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The higher up you go, the more your suggestions become orders.
In the arc of what can be a long successful career, you will always be in transit from “here” to “there.”
why would I want to beat my head against this particular wall?
in a mental leap that’s easy to justify, we think that our past success is predictive of great things in our future.
I once polled three business partners to estimate the percentage that each of them contributed to their partnership’s profits. Since I knew the senior partner in this particular enterprise, I knew the true numbers. And yet the three partners’ combined estimate came to over 150 percent!
A good exercise to run with the team
80 to 85 percent of them will rate themselves in the top 20 percent of their peer group—and 70 percent will rate themselves in the top 10 percent.
People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats.
Given the choice, they will always bet on themselves.
The challenge is to make them see that sometimes they are successful in spite of this behavior.
When I surveyed executives about why they felt overcommitted, none of them said they were trying to “save a sinking ship.” They were overcommitted because they were “drowning in a sea of opportunity.”
Overcommitment can be as serious an obstacle to change as believing that you don’t need fixing or that your flaws are part of the reason you’re successful.
When we do what we choose to do, we are committed. When we do what we have to do, we are compliant.
I have now made peace with the fact that I cannot make people change. I can only help them get better at what they choose to change.
One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, “I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way.”
People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.
Everyone, even the biggest ego in the room, has a hot button that can be pushed—and that button is self-interest.
If you press people to identify the motives behind their self-interest it usually boils down to four items: money, power, status, and popularity.
Get out your notepad. Instead of your usual “To Do” list, start your “To Stop” list.
When someone makes a helpful suggestion, don’t remind them that you already knew that. Thank them and say nothing.
There’s a fine line between being competitive and overcompetitive, between winning when it counts and when no one’s counting—and successful people cross that line with alarming frequency.
The problem is, you may have improved the content of my idea by 5 percent, but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50 percent, because you’ve taken away my ownership of the idea. My idea is now your idea—and I walk out of your office less enthused about it than when I walked in.
That’s the fallacy of added value. Whatever we gain in the form of a better idea is lost many times over in our employees’ diminished commitment to the concept.
grading people’s answers—rather than just accepting them without comment—makes people hesitant and defensive.
Mission Neutral.
assure them that I am mission neutral. I don’t deal in approval or disapproval. I don’t judge. It’s not my job to weigh in on whether you’re a good person or bad because you’ve decided to change A rather than B.
No matter what you privately think of the suggestion, you must keep your thoughts to yourself, hear the person out, and say, “Thank you.”
When you don’t judge an idea, no one can argue with you.
