Introduction
"To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be
good is nobler and less trouble." - Mark Twain
A woman was asked why she was wearing her wedding band on
the wrong finger. "Because I married the wrong man," she
snapped. Before we make a commitment to spend time together,
let's make sure this book is the right fit for you. If
you're trying to change and improve a team, business, or
large organization, then we're off to a good start. Where
you are in the organization is less important than what you
are. You need to be (or strongly aspire to become) a
leader. Now that doesn't mean you must have a "leadership"
job in the traditional management sense. Rather, it means
you are trying to initiate and guide change and improvement
in a team, business, or organization.
But before you try to change anyone else, you've got to
change yourself. Self-leadership is at the heart of
effectively leading others. Self-improvement is the
beginning point to team or organization improvement. If that
sounds as if I've been bungee jumping with a cord that was
just a little too long, then we clearly aren't right for
each other.
The primary objectives of this
book are:
- Irritation. I'll do my best to get under your
skin. I want to increase your dissatisfaction with your
current approach to and rate of personal and
organization change and improvement. I am assuming this
book isn't recreational reading for you. You want to
make yourself and your team, business, or organization
better. Changes of the magnitude needed to excel in
today's world are hard and uncomfortable. So I won't go
easy. I will be in your face. I'll be part drill
sergeant, part guilty conscience, and part nag (which my
wife, Heather, and our kids, Christopher, Jennifer, and
Vanessa, can tell you comes very naturally).
- Inspiration. I've tried to select a wide
variety of inspiring examples, ideas, quotations, and
illustrations. My goal is to energize and inspire you to
begin or renew your personal and organization change and
improvement process on parallel tracks. Of course, what
I find inspiring you may find exasperating, and someone
else might find amusing. So highlight, pluck out, or
skip to those sections you find the most meaningful.
- Instruction. The road to higher
performance is full of traps, pitfalls, and dead ends.
I've watched people trying to change and improve
themselves, their teams, or their organizations fall
into many of them. And I've got the scrapes and bruises
to show that I've stumbled into my fair share as well.
So I'll point out as many I can along the way. But I've
also seen and used many highly effective and very
practical improvement tools and techniques. A big part
of this book is dedicated to giving you a wide range of
personal and organization improvement tools and
techniques to choose from. You'll then need to tailor
these to your circumstances, personality, and
organization culture.
The Bigger Theme of Things
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny
matters compared to what lies within us." - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
This book is a result of my continuing quest to combine,
compress, and connect the key principles and practices that
lead to ever higher team, business, and organization
performance. My first book (written with Art McNeil), The
VIP Strategy: Leadership Skills for Exceptional Performance,
outlined (and explained how to develop) many of the
interpersonal communication, coaching, team, and cultural
skills used by exceptional leaders to improve their
organization's performance. My second book (written with
Barry Sheehy), Firing on All Cylinders: The
Service/Quality System for High-Powered Corporate
Performance, outlined the strategic organizational tools
and techniques of customer service improvement. After
completing my third book, I debated its title with the
Canadian (Macmillan of Canada) and U.S. (Irwin Professional
Publishing) publishers. We decided to call it Firing on
All Cylinders since the first edition was never
published in the United States and the Implementation
Architecture (or "cylinder model") still formed the book's
central framework. However, the second edition of Firing
on All Cylinders was substantially larger and broader
than the first edition. It outlined in much greater depth
the implementation tools and techniques of service/quality
improvement, building a team-based organization, and process
management.
Pathways to Performance cuts through the "labelism,"
jargon, buzzwords, and narrower tools of excellence,
customer service, quality, benchmarking, continuous
improvement, empowerment, teams, reengineering, process
improvement, and the like to identify the underlying
performance principles of successful organization change and
improvement. The results of those efforts hinge on the
leadership skills and personal effectiveness of the people
leading and implementing them. So the book draws from and
combines the fundamental principles underlying organization
improvement, leadership development, and personal
effectiveness.
Weaving the High-Performance
Rope
Many of the issues and principles I will touch on
throughout Pathways to Performance aren't new. In
fact, they've been with us for decades, if not centuries.
But we continually need to rediscover them for ourselves,
repackage them for our time, and make them relevant for
today's circumstances or sets of problems. In writing this
book, as in most of my work, I am not driven by what's new
as much as I am pulled toward what works. When it comes to
dealing with personal and people issues, the fundamentals of
what works have remained fairly constant through the years.
If we continue to spend time together, you'll be hearing
these core themes many times in the pages ahead:
- Balance, paradox, and dilemmas. F. Scott
Fitzgerald once declared, "The test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in
the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability
to function." One of the reasons highly effective
leaders are so effective is because they have
well-developed judgment muscles between their ears. The
balancing of hard, analytical management skills with
those of soft, intuitive leadership is an example of a
key theme you'll be hearing.
- Constant improvement. You need to keep
working in your job, team, business, or
organization while you also work on your job,
team, business, or organization. Most people strive hard
to get their work done, keep their customers happy, meet
their goals and commitments, and keep their business
afloat. High performers develop the discipline to
continually look at whether they are doing the right
things in the best way.
- Laughter and fun. You may have missed that
recent study showing that suppressed laughter goes back
down to spread the hips and produce gas. High performers
often have a well-developed sense of humor, fun, and
playfulness. I've consistently found that the amount of
laughter (Laughter Index) found in a team, organization,
or family is a good indicator of its health. So I hope
you'll have some laughs in our brief time together.
- Your true self. You can't build a
team, business, or organization different from you.
There must be an alignment between who you are
personally and where you're trying to take your
organization or team. An unimproved leader can't produce
an improved team or organization. It's possible that
some of the changes your organization or team needs to
make will pull them closer to your true self. This can
be especially true if you've inherited or taken over a
group, business, or organization. However, chances are
higher that you'll need to make personal changes
parallel to the organization or team changes you're
trying to make.
- No quick fixes. Lasting and effective change
and improvement come from moving beyond bolt-on programs
to built-in processes. Many people are looking for
what's new in quick-fix improvement programs. But what
works are fundamental improvement practices that become
a habitual way of life.
- Taking action. My years of research and work
with behavior-based skill development methods clearly
show that we act our way into new ways of thinking far
more easily than we can think our way into new ways of
acting. Throughout this book you may find yourself
nodding or thinking "I know that already. When's he
going to get to the new stuff?" Whenever that happens,
ask yourself "So what I am doing about it?" I'll try to
nag, spur, inspire, prod, and otherwise move you beyond
knowing to doing.
- Blazing your own improvement path. There are
as many ways to change and improve as there are people
and organizations trying to do so. This is no one right
path or approach to higher performance. What works for
me may do little for you. What works for one
organization may be impossible in yours. That's why I'll
present an array of possible pathways, actions, steps,
and routes. You need to pick through them and choose the
ones that will move you farthest along the personal,
team, and organization change and improvement course
you're on. The most important thing is that you have an
improvement plan or process.
- Leadership as action not a position. I've
seen outstanding leadership action come from people who
weren't in key leadership (management) roles. I've also
seen too many key managers fail to act like leaders.
Highly effective organizations are brimming over with
leaders at all levels and in all positions.
The themes just listed are expanded on in Chapters 1 to
4. Chapter 1 discusses the nature of change and how you
might approach, anticipate, and welcome (but not manage) it.
Chapter 2 lists the reasons improvement efforts often fail,
reasons that reside in the misuse of tools and techniques
for improvement. Chapter 3 focuses on leadership its task of
managing paradox and on performance as a balance of
technology, systems and processes, and people. It introduces
the management-leadership balance found throughout the rest
of this book. Chapter 4 provides the starting point of
leadership self-leadership. Once these themes have been
developed, Chapter 5 maps out the path the rest of the book
will take.
Three Paths Converge
Experience is a comb that nature gives us when we are
bald. - Chinese proverb
Pathways to Performance flows from three paths of
my intense study and experience in organization improvement,
leadership development, and personal effectiveness. A brief
look at these will help you understand "where I'm coming
from." You'll also understand the performance and
improvement biases I've developed and tried my best to embed
in this book.
My Personal Effectiveness Quest
I've often been asked how long it took me to write a
particular book. This one has taken more than 20 years.
That's when I first began studying and applying the personal
effectiveness principles found here.
I was raised on a dairy farm in the 1960s near a town so
small that its only heavy industry was a farm equipment
welding shop and a 300-pound encyclopedia salesman. My
father taught (and especially modeled) the values of hard
work and self-sufficiency. He had an eighth-grade education
and planned for me to take over the family farm, so
learning, personal development, and higher education weren't
important. But my mother nurtured in me a deep love of
reading. I did well in grade school, but was a C student in
high school until I completely lost interest and dropped out
at the end of tenth grade, when I was sixteen.
In 1974, after two years of working in a local grocery
store, I took a job with Culligan Water Conditioning selling
water treatment equipment. I was eighteen, and I discovered
an exciting new world. The doors to that world opened when I
took a Dale Carnegie improvement course and read Claude
Bristol's 1950s bestseller, TNT: The Power Within You.
I began to understand and apply the principles of personal
development and visioning and many of the others you'll find
in Chapters 4 to 9 and sprinkled through the rest of the
book. I started my monthly subscription to Success
magazine (which I still get today) and began studying
personal development books by Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie,
Zig Ziglar, Og Mandino, Wayne Dyer, and others. I listened
to audiotapes by Earl Nightingale (and many others) in my
car to and from my office and in between sales calls. I also
took every personal effectiveness, communications, sales,
and management course Dale Carnegie offered and began to
help teach them.
At nineteen I became a Culligan sales manager and began
studying and applying many of the leadership and personal
development principles introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 and
embedded throughout this book. The power of these
principles, tools, and skills propelled me rapidly through a
successful series of training and general management
positions at Culligan. I continued my personal development
through evening classes to finish high school and university
business, writing, communications, and liberal arts courses.
Developing The Achieve Group
By 1980, I was running one of Culligan's largest
company-owned branches with full profit and loss
responsibilities in the same way the company's franchised
operations were managed by their owners. The organization
improvement, leadership development, and personal
effectiveness principles I had been studying and applying
worked so successfully that I began to look for ways to help
others learn and use them. I started by researching the
consulting and training field in my university's library. I
then began a series of interviewing and exploration
discussions with companies in the field.
Early in 1981, I connected with Art McNeil. He had just
started a company he called "Achieve Enterprises." One of
the first training programs he offered after moving from his
basement to a shared office was SUPERVISION from
California-based Zenger-Miller, Inc. I found the people
skills, values, and practical approach offered by
SUPERVISION powerful and exciting. It was a combination of
that program, the opportunity to help thousands improve
their personal and organizational performance, and the
attraction of owning (Art offered to sell me shares in
Achieve) and managing a company with such an exciting future
that convinced me to get off my fast Culligan career track,
take a drop in pay, and join Achieve.
From 1981 to 1991, when Art and I sold The Achieve Group
to Zenger-Miller, revenues mushroomed and multiplied many
times over. Using the principles and approaches outlined in
this book, we had become the largest "strategic
consulting/training" company in Canada. Many of our
competitors either scaled back or closed down their Canadian
operations, and many of their managers applied to us for
jobs.
Achieve's growth is modest compared to that of the
legendary companies that hit hundreds of millions or even
billions of dollars in revenues within their first 10 years.
But it was just successful enough to induce me to further
develop my personal experiences and applications of the
principles that have found their way into this book. We did
well and built a strong organization. But during those 10
years we also almost went bankrupt, missed payrolls, lived
off our credit cards, invested heavily in products that
didn't sell, hired the wrong people, created a bureaucratic
maze of interconnected companies, and made a bunch of dumb
moves. So I've got just enough entrepreneurial experience to
make me dangerous. In the pages ahead, I'll use some of
those Achieve experiences to provide a few firsthand
illustrations of the agony and ecstasy found in the concepts
we'll be exploring.
Living through the sale and merger of Achieve to
Zenger-Miller (which is in turn owned by Times-Mirror
Training Group) helped me get an up-close and personal
understanding of the challenges that mergers, acquisitions,
and culture change bring. Watching the company you raised
being managed differently by someone else is very difficult.
It's probably like trying to live with one of your married
kids. The dynamics of your control or influence in their
daily decisions and the new life and routines they've
developed are now very different. That's one of the key
reasons I moved back out on my own and formed The Clemmer
Group at the beginning of 1994.
A Student of Organization Change
and Improvement
In the early 1980s my attention was focused on
establishing Achieve and carving out a presence in the very
crowded leadership skill training market. In 1983,
Zenger-Miller and Achieve worked with Tom Peters as his and
Bob Waterman's book In Search of Excellence was
gaining momentum. Our work with Tom to develop an executive
action planning process built on the excellence principles
was another personal turning point. I now had just enough
experience with leadership skill development to understand
how hard (nearly impossible) it was to sustain new behaviors
if the culture didn't encourage or reinforce the new skills.
The "Toward Excellence" process that emerged from our
work with Tom introduced strategic keys to culture change,
participation and involvement, delegating autonomy
("empowerment" later became the popular label), service and
quality improvement, innovation, and system alignment. The
excellence principles of vision, values, service,
participation, and innovation also meshed with what I'd
learned from my previous 10 years of work on personal
effectiveness.
In 1984, the work with Toward Excellence kicked
off an intense period of personal study, writing (dozens of
articles, columns, and three books), and speaking on
leadership development and organization improvement that
continues to this day. I developed an extensive filing
system to catalog and easily retrieve the articles I had
(and continue to save) from Fortune, Harvard Business
Review, Training, and many other magazines and
newsletters. My expanding library contains hundreds of books
I continue to use in the course of this ongoing research.
I've given more than 1,200 presentations on leadership
development and organization improvement. I've run nearly
two hundred senior management retreats (usually two to three
days in length), workshops, and seminars to help management
teams understand and apply these principles and approaches.
I get to see the inside of many cabs, airplanes, airports,
meeting rooms, and hotel rooms. And some day I might even
have half as much fun on one of these business trips as my
family thinks I'm having.
This work is now my full-time job. It's coming
dangerously close to being my whole life. But the main
reason for telling you all this is to assure you that the
principles, concepts, and suggestions contained in this book
are well grounded in research and have been rigorously field
tested.
How to Bend, Mutilate, and
Otherwise Use this Book
We know by doing, but we don't always do by knowing.
As you'll soon discover, I've jammed as many "how to"
tips and techniques into Pathways to Performance as I
could without turning it into a tome that you need to put
wheels on. But if all you do is read this book, I've failed.
So let's start with a few suggestions for how to move this
book beyond what I hope is "a good read" to a catalyst for
action:
- Like an oyster you can use the irritation this book
provides to help you spin a pearl. If you think a
section or suggestion is too preachy, impractical, or
far-fetched, go ahead and put a heavy X through it. You
might even give me a big raspberry (be careful not to
get the pages too wet). But come back again later and
look at the offending section. If it hit you that
negatively, it probably touched an important nerve.
There's potential improvement energy there. It could be
a good place to start your pearl.
- Read this book with pen and marker in hand. Make
notes, underline, and turn down the pages. I once signed
a second copy of Firing on All Cylinders for a
highly effective service/quality leader who had worn out
his first copy. That approach to learning was one of the
reasons he had become a service/quality leader. Of
course, the main reason was because he read and applied
my book! If you send me your beat-up and worn-out copy
of this book I'll gladly send you a complimentary,
signed replacement free of charge (see page 298 for my
address).
- When I started my personal improvement quest back in
1974 I began by putting inspirational quotes on my car's
sun visor and on my office and bathroom mirrors. Later I
put them in my day planner on yellow Post-it notes.
These have been especially helpful in my darkest times.
I have become a serious collector of quotations (with
more than 20,000 in a computerized database and dozens
of books). That's why they're liberally peppered
throughout my books. You may want to pull out the quotes
that start each section of this book to inspire your
quest for personal, team, or organization improvement.
- Take a chapter or section and review it with your
team. The management team of one company held a
management retreat that used Firing on All Cylinders.
Team members each presented a chapter, discussing what
they agreed with, what they didn't, and what the team
should do to improve in that area. Once each
presentation had been made, the team summarized and set
priorities for the areas needing attention, identified a
champion for each one, and set 30-day action plans.
- There is no quick-and-easy road to outstanding
performance. If you're looking for shortcuts or
sure-fire formulas, you've got the wrong book. I've
tried to make Pathways to Performance easy to
read and understand. But it describes a series of
transformation and improvement steps and routes that,
when added together, take years to turn into habits and
routine practices. So use this as an ongoing
guidebook; most of the work described here is never
completed. Keep coming back to this book to review,
assess, and renew the endless job of transforming
yourself, your team, and your organization.
The turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson
implored us to "think like someone of action, and act like
someone of thought." May this book help you to contemplate
and reflect on your approaches to organization improvement,
leadership development, and personal effectiveness. But most
of all, may it cause you to act.
Jim Clemmer
Kitchener, Ontario