Live With Purpose

This week's post was written by Doug Post.

At work and at home, leaders live with purpose. Purpose is all about our direction and self-awareness. It's about having a North Star to orient and guide us through the critical issues of life: confronting, choosing, pursuing, and facing reality. Living with purpose is also imminently practical. Imagine a busy employee juggling multiple work responsibilities, parenting a few kids, taking care of a home, contributing at church, and volunteering in her community. Leaders do all this without compromising their values – or their sanity – by living with purpose.

At Interstates, leaders align around our common purpose: the importance of "The Why," our vision, servant leadership, and building relationships through our core values. Our leaders believe that when people throughout Interstates come to share in a larger sense of purpose, we are united in a common destiny. We realize a sense of continuity and identity not achievable in any other way.

Within this framework, Interstates leaders find their unique purposes – their personal mission statements – and they coach their people to do the same. Mission statements were discussed broadly in the late '90s during an Interstates-wide discussion of Stephen Covey's excellent book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. By 2003, writing personal mission statements had become the norm for Excellence in Leadership 1 (EIL 1) attendees who used FMI's Developing Your Mission Statement and peer feedback to better understand who they were and to document their personal mission. This remains an EIL 1 goal today.

Writing a mission statement isn't easy, but it is a powerful exercise in taking ownership of your life. As you grapple with the career component of your purpose, it's good to consider questions like:

1. What struggle or sacrifice are you willing to tolerate? It's liberating to realize "everything sucks, some of the time." If you want to be an entrepreneurial leader, but you can't handle failure, then you're not going to make it far. If you want to be a big-time PM, but you expect a steady 40-hour week with no surprises, then you're done before you start.
2. What did you do for the sheer joy of it when you were a child? What makes you forget to eat and sleep today? You're looking for the cognitive principles behind activities that enthrall you, e.g, self-competition, passion for improving things, organizing, generating new ideas, etc. They can easily be applied elsewhere.
3. How are you going to save the world? What problems are you uniquely equipped to solve? For example, a friend of mine deeply understands the construction environment and finds purpose in improving the industry via day-to-day operations, challenging clients on the status quo, and contributing at industry conferences. Start saving the world by making a difference where you can.
4. If you were given a one-year sabbatical, what would you do tomorrow? The enemy is complacency. It's critical to understand that passion is the result of action, not the cause of it. If something strikes your interest, write it down, then go out and do it.

Living with purpose is knowing who you are, what your North Star is, how you will make decisions, and what your unique contribution will be. Interstates leaders live authentic lives and serve others. They take Abraham Lincoln's warning seriously:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Regardless of how cleverly you package yourself, others will eventually see through your masquerade and recognize you for what you really are.

Before that happens, know yourself and your direction.

Continue leading the Interstates Way! -- Doug Post

Building Client Relationships

This week's post was written by Scott Peterson.

Does “building client relationships” mean being buddy-buddy with a client? That would be a no. Does it mean manipulating a situation and relationship for Interstates' benefit? Definitely not. Building Relationships is really about living our Core Values – Building Relationships through dependability, trust, quality, and family. We want all Interstates leaders to develop well-rounded client relationships. 

These relationships are:

• Mutually beneficial – It’s good for the client and good for Interstates. 
• Professional - We are viewed as a company (and individuals) with credibility, and clients have confidence in us to deliver the results they need. 
• Personal – We are connecting to and/or knowing the individual outside of work.

Applying servant leadership to client relationships is also important. We need to treat our clients with respect, regardless of their titles or positions. Looking for ways to make a difference for our clients is key ("Adding Value"). This could be in the form of passing an interesting article on to them, asking for their feedback, and/or asking hard questions that might challenge some of their assumptions.

There are a lot of examples that would fit here, but I wanted to share just a couple:

• AGP -- Randy Van Voorst and Larry Den Herder have great relationships with several key leaders at AGP. The strength of those relationships allows Randy and Larry to ask harder questions and push AGP for clarity on projects without the fear of losing the client. In fact, AGP has come to expect that push and those questions because they know the reason is to make them better. As the years go on, Randy and Larry have become close friends with that group. They get together for professional and personal events (hunting, fishing, golfing, etc.). Larry and Randy were invited to celebrate with a couple of retiring AGP leaders, which is significant since most of the other attendees were AGP team members. That shows you the depth of their connection. This type of relationship allows them to be direct, vulnerable, resolve issues faster/better, and, most importantly, serve the client better.
• Ardent -- Jake Ten Haken, Michael De Boer, and Bryan Monroe also have awesome relationships with our Ardent clients. They talk, text, and email frequently. Sometimes it's about work and sometimes about their skills (or lack of) related to maneuvering a snowmobile. If you catch the beginning of an Ardent meeting or phone call, you're likely to hear some trash talk. However, at the end of the day, Ardent knows and trusts these guys. Developing these friendships and building this trust has led to more work.

You never know how good a relationship is until it is tested. Therefore, when you face a tough situation with a client, it is really an opportunity – an opportunity for you to show the client what "Great Client Relationships" means. Resolving tough situations by walking with them as a partner will always deepen a relationship. This does not mean roll over –it means do the right thing! Be up-front, be direct, be helpful, and be a partner to them. That's how you build client relationships "The Interstates Way."

Continue leading the Interstates Way! - Scott Peterson