Growth is a mindset
Failure to acquire and practice a disciplined mindset for growth often hijacks the best interests of otherwise capable leaders and business owners. Education, intelligence, and experience alone do not guarantee long-term sustained growth. In fact, as the authors of Strategy in Action explain, “Experience is valuable only to the extent the future is like the past.”
But, somehow, we get distracted by the glamor and excitement of ultra-successful companies while the truth about how they achieve and sustain success is overlooked or misunderstood. Growing successfully is the result of very hard work and disciplined habits cultivated over time, thinking habits in particular.
Creating a culture of growth
This principle is especially true when it comes to the second most important function of leadership: developing people[1]. Developing people is possibly the hardest work of sustained, profitable growth, requiring exceptional leadership skills coupled with the discipline to demand the best from people while maintaining a humble servant heart and saying “NO” often and decisively. Successful growth, over a sustained period of time, is a direct function of a culture of discipline and humility starting with the leaders and cascading throughout the organization.
Such a culture is rare and almost priceless, especially considering the demands and variables that mark the building industry. But, almost paradoxically, it’s exactly in the midst of these demands and variables that highly successful companies are born and flourish. It’s because they have learned the secret of creating and managing healthy tension and revealing “simple, elegant solutions” to the complex problems that plague every other builder and so often go unresolved.
The skill of creating positive tension
In his landmark book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins talks extensively about how the “great” companies developed and practiced the skill of creating tension (without necessarily using that exact word). He discovered, through extensive research, that “great” companies all exhibited an ability to create positive tension, better understood to mean a healthy discomfort with the status quo. Sounds easy enough but that would be a complete misunderstanding of this essential concept.
Ray Dalio also discovered this invaluable principle at his ultra-successful hedge fund company Bridgewater. In his book “Principles”, he describes the skill of tension as a corporate culture marked by independent thinking and humility, where commitment to the greater good of the organization wins out over self-interest. The result of such a culture is a “meritocracy that encourages thoughtful disagreements and explores and weighs people’s opinions in proportion to their merits.” And while most of us might intellectually agree with this principle, at its heart, this is the perhaps the hardest and most demanding work of leadership. Thus, Dalio goes on to remark that “You have the option to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.” Most, I’ve discovered (myself included at one time), have unintentionally chosen the latter.
A few astute observers have begun to grasp the real value of healthy tension as the gateway to lasting growth and success. For example, Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg noted in her recent Harvard Business review article “What Sets Genius Teams Apart” that “The third — and least obvious — component of genius executive teams is the almost constant generative tension that characterizes their interactions. The energy on the teams is sparked by benevolent friction, conflict, impatience, and even well-intentioned intolerance.
What truly sets genius teams apart from other high-performing executive teams is their ability to manage — and willingness to generate — this tension in the service of the larger challenges they’re drawn to solve.”
Well-known and trusted author and business consultant Verne Harnish even notes that his readers should buy a copy of Collins’ Good to Great, “and read the three most important pages ever written in business – Pages 114- 116” which describe not just how to put this principle into practice, but how to radically alter an organization’s thinking and the resulting outcomes produced over time.
Taking action
Below is a brief summary of Collin’s (and others’) observations and recommendations, along with those I’ve observed most effective over the past 12 years of business coaching and consulting (and 33 years in my own building business), for instituting a unique culture of positive tension and struggling well:
- A steadfast commitment to and alignment with your company purpose and core values, from every person in the organization, especially the leaders. If a person proves themselves unwilling or unable to achieve such commitment and alignment, they are a liability, not an asset and must go.
- Development of a core group of key leaders (not necessarily based on position or title alone) are invited to participate in regular company “council” meetings with a focus on radical transparency and systematic problem solving.
- Maintaining consistent, laser focus on constraints dominated thinking and action. Dalio calls this “Developing an intolerance of problems or constrains that hinder progress.” The corollary: always know and verbalize your core purpose, values, and, as Collins put it, a vision of “what you could be the best at in your industry.” And at its core though, the word constraint equates to root issue vs symptom, so be careful not to get sidetracked and waste time here.
- Never accept the first suggestion or idea as the best answer. Encourage respectful dissention and extensive questions. Toyota developed their “Five Why’s”[2] process for this very reason and it has been a part of their ongoing decades of dominance in the auto manufacturing industry. Human nature generally leads us to believe we have the right answers until we’ve become humble enough to confront our personal bias and ask ourselves important questions like “What if I’m wrong?”. Collins refers to this as avoiding “the curse of competence”.
- Get comfortable with discomfort. Healthy tension is the fundamental discipline of doing the hard things others either cannot or will not do. You will know its presence when you can feel a palpable sense of conflict in the air along with a willingness to push forward toward exceptional results. One without the other is probably just an attempt to maintain the comfortable status quo.
- Always cling to the belief that there is inherent good in every person and that each one is uniquely significant and deserving of respect – until that is they choose to prove themselves unworthy through their attitude and / or behavior. Trust is built and maintained only through radical transparency and honesty and a healthy culture depends on both.
Sustained growth is a function of creative, healthy tension. And as Wedell-Wedellsborg notes “This generative tension is a vital part of genius teams’ way of working and their drive to succeed. It is also the biggest risk factor if not recognized and managed properly.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, a lack of tension is equally damaging.
The key for genius teams – most of which are self-managed – is to find the sweet spot where tension is neither tepid nor toxic.”
Lead on!
[1] The single most important function of leadership is protecting profit.
[2] Asking “Why?” five times to unearth the root issue and avoid wasting time trying to treat symptoms.