Do Big Things

The Simple Steps Teams Can Take to Mobilize Hearts and Minds, and Make an Epic Impact

Craig Ross, Angela V. Paccione, Victoria L. Roberts

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119361176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

An inspiring, practical and progress-oriented blueprint for energetic achievement.

Amid constant swirl, uncertainty, and complexity is your team capable of doing big things? Too often people are pulled together, labeled a "team, " given a directive, and expected to deliver results quickly. Soon, however, due to lack of focus, increasing pressures and competing priorities the team suffers from DSD: distracted, hopelessly stressed and disconnected from one another. Predictably, the team flatlines and the energy needed to succeed is lost.

Based upon research of what successful teams do to overcome severe odds, Do Big Things presents an intuitive, seven-step process that equips teams with how to quickly and consistently operate in a manner necessary for success.

Team members develop the self-awareness and ability to:

• Bring their best to every situation
• Bring out the best in others in every interaction
• Partner across the business to deliver common objectives

Filled with practical tools and engaging stories of teams today, Do Big Things equips leaders with "the how" to quickly identify and activate the behaviors needed to achieve more than you or your team ever thought possible. Idea and information exchanges interlock the hand, head and heart of each team member to get everyone moving toward a common goal. Increasingly, individually and collectively, the team becomes emotionally stronger and more productive as they do their work.

Do Big Things provides your team with the common language necessary to be authentic, empathetic and transparent, so that potential barriers to success come to light – faster. This empowers the team to be more accountable with an enterprise mindset, because they can have the profound discussions needed to adapt quicker to unforeseen challenges and demonstrate an innovative reflex.

By applying the concepts in this book, the team's daily interactions are transformed, focus is sustained, and energetic progress toward your goals is triggered. Every member of your team wants to succeed. Do Big Things provides a straightforward method to bring greater meaning to the work everyone does so the team delivers extraordinary performance together.

You know what your team can achieve—now use the proven method to enable them to do it.

1
Teams That Do Big Things

Those who know history increase their ability to make it. Here's a brief look at a team that made an epic impact. These seemingly unexceptional people demonstrated that together most any team can do big things. And they left a map for you to do the same.

At 1:00 P.M. on May 24, 1869, a team of 10 explorers pushed their boats into the water and floated away from Green River Station, Wyoming. They were determined to do something that had never been done: travel and chart the Green and Colorado Rivers of the western United States. At this point in history, the details of the nearly 100-year-old country's map were largely complete—except for one conspicuously large space. In an area the size of France, cartographers had simply written “unexplored.” The region was unknown. And for good reason.

Downriver, danger lurked. To begin with, the desert terrain was nearly all rock and sand. Native Americans roamed the untamed and unknown territory. And the river—it was already legendary. Tales were told of waterfalls that made Niagara look small. Others claimed the river disappeared completely like an enormous snake vanishing down a hole.¹

The last portion of the journey would take the explorers through what is now known as the Grand Canyon, a gouge in the earth 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and a mile deep. Today, tens of thousands of people apply for the chance to raft the river for sport; occasionally, some lose their lives as they do so. But to the team pushing their boats into the water that day some 150 years ago, the wild Grand Canyon wasn't there for fun. It was a job, something they were hired to do. It was something they had to do.

The leader of the band was a short, one-armed Civil War veteran named Major John Wesley Powell. As a would-be scientist, he had little experience in the Wild West. Still, he beamed with optimism. He'd assembled nine other men, all with varying degrees of experience as explorers and hunters, to complete the party. Some joined the team just days before their launch, motivated by the need for adventure and a paycheck. Altogether, these men weren't the best of their time, but they were all Powell could afford.

Prepared with supplies and food to last 10 months, the team reflected their captain's confidence. What they didn't know—couldn't know—is that they had prepared for the wrong trip. Their approach and planning were suited for entirely different circumstances. How they thought about their environment and each other was based upon the only resource they had: past experiences.

But there was nothing like the land they found themselves in. No river could compare to the one they were floating down. To achieve their objective, they'd have to do what they'd never done before.

The purpose of the expedition was to map unknown territory. For Major Powell, there was an additional objective: fame. The big thing he wanted to accomplish was earning a reputation as a legitimate scientist. While celebrity and fortune appealed to the members of Powell's crew, their primary objective was altogether different, yet equally clear: survival. While they'd never been on this particular river before, they knew enough from legend that they would be tested and pushed like they'd never been before. Success was not certain.

We'll return to Powell's journey into the great unknown shortly. First, though, consider the team you're on or the team you lead. What's your Grand Canyon? What's the significant objective the team must accomplish to positively and meaningfully impact the business? What's the transformation or big change or launch or innovation the organization is demanding you deliver?

And now, the question this book will equip you to answer in the affirmative: Is your team equipped to deliver big things?

A word of caution: Many who have gone before you into uncharted territory have mistakenly thought that the key to their team's success (survival!) was a matter of equipping themselves with a new structure, software, process, (quick, make another Gantt chart), or rearranging where people sit or dine. Most of those teams have not been heard from again. Their work was at best marginal, and therefore, forgotten.

That's because it is not merely how your team is structured or the equipment and resources in your hands that you'll need for success today. It's something more—much more.

Why Many Teams Can't Do Big Things Today

Well-intentioned organizations everywhere are sending their teams into the great unknown future riding inflatable floaties—the same type you give to children in the backyard pool. Companies spend an inordinate amount of time determining what they must accomplish, then slap acronyms on those goals, like S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely) and WIGs (wildly important goals).² Knowing your team must conquer its Grand Canyon, without being equipped with how to do so, however, is reckless (if not madness). Teams are increasingly desperate for knowing how as humans they'll achieve the what. We're functioning in what the U.S. military coined a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous)³ world. The disconnect is obvious: Employers are pulling employees together, calling them a team, giving them a directive, and expecting them to deliver results quickly.

But such teams can't. This isn't an inflatable backyard pool your team must get across. Your objective today is its own Grand Canyon. The way teams came together before won't work in today's intense, fast-changing world. When organizations fail to grasp the wisdom that the method for teaming successfully has changed, their approach can look like the antiquated change model depicted below:

• Step 1: Announce the new initiative the company needs to meet lightning-quick changes in the market.
• Step 2: Form teams and assign people to roles.
• Step 3: Tell people what to do and give them half the resources needed to do it.
• Step 4: Remind everyone of the company values (optional).
• Step 5: Apply external motivations in the form of rewards or penalties.
• Step 6: Try to overcome the resistance or confusion created in Steps 1 through 5.
• Step 7: Identify who is to blame for missed deliverables, milestones, and budgets.
• Step 8: Disband the teams or change personnel and repeat Steps 1 through 7.

This common approach never gives teams a chance to do something significant. In moments of fatigue, as people are shuffled from project to project while enduring new demands, it's easy to think the bosses have gone mad, while the bosses get mad. They can see what needs to get done, yet can't find a way to get the team to operationalize the new vision.

Is it any wonder why so many people avoid eye contact and hurry back to the isolation of their workspace feeling despondent?

Is Your Team's Whole Heart in It?

Who are we kidding? Nearly all of us lose a bit of ourselves each time we're forced through the eight dysfunctional steps of the antiquated change model. It's an unsustainable formula: We diminish ourselves while the magnitude of our work increases in volume, complexity, and speed. We used to finish the work we started; we used to celebrate jobs well done; we used to have meaningful relationships with those with whom we worked. But now? What used to make us feel alive is too often absent for too many. We are sapped of a certain sort of energy necessary to do big things.

inbIt's clear that there's a new requirement to succeed as a team today. The solution is refined and raw, sophisticated and practical, genius and basic, elegant and simple: It's heart. The ability for teammates to be at their human best and become bigger than anything they face. This is what many teams are starved for.

Is your team's whole heart in it? It's not enough for one or two individuals to have heart on a team of 10 people, as an example. In fact, that's tormenting as emotions usually erupt or apathy sets in. Teams rise above this and significantly increase their odds of achieving big things when their whole heart is in it. Defined, this is the point at which the members of the team fully commit to bringing their full self to the team and its efforts to ensure successful outcomes—unconditionally. Now, with the personal integrity of each team member in action, the purpose of the team transcends personal position, ambition, and recognition.

Whether your team has been together for years, you're a ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Do Big Things
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Read Me First
• Chapter 1: Teams That Do Big Things
• Chapter 2: Teams That Flatline
• Chapter 3: Commit to the Human Imperative
• Chapter 4: Embody Success (and Leverage Failure)
• Chapter 5: Choose to Contribute, Activate, and Connect Across the Business
• Chapter 6: Exercise Your Barrier-Breaking Authority
• Chapter 7: Focus on What Matters
• Chapter 8: Energize Around a Shared Reality
• Chapter 9: Mobilize Hearts and Minds Forward
• Chapter 10: Is Your Team Ready to Do Big Things?
• What Big Things Will Your Team Do?
• Key Terms And List of Tools
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement