“This feels risky! This feels risky!”

A colleague and I were joking nervously on the first day of an intense, weeklong training class.

We were about to begin a rigorous simulation as we learned to coach teams through high-risk, conflict-ripe situations.

In the release of tension through humor, we were being honest about our feelings and our sense of the learning risk we faced.

We met that risk. It was not easy.

But it was a definitely a risk worth taking.

Most of the business risks I’ve taken during my career have fallen into the “risk worth taking” category. They’ve been risks of all kinds, including:

– Starting a career in a difficult national and local economy
– Changing careers
– Changing companies
– Starting a business
– Moving halfway across the country
– Stopping work for a couple of years to get a master’s degree
– Changing careers
– Changing jobs several times in the same company
– Starting another business
– Adding new products and services as the market changes, some opportunities emerging, while others go away

For some, it’s because they see risk as an experience to be endured, not a process to be managed.

Or they don’t understand risk and its benefits, when successfully faced.

Risks in business can occur in many ways.

They can be the result of uncertainties with new projects, products or services.

Risks can arise when a company grows very quickly, or when it expands into unfamiliar markets and works to meet the needs of new customers.

Individual employees, too, face the risks of change. Sometimes that change is welcome or invited. But many times, that is not the case.

You get the picture: business risk can arise in many expected and unexpected ways.

No matter how you well you manage risk now, you can always learn to handle it better.

Start by understanding your risk personality.

Are you most likely to:

– Seek risk, seeing it as a challenge and an adventure in some way?
– Love the adrenalin rush of risk so much that you create it in situations where it doesn’t have to be?
– Try to understand and manage risk?
– Steer clear of risk in all forms?
– Believe that risk does not exist in your business or industry?

Remember, however you feel about risk, your competitors are trying to manage it better than you do.

And the company that handles risk most effectively has a clear advantage over more fearful and/or less adaptable competitors.

That’s because change is always underway, whatever your business or industry.

Consider these many moving parts that most companies face:

– Customers change in terms of what they want and need
– Markets move and adapt as new competitors emerge and others leave
– Technology continues to advance, and to become smaller, faster, and sometimes, less expensive
– Employees move to different jobs and companies
– Suppliers create new products and services, and enter new markets with the products and services they already sell

The net of it is that if you hate risk, and hate to change, you may become obsolete as you try to stay right where you are, attempting to preserve the status quo.

To understand how well you handle risk now, start by considering how you handled risks in the past:

1. Think of two to three major risks you faced in the past few years.

2. Did you anticipate these risks? If not, could you have anticipated them with more or different information?

3. How well did you handle each risk?

4. How could you have handled them better?

5. Are there risks you avoided? Were you able to keep them at bay, or did they show up again in a different, more vigorous or otherwise more challenging way?

Begin, also, to look ahead:

6. How would you like to improve your risk assessment and management abilities in 2013 and beyond?

7. What information might help you anticipate, understand, and manage risks better? How can you gather this information most easily?

Improvement begins with understanding and acceptance.

Knowing where you stand, currently, goes a long way toward helping you improve your risk management and other abilities.

We’ll return to the subject of risk in the next blog post. I’ll share ideas for how you can begin to handle risk better.

In the meantime, if you’d like more ideas on how to make the next year a better year, here’s a previous blog post I wrote, Seven tips to make your business change-ready for an improved year.

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“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
Alain de Botton

A good half of the art of business is resilience, as well.

Here’s how the need for it shows up, typically:

- All signs are that things are going pretty well.

- Oh, maybe the data show that one small thing is not quite right, but it shouldn’t turn out to be a big deal, after a few process tweaks and tucks. It’s really nothing to worry about.

- Suddenly, out of the clear blue, you’re facing potential disaster.

That little problem you weren’t worried about?

It blew up.

And now you’re sunk.

Or are you?

This is when resilience is a potentially business-saving asset, if you have it.

But for those who struggle with resilience, what causes it?

It’s fear.

And it’s human nature, in many ways.

No one wants to think about what might go wrong.

But putting your head in the sand is not a winning strategy in any business or profession. 

And it only increases stress, instead of burying it.

Manage your stress by reducing your stress, rather than by trying to ignore it.

If you’d like to grow or improve your resilience, start with the following five ideas.

They can soften the blow or save your business during unexpected and challenging times:

1. Stretch your thinking.

You’ll be more prepared to respond to any unexpected situation if you consider what might go wrong well before something happens.

Just by considering a wide range of possibilities, and mentally rehearsing what you and the people you work with would do to address them improves your ability to respond effectively in any circumstance that occurs.

One way to do this is scenario analysis. In a simple, structured format, you consider the best case, worst case, and most likely circumstances.

Then you stretch even further in each direction, and consider EVEN worse, and EVEN better things that could be ahead. Having done that, your “most likely” scenario is likely to be different and more accurate, than it previously was.

And however it works out, you are likely to have previewed and rehearsed, even in cursory fashion, what you might do and how you would approach previously unexpected situations.

Here’s a link to a post I wrote about it, Strategic planning: Mine your imagination with scenario planning.

2. Pay attention to critical details.

Track key indicators of possible change to improve your ability to predict what might happen, before it does.

Look at it this way: you’re improving the crystal ball you use to predict what will happen in the future.

To use examples in nature, animals, who are tuned in to very subtle signs in their environment, are far better than humans are at predicting and being ready for some natural disasters when they occur.

Dogs and cats, for example, can often tell when an earthquake is going to happen.

A recent New York Times article addressed birds’ ability to anticipate and prepare for dangerous storms. That article is here, Birds Have Natural Ability to Survive Storms.

Similarly, you can discover and track early warning signs of possible change in business.

To do so, start by identifying the highest risk aspects of your business.

Then brainstorm details or related trends that you could track to give you early warning about the very changes you worry about now…but could take action to prevent or minimize if you knew they were beginning to occur.

3. Figure out what processes and systems must work if only part of the company can work.

Change those core and key processes and systems now if they’re the ones your business must stand on to ride out an emergency for a while.

And if that emergency never occurs…and hopefully it won’t…you will benefit from faster, easier, more cost-effective processes and ways of getting work done.

That’s almost guaranteed to lower your costs and improve your profits.

4. Create an emergency plan and resources for your business.

This one is easy to wave off, but it could save your business, and it could save lives, too.

Encourage your employees and friends of the business, such as your customers, suppliers, and colleagues to do so, too.

Here are links to pages on the FEMA website that tell you how to create business preparedness plans and create emergency kits:

Business Preparedness

Build an Emergency Kit

5. Practice.

Find small ways to try resiliency out.

Be creative. Be positive, even if it’s not pleasant to think about.

Treat resiliency-building like a game, if you can. It’s a game with high stakes, if you have to exercise it.

But your business…and your life…could depend upon it.

And the odds are it will have beneficial effects far beyond what you might expect, even if that rainy day never comes.

The finish line.

When you read those words, what do you think? And what do you feel?

Do you imagine, or recall, experiences of:

- Soaring across a finish line?

- Struggling to cross it?

- Missing a finish line altogether, despite your best intentions and most dedicated preparation?

If you’re like most people, your experience with finish lines – and goal achievement – covers the full range from exuberance to missing the mark at times.

Goal-setting and goal achievement is, of course, on the minds of many people now, as the year begins.

If you’re setting goals for this year, try these steps:

1. Think back on your greatest achievements.

Recall what helped you see your way through to achieve them. Was it:

– Setting a clear vision of what you wanted to achieve?

– Seeking customer feedback, whoever the customers were for your work at the time, and letting that guide you forward?

– Following a thread of promising results, wherever they led?

– Concentrating on team or individual development so you’d be well-prepared for a future challenge?

– Did you use some other approach or strategy? If so, what was it?

2. Based on what you discover, what does it tell you about what may work best for goal-setting now?

– Do you need to create a clear vision of your goal, or a strong “felt sense” of achieving what you want now, and next?

–  Do you need to seek customer feedback to guide goal-setting?

–  Do you need to focus on what’s working well and use that to guide you to what’s best for you in the months ahead?

–  Or do you need to concentrate on developing skills or those of a team you lead so that you’re primed for a bigger goal in the future?

–  Is there yet another strategy that would guide you best as you prepare to achieve well in 2012?

Speaking for myself, when I do this exercise, I follow several approaches.

First, I create or refresh the vision that guides my work over several years.

Then I look at what worked well the prior year, and what I need to improve.

I use that information to set aggressive, yet grounded goals for the year ahead.

Next, I create a few annual performance measures to monitor and manage progress.

Finally, when it works best, I convert those annual measures into monthly and weekly measures. I use these to focus and produce steady progress.

These more frequent measures provide me almost instant feedback so I know if I’m on pace, and on-track to meet my goals, or if I must adjust my processes, resources, or perhaps the goals, themselves.

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An end-of-year, or end-of-project, assessment can be as simple as this:

- Did you meet your goals, or beat them?

- Or did you miss them?

- Why, and how?

That’s all you REALLY need to know to understand if you’ve been successful, right?

Not so fast.

Real success means much more than just “hitting your numbers” by the end of the year, or the end of a project.

Success that’s worth more than its weight in gold prepares you for the future, too.

Real success makes you:

- More confident because of what you’ve experienced (or survived).

- More able to repeat or improve on successes and challenges from the past.

- More skilled in seeing problems that may occur before they happen and so, more able to prevent or minimize them if they do.

- More able to dream big and do big because you trust yourself. You know now that you can experiment and adapt your way through unexpected events and challenges.

Set aside some time before the year ends to understand what you think and feel about the year that’s ending, as well as the year that’s about to begin.

Consider these questions, for starters:

1. What were your 2011 goals?

2. Did you meet them or miss them?

3. Why and how?

4. What have you learned this year that can help you in the year ahead?

5. What are your goals for 2012?

Make sure they’re written as SMART goals: specific, measurable, appropriately aggressive yet attainable, relevant and time-bound.

6. How do you want to be different at the end 2012? For example, what:

- Actions do you need to take?

- Knowledge and skills do you need to acquire

- Beliefs do you need to have or change?

- Habits do you need to drop or improve?

- How can you make these changes most easily?

7. What’s your biggest fear about the year ahead? What can you do to prevent or minimize the impact of it, if it does happen?

8. If you were to REALLY “wow!” yourself by the end of 2012, what would have happened? How?

9. What assumptions are you making about your 2012 goals, and the process of reaching them? How can you test or challenge these assumptions, and change them if it turns out you’re wrong?

10. What support do you need for the year ahead? How can you get it most  effectively and easily?

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The keys to success are often deceptively simple, yet they must be implemented.

One of those keys to success is as simple, yet as powerful as doing a great of follow-up.

Test that idea yourself.

Recall three of your greatest successes.

Imagine them in some detail, including the path you took, the challenges you met, and the pinnacle of achievement and how great it felt.

Now recall what made you successful in each of those situations.

How much did excellent follow-up have to do with success in each case?

It’s the same thing for almost any company, team or individual pursing a significant goal.

All elements of success can be present as the work begins, including:

- A clear mission

- A strong vision of the desired success

- A great leader

- A great plan that’s well-communicated and well-understood by everyone who has to implement it

- Talented, energetic people in every job, each person clear about his or her responsibilities, and the customer-focused quality he or she is expected to produce

- All the money and resources needed for success

Yet with all that preparation for success, poor follow-up can lead that team or company directly to failure.

And when it does, many problems begin to occur.

These include communication that goes awry, precious resources that are wasted, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Plans go off the rails and never get back on track.

Ultimately, the best intentions and opportunities fall apart in those cases or fall short of the mark, no matter how good the initial preparation was for success.

Why is great follow-up so hard?

I’ll address that, and the way to create a good follow-up process in future posts.

For the moment, enjoy some of your greatest achievements of the past. And in the process, recall lessons you learned about great follow-up and how essential it is for success.

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How do you remodel, refresh, or replace a dream you held if it’s no longer current for you?

A colleague and I noticed this was the case with several small business owners we worked with in a mentoring program we created.

You also see this with college students choosing majors, and then people who suddenly face a career change, whether it is forced or chosen.

You see this with companies and teams, too, when circumstances have changed and they may not have kept the dream alive as new people joined the company. Or maybe customers have moved on, making a once-successful company and products now an industry also-ran.

First, relax.

It may take a while, but you’ll discover what you really want to do and achieve if you’re open to whatever you discover, in the process.

Second, start paying more attention to the things you really like, and like to do.

For example:

– What do you love to do?

This can give you a general direction to look toward for your dream. It may or may not lead to an improved team goal or career path, but it can give you clues about where to look for more information.

At a minimum, paying attention to what you love to do, and then adding more of that to your life can make your present circumstances more satisfying.

If you’re part of a team that is trying to refresh its dream, notice the times when, as a group, you are most satisfied and most successful working together.

– What achievements are you proudest of?

This can give you clues about what makes you happiest. It can also help you understand what it is about those achievements that makes them so satisfying to you.

If you’re part of a team, pay attention to what collective achievements members of the team are proudest of. That gives you an idea of what motivates different members of the team, and what they might be driven to try to achieve again, together.

– Who do you admire?

If you admire people of great courage, perhaps you secretly wish you had more reasons and opportunities to exercise your own courage.

If you admire great artists, authors or musicians, perhaps you’re wish you had outlets for performing, expressing, or developing your artistic talents in other ways.

Perhaps athletes, inventors, great world leaders or Nobel Prize-winning scientists are those you admire most.

Whoever these people are, and whatever they have done, looking at who you admire can give you clues about what you long to do more of, yourself.

If you’re looking at this as a team, it can tell you more about what you’re driven to achieve, collectively, and what motivates you to do so.

There are other tools and exercises you can use to discover the dream that is real for you now. This just gives you a few ideas for how to start down that path.

If you find that you’re driving toward a dream or goal that just doesn’t move you,  have the courage to take a step back.

You will find that it can ultimately help you leap far ahead…and on a truer path.

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Your vision of the future may be fuzzy, indistinct.

Or it may be crisp, clear and compelling, guiding you to take action consistently to turn that vision into action and results.

Either way, you’re moving toward a vision you’re trying to create.

It’s better to know what your vision is, and to the degree that you can, to affect, improve and direct it in the most positive ways.

If you need to articulate, create or update your vision, where do you start?

Here are six important steps to take:

1. Decide who needs to be involved in creating the vision.

Start by considering who will implement the vision.

Err on the side of including these people in the process of creating the vision, if you want it to be the inspiring, fully-owned guide for future action that it can be.

Consider how people would feel if you said to them, “You’re not important enough to help create our vision. But we do want your full attention and energy when it’s time to take action to make it real.”

For a vision to be powerful, the people who will be implementing it need to be fully engaged, and to “own” it.

2. Consider how you’d like to create it, if your preferred process will work with the group involved.

If a very large group of people will be involved, you may need to use small groups to gather their ideas, and then combine that input in some creative and cohesive way. The process you use also depends on whether the people involved are geographically dispersed, or can all be working together in the same place.

If a small group is creating the vision, they may be able to work together at the same time and place easily.

Also, consider if you want individuals to do some pre-work before the visioning work is done, or if you want to catch everyone’s fresh, natural input without much advance thought.

Decide, also, whether you want to have someone guide or facilitate the visioning process for you, or if you want to do that work on your own.

3. Make the time and space for the vision to emerge.

Creating a vision takes some time.

It also requires some out of the box thinking. And that means that you need to create an environment that encourages people to think and imagine freely.

How and when can you create that experience and environment for the visioning work to occur?

4. Accept that not everyone who needs to be involved is going to be onboard with the work, initially.

mong the very important things you must consider is that some people are going to be resistant to creating the vision, in all likelihood.

It might seem too “touchy-feely” to them.

I worked for one senior finance manager at a high tech firm who was this way. Yet when I listened to his resistance but told him I thought we needed to use the tools with his team of senior finance managers, anyway, he loved the processes and tools we used, and the outcomes we achieved, as a result.

People who are uncomfortable with the visioning and other creative group processes at first might not trust their own creativity. And so, rather than controlling the process too much and excluding others, these people may want to delegate their full involvement and responsibility for creating the vision.

But there’s passion involved in turning a dream or vision into reality. That passion can’t be delegated. And the drive that it takes to make a really grand dream come alive is one that has to come from deep within. And if a group is involved, that shared drive has to exist in many different people.

5. Gather creative tools.

Creating a vision takes skill in bringing out the real thoughts, feelings and aspirations in the individuals and in the full group, as well.

The creative tools you use may be sources of inspiration, such as photos, stories, music, and other resources that loosen up people’s thinking and enable them to bring their best ideas out.

They may be creative group process tools, such as mindmaps and other approaches.

You may also find wall-size graphics, such as visual templates, to be a powerful way to elicit and easily organize individual and collective thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations.

6. Work together to create a felt sense, and a shared picture of the future that speaks to you as a group.

Know that you will use that vision, again and again. You need it to speak to you. And you need to have it work for you.

It takes a spark, again and again, to keep a vision alive. Many individual and collective actions must flow from that vision in order for dreamed-of results to become real.

Do the planning, create the environment, convene the team that gives your dream a chance to become a vision that becomes drives action leading to real results.

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Let’s say the subject of your vision comes up.

Is your natural response to say, “I don’t have one”?

Oh, but you do.

And if you’re a leader, your team does, too.

Whether you know it or not, for better or worse, you hold some expectation or belief about your future.

Effectively, that is your vision, unless you change it.

And that vision – positive or negative – is far more powerful than you might expect.

If your vision needs to be updated, here are a few initial steps you can take.

I’ll provide more guidelines for creating your vision in the next post.

1. First consider your goals.

These may be responsibilities that you worked out with your manager at some point. Or these may be goals or quotas that were simply assigned to you.

What, specifically, must you achieve?

By when?

2. Now stretch far beyond that.

What you really want to do?

We’re not talking about an intellectual exercise here.

This is what, in your heart of hearts, you REALLY want to do or achieve.

Or if you’re part of a team, this is the thing that you’re really driven to accomplish or create together.

3. For now, make a few notes about what you really want to do, or create.

You could also draw a simple picture, or capture an inspiring phrase that represents what you aspire to do or create in the future.

We’ll work on the next steps of creating or updating your vision in the next post.

Give this a few days to “percolate,” and we’ll move on to the next steps from there.

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Having a vision you don’t use is almost like having no vision at all.

Many organizations create a vision and then never use it, for any of a variety of reasons. One reason is that the vision was not compelling enough to grab, and guide the team. They never experience what a valuable tool a strong, shared vision can be.

Ask any team that was wildly successful.

You’re very likely to hear that their success was largely because – in addition to talent – they shared the bond of a compelling common vision, an aggressive goal that they believed they could reach.

In contrast, check with a team that failed.

Often a variety of things handicapped them. But one of the most fundamental problems was probably that they didn’t have a shared goal.

Or if they did, they didn’t really believe they could succeed together. They started to see what they believed was evidence that they couldn’t succeed. That, unwittingly, is the vision they drove toward…the belief that they would fail, or at least, not prevail.

Or perhaps they held strong, but wildly competing visions of success. Perhaps a few people drove toward personal glory, and others were focused on team success.

Whatever the circumstance, they shared something less than a common vision, bond, and dream.

What does it cost an organization to miss out on the power of a shared vision?

There are many:

Opportunities are lost. That may shows up in individual careers that don’t live up to their original talent or promise.

In other cases, teams or entire companies can fail.

Customers can be lost. They take with them current and future business, referrals, revenue and profits with them.

Competitors can overtake a company. This can happen when success seemed to be a sure, and forever thing. Check out past Fortune 500 lists. Some companies long on them no longer exist.

Whatever the reason, a vision that does not grab and hold the team whose vision it is supposed to be will never implement it.

Make sure your vision doesn’t get filed away, a dusty relic of a long-ago team offsite or meeting.

Make it compelling, and use it.

In future posts, I’ll address ways to make sure your vision works, and provide ways you can reinforce it. Make your vision real, in the best possible way.

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“Investors are investing in you, the team”

That’s what companies who seek venture funding are advised, as they were once again, many times, at a boot camp for startups where I was a mentor recently.

“We’re investing in the team” is easy to say.

It’s not always easy to understand.

That’s especially the case if you haven’t had a lot of team experiences, and more specifically, if you haven’t had a lot of business team experiences and roles.

To really understand “We’re investing in the team,” you have to understand teamwork in a visceral sense.

And sometimes, frankly, it helps to have been on, and to have led very successful and less successful teams, as well.

“We’re investing in the team” is far easier to grasp if you understand the risks, opportunities and tools of teamwork and leadership.

And often some of the best learning occurs when you’ve had excellent but also less praiseworthy experiences on, and at the helm of a team. You learn a lot, like it or not, from having to scramble to create success from impending failure.

Fundamentally, what “We’re investing in the team” means is that investors – whoever they are – are looking to see if you and your leadership team can:

1. Turn a great idea into a company and then a growing flow of profits
2. Work well together
3. Turn your strengths as a team into something far greater than your strengths, as a group of separate individuals
4. Connect well with your prospects and convert them into customers
5. Organize people and resources to meet the opportunities and challenges you face, some of which you know, and many of which you don’t…yet
6. Attract a great team
7. Engage the team in your vision and keep them engaged through the ups and downs of startup life
8. Lead without squashing the strengths and enthusiasm of individual members of the company
9. Adapt well, as a team, as conditions change – because they will
10. Admit when you, as a leader or leadership team, need help
11. Listen and learn from customers, advisors, employees, and other members of your team
12. Make good decisions
13. Lead effective implementation of decisions
14. Grow and change, as individuals and as a leadership team, as the need for your leadership evolves
15. Let go of the reins, as appropriate, and delegate well
16. Show courage without foolishness
17. Get over, around and through the barriers that are presented to you without, in the process, causing other problems downstream
18. Be an alchemist, sometimes making progress in lieu of funding, sometimes stretching cash, and always turning the resources you have into more and better results than one initially might expect
19. See the path to success, and keep seeing it, and keep leading your team to it as it changes occur, obstacles emerge, and distractions happen
20. Handle success well

There are other things that investors are looking for, too, when they say they’re “investing in the team.”

You can rest assured, however, that if you do the 20 things on this list well, and if you do them better than your competitors, you’re well on your way to success, however your company is funded, whoever is at the helm.

Think about what would give you confidence that a startup company and leadership team were likely to succeed, if you were an investor, trying to guess which company was most likely to succeed from among the many on which you could place your bets, and your money.

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