Jon Bohm

How do you view change? Is it positive or negative?

Unfortunately many businesses view change as negative. Which means as a leader you have to find ways to address change in a positive way and keep your team moving forward. Change can be a great competitive advantage. But to exploit change to our advantage, it is important to understand why change is often resisted. So here are 4 major reason change is resisted.

1. The first is FEAR. Fear is internal; it’s in our head. There’s a saying that I am fond of, “Fear is the great crippler of human potential.” There’s also an acronym that uses the letters F, E, A, and R that defines what fear is. The acronym stands for “False Evidence Appearing Real.”

2. The second reason people resist change is because of EGO. The need to be right is a powerful human need. It’s a common problem with leaders, managers, and business owners.

3. The third reason why people resist change is to avoid CONFLICT. Because when you try to leave all the people back in the “Land of Status Quo,” you’ll create and get some conflict. It’s not fun, so many people just avoid it all together.

4. The fourth reason that people resist change is LACK OF PURPOSE. Without a sense of purpose, people become stagnant and complacent. People get burnt out.

As a LEADER of yourself and others:
1. You have to overcome your own fear and help others overcome theirs by helping them change their mental attitudes that hold them back.

2. You also have to make sure that your EGO doesn’t get in the way. By being open to new and different ways to view things, as well as being open to the feedback and insights of others, you create an atmosphere where change is not an “I’m right and your wrong” mentality.

3. Of course, conflict is best handled through proper communication. It sounds simple on the surface, but we all know that it’s not.

4. Finally, you have to develop a sense of purpose, for yourself, and your team. What’s your vision for the change? Is it something that everyone understands and has a stake in?

Today… you have to be open to change to lead, and your organization needs to constantly change and evolve to survive. Think about all the changes that we must deal with. Technology continually changes. Customers continually change. Markets continually change. Competitors continually change. Why should our organizations be any different. CHANGE OR DIE: it’s been said so often that it sounds like a cliché, but it’s true.

In today’s world, we face more change in a year then our grandparents faced in a lifetime. It can be overwhelming; it can be scary; it can be frustrating, or it can be EXHILIRATING. Regardless of how you view change, the fact remains that it is very real and it will not go away.

With such rapid changes going on around us, we must find some way to comfortably accept change and actually benefit from it.

In his book, The Renewal Factor, Robert Waterman says, our “willingness to understand and exploit change is a powerful competitive weapon.”

When you can view change as good, then you will already have a competitive edge on the market, and when you can roll change out in your organization by addressing the above major reasons of resisting change then you will reduce turnover of both your teams and your customers.

May we view change as a great strategic partner.

Leadership

As a kid I had GI Joe’s, teddy bears, and transformers. But nothing was as awesome as the super hero action figures that moved when you pushed a button. All the other toys were good to look at, but they didn’t really do anything.

Relating that to business and life seems strange but I have to tell you that action is the biggest difference between success and failure on just about any given day. How easy it can be to allow obstacles like email, phone interruptions, a lazy morning, the desk top shuffling of papers, or hour long desk cleaning ritual, that keep us from actually doing anything that generates revenue or improves life. We can have some emails and clean desks to look at, but we didn’t really do anything.

Success comes when we can address the obstacles that keep us unproductive- find a solution for those obstacles - and then take responsibility for what actually needs to get done. So instead of throwing our hands in the air and saying I can’t get it all done “I had too many emails;” we find a solution for that obstacle and take responsibility for our own lives and results.

Columnist Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle sometime back: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

- Jon Bohm

Goals, Leadership, Motivation

Take a moment and think of someone you really admire as a leader. What character or personality traits do they have? Go ahead, take a moment to build a mental list.

What did you come up with?
Could those qualities be developed or do you have to be born with them?

If these traits are so easy for us to identify, and they can be developed, why isn’t everyone a great leader?

Can you have great leadership traits and still not be a leader? I will try to answer that question with the following incredible story:

In 1986, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Peter, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant. Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter’s legs and slammed his sorry butt against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

Peter had a lot of great leadership traits; courage, goodwill, curiosity, compassion, adventure, etc. But, Peter lacked the most important defining ability of a leader, the ability to get great RESULTS.

No matter what character traits you have, if you don’t get results you are not a leader. Building character in your team is good, and important, but it doesn’t guarantee results. You can make a leader out of anybody if you are able to help them plan, set goals, and achieve results.

Likewise success doesn’t just happen. It happens when we plan, set goals, and make it happen.
-Jon Bohm

Leadership

Today I was engaged in some conversations about helping a non for profit organization make more money. I heard some creative ideas about ways to help bring more money in the doors. But as creative as some of those ideas are, they can stretch the values of what an organization is actually in existence for in the first place. I was reminded how our values in life, business, and finance are always with us. They are always available to stand strong or be pushed to the side for something else at a moments notice.

I am in business to help make this world and everyone I work with better, and better is always a word that puts values over money. May we be encouraged to place values over money in every decision, so that at the end of the day we can look the person in the glass, square in the eye, and experience the satisfaction that comes from seeing that reflection smile with contentment.- Jon Bohm

THE GUY IN THE GLASS

When you get what you want in your struggle for self,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn’t your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Whose judgement upon you must pass.
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He’s the fellow to please, never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear to the end,
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And you may think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.

- By Dale Wimbro

Inspiration/Values