How To Drive Success In Your Business (And Family) by Urs Koenig

 

Want your staff and children to be more successful?

Yes, of course you do!

It’s oh so very easy:)  Simply cultivate the following combination of traits in your employees and your kids:

 

1. A Superiority Complex. Instill in them a deep seated belief in their exceptionality.

2. Insecurity. Make them feel that who they are or what they have done is not good enough.

3. Impulse control. Teach them the ability to systematically delay gratification.

It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s exactly this contrary combination that two Yale law school professors found that generates drive. In their book , “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America,” they detail how a chip on the shoulder and a burning desire to prove yourself, combined with the ability to sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment creates a  winning combination for success.

Chue & Rebenfeld, whose work was recently featured in the New York Times found a seemingly un-American fact about America today: for some cultural groups, the American dream of upward mobility is much more alive than for others. Some of the winners include Indian Americans, Iranians, Lebanese and Chinese. These groups, on average, earn almost double the national income.

Among religious groups, the success of Mormons in corporate America is well documented. Jews make only about two percent of the United State’s adult population yet make up a third of the current Supreme Court and about a third of American Nobel Prize winners.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others, as measured by income and test scores, can set off a firestorm and accusations of racism. It’s almost too obvious to state but these facts don’t make one group ‘better’ than others and material success does not equal a life well lived.

Groups rise and fall over time. This points to the fact that there are cultural forces at work here and debunks the idea that groups succeed because of innate biological differences (third generation Chinese American students for example perform no better than their white peers).

In isolation, each of these traits is insufficient, and potentially damaging. A superiority complex often leads to complacency, insecurity can be crippling and impulse control often results in an inability to experience pleasure.

Success is propelled by the combined triple package of superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. These simple qualities are cultural, learnable and hence open to anyone. We can model and teach them in our business and in our own family.

I have personally experienced how some of the world’s top management consultancies such as McKinsey, BCG, Bain et al.  do an outstanding job at cultivating the above traits. These firms pride themselves on hiring only the top students from business schools. Once hired, you belong to the ‘chosen few’. There is no question that these firms employ some of the brightest people and yet almost every single consultant I have ever met has deep seated insecurities about never being good enough, which makes them work so incredibly hard.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. A Superiority complex

• What stories and metaphors are you using to instill a belief of exceptionality in your people?
• How do you ensure people who work at your company feel like they are ‘the chosen one’? Part of a superior elite?
• What rituals are you employing to foster the belief that your business is the ONE that is going to make it big and leave the competition in the dust?

2. Insecurity

• How are you creating a culture of ‘good enough is never good enough’ in your business?
• How do you get your people to relentlessly strive for continued improvement?
• What stories are you sharing so that you make it clear that ‘around here, we are never satisfied with the status quo no matter how good it is’?

3. Impulse control

• What systems and incentive do you have in place so that folks are committed for the long haul?
• How do you ensure that your people become exemplars of your company’s culture and vision?

And of course, don’t forget: nothing is more powerful than modeling behavior you want to see!

 

In 2014: Design The Best Place To Work, by Urs Koenig, PhD, MBA, Principal, Redpoint Coaching

by Urs Koenig, PhD, MBA, Principal, Redpoint Coaching

As we embark onto 2014 I would like challenge you to design the very best place to work! How would this organization of our dreams look do you ask? Read on…

Rob Goffee, an emeritus professor of organizational behavioral at the London School of Business, and Gareth Jones, a visiting professor at the IF Business School in Madrid, posed the question about what the company of our dreams looks like to hundreds of leaders. They summarized their findings in the May 2013 edition of the Harvard Business Review (“Creating the best workplace on earth: what employees really require to be their most productive”)

Here is what they found. In the organization of our dreams:

1. I can be myself
2. I am told what is really going on
3. My strengths are magnified
4. The company stands for something meaningful
5. My daily work is rewarding
6. Stupid rules don’t exist

These principles might all sound like common sense. Who wouldn’t want to work in a place that followed them? Most leaders and all of our clients are aware of the benefits of such a ‘dream organization’, which many studies have confirmed. And yet, no organization we are aware of possesses all six virtues.

Why is that so? Several of the attributes run counter to traditional and well established practices and deeply ingrained habits. Others are complicated and costly to implement. Some conflict with each other. All of them require you as the leader to carefully balance competing interests and to rethink how you allocate your time and energy.

So as Goffee and Jones point out, the company of our dreams remains largely aspirational.  I therefore offer the below assessment as a challenge to you and your people to aim at creating the most productive and rewarding working environment possible.

The Dream Company Diagnostic

How close is your business to the ideal? The more checks, the closer you are.

1. Take the assessment yourself
2. Have your senior team and a cross section of your people take the assessment
3. Compare the findings and discuss inconsistencies

Let me be myself

___ I am the same person at home as I am at work

___ I feel comfortable being myself

___ We are all encouraged to express our differences

___ People who think differently from most do well here

___ Passion is encouraged, even when it leads to conflict

___ More than one type of person fits in here

Tell me what’s really going on

___ We’re all told the whole story

___ Information is not “spun”

___ It’s not disloyal to say something negative

___ My manager wants to hear bad news

___ Top executives want to hear bad news

___ Many channels of communication are available to us

___ I feel comfortable signing my name to comments I make

 Discover and magnify my strengths

___ I am given the chance to develop

___ Every employee is given the chance to develop

___ The best people want to strut their stuff here

___ The weakest performers can see a path to improvement

___ Compensation is fairly distributed throughout the organization

___ We generate value for ourselves by adding value to others

Make me proud I work here

___ I know what we stand for

___ I value what we stand for

___ I want to exceed my current duties

___ Profit is not our overriding goal

___ I am accomplishing something worthwhile

___ I like to tell people where I work

Make my work meaningful

___ My job is meaningful to me

___ My duties make sense to me

___ My work gives me energy and pleasure

___ I understand how my job fits with everyone else’s

___ Everyone’s job is necessary

___ At work we share a common cause

Don’t hinder me with stupid rules

___ We keep things simple

___ The rules are clear and apply equally to everyone

___ I know what the rules are for

___ Everyone knows what the rules are for

___ We, as an organization, resist red tape

___ Authority is respected

Decide where you believe the most important deficits are and take action during 2014 in order to move your organization one step closer towards the very best place to work.