4 Embody Success (and Leverage Failure)

Not everyone gets to commute to work on a space shuttle. Astronaut Mike Bloomfield did, though. Imagine joining him for a ride: You take your seat in the cockpit of a craft that weighs 4.5 million pounds as it sits on the launch pad. As you put your head back and face the sky, you feel the engines roar.

Power—massive energy—begins to lift you off of Earth. And then you get to experience what few people ever have. For the next eight minutes, your craft burns a ton of fuel every second. (Think about that for a moment.) You go from zero miles per hour (mph) to 17,500 mph, which means you’re traveling five miles a second. (You laugh as you think of your business colleagues who are traveling from Los Angeles to New York; it will take them over five hours traveling in a plane going 500 mph. You’re traveling that same distance in 10 minutes.) Every 90 minutes, you make another trip around Earth.

There’s no being late for meetings now. The last two minutes of your ascent you’re increasing your speed by 1,000 mph every 15 seconds. Three Gs of acceleration has your back pinned squarely into your seat. Then, as you arrive at your destination, you float: Instead of weighing 4.5 million pounds, your craft now only weighs 220,000 pounds.

Just another day on the job.

“Space flight is really, really hard,” Mike told us. “The mechanics and physics of the operation are mind-boggling. NASA makes it look easy. Private companies, loaded with talented people, are struggling to put people into space. They struggle not because their employees aren’t competent or hard working, but because the challenge of human space flight is very, very hard.”

Mike was the pilot of the Atlantis mission in 1997, as well as on the Endeavor in 2000. In 2002, he was the commander on the Atlantis. Their big thing: Equip the international space station to do more complex and advanced work.

Mike is a granite of a man with a humble heart, full of passion for team excellence. He was the captain of the football team at the U.S. Air Force Academy and an F-15 fighter pilot. When you meet him, or look at photos of the teams he’s been on, one thing is clear: success. He embodies a confidence that communicates achievement is imminent.

We asked him, “Mike, were you ever nervous going into space? Come on: A ton of fuel burning every second? Traveling at 17,500 mph? What if something went wrong? How did you remain so confident?”

“Faith in the process,” Mike answered. “In everything I’ve ever done, the first step is to identify the progression of steps that will deliver success—and then you work that process.

“When you have a process of success that covers all scenarios, you’re not afraid of one ‘gotcha,’ or something unplanned happening,” he said. “You’re prepared to achieve.

“And it’s important to remember that success means different things at different times,” Mike added. “Take Apollo 13, for example. Some might say that mission wasn’t successful because the crew didn’t make it to the moon,” Mike said as his words picked up their tempo. “But I say it was very successful. The circumstances changed—dramatically—and they had to ask: What is success now? Getting safely back to Earth was the answer. So, they worked their process of success.”

A few years ago, Mike the astronaut became Mike the successful business leader. He’s a part of an engineering team that develops space suits and other gear for extreme conditions. “In every business,” he said, “All the bosses want to know: ‘What’s your strategy to deliver the business objective?’ My strategy is to develop the process of success, one that adapts to the circumstances and environment as we move to our destination.

“People need to be careful that they are not always talking about the business deliverable. Success is a process. It’s executing the steps needed to get to the business deliverable,” Mike said. “When you do that, you can be relatively certain you’ll get where you need to go.”

Your Team Either Has Confidence—or It Doesn’t

Every team must decide what sort of team it’s going to be. Teams that do big things do not team casually. Regardless if a team may have been formed in seemingly spontaneous fashion, those who think their work together can be improvised as they go along make a grave error: When the unexpected occurs (and you can expect it will), winging it or relying on your wits to effectively relate and communicate with other team members means certain disaster. Even teams whose team members have intentionally paired personalities to maximize synergies require a way for those personalities to work together.

Teams that possess confidence that they can achieve big things feel that way because, like Mike the astronaut, they utilize a process to team effectively. That’s what the Do Big Things Framework is: a step-by-step approach to thinking and actions designed to enable the team to do big things in all circumstances. Such teams are not afraid of “gotchas” or unexpected events because they know that whatever happens, they have a process to follow that will lead them to success. This results in a move from amateur status to a professional team embodying the certainty of success.

For team members to operate day after day without the confidence that the team can succeed is a neglect of duty. Here then, is a question that stops some teams: Do we have confidence that the team will succeed? As you facilitate your team’s response to this question, we encourage you to hold the team accountable to yes or no answers. Our experience shows that ambiguous responses can creep in, such as “sort of,” “maybe,” and “only if.”

These statements, however, reflect one thing: The team isn’t confident, at least not enough to do big things. (Uh, Houston, we have a problem.) The team either believes they’ll succeed or they don’t. There’s no gray here, no waffling back and forth, and no room for conditions. (“We’ll succeed if we get more resources.”)

For certain, knowing the team isn’t confident is a good thing to understand—and the earlier the better. Confidence, or the lack of it, is your canary as you descend into your Grand Canyon: If the bird dies, it’s an important indicator that the team had better get busy taking the actions necessary for the team to believe.

Teams that do big things don’t wait for success to act like a success. They act like a success first because they have or quickly create a reliable teaming process to give them the confidence they need. Just like Mike.

Preparing for Success

While in the field working with a team of information technology (IT) professionals who were launching an internal crowdsourcing initiative, we saw their ability to embody success take shape.

This team had every reason to bring a halfhearted effort. They had just completed the integration phase of a merger: two companies were now one—or trying to become one. For nearly eight months, they’d worked hours that required far more cups of coffee than their bodies should be subjected to. Several people had to move their families to a new city. And on top of all that, now there were people on their team who they had once viewed as the enemy.

As we supported the team, we saw them transform from a collection of individuals seemingly randomly chosen to group together, to a team in the truest sense of the word. Here’s what the early part of their discussion and planning looked like:

Before they even applied the Do Big Things Framework, with simplicity they clearly defined their Grand Canyon, their one big objective so they could all see it: Enable every person in the company to crowdsource information freely, so they could truly be a learning organization.

Then, they took the initial step in the DBT Framework by defining and committing to equip themselves to deliver their human imperative: Function with an all-the-time and everywhere service-oriented mindset—especially with each other.

Next, they determined how they would embody success and leverage failure. This is the second step of the Do Big Things Framework.

Who’s in Control of Your Team’s Confidence?

More likely than not, at some point in your career you’ve found yourself on a team with someone who is like Mike the astronaut: They came to work each day with a conviction and determination to succeed that never seemed to break. As well, there were other people on the team who sat right next to Mike, yet their confidence always seemed to get replaced by anger, apathy, or anxiety every time a new challenge surfaced.

When you were on such teams, what did you do? As authors, to tell our truth, 30 years ago, before we had discovered the Do Big Things Framework, we did two things when we found ourselves in these situations: (1) We gave countless motivational speeches, and (2) We pleaded with our boss to swap out the players on the team that were dragging the rest of us down.

Now, after studying teams that do big things, we know clearly there’s a better option: Develop within the members of the team a greater locus of control. When you started this book, you likely didn’t know you’d learn to speak Latin, too. Consider this a bonus: In Latin, the word locus means place or location.¹ Therefore, those with an inner locus of control believe they can influence and determine results; those with an external locus of control are more likely to believe they’re powerless.

This is important Latin to know, too, because on teams that do big things team members consistently demonstrate a greater ability to take responsibility for their team’s failures and successes. This is distinctly different than teams that don’t achieve much, where external forces determine their level of confidence.

To learn how likely your team is to embody success then, it’s useful to ask the team this question: What are our primary motivations for succeeding that are top of mind for us? When a team is predominantly exposed to extrinsic motivators, team members are conditioned to develop an external locus of control. If this is the case for your team, act quickly.

Certainly, extrinsic motivations such as bonuses, promotions, and awards are all necessary parts of a healthy organization. But mountains of research make it clear, including what author Daniel Pink messages in his timeless book, Drive: If external motivations are the only reasons being used to energize us to do big things, we’ll be in an unhealthy organization quickly.²

Here’s why: If we as a team commit to doing something really big, it means we’re going to have to make sacrifices. Just like the IT team that came together after their companies merged, success required time away from families. It meant hours and hours in seemingly endless meetings with digitally disjointed images on monitors of teammates they didn’t personally know. It obligated them to stare with blurry eyes into computer screens late into the night at home, with children yelling in the background, “Aaaggghhh! Why is Daddy’s head spinning?”

If you want anyone to sign up for that experience, then the list of external motivations is going to have to get longer. In fact, the list of rewards will never be long enough. That’s because if it’s merely an external motivations game that’s going to be used to keep and motivate team members, then those team members will play the game, too: They’re going to be far more motivated to shop their talent around to other companies and compare the competitor’s list of engagement tricks to your company’s list.

That game doesn’t cause people to embody the success required for a team to achieve. It merely prioritizes personal or self-serving motivations, which is a proven method for causing a team to flatline quickly.

People want their heart to be activated. We all long to be a part of something significant. Daniel Pink provides evidence that we don’t want to be bribed away from our greater character. That’s why putting intrinsic motivations into play is so critical. Because all of us want to prove we have within us what it takes to do big things.

How to Put Intrinsic Motivations into Action

Pardon the stereotyping here. (We’ve got wonderful friends and family in IT.) We continue our earlier example merely to support a critical understanding: The IT team wasn’t too comfortable sharing their intrinsic motivations. After all, such information is personal.

This is precisely the point. For each of us, our individual motivations are personal. And so is the decision to take responsibility for the results we deliver. Once the team embraced this wisdom, they saw an immediate elevation in their collective confidence.

What this means: Teams that do big things are made of team members that are accountable to identifying and consistently fueling their personal and key motivators. And as a team, they actively support each other in this endeavor. To quickly put this knowledge to work for your team, try the following exercise:

Invite each team member to review and consider the motivations listed on the extrinsic and intrinsic (E&I) top motivations scale in Figure 4.1. As they do so, ask each person to identify their top one, three, or five (no more) greatest motivators in total. It’s important that the number is odd as the scale of priority motivations is rarely balanced. Lastly, remind the team to be as honest as possible, as there are no right or wrong answers.

As you debrief insights with your team, consider these questions:

• What does the scale of motivations look like for individuals? For the team as a whole?

Figure 4.1 Extrinsic and Intrinsic Top Motivations Scale

• What is the relationship between the motivators identified and the thinking and actions the team is currently demonstrating?

• Are motivations proportionally distributed in a manner you believe is necessary to do big things?

• What processes, systems, or other aspects of the culture support creating these motivational dynamics?

• Where can the team evolve and better leverage E&I motivations to better enable a more productive locus of control?

• What’s the reward to each person for leveraging their intrinsic motivations even more?

As the IT team candidly discussed their primary motivations with one another, several team members surprised even themselves. There were some real “Hey, look, this is what matters most to me” moments.

There was also an agreement: The more fatigued they were (and exhausted is how they described themselves), the more their motivations were weighted toward the extrinsic. The room was silent for a bit as they contemplated: Are we willing to go through the challenging days ahead relying on external forces to motivate us?

The answer was an emphatic no. The next step was to identify the intrinsic motivations that would balance the scale or weight it in favor of the motivations the team members could control. And this is the moment when things got even more interesting.

Few exercises develop a team’s ability to put their whole heart in it like identifying why the effort required to do big things is worth it. Marketing guru Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”³ The same holds true for the energy team members will need to do big things: It’s not what you have to do together that engages teammates in the effort; it’s why you do it that calls everyone to a higher expression of themselves.

Now, as each of us takes greater control of what we can control, confidence surges. We experience successes more today, which gives us greater evidence that we can and will be a success tomorrow.

How to Leverage Failure

Big objectives are big for a reason: They’re complex, almost always entail significant amounts of change, and test a team’s strength in ways that are often underestimated at the beginning. Things rarely go as planned. Therefore, the best time to measure a team’s ability to embody success is to observe their response to failure. When you embody success, even in times of trouble, you look like everything is going according to plan.

A search on the Internet for “failure quotes” provides a long stream of what successful people say about the topic. When you’re asked to speak at the company’s annual meeting (or you’re writing a book), it’s enjoyable to include failure quotes, because they often make people feel warm and fuzzy. The human spirit needs the reminder to pick itself up off the ground, again and again, in order to prevail.

But business is rarely warm and fuzzy. The business of doing big things is hard. If you’re an engineering team located in Paris trying to build a plant in India, and you find out that your people on the ground there mis-interpreted government regulations, positive quotes about how failure is only failure when you don’t learn from it, won’t do. If your team is responsible for hitting volume targets in an emerging country, and the employees there decide to go on strike, words Steve Jobs uttered when he was down and out aren’t going to get your product off the shelf. You need a team that is accountable, adapts, and focuses on the job at hand.

When your team misses a targeted delivery date, errs in delivering the product to agreed-upon specs, or comes in over budget, is the response one you’re proud of? The teams we repeatedly see do big things don’t blink, retreat, or assume a defensive posture. They possess an accountability reflex: an ability to quickly adapt to unplanned situations, respond effectively, and leverage the failure.

The key discovery: The magic of this reflex isn’t created when failure occurs. What makes the difference, and determines the type of response your team demonstrates, is what the team did early on, long before any failure was experienced. Specifically, development steps are accomplished that create the conditions for team members to be transparent, demonstrate ownership of their responsibilities, stay focused on solutions, and mobilize themselves and others forward.

How these conditions are created is outlined in each of the seven steps of the DBT Framework. As we’ve equipped teams to do big things, this is a profound and important shift in thinking: The seven steps necessary for teams to do big things apply to any situation—bad or good.

To give you further confidence in this approach, imagine any failure your team could possibly experience. Then, revisit the steps of the DBT Framework, and there it is: Exactly what successful teams do all the time—before, during, and after failure. This means business as usual becomes success as usual.

For now, take this accountability reflex assessment with your team to determine your current strengths and opportunities in response to failure moments. Then use the insights generated to further leverage the steps within the DBT Framework.

Accountability Reflex Assessment

Have team members use this scale to answer each of the five questions:

1 = always untrue, 2 = untrue most of the time, 3 = sometimes true and sometimes not, 4 = true most of the time, and 5 = true all the time.

Then compile the scores, and use the guide after the assessment to determine your team’s strength in being able to effectively respond to unplanned, and often negative, situations. Note: We encourage you to use these questions as a discussion guide, having team members share the rationale for their answers aloud. If the team, however, is not ready for this level of transparency, the assessment can be done anonymously.

Scoring guide for determining the strength of your team’s accountability reflex

20 to 25 points: Your team has the collective emotional muscles to do big things, especially in times of difficulty. ACTION: As a team, identify how you’ve created these dynamics, celebrate, and share with others what you’re learning.

15 to 19 points: Your team is at moderate risk of delaying the achievement of success when they encounter difficulties. ACTION: As you move through the DBT Framework, determine which specific step your team should focus on to rapidly develop necessary skills.

10 to 14 points: Your team is highly vulnerable to severe dysfunction when unplanned problems occur. ACTION: Call a time-out to operations soon and equip the team with the DBT Framework. Determine your sustainable plan to consistently strengthen the team’s accountability reflex moving forward.

0 to 9 points: You likely already know this: Your team is well on its way to flatlining. It’s likely your team has already gotten the attention of others in the organization; support—and changes—should be on the way. ACTION: Have the team collectively determine what sort of character they want to model to the rest of the organization as the intervention occurs. Then make certain you establish a plan to use the entire DBT Framework moving forward. Consider an internal or external neutral resource to provide support and facilitation.

Final note: The consequences of a failed plan are never as severe to the business as the consequences of a team that lacks an accountability reflex. What are you doing with your team today to prepare it for the response it must give to the crisis of tomorrow?

Staying Inspired When the Team Misses Their Target

The IT team was tested—in some cases, severely. Despite their best efforts to address potential rejections of stakeholders prior to making changes, they still had to deal with resistance. One business unit was dismissive of their efforts, saying their objective of implementing an internal social platform was void of value. Others criticized their plan for not including features that were more user-friendly, thus impacting user adoption. And the only attention they got from senior leadership was when they missed a deadline or went over budget.

The team, however, stayed the course by demonstrating their accountability reflex each time they encountered trouble. They had their moments of frustrations, of vigorous debates, of stepping outside for some fresh air (really, attempts to get away from each other for a moment). Interestingly, every teammate experienced some level of difficulty and doubt along the way. But because they had a process for success, like Mike the astronaut, and stayed true to their commitment to apply it, they were never frustrated as a team or doubted at the same time. Therefore, levels of confidence and emotional courage remained far higher across the team than they would have been in the past. They kept their whole heart in it.

As humans, we tether our emotions to our intrinsic motivations. When we get what we want, just as when we don’t, our emotions communicate to the world our personal agendas. Intrinsically motivated teams won’t be seen succumbing to fits of rage, defeatism, blame, or other self-defense tactics. Instead, their emotions center on trust, particularly of the most important sort: trust of self and each other.

A VP of product supply told us, in referring to his team, “The way work gets done today requires that you get put into countless and different groups of people every day.

“What’s your anchor? You’d better know yourself. Your team better know itself,” he said. “You have to be able to trust yourself. But you can’t if you don’t know what it is you’re here to do and why you want to do it.”

Most teams possess the technical or functional skills to do good work. The teams that succeed in going beyond basic expectations are those that foster and sustain a remarkable will, a determination fueled by intrinsic motivations. They weather the storm and stay the course as employees join midstream or leave unexpectedly (or even expectedly).

The IT team in our example in this chapter ended their year celebrating what they knew would happen: They had successfully achieved their one big thing. And they were stronger and more fulfilled for doing so. That sort of outcome qualifies as making an epic impact.

As we debriefed the experience with them, a funny thing happened: Given the power of celebration, we encouraged them to find ways to acknowledge their tremendous success. They asked us what that could look like, so we gave them some examples. What they decided to do surprised us.

They did very little. Why? Their response: Because they had known all along they were going to succeed, the end felt a bit anticlimactic.

Go figure. (We could only smile.)

How to Know If You’re on a Team That Embodies Success

Before your team takes the next step in the DBT Framework, we encourage caution on a specific point: Beware of being deceived by the words of well-meaning teammates. It’s not uncommon to hear teammates at a business kick-off meeting nearly shouting, “We’re confident!” In moments like this, it’s natural to think that the team is ready and able to embody success.

Words of confidence, however, are different than actions of confidence. What actions will give you the evidence that your team is acting like a success because they’re using a process for success?

In our assessment of teams that embody success, we found these three additional and distinctive qualities:

1. The team looks beyond itself. Just as selfish motives limit a person, a team is limited by a vision of success that only serves the team. When the team sees its larger role in the organization, as a team to support other teams in succeeding, then it embodies success and brings other teams along on the journey by equipping them to also do big things.

2. Teams that embody success transcend traditional measurements of success. Beyond the numbers, getting the sale, innovating a new product, or other efforts to impact the business, they take stock of their character. How they achieve success matters. There is no room for debate on this. They expect their hands to be hardened for the effort, but not their hearts and minds.

3. When successful people want to join your team, you know you embody success. Humans are drawn to the energy of those who know they can do the extraordinary. It’s uncommon and most of us crave it.

When the Future Becomes Now

Sting, the famous musician and lead singer for the band Police, recounts the early days of the band long before anyone outside of their families even knew they existed. While recording their first album together, band members would moonlight in a rent-by-the-hour studio; they could only afford the rates charged of artists when everyone else was sleeping.

After their recording sessions, Sting would drive his old, beat-up car back to London singing lyrics loudly while “in a state of euphoria.” He was doing what he always wanted to do. He was part of a team that embodied success. Their vision of the future was so clear that they collapsed the future into those early days as a band. Sting said, “We were insane in our optimism, and we were never happier.”¹⁰