Cul-de-sacs are lovely places to live.

With no through traffic, the cul-de-sac offers security, solitude and higher re-sale values. Cul-de-sac dwellers hold block parties and their children play hop-scotch in the middle of the street. Everything a cul-de-sac resident enjoys will make non cul-de-sac dwellers – through-streeters –jealous. Not everyone can live on a cul-de-sac, though many would pay dearly for the chance to do so.

But – Cul-de-sacs have an evil side.

The street itself doesn’t go anywhere. If you turn into a cul-de-sac, the only choice you have is to stay or leave. Cul-de-sacs take you nowhere. The term is actually French for “dead end.” The security of the cul-de-sac comes at a price.

Metaphorically, there is no future in a cul-de-sac because it’s a stagnant place. In a cul-de-sac, forward momentum inexorably grinds to a halt.

Seth Godin defines professional and career cul-de-sacs in his book The Dip:

It’s a situation where you work and you work and you work and nothing much changes. It doesn’t get a lot better, it doesn’t get a lot worse. It just is.”

- Seth Godin

A job or business model that is secure, predictable and without unwanted change may sound like a blessing, until you consider what it’s costing you to “live” on a dead-end street.

Dangerous third option

I mentioned that there were only two options available when you drove into a cul-de-sac: stay or turn around and leave. But there’s a third–insidious–choice that can trap and hold you hostage. It is also the most commonly chosen option:

You enter the security of the dead-end street and you circle, circle, circle, circle, circle – forever.

Circling feels good. It gives you the perception of forward momentum. It can sustain your need for progress. But you aren’t going anywhere.

. . . the dead-end is keeping you from doing something else. The opportunity cost of investing your life in something that’s not going to get better is just to high.

- Seth Godin

What’s your Cul-de-sac?

For me, the cul-de-sac has been the idea that if I worked REALLY hard at networking and following up and prospecting and selling and blogging and twittering and cold-calling and marketing and all the other things you’re supposed to do to have a successful business that somehow, somewhere, some day I would be able to FINALLY do the things that actually put money in the bank and were the reason I launched my practice in the first place.

I was stuck in the circular notion of doing more and more and more while getting less and less in return. There is a sense of security in doing the same things, but going around in circles was beginning to make me dizzy.

Escaping the Cul-de-sac

A series of events provided me the opportunity to see my efforts from a different perspective. I have made some changes as I result of what I saw. My hope is that you will be encouraged by my example.

Over the next few years, I will be relinquishing the job of promoting myself and will instead concentrate the majority of my efforts on teaching, training and helping people get better at what they already do well. The marketing stuff will be handled by the expert team at Fred Pryor Seminars in Mission, Kansas. They have a fantastic line-up of topics that I will be teaching–each in my own style and with my own experience woven in. The time I’ve been wasting trying to figure out which Facebook message might generate the greatest marketing exposure can now be focused on being the best corporate trainer, facilitator and coach I can possible be.

Getting out of the cul-de-sac has opened up more time for me to write and I have a couple of book ideas brewing. The newly found  ”free” time will also allow me to pursue some potential business that was previously unattainable because I was focused on low-hanging fruit in order to feed the circular activity. I am very excited.

Let me help you

My  consulting work continues to focus on helping people maximize what they already do well, and I’d be tickled pink to do the same for you. To set up a no obligation phone call, just pop me a message.

Which has greater impact on success?
Efficiency or Effectiveness

The answers indicated an overwhelming affinity for effectiveness.

Professional people across all industries and in scores of positions would rather be effective than efficient. The ratio was nearly 14-to-one, with comments like:

You can be the most efficient person in the world but if you are not effective, you aren’t making any impact. Efficiency can be taught but effectiveness is a rare talent. — WH

If an electric car has a 100 mile range on a single charge we call that efficiency. But if our destination is 150 miles, it’s not too effective. — JV

Love this question, for me it’s effectiveness because effectiveness implies a successful outcome whereas efficiency implies the speed at which any old task which may or may not support the outcome can be completed and in my mind to much focus on short term efficiency is often the cause of missing completely the path of least resistance for the big picture monster sized great outcome. — PH

But — my poll only tells half of the story.

Despite a 14:1 margin favoring effectiveness, most professionals are too often preaching one preference while practicing another.

Here are a few examples of efficiency trumping effectiveness:

• Firing off an email (or 2, or 20) when a phone call or face-to-face conversation would yield a better result.
• Allowing a poor manager to damage employee engagement because confronting him or her would upset the (dysfunctional) equilibrium.
• Handing a new hire an out-dated job description, with the comment, “A lot of this has changed.”
• Not taking enough vacation time.
• Once-a-year performance reviews.
• Skipping once-a-year performance reviews.
• Meeting agendas so tightly arranged that actual dialog is discouraged.

I am certain you can think of many more (and would love for you share them).

Being effective is about making a difference, efficiency is about checking things off a list. Unless your purpose is to add check marks to a list, efficiency is only a means to the end.

The mix of process and purpose will be different for everyone. It’s important for you to understand the formula that renders the best result for you — makes you the most effective.

Action thought:

Take time to consider an activity or function that isn’t living up to its potential. Instead of looking for way to alter the process, come at the solution from the opposite perspective by asking, “How can we do this more effectively.”

My consulting efforts are aimed at helping companies and individuals get better at things they already do well. If you’d like a coach who understands YOU and wants you to succeed, I’d be excited to lend a hand.

Now – remember how you felt when the car you’d been staring at for 30 minutes – the one in front of you – began to move. Just a tiny bit of forward momentum, at first, but you were MOVING. When you’re stuck, any forward movement is reason for hope.

Here in California, we’ve even named the condition. The CHP will declare a Sig-Alert if at least one lane of freeway is predicted to be immovable for 30 minutes or longer. Drivers will go to great lengths to avoid Sig-Alerts. I am not the only one  who will alter my route and go many miles out of my way to get around a standstill. The theory being, “I’d rather be moving than not.”

Being stuck is something very few of us tolerate well.

Think of all the ways we can get stuck:

• “He’s not in, can you hold please?”
• “We are number 13 for departure.”
• “We’ve arrived ahead of schedule, but there’s no gate available.”
• “Hmm, have you tried re-booting it?”
• “That’s a good idea – let me get back to you.”
• “Probably 35-45 minutes for a table.”
• “I’d like to help you, but we don’t have the budget.”
• “We have your application on file.”

As frustrating as being stuck can be, forward momentum can provide amazing motivation. Just like the way you feel when traffic finally starts moving again, getting unstuck – moving forward – nearly always makes us feel better. Dozens of psychologists have shared their theories on this. Maslow suggested that human beings were driven by a need to make progress toward the next highest level of his famous hierarchy. Frederick Herzberg listed “achievement, increased responsibility and advancement” among activities that motivate employees.

Douglas McClelland wrote that the need for achievement was one of the strongest human desires. And not because we want the stuff that comes with achievement, rather because we NEED to achieve.

If you manage people and are held accountable for their performance, consider what you can do to help them achieve forward momentum. If lack of progress is de-motivating, ask yourself what you can do to turn the tide, lift the Sig-Alert and facilitate even incremental amounts of progress. Where are the bottlenecks? What policies inhibit progress? What can be done to keep projects moving ahead?

Here’s an idea – what would happen if you gathered your team together, showed them the image to the left and asked, “What can we do make this cartoon irrelevant?”

Nothing succeeds like success.

- Alexandre Dumas

Please permit me, with great respect for one of my favorite novelists, to call bulls**t on this one. The single most effective deterrent to your being successful tomorrow is the enjoyment of success today. The problem with success is that it gives us a sense of our own brilliance. We feel good when we win and do whatever we can to repeat that feeling. But, we’re not actually brilliant. On the contrary, we too often fail to notice that tomorrow’s challenge is different and, blinded by our former success, aim yesterday’s solutions at tomorrow’s problems, failing more often than not.

A key component of whatever successes I’ve had has been what I’ve learned from my failures.

- Arianna Huffington, Inc. February 2013 (Pg 52)

In contrast to Dumas, it’s more accurate to say that success inhibits success. Huffington warns that “success generates fear” by making people afraid to take risks.

We do tend to focus on success a great deal. A quick search on the web site hashtagbattle.com finds that during the past week, “success” was used as a hashtag on 14,863 tweets, while “failure” was tagged on just 1777. 800% more tweets about #success than #failure.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to succeed–an appetite for failure should be cause for concern–but consider the amazing power of failure to catalyze new ideas. Evan Williams found success in Twitter only after Odeo was obliterated when iTunes added podcasting to its line-up. The success Steve Jobs had in his second season at Apple is widely accepted to have been the result of his being fired from the company he’d created.

Prosperitas vetat obscura successum

- Latin – Prosperity inhibits success.

When you succeed, enjoy the feeling. Then, immediately look for something at which you can fail.

Ray Lewis ends his NFL career on a high note, Colin Kaepernick increases his odds of getting a raise and 100-million people are grossed out (twice) by the hideous sounds of a super model and nerd sucking each other’s lips — but Super Bowl 47 will be remembered most for being the first NFL Championship contest delayed by a 36-minute power outage. The outage cut off commentator Phil Simms in mid-sentence and clearly left the CBS production crew with their pants around their knees. Having been involved in hundreds of broadcasts with considerably less import and scope, I can only guess at the number of planning hours that went into this program. A friend who worked at ABC during the days of Monday Night Football once told me there was a physical backup for everything–including a backup production trailer with a second director and crew, “just in case.” You can bet that “power outage” will be part of next year’s planning.

When you make plans, the hope is that you cover every possible scenario–but who could EVER imagine a massive power outage during the Super Bowl? I mean, come on! This is the 21st century. We’re in the United States. It’s a major city AND there’s no threat of bad weather. All true–but it’s just a matter of perspective.

Let me explain -

I had the opportunity in 2007 to do some consulting work for a client in Nicaragua. The engagement included three visits to Central America and hundred of phone calls over a three-year span. Nicaragua is a developing nation with great potential hampered by a horrendously inadequate civil infrastructure. Roads are in constant disrepair, trash is collected by little children riding donkey carts and there are few days when the electricity doesn’t go out for at least a few minutes.

My client had arranged for us to conduct a strategic planning retreat on Little Corn Island, 45 kilometers off the Mosquito Coast in the Caribbean Ocean. I had to pinch myself a few times. This was an amazing place to lead a retreat and 12 of us jumped right into an ambitious agenda. We had a lot of ground to cover and we were making good progress when POOF the lights went out, my laptop projector went dark, the over-head fans stopped spinning and the place was eerily quite.  The generator that supplies electricity for our part of the island over-heated and stopped running.

And here’s where change is influenced by your perspective of normalcy -

I was the only one in the room that seemed to notice (or care) that the power had gone out. Power outages happen so frequently in Nicaragua that they are normal. It was weird. I was the only one asking, “When will it come back on?” Waiting for the power to come back on became such a regular occurrence that I stopped be surprised–although it never became acceptable. When I’d suggest a battery or solar backup system to at least allow people to shut down their computers, the response was generally along the lines of, “We’ve gotten used to it, so there’s no need to change.”

Now, you may decry our modern dependence on electricity and other conveniences–I even wrote a column on the opportunity to do Analog Thinking during these frequent outages, but the sad reality is that the inconsistency of the power supply had become normal; not subject to scrutiny. From their perspective, this wasn’t a problem in need of a solution but rather a constant that was to worked around.

Just as the NFL took having electricity for granted, the people in Nicaragua had come to expect random work stoppages due to power outages.

There is hope: A handful of Nicaraguan nationals and foreigners who see the country’s potential and are working to develop alternative energy sources. They’ll be successful if they can break the stranglehold of complacency and establish a “new” normal.

What situations have you come to accept?

What’s your normal?

The world would be a pretty boring place if people didn’t get bored.

Being bored isn’t a problem, UNLESS you accept it as the way things will always be. If you find yourself in a state of boredom and do nothing about it, you become a bore.

BUT –

If you find yourself bereft of “anything in particular to do” you can use it as an opportunity to try something new, to experiment, to adjust, alter, tweak or change. Being bored helps you see the incredible power hidden in the tedium of sameness. The key to harnessing boredom is to see the doldrums for what they are — quiet clarions to the possibility of change.

New ideas often come as the result of immediate need; as the solution to an acute situation. Change often occurs when we’re looking to fix something that doesn’t work. Boredom–on the other hand–is the passive catalyst that leads us to fix things that AREN’T broken.

Use Boredom to Your Advantage

Think of an activity where you experience better-than-average competency; something you do frequently well and tend to enjoy.

Consider all the elements of that activity and find an area where the functions have become automatic or mundane; where you succeed without even thinking about how.

Now, jot down some ways to throw a wrench into your well-oiled machine by experimenting with a new approach. Not change for the sake of change, but rather change for the sake of better results.

Learn to recognize boredom for the opportunity it presents. Avoid the trap of becoming comfortable with recurring success. Recurring success begets complacency, which begets failure.

Share Your Stories

How have you used boredom to slingshot you to greater success?

PS – My thanks to TEDx presenter (and good friend) Kristen Wheeler for planting the seed of this idea.

That wisdom is as valid today as it was 1,500 years ago. The most respected people you know are those who know what to do — and do it. They have an intentionality about them that oozes confidence and competence. Others seek them out for advice and assistance because they’ve demonstrated the essential balance between knowledge and action. Abu Bakr didn’t say anything about being intentional, but I think he implied the value of purpose in his writings.

Most of us would rather be brilliant on purpose, than accidentally so. And that’s what the strengths concept is all about — discovering what activities give you the most energy and looking for ways to use them in the performance of your daily tasks.

The focus is primarily on WHAT you do and HOW you do it, but there are two other dimensions that are equally important. Knowing WHEN and WHERE you are at your best is just as valuable as knowing what and how.

Driving Ideas #17 – When & Where Matters explains:

To really excel at the things you are already good at, take the time to explore the 4th dimension and learn to manage your schedule in such a way as to give you an even higher level of excellence. My consulting and coaching work is focused on helping companies and individuals get better at what they already do well. I would be honored to help you.

The world has been consumed this past week, as it is every year at this time, by the theory and practice of setting resolutions. News broadcasters and print journalists have trotted out their annual story of humanity’s desire to change something about themselves or their situation.

“I want to

. . . quit smoking,

. . .lose weight,

. . . be a better person,

. . .take more time off,

. . . spend more time at work,

. . . get organized,

. . .be more relaxed.”

In a few days, we’ll hear and read a series of reports confirming what we already know, the majority of these goals are abandoned before the end of the month.

For a couple of weeks we seem to be obsessed with the idea of changing things. The status quo, that comfort zone of sameness we worship and struggle to maintain all year, is shuffled off to the corner for as long as it takes us to realize that change is difficult. We lay a problem on the table and no matter how resolved we are about fixing it, we either allow the resolution to quietly fade away or announce to ourselves and those who matter that we are no longer in the race.

“I have decided that losing 50 pounds in a year is impossible, so I am going to stop trying.”

These active decisions to stop fighting the status quo, or the gradual realization that we’ve failed, are usually met with a sense of unease. Human beings dislike change, but we like failure even less.

The dilemma of trying to change goes beyond your personal life. If your company is like most, there’s a file cabinet somewhere labeled,

“Things We’ve Tried to Change but Can’t.”

So, is it our destiny to set and fail at resolutions each year? Is this an unalterable path?

Let me suggest a road less taken.

Perhaps all we need do is to pronounce the word differently.

Instead of the conventional pronunciation – res-o-LU-tion – it might help if emphasis were placed on the first syllable, as in RE-solution.

REdesign, REthink, REposition – REsolution.

The whole process of resolving to change might take on new power and meaning if we look for new solutions to old problems. Rather than trying to fix today’s problems with yesterday’s answers, maybe what we need is to RE-solve the issue.

This is much easier to write about than it is to do, so here’s a little exercise I have used with some of my clients to help them begin the process of finding resolutions:

The problem with looking for new solutions is that the left side of your brain – the logical side – loves to follow patterns. When you ask it to think of solutions to problems, it goes through its file of “things that solve problems” and comes up with ideas that are, unfortunately, logical.

The key to finding new solutions is to bring the right side of your brain into the picture. I do this by tricking the left side into thinking we’re just playing a game.

Try This

1) Have a group of 4-6 people each tear a sheet of paper into 6 sections. On each slip of paper, have each person write a simple noun such as dog, tuna, hammer, kitchen, sky, book or pencil.

2) Put the slips in a hat, bowl or box.

3) Ask the group to suggest a couple of “problems” that need solutions. They should be somewhat simple things to start with, “My son is always late for school” or “My aunt is always changing her mind at a restaurant.”

4) Choose one of the problems, then pick a slip of paper from the pile and have the group offer up simple solutions using the chosen word as part of their suggestion. The solutions can be silly, in fact, I find that silliness helps. Encourage the group to quickly fire ideas around the table, branching out to derivatives and synonyms of the word and then playing off other suggestions.

5) Keep it going quickly and change to a new word as the momentum sags.

6) After running this with a few simple problems, try something a bit more complex or more in touch with your corporate reality, perhaps “The staff doesn’t seem to be engaged with our new product line.”

7) As with the simple issues, allow suggestions to start out silly and keep the pace up. You’re doing this to fool your left brain into thinking it’s “just a game.” But, if you pay attention, somewhere along the way an idea will float up that can actually lead to a plausible RE-solution of the problem.

As your group becomes more adept with this exercise, you can add adjectives and other types of words to the pile. Some of my clients play similar games every time they get together, as a way of encouraging creativity. If this one strikes your fancy, I’d be happy to suggest others.

Here’s to a great new year, filled to the brim with new ideas and successful RE-solutions.

Jim Seybert

PS – My consulting practice specializes in helping companies get better at what they already do well. Clients range from multi-national corporations to little tiny companies. If you have a specific problem you’re trying to resolve or if you’re interested in an on-going program that encourages fresh thinking, I’d be honored to chat with you.

This idea of intentionally playing to your strengths is backed by years of research by the Gallup organization. As a result of interviews with thousands of managers and over 1-million employees, Gallup found that the teams with the highest performance weren’t the highest-paid, or the ones with the best benefits. Teams with the highest productivity, customer satisfaction and employee retention were those teams where the greatest number of people could agree with this statement: 

At work I have an opportunity to do what I do best, every day.

I’ve written a 12-page whitepaper summarizing the findings of the most significant studies in this area and would be happy to send you a complimentary copy. To get yours, simply request one by email at jim@jimseybert.com.

Driving Ideas #2

One common misconception about playing to your strengths is the idea that:

Oh Goodie !! If I learn to focus on what I do best, I won’t have to do all the stuff I loathe.

Focusing on your native genius will NOT alleviate the need to clean toilets, balance the books or deal with HR issues. You’ll still have to make sales calls and attend the dreaded business networking lunches. There’s a reason they call what we do “work.”

But here’s the good news: 

By playing to your strengths, by focusing on activities that make you feel strong, you will have an easier time mitigating the effect of stuff that drains you. This installment of Driving Ideas shares a quick tip on how I use my natural abilities–my strengths–to lift me over the more mundane and loathsome aspects of my work.

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