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Among the myriad wise things I have heard Peter Drucker say, the wisest was, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”
the recognition and reward systems in most organizations are totally geared to acknowledge the doing of something. We get credit for doing something good. We rarely get credit for ceasing to do something bad.
1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point. 2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion. 3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them. 4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty. 5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these
negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.” 6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are. 7. Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool. 8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked. 9. Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others. 10. Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward. 11. Claiming credit that we don’t
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13. Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else. 14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly. 15. Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others. 16. Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues. 17. Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners. 18. Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent
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As we advance in our careers, behavioral changes are often the only significant changes we can make.
They are outstanding people, invariably in the top two percent of their organization. But they may be held back by a personal failing or two that they either (a) do not recognize, (b) have not been told about, or (c) are aware of but refuse to change.
Habit #1 Winning too much Winning too much is easily the most common behavioral problem that I observe in successful people. 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.
So many things we do to annoy people stem from needlessly trying to be the alpha male (or female) in any situation—i.e., the winner.
If you’ve achieved any modicum of success, you’re guilty of this every day. When you’re in a
meeting at work, you want your position to prevail. When you’re arguing with your significant other, you’ll pull out all the stops to come out on top (whatever that means!)
If the need to win is the dominant gene in our success DNA—the overwhelming reason we’re successful—then winning too much is a perverse genetic mutation that can limit our success.
It is extremely difficult for successful people to listen to other people tell them something that they already know without communicating somehow that (a) “we already knew that” and (b) “we know a better way.”
Rather than just pat me on the back and say, “Great idea!” your inclination (because you have to add value) is to say, “Good idea, but it’d be better if you tried it this way.” 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.
the higher up you go in the organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about
winning yourself.
There’s nothing wrong with offering an opinion in the normal give and take of business discussions. You want people to agree or disagree freely. But it’s not appropriate to pass judgment when we specifically ask people to voice their opinions about us. In those moments when other people have passed judgment on advice they have solicited from me, my first thought is, “Who died and made you the Critic in Chief?”
You need to extend that same attitude—the doctor’s mission-neutral purpose—to dealing with people trying to help you. And here I am not referring only to the people who are trying to help you change. You are not allowed to judge
any helpful comment offered by a colleague or friend or family member. No matter what you privately think of the suggestion, you must keep your thoughts to yourself, hear the person out, and say, “Thank you.”
Don’t judge the comment. If you find yourself constitutionally incapable of just saying “Thank you,” make it an innocuous, “Thanks, I hadn’t considered that.” Or, “Thanks. You’ve given me something to think about.”
We may think our boss is a complete ass, but we are under no moral or ethical obligation to express that—to the boss’s face or to anyone else for that matter.
Before speaking, ask yourself: 1. Will this comment help our customers? 2. Will this comment help our company? 3. Will this comment help the person I’m talking to? 4. Will this comment help the person I’m talking about?
When you start a sentence with “no,” “but,” “however,” or any variation thereof, no matter how friendly your tone or how many cute mollifying phrases you throw in to acknowledge the other person’s feelings, the message to the other person is You are wrong. It’s not, “I have a different opinion.” It’s not, “Perhaps you are misinformed.” It’s not, “I disagree with you.” It’s bluntly and unequivocally, “What you’re saying is wrong, and what I’m saying is right.”
opens up discussion. I monitor my clients’ use of “no,” “but,” and “however” instinctively now,
The paradox is that this need to demonstrate how smart we are rarely hits its intended target.
Being smart turns people on. Announcing how smart you are turns them off.
Stopping this behavior is not hard—a three-step drill in which you (a) pause before opening your mouth to ask yourself, “Is anything I say worth it?” (b) conclude that it isn’t, and (c) say, “Thank you.”
Anger has its value as a management tool, I guess. It wakes up sleepy employees. It raises everyone’s metabolism. It delivers the clear message that you give a damn—which employees need to hear on occasion. But at what price? Emotional volatility is not the most reliable leadership tool. When you get angry, you are usually out of control. It’s hard to lead people when you’ve lost control. You may think you have a handle on your temper, that you can use your spontaneous rages to manipulate and motivate people. But it’s very hard to predict how people will react to anger. They will shut down as
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The lesson is simple. There is never anyone in the other boat. When we are angry, we are screaming at an empty vessel.
Our guide was the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Each day Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged us to meditate on a variety of topics. One day the topic was anger. He asked us to think of a time in our lives when we had become angry and lost control. Then he asked us to analyze who was responsible for our unattractive behavior.
We all know negative people—or what my wife calls “negatrons”—in the workplace. They’re the people who are constitutionally incapable of saying something positive or complimentary to any of your suggestions.
“Let me explain why that won’t work” is unique because it is pure unadulterated negativity under the guise of being helpful.
If negativity is your flaw, my first impulse would be to have you monitor your statements the moment someone offers you a helpful
suggestion. If you’ve read this far, you know that I firmly believe that paying attention to what we say is a great indicator of what we’re doing to turn people off.
In order to have power, you need to inspire loyalty rather than fear and suspicion. Withholding information is nothing more than a misplaced need to win.
We do this when we’re too busy to get back to someone with valuable information. We do this when we forget to include someone in our discussions or meetings. We do this when we delegate a task to our subordinates but don’t take the time to show them exactly how we want the task done.
His work life was like a haphazard fire drill. He was
so distracted, so disorganized, so busy responding to calls and putting out fires that he never had time to sit down with his assistant for a daily debriefing.
In depriving people of recognition, you are depriving them of closure. And we all need closure in any interpersonal transaction.
Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.
I like to divide excuses into two categories: blunt and subtle. The blunt “dog ate my homework” excuse sounds like this: “I’m sorry I missed our lunch date. My assistant had it marked down for the wrong day on my calendar.” Message: See, it’s not that I forgot the lunch date. It’s not that I don’t regard you as important, so important that lunch with you is the unchangeable, nonnegotiable highlight of my day. It’s simply that my assistant is inept. Blame my assistant, not me.
The problem with this type of excuse is that we rarely get away with it—and it’s hardly an effective leadership strategy.
The more subtle excuses appear when we attribute our failings to some inherited DNA that is permanently lodged within us. We talk about ourselves as if we have permanent genetic flaws that can never be altered. You’ve surely heard these excuses. Maybe you’ve used them to describe yourself: “I’m impatient.” “I always put things off to the last minute.”
It’s amazing how often I hear otherwise brilliant, successful people make willfully self-deprecating comments about themselves. It’s a subtle art because, in effect, they are stereotyping themselves—as impatient, or hot-tempered, or disorganized—and using that stereotype to excuse otherwise inexcusable behavior.
There is a school of thought among psychologists and behavioral consultants that we can understand a lot about our errant behavior by delving into our past, particularly our family dynamics. This is the school that believes, “When it’s hysterical, it’s historical.”
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with understanding. Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there. My experience tells me that the only effective approach is looking people in the eye and saying, “If you want to change, do this.”
But even with the blunt talk, clients who cling to the past—who want to understand why they are the way they
are—remain my toughest assignments. It takes me a long time to convince them that they can’t do anything about the past. They can’t change it, or rewrite it, or make excuses f...
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When we make excuses, we are blaming someone or something beyond our control as the reason for our failure.
We can’t see in ourselves what we can see so clearly in others.
