Business Record - Iowa Biz

Acting Paradoxically for Success

Let's say you have to deliver a tough message about layoffs. Can you deliver that message in a compassionate way?

Let's say that you feel strongly about a certain issue. But can you jump on board and loyally implement another plan even if it opposes your view?

Can you both lead and follow equally well? Do you confront people when they don't perform but still be  approachable and easy to talk with?

Learning to shift gears readily like this is critical to being a good leader. (Especially today, when the landscape can change in a matter of seconds!) If you're a leader today, you have to be able to think and act in seemingly contrary ways at the same time, or when moving from one task to another.

One of the biggest leadership challenges for me is re-thinking the value of being "consistent," being who I am, deep down, all the time, following one set of beliefs. When called on to act paradoxically, what I do is push out my borders a bit and expand my normal range of beliefs, behaviors and style, using two extremes at once: I'm loud and soft, strong and flexible, persistent and adaptable.

How does paradox show up for you? How do you have to shift gears at work? What kinds of quick and difficult transitions do you have to make in the course of a typical day?

Write down the five toughest for you? How do these discontinuities make you feel and what might you do in that moment that gets you into trouble as a leader? Now decide what you'll do next time such a paradox shows up that will keep you out of trouble and lead you to success.

"She Made Me Mad"

Image via Wikipedia

"She made me mad!" Ever said that? Of course you have. We all have. As if she -- whoever SHE is -- crawled inside our heads, flipped a bunch of levers, and cranked up the dial labeled, "anger."

Others don't make us mad. Or happy. Or anxious. WE pull our own levers and turn our own dials.

In fact, one of the biggest stumbling blocks we all face -- whether as leaders at work or in our personal lives -- is our propensity to believe we know exactly what's going on around us. What we see is what everyone else must be seeing, right? So, our truth is also their truth -- and our emotions must match their emotions, right? No so.

Put 50 people in a room. Stage an incident. You'll get 50 different stories about exactly what happened there. More importantly, you'll get a plethora of different emotions, based on what the various stories are about. Scary stories might create the emotion "fear." Funny stories might create "joy." Et cetera.

Remember Shakespeare's admonition, "Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

THINKING=STORYTELLING

With apologies to Shakespeare, "Nothing in this world is good or bad, but 'storytelling' makes it so." If you want to change your feelings, (bad feelings like anger, frustration and sadness or good feelings like delight, happiness or curiosity) examine the story you're telling yourself.

Stories are assumptions. Remember the old adage you learned somewhere along the way: "If you assume, you make an "ass of  u and me." Storytelling...making assumptions...is especially troublesome when you're in a leadership role. I like Will Roger's thoughts on the subject: "It isn't what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know that isn't so." If I didn't know better, that concept could make me mad.

Achieve Your Goals by "Kedging"

Image via Wikipedia

We all get stuck sometimes. There's something we have our sights set on, we want it really, really badly, and for whatever reason -- we're stalled out. We can't get the traction we need to move forward with our goal. Maybe it's bringing a new product to market. Maybe it's getting a key position filled. Maybe it's learning a new skill that will make a huge difference in our bottom line.

Desperate measures are needed. We must persevere.

What do you do to get unstuck in a situation like that?

• Modify (i.e., lower) your original goal?
• Wait for an epiphany?
• Hire a consultant or a coach or a skilled pair-of-hands?

Have you ever tried "kedging?" Never heard of it? Neither had I. Until I was reading Crowley and Lodge's book, Younger Next Year. They explain it this way:

    Sailing ships in ancient times -- before the invention of the outboard motor -- often got becalmed and the crew had to just sit there in a funk. Which was all right some of the time, but not always. Sometimes there were enemy ships, a hostile shore looming closer, or the sailors just got bored out of their minds and started to squabble. The captain might decide to use kedging to get unstuck. He'd take a light anchor (called a kedging), load it into a longboat, and send a small crew rowing out a half mile or so in the direction the ship was wanting to sail. The longboat crew popped the anchor over the side of the longboat, making sure it was "set" on the bottom, and then everyone back on the big boat pulled like demons on the line attached to the anchor, literally hauling the ship to the anchor. Then they'd do the whole business again, until they got where they wanted to go...or until the wind picked up again. Sounds like a lot of work, but maybe well worth it if your ship was in dire straits.

I can think of instances when I used kedging to move projects or initiatives forward, not realizing what I was doing had a name. I just knew that I was desperate to make something happen.

For example, one time I called on scores of stakeholders --- one at a time -- over the course of months, spending countless hours in the process, in order to get enough agreement to make a much-needed major purchase. We were stuck; desperate needs sometimes demand desperate measures.

What about you? Now that you know what "kedging" is, how have you used it -- to avoid the enemy, the rocks, or poor morale -- in order to achieve a goal that your organization's very livelihood depended on?

Who me? Defensive!

Groucho Marx via last.fm

You're in a meeting and a team member points out an error you made in a recent report. Instantly, you feel your face flushing. Your stomach knots up. Your mind starts to race. What you do next - and say next - says a lot about:

• how you see yourself
• how open you are to learning and improving
• how others will ultimately see you

Get defensive when someone is critical or trying to give you feedback, and it's like shooting yourself in the foot. Get upset with messengers delivering messages - whether they're flattering or not - and soon the messages will dry up.

• People will give you less and less feedback. Pretty soon you're operating with a self-perception that's flawed because it's not aligned with how others see you.
• Then your blind spots start to multiply. Eventually you'll get in trouble because you're operating with pieces of important information missing.

Most people don't enjoy giving even truthful and helpful feedback to a defensive person. It's not easy or fun. So they just don't.

If you know you're guilty of being defensive, change all that. (And hey, we all can be defensive at times, depending on how invested we are in whatever is at stake.)

When someone says something that makes you bristle, instantly think to yourself,

• "Wow, if there's even an element of truth in what they're saying, I need to know it. I could be making a problem for myself, and others, and this could be a way out. What am I doing to get this feedback? What can I learn from this feedback."

Be curious. Sincerely curious. Like a scientist might be with a science experiment. If you can switch from:

• being defensive to being curious
• focusing on your own feelings to focusing on the other person's perspective,

a calmness will settle over you. The racing thoughts will slow down. The strong emotions will subside. Your ears will open up and you'll be able to listen for any nuggets of truth in what's being said.

It all starts with your frame of mind. Is your mindset open or closed? Don't be like Groucho Marx who supposedly said, "People say I don't take criticism very well, but I say, 'What the hell do they know?' "

"Look at me, Mommy!"

Cover of Good to Great

Where's your attention as a leader? On yourself or on those you're leading? Though all of us need affirmation and acknowledgment to some extent -- to bolster our confidence and to let us know that we're on track -- some leaders are downright needy. Wasn't it the extreme need for attention and personal gain that put so many so-called corporate leaders behind bars within the last year or so?

The need for attention is one of the factors that Jim Collins found separated good leaders from great leaders in his Good to Great research. Remember the pattern that Collins discovered that he called The Window and the Mirror? Great leaders are inherently humble, Collins found, and they focus their attention...in other words, they look out the "window" (outside themselves)... to give credit for good things that happen. On the other hand, they switch their attention internally when things go poorly, taking responsibility themselves for what's happened.

Where's your attention as a leader? Do you see yourself as the center of your own story at work, or is your attention on those who are helping you make that story a reality, day-to-day? Supposedly Jack Welch said this about the people of GE, before becoming their CEO, "they spent too much time with their face to the boss and their ass to the customer." That's not good. To GE's credit, Welch got them to turn their attention in the right direction!

Where's your attention as a leader? Great leaders pay attention to those they serve and in the process, they learn how to better serve those they lead.

• During the Civil War, the story goes that President Lincoln would often wander among the Union soldiers after a formal review, exchanging stories, listening to their concerns, expressing his appreciation for their valor and courage. He often worked late into the night so that during the day he could be accessible to the mothers and wives and average citizens who came to him to petition him with their personal tragedies.
• Robert Stephens, founder of The Geek Squad, tells how he decided to integrate off-hours game-playing into the training curriculum by paying attention to how the technicians were chatting and swapping repair tips on their own time. It wasn't about what interested Stephens; it was about paying attention to what interested his employees.

As leaders, we don't have to ask people to pay attention to us -- our employees, our customers, other stakeholders. They will pay attention to us as leaders -- and affirm and acknowledge what we're doing -- if we pay attention to their passions, interests, and needs.

Here Be Dragons

It's said that often -- on the edges of medieval maps -- was penciled the warning: "Here be dragons." Do the edges of your "maps" hold the fear of dragons?

Probably. If we're honest, most of us will admit that the fear of stepping beyond the boundaries of the known -- our comfort zone -- can be pretty frightening sometimes. We come by it honestly. The primitive part of our brain, the amygdala, equates change with the unknown. And then it reacts to the unknown with caution and fear. That's not all bad. It's helped us survive for eons.

However, as leaders, we have to be willing to step into uncharted waters, scared or not. To take risks. Even great leaders feel fear. Some are even brave enough to admit it.

Like Andy Grove, admired executive at Intel. When told, in the early lean and mean days of Intel, that he'd have to become director of operations when all he knew was engineering, he admitted, "I was scared to death. It was terrifying. I literally had nightmares."  Yikes! Sounds like "here be dragons" to me. By stepping off the edges of his engineer-map into the unknown realm of leadership, Grove faced the waiting dragons. And the rest is history.

A few of us were lucky enough to have early successes in finding our way into the unknown. It was thrust upon us and we became early believers. Richard Branson, for example, of Virgin Airlines. When he was four years old, his mom stopped the car a few miles from their house and told him to find his way home across the fields. He did. She made it a fun adventure and he relished the role of dragon-slayer.

Most of us have to be convinced, as leaders, that we can slay dragons. Consider Christopher Logue's poem. A dialogue between a leader and those being led:

    Come to the edge.

    We might fall.

    Come to the edge.

    It is too high.

    Come to the edge.

    And they came,

    and he pushed,

    and they flew.

Balance Optimism with Reality

Here's a question for you. "How do you maintain a positive, can-do spirit in your organization without ignoring uncomfortable facts - like profits are down, lay-offs are imminent and that long-awaited sales trip to Hawaii is toast?"

How you strike that balance is critical. It separates the good from the great. Literally. Just read Jim Collins' Good to Great. Remember the term "Stockdale Paradox" that Collins and his team of researchers coined to explain a trait that separated the great companies from the rest? Admiral Jim Stockdale, survivor of the notorious "Hanoi Hilton" prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam explained the phenomenon this way:

The optimists...were the ones who said, "We're going to be out by Christmas." And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, "We're going to be out by Easter." And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Stockdale's example teaches that it's not the presence or absence of challenging times and circumstances that define our characters and our leadership strengths. We all experience trials. What's important is how we see those inevitable difficulties and if we are able to balance them the faith that we'll endure.

Being able to paint a clear and powerful picture for ourselves, our teams, or our whole organizations of our eventual success - that we shall prevail - is one important part of that picture. The other part is being in touch with reality, in sync with the markets and the people and the culture and the emerging trends AND not being afraid to talk openly and honestly about the way all of those things are coming together. Wicking up reality and talking about it. I think of it as keeping the hopeful "future" state alive alongside the objective (and sometimes frightening) "current" state. We shall prevail, but only by grappling openly with what is, not by denying what is.

I like the way that Jim Lobaito of The Performance Group talks about this same balance in his most recent issue of Sales Quick Coach: "Detach yourself from the specific outcome, but have total faith that ultimately your goal will be achieved....Understand that there are an indefinite number of possibilities between point A (today's reality) and point B (tomorrow's goals). If one opportunity does not materialize, another will."

It's a delicate balancing act but important for all of us, in leading others and in living our own personal lives.

Keep 'Em Playing on Your Street

"Who trains your people?" Robert Spector - author of The Nordstrom Way - once asked a member of the Nordstrom Board of Directors. The board member replied, "Their parents."

That's where motivation comes from? It has its beginning deep inside the employees themselves. They were born with some and their early upbringing hopefully added some more...and life experiences likely contributed along the way as well.

I know what you're thinking: "But what about incentives and reward programs? They're important too, right?" They ARE a helpful component to focus employee attention on what's most important to the organization, but they can easily backfire. Incentives tend to get employees to chase bonuses and short-term targets, skewing motivation toward "what's in it for me?" rather than doing the job well. The recent payout of bonuses at AIG is a perfect example of this.

If people are inspired and engaged and find meaning and pleasure in their work, they're motivated. Add bonuses and that's icing on the cake. But it ain't the cake. Create a workplace where employees feel like they belong, where they can contribute in a meaningful way, and they have fun...you'll touch them deeply and elicit a powerful response. It's called motivation.

The story is told of Charles Handy, a prolific and profound writer, suffering from writer's block one day. A bunch of kids came by and were playing outside his window. The sounds of their laughter and frolicking made his creative juices flow and the words tumbled onto the page. He went out and told them how delighted he was that they chose that spot to play, how it helped him write, and then he asked them to come back and play the next day.

They did. The same thing happened. He wrote fluently and asked them to return. They did. And at the end of the third day, he was so excited about how much work he'd gotten done with them playing outside his window that he ran out and cried, "Come back tomorrow and I'll give you a pound!" (the equivalent of about two bucks in U.S. dollars).

Next day: no kids. Handy goes looking for them and finds them playing one street over. "Why didn't you come back," he asked?

"For a pound it wasn't worth it," they replied with disdain.

Unwittingly, Handy had put a price on what the kids had innately enjoying doing...and they found the price lacking. They took their motivation one street over.

How do you use inspiration to light the fire of motivation that's already burning inside the people you work with? Are they playing on your street or have they moved one street over?

Think like an “Instapreneur”

You can sense it. The signs are everywhere. There’s a major shift occurring in the world’s economy. Look around you on any given weekday morning at any Panera in town. Read back issues of Fast Company for the past couple of years. Listen to global economists talk about trends they’re seeing.

It wasn’t until I read the Avadon Group’s white paper entitled, “Convergence…an Emerging Revolution,” that it all sort of fell into place, the pieces began to make sense and I was both exhilarated and scared spit less at the same time.

Here’s Avadon Group’s thesis:  Baby boomers are retiring in droves. The resulting brain drain is fueling even more outsourcing and overseas growth in innovation and talent, especially in places like China and India. This shift of middle-class jobs overseas will reach a tipping point in 2012 and cause a new economic structure to occur. We need to embrace this new economic structure or, as a player on the world’s stage, we’re toast. The wheels are in motion. It can’t be stopped. We resist this emerging phenomenon at our peril.

What’s this mean for us…you and me and the rest of America’s workforce?

• Slow is over! Our old, slow bureaucracies are going to be stressed to the max. Most won’t make it. The age of the employer and employee is almost over. Now understand, I’m not talking 2050. I’m talking a few years from now! Look at GM, Morgan Stanley, and K-Mart.
• Brand yourself instantly…over and over! The pre-1912 model of individuals being their own businesses…independent contractors…providing the goods and services they have created themselves…will become the norm. These "instapreneurs" will form interlocking networks where they support each other and provide complementary services so each person can act as a complete company drawing on the network. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We already know people working this way. Get ready for millions more. Become one yourself.)
• Borders? What borders? The power of connection through the Internet means business and communication without borders has arrived. By 2012, the Millennial generation – who already live without borders – will be in the workforce. With the baby boomers out of the picture, a new economy and a shift to a more fluid, borderless state will emerge big time.
• It’s all about fluidity and agility. That’s the mind set it’s going to take to thrive in the decades ahead. The view that: “I’m not my job. I’m not a skill set. I’m a dynamic element that grows and reacts to change instantly and fits into the economy’s needs in the moment.” (Makes sense doesn’t it, when you think of all the blogging and twittering going on today and growing exponentially?)

Intrigued? If you answered no, and you’re not a baby boomer ready to check out in the next couple of years, you’re at risk.

Check out Norma Owen’s white paper (Avadon Group). Read Release Your Brilliance by Simon T. Bailey, who used his experiences at Disney to help millions become instapreneurs. And hold on! Because as business leaders – and citizens of planet earth -- we’re in for the ride of our lives!

Kill Chicken Little

Remember when your parents read to you the story of Chicken Little. He was hit on the head by an acorn that fell from a tree and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the sky was falling. Then he rushed out to sound the alarm and spread the fear.

This type of behavior is known in psychological circles as catastrophizing or "awfulizing." Our minds leap to believe the worst. Disaster lies just ahead -- and there's nothing we can do.

We're often guilty of this as individuals; it shows up in our roles as leaders as well. Think about it. You open your mail box and there's a letter from the IRS. Is your first thought, "Oh, great! I must be entitled to a refund." Or is it, "Oh, no! I'm being audited."

Or your boss sends you an email saying she'd like to see you in her office in thirty minutes. Do you get that sinking feeling? You know, the one where your heart falls into your stomach, and your stomach falls into your knees? The next thirty minutes feel like thirty years as you try to think of why you should not be on the list of those being laid off. It turns out your boss wants you on the new project team to improve customer service. Your suffering was needless.

Getting a handle on this tendency to think the worst is critical, especially when there's so much fear in the marketplace already like there is today. Let fear immobilize you and you'll miss out on all kinds of opportunities -- to grow, achieve, win. And, if you're in a leadership role, it's even more imperative to recognize the internal conversation going on in your head and to combat these self-defeating thoughts.

1.) They can keep you from thinking clearly. 2.) They affect your mood -- and your mood impacts the morale of your team. 3.) They take a lot of the energy that should be directed toward your creative efforts.

To de-catastrophize:

First of all, become aware that you have made the leap to, "The sky is falling." Then put your brain to work. Analyze those Chicken Little thoughts. Ask, "What exactly do I mean by 'I'll die if that's an IRS audit!' " Putting your brain to work keeps the blood in your brain so you can think more clearly. It overrides the effect of the adrenaline that shot into your system when your stomach fell to your knees. And it calms you down. These are all good things. You might also try jotting down what you're saying to yourself, starting with the worst conclusion you've come to and working your way back. Just seeing the words in black and white can defuse them and put them into perspective. And finally, think about what you'd say to someone else if they were awfulizing about this same scenario. Then take your own advice.

Do these things and chances are, you won't have to kill Chicken Little. Chicken Little will expire on his own. Fear will subside, reason will return, and you're once again leading with confidence and skill.