“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.”
The quote above was from Andrew Stephen Grove, former CEO of Intel, speaking about the Pentium Processor flaw of December 1994.
Andrew Stephen Grove was a Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, author and pioneer in the semiconductor industry. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the United States, where he finished his education. He was the third employee and eventual third CEO of Intel, helping transform the company into the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors. He knows what it takes to thrive through hard times. Do you?
2020 has been a challenging year for us all. It’s up to us leaders to show our team how to face adversity and push past it. We don’t ignore the problems but we do not let them keep us stuck and frozen with fear. We need to break past the grip of fear and take our teams with us.
Get a grip – things are not that hard today. World War II was hard – this is just annoying.
Mom always said there are two things you are not allowed to worry about; things you can fix and things you can’t fix.
1. If you can fix it – do it and move on.
2. If you can’t fix it – leave it with GOD and go work on what you can fix.
Fear is causing many leaders and their teams to wait and hope things will get better soon. We need to find ways to capture each issue and move it to a place of action now, or to “re-frame” it to find a new way to see the opportunity.
For example, I felt my business would never reach its potential because I was bad at sales. FEAR. So I needed to fix that. I started taking sales training classes from Frank Gustafson of Sandler Sales Training here in DFW. My close rate moved from under 10% to over 70% this year! Problem fixed.
Some problems are outside of our control to change so if we can’t fix it, we need to change the way we see it, we need to “re-frame” it. Instead of saying you are a prisoner of your home because of Covid-19, re-frame this to say you are protecting your family from this crazy pandemic while we find a solution. This may seem like a subtile difference but we need to find ways to move past fear and onto solutions.
If you want excuses for why you can’t do something, there are plenty to find. Nobody will believe in you unless you do first.
Visit www.15excuses.com to read how to reframe or solve your way past your fears. Stop accepting excuses and start finding solutions.
Your employees, business partners, suppliers, customers and family members are counting on you. Now is the time to show they can count on you to lead with excellence. If you need help, contact me to learn about our groups for business owners and CEOs here in DFW.
Robert Hunt