Think about the times in your life when you have felt most alive and engaged. Who and what were you focused on in those moments—on yourself or on something bigger that included others?
Captain Rob Newson, a career Navy SEAL and longtime leader in the Special Operations community, provided an interesting insight on this question when he described the difference between those who successfully complete SEAL qualification training and those who don’t. SEAL candidates can quit whenever they want by ringing a bell that hangs at the side of their training area. “I can say with certainty,” Captain Newson says, “when those who quit took the first steps toward the bell: the moment they stopped thinking about the mission and their teammates and started thinking primarily about themselves. So long as they stay focused on the mission and those around them, they can get through anything. But the moment they start focusing inward and fixating on how cold, wet, and tired they are, it is not a matter of if they will ring out but when.”
Captain Newson’s advice to those who wish to successfully complete one of the most difficult training regimens in the world is to focus on the mission and on those around them. His prescription is the outward mindset.
Our organizational clients find it helpful to apply the outward mindset in the four basic directions of work depicted in diagram 11.
Diagram 11. The Outward Mindset at Work
A person conceiving her work in the way illustrated in this diagram is alive to and interested in the needs, objectives, and challenges of each of the persons toward whom she has responsibility—toward her customers, direct reports, peers, and manager. The outwardly facing triangles show that her objectives and behaviors take these people’s needs, objectives, and challenges into account. As Captain Newson recommends, her focus is outward on something much larger than herself—on her essential contribution to the overall goals of the organization. And thinking of her role in this way requires her to focus on doing her work in a way that helps others to do theirs.
The power of this outward-mindset approach can be seen in the results of an innovative debt-collection agency that has built its entire mission and strategy in the way depicted in the outward-mindset-at-work diagram. The company is CFS2, headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Bill Bartmann, founder and CEO of CFS2, has known his own hard times. Having been hounded by debt collectors himself, he wanted to build a debt-collection company that worked differently—which is to say, outwardly.
Bill and his company focus on treating those who are in debt with dignity and respect. They operate from the premise that their clients owe them money precisely because they don’t have enough money to pay them. The typical approach to debt collection—an inward-mindset approach—is to browbeat those who owe money until you squeeze whatever you can out of them. An outward-mindset approach, on the other hand, begins with thinking about these people and what they are up against. Those who take this approach are alive to and interested in the challenges these people are facing, and their mission is to help them with those challenges.
With this approach, Bill Bartmann and his people began collecting debt not by squeezing their clients for money but by figuring out how they could help them make money. Bill asked his entire workforce to begin brainstorming and experimenting to see how they could best help their clients get jobs. At first, they tried giving their clients advice and suggestions about what to do. But this didn’t seem to help much. They huddled as a company to figure out how to be more helpful, and one of Bill’s employees offered this observation: “They can’t do the heavy lifting themselves—they’re so beat down they have no get-up-and-go left.”1
So the employees of CFS2 began writing résumés for their clients. They began looking for job opportunities for them, helping them fill out applications, and scheduling job interviews. They ran mock interviews with their clients to prepare them for the real thing. And they even began calling their clients on the mornings of their appointments to get them out of bed early enough to arrive at the job interview on time!
From there they began helping in other ways. Any headache in their clients’ lives became an opportunity to help. In an interview with Harvard Business Review, Bill talked about how they get requests now for all kinds of help—from food stamps to child care to home repairs.2 CFS2 has identified a myriad of organizations that exist to help people in need with these and many other services, and Bill’s team brings in these organizations to help meet the needs of their clients. And they do all this for free. In fact, Bill rewards his employees not for how much debt they collect but for how many free services they can provide to their clients!
From an inward-mindset perspective, this all seems crazy. But the results speak for themselves. After just three years in the industry, CFS2’s rate of collection was two times that of any firm in the industry.3 Clients feel helped by the people at CFS2—some even financially rescued by them. And because their clients have money they didn’t have before, they have resources to pay to CFS2. CFS2 has become a partner—even a friend—that they want to pay.
We see in the CFS2 story how an outward-mindset approach can mobilize an entire company to work on behalf of its customers—not just to provide a product or service but to enthusiastically innovate to meet the customers’ needs and help them achieve their own objectives. Inward-mindset people and organizations do things. Outward-mindset people and organizations help others to be able to do things.
CFS2 provides a good example of an outward-mindset approach with external customers. The same approach can be applied inside organizations—toward peers, direct reports, and managers.
Consider the example of the longtime NBA juggernaut, the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs have remained dominant in the NBA long past the time many have predicted they would decline. They have been able to do this despite the aging of key players, the annual turnover of many members of the team, and would-be challengers that have fallen and risen and fallen again. When you play the Spurs, you play a dynamically adaptive outward-mindset organism. We say organism because they are so alive to each other that they appear to act as a single entity. When you watch them play, you notice that the ball doesn’t stick in the hands of any player. The moment it would be more advantageous for the ball to be somewhere else, the ball moves there. There is no ego on the floor that keeps the most advantageous moves from happening.
When asked what kinds of qualities the Spurs look for in players, Coach Gregg Popovich says that they look for players who “have gotten over themselves.”4 A FOXBusiness article expands on this comment and explores how the Spurs’ outward-mindset culture gives them a significant competitive advantage.5 The author attributes the Spurs’ success to four factors: (1) recruiting for and building selflessness and teamwork—what Coach Popovich calls “relationship excellence,” (2) caring for players and staff as people, (3) giving players and staff a voice, and (4) achieving task excellence that is enabled by relationship excellence. “We are disciplined,” Coach Popovich says, “but that’s not enough. Relationships with people are what it’s all about. You have to make players realize you care about them. And they have to care about each other and be interested in each other.”6
This commitment to each other makes the Spurs players feel a heightened obligation to build their skills and consistently perform at their best. Why? Because that is what their teammates need from them. Their teammates need them to become the best they can be. And with an outward mindset, the players feel an obligation to help each other get better. They owe that to one another.
“Popovich understands,” the author of the article writes, “that without relationship excellence, task excellence and superior results are built on feet of clay. Because he intentionally develops relationship excellence among the team, the Spurs are able to achieve task excellence and sustainable superior performance.”7
The Spurs’ coaches and players demonstrate that people are able to achieve far greater results than they alone would be willing or able to do precisely because they have committed themselves to something that is bigger than themselves—an organizational and interpersonal cause that requires the best of each of them. All the members of the Spurs organization—from the general manager to coaches to players—help each other succeed. A lot of teams—most, in fact—are filled with people interested in their own success. Such teams won’t be able to approach the Spurs’ level of sustained success until all individual contributors become as interested in their colleagues’ success as they are their own.
Now that we have explored what the inward mindset looks like interpersonally and in organizations and the very different approach of outward-mindset individuals and organizations, we will explore a proven methodology to move from an inward mindset to an outward mindset.