Success Simplified

Simple Solutions Measurable Results

Copyright © 2011

Published in the United States by Insight Publishing Company 707 West

Main Street, Suite 5 Sevierville, TN 37862 800-987-7771

www.insightpublishing.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or

by any means without prior written permission from the publisher except for

brief quotations embodied in critical essay, article, or review. These articles

and/or reviews must state the correct title and contributing authors of this book

by name.

Disclaimer: This book is a compilation of ideas from numerous experts

who have each contributed a chapter. As such, the views expressed in each

chapter are of those who were interviewed and not necessarily of the

interviewer or Insight Publishing.

ISBN-978-1-60013-745-7

10 9 87 6 54 321

MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The interviews found in this book are conducted by

David Wright, President of ISN Works and Insight

Publishing.

Achieving success is serious business, or so it

would seem. So many people are striving for this

nebulous concept known as “success.” I’ve asked

many people what their definition of success is and

I’ve heard different answers from just about all of

them.

Some people appear successful and on the surface it seems that they should be

very happy about what they’ve accomplished. But often they are not. Their

lives have become so complicated that they feel harried and on a treadmill of

endless thing gs to do to keep their hard-won success.

Can’t success be simple? I wondered if anyone else had ever thought about

this, so I searched for speakers and authors who would give me some answers.

In this book, Success Simplified, the successful business people I found gave

several different answers to my question. The answers were very insightful, in

my opinion. I think they will give you a new perspective on success and how

to make it simple.

DAVID E. WRIGHT, PRESIDENT

ISN WORKS & INSIGHT PUBLISHING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One.......................................................................................... 1

Success Simplified: Leadership Alignment and Getting

the Right People in the Right Roles

By Tom Olivo

Chapter Two......................................................................................... 23

Set People-Centered Values

By Dr. Stephen R. Covey

Chapter Three ………………………………………………………...........37

Organizational Leadership Simplified

By Ilene Patasnik and Terrence Overholser

Chapter Four........................................................................................ 61

Mastering the Art of Productivity

By Brian Bartes

Chapter Five......................................................................................... 77

Do Less, Be More

By Linda Gartland

Chapter Six........................................................................................... 93

Total and Lasting Success

By Wendy Ghebrhiwet

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Seven.................................................................................... 115

How to be Unstoppable

By Ed Tseng

Chapter Eight ..................................................................................... 125

Purpose, Passion, and Transformation

By Ian and Tonya Fitzpatrick, Esqs.

Chapter Nine...................................................................................... 145

Using the Platinum Rule

By Tony Alessandra

Chapter Ten....................................................................................... 165

Essential Success Principles — (ESP)

By James Melton

Chapter Eleven .................................................................................. 181

The Power of True Listening

By George Ritcheske

Chapter Twelve................................................................................... 199

Speaking for Success: Communicating with Confidence,

Clarity, and Color

By Dr. Irena Yashin-Shaw, PhD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Thirteen................................................................................. 215

Business Intuition: Unleashing your sixth sense

By Marishka Glynne

Chapter Fourteen................................................................................ 233

Simplicity Equals Success

By Patty Kreamer, CPO®

Chapter Fifteen................................................................................... 249

Centering for Success

By Sydney A. Paredes

Chapter Sixteen.................................................................................. 265

How to Get Ahead and Stay There

By Patricia Fripp

Chapter Seventeen............................................................................. 279

Coaching, Teaching, and Healing: A Path to Success

By Robert Gramillano

Chapter Eighteen ............................................................................... 293

Down with Stress: Up with Success

By Sharon Gilley

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Nineteen................................................................................ 321

Make it Mostly on Your Own

By Dan Clark

Chapter Twenty.................................................................................. 339

No Regrets: Finding Your Recipe for Personal and

Professional Success

By Ken Thoreson

Chapter One

Success Simplified: Leadership Alignment and

Getting the Right People in the Right

Roles By Tom Olivo

David Wright (Wright)

Today we’re talking with Tom Olivo. Tom is a founding partner in

Healthcare Performance Solutions and President of Success Profiles Inc., a

consulting firm that specializes in business performance, measurement, and

marketplace research. Established in 1990, Success Profiles designs and

provides organizational performance measurements, instruments, and database

management services to clients, management consulting firms, and

professional associations. The focus of their service is creating business

intelligence.

In his professional career, Mr. Olivo has more than twenty-five years of

experience in identifying, measuring, and comparing the commonalities of

highly successful athletes, business leaders, and organizations. Tom has

worked in a multitude of industries with thousands of senior executives and

managers, emphasizing the importance of high performance standards

consistent with best business practices. Success Profiles has measured the

performance of more than a thousand organizations and developed a database

of business practices that includes more than twenty-five thousand individual

business units.

He is the co-author of Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People,

by business leaders to be an expert in workforce optimization and is one of the

most requested speakers on the topic of practical and applied performance

measurement.

Tom, welcome to Success Simplified.

Tom Olivo (Olivo)

Thanks, David; it’s a pleasure to be with you today.

Wright

So tell me, Tom, why are you known by your friends and clients as “the

measurement guy”?

Olivo

Maybe some of my natural measurement aptitude was inherited, so I think

that some credit has to go to my dad who was a mathematics teacher,

professional musician, and tennis coach. With respect to math and

measurement, my early passion was geometry—it just came naturally to me

because it was visual.

Second, in my academic pursuits I had a curiosity for geology, which is

technically an inexact science. In geologic science, you’re continuously

solving puzzles and dealing with the probability of repeating events or patterns

over long periods of time. I’ve come to appreciate that these patterns or

common denominators also apply to business practices, where you tend to see

more similar issues that are challenging leaders than those that are unique.

The third reason is that I have this obsession, habit, or practice discipline of

measuring, quantifying, and recording just about everything in my life. It helps

me keep score. Whether it’s my diet, my workout routines, financial records,

even when I go fishing, I’m going to want to keep a log of what’s going on, of

weather conditions and what works, what doesn’t. This focus on keeping score

helps me evaluate and track progress and performance in any activity. I believe

that the “keeping score” discipline began at around age fifteen.

I’m very fortunate that this natural ability and scientific curiosity,

compounded with forty years of practice, created long-term benefits for my

business profession of performance measurement. Since the core purpose of

Success Profiles is to identify, measure, and compare leadership and

organizational performance, it’s instinctive for me to be able to quantify and

differentiate how people perform.

Wright

Will you tell our readers a little more about your athletic background and

how the practice of coaching athletes transitioned into coaching business

executives?

Olivo

My evolution as a coach really began as an athlete when I was introduced

to both springboard diving and gymnastics at the age of eight. Having a little

bit of natural ability allowed me to quickly advance to more competitive

environments where early on I was exposed to fairly good coaching. There was

also some luck involved when at age eleven I was introduced to the person

who would become the most influential coach and mentor throughout my life,

Rod Mergardt.

I can close my eyes at any time and still visualize my first impression of

Coach Mergardt. There he was, fit as an Olympic athlete, leading a class of

sixth-graders through the famous Fox Lane “Whistle Drill” exercise (a

combination of moves that today would be cited as a best practice in core

strength training). There was Rod, super motivated and perfect in his

technique, demonstrating the ultimate level of commitment we should aspire

to.

That winter, Rod became my gymnastics coach and in the summers, my

diving coach. His encouraging and professional style seemed to click with me,

and I became passionate about improving my technique and competing.

One of the most important lessons Rod taught us was to become students of

the sport and if you wanted to be the best, you had to learn and train with the

best. He arranged for us to attend advanced training camps with our current

Olympians and top NCAA coaches. He also emphasized setting the “first

class” standard among student athletes at Fox Lane High School by having us

dress in a coat and tie on any school day we had a competition. He knew that

every student and teacher we encountered on that day would ask us why we

were “dressed up.” At first it was uncomfortable to stand out, but Rod wanted

to establish a culture where the entire team became recognized for setting the

highest professional standard. This professional standard was permanently

imprinted upon me and later transferred to other disciplines in life.

I’ve now known Rod Mergardt for more than forty-two years; I don’t

believe that I’ve gone more than ninety days in that time period without

connecting with him in some manner. Now, at the age of fifty-three and with

Rod at age seventy, the student has become the teacher. We travel the world

together on remote fly fishing expeditions and I get the chance to teach Rod

the artful technique of fly fishing.

I’ve come to recognize that while my relationship with Rod was special for

me, all the high-achieving people I’ve ever met have someone in their life who

connected with them and influenced them the way that Rod connected with

me.

In difficult times, I often ask myself how would the person I respect the

most (Rod Mergardt) handle the situation I’m in right now? If business leaders

could take a brief “time out” to ask this question before they emotionally react

to a challenging situation, the performance of everyone receiving their

feedback would improve significantly.

After coaching what I’ll refer to as “amateur athletes” for fifteen years in

competitive diving and gymnastics, I started to realize that my intellectual

interests and financial goals were being neglected. I had another respected

diving coach and mentor, Hobie Billingsley, convince me that I had the

potential to accomplish more in my professional career if I left coaching

amateur sports and started to look into other vocations. All career changes are

difficult, but the logical thing to do was to increase my likelihood of success

by aligning my natural talent for assessing performance (measurement) with

my passion to help motivated people achieve (coaching). This alignment

created an opportunity to transfer my skills into creating the performance

measurement firm, Success Profiles Inc., and combine that vocation with

executive coaching.

As a gymnast and diver, every skill is highly technical. Proficiency is

accelerated with an athlete’s understanding of science, particularly physics,

biomechanics, and kinesiology. Athletes also have to be able to internally

“visualize” every aspect of their performance. This visualization is from two

perspectives: internal with the athlete and external with the coach. Ultimately,

for the athlete, the degree of alignment between the internal and external

perspectives is directionally proportional to the consistency of performance

and rate of improvement.

Athletes also need to incorporate practice discipline into their training. The

most effective way to do this is with spaced repetitious education, which

involves intense internal training to simulate competitive conditions. This

practice discipline can be slightly different for different sports and it also has

broad application to accelerating skill development in other fields such as

music and business.

The only difference with being a successful coach in the business

environment (versus sports), is that you have to substitute specialized

measurement tools to diagnose performance and have the practical business

experience to know what to prescribe.

Being a successful coach in any endeavor is also similar to being a

physician—there are four key protocols or elements to follow. Quite simply,

coaching can be summarized as:

1 Diagnosing performance (an objective, evidence-based analysis).

2 Prescribing solutions (recommendations with reasonable probability or

high odds of success).

3 The science of providing feedback (what specific message is proposed

or what is “said”).

4 The art of providing feedback (how the message is positioned or what

is actually “heard”).

The challenge in coaching effectively is not so much with the first two

steps, Diagnosing and Prescribing, but more with the last two, the Science and

Art of providing feedback. The only difference with being a successful coach

in the business environment (versus sports), is that you have to substitute

specialized measurement tools to diagnose performance and have the practical

business experience to know what to prescribe.

Here is a proven diagnostic approach that can help anyone become a more

consistent and effective coach for managers or supervisors who may be

struggling in the workplace. The following ten-point checklist can help any

leader identify 95 percent of the most common problems that take away from

leadership effectiveness.

1 Assess the leader’s demonstrated talent or his or her leadership ability

level. Does the person have the natural or learned ability to perform well,

given the complexity of the assignment?

2 Are there skill deficiencies? Are the minimum skills required realistic

for the person to master in the time frame provided?

3 Is there an experience or maturity deficiency? Maybe the person is

new to being a manager, maybe he or she hasn’t matured enough as a leader

yet. Maybe the person hasn’t seen enough diversity or been exposed to the

common challenges he or she will face in the role.

4 Are there behavioral style deficiencies where the person struggles to

maintain composure or he or she is inflexible with his or her ability to adjust

and style-flex in different management circumstances? At the director level

and above, approximately 80 percent of the reason that people are going to fail

is because of their behavioral style and not their technical skill.

5 Is it the person’s genuine discretionary effort? Is it his or her attitude?

Maybe the individual is not committed or trying hard enough.

6 Is it the complexity of the leadership role or assignment? It could be

significant obstacles and barriers within or outside of the leader’s control that

take away from his or her performance.

7 Are the resources lacking? Does the leader have enough people? Does

he or she have enough financial resources? Does the person have the right

tools and equipment to get the job done?

8 Are the people hired or appointed below the leader effective? Is the

leader tolerating poor performance or disruptive, negative behavior?

9 Are those in positions above the leader effective at coaching him or

her? Is the leader’s performance suboptimized because of who he or she

reports to?

10 Finally, consider if the business model itself is even viable. You could

have someone who is highly talented and experienced in an unviable business

model. In this case, it doesn’t matter what coaching or training the person

receives, he or she is not likely to be successful.

All great coaches are great teachers first. Remember that it’s not the

diagnosis and prescription that is most important in being an effective coach.

It’s the Art and Science of providing feedback to bring out the best

performance in others.

The great basketball coach Red Auerbach was once interviewed by a

reporter who asked him the question, “Red, when your basketball players

return to the court from a time out, they seem to know exactly what to do on

the floor to implement the play and they’re successful much more often than

lots of other teams. What do you tell them that seems to enable them to get it

right?”

What Red said was very profound, “It’s not what I tell them that’s

important,” he said, “it’s what they hear.” He had to give feedback to each of

the five players going back out on the floor, slightly differently. So he was

more concerned with the receiver than he was with himself, the transmitter, in

providing the coaching. Red seemed to naturally consider the following in his

coaching style: How are the people I’m about to give feedback to going to

receive the information in a way that motivates them and gets them to do

something that maybe they don’t even think they can do?

With people, meaningful change will not occur until something becomes an

“imperative.” It’s the Art and Science (or packaging and positioning) of the

coaching feedback that creates the motivation to do something differently than

what is most comfortable.

“People don’t change because they are told that they should, people only

change when they themselves feel that they must.”

—Thomas Friedman

Pivoting to business, for the last twenty years I’ve had the unique

opportunity of being with thousands of high achieving executives, directors,

and front-line managers. Their behavioral wiring is virtually identical to highly

accomplished athletes, and the coaching techniques to enhance their

performance are much more similar than different.

Wright

I understand that during the last ten years you’ve had a concentrated

emphasis on healthcare where you’ve traveled more than one and a half

million air miles and performed site visits with more than two hundred

healthcare systems. Would you tell our readers about the comprehensive

performance measurement databases, leadership, and cultural performance you

have compiled?

Olivo

In 2001 I was asked to serve as a lead faculty member and head consultant

to a national collaborative on workforce effectiveness for healthcare. The

initial “mass strike” exposure to ninety healthcare systems enabled us to very

quickly identify, measure, and compare their business practices and ultimate

performance outcomes.

This gave us an instant nationwide laboratory to be able to better

understand the industry challenges and to determine the drivers of high

performance. Here are the basic facts:

1 Since healthcare organizations (hospitals) are a business, there is

essentially no difference between them and the common business practices of

any other medium or large size organization. Their leadership, culture,

business practices, and operational processes are perfectly designed for the

results they are achieving (a great place to work, a great patient experience,

financial success, and community stewardship). Therefore, if hospital leaders

want to improve the downstream outcomes, they need to focus and get

leverage on the upstream drivers of those outcomes.

2 The most common “rate-limiting” factor to individual departmental

performance was ineffective leadership at the front-line manager level where

people often became “overleveraged” (in over their heads).

3 When senior leaders get the right person in the right role, everything

gets easier and the results meet or exceed expectations more often. When

leaders get the wrong person in the role, performance is almost always

sub-optimized and they tend to struggle or fail.

4 The importance of organizational culture is always underestimated and

large-scale, organization-wide culture change initiatives are very ineffective.

Meaningful culture change needs to occur one leader at a time and one

department at a time.

The single defining statement that sums up what we’ve learned is, “as goes

the talent and demonstrated ability of the front line manager, so goes the

performance in that department by virtually every measure.” This one business

practice becomes the “Achilles Heel” of performance. If you get it right,

everything gets easier. If you don’t get it right, things get significantly harder.

“As goes the talent and demonstrated ability of the

front line manager, so goes the performance in that

department by virtually every measure” —Tom Olivo.

Wright

Will you elaborate on the statement that leadership performance is similar

to swimming in that you cannot effectively assess capability with a written

test?

Olivo

If you think about leadership, it’s all about your demonstrated

performance—what you do—versus what you know. In the swimming

example, if someone were to study how to swim through observation, then

read the textbooks, then would watch videos, then memorize all of that

material, and then take a written test and spit it all back, he or she may know

and say all the right things, but if you throw the person in the pool, there is a

high likelihood that he or she is going to drown.

Applying the swimming analogy to effective leadership, we make the

assumption that the only way to truly assess leaders’ abilities is by observing

and measuring their demonstrated performance from multiple

perspectives—what they actually do versus what they know. The assessment

from multiple perspectives should include all the people who report to those

leaders. It should include the perspective of the leaders above them looking

down, it should include all of their “hard metrics” performance results, and it

should include an objective assessment of their dominant behavioral style. For

the complete picture to be valid and reliable, how managers show up must also

correlate and link to the desirable outcomes they achieve.

The easiest way to describe this process is for people to visualize the

mapping search function of a Global Positioning System device (or GPS).

Today, most people actually have GPS capability in their cell phones that

can triangulate and pinpoint their precise location fairly quickly, within a few

seconds. The GPS device works by triangulating its relative position with

multiple satellites orbiting the Earth (typically three to five). What I’m

suggesting is that if you want to most accurately determine a manager’s overall

performance, it would be similar to using a GPS device to triangulate on

multiple performance perspectives (see diagram above).

By placing a front-line manager of a department in the center of the picture

and asking the basic question of what performance criteria is most important to

consider in evaluating g overall performance, you could create GPS precision

with a more comprehensive and balanced assessment. Perspective number one

and number two from the staff and customers is differentiated and illustrated

on the Eye Chart format in number three (see example of the Eye Chart

below). Perspective number four is the top-down leadership evaluation by the

senior executives.

Perspective number five is the manager’s behavioral hardwiring. Perspective

number six is the hard metrics. Perspective number seven is the manager’s

talent alignment and re elative odds of success considering all the performance

elements (see odds of success chart on page 13.)

If you could actually see “Analytics” and “Business Intelligence,” what

would it look like? The Performance Management Eye Chart.

The Performance Management Eye Chart (PMEC) is a right-brain visual

tool that compares leadership effectiveness and cultural engagement at a

glance. Leaders can instantly see which departments have “healthy”

subcultures of excellence (on the right of the chart) and which ones are facing

difficulties (struggling or failing on the left of the chart). With a unique

combination of presenting information in a way to allow both detailed focus

and peripheral vision, the Eye Charts create synthesis and meaning by

allowing people to instantly see the complete picture of performance. For more

information about the Eye Chart suite of measurement tools, please visit

http://success.rpr2.com.

Wright

Is there a fairly simple way to guide leaders on appointing the right people

in the right roles with the highest odds of success?

Olivo

Yes, in addition to this concept of demonstrated leadership ability, we have

also learned that not all leadership roles are created equal. There are varying

levels of complexity that people face depending upon their position, span of

responsibility, and departmental challenges.

Over a period of fifteen years, with performance data from more than

fifteen thousand leaders, we were able to develop probability of success

models to better estimate performance expectations of leaders in different

roles. Quite simply, if you have the ability to quantify the complexity of the

leadership role (low, medium, or high degree of difficulty) and the ability to

differentiate the demonstrated leadership ability level (with a talent rating of

A, B, C, or D) you can accurately estimate the success rates of people

appointed to different assignments.

Logically you wouldn’t take people who are B minus level leaders and

assign them to the most difficult role because they would have a fairly low

success rate (odds of success are only 35 percent). Therefore, the business

practice competency for organizations to master is the consistent ability to

match the talent level of leaders or managers (their demonstrated ability) with

the appropriate complexity level of assignment (the degree of difficulty) to

increase their relative odds of success.

In the diagram above, we illustrate the leadership talent level along the

horizontal X axis and the relative odds of success along the vertical Y axis.

There are three parallel tracks for complexity or Degree of Difficulty (high,

medium, or low). A leader’s odds of success can be estimated by aligning the

leadership talent level (A, B, C, or D) with the role complexity (Degree of

Difficulty). In the upper right corner ellipse, we see that when A-and B-level

leaders are appointed to the appropriate level of complexity, they are three to

one likely to succeed. In the lower left corner ellipse, we see that when C-and

D-level leaders are appointed to virtually any assignment, they are three to one

likely to fail.

The most common mistake that leaders make is when B level leaders are

appointed to assignments with a high degree of difficulty. In this case, they

have an overall success rate of only 45 percent. We’re not suggesting that a

B-level leader can’t be successful in the most difficult assignments; we are

suggesting that you should avoid making those appointments where leaders

can be in over their head. Our term for this is that they become

“Overleveraged.”

Wright

The concept of “nature versus nurture” has been argued by behavioral

scientists for hundreds of years. Do you believe leaders are more “born”

(nature) or are they more “developed” (nurture)?

Olivo

Since both nature and nurture elements are both required for success, the

question cannot be framed with an expectation of an either-or response. It

doesn’t really matter if they are naturally hardwired with the right type of

behaviors and natural talents as a leader, or if they develop those skills over

time. The important thing to consider is that by age thirty, do they consistently

demonstrate it? I’m often asked about the significance of age thirty. The

bottom line is that by that age, if they have never demonstrated the

fundamental leadership skills required for the assignment, it is highly doubtful

that you can train them to become capable.

The nature versus nurture debate is similar for athletes. Sports science

studies have revealed that approximately two thirds of an elite athlete’s talent

potential is determined at birth. About one third is developed over time. Sport

specificity analyses also show that there are unique physical attributes with

certain sports in which people are either highly likely or highly unlikely to be

successful.

“The evidence suggests that athletes are first born, then made better

over time.”

—Dr. Robert Arnot

Imagine taking someone who, at an early age (by age fourteen), is a great

natural athlete, has terrific flexibility, unusual strength, great conditioning,

balance and kinesthetic awareness, and keen vision and/or coordination skills.

The person initially could excel in virtually any sport but there is probably one

physical activity or sport that he or she is most ideally suited for. The person

has the ideal height (tall or short), weight (lean or compact), aerobic capacity

(endurance) or sprinting ability (quickness), fast or slow twitch muscle fiber,

or unique fine movement coordination (a golf swing or ballet grace) for some

specific sport. The success of people with these characteristics is initially

determined by their early maturity and ability beyond their years, but as they

develop, they could achieve extraordinary levels of achievement with the ideal

alignment of the right talents with the right sports science fit.

The facts today are that if a young athlete (by age fourteen) doesn’t commit

unconditionally to one specific sport, his or her competitive development

between ages fifteen and twenty-four could be sub-optimized. In English, that

means these people may never achieve their true potential because they are

committing to one sport too late.

Finally, similar to the magic of the compound interest effect, the earlier a

person commits to a particular activity or skill, there also appears to be a

compounding (amplifying) effect that occurs over time. If another person

begins even a year later, he or she may never quite catch up.

Is it possible for dedication, hard work, and practice discipline to

out-compete talent? Yes, but there are “natural laws of competitive

performance” that tend to hold up like the laws of gravity. For example:

• If two people of the same natural talent level train or practice with the

same degree of intensity, they will most likely be evenly matched.

• If a person with more talent does not train or practice consistently, he

or she becomes vulnerable to losing to a less talented opponent. Therefore,

drive and practiced discipline can triumph over raw talent.

• If an extremely talented person also trains with extraordinary drive and

practice discipline, it becomes a rare occurrence for him or her to lose to a

lesser talented and/or driven opponent. Get the picture?

The reason people have trouble with comparing the advantages of talent

versus drive is because it’s difficult to quantify and it’s possible to have

someone with average ability who works really hard to occasionally

outperform people with superior natural talent. But eventually, if two equally

talented people are matched head-to-head, the one who consistently exhibits

greater drive and practice discipline will most likely prevail more often. The

head-to-head win-loss record eventually falls in line with predictable odds of

success.

We believe that the same can be said with leadership. We see that people

have a certain amount of ability that may get amplified over time if they’re

willing to work at it continuously. It’s been proven that your IQ (raw

intelligence) peaks around age twenty-one, so the vast majority of the people

reading this material “are pretty much done.” Yet a person’s emotional

intelligence and ability to work with others can continue to develop (possibly

for his or her entire life). If someone has the natural behavior wiring to be a

good leader (drive, emotional intelligence, genuine supportive nature) and he

or she continuously works hard for ten thousand hours (ten years), twenty

thousand, or even thirty thousand hours, he or she is going to reach the

ultimate level or the end of the bell curve performance where the person is in

the top 1/10 of 1 percent of all people in a leadership role.

To more easily illustrate this concept, visualize people climbing a ladder.

More naturally talented people start at a higher rung up than someone with

lesser natural ability. If, however, the more talented person stops climbing

(becomes complacent), he or she can eventually become the rung for the more

driven person to step on while that person is climbing up the ladder from a

lower position. Therefore, if athletes are first born, then made better, maybe

the same can be said for leaders.

Wright

Will you explain the concept and definitions of overleveraged and

underleveraged?

Olivo

The evidence in measuring more than fifteen thousand leaders, directors,

and front-line managers proves that many people can get in over their head

regarding performing as expected. We refer to this performance gap level as

being “overleveraged.” This has also been historically labeled as the “Peter

Principle”—people get promoted to their level of incompetence.

The challenge for healthcare has been that the complexity of healthcare has

increased at a rate that is faster than the organizations’ ability to keep up. This

condition creates a management complexity gap.

Consider this dilemma: Five years ago, a front-line manager in an imaging

department was successful in creating good performance outcomes with good

patient satisfaction but today, he’s falling behind and struggling because: 1)

The complexity of the role (pace of the job, financial literacy requirements,

patient volume fluctuations, productivity expectations and doing more with

less, budget expectations, employee turnover, obsolete technology, etc.) has

gotten away from him, 2) He has not invested sufficient time in leadership

development, technical or management skills, 3) He has not hired or appointed

the sufficient talent below him, or 4) Any combination of the above.

Whereas this scenario sounds impossible for anyone to manage

successfully, we have found that A-level leaders can keep up, given these

demands approximately 65 percent of the time, B-level leaders will be

successful 45 percent of the time, C-level leaders, 20 percent of the time, and

D-level leaders, only 5 percent of the time.

“People can get in over their heads when the increasing complexity of the

assignment exceeds their natural and developed ability level to keep up. We

refer to this condition as being overleveraged.”

Someone who could be considered underleveraged is usually extremely

talented (an A-level player) and assigned to a low-complexity assignment

where he or she is excelling in overall performance. The person clearly could

handle additional responsibility or possibly even be promoted to a more

challenging role. In this case, the person’s odds of success is very high (85

percent) and with each Degree of Difficulty increase (from low to medium and

to high) the odds of success will go down slightly (from approximately five to

one, down to three to one). (See diagram number three.)

Just as there are standard protocols of patient care in the healthcare

industry, we believe that there should be standard protocols of coaching

assistance for helping people who are “overleveraged” (in over their heads).

This condition occurs much more often than we think. In fact, the numbers

show that the average healthcare organization gets it right—aligning the right

leadership talent level with the appropriate level of complexity—about 60

percent of the time (just 10 percent better than a coin flip). A poor performing

organization will have approximately 25 percent of its leaders and managers

seriously overleveraged. High performing organizations only have about 12

percent of those people significantly in over their heads.

One final comment about managers being overleveraged: If people are in

over their heads and they’re struggling every day in their job as a manager,

they’re most likely going home most nights feeling miserable, their work/life

balance is out of alignment, and their level of anxiety compounds to eventually

create a negative feedback loop of declining performance.

While it’s a tremendous disservice for the leaders above this manager to

leave him or her in that role, the potential downside risks for patients (or

customers) are far worse. If a healthcare executive knowingly leaves an

overleveraged manger in a role where he or she is failing, wishfully thinking

that that person is going to be able to turn around his or her performance while

the department is performing at a sub-optimized level with poor quality and

safety, inefficient operational performance, higher turnover of employees,

lower patient satisfaction, it can be considered gross negligence or malpractice.

We have to continuously remind healthcare leaders that they are not

primarily in the employee rehabilitation business—they are in the patient care

business. They can’t afford to prioritize rehabilitation attempts with managers

with extremely low odds of success over the care and safety requirements for

the patients. They need to make more informed selection choices up front to

get the right people in the right roles.

Wright

How important or beneficial can coaching be to amplify performance?

Olivo

In 2005, I learned a very important and personal lesson about the value of

coaching. While fishing on a flats boat in the Gulf of Mexico just north of

Tampa, Florida, I had a serious accident. The fishing guide driving the boat (at

about thirty miles per hour) hit a reef in about two feet of water. The end result

of being ejected from the boat at high speed was that I shattered the fibula

bone in my right leg, completely tore my MCL, my ACL, my medial meniscus

and lateral meniscus, and I tore ligaments on both sides of my right ankle.

Fortunately, I wasn’t killed, my right leg was still attached, and I didn’t hit my

head on the reef and lose consciousness.

Taking inventory of my body parts while in the water and without knowing

the total extent of the damage, I had one immediate instinctive thought, “What

was it going to take to recover and get back to 100 percent?” The intense

desire to be able to walk and run again created the “have to” mindset to do

whatever it took to achieve full functionality.

There were four elements that had to happen, in sequence, for me to get

back to my physical and mental athletic performance level prior to the

accident:

• I had to have a first class surgeon put the parts back together. I chose

Dr. John Campbell, the U.S. Olympic Ski Team Orthopedic surgeon—clearly

the right person for the role.

• My body needed quality time to “heal well,” which required a sound

and healthy immune system. This meant being committed to a highly

regimented diet.

• I had to demonstrate the practice discipline and intense desire to

endure pain and train extremely hard. That meant icing my leg ten to fifteen

times per day, keeping it straight and elevated while sleeping, and putting in

the extra time, seven days per week to do strength and range of motion

exercises.

• I had to have the right coach with both the physical therapy rehab

knowledge to develop a structured twelve-month game plan and the

emotional intelligence to bring out a superior performance in me.

According to my best estimate, my physical therapy coach and good friend

John Zombro somehow managed to bring out at least a 50 percent

discretionary effort in my rehab performance. As disciplined as I thought I was

and as hard and often as I trained, when I exercised on my own, there was only

so much effort that I was willing to expend. His caring as a coach to encourage

and motivate me, his knowledge and expertise of what to do, the diverse and

creative exercises to incorporate, and finally, his ability to read my pain

tolerance and adjust the daily rehabilitation routines, all contributed to bring

out an entirely new level of performance that I was unable to equal on my

own.

This traumatic experience allowed me to better comprehend how important

coaching is in the workplace and to quantify the upside benefit that coaching

can contribute to performance improvement. I’ve concluded that the potential

upside benefit of coaching is directly proportionate to the degree of motivation

to achieve a desired goal or outcome. In the diagram below, there are two

extremes that define a person’s level of intensity, desire, or commitment to

achieve a goal.

On the left hand side of the diagram, we illustrate the frame of reference

where someone feels that he or she “has to improve” to achieve a goal. This

was my case following my accident and leg injury. I truly felt that there was no

choice—if I was ever going to be able to walk, hike, or possibly run again, I

needed the intense commitment to do whatever it was going to take to get back

to full functionality. It didn’t matter what the health insurance was going to

reimburse for the rehab costs, it didn’t matter how much business travel time

or earned income I was going to lose. It also didn’t matter that I was going to

sacrifice eating normal food. I had to try and get back to normal and my

degree of commitment was probably at level ten!

On the right hand side of the diagram, we illustrate the frame of reference

where someone “wants to improve” to achieve a goal. From a scale of zero to

ten (zero representing virtually no interest in achievement and ten representing

the u ultimate level of commitment— being all in and willing to do whatever it

takes), we see that an average level of commitment will allow coaching

assistance to add approximately 10 percent upside benefit or value. As the

level of commitment rises (from a level five to l level 10), we see that the

benefit from coaching can possibly increase its value fivefold to a maximum

upside of approximately 50 percent. Therefore, can we conclude that virtually

everyone who is interested in improving his or her performance benefit from

coaching? Yes. Does the increase in benefit rise linearly? Probably not.

In conclusion, it’s my belief that a person’s level of intensity, desire, or

commitment can amplify the ultimate benefit that coaching has on overall

performance.

One of the most publicized examples of the “want to” motivation to

improve was observed with the Olympic Swimming Champion Darra Torres.

In the 2008 Olympic Games in n Beijing China, she won three silver medals in

swimming at age forty-one. Two years prior to the games, she took inventory

of what it was going to take to 1) be competitive again after retirement and

having her first child, 2) make the U.S. Olympic team, 3) make it to the fin

nals of the races she selected, and 4) to be on the podium and receive an

Olympic medal. Her degree of intensity, desire, and commitment was

obviously at level ten—she was “all in.”

Darra was so committed to doing “whatever it took” that she created her

own private dream team of coaches: one to structure her regimented diet, one

to work on her flexibility, one to work on her strength training, one to work on

her stroke technique, and finally, a massage therapist to improve her alignment

and post-exercise recovery time. She even had the entire coaching team travel

to Beijing to work with her daily at the Olympic Games. Her superior

performance at the 2008 Games proved that athletes can now be competitive at

the elite level far longer than we previously realized—if they are willing to be

totally committed and benefit from the maximum amplification that coaching

can provide.

Finally, I recently had an experience with a senior executive who

represented the third extreme example in our coaching model. This very

talented and experienced healthcare executive achieved superior results but

exhibited consistent instances of inappropriate behavior. His hardwired style to

win and assertive/dominant behavior actually took away from his leadership

effectiveness as perceived by his peers and his direct reports. When his CEO

required him to receive executive coaching, he was insulted. He felt that his

track record of performance was so superior that he neither had to change nor

did he want to change. This level of zero desire or commitment to improve

limited him to “just going through the motions” where he received virtually no

upside benefit to the coaching process. In other words, he became

“uncoachable.”

The most unfortunate part of this example was that if this person (who is as

naturally talented as Darra Torres) was committed to do whatever it took to

improve, he could ultimately become one of the most respected leaders in the

healthcare industry. I hope that someday, this leader decides to have a more

open mind to coaching and receiving feedback that can truly help him achieve

more. As a coach, nothing is more frustrating than trying to assist an extremely

talented person who is uncoachable.

“There is no question that a person’s level of intensity,

desire, or commitment can amplify the ultimate benefit that

coaching has on overall performance.”

About the Author

Tom Olivo is the President of Success Profiles, Inc.

and a founding partner in Healthcare Performance

Solutions (HPS). He has more than twenty-five years

of experience in identifying, measuring, and

comparing the commonalities of highly successful

athletes, business leaders, and organizations. Tom has

worked in a variety of industries with thousands of

senior executives and managers, emphasizing the

importance of high performance standards consistent with the ethic of

leadership and best business practices.

Tom’s work with Olympic athletes, coaches, and successful business

leaders led to the development of several unique diagnostic instruments that

differentiate performance. The Success Profiles methodology, combined with a

measurement framework and supporting research data, proves that consistent

success in business today rarely occurs by accident. Identifying and measuring

the characteristics that lead to success in leaders and businesses, then using

them as benchmarks for improving performance, is the basis for the Success

Profiles method.

Tom is the co-author of Impending C Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few

People (a business best seller for 2003 3). He is considered by business leaders

to be an expert in workforce optimization and is one of the most requested

speakers on the topic of practical and applied performance measurement. Tom

lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Katie, and daughters, Sarah and

Christine. His favorite hobbies include all forms of outdoor recreation,

especially fly-fishing.

Tom Olivo Success Profiles and Healthcare Performance Solutions (HPS)

200 Longhorn Rd.

Bozeman, MT 59715

406-582-8884

tolivo@successprofiles.com

www.successprofiles.com