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Golfers are also delusional about how they achieved success. That’s why they award themselves second shots (called mulligans) when the first ones go in the wrong direction, move the ball from an awkward lie, conveniently neglect to count the occasional errant stroke, and otherwise fiddle with the rules and scorecard, all in an effort to buff up their handicaps and take credit for a better game than they actually possess.
Exaggerate our projects’ impact on net profits because we discount the real and hidden costs built into them (the costs are someone else’s problems; the success is ours)
If you asked your colleagues to estimate their percentage contribution to your enterprise, the total will always exceed 100 percent. There’s nothing wrong with this. You want to surround yourself with confident people. (If your total ever comes to less than 100 percent, I suggest you find new colleagues.)
People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats.
Successful people tend to have a high “internal locus of control.” In other words, they do not feel like victims of fate. They see success for themselves and others as largely a function of people’s motivation and ability—not luck, random chance, or external factors.
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.
Almost everyone I meet is successful because of doing a lot of things right, and almost everyone I meet is successful in spite of some behavior that defies common sense.
Harry acknowledged that other people thought he should become a better listener, but he wasn’t sure that he should change. He had convinced himself that his poor listening actually was a great source of his success. Like many high achievers, he wanted to defend his superstitious beliefs. He pointed out that some people present awful ideas and that he hated cluttering his fertile brain with bad ideas. Bad ideas were like brain pollution. He needed to filter them out, and he wouldn’t pretend to hear out bad ideas simply because it made other people feel better. “I don’t suffer fools gladly,” he
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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.
If you press people to identify the motives behind their self-interest it usually boils down to four items: money, power, status, and popularity.
Take a look around you at work. Why are you there? What keeps you coming back day after day? Is it any of the big four—money, power, status, popularity—or is it something deeper and more subtle that has developed over time? If you know what matters to you, it’s easier to commit to change. If you can’t identify what matters to you, you won’t know when it’s being threatened. And in my experience, people only change their ways when what they truly value is threatened.
“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.”
For some reason, we are less likely to poison our thinking this way in normal everyday life. When it comes to stopping behavior or avoiding bad decisions outside the workplace, we congratulate ourselves all the time.
But we lose this common sense in the can-do environment of an organization—where there is no system for honoring the avoidance of a bad decision or the cessation of bad behavior. Our performance reviews are solely based on what we’ve done, what numbers we’ve delivered, what increases we have posted against last year’s results. Even the seemingly minor personal goals are couched in terms of actions we’ve initiated, not behavior we have stopped. We get credit for being punctual, not for stopping our lateness.
What we’re dealing with here are challenges in interpersonal behavior, often leadership behavior. They are the egregious everyday annoyances that make your workplace substantially more noxious than it needs to be. They don’t happen in a vacuum. They are transactional flaws performed by one person against others. They are: 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
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That’s why behavioral issues become so important at the upper rungs of the corporate ladder. All other things being equal, your people skills (or lack of them) become more pronounced the higher up you go. In fact, even when all other things are not equal, your people skills often make the difference in how high you go.
Think about how we perceive other successful people. We rarely associate their success with technical skill or even brainpower. Maybe we say, “They’re smart,” but that’s not the sole factor we attribute to their success. We believe they’re smart and something else. At some point we give them the benefit of the doubt on skill issues. For example, we assume our doctor knows medicine, so we judge him on “bedside manner” issues—how he tolerates our questions, how he delivers bad news, even how he apologizes for keeping us cooling our heels too long in his waiting room. None of this is taught in
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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.
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.” That’s the problem with adding too much value. Imagine you’re the CEO. I come to you with an idea that you think is very good. 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
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But the higher up you go in the organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about winning yourself.
One of my clients, who’s now the CEO of a major pharmaceutical, said that once he got into the habit of taking a breath before he talked, he realized that at least half of what he was going to say wasn’t worth saying. Even though he believed he could add value, he realized he had more to gain by not winning.
Try this: For one week treat every idea that comes your way from another person with complete neutrality. Think of yourself as a human Switzerland. Don’t take sides. Don’t express an opinion. 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.”
Press people to list the destructive comments they have made in the last 24 hours and they will quite often come up blank. We make destructive comments without thinking—and therefore without noticing or remembering. But the objects of our scorn remember. Press them and they will accurately replay every biting comment we’ve made at their expense. That’s a statistical fact. The feedback I’ve collected says that “avoids destructive comments” is one of the two items with the lowest correlation between how we see ourselves and how others see us. In other words, we don’t think we make destructive
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Destructive comments are an easy habit to fall into, especially among people who habitually rely on candor as an effective management tool. Trouble is, candor can easily become a weapon. People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuse that they are true. The fact that a destructive comment is true is irrelevant. The question is not, “Is it true?” but rather, “Is it worth it?”
Warren Buffett advised that before you take any morally questionable action, you should ask yourself if you would want your mother to read about it in the newspaper.
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.” Nothing productive can happen after that.
Being smart turns people on. Announcing how smart you are turns them off.
The next time you start to speak out of anger, look in the mirror. In every case, you’ll find that the root of your rage is not “out there” but “in here.”
“Let me explain why that won’t work” is unique because it is pure unadulterated negativity under the guise of being helpful.
In the age of knowledge workers, the cliché that information is power is truer than ever—which makes withholding information even more extreme and irritating.
The problem with not sharing information—for whatever reason—is that it rarely achieves the desired effect. You may think you’re gaining an edge and consolidating power, but you’re actually breeding mistrust. 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.
Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.
One of my clients taught me a wonderful technique for improving in the area of providing recognition. 1. He first made a list of all of the important groups of people in his life (friends, family, direct reports, customers, etc.). 2. He then wrote down the names of every important person in each group. 3. Twice a week, on Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon, he would review the list of names and ask himself, “Did someone on this page do something that I should recognize?” 4. If the answer was “yes” he gave them some very quick recognition, either by phone, e-mail, voice mail, or a note.
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That’s what it is when someone claims credit that they do not deserve: theft. It’s as if they’re stealing our ideas, our performances, our self-esteem, our life. We didn’t like it when it happened to us as children (and the stakes generally involved little more than our teachers’ approval). But we actively hate it when it happens to us as adults (in part because the stakes in terms of our careers and financial rewards are so much greater).
Our personal stereotyping may have its origins in stories that have been repeated for years—often from as far back as childhood. These stories may have no basis in fact. But they imprint themselves in our brains, and establish low expectations that become self-fulfilling prophecies. We behave as if we wanted to prove that our negative expectations were correct.
Likewise the next time you hear one of your coworkers try to worm their way out of accepting responsibility by saying, “I’m just no good at . . . ,” ask them, “Why not?” If we can stop excusing ourselves, we can get better at almost anything we choose.
But for some reason, many people enjoy living in the past, especially if going back there lets them blame someone else for anything that’s gone wrong in their lives. That’s when clinging to the past becomes an interpersonal problem. We use the past as a weapon against others.
I started yammering about growing up in Kentucky in a gas station and how we didn’t have money and how hard I had to work to become the first person from my family to graduate from college. Contrasting this, of course, with all the wonderful things Kelly had. She patiently listened to my diatribe, instinctively letting me vent. When I was finished, she said, “Daddy, it’s not my fault you make money.”
I can’t say that I am any better. I love my dog, Beau. I travel at least 180 days a year, and Beau goes bonkers when I return home from a trip. I pull into the driveway, and my first inclination is to open the front door, go straight to Beau, and exclaim, “Daddy’s home!” Invariably, Beau jumps up and down, and I hug him and pat him and make a huge fuss over him. One day my daughter, Kelly, was home from college. She watched my typical love fest with Beau. She then looked at me, held her hands in the air like little paws, and barked, “Woof woof.” Point taken.
If we’re honest with ourselves, our recognition of people may be linked to how much they seem to like us rather than how well they perform. That’s the definition of playing favorites.
This experience instilled in me the conviction that if you put all your cards in someone else’s hands that person will treat you better than if you kept the cards to yourself. I’m sure this is what Benjamin Franklin believed when he said, “To gain a friend, let him do you a favor.”
Apologizing is one of the most powerful and resonant gestures in the human arsenal—almost as powerful as a declaration of love. It’s “I love you” flipped on its head. If love means, “I care about you and I’m happy about it,” then an apology means, “I hurt you and I’m sorry about it.” Either way, it’s seductive and irresistible; it irrevocably changes the relationship between two people. It compels them to move forward into something new and, perhaps, wonderful together.
That’s the magic in this process. When you declare your dependence on others, they usually agree to help. And during the course of making you a better person, they inevitably try to become better people themselves. This is how individuals change, how teams improve, how divisions grow, and how companies become world-beaters.
There’s really no art to saying, “Thank you.” You shape your mouth in the appropriate manner, flex your vocal cords, and let the two monosyllabic words float past your lips and out upon the grateful appreciative ears of anyone within shouting distance.
I try to teach people that, if they don’t know what to say, their default response to any suggestion should be, “Thank you.”
My friend Chris Cappy, an expert in executive learning, has a saying that put this into perspective for me. No matter what someone tells him, he accepts it by reminding himself, “I won’t learn less.” What that means is when somebody makes a suggestion or gives you ideas, you’re either going to learn more or learn nothing. But you’re not going to learn less. Hearing people out does not make you dumber. So, thank them for trying to help.
The irony, of course, is that infallibility is a myth. No one expects us to be right all the time. But when we’re wrong, they certainly expect us to own up to it. In that sense, being wrong is an opportunity—an opportunity to show what kind of person and leader we are. Consumers judge a service business not so much when it does things right (consumers expect that) but rather by how the business behaves in correcting a foul-up. It’s the same in the workplace. How well you own up to your mistakes makes a bigger impression than how you revel in your successes.
I finally stopped him and said, “No matter what you say, I don’t believe you have a problem with handing out praise. Nor is it that you think doing so means you’re a phony. The real problem is your self-limiting definition of who you are. You define phony as anything that isn’t . . . me! When you hand out praise, you’re thinking, ‘This isn’t me.’”
It’s an interesting equation: Less me. More them. Equals success.
