The Star Factor
By William Seidman and Richard Grbavac
Organizations usually have a few star performers who are more motivated and dedicated and deliver better results than the others. What if it were possible for every person in your company to be a star performer? The Star Factor: Discover What Your Top Performers Do Differently–and Inspire a New Level of Greatness in All tells how to make that happen.
The authors are William Seidman, cofounder and president of a performance improvement company called Cerebyte, and Richard Grbavac, a Cerebyte employee and expert on organizational development. They describe the system they developed to identify how top performers behave and then teach those attitudes to others. Their system is based on the new science of “positive deviance,” which refers to the standard deviation at the far right of a normal distribution curve for performance.
“In this book you will learn how to develop a comprehensive Affirmative Leadership program,” the authors promise. “You will learn how to use the science of ‘positive deviance’ to identify and discover your stars’ wisdom. You will see how the neuroscience of motivation creates intense motivation in others to learn that wisdom.”
The first step is to identify the stars themselves, by asking three questions: (1) Who are the people you respect to perform the needed functions? (2) Would you go to these people to solve a problem or lead a project? (3) Would you believe them and do what they told you?
A noteworthy message of The Star Factor is to not focus on people in leadership and management positions. Your stars may not appear on organizational charts; they lead informally by being respected for their expertise and contributions and teamwork.
If an organization’s leaders think they have no stars, there are usually cultural problems. The authors give the example of a vice president of operations who didn’t believe anyone could know more about local store operations than he did. They warn us, “Cultures that are so deeply dysfunctional that they do not trust their own people are not good candidates for the Affirmative Leadership program.”
The next step is to bring this group of stars together for a Wisdom Discovery session to mine their knowledge and attitudes. The Star Factor is a structured description of the Cerebyte system, with explanations of various ongoing sessions and processes. It is not a do-it-yourself book. Although there is no advertising in the book itself, actually applying the information would be difficult without Cerebyte facilitators and consultants.
Still, there are useful and thought-provoking ideas, and the book is easy to read and understand. “You can’t be a great leader without being a great learner,” we are told, “and you can’t have a great organization without a culture that values active learning.”
As a student of leadership myself, I found the ideas expressed in The Star Factor to be realistic and intriguing. I skipped over much of the play-by-play descriptions of facilitated sessions but agreed with comments such as “one of the best ways to motivate people to accept change is to present that change in ways that increase listeners’ dignity and honor.” Fair Process is the name Cerebyte gives to “this mind-set, focused on respect for the listeners rather than top-down authority. . . . Fair Process stresses participation and lots of communication.”
Identifying your stars, capturing in words how they think and operate, and then teaching all employees to think and operate that same way–these are the tenets of the Cerebyte system. If that’s what you want to accomplish in your company, reading The Star Factor is a good place to begin.
