Where do you put your attention each day? On whom? With what intention? What is the result? Are you getting the best result or are you simply trying to overcome inertia? Every leader worth anything knows the secret to success is to be able to get his or her people to get things done. The power and measure of any leader is their ability to get people to produce. The survival of your organisation is based on its ability to produce highly exchangeable results, over and over again. The assumption is that these are needed and wanted by your market. If they are not, you will need to survey and adjust, or go bust!

The challenge every leader faces at some point or another is that he or she runs into guardians of the status quo, the creators of inertia, the resistors to change. We often think that resistance to change is purely about changing direction or pursuit of a new goal. Resistance to change is more often about resisting the rate and intensity at which we pursue the goal.

At Elephants in Main Street International, we have been helping teams and leaders achieve their goals for over two decades around the world. Our turning point interventions are designed to unlock passion, raise enthusiasm and increase levels of knowledge, understanding and ultimately the ability to apply and produce.

Why are our interventions so valuable to leaders? We help leaders improve their personal capacity to engage and lead. We help leaders deal with inertia, activate their people and overcome stops and obstacles. In our experience, 90% of the problem of leadership is related to people. It all starts with the leader. It flows to the team, and if the leader uses the skills and tools learned on our turning point interventions, the organisation rockets into a new range of excellence and wellbeing.

This article captures some of the keys to success that we have shared with leaders and teams over the past twenty years. Please test each one. Some of them will give you instant success, others may be used in conjunction with each other to give you a collective benefit and resultant alignment of culture and strategic intent.

It helps you consider what you have and how it fits together? Do you know what a performance network is?

You are the head of an organisation, or you are the head of a division or department or team within that organisation. If you want to mobilise minds and activate hearts, you need to confront the fact that you are part of a performance network and/or run that network or node within a bigger network.

A performance network is a set of people (live nodes) connected by communication lines, united by a set of common or related goals.

Most leaders forget this. If you want to change the output of the performance network, you have to understand what it is and who creates positive energy inside it so that you get positive outputs from it.

Most leaders think that if they put negative energy into a network, it will somehow transform into a positive outcome. They have this weird idea that their people will absorb the criticism and miraculously transform it into something good. This sometimes works on people who are used to this kind of programming. It, however, is short-lived. The truth is that the negative stuff just slows them down and impedes their ability to unleash their real value and competence. It is a poor substitute for communication, training and understanding. When we coach senior executives we often find that their own frustrations, fears and insecurities fuel the need to criticise rather than inspire, share, collaborate, problem solve and create new opportunities for success.

Six key actions should be undertaken each moment when leading your team

1. Take a Sun Tzu viewpoint, ‘create allies rather than enemies’
2. Turn allies into rock stars, let them own the stage
3. Look for and include new players in the game, constantly listening to what is needed and wanted and letting them shape a culture of excellence, outstanding delivery and superb shareholder returns
4. People learn by doing rather than by talking. Create tangible learning platforms for your teams to practice and perfect their skills
5. Reward people for blowing your clients’ hair back with speed, quality and intense value
6. Get your clients to join the network and bask in their glory having included your team in their success

In short! Get everyone obsessed with these 6 key actions.

All of our interventions are designed to help you create a culture that underpins and supports the attainment of your strategic intent.

Use this advice freely and enjoy the results. Call us to find out how we can work with you to do this on a wide scale and ensure that your organisation plays in the league it deserves to. Look out for our next edition of Bull’s Eye, in which we share how to find game changers.