT, PRESIDENT
ISN WORKS & INSIGHT PUBLISHING
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One.......................................................................................... 1
Success Simplified: Leadership Alignment and Getting
the Right People in the Right Roles
By Tom Olivo
Chapter Two......................................................................................... 23
Set People-Centered Values
By Dr. Stephen R. Covey
Chapter Three ………………………………………………………...........37
Organizational Leadership Simplified
By Ilene Patasnik and Terrence Overholser
Chapter Four........................................................................................ 61
Mastering the Art of Productivity
By Brian Bartes
Chapter Five......................................................................................... 77
Do Less, Be More
By Linda Gartland
Chapter Six........................................................................................... 93
Total and Lasting Success
By Wendy Ghebrhiwet
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Seven.................................................................................... 115
How to be Unstoppable
By Ed Tseng
Chapter Eight ..................................................................................... 125
Purpose, Passion, and Transformation
By Ian and Tonya Fitzpatrick, Esqs.
Chapter Nine...................................................................................... 145
Using the Platinum Rule
By Tony Alessandra
Chapter Ten....................................................................................... 165
Essential Success Principles — (ESP)
By James Melton
Chapter Eleven .................................................................................. 181
The Power of True Listening
By George Ritcheske
Chapter Twelve................................................................................... 199
Speaking for Success: Communicating with Confidence,
Clarity, and Color
By Dr. Irena Yashin-Shaw, PhD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Thirteen................................................................................. 215
Business Intuition: Unleashing your sixth sense
By Marishka Glynne
Chapter Fourteen................................................................................ 233
Simplicity Equals Success
By Patty Kreamer, CPO®
Chapter Fifteen................................................................................... 249
Centering for Success
By Sydney A. Paredes
Chapter Sixteen.................................................................................. 265
How to Get Ahead and Stay There
By Patricia Fripp
Chapter Seventeen............................................................................. 279
Coaching, Teaching, and Healing: A Path to Success
By Robert Gramillano
Chapter Eighteen ............................................................................... 293
Down with Stress: Up with Success
By Sharon Gilley
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Nineteen................................................................................ 321
Make it Mostly on Your Own
By Dan Clark
Chapter Twenty.................................................................................. 339
No Regrets: Finding Your Recipe for Personal and
Professional Success
By Ken Thoreson
Chapter One
Success Simplified: Leadership Alignment and
Getting the Right People in the Right
Roles By Tom Olivo
David Wright (Wright)
Today we’re talking with Tom Olivo. Tom is a founding partner in
Healthcare Performance Solutions and President of Success Profiles Inc., a
consulting firm that specializes in business performance, measurement, and
marketplace research. Established in 1990, Success Profiles designs and
provides organizational performance measurements, instruments, and database
management services to clients, management consulting firms, and
professional associations. The focus of their service is creating business
intelligence.
In his professional career, Mr. Olivo has more than twenty-five years of
experience in identifying, measuring, and comparing the commonalities of
highly successful athletes, business leaders, and organizations. Tom has
worked in a multitude of industries with thousands of senior executives and
managers, emphasizing the importance of high performance standards
consistent with best business practices. Success Profiles has measured the
performance of more than a thousand organizations and developed a database
of business practices that includes more than twenty-five thousand individual
business units.
He is the co-author of Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People,
by business leaders to be an expert in workforce optimization and is one of the
most requested speakers on the topic of practical and applied performance
measurement.
Tom, welcome to Success Simplified.
Tom Olivo (Olivo)
Thanks, David; it’s a pleasure to be with you today.
Wright
So tell me, Tom, why are you known by your friends and clients as “the
measurement guy”?
Olivo
Maybe some of my natural measurement aptitude was inherited, so I think
that some credit has to go to my dad who was a mathematics teacher,
professional musician, and tennis coach. With respect to math and
measurement, my early passion was geometry—it just came naturally to me
because it was visual.
Second, in my academic pursuits I had a curiosity for geology, which is
technically an inexact science. In geologic science, you’re continuously
solving puzzles and dealing with the probability of repeating events or patterns
over long periods of time. I’ve come to appreciate that these patterns or
common denominators also apply to business practices, where you tend to see
more similar issues that are challenging leaders than those that are unique.
The third reason is that I have this obsession, habit, or practice discipline of
measuring, quantifying, and recording just about everything in my life. It helps
me keep score. Whether it’s my diet, my workout routines, financial records,
even when I go fishing, I’m going to want to keep a log of what’s going on, of
weather conditions and what works, what doesn’t. This focus on keeping score
helps me evaluate and track progress and performance in any activity. I believe
that the “keeping score” discipline began at around age fifteen.
I’m very fortunate that this natural ability and scientific curiosity,
compounded with forty years of practice, created long-term benefits for my
business profession of performance measurement. Since the core purpose of
Success Profiles is to identify, measure, and compare leadership and
organizational performance, it’s instinctive for me to be able to quantify and
differentiate how people perform.
Wright
Will you tell our readers a little more about your athletic background and
how the practice of coaching athletes transitioned into coaching business
executives?
Olivo
My evolution as a coach really began as an athlete when I was introduced
to both springboard diving and gymnastics at the age of eight. Having a little
bit of natural ability allowed me to quickly advance to more competitive
environments where early on I was exposed to fairly good coaching. There was
also some luck involved when at age eleven I was introduced to the person
who would become the most influential coach and mentor throughout my life,
Rod Mergardt.
I can close my eyes at any time and still visualize my first impression of
Coach Mergardt. There he was, fit as an Olympic athlete, leading a class of
sixth-graders through the famous Fox Lane “Whistle Drill” exercise (a
combination of moves that today would be cited as a best practice in core
strength training). There was Rod, super motivated and perfect in his
technique, demonstrating the ultimate level of commitment we should aspire
to.
That winter, Rod became my gymnastics coach and in the summers, my
diving coach. His encouraging and professional style seemed to click with me,
and I became passionate about improving my technique and competing.
One of the most important lessons Rod taught us was to become students of
the sport and if you wanted to be the best, you had to learn and train with the
best. He arranged for us to attend advanced training camps with our current
Olympians and top NCAA coaches. He also emphasized setting the “first
class” standard among student athletes at Fox Lane High School by having us
dress in a coat and tie on any school day we had a competition. He knew that
every student and teacher we encountered on that day would ask us why we
were “dressed up.” At first it was uncomfortable to stand out, but Rod wanted
to establish a culture where the entire team became recognized for setting the
highest professional standard. This professional standard was permanently
imprinted upon me and later transferred to other disciplines in life.
I’ve now known Rod Mergardt for more than forty-two years; I don’t
believe that I’ve gone more than ninety days in that time period without
connecting with him in some manner. Now, at the age of fifty-three and with
Rod at age seventy, the student has become the teacher. We travel the world
together on remote fly fishing expeditions and I get the chance to teach Rod
the artful technique of fly fishing.
I’ve come to recognize that while my relationship with Rod was special for
me, all the high-achieving people I’ve ever met have someone in their life who
connected with them and influenced them the way that Rod connected with
me.
In difficult times, I often ask myself how would the person I respect the
most (Rod Mergardt) handle the situation I’m in right now? If business leaders
could take a brief “time out” to ask this question before they emotionally react
to a challenging situation, the performance of everyone receiving their
feedback would improve significantly.
After coaching what I’ll refer to as “amateur athletes” for fifteen years in
competitive diving and gymnastics, I started to realize that my intellectual
interests and financial goals were being neglected. I had another respected
diving coach and mentor, Hobie Billingsley, convince me that I had the
potential to accomplish more in my professional career if I left coaching
amateur sports and started to look into other vocations. All career changes are
difficult, but the logical thing to do was to increase my likelihood of success
by aligning my natural talent for assessing performance (measurement) with
my passion to help motivated people achieve (coaching). This alignment
created an opportunity to transfer my skills into creating the performance
measurement firm, Success Profiles Inc., and combine that vocation with
executive coaching.
As a gymnast and diver, every skill is highly technical. Proficiency is
accelerated with an athlete’s understanding of science, particularly physics,
biomechanics, and kinesiology. Athletes also have to be able to internally
“visualize” every aspect of their performance. This visualization is from two
perspectives: internal with the athlete and external with the coach. Ultimately,
for the athlete, the degree of alignment between the internal and external
perspectives is directionally proportional to the consistency of performance
and rate of improvement.
Athletes also need to incorporate practice discipline into their training. The
most effective way to do this is with spaced repetitious education, which
involves intense internal training to simulate competitive conditions. This
practice discipline can be slightly different for different sports and it also has
broad application to accelerating skill development in other fields such as
music and business.
The only difference with being a successful coach in the business
environment (versus sports), is that you have to substitute specialized
measurement tools to diagnose performance and have the practical business
experience to know what to prescribe.
Being a successful coach in any endeavor is also similar to being a
physician—there are four key protocols or elements to follow. Quite simply,
coaching can be summarized as:
1 Diagnosing performance (an objective, evidence-based analysis).
2 Prescribing solutions (recommendations with reasonable probability or
high odds of success).
3 The science of providing feedback (what specific message is proposed
or what is “said”).
4 The art of providing feedback (how the message is positioned or what
is actually “heard”).
The challenge in coaching effectively is not so much with the first two
steps, Diagnosing and Prescribing, but more with the last two, the Science and
Art of providing feedback. The only difference with being a successful coach
in the business environment (versus sports), is that you have to substitute
specialized measurement tools to diagnose performance and have the practical
business experience to know what to prescribe.
Here is a proven diagnostic approach that can help anyone become a more
consistent and effective coach for managers or supervisors who may be
struggling in the workplace. The following ten-point checklist can help any
leader identify 95 percent of the most common problems that take away from
leadership effectiveness.
1 Assess the leader’s demonstrated talent or his or her leadership ability
level. Does the person have the natural or learned ability to perform well,
given the complexity of the assignment?
2 Are there skill deficiencies? Are the minimum skills required realistic
for the person to master in the time frame provided?
3 Is there an experience or maturity deficiency? Maybe the person is
new to being a manager, maybe he or she hasn’t matured enough as a leader
yet. Maybe the person hasn’t seen enough diversity or been exposed to the
common challenges he or she will face in the role.
4 Are there behavioral style deficiencies where the person struggles to
maintain composure or he or she is inflexible with his or her ability to adjust
and style-flex in different management circumstances? At the director level
and above, approximately 80 percent of the reason that people are going to fail
is because of their behavioral style and not their technical skill.
5 Is it the person’s genuine discretionary effort? Is it his or her attitude?
Maybe the individual is not committed or trying hard enough.
6 Is it the complexity of the leadership role or assignment? It could be
significant obstacles and barriers within or outside of the leader’s control that
take away from his or her performance.
7 Are the resources lacking? Does the leader have enough people? Does
he or she have enough financial resources? Does the person have the right
tools and equipment to get the job done?
8 Are the people hired or appointed below the leader effective? Is the
leader tolerating poor performance or disruptive, negative behavior?
9 Are those in positions above the leader effective at coaching him or
her? Is the leader’s performance suboptimized because of who he or she
reports to?
10 Finally, consider if the business model itself is even viable. You could
have someone who is highly talented and experienced in an unviable business
model. In this case, it doesn’t matter what coaching or training the person
receives, he or she is not likely to be successful.
All great coaches are great teachers first. Remember that it’s not the
diagnosis and prescription that is most important in being an effective coach.
It’s the Art and Science of providing feedback to bring out the best
performance in others.
The great basketball coach Red Auerbach was once interviewed by a
reporter who asked him the question, “Red, when your basketball players
return to the court from a time out, they seem to know exactly what to do on
the floor to implement the play and they’re successful much more often than
lots of other teams. What do you tell them that seems to enable them to get it
right?”
What Red said was very profound, “It’s not what I tell them that’s
important,” he said, “it’s what they hear.” He had to give feedback to each of
the five players going back out on the floor, slightly differently. So he was
more concerned with the receiver than he was with himself, the transmitter, in
providing the coaching. Red seemed to naturally consider the following in his
coaching style: How are the people I’m about to give feedback to going to
receive the information in a way that motivates them and gets them to do
something that maybe they don’t even think they can do?
With people, meaningful change will not occur until something becomes an
“imperative.” It’s the Art and Science (or packaging and positioning) of the
coaching feedback that creates the motivation to do something differently than
what is most comfortable.
“People don’t change because they are told that they should, people only
change when they themselves feel that they must.”
—Thomas Friedman
Pivoting to business, for the last twenty years I’ve had the unique
opportunity of being with thousands of high achieving executives, directors,
and front-line managers. Their behavioral wiring is virtually identical to highly
accomplished athletes, and the coaching techniques to enhance their
performance are much more similar than different.
Wright
I understand that during the last ten years you’ve had a concentrated
emphasis on healthcare where you’ve traveled more than one and a half
million air miles and performed site visits with more than two hundred
healthcare systems. Would you tell our readers about the comprehensive
performance measurement databases, leadership, and cultural performance you
have compiled?
Olivo
In 2001 I was asked to serve as a lead faculty member and head consultant
to a national collaborative on workforce effectiveness for healthcare. The
initial “mass strike” exposure to ninety healthcare systems enabled us to very
quickly identify, measure, and compare their business practices and ultimate
performance outcomes.
This gave us an instant nationwide laboratory to be able to better
understand the industry challenges and to determine the drivers of high
performance. Here are the basic facts:
1 Since healthcare organizations (hospitals) are a business, there is
essentially no difference between them and the common business practices of
any other medium or large size organization. Their leadership, culture,
business practices, and operational processes are perfectly designed for the
results they are achieving (a great place to work, a great patient experience,
financial success, and community stewardship). Therefore, if hospital leaders
want to improve the downstream outcomes, they need to focus and get
leverage on the upstream drivers of those outcomes.
2 The most common “rate-limiting” factor to individual departmental
performance was ineffective leadership at the front-line manager level where
people often became “overleveraged” (in over their heads).
3 When senior leaders get the right person in the right role, everything
gets easier and the results meet or exceed expectations more often. When
leaders get the wrong person in the role, performance is almost always
sub-optimized and they tend to struggle or fail.
4 The importance of organizational culture is always underestimated and
large-scale, organization-wide culture change initiatives are very ineffective.
Meaningful culture change needs to occur one leader at a time and one
department at a time.
The single defining statement that sums up what we’ve learned is, “as goes
the talent and demonstrated ability of the front line manager, so goes the
performance in that department by virtually every measure.” This one business
practice becomes the “Achilles Heel” of performance. If you get it right,
everything gets easier. If you don’t get it right, things get significantly harder.
“As goes the talent and demonstrated ability of the
front line manager, so goes the performance in that
department by virtually every measure” —Tom Olivo.
Wright
Will you elaborate on the statement that leadership performance is similar
to swimming in that you cannot effectively assess capability with a written
test?
Olivo
If you think about leadership, it’s all about your demonstrated
performance—what you do—versus what you know. In the swimming
example, if someone were to study how to swim through observation, then
read the textbooks, then would watch videos, then memorize all of that
material, and then take a written test and spit it all back, he or she may know
and say all the right things, but if you throw the person in the pool, there is a
high likelihood that he or she is going to drown.
Applying the swimming analogy to effective leadership, we make the
assumption that the only way to truly assess leaders’ abilities is by observing
and measuring their demonstrated performance from multiple
perspectives—what they actually do versus what they know. The assessment
from multiple perspectives should include all the people who report to those
leaders. It should include the perspective of the leaders above them looking
down, it should include all of their “hard metrics” performance results, and it
should include an objective assessment of their dominant behavioral style. For
the complete picture to be valid and reliable, how managers show up must also
correlate and link to the desirable outcomes they achieve.
The easiest way to describe this process is for people to visualize the
mapping search function of a Global Positioning System device (or GPS).
Today, most people actually have GPS capability in their cell phones that
can triangulate and pinpoint their precise location fairly quickly, within a few
seconds. The GPS device works by triangulating its relative position with
multiple satellites orbiting the Earth (typically three to five). What I’m
suggesting is that if you want to most accurately determine a manager’s overall
performance, it would be similar to using a GPS device to triangulate on
multiple performance perspectives (see diagram above).
By placing a front-line manager of a department in the center of the picture
and asking the basic question of what performance criteria is most important to
consider in evaluating g overall performance, you could create GPS precision
with a more comprehensive and balanced assessment. Perspective number one
and number two from the staff and customers is differentiated and illustrated
on the Eye Chart format in number three (see example of the Eye Chart
below). Perspective number four is the top-down leadership evaluation by the
senior executives.
Perspective number five is the manager’s behavioral hardwiring. Perspective
number six is the hard metrics. Perspective number seven is the manager’s
talent alignment and re elative odds of success considering all the performance
elements (see odds of success chart on page 13.)
If you could actually see “Analytics” and “Business Intelligence,” what
would it look like? The Performance Management Eye Chart.
The Performance Management Eye Chart (PMEC) is a right-brain visual
tool that compares leadership effectiveness and cultural engagement at a
glance. Leaders can instantly see which departments have “healthy”
subcultures of excellence (on the right of the chart) and which ones are facing
difficulties (struggling or failing on the left of the chart). With a unique
combination of presenting information in a way to allow both detailed focus
and peripheral vision, the Eye Charts create synthesis and meaning by
allowing people to instantly see the complete picture of performance. For more
information about the Eye Chart suite of measurement tools, please visit
http://success.rpr2.com.
Wright
Is there a fairly simple way to guide leaders on appointing the right people
in the right roles with the highest odds of success?
Olivo
Yes, in addition to this concept of demonstrated leadership ability, we have
also learned that not all leadership roles are created equal. There are varying
levels of complexity that people face depending upon their position, span of
responsibility, and departmental challenges.
Over a period of fifteen years, with performance data from more than
fifteen thousand leaders, we were able to develop probability of success
models to better estimate performance expectations of leaders in different
roles. Quite simply, if you have the ability to quantify the complexity of the
leadership role (low, medium, or high degree of difficulty) and the ability to
differentiate the demonstrated leadership ability level (with a talent rating of
A, B, C, or D) you can accurately estimate the success rates of people
appointed to different assignments.
Logically you wouldn’t take people who are B minus level leaders and
assign them to the most difficult role because they would have a fairly low
success rate (odds of success are only 35 percent). Therefore, the business
practice competency for organizations to master is the consistent ability to
match the talent level of leaders or managers (their demonstrated ability) with
the appropriate complexity level of assignment (the degree of difficulty) to
increase their relative odds of success.
In the diagram above, we illustrate the leadership talent level along the
horizontal X axis and the relative odds of success along the vertical Y axis.
There are three parallel tracks for complexity or Degree of Difficulty (high,
medium, or low). A leader’s odds of success can be estimated by aligning the
leadership talent level (A, B, C, or D) with the role complexity (Degree of
Difficulty). In the upper right corner ellipse, we see that when A-and B-level
leaders are appointed to the appropriate level of complexity, they are three to
one likely to succeed. In the lower left corner ellipse, we see that when C-and
D-level leaders are appointed to virtually any assignment, they are three to one
likely to fail.
The most common mistake that leaders make is when B level leaders are
appointed to assignments with a high degree of difficulty. In this case, they
have an overall success rate of only 45 percent. We’re not suggesting that a
B-level leader can’t be successful in the most difficult assignments; we are
suggesting that you should avoid making those appointments where leaders
can be in over their head. Our term for this is that they become
“Overleveraged.”
Wright
The concept of “nature versus nurture” has been argued by behavioral
scientists for hundreds of years. Do you believe leaders are more “born”
(nature) or are they more “developed” (nurture)?
Olivo
Since both nature and nurture elements are both required for success, the
question cannot be framed with an expectation of an either-or response. It
doesn’t really matter if they are naturally hardwired with the right type of
behaviors and natural talents as a leader, or if they develop those skills over
time. The important thing to consider is that by age thirty, do they consistently
demonstrate it? I’m often asked about the significance of age thirty. The
bottom line is that by that age, if they have never demonstrated the
fundamental leadership skills required for the assignment, it is highly doubtful
that you can train them to become capable.
The nature versus nurture debate is similar for athletes. Sports science
studies have revealed that approximately two thirds of an elite athlete’s talent
potential is determined at birth. About one third is developed over time. Sport
specificity analyses also show that there are unique physical attributes with
certain sports in which people are either highly likely or highly unlikely to be
successful.
“The evidence suggests that athletes are first born, then made better
over time.”
—Dr. Robert Arnot
Imagine taking someone who, at an early age (by age fourteen), is a great
natural athlete, has terrific flexibility, unusual strength, great conditioning,
balance and kinesthetic awareness, and keen vision and/or coordination skills.
The person initially could excel in virtually any sport but there is probably one
physical activity or sport that he or she is most ideally suited for. The person
has the ideal height (tall or short), weight (lean or compact), aerobic capacity
(endurance) or sprinting ability (quickness), fast or slow twitch muscle fiber,
or unique fine movement coordination (a golf swing or ballet grace) for some
specific sport. The success of people with these characteristics is initially
determined by their early maturity and ability beyond their years, but as they
develop, they could achieve extraordinary levels of achievement with the ideal
alignment of the right talents with the right sports science fit.
The facts today are that if a young athlete (by age fourteen) doesn’t commit
unconditionally to one specific sport, his or her competitive development
between ages fifteen and twenty-four could be sub-optimized. In English, that
means these people may never achieve their true potential because they are
committing to one sport too late.
Finally, similar to the magic of the compound interest effect, the earlier a
person commits to a particular activity or skill, there also appears to be a
compounding (amplifying) effect that occurs over time. If another person
begins even a year later, he or she may never quite catch up.
Is it possible for dedication, hard work, and practice discipline to
out-compete talent? Yes, but there are “natural laws of competitive
performance” that tend to hold up like the laws of gravity. For example:
• If two people of the same natural talent level train or practice with the
same degree of intensity, they will most likely be evenly matched.
• If a person with more talent does not train or practice consistently, he
or she becomes vulnerable to losing to a less talented opponent. Therefore,
drive and practiced discipline can triumph over raw talent.
• If an extremely talented person also trains with extraordinary drive and
practice discipline, it becomes a rare occurrence for him or her to lose to a
lesser talented and/or driven opponent. Get the picture?
The reason people have trouble with comparing the advantages of talent
versus drive is because it’s difficult to quantify and it’s possible to have
someone with average ability who works really hard to occasionally
outperform people with superior natural talent. But eventually, if two equally
talented people are matched head-to-head, the one who consistently exhibits
greater drive and practice discipline will most likely prevail more often. The
head-to-head win-loss record eventually falls in line with predictable odds of
success.
We believe that the same can be said with leadership. We see that people
have a certain amount of ability that may get amplified over time if they’re
willing to work at it continuously. It’s been proven that your IQ (raw
intelligence) peaks around age twenty-one, so the vast majority of the people
reading this material “are pretty much done.” Yet a person’s emotional
intelligence and ability to work with others can continue to develop (possibly
for his or her entire life). If someone has the natural behavior wiring to be a
good leader (drive, emotional intelligence, genuine supportive nature) and he
or she continuously works hard for ten thousand hours (ten years), twenty
thousand, or even thirty thousand hours, he or she is going to reach the
ultimate level or the end of the bell curve performance where the person is in
the top 1/10 of 1 percent of all people in a leadership role.
To more easily illustrate this concept, visualize people climbing a ladder.
More naturally talented people start at a higher rung up than someone with
lesser natural ability. If, however, the more talented person stops climbing
(becomes complacent), he or she can eventually become the rung for the more
driven person to step on while that person is climbing up the ladder from a
lower position. Therefore, if athletes are first born, then made better, maybe
the same can be said for leaders.
Wright
Will you explain the concept and definitions of overleveraged and
underleveraged?
Olivo
The evidence in measuring more than fifteen thousand leaders, directors,
and front-line managers proves that many people can get in over their head
regarding performing as expected. We refer to this performance gap level as
being “overleveraged.” This has also been historically labeled as the “Peter
Principle”—people get promoted to their level of incompetence.
The challenge for healthcare has been that the complexity of healthcare has
increased at a rate that is faster than the organizations’ ability to keep up. This
condition creates a management complexity gap.
Consider this dilemma: Five years ago, a front-line manager in an imaging
department was successful in creating good performance outcomes with good
patient satisfaction but today, he’s falling behind and struggling because: 1)
The complexity of the role (pace of the job, financial literacy requirements,
patient volume fluctuations, productivity expectations and doing more with
less, budget expectations, employee turnover, obsolete technology, etc.) has
gotten away from him, 2) He has not invested sufficient time in leadership
development, technical or management skills, 3) He has not hired or appointed
the sufficient talent below him, or 4) Any combination of the above.
Whereas this scenario sounds impossible for anyone to manage
successfully, we have found that A-level leaders can keep up, given these
demands approximately 65 percent of the time, B-level leaders will be
successful 45 percent of the time, C-level leaders, 20 percent of the time, and
D-level leaders, only 5 percent of the time.
“People can get in over their heads when the increasing complexity of the
assignment exceeds their natural and developed ability level to keep up. We
refer to this condition as being overleveraged.”
Someone who could be considered underleveraged is usually extremely
talented (an A-level player) and assigned to a low-complexity assignment
where he or she is excelling in overall performance. The person clearly could
handle additional responsibility or possibly even be promoted to a more
challenging role. In this case, the person’s odds of success is very high (85
percent) and with each Degree of Difficulty increase (from low to medium and
to high) the odds of success will go down slightly (from approximately five to
one, down to three to one). (See diagram number three.)
Just as there are standard protocols of patient care in the healthcare
industry, we believe that there should be standard protocols of coaching
assistance for helping people who are “overleveraged” (in over their heads).
This condition occurs much more often than we think. In fact, the numbers
show that the average healthcare organization gets it right—aligning the right
leadership talent level with the appropriate level of complexity—about 60
percent of the time (just 10 percent better than a coin flip). A poor performing
organization will have approximately 25 percent of its leaders and managers
seriously overleveraged. High performing organizations only have about 12
percent of those people significantly in over their heads.
One final comment about managers being overleveraged: If people are in
over their heads and they’re struggling every day in their job as a manager,
they’re most likely going home most nights feeling miserable, their work/life
balance is out of alignment, and their level of anxiety compounds to eventually
create a negative feedback loop of declining performance.
While it’s a tremendous disservice for the leaders above this manager to
leave him or her in that role, the potential downside risks for patients (or
customers) are far worse. If a healthcare executive knowingly leaves an
overleveraged manger in a role where he or she is failing, wishfully thinking
that that person is going to be able to turn around his or her performance while
the department is performing at a sub-optimized level with poor quality and
safety, inefficient operational performance, higher turnover of employees,
lower patient satisfaction, it can be considered gross negligence or malpractice.
We have to continuously remind healthcare leaders that they are not
primarily in the employee rehabilitation business—they are in the patient care
business. They can’t afford to prioritize rehabilitation attempts with managers
with extremely low odds of success over the care and safety requirements for
the patients. They need to make more informed selection choices up front to
get the right people in the right roles.
Wright
How important or beneficial can coaching be to amplify performance?
Olivo
In 2005, I learned a very important and personal lesson about the value of
coaching. While fishing on a flats boat in the Gulf of Mexico just north of
Tampa, Florida, I had a serious accident. The fishing guide driving the boat (at
about thirty miles per hour) hit a reef in about two feet of water. The end result
of being ejected from the boat at high speed was that I shattered the fibula
bone in my right leg, completely tore my MCL, my ACL, my medial meniscus
and lateral meniscus, and I tore ligaments on both sides of my right ankle.
Fortunately, I wasn’t killed, my right leg was still attached, and I didn’t hit my
head on the reef and lose consciousness.
Taking inventory of my body parts while in the water and without knowing
the total extent of the damage, I had one immediate instinctive thought, “What
was it going to take to recover and get back to 100 percent?” The intense
desire to be able to walk and run again created the “have to” mindset to do
whatever it took to achieve full functionality.
There were four elements that had to happen, in sequence, for me to get
back to my physical and mental athletic performance level prior to the
accident:
• I had to have a first class surgeon put the parts back together. I chose
Dr. John Campbell, the U.S. Olympic Ski Team Orthopedic surgeon—clearly
the right person for the role.
• My body needed quality time to “heal well,” which required a sound
and healthy immune system. This meant being committed to a highly
regimented diet.
• I had to demonstrate the practice discipline and intense desire to
endure pain and train extremely hard. That meant icing my leg ten to fifteen
times per day, keeping it straight and elevated while sleeping, and putting in
the extra time, seven days per week to do strength and range of motion
exercises.
• I had to have the right coach with both the physical therapy rehab
knowledge to develop a structured twelve-month game plan and the
emotional intelligence to bring out a superior performance in me.
According to my best estimate, my physical therapy coach and good friend
John Zombro somehow managed to bring out at least a 50 percent
discretionary effort in my rehab performance. As disciplined as I thought I was
and as hard and often as I trained, when I exercised on my own, there was only
so much effort that I was willing to expend. His caring as a coach to encourage
and motivate me, his knowledge and expertise of what to do, the diverse and
creative exercises to incorporate, and finally, his ability to read my pain
tolerance and adjust the daily rehabilitation routines, all contributed to bring
out an entirely new level of performance that I was unable to equal on my
own.
This traumatic experience allowed me to better comprehend how important
coaching is in the workplace and to quantify the upside benefit that coaching
can contribute to performance improvement. I’ve concluded that the potential
upside benefit of coaching is directly proportionate to the degree of motivation
to achieve a desired goal or outcome. In the diagram below, there are two
extremes that define a person’s level of intensity, desire, or commitment to
achieve a goal.
On the left hand side of the diagram, we illustrate the frame of reference
where someone feels that he or she “has to improve” to achieve a goal. This
was my case following my accident and leg injury. I truly felt that there was no
choice—if I was ever going to be able to walk, hike, or possibly run again, I
needed the intense commitment to do whatever it was going to take to get back
to full functionality. It didn’t matter what the health insurance was going to
reimburse for the rehab costs, it didn’t matter how much business travel time
or earned income I was going to lose. It also didn’t matter that I was going to
sacrifice eating normal food. I had to try and get back to normal and my
degree of commitment was probably at level ten!
On the right hand side of the diagram, we illustrate the frame of reference
where someone “wants to improve” to achieve a goal. From a scale of zero to
ten (zero representing virtually no interest in achievement and ten representing
the u ultimate level of commitment— being all in and willing to do whatever it
takes), we see that an average level of commitment will allow coaching
assistance to add approximately 10 percent upside benefit or value. As the
level of commitment rises (from a level five to l level 10), we see that the
benefit from coaching can possibly increase its value fivefold to a maximum
upside of approximately 50 percent. Therefore, can we conclude that virtually
everyone who is interested in improving his or her performance benefit from
coaching? Yes. Does the increase in benefit rise linearly? Probably not.
In conclusion, it’s my belief that a person’s level of intensity, desire, or
commitment can amplify the ultimate benefit that coaching has on overall
performance.
One of the most publicized examples of the “want to” motivation to
improve was observed with the Olympic Swimming Champion Darra Torres.
In the 2008 Olympic Games in n Beijing China, she won three silver medals in
swimming at age forty-one. Two years prior to the games, she took inventory
of what it was going to take to 1) be competitive again after retirement and
having her first child, 2) make the U.S. Olympic team, 3) make it to the fin
nals of the races she selected, and 4) to be on the podium and receive an
Olympic medal. Her degree of intensity, desire, and commitment was
obviously at level ten—she was “all in.”
Darra was so committed to doing “whatever it took” that she created her
own private dream team of coaches: one to structure her regimented diet, one
to work on her flexibility, one to work on her strength training, one to work on
her stroke technique, and finally, a massage therapist to improve her alignment
and post-exercise recovery time. She even had the entire coaching team travel
to Beijing to work with her daily at the Olympic Games. Her superior
performance at the 2008 Games proved that athletes can now be competitive at
the elite level far longer than we previously realized—if they are willing to be
totally committed and benefit from the maximum amplification that coaching
can provide.
Finally, I recently had an experience with a senior executive who
represented the third extreme example in our coaching model. This very
talented and experienced healthcare executive achieved superior results but
exhibited consistent instances of inappropriate behavior. His hardwired style to
win and assertive/dominant behavior actually took away from his leadership
effectiveness as perceived by his peers and his direct reports. When his CEO
required him to receive executive coaching, he was insulted. He felt that his
track record of performance was so superior that he neither had to change nor
did he want to change. This level of zero desire or commitment to improve
limited him to “just going through the motions” where he received virtually no
upside benefit to the coaching process. In other words, he became
“uncoachable.”
The most unfortunate part of this example was that if this person (who is as
naturally talented as Darra Torres) was committed to do whatever it took to
improve, he could ultimately become one of the most respected leaders in the
healthcare industry. I hope that someday, this leader decides to have a more
open mind to coaching and receiving feedback that can truly help him achieve
more. As a coach, nothing is more frustrating than trying to assist an extremely
talented person who is uncoachable.
“There is no question that a person’s level of intensity,
desire, or commitment can amplify the ultimate benefit that
coaching has on overall performance.”
About the Author
Tom Olivo is the President of Success Profiles, Inc.
and a founding partner in Healthcare Performance
Solutions (HPS). He has more than twenty-five years
of experience in identifying, measuring, and
comparing the commonalities of highly successful
athletes, business leaders, and organizations. Tom has
worked in a variety of industries with thousands of
senior executives and managers, emphasizing the
importance of high performance standards consistent with the ethic of
leadership and best business practices.
Tom’s work with Olympic athletes, coaches, and successful business
leaders led to the development of several unique diagnostic instruments that
differentiate performance. The Success Profiles methodology, combined with a
measurement framework and supporting research data, proves that consistent
success in business today rarely occurs by accident. Identifying and measuring
the characteristics that lead to success in leaders and businesses, then using
them as benchmarks for improving performance, is the basis for the Success
Profiles method.
Tom is the co-author of Impending C Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few
People (a business best seller for 2003 3). He is considered by business leaders
to be an expert in workforce optimization and is one of the most requested
speakers on the topic of practical and applied performance measurement. Tom
lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Katie, and daughters, Sarah and
Christine. His favorite hobbies include all forms of outdoor recreation,
especially fly-fishing.
Tom Olivo Success Profiles and Healthcare Performance Solutions (HPS)
200 Longhorn Rd.
Bozeman, MT 59715
406-582-8884
www.successprofiles.com