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Marketing Personal Development

A Celebration Cocktail Each Executive Should Know How to Mix!

A Celebration Cocktail Each Executive Should Know How to Mix! 

By Judith E. Glaser

Great leaders identify, measure, recognize, and reward meaningful efforts and achievements—and celebrate often with the people involved.

Why should managers and leaders celebrate more?

Creating a feeling of celebration helps meet people’s needs for inclusion, innovation, appreciation, and collaboration. Our brains are designed to be social – and the need for human contact is greater than the need for safety. The research by Matt Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger, scientists at UCLA, has shown that feeling socially excluded activates some of the same neural regions that are activated in response to physical pain, suggesting that social rejection may indeed be “painful.”

Those companies practicing celebrations as part of their conversational rituals open up their employees to make them feel part of the company’s common success, enable them to have the confidence to challenge the status quo, take ambitious initiatives, and share their creative ideas with others.

How might the disciplined practice of celebration change the culture of a company?

From my study of The Neuroscience of WE™, and my work with executives, I know that celebration has a big impact on individuals, teams and companies.   It literally works wonders in the brain.

Scientists are learning that our brain is more changeable than we ever imagined—our brains exhibit neuroplasticity.  Our brain neurons can change their physiological properties in response to outside factors.  That is how babies develop and learn.  As we grow older we do not lose that ability to learn and modify our responses to things that happen.  In fact, we now know that a percentage of our genes, can be impacted by the environment – these changes, called epigenetic changes, are part of neuroplasticity as well – however they open up a whole new set of insights about the power of conversations to change fundamental and long lasting changes to our character – yes nurture is as or more powerful than nature!

The Ingredients of Healthy Celebration Cocktails
Neuroscience explains what impact you as a leader can have on healthy physical and emotional changes of your team by having positive celebrations and intelligent conversations.

  • Celebration Conversations elevate the level of such “feel good” chemicals as oxytocin and the endorphins – neuropeptides produced in the central nervous system. Their release into our system gives us a sense of well being, creating a safety space that enables us to experiment, take risks, learn and handle the challenges of growing the business.
  • Serotonin that is boosted by cheering and pleasant conversations is widely known for transforming lazy people into enterpriser, low performer into go-getters, and skeptics into supporters. For individuals or teams, serotonin adds focus, support innovative or disruptive solutions, increases motivation and can even transform stress into success. 
  • Researchers found that by having positive conversations during celebration time you trigger basal ganglia system that releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical communicates with the brain areas in the prefrontal cortex to allow people to pay attention to critical tasks, ignore distracting information, and update only the most relevant task information in working memory during problem-solving tasks.

What Makes Us Feel So Good?
Recent studies by numerous researchers show that the basal ganglia facilitate learning, with dopamine important to the process. One way that these behavioral routines are encoded is by the processing of reward information.

Wolfram Schultz, a principal research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England, studies how the brain processes reward information. “When something is really good, you go back for it again,” he says. “ Thus, by praising the accomplishments a leader, we are contributing to creating healthy behavioral patterns that will be repeated more often.  Celebration and dopamine is a reward to our brains like treats are to animals.

  • While elevating the level of “feel good” hormones with positive conversations, the level of cortisol is significantly lowered. Cortisol has been shown to damage and kill cells in the hippocampus (the brain area responsible for your episodic memory) and there is robust evidence that excessive cortisol shuts down learning, creates anxiety attacks, can cause depression, and premature brain aging.
  • The words of acknowledgement, encouragement and support, especially when granted to a person under much stress, calms her amygdala mediated response – of fight-flight-freeze – allowing her to move into a more thoughtful and calm state.

When we converse openly with others, we are sharing our inner world, our sense of reality, to validate our reality with others.  We are measuring the levels of trust in our relationship to determine whether we can partner with others. The quality of our conversations depends on how open or closed we feel at the moment of contact. The neurochemical reactions in our brains drive our states of mind, and these affect the way we communicate, how we shape our relationships, and how we build trusting relationships with others.

When we receive public praise and support, we unlock these powerful set of neurochemical patterns that cascade positive chemistry throughout the brain. Highly motivated employees describe the feeling of performing well as an almost drug-like state.

When this state of positive arousal comes with appropriate, honest, and well-deserved (sincere) praise, employees feel they are trusted and supported by their boss. They will take more risks, speak up more, push back when they have things to say, and be more confident in their dealings with their peers.

Judith E. Glaser is CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc. and Chairman of The Creating WE Institute. She is an Organizational Anthropologist, and consults to Fortune 500 Companies. Judith is the author of 4 best selling business books, including her newest Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results (Bibliomotion, 2013) Visit www.conversationalintelligence.com; www.creatingwe.com; jeglaser@creatingwe.com or call 212-307-4386.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

A Celebration Cocktail Each Executive Should Know How to Mix!

A Celebration Cocktail Each Executive Should Know How to Mix! 

By Judith E. Glaser

Great leaders identify, measure, recognize, and reward meaningful efforts and achievements—and celebrate often with the people involved.

Why should managers and leaders celebrate more?

Creating a feeling of celebration helps meet people’s needs for inclusion, innovation, appreciation, and collaboration. Our brains are designed to be social – and the need for human contact is greater than the need for safety. The research by Matt Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger, scientists at UCLA, has shown that feeling socially excluded activates some of the same neural regions that are activated in response to physical pain, suggesting that social rejection may indeed be “painful.”

Those companies practicing celebrations as part of their conversational rituals open up their employees to make them feel part of the company’s common success, enable them to have the confidence to challenge the status quo, take ambitious initiatives, and share their creative ideas with others.

How might the disciplined practice of celebration change the culture of a company?

From my study of The Neuroscience of WE™, and my work with executives, I know that celebration has a big impact on individuals, teams and companies.   It literally works wonders in the brain.

Scientists are learning that our brain is more changeable than we ever imagined—our brains exhibit neuroplasticity.  Our brain neurons can change their physiological properties in response to outside factors.  That is how babies develop and learn.  As we grow older we do not lose that ability to learn and modify our responses to things that happen.  In fact, we now know that a percentage of our genes, can be impacted by the environment – these changes, called epigenetic changes, are part of neuroplasticity as well – however they open up a whole new set of insights about the power of conversations to change fundamental and long lasting changes to our character – yes nurture is as or more powerful than nature!

The Ingredients of Healthy Celebration Cocktails
Neuroscience explains what impact you as a leader can have on healthy physical and emotional changes of your team by having positive celebrations and intelligent conversations.

  • Celebration Conversations elevate the level of such “feel good” chemicals as oxytocin and the endorphins – neuropeptides produced in the central nervous system. Their release into our system gives us a sense of well being, creating a safety space that enables us to experiment, take risks, learn and handle the challenges of growing the business.
  • Serotonin that is boosted by cheering and pleasant conversations is widely known for transforming lazy people into enterpriser, low performer into go-getters, and skeptics into supporters. For individuals or teams, serotonin adds focus, support innovative or disruptive solutions, increases motivation and can even transform stress into success. 
  • Researchers found that by having positive conversations during celebration time you trigger basal ganglia system that releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical communicates with the brain areas in the prefrontal cortex to allow people to pay attention to critical tasks, ignore distracting information, and update only the most relevant task information in working memory during problem-solving tasks.

What Makes Us Feel So Good?
Recent studies by numerous researchers show that the basal ganglia facilitate learning, with dopamine important to the process. One way that these behavioral routines are encoded is by the processing of reward information.

Wolfram Schultz, a principal research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England, studies how the brain processes reward information. “When something is really good, you go back for it again,” he says. “ Thus, by praising the accomplishments a leader, we are contributing to creating healthy behavioral patterns that will be repeated more often.  Celebration and dopamine is a reward to our brains like treats are to animals.

  • While elevating the level of “feel good” hormones with positive conversations, the level of cortisol is significantly lowered. Cortisol has been shown to damage and kill cells in the hippocampus (the brain area responsible for your episodic memory) and there is robust evidence that excessive cortisol shuts down learning, creates anxiety attacks, can cause depression, and premature brain aging.
  • The words of acknowledgement, encouragement and support, especially when granted to a person under much stress, calms her amygdala mediated response – of fight-flight-freeze – allowing her to move into a more thoughtful and calm state.

When we converse openly with others, we are sharing our inner world, our sense of reality, to validate our reality with others.  We are measuring the levels of trust in our relationship to determine whether we can partner with others. The quality of our conversations depends on how open or closed we feel at the moment of contact. The neurochemical reactions in our brains drive our states of mind, and these affect the way we communicate, how we shape our relationships, and how we build trusting relationships with others.

When we receive public praise and support, we unlock these powerful set of neurochemical patterns that cascade positive chemistry throughout the brain. Highly motivated employees describe the feeling of performing well as an almost drug-like state.

When this state of positive arousal comes with appropriate, honest, and well-deserved (sincere) praise, employees feel they are trusted and supported by their boss. They will take more risks, speak up more, push back when they have things to say, and be more confident in their dealings with their peers.

Judith E. Glaser is CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc. and Chairman of The Creating WE Institute. She is an Organizational Anthropologist, and consults to Fortune 500 Companies. Judith is the author of 4 best selling business books, including her newest Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results (Bibliomotion, 2013) Visit www.conversationalintelligence.com; www.creatingwe.com; jeglaser@creatingwe.com or call 212-307-4386.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Leadership Personal Development

Are You Ready to Promote Someone?

Are your people ready for their next step up?

Promoting from within can be an excellent method of filling the ranks within a growing organization, but there are several pitfalls for senior leaders to consider when organizing their promotion plans and elevating people into new or elevated managerial positions.

These considerations fall into the broad categories of technical skills, peer relationships, and leadership attitude.

Promoting from within is never easy for organizations, but there are concrete steps to ensure that new managers are set up to succeed in their new roles and that their teams are not left leaderless and directionless.

Managers, especially new supervisors, are often promoted on technical merit. After all, if someone is good at a particular job, it can be easy to assume that they are ready for a direct supervisory role over others in the same or similar functions. Job functionality is only part of leadership competence. New managers often find themselves lacking or having little organizational, strategic, and interpersonal skills for their new roles.

For these managers it can be stressful adapting from actively being engaged in one project at a time to managing multiple projects over time, keeping track of each and ensuring accurate and positive outcomes for each. Just the same, they often cannot see how their job affects others inside and outside the organization on a more strategic basis and can have difficulty in finding the appropriate solutions to their teams’ larger-scale problems. As these problems intensify, new leaders can feel additional stress and become further removed from building the crucial relationships with their teams in establishing themselves as a growing leader and functional manager.

Compounding these interpersonal worries — and having the appropriate interpersonal skills to manage, direct, inspire, and review their personnel — is the aspect of their past peer relationships. No one should ever be denied a promotion because they have close friendships in an organization, but these friendships enter a new dynamic when one is promoted over the other, especially if the newly promoted manager finds themselves in a direct supervisory position over their former peers. These new leaders will need additional coaching and support in this environment, as it will be comfortable to either fall back on old relationships creating a possible fraternization atmosphere or become stressed because of the new dynamic and begin to withdraw and craft avoidance behaviors around their former peers.

Attitude is everything in an organization, and it can be an unpredictable aspect to a newly promoted manager. New positions and responsibilities can mean new stressors, and it can often be difficult to ascertain beforehand how someone will react when placed in a higher-responsibility situation. Leaders should be grown into a new position, not thrown in. Proactive mentorship can provide growing leaders an opportunity to hone their skills, develop the mindsets off of a positive role model, and seek resolutions towards smaller problems and apply these outcomes towards larger ones.

New and growing leaders require support in all aspects of their development. It is no simple event to promote someone and then expect them to have the success in their new position as their last. Senior leaders must cultivate a strong strategy in their organizations for how their personnel will grow and develop over time, provide concrete goals, and paths for how careers can, and will, progress.
These pathways should include adequate support at all levels, in both formal training and education, and informal mentorship. Also, there should be planned job enrichment and expansion for growing leaders to give them time to cultivate and hone these skill-sets which can vary widely from their traditional roles.

Categories
Growth Management Skills

Building Relative Vision

Vision is relative.

As organizational leaders, we thrive on the big picture. Not one senior leader that I have spoken with has said to me that this is a 9-5 job for them and that their sense of purpose ends when they leave in the evening. As senior organizational leaders and executives, we gain a great deal of motivation though building strategy, charting new courses though unexpected, and often turbulent, waters, and seeing our organizations reach new milestones in their journeys.

However, in every organization I have worked with there is also a level of stratification where the organization’s junior leaders lose this sense of purpose, and an “us versus them” mentality develops. The idea of “here’s the latest bit from the good idea fairy up at corporate, from people who don’t even know what we’re doing down here, which makes our job harder” is prevalent and demoralizing across teams in the majority of businesses.

The facts show this as well, studies published in Harvard Business Review, showcase a significant gap between strategy and execution. This gap presents a high failure rate which is often not based on having a successful plan but in having junior leaders execute successfully on what the senior leadership has proposed.

Though my coaching and consulting in the past two years I have found that the simplest explanation for this is the vision. Junior leadership often adopts the 9-5, just a job mentality, and the organization’s grander vision is reduced to a few bullet points which are posted in the company break room and given out at annual training events. The junior leaders lose their stake, their purpose in the organization is reduced to merely knocking out tasks without a grander idea of how those tasks contribute to the whole. Likewise, senior leaders are looking for people to execute, but provide no more substantial motivation towards that purpose besides, “it’s their job, do it.”

Building a relative vision is critical in today’s agile and change-orientated business environment. Junior leaders must build up their piece of the company’s overall vision. They must learn how their teams contribute, what their effect is on the larger scheme, and how they may more effectively chart a course through uncertain futures. Senior leaders must find the ways to begin bridging this gap. Simply posting company values and outlining KPIs is not enough. They have to become more inclusive in their strategy sessions, including ideas and input from their subordinate leaders, as well as providing mentoring and coaching opportunities towards these leaders’ personal and professional growth. From all these junior leaders must become more imposed to take action and hold ownership over their pieces of an organization; and as their competencies a grown are proven, they must be given more time and space to manage their teams without excessive or obtrusive management oversight.

All this creates a dynamic leadership structure where motivation is derived from a shared sense of purpose and direction. This shared mentality helps join leaders feel their place in business from more than someone who is merely trying to manage their teams time and resources to someone who is an active participant in a company’s success.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development

Converting Information into Knowledge-Based Assets

When I developed my forecasting model in the early 1980s, I could see that a digital revolution would unfold, and as it did, an advanced form of capitalism would emerge, one where ideas and knowledge stimulated economic growth even more so than labor, land, money or other tangibles. It later became known as the Knowledge Era – or the Knowledge Age – in contrast to the Industrial Age.

A Few Strategic Questions to Consider

There is a big difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Today we are all focused on big data, and we should be because it provides the foundation for the three higher levels. We all have a database, and as we all know, there is no shortage of information, but do you have a knowledgebase? Is your organization creating new revenue streams by converting information into actionable knowledge, sharing that knowledge internally to increase its value, and then selling it in non-competing industries? I helped a large global organization do this several years ago and they generated over $100 million in the first year. All too often we fail to see the hidden value of the people part of the business. Are you actively using web-based technology to leverage the talents, knowledge and wisdom of employees to create new high-margin products, as well as solve problems faster?

All too often, as we grow larger and move faster, we can easily lose track of the wide variety of intellectual property (IP) we have created. Are you actively formalizing, capturing and leveraging your intellectual property(IP) to create higher value assets? Using today’s digital tools, it has never been easier for any organization, regardless of size, to create new revenue streams by leveraging their enhanced IP.

Three Must-Have Components to Leverage Intellectual Capital

1. Everyone in the organization must see the tremendous opportunity and added value in going beyond the current activity of converting data into information, to higher levels of value by creating and delivering actionable knowledge and wisdom. In addition, auditing and evaluating intellectual assets must be seen as a strategic direction.

2. Everyone in the organization must see that its technology infrastructure and organizational culture are the keys to unlocking the vast wealth of knowledge within the organization, both for the organization and your clients. Knowledge increases in value when it is shared within the organization, and that means shifting from being an Information Age organization to entering the Communication Age. Informing is a one-way activity that does not always produce a result. Communicating is two-way and dynamic and almost always causes action. That’s why social media has grown so fast; it is a Communication Age enabling technology. An internal knowledge-sharing strategy, focused on fostering two-way communication and dialog, is crucial because as I said earlier, knowledge increases in value when it is shared.

3. Everyone in the organization must see their participation as essential to building a strong foundation for the enhancement, sharing and delivery of knowledge. When we have collective knowledge and wisdom at out fingertips, everyone can accomplish their work with less time and effort.

Keep in mind that you get the behaviors you reward; therefore, there must be a rewards system for sharing knowledge. Remember, there are many ways to reward people and not all have to involve money.

If you would like to learn more about how to convert information to knowledge and then productize it for revenue, I recommend reading my latest bestselling book, The Anticipatory Organization.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development

Workplace Civility Starts with Management

 

Most Americans would agree that we’re living in an increasingly uncivil society. Our incivility is now invading the workplace, and bad behavior is demoralizing managers and employees. If you want to do something about this negative trend, listen to what Christine Porath has to say.

I recently interviewed Dr. Porath, an associate professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace, on an episode of my podcast Manage Smarter.

Porath suggests that managers increase awareness of their own civility. Managers often don’t realize that simply checking their phones during a one-on-one can be seen as rude. Porath urges managers “to ask people they work with about how they could improve their effectiveness. They should also ask which of their habits rub employees the wrong way.”

While they’re at it, managers should solicit feedback across the organization. Once you hear about how your habits and behaviors impact others, reflect on what was said. If people say you have a sharp tone in your email, think about how to change. For example, maybe you’ve been firing back responses to emails when you’ve been stressed. Are you always a bit stressed in the afternoons? If so, don’t respond to email until the morning, when you’re feeling energetic and positive.

Remember that uncivil behavior on the part of a manager can result in a big hit to the bottom line. Porath’s research shows that when managers act like their computers or phones are more important than anything else, employees react negatively. They:

  • Cut back on work effort: 66%
  • Worry about the incident: 80%
  • Leave the organization: 12%

Employees

Besides demonstrating their own commitment to civil behavior, managers should be on the lookout for employees who are rude and condescending. Some employees may act that way directly to their managers, while others are only rude to co-workers. If you want to curtail this kind of behavior, pull the offending person aside for a private chat. Explain how their behavior is hurting company culture and their personal reputations.

Another path toward a civil workplace is to establish a formal policy. Your policy could address topics that frustrate team members. For example, employees should show up on time for work. They should behave courteously to everyone in meetings. And they should nip their other rude tendencies in the bud.

Managers must showcase their commitment to civil behavior if they want to see change in their workplace.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Health and Wellness Leadership

Leaders Who Lunch Are Better Leaders.

I know what you are thinking.

You are thinking that leaders who lunch are better because they are out there networking.  But that’s not why.

For leaders, lunch matters.

Contrary to popular belief, a sit-down lunch away from your desk is NOT a luxury. Rather,  it is an essential to your performance at work.  When leaders don’t take a break in the middle of the day, or perhaps not even all day, we push ourselves into survival-mode instead of performance mode. We are not pausing to refuel when we need it most to provide the energy our mind and bodies need to do our best work. And if you don’t even eat breakfast, then you’re running on empty all day.

Sure, you can push yourself to function without fuel for a while, but then you’re not performing optimally. I see this all the time with  leaders. They are so focused on the goal that the can forget the importance of the process to get there. They make it through the day over and over again, but they also collapse at night with a meal that is too big or not very healthy, because they are hungry and exhausted. Then they compound the problem with poor or too little sleep,  only to get up and do the same thing the next day.

Lunch switches off survival-mode to make us perform better.

Working on survival-mode causes leadersto work on basic instinct,  reacting before reflecting, leaving us to put out fires rather than thinking through a solution that might be different (and better) than we have always done.

In survival-mode, leaders focus on what is safe, because  we don’t have capacity to think out of the box and  coach our teams to become better at what they do. We might not even have the capacity to behave the way we would like to behave, because we are feeling the urgency – and the impatience and anger — that comes with running on empty.

We all end up in that situation from time to time, spending more time repairing the damage than  a much needed break would have taken.

When leaders don’t take time for ourselves, we tend to not take time for others, and it affects the company culture. Too often, employees tell me they don’t eat lunch, because their leader does not eat lunch. As a result, they think they are not allowed to go to lunch, or it is not appropriate for them to take a break.

When the leader is working on survival-mode, the whole team is on survival-mode. And the company hurts.

People who eat together, solve problems together.

Good leaders understand how important sharing meals is for company culture. They also know that a successful leader doesn’t hover over the team. Rather, they are part of the team, and nothing brings people more together than sharing a meal. It fosters a sense of community that cannot be created in a work environment full of business meetings, with just snacks and ping-pong tables  offered as an attempt to bring people together around a common vision.

Sharing a meal reminds us of family, helping us communicate in a more open and friendly way. Over a meal, we share ideas more freely, ask for help with problems more openly feel like we are not alone, fighting against the machine. It helps us feel part of, instead of separate from.

Our human resource is still our best resource and we need to nourish it. The company teams that eat together do not just talk business, they talk life. It is not a productivity meeting over food. It is a people meeting to create community and shared goals.

Sharing lunch serves up trust and safety.

The number one reason people are more satisfied at work is that they feel safe. They trust their leader, they feel seen and heard, they feel they matter, and they feel like they belong. When we are working on survival-mode there is no trust, there is no safety. Everything is danger.

When we share meals, we can bring our humanity to work, access our soft-skills, solve problems, and thrive together. So go ahead, put lunch on the schedule! You won’t only nourish your body, you’ll nourish your company.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development

The One Big Reason Your Process is the Path to Profit

Everyone loves a process when it produces results. But what about when it doesn’t? What happens then?

I’m a big process guy. I founded my company around them, to the point that the profit-driving selling methodology we teach to our clients is rooted in the process. We believe that when you find and adopt systems that work, you can radically improve your sales using the same baseline methods. You just need to trust the process, follow through and let the results take care of themselves.

In truth, it’s easy to follow processes when they work. They create true workplace cultures by placing value on the same things, generate certainty with your employees, and they drive profit in a way that more spontaneous approaches simply can’t.

The tough part is staying true to the process in the event it doesn’t produce the desired outcome. Those are the true gut-check moments, and if you want to continue growing, it’s key to stick to your guns and trust in the process.

The New England Patriots learned this lesson the hard way in the Super Bowl. Malcolm Butler was the Patriots’ best cornerback for the entire 2017 season, and he played 98 percent of the team’s snaps up to the Super Bowl. Then, suddenly, he was riding the bench. He played just one play in the big game, a meaningless play on special teams. Other than that, he sat and watched from the bench with the rest of us.

The big question: why?

Patriots coach Bill Belichick is also fond of his processes, so much so that it’s become known as the Patriot Way. Whether it was because of a team infraction or just because the matchup favored the backup, Belichick opted to stick to his system and sit Butler. It didn’t work so well. The Philadelphia Eagles racked up 374 passing yards, backup quarterback Nick Foles threw three touchdowns and the Eagles scored 41 points. They also won the game.

It’s all too easy to criticize the Patriots’ system when things don’t go right. Surely they would’ve had a better chance if they started Butler, right? If this was the result, shouldn’t the Patriots overhaul their system so this doesn’t happen again?

This same conversation happens over and over in corporate offices and boardrooms every day. An otherwise successful process doesn’t produce the desired result, and suddenly it’s time to throw it out and start over again. The problem with this thought pattern is that it doesn’t leverage past success and takes a nearsighted look at a farsighted concern.

The Patriots’ system is without a doubt the most successful in the history of the NFL. Under Belichick they’ve won the AFC East 15 of 17 seasons and won five Super Bowls since 2001. But it also hasn’t been perfect. They’ve lost three Super Bowls and even missed the playoffs twice. The temptation during those trough periods is to blow it up and start over. Clearly the process has failed, so it’s time to move on. Or so many of the prevailing theories go.

The truth is that what separates the Patriots from everyone else is that they stick to the process even when they don’t reach their desired outcome frame now and again. Setbacks are inevitable in life. No process is perfect, and even the Patriots undergo some necessary tweaks and maintenance every year. But that relentless and repetitive focus on the process over the results is the reason why the Patriots win so much, not the reason why they lose.

So even if the decision to sit Butler didn’t work out on an individual level, the systematic framework that created that decision is the entire reason why the Patriots were there in the first place. The same adherence to the process produced the Tom Brady draft pick and everything that came after. That’s why Belichick had no regrets about his decision after the game. He trusts his process in all circumstances.

Psychologists call it tunnel vision. In a crisis or a setback, it’s easiest to focus entirely on what’s happened in the moment as opposed to seeing the grand plan you’ve already put in place. Think of a child knocking down an entire Lego village they’ve built because they messed up the placement of a window in one of the houses. You’d teach them to fix the window and keep the rest of village standing, wouldn’t you? It’s vital to view your company’s processes the same way.

This is what separates companies that have long term success over flash-in-the-pan companies that have quick success and then fade away. Companies like Apple and Space X developed processes they trust even when the market dives, or when a product doesn’t work as intended. Companies that hit bankruptcy either didn’t develop a successful process, or they didn’t follow the one they already had.

This is every business’s greatest challenge and greatest reward. Develop a process that works and stick to it through tough times. You’ll be amazed at the results on the other side of the setback.