Image by Keith Allison via Flickr

What helps distinguish leaders and managers is about control and, quite literally, how “hands-on” you are.

When you first learn the game of golf, the chances are that you grip thew club tightly. After all this is basically holding onto a stick that you will swing through the air and hit a ball. Allowing the club to “follow-through’ – if you don’t hold on tight, the club might just go as far as the ball.

(I appreciate that many of you reading this may not have ever played golf, for you some alternatives, perhaps liken the tight grip of a golf club to:

New golfers have to learn how to ‘let go’ – to relax their grip. If a tight grip is a 10 on a scale, we want a 4 out of 10.

The same is true of leadership and the way we hold on to our people. Hold on too tight (micro manage) and people have little freedom to use their own skills and strength. Hold on too tight to the club, and it is the golfer doing all the work.

So the question is: “who should be doing the work?” The manager or leader or the member of staff? The golf club is weighted for a reason. If you allow the club to do the work, the swing and striking of the ball, becomes almost effortless. Relax your grip on your team and allow them to excel at what they do, and the work becomes almost effortless.

Once you know, as a golfer, that the club is designed to do the job of striking the ball and your job is simply to swing and allow physics do to its job, you can relax. Maintain just enough control to ensure alignment, direction and distance and the ball will fly according to the club used, and the size of the swing. If you want a long distance, you use a long club and a full swing. A short distance off the fairway onto the green requires a shorter distance club and a smaller swing. The power to achieve the distance lies in the tool being employed and the chosen swing – the rest is pure physics.

So what can we learn as a leader? Isn’t it the same. Make sure that you are using the right tool – the person needs the right skill set (and/or mindset) to do the required job. The leader’s job is to have a little control to ensure that the skills are employed in the right direction for the right distance – that’s about judging how far it is to the goal and translating that into the swing itself – in the case of people, the swing is influence and motivation… let the staff do the rest.

And just like that golf ball landing exactly where you both planned and wanted it to be for the next shot. You celebrate. Unlike golf though, praise your club and thank them for their effort. After all, they did all the work!

When we use this metaphor on our golf leadership workshops, the feedback is instant. Hold tight onto the club and the golfer has to use a great deal of effort and the ball often ends up being pulled, pushed, sliced or hooked – going two thirds of the required distance. Relax the grip maintaining directional control and the ball flies straight to the full distance of the club and swing used.

(For non-golfers… try this with a horse, hold tight, the horse will slow down even when you whip it! You dog on a short leash stays by your side whilst pulling your arm out of its socket! Your child dangles from your hand as you cross the road.)

Yet, new golfers on particular, find their grip tightening in more difficult situations. The very moment when they need to be most at ease, most truly controlling, fear envelops them, pressure builds, the grip tightens and the ball goes astray.

The same is true of business leaders under pressure. Listen to the media hype about the doom and gloom of the current economic situation and fear can easily creep in to the mind. Many leaders respond by tightening their grip on their people and their business, believing that the tighter they hold, the more control they have and the more likely they are to survive and pull through. Albeit, they expend huge amounts of effort, feel incredibly stressed, and more likely to explode a blood vessel!

Tough times in business are better served by leaders keeping a clear head, a loose grip, maintain direction and let your people do what they do best. Let’s face the truth here, even a behemoth the size of AIG can’t control the market, what makes you think that you can? My advice, ignore the noise (media doom and gloom), look for the opportunities and focus on the goal and it’s direction, choose the right club, loosen your grip and let your club do the work.

Loosen your grip and you’ll have more control.

Local and international research has found that there are eight key drivers that can improve the productivity, efficiency and profitability of any business. They are:

1. Creating a productive work culture based on shared values. Positive relationships between staff, teams and managers are the foundation of improving workplace productivity.
2. Shared Goals and Vision. Productive organizations know where they are going, what they will achieve and how everyone in the organization contributes to achievement and success.
3. Show positive attitude and superior alignment. The skills and knowledge of people are a company’s biggest asset. To put it simply what people know and can do is the difference between success and failure. Making sure that the right resources are optimally used creates profitability. The attitude that people show each day radically impacts an organizations ability to align their resources effectively and efficiently.
4. Influencing, networking and collaboration. Productive workplaces keep abreast of new ideas and technologies and network regularly with others. Effectively influencing stakeholders is key to revenue, collaborations and overall business success.
5. Nature of leadership and management. Research shows leadership needs to be developed at every level of an organisation, not just amongst managers. The flexibility of individual leadership style is the difference between an engaged or involved workforce and a high-stress, low morale, ‘jobsworth’ inefficiency.
6. 6. Outcomes and tactics. Productive workplaces have structures, systems and processes that are well-organised and adaptable. Successful organizations find the optimum balance of (urgent) tasks and (important) goals.
7. Learning and Review. The organisation that continually learns and shares is agile, flexible and successful.
8. Measuring what matters. Productive workplaces understand and measure the things that make the biggest difference to their business, whether it’s customer satisfaction, employee morale or feedback from suppliers. These indicators make it easy for everyone to share goals and work towards them.

All of these drivers are the responsibility of the organisation’s leadership. At CELSIM, we have more than 20 years experience in developing targeted development for individuals that impacts the organization.

In designing appropriate development interventions, our approach is to uncover the needs of the organization in the business environment, and the personal development needs of the individuals.

Finding the best balance that addresses these needs within your budget and your timeframe results in an effective solution.

Our paradigm is experiential learning because this accelerates the learning process and enhances immediate, sustained business impact.

You are invited to undertake the GAINMORE^TM DNA (Development Needs Analysis) for your organization to help understand the most pressing business development needs. We will then follow up with you to recommend an approach that will make you and your organization more successful.

Contact us to start driving your profitability forward.

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Lets move this away from you for a moment as I know this is difficult for the virgin. Let’s say for the moment that your close friend has a ‘wayward’ son. A teenager dressed in grubby jeans, a haircut that suggests an alien stylist, colours that jar the eyes running with the local mob of ne’er do wells. Your friend laments to you that they are at their wits end and don’t know how to ‘get the boy back on the right track’. You like the lad, and tell your friend that you’ll ‘have a word’ and see if you can help in anyway.

Sometime later, you bump into the young lad and get chatting. The lad, reluctantly at first, and then more fluently pours out his heart to you – how his parent (your friend) is so controlling, so old-school, such a … You are surprised, this can’t be the same person he’s talking about… you tell him this.

Who’s got the right perception? Your friend, the son, or you? That’s right. All of you! Three completely different perceptions of the same situation and… they’re all correct! For the people holding the perception.

Ask the police. 20 people are eye-witnesses to a car-accident. 20 statements are taken and there are 20 variations of exactly the same event.

Ah, I hear you say – yes well, different viewpoints… Exactly. It’s what we perceive that is our reality.

Back to our peer group. If you perceive that they do not accept you, do not connect with you. That is your reality. Can you change reality? Of course, just change your perception of it and reality changes. I’m not suggesting Ostrich-like behaviour and burying your head in the sand (works for the Ostrich – have you ever seen an Ostrich hit a bad drive?) I am suggesting that you can change your attitude by acting as if it were true, and thence change reality.

Many people who play golf have never taken a lesson!
They get introduced to the game by a friend or family member and learn to play by going along to the golf course and playing.
When you learn this way, by instinct as it were, you develop a muscle memory of your technique and a discovery process of what works and what doesn’t, hopefully repeating the positive patterns that achieve roughly what you want to achieve. Someone who finds that their ‘natural” swing slices the ball, will compensate by aiming to the left of the ball so that it will slice back onto the fairway.

The hardest thing in golf is not hitting the ball, it is consistently hitting the ball straight – or at least in the direction intended. You’ll hear many a golfer say something along the lines of “I was hitting the ball really well today, but my score doesn’t reflect it”. The reason for most is that they aren’t aligning their body and their swing with the target.

Thinking back to the blog on Goals and Vision for a moment. If you can clearly see your goal, both in your mind?s eye and in reality – it would be strange if you faced your club at a 90 degree angle to it? How about 5 degrees? How about 1 degree? Perhaps if you are compensating for your very “natural” slicing habit but let?s take a quick trigonometry reminder. You see, those maths classes were going to prove useful!

Let’s assume, for a moment that you have a clean fairway shot to the green 135 yards straight ahead and plan to use your trusty 7-iron in that straight line, oh, and you would strike the ball clean and straight. Aligning yourself and your club just 5 degrees away from the straight line will put your ball about 6 yards away from your target – assuming that you still hit the ball the full yardage. You don’t need me to tell you that 6 yards from the hole is usually the rough, or a bunker, or a pond. And this is when everything else is working very very well indeed. The added complication with alignment in golf is the club face alignment. 5 degrees off centre alignment with an open or closed face, will reduce the yardage of the ball because the ball will not loft as high – it’ll hit the ground sooner which robs the ball of some momentum depending on the friction between the ball and the ground. You don’t need me to tell you that a ball landing on the fairway rolls further than a ball rolling in the rough. Oh well, I told you anyway.

So how do you ensure alignment with your target. In the words of Harvey Pennick, “Take Dead Aim”. Well that’s pretty simple and something you can easily practice on the range. Many practice ranges have sticks or plastic arrows – you align one with your feet and another with your tee or ball, directing them both in parallel to your target. Swing, thwack and low and behold, on the practice range, the ball flies straight to the target. You do it again, and again, and again – eventually removing the visual markers and “imagining” them. Settling yourself calmly and your G.A.S.P. (grip, address, stance, posture) and “thwack” off the ball flies straight to target. If it were that easy, we’d all be able to do it. The physics is unarguable, the theory straightforward, the requirements from you are not overly demanding – yet, somehow, the swing just doesn?t align to the target. You spend a small fortune on your highly-engineered custom clubs to eradicate the anomaly, and still you miss the target.

The physical process is important, don’t let anyone persuade you different. A good golf coach will see if there is anything to correct in your swing that may be causing the problem, but only if the problem is physical. 95% plus of the problem is not physical, it’s mental. It comes back to your unconscious giving your body instructions. When you?re on the range, you?re hitting ball after ball after ball. Concentrating on your technique and getting into a rhythm.

Out on the course, your hitting a ball, club back in bag, pick up bag, walk, walk, walk, chatter, talk, “oh that’s interesting?”, thinking, “I wonder if my better half is still angry with me?”, “I must finish that report”. “oh and that email I received.” “so and so was a bit odd today.” walk walk walk, and then getting closer to your ball. “ah there it is, a bit of long grass around it, but otherwise, a pretty nice lie, hey and not bad – a couple of feet further to the side than I wanted, but I’m getting better. I wonder if I’m going to get this right, now which club, hmm” and on and on. How much of your game is hitting balls, and how much is not hitting balls? 
See, if you play a game like squash, say. You don’t have  much time after hitting the ball, before it’s your turn to hit it again – and that short time is spent focussing on where the ball is, your opponent is and so on – a few seconds at most. Now the brain works very very quickly, but essentially you don?t have much time to drift into other matters – it’s all about the ball.
How much time do you spend aligning yourself – and by now I think you realise that I mean mentally and physically, before each shot.

Alignment is not just a physical process – that funny little waggle that golfers do. It’s about training your mind to align as well. Taking each goal for each and every shot, envisioning how it is going to be successful. Settling the body and focussing your mind – trusting your technique to deliver what it delivers. What you focus on, you will get more of?

In training your mind to give you an advantage, there is an important element. Do NOT reinforce the bad. Now if you’ve stayed with me so far, you know that the unconscious cannot process negatives, and I just gave you a negative. But that’s to get it out of the way so we can now focus on the positive. Reinforce the good.