The Diamond of Excellence Leadership Certification

This is Luman’s 29th year of working with leaders at all levels to create realistic, passionate, smart organizations that deliver consistent results.

And in that sentence you find an encapsulation of the Diamond of Excellence.  Who else is teaching leaders how to build “facing and defining reality” into its cultural DNA?  Or how to go beyond motivational tricks and techniques to building a team that is truly passionate and committed?  Or how to produce decisions and actions over time that are smarter than the smartest people in the room?  Or – the bottom line – how to create a cultural design that yields not good performance, not high performance, but what we call pure performance?

“We wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm…”

From the beginning of our work, and through collaborating with tens of thousands of leaders from hundreds of organizations and dozens of industries, we purposed to create material that had as perfect a blend of effective principles and efficient practices as could be achieved.  We wanted something that worked consistently with actual human beings trying to collaborate, one of the hardest things people can attempt.  We wanted to offer material that could bring out the very best of human nature in a team environment.  And we wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm that is the equivalent of cotton candy – it tastes good, but pretty soon you’re feeling empty and just a little bit queesy.

Continue Reading…

Swift Energy and Cary Stockdell – Making a Difference with People

From time to time, we enjoy telling the world about the great success of a Luman International client, and in particular how their application of key leadership principles has made a huge difference in their performance and results.  Here we’d like to give a shout out to Swift Energy, a U.S. energy company based in Houston, and to its driver of organizational development, Cary Stockdell. 

In honor of Cary’s work since joining Swift in 2007, he was recently declared “HR Leader of the Year (company size 0-1,000)” at Houston’s 7th Annual Impact Awards Ceremony.  Given the size and diversity of the Houston business community, this is an outstanding achievement by Cary.  After working with him since 2007, we can add that it was well deserved.

His biography in the award program said that Cary has “played a strategic role and has a seat at the management table.  Cary is a trusted advisor of the executive leadership team and serves as a mentor to many up and coming staff.  He is setting the standards for a top-tier training and development program.  Cary has helped grow the leadership of a compoany that has been in existence for over 30 years, something not common for the Oil and Gass industry.  He helped to make a team out of a group of people, impacting the company’s success.”

We have had the pleasure of working with Cary since 2007 in his efforts to take a long-standing, successful company to the next level.  He is never comfortable with the status quo, and immediately began challenging executive leadership, senior leadership, and team members to learn and apply new principles and practices.  All too rarely for someone in his role, he quickly became a trusted advisor to executive leadership.  He used that position to move people out of a comfort zone and into a “collaboration for excellence” zone.  He outlined a “Road to the Future” that was thoroughly embraced by leadership at all levels, and as time passed by team members at all levels.  He led the charge in helping a fine group of professionals turn themselves into an even finer team.

We have been most pleased with the terrific progress made by the Swift team.  They have absorbed new leadership thinking, principles, and practices and have turned them into a deeper sense of commitment and a higher level of results.  They created a fresh VMVB (Vision, Mission, Values and Behaviors) to focus the organization and prepare it for future growth and opportunities, and are working hard to live it.  The executive leadership team – Terry Swift, Bruce Vincent, Alton Heckaman, Bob Banks – have been fearless in allowing us to assess their progress (quantitatively and qualitatively), and then in facing and embracing the truth, and then in taking actions to improve. 

Change is always hard, but Swift and Cary have made change a valuable component of their success.  The Luman principle is that “Either you’re exploiting change, or change is exploiting you.”  This great group-turned-team is now in the business of exploiting change.  We call our leadership program the Diamond of Excellence, and 5 years of passionate, hard work by the people at Swift has advanced them to a Diamond of Excellence level.

Congratulations to Swift Energy and to Cary Stockdell for their remarkable achievments.  It couldn’t happen to a better team.

Note: Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

Good Enough…Isn’t

How often do we hear the comment, “It’s good enough” or some variation of it – that’s fine, that’ll do, that gets the job done?  I like to kid my Oklahoma friends about the motto, “Oklahoma, OK.”  OK?  We’re average?  Right in the middle?  Nothing special?

 The big problem with this isn’t the specific instance – often, what’s been done is enough and spending any more time or resources on it isn’t productive or valuable.  The big problem is the mindset it creates in actual human beings.  It sets the bar too low, and we’ll end up getting “good enough” even on work where it isn’t.  With people, we tend to get what we expect (or less).  If we expect average or okay, we’re going to get average or okay (and even that only if we’re lucky).

At Luman International, we created the concept of Pure-Performance.  We came to hate not only “it’s good enough” but “let’s work for high performance.”  “High” is too often subjective.  Higher than what?  Last year, last quarter?  Everyone facing bankruptcy?  Higher than whom?  Our peers?  The biggest people in our market?  Google?  Apple?  We can always find someone or something that we can be “higher” than.  It doesn’t mean the comparison is worthless, or even wrong.  It just means that we’re setting the bar too low, or maybe too fuzzy.  The output is not likely to be labelled “great.”

Pure-Performance says, “Good enough isn’t.”  It lines up with football legend Vince Lombardi’s guidance, “Aim for perfection, and you might end up with excellence.”  It urges us to throw out everything that isn’t producing results, adding value, or leading to improved performance.  If it isn’t leading to something useful and great, why on earth are we doing it?  We might not be able to weed out all of the useless activity, but we’re sure going to be a better organization if we try.

The vast majority of training and leadership development misses this mark almost entirely.  Even worse, it often forces everyone toward the “norm:”  “This is how leaders act/should act.  Go and do likewise.”  But in our 29 years of working with hundreds of organizations, we can say with absolute certainty that most leaders are leading something that is 20 or 30% performance and 70 or 80% nonsense.  They don’t even try to build the pillars of performance into their cultures, or to drive out the barriers to performance (even if they knew what they were).  Organizations that have managed to survive for decades – in part because their competitors are even more clueless – are wasting resources and exposing themselves at some point to organizational disaster.

Examples?  Recent ones are:

• Kodak – facing bankrupty from the digital onslaught, even though they invented it – more available in digital than just a short time ago, but not “high” enough to save them
• Barnes & Noble – coming to dominate the bookstore market just in time to watch it become burdensome, costly, and a distraction from the digital world and the introduction of their Nook (but at least they were operating “higher” than Borders!)
• Circuit City – trumpeted by Jim Collins as one of the 11 “Good to Great” companies right before they shuffled off this mortal coil
• Fannie Mae – dominating the mortage market right before they helped destroy the mortgage market and themselves (also a “Good to Great” company)

These were all once great companies, operating at a “higher” level than their competitors.  Higher didn’t save them.  They all had way too much waste, misdirection, and focus on the wrong things.  They not only didn’t get to Pure-Performance  – they didn’t even know what it was.

Pure-Performance.  There are keys to getting it, and things to avoid like the plague if we want it.  We encourage you to stop worrying about high performance.  Enter the world of pure-performance instead – different in kind, not just in degree.  There is leadership and market dominance in people who go through that door.

Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

Leadership Models and the Diamond of Excellence

It doesn’t take long to figure out that there are dozens if not hundreds of leadership models out there.  Some are focused on individual areas (like teams and teambuilding) while others are intended to be comprehensive.  Frankly, most of them are useless, and some are actually counterproductive.  But you’ve got to have one.

Why does anyone need a great leadership model?  For a number of very good reasons:

• There’s so much to think about that it’s extremely helpful to have a grid into which you can place new learning, ideas, material, and tools.
• It’s important to have a framework by which you can see if your approach is balanced or out of whack (like spending all of your time on one or two areas instead of the whole realm of leadership requirements)
• It keeps you focused as a leader on what’s really important and helps you avoid a thousand meaningless distractions
• It allows us to evaluate books, articles, seminars and other arenas where leadership teaching is offered
• It helps us – especially with decent assessments – to determine with great accuracy where our challenges and opportunities lie

Should an effective model be simple or comprehensive?  Absolutely.  It has to be simple enough that a leader can keep it easily in his or her head.  Complicated 7 to 10 models with lots of sidebars are just too much to be handy or useful.  But it also has to be comprehensive enough to allow everything that’s important to a leader to be incorporated.  Too many models are focused on just 1 or 2 aspects of leadership, or worse – or built around a gimmick (you can probably think of a few there).

You want a model that has elegant simplicity.  We spent 25 years distilling our experience with hundreds of organizations and tens of thousans of leaders down into a model that is both straightforward and robust.  We call it the Diamond of Excellence™.  It has 4 facets that are easily grasped but rich enough to cover everything a leader needs to know and do to be top-tier effective.  We’ve been challenging leaders for the past 5 years to name one important leadership situation or challenge that isn’t covered by the Diamond, and to date no one has been able to come up with anything.

The spirit of the Diamond is captured in our tag line, Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations™ – all based on a foundation of facing and defining reality.  Please take a few minutes and check out the Diamond on our website.  Whatever you do, find a model that works – for you personally as well as for your team or organization.

Models come in all shapes and sizes.  Make sure you use one that you can build on forever.

Is Leadership Really About “Style?”

There’s a lot of material out there about leadership “styles,” “personalities,” “strengths,” and a host of other things that are frankly off the mark – some of them way off the mark.  The notion is that if you look “inside” closely enough, if you understand more and more who you are and why you do what you do, you can become an effective leader.

There’s some truth in these materials that at times seem to dominate the market in leadership development.  These tools and instruments can have some value.  But not as a starting point.  If we begin here, we end up focusing too much on our personality.  We can too easily end up overfocusing on ourselves and on our “strengths” and flaws, as we’re led unwittingly to leadership narcissism.

Real, effective leadership is first about powerful principles and practices and second about personality and style.  There are things that work for leaders; we have to learn them no matter how hard it is for us personally, or we simply will not be good leaders.  And there are things that don’t work for leaders; we have to unlearn them no matter how hard it is for us personally, or we simply will be bad leaders.

We need to assess ourselves against the very best that leaders can be.  There really is a set of principles that works with actual human beings, teams, and organizations.  Once we know what these are, we can learn how to act on or adjust our personality and style to apply them in the most effective way.  There’s just no way to be a passionate, performance-oriented, ethical leader if we don’t know what that means, if we’re making it up as we go along based on the latest “hot” self-assessment tool.