Cutting Edge Leadership Solutions

Objective Truth Language

Working With Objective TruthTM

Introduction
Emotions are a major pitfall in any leadership and transformations scenario. These negative emotions are called opinions. Every human being has an mental operations model based on their paradigms and experiences that is expressed as an opinion.

How Opinions Become “Truth”
When two human beings communicate it is commonly assumed that they are having a clear, objective and neutral conversation based on facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people are totally unaware that they sense of reality is actually based on a battery of emotional opinions gathered over a lifetime of successes and failures. These are all deeply personal beliefs held on just about any subject, all of them held to be perfectly true by each single individual and oftentimes backed up by no more than a hunch or hear say (see the famous ‘urban legends’ held to be true by many people and influencing their decisions about a wide variety of subjects.

A Recipe For Communications Breakdown > 2 Opinions Collide
In any given communications scenario run without the application of Objective Truth ™ technologies we will find 2 or more people looking to solve a problem based on their deeply subjective views of the world. Both parties ‘know’ that they are ‘right’ and that the other party is ‘wrong’.

If both parties are at a comparable social/business level such a conversation can lead to a spirited exchange of opinions or even to a fight. Such a conversation may not always lead to a satisfying solution, yet both parties can clearly define their opinion to each other, this at least leads to some form of clarity.

The true danger for any organization starts when a manager starts communicating with a team which feels it is not empowered to speak back. In other words the teams rationale is: ‘Ok, just go ahead, tell us what you want to tell us… we know this is just your opinion and you are the boss and whatever you say is whatever you say, we’ll see how much of what you say means anything to us…’

In other words, the team has just listened to the manager’s opinion without ‘resistance’ because it is useless to try to dissuade the boss from his opinion which does not fit with the opinion of the majority of the team member.

Creating Objective Truth™

Lets take a simple case study to establish the difference between forcing people to do something based on role power and achieving high buy in levels of the team based on Objective Truth™.

Being on time: Most all professional people agree that being on time is a minimal prerequisite to be able to do business.

Yet a substantial minority of people in any given corporate situation manage to be late. Being late has become sort of a lesser sin in which the latecomer is never really held to a higher standard of punctuality, just in case I might be late one day.

Some managers get seriously put off by such a lax attitude and decide to get their teams to comply with the simplest of all corporate rules: be on time… period! These managers will achieve punctuality through sheer application of will power. And they will achieve something else: massive emotional re-action, the majority of employees will extrapolate this manager’s ‘strictness’ and ‘intransigence’ into other areas of his job and become resentful of a wide variety of activities associated with selfsame manager. The net result of such a power-driven implementation can be a large amount of insidiously silent resistance to the manager.

Removing Resistance and Creating Total Buy-In
We have implemented a total punctuality drive with little or no resistance through many major MNCs with a simple exercise of Objective Truth:

Call the team in question together and implement the following 7 step plan:

Ask each single team member for their age (yes, ladies included!)
It becomes objectively true that they are all legally adult
Ask each single team member to rate themselves as professional from 0-10 (0 = lousy – 10 = outstanding)
Predictably most team members will choose a number above 5, this means they are all categorized as ‘above average’
Establish Objective Truth™: ask the team what the first sign for professional behavior is when two people have a meeting… the objectively true answer is: being on time!
You have just gotten your team’s complete and objective agreement that being on time is a basic, non-negotiable part of professional behavior!
Now you can establish a clear set of rules to manage ‘being on time’:

We all agree to be on time
If anyone knows they will be late for a good reason they must make the other meeting members aware of it
If a person comes late without prior information to the other participants this person will have to pay a penalty ($50 fore charity, sing a song, etc)

This simple exercise contains all major moving parts of creating Objective Truth™ and total buy-in from a team. Most all contentious situations can be de-fused by using Objective Truth™ technologies.

The Power Of Invitation

Introduction
Transforming a team from Expected to Extraordinary can only be achieved by creating complete emotional acceptance in a statistically important majority of team members.

Predictably, team members in a large number of companies are trapped in a paradigm that tends to be risk- and change-averse. Especially companies operating in traditional sectors like manufacturing, banking, pharmaceuticals tend to be very re-active, whilst new-paradigm companies in the realm of software, IT and cyberspace (Apple, Google, e-Bay, etc) tend to attract more flexible people used to operating in new, undefined, spaces.

Traditional businesses face the massive challenge to emotionalize/energize individual team members to start moving into a totally new future. A statistically significant percentage of most traditional top-down managed companies operate in the

Paradigm of Compliance: you tell me what to do and I will execute it to the best of my ability in order to please you and secure my pay cheque.

From Re-Action To Voluntary Action Invite Them!

Hand in hand with the Paradigm of Compliance comes a certain renunciation of responsibility that sounds somewhat like this:

“If the management wants to achieve these crazy new goals that is fine and dandy by me, however, I know that these goals are too high, but they won’t listen to me anyhow, they never do and, what the heck, I’ll just say yes to whatever they demand of me and get on with what I have to do…”

This imaginary rant describes the silent inner dialogue going on in a significant majority of employees across the majority of traditional, risk averse businesses.

The key to unleashing the full cooperation of each team member is a 6 step process:

Clearly establish the fact with the team members that they have joined this company out of their own free will
Clearly communicate that no one can force them to do anything, that they are fully sovereign individuals operating within a free economy
Clearly state that their presence at this company is highly valued
Now clearly state that the company has a new vision and specific targets that will allow all those who fully cooperate in achieving these to get their due reward.
The vision and the target are non-negotiable!
Now INVITE each and every single team member to be a part of making this reality come true. Those not interested in achieving the target will be invited to please accept the fact that this company has made it’s intentions clear and only wants to work with people who are interested in the new vision.

Emotional Maturity >The Key To Breakthrough
This carefully calibrated strategy leads to a long term attitude shift:

We are a company made up of emotionally mature individuals who have chosen to work for this company out of their own free will. We have also chosen to accept the company’s invitation to come on board of the journey to achieve success and the new vision, fully knowing that for things to change the company and us will undergo wide ranging changes.

The decision to invite the team to achieve the common goal creates a completely different base for the transformational exercise. It allows each team member to step out of a possible re-action thinking (us vs the management) and make an emotionally mature decision to be a part of the change process.

The Race For The Best & Brightest Is On!
Winning The Battle For The New Productivity Frontier

The Challenge

Technology Has Become Generic!

The world has crossed a crucial threshold: Technology has become generic! The day IBM sold it’s PC division to Lenovo is the day the world understood that technology on it’s own cannot provide a cutting edge advantage to your company anymore. Your competitors have unlimited access to technology and are able to equalize technological advantages in a matter of months, instead of years.

The race for success now lies squarely on the shoulders of your team, a team where each single individual takes full ownership of their position, delivers at the top of his game and propels the company to success faster than your competitors… The race for the Best & Brightest is on!

Why Should The Best & Brightest Work For YOU?
Hand in hand with rapidly evaporating technological barriers emerged a new phenomenon: The ME Company.

Starting your own company has never been so easy and so cheap. Generic technological infrastructure (internet, generic laptops, printers, professional software, MSN, Skype, etc) allows the Best & Brightest to work for themselves and start their own globally operating companies at a formerly unimaginably low cost.

An ever increasing brain drain of the Best & Brightest is leaving corporate life to follow their dreams and set up their own ME Company or leave college never to enter a corporation!

The Solution
The new Productivity Frontier is your human capital. You must win the battle for the Best & Brightest minds at three levels:

Transforming your existing team from an expected level of action to an extraordinary level of performance of action from the heart. This goes hand in hand with:
Creating a Legendary Work Culture. An open, fast paced, highly communicative work culture that magnetizes the Best & Brightest to stay. A Legendary Work Culture that has:
The Best & Brightest lining up to join you

Creating A Legendary Work Culture
Most companies battle with the pervasive problem of complacency. Human beings are creatures of the comfort zone. If changes for the worse happen in small enough steps people will see these not as threatening, but as natural progression of things: “that’s just how it is”.

Step 1 Declare A BOLD Vision & “Impossible Targets”
The essence of transformation is to shake people out of complacency, to demand more of themselves than they ever thought possible! To create a climate of vision driven excitement combined with a healthy fear of the unknown.

Step 2 Show Them The Brightness Of Future: What’s In It For Them!
Predictably the announcement of a big new vision will collide head on with the well established, hardened crust of people’s comfort zones. It is crucial for each individual to understand that there is glory, money, rewards in it for each and every one of them at the end of the rainbow!

Step 3 Make The Gap Evident – Then Help Them Bridge It!
As soon as the vision and the goals have been declared one simple fact will become amply evident: To achieve the vision and reap the personal rewards of this victory things cannot stay as they are à there is a GAP and we will all work together to bridge the gap in order to achieve our vision.

Step 4 Design The New Legendary Work Culture
It is time to create the new Legendary Work Culture. This work culture is an INVITATION for all team members who are out to achieve the extraordinary to play full out and make the impossible happen. It is a set of working values that allows each employee to unleash their full genius, bring all they have to the table, working as a tight elite team that creates new market standards.

Step 5 Tell The World About It And Attract The Best & Brightest!
Winners want to play with winners. Document your new Legendary Work Culture, document it’s wins, it’s successes and talk to the press. Show the world the synergistic magic of your team and how the Best & Brightest love to be on your team… and the Best & Brightest in the market will find their way to your door!

The Global Battle For Talent

A quick glance at this list of 9 key characteristics shows up a simple fact: most companies are woefully short of talents in this calibre class.

9 Key Characteristics Of Your Must-Have Leadership Team
Cutting edge companies who will master their future need to work with managers/leaders who fulfill the following requirements:

Emotionally mature individuals (avoid politics, goal driven, self assured but not egotistical)
Ability to observe, study and synthesize large swaths of technological & social developments, recognizing emerging convergences they can turn into disruptive new business opportunities
Actively contribute at meetings & brainstorms (a room full of silent, nodding middle managers are a sure-fire sign of trouble! You are not able to access their brain capital)
Ability & willingness to constructively question & disrupt the current business model
Excellent ability to communicate (able to create total buy-in across their teams and generate fast response)
Massive contributor of new ideas & observations
Ability to confront and point out system failures (not just go with the flow and be ‘nice’)
Ability to create Team Velocity and implant new strategies and tactics in a short time
Ability to live with the risk of failing & learning fast

Our survey of over 150 top managers across Asia has shown an interesting result:

Asked how many of their managers were truly irreplaceable individuals, individuals whose contribution or absence would make or break the company the answer was astounding:

3-5% of all managers were seen as true game makers and game changers, the rest of the team were perceived as exchangeable executives who had no real bearing on a company’s future.

Why Should I Work For You?
Far from being just an interesting statistic this percentage has a real life impact on companies far greater than previously imagined.

Companies are faced with the biggest disruption of work force availability in history.
Never before in history have individuals been as empowered to make their own work choices as today. The fact is:

The more intelligent I am the less I NEED to work for you!
Intelligent individuals can make a living in a myriad new ways that were non-existent a mere 10 years ago:

Professional blogger
e-Bay professional
Private e-security consultant
Website owner (facebook, etc)

However: The capacity of your company to succeed is directly linked to your capacity of attracting the Best & Brightest to work for you, to ideate for you, to create with you.

The Best & Brightest Team Members Want To Work For The Best & Brightest Leaders
This is then the key question: Do you presently have

A team of Best & Brightest leaders who attract the Best & Brightest team members
A Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BIHAG) that attracts these Best & Brightest who are truly looking for a mission (Google team members don’t go to work to pay the bills, they go to work to change the world)
Leaders who are truly bought into your BIHAG
A culture that thrives on innovation, openness, exchange
Leaders who can work with a minimum of hierarchical power
Leaders who can truly empower others instead of micro managing
A workspace environment that is truly airy, fresh, light, attractive & conducive

The quality of your leaders and their ability to create an open, conducive, inclusive, vibrant and innovative work culture is directly linked to your ability to attract the Best & Brightest.

From Employees To Co-Creators
It is time to install a wholly new paradigm about how we approach the question of our employee’s psychology.

According to the old company/employee paradigm we lived in a paternalistic society:
The company paid the salary in exchange for the employee’s presence at the company’s premises to ‘do his job’.

In essence this meant that ‘thinking’ was done by management and ‘doing’ was done by the employee (as in: don’t question management decisions, just ‘do your job’)

This led to the divisive paradigm of white-collar vs blue-collar thinking: two enemy camps made up of the ‘unfairly overpaid bosses’ vs the ‘unloved, marginalized, exploited employees’ whose thoughts did not count.

The realities of the present market are relegating this approach to the age of dinosaurs fast.

The truth is that everyone has something to contribute. Starting with the Japanese Kaizen approach of including everyone’s thinking/ideation abilities the success of your company will depend on how fast you can bring the whole team’s capacity to contribute ideas in motion.

As a matter of fact we need to introduce a new paradigm:
You are not just employed… you are a co-creator
Your thoughts, ideas and input count. We want to hear it and we will listen!

Unleashing The Co-Creator Within In X Easy Steps

Step 1. Speak out the clear invitation to become co-creators
Step 2. This creates some hope and a good measure of doubt in the team
Step 3. Share the company’s BIHAG
Step 4. Share with the team that you know for a fact that there are many things that need to be improved/changed in order to achieve the BIHAG (yes, there is a gap and we know about it)
Step 5. Invite them to share their ideas about what problems need to be overcome in order to achieve the BIHAG
Step 6. Thank each and everyone of the team members who speak up as soon as they have finished their sentence (remember, it is scary to move from the safety of silence into the glare of speaking up)
Step 7. Ask the team members to list their problems in order of magnitude
Step 8. Ask them to pick the 3 smallest problems they have on this list
Step 9. Ask them to tell you what they would do about these problems if they were in your shoes
Step 10. Listen to their ideas, fine tune them with necessary additional information and
Step 11. Release them to solve these 3 initial problems based on the solution negotiated with you
Step 12. As soon as the team has tackled the problem the way they negotiated with you it is time to praise
them , to remind them that they are now co-creators and that they have achieved their first success.
Step 13. Now sit down with them and tackle the next 3 problems on your list in the manner described above
Step 14. Repeat the process until full trust in their own problem solving capacity and ability to co-create is established

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