What is it you see?

This is a scale showing my last weigh in. That's what you see, but is it really? Do you see a weight that has gotten out of control and puts me at a health risk? Or do you see a weight that is 20 lbs lighter than I was 2 months ago. Maybe this is quite an achievement for me? Why might different people see the same thing but come to two totally different conclusions on what they saw?

See this smile? What do you see? Someone flirting with you? Maybe its an act of kindness? Or maybe yet, its a little bit of cynicism? How do you know? What makes something you see clear to you?







Seeing is not just an activity of the eyes. The reality is that how you feel and what you do is not about what you see, it's what you see it is.

Seeing is really about perceiving and perceiving is more than seeing. When we encounter our environment and observe what it entails, we take in more than data (199 lbs or a smile), we take in information (a good weight or a bad weight and the intent of the smile). Information is data that we have given context and the context we give is based on biases and filters that are part of our sense-making system. Each one of us has one and each is different from all others.

There are far too many examples of this because it goes on all the time and is even happening right now. You see words, but you make sense of them in context. Who wrote them and does the author have credibility or not? How are you feeling at the time you read them? Are you confident and hopeful or are you fearful or cynical? Are you distracted at the time or are you giving what you see your full attention?

Someone says something to you. Do you trust them or not? Do they make you feel good about yourself or not? What are your needs at the time? What are your expectations of this person?

Your boss gives you feedback. You do not just see the feedback, you see what it is, what it means to you based on the context that defines your relationship with your boss and preconceived notions or biases about the company, the boss, and your peer employees.

Your gender, your age, your personality, your culture, your experiences, knowledge, beliefs and more determine more than what you see, these control what you see it is. Learning to trust yourself less with your initial response to what others do and say will help you be less judgmental. Be intentional to shine a light on your perceptual biases and filters to understand and validate the context so that the data you receive is not distorted information.

To be a good leader you must develop clarity in what you see others do. How do you do that? How do you sharpen your vision.

Faith, which is trusting not what you see but what you know to be true, is essential in the maturity of SEEING WHAT IT IS! 

Trugreen: Why Chapter 5 Matters

As many of you know understanding and explaining strategy for individuals and companies is one of my priorities in late life. So much so I wrote a book on strategy called "Winning in a Hostile Environment". Section Two of the book deals with seven reasons companies fail. These are not common topics for business people, not taught in Strategy classes to MBA's, and seldom discussed within executive chambers as the keys to good strategy. Therefore many people do not elaborate much on these 7 points, especially executives who are more likely to follow institutional prescriptions for success.

It has intrigued me that while some may dismiss my points and not choose to elaborate on these challenges, I see examples everywhere of how companies fall prey to these snares. Latest case in point is my experience with Trugreen Lawn Care. They have really good marketing and customer plans for service. They say all the right things that customers would want to hear. They make it easy to purchase and pay for the services. BUT, exactly how do they line up with Chapter 5?

Chapter 5 claims that companies lose when they choose to approach strategic initiatives as if they were utilitarian. That may sound too academic or complex to apply, but it is very simple and profound to winning or losing. So what do I mean by the strategic point in Chapter 5? Let me give you my story and I think you will see.

I subscribe for annual lawn care service from Trugreen, which includes timely application of weed killer and fertilizer. Once a year they aerate and over seed my fescue yard. This is critical because it happens once a year and determines a great deal of how the yard will look for a year. This service is normally completed in September. They take the initiative to schedule the service and I do not even have to be home for them to execute. As expected they schedule the service, but late the day of service I get a call saying they could not do it because I didn't mark my sprinkler heads so they could avoid them. I don't have a sprinkler system. They didn't put forth effort to see this. So they rescheduled. and this time i was home. They show up after 5pm on the day of schedule, two men jump out of their truck with aeration equipment, speedily move across the yard staying 3 feet from all boundaries, such as sidewalk, drive way, and mulch areas. In less than 10 minutes they were back in their truck and gone. You might say, "good job, they were motivated and efficient."

Yes, they were efficient, but they were not effective. Two things were wrong, which left me, the consumer, dissatisfied. One is that by not taking the time to aerate near the borders, I have no holes punched for new seed to fall and germinate. The second issue, they didn't even put down any seed, although the invoice left for the service said "aeration and over seed." Somewhat befuddled, I just assumed these service technicians were in a hurry and wanted to get home. Poor employee performance was my conclusion. trump would have said, "you're fired".

Somewhat taken back by what I experienced, I couldn't wait to call and report the poor service, get a supervisor to call me to discuss these employees and reschedule. Of course, calling was one of those experiences where you give them a number and they call back in 20 or 30 minutes. I did and they did. The call center service employee was pleasant, acknowledge my frustration and put in a message for the local manager to call me the next day. The next day I waited and by 10:30am there was no call. I proceeded then to call service center again and got a different service operator. Again, she was pleasant and agreed to resend a message to manager. She said one more thing that really got my attention. When i shared that their service felt like a "hit and run" and that the service techs were running through the yard as if they couldn't wait to get home, she said an amazing thing. "It shows in our records that your yard is 2000 sq ft and that means they are scheduled 5 minutes for that job." At first I couldn't believe what i heard and then it hit me.

Those employees were trying as hard as they could to be successful. Its just that SUCCESS meant meeting the efficiency standard for the job. It did not matter how the job was done, that it significantly failed to meet my satisfaction.  Here's what apparently is Trugreen's model - to treat strategic initiatives as if they were utilitarian, a formula for failure. Trugreen sees success through efficiency lenses. Employees are doing as they are rewarded.


Here's the point of Chapter 5 - Strategic initiatives are anything a company does that affects why someone would be your customer or consumer. In this case the aeration/ over seed service is clearly a strategic initiative. BUT, Trugreen believes that success is how efficient they do the service, not how effective. Utilitarian initiatives of a company, such as accounting, mail room, janitorial, and such, need to be efficient only. That's OK. They make a good application for Lean 6-sigma. However, when things a company does that effects the customer/consumer experience is primarily about being efficient without first being effective. The company will lose.

BTW, I have since found that everyone I thought were using Trugreen had fired them already. I am the last, but its now done!!!  

does money motivate?

This is a popular topic in human behavior. The dominant view is "not yes, but heck yeah." But the relationship between money and motivation is very complex. Here are a few principles:

1. the monetary reward must be of a size to have value (e.g., 2% raise vs 15%)
2. the monetary reward must be proximal to the behavior, that is, the money to be gained must be closely associated with what the person must do to get it.
3. the monetary reward is competing with other types of rewards, especially intrinsic rewards of meaning, significance, and enjoyment
4. the monetary reward is often a symbol for some other value the person has, such as fairness, status, and power

The research on when money motivates is quite extensive and basically concludes that money alone often does not motivate a specific behavior and reward givers must not see monetary rewards as a silver bullet to motivation.

But I want to venture into an area of this topic that may be more prevalent than the attention given to it. That is, what are the motivational implications of monetary rewards exceeding the need of the individual for money. Are there behavioral risks to emotionally turning your back on money?





Let's think about it this way. How do you feel when you believe that the monetary reward for what you are doing is in excess of what you need? This is a little different than believing you are overpaid for the work. That usually results in anxiety and fear that you will be found out and that you will lose what you have.

Being rewarded with money when you either have what you need or you are highly intrinsically motivated meaning you do not associate monetary reward with your behavior can create some interesting risks. One is that the world generally associates the desire for money with motivation to do the job. Communicating to others may make them feel you do not care, which has ramifications to how they view your commitment. Research also shows that when we are doing something we love to do and then money is provided as a reward for doing it, we can begin to lose the intrinsic value of what we are doing, be less enthused, and feel obligated to the reward giver.

The main point here is that monetary rewards create feelings in each of us differently based on our needs. Our feelings affect our motivation. The world operates on a system that people do what they do in exchange for rewards. Taking a "one size fits all" view of money as a motivator is risky for the reward giver and not being sensitive to how others read our response to monetary rewards has risk for the the one being rewarded.

just something to ponder ......

a view of Worldview

Worldview is a popular notion used by scholars and practitioners to encompass individuals' and collective cognitive orientations of various aspects of our world, such as science, religion, government, business, etc. At its very core, worldview is no more than the sense-making people have of themselves and the world around them, the perspectives gained from perception and interpretation. 

While there are many influences on people's sense-making like personality, experience, beliefs, human biases, and culture, there is an interesting overarching dichotomy that seems to skew the influences of all the other levels of sense-making to one end of the spectrum or another. How anyone processes the tension between whether I am an individual or whether I am part of a collective will go a long way in determining worldview.

Interestingly, the influences on how an individual resolves this tension are both trait driven and culturally driven. Individual personalities differ in the need to be independent or the need to be affiliated. Ambient influences, such as culture, are also powerful forces for individualism or collectivism. Generally speaking, while both are contributors to sense-making, the one that will have the most influence on worldview is the one that is the strongest.

For instance, when you look at the picture above, do you primarily see a body and a tree, or do you see arms, legs, head, etc. and branches and leaves. The reality is that both exist and both have function. You can focus on your hand and make it stronger, better, well if it has been sick, and so forth. When we have to rake leaves we do not think much about the tree, but the presence of leaves or branches. Yet at the same time, the body functions and the tree has presence. The body accomplishes tasks and the tree gives shade.

Thus, the worldview of individuals will largely be shaped by their tendencies to focus on the parts or the whole. A good example is making sense of unity. If someone has more of an individual worldview, then unity is seen as equality of opportunity. If someone has a more collective worldview, then unity is viewed as equality of outcome. Unity is really exercising each individual part of the collective in its own unique way for the benefit (glory) of the collective. Neither extreme is better than the other. When your worldview comes closer to a perfect blend that you function as an individual and at the same time you function as a community, then your worldview will come closer to the truth of who you are meant to be. You have a personal identity and you have a social identity. Learning to make sense of yourself and the world around you through a lense that brings both into focus is the worldview you should strive for.

Just saying ....  

Sex and Motivational Strategies

Don't get excited yet, when I refer to sex I am referring to the male/female trait, not the act itself, With more and more females engaged in all kinds of enterprises, the question of whether one's sex matters in how individuals are motivated. If so, what should we know? Which strategies work better for men and which strategies work better for women? Keep in mind these are general tendencies recognizing that humans are quite complex and there are many factors that ultimately affect what we do.

Studies reveal that men are likely to be more competitive than women. While in individual cases this may not be true, the view of competitive achievement is still different for men and women. Men tend to want to have opportunities to compare their whatever to others. While women can be competitive, they are likely to focus more on whether they are included in the contest and how others view them than whether they actually are winning.

Within the broad sex influence on how individuals view competitive situations, there exist a personality trait that captures the competitiveness of the individual regardless of sex. So a male could be high or low in competitiveness and a female can also be high or low. Thus, what we have is a 2x2 matrix with four possibilities for motivational strategies.

A male who is high in competitiveness will give high levels of effort when there is a performance context in which his performance is compared to others and rewards are individual. It would be difficult for this male to be motivated to collaborate with others for team performance.

A male who is low in competitiveness will be sensitive to the fact that his performance is being compared to others and would likely withhold his effort if there is too much focus on competition. In this case this male would be more likely to put forth effort if emphasis was on team rewards.

A female who is high in competitiveness will give high levels of effort in a performance context when individual achievement is recognized but being a part of the competition is the major focus. A highly competitive female is more likely to be motivated by an "if one wins, all wins" strategy.

A female who is low in competitiveness is not motivated much at all in a context where individual performance is emphasized. This female is largely interested in just belonging to the team and experiencing the journey together. These individuals are motivated the most by rewards for cooperation and collaboration.

These individual differences based on sex and motivational traits are what makes leading a team so interesting. It certainly informs selection of team members based on the type of strategy to be used and shows why a "one size fits all" approach to motivational strategies is problematic.

This is .....

What's so great about winning?

Throughout history winning has had quite an appeal to individuals in society. Recently cynics of success and advocates for "everyone should win" has challenged the idea of competition. This perspective is in contrast to the principle that I grew up with, "if you cannot fail, then you cannot succeed." Individuals vary in their trait characteristic of competitiveness so everyone doesn't strive to win with the same fervor. Some compete with themselves while others prefer to avoid performance settings because they fear losing or being seen as less than competent. Let me offer an alternative view of winning - maybe its the inspirational story of a person striving in extraordinary ways and overcoming obstacles to win that makes success compelling.

Case in point.

Jason Day just won the PGA Championship. He won in historic fashion, but what caught the imagination of the audience? It was his story. His father died when he was a child and he struggled to stay out of trouble. His mother sold her house so he could attend a boarding school where he met his now friend, father figure, and caddie. His story includes many flirtations with winning major championships, finishing in the top 10 nine times. Had he not won the PGA, he would have been the first in history of golf to have or share the 54 hole lead in a major three times in a year without winning. People who do not even follow golf were drawn to his victory, not because he won, but because of his story.

We can conclude from this example and many others that chasing success is the story that matters. Obtaining success is just a validation of the chase. People soon forget who won what, but people remember the compelling stories of individuals overcoming obstacles to achieve in meaningful ways. Everyone can't win a national championship, but everyone can set goals and accomplish them. The story of winning for each individual always involves over coming obstacles to get to the desired destination.

Yet, how often is our story defined by good intentions, like short lived New Year's resolutions. Setting goals is the easy part, staying on tract in our chase is the tough part. Like Jason Day, the story that unfolds in chasing your goal has a better chance of success when their is leadership, an advocate or a coach to challenge and guide the journey, giving you objective feedback and advice that you can trust.

Everyone cannot always find or afford a coach, so my colleague and I have developed The Concierge to help you pursue your life's goals, whether personal or career. The Concierge gets to know you personally, how you are motivated and how you see the challenges of achieving a specific goal. From these insights The Concierge provides you and those who are helping you suggestions on how to overcome your obstacles. Your personality and the context associated with your goal become unique characters in your story. The role these characters play determines how your story comes out. Ultimately, this gives you more control to move past "good intentions." One thing is for sure, your story will become a better story if you have The Concierge by your side as your coach.

Check us out @ www.lmxconcierge.com

Making sense of Heaven and the Heavenlies

My cousin and others have recommended the book "Appointments with HEAVEN". This book is self told stories of Dr Reggie Anderson. Reggie grew up in a Christian family in rural Alabama in the sixties, but fell away from his faith in high school and college due to questions he had about God resulting from tragedies in his family. God never quit pursuing him and he came back to faith as he completed medical school, married, and began practicing medicine outside Nashville, Tenn.

As a physician his stories focus mainly on experiencing life and death of patients where he had personal observations of heaven and hell. In addition to his own senses of sight and sound as patients died, some actually related similar experiences as they had been clinically dead, only to return to life to share with him their own experiences.

He recalls occurrences of light, fragrance, and warmth as the veil opens and patients pass to the other side. In this context Dr Anderson sees Heaven as a destination of the soul of the believer, where it leaves this body ("shell") and is "birthed" into a body that is restored to perfect health and joy. In Heaven Christians are reunited with loved ones who had gone on before them. The details of Heaven as a destination are never clear and he admits they may be different for different people. These encounters with Heaven are real for Reggie and more pronounced than his experiences on this side of the veil. He contrasted the sights and smells of Christians with non Christians at death, convincing him of the realities of hell.

While Heaven as a destination is the book's headline, much of the book is how God provides Reggie with guidance and protection as he engages life and patients in chronic situations. His return from atheism occurred as God visited him in a dream providing him healing from his family tragedy, and a road map for his marriage and career. While his struggle with questions about God never were completely resolved, God continually provided him sufficiently for his faith.

These experiences is what i have called "the provisions and privileges of the Heavenlies," a notion i received from Dallas Willard's book "Divine Conspiracy" and my personal study of Scripture. I have been an advocate in my later years that Christians have access to Heaven before this body deteriorates and dies thru faith. I was pleased to see that eventually Reggie recognized this as much as he had been inspired to relate Heaven as a destination to the reader.

Late in the book he says, "When we are young, we often get the impression from adults that heaven is light years away, off in space somewhere, or at the very least, up in the clouds. ... We often think of heaven as an end point or a final stop on a journey. We look at life on earth as if it begins and ends here, thinking that heaven somehow lies outside all that. I view it differently. During our lives here on earth, I don;t believe we're walking toward heaven - I believe heaven walks alongside us."

I couldn't have said this better myself and certainly worth pondering ....

From Ephesians - where we reside as believers

"Blessed (lavish our affections) be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed (bestowed on) us with every spiritual blessing (provisions) in the heavenly places in Christ."

"But God. who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which he loved us, raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus."