Where Does Confidence Come From?

Do you wish you had more control over the results of your professional interactions and transactions?  Do you wish you felt more comfortable speaking about who you are and what you?  Do you wish you felt more comfortable in interviews?  Do you wish you felt more confident making a cold call or dealing with a difficult or intimidating person at work? Do you wish you felt more comfortable speaking publicly and extemporaneously?

The good news is that about 90% of the human race wishes for the same things!  The even better news is that you can start feeling more confident and comfortable in these situations NOW.  A very wise person once told me “you can only have confidence if you know what you are doing!”  The fact of the matter is as soon as you get a few skills under your belt, you can navigate challenging interactions more effectively and miraculously confidence follows!

In future posts,  I will share with you techniques and insights that you can apply immediately to get more powerful, positive results in your professional interactions and transactions.

Act More; Think Less; Make the World a Better Place

Actions.  Do you remember being told when you were growing up to think before you act?  Think before you cross the street, think before you speak, think about the consequences of a poorly thought out action.  This good advice creates an automatic “stop and think” reflex in kids.  It can be a great survival (both social and physical) strategy, but it can also become a terrible self-limiting behavior; sometimes referred to as analysis paralysis.  Every day we have lots of impulses to act. We experience something either in the world or in our mind’s eye and we think “I would like to do this, or “I could do that.” Then the “stop and think” reflex kicks in and suddenly we are thinking about all the reasons we shouldn’t or couldn’t or won’t.  Sometimes we substitute a safer action for what we really want to do because it passes the think before you act criterion: it is safe.  How much trouble can you get into watching an NCIS re-run?  So we watch a re-run, or clean out a drawer, or order something off Amazon instead of doing the thing we actually wanted to do. We feel the satisfaction of having done something but what difference did it make, really?

I grieve for all the un-actioned impulses.  How much innovation and joy and beauty and satisfaction go unrealized every day?  While some embarrassment, failure and rejection are avoided by unrealized actions, I suspect that the world would be a better place if more actions were realized. What is the ratio of differentiating actions that occur to you versus the actions you actually act on?  What would you like your action ratio to be?  How do you know whether not acting or taking action was the right decision for you?  I challenge all of us to increase our action ratio a bit and take note of how much more good we start putting into the world.

Getting Stuff Done: What Do You Want to Get Done?

What do you want to achieve?  Can you say it in a simple declarative sentence? If you can, then you have a good chance of achieving that goal.  If you can’t,  it is very likely  you won’t achieve that goal. How could you?  You don’t know what the goal is!  This may sound obvious but people are always trying to achieve goals without having really figured out what the goal is.  Ask the next person you see “what’s your big goal over the next couple months?” (This is actually a great way to start a conversation at a party too!)  Chances are you will hear a lot of hemming and hawing, a list of goals under consideration, a theme or two but I would be surprised if the person you asked responded immediately and confidently with a a clear, simple, observable, valuable goal.

Commitment, Confidence and Scope are three big inhibitors to setting good goals.  Saying what you want to achieve means at some level you are committing to do it and that is a big deal.  If commitment is your blocker, you probably hear yourself saying “but  I don’t have time” or “but it’s too hard.”   If confidence is your blocker, you may hear yourself saying  “but I would have to go back to school” or “but I could never make enough money” or “but I don’t know how to do it.”  If scope is your blocker, your goal keeps changing and getting bigger and getting pushed further and further into the future.  “I want to write a novel and have it published and be on Oprah and win a Booker award.”  This is a far cry from a sensible goal like  “I want to write a complete short story and read it out loud to my best friend.”  Scope may seem to be the opposite of confidence and commitment because scope is about wanting to do everything or wanting to do it all at once.  But scope, like commitment and confidence is just another sneaky way we use to get out of having to really achieve something.  Human beings are resourceful.  They can do just about anything they want to do (or at least approximate it) if they want to do it badly enough. Yes, a 50 year old person who wants to become a doctor could achieve a reasonable approximation of this outcome if he or she really wanted it badly enough.

The trick is to separate what from how.  As soon as you let your doubts about how you are going to achieve the goal interfere with what the goal is, you are sunk.  So in my next blog, we will talk about how to set a good goal.  Later we will talk about how to achieve it.

Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

There are 21 key elements of great groups that I believe emerge from Bennis and Biederman’s analysis. I have listed them below.  While the 21 elements aren’t that surprising, the book does make three surprising revelations about the elements.  First, all of these 21 elements feature in all of the great groups.  It would seem that you don’t get a great group unless all of these conditions are met, somehow. Second, these elements are not planned and implemented top down.  They seem to evolve organically from the leadership.  Third, the manifestation of these key elements is not slick, fair, institutionalized or particularly attractive taken out of context. Human Resources and Senior Management are not likely to cheerfully sign off on a strategy to create these conditions. Even if they do, you probably can’t implement these 21 elements top down and get a great group.  That is the dilemma we are left with when we finish this book. We can see what a great group looks like but it is not certain that we can actually create one deliberately!  That said, Organizing Genius is a great read, the stories are vibrant and detailed and it’s a pleasure getting a little glimpse of what it was like to work on the first personal computer, Snow White and the first U.S. jet fighter. While the stories can’t show you precisely how to create a great group, they will give you good idea of what a Great Group looks like and feels like and that is a big help!

Great Groups – Key Elements – A Checklist

  1. A clear, tangible outcome. The best outcomes are widely recognized as important or fantastic.
  2. An outrageous vision for the outcome.
  3. A leader who can get people to get personally committed to the vision and the outcome.
  4. Exceptionally capable people on the team – the best talent available.
  5. A leader that the team respects.
  6. A leader who gives the team members the information, recognition and latitude they need to deliver the outcome.
  7. A leader who keeps the team focused without micro managing it.
  8. A shabby workplace with access to all the equipment, materials, tools and training the team needs to deliver the outcome.
  9. Team is protected from bureaucracy of the sponsor/sponsor organization.
  10. The workplace enables collaboration.
  11. Team is insulated from distractions.
  12. There is one focus for the team – the outcome.
  13. Team members have responsibilities that are aligned to their expertise, interests, and capabilities.
  14. Team members are willing to work on what needs to be worked on when it needs to be worked on.
  15. People don’t always get along but everyone wants to achieve the outcome so this common desire transcends individual conflicts.

What Do You Aspire To?

Aspire – to long, aim, or seek ambitiously; be eagerly desirous, especially for something great or of high value (usually followed by to, after, or an infinitive): to aspire after literary immortality; to aspire to be a doctor. to long, aim, or seek ambitiously; be eagerly desirous, especially for something great or of high value (usually followed by to, after, or an infinitive): to aspire after literary immortality; to aspire to be a doctor.  (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aspire)

  • What do you aspire to?
  • What’s your strategy for achieving your aspiration?
  • What have you done in the last year, month, week, today to make progress toward your aspiration?
  • How would you rate your progress?
  • How has your aspiration evolved since you were 12, 24, 36,48, 60, 72?

As a coach, friend, consultant, colleague, I talk to people all of the time and in one way or another I ask these questions.  I find that few people can confidently answer them.  Often these questions put people off.  They get embarrassed or defensive or they just freeze like deer in the headlights.

What is important about aspirations is not what the aspiration is, it is having thought about what you want, having an approach to achieving what you want and staying focused on achieving it.  I worry about the people who can’t answer the questions.  I worry because I suspect they have  an aspiration but because they aren’t clear about what it is and because they aren’t actively pursuing it, it is only a matter of time before they start saying “oh its too late for me” and just give up.

Each of us has so much we could give to ourselves, to each other, and to the world.  When we think about what we want and how to achieve it, we can make good on this potential. When we make working on our aspirations a lower priority than dealing with daily challenges and distractions, we stand a good chance of only enjoying a small part of what life offers us and only giving back a small part of what we have to offer.

The keys to achieving our aspirations are Clarity, Strategy, and Focus.  Simple?   If only. But how?  More to come!

Give The Gift of You!!!

Alexandra Levit had a great post today about  How To Be More Visible At Work. I hope her readers take her advice to heart and turn it into action – especially the task-oriented ones, like me!  Those of us who tend to be more oriented toward information and doing the work than relationships, incorrectly assume that our knowledge or productivity will speak for itself letting us off the hook for speaking for ourselves.  Rather than seeing talking about ourselves as shameless self-promotion, we need to start seeing it as our responsibility.  We have a responsibility to let team members and decision makers know what we have to offer, how we can contribute and how we are making things better.  We are always happy when we find out about a product or service that is “just what we need.”  How are we going to find out about these things if someone, somewhere isn’t deliberately working on letting us know about them?  Similarly how can we expect our bosses to find out about what we have to offer if we aren’t letting them know?  So in the spirit of the holiday season, let’s all go out and give the gift of US!!!

Know It All Managers

I read an article recently by Steve Tobak titled “The Problem with Know It All Managers“. The issue that Tobak presents is that often when people become managers, they start acting like they have all the answers.  These managers stop asking questions and start telling everyone what the answers are.  Tobak’s conclusion is that this is bad for employees and bad for the organization and bad for business.  I agree but I have to ask myself what motivates people to become “know it all” managers? It could be arrogance or it could be an organizational culture that implies that value is linked to one’s ability to always have the answer. It is not uncommon for compensation and promotion decisions to be based if not explicity then implicitly on one’s reputation for always having the answers. Conversely and unfortunately, managers are often devalued by senior management and stakeholders when they are seen to ask a lot of questions, openly consider many alternatives, and rely on their subordinates for up to date subject matter expertise. As we transition from do-ers to leaders, our value to the organization needs to come from our ability to elicit knowledge, ideas, issues, and possible solutions from the workforce and then to use that information to develop and execute strategies that achieve differentiating business goals. Answers based on the experience of many are more valuable than answers based on the experience of one person. One of our challenges is to help our senior management and stakeholders recognize and appreciate the value to the business of this sort of higher order, leadership behavior.

The Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders June Harvard Business Review: Are We in Denial?

Have you read the pithy one page article entitled “The Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders” in the June 2009 Harvard Business review?  I quickly skimmed the flaws to see if I had any of them.  At first I was relieved.  While I can be pretty hard on myself, I didn’t think I had any of these flaws.  But the authors’ closing comments caused me to reconsider.  “But the ineffective leaders we studied were often unaware that they exhibited any of these behaviors.  In fact those who were rated most negatively rated themselves substantially more positively. Leaders should take a very hard look at themselves and ask for candid feedback on performance in these specific areas.  Their jobs may depend on it.”   Denial is a dangerous thing.

I read the ten flaws a bit more thoughtfully and my conclusions the second time were sobering. For each behavior,  I took the time to think about things I had done or had not done in the last two weeks that a third party might view as examples of “flawed” leadership behavior.  I was able to recall at least one example for each of the ten flaws.  While this doesn’t necessarily mean I am a hopelessly flawed leader, it made me own up to the fact that I regularly exhibit sub optimal leadership behavior.  This exercise made me realize that seemingly small transgressions that I excuse because I am busy (and a leader – see the Toxic Tandem in the same issue of HBR), when seen objectively, are powerful examples of poor leadership and they add up.  Maybe going through this exercise will help you identify some areas in which you could raise your game and improve your image as a manager and a leader!

The Ten Fatal Flaws by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

  1. Lack of energy and enthusiasm
  2. Accept their own mediocre performance
  3. Lack clear vision
  4. Have poor judgement
  5. Don’t collaborate
  6. Don’t walk the talk
  7. Resist new ideas
  8. Don’t learn from mistakes
  9. Lack interpersonal skills
  10. Fail to develop others

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

Influencer: “The Power to Change Anything” was published in 2008 by McGraw Hill and was written by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzer.  It is a New York Times best seller.

The authors start out by flat out debunking the notion that the ability to influence is reserved for people with charismatic and silver-tongued DNA.  They firmly and kindly suggest that this notion is an excuse used by those of us who have tried to influence and failed or who feel daunted by the prospect of using influence to bring about significant change.  Deciding that we aren’t equipped to influence gives us permission to work on that spreadsheet that will convince the world we are right or to yell louder hoping that people will eventually “get it,” rather than getting out there and making change happen.  Having momentarily snapped us out of denial, Patterson et. al. give us a how-to manual for influencing that  is solid, accessible and informative.

While I am tempted to summarize the whole book here, I will not.  I will share a bit about the three elements of the book that I found most useful.  (I have been much more heavy-handed than the authors.  In my defense I have a few paragraphs to win you over, they have a couple hundred pages)

1) Change the Way You Change Minds:  “People choose behaviors based on what they think will happen to them as a result.”  “When it comes to resistant problems, verbal persuasion rarely works.”  Sharing personal experience is a great tool but in the absence of this tell people a story.  Tell a story that acts on their internal view of the world and gets them thinking that they have the ability to change and that change might be in their best interest.  The lesson here:  TELLING PEOPLE WHAT THEY SHOULD DO AND WHY DOES NOT WORK. STOP TRYING THAT APPROACH.

2) There are actually six influence points not the one (whatever it is) that YOU know and use over and over (with, the authors predict, limited success). The authors provide an intuitive and simple to remember influence framework that you can refer to you when you are planning (note, planning) to influence.  While the examples and teaching that the authors provide will help you quickly internalize the elements, once you see the framework you might feel a little sheepish that you hadn’t thought of it yourself.  The lesson here:  INFLUENCE IS NOT MAGIC, THERE IS A “FORMULA.”  IF YOU USE IT, YOU CAN BRING THE CHANGE YOU DESIRE.

3) There are six influence points and the more of them you use, the more success you will have. Conversely if you use  just one or two, you will fail.  The lesson here:   PEOPLE ARE COMPLEX. PEOPLE RESPOND TO DIFFERENT THINGS.  YOU ARE NOT A SHEEP, STOP TREATING THOSE YOU WISH TO INFLUENCE AS THOUGH THEY WERE.  USE MULTIPLE STRATEGIES.

I highly recommend this book.  I suggest reading it through once and marking up the parts that seem particularly relevant to you.  Chances are you will want to come back to the highlighted sections again and again as you apply the lessons of Influencer to the change initiatives you are trying to move forward.

New IT Capability Depends on Operating Model Changes

An article in the April 2009 Harvard Business Review by Julia Adler-Milstein describes research that suggests that organizations need to make changes to how they are organized and how they operate in order to enjoy the benefits of new technologies they introduce.  The article cites a study by MIT Sloan School’s Erik Brynjolfsson and others that finds that the following specific operating model changes were required for successful implementation of new technologies:

  1. increased training
  2. increased individual decision making authority
  3. flattened hierarchies
  4. greater use of skilled resources
  5. decentralized teams
  6. incentives for team performance

Organizations that didn’t make these changes fared worse than they would have had they not introduced the technologies in the first place.  The article focuses on adoption of electronic health records but the findings apply across the board.

One thing we can take away from this is that successful change that brings value and is sustainable is multi dimensional. We need to take time to think deliberately about the whole system into which we are introducing a change (people, the processes, physical assests and the organization structure).  We need to think openly and strategically about what other parts of the system need to be changed to create the conditions for success and to minimize the conditions for failure.

As managers we may find that “we don’t have time” to think about all of this or that the prospect of thinking about it all is daunting – like confronting a multi dimensional chess game.  We often find that our management just wants the change to happen and doesn’t want to get bogged down in considerations and activities that might increase cost and slow down delivery.  You can use this HBR article and the underlying research to make your case!