Unstoppable

Transforming Your Mindset to Create Change, Accelerate Results, and Be the Best at What You Do

Dave Anderson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119412496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Where do you fall on your organization's performance spectrum?

Unstoppable is performance-enhancing manual for those who are ready to change the world. Regardless of talent or skill set, there are four types of people in every organization: Undertakers, Caretakers, Play Makers, and Game Changers—but value is definitely not equal across the board. Game changers move things forward with relentless energy, effort, attitude, and excellence. They elevate those around them, inspire exceptional performance, and drive their organization to the top. This book is designed to help you rise to the challenge and become the Game Changer your organization needs. Candid insights from dozens of coaches, managers, CEOs, journalists, entrepreneurs, and other elite performers reveal the qualities that make some people stand out, and the underlying theme is mindset.

While talent is a great head start, it is merely potential. Undeveloped and erratically-wielded talent holds little value for an organization. The key to high performance is an intentionally cultivated mindset of success, backed by the bold action it takes to make things happen every day. This book delves deep into the elite performance paradigm to help you work at the highest levels.

• Learn what separates the playmakers from the game changers
• Step up your performance with a simple five-step process
• Transform your thinking and develop an unstoppable toughness

• Be the best at what you do, and elevate your entire organization

The performance spectrum is not about classifying your coworkers; it's about self-assessment, self-reflection, and self-improvement. Everyone has star quality, even if it is buried deep inside. Unstoppable helps you uncover your potential, and upgrade your performance to become the best.

Chapter 1
The Undertaker

One who daily does less than he can gradually becomes less than he is.

I won't devote much space to the undertaker performer. Frankly, who they are and what they do is as obvious as it is devastating. Here is a quick summary.

Undertakers Do Sub-Baseline Work

In the next chapter we will discuss the caretaker; and, while the caretaker at least does baseline work (not heroic by any means), the undertaker does not. Undertakers might be nice enough as people, but someone else continually has to carry their load, clean up their mess, or be frantically rushing around performing damage control in their wake. True to his or her classification, the undertaker undertakes and achieves nothing meaningful, and takes under or lowers morale, momentum, your brand, performance outcomes, cultural integrity, and your personal credibility. To exacerbate matters, the costs they inflict are not a one-time lump-sum payment. If only it were that simple! If only you could hold your nose one time, write a single check, and be done with the costs they inflict. But it is not that painless. For as long as you keep them, undertakers will create a torturous form of misery on the installment plan. The cost of keeping undertakers is staggering, and it can eventually put your organization on the endangered species list.

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In essence, an undertaker is essentially unemployed, but still on your payroll. It is not the undertakers you remove from your organization that make you miserable; it's the ones you keep.

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Toxic Achievers Are Undertakers

Despite a cliché to the contrary, the fact is that you can argue with success, if someone is getting it at the cost of violating your values. While the first characterization of undertakers addressed the below-average performer, a toxic achiever is one who may perform well—he or she could even be a top performer—but who also violates your values, can be selfish and divisive, and creates ongoing drama that debilitates culture. Weak leaders tolerate toxic achievers because they produce, but in the process they relegate themselves to heartless, selfish, sellouts. The damage that undertaker toxic achievers do to your culture, credibility, and brand is incalculable. Undoubtedly, well-known undertakers may have come to mind as you read these words—high-profile athletes or hired guns in business who sojourn from team to team performing well and meanwhile poisoning the locker room. But if identifying others who may fit either of these two descriptions was your primary focus, then you have missed the point. While there is a recommended resource in the Appendix of this book to help you identify and develop game changers in your organization, the four performance groups in this book are not first and foremost about anyone else when you consider them; they are about you.

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If you are lazy, selfish, or corrupt, you either won't use or will misuse your talent and make yourself completely expendable in the process.

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How often do you demonstrate the traits in either of the prior two points? How often do you become divisive, bitter, selfish, or territorial; do less than you can; or create messes that others must clean up? To reiterate what I mentioned earlier, we are normally all a blend of the four mindsets from time to time. But, to become unstoppable, it is essential we develop the mindset and focus to think and act as a game changer more consistently, so that it dominates our work and personal life.

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“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”—Leo Tolstoy (AZ Quotes 2017)

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In my work consulting with retail clients like automotive dealers, I frequently observe sales representatives in both undertaker categories. On one hand there is “five-car Fred”—the underachiever—whom no one can count on to lift the team to a new level, and who predictably performs at substandard levels. But there's also “25-car Ted,” who consistently leads the sales board, but thinks his high performance is a permission slip to live above the rules and values that the lesser performers are held accountable for. He comes in late, shortcuts processes, does not attend training, is not overly concerned about the rest of the team, and frequently conducts the “meeting after the meeting” at the watercooler to talk about how what was discussed by management is stupid, is irrelevant, or will never work.

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If toxic achievers threaten to leave because they do not want to live your values, let them go. It's kind of like the trash taking itself out.

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It's the Mindset

Incidentally, undertakers in both categories may be knowledgeable and highly skilled, possess impressive credentials, and be blessed with copious talent. But their mindset is seriously flawed, and all those aforementioned assets and advantages are never fully activated as a result. There are those who spend an inordinate amount of their personal and professional lives demonstrating undertaker characteristics who may be considered largely successful, but still miss their potential by miles.

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No one individual can make another person an undertaker. Rather, undertakers cannot get out of their own way. They are products of their own poor decisions and excel in the art of self-destruction.

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In summary, it is time to acknowledge where your self-destructive mindsets and actions have sabotaged your personal and professional life, and renounce those things immediately. You can change them. No one else but you can. It is not acceptable to do less than you are able. There is no way that is okay.

Nor is it tolerable to do great work but think you are above the values and behaviors that others must adhere to. In fact, that demonstrates an arrogance and selfishness that is disgusting. The great news is that you can change all of this—not by waiting for so...