CHAPTER 4
RHYTHM

What Is the Commitment to Rhythm?

All leaders who truly get the best out of their teams, who inspire them to be better than they thought they could be and create an environment where people love working together, generate rhythm. The origins of leaders committing to rhythm were not about people, but production. Craftsmen across Europe at the turn of the second millennium organized into guilds. Groups of carpenters, masons, and metalsmiths each had their own associations providing the labor for diverse industries. These were the first talent academies—part union, part training center, part cartel—and the dominant model of producing and organizing the available skilled workers, until the Venetian Arsenal.

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in Venice, the way ships were built changed forever. Instead of craftsmen coming from the guilds, the government began an industrial complex in which workers manufactured all parts of the ships in an area that ultimately took up 15 percent of the city. The rhythm of the assembly and production was so impressive, Dante included it as an aside in his Inferno. He describes a ship being repaired:

As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels o’er again,
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made;
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern,
This one makes oars, and that one cordage twists,
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the Arsenal and its 16,000 workers living and building around the complex could produce nearly one ship per day.

The streamlined craftsmanship in Venice was the precursor to the assembly line used in car manufacturing. First implemented by Ransom Olds of Oldsmobile, when Olds specialized the work of each employee, his plant went from producing 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 cars in 1902. The purpose of both gathering a team together and focusing each teammate’s efforts is obvious: the rhythm multiplies the outcome; it has the right person ready to complete a task at the perfect moment.

And, as leaders we have to pay attention to rhythm because our minds and bodies naturally gravitate toward experiences with consistent patterns. In music, we want a succession of notes that draw us in. With teachers and coaches, we want instruction that paces the learning so that we’re not overwhelmed but in which we’re always challenged enough to stay engaged and apply what we absorb. In a complete workday, rhythm is the balance between efforts and breaks. From our heart’s beating to the circadian cycles of when we eat and sleep, we need rhythm in everything we do to make it an experience we value.

The commitment to rhythm as a leader is about timing, in two ways. First, it’s the way we organize our work together to elevate what each person and team can achieve on his or her own. Ten people doing every part of a car’s manufacture individually might take a year to build 10 cars. Add a leader. The leader commits to clarity and stability for each person, and then provides a flow of work free of obstacles: efficiencies of method, meetings focused on creativity and innovation, and attention to what keeps the team energized so the whole system hums. The leader makes it possible for the same 10 individuals to work together and produce hundreds if not thousands of cars.

The second aspect of timing to which leaders need to pay attention is when and how we interact with teammates. When we lead, too many of us fail because we force it. We demand interactions that make us comfortable rather than stepping back and truly assessing who our people are and when they need us to be most effective. We force the kind of production we demand from our teams, paying no attention to the demands of their lives in addition to what we’re doing together or the way they need to work to be their best. We even assume the persona we think we need to display as a leader, interacting with people when we think we should rather than intentionally reflecting on how we can attract others without trying too hard.

A leader who pays attention to the rhythm of how the team works together and how to work with the team, on the other hand, has the elixir to relieve the pressure and stress that is stifling modern organizations across businesses, governments, and communities. When a team has clarity and stability, rhythm is the final way of working together in which every individual on a team becomes completely focused on his part of the work. When a team has rhythm, the action happens effortlessly. The leader moves between people and meetings without ever interrupting if doing so won’t add value and knowing when to offer direction or encouragement just at the right moment. The team or organization begins to flow, moving around challenges like a river’s water bends around boulders.

This is not how most of us were taught to think about leaders. The rhythm with which most of us have learned to lead is more like the sound from an unrelenting ticking clock than an elegantly played piano concerto. We’ve been taught to drive ourselves and our people to their maximum output. We’ve become convinced that our rhythms need to follow an external calendar: the demands of the quarter, election cycle, or the school year. We’ve learned that there is a right way to lead; it is aggressive, directive, and merciless on the march towards progress. Few of us are attracted to leaders who pay attention only to what we’re trying to achieve, forgetting that the way we achieve it together matters just as much.

Leaders can identify and build a natural rhythm of working with others that creates an experience of working with us that feels authentic to anyone we meet. Our goals can have natural checkpoints where the moment of interaction fuels progress rather than interrupting an individual’s or team’s concentration, production, and creativity. We can literally generate an environment where people do their best because they want to. We don’t have to motivate people with manufactured competition and incentives. People want to work with leaders who pay attention to rhythm, because we inspire a consistent confidence that puts people at ease and lets them pour all their energy into what they’re doing.

The Perfect Work Day

Leadership experiment Number Four: imagine your perfect day. We know: impossible. But if you can’t imagine the rhythm you need for the perfect day, your frustration and unhappiness will show up as you imagine, or fail to imagine, what you can do together with your team; as you try to support but ultimately stifle your teammates.

The first roadblock to rhythm is that we continue to think about what we have to do first. We bury ourselves in what we’re supposed to complete as leaders, and often we become more manager: taskmaster rather than visionary of better things and better ways to work together. Although most of us get stuck in the management cycle for much longer than we want to, remember that the key difference between managing our people and leading them is the vision we create together, both for our lives and what we do as a team.

The second and biggest roadblock to achieving rhythm is time. Pretty obvious, right? To lead our people, we simply need to pay attention to the first two commitments of clarity and stability in a rhythm that allows teammates to be their most productive and connected to other team members. But we’re all doing so much. Daily, too much of what we’re doing doesn’t get our full attention. To compound the issue, after back-to-back 12- to 14-hour days, we burn out. Although we could quote studies, we don’t need to because we all feel it: our bodies—the bodies of every person on our team—were not made for the pace, sleep deprivation, and stress of the modern world.

That makes it our responsibility as leaders to create a better rhythm for ourselves and our team. Here’s a quick exercise that will help regain focus and overcome the biggest challenge in that transition. Write your schedule with 24 hours divided into one-hour increments; block off what you would do and how long you would spend on each experience.

We’re not looking for you to solve the problem of how to make your day better; we’re hoping you can start to build your consciousness of your ideal life as a leader so it will become your real life. If this sounds difficult at first, just wait. Give yourself some mental room for what you really think to emerge from the swamp of busy and scattered thoughts our minds have become. All of us need to reflect on why we wake up each day and take the lead. To spur your reflection, here are a few questions you probably haven’t thought about in a while.

• What do I need every morning to look forward to my day? Do you begin with a coffee and the paper, or a run? What about the kids? Do you want to have breakfast with them first, or is morning your time for solitude? What about your commute? We don’t want you to think about what you are required to do, rather focus for this brief experiment on your ideal. We want you to dig into what gives you the perfect timing between personal and professional, effort and rest, inspiration and action.

• What do I love to do each day? We each have the core functions of work and life, and as leaders, we can’t get away from them. Unfortunately, we let these activities drive our day instead of starting with what we do that makes us most valuable to the people around us. For instance, you love brainstorming with your team about the future, but you can’t, because all your meetings are taken up with solving crises or planning core functions such as budgets. This experiment is to see if you’re capable of naming your version of perfection. As leaders we can end up putting everyone else’s needs first, and that can be the right thing to do. Conversely, too much focus on other’s needs first can make us the kind of grumpy bear who people don’t think of as a leader anymore.

• When do I have my best energy? Some of us are morning people; others need a few hours or even the majority of the day to hit their stride. If you know when you’re at your best, this is when to plan the most important people interactions or your most creative work. This is also how we know how long we should be working. Some of us stay in the office grinding because we think that’s how we get more out of ourselves and we need to set a good example for our people. Some people work like the turtle, while others can produce more in a few hours than they could if they stayed all day. For this experiment, build your day around what you want, need, and when it is most pleasurable for you to have those experiences.

• What do I need at the end of each day to say it was worth living? We’ll talk about what you need to renew each day later in the chapter, and this is such an important question because many of our answers are habits, not what we truly want. Too often at the end of the day—at least these are our weaknesses as authors—we eat and drink too much. We work more. We fail to pay enough attention to our families and friends. We schedule more of the things we think we’re supposed to do rather than prioritizing what we really want to experience so our lives have a balance of work, play, and rest that truly keeps us energized.

If you can write down your perfect day, now you have your game plan for perfect timing. You’re a leader, so go start building it. That’s right: every day, you can make one little change to get your schedule closer to the rhythm that is ideal for you. We spend so much time as leaders getting in our own way because of the friction of schedules and bad energy. Of course all our days won’t be perfect, but what we do with our teams, even if it’s working well, can be a lot smoother than it is right now. And once you have an awareness of your perfect day, you can do the experiment with every member of your team and make better days the norm for everyone.

Do You Have Rhythm?

We’re not asking if you’re a good dancer. Primed by the experiment about your perfect day, we want you to reflect on your rhythm working with others so you can start to build patterns that let nothing get in the way of progress. Here are a couple of quick questions that will reveal if you and your team have it.

• What routines are working? With the time constraints and hurricanes of information bombarding us each day, it’s very easy to lose sight of why our work matters. Our routines create the groove we can return to because we know that when we take these actions they’re our best bet for getting things done. What ways of reviewing people get them inspired and focused? What measurements do you take that keep you aware of which actions really produce results? How are you renewing yourself and your team so they have the positive energy they need to succeed?

• What patterns of interaction create connections? Consistency is key to building relationships in which we have fewer ugly days and more time in which our efforts produce the results we all want. The reason our relationships and our patterns of interaction are so important to fulfilling the commitment to rhythm may be a bit shocking: people are what get in the way of progress. One angry, frustrated, or stuck person acts out and our entire team can be derailed. Sound familiar?

Every coup d’état in history can be traced to one person who wanted more power. Every teammate who lashed out probably misunderstood that exceeding their targets once doesn’t mean they are ready for the next step. Whether they were in the right or in the wrong, a quick review of the patterns—making sure every person felt that they’re on the same team—would have prevented the damage. In every culture, there are certain ways of meeting, reviewing, innovating, and creating that will best develop a pattern where every person can contribute meaningfully without blocking another’s best work.

Fundamentally, rhythm is a pattern. It is in paying attention to our rhythm, the rhythm of our environment, and our team’s rhythm that we can create patterns of life together, which infuse all of us with energy and make the best results possible. Rhythm disappears when we become fixated on the wrong parts of our work. When we think too much about the results we need, the process that has worked before, and what our people are supposed to be doing, we stop paying attention to what we can do to foster a rhythm that naturally relieves the inevitable conflicts and headaches of human beings working together. Let’s take a look at a legendary innovator and leader through the eyes of an equally talented colleague. These men shaped the world as it is today by creating patterns that allowed them to achieve what others thought was impossible.

Henry Ford on Thomas Edison

The modern master of creating a team whose rhythm produced continual genius was Thomas Edison. We know him as the inventor responsible for 1,093 patents; what we haven’t paid enough attention to is the ease with which he created an environment of like-minded inventors driven to give birth to new technology. The best account of what Edison did was from another genius of rhythm, Henry Ford.

It’s no longer common knowledge that Henry Ford began working for Thomas Edison in his thirties. Ford had become the chief engineer of the Detroit Edison Company when he attended a meeting of Edison’s managers from around the country on August 11, 1886. As they sat around an oval dinner table at the Manhattan Beach Hotel, Edison heard about Ford’s idea for the automobile and said:

Young man, that’s the thing; you have it. Keep at it. Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do either, for they have to have a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.

It was the first meeting in what would become a long friendship that lasted until Edison passed away in 1931.

From their regular camping trips together and their winter homes next to each other in Fort Myers, Florida, Ford knew Edison like no one else; the way only leaders who share the same kind of responsibility and success can appreciate each other’s ideas and feeling. In his book, Edison As I Know Him, first published in 1930, Ford describes the rhythms that made his incredible volume and quality of production possible.

It started with the way Edison worked. When he was caught with an idea, he might work through the night, only sleeping when his brain ceased to function. He ate what he wanted when he was hungry, and besides smoking cigars, his addiction was invention. Edison liked people. “He was wonderfully tolerant—except of bad work,” Ford said. When he became obsessed with an invention, he wanted to create a way to maximize what any of his inventions could do. And he expected the same from his Muckers, the fellow inventors he hired to multiply the volume of experiments he could never do alone.

Ford described the rhythmic process of the “Wizard from Menlo Park” in a detail perhaps none of us could grasp as deeply as the man who himself figured out how to perfect the assembly line for mass automobile production.

His procedure is always the same. First he determines his objective—exactly what he wants to accomplish. He may start to improve some crude device already in existence, as he did with the telephone, typewriter, dynamo and scores of other bits of apparatus; or again, there may be nothing in existence to improve. In any case he first gets before him all that is known on the subject, testing each bit of knowledge as he goes along.

Sometimes he makes the tests himself but usually he states what he wants on a sheet of yellow paper in his own handwriting and sends it on to an assistant. The assistants record in notebooks the results of each of their tests and these books are turned in to Mr. Edison each evening. The notes mean more to Mr. Edison than to anyone else, for he knows exactly what he is after and the assistant does not always know.

If the experiments do not turn out as he expects, he writes further notes and suggestions; if the experiments show that they are not worth continuing, then Mr. Edison takes another line. He is always in control.

Edison’s rhythm started with the first commitment to clarity. He had a clear objective, and he had explicit instructions for how he wanted experiments handled. None of his Muckers could be in doubt about the goal and their role in the process. That’s how Edison produced volume: he took his ideas and then handed them off to others in a fashion so clear that their failures and successes could move the creation further along.

Ford then describes Edison’s clear process with teammates that created stability.

Mr. Edison almost never gives verbal instructions because he finds it easier and quicker to write or to draw than to talk and he writes by hand instead of dictating because he can write with the utmost plainness and in faster time than he can dictate. If there is anything to be made or an experiment is to be conducted in a certain way, he draws a diagram in such clear, quick fashion that no further explanation is necessary. The speed with which Mr. Edison does all this is remarkable. He sketched the model of his first phonograph in less than five minutes.

Thus, although utterly without formality of any kind, there is actually a record of everything that goes on in the laboratory and Edison has been able, through this ability, to give rapid and explicit written instructions or drawings, to carry on a number of important and entirely unrelated investigations at the same time. I have never known him to be working on only one thing. Even when he was in the midst of his work on the incandescent lamp, he was carrying forward several other lines of investigation of the highest importance.

In the same way a development plan creates stability for our teammates, Edison had a clear plan for every invention. The written instructions became a permanent record of everything they were doing, so no effort was lost.

The environment of clarity and stability he created allowed a rhythm that had both the timing of how he had people working and the way he worked with people. Edison got the best from his Muckers because he created a distinct rhythm of how he would engage them. He would take suggestions, and each man knew when to bring them: when they were well thought out and applied to the project.

The absolute direction of all these investigations is with him. He is the leader and no one ever questions his leadership. I believe it is rarely possible for any assistant to get ahead of him on a suggestion—not because he is unwilling to receive suggestions but because in his comments on any experiment he invariably covers the point of the subject so thoroughly that the assistant discovers that his suggestion was only a tiny section of what Mr. Edison already had in mind.

He does not have to assert leadership. It is simply unquestioned by any man of real intelligence—and Edison does not for long have near him any person who does not possess far more than average intelligence. He will not tolerate stupidity or long-winded explanations.

Edison was clearly a hierarchical, controlling leader who wanted things done his way. And, in his style, he created a pattern of interactions where people knew exactly how to work to produce the most discoveries, and how to interact with him so they could gain the benefit of his experience and creativity.

The rhythm with which Edison and his Muckers worked became so precise that discoveries became almost inevitable. As Ford said in concluding his thoughts about Edison’s process,

There is no luck whatsoever in anything that Edison does . . . He regards an experiment simply as an experiment. If he does not get the results that he planned for, then the experiment has taught him what not to do and gradually, by a process of elimination, he finds what to do.

Edison is celebrated for his patents and the fact that he started General Electric. Many of his Muckers became brilliant inventors in their own right. Perhaps his biggest discovery as a leader: he set up the rhythm of his operations and his interactions so that every effort went into invention.

Edison created an environment that fulfilled all three commitments. The boundaries in which Muckers worked were strict, but entirely clear. The hours could be long—Muckers fell asleep on their books—but Edison was right next to them providing the resources they needed and building the trust that came from constantly mucking on experiments himself. As a result, they created a flow of effort that produced nearly 5,000,000 pages of notebooks and papers housed at Rutgers University. Both of his labs are now permanent memorials to mastering a leader’s commitment to rhythm. Ford actually moved Edison’s first lab in Menlo Park to Michigan, where it is preserved today. His larger West Orange, New Jersey lab, where he worked until his death, is a national park where all of us can go and witness how he drove a rhythm of innovation that reached the heights of what human beings can produce.

The Foundation of Rhythm Is Freedom

Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, writes about the social science discovery that as our world interconnects and global competition gives us myriad choices in most parts of our lives—from what to do for a career to where to eat for dinner—freedom without boundaries is dangerous. Too much freedom, too many choices: we freeze—even the lion and the rabbit freeze. And, at the same time, without freedom, our teammates will feel trapped. We have to give our people freedom or else they cannot work in a way that is natural to the timing of their bodies and minds.

The freedom we’re talking about, however, is not giving someone an assignment and then expecting it to be done on time. When Welch made “boundaryless behavior” a measurable value at GE, he didn’t mean for employees to do anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. Once leaders have committed to the clarity of what we’re doing, why, and by whom, and once we’ve created the stability of resources and built the trust of the team, we must make room for people to work in their own ways.

The best way to give people the freedom that begins our commitment to rhythm is actually to fulfill the first two commitments to clarity and stability. Edison had specific requirements of what he wanted from his Muckers and how he wanted them to document their experiments. He gave them all the resources they needed at his labs. Only then, once they had a clear and stable project, would he set them free to work in whatever way was best for their process of discovery.

Another way to offer freedom: companies such as Google and Lego allow employees 20 percent of their time to work on a project that relates to the company but that may be outside the teammate’s core responsibility. That doesn’t mean a person doesn’t have a clear job to do and a development plan to follow; it means every manager wants every teammate to lead within the organization based on what interests him or her most. We want our people to see a better way of doing things and to make it happen because they are not only working on becoming leaders, but because they are also filling voids in what we do that only their unique perspective can recognize and solve.

We have to give every teammate freedom, because when we control people we actually lose control. We not only make our teams more inefficient, because unhappy people spend hours a day distracted or complaining, but we also interrupt the flow of their creativity that is essential for deep innovation and relationships. When we find ways to offer people freedom within clear boundaries, that’s when they want to work on their projects and they want to give their best to us as leaders.

Happiness Equals Rhythm

The brain: round three. The commitment to rhythm is about removing the barriers to progress, and it is ultimately about creating teams that are happy to work together. Happiness is not psychobabble. In the quest for results, the way we interact on a regular basis either improves our state of mind or it makes us miserable. Sounds like an easy fix, right? Just start being happier and everything will fall in line. If it is that simple, why don’t most leaders pay attention to happiness?

Since the beginning of the civilized world, humans have equated happiness with pleasure: we’re happy when we feel good. But psychologists working off Maslow’s realization—that the people who achieve the most amazing things share similar positive attributes—have gone deeper into what happiness truly means. Researchers such as Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard continue to explore the positive traits in human beings, which make happiness a sustainable reality.

This is all about using our gray matter to get bigger results. Too often as leaders, we were taught that if we drive people hard and push them to a place of discomfort, we’ll achieve more and grow faster. That may be true—at first. But as a car runs out of gas, so will we. Intuitively, we know happy teams produce better results because they don’t get in one another’s way; they work together smoothly and as a result, more effectively. But the reason we haven’t paid attention to rhythms that create happiness for our teammates: we don’t know what happiness actually is.

Seligman’s theory is that pleasure is just the first stage in tapping our brain’s pleasure center. In addition to pleasure, we also need engagement and meaning. Engagement is the place of complete absorption in what we’re doing. Written about first in 1991 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, engagement is the place where the outside world disappears. It’s the experience of peak performance where our mind and body focus entirely on what we’re doing. It’s that zone of focus where nothing distracts us. But as pleasure is not enough to keep most people happy for long, the problem with a life of engagement is that none of us can stay there permanently. We all get tired.

When fatigue takes over our bodies, it is Seligman’s third stage of happiness, meaning, that makes life worth living. Meaning comes from having a higher purpose to the work we’re doing. It means discovering a core motivation that allows our bodies to tolerate discomfort, to move in and out of engagement, and to know that all levels of experience lead to something bigger. We need to know that our brains crave all three stages of happiness, and as a result, the rhythms we establish for our teams need to engage all three varieties of happiness.

In addition to the three stages of happiness, leaders have to take into account the fundamental learning of Gilbert’s research highlighted in his 2007 book, Stumbling on Happiness: people don’t know what makes them happy. We think we do. We think the greener grass or the leader’s chair is exactly what we need to wake up smiling. Too often, we may not be right. That’s why as leaders we have to pay attention to when and how our teammates get stuck. When they told us what they wanted, they may have been telling us what we wanted to hear. They may not know what they want, and they need our help to figure it out. Even once we achieve happiness, Gilbert’s discovery is crucial to leadership because we have to be ready to create new rhythms—over time what will energize a person’s brain with happy chemicals will change.

Leaders who ignore happiness like Scrooge, because we think happiness is just about feeling pleasure, will ultimately lose the engagement of their teams. While superficial pleasure—like having a pool table at the office or having days off to simply have fun together—can be part of creating a daily rhythm for our teams, it is not enough. The rhythm comes from paying attention to the engagement and meaning of our teammates’ needs, and then always being open to new and different ways they want to work on projects with us as their leader.

Regular Measurement

What do you need to measure to make sure that your team is focused? We can create clear boundaries and provide resources, but the only way we achieve rhythm with our teams is to measure our efforts together. We have to understand and be aware of the progress toward what it is that we’re working on. We have to make sure we’re putting in the right actions to get to our stated objective: if we want to produce a certain number of widgets, we have to know we’re getting there. If we set a specific objective and goal and only measure it once a year, to potentially alter the plan to be successful, we’re often too far down the path to hit our targets.

Most people freak out when they are measured. The reason: there is no regularity to the collecting of data. As leaders, when we measure performance annually, it turns what teammates do into a numbers game. When we pay attention to measurements consistently and use them to help people develop the skills they need to improve, however, it shows we are invested in their success. It provides the feedback they need to grow and develop. It gives them an opportunity to celebrate achievements and the move toward progress.

As humans, we desperately need that positive stimulation. It can’t just happen at the end of a project. We need to see a progression because if we’re just fixated on the end goal, it’s much harder for us to drive through bureaucracy and unavoidable mistakes and we’ll often give up because we think what we’re doing isn’t working or worse, that it doesn’t matter. When we measure with intention and regularity, it becomes an interaction with our teams we can look forward to because we either get to bask in the glow of accomplishment, or discover where we need to learn and become better.

The mistake many organizations make is they measure too much, and often the wrong things. As valuable as balanced score cards and detailed metrics can be, there are only a few key numbers we need to keep our eyes on to make sure the whole team is moving in the right direction and here’s a hint—it’s not all about sales and savings. Sure, sounds crazy as you’re trying to run a business, and profits are the bottom line.

What is often overlooked is that the key drivers to that bottom line are your people. Airline pilots have more instruments these days than they can ever truly focus on. Every pilot still goes back to the fundamental measurement of whether they are flying straight and level: a part of the airplane and the horizon. By checking that simple relationship, they can keep going in the right direction; as leaders, we need to choose the simple measurements for our team and each teammate, which keep us aware that what we’re doing is working and that our present rhythm is worth repeating. The key to rhythm is the timing of consistent repeatable patterns, and our people need to know that their patterns are worth repeating.

If you had to pick only two things to measure with your people every day or week, the equivalent of the pilot using the horizon and a part of the airplane to stay level, what would they be? You know you’ve picked the right metrics when your team is excited to get the numbers, and consistently motivated to improve poor numbers and make good numbers even better.

The Three Levels of Rhythm

In organizations too, rhythm is about timing, and that timing shows up in three distinct forms: function, inspiration, and a new category we’d like to introduce, cadence.

The first level of rhythm is function. It pays homage to the methodological greatness of the industrial innovations by the Venetian Arsenal, by leaders like Henry Ford, and companies such as Xerox and Motorola. As leaders, we have to pay attention to the process around us. It is not all that matters in creating a team, but as shown by the inefficiencies of the guild system that led to the development of the Arsenal and the demand for cars that produced the assembly line, we need to find the places where we can do things in a new rhythm that maximizes what our teams can do.

We all want efficiency because it produces better results, and because it feels better as a team. We don’t want people to worry about reinventing the wheel; we want them to use the inventions and ways of working that we know are effective to create the next innovations that make our organizations soar. When it comes to the individual performance, Xerox sales training is legendary for teaching people functional tasks so consistently that every person who learns the company’s ways of selling can call up the behaviors—the common understanding and language—and apply them to selling anything.

The model was developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts company and purchased by Xerox. Originally created to help salespeople get over the fear of being turned down, Xerox bought the program in 1965 to take advantage of the growing market for corporate learning. Participants never sold their product. If students sold computer software, they would learn the techniques in role-playing, where they would sell washing machines or bulldozers. The reason: when we learn skills, if we’re worried about our product—about what we have to do to satisfy the requirements of our job—we stop thinking about the needs of a customer.

The training taught ways to focus on the person to whom the salesperson wanted to offer a product. Everyone in the class could eventually see the separate parts of selling in the same way that a golf pro could break down every element of a swing. The conversations about selling then became learning that wasn’t about understanding method, but perfecting it. When every salesperson absorbed the way to sell with the most impact so deeply that his actions happened naturally, companies could focus every salesperson’s attention on customer needs and not just meeting a quota.

What Xerox did to make salespeople more productive, Motorola USA did to process improvement with a system called Six Sigma. Used by corporations such as GE and Pepsi, as well as more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies, it was invented by Motorola in the 1980s as a methodology to reduce defects in production to a level at or below 3.4 parts per million produced. That’s 99.9997 percent perfect. Think about that for a second. How efficient would you say your organization is? In the next one million interactions with your customer, you are allowed 3.4 miscues or incorrect words, so choose them wisely. That’s less than four spelling errors in the next one million e-mails you write. In the interest of full disclosure, using the above criteria, our original draft of this book was far below Six Sigma.

We are obviously not leading cars or robots, but ask anyone who has implemented Six Sigma into a corporate workforce environment and they will explain that success comes down to timing. Whether it’s timing of the task at hand (what you do) or the execution of your responsibilities (how you do it), the concept behind continuous and sustainable improvement provides the rhythm necessary to achieve great things. No matter how far off the end goal may seem, taking a similar approach to that of Trader Joe’s, where the staff focuses on the 1 percent they can improve on today, continuous improvement creates a rhythm for our people that makes seemingly impossible performance and results approachable. It gives them something specific and measurable to focus on, and breaks it down into patterns that can be easily repeated.

Functional rhythm, however, is not enough. Within any organization, efficiency won’t keep most people happy over the long term. The second level of rhythm is inspiration. As we aren’t cogs, no process can produce the innovations and improvements that truly make growth possible. As global competition increases, the companies that survive will be more than just better at making the same products, they will find ways to help every teammate pour their best ideas and energy into everything they do. We need to be pulled into ways of connecting to our work and one another that moves us deeper than just getting more done. But that doesn’t mean that the relationships can’t focus entirely on what we’re trying to do as organizations.

At Lego, even the hiring process inspires what its leaders consider the key to the business’s success. As a family-owned company, relationships and creativity are the keys to its culture. When employees are brought in for their interview, the experience can often be: you have 20 minutes to turn a pile of Legos into a structure that reflects how you will fulfill the role for which you’re interviewing. The company isn’t looking for the perfect creation, rather the kind of person who can be creative no matter what he or she is doing. Lego knows that the foundation of its success has been creativity and the belief that all employees are part of the family. For Lego to continue its success, each employee must be ready to feed off the inspirational rhythm of Lego’s culture.

We need inspirational rhythm because all our work, over time, becomes flat. We get stuck in the same tasks and lose sight of progress, even if the tasks are experiences we love to have. The innovation mentor program at Whirlpool is an example of how organizations can create inspirational rhythm without disrupting their focus on core products. Most of us think of washers and dryers as white boxes that simplify our lives; you may not realize how the industry changed when colors, matching units, and design as sophisticated as a Ferrari’s became the norm for appliances. The Benton Harbor, Michigan company is responsible for changing that.

Hundreds of I-mentors, individuals chosen for their skills such as comfort with change and project management, work throughout the organization’s cross-functional teams. While they may be designers or chemical engineers, they also make sure the innovation pipeline—the ideas that will improve Whirlpool’s products across 16 brands such as Maytag and Sears’ Kenmore—continues to flow. All employees have to go through Innovation 101 as part of their training, in which they learn what Whirlpool means by innovation and how the company develops it. Then, the ideas are available to every employee to see and contribute to, or the employee can add her own to the I-pipe. The innovation mentors drive the process across the company, and it’s the attention to innovation that creates the inspiration. When it’s always part of your life, it becomes part of every teammate’s normal rhythm.

Even when leaders focus on functional and inspirational rhythm, that still doesn’t mean every teammate feels connected to what he’s doing. The ultimate level of rhythm on any team is cadence. Cadence is the consistent sequence or timing that produces the highest level of performance a team is capable of. If a cyclist on an uphill climb doesn’t keep a consistent cadence, it takes multiple times longer to reach the pinnacle. Inconsistent cadence means we expend energy and effort in bursts. The extra work needed to produce short bursts wears us out, while if we can approach what we do with a consistent rhythm, we can physically and mentally adapt to do more of whatever we hope to achieve.

In leadership, however, cadence is not actually something you do; rather, it’s a result of our attitude. The only way to achieve cadence with your team is to believe that every action they take builds upon one another’s work. Cadence happens, like bikers flowing for 100 miles at 35 miles an hour by taking turns in the lead, when pure collaborative acceptance of one another happens in a team. Teams can literally fly as they are, no longer trapped by their roles or perceived limitations within the process; when there is nothing in the way of what we do together; when our work has pleasure, engagement, and meaning; and when we have the right freedom and measurements.

Here’s the problem: we can’t give you an organizational example of cadence because no company will ever reach it. That doesn’t mean that your team cannot achieve it; it means that entire organizations are typically made up of a mix in which some teams achieve it on occasion and others never do. Edison’s Muckers didn’t all stay with him because his drive for innovation burned some of them out. Xerox nailed the process of selling in the 1970s, but almost went bankrupt in 2000.

As we said earlier, we are not leading machines and we are all human beings. While the emotion and intellect we contribute is a benefit, that also means our human imperfections will always get in the way. In the fatigue and resulting emotion of working in a constantly changing world, we will lose our vision about the most productive ways to work together and as leaders, when and how to interact with teammates. Cadence is the hardest thing to achieve and one of the easiest to lose focus on when we find ourselves in challenging times.

And cadence is still the goal we aspire to. As an individual biker will be crushed in any tour by a team working together, a team that builds on one another’s work will always outperform a single leader telling others what to do. When we pay attention to generating a rhythm where everything we do builds on every other person’s work, we find places every day to remove the distractions and disruptions that block our flow. The more cadence we find, the bigger results we can produce—and the happier we are as a team.

Weekly Reviews

One way to build cadence is by having weekly reviews. The custom in most organizations is to have yearly reviews. Tied to our budget processes, we get in a pattern of holding teammates accountable once each circle of the sun, and it is the silliest process for developing rhythm that was ever conceived in the history of organizational behavior. When reviews are conducted only annually, not only do we miss the opportunity to truly build talent, we have just turned our performance management cycle into a numbers game. Painting by numbers is fun for a 3-year-old with a limited attention span, but not so much for a 33-year-old with career aspirations.

If you take a quick informal poll among colleagues and friends on what the term annual review means to them, one of the most common words associated with it would be bonus. Even worse, if an employee doesn’t receive the bonus she thinks she deserves (and we all aim high), she may shut down and with her disengagement, any chance of development in the near future is stifled. Why? Because without a consistent review of her progress, she feels sucker punched when she was told that she wasn’t performing at the same level she perceived herself reaching.

When we think about weekly reviews, it is the opportunity to shift from cold, calculated numbers back to the most important asset on our balance sheet, our teams. Once they have a development plan and we commit to the stability of constant updates, weekly reviews provide a steady stream of data for us to plan our days and adapt to whatever comes our way. Don’t be afraid that weekly reviews will interrupt rhythm—it’s actually the opposite. We need to know where we stand at all times and that we are working on the right things to make progress on our goals.

Want a way to check in that won’t disrupt the work you do together? Take the actions of the development plan and have a simple conversation building on two simple questions: What went well? What needs work? Start with what went well, because we need a positive frame to keep people’s alarms from sounding and to keep them focused on what’s possible. Leaders get in the rhythm of being clear and creating stability around the good news to set the tone for solving problems. When we know we’ve done great things, we’re ready to work on our growing edges. Then talk about the challenges. This is not a punitive conversation; rather, you’re trying to discover the places where different actions will produce better results. We need to build trust in the development process, and that happens only when people return regularly to the good they’re doing.

Have the person take down the notes of the conversation, the new tasks and approaches, and keep an e-mail record. Just providing a regular measurement in a few key areas gives us quantitative data to track our progress and stay focused; however, the record of weekly reviews with the detailed notes of our actions gives us a qualitative understanding of where we’re succeeding, what’s broken, and how together as a team we’ll get into a rhythm that moves us closer to our goals.

Renewing Rituals

Once we have freedom, consistent measurement, and regular reviews, a final place we hope you’ll commit to rhythm is how you renew. We can’t maintain cadence without enough energy; the ways we recharge each hour, day, week, and year will decide whether we become the kind of leader who others want to work with, or the kind of grumpy bear who snaps, yells, and fails our teammates.

The case study is short and obvious: You traveled all week, you arrive home Thursday night just before midnight, and you’re already in the office again Friday morning at seven. You saw your children asleep and left before they woke up. You send your team home early for the weekend because they did so well while you were gone, but one of your most faithful colleagues stays late with you to finish a deal. Wanting your input, he keeps walking into your office with questions when you really need the silence for your tired mind to focus. On the fourth interruption, you snap: you simply say, “What?” He walks away and is gone when you come out of your office.

If we do not find the ways throughout the day and throughout our lives to renew the energy we need as leaders to create an environment where others want to work with us, we will make mistakes that over time erode our people’s trust. They won’t hear what we need from them, and when we say we care about their development, they won’t believe us. They will spend more time figuring out how to stay out of our way than actually working on what we’re trying to achieve together. But we can find those places where what we enjoy gives us energy and makes us more appealing to be around.

Jack Kennedy is again an example of both the power of renewing rituals and the renewal trap that too many leaders fall into. Kennedy’s positive habit in stressful times, particularly in his presidency, in which he could never pull the rip cord and hand off his responsibility, was sailing. His love affair with the waves and wind began as a child. His family spent summers on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and after learning to sail at age 15, his parents gave him a 26-foot sailboat named Victura. He was a champion sailor in his youth and in college, so when he needed a break as president he headed out on the Potomac or Chesapeake Bay on the Manitou, the 62-foot boat he had equipped with communication gear capable of connecting with Moscow. On vacations he went back to Cape Cod and sailed with his wife and children in Victura.

Kennedy used sailing and the thought of sailing to clear his mind. In the middle of the Cuban Missile crisis, an epic moment of stress that would cripple even the strongest leader, on a page of White House stationery, which also include the words money, Castro, and Blockade Cuba, is the doodle of a sailboat. Just the image of a sailboat relieved his mind in the chaos of one of the world’s most difficult jobs. The night before Kennedy was assassinated, we know he was thinking of sailing too. The staff at the Rice Hotel, in Houston, cleaned the president’s suite when the news came about the shooting. An alert staff member grabbed a piece of paper next to Kennedy’s bed—it was a picture of a small sailboat with a striking similarity to Victura.

We need the renewing rituals so that our minds can stay focused in the midst of stress, so we can respond to our teammates in a way that keeps us teammates. Other presidents such as Eisenhower golfed; Bush the younger likes to mountain bike, run, and clear brush on his ranch; and Obama shoots hoops. Business giant Richard Branson swims in the morning, reflects in his hammock when he’s at home before business calls, and finishes his day kiteboarding. Nelson Mandela, after years in prison, liked to walk before sunrise and to listen to classical music while watching the sunset. The danger if we don’t renew ourselves, besides exhibiting bad leadership, is that we take risks in our personal life—the kind Kennedy became infamous for, that offer us the kind of short-term relief that ultimately cause more stress.

The key is consistency. You know your own rhythm. As a leader, you are capable of performing for weeks, even months and years under incredible pressure, and yet ideally, you know when you get your best work done. You know when you are happy to see people, and when you need to be alone. You know what amounts of food, drink, exercise, and sleep fuel your best efforts, and the kind of habits that leave you anxious, tense, and ultimately ineffective.

To maintain rhythm in the work of our team, the first step is to find the ways of being that renew us. The next step is to support each teammate in finding his or her own rituals. It may seem as if your colleague who stays late every night, is willing to miss family events, and responds to every e-mail at all hours is the kind of teammate you want. True, if she is also physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. The simple question to ask her: what do you do to recharge each hour, day, and week?

Last, we have to pay attention to the habits of our team and our organization. Google has beach volleyball on campus. Some companies will take whole divisions golfing. Corporations will fly teams to a resort for a learning event or conference. We’re not interested in judging what patterns renew a team; we’re simply asking each of us as leaders to pay attention to the patterns that renew. Without intentional recharging, people will never stay long enough on our team so we can reach the ultimate goal of the three commitments: to help others become leaders too.

Simple Assessments: What’s in Your Way?

The simple assessment for fulfilling the commitment to rhythm is to ask, “What’s in your way?” The gravity that stops most of us from flying is either a perceived or real tether, which as leaders we can often do something about. That doesn’t mean when someone comes into our office and says, “I need more budget,” we instantly provide more money. Our role as leaders is not to solve everyone’s problems. Our opportunity as leaders is to help the people see what’s getting in their way; if it’s imagined, after listening, ask them to move past it; if it’s real, help them create their plan to get back into a routine and pattern of interaction with teammates that produces results.

There is a lovely cliché about forests and trees. The reason we can’t see the forest as people is because we get stuck. Our shortcuts are wrong, our alarms go off, or we’re simply unhappy in what we’re doing. The roadblocks are everywhere, but our job as leaders is to provide perspective about where they’ve lost rhythm. When Jack is sitting in front of you—confused, frustrated, and miserable—we help him get up to 10,000 feet so he can see what’s really going on. It’s with a wider vision he doesn’t have on his own that we can help him figure out ways up, around, or under his stuck places.

Sustainable results come from rhythm. When we repeatedly help people emerge from their stuck places, over time they learn to measure, review, and renew in a pattern that allows them to walk into your office and have a different conversation. Jack will always get stuck, just like each of us has the places in our work where we struggle. When Jack has rhythm, however, he’ll start conversations at 10,000 feet. Instead of having to spend as much time venting about what feels wrong, you’ll produce better results as a team because you spend your time using each other’s insights to build better cadence. When your relationships can always flow around what gets in the way—the highest heights of following the three commitments—you and Jack are ready to become a team of leaders.