Leading With Self-Control

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"Let your breath be the first word."

—Jefferson Fisher

What contributes to CEO failure? 

"How do CEOs blow it? More than any other way by failure to put the right people in the right jobs—and the related failure to fix people problems in time," says Ram Charan and Geoffrey Colvin in a timeless FORTUNE magazine article published in June 1999. 

"Specifically, failed CEOs are often unable to deal with a few key subordinates whose sustained poor performance deeply harms the company. Everyone around the leader knows about these problems, but their opinions are ignored," the writers added. 

CEOs know there's a problem, but they suppress it. 

The article concludes that the failure is one of emotional strength.

Defining self-control

Self-control plays three vital roles: thinking before acting, controlling disruptive emotions and impulses, and saying "no" to temptation. However important this characteristic is, it's often overlooked when hiring. 

Dr. Christopher Barnes from the University of Washington reports that self-control varies over time within the same person. 

The studies point in these directions:

• It's a time-limited response. Too much is used in one place, leaving less to be used in another. 
• Think of it as a finite cognitive resource. Exerting self-control can negatively affect future self-control if not replenished.
• As self-control depletes, one is more likely to succumb to temptation. Even good people can have weak moments.
• Different types of self-control tap into the same pool of limited resources.

Temperament (personality) and self-control are closely related but not the same. Temperament is innate and influenced by biological factors. Self-control, learned over time, is the key to managing one's temperament effectively. 

Desirable habits

Embracing self-control has many rewards, including better people decisions.

A self-regulated condition means eating healthy, improving job performance, and forming higher-quality friendships. Inspiring and intellectually challenging associates rather than abusing and micro-managing them is a plus.

Without self-control, we revert to impulsive decision-making, emotional outbursts, and difficulty managing stress. The literature cautions against sending a text or email or calling someone when angry, as words written or spoken can never be returned. 

Judicious restraint using the 24-hour reply rule is a teachable moment, as others pay more attention to what we do than what we say.

A reflective leader

Psychologists define reflection as evaluating our thoughts, behaviors, and motivations. This process is about self-awareness, knowing who we are, and clarifying the boundaries of our lives. Furthermore, this prearranged time helps us assess the quality of our circumstances. 

In the age of noise, leaders need to be alone and offline. As the playwright Jon Fosse declares, "The silence speaks."

Suppose we don't periodically reflect on what matters to us. In that case, we can be misdirected by outdated thinking. Or, confused by a disorienting culture whose moral fabric is rated poor by 54 percent of U.S. adults, according to a 2024 Gallup Poll. In that same survey, 83 percent of respondents said that moral values are worsening.  

"Leaders have to get outside the emotional climate of the day," writes Edwin Friedman in A Failure of Nerve—Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. "Vision is generally considered a cerebral event, but the ability to see things differently is an emotional phenomenon," he notes in his last book.  

Widely respected, Friedman, a rabbi turned consultant, makes clear that when attempting to engineer an organizational renaissance, those at the top have to muster the inner strength to overcome resistance and rejection, especially from those within who may have lost their will and way.

The gift of sleep

If energy is the fuel for self-control, how do we tank or power up?

Certainly, diet, exercise, and fresh air make a big difference. Experiencing new environments and including individuals of strong character in our circle of friends helps greatly. Continuous learning renews our minds. Don't forget the encouragement and support from families. 

Nevertheless, a good night's rest is the greatest daily power source for regaining emotional strength and self-control, which can positively influence one's temperament. After all, the wisdom of ruling our spirit is a time-honored instruction. 

Mayo Clinic recommends that adults sleep at least seven hours each night. However, the quality of sleep and routine matter more than the number of hours. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and deep sleep are required to improve cognitive function and memory, reduce stress, and boost the immune system. Sleep also has a physical healing quality.

Sleep psychologist Dr. Michelle Drerup suggests that the bedroom temperature should be 60 to 67 degrees (15-19 C). "It should be cool, dark, and quiet to enhance sleep," she notes. 

Can you ever make up for lost sleep?

"We don't know," says Dr. David Gozal of the University of Chicago. "If a person goes without sleep for just one night and tries to replace that lost sleep—to repay that sleep debt in just a day or two, most likely they will be able to regain normal function. But getting extra sleep does not immediately restore all systems," Dr. Gozal quickly adds. 

Buffer days

The late Bob Buford, co-founder of Leadership Network with Fred Smith, liked introducing something he had been thinking about when opening the Network's conferences. One idea that sticks in my mind is inserting "buffer days" into busy schedules—perhaps one or two days to rest—for you and your colleagues, too.

Back-to-back meetings are sometimes a reality. Red-eye flights may be necessary, and overseas travel can cause jet lag. However, an intermittent buffer day can provide emotional strength, offsetting the physical and mental strain of demanding responsibilities.  

Author Alan Cohen sums it up this way: "There is virtue in work, and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither."

Sources: Self-control: A vital behavior for leaders everywhere, Sarah Mangia, The Ohio State University, September 15, 2020; Leadership Takes Self-Control. Here's What We Know About It, Kai Chi Yam, Hulwen Lian, D. Lance Ferris, and Douglas Brown, Harvard Business Review, June 5, 2017; Sleep Deprived People Are More Likely to Cheat, Christopher M. Barnes, Harvard Business Review, May 31, 2013; The Skill that Matters Most, Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review, September 13, 2011; A Neglected But Essential Leadership Trait--Why Self-Control Really Matters, Prudy Gouirguecheon, Forbes, April 3, 2018. 

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The Struggle with Strategy

Adobe

"No worthwhile strategy can be planned without taking into account the organization's ability to execute it."

—From Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

It's pretty standard that when things go wrong in corporate life, there's a tendency to blame the marketplace, competitors' disruptive actions, timing, and even government regulations. Each of these factors can and does weigh against the best strategic plans. Those plans aim to identify, in plain language, the organization's desired future and how to make it happen (strategy defined).  

However, there may be something more critical than rounding up the usual suspects.  

"The single greatest reason companies get into trouble is that CEOs are bad at strategy," says Cesare R. Mainardi, adjunct professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management and a former CEO of Booz & Company.   

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Professor Mainardi quotes two statistics from a global study about leadership capabilities:  

"81% of the time when major shareholder value is destroyed, it's because of bad strategy decisions (Ron Johnson, former CEO at J. C. Penney). And only 8% of all executives are good at strategy and execution--that is, betting on the right strategy and doing the right things to make it happen (Jeff Bezos, current CEO at Amazon)."

Day-to-day matters

"If things go sideways, it is most likely the strategy and execution decisions made day-in and day-out," Mainardi concludes.

The apparent self-deception facing an enterprise is that it often appears to be doing all the right things, focusing on growth, pursuing excellence, reorganizing for change, and creating a lean structure. Yet that list often proves to be nothing more than imitative rhetoric.

"Conventional wisdom is actually a trap ... it creates a huge gap between a chosen strategy and the ability to deliver it," the study notes.  

In their best-selling book referenced above, Bossidy and Charan point out that "execution requires a comprehensive understanding of a business, its people, and its environment."   It means top management is to be clear — but not too clear — about strategy, focusing on the objective while not defining the day-to-day execution method.       

Roger Fisher, former director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, put it this way: "Distant visions and hard work are both required, but unless what you do today is related to where you want to end up, you will never get there."     

The idea of mutual accountability for results may be too uncomfortable for some. If so, it explains, in part, why the strategy-execution gap is not broached more often in corporate and business unit discussions.   

Closing the gap

What are ways to help close that gap?  

Professor Mainardi offers the following:

1.   Commit to an identity. Stop endlessly chasing growth. Invite it. Define oneself by what one does--not just what one sells. A genuinely differentiating identity is built on bespoke, difficult-to-build capabilities.  If a leader remains true to their company's identity day in and day out, they can build a great company.

2.   Translate the strategic into the everyday. Stop the endless benchmarking. Focus on building a handful of unique, cross-functional capabilities that deliver on strategy. Leaders must roll up their sleeves and be close enough to execution to become the architects and chief builders of the required qualifications.

3.   Put culture to work. Stop fighting a company's culture and blaming it for undermining strategy. Start putting it to work instead. No culture is perfect. The key is to identify and leverage the parts that work in a company's favor.

4.   Cut costs to grow stronger. Stop making the classic mistake of going lean everywhere. Most companies waste 20% to 40% of their budgets on expenses unrelated to their strategy.

5.   Shape the future. Stop constantly reacting to market changes. Agility is overrated. It has unfortunately become code for throwing out strategy and chasing any opportunity one thinks might work. The best way to own the future is to be the one to shape it.

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Profitable Growth

"By itself, there is no virtue in business growth. A company is not necessarily better because it is bigger, any more than the elephant is better because he is bigger than the honeybee."

--Peter F. Drucker

In the fourth and final installment on principles of business growth, we turn our attention to additional findings on this elusive subject.   

Our premise from the beginning:

That a one-dimensional strategy is insufficient to achieve sustained growth and create a future for the organization. In addition, healthy and sustained growth, even with the right people and processes, is as much a mystery as a planned strategy.

In the book, The Alchemy of Growth, we are reminded of two key factors for growth:

• That accelerating growth lies in turning ideas into reality 
• A group cannot profit from an opportunity, no matter how attractive, if it does not have the capabilities to capture and defend it

An article published in the McKinsey Quarterly raised this question, "Is your growth strategy your worst enemy?"

The authors then asked: "Why do plans that look good on paper go so bad when they are executed?"

Not accounting for how the competition might react is a secondary reason why plans don't go well. Rivals often threaten the best-laid plans with inventive responses. Put another way every action produces a reaction, some of which may not be anticipated in the planning process. 

Good growth and bad growth

What else does management writer Peter Drucker have to say about business growth?  

• While every business would likely claim a desire to grow only a handful have a growth policy or growth strategy. Fewer know whether they are really growing or just becoming more obese.
• A business has to be the right size for its market, its economy, and its technology. The danger is becoming marginalized in any markets the business may be in. An enterprise is always the wrong size if it is marginal in its market.
• A company must know its minimum growth goal or it has no growth policy. 
• The first step in a growth strategy is not to decide where and how to grow. It is to decide what to abandon. To grow you must have a systematic policy to get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete, and the unproductive. The foundation of a growth strategy is the freeing of resources for new opportunities.
• It is not how much growth we want?"Rather it is how much growth do we need so as not to become marginal as our market grows?"
• The greatest mistake in a growth strategy is to try to grow in too many areas.  

Changing Mindsets

Coming out of a very deep recession, how do leaders manage the polarity between expense and growth? 

"Going after revenue productivity requires a different corporate mindset than the one for achieving cost productivity," says consultant Ram Charan. 

"Here, what you spend is less important than what you spend it on and the revenue it produces. And just as you get everyone to focus on cost-cutting, you need to get everyone focused on revenue productivity," Charan adds.

He goes on to propose a "growth budget" for getting silos to work together; to lay out a growth plan; and most importantly, how to fund that plan.  

A growth budget would be separated from the traditional budget so it could be identified and have its discipline and review. That way everyone could see the funding for growth. This design focuses on building the business while encouraging and rewarding cooperation to reach a common goal.

Charan makes the point that having a social engine (not a task force), centered around open communication and relationships built on trust, enables collaboration to occur naturally and helps foster growth.   

Do you have a growth budget to pursue the right opportunities?

More than the right organizational chart, do you have a healthy social system to get things done?

The next big thing

"Everybody is fleeing into the future just as fast as they can," says Paul Saffo, of Discern Analytics. He adds, "They don't know what they are going to need in their toolkit, so they are grabbing stuff as they go."

So Google and Facebook start a bidding war for Titan Aerospace, a drone start-up that makes high-flying robots. Google bought Titan (terms not disclosed) as Facebook acquired U. K.-based Ascenta, another drone maker. 

That Facebook deal puts in place another building block of beaming the Internet to a third of the world's population who can't get it any other way.  

In the meantime, Apple pays $3 billion to acquire popular headphone maker Beats Electronics, and its related streaming music service Beats Music, to shore up iTunes.    

With billions in reserves (Apple alone has more than $137 billion in cash--greater than Microsoft and Google combined), these technology and social media giants can afford to place multiple bets on the next big thing and wait for their investments to pay off if they ever do.

Unfortunately, most cannot participate in that kind of big-dollar acquisition spree with an uncertain or likely delayed return on investment.

How then does everyone else grow profitably (including nonprofits who also need to show a profit or have reserves)?

To answer that question let's come back to our original post in this series. As the Alchemy writers conclude, in addition to hard work and timing, most businesses and nonprofits grow and sustain that growth by extending and strengthening the core of an existing business; developing new entities (faster than existing ones are extinguished); and instituting a process for creating viable options--stretching the mind for future possibilities

Perhaps that three-dimensional approach is worth a look during your next strategic planning cycle, especially if profitable growth, however, defined, is the ultimate goal.

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