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Preparing for War: Resource Management in the Modern Marketplace

During my time with the Australian Army, I learned a lot about strategy and tactics with regard to resource management. 

History has shown that the outcome of almost every major military effort comes down to differences in strategic approach. Essentially, one approach works, and one fails. After I left the service and became a management consultant, I found this to be relatively similar in the corporate world. While organizations can co-exist in the same industry, their actions still affect one another, especially if they are locked in a contest for market share. In that contest, as in military action, one strategy will succeed, and one will not. Yet even with that knowledge, many company leaders refuse to change their strategy, often to their own detriment. 

Conversely, those organizations that are willing to entertain new approaches often end up leaving their competitors in the dust. Regardless of size or industry, companies that seem to glide toward their goals are able to answer one fundamental question:

How do we best allocate our resources to achieve our goals? 

When it comes to resource management, you can apply many different military methodologies to a corporate and commercial context.

Attrition Resource Management

Attrition warfare involves wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse. The World Wars were prime examples. During these campaigns, one side would bring as much force to bear on the enemy as possible until they fell apart. 

Attrition warfare unequivocally favors the more significant force and requires less imagination and agility than other strategies. The resource cost is immense, but if conducted in the right context, it can result in decisive victories where the enemy is incapacitated in one fell swoop. However, if a decisive victory is not achieved, wars of attrition can drag on for years as each side becomes more entrenched and, therefore, more difficult to dislodge.

In the corporate context, examples of attrition warfare tactics as they related to resource management might include:

  • Paying for premium ad space that may be unreachable for competitors (such as a Super Bowl commercial)
  • Sponsoring major industry events
  • Taking legal actions against competitors (such as copyright or trademark infringement lawsuits)
  • Poaching high-end staff with the promise of better pay and benefits

Attrition as a practical commercial strategy is only practical for those with a large number of resources on hand. Corporations that already control a massive share of the market will do the best with attrition resource management as there is no practical way for smaller organizations to compete with them. 

Maneuver Resource Management

Maneuver warfare is a strategy aimed at unbalancing or unhinging the enemy. It identifies the root purpose of the enemy campaign (such as taking control of a certain landmark) and finds different ways to do the same thing. Essentially, it targets an enemy’s “center of gravity,” or the ineffable “something” that gives them the will or the ability to fight.

Throughout the course of history, militaries have used maneuver warfare through the following avenues:

  • Physical Dislocation: Removing the key assets or logistics that enable the enemy to operate.
  • Temporal Dislocation: Moving faster when achieving important terrain, milestones, or assets.
  • Moral Dislocation: Attacking the enemy’s will to fight. This often includes a significant effort to get into the minds of the key decision-makers and shape their decisions.

These methods can run simultaneously, and all of them emphasize the elements of surprise and speed.

For resource management, maneuver warfare shines brightest in organizations that are adept in prioritization and channeling their efforts towards the outcomes that will have maximum impact for minimum input. These organizations know their strengths and weaknesses inside and out and magnify their results exponentially by focusing their precious resources on two or three outcomes instead of a dozen. 

Maneuver warfare for resource management not only allows medium-sized organizations to start capturing market share from bigger competitors, but it also ensures a more tailored market share.

Guerrilla Resource Management

The concept of guerrilla-style tactics was heavily publicized by Sun Tzu, who suggested in The Art of War that a small force could win against a much larger competitor if it made use of every available resource with the utmost haste. 

Guerrilla warfare is based on the idea that smaller teams can create significant issues for their enemies providing they stay under the detection threshold. They almost always have few to no resources, and therefore rely heavily on unorthodox methods (such as ambushes, raids, or sabotage) and a loyal support network. 

In the corporate or commercial context, smaller, more agile organizations can achieve proportionately huge impacts if they are agile, dynamic, and able to rally passionate support for their cause. It also means that smaller boutique agencies can provide highly tailored services to those with simpler, more focused needs.

In many ways, this approach to resource management has been one of the founding successes of The Eighth Mile Consulting. We endeavor to support areas of the market that remain undetected by the larger players in the industry. With support from partner organizations, we can seize opportunities quickly, provide valuable services, and maintain our support network.

In Conclusion

This might seem counter-intuitive given what’s been discussed thus far, but these resource management strategies do not have to be adopted in an overtly aggressive manner. They may be more useful at guiding your team’s operations than they are at destroying your competitors. 

In addition to a competitive edge, consider what a resource management strategy can help you achieve:

  • Prioritizing your efforts toward specific outcomes
  • Focusing the scope of operations on what will be the most impactful
  • Highlighting strengths and weaknesses
  • Identifying paths of least resistance in the marketplace and promoting early action
  • Incentivizing creating thinking instead of reinventing the wheel

As you can see, the real enemy is not your competitors, but the conditions in which you operate. Through proper and appropriate resource management, you arm yourself with the weapons you need to reinvent, endure, and ultimately succeed.

At The Eighth Mile, our organizational values and ethos are clear:

  • Service: Client-tailored training
  • Initiative: Find the needs and fill them
  • Integrity: Deliver on every promise
  • Accountability: Personal investment in every outcome

Manage and lead your team to victory through our 8-week online leadership courses or private consulting for unique business strategies. Get in touch with our team to discuss your company’s needs.

Additional Resources

The Principles of War – A Corporate Translation

We Do Not Retreat

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How NOT To Collect Data For Business

Data is the new oil.

Clive Humby made this claim all the way back in 2006. Like oil, everybody wants data and is willing to pay whatever it costs to get it. 

In response to massive data-based success stories like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, many organizations are tempted by the lures of data, such as:

  • Vanquishing a competitor, especially one who also seems to have a “robust data strategy.” 
  • Looking and feeling like you’re moving the company forward
  • Gaining insight into your industry
  • Finding proof that a decision you made was the right one

Data collection often ends with a slick presentation of dashboards, graphs, and tables, with loads of information and tons of answers.

This is not how to collect data for business. Here’s why:

In The Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, an alien race develops a supercomputer Deep-Thought in order to answer the ambiguous questions regarding  “life, the universe, and everything.” The answer it comes back with?

Forty-two.

When pressed for an explanation, Deep-Thought continues:

I think that the problem is that you have never really known what the question is…You have to know what the question actually is, in order to know what the answer means.

So many organizations are frantically collecting as much data as they can without any coherent understanding of the purpose behind it. When you don’t know how to collect data for business properly, the very thing you expected to save you will open expensive and time-consuming rabbit holes that might actually endanger the future of your company.

How Not To Collect Data For Business

Any statistician worth their salt will describe how information can be manipulated to tell the desired story. Moreover, poor collection of information will lead to unreliable outcomes.

When you’re considering how to collect data for your business, make sure you keep the following pitfalls in mind.

Inadequate Sample Size

If the pool of information is too small to accurately represent the demographics you’re researching, it will not be a reliable basis for your decision-making.

Too Short a Study

Not allowing enough time to capture your data might make acute environmental factors look more catastrophic than they are. For example, compare those who check the stock market every few hours or minutes to those who review their portfolios every month or so. The report you get from each person will likely be widely different. Moreover, temporary fluctuations do not tell an accurate story of the overall performance.

Errors in Scope

When the question you are trying to answer is poorly defined, you are likely to collect data that isn’t all that useful to you (such as “42”).

Improper Collection Method

There are countless different mechanisms for how to collect and analyze data for business. If the wrong method is chosen, it could distort the results.

Unreliable Sources

There is a saying in the data industry: “garbage in, garbage out.” If the information is obtained from dubious sources, then the validity of the findings cannot be trusted from the start.

How To Collect Data For Business The Right Way

Now that you know some of the mistakes you may encounter with how you collect data for your business, let’s take if from the top–the right way.

Have a Strategy

Your strategy should underpin everything that you do in your business. The link between operational efforts and strategic direction should be strong, coherent, and measurable.

As a minimum, our organizational strategies should include:

  • Vision. Where we are heading?
  • Mission. Why are we heading there and how do we know when we arrive?
  • Scope or Services. How do we want to fulfill our mission?

These strategies must be the basis of all our decision-making. Data, on the other hand, can help reinforce those decisions by:

  • Creating faster decision loops
  • Helping make the choice between viable courses of action
  • Disproving assumptions in favor of facts
  • Measuring the success and validity of our objectives
  • Identifying new opportunities that align with our goals
  • Linking our understanding of risks and opportunities

In order to achieve all this, how you collect data for your business must behave like a scalpel and not a shotgun. 

Ask The Right Questions

Before determining how to collect data for your business, you must know why you are doing it in the first place. You need to ask the right questions. But what do the right questions look like? At a minimum, they must:

  • Address an overarching concern or opportunity
  • Link to our organizational strategy
  • Refine the scope in order to limit ambiguous answers

To get started, ask yourself:

  • What decisions need to be made?
  • How much information do we need before we can make that decision?
  • Can I further tighten the filters and variables to make the question even more specific?

Don’t Ignore the Human Factor

The list of human shortfalls that affect how you collect data for business is too lengthy to mention. But here are two very important factors that are often overlooked.

Bias

Bias comes in all different forms, including everything from confirmation bias (seeking out information that is guaranteed to align with our existing beliefs) to selection bias (acknowledging pleasing information while ignoring unpleasant information), and everything in between.

When collecting and reviewing data, our own personal biases will undermine our objectivity if not cross-referenced against other sources.

Examples of this occurring include:

  • Poorly worded or slanted questions 
  • Handpicking people or demographics that will support our claim or stance
  • Breaking people into groups that will lead to the desired outcome
  • Measuring things incorrectly or lending undue weight to certain responses

Subjectivity

Everyone experiences the world differently. Moreover, the way we feel at a certain time in our life can have significant implications on the way that we collect information, engage with participants, and interpret information.

Unlike bias, which can be eliminated with a bit of conscious thought, subjectivity is inherent to the human condition. We can only truly experience the world as ourselves, not as another person or as a completely detached and objective entity.

While there is no way to eliminate subjectivity entirely, you can remove a large amount of it from your data collection with the following:

  • The right tool for the right job
  • Structured sequencing and staging
  • Multiple sources of data and quality checks
  • A commitment to keeping an open mind about the results, and not clinging to old assumptions regardless of the information presented.

If you do not have these things as a minimum, then all that time you spent figuring out how to collect data for business collection will amount to nothing more than a flashy and expensive waste of time.

In Conclusion

Is data the new oil? For companies that know how to collect data for business, it might be. For everyone else, it is simply a fad–shiny and cool, but ultimately meaningless.

If you are looking for data that prove to yourself that you are doing great work, then you are likely using it for the wrong reasons. If you are collecting data without knowing why, then now is the time to reassess your strategies and biases and align your collection methods accordingly.

Of course, even the best data collection strategy can’t take the place of strong, smart, and determined leaders. The Eighth Mile offers online leadership courses that provide one-on-one coaching, self-paced learning modules, and regular interactive virtual workshops for all learning styles. Visit the Course Details page to find out how you can take yourself and your team to the next level–with no data analysis required.

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Top 9 Benefits of Online Leadership Training

A company today must think fast, pivot, and always be on its proverbial toes. With so much change happening all around the world, talent retention and leadership cultivation are ongoing challenges. Without continued dedication to leadership training, a business’s short- and long-term success could hang in the balance. That’s not to say a company’s success is more important than the personal successes of its leaders. In fact, it’s only with great leaders that a business sees success, leaving many organizations wondering about online leadership training benefits.

A leader must be resilient, as well as:

  • Capable of empathy
  • Familiar with accountability
  • Tenacious
  • Self-aware

At The Eighth Mile, we enjoy partnering with businesses to cultivate positive outcomes and successful leaders. Organizations reach out to us to ask about the differences between traditional classrooms and online leadership training and what makes us different. We’ve found, even prior to the events of the past few years, that online leadership training benefits are virtually equal to those of traditional classroom learning —and then some.

Why Should You Choose Online Leadership Training?

If you’ve ever sat through a business meeting in person versus over Zoom or another platform, you can understand a few of the differences between classroom-based leadership courses and online leadership training benefits. There’s a definite difference between uninspired, text-based PowerPoints disguised as a “class” — whether traditional or online — and a specialized course developed according to real-world lessons learned over the course of a lifetime in the military and business. The latter training allows for hyper-personalization, attendance on your own time, and exciting coaching sessions, both individual and group.

We developed our coaching sessions and coursework through years of hands-on experience in the military and through years of lessons learned in and outside of boardrooms and businesses. As such, we know that it’s all about engagement. Without it, and without the online leadership training benefits we’re about to discuss, developing strong, empathic, accountable, and self-aware leaders would be impossible.

9 of the Most Important Online Leadership Training Benefits

Aside from some of the more obvious online leadership training benefits, such as saving on fuel, arranging your schedule as you need to, and not missing workdays, an online leadership training course also provides these lesser-known but ultimately more important benefits for employees, administrators, HR staff, and the company as a whole.

1. Support to Find Success

With a busy lifestyle, you may neglect the things you want for yourself in favor of others, even if one of your goals is professional success. Online leadership training imparts the motivation and confidence you need to overcome obstacles and distractions to achieve those goals.

2. Time to Listen to Yourself

Introspection is a gift, and it is the online leadership training benefit that reveals your weaknesses and strengths in a familiar environment so you can learn to trust yourself and your gut feelings.

3. Learn to Influence Others

Leaders must exude a careful mix of confidence, conviction, and humbleness. In doing so, you can influence and motivate the rest of your team to follow your lead. Really, a great leader helps the whole team become leaders by listening and trusting, which helps build everyone’s confidence.

4. Connect With Other Leadership Professionals

In an online leadership training course, you’ll learn the history of leadership, how ideas and methods evolve, and how those ideas and methods create successful leaders. Leadership is a bit like medicine in that respect — it’s an ongoing practice and it is fluid. You become part of a leadership network that stands together, grows together, and continues learning together from your combined experiences.

5. Gain a Better Understanding Of Your Business

HR professionals can especially benefit from online leadership training. When you’re the one responsible for hiring the right people, it’s important to understand the business and how it works. It isn’t enough to know Human Resources’ language — the HR team should be contributing members to the company’s mission and overall vision. If not, it’s unlikely that upper management will take you seriously because these are necessary aspects of fulfilling your duties, such as workforce planning.

6. Promote and Nurture Teamwork

The best leaders know how to build teams of individuals happy to collaborate. While you are engaged in your training to better yourself as a leader, you also have the opportunity to step away from the team and delegate. As stated previously, good leaders create other good leaders. Now’s your chance to see how you’ve done up to this point.

7. Clear Your Vision

Leaders who have no problem looking at a project and seeing exactly how it works out have clear sight — they’re considered visionaries, especially when presented with a rudimentary idea. Leadership training cultivates your vision. When you can “see” how to make something happen, you can also help others see it too, and motivate them to follow you.

8. Be Kind to Your Budget

Learning & Development is a department most of today’s companies couldn’t live without. As technology and business approaches shift, upper management has to stay on top of these changes by continuing to upskill. As such, one of the greatest online leadership training benefits for your company is the cost — it’s thousands less than a traditional college or university course. You can upskill an entire department in an online course for what it would cost to send just one student to a university.

9. Learn to Fail Better

One of your lessons in a leadership course is how to avoid making mistakes. Now, this doesn’t mean that at course completion you’ll never make a mistake again. What it does mean is you’ll know what to watch out for, how to spot a potentially damaging error before it happens and prevent the worst of the mistakes. As you learn how to do this for yourself, you’ll also learn how to help your team apply the same rationale.

Mistakes are human nature and bound to occur from time to time — the greatest leader won’t seek blame but rather a resolution. And after you fail (because again, you likely will), you’ll now have the tools to get back up, which may be the biggest benefit of online leadership training there is.

How The Eighth Mile Consulting Can Help

If you want to know more about online leadership training benefits, and the leadership style, level of accountability, and overall resiliency we strive to cultivate in businesses of all sizes, let us know. Our 8-week online leadership training course can help you develop strong leaders in your organization or become one yourself. Contact us to learn how we can help your organization improve and help your team unite and confidently embrace the challenges ahead.

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What is Online Leadership Training?

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a trailblazer to go where no path exists. It takes a leader.

In every business, it’s leaders who provide direction. Your business couldn’t reach its goals without this.

But great leaders aren’t necessarily born — they’re made. Leadership is one of those qualities that people can learn.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) recent report on working millennials, 29% of those surveyed accepted their most recent position for its personal development opportunities and advancement potential. Only 14% chose their position for the benefits package.

The bottom line? Millennials are poised to make up 75% of the workforce in just a few years. These workers want to see training opportunities offered, and employers who don’t meet this desire risk losing current (and attracting future) talent.

The question is: do you opt for traditional classroom-based or online leadership training? And how do you know if online leadership training is right for you or your organization?

Classroom-based learning has its place, but online leadership training offers multiple benefits over the classroom — for employees and employers.

Benefits of Online Leadership Training

Whether you want to help employees jumpstart a soaring career trajectory, succeed in a current role, or prepare for a future role, knowing the benefits of this kind of training can help point you to the right type of program.

At Eighth Mile Consulting, we pride ourselves on helping organizations grow by improving their people and processes. Our consulting services can help your organization handle change, build resilience, and develop the strategies that cultivate leadership.

The right online leadership training program can provide many opportunities for improvement.

Assess your Leadership Effectiveness 

To improve upon anything, you need to know where your skills stand currently.

  • What are some of your weaknesses?
  • How can you strengthen those areas?
  • Where do your strengths lie?
  • How can you pull from your current skillset to improve your leadership qualities?

Becoming familiar with these answers generates awareness. It offers insights that identify improvement strategies and personal leadership styles. You and your employees can reference, pull from and build upon these skills over the course of a career.

Learn and Practice Vital Leadership Skills

Effective leaders know how to:

  • Define direction
  • Create teams
  • Coach coworkers
  • Give constructive criticism
  • Offer meaningful advice and feedback
  • Generate interpersonal relationships built on trust

The mark of a genuine leader lies in their influence on (and empowerment of) coworkers, subordinates, and bosses. Great leaders can tackle stressful situations and identify whether delegation is necessary or if it would be better to handle the task on their own.

Receive Honest Advice From More Experienced Leaders

This is the greatest benefit of online leadership training: the exposure to others in leadership positions. Leaders in all career stages have experiences they can share, and learning from others is one of the best ways to grow. Freely debating and exchanging ideas is something that can prove invaluable compared to trying to learn how to lead all by yourself.

Who Benefits Most From Online Leadership Training?

You may think the only candidates worthy of leadership training are those who already hold some type of leadership position. Actually, a wide range of positions and career stages can find value.

Let’s take a look at four types of professionals who typically see the most benefit from online leadership training.

Entry-Level to Mid-Career Employees 

These professionals might be experts in their field or company. If this person wants to eventually take on a leadership position but isn’t sure of the path to get there, leadership training is the map. Proactive development of the skills a leader needs primes these employees for lift-off when the right position opens.

Employees New to Leadership Roles

Most larger companies have an established hierarchy that determines those next in line for promotions to leadership roles. For example, specific education and relevant experience may be required for consideration.

On the other hand, smaller and more agile companies might not have such a formal hierarchy. This is ideal for employees who desire a leadership role but don’t have any experience yet. Employees suddenly thrust into leadership positions can especially benefit from leadership training to get acclimated to their new responsibilities.

New Entrepreneurs

A lot of small businesses begin as single self-employed individuals. There are no other employees to schedule, manage or otherwise consider.

The moment this entrepreneur’s business grows, hiring that first employee can change the game entirely. The entrepreneur isn’t just responsible for themselves anymore. Many people can attest that solopreneurial success doesn’t always translate to entrepreneurial success.

Honing leadership skills is a must for people whose desires lie in the entrepreneurial territory. It helps them learn the skills needed to hire and manage a high-performance team.

Entire Companies

Depending on the business or industry, some companies look outside to hire for open leadership roles. But there are several benefits of promoting someone already familiar with how the business works, such as:

  • Reduced costs. There’s no expense to recruit, screen, or interview candidates.
  • Faster acclimation. Since the employee already knows a lot about the company, there’s much less time spent on training.

Offering access to online leadership training can help the newly promoted individual learn more about management and build the skills necessary for success in their new role.

What Problems Can Online Leadership Training Solve?

Online leadership training, compared to traditional classroom-based training, can ease the strain on employees in several respects, such as:

  • Employees with children don’t need to seek childcare.
  • Employees whose families share one vehicle don’t need to coordinate transportation.
  • Employees can still address other responsibilities outside of work.

Unfortunately, some companies cast aside these benefits in exchange for perceived cost savings because the C-suite mistakenly believes that investing in online leadership training is cost-prohibitive. Did you know: After changing company policy and implementing online leadership training, IBM saved almost $200 million?

Partner with The Eighth Mile

At The Eighth Mile, our mission is to work with good people who are ready to improve their leadership and management skills through critical evaluation and absolute honesty. If that sounds like a challenge you are ready for, we’d love to hear from you. Our consulting and educational programs can help you design your ideal team through our 8-week online leadership course with regular virtual workshops and even one-on-one coaching sessions included with the modules. If you want to learn how to better handle changes in your organization, build greater resilience within your staff, and develop the strategies that cultivate strong leaders, connect with us to learn more.

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The Blame Mindset: A Convenient Way to Fail as a Leader

When I was a teenager I had an answer for everything. On one occasion I was engaged in a semi-heated discussion with my parents, who were challenging me on my lack of commitment to my schooling. I had developed a number of unresourceful habits and had become lazy with some of my subjects. Simply put, I was failing.

My parents, of course, wanted me to be able to capitalize on opportunities afforded by my capabilities. I wanted to take the path of least resistance. They would ask a question and I would provide an excuse. They would ask another question and I would repeat the process. For me, a quick-witted teenager (or so I thought), it seemed all too easy to redirect their questions toward others.

Then, after a number of these exchanges, my Dad finally said, “how convenient when it is always someone else’s fault.”

That stopped me in my tracks. He had hit the bullseye, and there was no way I could respond save one–to take responsibility for my actions. 

I know now that my parents had my best interests at heart. Not only that, but they chose to engage in an uncomfortable conversation to ensure that I didn’t head toward a path of unnecessary turmoil.

Today, I work with people and organizations all around the world. Many of those who reach out to us have exhausted their current resources and are open to new ideas or alternatives. I routinely engage in uncomfortable conversations with people about their career progression and leadership understanding to determine if they are interested in real change or simply going through the motions. Inevitably, I think back to that exchange with my parents, and I ask myself: Is this person willing to take responsibility for their own circumstances, or not?

In short, do they have a blame mindset?

The Blame Mindset: What Is It and How To Spot It

There are two factors you must take into account when determining if you are dealing with someone who has a blame mindset: context and personality.

Context

In this case, context means the situation in which the person looking for help is operating. 

It is important not to confuse “context” with “excuses.” While excuses are geared towards blaming someone/something else, context explains how and why the individual arrived at the decision to try and find assistance.

Personality

When evaluating the personality of the individual, the language they use when describing their problem is key in determining whether they are harboring a blame mindset. For example:

  •       “I couldn’t do anything because they were a bunch of jerks”
  •       “They made me do ______”
  •       “They did _____ to me”

Now, some people have experienced some genuinely unfair, unreasonable, and inequitable things, in which case the above sentiments may be warranted and a blame mindset is unlikely. The distinction lies in the way they frame situations. For example, Person A might frame their situation by saying:

“I have found myself in a situation that I know is not working for me. I am experiencing tough times in my family life, my job, and my health. I am keen to see where the opportunities exist in order to change what I can in order to head towards a better trajectory.”

This is a world apart from Person B:

“I just got fired from my job because they couldn’t handle the information I was telling them. I don’t think they could deal with the fact that I knew what was going on and they didn’t. My partner is being a real jerk about it too and they are just siding with the business. Everyone else doesn’t just get me and the fact that I know what I am talking about threatens them.”

Conversations like these are part and parcel of the operating environment for someone in my profession. Sometimes, the indicators of a blame mindset are more subtle. Sometimes, it’s very obvious. But sooner or later, through asking the right open-ended questions, the true personality emerges. This, combined with the context of the situation, will determine if coaching is a viable option or if a blame mindset has already set in.

“Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses.”

-George W Carver-

Accountability: The Blame Mindset Antidote

One of my mentors once explained to me:

You cannot change someone’s mind. All you can do is provide additional information that might lead them to a different conclusion.

It’s good advice, but over the years I’ve realized it’s incomplete. It’s not only the information you provide, but how you provide it, that helps lead people in the right direction. At the end of the day, however, the buck still stops with the individual.

Someone who has a deeply ingrained blame mindset is virtually impossible to help. Anything that goes well is attributed to them and their selfless brilliance. Anything that goes poorly was the fault of others, the environment, a change in circumstance, and so on. Sadly, but not surprisingly, these people find themselves subtly ostracized as their cohorts move away from their draining, self-centered energy. 

When I see that a person has adopted a blame mindset, I have a choice to make. I can accept this person’s money and attempt to guide them to a different conclusion. Or I can call out the issue by saying something like, “Has it ever occurred to you that, in all these stories of other people’s failings, the single point of consistency is you?”

When you ask a question like this, people will do one of two things: attack or consider. 

Getting defensive is often a symptom of a deeply ingrained blame mindset. Therefore, those that attack are rarely good candidates for coaching.

For those that consider the information, there may still be hope for them to adopt an accountability mindset. Not to be confused with a guilt mindset (where “everything” is your fault) or victim blaming (which is simply another iteration of the blame mindset), the accountability mindset prompts you to take ownership of the role you play in your current circumstances. It also encourages you to accept the likelihood that, to effect the change you are looking for, you will have to change yourself to some degree as well.

People who adopt an accountability mindset often make the most significant and influential leaders by building cultures centered around personal responsibility. It is in these environments that nurture new ideas and drive progress. But no one can build a flourishing ecosystem when everything that goes wrong is always “someone else’s fault.”

Conclusion

Adopting a blame mindset almost always ends in failure. People have limited patience for those with no interest in acknowledging their transgressions, and will not trust such leaders as a result. Without accountability, their employees will leave in droves.

It is also important not to confuse people with the blame mindset with those who have endured true hardships and whose grievances are justified. However, even when this is the case, the best way for these individuals to re-empower themselves is to take ownership of identifying and preventing future bad scenarios, both for themselves and others.

This empowerment can begin by being about who you spend your time with. If you hang around people who shirk blame and adopt a victim mentality, it won’t be long until you begin adopting the same behaviors and thoughts.

Personally, I make no apologies about filtering who I do and do not let into my professional and personal spheres. If someone can’t learn from their mistakes because they feel they have never made any, then we are at a crossroads. One which will send us on different paths.

For leaders looking to empower their people, the answer is simple: give them choices to own. No one should feel that everything is always happening to them. Illustrate how powerful they are and show them how much they have learned through their previous experiences, especially if those experiences were particularly arduous or unfair. Only then do we see people move forward in the world, protected by a suit of armor forged in accountability.

And that goes double for leaders. Wear your failures and lessons learned as a badge of pride. Let it strengthen your reputation and character. And when you make a mistake, own it. It is your opportunity to improve. Yours, and no one else’s.

Interested in learning more about how to prevent the blame mindset? Contact us for information on individual coaching, leadership training, and more.

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Accountability Is Disappearing From The Workplace. How Can You Improve?

When I was a young boy I made a monumental mistake.

My rebellious friends and I had managed to swipe a big box of matches. We headed down to the makeshift BMX ramps in the nearby pine forest that surrounded our suburb. It wasn’t long before we figured out that, with a simple hold and flick, we could shoot matches at each other. 

Who would have thought that hundreds of flaming matches in combination with a dry and arid Australian bushland would be a recipe for disaster? 

It didn’t take long before we started a small brush fire. We tried to stop the spreading flames by taking off our T-shirts and smothering the flames. With a little bit of luck and some lateral wind, we won the battle and went home. 

Hours passed uneventfully. Then there came a knock at the door. One of my friends stood on the stoop next to his dad. My heart practically stopped. 

My friend’s dad filled my dad in on what had happened. With every word that passed, my father’s rage grew as fast as that brushfire. After they had left, he turned to me and said one simple and entirely unexpected thing:

“Where was your self-discipline?”

Now, courtesy of one of the most disciplined men I know, I pose that same question to you.

Where is Our Self-Discipline?

Society has evolved rapidly, with the last ten years alone spawning huge innovations in technology, population expansion, globalization, and leadership. And yet in other, more subtle ways, we have regressed. It has become more acceptable to withdraw from accountability. Truth has slowly been replaced with whatever makes us comfortable. We’ve stopped telling people what they need to hear in favor of what will make them happy. We make excuses for people’s bad behavior in order to avoid difficult conversations. As a result, many people feel disconnected, even irrelevant, from those around them.

Our minds are often geared to resist change, whether out of laziness, risk avoidance, or fear. To combat this resistance requires finding a purpose, such as serving others. But without the will to act, people remain in a state of limbo. They have a lot of ideas but rarely have the calloused knuckles of a person who does the work to make them a reality. To borrow a phrase, they are all talk and no action. 

Recognizing this and finding the will to change is the start of how to improve self-discipline.

The Art of Doing What’s Necessary–Whether You Want to Or Not

If we do not discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us.

-William Feather

During my military career, I met some of the most disciplined people in the world. They would stop at nothing to achieve the goals required for their individual and team success. If they were scared, they bit their lip and did it anyway. If they were underperforming, they trained harder. If they were hurt, they found another way to contribute. If they did not figure out how to improve their own self-discipline, you can bet their superiors would do it for them.

In civilian life, you don’t have a commanding officer or a unit of other soldiers that will hold you accountable. If you do not follow through on the tasks you set for yourself, it will be your own loss. Therefore, you have to be responsible for how you improve your self-discipline on your own.

How to Improve Your Self-Discipline in Three (Not So Easy) Steps

Perform An Honest Self-Evaluation

If you struggle with how to improve your self-discipline, start by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. Do you only do things when influenced by others?
  2. Do you understand your purpose? Does it influence your daily activities and behaviors?
  3. Do you routinely blame external influences or people for your failures?
  4. Do you judge other people on their lack of performance? Do you judge your own lack of performance on the same scale?
  5. Are you unhealthy in body and mind?
  6. Are you lazy?

If you can’t answer any of these questions, or if the answer you give is unfavorable, then you need to examine further:

  1. Why are you in this unfavorable circumstance? More specifically, what was your role in the events that brought you to this point?
  2. Do you have the ability and the interest in taking the necessary steps to change it?

It’s not easy, but if you’re really struggling, this is how to jumpstart your improved self-discipline.

Get Used to Accountability

Think about the New Year’s resolution you made. Did you follow through on your goal or not? If not, did you take responsibility for that decision? 

It is not someone else’s responsibility to fix your job, your finances, your relationships, or your life. If you want to improve your self-discipline, you must own your behavior, your attitude, and your results. When you make a mistake or do something wrong, you must accept responsibility without making excuses or redirecting the blame.

Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Regardless of what we might want, life is never going to be easy. Our existence plays out in an environment full of chaos, uncertainty, and friction. By placing our fate in the hands of that environment, we surrender control of our own futures.

Most people avoid discomfort like the plague. But if you’re looking for how to improve self-discipline, it’s time to start seeking it out. The more uncomfortable, the better. Eventually, you will have spent so much time feeling uncomfortable that it will become familiar. Then you will be able to make choices that can significantly improve your life and circumstances, no matter how untenable they once seemed. 

This doesn’t mean you have to jump into a snake pit, proverbial or otherwise. Instead, commit to doing something small that you’ve been avoiding (a phone call, an errand, etc) and get it done. Tomorrow, do something slightly bigger, and so on. This is how you improve self-discipline–by forcing yourself to confront the most tedious or unpleasant items on your to-do list and finish them. You have a lot more control over yourself and your future than you think.

In Conclusion

If you’re seriously looking for how to improve your self-discipline, start by accepting accountability for your actions. Identify behaviors that are counter-productive and stop them. Surround yourself with people that are also on a journey of betterment, but don’t rely on them to do the work for you.

If you want to commit to sustained, long-term success,  I say:

Ad Meliora – Onwards to better things.

As a place to start, you might consider enrolling in the 8-week online leadership training course from The Eighth Mile Consulting. Your self-disciple will be tested with four self-paced modules, plus regular interactive virtual workshops and individualized coaching to keep you accountable. Check out the course description or contact us for more information.

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3 Things Anyone Considering Individual Coaching Should Do First

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that the articles here tend to focus on leadership, group dynamics, projects, resilience, and communication. This article is different. Instead of focusing on the team dynamic, we will shift our attention to the individual–specifically, to those who feel as if life is holding their heads underwater.

Recently there has been an incredible influx of people seeking our help and assistance in the form of individual coaching. In most cases, they have been triggered by a LinkedIn post, podcast, or article that has pointed out a deficit or dissatisfaction they have. The most common complaints we receive involve at least one of the following:

  • A lack of direction
  • An inability to maintain meaningful relationships
  • Frustration in determining what one’s priorities consist of
  • A subtle but consistent straying from one’s values
  • Resilience refocusing

In nearly all cases, the individual believes they have exhausted their own ability to fix their problems. They are seeking an objective, external force to act as a circuit breaker for their dysfunctional thought processes. Thus, they turn to the concept of individual coaching.

But that move might be premature. In almost all instances, the person has been operating within a suite of assumptions and beliefs that are not serving them (or the people around them) well. Adjusting some of those thought processes first will lay the groundwork to make any future individual coaching even more fruitful.

Before You Begin Individual Coaching

Prior to enrolling in customized or individual coaching sessions, there are three concepts you should get comfortable with first. For some of you, these three ideas might be all you need to get yourself on the right track. For others, the structured guidance of individual coaching might still be needed.

1) Be of Service

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

– Mahatma Ghandi

You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating: Life is not all about you.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that frowns upon criticism, promotes a scarcity mentality, and accepts ‘the blame game’ and fingerpointing instead of demanding accountability. What this amounts to is disconnection on a major scale. So many people are without direction because all their energy is invested in service of themselves.

If you want direction, the easiest place to start is by finding a worthy cause. If you want to cut off the internal rehashing of your own problems, invest that precious time towards solving someone else’s. They might even return the favor one day, which could provide that outsider’s perspective you’re looking for.

2)  Own Your Decisions. ALL of Them.

Life is the sum of all your choices.

– Albert Camus

Every situation demands choice, and each choice will result in a different outcome. In some cases, our choices might include a decisive action (take a new job or not, stay in a team or not, go left or right). 

In other cases, though we might not have control over the action, we can still choose to reframe how we view it. 

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

– Viktor Frankl

 

The moment we feel we are without choices is the moment we become truly powerless. But that’s the thing: no matter what the situation, we are never without a choice. You always have with you the tools that need to claim your power. 

Ironically, this can be a somewhat scary proposition. It means that you are where you are because of your previous choices, and where you go depends on what choices you make from here. If you have power over every choice, whether active or reactive, then you, and you alone, bear the responsibility for their results.

3) Prepare to Sacrifice

The price of excellence is discipline. The cost of mediocrity is disappointment.

– William Arthur Ward

If you want to effect significant change in your life, you need to be willing to invest significantly in the outcome. Whether that is time, money, energy, or vulnerability, this investment will take commitment. 

Do not be lazy when it comes time to do the hard work. To make your self-improvement a priority, you will likely have to move other things down the to-do list. You might also have to endure some unpleasant things, such as:

  • Physically or emotionally stressful circumstances
  • Removing toxic people from your life
  • Learning new skills
  • Spending money on personal development (such as individual coaching)
  • Disappointing people if you determine certain projects are no longer in line with your priorities
  • Committing to late nights and early mornings
  • Being honest with others so that they might help you out of your rut

Whatever is needed or required for you to refocus your life, you are the one behind the wheel. Will you take the smooth, easy road, or will you venture into untraveled terrain? In other words, what comforts are you willing to give up in order to get where you want to go?

Next Steps: Individual Coaching with The Eighth Mile 

The areas of service, choice, and sacrifice can and should be custom-fitted to each person’s circumstances. However, based on our experience at The Eighth Mile, adopting a mentality geared toward service and accountability is a proven step in the right direction. 

If you feel you still need assistance in the form of individual coaching, please reach out to us and we will be happy to discuss your circumstances further. Other areas that often require attention include: 

  • Letting go of resentment 
  • Priority and goal-setting
  • Building rapport with others 
  • Communicating with empathy
  • Leadership skills 

If you want a training experience that mirrors the classroom but can still be conducted on your own schedule, then you may benefit from our 8-week online leadership training course, which includes several individual coaching sessions in addition to training modules and virtual workshops.

Whatever path you take from here, remember that no matter what the situation, you are never powerless. Whether through action or reaction, the choice is always yours to make.

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