Mark Fritz

Interview with Mark Fritz

What are your most popular keynotes?

I have two popular keynotes:

• Why You Never Wash a Rental Car
• What Do your Inbox & Calendar Say about YOU?

Why You Never Wash a Rental Car?

When was the last time you washed a rental car? Probably never . . . . because you don’t own it.  To continue the automobile metaphor, would you rather have your people “renting” or owning their job? The latter, of course. And driving people in that direction is the challenge of leadership that I address in this keynote.

I explore the path from a “rental” mentality to a full ownership mindset, and show you where to start: your own mirror. That’s right– instilling a sense of ownership starts with your personal ownership. (If you’re going to lead, you need to lead yourself first).  I then explains how to enable personal ownership in others, and from there, how to enable team and organizational ownership.

As you will learn, the key to unlocking the power of ownership starts with creating an “outcome” focus. It’s not enough to get people to take ownership for an activity; the goal is to get people to take ownership for accomplishing specific outcomes.

The benefits of an outcome-centric approach to leadership are enormous.  Whereas job “renters” will simply bring problems back to their leaders, people who own their job will always feel challenged to solve problems themselves. So the more ownership your people take, the more successful you and your organization will be.

What Do your Inbox & Calendar Say about YOU?

You often hear people say “I just don’t have the time!” You’ve probably said that to yourself as well.  Fact: in an eight hour day, everybody gets the same amount of time – eight hours. So why do very successful leaders achieve more with their time than others? Are they just better at time management? No, they’ve gone beyond time management and they’ve mastered the art and science of “focus management.”

Are you laser focused on what counts? Or do you live an “interrupt-driven” work life?  One clue to the answer lies in your inbox and calendar; both reveal a lot about you and how your focus can slip away from throughout the day.

In this keynote talk or interactive workshop, I show you how to use your outbox (your outcomes), not your inbox as a barometer of your focus level, and then provides simple strategies and tactics for creating and maintaining a much stronger focus in your work life. The result? You’ll achieve more and then develop habits suited to your cognitive style and personality.  You’ll have more time to do what you have to do.  And you just might hear yourself saying, “It’s great, I have time to. . . .”

How do you relate rental cars to leadership?

Using rental cars as an analogy is a great way to think about leadership.

You don’t wash a rental car because you don’t have the pride of ownership.  What happens in your organization if your people don’t have pride in what they are being asked to accomplish.

What do you if something breaks on your rental car?  Do you try to fix it?  No, you just give it back, and that’s what happens in your organization if your people don’t own what they are being asked to achieve.  Whenever they have a problem, they just come to you for the answer (giving it back to you).  If your people own what you are asking them to achieve, they will want to first try and solve the problem on their own before coming to you.

Are your people renting or owning what you are asking them to achieve?

Can you give some tips to how organizations can tackle cross-cultural issues?

When working across cultures, there are two C’s that enable more effective collaboration.

First, it’s character.  You can never work across cultures and never make a mistake with respect to other countries customs and ways of working.  A question:  If a cultural mistake is made, which person will be forgiven faster?…the person with a good character or a bad character?   Character is a foundation for stronger trust, and the people you pick for your cross-cultural team is one of the most important factors for your team’s success.

Second, it’s communication.  It’s about developing a strong foundation of trust that everyone is willing to pick up the phone and deal with issues or opportunities in real time.  Trust is enabled by investing time up front to help everyone get to know each other versus rushing to get right into all the action.  The outcome of high trust is the communication you see happening across your team without your people always coming to you to facilitate it.

Remember, character and communication…the foundation of strong cross-cultural teams.

How have audiences described your keynotes?

Two words are expressed often: Inspired and Action.   First, leaders feel inspired to implement the ideas to move their leadership to the next level, and second, they received the right information to turn those ideas into action right away.

The feedback received just last week describes my keynotes the best:  “With the stories and examples you shared today, I now feel I can be that successful leader you have described throughout your talk.”