Posts Tagged ‘dave anderson author’

Don’t Confuse the Scoreboard for the Game!

Monday, August 29th, 2011

Good leaders are students of the numbers. Great leaders are students of behaviors. This is because great leaders know that their own and their people’s behaviors will ultimately determine the numbers, and that by watching them, reinforcing them, and intervening when they’re off track, they can influence outcomes before they’re final. Because many managers spend more time managing “stuff” than leading people, they often confuse the scoreboard for the game. They ponder reports, crunch numbers and get dazed by data, never taking their eyes off the scoreboard as they anticipate what numbers the team is producing. On the other hand, the best and most astute leaders stay in the game. They invest more time in the trenches with their people than in their office with “administrivia,” positively impacting the numbers that show up on the scoreboard.

While spending adequate time with the numbers part of your job is important, you can’t afford to become a passive leader who awaits results versus doing all you can to personally impact them. Many managers who at one time led effectively now simply tweak, tinker, tamper, manage, massage, maintain, administer or preside. While these folks may still have a leadership title, they lead no one and impact nothing. They are ceremonial leaders at best, perfectly content to record history rather than to help make it.

If disappointing numbers catch a manager by surprise, it normally indicates they didn’t spend enough time evaluating, coaching, and redirecting the daily behaviors of their people that created those numbers. Because of their neglect, the ineffective seeds their team members sowed each day inevitably manifested in the form of a lean harvest. There’s no need to let this happen to you. By studying the daily behaviors of your people and acting upon them, you don’t need a crystal ball to predict where a particular department in your enterprise is headed. Just pay more attention to what’s happening today because it becomes the future. Following are two sample behavioral areas to manage daily.

 1. Are people doing enough of what matters? In other words, is activity translating into accomplishment? What’s more important than people staying busy each day is making sure they are busy doing what matters most. By meeting one-on-one with each team member and helping them to structure their day so that they are working within the discipline of priorities, you can ensure that their daily behaviors will stay on track and bear fruit come scoreboard time.

 2. What are people doing with their down time? When traffic and the activity it creates slows down, do your people convert their down time into prime time by practicing, prospecting, planning; and following up, or do they become passive and watch, wish and wait for something to happen? It’s the manager’s responsibility to create daily, structured activities that keep people in motion and engaged with productive tasks in-between customers.

 While the two aforementioned disciplines are basic, they are often overlooked, and require diligence to ensure day-in, day-out execution. If you owned a professional sports team, it would be hard to imagine that you would tolerate a well-paid coach who lounged in an office, paid scant attention to the game, and passively waited to see what numbers appeared on the scoreboard, as he held his breath, crossed his fingers and hoped for the best. No, if you were in the owner’s suite, you’d undoubtedly insist that your coach maintained a positive presence on the field, with the team, observing, analyzing, reinforcing, and redirecting as necessary in order to ensure there was a “W” on the scoreboard at the game’s conclusion. You’d make sure that your coach and team exercised the daily disciplines necessary to win the game. What have you done today to ensure the same level of focus and accountability within your business?

Revisiting “The Calm before the Storm!”

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Fifteen months ago, in June of 2010, I wrote a magazine column, The Calm before the Storm! In it I suggested that despite the economic upswing, a debt-induced financial crisis loomed and could cause tough times in 2011. I also offered eleven steps one could take to strengthen their business foundation and prepare for a downturn. This may be an appropriate time to revisit the eleven steps, and evaluate which of them you can employ to help bullet-proof your business. While implementing these strategies back when they were first presented would have helped you to better maximize them, it’s certainly better to do so late than never.

 Please read and share with those whom might benefit from the suggested actions. The article link is here:

Excuses, Mediocrity & How to Rise Above Them!

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

A clear sign of leadership maturity is the willingness to take responsibility. One aspect of this virtue is refusing to make excuses for personal failures or for those of others. I readily admit that listening while others blame is one of my pet peeves. Little rubs me rawer than when someone attempts to defend failed actions or inferior results by compromising, sanitizing, or trivializing the truth. Occasionally, I must endure the whininess in person at one of my workshops, as a leader goes to great lengths to defend why he’s keeping “five-car Fred” on the payroll. In other instances, it’s a self-righteous lecture I occasionally receive via email from a reader in denial. I rarely have time to respond to the complainers anymore. Over the years, replying to their reasoning has drained far too much time. I may be a slow learner, but I have picked up on the fact that people who rationalize failure are practically un-coachable and mostly unchangeable.

 Excuses for failure remind me of a quote I heard and embraced years ago: “Excuses are the DNA of underachievers.” This same speaker went on to say that living in denial makes you a prisoner of wrong actions and outdated beliefs since it is impossible to change what you don’t acknowledge. Most would agree that excuses are a prime contributor to mediocrity. When you begin to explain away why you, or others, failed to deliver results, you become quite ordinary and blend into a crowded mass of mediocre souls slogging through life, all the while complaining that they haven’t caught the breaks or are victims of bad press or perceptions. In their sanctimonious minds, they are simply misunderstood. But what they fail to understand is that success, and failures, are not accidents. You either set yourself up for them or you don’t. Successes and failures both result from a series of choices and actions one makes over time, of sowing and reaping. While one may catch a good or bad break occasionally, over the course of a lifetime, you don’t succeed or fail by chance.

Those who become mediocre in their thinking, actions, and results, forego the opportunity to turn their fortunes around by shifting their focus to making better decisions and taking wiser action. Instead, they continue to bemoan conditions and render themselves powerless to affect their own futures. If you look up the dictionary’s definition for “mediocre,” it says: moderate to inferior in quality; ordinary. This definition reflects an accurate picture of what happens when one engages in the blame game.

 If you’ve succumbed to the blaming habit, you’re in grave danger of becoming “moderate to inferior,” if you haven’t descended into that state already. Here are five thoughts concerning mediocrity to help you, or someone you care about, right your course and stay on a path of personal responsibility that elevates your self-worth, the value you bring to others, and to your organization.

  1. Mediocrity begins with “me.” It is not something that someone or something does to you. It is a result of choices you’ve made, conditions you’ve accepted, or wrong actions you’ve taken.
  2. Mediocrity is a personal concession to less than your best. What the mediocre are really saying is, “this is good enough so deal with it.” When you substitute excuses for results, you are boldly making this concession and resigning yourself to living out a career and life that’s “good enough” rather than the best it can be.
  3. You break free from mediocrity by making better decisions, not by waiting for more favorable conditions. This should encourage you, because while you cannot control conditions, you do have control over your decisions.  
  4. Living in denial prolongs your marriage with mediocrity. If you don’t face it, you cannot fix it. The box you’ve put yourself in will one day become a casket. 
  5. Make your break with any mediocre aspect of your life by deciding to do the following:
    • Put away your black belt in blame and accept responsibility for your results. Understand that one of the best days of your life is the day that you renounce excuses, grow up, and become a man or woman of responsibility and accountability. 
    • Stop defending mediocrity in others on your team, and face reality about their skills, talent, discipline, attitude, or character. Only when you first see people as they really are can you help them become what they’re meant to be.
    • Commit to personal development so that you elevate the quality of your thinking, and are able to make better personal choices concerning your own attitude, character choices, application of knowledge, and strengthening of discipline.
    • Get clearer about what you want and then resolve to pay the price to achieve it; deciding up front that you’ll ditch the excuses and hold yourself accountable for results.

 One of the saddest epitaphs for many who choose to lead mediocre lives will be that when they die it will be as though they never lived. But what’s sadder yet is that when the sweat of their death bed wakes them up to the fact that they’ve missed their life, they’ll be haunted by the classic lament of life’s biggest underachievers: “I could have, I should have, if only I would have.”

 Each day you have two choices: performance or excuses. Choose well, it becomes your legacy.

Until You’re Perfect, It’s Not Redundant!

Monday, June 27th, 2011
























The Truth about Potential!

Monday, June 13th, 2011

A top reason an under-performer is kept on a payroll despite failing to realize results is because his or her manager touts the person’s “high potential.” This is notwithstanding the fact that the employee has accomplished little or nothing of significance in their job up to that point.

While it is important to have employees with high potential, continually touting someone’s potential is normally an indication that the person hasn’t actually done much yet. The dictionary’s definition of potential bears this out: a latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed; possible, as opposed to actual. To fully appreciate the implications of this definition, it’s also helpful to grasp how latent is defined: potentially existing but not presently evident or realized.

Have you or your managers been hiding behind “potential” as a means to rationalize keeping someone who does not presently add value to your team? Consider the following four thoughts in this regard:

1. Potential is common. In fact, it can be confidently stated that everyone has potential at something.

2. Unfulfilled potential is nearly as common as potential itself. The world abounds with those who, on their deathbed, are haunted by personal confessions like, “I could have,” “I should have,” “if only I would have.” Calvin Coolidge nailed it when he said: “The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.”

3. Continually falling short of one’s potential may indicate serious flaws within an individual: lack of drive, passion, character, discipline, focus, work ethic, energy, or persistence. Someone who cannot develop or control these aspects of their lives will normally require enormous amounts of management time and energy as their leaders beg, threaten, and regularly pump up a laggard with “potential” in order to get them to do their jobs. To once again quote Coolidge: Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. As author Liane Cordes observed, “Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.”

4. You are expected to work with someone according to their potential for a period of time, but eventually you must work with them in accordance with their performance. In other words, there comes a day when people with potential must stop belching out the baloney and bring home the bacon. How long should you work with someone according to their potential depends upon several factors. Common sense is more useful here than a cut and dry, pre-established cut-off date. Here are three guidelines:

A. Even if the person is not growing as fast as you’d like, do you see measurable progress in reasonable periods of time. and without “one step forward and two steps back” regressions? If so, continue investing in the employee.

B. What is holding them back: teachable or unteachable deficiencies? Both knowledge and skills related to job competence can be developed through training. But if they lack “inside” traits related to their character, drive or attitude, there is little you can do to influence these factors in a meaningful way. You should cut your losses and redirect your energies into finding and developing people who possess those vital critical success factors.

C. Has your management team done its job to create a culture conducive to developing the potential of others? An employee may have a bag filled with fertile seed, but the seed in their bag won’t produce a harvest unless there is fertile ground in which to sow. Creating this environment includes duties like setting clear expectations, ongoing training and coaching, and a value system that rewards results over tenure, experience, and best efforts. It is the responsibility of your leadership team to: select employees with the “right stuff” in the first place, and then draw out those assets in order to make up the difference between where someone is currently and where they have the potential to grow. In the absence of fulfilling these responsibilities, discarding someone for failing to perform is reckless and unfair.

The Nike slogan, “Just do it” never resonated with me, because it smacked of procrastination. “Just do it” indicates that you haven’t done anything yet. In order for each of us to move forward in our jobs and in life, we must move from “just do it’ to “just did it.” The same holds true for the underachieving high potentials that remain on your team. It’s on your watch that they continue to waste resources and opportunities, relegating you more of an enabler than a leader as you preside over their mediocrity and abet the diminishment of your enterprise.

Does Your Organization Sell Experiences?

Friday, June 3rd, 2011




















Do You Over-manage & Under-lead?

Saturday, May 21st, 2011

One of the most common mistakes that prevents a manager from reaching his or her potential is to over-manage and under-lead. Many of the managers I’ve met over the years don’t even realize that there is a difference between management and leadership, or that developing a balance of both skill sets is essential if they want to grow their team and maximize results. While I can’t explain as well in a few hundred words what takes me two hours to cover in my workshop, I’ll do my best in this space to outline a handful of key differences between management and leadership. Evaluate your own tendencies, and determine if there are adjustments you should make that will help you to optimize your leadership effectiveness.

Think of management as being about paperwork, while leadership concerns people-work. Management involves systems, controls, budgets, forecasting, scheduling, processes and procedures. On the other hand, the focus of leadership is to attract and develop talent, motivate, create vision and values, and build a team that can succeed in your absence. I explain to the attendees of my workshops that there are two categories of tasks you can engage in every day: “stuff” or people. Frankly, management is the stuff part of your job, and it’s so easy to become consumed by that aspect of your daily responsibilities that you have little or no time left for people. A consequence for building an organization that is over-managed & under-led is that the team is likely to be under-developed & overwhelmed.

Management and leadership are equally important. Don’t get the idea that “management” is a bad word. The problem comes when you over-manage, and spend so much time with stuff that you become isolated, aloof, out of touch, and stop impacting your people. The reason I’ve spent so much time over the years writing about and teaching leadership is that it’s the skill set that most managers have had little training in. They get schooled on how to do the “stuff” part of the job (data entry, inventories, forecasts, budgets, scheduling, reading financial statements, etc.) but don’t have a clue how to recruit, interview, motivate, cast a vision, hold someone accountable, or mentor.  While it is common to over-manage and under-lead, it is also possible to over-lead and under-manage. Think about it this way: management without leadership means that you won’t be able to grow what you keep, whereas leadership without management means you won’t be able to keep what you grow.

Here are three of the twenty key differences between managers and leaders that I discuss in my seminars to help attendees become more aware of what they’re doing well, and where they need to make adjustments in their daily approach to leadership:

1. Managers maintain whereas leaders stretch. Managers are decent at maintaining people, but they’re not great at growing them because they don’t spend enough time with them, and were never trained how to evaluate or develop human capital in the first place. They don’t seem to realize that while you can impress people at a distance (in your fancy office), to impact them you must get up close. Leaders, on the other hand, are committed to leaving followers better than they found them. They stretch them out of their comfort zone, provide the tools and personal touch their team members need to grow to their potential, and hold them accountable for results.

2. Managers lead from the rear, leaders lead from the front. Because they are enamored with “stuff,” managers spend more time in their offices getting dazed by data and numbed by numbers, than they do in the trenches acting as a catalyst and unleashing the potential of their team. As they pencil-whip budgets and count beans in an attempt to turn the numbers around, they fail to develop their human capital—turn the people around—so that their people can turn the numbers around. These folks talk like leaders but act like anchors. On the other hand, leaders spend more time charting the course than they do charting results. They focus on what’s happening in the arena and on the horizon, because they know that the front line determines the bottom line.

3. Managers resist change and defend the status quo; leaders rattle the status quo and change before they have to. Managers who spend a good part of their day roosting in an office, surrounded by stuff, or suffering through hours of death-by-meeting, devolve into a defensive posture where they spend more time plugging holes, doing damage control, and reacting than they do initiating change. However, when they lead in the trenches with their people, they see more clearly what needs to be changed and are quicker to take action. Too many leaders, who were successful at one time because they lead from the front and acted as a change agent, gradually withdrew from their catalyst role and begin presiding and administering from their backside. They regress from active to passive; from “lead,” a verb, to “leadership,” a noun. During this regression, they descend from risk taker, to care taker, to undertaker, eventually presiding over a lifeless enterprise that became comatose on their watch.

If you over-manage and under-lead in areas like the three I’ve presented, don’t beat yourself up. After all, we all get off track. What’s important is that you become a more self-aware leader who makes faster adjustments when you stray from a sound leadership style so that your temporary detour doesn’t lead you into a rut which, if you stay in it long enough, becomes a grave.

Train Wreck: The Danger of Promoting Beyond One’s Competence!

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

John Bell Hood was a Confederate general during the Civil War. He had a reputation for bravery and aggressiveness that sometimes bordered on recklessness, losing the use of his left arm at Gettysburg and having his right leg amputated after victory at Chickamauga.

Reading about Hood’s life while in Nashville recently, the site of his final and resounding defeat in the battle for that city in late 1864, I was struck by how similar his career path is to many managers I’ve seen rise through the ranks in organizations over the decades. These are the men and women who excel at a lower level management position, and then fail when promoted beyond their talent and competence. Apparently, this is what happened to the hard-charging Hood. Wikipedia puts it this way:


Another historical website offers:

A premier example of the Peter Principle is the case of John B. Hood who excelled as a brigade and division leader, was uncooperative as a corps commander, and was an unqualified disaster at the head of an army, which he all but destroyed. . . . Besieging the Union forces in Nashville, he attacked in mid-December 1864 and his army was annihilated. Retreating into the deep South with the fragments of the army he relinquished his command and his temporary commission in January 1865. After the war he settled in New Orleans and was a prosperous merchant until an 1878 financial crisis. He died the next year in a yellow fever epidemic. His memoirs are entitled “Advance and Retreat.” —

When you study the career path of Hood, here are two lessons to learn from and apply in your enterprise:

1. Hire or promote the best, not the “least bad.” When President Jefferson Davis asked General Robert E. Lee’s opinion of promoting Hood to the head of the Army of Tennessee, Lee’s response was lukewarm and noncommittal. General Braxton Bragg, preferred Hood, not because he possessed superior ability, but because he had something personally against the other candidate Davis was considering. Promoting someone for the wrong reasons; someone who is not up to the task but is less offensive than others, is a poor strategy for building excellence within your organization. Actually, it is a recipe for eventual disaster.

2. Prepare your people for the next position before they’re in that position. In war time, mid-level commanders are promoted too quickly because those above them are often killed in battle. You don’t have that excuse in your organization. High potential people should be mentored to develop the skills necessary for their next position, long before they’re in that position.  

Whom are you preparing for advancement within your organization? Do you have a structured training and mentoring career path for your high potentials? Here are a handful of tasks you can do with these team members, depending of course upon the position you’re getting them ready for:

A. Personally mentor them by giving them resources for study and application, and by doing select tasks with them to show them what good performance looks like in areas that go beyond their normal scope of responsibilities.

B. Send the members of your talent pool to seminars and courses that will elevate their skills and broaden their perspective before they’re actually in the position you’re preparing them for.

C. Take high potentials to industry gatherings, conventions and association conferences and debrief them after the meeting to discuss what they learned.

Final reminder: Save yourself months or years of headaches, and a wealth of financial resources by not putting into your talent pool anyone who has the skills and talent, but lacks the character for more responsibility. Character protects talent and without it, the talented but character-deficient team member will eventually self-destruct.

Act Like a Challenger, Even when You’re the Champ!

Friday, May 6th, 2011





  1. Challenger’s mindset: hungry. Champion’s mindset: satisfied.
  2. Challenger’s mindset: humble. Champion’s mindset: arrogant.






The Pursuit of Wisdom

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

You become what you pursue. That being said, what are you chasing: worldly wisdom and activities, trivial amusements to help you pass the time, or God’s wisdom so that you can maximize your life and organization’s results? Below are important thoughts on the topic of pursuing wisdom from Boyd Bailey’s daily Wisdom Hunter’s devotional. Enjoy and prosper!


Pursuit. It is what we all experience. We pursue dreams, we pursue jobs, we pursue opportunities, we pursue a husband or a wife, we pursue hobbies, we pursue friends, we pursue adventure, we pursue good health, we pursue success, we pursue significance and we pursue happiness—to name a few of our positive pursuits. Indeed, what we pursue becomes the focus of what we do.

Pursuit is stated clearly as a priority in the United States Declaration of Independence: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Over the course of history, the human race as a whole, would agree that the pursuit of good things is an inalienable right of individuals. Conversely, we can choose to chase after unhealthy pursuits like: greed, lust, power and pride. Wise pursuits facilitate good outcomes, while foolish pursuits produce bad results.

“The wise inherit honor, but fools get only shame” (Proverbs 3:35).

Our pursuits make up who we are, thus it’s important that we pursue the right things. If you were honest, would a pursuit of wisdom make the top ten list of your life’s pursuits? Ask God if wisdom is His priority for your pursuits. If wisdom is the knowledge of what’s right and the judgment to rightly act on that knowledge, then anyone is capable of learning and applying wisdom. Perhaps—based on the day of the month—you begin by daily reading one of the 31 chapters in Proverbs. God gives wisdom to believing seekers.


Does the pursuit of wisdom motivate your actions? Is it a part of your portfolio of pursuits? If not, consider moving it up toward the top of your list. After all, wise-decision making affects all of your other pursuits. It could be argued that a life full of wisdom will lead to the most fulfilling life, but a life void of wisdom sets the stage for foolish living. What we pursue becomes the focus of what we do, so endeavor to seek God’s wisdom.

“Cynics look high and low for wisdom—and never find it; the open-minded find it right on their doorstep” (Proverbs 14:6, The Message)!