From "Strong Finishes" to "Fast Starts"

Happy February! The second (and shortest) month of the year boasts a boatload of celebrations and holidays including African American History, the Chinese New Year, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, National Pizza Day, The Super Bowl, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and yes, Groundhog's Day. It's also the second installment of The Positive Deviant, so let's get after it!

A week ago today, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, signaling six more weeks of winter. That's not the only definition of Groundhog Day. Like the 1993 movie starring Bill Murray, Webster offers that it can also be "a situation in which a series of events appear to be recurring in exactly the same way; experiencing every day as the same." As Trent Reznor sings in "Every Day is Exactly the Same," "I believe I can see the future, 'cause I repeat the same routine. I think I used to have a purpose but then again, that might have been a dream."

Raise your hand if you are attending a "Fast Start" meeting this month. I see you, Big Pharma! For the ten years I was at AstraZeneca, (and probably for another ten preceding that), our "Fast Start" meetings all looked the same in terms of aim, content, and intent. We reviewed sales forecasts, had patient panels and testimonials, reviewed new marketing materials (to help close the gap in said forecasts), were offered a session on personal development, gifted plenty of branded swag, engaged in role plays (or pretended to), held district time, and usually had a fun, team-building event and district dine-arounds in the host city. Meeting themes ranged from "Be Resilient," "Be Relentless," and "Best Year Yet," to "Accelerate," "Elevate Your Game," "Play to Win," and "Win as One," all implying that we were somehow way behind the projected pace and could do better. (And these were not to be confused by the fourth quarter meetings of the "Finish Strong" variety). If everything is always the same, how can we expect to differentiate ourselves or achieve different results?

In hindsight, it left me wondering, how important is a fast start?

No doubt, beginnings and endings are powerful and memorable. Sometimes.

Just last week, Allegra (11) found an old "Baby Genius" CD and we played it on the way to school. Suckered into parental marketing messaging that listening to these xylophonic tunes of "Little Boy Blue," "Mary Had a Little Lamb," "Baa Baa Black Sheep," and "Where is Thumbkin?" would somehow improve infant neural connections, make her learn the alphabet faster, and put her on the fast track to an Ivy League school, I was shocked when she didn't recall one song. Not one! Not even when I made the Thumbkin gestures on the steering wheel at a red light. She was equally hysterical and bewildered that I recalled all of the lyrics by heart. Are "fast starts" important if you don't remember them?

Or take for instance those in the New Year's Resolution camp. How many of you are still hitting the gym five days a week like you committed to January 3rd? A visit to my gym this week suggests very few. Like a Roman candle, many of us start new habits strongly and with good intention, only to find that come February, we've fizzled, are frustrated, and finished. Did our fast starts get us closer to achieving our goals?

While fast starts may be helpful, they are not necessary for success. (Michael Jordan failed to initially make his high school basketball team). I propose an alternative hypothesis that my colleagues can attest to hearing me espouse (over and over and over again): consistency itself is a high-performance habit. Far better to make daily decisions to get incrementally better than post lofty goals without a structured plan to help us achieve them.

How, then, can we avoid Groundhog's Day? Here's some actionable advice:

For leaders: Break the Fast Start Meeting cycle. Add these elements to your next meeting:

1. Celebrate the wins of the prior year. Not just the outcomes and metrics exceeded, but recognize the effort, the process, and your people. Where did we most improve? What did we learn? Where did we take risks? What would we do differently?
2. Begin with the end in mind. Rather than blindly encouraging your team to "find another gear" after they've exhausted all gears and beginning where the last quarter ended (usually with a deficit to make up), share a vision of success that is defined by December 31, 2022. Being clear about the goals and objectives for the year, rather than the latest tactics to employ over the next quarter, rallies the team to the larger outcomes and inspires greater, shared accountability for the results.
3. Create space for connection. Not every minute on the agenda has to be tightly managed. When flying folks across the country to sit in a conference room for a week, be intentional about the "free spaces" on your meeting bingo card. Agenda buffers between the last session and dinner, time to step outside for some sunshine, and a few nights that are unscripted are key. Everyone has been through a lot the past two years and leaving space for casual collisions may pay dividends.

For my family, friends, and colleagues who started new jobs in 2022 (and that's a lot of you!), how do you ensure exemplary performance in your new role?

1. Align with your Manager on what great looks like in your role. Craft a 30-60-90 day plan to achieve it, if it wasn't part of your interview preparation process.
2. Ask for feedback and coaching and embrace it! Become a Feedback Fiend and seek true feedback, NOT simply reassurance. Understand that feedback is fuel for winning. Show appreciation to the person offering the feedback. Listen to understand, not to respond. Ask for more...and stay silent. Summarize the feedback and make it actionable. Consider enrolling the provider of the feedback as an accountability partner. Repeat!
3. Be clear about your strengths and harness them. An activity that leverages your strengths is invigorating, energizing, evokes excitement and positive emotion, and you find that you perform it quite effortlessly. What activities come most naturally to you? What are things you have learned quickly? What are you most passionate about? Identify those activities and then the associated strength, which is something in which you naturally excel. For example, do you like practicing and writing music? Can those creative skills be translated into innovative marketing campaigns? Ensure your work outcomes leverage those strengths.

For our Executive Recruiting friends and fellow leaders hiring their next stars: Go beyond the traditional interview guide and generic competencies and look to job outcomes.

1. What does your ideal employee need to produce over the next 6-12 months to be considered an outstanding performer? Ensure the answer is SMARTe – including a specific task, measurable outcome, action verb,?is results-defined, time-bound, and says something about the environment (pace, team, culture, any unusual challenges, etc.). What are the actual deliverables they need to produce?
2. Given this, what does the person need to do in the next 30, 60, 90 days to ensure these major outcomes are met? What type of work will the person be doing the majority of the time? What are the subtasks they’d need to complete? What are the biggest technical/team/resource challenges they’d need to overcome? How will the organization and the candidate know they are winning at 30, 60, and 90 days into the role?
3. ?Then, when interviewing your candidates, you can ask them to describe something similar they’ve accomplished that’s most comparable to the outcomes you gathered in Steps 1 and 2. This expands your diversity and inclusion reach because the accomplishments can be achieved in similar jobs, not only by requiring specific industry or domain experience. Things you’d listen for include: their general approach to the problem, the quality of the follow-up questions asked, details provided, metrics use, data use and insights created, how they managed teams to achieve a goal, how they managed conflict, who was on the team, challenges encountered, and the results achieved.?

Try one of these 9 tips this month and let me know in the comments section how you fared. Have a question or topic you'd like addressed next month? Let us know that, too!

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Here's what we're reading:

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Dan Pink (2022)

Hire with Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Outstanding Diverse Teams , by Lou Adler (2021)

Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2015).

Here's where we'll be: Presenting a Masters Series entitled, "Driving Business Results by Benchmarking Your Star Performers" at ISPI's 2022 Performance Improvement Conference, Nashville, TN the week of April 24th.