← No Bullsh!t Leadership
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Every time you step into a bigger role, or even when you've been in the seat for a while, the same traps show up. Slipping back into old habits, avoiding the hard conversations that actually lift performance, and overcompensating for poor performers instead of leading at level. Now, if any of that sounds familiar, our brand new live workshop is for you. It's called the first 90 days at any New how to Win Trust, Build Credibility and Deliver Results. Marty and I are running it on September 17th live on Zoom and if you show up live, you'll get the Blind Spot Identify Tool, a resource that exposes the hidden gaps holding leaders back. Save your free spot now at bit ly NBL90. That's bit ly NBL90. I can't wait to see you there.
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When we started this podcast, we we had to figure out a lot of it on our own, which was pretty daunting at times. When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list just keeps growing and it can begin to consume every waking moment. Finding the right tool that helps you out and simplifies everything can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com leadership. Go to shopify.com leadership Leadership.
- [01:52]
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 325 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode finding your team's superpower, the one thing that matters most. You no doubt hear me talk frequently about value creation. Now, as a leader, your primary objective above all else is to deliver value. How you do that depends on your context. One of the key principles that enables this is razor sharp fixation on value is simplicity and focus, simplifying your company's objectives, its work program and its customer value proposition. Is a complex and difficult process, but if you can get it right, it opens the door to greatness. In today's episode, I'm going to lay out some examples of the overwhelming body of knowledge that supports the principle of simplicity and focus. How can you use it to discover and develop your superpower, the one thing that matters most? I'm going to begin with a look at some of the most interesting published work on how to use simplicity and focus to maximize strategic value. I'm then going to give you a real world example of a company that I worked for that had its superpower absolutely nailed. And I'll finish with some tips for evaluating where your own team is right now so that you can identify and develop each its unique superpower. So let's get into it. I've lived by the mantra of simplicity and focus for decades now. I reference it frequently and I've dedicated a few podcast episodes to this topic previously, like episode 222 the Power of Simplicity Simplicity is critical in unlocking value. Complexity, waste and rework are its enemies. You can find any number of quotes from life's diverse endeavours that speak to the importance of simplicity. The artist Hans Hofmann gave us the quote, the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. The composer Chopin said, simplicity is the final achievement after one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes. It is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, for the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig. But for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life. And of course, in business strategy, Michael Porter gave us the quote, the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Although the principle may seem obvious, very few organizations embrace it fully. We all try to do too much with all the best intentions, of course. Why is this so hard when there's such a huge body of knowledge on the Benefits of Simplicity and Focus the Four Disciplines of Execution, or four DX for short, was co authored by Sean Covey. Now, Sean is the son of the great Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This book proposes the idea of the wildly important goals. It exhorts leaders to take a minimalist approach to allocating resources, paving the way for people to focus on the highest value tasks and not get distracted by the things that don't generate value. In his seminal work Good to Great, Jim Collins proposes the Hedgehog Principle. This is taken from an essay by Isaiah Berlin and it's based on the concept that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows just one big thing. When it's threatened, it curls up into a spiky ball to defend itself. In business terms, Jim Collins Hedgehog Principle proposes that going from good to great requires that companies have a profound understanding of of three things. The first is what are you deeply passionate about? The second is what can you and of course, what can't you be the best in the world at? And the third thing is what drives your economic engine. Now, preferably, Collins says, this can be boiled down to a simple measure of profit per x. Then there's ikigai. Ikigai is an ancient Japanese philosophy that translates roughly as life value. As you might expect, the rather more spiritual intent of ikigai has been adapted for the cutthroat world of competitive business. The westernized version encourages you to look at four dimensions of your business and career to unlock your potential Uniqueness what do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? And what can you be paid for? These are just a few of the works that mount the case for doing less stuff and focusing on the things that make the most difference to the long term value of your business. And when we think about superpowers, there's no way we can even know where to look without first passing through the eye of the needle on simplicity and focus. How do we refine what we already know in order to unlock unique value? When we start talking about superpowers, we can apply the principle to individuals, to teams, or to companies. My personal superpower is my ability to synthesize the most complex leadership and business concepts down to their simplest form but no simpler. This is the foundation of our highly successful and profitable business model. At your CEO mentor I love the recent McKinsey article which was titled what's your How Companies Can Build an Institutional Capability to Achieve Competitive Advantage. The phrase institutional capability is critical here. What is the one thing the article uses? A case study of a retail giant that was going through tough times. It went looking for ways to turn this around, doing the deep work that was required to discover the one thing. Now the company decided to focus on building an analytics driven pricing model and a world class analytics capability to match. This revolutionized how the company conducted its merchandising. It changed how pricing and markdown decisions were made and the company trained and certified staff in the new ways of working. In the first year, this strategy produced hundreds of millions of dollars in margin expansion and now it's been embedded into the company's capability and is likely to provide a competitive advantage for many years to come. There are many examples of companies that find their competitive superpower and focus all resources into into that one thing. In the words of the author, the companies that do this have made a choice, aligned their resources and built their chosen superpower to deliver superior economics and sometimes leapfrog rivals and innovate entire industries. So what is institutional capability? McKinsey defines it as an integrated set of people, processes and technology that creates value by helping the company consistently do something better than its competitors. Think about how this might apply at the team level. If you're not yet the CEO, if you're in a business unit or a line role, it's about developing the people and integrating the processes and technologies that leverage that one thing in the market. In other words, the superpower that the company is pursuing. If you're in a functional support or staff role, how do you build the capability in people, processes and technology, in your function that best supports the company in its goal to deliver its superpower to customers? Now, word of caution here. If you are leading a functional support team, don't let complacency sneak in. Just because you happen to be the only game in town. You have an obligation to ensure that your expertise can't be replicated externally. Think about how you contribute value to the company as it works to develop its one superpower. The competition you should focus on is the outsourced version of what your team does. Could the company buy the capability that you deliver from someone else in the market who potentially offers greater value than your team does? Well, if so, they probably should. Once that superpower is identified, McKinsey calls for step change. Now, this step change has to be in pretty much every area in the company in order to consolidate the competitive advantage that the superpower may bring. Whatever team you lead now, this is directly applicable to you. What does step change look like in your world? Step change is usually characterised by a couple of things. One is a radical shift in thinking and the other is a major initiative to retrain and recalibrate all of your people. Now, if you say that fast enough, it sounds easy and in fact, it may be quite simple. But executing it is the hardest thing in the world. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. I want to give you a practical example from my corporate career, where identifying and focusing exclusively on the one superpower of the company led to an enduring competitive advantage in the market in 2004. God, that's 20 years ago. 2004. I accepted the role of Chief Information Officer at National Transport Insurance. So big shout out to Tony Clark and the NTI team. Wayne Patterson, the CEO who hired me, was, was a superb leader whom I learned a huge amount from, particularly about how to manage a board. NTI is a boutique insurance company that specialises in heavy motor vehicles. Now we're talking big trucks and trailers here. It's not the most glamorous industry, but it's critical to our way of life. And if you aren't convinced of this, just try parking up all the trucks for a week and see how it affects your daily routine. It's absolutely an underrated industry. NTI's superpower was its intimate knowledge of the heavy vehicle market. General insurers simply couldn't compete. When their underwriters look at a truck, they see a truck. When our underwriters looked at it, they understood the risk that the company would be taking on that particular truck. We knew the difference in risk between a silver rigid body refrigerated Isuzu truck which was delivering to supermarket loading docks in Sydney, and a red Mac 18 Wheeler hauling articulated loads between Sydney and Perth. And we were able to price that risk accurately. This enabled us to earn some of the highest profit margins in the insurance industry. But did the customers get shortchanged in the name of greedy corporate profits, I hear you ask? Absolutely not. NTI has one of the most loyal customer bases you could imagine. Why? Because we didn't use the classic insurance company ploy of denying claims to boost our profits. A lot of insurers charge low premiums so that you'll choose to insure with them, but then when you have a claim, they'll do everything in their power to not pay it. Now we call that underwriting at claim time. NTI's claim service was also a competitive advantage. It delivered the best customer experience imaginable because we charged the right premium for the risk. When that risk materialised and a customer needed to make a claim, we had no problem honouring our commitments and exceeding our customers expectations. And because of NTI's one superpower, the deep understanding that enabled us to develop the people, systems and processes to leverage that deep market knowledge, no one else could compete. Now, I bumped into the CEO Tony Clark just recently on my trip to Australia and I was so excited to hear that the company's going from strength to strength. It's still using its one superpower to grow profitably two decades later. I want to finish with a couple of tips so that you can work out exactly where your team's at right now. This is the doorway to the discussion about its potential superpower. There are no easy answers here, as your first steps are going to be quite different depending on your current position. To evaluate your situation properly requires awareness, introspection, and brutal honesty about your people and your team's historical performance. I hate to say this, but it's quite possible that your team is average at best. But you and those around you may be in denial. It really depends on where you set the performance bar. I frequently run into senior leaders who are living in a fantasy world where they can't see the reality of their team's true capability and performance, and they manage to perpetuate the ruse by saying things like we have the best people or I've built a high performing team. On what basis? It's extremely rare that you'd have a team where you genuinely had the best people. It's all relative though. So the goal is to work your ass off at getting the best people you possibly can. Given the hiring constraints that you're subject to. Your brand, your industry, your location, and your financial limitations. How much can you pay these people? At the same time, you need to have a relentless focus on your team's work program to make sure people are doing the right things. Then there's leadership and culture. You ultimately have to lead every individual to perform at their best. This gives you a different yardstick to use in determining what good looks like, and it doesn't lend itself quite so much to the bumper sticker platitudes as of modern day leadership theory. Working on team composition and individual capability is a prerequisite for developing the focus on a single superpower. Now I know because I've seen a few examples of how not to do it over the course of my career. I once had an executive reporting to me who bandied around the term superpower until it lost all of its meaning. Now he was running a functional support team, and when he came into the company, his first move was to bestow everyone with a superpower moniker. The team went away on a retreat to identify each other's superpowers. In my eyes, some of those individuals were obvious underperformers who needed to lift their game. If I was that executive, my energy would have been better spent explaining to these individuals what the shortfall was between their performance and the required standard. Instead, they came away feeling as though they had an invaluable capability that the company couldn't live without. The result was dangerous and ineffective, and there wasn't A superpower in sight. Here are my four tips to help you position yourself so that you can begin to uncover your team's one superpower. The first tip is be brutally honest. Where are you now? I've spoken a bit about this, but if you can't get this thing right, nothing else will matter. Whether you're thinking about your personal superpower, your team's contribution to the organization, or the one superpower that sets your company apart from its competitors, brutal honesty is your ticket to this game. Tip number two. Think of identifying your superpower as if you're developing your corporate strategy. Ask yourself the critical question, what resources do we have that enable us to compete? Again, regardless of what level you're thinking about this at, taking an inventory of what you have is the first step to help prompt your thinking. Consider the different resource categories that might be the source of potential advantages. Physical resources, Organisational resources, Financial resources, Technological resources. For each resource you identify, once again, be brutally honest as you assess whether or not it's likely to provide a competitive advantage over others. Is this resource valuable? Is it rare? Is it hard to copy? And can it be substituted for something else? This process is going to give you the basis for homing in on any potential superpowers. The third tip is whatever you discover has to ultimately align with the company's view. Now, if you're not doing this exercise for the company as a whole, you'll need to make sure your team's superpower aligns with the company's strategy. Understanding how the company differentiates itself, even if it isn't focused on the single superpower, is going to require a number of conversations with your boss. Even if you think you have your team superpower nailed, without company alignment, you're doomed to fail. The fourth tip is what if you either can't get alignment with the broader business or you can't identify any superpowers in your team? Now, this happens quite frequently and in cases like this. Go back to basics. Ask yourself a slightly different what's the one thing I can do to most improve my team's focus, identity and value proposition? Right now? You may need to replace someone. You may need to strengthen the leadership capability lower down the pecking order. You may need to rationalise the work program. You may need to redefine the scope of your team's accountabilities. Whatever it is for your situation, it's going to undoubtedly demand that you step into the hard work of leadership bringing this all together. Everyone says they want to be the best, but very few leaders are prepared to do the work that it would take for that ambition to come true. Imagine if you did the work to identify the one thing, the superpower that your team could build on to drive extraordinary value creation. I don't think there's any doubt that the principle of simplicity and focus is key to unlocking this kind of value. So why do we spend so much time in the distraction of busy work? Make the commitment with me right now that before the day is out, you're going to take your first step. Just ask yourself the question, what do we have that no one else has? Once you start pursuing this answer, it's going to be really hard for you to look at the world in any other way. All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 325. Thanks so much for joining us. And remember, at your CEO mentor, our purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally. So please share this episode with your colleagues. I look forward to next week's episode where I'm going to take on another one of those really big questions. Are leaders born or made? Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit.