Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

Feelings rule. Most of us recognize that they shouldn’t, but they do. If you take the view that people shouldn’t have feelings and proceed to ignore them, you will limit your persuasive effectiveness. If you allow yourself to be held hostage by feelings, you will be paralyzed. The key is to recognize, accept and express everyone’s feelings and then recruit those feelings to your cause.

1. Recognize your own feelings. This is not as easy as it sounds. Most of us react instinctively to the events in our lives without recognizing the pivotal role our feelings played in those reactions. Most of us who react impulsively are embarrassed to admit that we don’t keep our feelings on a shorter leash.

2. Recognize others’ feelings. This is a lot easier. Most of us are pretty good at divining how others feel; we just don’t think they should feel that way—if they turn out to feel differently than we do.

3. Accept feelings. We all have them. They change. They enrich our lives and torment us. We can do the right things in spite of them.

4. Express them. It’s not enough to just recognize and accept them. We have to put them on the table. Then we can deal with them. Unrecognized and unexpressed feelings will derail the best-laid plans every time.

How do you deal with feelings at work?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

Discomfort is a double-edged prod. Most of us will not change unless we experience some discomfort. Too much of it is paralyzing. Leaders walk this tightrope every day. Effective leaders know that they must feel and create some discomfort, but if they make their colleagues too uncomfortable organizational momentum will stall. It’s not an easy balance and even the best leaders don’t always get it right.

1. Make yourself uncomfortable first. Until you have achieved personal perfection, there are plenty of opportunities. Leaders long for comfort just like every other human being on the planet. If you can find no other personal flaws, feel uncomfortable about feeling too comfortable.

2. Focus on those organizational results that are not hitting the mark. It is counterproductive to create discomfort for discomfort’s sake. It must derive from the failure to achieve meaningful goals to have significant impact. If you are consistently meeting all of your goals, you have set the bar too low.

3. Hold yourself and others accountable. Figure out who has the power to make things happen and then hold them accountable for making them happen. Since the leader is always accountable, you cannot do this successfully without holding yourself accountable.

How do you create just the right amount of discomfort in your workplace?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

It’s not what we say; it’s how we behave. All of us show up wanting to do more of what we feel like doing and less of what we don’t want to do. When leaders say one thing and do another, everyone notices and leadership credibility suffers. The hypocrisy of leaders is the reason that people use most often as an excuse to slack off. “If they don’t do it, why should I?” And they have a point.

1. Clarify your expectations for how you will interact with each other at work. No one is perfect and all of us will slip from time to time, but at least everyone will know what’s expected of them.

2. Confront violators. Ignoring obvious rule transgressions is worse than having no rules at all. Of course, confrontation is hard and no one wants to do it. That’s tough. It’s your job to confront others and to own up to your own shortcomings when your colleagues point them out.

3. Tell stories about changed behavior. If you confront each other, behavior will change. And such stories are among the most effective organizational motivators known. Find them and use them.

How have you clarified your behavioral expectations at work?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

It’s difficult to achieve exceptional results, but it’s much harder to sustain them. Having achieved the goal, we all tend to congratulate ourselves and move on to the next challenge. We become bored, lose interest and focus, and backslide. We stop doing the things that made the difference, mistakenly thinking that those processes are now stable.  They are not. All organizational processes are naturally unstable.

1. Prepare yourself and others for performance deterioration. Begin talking openly about this danger as a part of your goal achievement celebrations. Remind everyone of examples where you’ve scaled the summit and then fallen off a cliff. There will be plenty of these examples.

2. Keep monitoring all key processes. A performance dashboard is the perfect tool for this. You can see how you are doing at a glance each week or month. Any unraveling will become immediately apparent.

3. Make sure that a leader remains accountable. We all pay more attention when our names are on the board as the responsible leader. Others may become intoxicated with success, but the fear of embarrassment will keep the designated driver focused.

3. Create a crisis at the first sign of performance droop. Become distressed and let it show. People are exquisitely sensitive to how their leaders feel. Use this fact to your advantage.

How do you sustain exceptional performance?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

We all like to think we are special. Have you noticed that? This longing to feel special is greatest among those of us who are below average. A good many misguided leaders miss this point entirely. They think that the way to motivate others is to never be satisfied, to always be critical and demanding.

1. Make the goals easy at first. Here’s an uncomfortable truth. Success, even when it’s meaningless, feels good. People actually rejoice when their teams win. They may not have had a thing to do with it. Success energizes, motivates and feeds on itself.

2. Celebrate incremental improvement. Progress matters. Make a big deal out of it. People need emotional fuel to keep going. They want feel that they are at least making some headway.

3. Take small steps. People who don’t make some progress tire quickly, become discouraged and give up. They convince themselves and others that the goal didn’t really matter that much anyway.

4. Preach patience and practice what you preach. Variation happens. Significant change usually takes a long time. While genuinely celebrating incremental progress, repeatedly clarify the difference between movement and the goal line.

5. Do not celebrate failure. Feel-good leaders often mistakenly conclude that feeling good is the goal. Nope. Results are the things that matter.

How do you make people feel special?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

One of the evidence-based ways to achieve the results you want is to design and deploy a process that produces those results. But once we adapt to a certain process, we keep following it even if it no longer works—or never did. People don’t like change. It’s true that change occurs naturally, but the pace of natural change is glacial. Successful competitors rarely wait for change to occur naturally.

1. Focus relentlessly on results. The best case you can make that a process must be improved is the fact that it is not producing the desired results.

2. Identify a small group of passionate process owners. If you expect everyone in the group to leap at the opportunity to improve key organizational processes, you have lost your grip on reality. Only a small number of people care enough to make the necessary changes. Find them. Feed them. Empower them.

3. Make the case for change. If you just announce that the process has changed and everyone will just have to deal with it, a fair number of your colleagues will sabotage your recommended changes on principle. Explain yourself.

4. Force compliance. When you’ve accomplished as much as you can with effective persuasion, employ brute force to make the change stick. Audit the players’ compliance. Post their individual results publicly. Public embarrassment works. Attach unpleasant consequences to the failure to comply.

How to you achieve process improvement in your work environment?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

This is hard to do. It’s even harder to do well. You have the nice leaders who want everyone to be happy and love them. They just can’t bring themselves to confront their colleagues because that would hurt their feelings. They hint and beat around the bush. They avoid unpleasantness by talking about some other problem.

Then there are the jerks. They yell at underlings and berate people publicly for not doing what they want them to do the way they want them to do it. They confront not to produce results but to distract others from their own shortcomings or to throw their weight around.

Effective confronters avoid these two paralyzing extremes. Here’s how you can do it:

1. First, calm yourself. If you confront others when you are angry or frustrated, your emotion will drown out your message. You want to create an energizing discomfort that motivates, not discourages.

2. Ask reasonable but pointed clarifying questions. Ask permission to speak frankly and emphasize that you do not wish to be hurtful. Get right to the point. After you’ve asked the right question, stop and wait for the answer. Resist your natural inclination to fill uncomfortable silences with rambling explanations about why you hate to have to ask what needs to be asked.

3. Ask whether you’ve been clear. Ask whether you are making sense. Ask whether the questions you are asking are reasonable. Then wait for the confirmation that you have indeed been clear.

4. Ask whether you’ve provided the support they need. The reality is that people often need muscle to get things done in bureaucracies. If you can’t or won’t block for your runners, you cannot expect them to advance the ball.

5. Extract a new commitment. Refuse to leave the discomfort zone until you have a renewed commitment to achieve the results that you have both agreed make sense.

How do you effectively confront poor performance in your organization?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

It is easy to write an action plan. You’ve dashed off hundreds of them. They sound good. After you’ve read a few, they all start to sound alike. They are well intentioned. They sound like they would work. Once you’ve written it, you can check this box knowing it is unlikely that you or anyone else will ever look at it again.

Creating a customized, innovative action plan is a lot harder. You have to think. Instead of writing down the things you feel like doing, consider what you would do if you were willing to do whatever it took. Forget about the barriers you face for a moment. Suppose you could get everyone’s full cooperation. What would you do then? When brainstorming about what might work, don’t hesitate to consider the most ridiculous options.

1. Specify exactly what you are going to do. Begin by explaining what you have already done. Use short, simple sentences. Focus on behavior instead of intention.

2. Explain how you are going to do it. Break it down into the simplest possible steps.

3. Identify who will do it. When it comes to persuading key stakeholders and opinion leaders, the people who are most effective are those with the best personal relationships with those opinion leaders. These powerful persuaders may be low ranking employees or informal leaders who are not even on your team.

4. Say when you will do it. Ask the responsible leaders whether the timeframes are reasonable. Obtain their commitments that they will execute the plans by that time.

5. Check to make sure it was done. The only action plans that matter are the ones that are executed. We all know how rare real execution it. Go over the task list at every meeting. Check off the tasks you have completed. Ask about the progress others are making. Offer your help while making it clear that you will not stop checking on them until their work is done.

6. Monitor results. The most elegant action plans—even when fully deployed—are worthless if they don’t produce improved results.

How do you encourage the development of action plans that actually work?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all just did what we are supposed to do? Some of us are more self-disciplined than others, but all of us tend to slack off if we can get away with it. All of us know that we should wash our hands between patients, but an astounding number of us will not do it unless someone is watching. It’s discouraging, but it’s just the way it is.

1. Specify the behavior you expect. Be very clear and specific. Describe precise behaviors. Resist the temptation to focus on attitudes. Assume nothing. When you have clarified exactly what you expect to happen, make it clear that you expect it to happen every time.

2. Inform people that you will be watching. Then watch. When people figure out that no one is watching, they will fall right back in to their natural patterns of non compliance. Do you really believe that anyone would follow the speed limit if the cops were never around?

3. Hold people accountable. The consequences for noncompliance must sting. If you issue parking tickets to those employees who park in the spaces reserved for patients but do nothing more, the transgressors will just tear up the tickets and keep parking improperly. And they will complain bitterly about receiving these annoying tickets. If, on the other hand, a ticket results in an automatic corrective action and a letter to their files, they will find another place to park.

How do you inspect what you expect in your company?

Kendall L. Stewart, M.D.

We all face a blizzard of complex and confusing processes every day at work. It is easy to get lost. Confused, discouraged and distracted, we fall into doing what is right in front of us, what we feel like doing—or doing nothing at all. We completely lose sight of the goal. Average or below-average results predictably follow. Deliberate, focused activity does not occur naturally. Leaders make it happen.

1. Focus on the results you want to achieve. You cannot focus on everything at once. Begin every leadership meeting with your performance dashboard. If don’t have a dashboard, create one. Focus intensely on those indicators that are currently not meeting your targets.

2. Figure out exactly what you will have to do to improve your performance. This is not as easy as it sounds, but you must do it. Since you have selected indicators that allow for comparative performance, someone somewhere is getting the job done. That means it can be done if you will figure it out and do it.

3. Review your task list at every meeting. Everyone loves to talk about what others should do, but personal accountability and follow through are not nearly as much fun. Make sure every task has a timeline and that someone is responsible to see that it gets done.

How do you use task lists to produce and sustain exceptional results?