The Any Person Mindset: Be Accountable to the Difference You Can Make

Authors

Introduction

This book is for people who want to make a difference.

To us, making a difference means improving your performance to improve the results of your team, which in turn contributes to the results of the organization. We’ve designed the processes in this book to produce long-term sustainable results that provide ongoing success versus, so to speak, a good run followed by a rebuilding year or two.

For you, those results might include improving your focus on critically important tasks, building more effective relationships with different kinds of people, and advancing your career in the direction you want it to go. They might also mean shifting your sustained negative emotions to positive emotions, broadening your imagination, and leading with greater influence.

In terms of the work groups of which you are a part, those results might include building teamwork where people support one another toward improving quality and productivity.

For your organization, those results might include generating sustainable profitable growth, focusing on fewer projects, sacrificing activities that no longer add much value, and developing difference-makers throughout the company.

Generally speaking, we’ve written this book for people who want to be both effective and significant. We define effective as improving a desired outcome, and significant as making a tremendously positive and lasting impact on a meaningful outcome for an organization.

Specifically speaking, we’ve written this book for people who want to be effective and significant business managers and executives. That is the territory we know the best. Any person who wants to make a difference by being effective and significant, however, can apply these ideas.

If you are looking to really improve your effectiveness and make a noticeable difference, then we urge you to seriously apply the contents of this book. We’ve written it in a way that will guide you through practical steps or processes that you can use right away. We’ve seen them work over and over again and literally change results for the better.

Now, imagine this situation.

You’re in charge, and you have a decision to make.

You’re responsible for the results of an entire organization or a part of an organization, and you have to decide how you are going to manage people to achieve the desired results. Some people think managing means getting the most out of what exists now, taking care of what you’ve been given, and sticking with the existing processes. We think managing means leading the organization or your part of the organization to achieve the desired results. The starting point for you is to decide how to optimize the performance and results your group can achieve.

Frequently, managers believe they need to build their group around a few star performers to be successful. This management approach has developed over the past 35 years and has swept around the world. We call it The Star Performers Mindset. The idea here is that if you work really hard to recruit, hire, and retain a group of stars, they will make your organization extremely successful and you will look like a great manager.

Many times these managers ignore insights from the non-stars as though these other people are not capable of providing valuable ideas. They often divide the organization into the thinkers and the doers. In certain instances these managers write off the non-stars as not being able to make a significant difference in the organization while they wait for the star performers to save the day over and over again.

We believe The Star Performers Mindset is an old-school management approach. It started in the 1980s and is known for catch phrases like the 80/20 Rule, the 20/70/10 ranking of employees, top grading, and reengineering. It really does work well…for a while.

The problem, and this is a really big problem, is that it short-circuits the success of the organization over the long term. One of the primary problems is the incredible lack of engagement that the non-stars develop over time. They are ignored, and they feel ignored. Their ideas are not considered, and consequently they stop offering their perspective. The non-stars begin to believe they are not responsible for results, and therefore are accountable to nothing. With The Star Performers Mindset, a lot of strategic leaders believe they have to keep the thinking within the leadership inner circle. Our experience has shown that including front-line and middle managers in the strategic planning process keeps the conversations more connected to reality and execution improves.

Another problem is that more and more is piled on the star performers to the point of them feeling entitled. They start to expect every important project and decision has to go through them. The stars tend to get burned out or bored. They sometimes hoard information and even keep it from their boss as a way of maintaining power in the group. By having more knowledge than the boss, they feel even more empowered to make demands. They develop a strong desire to control everything that happens. They want bigger projects and bigger compensation packages to stay motivated and energized. They feel entitled to all these things and threaten to walk away if they don’t get them, which becomes a distraction to the business because the manager has to worry about finding ways to keep the star. If a star leaves, the manager feels compelled to go out and recruit another star. This further disengages the non-star employees.

Talk about unhealthy. And it happens over and over again in organizations in every industry.

The number one reason to permanently leave The Star Performers Mindset behind is because it is counterproductive to fulfilling the purpose of your business. Your business exists to continually improve performance and the results it generates by creating appropriate value for customers that can be sold at a profit. The goal is to win as an organization on an on-going basis. Its purpose is not to have a few stars.

What if there were a better way to manage than The Star Performers Mindset?

Well, there is a better way. It’s called The Any Person Mindset.

It’s a management approach where each person is moving toward delivering his or her full potential and where people support one another toward achieving great results. Too often managers see their job as categorizing people and treating them accordingly, but that’s not the purpose of a manager. The purpose of a manager is to improve business performance and results every year for the organization. So what’s the best way to do that?

The Any Person Mindset consists of two primary thoughts. First, you can make a significant difference in your organization, and you are accountable to the difference you can make. Second, any person can make a significant difference in your organization, and each person is accountable to the difference he or she can make. These two thoughts provide the foundation to this approach to management.

Specifically, you are accountable to your results, your relationships at work, and your behaviors. At the end of a year, you will be evaluated on the results you helped to generate for your organization, on your ability to work effectively with other people both inside and outside of your organization, and on your individual behaviors.

Imagine it’s time for your annual performance review. You go into your boss’s office and you sit on your side of the desk, but your boss is not on the other side. Instead, you’re facing your results, relationships, and behaviors from the past year. You are accountable to these three areas. You’re not accountable to your boss, but your boss will hold you accountable to your results, relationships, and behaviors, and will give you positive or negative feedback based on how well you did in each of these three areas.

You are also accountable to one more factor on the other side of the desk. You are accountable to the difference you could have made over the past year. You can have a very successful year in business if your behaviors were good, your relationships were strong, and the results you helped to generate for your organization were great; however, did you make the kind of significant difference that you were capable of making? What results could you have achieved, what relationships could you have built, and what behaviors could you have displayed? This is an intangible question and often you are the only one who will know the answer.

Not every person can make the same difference, but any person can make the difference he or she is capable of making. When you build an entire organization of people who think and act with accountability to their results, relationships, and behaviors, you have an organization that is moving toward generating sustainable success.

Your mindset is the starting point for treating yourself and other people in a way that brings out the best in every person. You can choose whether you believe any person can make a significant difference or not. Your choice will have great implications on how you behave as a manager, and the decisions you will make. We believe the fastest way to ruin excellence in an organization is to mentally write off people who are still working in your organization as not having what it takes to make a significant difference. Whenever you think that way about yourself or any other employee, you have reduced the capacity for greatness throughout the organization.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a trait as a distinguishing characteristic that makes one person different from another. Thinking traits are how a person consistently thinks. The Any Person Mindset says any person can make a significant difference in an organization, but no one is born with the thinking traits necessary to make a significant difference. These are learned thinking traits.

Because these traits are learnable and can be improved through effort is the primary reason why any person can get to a point where he or she is making a significant difference in an organization. Recruit the most appropriate people you can to your organization, and then focus on improving the thinking traits in all of them, not just the top performers. This is when your primary role as a manager begins, not ends.

We believe it’s time to move from the 80/20 Rule to the 80 + 20 Rule.

Managers with The Star Performers Mindset obsess over the 80/20 Rule. The 80/20 Rule states that 20% of your employees generate 80% of the results. There is some truth in that. Top performers do outperform the other performers. That’s how they got the name top performers. There is also some truth in the idea, however, that no person in an organization achieves any result all by himself or herself.

The problems with the 80/20 Rule occur when executives and managers start to think the top 20% are the only people who can get things done. These problems become even worse when managers assume that people with certain labels such as industry experience, charisma, degrees, or salary levels are better prepared to step in and be in the Top 20% right away. Consequently, every project and every decision is funneled through the top 20%. They become stronger at what they do and they get paid better for doing their work at a higher level. Still no problem with this situation. People deserve to be paid better for doing better work.

The main problem is what is happening with the other 80%. Without realizing it, bosses are sending messages to those employees that say, I can’t count on you to take charge of a project, and I don’t have the time to listen to your ideas because they probably aren’t that great anyway. You end up either developing employees who feel helpless or hopeless, or you end up losing those employees who go somewhere else where they can make a positive difference. This is how organizations end up with high turnover, low employee engagement, and inconsistent results.

If you are an executive or manager who always turns to the same people to lead projects or to make decisions or to give you input, then we can pretty well guarantee you that you are disengaging a large percentage of your workers. You’re creating an atmosphere where a lot of people don’t feel valued.

Over time these people who originally wanted to make a positive difference start to give up any hope of doing anything meaningful in their work. They become mired in the 80% of the 80/20 Rule thinking of tell me what to do and I’ll go do it. They think, I won’t rock the boat. I won’t offer any new insights because I know they won’t be listened to anyway. Or they think, I’ll leave. No point in staying. And then they leave as soon as they find a position that pays close to what they are making now. Or if they are really courageous, they just leave.

Rather than obsessing on the 80/20 Rule, the manager’s attention using The Any Person Mindset is on the 80 + 20 Rule, which says that 100% of the employees are generating 100% of the results. This is where 100% of the employees are using their best strengths and their greatest passions on a regular basis to help the organization improve and achieve the desired results. The top performers still will perform better than the other people, but the key is to focus on getting the best performance out of all the employees, not only the top 20%.

If you want a quick visual of the 80 + 20 rule, watch a championship game in any team sport. Watch the whole game, not just the highlights on ESPN. Over the course of the game the top 20% of the players usually do make many important contributions. The winning team, however, almost always has many important contributions from people who are not in the top 20%. You will notice over and over again how players who are not considered stars by the media make key contributions to the success of the team.

The sports organizations that obsess over star players continue to lose to organizations that focus on a total team concept where any player can step up and make a significant contribution on any given night. In other words, the result was achieved by 100% of the team members, the top 20% and the bottom 80%. You need all of the members of the organization contributing. Don’t rob your organization of its potential by focusing solely on the top 20% of the employees.

When The Any Person Mindset permeates an organization, you have employees who are always looking for opportunities to make a meaningful contribution to the success of the organization. They believe they have what it takes to make a difference and believe they will not be blocked from doing so. This is the kind of atmosphere in which people want to work. They want to know they matter and can make a real difference for the success of the whole. This is when work becomes meaningful, rewarding, and exciting.

No one wants to feel like he or she is just a warm body taking up space and collecting a check so the real stars can deliver the goods. People don’t go to work for that feeling. They go to work to do worthwhile work that makes them feel like they contributed something meaningful.

Your job is to start with yourself. Focus on developing in yourself the thinking traits necessary to make a significant difference. That’s Part One of this book.

Then focus on developing every person in the organization, or in your part of the organization, so they have more of the thinking traits necessary to make a significant difference. That’s Part Two of this book.

Then focus on these five critically important business drivers: reflect, discern, discuss, decide, and act. Put together a practical plan of action and get going. That’s Part Three.

When key thinking traits become strong throughout an organization, the ability to rise together and make a significant difference in the marketplace becomes extraordinary.

The ideas in this book are based on our more than 60 years of combined experience working inside and with corporations.

My (Lee Renz) research for The Any Person Mindset happened during my 42-year career at McDonald’s USA.

I moved from crew person to division president. Along the way I served as an area supervisor, regional department head, divisional senior director of operations, regional vice president/general manager, vice president of McCafe, senior vice president & chief restaurant officer, and central division president responsible for the business performance of one-third of the United States including more than 4,500 McDonald’s restaurants.

McDonald’s is a company that has proven over and over again that any person can make a significant difference in helping the organization sustain success. Many of its most successful executives and managers were hired as crew members working in the restaurants. Many of those crew people went on to become successful executives and managers in other companies as well. They were given opportunities to grow and develop and lead, and they became accountable to their results, relationships, and behaviors.

I co-authored this book and its content with Dan Coughlin, without any collaboration from McDonald’s Corporation, and therefore, the views expressed herein are mine and Dan’s, and not necessarily those of McDonald’s.

My (Dan Coughlin) research for The Any Person Mindset happened in three ways.

First, I have provided more than 4,000 executive coaching sessions to more than 250 executives in six countries and in more than 40 industries since 1997. The average length of these relationships has been approximately 18 months. The range of our topics has included hiring and firing employees, the emotional challenges of being an executive, strategy, tactics, planning, execution, leading, teambuilding, problem-solving, brand-building, innovation, and more. Through this experience, I have seen what management approaches have been effective for executives to improve results and which ones have been ineffective.

Second, I’ve read a little more than 500 books since I graduated from college in 1985, most of which had something to do with leadership. In Appendix A, I offer book recommendations for some of the ideas in each of the first six chapters in this book.

Third, I’ve now given more than 500 keynotes and seminars for more than 200 organizations including McDonald’s, Abbott, Toyota, Shell, Marriott, RE/MAX, Cisco, Prudential, the St. Louis Cardinals, Coca-Cola, and other large to medium-sized businesses in more than 50 industries. In about 100 of those situations I went to the company a few weeks before my presentation to observe managers and employees in action. This enabled me to see the actual cultures of these organizations in action, and also enabled me to see which management approaches were effective and which ones were not.

I worked with Lee as an executive coach for a time while Lee was at McDonald’s USA. Dan coaching Lee, however, isn’t the right way to describe our relationship. It was more like a collaboration of thinking partners