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January 7 - January 24, 2019
To all successful leaders who want to ‘take it to the next level’ and get even better
You can empathize with victims and excoriate the bad guys. You can spin words together beautifully on deadline and create rich meaningful metaphors that leave readers gasping with admiration. And yet, if you put a comma in the wrong place, that tiny sin of commission can wipe out the rest of your contributions.
When we do what we choose to do, we are committed. When we do what we have to do, we are compliant.
For example, if you believe your colleague Bill is a jerk, you will filter Bill’s actions through that belief. No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace.
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. It’s in our nature. It’s the law.
Get out your notepad. Instead of your usual ‘To Do’ list, start your ‘To Stop’ list. By the end of this book, your list may grow.
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
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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 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.
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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.
Being smart turns people on. Announcing how smart you are turns them off.
We all know negative people—or what my wife calls ‘negatrons’—in the workplace.
‘To gain a friend, let him do you a favor.’
It’s an interesting equation: Less me. More them. Equals success.
We think we’d be truly happy (or at least happier) if only we made more money, or lost thirty pounds, or got the corner office. So, we pursue those goals relentlessly. What we don’t appreciate until much later is that in obsessing about making money, we might be neglecting the loved ones—i.e., our family—for whom we are presumably securing that money;
Take the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai
The solution is simple, but not easy. You have to step back, take a breath, and look. And survey the conditions that are making you obsessed with the wrong goals.
How We Can Change for the Better
One reason so many people deny the validity of feedback is that they believe that the feedback was delivered by the ‘wrong people.’ Since my clients pick their raters, it is hard for them to deny the validity of the feedback.
I then present these coworkers with four requests. I call them The Four Commitments. I need them to commit to: 1. Let go of the past. 2. Tell the truth. 3. Be supportive and helpful—not cynical or negative. 4. Pick something to improve yourself—so everyone is focused more on ‘improving’ than ‘judging.’
change is not a one-way street. It involves two parties: the person who’s changing and the people who notice it.
Remember, this process (especially at the beginning) is not supposed to be difficult. Getting feedback is the easy part. Dealing with it is hard.
The interesting stuff is the information that’s known to others but unknown to us. When that information is revealed to us, those are the ‘road to Damascus’ moments that create dramatic change.
Turn the sound off and observe how people respond to you as they enter. What they do is a clue about what they think of you. Do they smile when they see you and pull up a chair next to you? Do they barely acknowledge your presence and sit across the room? Note how each person responds to you. If the majority of people shy away from you, that’s a disturbing pattern that’s hitting you over the head with some serious truth. You have some serious work to do.
Your flaws at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home.
These five examples of observed feedback are stealth techniques to make you pay closer attention to the world around you. When you make a list of people’s comments about you and rank them as negative or positive, you’re tuning in the world with two new weapons: Judgment and purpose. When you turn off the sound, you’re increasing your sensitivity to others by counterintuitively eliminating the precious sense of hearing.
When you try the sentence completion technique, you’re using retrograde analysis—that is, seeing the end result and then identifiying the skill you’ll need to achieve it. When you challenge the accuracy of your self-aggrandizing remarks, you’re flipping your world upside down—and seeing that you’re no different from anyone else. Finally, when you check out how your behavior is working at home, you realize not only what you need to change but why it matters so much. The logic behind these drills is simple: If you can see your world in a new way, perhaps you can see yourself anew as well.
I tell my clients, ‘It’s a lot harder to change people’s perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers.’
Be Your Own Press Secretary
Listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t finish the other person’s sentences. Don’t say ‘I knew that.’ Don’t even agree with the other person (even if he praises you, just say, ‘Thank you’). Don’t use the words ‘no,’ ‘but,’ and ‘however.’ Don’t be distracted. Don’t let your eyes or attention wander elsewhere while the other person is talking. Maintain your end of the dialogue by asking intelligent questions that (a) show you’re paying attention, (b) move the conversation forward, and (c) require the other person to talk (while you listen). Eliminate any striving to impress the other person with how
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The plane landed safely. (Believe me, I thanked the pilot and crew.) When I got to my hotel room, the first thing I did was write gushy, mushy thank you notes to at least 50 people who had helped me in my life.
‘Thank you. You’re one of the top 25 people who have helped me have a great professional life.’
Once you master the subtle arts of apologizing, advertising, listening, and thanking, you must follow up—relentlessly. Or everything else is just a ‘program of the month.’
Follow-up is how we remind people that we’re making an effort to change, and that they are helping us.
Follow-up is how we erase our coworkers’ skepticism that we can change.
If people understand, then they will do. That’s not true. Most of us understand, we just don’t do. For example, we all understand that being grossly overweight is bad for our health, but not all of us actually do anything to change our condition.
The first question is always, ‘How happy are you?’ Because for me it’s most important to be happy. Otherwise, everything else is irrelevant.
You’ve identified the interpersonal habit that’s holding you back. You’ve apologized for whatever errant behavior has annoyed the people who matter to you at work or at home. You’ve said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.’ And they’ve accepted that. You’ve continued to advertise your intention to change your ways. You’ve remained in steady contact with the people who matter, regularly reminding them that you’re trying to do better. You do this by bringing up your objectives and asking point-blank, ‘How am I doing?’ You have also mastered the essential skills of listening and thanking. You can
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Practicing feedforward makes us ‘shut up and listen’ while others are speaking.
feedforward encourages you to spend time creating a future by (a) asking for suggestions for the future, (b) listening to ideas, and (c) just saying thank you. Its strongest element, by far, is that it doesn’t permit you to bring up the past—ever. It forces you to let go of the past.
Realize that the ‘quick fix’ and the ‘easy solution’ may not provide the ‘lasting fix’ and the ‘meaningful solution.’
An objective that made sense when they were nine years old didn’t make sense when they evolved into teenagers.
I have learned a hard lesson trying to help real people, change real behavior in the real world. There is no ‘couple of weeks.’ Look at the trend line! Sanity does not prevail. There is a good chance that tomorrow is going to be just as crazy as today.
There’s a fine line between legitimate face time and get-out-of-my-face time. It’s up to you as boss to make the troops face that.
As a general rule, people in their 20s want to learn on the job. In their 30s they want to advance. And in their 40s they want to rule. No matter what their age, though, understanding their desires is like trying to pin down mercury. You have to find out what they want at every step—by literally asking them—and you can’t assume that one size fits all. The person who sees the noble goal of ‘work-life balance’ as irrelevant at age 24 may find it critical at 34.
Well, the future is here with a vengeance. And smart managers need to shed the overconfident bias that they know as much as their employees know in specific areas. It’s a blind spot that diminishes their employees’ abilities and enthusiasm, and ultimately shrinks the boss’s stature.
Stop trying to change people who don’t think they have a problem.
Finally, stop trying to help people who think everyone else is the problem.
Use that wisdom now. Don’t look ahead. Look behind. Look back from your old age at the life you hope to live. Know that you need to be happy now, to enjoy your friends and family, to follow your dreams. You are here. You can get there! Let the journey begin.
Global Leadership Inventory
