Welcome to AED Foundation's self-study course entitled Own the Vision. In today's dynamic business environment, it's more important than ever for dealers and distributors to have strategy and operational decisions quickly translated into action. Successful strategy execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by our employees acting according to three things, the information they have, what the organization reinforces and tolerates, and their own self-interest. This module is focused on owning the vision so you as a leader can gain initial buy-in and changes needed to execute your dealership strategy, second, build momentum, and finally and most importantly, sustain the gains. Self-study goals are simple in concept but challenging to do. We're asking you to dedicate time for personal development away from all the demands of your everyday responsibilities, to help reinforce some things you already know but perhaps may not have addressed yet, to identify some potential blind spots, those things that you're too close to and cannot properly see, and finally, to provide you with tools and techniques that can be applied immediately. The layout of the overall course contains a number of common elements including learning objectives and definitions, some notable quotes, some content, and then at the end of each of the four videos, you will have some individual exercises to do. At the end of all four videos, you'll also find follow-up application exercises to continue your development and usage of these tools. The subjects that we'll cover today are these five. We'll start with strategy execution and some of the challenges that happen as we execute good plans. We'll look at the influence that our business culture and values has on strategy execution and also the importance of individual accountability. We'll then finish up with employee engagement, the fuel to get things done, and then we'll look at a high-performance model to help put things into perspective and identify some of your strengths and potential areas for improvement. So the connection between leadership and learning goes back a long ways. In fact, John F. Kennedy, our president, said in 1963, leadership and learning are indispensable to each other, and interestingly enough, over 50 years later in their book, the same conclusion was concluded with great leaders create great workplaces. We're looking for you to be open to new information and ideas and not afraid to experiment and use some of the tools and techniques that we'll share with you today. So the first subject that we'll cover will be strategy execution. Our learning objectives are as follows. First, examine some common communication challenges as strategies are rolled out and executed. Secondly, look at the power of beliefs, beliefs of our leaders, beliefs of ourselves, and beliefs of employees and how they can influence strategy execution. And then finally, look at ways to identify and mitigate two major barriers to change. We'll talk about that. So from a common definition standpoint, let's think about strategy in its simplest form as simply a plan or a method to reach a future desired state. Some notable quotes and research for you to consider. It's important to have a strategy because otherwise it's just a lot of activity, but it's also very important that execution happens. We like this quote from Larry Bosley that talks about meshing strategy, aligning people, and achieving promised results, and that's what it's all about, achieving desired results. Usually strategies are multi-year, so it's important that they keep updated. It's also very important, as said here very well, that we execute the basic blocking and tackling to make sure that those plans get executed. Interesting research by Harvard Business Review indicates that companies on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise. So two-thirds of the time we're successful and one-third of the time we're not. And part of that is because when strategy becomes change, and the Gallup organization reported in their research that more than 70% of change initiatives typically fail. So let's take a look at five common challenges in strategy execution, and this will be the content for the first video. We'll look at clarity. Everything starts with clarity. We'll then look at individual and organizational alignment. We'll then go to cross-functional commitment because if each individual is aligned but we're not committed across the different departments and divisions and facilities, then we have challenges in strategy execution. Look at the power of beliefs, and then we'll look at the common resistance to change. So we'll start with clarity, and clarity is about three things. It's about building focus on what to do, understanding when and how to do things, and then building trust of who to do it with and who are we doing it for. Many times our executives and senior managers spend countless hours and days developing the strategy. They review data, they benchmark best practices, they debate different opinions and discuss options and alternatives, they build consensus, and then comes the challenge. How do they simplify this information so everybody in the organization not only understands it but knows what to do? Some common challenges that organizations face with strategy execution include taking very complex messages and simplifying them for different audiences, deciding what information is going to be transparent and open to everyone and what information is going to be selective and only for individual groups. Looking at the chain of command, many organizations use a cascading approach to share information down through the organization, and as has been said so well in the past, any kind of chain is only as good as its weakest link. So if someone is not delivering the information in a timely or quality manner, then everyone below them is not going to get good quality information. With this credibility, you can have great, simplified, concise messages, but without the credibility of the individuals sharing the information and helping to generate understanding, the strategy will suffer. And then finally, managing what I call IBL or institutional body language. Similar to personal body language, this is where the words and the documents say one thing about strategy, but then the organization's actions say something totally different and create confusion and frustration with employees. So let's look at seven practical reminders that you can look at for strategy execution. Some of these your organization may be doing extremely well, and some of them may need a little bit of focus. The first is that communications is three steps. We share information, we generate understanding, and we reinforce key messages. Too often dealerships focus most of their attention on only sharing information, and technology today makes that easier and faster to do than ever. Emails are sent out with multiple attachments. PowerPoint presentations are developed. A video is made. There's slick handouts or brochures. Banners or posters are displayed, and website content explodes. But these actions alone will not create the understanding of your workforce. You need to dialogue, you need to discuss, and you even need to debate in some cases. You must find a way to balance both the high-tech and the high-touch side of communications. The second practical reminder is research shows that key messages must be repeated a minimum of seven times by using different communication methods and techniques before the average person will retain it, not because of their intelligence level, but because there's so much information being shared to them, not only in work and life. And so critical messages must be repeated. Third, our short-term memory is a very interesting thing. We have to be careful that we avoid data dumps. Short-term memory will only hold seven basic ideas, plus or minus two. So it's really important with strategy execution to narrow communication down to no more than three points at any given time. Bombarding your team with more information than they can handle or absorb increases the likelihood that they'll ultimately tune out. Next, research also shows that 90% of what is learned is forgotten in one week unless it's reinforced. This is not only critical for communications, it's also critical for the learning side of the business and its impact on strategy execution. Next, when presenting information like I'm doing today, it's important to remember the 800-200 rule. This research shows that the average human being can process information four times faster than we can speak, or about 800 words a minute. So don't create distractions with lots of charts and graphs and words because people will be easily distracted because ultimately we talk too slow. You want to keep their focus, then share bits of information as you go. Some people learn and remember best by reading, others by seeing examples, and others by experiencing hands-on. So please don't put all your communications into just one size or one technology. It's important to balance the media that you use as well as the frequency. And finally, Q&A breaks. Too often we wait to hold Q&A at the end of a session and then we typically run out of time. So why not consider putting your Q&A session in the beginning or the middle and reducing the amount of content? May cause a lot of improvement in the clarity of your messages on strategy. So next let's consider alignment, similar to getting all of our ducks in a row. Alignment's important because it sets a clear line of sight. It helps answer a really important question for each and every employee. Here's the impact you have on the business because ultimately you matter and what you do matters. Unfortunately, all too often dealerships cascade information and objectives down using descriptors and language and terms that many employees are unfamiliar with. Goals and objectives must be translated into real activities that employees do. Please also be very careful about creating false sense of success with your communication and your alignment. Cascading goals down is one thing, but it's also very, very important that people understand not only the what, but the why. In addition to that, please be careful not to mistake signs of understanding. One of the classic examples of this is ask employees if they understand what you just shared and a bunch of heads nod or hands raise and so therefore you conclude you have understanding. Instead I challenge you to ask them to demonstrate and or show how they use this information when they're doing their job or how they would explain it to someone else. Terms and descriptors found in many, many strategic documents have words that we all think we know, things like customer and quality and cost, things like becoming a partner of choice and many, many different types of acronyms including return on sales and assets and investment. The challenge is as we're creating alignment, do people really understand those terms and how more importantly how they can influence them? Let's take two simple examples. If we had a goal to create greater customer value and we wanted to create better alignment, which of these two options would create better alignment from your perspective if someone were working at the parts counter? First, I'll consistently answer calls at the parts counter on two to three rings and return any call made by 5 p.m. the same day. Or I will interact with customers in a way that adds value and helps return business. I would hope that you would say the first option is better. It's much, much clearer. It's very specific. It's easier to see, to hear and to measure if it's being done and it helps drive behavior. Let's look at one more. What if the goal was to create better alignment to a strategy to create better business efficiency? There's two options. I'll explore ways to improve business efficiency by benchmarking other dealer locations or I'll investigate and replicate processes used in other locations that consistently meet month-end closing requirements. Again, we believe that the second option would be the best for alignment. It's more specific, it can be measured and we know what the end goal is, which is meeting month-end closing requirements. We've touched on alignment and we understand that clarity complements alignment, but there's a third element that's very important and that's cross-functional commitment. Research continues to reinforce that managers strongly feel more likely that they missed performance commitments because of the inefficient support from other departments or groups than their own team failing to deliver. When this happens, mistrust occurs and we create waste in the dealership, including duplicate effort, conflicts and disagreement and then the proverbial accountability issue of who's responsible for what and who's going to take and correct something. Success with cross-functional commitment between departments and divisions and shifts and functional areas and different locations requires three things. It requires time to understand and resolve different ways that different groups and people within those groups think and act. It requires complementary functional priorities. If marketing's priority is one thing and your operations priority is something else, then you're going to get conflicting behaviors and activities, which may fall short of meeting your strategic goals. And finally, ownership, which is another way of saying accountability, which we'll talk about a little bit later in this self-study. So the question I have for you is how many of your strategic goals can be 100% accomplished by any single department or group? Can safety, can inventory accuracy or customer service? No, they can't. Can employee retention or leveraging new technology or increasing your market share? I would suggest no, not again. So why don't we get more often breaking down some of those functional silos and remind people of their interdependence for success? Let's look at a specific example. Consider customer service and its potential impact on new sales and market share. So if you have a customer that is continually frustrated by the lack of functionality on your website, or one who's frustrated because of mishandling a parental or a product, or upset with the timeliness of return phone calls to your organization, or disappointed with consistent errors in service estimates, or frustrated with broken commitments that have been made or perceived to have been made, or delays in getting replacement parts, or irritated with the behavior of a service technician on the job site. What about if they're passed off to multiple departments to resolve a problem? Or billed incorrectly? All of these types of things have an impact on new sales and market share. So ultimately, who's responsible? The answer is many departments and individuals and interactions. Great leaders have to help the employees connect the dots with how their actions and behaviors and results impact each other both internally as well as outside with the customer base. The next area that we'll look at is limiting beliefs in the dealership. Beliefs are very powerful. They influence how we think and therefore how we act and behave and the consistency of that as well as it impacts then the results and or the perceptions that we achieve. There are five very good conclusions about beliefs. First, beliefs are those things that we accept as truth so we adjust our behaviors to fit them. Whether they're right or wrong, it doesn't matter. If it's our belief, then we're going to adjust our behaviors accordingly. When we believe in something, we don't need any proof, and if we don't believe in something, all the evidence, we sometimes don't regard and take into consideration. When we believe in something, we see very quickly all the arguments for it and in some cases create blind spots for arguments against it. Most of our arguments really are about what we believe in, and here's the critical one. If we can change a limiting belief, we can significantly increase our options. Think about that for a second. If we can change a limiting belief on how strategy is being executed, on how serious we are about doing something, our options can significantly increase whether it's an employee's belief, a leader's belief, even beliefs externally. So let's take some practical pictures and see what beliefs might be in play. What might the belief be of these young children jumping off into the swimming pool? Hopefully one of trust. What about this little guy sitting on the sidelines? Perhaps his belief is, if I can get in the game, I can make a big difference. What about this little guy getting ready to hit the tee ball? Perhaps their belief is, it's going over the fence. And one of my favorites, Charlie Brown, what's Charlie Brown's belief based on past experience with Lucy and the football? I'm just going to pull it again on me. And then for your strategy, what's the belief? Is the belief that it's possible to execute it and be successful or it's impossible? That belief will have tremendous impact on the actions and behaviors that you get for execution. So in a moment I'm going to ask you to pause. I'm going to ask you to look at these questions and they all have to do with beliefs about how strategy or execution is taking place. So I'd like you to take a look at these and then decide which of these you believe hinder execution and or those that help execution. So I'll show you these. You can pause for a moment and then we'll be back on. You hit pause, and then when you're ready, please proceed again. So if we looked at these statements, let's take a look at them in a couple of specific ways. First of all, we would contend with you that the ones in black might have some adverse impact on strategy execution, and the ones in green might be very powerful and beneficial in strategy execution. Let's just take a couple of quick examples. Let's take a look at the first one. We still get questions about our strategy. My belief is it's got to be the new hires, so everyone needs to understand it. If I have that belief, then I'm probably going to focus my communications on new hires and not on the masses, and that may be a huge mistake. But my belief is causing me to take action. The third one, I'd be reluctant to share that information with our executive group. They don't like bad information. So how often do we see strategy not being properly executed because we are filtering information up to the ultimate decision makers? The bottom line is, would we be better off if they knew the thoughts and feelings and frustrations and questions more openly about what's happening from the rank and file? Let's take a couple in the green. Let's get some feedback on things in our strategy employees are confused or need more clarification on. What a great opportunity to find out and refine communication activities and drive that first factor we looked at today called clarity. Or what about the second green one? Let's pilot the change. It would help us uncover potential issues quickly before the overall rollout. Again, great belief and action to take place if there's a large change taking place because of your strategy. So beliefs are very powerful. They're stubborn, but they can change over time with repeated reinforcement of behavior in your organization. The last element we're going to take a look at in this section is change. And as you know, transformation requires change both within the dealership overall, within leaders, and personally with each individual. Change can bring about temporary stress and typically it does because people have a tendency to focus on what they're going to lose or what they're going to give up. There are a number of common reactions to change. Some people retreat from the change and deny it and stay away from it and kind of ignore it, hoping that it will go away like perhaps some other change that's been suggested. Some resist change and delay it. Sometimes this resistance is a little bit passive. And then other times people will rebel against the change and fight it. That's much more active. Sometimes people will run from the change to avoid it, maybe change a department or an area or a shift or perhaps even leave the organization. And some people ultimately accept the change and grow from it. Interesting, change has a huge impact on strategy because in strategy we need change. And according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers, nine out of ten of the key barriers to success of change programs are people-related, not money-related, not technology-related, not physical assets-related, not process-related, but people-related. So it's very, very important that we spend time in this area. Finally, resistance to change, there's been lots and lots of research that's taken place about this. And at the end of the day, there are really two large buckets. The first bucket is obstacles. Those are the rational things. And people typically articulate obstacles by saying things like, I can't make that change because you have not done or provided B. Things like tools and training and standard processes, et cetera. Responsibility in this case is solely placed on the leader or the process owner to fix these obstacles before the individual will change. People try to maintain their current behaviors until the perfect solution to all these obstacles are eliminated. In other words, build me the perfect mousetrap. On the other side are objections. These are the emotional, and they are less overt. They're typically exhibited not by words, but by attitude and behavior that sends a strong message, I'm not interested or I don't want to change because of behaviors I might have to change or choices or responsibilities, et cetera. Objections are very, very powerful. They can wreck change initiatives, create distractions, and execution waste. Now the interesting thing is that behavior goes through a set of phases, including compliance, commitment, and finally the creation of a new norm. There's an interesting thing called a cultural pinch point that occurs between the commitment phase, where you have some people doing the desired leadership behavior some of the time, and the norm stage where everyone's doing it all the time. It's a pinch point because many people figuratively say, ouch, my personal behavior might or has to change and it doesn't feel good to me. I think change takes place by pushing through the pain of this cultural pinch point. It happens when we proactively address those individuals, whether they're employees or leaders who only superficially embrace the desired change. It's when desired behavior change is no longer optional, nice to do or only done when it's convenient, and unless both the obstacles and the objections to change are acknowledged, assessed, and actively worked on, your great ideas, initiatives, and strategies will fall short of their potential. Well that's part one of this self-study. We now would encourage you to go to your workbook and look at the individual exercises where you can take some more of these thoughts and ideas, tools and techniques, and apply them. We look forward to seeing you for session two. Welcome back. This section is focused on dealership behavioral blueprint, which is its culture and its values. We'll examine some simple behaviors that drive culture, truisms about business culture and which ones you might feel are applicable today, and some critical guidelines that will increase the value of your business values and help you with strategy execution. Business culture is interesting because sometimes we forget or it's not shared with us why we do the things we do. Here's a great cartoon. For some reason, we don't understand where it started, but we all are required to wear this type of hat. Culture is the same way. It's the accepted or perceived way, and many times people don't understand where it originated. One other critical thing about business culture is that you can see it in behaviors. You can hear it in words that are said, and you can experience it with emotions and or the lack of emotions. When people say that culture cannot be measured, they're missing a great opportunity because you can see it. You can hear it and experience it every day if you just stay alert. The objectives of this session will be to help you look at some truisms about culture and see which may or may not be applicable within your dealership today, to look at how leaders embed culture and therefore help to execute or not execute strategy, to look at the power of values and seven critical guidelines to use with your values in the organization, and then to share with you a very simple technique to see where people believe actions and behaviors are aligned and where they're not. For purposes of this session, let's consider business culture to be the accepted or perceived way we do things here. Values are the principles or standards of behavior for the organization. Here's some notable quotes and research. Harvard Business School concluded that there's significant impact on your economic performance if you focus on culture. London Business School reiterated that, indicating that many organizations are intimidated or convinced that it's secondary in nature, but ultimately it's not, and that you can't assess culture or change it, but that's been disproved. One of the researchers who's well-known in this area for business culture is Edgar Sheen from MIT, and this is a great quote, there's no right or wrong culture, so this is not about cookie cutter. It's about what you need to have in order to accomplish your goals and objectives in the environment that you're working. And then the famous quote from Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Some have said even for lunch and or dinner. Let's look at a couple more. Harvard Business Study concludes that as much as half of the difference in operating profits between organizations can be attributed to their culture. And Harvard Business Review also concluded that companies with effective culture outperform their competitors by a margin of 20 to 30%. Interesting, the chairman and CEO of Levi Strauss said that values drive the business and that the soft and hard stuff has to be intertwined. If values are so important, here's an interesting piece of research that was reported in Fast Company Magazine that found only 3% of companies surveyed used their values as a form of self-governance. So therefore, what is it used for? And finally, from Disney, it's not hard to make decisions if you know what your values are because ultimately it's about choices and consequences. So business culture, bottom line research would indicate that it's influenced by two major behaviors, what's reinforced and what's tolerated. What's reinforced by who we select to have jobs in our organization, what roles we put people into, what we show appreciation for, what we reward, and how we reinforce performance through performance management processes. The opposite is what's tolerated, what do we ignore, what do we walk by. Those also have a huge impact on our business culture. As I mentioned earlier, business culture goes through three development stages. The first phase is compliance. Compliance is mandatory. Employees will do it at least while you're watching like wearing safety glasses but they don't truly buy into it or see what's in it for them. In the next phase, the commitment phase, more people are doing their desired behavior more often and they're doing it the right way. They're starting to begin to see the benefits for both the dealership and the individual. And then finally, the third stage which is the ultimate desire of all of us and that's the norms phase. That happens when most people are doing the desired behavior most of the time and they don't even think about it. It's just become the accepted way we do things here. The defining moment in your business culture and any business culture is when no one is watching. Will your employees do the right thing at the right time, the right way, for the right reason? Let me repeat that. The defining moment in a business culture is when no one is watching. Will your employees do the right thing at the right time, the right way, for the right reason? If the reason is fear of getting in trouble or punishment, then it's not a norm behavior at all. It's simply you're in a compliance mode. So here are some truisms about business culture. First, you either manage the culture or it will influence and change the behaviors of people. Secondly, when and if culture is taken for granted, behaviors are ignored or neglected. They're tolerated. People forget to tell you that things matter. Therefore, we start thinking it's not that important. There's usually an increase in several things, a waste of our human capability, our talents and skills and ideas. There are compromises on values-based behavior. There's slippage of critical behavior standards and there's a regression back to shaming and blaming, which we'll find out in the next section is about accountability and that is very, very dangerous. Declining or poor culture drives declining or poor performance. So my question to you is this. Which truisms do you believe apply most to your dealership right now? Are you managing the culture or is it managing you? Are there certain elements that are being taken for granted and do you see any type of similarity between your culture and how your overall organization is performing? So just like the first video that we had in this session, for this exercise, I'd like to go through this and then have you pause and answer these questions. It will help you determine where people think you are in your culture and what's being reinforced and what's being tolerated. So do your employees believe more often that policy and procedures are used as guidelines or rules, that processes can be skipped or they have to be disciplinedly followed, that measurement is more often just a hammer or it's a corrective tool, that when we go through learning and development, is it a check the box exercise or is it expected to be applied? Do more people in your organization believe that there are stumbling blocks for their careers or building blocks? Is your execution of strategy more distracted because of competing priorities or is it very focused, in fact, laser focused? When goals and objectives are missed, is there blaming and shaming or is there taking responsibility? And is feedback to leadership filtered, telling them what we think? Is it what they want to hear or is it respectful and frank? So I'm going to ask you to take a minute and think about those, pause, and decide where you believe employees believe the organization is right now in each of those areas. Bottom line is, please remember that every one of the actions will create a consequence for your organization. That consequence could be better strategy execution or it could be a missed opportunity. We hit pause now. Welcome back. So another critical element for culture, we mentioned earlier a quote by Edgar Sheen, professor at MIT, is how you as leaders embed culture in your organization. First thing is what you pay attention to and measure. If a leader is continually talking about, let's say, safety and watching key numbers like recordable injuries, lost time and work comp claims, and focusing on unsafe acts and conditions and wearing proper PPE themselves, then most people in your organization would quickly conclude that safety must be important. How do your leaders respond to emergencies and crises? Do they run and try to put out the problem or fire themselves? Or do they support the team in solving the problem? Do they encourage a quick temporary fix or do they take corrective action so that the issue doesn't repeat itself? How do they allocate scarce resources? The three scarce resources to business remain the same and have remained the same. Where's time being spent and not spent? Where's money being spent and not spent? And where's talent being allocated and not allocated in the organization? Employees watch where does time, money, and talent go. Those are ultimately concluded to be the initiatives, the projects, the departments that are most important to your organization and your culture. Everything else is secondary. Next, what leaders model, coach, and teach? Remember that it's actions speak louder than words, it's very, very important here. If active listening, for example, is important, then we should see leaders doing that with other leaders as well as with employees, correct? Next, what leaders recognize and reward? If employees perceive quantity gets more praise and reward than quality, then they may trade off quantity for quality and do it without leaders knowing. And then finally, what leaders use as perceived criteria for selecting and deselecting people? That includes new hires, promotions within, and removal from job or responsibilities or even removal from the dealership. So whether leaders say anything or not, they're casting a shadow about what's important in their culture. And employees are watching these six things and determining to the best of their ability what's important and what's not important. So in addition to many, many behaviors, there's also some key processes that will drive your business culture. And it's very, very critical that these be sequenced properly, that they not be skipped, and that there's disciplined execution of these processes by all leaders in the organization. The first set of processes are about informing. Those include things like your communications. How open is it? How are questions answered and responded to? What information is shared and not shared? Policies and procedures send another major message because these are explaining the rules of the road in your organization. People-related processes also inform employees about your culture. Things like overtime notification, time off requests, if performance reviews are done and how, how holidays and vacations are handled, and job postings are simple examples. And then finally, measurement. What we measure not only is important to get a quantitative, but it also sends a very important message as to what's important and what's not important. The second set of processes teach. These include your orientation and onboarding process, and these are very different. The formal learning and development that you have your organization go through, whether it's classroom, hands-on, e-learning, et cetera. What they see leaders modeling, coaching, and teaching, as we just explained from Edgar Sheen's model on embedding culture. And then we also teach by the decision-making that we allow employees to do. How do we share responsibilities, accountability, and authority teaches decision-making and says much, much, much about your culture. Finally, what we reinforce. We reinforce through things like who we select to join the organization, who we select to promote within the organization, what roles we put people in, what kind of performance management do we do. Do we talk about the things people are doing well as well as the things they need to improve? How often do we talk about it? How well do we reinforce desired behaviors through non-financial ways of showing appreciation called good old-fashioned recognition? And then how do we use financial means to reinforce desired behaviors? So now let's switch gears from culture to values. Values have been described in a number of ways. They've been described as a compass that will consistently provide direction to your organization. They've been described as a ruler that provides key measurement of success or failure. They've been described as a magnet because they'll attract some individuals to your organization, but they'll also recall individuals whose personal values don't match up. And they'll also become an important glue that holds you together when you have to make those challenging decisions. Values should never be rhetoric or slogan. Repeat that. Values should never be rhetoric or slogan. Values should be alive in your organization and displayed by daily actions and behaviors. For a second, I'd like you to think back to your family values. Did your family have values? Of course they did. Now think about the process your family used to introduce and reinforce these values. Did they create placemats or tent cards for the kitchen table? Did they have special magnets made for the refrigerator? Did they have posters so that you could have those in each of your bedrooms so you could look at them and memorize them? Did they encourage you to read documentation on your family values or did they assess you once a year on whether you understood them and how well you were applying them? I hope for all of those questions you answered no, because we simply knew what to expect by what we consistently saw, what we consistently heard, and most importantly, what we constantly experienced on a day-to-day basis in our family. Values created predictability and clarified the traits and the qualities that our family considered most critical and of the highest priority, especially in tougher, challenging times. Well, the same is true for business that want to excel in values-based behavior and enhance their credibility, their trust in the organization, their relationships. So here's seven critical business value behaviors, excuse me, principles I'd like you to consider as we try to walk the talk. First of all, values are not taught. Leaders and co-workers modeling the desired values-based behavior is the best way to teach others, not sitting in a classroom or taking an e-learning module or reading a values booklet. Secondly, individuals may have slightly different mental pictures and definitions of the specific behaviors required for some very common business values like integrity or teamwork or customer service or quality, especially what those mean in challenging or difficult situations. So take the guesswork out, clarify the most critical behaviors needed to walk the talk and walk that value in your organization. It'll have a huge impact on your strategy success. Avoid those one-and-done annual assessment mentalities that some organizations have. Routinely use simple, practical measurement tools and techniques to gauge and address behaviors that are perceived to be both in sync and out of sync with values. It adds credibility by being proactive by then addressing those out-of-sync behaviors. Next, excelling at values-based processes cannot be HR's responsibility only. It must be consistently executed by all leaders and integrated into everything that you do. It's also important that there are safety valves in your values process. A safety valve is very simple. What do I do that's safe and confidential to alert others of potential perceived value and fractions? It's important not to let those small, non-value-based behaviors fester and grow. They need to be addressed quickly. Next, reinforce with consistency, both positively and negatively. When your organization's values are actively lived, they must be recognized and rewarded, not taken for granted. If they're skipped, avoided, or just pulled out when it's convenient, then they must be proactively addressed and corrected. There cannot be double standards and inconsistencies in your values. If there is, it will erode trust. And finally, regularly assimilate your values. We're always better prepared when we practice things. So why not start some initiative like Value Scenario of the Month for all your employees, or do value case studies in staff meetings or in training to help develop the right mentality and the right behaviors to live your values. Having values did not exempt your family from making tough decisions and choices when you were younger. The same is true for dealerships today. By actively practicing the guidelines above, the dealership can enhance its credibility, its trust, and its relationships, both internally and externally. Everyone will know what's expected and what's expected of them, especially in challenging times. Now, one way to continually measure and keep a pulse on values-based behavior is to ask people to routinely conduct what we call a values gap assessment or analysis. This helps capture where employees believe the talk and the walk are in and out of sync. Let's look at the technique, and there are three simple inputs. The say, what we verbally say or what's documented. The do, which is actions and behaviors and their consistency. And the get, which is results and perceptions. Here's a couple of examples. An organization says they focus on customers, and the expected behavior is, and they do on a regular basis, check all service work before returning it to a customer. And what they get is repeated business. So therefore, we would conclude that this value of focusing on the customer is in sync, this behavior. Next, the organization says safety is first, and everyone, regardless of position or title, has to wear their appropriate PPE in the shop. There are no exceptions. And as a result, there's been no injuries in 12 months. Again, walking the talk on safety first. But what about missed opportunities? What about an organization that says we must better leverage technology? And then employees struggle because PC repair time takes forever. Frustrations and delays in entering data happens. In this particular case, employees can say we're not walking the talk. It's out of sync. It's creating waste in execution. And finally, let's harvest the power of teamwork. But in this case, there's continual arguing and finger-pointing between two critical departments, sales and service. Problems take too long to fix. There's a lack of accountability. And therefore, employees say we're not walking the talk about teamwork. And we're creating waste and frustration in the process. This is a very, very simple tool to do and use. And, in fact, we're going to encourage you in the exercises that follow to look at identifying some simple say-do-get examples in your organization. So as we wrap this up for the second video, some dealers have their values written down and some don't. But every dealership and distributor has values. Every dealer has guiding principles that help run it. The key is how do we use those and leverage those for better strategy execution. So now, if you'll stop, this is the end of video two. And we would encourage you again to look at the individual exercises and practice using some of the tools, techniques, and concepts that we've shared with you in this session. Welcome back to video three of four on owning the vision. In this session, we plan to talk about accountability. We're going to encourage you to look at a different and new definition of accountability. We're going to ask you to pause and think about what employees should be accountable for and what they perceive they're accountable for, and then how leaders and employees together can create mutual responsibility for accountability. Our learning objectives for this session will be to help redefine what accountability means in high-performing organizations today, to learn and be reminded of some key signs of people and individuals avoiding accountability, to look at the age-old issue as to why sometimes we avoid helping others with accountability, and to look at a new model where there's mutual responsibility for accountability. Accountability is a very, very interesting thing because ultimately everybody wants it and needs it, but we don't always practice it, similar to this cartoon where we see everyone's in the same boat, but based on the caption, not everybody's helping to fix the issues. So let's start with a new definition of accountability. Accountability in high-performing organizations is being viewed very differently than in many organizations today. It's being viewed as a personal choice, and therefore with personal choices there are natural consequences. It's being viewed as the ability to proactively influence. Therefore, it's not based on a position or title. Anyone and everyone can proactively influence. Third, it's about taking ownership, and when we own something, there's a different mindset, there's a different set of beliefs that we talked about earlier, and there's a different set of behaviors. And finally, it's about delivering the desired results. Sometimes those desired results are organizational. Sometimes they're individual, but it's, again, about delivering results. So here's some, again, notable quotes and research about accountability. Stephen Covey said it very well when he said accountability breeds response ability. When ultimately we have two choices, we can either accept the conditions or we can take responsibility to help change them. Ben Franklin said he that is good at making excuses is seldom good for anything else. So making excuses wastes time and isn't taking accountability. Joe Dumar's famous basketball player said great team players hold players, each other, accountable. It's not just a leadership issue. When we are accountable for things, we are accountable for things not only that we do but also the things that we don't do or say. And interestingly, research by the American Management Association found that one out of five managers believe that up to 20 to 30 percent of their employees avoid taking responsibility. It's critical for accountability. So mistakes happen. Assumptions and oversights occur. Sometimes people are careless. Sometimes they hurry through routine things and they don't always pay attention to detail. People, both employees and leaders, are not perfect. But that doesn't mean that there cannot be accountability. If you candidly answer the following two questions for your organization, you will quickly discover a lot about how your dealership handles accountability. The first question is how are mistakes and errors handled? Are people open when they make mistakes? Do we discuss what was learned from those mistakes and errors? Or are they hidden and we only talk about best practices and never lessons learned? And secondly, what happens when goals or targets are not met? Do we look at process? Do we look at the goal that was set? Do we look at technology or do we look for an individual to hang? Again, the challenge with accountability is really simple. Everybody wants it. Everybody expects it. The question is how well is your dealership handling it and managing it? If in your organization there is any perceived blaming or shaming or lecturing or punishing or threatening or humiliating, then accountability will be avoided. If failure is considered fatal for individual performance and or career advancement, then risk-taking, innovation, and accountability will absolutely suffer. So the first question should be what should an employee be accountable for? Well, here are some starters. How about being on time or their work effort? Or how about their attitude, which is most importantly reflected in the behaviors that they have? What about they follow through on their commitments? They come prepared to meetings or to work, and they're coachable when they need to improve. What about safety for both themselves and others? How about just successfully completing the tasks that they're assigned? How about the specific duties that go along with a job that may not be included in the job description? What about living your values, which we talked about in the last session? What about working towards common goals and that cross-functional commitment that we talked about? But what about maintaining and enhancing your brand? So here's a question. What do your employees believe they are and are not accountable for? And does your list as a leader match up with their list as an employee? Very important. Remember, we started this overall self-study class talking about clarity. If there's not clarity as to what I am and am not accountable for, then there is opportunity for waste. Now, there are natural signs of avoiding accountability. In fact, recently I was with an organization and we did some focus groups, and I asked these specific questions about signs of accountability and was it happening or not happening. And throughout the organization, individuals said, oh, we see those types of things happening all the time, and yet we don't see anything being done. Therein lies the issue for that particular organization and perhaps others as to why accountability is not being effectively done. The key in all cases is to look at a pattern versus a one-off event. But do we see individuals or groups that lack interest in the team or the organization's overall well-being? Do we see some consistency in missing deadlines or having excuses? How about those individuals or groups that don't take initiative, that don't volunteer? Or when there is a mistake, they accuse others of misunderstanding or the individual did not communicate properly and therefore they misunderstood what you wanted. How about telling others what you want to hear or what you intended for them to do but they have no intentions of doing it themselves? Or blaming others for mistakes or errors? What about conversations that go like, I forgot or I didn't think it was that important? Or what about we spend more time pointing out the inadequacies of the organizational leader or teammate versus what the individual could have done differently? Or just simply silence? If you see these types of things happening on a routine basis or a pattern with individuals or groups, these are signs that people are avoiding accountability. So why don't we hold people accountable? Well, very simply, sometimes we don't because we don't like putting people on the defensive. Or we don't believe that it will really make a difference. We tried it before and it didn't. Or we really don't have the time to have the conversation so we decide we'll just do it ourselves because we know we can do it or we get someone else to do it. Or we don't want to create bad feelings or relationships or worse yet, we fear some type of retaliation. Every one of these excuses, and they are excuses, has a natural consequence. And we are enabling the individuals to continue to do exactly what they're doing and not take accountability for things and we're working around them. So here are some practical tips to consider as you look at this subject. First of all, remember this formula. Rules without relationships equal resistance. If people believe you truly care about them as individuals and have their best interests at heart, then usually they will tend to be less defensive when you give and accept feedback with them and help them be more accountable. Secondly, the big T is trust. It's the foundation of all good relationships. And when people trust us, we can make a difference in their life. They're more readily willing to seek out and accept our input and trust is made up of lots and lots of little things that are consistently done. The third thing to remember about accountability is that it must be used holistically. If we only talk about accountability when something goes wrong, people will naturally associate it with something negative. Here's a question for you to consider. When was the last time someone was called out in your organization and recognized for truly being accountable? The fourth area, GAF, is about giving and accepting of feedback. It's something that many of us don't do very well because we don't practice it enough. It's a skill. Instead, we only do it when it's challenging or there's an emotional situation like an unacceptable performance issue, discipline, et cetera. We must be better and we must practice both giving and accepting of feedback in order to help with accountability. And finally, use a consistent discipline standard. Let's show you one that you can use. We call this the mutual responsibility model and it has six steps. Step one, again, starts with clarity. Clarify expectations. The leader provides the what and the when and may be more open to the how. And then, after that, the employee feeds back what they've heard so they're on the same page. Step two, then, is the planning success. This can be a combination of both qualitative and quantitative factors. Employees then must acknowledge that they know how to influence and monitor their progress using this factor. It is impossible to hold someone accountable if they don't know how it's being measured and what success looks like. The third step in this mutual responsibility model is that leaders express confidence. The employee has the skills and the ability to complete the objective. And then the employee reconfirms their commitment to doing the job correctly. The fourth step establishes a check-in process. This helps avoid the perception of micromanaging because it's predetermined when check-ins are already going to be. Here, a leader asks if any help is needed or if an employee can also identify where support's needed. Step five is to provide dual feedback. This is where you as a leader practice giving and accepting feedback on how each of you is doing, both the leader and the employee. Provide the positives first and then areas to improve the next time. And then finally, reinforcement. Remember, accountability is a personal choice with personal consequences. Positive actions, behaviors, results, and progress need to be recognized so they can be repeated. Unacceptable actions, behaviors, and results must be addressed so they provide and can improve over time. So let's look at a very typical scenario in many dealerships or distributors. I have two questions that I'll ask you at the end. One is, is the individual accountable and how would you evaluate performance? So in this case, Ben works in sales, and his objective is to increase market share. He's identified a great opportunity for a very large sale, but it's time-sensitive, and the competition has product available. The challenge, product availability. And so this individual, Ben, has done the following. They've been in continuous dialogue with the manufacturer. They've contacted other dealerships outside the territory to see if there's any product available. They've looked at rental options. They've reevaluated the job requirements to see if a different piece of equipment might work. They've brainstormed with both their peers and their boss. So here's the question. Ben loses that sale. Was he accountable? And how would you evaluate his performance? If you like this one, you'll find several more in the homework assignment that follows. Real-life situations, decision-making points on how accountability will be handled and how it will be used in your organization. Huge impact on strategy execution. So we've now concluded video number three of four. We'd encourage you to go to the individual exercises and, again, apply some of the tools, techniques, and concepts in more detail in your organization. And we look forward to seeing you for the fourth and final video. Welcome back. Video four of four, Owning the Vision. In this session, we'll be covering two subjects, employee engagement, which we believe is the fuel for your organization, and high performance. Let's start with employee engagement. For this session and this topic of engagement, we're going to ask you to understand and be able to examine five strategic questions. We're going to share with you and help you discover the importance not only of rational factors for engagement but also emotional factors. We'll help you better identify what engagement looks like, sounds like, through actions and behaviors. We'll teach you the four-step techniques so you can determine if there is sustainability with your engagement. And we'll also ask you to compare your actions against ten needs that all employees have that drive engagement. So for purposes of this topic, let's consider employee engagement to be simply commitment, effort or discretionary effort, and loyalty while I'm employed in your organization. Not necessarily loyalty for life, but loyalty while I'm employed in your organization. Loyalty to your brand. Loyalty to your mission. Loyalty to your values. Loyalty to your business strategy. So many, many things have been written about engagement and research. Here's just a few. Sunny Pictures executive said that employee engagement has been about believing that the culture of the companies is as important as the product. Employee engagement must be an investment. We handle investments totally differently than we handle expenditures. You'll see and read lots of research where you'll see employee engagement has a huge impact on customer experience. Jim Owens, retired CEO of Capitola said it's the first thing required to win on the global stage. Research by the Conference Board showed that highly engaged employees have a huge performance difference compared to their disengaged colleagues. The HAY organization's research concluded that if someone's in sales that they have a significantly higher impact on generating revenue if they're engaged. Corporate Leadership Council said, you know, if you've got engaged employees, you're going to have less attrition issues. They're going to stay with your organization. And then the Gallup organization through a very extensive study concluded that there is a well-established connection between engagement and many performance outcomes including customer rating and profitability, shrinkage, safety, quality, et cetera. Finally, research also indicated that a disengaged employee in the workforce can cost you about $0.34 per dollar of salary. Very significant. So let's take it one step further. Let's look at some specific research about a major equipment dealer study. This occurred with a major industrial leader in construction equipment. They looked at a number of dealerships and then branches within those dealerships. And they compared the engagement levels in those organizations to some standard metrics that they used to measure the performance. They found that highly engaged hit their financial targets more often. They had less rework from technician-related errors. Their productivity was higher. Their safety in accidents were significantly lower. And that their turnover of employees was significantly lower. So there was some definite correlation or relationships between high levels of engagement and other critical business metrics. So here are five key messages that very quickly you can determine how important engagement is in your organization. If employee engagement is discussed, is it considered a need to do or a nice to do? Does it have strategic value or not? Secondly, the dealerships think that it's an outcome or an objective. Dealers that have only used survey results to determine what their engagement is and nothing else see it as an objective. And many of them have fallen short of maximizing their business return on engagement. Is employee engagement considered a program or a process? Highly effective organizations and high performing have used engagement and integrated it into their daily business processes. It's not seen as a stand-alone HR initiative. Things like lean manufacturing, things like performance management have been integrated into with engagement elements. Fourth, is engagement considered a sole or mutual responsibility? Many organizations have fallen short with engagement and its impact on strategy execution because they have not treated it as mutual responsibility. There's a responsibility for engagement by the company, by the leaders, and the employees. Too often many organizations have not created the responsibility for their employees as well. And finally, with leaders being so busy today, do they consider engagement to be more things to do or simply how they do the things they're supposed to do as a leader of people? So let's clarify engagement just a little bit. First of all, many people confuse satisfaction with engagement. Satisfied employees show up to work. Engaged employees are committed. Satisfied employees don't leave their organization, although they may not be making huge contributions. Engaged employees plan to stay in advance and therefore are making contributions. And finally, satisfied employees go through the motions, do what they're told, at least while you're watching. Engaged employees contribute in active, positive ways consistently. There's also another way of looking at this. It's about maximizing four needs. When you want to engage an employee, you're trying to maximize their head, which is their creative ideas and problem-solving capabilities. You're trying to maximize their heart, which is moving from the commitment stage, not the compliance stage. You're looking for their hands to physically do the work. And then you're looking for their habits to make sure they're consistently aligned with what you desire. So lots and lots of research on engagement. Two buckets, ultimately, of factors. Over 300 factors have been identified over the years. They fall into these two buckets called rational and emotional. Rational ones must be done first. The most common rational items are things like, do you have competitive wages and benefits? Do you have a safe work environment? Do you provide basic tools and training and job responsibilities for the individual? That's a ticket of admission into the engagement arena. They have to be provided first, and they have to be properly maintained. But then research shows that you will not maximize employee engagement unless you move over to the emotional side. The emotional side is comprised of what we call the triple I, identity, importance, and impact. Identity stands for what does it mean to be part of your dealership? What's different about it? Why should an employee be proud to be part of your dealership with its rich history and its bright future? That's identity. Secondly, importance. Why is it so important that your employees do things a certain way in your dealership, perhaps different than they've ever done before? Why is it so important to follow your policies and your practices and your procedures? Why is it so important to live your values? And then finally, the third is impact. What impact does the employee make on the big picture? For example, an employee thought that they only made bricks until they're taken to a cathedral where the bricks were being used. The employee understood their impact and better described their role as helping build great structures. So what would your employees in your dealership at all levels say the impact they have? What is someone picking parts? What is someone doing maintenance on equipment? What's someone doing data gathering? Every single job is important to the big picture. The other critical element with the III is delivery. The best delivery is when leaders and other employees tell their stories about identity, about importance, and about impact compared to just throwing it out on some electronic media. One thing we always talk about with clients regarding employee engagement is that it is a contact sport. Research also tells us that if you maintain the rational side and move over to the emotional side, that you will get a three or four times the return on your investment with time, money, and resources instead of only playing on the rational side. So it's important. It has a huge potential impact on strategy, execution, and business results. So what does it look like? Well, here's a few examples. If your employees consistently offer each other help, participate in meetings and not just show up, make suggestions for improvement either formally or informally, willingly volunteer, pay attention to metrics on how to improve them and achieve them. If they're strong advocates for your products or services and your brand both when they're at work and when they're outside of work. When they treat all your resources, your time, your money, and other individuals prudently. When they give each other recognitions for job well done and a pat on the back. And when you hear things like we and us and our versus me, I, and they, then you might have engagement. Now one of the challenges with engagement is making sure that it's sustained. Sometimes people declare victory too soon and get a false reading. So here's a very simple tool that you can use practically to see where you are with engagement. It involves doing four things right. You do the right thing, which is aligned to your goals and values, to your strategy. The employee does it at the right time, very timely doing it. They do it the right way. They follow your processes and your procedures and your policies the way you want things done. And they do it for the right reason. They move past the compliance mode into commitment and ideally into the norm. So let's look at a couple practical examples. You'll be asked to use the same tool when you get to the individual exercises at the end of this session. So for example, in your organization you gain consensus with your peers in a meeting only because the boss is in the room. So did you do the right thing? Yes, you gained consensus. Did you do it at the right time? Yes, you were all together. Did you do it the right way? Perhaps you listened to each other's ideas. But did you do it for the right reason? Absolutely not. It was done primarily because the boss was in the room. So you do not have engagement. How about you attend a mandatory meeting, you arrive late, and do other work? Well, you did the right thing, you went to the mandatory meeting, but you weren't on time, you're not doing it the right way because you're multitasking and not being respectful, and you're not doing it for the right reason, you only went there because it was mandatory. So therefore, that behavior and that engagement is not sustained. Finally, you take time to listen to a customer, to explore options to satisfy their needs, and you resolve the issue. You did the right thing, you listened to the customer, you did it at the right time, you did it the right way, you explored options, and you did it for the right reasons so you could resolve the issues, though that truly is engagement. So if any of the answers are no, then you don't have sustained engagement. The results or perceptions will most likely be short-term at best. So remember, no partial credit, and look at some of the real things that are happening today in your organization. All dealerships want active engagement and sustained engagement. They want that positive engaged behavior, but sometimes they forget that their actions and actions of leaders left unaddressed can actually hurt engagement. So let's just look at a few. When you're not available and you're not visible and accessible, when there are unclear roles and responsibilities, back to that clarity issue again, also impacts accountability. When there are extended periods of work-life imbalance in your organization, or when there's compromise with health and safety issues, even minute ones. When there's blaming and shaming for mistakes, not only have you missed a boat in accountability, you're also going to hurt engagement. Or when you cut corners and undercut people, when you make them feel that they can be easily replaced, that they don't like what they're doing or how they're being asked to do it, or downplaying the need for showing appreciation and just thanking people for a job well done. When your focus and communications are on only what's in it for the business and not what's in it for the employees as well, you'll miss engagement opportunities. Or when people have questions and you don't get back to them in a timely manner at all, or at all, that will hurt engagement. So here's six principles that we would encourage you to help drive engagement. You will have heard some of these already in this overall self-study course. First, let values be your guide. Research by the Ethics Research Center actually confirms that ethical behavior promotes employee engagement. Secondly, research shows 70% of mistakes are caused by a breakdown in communications. So the better you are in communicating, remember communications is three steps. Share information. Generate understanding. Reinforce key messages. The better you are at doing that, you provide clarity and that will help you with execution and that will help you with engagement. Third, focus on relationships. Research indicates there is up to a 30% difference in measured engagement when leaders show a genuine interest and concern for their employees. And remember, we discussed this factor also very important in driving accountability. Next, recognize what you want more of. Showing appreciation through non-monetary means has a three times greater factor compared to monetary rewards. Showing appreciation, saying thank you in a sincere, timely, specific way has a huge impact on engagement. Next, there are common everyday things leaders should look and listen for that indicate engagement or disengagement is happening. In addition to the items that we shared earlier of what engagement looks like, watch for things like patterns at the beginning or end of the shift. The level of people referring other individuals to your organization. How about attendance at optional or voluntary events? It's not always the location or what you're serving for food that causes people not to come. And or a willingness or unwillingness to wear and carry your business name or logo on shirts, on jackets, on stickers, on hats, you name it. Finally, focus on results, not activities. Don't create a false sense of security by increasing activities without achieving closure. Let me give you a simple example. If you conduct any type of formal employee survey without providing timely feedback on what was heard and or taking any tangible action, it's simply an activity. In fact, research shows that in survey work, if you use this incompleted process and don't provide timely feedback and tangible actions, that actually morale and effectiveness will increase. So one challenge in employee engagement is a tendency to read lots of articles and see lots and lots of things that talk about differences compared to common wants and needs. We believe there are ten needs all employees in your workforce need to be engaged. They cross boundaries and borders and ages and genders and ethnicity and education levels and household compositions, et cetera. So think about these ten and how well your organization is doing. Affiliation. People want to belong to a winner. Do they feel you're a winner? Do you make them feel like a winner? Second, they want affirmation. Before you tell them they need to work on something or improve, they also need some recognition as to what they're doing well. Third, achievement. They want to take pride in what they've accomplished. They know there's menial tasks, but they also want to do things that really matter. So help them understand how it really matters with what they're doing. Help them with their impact. And then camaraderie, not only with their coworkers, but also those relationships with other leaders and their direct boss. Again, ethical values especially are measured when tough decisions and choices have to be made. In fact, I personally have seen engagement levels maintained or improved during really tough decision-making times because of how well values-based behaviors were exercised. Equity. Employees all want fairness in procedures and how they're applied to everyone consistently on how things are distributed, including praise, reward, recognition, and interpersonal activities like just access to individuals. They want to be informed on what's going on, how they can impact it, what they need to do the same, what they need to do differently. They absolutely want personal development. Employees, regardless of age and or ethnicity or race, doesn't matter. They want to thrive. They don't want to just survive. People want a safe place to work, not just a physical environment that's safe, but also an emotional one where they feel that they can express their opinions in a respectful way and they won't be put down or ignored. And finally, they want to feel valued and appreciated, not taken for granted, not considered to be just another number, not considered to be someone that the door can hit them in the butt as they leave. They want to feel valued. All employees, if you're doing well in these ten areas for all your employees, I would conclude that you probably have high levels of engagement. So finally, in this session we're going to talk about high performance and we're going to do it in a couple of ways. We're going to introduce you to a new model, and we're going to ask you to think about high performance being three things. It's getting superior results, faster in your competition, and you can remain resilient regardless of the changes in the economy, the changes in the business climate. That's high performance. So here's the model. It has several components. First of all, strategy. Second of all, processes. Third of all, accountability. Sounds familiar with the things we've been talking about in the self-study course. And finally, results. So here's what we're looking for. In strategy, we're trying to better understand things like, was your strategy well thought out? Do people understand it at all levels in the organization? Are they aligned to it? Are they committed to it? Do they know how it's going to be measured on whether you're successful or not? Do they know the milestones? And do they have confidence in the strategy and that it will make a difference, not only for the organization but for them? Secondly, we're looking at organizational culture processes. We talked about these earlier. Those things and processes that inform, teach, and reinforce. Are they sequenced? Are they skipped? Is there discipline execution? Do they need to be revised and improved, but are they being executed well while they're under construction? And finally, accountability. Individual accountability moving from compliance to commitment and then hopefully getting the masses to move to a norm. And remember that you must have full engagement to maximize accountability. So let's see how the model works. So first and foremost, let's remember this is used for illustration and to identify strengths and weaknesses. It's intended to give your organization an absolute value. So let's look at example A. In example A, strategy is seven. So we would conclude that our strategy is above average. We rate strategy on a one to ten scale. We also rate organizational cultural processes on a one to ten scale. For organizational cultural processes, we rate it at a four. We decided that it wasn't well sequenced. We had skipped some steps. Some steps were incomplete, and we weren't executing very well. Therefore, we weren't informing, teaching, and reinforcing people properly. And then finally, individual accountability rated on a scale of one to three. One is compliance. Two is commitment. Three is a norm. In this case, we're in the compliance mode. People are doing it because it's mandatory, and not everybody is doing it or doing it unless leadership is around. So if we take the product of strategy times organizational processes, take them to the power of individual accountability, the results are 28. So therefore, the civil straights that we have fallen way short of our potential. So let's look at a different example, example B. In this case, our strategy is still the same. It's above average. But now we have spent more time and we have sequenced our processes that inform, teach, and reinforce better. We're not skipping steps, and we have more disciplined process in those processes, even if they're not perfect. We also have more people doing it regularly, so we've moved from the compliance state to the commitment state. And when we take strategy times organizational process, take them to the power of individual accountability, now our results are significantly different. In fact, over 80 times better. Again, not an absolute value, but absolutely showing you the critical importance of organizational culture processes and the disciplined execution as well as accountability. We'll be giving you a number of these exercises to do in the personal exercise section, and we'll also be asking you to evaluate where you think your organization is using this model. One final illustration on high performance, think about it this way. You can have GPS, or you can have an old-fashioned map. You can have a high-performance engine, or you can have one that's in desperate need of repair and maintenance. You can put some really good fuel in your tank, or you can put some bad gas. And you can have leaders who are well-trained and are going to follow the disciplined processes that are required. Or you can have a leader or a driver who is going to go from point A to point B, but is going to scare a lot of people in the process. Think about the GPS being your strategy. And when people slightly get off course, it recalculates. We're just letting everybody pick their own direction and their own route to go. The engine is your culture. The culture of your organization, the accepted or perceived way that you do things. Engagement becomes the fuel. And, yes, the fuel may be consumed short-term, but you can refill the tank with proper behaviors and activities. And the driver is leadership. Are the leaders going to take this as a nice to do, a need to do? Are they going to take it as their responsibility or someone else's responsibility? And are they going to ultimately do what the organization is asking them to do and do it in a high-quality, efficient way? So the next steps for you as you finish this fourth video are as follows. We would ask you not to forget follow-up. So we've left you with some follow-up application activities that you'll find in the workbook. During the four videos, we have provided over 20 different topics and ideas and techniques. There's a checklist for you in your workbook so that you can use it as a guide. And then we would finally challenge you to take what we call a 7, 10, 14-day challenge. We'd like you to take one thing personally from this self-study and use it and try it out in the next seven workdays. Share one thing with a peer in the next 10 workdays, and then share or do with your team in the next 14 days one of the activities or one of the concepts. That's our challenge to you. We thank you so much for your time, and we'll leave you with this final thought. Average leaders raise the bar on themselves. Good leaders raise the bar for others. And great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar. We hope that this self-study will help you not only raise the bar for yourself, but inspire many, many others. Thank you so much.

Own the Vision

self-study video course

strategy execution

business culture

values

clear communication

engagement

leadership

change management

employee engagement

high performance

satisfaction

model for high performance

positive business culture