Effective Leadership Skills Blog

Decision Making Skills Boost with Brain Teasers

successtv — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:49:30 +0000

by Holly Green

Thanks to the way our brain works, we have a very strong tendency to see what we want to see and what we expect to see. This has huge implications on our decision-making skills when studying our customers, markets, competitors, and other data that influences key business decisions.

When we only see what we want or expect to see, we hamper our critical thinking skills and miss competitive threats because our brain tells us a threat couldn’t possibly come from that direction. We miss opportunities because we only see what has worked in the past rather than what could be. And we miss major market shifts and changes in customer needs that seem obvious in hindsight but are easily overlooked when focusing on what we already know.

Test your mental acuity and decision-making skills

Answer the following questions (no peeking at the answers!):

Johnny’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?
A clerk at a butcher shop stands five feet ten inches tall and wears size 13 sneakers. What does he weigh?
Before Mt. Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain in the world?
How much dirt is there in a hole that measures two feet by three feet by four feet?
What word in the English language is always spelled incorrectly?
Billie was born on December 28^th, yet her birthday always falls in the summer. How is this possible?
In British Columbia you cannot take a picture of a man with a wooden leg. Why not?
If you were running a race and you passed the person in 2^nd place, what place would you be in now?
Which is correct to say, “The yolk of the egg is white” or “The yolk of the egg are white?”
A farmer has five haystacks in one field and four haystacks in another. How many haystacks would he have if he combined them all in one field?

Answers

Johnny.
Meat.
Mt. Everest. It just wasn’t discovered yet.
There is no dirt in a hole.
Incorrectly (except when it is spelled incorrecktly).
Billie lives in the southern hemisphere.
You can’t take a picture with a wooden leg. You need a camera (or iPad or cell phone) to take a picture.
You would be in 2^nd place. You passed the person in second place, not first.
Neither. Egg yolks are yellow.
One. If he combines all his haystacks, they all become one big stack.

Okay, some of these are a bit corny. But they all illustrate several brain idiosyncrasies that affect our decision-making ability.

Our brain doesn’t like information gaps, so we tend to jump at the first answer/solution that looks good rather than take the time to examine all the data. This is especially true in a world where we receive more information every day than we have time to assimilate. Finally, our brains love to see patterns and make connections. This trait serves us well in many ways as we move through the world. But the brain doesn’t always get it right.

Critical thinking patterns and language

How did you answer question #1 (be honest)? For most people, the first word that pops into their head is “June,” because the brain quickly spots the April/May/June pattern. Upon re-reading the question and analyzing the data, the answer “Johnny” becomes obvious.

And what about the man with the wooden leg? Your answer depends on how you interpret “with.” Does it refer to the man with the wooden leg or to the camera? A bit of a trick question, but it clearly illustrates how the language we use shapes the way we look at the world.

Perhaps the best example of how we miss things is the egg yolk question. Everybody knows egg yolks are yellow. But the question’s phrasing puts our attention on selecting the correct verb, so we overlook an obvious piece of data and an even more obvious answer.

What data are we missing for good decision-making skills?

We can’t change how the brain works – at least not yet. For now, we can become more aware of how our brain works, then pause from time to time to consider what we’re missing. This includes the critical thinking data we’re unconsciously screening out as well as different sources of data to counterbalance what we expect to see.

Get in the habit of teasing your brain. You’ll be amazed at what you end up seeing that you didn’t see before.

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Holly is CEO of The Human Factor, Inc., and helps business leaders and their companies achieve higher levels of performance and profitability. Holly was previously President of The Ken Blanchard Company and LumMed, Inc. Holly’s clients include AT&T, Microsoft, Expedia, Nokia, and Google as well as numerous small and midsized businesses.

Holly’s top selling book, More Than a Minute: How to be an Effective Leader & Manager in Today’s Changing World (available in 9 languages globally) goes beyond the theory of leading and managing by providing practical, action-oriented information.

Leadership Training Videos Support Short Training Modules

successtv — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:00:29 +0000

Most likely, your managers and peak performers are too busy or distracted to sit in a classroom training. Still, they need to learn leadership and team building skills which are vital to an organization’s growth.

Enter short leadership training videos. They can boost a blended learning program with videos of great leaders showing a particular leadership skill. We call them bite-sized or “micro” business training that are under 20 minutes.

Business Training Videos in Micro Courses

Want a manager or executive to learn effective communication skills, how to motivate a team or how to give feedback? Business training videos along with quizzes and a case-study can reinforce a learning concept in under 20 minutes. The added advantage is that participants can watch these leadership training videos and modules during a break or when they’re traveling or at home. Then, they can reinforce what they’ve learned in a traditional classroom training.

How businesses are deploying business training videos

Corporations and universities are using short leadership training videos in their online courses, in classroom training, as an after work assignment or in a series of webinars or even as a replacement to traditional in classroom training or online business training courses.

Some of the advantages of business training bursts with leadership training videos is that they can be accessed anywhere. Think of your sales guy on the road who has a layover or flight delay. S/he can watch business training videos on his or her phone or computer. These business training bursts are designed so that you can take them in any order, each business training video burst is a “micro” course. Organizations save lots of money they don’t have to spend on in person classroom training: travel, facility costs, food, printed workbooks, etc. Plus, they can use the business training videos to freshen up other critical skills trainings.

Managers and employees, who are too busy for long training sessions, can pop in and watch short micro leadership training videos whenever it is convenient and gain just-in-time learning.

Critical Thinking Skills for Managers

successtv — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:29:25 +0000

Faced with global competition, pricing pressures and constantly evolving new technology, the leadership decision making process requires managers to master critical thinking skills.

But, how do you set up a good management decision making process when you have more than a day job? Innovation expert and author Holly Green provides a great step by step guideline for the management decision making process. It actually sounds like a lot of fun and the by-product of this leadership decision making process is employee engagement and buy-in.

Critical Thinking Skills in the Management Decision Making Process

She uses the leadership decision making process of divergent and convergent thinking, but not at the same time. Divergent critical thinking skills are kind of like silly putty for your brain. You stretch your brain in all sorts of directions without seeking the familiar. For example, look at magazines or stores just to give your brain input from unfamiliar or random images.

Green explains how to use these critical thinking skills in a fun way: “Deliberately create new links between objects, ideas, events, people, or processes. As you link things together that are normally not connected, you begin to see new relationships and possibilities in the creative process.”

She uses the example of a rubber ball. Its qualities include being round, smooth, fun, resilient and they bounce. Now, you can use your leadership decision making process to see how those qualities relate to innovative ideas around a new product or service.

How could you make your product or service more resilient? How could your product be more fun? What could you do to get customers who have left to bounce back to doing business with you?

The flip side of divergent critical thinking skills is convergent thinking where you group all your ideas around a particular criteria. This starts the management decision making process of whittling down ideas with the goal of executing on some of them. You can base your management decision making process on costs, time to execute and risk.

Success with this leadership decision making process is only ensured with an effective communication strategy and sharing your vision and what’s in it for the team.

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Strategic Leadership Problem Solving for Innovation

successtv — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:58:01 +0000

by Holly Green

As a strategic leader, you have many good ideas to choose from, but how do you decide which ones to implement? Here’s a problem solving technique for selecting the best ideas for your business.

Recently, I wrote about the first phase of the creative decision making process (divergence), which consists of stimulating new critical thinking skills by diversifying and exploring.

The second phase in the decision making process is convergence, which involves refining and choosing the best possibilities from the ideas generated during the divergence phase.

In today’s global economy, market opportunities abound. For the strategic leadership in most companies, the problem is not coming up with enough good ideas. It’s deciding which ones to execute. Convergence tools help to make sense of what often seems like an overwhelming decision making process. They enable you to narrow the range of choices in order to make an intelligent decision. And they provide a starting point from which to implement those decisions.

To get the most out of the convergence phase, I recommend using the “SOARS” decision making process:

Sort to bring order out of chaos
To make sense of all the different possibilities in front of you, start by grouping them into meaningful problem solving categories. These categories might be related to time, feasibility, market demand, availability of resources, type of possibility, or any other category that would help to bring order out of the chaos.

I like to use a three-color sorting technique to simplify the sorting decision making process.

Green represents ideas that clearly fit with your criteria.
Yellow is for ideas that have some fit but probably need further problem solving.
Red identifies ideas that do not fit the strategic leadership criteria.

Order for the Best Ideas :
Once you’ve sorted your ideas by category, rank them against established strategic leadership criteria to create an order of preference. A basic quadrant chart that incorporates two important criteria offers a simple yet powerful way to see your critical thinking skills in action. You’ll see which ideas best fit your strategic leadership criteria. For example, if you choose “cost” and “feasibility” as your criteria, you end up with four distinct quadrants in which to place your ideas:

Critical Thinking Skills Strategic Leadership Quadrants

High cost, low feasibility
High cost, high feasibility
Low cost, low feasibility
Low cost, high feasibility

You can also use other problem solving criteria — such as time to market, probability of success, relevance to customer wants and needs, anticipated return on investment, etc. — to help you narrow down the list.

Adapt Critical Thinking Skills Creatively
When you have identified your list of possibilities, you can expand and adapt them create even better ideas. “Take Away” offers a simple tool for engaging in this process. Identify all the critical components of an idea, then take one away and see what you would have to do if that component wasn’t available or didn’t exist. For example, if you didn’t have access to electricity, you might start thinking about phones that didn’t have to be plugged in.

Refine Critical Thinking
Now it’s time to start critiquing the idea by identifying weak spots and potential failure points. The goal here is to “bullet-proof” an idea before deciding to move forward with it. Start by thinking of all the ways the idea could fail, what external events might create a disaster, or who could and/or would say “no” to the idea. Then begin problem solving by brainstorming ways to avoid these possible obstacles. If the obstacles that remain are too complex, costly or difficult to overcome, the idea doesn’t pass muster.

Select the Best Ideas
“Dot Voting” offers a simple technique for selecting ideas. Make all of the choices available, and give each participant a certain number of dots to vote with. If you’ve established the criteria in advance, this innovation process can be very effective for selecting the best ideas and getting buy-in from people as they see that certain concepts match the strategic leadership criteria more than others.

Keep in mind that ideas are only ideas until they get implemented, and implementation requires that someone take ownership. Getting the right people to take ownership of an idea is a critical piece of the process.

Also, it helps to have a critical thinking process and/or methodology for turning your newly selected ideas into practical products or marketable services. Start by identifying what innovation means to your organization. Why is it important and what will happen when you achieve it?

Choose an innovation model or critical thinking skills approach that fits your type of business and your available resources to drive your innovation efforts. Then identify metrics for inputs, development, and output. If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Mobilize the organization by clarifying and communicating your vision of what successful innovation looks like in your business. Provide the tools and support people need. Hold them accountable for new ways of thinking and working. And keep people inspired by sharing stories of success and failure.

Hopefully, people in your organization are coming up with lots of new ideas. When they do, the SOARS decision making process will make it much more likely that you act on the best ones.

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Holly is CEO of The Human Factor, Inc., and helps business leaders and their companies achieve higher levels of performance and profitability.

Holly’s top selling book, More Than a Minute: How to Be an Effective Leader and Manager in Today’s Changing World (available in 9 languages globally) goes beyond the theory of leading and managing by providing practical, action-oriented information.

Creative Problem Solving For Innovative Ideas

successtv — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:40:57 +0000

by Holly Green

Anyone can enhance their creative problem solving ability simply by understanding the underlying principles of creativity and grasping one very important rule.

The creative process consists of two distinct phases – divergence and convergence. Divergence is the stimulation of new creative thinking by diversifying and exploring. Convergence refines and chooses the best possibilities from the ideas generated by divergence.

Divergent thinking is an expansive process, with the idea being to stretch the mind in order to come up with new ideas. Convergence involves a reductive process whereby you whittle the list down to only those ideas with the most potential.

The one very important rule of creative problem solving? Separate the two phases!

Trying to diverge and converge at the same time sucks the juice out of the creative process. It leaves you with pale, lifeless innovative ideas that never go anywhere. And it has a negative impact on future attempts at idea generation. So always start with divergence first, and then schedule a different meeting for the convergence process.

To kick-start the divergence process, use the SWAMI technique:

Suppose – Creative problem solving techniques

Putting yourself in imaginary situations switches on new ways of creative thinking. For example, if you were from Mars, what would this problem look like? If you were six years old or three feet tall, what would the future look like to you? If you could smash all the assumptions around this issue, what would happen?

To stimulate the “suppose” process, create future stories in which you think of headlines you would like to see. Then make up a story about how those headlines came to be. For example, “Company XYZ Turns Industry Upside Down!” Then describe how you turned the industry upside down through creative problem solving. What innovative ideas did you provide to customers? How was it delivered? How did it change the industry? When you answer these kinds of questions, you can gain great insight into what new product or service to offer.

Wander through the Creative Process

Wandering through new territory with an open mind scoops up new connections and links. For instance, you can wander through hardware or antique stores, new magazines or conferences, or even the great outdoors. It helps to use random images taken from magazines and other sources, such as photographs or postcards, to stimulate creative problem solving about the issue you’re working on.

The less the random images relate to your problem or issue, the better. When you look at images that remind you of what you’re working on, it tends to bring up old thinking patterns. Looking at unrelated images creates divergent thinking and takes the mind in new and different directions.

Associations in the Creative Process

Deliberately create new links between objects, ideas, events, people, or processes. As you link things together that are normally not connected, you begin to see new relationships and possibilities in the creative process.

Metaphorical creative thinking helps with this process because it uses the qualities of one object to get you thinking about another. For example, if you’re trying to come up with innovative ideas to create better customer service, you might think about the qualities of a rubber ball. Rubber balls are round and smooth. They bounce. They’re resilient and not easily damaged. And they’re fun to play with.

Now, examine each of these qualities to see what innovative ideas they might stimulate around customer service. How could you make your product or service more resilient? How could your company be more fun (easier) to play (do business) with? What could you do to get customers who have left to bounce back to doing business with you?

Morph

This involves changing various aspects of a situation by making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Use the technique of brain-writing to drive the process of building on other innovative ideas. Start by creating a worksheet with six rows and three columns of empty boxes. Have each person write three ideas in one row of boxes, then pass their worksheet on to the next person. The idea is to build on the ideas of others or use them to stimulate new creative thinking. Repeat the exercise until all sheets are filled.

Inquire: The great “What If?” for Creative Thinking

Questions create openings. Asking great questions can unravel a mystery like a kitten batting a ball of twine. Start by asking the most powerful question for opening up new possibilities: What if…..?

For example: What if our customers ran our business….? What if we’re looking at it the wrong way….? What if we saw this in a way that nobody has seen before…? Have everyone think of 10 ways to complete the question. Then compare notes.

Once you’ve come up with several good innovative ideas for addressing your problem or challenge, schedule a separate time to use the convergent thinking phase. Next week, I’ll share some ideas for managing the innovation process of turning good ideas into practical application.

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Holly is CEO of The Human Factor, Inc., and helps business leaders and their companies achieve higher levels of performance and profitability.

Managers, Is It Better to Coach or Delegate?

successtv — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:27:16 +0000

by Holly Green

Have you ever wondered why the head of a baseball team is called the manager and the head of a basketball team is called the coach?

Beyond the obvious differences between the two sports, the answer lies in how the players are coached and managed during particular games. Just as baseball and basketball are two very different sports, coaching and managing are two very different activities. One has to do with directing, the other has to do with teaching.

Managing is all about telling, directing, authority, immediate needs, and a specific outcome. Coaching involves exploring, facilitating, partnership, long-term improvement, and many possible outcomes.

During a baseball game, the manager focuses primarily on strategy and managing the flow of the game. He decides who pitches and when. He positions the players in the field based on the tendencies of the batter. And he relays commands to coaches, who then tell players when to swing, when to take a pitch, and how to run the bases.

In basketball, the coach has the same authority as a baseball manager, but he gets more involved with the action on the court. He calls out plays and defensive schemes to the players, but they are then free to implement those plays (using their skills and knowledge of the game) as they see fit. During time-outs, the coach draws up plays on the clipboard. He offers encouragement, support, and suggestions. And he instructs players on how to react to many possible outcomes depending on what the other team does.

Obviously, the roles and responsibilities of a baseball manager and basketball coach overlap. But while the baseball manager focuses on authority and directing, the basketball coach works in more of a teaching/facilitating capacity.

What does all this have to do with business leadership? More than you might think.

In business, we have to be both coaches and managers. To lead effectively, we need to know when to wear which hat.

Managing involves a more directive, task-oriented style that should only be used under certain conditions. It usually produces the best results in a crisis situation, when someone has never done the task before, or when they have little or no confidence in their ability to get it done.

Coaching works best for developmental purposes, especially when you have a team of competent professionals already performing at a reasonably high level. Once you define winning for your organization, team members may need your guidance and support. But in most cases they shouldn’t need direction.

Knowing when to direct, delegate or develop is critical to managerial effectiveness. Determine which style is appropriate based on the task at hand rather than the individual. Often, people will need a combination of styles depending on the complexity of the task assigned, their experience with the task, and the competency levels required to complete it with excellence.

Direct when the employee has low to moderate competence with the skills and abilities needed to complete the task. Be sure to define excellence (what, how and when), and provide specifics (templates, examples, etc.) so the person can achieve the desired outcome. Direct when a person:

Is new in a role
Is new to the company
Is new to the client/customer
Has new job responsibilities or tasks
Has new ways of working

Delegate when the employee has moderate to high competence. Again, define excellence so both sides have clarity around the goal. Then let the employee determine the approach they will take and keep you informed as to their progress. Ask questions and provide direction and specific support when necessary. Delegate when a person has:

Some experience in the role
Marshall Goldsmith Effective Leadership Skills Coaching DVD
A track record or competence
A sensitive task or client
Confidence in their abilities
Similar ways of working

Develop when the employee has high competence and high commitment to the task. Then define excellence and get out of the way! Give plenty of recognition for successful completion of the task. Then determine the person’s next challenge. Develop when the person:

Has extensive experience
Has demonstrated evidence of competency
Has experienced similar clients or task sensitivities
Is growing new competences
Is trying new approaches

Sometimes we have to coach and sometimes we have to manage. But the more time we can spend delegating and developing, the more effective we’ll be.

Related Story: Business Cost of Employee Turnover

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Holly is CEO of The Human Factor, Inc., and helps business leaders and their companies achieve higher levels of performance and profitability.

What to do about Delusional Decision-Making and Bad Behavior

successtv — Sun, 06 May 2012 03:00:52 +0000

Success Television email 5.6.2012

How we can delude ourselves from effective decision-making
25% off popular business training DVDs
Leadership lessons from a POW
Consumer Engagement trends in health care

It’s the weekend so do this for fun. Just watch the first 40 seconds ONLY! of this video then stop it.Later on, you can watch the rest of the video but first you want to have followed the instructions in the first 40 seconds and have an answer. (There’s a great payoff to this if you’ve never seen the whole video.)

How many times was the ball passed by people wearing white shirts?
Did you see a gorilla? Don’t go back and look – just answer yes or no.

Read more about how this relates to our ability to make good decisions.>> It’s guaranteed to get you thinking!

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If you work for a State Government or Educational organization, you can get big discounts – 25%– on popular business and leadership training videos. Get the leadership training DVD discounts here >>

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It’s not a stretch to conclude that dishonorable behavior is epidemic–you can see it, hear it, and almost taste it in the air.

But, the stark reality is that we all live only one or two choices away from similar bad behavior. Human beings are dynamic, living, vibrant, strong and resilient, but we are also frail in terms of will power to resist the temptations of the moment. So how can we avoid the pitfalls of exhibiting bad behavior like John Edwards, the Secret Service and cheating teachers? Read more about how a former POW and author says we can avoid our own shocking examples of behavior in business and in life >>

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Success Television is proud to announce that digital media speaker Craig Forman will be the keynote speaker at PRISM Service Group’s first annual health care conference on consumer engagement and health care. Forman has been working on the front lines of digital media, helping companies grow through consumer engagement.

Book your next motivational speaker with Success Television.

Secret Service, John Edwards, Teachers Cheating! What’s up Doc?

successtv — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:27:12 +0000

by Lee Ellis

Have you noticed the disconnect? Everyone thinks they have high ethics and honorable behavior, yet the headlines seem to indicate that our society has big problems in living and leading with honor.

Shocking Behavior in the Headlines

Recently, there has been an avalanche of horror stories that raises questions of honor and integrity:

Where was the honor of the GSA group spending tax payer money lavishly at a conference in Las Vegas?
How about the Secret Service advance team’s party in Columbia?
This week, we are learning just how dishonorable vice-presidential candidate John Edwards was with his wife, his mistress, and campaign donations.
Last year we learned that some Atlanta Public School teachers and administrators were cheating by changing answers on standardized test scores. Yes, you heard it right; it was the teachers–not the students–who were indicted for cheating. The Atlanta papers have done similar investigative research in large cities around the nation and concluded that similar standardized test fraud is happening there also.

It’s not a stretch to conclude that dishonorable behavior is epidemic–you can see it, hear it, and almost taste it in the air.

Dr. Scott Peck, who is a psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Traveled, concluded that ultimately “sin”, in the broadest sense of the word, is due to laziness. When considering the epidemic in bad and unhealthy behavior, I think he has a good point.

Our natural tendency is to take the easy way out; to look for wealth without work,success without sacrifice, to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The road of honor is less traveled because it is often the hard way. It takes discipline to keep our commitments and courage to make our walk match our talk.

Return with Honor

During more than five years as a POW in Vietnam, I watched and heard leaders endure hardship and pain in order to do the right and honorable thing. Often it took every ounce of energy they had to follow our code of conduct and stand firm in their loyalty to their country and fellow POWs. Our short but powerful motto of “Return with Honor” encompassed our mission, vision, and values all in just three words. To live and lead with honor was our highest goal.

Thanks to our code of conduct and courageous leadership in our seemingly hopeless environment, the idea of living and leading with honor became our highest value–worth suffering to achieve.

That human beings are lazy in self-discipline is obvious–just look at our problems caused by gluttony, alcohol abuse, smoking, adultery, lying, cheating, etc. We each have our temptations. To overcome that laziness requires self-governance based on strong personal commitments under-girded by courage–a willingness to lean into the pain of our doubts and fears to do the right thing.

What’s Up with You?

So what about you? What is your personal area of weakness and temptation, and what are you doing to guard your character? Whose example are you following? What about your leadership? Who is watching you and what are they learning about courage and character from your choices and behaviors?

Think about it–one person supervising the GSA party, one person in the Secret Service on the scene in Columbia, or one person in the Atlanta Public School District could have made the difference. When it comes time to lead with honor, will you stand and make the best choice regardless of the consequences? With courage and commitment, I believe that you can!

~~~~~~~

His latest book is called Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton.

Six gorilla-sized illusions that blind side good decision-making

successtv — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:44:09 +0000

by Holly Green

Here’s a short video clip, under two minutes. It is a fun test of what you see and don’t see when you’re focused.

What was your answer? Also, did you see a gorilla the first time around?

If you didn’t see the gorilla, you were like half the participants in a Harvard class taught by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons. In that class, the professors were surprised that despite their assurances that the gorilla did indeed make an appearance, those who didn’t see it remained confident in their belief that it didn’t exist.

Obviously, knowing the outcome guarantees you will spot the gorilla. You’ll be amazed that anyone could not see it – it’s that obvious.

I often use this clip with participants in keynote addresses and my experience is that less than 30% of the audience sees the person in the gorilla suit the first time – even lower than what the original professors experienced!

The two professors have now written a fascinating book called “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.” It’s a great read that addresses several critical shortcomings inherent in our most important leadership tool – our brain.

Six Everyday Illusions

“The Invisible Gorilla” examines six everyday illusions that profoundly influence our lives: illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. According to the authors, these illusions represent distorted beliefs we hold in our minds that are “not just wrong, but wrong in dangerous ways.”

The gorilla clip offers a great example of the first illusion (attention), which says that we think we pay attention to much more of the world around us than we actually do. The audience is so focused on a specific task (counting the number of bounced passes) that many people don’t spot the simian as it leisurely strolls through the video.

With a background in behavioral science, I’ve learned a lot about how the brain filters what we see, hear, and pay attention to. It’s the reaction afterwards that would be comical were it not so scary.

At first, people who didn’t see the gorilla insisted that no such animal appeared in the clip. No way could they have missed something like that! After watching it a second time, however, all were shocked and amazed at how obvious the gorilla appears. Some even accused the professors of showing a different video the second time around.

And that’s where three of the illusions come in:

We think we see more than we actually do.
We overrate our abilities to recall what we have seen.
And we constantly overestimate our own qualities and abilities .

These illusions show up everywhere you look in the business world.

How else to explain a company like GM continuing to crank out monstrous gas guzzlers in a world of declining oil supplies and soaring prices? How else to explain Blockbuster continuing to invest in bricks-and-mortar video outlets even as their customers flocked to NetFlix and on-demand cable movies? How else to explain the popular music industry fighting digital downloading while watching an entire generation of their best consumers walk around listening to iPods?

These companies were run by very smart, capable people. But their brains caused them to see what they wanted to see. And they missed the 800-lb. gorillas walking right through their industries. Add to that their inflated confidence in their abilities to continue dominating their markets, and the end result was inevitable.

General Motors seems to have woken up and seen the gorilla (albeit with a lot of help from the federal government). The music industry continues to crank out CD’s, but they’re beginning to adjust to the new realities of popular music distribution channels. And Blockbuster is desperately trying to reinvent its business model while protected by bankruptcy, but they may have fallen too far behind to ever catch up.

As business leaders, it behooves us to get more in tune with how our brains really work. In particular, we need to become more aware of the many ways it causes us to distort reality and miss what’s really going on in the world around us. “The Invisible Gorilla” makes a great starting point for accomplishing this goal.

What “gorilla” have you missed in your business or industry that was blindingly obvious in hindsight? What are you so sure of that it is causing you to screen out contradictory data and remain committed to a plan that could be outdated?

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Holly is CEO of The Human Factor, Inc., and helps business leaders and their companies achieve higher levels of performance and profitability.

10 Misconceptions about leadership training videos

successtv — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:49:43 +0000

Ever had to suffer through the grainy video or guy with the mustache from the 70s when you took a leadership development course? Leadership training videos can be schlocky, too long, have no credibility, on and on. Just like with any product, there are winners and losers. But, let’s assume you’ve found some good management training videos. You’re a believer because you know the value of video to engage and boost retention. But, someone on your team is hesitating.

We’ve compiled a list of mistakes in thinking or execution in the use of video in trainings. We’re listing these not to criticize but to help other career development trainers and HR folks who have to decide the best way to train and develop their executives and peak performers.

1. Leadership videos take up too much time: One Fortune 500 director of training actually said this. If we’re under 40 and grew up watching online videos, he might not be engaging us. Videos can be short, 3 to 5 minutes in length, and ideal for backing up a learning concept in a highly visual, emotive way. They also can convey a complex thought or sensitive subject in a shorter amount of time than it takes for a trainer to explain or have participants read about.

Read more for the other nine myths of leadership training videos >>
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See our video library of short 3-5 minutes videos of great leaders designed for you to insert into an existing or new training.

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What does spaghetti have to do with engaging employees?

Stupidity is often described as trying to do the same thing over and over hoping for different results but getting the same results. It’s like pushing a string or a wet spaghetti noodle hoping it will become a straight line.

Why do we do that?

That’s the same with hiring/firing/re-hiring. There are all sorts of HR stats and if you were a betting man or woman, you could almost predict the number of new employees that will blow out within six months to a year and a half.

A mid-level manager is expected to last 6.2 months, according to Michael Watkins, author of “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.

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