7 Steps to Make Your Great Ideas Succeed

Photo by nrkbeta

There are more PCs than Macs.

There are more Android phones than iPhones.

Whichever platform you personally prefer, the Apple products have had a major impact regardless of their smaller market share - you don't have to be the biggest or most prolific in order to be successful with a game-changing idea.

You might be frustrated at times when your big idea isn't adopted right away. You know vision and innovation are important, but how do you take those great ideas and give them a chance to become reality? 

Here are 7 steps to make your great ideas succeed:

1) Start small

Pilot everything - try the idea with as small a group as possible. This might be one person...or one team...or one classroom...or one building - whatever the smallest practice unit might be and for which you have responsibility. Start with people who can buy-in to the concept and implement it. Even if that is just you to begin with.

2) Learn from successes and failures

In your pilot effort, note what worked and, most importantly, try to determine why it worked. It's not always what you think. Then look at what didn't work. Can you make corrections?

3) Course correct and try again

Implement your lessons learned from successes and failures and try again...maybe with two or three pilot units. Are things working as you envisioned? If not, continue in steps 1 - 3 until you're comfortable to you can demonstrate results. Invite people, without pressure, to see what you're doing. Start with opinion leaders and those who you know have similar problems.

4) Quantify and qualify results

Take time to demonstrate the impact of your great idea. Tell the human story and show the numbers. For someone who has never thought this way before, what benefits does your idea have? What problems does it solve? In your pilots, you should have obtained some numbers and good stories.

5) Manage up and sideways

If you're a growing leader with great ideas, this might be a challenging step. You want to win support for your concept.

Begin with the values and problems of your coworkers and supervisors. What is important to them - how does your idea reinforce those values? What problems do they have - how does your concept solve their problems?

Note: If your big idea requires that the organization or your supervisors change their values or adopt problems they don't currently see or care about, this step requires a great deal more time and work. Start with education - "Did you know...? How do you feel about...? Have you considered...?" Present challenges and data in terms of their existing values and problems. Being pushy and self-righteous will not help you accomplish your goal.

If your idea is a good one and you can implement it, continue demonstrating the data and results. In time, you will be ready for:

6) Implementation

If your idea is adopted or you get the responsibility to take it further, this is a critical step: don't let a good idea wither by neglecting your "whys" and "whats"!

6a) Why

First, have "why" conversations with those responsible for implementing this idea. They have their own values and their own problems. Why should they care about your great idea? In fact, at this point it's no longer "your" idea - now it's an opportunity for everyone to be [safer / more effective / save money / make money / enjoy work / etc.]

Don't skip this step! Your idea relies on others understanding why they are doing it. People (including you and me) do what we have a personal interest in doing. This is one of the reasons you want to expose people to the idea during the pilots, to build excitement and personal connection.

6b) What

Once the "why" is very clear and people are invested in the solution, then move to the "what" - how to implement the great idea. What knowledge and resources do people need? What skills?

7) Monitor and Feedback
Just as you did during your pilots, keep an eye on what is and is not working. Don't ignore feedback you receive. Something that worked in the pilot might not make sense with a larger implementation. As you monitor and receive feedback, implement what you learn. As needed, revisit "whys" and "whats" - do they still make sense? Make changes as needed.

Size Isn't Everything

I began this post by referencing the smaller market share owned by Apple's computers and phones - your idea doesn't have to be used by everyone to change the world.

Take pride in your ideas and give them a chance to succeed. You might just revolutionize your organization or the world!

You Might Be Interested In:

Lincoln's Rule of Four

Do You Commit These 5 Management Mistakes?

The Garden of Ingenuity

I Looked for the Dry Places

Take care,

David M. Dye

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Eight Leadership Lessons from Tim Tebow

Photo by Jeffrey Beall

Can Tim Tebow make it as an NFL quarterback?

More on that debate at the end of this post...

What is not up for debate are the leadership lessons we can learn from Tim Tebow.

I've met Mr. Tebow several times through my work in Denver, have watched him during games, and in interviews. Through two years and in every venue I've observed him, Tim Tebow has consistently demonstrated eight leadership principles:

1. Belief

One of the greatest gifts a leader brings to their team is belief - belief in the team, belief in the vision, belief that we can do this. Leaders believe when no one else does.

In just a few games as a starting quarterback, it is clear Mr. Tebow believes his team can win. That belief is contagious and brings out the best in everyone else.

2. Results

Effective leaders consistently focus on results. They regularly call their teams back to what they're trying to accomplish and make decisions on the basis of what will accomplish results.

Watching his celebration in the end zone after his most recent touchdown, it is clear that Tim Tebow is a competitor with an intense desire to win.

3. Humility

Effective leaders maintain a realistic sense of self. They know they're not perfect while also appreciating others' value and dignity. Humility is vital for leaders to establish credibility and maintain connection to their team.

In the times I've met Mr. Tebow, the characteristic that stands out most for me is his humility. So far, the incredible hype surrounding his short professional career has not gone to his head. 

I once heard him say that had he grown up in a different country or a different time, his skills as a football player would not be valued and no one would know him from anyone else. His sense of gratitude and having been 'blessed' is very real while he also knows he isn't all the press says he is - good or bad.

4. Perspective

Part of what keeps effective leaders humble is healthy perspective. That is, understanding how their work fits into a bigger picture and knowing what is most important.

After the Broncos' most recent win, Tim Tebow was asked how he maintains a level-head with all the media attention focused on him. He responded: This is just football. I'm able to help build a children's hospital in the Philippines - that's something that really matters. Tebow is a man of faith and it obviously informs every aspect of his life.

5. We Not I

Consistent with humility and a healthy perspective, effective leaders understand they are one person on a larger team and that everything that's accomplished is a product of that team.

Tebow consistently gives credit - not just to his team, but to the coaches. You just don't hear many professional athletes acknowledging the role their coaches play in the team's overall success.

6. Focus on Strengths not Weakness

"You cannot build on weaknesses...place a person in a position where his or her strengths can be fully utilized..." -Peter Drucker
"Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.” – Marilyn vos Savant

Competence matters. Tim Tebow is an inconsistent throwing quarterback - his passing rating is one of the lowest in the league. However, he is a strong running quarterback and reads defensive schemes well. In a display of strengths-oriented leadership, the Denver coaching staff have modified their offense to make these strengths productive.

7. Focus on What You Can Control

Ultimately, the only thing we have control over is our own behavior and attitude. Effective leaders take responsibility for themselves, their influence, and for their own contribution to results.

In a recent press conference, when asked why he thinks he is such a controversial sports figure, Tebow responded by saying it doesn't matter because it's not something he controls. What he can control, he said, is working hard, practicing with his team, and trying to get better. So that's where he puts his focus.

8. Learn, Work Hard, Get Better

Effective leaders make learning and developing competence a priority. Stagnant leaders lose credibility and cannot, with integrity, ask their teams to grow.

Tebow knows his passing game needs work. During the week he spends many hours with coaches working on his skills. He puts in the time and is learning.

Sustained Results

Back to the question I asked at the beginning: Can Tim Tebow make it as an NFL quarterback?

I am no football expert - what I do know is in six games he has proven he can lead and produce results.

Whether or not he and his team will be able to sustain performance over time will depend on their ability to stay together, remain focused on results, react to a changing environment, learn from their mistakes and successes, and grow over time.

And that's true for any team.

Read More:

15 Tips Every New Leader Needs
Avoiding the Waterfall
4 Key Practices for Every Organizational Leader
Where are Your Eyes?
Do You Commit These 5 Management Mistakes?

Take care,

David M. Dye

Know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog?
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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Four Key Practices for Every Organizational Leader

Photo by m4tik

If you're leading an organization - whether a team, a company, or a group of volunteers - there are four things the organization requires to be successful. Effective organizational leaders consistently do these four things:

1. Focus on Results

Your organization exists to accomplish something. Organizational leaders keep everyone focused on those results. They will make changes in systems or personnel if either hinder the team's ultimate purpose.

Why does your team exist? What does it accomplish or produce outside of itself?

2. Develop People

People are the most important resource in any organization. Effective organizational leaders devote a significant amount of their time to ensuring people are properly trained, equipped with the resources they need, and matured as leaders.

Do your team members have the skills and resources they need to be effective? Who will carry the team's vision when you are gone? Are they carrying that vision now?

3. Cultivate Values

Every group of people has a culture of how it conducts business, how people treat each other, and how problems are resolved. Values are the foundation of this culture. Too often, values are just words on a wall. Effective organizational leaders consistently model, reinforce, and celebrate organizational values. As a result, they grow an organizational culture.

What are the unwritten rules in your team? How do people treat one another? How are problems resolved?

4. Promote Organizational Learning

Effective organizations regularly evaluate themselves against their environment and their own goals. Organizational leaders promote learning, not just at the individual level, but at the level of the team/organization. Effective leaders do not waste time placing blame for past problems, but continually ask their teams to think about how things can be done more effectively in the future.

How do you institutionalize learning? How does your team discover what worked and why it worked? How do they address future improvements?

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Organizations are more than just a collection of individuals. They develop a life and energy of their own. As an organizational leader, your role is to actively develop that energy and keep it focused.

Take care,

David M. Dye

Know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog?

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: Good to Great

This week's book review is really a two-for-one. Jim Collins' Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't was a follow-up to an earlier work called Built to Last. In part, Good to Great is the focus of this review, but really, of all the books in this series, the most powerful may be Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great.

Collins wrote the Social Sectors Monograph after many nonprofits asked how he would apply the concepts of Good to Great to Social Sector organizations where shareholder profit is not available as a metric.

His answer to that question is page-for-page one of the most richly packed 35 pages you'll ever read. I recommend the monograph for any manager or leader, whether engaged in nonprofit or for-profit business.

In Good to Great and the Social Sector you will find a distillation of Collins research of thousands of organizations and his team's conclusions about the critical factors that help organizations make the transitions from "good" to enduring quality and impact. 

One of the most critical points Collins makes in this monograph is that a vital key to lasting organizational impact is discipline - and that discipline is not an automatic characteristic of for-profits or nonprofits.

Rather, discipline is a characteristic of great organizations - and is too often lacking from businesses of any stripe.

He goes on to suggest that social sector organizations can assemble a core set of metrics to which they consistently hold themselves accountable. I once heard Collins express the idea like this: You want to assemble a body of evidence such that a jury would have to find you guilty of being effective.

In my opinion, this principle works as well in for-profits as nonprofits. Impact is more than profit.

Good to Great (and the Social Sector) emphasizes a combination of leadership and management principles found in enduringly great organizations. These businesses feature leaders with a "paradoxical combination of humility and professional will". 

The organizations' management is very clear and stays focused on what drives their economic engine - the thing they are able to do better than anyone else in their sphere, yet they change quickly and firmly when innovation is required.

Leaders and managers work together to create a culture of excellence, discipline, results, and impact through a series of small wins which build into momentum with a life of its own.

There is something for nearly every reader in Good to Great and the Social Sector. The section of leadership and results-oriented accountability alone is worth the price of this very small book for any growing leader and manager.

Happy Reading!

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Avoiding the Waterfall

Have you ever led, managed, or been a part of a team/organization that was:

a) constantly bickering?
b) so tied up in bureaucracy that every form had a form to request the form?
c) hamstrung by office politics?
d) full of people lacking passion and energy?

If one or more of these characterize your organization or team, it's often because the team lacks a vital ingredient. The missing ingredient?

A focus on results. 

When an organization lacks a clear focus on results, its attention becomes scattered on trivialities, turf-wars, and passion-sucking processes that exist only because someone wanted a process - not because it accomplishes anything meaningful.

Effective leaders and managers maintain a consistent focus on results. Those outcomes are the reason the team and organization exist in the first place. A focus on results provides clarity, it prevents organizational navel-gazing, and it energizes individual's with a passion for the outcomes.

Management guru Peter Drucker defined results as the things that take place outside of the organization. Everything inside the organization is a process to produce those results.

Examples of results (what happens outside the organization) include:

• Customers purchasing products and experiencing the benefit of those products (the results of a retail business)
• Children benefiting from their education (the result of a school)
• Citizens experiencing safety and a decline in crime (the result of a police department)

In each of these examples, multiple internal processes might take place to produce the results. Each internal process can be weighed against how effectively it contributes to the desired outcomes.

In our day-to-day work it is easy for us and our teams to run in circles chasing all the small distractions that come our way. Long ago I learned that a group of people in a boat headed toward a waterfall don't spend a lot of time arguing - they all grab an oar and paddle. Their clear results (get to shore and continue living) produce clear action (paddle!). One significant way we can serve our teams is by regularly and passionately calling our attention back to the desired outcomes.

Next time you are part of a team that feels confused or unproductive, clarify what results they want to achieve. It brings everything else into focus.

Take care,

David M. Dye

Know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog?

Please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: The Oz Principle

Today's book review is The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability by Hickman, Smith, and Collins.

The Oz Principle is an entire book thoroughly exploring one concept: responsibility. I appreciate this book for its laser-sharp focus on helping individuals and organizations recognize that they are responsible for their own reactions, decisions, behaviors, and ultimately, results. The Oz Principle's greatest strength is in the methodology it gives the reader for assessing a situation and determining what action they can take to produce the results they want to see. This is a valuable and needed process - especially for emerging leaders who haven't yet grown into their own influence.

The "Oz" reference is a metaphor for those who abdicate their own responsibility and hope that a wizard (such the one Dorothy seeks in the Emerald City) will solve their problems for them. In the end, the lion, tin-man, and scarecrow realize that they provide their own solutions. The power of the metaphor comes in realizing that we can have amazing influence on the world around us and on the results we desire.

If I have any criticism of the book's message, it is that the personal/organizational responsibility mantra can be taken too far if removed from a context of strong personal and organizational values. For instance, I may very well be able to take action on one hundred different issues that concern me. However, just because I can doesn't necessarily mean I should. The Oz Principle's message is incredibly valuable - if you have done the work to prioritize your own values and know what is most important. Without doing that work, the message of personal responsibility can be overwhelming.

I recommend The Oz Principle for leaders and managers who have a strong internal compass and want to increase their influence.

Happy Reading!

David M. Dye

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

What's the Difference?

In response to some of last week's posts I was asked about my view on the difference between management and leadership.

There are a variety of opinions on the subject, but I will start with an observation: some leaders I have known dislike management. They share a feeling that managing is stale, bogged down in routine, and isn't concerned about the future. In general they feel like management doesn't help change the world.

I contend that what these leaders dislike is poor management. Just as poor leadership can produce bad results, so can poor management. So let's focus on good leadership and good management - how are these related?

Generally speaking, leadership is concerned with envisioning the future, building a team, motivating, developing people, and finding solutions to the problems of the day. When people talk of good management, generally speaking, they are talking about producing results through a team, getting things done, and ensuring resources are used effectively.

When I look at those lists, however, one question jumps out at me: Won't good managers also practice leadership skills? Teams are more effective if they share a common vision, are motivated, are growing as people, and are doing meaningful work.

I contend that the most effective managers also practice leadership. I also believe that effective leaders either practice some management or else bring in other people to ensure that management is taking place (those castles in the air need foundations beneath them!)

If leadership is on one end of a continuum and management on the other, there is a wide area in the middle where the two overlap.

How do you balance leading and managing?

David M. Dye

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.