Predictive Leadership: Avoiding the 12 Critical Mistakes That Derail Growth-Hungry Companies

By Kirk Dando

Nothing masks issues and robs an organization of its full potential like success

That's right! Most successful, growth-hungry companies begin to miss their projections or worse, not because demand is low or conditions are difficult, but simply because they don't know how to predict, nurture, or even maintain their own growth and success. At each stage of growth, natural problems are glossed over in the scramble to expand, making the organization vulnerable to chaos, no matter how strong or expert its leaders. Most leaders feel isolated, pressured to build on earlier success and maintain total control – the perfect recipe for the 12 most common and critical mistakes to show up and slow or kill growth.

Kirk Dando, leadership and growth expert, CEO of Dando Advisors, calls these roadblocks the "12 Warning Signs of Success," and has helped leaders across industries predict, prepare, and avoid them at every stage of growth. Predictive Leadership is rich with real-world stories, prescriptive advice on how to scale your business and limit the drama so you can unlock the growth and success you desire.

Maybe you had the right idea but hired the wrong person. Maybe you're running into a leadership bottleneck, having trouble getting your team aligned, unknowingly incentivizing failure, or losing sight of your core values. Dando, known in leadership circles as the "Company Whisperer," has encountered every one of these obstacles himself, as a C-level executive in a high-growth billion-dollar business. He knows firsthand that these moments of truth determine whether you can lead your company to become a strong, mature, and financially sustainable organization, or drift toward an uncertain future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137451798

Kirk Dando

Kirk Dando, CEO of Dando Advisors, is a highly sought-after and well-respected leadership and growth expert whom executive clients call “The Company Whisperer.” He is the author of Predictive Leadership. A former corporate executive, he has helped more than 5,000 executives – including several regional Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year and “Best CEO” winners – overcome common business pitfalls to unlock explosive growth. As seen on Fox Business and Bloomberg Television, executives relate to his real-world stories and his high-energy, no-nonsense style as he demonstrates how leaders can predict problems before they show up in the results. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Book preview

Introduction

I’ve Been There—Here’s How This Book Can Help You

I’ve been there.

What makes this book unique is that I am going to help you predict, prepare and normalize your leadership and growth journey. I have walked in your shoes. I have learned many of these lessons and discovered the best solutions the hard way. Whether you’re leading a small start-up or an established international company, you’ll see yourself in these pages.

I am going to share a little bit about my background because I believe it is important that you understand how I am hard wired, what drives me and why I am so passionate about what I share in this book.

I want you to know you have a friend in the foxhole, someone who has gone before you and is now coming back to help you grow and scale . . . without all the drama. I have practiced, researched, applied and exploited the patterns of what the world’s most successful leaders do differently, the warning signs of their success and how to predict the risks and opportunities before they show up in the results, when it is too late.

I learned a long time ago how to read the tea leaves; to see past the glare and figure out what’s really there; to cut through the chaff and get straight to the heart of the matter. I did this out of necessity, driven by fear and the survival instinct.

I was born in Englewood, Colorado, to a schoolteacher father and a stay-at-home mom, and my life was fairly predictable until I was in the fourth grade. That year, my parents divorced. All of a sudden, my life was in free fall, and I was trying to patch together a parachute on my way to the ground. The sudden pain, uncertainty and loss left me doubting everything and everyone, including myself.

Those words, we are getting a divorce, broke me and upended me in ways that changed me to the core. I had no idea my parents were even unhappy. How could I not have seen this coming? What did I miss? Could I have helped avoid this crisis, this intense fear and pain I was feeling, if I had somehow seen it coming?

I did not know it at the time, but this profound pain and the irrational idea that I could have done something to help save my parents’ marriage if I had recognized the warning signs set me on an unplanned journey that has ultimately served both me and thousands of other leaders extremely well.

Although my story is not your story, I think you will find that we are not all that different. As you read this book, I believe you will come to appreciate and understand the significance of this overly obvious and embarrassingly simple truth.

I have worked with and coached over 5,000 growth-hungry leaders. I have helped lead and grow a business to $1 billion in annual revenues. I have seen the rational and irrational thought processes behind literally millions of decisions, sat in and facilitated countless strategy sessions, been in extremely volatile board meetings and seen entire executive teams get fired. I have sat at the right hand of some of the world’s most recognized leaders while they had major victories and when they had major breakdowns that exposed rawness and vulnerability that few others get to see. This has helped give me a true insider’s view of how high-growth leaders succeed and what really goes on inside their organizations.

Keep reading—I will explain how my story, my journey and what I have learned can serve you well, too!

Part I

A Leader’s Journey

This book is about helping you grow as a leader and helping you predict and prepare for success. I will help bust open the isolation so many leaders feel when growing their team and their organization by shedding light on the sweet little lies success tells you. You will have the logic and data to take the drama out of the journey of leading a great organization that truly changes the world. In this book I will teach you how to navigate the obstacle course that success and growth will inevitably present.

You will hear me say this numerous times in this book: Your details may be different, but the dynamics that growth and success cause are always the same.

Once you understand this important distinction, in business as well as in life, you will see beyond your details and see to the patterns that will enable you to become a predictive leader. You will lead way beyond telling and analyzing the what happened and why story; you and your team will be all about what’s coming. This is what the 12 Warning Signs of Success are all about!

At age 10, faced with the new reality of a broken family, I set out on a journey that would lead to more loss, growth, learning and success than I could have ever imagined. I developed two skills in particular that have served me well in this journey of studying leadership, growth and success. First, I began to pay attention to the dynamics and the patterns in all my relationships. I learned how to read people: their motivations, what made them tick, what made them successful or tripped them up. Second, I developed a never say die, contrarian mentality that drove me to accomplish whatever I set out to do—and prove naysayers wrong. This is the rocket fuel that has driven me to research what is often considered to be mystical and theoretical—success and growth. I had to know, are there patterns found in historical and transactional data that can be exploited to help predict success and growth?

One of my earliest memories of trying out this latter skill was when my big brother, Kevin, bet me (who knew me too well) I could not outrun a BB from my Daisy pump-action BB gun. I remember thinking, "I cannot possibly say no, but maybe if I run in a zigzag pattern, he will miss and I can claim I outran the BB." Well, he didn’t miss. Feeling the sting of the BB on my skin, I remember resolving to never let others define me and determine what I could or could not do. Even after the bruising went away it never occurred to me that trying to out run a BB from a BB gun was a bad idea, it just made me mad and more driven!

After high school I was told that I was not good enough to play Division 1 football, so I walked onto the football team at Colorado State University and earned a full-ride scholarship to play football for four years. While at CSU, the only class I did not get an A in during my freshman year was accounting, so I decided to make it my emphasis in my business major. From the beginning, whatever people—coaches, teachers, colleagues, relatives—told me I couldn’t do was what I wanted to do to prove them wrong.

Since successful leadership requires a certain kind of personality, I’m guessing this habit of getting in way over my head is one that you share or can relate to.

After graduation, through sheer determination and relationship management, I got the opportunity to work for Arthur Andersen in the audit division. I am so grateful for this opportunity and what I learned. I worked with a variety of businesses, helping them grow and improve. It was pretty normal stuff, but what fascinated me most were all the leaders in all the companies I observed and learned from. I remember thinking, There has got to be a pattern that determines what makes a leader successful—or a mess, and I resolved to figure it out! The same irrational resolve I have been explaining to you.

I began watching, reading and learning from some of the world’s most recognized leaders, both good and bad. I would even study them when we went to dinner: how they treated the wait staff; how many people in the restaurant they knew; whether they could remember a colleague’s first name and the names of family members—not just the spouse.

I was part of a pretty big team, and we provided written strategic, practical, organizational and personnel recommendations to our clients about what their companies needed to do in order to improve and grow. But I always wondered why we never just sat down and had the awkward and scary conversations—for example, telling the CEO that the CFO or VP of sales was a jerk, a poor leader who was actually hurting the company’s ability to put a winning team on the field. I figured either the senior partners and managers were having those conversations and I simply wasn’t part of them, or I was just young and had a lot to learn about what worked best in the advice-giving business.

Yet when we showed up at the same company a year later, the same people were still in the same positions, very few of our recommendations had been implemented and the company’s situation was worse, not better. This frustrated me to no end, for I believe that if you are going to play, why not play to win? Firing a brilliant jerk was well within our mandate to recommend and the CEO’s responsibility to handle. Why didn’t it happen until there was a crisis? And believe me, the crisis always came

Reviews for Predictive Leadership

[pencilstubs-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I recently read a book on creative industry management where one of the major points was that instead of focusing on problem prevention, management should focus on enabling employees to become problem solvers. I wanted to read Kirk Dando’s “Predictive Leadership” to see the argument behind the opposite approach—management should focus on problem predicting/preventing instead of problem solving. It definitely makes a ton of sense in a non-creative context.This book is wonderfully thorough with detailed explanations and many real-life examples. It also covers a wide range. There’s chapters dedicated to each of the different levels of growing companies (start-up, hyper-growth and market leader) and the problems typically encountered at these levels. There’s also chapters on the twelve warning signs that a company’s current success is going to lead to problems sooner or later. The methods for predicting/preventing future problems (and solving current problems) seem like they’d be achievable and effective. I’ve read several business books, and this one contains a lot of perspectives and advice that I haven’t seen before. For example, Dando points out that management often goes unknowingly soft with their expectations on employees after a while, when their expectations should remain high permanently. If you have an employee that you’re not thrilled with, but who doesn’t seem bad enough to warrant firing, Dando suggests asking yourself, “If this employee interviewed for this position today, would I hire them again?” When Dando asks his clients this, the answer is often “no,” which is very telling. If someone couldn’t get past the interview stage again, why keep them now?Overall, this book is well written and I’d recommend it to any business owner or anyone in management. Note: I received an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.