Month: January 2021

Every child dreams of what they want to be when they grow up. While most kids choose jobs like teacher, doctor, or president, there’s one powerful position usually left off the list. 

 

“I actually decided early in life that I wanted to be a CEO and not because I know what that even meant,” Shellye Archambeau, said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. 

 

Shellye not only became a CEO, but she also broke through several glass ceilings along the way. She was Silicon Valley’s first female, African American CEO. Today she is a board director at Verizon and sits on the board at Nordstrom, Roper Technologies, and Okta. A conversation with a high school guidance counselor introduced her to the idea of going into business. Shellye told the counselor she liked to run clubs, and the counselor said business is like running clubs. With that, she began planning her life after high school. 

“I decided then I’ll run a business, but I had no idea what that actually meant,” Shellye recalled. “It became my goal. Literally, I spent my career trying to be very intentional, paying attention to who are the CEOs. What do they do? What were their background experience? And then mapped out a plan for myself.” 

 

Through her research and planning, Shellye found many CEOs had one thing in common.   

 

“Turns out they all start out in sales. So, I said, ‘You know what, I gotta start out in sales,'” Shellye said. “It wasn’t because I suddenly love sales. It was just obviously the skill set and the path to power.” 

 

“The key is really figuring out what’s required (and) asked myself what has to be true, and then how do I make it true.” 

 

She added, “By starting out in sales, you start out right in the beginning understanding how money comes into the company. Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” 

 

“No matter what you want to do, because all the skills you learn in sales you can leverage personally because you learn how to handle a ‘no.’ You learn how to qualify. You learn how to negotiate. You learn how to communicate effectively. You learn how to read a room. I mean, I could go on and on.” 

 

In the 1980s, Shellye worked her way up the ranks at IBM over 14 years, becoming the highest-ranked African American woman in the company, running multi-billion-dollar divisions, taking international assignments, and not shying away from any opportunities that came her way. While Shellye admits she had done well for herself, she wanted more. So, she worked her way to the Silicon Valley, where she got the opportunity to become CEO of MetricStream. While it took years for Shellye to get to the job she dreamed of back in high school, she never gave up. 

 

“That’s one thing that my mother literally drummed into me growing up. Something happens to you as a kid, and you come home, you say, ‘Mom, it’s not fair,'” Shellye said. “Mom would basically look at me and say, ‘You’re right. Life’s not fair.'” 

 

She didn’t let fairness deter her from her goals. In fact, she used that as a catapult instead.

 

“I know the odds aren’t in my favor, so what can I do to improve the odds for me to get what I want to make something happen. To turn around a company. To build a business. It was always how do we improve the odds and then trying to execute against those things to improve the odds to actually make things happen.” 

 

“I had no idea what it really meant (to be a CEO), but I absolutely enjoyed it. I enjoyed the impact. I enjoyed developing people, creating new leaders, solving problems. All those things.” 

 

Despite all her success, Shellye said she still had those little voices in her head, reminding her of her past failures and trying to sabotage her next step. It happens to everyone. Psychologists call it impostor syndrome, meaning you are always worried about being called a fraud. If you find yourself falling into that trap, Shellye has some advice for you. 

 

“It turns out most people suffer from impostor syndrome at some point or another,” Shellye said. “Women more than men, but women of color the most.” 

“When you hear that voice, it’s like TV. Sounds real, looks real, feels real. It’s not real. So, you have to learn how to do deal with it and overcome it. Frankly, I’ve been dealing with it my entire life. Don’t let it stop you. Don’t let it stop you when people offer you opportunities. They obviously believe you can do it. Believe them if you can’t believe in yourself.”  

 

When things get tough, Shelley says, don’t be afraid to lean on people with more experience.  

 

“People think asking for help is a sign of weakness. I believe it’s a sign of strength. It means you know what you know, and you know what you don’t,” Shellye said. “Go out and find people who can help you, who have been there, done that, because the good news is almost anything you try to do somebody’s done in some shape, form, industry, whatever. Go find them and learn from them. It turns out that if you ask in the right way, people actually want to be helpful, so you’ll get the help.” 

 

I want to thank Shellye for being helpful and gracious with her advice and her time. If you’d like to hear more about her road to the c-suite, how she turned around MetricStream, how serving on corporate boards helps her stay in the business game and insightful questions from our community, click here. 

 

As busy executives, we all seem to be in a constant race against time.   

Time is both our most precious resource and our enemy.    

We wonder why projects don’t get done on time. We’re always looking for more time in our schedules and wonder when we can find time to get the team together for a meeting. Then comes our personal time, but that is an entirely different story.     

Managing time was a big theme during a conversation Tricia Benn, Chief Community Officer of the C-Suite Network and General Manager of The Hero Club, had with Josh Kaufman. He is best known as the author of the best-selling book, The Personal MBA, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.  

Josh says the first thing you need to do to get control of your time is focus. While it may sound simple, there is some complex psychology involved.  

“There’s this idea in cognitive psychology called monoidealism, where you have one, and only one thing, on your mind at any given time,” Josh said. “Your full focus and attention is on what you’re doing and nothing else. If you think of Nike’s brand slogan, “Just do it,” that’s a very nice encapsulation of what monoidealism is. What it feels like. The question is how to get there.”  

How do you get there?  

Josh says it takes an organizational shift. Managers and executives need to change the structure of the workday. He recommends blocking off specific times for specific things, like focusing on getting work done in the mornings and scheduling meetings for the afternoon.   

“Blocking out time is the best thing you can do for yourself personally. Organizationally it gets even more effective,” Josh said. “Some of the most effective organizations that I’ve worked with have made large-scale changes in making this sort of behavior, having a period of time for focus, a period of time for communication.”    

Nobody reading is guilty of over-communication. While communication is essential, it can bog a company down. Josh introduced to us the idea of communication overhead. Simply put, it’s the idea that the more people you communicate with within your organization, the more time it takes away from focusing on your work. Josh says this is why big companies tend to react slowly. There are many people, at different levels, in various departments, that need to know about the progress of a project. In the book, Josh recommends keeping your team as small as possible, so you don’t spend a lot of time communicating with others.   

So now that we know how to structure our days, how should we get work done?  

It doesn’t matter if we use fancy task-management software or an old-fashioned to-do list, we all use different metrics to track our work. No matter your method, there are times those lists can be overwhelming. With this in mind, Josh recommends breaking your day down into MITs – which stands for Most Important Tasks.   

“The general idea is you have your big system, and at the beginning of the day or the evening before go through that system and pick three things that would make the biggest difference in moving your projects forward, getting things off your plate, helping you maintain a positive sense of momentum,” Josh said.  

He continued, “Take a 3×5 index card, write those things down then as you’re working, you don’t work from the big system. That’s distracting. You work from the 3×5 index card.”  

While organizing yourself is crucial, so is organizing your team. Josh says to not only make these practices company-wide, but you should share them with your peers.  

“Anything you can do to help them manage their attention, energy, effort well as well as bake into the organization as much as possible — practices, systems, procedures that make it much easier for the folks you work with to do the same, that is going to be beneficial,” Josh said.  

Practice in any discipline is essential, so making a conscious effort to make those changes. Not only do these time management skills take practice, so does the art of business. While book learning is important, it doesn’t make up for real-world experience. Josh says this was one of the original motivations behind The Personal MBA. The book focuses on what Josh calls “a small set of techniques that can make an enormous difference” in three areas:  

 

• Principles of business – these are the basics of business, no matter what the size 
• Understanding people – People make up businesses, and businesses exist for people. Josh says a little knowledge of psychology can go a long way towards making your business and decision-making better 
• Understanding Systems – Josh says businesses are complex systems that operate inside other complex systems, like industries, governments, and societies

 “There’s a big difference between credentialing and knowledge, skill, and experience. Just sitting in a classroom doesn’t really get you there. You have to fully understand what’s going on, what’s important, how to make things better,” Josh said.   

These are just the highlights of a great in-depth conversation guest host, Tricia Benn, had with Josh.    

If you’d like to hear more about getting your team aligned and managing your time, listen to the complete interview here.  

 

Businesspeople love to use war analogies when talking about their companies. 

 

We all have people “in the trenches” fighting hard “on the frontlines” of our organizations with “boots on the ground” moving our missions forward. How many times have you had to “bite the bullet” and take a hit to profits after a deal that you were counting on didn’t work out? 

 

While we’re quick to adapt military jargon, there’s a good chance your company isn’t moving fast enough to hire military veterans. Everyone finds itself in a war to recruit top talent. While hiring managers are quick to put the word out with at the local university with an MBA program, you’re probably not expanding their searches to an often-overlooked talent pool: Veterans. 

 

“The U.S. Military is the world’s greatest leadership incubator,” said George Randle, author of the new book, The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent. “In the military, you are trusted with millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment. Hundreds of troops. Complex and everchanging situations all across the globe, for which many times there is no book solution. You’re constantly in this fishbowl of learning.” 

 

He continued, “All of my success is rooted in the coaching and mentorship and council that I got from so many noncommissioned officers and officers over my time in the military. It’s like a debt I can’t repay.” 

 

George was a recent guest on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett. He teamed up with his business partner, Mike Sarraille, to pen The Talent War. They also help run the executive search firm, EF Overwatch, a company specializing in getting military veterans into business leadership positions.  

 

Through EF Overwatch, George and his partners have placed veterans into the c-suite and other vital roles in companies. He has spent his non-military career in talent acquisition and human resources pointing out the one thing veterans don’t realize when they’re on the mission of finding a job after military service. 

 

“It’s really a case of you don’t know what you don’t know,” George said. “With that overwhelming information (social media, websites), how much you don’t know about how to market yourself and how to articulate what actually made you successful in the military. (Those skills) made me, and it made every other veteran successful in corporate America.” 

 

To help veterans out, George and Mike deploy their special operations training and came up nine attributes that military leaders have: drive, resiliency, adaptability, humility, integrity, effective intelligence, team ability, curiosity, and emotional strength.  

 

George says most companies tend to think experience is the best way to predict success, but that’s not always the case. While there are minimum qualifications for the job(s) companies is hiring for, don’t “over rotate on experience.” Instead, George believes hiring managers need to look beyond the resume and consider other skills such as the applicant’s character.  

 

“When we get into situations, much like COVID, that haven’t been predicted or haven’t been foreseen or haven’t been planned for, it’s the character that enables your success, more so than the experience and the hard skills. If you’re hiring for character, you’re more prepared for whatever comes your way than just relying upon skill.” 

 

One stereotype many veterans face have to overcome is that a regular desk job won’t be enough for them. Potential employers make the assumptions that making life and death decisions every day and exist in extreme situations might not be enough. George says that’s not the case. He calls it “empathy on a dimmer switch,” meaning military veterans can turn specific skills up and down depending on the situation.  

 

He expands, “You’re only changing the environment. Now the environments are not as extreme, but it can be extreme in business. We’re finding (veterans) are making that transition with our coaching even easier than people would normally think.”  

 

“It makes veterans all that much better under pressure situations with business. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no factor. Okay, they’re not shooting at me. I’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll figure this out.’” 

 

George also adds military training helps equip veterans in the workplace to handle stress better in challenging situations like layoffs. 

 

They also understand how to deal with conflict and co-workers who aren’t pulling their weight. George thinks we all need to get away from the military stereotype of commanders yelling at their troops. He says there’s a lot more sensitivity than you realize among the ranks. 

 

“The military is the most diverse set of backgrounds. To be a leader there means you have to be able to build relationships across the entire suite of human nature and personalities and backgrounds and ethnicities and religions. You have to be able to communicate. You have to be able to relate. You have to be able to set the standard for those people, and you have to be able to lead and create vision and motivation across the broadest section,” George said. 

 

A real challenge for military men and women in the civilian world is what George referred to as ‘the military’s all-consuming nature.’ No matter what branch you’re in, you are dependent on the military for everything — from shopping, to where you socialize. After leaving the military, many veterans struggle with filling their non-work time.  

 

“One of the things we coach is you get to go build your life. You get to have that family life. You get to have those professional and personal interests that you get to balance. It takes a little bit of time to assimilate,” George said. 

 

Let’s be honest work-life balance can be a difficult thing to achieve for those of us in business as well. 

 

I’d like to thank George for the eye-opening conversation. Accounting for character is a hero value we must not overlook when we’re hiring – or even in life.  

 

If you’d like to hear more of our conversation, click here.  

Go with your gut.

You hear that all the time, but it turns out; it might not be the best advice.

“Unfortunately, this message is so flawed,” Dr. Gleb Tsipursky told me during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. “It feels very comfortable, intuitively, but it often leads to disastrous decisions.”

He continued, “Your feelings, your intuitions are unfortunately going to lead you astray.”

Dr. Tsipursky is CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, a consulting firm that helps companies with decision making, risk management, and strategic planning. He is also the author of the appropriately titled, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. I was so impressed with his insights; I spoke with him twice in 2020 – first on my All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett podcast, then the aforementioned Digital Discussion.

If you’re wondering why you shouldn’t trust your gut instincts, Dr. Tsipursky points to the science.

“Our guts are evolved, not for the modern world, they’re evolved for the ancient savanna,” he said. “The modern world with the Internet and so on (has) really been around since 1990. Do you think we’ve had time to evolve for it?”

If you’re thinking, ‘what about your experiences?’ then you’re not alone. I thought the same. Dr. Tsipursky said not to confuse the two. Your experience comes from what could be years of practice. He used the example of looking at your inbox and differentiating the critical messages from the spam. The same goes for your business experience. If you’ve been in a similar situation before, you have the information you need to make the right decision.

The other reason you shouldn’t trust your gut is rooted in psychology. Dr. Tsipursky says our cognitive biases also get in the way. For anyone without a psychology degree, cognitive biases are flaws in the way we think. Some scientists believe these biases may be hardwired in our brains. There are many types of these biases, but Dr. Tsipursky focused on three:

• Normalcy Bias: The idea things will continue as normal – such as believing things will return to “normal” when the pandemic is over
• Confirmation Bias: This is looking for information that confirms our beliefs and feelings. “When you get information that doesn’t (confirm your beliefs), you tend to reject it because it doesn’t feel comfortable,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “You’re letting your emotions drive you in business, and that leads you to make bad mistakes.”
• Planning Fallacy: This is when we make plans and stick to them but don’t pivot quickly enough when the environment or situation changes.“You need to be aware that your plans
  will be screwed up sometimes. They will not go according to plan and build in a lot of extra resources, time, money, and so on for things that you don’t anticipate,” Dr. Tsipursky said.

One method businesses use to plan for the future is through a SWOT analysis, a system where companies evaluate their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Dr. Tsipursky says companies that use ‘SWOT’ gives management false comfort.

“You don’t account for all the weaknesses. You don’t account for all the threats,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “One of the fundamental things about SWOT that people look for is information that goes along with what they think.”

“What (companies) should always be doing when they go through a process is try(ing) to prove themselves wrong. That’s not what SWOT is. SWOT is proving yourself right. What you should be doing is trying disconfirm what’s going wrong.”

In place of SWOT, Dr. Tsipursky developed five questions your company needs to ask to avoid decision disasters. He says you can use these 5 questions daily for situations that pop up or in strategic planning sessions:

1. What important information did I not yet fully consider?
2. What dangerous judgment errors did I not yet address?
3. What would a trusted and objective adviser suggest I do?
4. How have I addressed the ways this could fail?
5. What new information would cause me to revisit this decision?

“These five questions can be used for any decision. Any decision you don’t want to screw up,” Dr. Tsipursky emphasized. “Especially for a team decision because you can get together, have all members of the team answer this in advance, and have a team decision meeting where you structure the agenda around these five questions.”

He says working on the questions in advance makes for more productive and efficient meetings.

Another bias companies find themselves trapped under is the Sunken Cost Fallacy, or as you hear it referred to sometimes in business, chasing good money after bad. Companies put so much effort into a failing project, and they continue to pour money into it, hoping it will turn around. These costly projects not only damage a company’s bottom line, but it can hurt reputations as well. Dr. Tsipursky used the Boeing 737 Max as an example. Boeing grounded the plane in March 2019, after two fatal crashes. They has also had trouble with its 787 Dreamliner, blamed for engine fires and battery problems.

While Boeing may be an extreme example of sunken costs, every business goes through its version of it in some form or another. So, why does it happen?

“We don’t want to be wrong,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “That feeling of being wrong, it’s driving a lot of egos.”

“One of the most dangerous things to have in business is not (to) have a sense of humility.”

Dr. Tsipursky says trading ego for humility is the driver behind question five: What new information would cause me to revisit this decision? He designed the question to address sunken costs.

“It’s one of the biggest reasons why businesses fail. They don’t pivot in a quickly enough manner. You need to be oriented towards pivoting. You need to be oriented towards humility,” he advised.

There’s another bias Dr. Tsipursky says humility will help you overcome, but you’ll have to listen to our full conversation to hear what it is. You’ll also hear the excellent Q & A from our community as well.

I’d like to thank Dr. Gleb Tsipursky for his eye-opening insight. He never disappoints.  

 

I’ll be sure to think twice next time I’m tempted to go with my gut.