It’s the 4th July holiday week here in the US. Many will enjoy a long weekend of fun, family and some fireworks for good measure. To fit the holiday vibe, I thought this week I would reflect on the fun moments of a career when everything comes together and you’re on a roll. What can we learn from the best of times?
First, these moments don’t come along every year like the holidays. It is rare that all the stars align. Your plans are working better than you hoped, delivering great results and boosting your team’s enthusiasm and output. Energy begets energy. So, the priority, is to make this rare period last as long as possible. This requires the rarest skillset of the strategist. Editing. It is so easy to adopt an abundance mindset in the good times. You add more and more because everything seems to be working. In fact, it is the time to be very disciplined. Boil the success down to the essential repeatable model that drives it. Make sure each aspect of that is sustainable and firing on all cylinders. Be diligent about distractions. Beware hubris most of all. When your success creates a lot of resources, you tend to take more ill-considered risk. Spending less wisely, assuming your success in the core will easily travel to much more tangential ideas. Be relentlessly focused on the core ideas driving the momentum.
An extension of this idea is not to be tempted to tinker. I have often found the minute some outsize success happens, that the team can be quickly disbanded to new assignments or given additional projects as a badge of honor. This is particularly true in large corporations, where “moving up and moving often” is how you succeed. It seems to make sense to advance the team, but in fact you are taking great risk with the momentum. The smart thing is to insulate that momentum and let it achieve the best results for as long as possible. Equally problematic is the way executive teams can play the portfolio. A bunch of business issues elsewhere can be overlooked and compensated by the momentum of the best performers. In so doing, you milk the golden goose when you should be feeding it. Those other issues remain unresolved and bite you once the momentum businesses can no longer cover it. Deal with tough issues in the good times and you will outperform for longer. Let your high performing priorities get all that they need first, and balance the books with whatever the remaining portfolio must deliver.
Finally, never take success for granted. The best business teams I have overseen had a consistent pattern. They would accept my demands for tight focus and bold ambition and would constantly tell me what they needed to achieve that. We found a balance of delivering results to stakeholders while reinvesting part of our success in what needed to come next. I found these successes had me much less involved in execution detail as I trusted the high performing teams implicitly. Instead, I was the backer who would listen to what was needed and look for ways to help get that. I have always believed the best teams need a patron who creates the conditions for them to do their best work and then gets right out of their way! That can be one of the most rewarding leadership experiences. Seeing teams fulfill their potential and blow past your ideas and expectations. Those are fun times in business.
Enjoy the holiday for all who celebrate!