This article is Part 2 of a seven-part series on the importance of drive in the home building industry by sales consultant Jason Forrest. Click here for the introduction and here for Part 1.
A few years ago, as my company was in the process of hitting one of its first growth spurts, I had my first three-day conference trip. I’d never been away from the office for three consecutive days before, and I left the day-to-day running of the business in the hands of my leadership team. In many ways it was a new experience for all of us.
We held – and still hold – meetings each Thursday with our trainers called Thursday Throwdown. It’s an important part of our week where we take two hours to train our trainers and learn from our experiences from the previous week. I returned from the conference on Friday and asked my team how Thursday Throwdown went. They told me that since I was gone, they hadn’t held it.
I immediately recognized this as a teachable moment and a turning point in how I viewed our second behavior observed from drive: being self-directed and managed. If things didn’t get done when I was gone for three days, what would happen if I wasn’t there for a week? Or two?
This became a constant push of ours over the following months and years. For an organization to work at peak efficiency, leaders and employees alike have to uphold the same standard whether the entire C-Suite is gone or if CEO was feet away in their office. This is a key observable behavior of being in drive; that your company hums along at top speed whether leadership is in house or not because everyone’s drive comes from within, not from without.
Fast forward to several years later. I put our new self-directed model to the ultimate test when I left for a 10-day retreat with no cell phone service. Even if I was desperately needed, my team couldn’t contact me. I returned to find that not only had everything gone seamlessly in my absence, but the team closed the biggest contract we’d ever had while I was gone. Needless to say, I was as proud of my team that day as I’ve ever been. To this day, this lesson is one of the biggest facets of our award-winning leadership training program.
I define true workplace culture as what happens when the boss isn’t looking. The more we can create a culture that drives employees and leadership teams to operate on a self-directed path fueled by their own desire to succeed and not just to make the boss happy, the happier and more genuinely productive employees we’ll have.
The biggest modern innovation in grilling is something called a pellet grill. These are different from a traditional grill in that they automatically and constantly feed the fire with preloaded pellets. This keeps the fire at a constant temperature during cooking without ever needing to fumble with adding fuel to the fire yourself. This is the cornerstone of a fully functioning, self-managing company culture.
When you afford your employees trust and give them responsibility, they’ll be able to constantly fuel their own fires without pesky and inefficient micromanaging. If we’re looking for long term growth in our companies, in truth we all want our offices to be pellet grills.
Ron Siegel is a professor at Harvard University, and in his lecture series ‘The Science of Mindfulness,’ he argues that the key to turning a task from a “have to” into a “want to” is largely a matter of environment. Our brains, he argues, are still hardwired to survive in dangerous environments, and guarding against danger when we perceive it outranks everything else.
This, he says, is still the case, meaning people who have an optimistic viewpoint are accessing parts of their brains that allow them to see tasks and objectives not as dangers, but as opportunities. And work environments that foster this kind of thinking inevitably have more optimists than pessimists.
The reason so many alcoholics don’t quit despite the destructive nature of their actions is because their motivation is negatively reinforced both internally and externally; they contemplate the difficulty of the task ahead and what they’re giving up first and foremost. The ones who do recover have completely different mindsets encouraged by positive community groups; they think about how good it will feel to be healthy and to get those moments of their life back.
This kind of positive reinforcement instills companies with a self-directed, internally-motivated drive fed by the knowledge that their company leadership has their back and wants the best for them. When employees feel this from their leaders, they’ll have a mindset that keeps them driving forward with a positive outlook and internal motivation no matter the circumstance.
