It takes practice

What is "it"? Well....it's anything. There's simply nothing you can expect to be good at without a lot of practice. This holds true in sports, acting, music, writing, and yes - also in business. The difference is that in business we're often not given (or giving) the opportunity to "practice" - everyone is always competing.

This is a huge problem.

Practice is where you get to make mistakes. Practice is where you push yourself to limits you're not quite sure you can handle. Practice is sometimes successful only when you identify the point where you fail. I'm a huge believer in the theory that we learn more from success than we learn from failure. But I also believe that no one becomes successful without a lot of practice and that sometimes the best practice sessions are filled with mistakes. The key is to keep the mistakes small, contained and to learn from them.

I was a springboard diver from about the age of 7 and continued all the way through my senior year at the University of Iowa. The amount of practice time compared to actual competition time was astronomical. We would practice 6 days a week and 4 hours per day, but we would only have competitions once every couple weeks. When we competed though, we were ready and in top form - because we practiced so much.

In the world of business, this practice to competition ratio is completely flipped.

Rarely are developers, project managers, designers, marketers and a host of others given the opportunity to practice. People are expected to perform at "competition" levels without ever being given the opportunity to push themselves to their professional limits. The result is one of two things: When mistakes are made they're huge with tremendous impact, or talented people find themselves in positions well below their abilities and ultimately become bored from the lack of stimulation.

The other thing that's required to make practice effective though is coaching. Unfortunately, this is something that a lot of managers are either unwilling or unable to do for their people and it's a real shame. Coaching takes knowledge, skill, time, patience and effective communication. How many managers do you know that possess all of what's needed to provide proper coaching? Is it any wonder then that people aren't given the opportunity to practice?

The combination of constant competition along with a managers' inability to coach virtually guarantees most employees aren't going to get practice time. The opening here is for those of us who can coach, and are willing to let our employees push themselves to their limits. We need to recognize that if we've hired people with talent, then we owe it to them to give them practice time.

This means giving them more responsibility than others might be willing to give them. It means knowing ahead of time that some mistakes will be made and being okay with it. Most importantly though, it means being able to take the time to coach them.

How much practice time are you getting? How much coaching are you providing? The answers are more important than most people realize.

Don't define yourself by your liabilities

When I started Ideal Project Group back at the end of 2006, I received what is probably some of the best business advice I have ever received - don't define yourself by your liabilities. I had (and still have) the good fortune of knowing Stephen Neish, CFO for Voxeo Corporation and he warned me that too often businesses believe it's their liabilities that make them legitimate. He explained that he had seen countless organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on everything from leather couches to flat screens to servers that could provide capacity they probably wouldn't need for years - all in an attempt to legitimize themselves.

Three years later, being more profitable than General Motors, Bank of America, Citibank and a host of other zombie corporations littering our economic landscape, I'm glad I listened to his advice and thought I should pass it along.

The reality is, profits are what make you legitimate.

If you're thinking of starting a business, or have one already, allow your profits and your assets to be your guiding light - not your liabilities. Thinking of starting a web development firm? Do you really need office space right now or can you work out of a public library with free Wi-Fi? Want to open a restaurant? Do you really need a score of $2,000 flat panels? Opening a boutique retail shop? Is it necessary to spend $20,000 or more on hardwood floors?

Now, during the course of identifying yourself by your profits and not your liabilities there will be those who attempt to diminish you and/or your company. Why? Because it's very easy for people to see your liabilities; it's not so easy for them to see your profits.

I cannot count the number of times someone has tried to belittle the company I am building. You just have to be willing to shrug it off keeping only one thing in mind - anyone that tries to diminish you or your business because you don't have more liabilities is almost certain never to have started their own company. It's also helpful to remember it's a lot easier to tell someone else how they should spend their money than it is to spend it yourself.

Don't define yourself by your liabilities. Good luck; and may your profits allow you to succeed.

Talent Problems Cannot be Solved with Process

Sometimes work doesn't get completed because it wasn't clear to the person who needed to do the work that they were responsible for the task at hand. Sometimes work is completed late because due dates were not communicated clearly. Other times, work isn't completed because something else suddenly took higher priority. In these instances, a new process may help prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. Keep in mind, a "process" in these examples may amount to nothing more than a simple list of priorities or it may be something more complex. None the less, they are issues that can be solved by providing greater clarity on priority, responsibility, and delivery dates.

Sometimes however, tasks aren't completed or priorities are mixed up because the person responsible for doing the work is simply not good at their job. No amount of process will turn a poor performer into a good performer. I could follow the same workout routine, eat the same food and wear the same shoes as Kobe Bryant. Guess what - I'm still going to be a crappy basketball player. I simply don't have the talent that he has.

To take the sports analogy a bit further, look at how often teams change their players. Even dynasties that keep the same core athletes still identify ways to make their teams stronger, and this often involves getting rid of athletes that aren't performing.

Now, I'm not suggesting that companies should be going around looking for people to fire. What I am saying though is that before implementing new processes and procedures, you should make sure that you're not trying to address a talent problem.

If you truly have issues with clarity, prioritization and ownership then a little more process may be exactly what you need - no matter how lightweight it may be. If however you're trying to correct someone's performance by adding more process, don't do it because it won't work.

The Importance of Momentum

Gaining and keeping momentum on a project is a critical component of it's success. In the same way that a car requires a lot of energy to initially get going, projects generally require an initial burst of energy. Once this is applied though, if you can maintain your momentum a much smaller amount of energy is required to keep moving at the speed to which you initially accelerated.

Likewise, once you've lost your momentum, it takes a pretty large amount of energy just to get things moving at the same pace again. It's not just inconvenient, starting and stopping on a project quite simply wastes a lot of energy. People need reminding as to what the priorities are. Team members become engaged on other initiatives. Vendors may think you're not serious about working with them. Employees question the importance of the project. The list goes on and on. In fact, I would argue that not starting a project is much better than starting a project that constantly loses it's momentum.

When I was in college I waited tables, and the worst shift was always Sunday evenings. Service was bad, mistakes would be made in the kitchen, the host or hostess would be MIA, etc. Why? Because Sunday night was by far the slowest time of the week; we would never get any momentum going for the evening. When a customer would come in we'd be annoyed that we couldn't keep joking around in the kitchen. We'd be eager to have our "shift beer" and no one was making much money that night anyway. In contrast, on a Saturday night when we were busy, things would be humming along smoothly.

It's the same situation with projects. No one wants to work on a something that seems like it's on life support. People like working on fun, active, fast-paced projects where tasks are regularly being completed. It turns out that these are also the easiest to manage because they have a ton of momentum - they only require a little bit of energy to keep things moving quickly. You may need to steer one way or the other and slow down or speed up in different situtions, but relative to starting from a near stand-still it's a negligible amount of energy.

Momentum is very real, and losing it on your projects can have far reaching ripple affects which are almost never good.

The hidden cost of corporate politics and the benefits of confrontation

Corporate politics and the people who engage in them account for an extraordinary amount of waste, in terms of both time and money. We've been so wired to avoid confrontation, that issues fester for weeks, months, and often times even longer. Instead of addressing problems head on, and rewarding those who demand that they be resolved, passive aggressiveness takes over and relationships become permanently tainted.

Instead of having open debate, disputes are resolved by the person who can more effectively bend the ear of an executive over lunch. Instead of making someone justify a position against available evidence to the contrary, people who bring forth the evidence are encouraged to wait for something to "blow up".

It can be a funny place, the corporate world, where one is judged not only on the basis of their performance, but also their ability to control other people's perception of their performance. It's a world where the way someone reacts to a bone-headed decision becomes more important than the original problem itself.

It seems sometimes that in the corporate world you get all the bad things from politics, and none of the good. You get the ear bending, schmoozing, jockeying for position, and behind closed doors rule making. But you don't get Freedom of Information, an appeals process, open debates, challenges to authority, or any of the other stuff that makes politics fun.

What I'm driving at here though is that all of this has a cost, and it's huge. When the corporate politicians are running around, sales aren't getting closed. Software isn't being built. Automation of manual processes isn't happening. New products aren't being introduced.

The problem is, the cost rarely affects the people playing this "game" - at least not immediately. In fact, they're often times rewarded if they play the game well. The reward might come in the form of a promotion, a raise, or maybe even just a little more credibility the next time a similar issue rolls around.

But if they're not paying the cost, then who is? The people signing their checks, that's who. It's the shareholders, or the entrepreneur, or maybe even their fellow colleagues who aren't going to get a bonus because everyone wanted to avoid getting into an argument or being perceived as a trouble maker.

Confrontation isn't comfortable, and it isn't always the answer either. Sometimes though, a little confrontation is all you need to figure out who's stopping you and your company from being its best; you would be wise to encourage it every now and then.