Online Extra: Survival Guide

Scenario 1: Your team has lost a major bid. One that your bosses considered a must win. How do you salvage your team's morale so they can bounce back?

Scenario 2: Your project has fallen behind. The customer is unhappy. The bosses are unhappy. People on the team are getting angry. Feelings are hurt. How do you turn the situation around?

Scenario 3: You have a great team, the project is hitting all its milestones. How do you keep it going?

Scenario 4: A member of your team was your star, but now his performance is off. He works hard, but misses deadlines and the quality of his work is poor. What is the best way to restore his confidence and improve performance?

Scenario 5: Your company has bought a competitor. People you and your team once wanted to pummel are now co-workers. How do you get people to work together?

WT: How did you get started in sports psychology?

Llewellyn: I went to Florida State and earned my Ph.D. in 1972. I concentrated in motor performance and sports psychology was an outgrowth of that.
Then I taught sports psychology on graduate level for over 12 years and worked with some athletes.
The Montreal Expos was my first baseball team in 1975. I worked with different teams and different sports and that side of the business got to be a lot more fun and I left teaching in 1983.
When I started working with athletes, I also began to speak at corporate events about winning and what it takes to be successful versus just surviving. Since that time, I have done probably as much or more in the corporate environment as I have in sports.
But my visibility has come from sports.

WT: How does sports relate to business?

Llewellyn: They are basically the same. What I have done with the corporate programs, with speeches and with long-term programs, is just take the concepts that I use in sports psychology and use those in business. Such things as treating stress as an asset and thriving on it. Learning some mental skills to recover faster from adversity, which is particularly important in sales. Treating emotion as an important asset to supplement your talent.
Business and sport are both competitive. In sports, if you don't perform, you get released. In business, if you don't perform, you get fired. So there is just tons in common.
You play to win everyday. If you don't play to win, you shouldn't play the game. Or if you don't play to win, you shouldn't be in the company.

Most companies have a lot of role players, star players, but they all play to win. And the breakdown is about the same ? coaches, managers, players. It is about the same.
Every corporate meeting you go to, and I speak to maybe 45 to 50 corporate conventions a year, you hear somebody at some point, refer to the company as his team, getting to first base, or hitting a grand slam, all the sport analogies are used.

WT: Let's get to the scenarios.

Scenario 1: Your team has lost a major bid. One that your bosses considered a must win. How do you salvage your team's morale so they can bounce back?

Llewellyn: I hear this a lot, but I question anybody's motivation when they talk about a must-win deal, a must-win account.
My philosophy is real simple: You do what you do everyday as well as you possibly can do it, which means you play to win everyday, which means that all contracts are basically of equal importance as far as the energy you put into it.
If, in fact, everybody has talent and you supplement that with aggression, anxiety under control and high energy, then you never adapt a must-win mentality. Every contract is important.

If you position to your people that this is a must win deal, you've done two things. No. 1, you have put a ton of pressure and anxiety on people. And the other issue that maybe more important is that it can have a morale effect on your people.
It can have a morale effect because if people are there not working on that "must-win" contract, then their efforts and their contracts and their contributions are seen as less important in their eyes.
If you don't get the contract, the other issue is that once you analyze what you did and what worked and didn't work, you use your assets to move ahead.

The last thing you want is to cause your people to play to not lose.Because if I told you this was a must win deal, and it doesn't happen, [then] right away, you have the perception we are in trouble. What do you do? Do you play to win, when you just got chewed up and spit out or do you start playing to not lose? You start protecting yourself and you really aren't playing to win.

So that's the issue that you got to deal with.
What you do, you give your people some tools so that if these things happen again, you'll react better.

No. 1: You teach them how to recover faster from adversity. Assuming that if you have talent and you get in adversity, you'll recover over time. We know that.
The question is how long does it take you to recover.
If they lost this contract, how long are they going to lick their wounds? How many contracts are they going to miss over the time it takes them to recover?
If they have a mental vehicle they can use and pull out of their bag to help them recover in a matter of hours, then you eliminate that problem.
Speed of recovery needs to be taught.

No. 2: Review the assets and liabilities of the people, the assets and liabilities of the company, and then you get back up to the emotional edge and you use those assets to play to win every day.

There is a natural tendency when you have adversity to use your energy to avoid your liabilities?Why did we miss the deal? What did we do wrong? What don't we have??as opposed to looking at the assets and saying, maybe there were some things we couldn't control.
You want to help your people keep track of the assets, because they are going to drift to the other side if they don't.
Also give them some mental vehicle to thrive on the stress.
Is the stress going to kill your folks or is the stress going to cause them to become better?
Most people perceive stress as a negative thing. In a situation like this scenario, stress is a positive thing. You didn't get [the contract], why didn't you get it and what can you do to get the next one? It is stressful, but it is something that is going to make you better the next time.

WT: What are some of those tools?

Llewellyn: If you want to help people recover faster from adversity, they need to have a clear understanding up front, and probably need to sit down and write out, their assets and liabilities.
When people are feeling bad, it is a good time to review their assets.
The next thing to do is to teach people how to pull up things that they did in the past that were successful mentally.
For example, I hit a bad shot in golf. So I don't carry that baggage to the next shot, before the next shot, I pull up a shot I hit that was really good and I mentally see that shot before I hit.
If I miss this account, then I have to pull up some previous meetings or previous presentations where I was very successful and review those.

You store everything you do and of course the negative file is full and the positive file has plenty of room left ? in most people. So you are not trying to forget the negative thing, you are just trying to replace it with more positive things.
Once you visualize something you were successful at and do well, that helps you to get back and appreciate your assets.

Scenario 2: Your project has fallen behind. The customer is unhappy. The bosses are unhappy. People on the team are getting angry. Feelings are hurt. How do you turn the situation around?

Llewellyn: There are two things you do. No. 1, you have to chat with your people as a group and then follow that group meeting with individual meetings to personalize the message.
In other words, here are the generic things, here are the things that happened to us. Then meet individually so you can personalize and they will feel a part of it.

You probably have two types of people. You have people who have a fear of failure. They are going to blend into the group and not except any responsibility. You need to get to those folks individually and let them know what their responsibilities are.
You may also have people who have a fear of success, which is a real issue in the corporate environment. It is an issue we don't deal with very much.

For example, there are probably a lot of people in the technology industry who have a fear of success. They would rather be part of the team but not the star. They've got security, they've got a job, they are going to be okay, but they don't have the accountability of the number one person in the company. That is the reason you need to meet with folks to personalize and give them some accountability.
Explain to them that you can use 20/20 hindsight and create a survival mentality, but if you use 20/20 hindsight you are going to only be survivors at best.

Or you can choose to go another route and put together a plan that starts from this day forward. You can kill yourself talking about what we didn't do. The bottom line is: We are behind, the deadlines haven't been met, we are not doing well. The question is not really why; the question is where do we go from here. What assets do we have that will make us better?
It is a different way of saying: I know we are behind, but the folks who want to win step forward, the other folks pack your bags.
You don't want the folks who are going to sit around and lick their wounds. Those folks are never going to get you to the front.
I also think the best way to win them over as a leader is you have to accept accountability from the start. You've got to accept accountability as the leader because there are things you obviously didn't do or you would have nipped this thing in the bud before it ever got this far.
Once you do that, then you win a certain respect from your folks and they are more likely to buy into what you are saying.

WT: Is it hard to convince executives and managers to accept responsibility?

Llewellyn: It is. You've got people with pretty big egos in those positions. You've got people who a lot of times are not real open and don't want to show an emotional crack in their armor. So it is tough. But once you do it, they understand in pretty short order they are where they are because of their people.
I always say what we need to remember is if the players quit, the coach gets fired.
It is a pretty simple deal. If you don't have the confidence of your people and you can't help your people dig out of a situation like this, then they are not going to play for you.
You either fire 100 people in the company or you fire the CEO. And it is quicker, cleaner and easier to fire the CEO.
So you've got to win your folks over first.

Again, you go back to the first scenario we talked about: You've got to make sure your people have the mental tools to help them recover from adversity, to help them thrive on stress. To help them use their emotions as assets. We assume that technology and talent will take us to the ends of the earth. I think a lot of technology companies have proven that to be wrong.
We have got to do a better a job?in that field especially?of giving people mental tools to help them over situations.

WT: How do you teach thriving on stress?

Llewellyn: You sit down and make certain assumptions.
No. 1, stress is always going to be a part of your life. Anyone who presents a stress management seminar and tells you that they are going to teach you how to eliminate all the stress in your life is lying to you because stress is a part of your life everyday. You have stress sitting, you have stress talking, you have stress walking, you have stress on your body all the time. So don't lie to me and tell me that we are going to eliminate stressors.
Rather, tell me to sit down and list all the stressors I can think of in my life.
Then make a second list and determine which of those can be incentives or positive influences in what you do professionally and personally.
Then have another list of those that you can eliminate?and you can eliminate some. Those are the controllables.
Then have that third list, which should be relatively short, of those stressors that are just always going to be a negative, are always a pain in the tail. And they are going to be there, come hell or high water and are going to be there everyday the rest of your life. Those, you just got to learn to live with them. Or you can run away from them, succumb to them and have a heart attack and die.
Or you can take control and use stressful situations and make yourself better and probably be better than you ever imagined you could be.

It is your choice to make. I worked with one guy 29 years old, recovering from his second heart attack from stress. I worked a lot of people in their 20s who had heart attacks that were stress related. My comment to them is it is your own fault. You let it happen most of the time.
When the tech industry really got rolling, how many people did you know who were around 30 years old and all they could think about is retiring at 35? I had a friend in the tech industry who was going to retire at 35. He was 33, already left his family because they took up too much time. He was doing well. Then he was 34 years old and had a heart attack, dead. Retired early. The issue is, whose fault was that?

We've got to keep track of the stressors in our lives and the ones we can use and the ones that try everyday to use us.
On paper it is a relatively easy thing to do, but it is difficult to execute. I don't argue that for a heartbeat. It takes time, a lot of energy. But the point is how much better can it be if you control the stressors in your life that are actual controllable and use them to help you. A lot of people don't.
A classic example: The further behind we get, there is a tendency to focus on the end of the project rather than focusing on what can I do this afternoon that is going to get me back on track.
If I have a baseball player and I ask him what he wants to accomplish as a hitter for the year and he says, "I want to hit .300." He can think about that .300 batting average all summer and come up short, or he can take that .300 and back it up and determine what he has got to do March 13 in spring training the next day to contribute to the .300.
One way to keep from getting behind is to make sure that people have something every single day related to the end result. And if, in fact, they accomplish that, [then] they can reward themselves. It gives them some incentive to go the next day.

Scenario 3: You have a great team, the project is hitting all its milestones. How do you keep it going?

Llewellyn: When I speak at a convention, 95 percent of the people want the theme of winning versus surviving. It is interesting because the company that is successful has a bigger challenge than the company that hasn't won. If everything is going well and everything is on a roll, there is a tendency on the part of people to get complacent and just ride it out.
If you assume, for example, that it takes everybody in your company for the company to win and it only takes one person in the company to cause it to lose, then this is a critical situation. So have in mind, whatever you do with these folks, it needs to be an effort to head off any complacency.

One quick way is to use more short-term rewards. You can have weekly rewards or rewards everything three or four days, or rewards when a certain segment or deal is done, instead of waiting until the end of the year and having the big hoedown.
The other thing is, if you doing well, it is a tremendous opportunity to document successes so that team members will have something to recall and visualize to keep their direction. If they get off track on future projects, then they have something to recall and visual to keep on track. When you are doing well, it is not only tremendous for the present, but you have got to hold on to those things for the future.

The one thing you don't want to do that I see a lot in companies: You don't want to use the success you are having now to create unrealistic expectations for the future. It is a natural tendency to say, "We went to $2 billion this year, then, heck, next year we should do $2.5 billion or $3 billion." You don't want to create a fear of success.
Fear of success happens when somebody doesn't want to accept increased expectations, increased accountability, higher levels of performance.

The thought process is: Why not let me make my goal and go home? As opposed to making 125 percent, and then next year that 125 percent is my goal. So now I've got to do 150 percent.
You don't want to cause people to think that just because they are doing well, you expect twice as much next year?even though you might.
You don't want your people walking around saying, "The more we do the more they expect." You want people to try to win every day.
If you have some talent in golf, you can get on a roll and do well almost in spite of yourself. But it doesn't mean that if I go out and shoot 78, then I expect to go out and shoot a 78 everyday. That is a joke.
But I can go out everyday and try to hit a good shot every time I hit it, and if 78 is the result, then so be it.

Scenario 4: A member of your team was your star, but now his performance is off. He works hard, but misses deadlines and the quality of his work is poor. What is the best way to restore his confidence and improve performance?

Llewellyn: The common thread that runs through all five of these scenarios is the assets and liability issue. You have this situation everyday in both business and sports. You've got to determine first if this person for some reason might have developed a fear of success.
He was so good, he was doing so well, and he was always a star. Did he just get tired of the attention and having those expectations? Did he just decide to drop back a little bit? Did he watch other people and say, "These folks are doing okay and they don't have all this attention and they are making good money to take vacations and retire. So maybe I'll just drop back into that group."

That happens. And it happens more often than we think. Many times perceived hard work is a good cover for some deeper issue. If a person has lost confidence, if a person has that fear of success, if there are some other things that have happened, and they don't have a handle on them, they'll work longer and harder. And get less done.
And we look at them, and think, "God, they are working hard, putting in more time than they ever had, but they are getting less done."
Well, there are some insecurities there from something, and the hard work may be a symptom that they want to do real well or it may be a symptom that they are covering the reasons they aren't doing real well.
There may be some self-doubt for example.
Self-doubt is one of those personality traits that never rears its ugly head until you get into adversity and then it makes it harder to recover. Like a pitcher who suddenly can't throw strikes. If he has got a high level of self-doubt, it is going to make it much harder to get back to where he was. If he is very self-assured, it is going to make it easier to get back.

So your personality is a real big influence here.
The first thing I'd do is I'd sit down with him. I'd review his assets and liabilities. I'd review what I thought they were and I'd have him tell me what he thought they were.
What's happened eight times out of 10 is he has stopped using his assets and started working off his liabilities. In other words, when he started not doing so well and had a couple setbacks and he forgot about his assets. He is supposed to be the star, so all of a sudden, he's trying not to screw up.
Once you've sat down reviewed the assets and liabilities, you have to make sure you write out some very specific actions to cause them to use their assets. It may be daily, it may be every two days, but you are going to check them.

Make sure they are measurable things and that they are specific, but that they are difficult. In other words, they have to stretch the emotions a little bit. But you have to get them back on track, where he is recognizing the value of his assets.
You might even have him spend time with less tenured people. Younger folks, where he actually has to teach people and use his assets. A star employee can be like a hitter, all of sudden he quits trying to hit and tries not to strike out.

John Smoltz, the pitcher, his record was 2 and 11 at the 1991 All Star break when we started working together. He has a ton of talent, the No. 1 guy?or should have been, talent wise. He'd pitch well and lose and pitch poorly and lose. So he had started pitching to not lose. He'd just try not to mess up.
Once we put together a program, he threw every pitch with the intention that it was to help him win. The second half of the year, he was 12 and 2. It was the biggest pitcher turnaround since 1918. And we went to the World Series.
It is incredible, if you have talent, what you can do if you spend a little time trying to work on your mental development.

Another example, Paul O'Neill, played right field for the Yankees. He was probably .250 to .260 hitter when he came over from the Reds. He goes to New York and for the first time started working on the mental part of his game. Never changed his swing, never changed his mechanics. He began developing himself mentally, Going up to the plate every swing and trying to hit the ball hard as opposed to trying to not miss it.
Paul O'Neill became the first Yankee in history to hit over .300 for six straight years.

WT: What do you teach people?

Llewellyn: Visualization techniques and focusing techniques. When to concentrate and when not to concentrate. It is my philosophy too, [that] whatever you do, [do it] every day at as high an emotional level as you can control. In other words, you've got to be right there on the edge everyday, if you are going to separate yourself. If you want to separate yourself and be really good at what you do, you've got to use your emotions as a supplement.
Your emotions do one of two things for you: They either help you become better or they become a detriment. They never lie dormant in your system.

A lot of people don't realize that unless you consciously control your emotions, in tough situations they will drift to the "don't-fail" side every time, because we are raised and trained from birth to respond to negative expectations.
By the time a normal child is 18 years old, they have been told 186,000 times what not to do. So is it any wonder that when we go into business, when we have some adversity, how are we going to deal with it? We are going to try not to lose, because we are conditioned for that.

WT: Is this what makes people resistant to change?

Llewellyn: Yes, no question, because with change you are going to have adversity. It has nothing to do with your physical ability or your talent. It has to do with how strong you are mentally most of the time.
You have got to consciously make an effort to make yourself stronger mentally and there just aren't many companies that spend time on that.

Scenario 5: Your company has bought a competitor. People you and your team once wanted to pummel are now co-workers. How do you get people to work together?

Llewellyn: When the banks wanted to be a one-stop shop and brought brokers into the banks, I spoke at the first meeting of bankers and brokers. It was a dinner. You could pick them out. The bankers were measuring the food, and talking in low tones. The brokers were having food fights.
I did a meeting when Chase and Chemical banks merged. Big, big deal in New York. I spoke at the first meeting where they had the managers of the branch banks. Some of these branches were across the street from each other, so it is not a complicated thing to realize that some folks are going to lose their jobs. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife; the anxiety was incredible.
But I think you spend less time trying to get people to love and hug each other. Initially, what you have to do is move away from the hard business issues and help people understand what they bring to the party.

Again, we are talking about assets and liabilities. If you are from Business Objects, for example, and I'm from Oracle, and all of the sudden we merge one day, what assets do you bring that makes me better and what assets do I bring that will make you better?
You are going to find if you do that, No. 1, you are going to be giving folks, in front of each other, credit for having these assets. No. 2, you are going to start to build a network between the two groups. You try to build small groups so that people are using their assets to help other folks. That is a real practical, easy, quick thing to do.

At the same time, you are recognizing the value of people on both sides.I think when you start pounding people with stockholder value issues, I think you most often are going to alienate those people who are most talented and you are going to lose those people. And when you lose those people, you are going to lose.
How many companies have set up early out programs and the better people leave?
I once worked with a company that laid off 30,000 people at one time. Two months later, I'm on a plane with someone who works for that company. I ask her, "What do you do?"
She said, "My title's marketing vice president."
I said, "What do you do though?"
She said, "Nothing. I'm just trying to stay out of the vision of the top people."
My question is: If she is the vice president, how do her people feel? So you can lose good people and you cause paranoia in the other people that are left.

I don't know why CEOs think they need to stand in front and say we did this for stockholder value. They must have some reason to do it. We aren't stupid. If they are a public company, what other reason could there be? So don't hound me with that.
Most of the time, the more elite your performers, the more mentally fragile they are.
For example, I work with a NASCAR driver, who may be the best driver in the world. Let's say, for example, you've got a car and it is an 8-cylinder, but it is running on 6, but it gets you to work and back. That's okay.
But let's say, he is on the Atlanta raceway and he has to do 195 to keep up and one of his cylinders goes out. What happens? Or a spark plug? A little bitty thing like a gap on spark plug. That doesn't hurt your car, but it is devastating to him.
Athletes and elite business people are that way. The better they get, the more important the little things become.
Technology, for example. If you aren't very good but are willing to learn, you can make some big mistakes, but you are going to get better because you've got tons to go. But if you are really, really good. You are at the top, and you make a little bitty mistake, how devastating is that? People go nuts.

We have a couple books and this one book is a summary of my program. When it came out, I was so bothered that I found a couple words misspelled. You are talking about 200 some pages, but it bothered me because it is mine. Other people read it and I guarantee it, 99 out of 100 people wouldn't even see those words.
Technology is a people industry. I've done meetings with a lot of companies that do warehousing software. The interesting thing was, the audience were all sales people and they had all worked for the other companies. I always thought it was like baseball, you get fired and you just go to another team. Once you are in, you're in.
Technology companies are hopefully beginning to realize there are a lot of folks who make good products. It is the people who make the difference and separate you from other folks. That hasn't always been the way. They've always felt you get the smartest, brightest people and we'll be the best, which is absolutely not the case.

WT: What is the key to keeping your people concentrating on assets and liabilities?

Llewellyn: There are things that have become more important to companies in the past few years. One thing companies need to address in a conscious manner is the balance issue.
Young people who work seven days a week, 24 hours a day and retire early, but they lose their balance in the process. They may retire at 35, but they are miserable people. I work with some athletes that are miserable people but have all the money in the world.

So my position has always been: You have never really won unless you win personally and professionally.
Once you understand why you do what you do, then you begin to understand the whole balance issue. Peel away the money, the positions, the promotions. Peel away all those things and try to determine if something in the job gives you some kind of intrinsic fulfillment.
Probably one of the reasons you do what you do is to support your personal life. If you've thrown your family into turmoil for your job, then you have lost track of why you do what you do. So the balance issue is a critical issue that is being addressed more now in companies. Not all of them, but more.
I've had people tell me, I work 18 hours a day. Well, there is one of two things going on: Either you don't know what you are doing or you've got bad people working around you.

There is no job in the universe that should take 18 hours a day. It doesn't mean you don't have to do it every now and then. I'm not saying that. But you don't do it as a lifestyle. You have to address balance consciously as an issue, otherwise people won't think about it.
Another thing people don't deal with unless things are going to hell in a hand basket is chemistry. Nobody ever talks about chemistry until you don't have it. So you need to talk about it, the team chemistry.

You have to have something that promotes chemistry on the team so people develop mutual respect for each other. Chemistry is a key issue and it is one that is never addressed until you don't have it.

WT: Is chemistry a matter of encouraging people to "like" each other?

Llewellyn: I don't think it is "like." That might come out of it as a result, but it is more like "respect."
You teach people to respect what the other players bring to the team. You don't have to like them, you don't have dinner with them, you don't have to hang out with them, but teach people to respect what other people bring to the team.
And you let people know that you understand that if the players quit, the coach gets fired. That you are going to do whatever you can to help your folks be successful. And sometimes you have to tell folks that, because it doesn't appear that way.