WorkPuzzle

Execution Failure and Rescue: Lessons from HealthCare.gov

The key ingredients to HiringCenter success are no different than those responsible for rescuing the HealthCare.gov website; ingredients the recent administration had sorely lacked and had to discover the hard way.

Time magazine sets up the scene:

“Last Oct. 17—more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House press secretary Jay Carney was going through what one senior Obama aide calls 'probably the most painful press briefing we’ve ever seen.' Pressed repeatedly on when the site would be fixed, the best he could say was that 'they are making improvements every day.'

“They” were, in fact, not making improvements, except by chance, much as you or I might reboot or otherwise play with our computer; a shot in the dark fix. Yet barely six weeks later, HealthCare.gov was working well and on its way to performing even better.

This is the story of a team of unknown—except in elite technology circles—coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspects (Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn’t work) this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.”

The remainder of this article describes the drama associated with this technology crisis and boiled down the ultimate rescue to principles essential to execution success; principles that coincidentally guide every one of our clients in their HiringCenter results.

Principle I:  Metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort   

"In the meetings prior to the launch, President Obama always would end each session by saying, 'I want to remind the team that this only works if the technology works.' The problem, of course, was that no one in the meetings had any idea whether the technology worked, nor did the President and his chief of staff have the inclination to dig in and find out. The President may have had the right instinct when he repeatedly reminded his team about the technology. But in the end he was as aloof from the people and facts he needed to avoid this catastrophe as he was from the people who ended up fixing it.”

The Blaze website summarizes the Time article this way:

 “When it became clear that the website had major flaws and needed working, the Obama administration rushed to assemble a team to fix it. This involved bringing in some of the brightest tech minds from the private sector.

However, as the team slowly came together, they found that the website’s problems were bigger than they initially imagined.

Mike Abbott , for example, is known in the tech industry for being the man who developed Twitter’s technology into what it is today. He was shocked by what he found when he was brought on to rescue healthcare.gov.

'Abbott could not find … leadership. He says that to this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the Healthare.gov launch,' Time reported. 'Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients.'"

According to additional comments from "Time": “Jeff Zients isn't a techie himself. He's a business executive, one of those people for whom control--achieved by lists, schedules, deadlines and incessant focus on his targeted data points--seems to be everything.

This story thus far resonates with everything we at Tidemark have come to understand about HiringCenter results: Our best performing clients ensure that those responsible for the oversite of each piece of the HiringCenter process is someone with a proven history of measurement and execution. Everyone involved knows who is in charge, and who oversees each metric in the process. Do you?

In the next edition I will share more of this interesting story and the final two principles that drive success. 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Sales Meeting Prep: 9 Lessons from Shark Tank

Since the focus audience of WorkPuzzle is real estate industry leaders, owners, and managers, readers often tell me that they’ve used our blog content as discussion topics for their sales meetings.  Many of the topics we cover can be adapted to help agents perform at a higher level. 

If you haven’t thought of doing this yet, try searching a topic on WorkPuzzle.com (right side of the
website, next to the search button).  There are more than 600 articles we’ve written over the last few years.

To get some ideas flowing, I’ve found an article that could be very helpful in teaching your agents to think like entrepreneurs.  It was originally written by Brett and Kate McKay and published on their popular blog.

The article highlights some lessons the authors gleaned from the popular television series Shark Tank.   If you’re not familiar with Shark Tank, it is a show where aspiring entrepreneurs get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a panel of “sharks” — five self-made millionaires and billionaires and ask for funding in exchange for equity in their businesses.

Here are some excerpts from the top three lessons that I believe apply to real estate agents:

Learn how to pitch. If there’s one lesson you take from Shark Tank and this post, let it be this: master the art of the pitch.

Even if you don’t think you’ll ever find yourself standing in front of a bunch of venture capitalists, every entrepreneur needs to know how to effectively sell himself and his idea to his potential partners, employees, and clients/customers.

You’d think on a show like Shark Tank — in which people know they’ll be asking for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on national television – the entrepreneurs would prepare for their pitch like crazy.

But you’d be wrong.

I’d venture that 50% of the pitches on Shark Tank are absolutely horrible, 40% are so-so, and 10% are stellar. Some of the folks on Shark Tank just seem like they’re winging it, which makes for some awkward, yet entertaining moments.

If only 10% of Shark Tank participants are able to make good pitches, do you think some of your agents may be doing sub-par pitches to their clients?   I think you could bet on that. 

I’ve heard from several sources that the best pitch ever done on Shark Tank was by an 18-year-old girl who owns a skincare company called Simple Sugars.  It might be worth buying this episode and using it as a case study. (Season 4, Episode 19)

Know your business.   Mark Cuban once said, “Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world.”

You need to know your numbers — sales, cash flow, debt, margin, and so on. The sharks often hesitate to make a deal with entrepreneurs who don’t know important data points like their customer acquisition cost.

But knowing your business extends far beyond having a handle on your numbers; it requires a deep understanding and grasp of the industry you’re competing in. Lots of entrepreneurs come on the show pitching a product or service they think is truly unique, only to be informed by one of the sharks that a very similar product or service already exists. If they had done just a bit of due diligence, they could have avoided that embarrassing “surprise.”

A perfect example of entrepreneurs who came on "Shark Tank" without really understanding their industry (or even business) was a pair of doctors pitching a social network for their fellow MDs called Rolodoc. The docs had no clue how social media worked, or even what it was, despite the fact that their business idea would supposedly revolve round it. Consequently, they stumbled over even very basic questions about how their idea would be executed and how it would actually make money. Mark Cuban called it the worst pitch in "Shark Tank" history.

Do your agents really know their businesses?    This is a great way to breach this topic without coming across as overly critical.  You can buy this episode also (Season 5, Episode 1).

Concentrate on your core competency. Sometimes an already successful business will enter the tank seeking more capital to expand and grow.  Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when one of these companies wants to use that money to expand into a somewhat related product line or service that detracts from their original core competency.

Most of the sharks are leery of these businesses and will often tell the entrepreneur that they’ll only invest if they drop their plans for the expanded product line. Why would they want their money funneled into an untested product or service instead of being used to boost a proven winner?

It’s good to experiment and try different things in business, but never lose sight of your core competency. Getting sidetracked has been the downfall of many a business. This is especially true with the volume and ease with which you can get feedback on social media these days; you might hear from a bunch of folks who say, “I wish you guys would make this too!” leading you to believe there’s a popular demand for a new expansion in your business. Then it turns out that those commenters actually represented a very small but disproportionately vocal minority.

Know what you’re good at and stick close to it.

These are good lessons for any businessperson. They are especially helpful for real estate professionals because the best agents are entrepreneurs at heart.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Shrimp Fishing and Recruiting - Really?

If you are a Tidemark client and user of HiringCenter, you've experienced the occasional interview that can't end fast enough. The candidate who is scheduled for an hour of your valuable time and then turns out to be a dud. 

During a recent checkup meeting with some of our newer clients at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Georgia, a manager shared a disturbing (but funny) story about one of her first candidate interviews.

The candidate showed up "high on something," sweating profusely, bragging that she was "in the sexual prime" of her life, and asked if she could have "some of your candies," only to sweep the entire platter into her large purse. At this point in the interview the dazed manager began looking around her office attempting to locate the hidden cameras, certain that Alan Funt would spring out at anytime.  

After hearing this brief narrative, I think many of us considered such an interview to be a waste of time and had some real doubts about the success of recruiting in general.

However, CEO Dan Foresman stood up and said, "Recruiting is like shrimp fishing." Over the next several minutes he had us all captivated by his incredible expertise when it comes to shrimp fishing, and also its relationship to this type of "early in the pipeline" recruiting. 

My recollection of Dan's tale was as follows. Dan was once a captain of a shrimp boat. In the winter shrimp fishing is basically throwing down the nets and hauling them in predominantly with shrimp. This is because shrimp don't mind cold water, whereas catfish and crab don't like it. Bringing up only shrimp in your nets is a great feeling and is similar to experienced agent and new licensee recruiting:  you know what you have in the net. 

When using services such as HiringCenter for recruiting you don't know exactly what you're going to get. This is more like summer shrimp fishing. As Dan explains it: "When that net comes up... It's not full of just great shrimp. Oh no! It comes up with mostly everything else you can imagine.  You sort through catfish, crab, trash and everything else you can imagine. In fact, the crab bite your ankles, the catfish sting your hand, the trash smells, but it must be done to get to the shrimp." 

Although that sounds like a lot of unpleasant work at times, the shrimp fisherman chooses to fish for both the winter and summer season. The fisherman realizes that he has made an investment in his boat, nets, crew, etc. so the more shrimp the more success.

The analogy is painfully clear. Nothing worth acquiring is obtained without a screening or selection process. Whether its gold, silver, diamonds, shrimp or agents, you have to be able to sort through the whole to find what you really want. 

Back to recruiting: Dan and most of our clients tell us that even when they are "winter" recruiting for experienced agents, the conversion rate is 20% or 1 in 5. With new-to-Real Estate- HiringCenter recruiting our clients average 20-25% on conversion from interview to hire. So what actually might feel like summer shrimp fishing, where there might be a few crab and catfish, in the end the odds of landing shrimp who stay on your boat is really no different. 

The bottom line is someone has invested in the boat, the license to fish, the nets, the fuel and the sonar equipment. With HiringCenter, the captains have even invested in deck hands further up stream to sort through much of the debris before you even see the net.

This sorting is done by Tidemark and your own Recruiting Coordinator.  What they want you, as a manager, to understand is that sorting through a few "catfish and crab" is time consuming but ultimately successful.

To increase the hires in every season is a reasonable outcome for their investment. Do you have 2 or 3 hours a month to do that sorting? 

We realize that some managers in certain seasons will get more catfish than shrimp, but as long as the net gain of excellent candidates are coming in the door somewhere, it should give us all hope for our own "big catch." 

By the end of our time with BHHS Georgia, and Dan's great analogy, every one of their excellent group of managers understood this message. They also understood that after all, "summer shrimp fishing" is what they ask their agents to do every day of the year.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Why Hiring Candidates Who “Hit the Ground Running” Will Eventually Kill Your Company

Dave and I had the privilege of spending time at two major real estate industry conferences over the last month.  I love this time of year because we get to interact with many real estate industry leaders, owners, and managers.

We learn a bunch by spending face-to-face time with our clients and other thought leaders during these times.  The most insightful information almost always comes in the one-on-one conversations.  So, we seek out opportunities to engage in as many of these discussions as possible.

In future WorkPuzzles, Dave and I will both share some of the things we learned at these conferences.  Today, however, I wanted shed some light on a myth that is alive and well in the real estate industry.

Over the last month, I’ve heard at least a dozen managers tell me that their primary objective in hiring is to engage candidates who can “hit the ground running” and make a quick contribution to their offices.

This typically means hiring an experienced agent who is working for a competitor or a new person that is already licensed or near the end of their licensing process.

If all other things were equal, of course it would make sense to use this criteria.  But what happens when this criteria takes priority over other criteria?

I’m going to let one of the most successful hiring companies in the world answer that question.  It’s not a real estate company, but they are in an industry where speed, competence, and successful hiring are just as critical to their business model as it is to yours.

The company is LinkedIn, and the details of their hiring practices were recently published by Max Nison on the Quartz financial news aggregator.  Here is an excerpt from Nison’s article:

“The thing that you start to hear as you get bigger, when someone talks about a candidate they want to hire, they often start talking about how they’re excited because this person will hit the ground running,” LinkedIn’s Dan Shapero tells Quartz. “And hitting the ground running is a very short-term benefit.”

Shapero’s organization has certainly gotten bigger. He heads LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions group, which provides tools for recruiters and is by far the most profitable of its three major divisions. It produced $245.6 million in revenue last quarter, 55% of the company’s total. In Q2 of 2011, the first time LinkedIn reported earnings after its IPO, the division made $58.6 million.

The better way to hire, Shapero says, is to think about long-term potential and cultural fit.

“I’m trying to change the language on a team so they’re not talking about hitting the ground running, but about long-term potential,” Shapero says. “Who, over the course of two or three years, is going to have the biggest possible impact on the organization? That pivot has changed the way we think about new hires.”

Some of his most successful people, he says, don’t have a background typical of the job they have. They take a bit longer to get going, but it’s worth it.

“There was something in them, a fit with who we want to aspire to be as a company, a real aptitude, and a real motivation that we saw something in and were willing to take a bet and wait a little longer to see play out,” Shapero says.

Let’s imagine you’re wandering around the halls of LinkedIn and you’re listening in on what your counterparts (hiring managers) are talking about in their team meetings.    You’d be hearing many of the same topics you discuss in your team meetings—how to hire people who can make a contribution quickly.

Many real estate hiring managers think this issue is unique to the real estate industry. Nonsense!  This problem exists everywhere humans run companies.  Every hiring manager has to fight the urge to grab the short-term benefit at the expense of long-term progress.

There is more to this story that I’ll cover in a future blog.  For today, I encourage you to follow the lead of the most profitable division at LinkedIn—focus on hiring people who have the highest long-term potential for your organization. 

Know that this strategy will take more work, patience, and discipline than other methodologies because high-potential candidates are rarely at a place where they can “hit the ground running” when you first meet them. 

Remember what you learned in kindergarten—the tortoise does eventually defeat the hare.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Recruiting the Next Generation

Ben has written extensively on the topic of the aging Real Estate Agent demographic and its threat to derail the future of the traditional Real Estate model.

We have heard similar conversations about this topic repeated among many of our clients and it was a "hot topic" at recent conferences.

So is there any validity in the theory? I did some poking around to find hard data to verify or discount this trend. 

In a recent survey by Imprev (A Real Estate marketing firm) it turns out that finding younger talent is on the minds of most thought leaders in the industry. 

"Although recruiting is a perennial issue, leaders of the nation's major brokerages who were surveyed about the issues that concern them most put an even finer point on it, citing "recruiting younger agents" as their top business challenge; it was selected by 70 percent of respondents. "Recruiting top talent" is the second-most crucial business challenge, specified by 65 percent.

"The real estate business is aging out," said Renwick Congdon, chief executive officer of Imprev, the real estate marketing software firm that works with 150,000 agents and brokers nationwide. "Broker-owners and other top real estate executives are under pressure to find new talent."

And another supporting piece -

National Association of Realtors data show that a mere 6 percent of its membership is under the age of 34 -- and that in the past 15 years, the percentage of members in their 40s has dropped by one-third. Additionally, more than 40 percent of all Realtors are older than 60 and one in four is 65 or older.

Based on the factors discussed in the above paragraph it should come as no surprise to learn the following:

Recruiting is a pervasive topic: When asked the open-ended question, "What is your firm's single biggest challenge today?" nearly 40 percent of the written answers cite recruiting. Profitability garners the second spot, cited by 14 percent of the executives, with 13 percent mentioning technology.

The good news is that the majority of you who read this blog already address this vital challenge and as a result are hopefully ahead of your competitor.

And in finding solutions to this challenge, you are providing the next generation and your consumers (both current and future) an incredible gift.

• Offering the younger talent, an alternative to being underemployed in a possible job with no future.
• For the consumer - More diversity, which can potentially lead to a better match in the style and knowledge of the agent they choose.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Retention: Predicting Who Will Jump Ship in Your Organization

Many of our company’s clients are increasingly focusing on the metric of “net hires.”  While recruiting is critical to any growth strategy, it must be coupled with outstanding retention strategies if growth is going to materialize.

The work of a real estate leader is to create an environment where agents are first attracted to join and then compelled to stay and contribute their talents to the organization.

There are very few tricks and gimmicks that produce long-term success in the quest to retain agents.  If you’re not providing an environment that offers real value, cracks will develop in your proverbial bathtub and water runs downhill.

Today’s topic assumes you have a great bathtub and you’re doing the work of keeping the cracks from developing.   Here’s reality--even under the best of circumstances, good agents will sometimes become disillusioned and leave your organization. 

The question for today:  Can those agents be saved if you were given enough warning of the impending departure?

Yes.  They can be saved, but only if you have enough time (usually several weeks) to solve problems and address issues that are causing the disillusionment. 

How do you get advanced notice that someone is going to leave your organization?  Several years ago, the researchers at the Huntsman School of Business (Utah State University) started putting thought into that question and came up with some surprising answers.

The research was led by associate professor Tim Gardner and focused on the symptoms that lead to voluntary turnover.   Here is a summary of the findings:

[Gardner] was surprised when his research showed, for example, an employee who starts taking more vacation time, punching out at 5 p.m. every day and looking at outside openings on company time, is not necessarily someone who is about to leave.

Gardner discovered, however, one thing most employees had in common before they left was that they began to “disengage” in the workplace.

Here are a few examples of subtle but consistent behavioral changes people often make in the one to two months before they leave their job:

They offered fewer constructive contributions in meetings.

They were more reluctant to commit to long-term projects.

They become more reserved and quiet.

They became less interested in advancing in the organization.

They were less interested in pleasing their boss than before.

They avoided social interactions with their boss and other members of management.

They suggested fewer new ideas or innovative approaches.

They began doing the minimum amount of work needed and no longer went beyond the call of duty.

They were less interested in participating in training and development programs.

Their work productivity went down.

Gardner said if employees were demonstrating at least six of these behaviors, his statistical formula could predict with 80 percent accuracy that they were about to leave the organization.

So think about this:  If you can detect one to two months out a person’s tendency to leave your organization with 80% accuracy, this information could significantly improve the retention percentage of agents on your team.

With this type of foreknowledge, you’d have time to probe for the irritations the agents are experiencing, uncover obstacles that are causing them to lose focus, and solve problems before they become deal-breakers.

How could you execute a system that would make use of this research?  For starters, you could create a simple scorecard that allows you to rate each agent on a scale of 1 to 3 (never, sometimes, frequently) for each question.  

Then color-code (green, yellow, red) your agents w/ a probability of staying in our organization.  Those agents receiving a score of 24 points or higher should probably be marked as red.  Those are the ones that need your attention.

Gardner sums up his research by saying,

“It appears that a person’s attitude can create behaviors that are hard to disguise,” he said. “As the grass starts to look greener on the other side of the fence to you, chances are that others will soon notice that you’ve lost your focus.”

Become proficient at detecting that loss of focus, and you’ll head off retention problems before they become your realty.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Coaching and a Putt-Putt Champion

I am a golfer. The type that loves to spend 4+ hours at a time playing on regulation golf courses. But, did you know that there is a little known culture dedicated to the practice and perfecting of the game of Putt-Putt Golf?

You know the game! The sometimes gimmicky putter-only courses you typically only play with kids. This group can teach us a great deal about coaching. More on that later..

Over the past 2 months I've shared with you some basic principles of great coaching, and I hope that you've benefited from the concrete structure around the art of coaching. A recent article in Forbes by Candice Frankovelgia, gives us an excellent synopsis of what we've discussed over the last few weeks. 

1) Building the relationship. It’s easier to learn from someone you trust. 

2) Providing assessment.  Assessment often focuses on gaps or inconsistencies, on current performance vs. desired performance, words vs. actions and intention vs. impact.

3) Challenging thinking and assumptions.  Coaches ask open-ended questions, push for alternative solutions to problems and encourage reasonable risk-taking.

4) Supporting and encouraging. They encourage employees to make progress toward their goals, and they recognize their successes.

5) Driving results.  Effective coaching is about achieving goals.

All of these principles are important. But, what is the real key? What is the bottom line to great coaching? What have I witnessed in every great coach who I have ever had the pleasure of being inspired by? What can make you a great coach? 

The answer came when I watched the following video on a group of gentleman who have spent most of their lives perfecting the game of putt-putt golf.

The Key is Reverence!

Every great coach conveys a reverence for their craft. The craft that they help teach others to learn and execute appears to me as some extension of the divine; a love of the game (whatever it might be).

A husband of one of my clients sells copiers and fax machines for a living, and does quite well. When I asked him what got him into the business, he told me a great story. As he was interviewing as a new college graduate, he told the hiring boss..."But I want to sell something important... something that saves lives..." His future boss looked at him sternly and said, "I sell copiers to people who save lives every day." And he meant it. 

So the big question is: Do you have a reverent or sacred view of what you do and what you are inspiring others to do. Beyond what you sell, the lives and inner dreams of those you manage can be approached with reverence.

When you combine the human element with the structured principles, then you are a truly great coach and the results will prove it! 

Enjoy this great video of a perfect Putt-Putt game and experience the reverence and dedication of the best putt-putt players you'll ever see. 

  

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

3 Reasons For a Coaching Mindset

Do you have a coaching mindset? Do you know anyone who does? I would bet that the greatest leaders influencing your life exhibited a natural coaching mindset. Those leaders are few and far between. 

Why are they so rare and why do those who possess or learn the coaching mindset have such a powerful influence? The answer lies in what they do that is the opposite of what the rest of us do: At the end of most conversations they
know you a little better and you leave with a feeling that they truly care
about who you are. 

These are the people who listen, probe your experiences, find out what you
are learning, and ask more questions.

Why is this so important in relationships and why is it vital to great
coaching? 

Below are some reasons why being an Active listener is vital to coaching:

1. We are all puzzles to ourselves. 

Nobody really knows their "self." No one thoroughly understands who they are or what prompts their thought or decision making processes.

As a good listener you are helping them fit more of the puzzle pieces together. You are not defining their "self" but working with them to better understand what drives them. You are working alongside them in this mystery we call life!

Even those who have solid values, a strong faith, and good friends continue to need help figuring out who they are, what they stand for and where they are going. You can be a valued and active piece in filling that role by helping many to assimilate some of the missing pieces.  

2. Coaching Demonstrates Love.

I know that many of you are scared of such a strong word in connection to coaching; but I have news for you; wanting to help people piece together a framework of understanding; what makes them tick and what path they are on is exhibiting Love.   

The opposite of Love in a business relationship is not hate, it's exploitation. If you actively listen and ask leading questions then you will get to know your employee.  This again is displaying a Coaching Mindset and should ward off any temptation to exploit those you coach. It is a great litmus test of the ultimate motive. Are you in it for mutual flourishing or for your own needs?

3. "Listen First; Talk Later."

The best coaches are intent on developing, in their agent, the ability and habit of reflecting on all that they do; dissecting what worked and what didn't and improving their future performance and success.

Coaching is not teaching. Coaching is helping a person to continually assess what they are doing, critiquing and learning from those experiences.

Sports psychologists are experts at this. They don't teach, instead they aid a person in becoming aware of differences in good performance and poor performance.

Continue to develop your Coaching Mindset and I guarantee you will see success in even the most doubtful agent.

More importantly, everyone will benefit.

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Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

The Case Against Positive Thinking to Achieve Success - Part 2

Last week, I started a discussion about the prospects of positive thinking alone being a pathway to success.  When researched in an objective manner, this philosophy has been shown to produce less-than-positive results.

Don’t get me wrong—there is nothing harmful about being optimistic and having positive thoughts.  However, there seems to be a line that is crossed by some people where positive thoughts become a strategy.   Under the scrutiny of objective research, this philosophy appears to be flawed and unreliable.

As much as researchers have been critical of positive thinking success strategies, they have become excited about the concept of “grit.”  Grit is a success strategy that does withstand the rigors of research.

If you’re a long-time WorkPuzzle reader, you’ll probably remember this topic.   Dave and I have both written about it several times over the last five years.

For those of you who may be new readers, I’m going republish parts of two blogs (1, 2) Dave wrote in 2009.   Even if you’ve read these blogs already, it is a good reminder on how success is truly achieved.

Angela Lee Duckworth, PhD, has conducted a series of studies on a concept called "grit." 

Grit is another word for backbone, chutzpah, fortitude, guts, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. 

It all started when Dr. Duckworth observed that it wasn't necessarily the smartest people who succeeded and made a lasting impact on science. She had a hunch that it was a person's personal "grit" recipe that made the difference in their level of success. 

Across six studies, Duckworth found that grit significantly contributed to successful outcomes:  Undergrads with the most grit earned higher grade point averages than their peers.  West Point Cadets with the highest levels of grit were more likely to return after the first summer.  Even "grittier" spelling bee competitors (a situation where IQ would seem the best predictor) out-spelled their less tenacious competitors.  Among older individuals, people with substantial grit had higher levels of education and made fewer career changes than less gritty peers of the same age.

Many successful people don't attribute their success to their IQ or level of talent [or positive thoughts], but rather to their tenacity.  Thomas Edison was one of those people.  Edison once said:

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Here is another prime example of grit:  Poet David Baker is Director of Creative Writing at Denison University, and author of seven books of poetry, including "Midwest Eclogue."  Mr. Baker laments:

"Unfortunately, no one comes in my window and whispers poems to me... Poets [have to] work hard.  I may work on a single poem for weeks or months and write 60 or 70 drafts—only to decide that draft 22 was the good one.”

Along these same lines, people often refer to Mozart's diaries, where he divulges that an entire symphony appeared, supposedly intact, in his head. However, Jonathan Plucker an educational psychologist at Indiana University points out:

"But no one ever quotes the next paragraph, where he talks about how he refined the work for months.”

So, if you review the research I referenced in the last blog… you’ll see that grit appears to the vital component to success.

Success comes to those who work harder and demonstrate perseverance in the face of obstacles. 

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."  (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

Where does that leave the positive thinker? 

Not as far from the truth as you might imagine.  Having positive thoughts is a great start, but it must be combined with hard work, tenacity, and focus on doing whatever it takes to accomplish the goal. 

This is grit.  It’s far beyond positive thinking, and it’s what effective people do to be successful.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.