Tom on Leadership

Storytelling Redux with Seth Kahan

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:09:59 PST

Following up on our recent interview of four experts on business storytelling, we drill down into the how-tos of good storytelling, including when to use which type of story. My returning guest is Seth Kahan of visionaryleadership.com, who will also discuss his forthcoming book "Getting Change Right."

There are types of stories?

Yes, says Seth. One expert, Steve Denning writing in Harvard Business Review identified eight (8) different types, of which we touched on three in particular:

Building Rapport
Inspiring Action
Teaching Lessons

Seth was introduced to the power of storytelling through the work of Joseph Campbell. In addition to his "day job" at the bank, Seth was doing a lot of theater, and exploring ancient human rituals and rites of passage. One day Seth's boss asked about his life outside of work, and this boss was excited by the possibilities of using stories as a way to communicate better inside this large organization.

That was important because people routinely fail to communicate well inside large organizations. You can use status reports, charts, graphs and memos, and a dozen other tools (including hiring consultants), and see people "not get it" -- or your message connects yet there is no behavior change. For this boss, the one-on-one conversation seemed to be effective, yet that doesn't scale up. To really get through to people, they found, nothing beats a good story.

Pretty quickly they found that both the story telling, and some of the elements of ancient rites of passage, all worked really well. They had to "transpose" the rites of passage -- you don't bring in inappropriate things like mandatory three-day fasting or bonfires on the conference tables. They found ways to adapt ancient practices to modern circumstances.

Invoke your Meetings
A good example was invocations at meetings -- Seth's folks would start their meetings with an invocation. Across cultures and across history, meetings would be started with some form of invocation. This was just 30 seconds or so where attendees are asked to put away outside concerns, enter the room and be fully present, and be reminded of the purpose of the group and the purpose of the meeting.

For instance, the person convening the meeting might say "Let's begin. I'd like us all to agree to be fully present at this meeting, silence your cell phones, put away your messaging devices, and put to rest your outside concerns. As we all know, our group exists to help third world children get the education they need to have a better future. The purpose of today's meeting is decide details of our annual membership party."

When you start each meeting by re-connecting with the energy that drives the group, it makes for a better meeting. You set a very clear context, which allows people to have much more constructive conflicts within a frame of shared values.

Meetings have changed substantially due to the Internet. Meetings are no longer to share scarce information. We have lots of information. We don't need more content.

Meetings are really about context. The power of meetings includes the power of convening people together, and allowing each one to bring their unique genius to the challenges we face.

Takeaway: work with your people to craft an invocation that works for them, and use it to open every meeting. Script the first 3/4 word for word. This invocation should:

be short (about 30 seconds)
help people clear their heads (and silence their cell phones)
reconnect everyone to the glorious mission of the group
state the purpose of this specific meeting

Stories to Build Rapport and Increase Trust
For this purpose, a good story is anything that is true and comes across as authentic, that reveals things about me, and that other people can relate to. And it's important to swap these stories. (This is similar to "Structured Disclosure" covered previously.) These can and should be practiced. When you practice, ask if the story is resonating with people. And it's okay to repeat your story. In other cultures it's much more common to re-tell a story many times -- Americans are a little less prone to do that, however you should feel free to do it.

Stories to Share Knowledge and Wisdom
Knowledge sharing stories often do not have happy endings. They don't have to. As long as your message is put in the form of a story, it's more likely to be remembered and acted upon.

Seth was going camping with his 80-lb dog, and he noticed his dog walking strangely and foaming at the mouth. Suddenly he remembered when the dog jumped in the truck, Seth heard a yelp as if the dog had banged his belly on the tailgate. And a story suddenly came into Seth's mind that he had heard three years earlier on the radio, about how a large dog's stomach can torque, can flip over and be sealed off on both ends like a baggie, if it's full of water or food and if the dog bangs it on something the wrong way. It's a lethal condition if untreated, because nothing can get in or out of the stomach including blood -- without an operation within 4-5 hours the dog will die.

All of this flashed into Seth's head in an instant. He hurried the dog back to the truck and went knocking on the door of the last house he'd passed on the drive in.

Notice what would happen if I stopped telling this story right here. You feel up in the air -- you want to hear the rest. That's one of the characteristics of the good knowledge story -- we want to hear the end. We get involved.

Seth got the name of the nearest vet and called -- it was 5 pm on a Friday and the vet was just about to switch on the answering machine and leave the office. The vet said "you have to bring the dog here and I have to operate." She was two hours away. Seth said "can you meet me halfway?" The vet said "no, if you've diagnosed this right we'll need the operating room. Bring him here."

Seth drove his dog two hours through the winding mountain roads, got there and the vet operated for 90 minutes. She came out and said "your dog is alive and well. Go finish your camping trip and pick him up when you're done." All because Seth remembered that radio story.

The story has to have a charge to it. It has to have a very clear message. When you're under fire, under pressure, the average person can only remember one thing. It better be the right thing. A good story can be a single thing that's remembered, and the story provides lots of handles for hanging on to the lesson.

Stories to Call People to Action
This is the sort of story you tell when you want to motivate others to go out and do things in the world. Steve Denning calls these "springboard" stories and covers it in his book. These stories are very short -- 45 seconds. The audience can see themselves in it. The protagonist must be someone the audience can relate to. Tell your line workers a story about a line worker. Tell your people about a customer. It must be wholly true -- when people research it they must come to the same conclusion you do. (If you said "on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, 700 happy passengers reached New York," you're leaving out key facts, and distorting the story. People will hang you on the difference.) It must have a happy ending.

Afterward, you don't want people saying "what a great talk." What you want is people to come up and say "here's what I'm going to do."

The classic example is this one used at the World Bank to kick off a knowledge management effort, about when knowledge management work. It was told in 1996.

"In June of last year an impoverished farmer in Zambia went to the web site of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and got an answer to a question about treating malaria. Zambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and this happened in a tiny place 600 km from the capital. The most striking thing about this story is that the World Bank is not in it. Despite our know-how on so many poverty related issues, our knowledge is not available to the millions of people who can use it. But imagine if it were. Think what it would be like if our organization could do this?"

That story was responsible for taking an unfunded idea to a $60 million annual allocation in two years. That story lit a fire throughout the organization, so people took action, and said "here is how I am going to make my information available" -- without any supervision from Seth's small unfunded team.

That story was unique to that organization, so leaders need to come up with their own.

Listening to Stories
As a leader you also need to listen to stories and capture them. In Seth's book he describes the Reconnaissance Report -- a one to two page summary of those stories, that shows people that you've heard them and understand them.

Taming the Grapevine
Stories can be used to defuse rumors and help stop the undercutting of a leader's agenda. When Bill Clinton was running for President in 1992, his opponent George HW Bush said that Bill's wife Hillary would be a bad first lady because she didn't bake cookies. How do you defuse that? In politics the strangest things can hurt you, so you may not be safe if you ignore it.

If you engage directly, and start talking about the baking of cookies, now you look foolish. You need to re-engage at a different level that is humorous and undercuts the assumptions in the first story. So what Bill Clinton did was say "my opponent isn't running for President -- he's running for First Lady." That ridiculed the rumor and invalidated it without addressing it directly.

As a consultant I might face a rumor that I'm there to lay people off. To re-direct that, try something like "Some folks are focused on losing their jobs -- we need to be focused on turning this company around and serving our customers even better, so that we can all keep our jobs." However I cannot use that re-direction if my plan does involve layoffs. I cannot lie and be effective -- that makes it much, much worse.

What if the truth is, that there may be layoffs? Then Seth suggests meeting privately and speaking and listening candidly to the people carrying the rumors, to share with them what's going on, both good and bad. Engage with them constructively. 95% of them can be worked with.

There are also toxic people. They may need to be handled differently. Seth covers this in greater detail in his book.

Other Resources
Don't miss the upcoming Storytelling Weekend at the Smithsonian on April 15-17, 2010. That's Thursday afternoon, and all day Friday and Saturday. More details at stevedenning.com.

What is Trust?

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:39:58 PST

A big part of our last show on rebuilding a damaged team included the importance in the team of trust.

What is trust?

One formulation suggests it is:

Predictability - I know what you will do and can guess with high confidence your future behavior in certain circumstances
Value Exchange - we engage in mutually beneficial exchanges
Delayed Reciprocity - we offer value without needing an immediate return; when others offer value without a demand, we remember and reciprocate later
Exposed Vulnerability - all progress involves some risk, so team members have to feel safe taking risks and doing things that make them feel vulnerable --or else they won't take the risk, and thus won't make progress

I think that makes a great list of things to look at when seeing why trust has eroded, and finding ways to fix it.

For example, we could ask team members to rate each other and themselves in these four areas, and define clear social expectations and rules of engagement around them.

Re-Building your Virtual Team

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:06:39 PST

How can you re-build a virtual (i.e. geographically dispersed) team that has had some negative interactions within the group? If you had a single in-person team meeting, how would you go about rebuilding trust and a sense of camaraderie within the group? Or can it be done?

I posed this question to a panel of world class experts:

Mr. Peter Bye - former Corporate Diversity Director at AT&T, he was selected in 2008 by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) as one of 100 distinguished global thought leaders
Mr. John Bender - holds an Executive MBA from Harvard University, and led the world-wide HP/Compaq Integration Office responsible for planning and executing the $19B acquisition, which involved creating multiple virtual teams
Mr. Tim Flanagan - Senior Instructor and Director of Custom Programs at the Leadership Development Institute and the co-author of three books: Becoming a Conflict Competent Leader, Building Conflict Competent Teams, and Developing Your Conflict Competence
Ms. Danna Beal - author of the book The Tragedy in the Workplace: The Longest Running Show in the Country, and creator of the "Healing the Workplace Culture Series" that teaches individuals how to operate from authentic power and genuine self worth, rather than egos and personal agendas
Dr. Mike Kroth - Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho in Adult/Organizational Learning and Leadership, and author or co-author of three books including Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace and The Manager as Motivator

This may be our best program of the year so far. (read the full article) (listen to the interview)

Peter Bye opened by saying that a team can be rebuilt, and suggesting that a key success factor is to focus on "how" -- how the team interacts. Pete knows this first hand -- he once took P&L responsibility for two virtual teams, one with a mature product that was losing money and the other with a new product that was late.

Both these teams were focused 100% on their tasks -- on the "what" they were supposed to be doing, and were not paying conscious attention to "how" they were doing it. Pete started by listening a lot, letting people vent, and understanding the nature of the problems. (By making sure everyone feels heard, you build trust.) Then he brought each team together in one place -- for the first time in that team's history -- and worked with them on developing and getting agreement on the "rules of engagement" (my term) for how the team would work together.

Pete turned these teams around. The mature product became profitable, the new product got finished, and people's happiness soared.

Notice that this seems on its face to contradict some good management theory about empowerment -- that you should tell folks What to do, and leave them free to decide for themselves How to do it. There's a big difference between telling someone "What not How" with regard to tasks -- we do want to empower people to accomplish their work tasks -- and helping them master tools for communication.

These team dynamics are even tougher with a cross-cultural team. You learned how to communicate with people by growing up in a family. Even if you had a highly effective home life, your inner rules for how to communicate are still tied to that context, that culture. To work well with folks from a new culture, you cannot assume your old skills will work or that others will understand you.

Once the team members understand there is a difference between the Message I Sent and the Message You Received in team communications, they can start to build some explicit and written rules for how to communicate important concepts and messages with each other.

Culture is just one factor. Consider the case where one teammate feels let down by another. The hurt is there and needs to be addressed.

How do you heal the team? Pete does these steps:

Interview folks in advance to discover the depth and details of the hurt
If the hurt is big, work on healing - otherwise skip
Start creating a new shared vision of the future, shared values, shared goals, and rebuild trust
Get the team to create shared ways of communicating - operating principles in writing that state how we will support each other in the new way of being

Pete worked with a virtual team with lots of dysfunction and mistrust. They were a mix of Americans and Canadians, and half were former independent business owners.

What are some of these "operating principles" the team might write down and agree to?

I'll do what I say I'll do, and when I don't, I'll help clean up the mess
Listen sincerely and openly to others' ideas, and seriously consider them

These are all about clarity of our roles as team members, and having more mutual respect.

My next expert was John Bender. He says there are some critical success factors for managing a virtual team:

Connectivity - the team's operating norms and rituals that provide a sense of cadence, community and togetherness. This is enabled by technology. It's reinforced by face-to-face interaction.
Confidence - owned by the team collectively - the team must believe everyone is able and willing to fulfill their roles.
Commitment - whether or not team members have a choice - do they get the chance to enroll or un-enroll in projects, can they pick directions and establish goals and make choices, and is the work important and worthy and meaningful? Do I feel challenged to grow?

John says these can be built deliberately.

When a team has struggled, it's often the case that they are then weak on Confidence -- the past failures are predictors of likely future failures. The team does not jump on opportunities to solve problems. They leave problems on the table. Instead they catalog the issues for possible future use as excuses. You overcome that by creating quick wins.

When you undertake "re-launching" a team, John recommends:

Honor the past - past successes and challenges - as part of the context for the re-launch
Offer teams the opportunity to re-enroll, both individually in advance, and then collectively as a group -- this step could need to be repeated

Enrollment is personal and reflective -- it's the intersection of the team member's own personal goals and the goals of the team and organization. It's the method of deciding if you want to be on this team or not. To check your own level of enrollment, as yourself:

Am I excited about this opportunity?
Will I be challenged and will I grow?
Do I trust my teammates and the leader?

In virtual teams, using lots of electronic communication, much of the nuance of communication (facial expression, posture, gesture, some voice inflection) is lost and it can be harder to build trust because of that loss of nuance.

Danna Beal found that across all the people and industries she worked with, the same basic underlying dysfunctions were at work -- a web of egos, in which people engage in gossip, sabotage, secrecy and politics.

That's true across virtual and non-virtual teams alike. And there's a way out, which takes courage.

These biggest underlying cause is fear. A lack of trust will accelerate fear, and a bad economy will enhance fear.

To fix it, the leader needs to start by looking at his or her own ego, and start developing the traits of true leadership:

humility
self-reflection
ability to honor each individual

Danna would start the team rebuilding by creating honesty, where the team members acknowledge that past behaviors have contributed to the problems, and that they all want to move to a place of increased compassion and respect.

This meeting starts out with acknowledging the negative experiences people have had -- gossip, fear, sabotage, and so on.

Danna next leads everyone to see that harm to another team member also harms the team. She helps each member release their fear. Each person acknowledges the "image" they like to project, and then lets go of their need to project that image to the team -- becoming less fearful, more authentic and more human.

Now the team can come together around their goals, and the new steps they will take when problems arise, the new ways they will express their needs without fear of being attacked or diminished.

Teams only work well when there is trust, respect and a sense of safety. Leaders have to create that safety so team members can take risks and be vulnerable.

Tim Flanagan agrees that conflict, and erosion of trust, are big issues with teams. Research shows there are two types of conflict that can erode trust -- these are Task or Cognitive Conflict (about the work or "the stuff") and Relationship or Emotional Conflict. Far too often we try to dive in to the rational, logical, task portion when the problem is in the relational and emotional end, or before the team members are emotionally ready to work on "the stuff."

Many engineers and other task-oriented folks (including many CEOs) want to work on things they are comfortable with, i.e. tasks. Making those folks stop, switch gears, and engage in an area where they may feel weak or be uncomfortable, is not easy for them, and it's not easy on them. Yet we have to work on the relational and emotional aspects of the team conflict first.

How do we get them to do this? Tim worked at the Harris Corporation with 30,000 engineers, and agrees with this assessment. He's working now on a nuclear power plant construction project that's virtual -- the client is in one place, the engineering firm is in another, and the construction is happening in a third place.

The right way to do this is to front-load this team development work. Acknowledge the inevitability of conflict, and develop up front the agreements, operating principles and relationships needed to handle that conflict well.

Trust is a huge mandatory element. You cannot just adopt a standard set of operating principles. You have to make sure everyone feels heard and understood. People only develop trust by taking risks and then having them turn out well.

How do you build that trust? Tim's book contains lots of small exercises for exactly this purpose. One of his favorites is called Structured Disclosure -- as people are re-introducing themselves, along with the usual name, job, role, and location, Tim likes to ask them to add one unique thing about themselves that nobody else in the room knows -- it should be positive and culturally appropriate, and need not be work related.

These disclosures help create new connections among the team members.

This harkens back to the Johari Window, the model that suggests we grow as people by both revealing themselves and being open to feedback from others.

Dr. Mike Kroth (rhymes with "growth") has lots of experience with engineers and relates his experience -- the same engineers who complain and say they don't need or want to learn soft skills -- will then complain about bad team experiences using these exact terms: they need respect, they need trust, they need to be heard.

I think they resist the soft skills learning because they know they aren't very good at it. It sounds like you're asking them "How would you like to spend an afternoon being uncomfortable, doing something you're not very good at?" They will often say "no."

The team should have a shared understanding of how we will interact.

Suppose our team has agreed that, if I have a problem with Mike, I'll take it to Mike. And suppose I have a problem with Mike and I go to Alice and start complaining. I say "You won't believe what Mike did."

Ideally, at that point Alice will hold me to our joint agreement and say "What did Mike say when you told him how you feel?" And when I admit I haven't gone to Mike yet, ideally Alice will say "Do you need my help to take this to Mike?"

If we've all agreed to this in advance, then Alice will feel comfortable doing this, and I'll feel supported by Alice when she does it -- because she's helping me live up to the behavior I had agreed to.

Mike does not believe that the case study example for this interview is workable -- if the team really is dysfunctional, then a two-hour meeting will not be enough. It's way too late.

Good virtual teams start off by norming even before storming -- by agreeing up front how to run meetings, how to share information, and starting the team off with shared expectations. Up front, we should share information, share details about ourselves, get to know each other deeply. Establish social bonds. Create a virtual water cooler.

(Experience shows that high performing teams, even after they disband, the relationships among the team members continue.)

Once you have these good things in place, as issues begin to arise, there's some hope the team will be willing and able to face them and work through them.

Trust is a process. It's taking a risk. No two-hour meeting is going to create the trust, or not fully. Good virtual team leaders are always looking to make connections. And so far at least, no matter how good the technology has become so far, we still don't have telepresence or webinar tools that replace the "Bagel Practice" of having a face-to-face experience like eating a meal together.

Good virtual team leaders often spend lots of time on the road in order to have that face time with their team members.

All the principles of team development:

demonstrate caring
communication
going through the phases of Forming Storming Norming and Performing

all apply to virtual teams as well. The practices themselves may be different. The virtual team leader may want to be far more sensitive to the early signs of conflict in order to fix it early.

The interview went on for another 30 minutes, including an excellent set of stories (the Trip to Antarctica was especially good) -- listen to it here.

Derek Sivers' Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:25:03 PST

It's delightful how a simple video becomes a powerful teaching tool in the hands of a master like Derek. Enjoy.

CEO Tips for Email Sanity

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:53:36 PST

There are two groups of topics I cover -- issues unique to CEOs and business owners, and topics more universal that I know many CEOs care deeply about. This topic is the latter -- Email Sanity.

I found the perfect resource for this hour-long interview: Randy Dean, the "Totally Obsessed Time Management Guy" who has spent several years understanding the best -- and worst -- habits we have around email, and why it wastes so much of our time.

Randy says that there are two fundamental ways we mis-use email. First, we have bad personal processes -- such as re-reading the same email five times before deciding what to do about it. Second, email encapsulates bad communications habits -- we forward someone an email without explaining why we did it, or what we want them to do with it, and the time we "saved" by not telling them that is then lost when they either ask us to clarify, or they guess wrong and do the wrong thing.

(read the entire article)

Bad Personal Processes
Bling
First, stop checking email every time you hear the "bling" sound that tells you a new message has arrived. You can only be productive if you preserve blocks of uninterrupted time for important tasks. You destroy your productivity if you allow yourself to be interrupted constantly by checking email. Stop it. Instead, depending on how customer-centric or responsive you truly need to be, set a schedule of checking your email no more than once per 4 hours -- or as frequently as once an hour if your job really requires it.

Indecision and Re-Work
When you read an email, decide then and there what to do with it. (The average person re-reads each non-spam email message 2 to 7 times before deciding what to do about it -- a phenomenal waste of time.) Randy recommends this "Decision Tree"

Is action Required? (If no, file or delete it.) If yes:
Can I do it in 3 minutes or less? If yes, do it, then file or delete the email
Can I do it in 3 minutes or less? If no, put it on an action list (to-do list) or in an action file

Mixing Business and Pleasure
Stop jumbling your email types together. Set up three separate email accounts:

Business (for your work)
Personal (for your real friends)
Internet (for every web site that demands an email address to complete a transaction -- this will get most of the spam)

Through mere luck, I've actually done this partly, and it's been useful. I am going to invest some time here to complete the separation.

Bad Communications Habits

'Read My Mind' Forwarding

If you've ever forwarded a long convoluted email chain to someone, and at the top you've added nothing more than "FYI" or "you should handle this" or something equally cryptic, then you're perpetuating a truly bad habit.

Take the extra 30 seconds to specify what exactly the issue is, and what exactly you think the other person should know or do. Better yet, follow Henry Evans' advice in Winning with Accountability and include also when you want it done, and be sure the request has a clear visual of the outcome or is otherwise crystal clear.

Abdication by Forwarding

Sometimes a person won't want to do a task, and so sends out an email to a workgroup saying "someone needs to do X". Nobody volunteers, and the task goes undone. The fix is to establish a shared cultural understanding that the person who sent that email still owns the task until it is explicitly assigned to or picked up by another individual -- sending the group email doesn't absolve the sender of responsibility.

If you're having a hard time finding a task owner, especially in a volunteer organization, then learn how to motivate and how to ask specific individuals for specific things.

True Supplier Partnerships

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:32:07 PST

I interviewed two experts on True Supplier Partnerships (listen here) -- Rick Pay (The R Pay Company, LLC), an expert on manufacturing process improvement, Lean, and related disciplines, and Kate Vitasek, lead researcher and author of a new book on the concept of Vested Outsourcing.

(read the entire article)

Rick discussed the challenges of truly partnering with suppliers, as opposed to beating them up and trying to drive their prices down. One of Rick's clients is a supplier who has been pushed for annual cost cuts of 3-5%, with 125-day payments, and with no forecasting information shared. This supplier is considering firing the customer -- and who can blame them? That's classic zero-sum thinking at its worst.

Rick sees a lot of lost opportunity in cases like this, because a well executed partnership can enrich both parties. To do so, you have to actually trust your suppliers and customers, and share a lot of information.

Rick likes to step back from the detailed contract and start such a positive relationship with a Memo of Understanding that lays out:

the key contacts for both firms
the payment terms
quality expectations and measures
delivery expectations and measures
lead times
cost reduction efforts
participation by both parties in design activities
communications including regular meetings

As my prior guest Henry Evans put it in his excellent book "Winning with Accountability," all true accountability is front-loaded, by setting the expectations up front. Rick's MOU does that.

A well executed partnership provides some significant advantages:

World class pricing
Shorter lead-times
Enhanced quality
Greater profitability
Increased inventory turns

Rick has an article that describes this in even more detail -- get it here.

My second guest was Kate Vitasek, lead researcher and author of a new book on the concept of Vested Outsourcing.

Kate has been studying the challenges involved in outsourcing -- specifically the ways the interests of the customer and the service provider are not always aligned, and the problems that arise when that occurs.

What excites me about Kate's work is that she derived her lessons by studying the most effective and successful outsourcing firms, including Microsoft. And she partnered with the US Air Force, learning what problems were occurring with their large amount of outsourcing.

The result was a catalog of the ten ailments most common to outsourcing relationships, and five rules that help create true win-win or "vested" outsourcing relationships.

The rules are:

Laying the Foundation – What’s in it for We?
Rule #1 Focus On the What, Not The How
Rule #2 Focus on Outcomes
Rule #3 Agree on Clearly Defined and Measurable Outcomes
Rule #4 Optimize Pricing Model Incentives
Rule #5 Governance Structure Should Provide Insight, not Merely Oversight

GE and the Navy have a contract at the Jacksonville Navy Depot to maintain the 404 Engine. This contract is based on incentives regarding reliability and availability. There is a repair turnaround time goal. And while GE has some skin in the game, all the hands-on work is being done by Navy personnel.

So GE relies on teaching the Navy to use Lean Six Sigma and has invested in information technology, all to move these metrics in the right direction. It's a true partnership with a remarkable absence of finger-pointing.

There are several other case studies and examples. Listen to the whole interview here.

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:31:49 PST

Quote attributed to BF Skinner (via Sam Carpenter and Mathew Strong):

When people work only to avoid losing a job, study only to avoid failure, and treat each other well only to avoid censure or institutional punishment, the threatening contingencies generalize. It always seems as if there must be something that one ought to be doing. As a result very few people can simply do nothing. They can relax only with the help of sedatives or tranquilizers, or by deliberately practicing relaxation. They can sleep only with the help of sleeping pills, of which billions are sold in the West every year. They are puzzled by, and envy, those in less developed countries whom they see happily doing nothing.

Moral to the story: don't work for avoidance -- work in favor of positive things. And learn to relax.

Taking your Product or Company International

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:35:06 PST

What does it take to go international? I interviewed expert Mark Ross (Global Sales, Marketing & Business Development, linkedin.com/in/markross101) -- Mark "creates the blueprint to take a company international." He relates stories and lessons from his 20 years of international product market development.

Why go international? Because:

90% of the world's consumers are outside of the United States
Diversifying outside the United States reduces your economic risk
Meeting the challenges of going international will make your company a better company

(read the complete article)

In brief, Mark says you need to have a successful domestic brand before you try to go international. Your first step could be to validate the targeted international market -- one low risk way to do that is to participate in an international tradeshow sponsored by the US Department of Commerce. At that show, you will want to connect with local retailers and distributors.

Once you get home, start researching the distributors. They will be your key to unlocking that targeted international market. Ask the retailers, which distributors are most reliable, and find out which ones carry complementary and non-competing products to yours.

For example, Mark worked at a company that made military style jackets, and a complementary product line for them was bluejeans. In this example, Mark's advice is to contact the American bluejeans company to find out which distributors pay their bills on time and are reliable partners, and check with retailers in the target market to validate that your target demographic actually shops there.

Throughout the interview, it became increasingly clear that this distributor relationship will be absolutely crucial to your long-term international success.

And, this partnership runs both ways -- by carrying your jacket, the distributor may be able to sell into a retailer who would not have taken bluejeans alone, but will take the mix of bluejeans plus jackets. By carrying your product, the distributor can become a stronger player.

As soon as you start to get some distribution, a good distributor will start give you crucial market feedback, and you are ready to take the next step -- tweaking your product to better fit the new market.

These tweaks could be as simple as packaging changes, or country specific hang tags. In the case of apparel, if you were for example going into the Japanese market, you would quickly discover that the Japanese consumer has a much higher expectation of quality than any other consumer in the world. You will not find a single loose thread on a single pair of jeans in a successful Japanese retail store.

So, in order to compete, you may need to make product changes. Mark recalls how difficult it was for his jacket company to respond to their international distributors request for the military style jacket, but in the color blue instead of olive drab. His company had never made any other color before. By the time Mark left, they had gone from one style jacket one color, to 11 jackets in 6 to 8 colors each.

Eventually, your overseas presence may become so large that you can open an overseas office. Until that happens, however, you must rely your distributor could be your eyes and ears into the marketplace. That means you distributor relationship must be one of great strength and great trust.

An Example of Brief, Clear Communication

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:36:01 PST

I just received an email that impressed me in some perhaps subtle ways:

Thomas,

I have been asked to schedule a ½ hour (or so, if that is enough time) conference call for you and M__ . M___ is traveling heavily right now so we are looking into the first week of March. Would you be available Monday, March 1st from 3-3:30 PM orTuesday, March 2nd from 9-9:30 AM. If not, please advise me of your schedule and let’s get some time secured.

Thanks so much ~

D____

Executive Assistant to the President

What struck me about this was the brevity, clarity, vigor, and sense of polite assertiveness. In four sentences, I knew

What the writer knew
What her agenda was (schedule a call)
What the options were
What the escalation path was
What the common goal was

I especially liked the firmness of the "let's get this done" attitude, combined with the "we" sense of teaming up.

I seldom see so confident a communication that is also this respectful -- of both me and the author herself.

The Blue Collar Millionaire

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:17:58 PST

Great article in Inc. Magazine about a highly profitable pizza restaurant chain and its owners' ability to create big profits with low staff turnover in a business that's typically the other way around. Read it here.

The lessons I take from it are:

1. Build Systems that
2. Enhance Trust and
3. Empower Workers while
4. Retaining Oversight.

Their relentless focus on culture, values, training, and execution are awesome. Anybody could do this, with any business. Most folks won't.

Pete Friedes on Praise and Management

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:05:12 PST

I wished I'd booked an hour or more for my interview with Pete Friedes. He's the retired CEO of Hewitt and Associates, a firm that under his leadership grew over 23% per year for 23 years. Pete is an engaging guy and one who obviously knows how to grow the leadership skills of others. He's currently the architect of the organization "Managing People Better."

Pete condensed his wisdom into his 2002 book "The 2R Manager: When to Relate, When to Require, and How to Do Both Effectively" which I plan to read very soon.

At the core of Pete's wisdom is the belief that we need to do two things when we lead and manage -- we need to maintain good relationships, and we need to require good performance. And we need to do both of these at the same time, which is the hard part.

(read the complete article)

Relating consists of several skills:

Asking
Listening
Coaching
Encouraging
Including

Requiring consists of several other skills --

Creating common expectations
Insisting on excellence
Focusing on objectives
Creating appropriate controls
Following up
Solving complex problems

Most managers are better at one than the other -- they lean one way or the other. That's normal. However being effective requires us to be good at both skill sets.

Praise, my topic, is part of "Encouraging" -- it helps us create the human connections that are part of the constellation of Relating.

The whole purpose of having the relationships is to be effective at getting things done -- otherwise we don't have a company, we have a club. That means the manager has to be able to create common expectations.

It's also vital for a manager to insist on excellence -- that things be done the best way they can -- yet that definition should be a shared definition, one that's developed collaboratively and inclusively, with asking and listening. So we're constantly using elements of both these skill sets almost simultaneously.

Managers who start off with a dominant mode of Relating, can struggle to Require (just as most of the Requirers are weaker at Relating.) A Relater may have a hard time asking for what he wants, may struggle to confront performance problems, may shrink back from dealing with people who need to be dealt with.

Why is there this tension between these two skill clusters? I'm still not sure. Nevertheless, we can all get better at both. You can find out how you stack up personally by taking the free self-assessment at www.managingpeoplebetter.com. This helps you find out what you need to do differently to be more effective as a manager.

It doesn't matter which is your dominant style, as long as you do both. If you are too excessive with your Requiring, you cannot Relate. If you are too much of a Relater, you cannot require. They only conflict if you do one to excess. (This is not to say you cannot suck at both. You can. I have.)

When I've been managed and led by others, I've welcomed both -- I've loved having good relationships with my bosses, and I love being able to do a good job and being challenged to rise to excellence. I didn't feel the conflict. As soon as I started managing anybody, I immediately felt a tension between these two styles or skill clusters. When I was focused on Requiring, I was worried I was losing the relationship. When I focused on Relating, I was afraid I was being too weak on getting results. Since I lean to Relating, I would err by avoiding conflict.

Since these are skills, we can get better. (Long time listeners will note the parallels between Pete's work, and Reut Schwartz-Hebron's work with the KindExcellence Institute.)

Let's agree then that behavior change is hard, that building new skills and habits can be hard, and that we are committed to doing so. Where to start?

One place to start is by being more mindful -- by noticing what we are doing as we do it. Another is to notice what we are not doing, and take heart from knowing that this area of non-performance represents a huge opportunity.

Suppose we have a manager who doesn't give praise. We can honestly tell him, "Jim, you've got a great opportunity here. People have gotten use to you being the old way. As soon as you change a little, you'll get credit for changing a lot."

With praise, it's fairly easy. Just watch your people until you catch them doing something right. Then tell them about it, be timely, be specific, and be honest. You've either not done it before because you're shy, or because you're mean. Or perhaps you're conflicted because your people are doing other things that you don't like, and you're not sure how to praise the good things.

With praise specifically, just come out and say it, and then shut up. Don't feel you have to balance it out by also mentioning the things you don't like, or areas where they could do better.

There are managers who worry that the employee will "take advantage of me if I tell him I like something he did" -- that's a wrong assumption, says Pete. I suspect that managers who are uncomfortable with giving praise, will come up with a series of reasons not to do it, in order to avoid performing a behavior -- giving praise -- with which they are uncomfortable.

So, imagining a bunch of fears like "they'll ask for more money" or the like can be just a defense mechanism. Pete and I both think you can safely ignore these fears -- these are not realistic.

In the past I've taught a couple of different scripts for giving praise, which always start off with the specific thing you saw the person do. Start with one or more of the five senses -- I saw this, or I heard you do that, or I smelled the coffee you brought, or whatever it was. When you start with sensory input, you start with something they cannot argue with, and indeed they probably can relate your report to something they also experienced. This creates common ground for the next step. For example, "I saw you about an hour ago with that really angry customer who was shouting and waving her arms, and you listened, you did not interrupt, your voice remained level and quiet, and you were focused entirely on her."

The second step can be either of two things (or both) -- one is to tell them what impact their actions had, and the other is to tell them what character trait you see in them. For example, an Impact statement might be, "I think you saved that customer relationship." A character assessment might be, "You showed that you have a lot of patience." And you can combine them.

Pete also thinks praise should be short. Don't do all the talking. You want to get quickly back into a listening mode so you can see how your words are being received.

Not only must praise be honest, it must also be in the context of you not expecting anything from them right then -- you are not buttering them up prior to asking a favor or imposing new work or delivering a criticism. The praise needs to not be a pretext.

Sometimes people push back against being praised. They may say "I could have done better." These folks are often perfectionists, or they are not used to getting praise.

If you stick with "I really liked that," then there is not much room for them to resist.

This same pattern can also be used outside of praise to avoid fights -- rather than starting with a conclusion, which can be argued, start with what you heard, then say how you interpreted it, and then say how you feel about it.

For example: "I watched you and listened to you deal with that angry client. You kept calm and you came across as very patient. That made me feel good to have someone with your patience on the team, because we can really use that good example around here."

Praise is part of Relating. The other elements are:

Asking - not personal questions, just things you need to know. Show interest.
Listening - perhaps the most important of the skills. It shows respect. You can disagree -- listening does not imply agreement. By listening you are showing you care and that you think the other person has something worth saying.
Including - give your people a voice in decisions that affect them.
Coaching - an environment of praise helps with coaching because it opens the other person up to your input.
Encouraging - includes praise.

Suppose I'm a Relater and don't do a good job Requiring. I start to make excuses for the other person before they do. I want to please them -- I don't want to leave them feeling badly. What's a good way out of that?

First, develop some asserting skills. Be able to say what you want. Be able to say "I expect you to" or "I need you to..." This can be very hard for a Relater to say. Practice them. It doesn't feel bad to hear them, believe it or not. It's actually nice as a worker to be told what you're expected to do.

Start of by asserting: "I need..." If they don't do it, then you can move on to requiring.

The first skill set in overcoming low requiring is asserting.

One way to help yourself if you need to do better Requiring is by practicing the use of Standard Goal Language, which means you state Who will do What by When. I've become able to be fairly hard-nosed around this even though I'm a Relater, and I'm comfortable asking for detail. If I'm not clear on Who will do it, I'll ask until it's clear.

And, by introducing and sticking to this concept of Standard Goal Language, I'm setting clear expectations, which is part of the skill set of Requiring.

Pete adds, also set up checkpoints for when you will look back in to ensure things are going well.

Pete says he was always good at knowing what his people need to do better, however he typically didn't have any idea how to make those changes. So, his organization hired a lot of coaches to help with those changes. Pete started off as CEO of Hewitt and Associates at age 28, and he wasn't very good at praise. He was, however, a pretty good listener even then, and he was told he wasn't giving his people enough encouragement.

As he learned how to praise and as he practiced it, he was astonished at how much it helped his people perform better.

So go to Managing People Better, get your free assessment, and find out what you can do immediately to be an even better manager and leader.

Three CEOs on Praise

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:31:34 PST

Three CEOs shared their perspectives with me on what role praise plays in their leadership style. My guests included Robert Stack, President and CEO of Community Options; Mitch Pisik, President and CEO of Breckwell Products; and Bob Fishman, CEO of Resources for Human Development.

(read the whole article)

My first guest was Robert Stack, CEO of Community Options. He spent time in high school volunteering to work with the developmentally disabled. After college he went back to see how his old volunteer group was doing, and found they were out of business. He decided to bring business savvy -- and thus financial stability -- to the nonprofit world of finding employment options for developmentally disabled people, and founded his own nonprofit.

People work for these reasons -

to feel valued
to be recognized
to make decisions or have control
and lastly to make money

Something that makes a big difference is giving public recognition in front of peers.

Criticism needs to be done privately for a couple of reasons, including the need to keep people feeling a certain level of safety -- without a baseline level of safety, you can't have teamwork.

If you are ever going to violate that assumption -- if you ever criticize someone publicly -- be sure it's done calmly and strategically. Any public criticism that was done impulsively or with anger, makes everyone feel less safe because it makes you seem out of control.

You may not have control of every situation, however as a leader you do need to have control of your own emotions.

How do we teach our subordinates to praise more?

The most effective approach, Robert says, is to model it. Robert related how he watched one of the investment banks that recently imploded, and saw how their top leader set a tone that was arrogant, rude, demeaning, nasty, and a bad way of leading. And the opposite also works -- you can set a positive example. It's one of the most powerful things a CEO can do.

At the risk of using a sports analogy, Robert sees himself as being in the bleachers. He expects his managers to be on the sidelines cheering and encouraging. You have to create a culture of constantly thanking people and appreciating them. Robert sees a CEO as being there to collect information and allocate resources. He cannot read minds, and so he constantly asks for as much info as he can get. "I think you're doing a great job, and I need you to tell me what you need in order to do an even better job."

Robert likes to provide executive management training as a way to express his confidence and feeling of value for his folks. It's an extended way to praise, as well as to invest -- providing training shows that you care, that you believe in them, and you want to help them grow.

By investing in folks via training, you show faith and trust in them, and you signal that you value people.

Robert says the worst kind of control freak is a remote control freak. You cannot control the culture of every different office. He has to give them autonomy and show confidence.

For December, Robert took several hours to call every direct report, and all of their reports, and even the third tier managers who had been with the firm more than a few years. Those conversations were extremely influential and rewarding for all concerned. As a prior guest said, 'the currency of leadership is attention' -- and the most effective leaders of all time, from Lord Nelson to Abraham Lincoln, had the ability to focus 100% on the person to whom each was speaking -- and making the other person feel important and valued.

And praise needs to be heartfelt.

Robert says that time is worth an enormous amount, and that an ounce of praise is worth a pound of criticism. When you really understand that and internalize it, you will have exceptional results.

My second guest was the CEO of Breckwell, Mitch Pisik. Breckwell is headquartered in Arlington, Texas.

Mitch worked as an executive at large global companies including Kraft, Newell-Rubbermaid, and Novartis/Gerber Foods, in addition to being President and CEO a couple of mid/smaller enterprises over the past six years. The larger international firms are well known for strong management; yet, as with all companies – some managers and leaders are better than others.

Now that Mitch is CEO he's creating a highly effective corporate culture. He believes that companies are driven by results, and results flow from people and the motivation of those people.

To get that, you need sincerity -- you have to really mean what you say, and you have to be seen to mean it. Praise is one arrow in your quiver.

Mitch has run a variety of divisions in his career; including those in Accounting, Finance, Operations, Business Development and General Management. He knows that everybody is motivated differently. You should NOT follow the Golden Rule, of "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." Because you really want to "do unto others as they want to be done unto." In other words, don't treat them as you want to be treated -- treat them as they want to be treated.

And you have to be careful -- because doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing.

You can motivate with a new title. You can motivate by giving a raise. And you can motivate in some very simple ways -- things can be simple and still work very well.

A recent example: Mitch received a huge smoked turkey as a gift from a customer this year. Mitch gave it to his CIO as one of the ways of expressing to the CIO that he had done such a good job this year. And the CIO really felt appreciated, because Mitch gave it very deliberately and sincerely. It wasn’t the turkey -- it was the recognition that made the gift meaningful.

Mitch believes all praise needs to be specific, and also timely. Lots of employees fear that their boss, and especially the CEO, doesn’t know what they (the employees) do all day.

Every time Mitch visits a location, he asks the local leadership for the details of who recently accomplished something that was very impressive. He then praises and acknowledges those people with specifics of their actions, and how they are making an important difference to the team, the customers, and the company.

I call that "positive gossip" -- it signals that folks are paying attention and care. It's the only gossip you should ever repeat.

Mitch has seen CEOs go to a branch location and only talk to the manager. That's a lost opportunity. You absolutely should go visit every level of the organization and, by paying attention to them, signal that they are important.

I wonder if some leaders resist that because they feel self-conscious, as if they are thinking "I'm just Fred, I just happen to be CEO but I'm not important, and I'd feel silly acting like some Field Marshal inspecting the troops." And the reality is if you're the CEO you have duties that come with that role. Maybe Fred is no big deal, but the CEO is always a big deal. You have positional power and you have to direct your attention thoughtfully.

Mitch believes most people will give you the benefit of the doubt, and will assume you deserve your position. If you act as if you deserve to be the boss, over time you'll feel it too. Repeated behavior will alter your attitude and beliefs.

Mitch repeats that you have to give it, and you have to give it right. Sincerity is vital.

Sometimes, if you offer cash rewards, you can occasionally insult them. Only rarely offer it in advance like a carrot.

Another great tool is the hand-written note. And Mitch prefers to mail it to the person's house. That way the spouse is much more likely to see it, and it helps raise the morale of the whole family.

Another praise tool is the special parking space for the Employee of the Month. Mitch abolished all the special close-in parking spots for the top executives, and only kept the Employee of the Month parking spot.

Usually we want to praise in public, however that's not always the case. Sometimes people prefer to not get praise in public because they are shy. Mitch actually had someone quit because he was so shy and so uncomfortable with the way the praise was given by his supervisor. They did ultimately get him to come back, however the manager doing the praising was tone-deaf about this employee's strong feelings on the matter. The moral is, give them praise the way they want to get it.

Remember, praise is about the recipient, not about meeting the emotional needs of the person giving it.

Mitch would give "Company Dollars" redeemable at the company cafeteria, and very publicly hand out $5 worth of these to each member of the departments that hit their weekly and monthly goals. This helped create a friendly competition between the work groups and departments and pods. This sort of public praise can serve multiple purposes.

And once again we see that the currency of leadership is attention.

When we have supervisors hand out gift certificates to staff, it's not really for the direct benefit of the workers so much as it is (I believe) to train the supervisors to look for good things so they can notice and praise them. If you're a supervisor and you end your shift with a bunch of coupons still in your pocket, it means you were not out there on the floor looking for things to praise. Doing this trains you to look for "good stuff."

Mitch believes that if you manage with sticks and carrots, you need to have a bias towards the carrots. And the praise has to be extremely specific -- he prefers it be numeric and defined in advance. You never want the praise or rewards to come across as capricious.

So praise, Mitch believes, needs to be specific, timely and sincere. Incentives need to feel positive to the recipient.

You can also overdo it. It needs to be administered with an appropriate amount of frequency and enthusiasm. You have to know as many employees as possible – at all levels of the organization. If you make a big deal over something that they don't see as a big deal, it can come across as condescending, or you can set the recipient up for ridicule. And it can make you look like you don't know what's really going on.

So if you're not sure how things will be received, you might underplay it.

I like to encourage managers to make a list of their direct reports, and for each one, find out what they care about, find out what motivates them, and find out where they want to be in five years. Use that information to figure out how to deliver praise that will be meaningful to the recipient.

My own praise formula -- the color-by-numbers approach I teach to new managers -- includes these steps:

The specific sensory inputs that I had around their behavior -- I saw or heard or smelled something
The impact the person's behavior had on the world -- the difference they made
The character trait in them that drove their behavior -- like caring, honesty, or patience
The positive future -- "That's the kind of blocking that wins a pennant" or "Your patience will help make next week's staff training a big success."

Mitch had a financial analyst one time who wanted to go into sales. Mitch provided him with opportunity to excel at being a financial analyst – and told him that if he did that then the opportunities would come. He did a great job as an analyst, was then given the sales position, and has since continued to flourish.

Mitch also believes in specific numeric challenges. He ran a national franchisor and manufacturing firm headquartered in NY. The labor cost as a percent of total cost of sales was around 12%. One month they got it down to 11.7% (a record); and the plant manager (who had been with the company for 20 years) was very pleased. Mitch told him that the improvement was good – but that we were really doing our job once we hit 9.5% (a huge improvement). As you can imagine Mitch was met with skepticism. Mitch then told him: I believe your people can do it – and I will give $1,000 to each of your 12 Supervisors the first month they do it. "And I believe you can do it," he said. Mitch let the manager pitch the supervisors and be the hero.

It took just one month for them to hit 9.5%. Mitch paid $12,000 in bonuses and it saved the company over $100,000 for the month.

So then, Mitch offered them a second $1,000 if they could keep it below 9.5% for three consecutive months, including the one just completed. And they did that too, and even got it below 9.0% in the third month.

Another example -- Mitch joined his current firm, Breckwell, which had not designed a new stove in five years and had never won a design award in the 30 years it has been in business. He challenged them to design a new stove and win a design award for it. Six months later they had a new stove – and it won the design award. All during the process at each milestone, Mitch made sure to celebrate their progress.

In sum, Mitch says if you can motivate and inspire your people, and they believe you care about them, the financial results will be terrific and will prove well worth the time and effort invested.

My third guest was Bob Fishman, CEO of Resources for Human Development, and author of "The Common Good Corporation."

Bob started as a family counselor, and saw how dysfunctional relationships in families could produce bad outcomes, and saw also how similar dysfunctions existed in corporations, sometimes to an even greater extent than in families. Conflicts in families are hard to manage with just two people. Organizations will sometimes accept extremely destructive behavior -- the same destructive behaviors that in a family will lead to psychosis and breakdown. So it was no surprise to him that he saw breakdown at the organizational level.

What organizing systems were at work that allowed this behavior?

Bob decided to create his own organization to eliminate these bad organizing systems and these dysfunctions.

For example, suppose you had a family where one parent acts as if he knows absolutely what is right. And imagine a child growing up in that family who has their own vision of what is right. There will be conflict, and such a parent will not say "this is not my preference" -- he will say instead call the child names and tell the child she is crazy. You have a dysfunctional family. The child can choose to keep silent, or oppose aloud and be punished. Sometimes the child will move toward self-abusive behavior.

You see the exact same behavior with managers who pretend that they know exactly what we need to do in order to create a successful future. As though people are in management because they know the future. No one knows the future.

When managers act as if they have all the answers, you create a psychotic environment, and to survive in that environment you have to join the psychosis.

In Bob's organization, people are not made managers because of any ability to predict the future -- they are made managers because they can engage a group successfully in a process for managing difficulties that come up and moving toward an ever-changing future.

If you are a manager and you think you have to have all the answers, and you're at GE and a worker tells you "hey that compressor won't keep that refrigerator cold," you'll likely say "let the engineers figure that out, and stop thinking." This actually happens all the time. There are plenty of warnings -- they just go unheeded.

Managers ought to be able to accept new data, accept challenging input, and enroll the team -- in solving problems as they arise and in responding to an ever-changing future.

The problem with authoritative, top-down leadership is that input from the group is discouraged. Most corporations do this, Bob believes -- it is not a Common Good Corporation. It rewards behavior that is psychotic.

Bob has 4,000 employees, and he feels he has to remain at all times humble, and open to new data. So all policies are reviewed by working groups using the guidance that the future is ever changing and nobody knows the future.

Bob has managed to create a holding company that has defied the problems that have long plagued the holding company model. They will entertain any business idea that is legal.

Bob is also a great skeptic of strategic planning that tries to limit what you will work on or consider, because you're effectively making unprovable and unknowable predictions about the future. Things like "sticking to our knitting" reflect this thinking that Bob rejects.

How can Bob praise while also remaining humble?

Bob prefers to see people rewarded and recognized not as individuals but as groups. Everybody gets the same bonus as everyone else in the group. Each group member knows the group's members, they know the budget, and they know the goals. They all have the same benefits. Managers and workers will have the same benefits when they are in the same group.

People may have higher salaries depending on their role, however performance bonuses are always shared.

There's a big risk that individualized rewards can reduce team cohesion. Bob is a great proponent of a recognition and reward system that reinforces, rather than undermines, the effective functioning of the group.

Bob suggests creating an explicit social contract or written group understanding of how the group will handle things like money -- create a group process for forging explicit expectations as to how the group will handle new ideas, will handle bonuses, will handle people who come in claiming to know the future.

Praise and recognition are basic to the community. Praise needs to be based on shared values, and you will have a stronger organization if you make those values explicit, and reach those conscious agreements using a shared and explicit process.

CEOs in a Tough Industry - Commercial Banking

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:36:49 PST

Think you're in a tough market? Try commercial banking, where the fundamentals are as ugly as they've been in decades. What are savvy banking pros doing to respond to this hostile environment? What lessons can we all learn from them? I talked to Chris Hurn, CEO and Cofounder of Mercantile Capital Corporation; and Drew White, CFO of Sageworks, Inc.

(read the complete article)

Chris got a degree in finance, went to GE Capital for a while, and learned a lot about commercial lending and commercial real estate. He then spent two years as a management consulting, traveling a great deal, and then a friend encouraged him to get back into commercial lending.

Eight years later, Mercantile Capital is a fast growing firm -- in fact they grew 15% between 2008 and 2009. Part of the reason is that Chris chose to create a firm that meets his own needs.

One trick has been to pick a niche and dominate it. Others have engaged in mission creep, and become generalists -- most banks have done this, trying to be all things to all people, and their staffs have to juggle dozens of products.

Chris chose instead to focus on small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to own their own buildings.

This focus is highly aspirational. While there's nothing aspirational about changing your checking account, there is a lot that's aspirational about being a small business owner and owning the building you operate out of -- being your own landlord and paying rent to yourself.

Chris' firm has developed a national reputation as experts in the SBA 504 loan. This is actually a safer and more profitable strategy than generalizing.

Competitors have shrunk dramatically, so the bad economy has provided him with a big growth opportunity. Plus, with property prices down and interest rates low, his firm is well positioned.

How do we take lessons from Chris' experiences?

Competitors have scaled back -- use that as an opportunity to push harder.
Focus on customers and understanding their needs intimately. Define one or more niches to understand and dominate.
Even if you think you know, go back and re-confirm customer needs and how your product fits. Articulate the "reason behind the reason" why clients come to you.
Be humble and constantly ask questions.
Maintain a relentless focus on the basics of good business.

Clients tell Chris that he's the only one who talks about lending using the language that the clients use themselves -- they are in business to fulfill entrepreneurial dreams.

By speaking the language of the clients, Chris builds an entirely different client experiences.

Another thing Chris is doing is using his web site to draw people in and self-identify as potential clients. He gets 53 leads a day -- that is, they come to the site and either ask for a free report, sign up for a newsletter or even fill out an application.

Chris even has different, specialized web sites -- one just for day-care firms, one for hotels, and one for restaurants that might want loans. He also has increased his direct mail, because his competitors have pulled back and he's able to target those mailings to be very cost-effective.

My second guest was Drew White, CFO of Sageworks, Inc. Sageworks specializes in the financial analysis of privately held companies, and provides a suite of tools to help bankers do a better job managing their loans and even to add value to their client relationships.

Sageworks provides an expert system that interprets financial statements into narrative English. It's deployed as Software as a Service -- like Salesforce.com -- and lets CPAs and Accountants help business owners really understand their own data.

More interestingly, Sageworks hosts the central data store for thousands of accounting firms and thus the financial data from thousands of privately owned firms.

A bank in Tennessee saw one of these reports and started using the Sageworks product as a way of differentiating themselves. It also became a way for banks to understand what market segments need what sort of banking products.

The Sageworks data outperforms the government data in two ways -- it's available in real time (rather than several months late) and is based on 100% of participating firms (rather than the 5% of firms who return government surveys).

Sageworks is succeeding because they took the trouble to bridge a gap that most of us have assumed was un-bridgeable -- the gap between the arcana of financial statements, and what normal folks can grasp easily.

What lesson should we take away? Look for the gap that nobody thinks can be bridged, and bridge it. Look for the problem that everybody just puts up with, and stop putting up with it.

Another lesson is to find the vendor who provides a huge value add, and white label it -- for a very small dollar amount I can start providing huge value to my clients, or provide a free report as a way to warm up a relationship, or provide a smaller service to sell as a way to begin creating a longer and deeper relationship.

By providing this as an integrated service, I can "jump to the head of the line" -- I am no longer providing a commodity. I'm not competing on price, instead I'm competing on value add.

My takeaway from this interview is that commercial bankers are facing huge opportunities for growth and differentiation. And if bankers can thrive in this market, anybody can.

Latest on Beating Procrastination with Dr. Renate Rieman

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:58:26 PST

I invited Dr. Renate Rieman back to discuss her newly released CD, "Move Beyond Procrastination™ and Get Things Done!" She's a returning favorite -- her first appearance was the #1 most popular episode of Tom on Leadership in 2009.

The CD is an outgrowth of a popular workshop Renate has put on for a while. She recorded one of the workshops and then added more material, and edited it, to make it useful for home study.

She starts with reasons why we procrastinate, then with techniques to address the reasons, and finally implementation for long term success. There are lots of exercises.

Most people don't know why they procrastinate, and they get very upset with themselves -- this eats up the energy that they have, so they have neither the ability nor the energy to make progress.

I asked Dr. Rieman where someone should start. She first recommends looking at reasons and triggers for procrastinating.
(read the complete article)

One reassuring thing Renate helps people realize is that they actually are highly functional in many areas of their lives. By taking an inventory of major life tasks and activities, and finding which ones involve procrastination and which do not, people get a sense that maybe they aren't so bad.

For example, one client can never get her clothes out of the dryer and into her closets or dresser -- she ends up using the dryer as a dresser -- because her closets are so cluttered and disorganized there's no place to put the clothes.

The Function of Procrastination
Most procrastination behavior is really not exactly dysfunctional. While it the procrastination behaviors (like playing Solitaire on the computer) do prevent you from getting your "real" work done, they also can be helpful in reducing feelings of stress, at least temporarily. If we don't schedule in rest time, our minds and bodies will need it anyway -- and in some cases procrastination behavior is the only relaxation we get.

If that behavior is not very re-energizing, then you'd be better off scheduling in some relaxation time and make a point of really resting.

Poor Time Estimates and Poor Time Management
One of Renate's clients was keen to write a memoir, and unrealistically set the goal of writing for 2-3 hours each night -- after working a full day. He wasn't able to do it.

That's a common pattern with problem procrastination.

Another error is to not take breaks and not take lunch. That's often a mistake. With no breaks and no rest, your mental capacity can become so low that you actually make negative progress -- you create mistakes that will cost you hours of time to fix once you catch it.

Don't fall into the trap of trying to look busy. If your work culture rewards that, find ways to fight that culture.

Stress and Procrastination
People who are not bothered by their own procrastination are often not stressed. Those people who are deeply bothered by their procrastination are stressed, often deeply.

Serious procrastination is often connected with serious loneliness. It's hard to admit that you have the problem -- sufferers often try to hide the procrastination, work longer hours to try to make it up, and thereby increase their own overall stress load.

Learned Helplessness
The more a person experiences helplessness, the more that person may internalize the belief that they have no choices -- and when a choice does arrive, that person will ignore the choice because they just aren't able to perceive it as an option. Such a person becomes trapped mentally -- they have internalized their limits, and impose them on themselves even when their external limits go away.

External Perspectives
Folks with serious procrastination can be so caught up in the problem that they lose perspective. Those folks can get real benefit from an external resource like a therapist or coach.

One of Renate's clients only came to her because she was desperate and feared being fired from her job. Renate worked with her to understand her daily patterns. For this client, her pattern included working nonstop for up to 12 hours at a stretch. The lack of any breaks was causing her effectiveness to drop -- after the first few hours her productivity was very low.

Over time this client was able to become much more aware of the daily ebb and flow of her energy, and could start to match her tasks to her rhythms -- she did high demand work during high energy periods, and was able to take breaks to rest and regain mental energy.

Eventually, this client was completely turned around, began to catch up on her work, and found increasing relaxation and productivity in her job.

First Step - Awareness
Renate agrees that a good first step in breaking out of a bad procrastination habit is to analyze the causes -- those causes can include -

Practical Reasons:

Skill level
Resource missing
Timeframe unclear or too short
Scale of project is overwhelming

Psychological Reasons

Fear
Shame
Resentment
Other strong emotion that prevents progress

Sociological Reasons

Looking busy is rewarded by your culture
Too much work is considered normal
Expectation of keeping up with gadgets and technology

Ultimately, Renate believes, serious procrastination indicates a mis-alignment at some level between what you want and what others want, and the procrastination serves to reduce the tension in that mis-alignment. For example, if you fear deep down that upgrading your version of some key program is going to cause your whole PC to become unstable, you may procrastinate on following your firm's policy of upgrading.

(Listen to the full interview here.)

The Listening Leader

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:14:52 PST

Why is listening so powerful, and how can we use listening to be more effective leaders? (Listen to the full interview here.)

As my guest Mark Goulston hints in the subtitle of his book "Just Listen - Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone", effective listening helps you get through to anybody.

In one of the first stories in his book, Mark relates the story of a suicidal man sitting in a mall parking lot pointing a shotgun at his own head. The negotiator is having no luck connecting with him, until he says "I'll bet you feel that nobody knows what it's like to have tried everything else and be stuck with this as your only way out, isn't that true?"

That was the first thing anybody said that actually got through to this suicidal man. It worked because it reflected his inner state -- he felt listened to.

When you can make someone feel listened to, you earn for yourself the right to engage in dialog with them. You create for yourself a seat at the table for a conversation. You've started to get through to them.

If this sounds like it reflects the excellent Steven Covey advice, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood" you would be right -- because Covey understood intuitively what my guest understands in clinical detail: many folks cannot hear you until they first feel heard. They will not listen first, often because they cannot.

As Mark puts it, you want to "get into the listening" of the other person -- to understand what the other person is hearing from the world.

Mark has several tips for making meetings more effective, which involve listening and things related to it. One is to start on time. There's a method called the Tavistock Method, that when the meeting starts you lock the door, and you don't ding the folks how miss out, however it's on them to find out what happened.

Another technique is to say "I think this meeting is worth our undivided attention, so let's take five minutes and write down the things you need to get done the rest of today. Then fold it up, set it aside, and we can focus here." Mark feels this works because it shows that you as the leader understand that they have a lot going on, and that the meeting is an interruption of those other things.

I would add that this also allows people to "unload" data from their heads and onto paper, allowing them to stop worrying about remembering all their to-dos.

Mark reports that this has been so effective for some of the folks who have tried it that they do it at every meeting.

On a related note, one of the ways you can relax deeply is to find a way to be deeply listened to.

Sales people are often trained to listen. Do that, however don't just use it as a technique. Take the time to really listen and care about what you hear. While mirroring and matching and listening can certainly work as techniques, it works a lot better to actually mean it.

Mark dedicated this book to his mentor Warren Bennis, the author of many classic books including "On Becoming a Leader." Warren is a deep listener, and he makes the folks around him feel interesting.

There's an old saying that 'if you bore me, I will forgive you; if I bore you, I will never forgive you.' Because if I bore you, you've sent me the message that I'm not interesting. And people hate that message.

Tip #1 - Bite your Tongue
One thing you can do immediately is, notice whether the things you want to say are really for the other person's benefit, or your own. If you are listening to a client, and (as Mark puts it) something brilliant comes into your mind that you want to interrupt them to say, just to sound brilliant, notice yourself and stop. Only say things that serve the conversation, not yourself.

Tip #2 - Ask for Three Things
Another great place to start is, tell someone important to you, "I want to be better in my part of our relationship moving forward. What are three things that I could start to do, or do more, that would help our relationship? And what are three things I could stop doing, or do less, that would also help our relationship?" And then listen to their answer.

What about me?
Sometimes folks resist this idea of listening because they start to worry "when are we going to get around to my stuff? I don't want to spend all my time on the other person's agenda, or forget my points." I think in reality, if you set your agenda aside for a while and listen, you won't forget what you care about. Your agenda won't vanish.

In the rare case when the other person seems to be complaining endlessly, you may wish to redirect them by telling them that what they are saying is too important, and needs your undivided attention, and set an appointment to specifically listen to them.

As Warren Bennis put it, "Boredom occurs when I fail to make the other person interesting."

Mark has been attending several tributes to Warren, and they are filled with very heartfelt stories and expressions of gratitude and respect. Warren is so humble, he responded by saying "the great thing about this sort of praise is, it gives you something to live up to."

Mark and Warren seem to get into listening contests -- each tries to listen to the other. (Listen to the audio for the humorous anecdote - I won't spoil it by trying to paraphrase it here.)

Be Excellent and Multiply
Mark recommends you try to identify your core of excellence, as identified by the people who benefit from it. This identifies the area where you have the greatest competence and confidence. This tells you where you least need to BS people. By coming from that place, you are filled with confidence and that makes you a better listener. For Mark, it's the ability to "listen to the unsaid" and bring out the unspoke truth in a non-threatening way that allows people and firms to finally begin to address it.

Next, what is the best application of that core of excellence? Align that excellence with a noble cause.

Handling Toxic Coworkers and Bosses

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:15:05 PST

What are toxic behaviors really? Is it more than just a personality conflict? Yes - toxic behaviors obstruct performance. My experts were Mitch Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway, co-authors of "Toxic Workplace!: Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power".

Toxic people:

Shame, humiliate or bully.
Engage in passive hostility or passive-aggressive behavior.
Sabotage their teams.

The toxic worker engages in a pattern of behaviors that harm team performance. And, they get away with it.

Toxic workers don't exist in a vacuum - most have at least one enabler -- a "toxic enabler" or a "toxic buffer" or both.

An enabler is someone who is relatively well functioning, yet does thing that shield someone from the consequences of their own actions, and make it more likely that the toxic person will continue to misbehave.

The Toxic Enabler - usually the boss has a "special relationship" with the toxic person, usually because he is a high producer, or has special skills, or the like. Often this is a boss who tries to intervene, yet is ineffective. A boss may restructure the team to reduce the negative effect of the toxic person, or do other things that actually make it easier for the toxic worker to continue to misbehave.

The Toxic Buffer - these are often the most emotionally competent and caring people, who try to protect the team from the toxic person, often a toxic boss. The Buffer will make excuses for, and be a communication conduit to and from, the toxic person. This person eventually becomes burned out and leaves, and nothing has changed for the better.

Costs of Toxicity
Up to 12% of the victims of the toxic person will leave the firm. That costs the firm an enormous amount of money - HR studies put it at 1.5 to 2.5 times the annual salary of the person who leaves. Of the remaining staff, over 60% report that they:

reduce their efforts
reduce their work time
become less productive
waste time avoiding the toxic person
reduce their commitment to the firm

A good intervention has to be systematic. Just as a troubled child needs the entire family to engage in therapy, a toxic worker needs to face a systematic intervention that involves altering the enabling behaviors of the enablers as well as the toxic behaviors of the toxic worker.

Do I Have a Toxic Employee?
Do I have a toxic employee? Look for the symptoms, starting with low performance and morale problems, and high staff turnover. Look for a long term pattern of behaviors that poisons others. Look for one or more of shaming, passive hostility, and team sabotage.

Collect info from a variety of levels of the organization.

Example: Kiss-up, Kick-down
Mitch and Elizabeth worked with a CEO who came in to turn around a company. He had one division leader with high turnover, who said he was on board with the changes, yet did not engage. It took time to discover that this was all lip service, and the division leader was in fact toxic. It took another year and a half to terminate that person -- because he was able to pretend cooperation so well.

Good firms will integrate "values" with their performance metrics. By "values" we mean things like "showing respect for others." Once these values are articulated and are integrated into the performance management system, you as a leader have a basis for holding people accountable for living those values.

A good way to build your values system, is to involve all levels of the firm in defining the specific details of what we mean by "integrity" or other values. Integrity can mean "not gossiping." All vague words in the values must be translated into specific behaviors.

By involving key stakeholders at all levels in defining the behaviors, defining consequences, and defining enforcement processes, you get much higher buy-in.

Where to Start
Look at perf appraisal form - are values there, are they rated on them, and are the ratings tied to specific behaviors? The form can't be based on innuendo - all evaluations must be behaviorally specific.

Once you have your values identified, built collaboratively, and values are tied to specific behaviors, you can use this three point format for feedback:
1. impartial third party data, such as performance or 360-degree feedback
2. connect to their needs -- i.e. I know you want to become a
3. challenge them -- "I'm not sure you can do this." They are often ambitious and willing to tackle challenges.

Toxic people are often deep in denial and good at undermining others. So step 1 -- basing the feedback in objective data, and also couching the entire intervention in the context of an integrated performance management system, the toxic person will have less room to wiggle out of the consequences or undermine their boss, claiming "look how hard so-and-so is being on me".

Some 94% of surveyed people said they had worked with a toxic person in the past three years. And 92% of them rated their pain as a '7' or higher. And that can be made worse by the sense of helplessness that toxic victims often experience.

What can I do?
1. Corroborate - make sure it's not just you. Identify the concrete behaviors that are at issue.
2. Collaborate - create a unified voice. Go as a group to your leader.
3. If needed, perform "skip-level evaluation" where you tell your boss' boss about your experiences. If you're a top manager, reach down to the subordinates of your direct reports for feedback on the performance of your subordinates. (Make sure there is a process in place for this.)

Listen to the podcast here.

For Consultants: Getting Published

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:15:27 PST

Many consultants enjoy the aura of expertise that comes with having their articles published. I interviewed one widely published consultant I admire, Steve Balzac of Seven Steps Ahead.

Why to Write
For a consultant, writing creates your brand. The more you publish, the more widely you are seen. That gives a prospective client something to find when they are researching you. Being published also allows people to get a sense that they know you -- it enhances their trust. Since consulting work is based on trust, anything that enhances a prospective client's sense that they know and trust you will help you sell your services.

Remember that, as a consultant, you're not selling your secret special knowledge. You're selling your ability to help the client make use of the knowledge that is out there. Your real value is in helping a client change. No article can do that for them.

Don't worry about giving away all your expertise. We could all, for example, learn everything there is to know about accounting. Yet most of us don't. And we're happy to hire the people who have learned it. Your clients are the same way - they don't have time to learn what you know.

When to Write
Steve has written widely, and now writes every Friday. It took him a while to get into a habit of writing regularly. Steve's a big proponent of writing regularly and being disciplined about it. Do write for a block of time, perhaps 1-2 hours. Don't allow interruptions, and don't write longer than perhaps 3 hours -- you will become fatigued and your productivity will diminish.

Steve will shut down his email, and may shut down his web browser unless he has a specific source to look up to quote in the article.

What to Write About
Steve organizes his ideas by entering each new writing topic into his calendar on the next available Friday. Every time a new writing idea pops up, he puts it on the calendar. Then, each Friday he sits down for an hour or two and writes 500-800 words on his chosen topic.

Don't be promotional. Nobody wants to read an ad.

Steve started with a monthly newsletter. The discipline of putting out the regular newsletter helped him develop the habit of writing. It also gave him something to pitch to editors.

It's okay to write about client experiences provided you are careful to avoid betraying confidences. Steve will change names and even create a composite of several real examples. Always get permission. And if your client is a huge firm like IBM, you can generally write about them with impunity because they don't get offended or self conscious, as long as you don't single someone out for public humiliation.

As he reads articles, Steve will notice something he wants to write about -- he'll immediately email himself a link to the article, or paste the URL of the article into either the book outline, or some other place where he is capturing ideas for future writing.

Whom to Write For
Then Steve will pitch the article to editors. This usually consists of an email describing the proposed article, why it fits their readership, and 3-5 benefits that readers will get. He won't send in what he wrote, he just sends the topic description. That way he has the option of revising it to fit a particular audience, and the editor only sees the revised article, not a generic one that might be a poorer fit to their audience and thus turn them off.

As part of the pitch conversation, Steve gets a sense of the length desired, and other parameters that the editor wants. As soon as Steve gets an agreed article, he'll push that writing assignment into his calendar right away on the next Friday, and bump whatever idea was there out into the future. That way he is flexible and able to respond quickly to the editor's interest.

Proposals are always short. "Hi, I'd like to propose an article. It's based on my experience as ___. It's tentatively titled (something) and would provide your readers with these three benefits (lists them)."

Most articles of this nature are not paid. The benefit to you is that it increases your notoriety. And the benefit to you of landing a $50,000 consulting contract far outweighs being paid $50 for an article. Sometimes you might be paid, however that's just a bonus and should not be your focus.

Once you have a positive reputation with an editor, you can pitch ideas more interactively and you'll get more traction -- because you are a known quantity.

Steve maintains a list of publications he will pitch. He gets ideas of new publications to pitch by noticing, in the bios of other consultants, that they have an article in thus-and-such a publication. He'll note down that publication and later research it to see if it's a good fit for him.

Link to your Articles
On your web site, have a page that links to your published works. Sometimes you'll capture a PDF of the article and you'll link to it, for example if the publication doesn't publish online, or if articles age out quickly. Steve's page is here.

What hasn't Worked?
Steve has put out way more proposals than he ever got accepted. Sometimes he'll pitch a publication every month for six months, and not even get a nibble. It can be hard to do it over and over and over - it's a slog. However that's what you have to do. Don't expect every pitch to work.

From Articles to Books
Steve had responded to a PR lead, which led to a publisher asking for his CV. Then McGraw-Hill asked him to propose a book outline -- a table of contents and a sample chapter. Steve had earlier last summer decided he wanted to write a book, and had already gone through the exercise of creating those elements -- a table of contents, a sample chapter, and so on. While he couldn't re-use that summer exercise, he was comfortable with the process, and was able to respond to the request within a day.

Steve is finding that his experience writing articles has made his work on his book much easier.

For example, each chapter touches topics on which he has already written something. He can go review his prior writings and review his thinking on those topics. That vastly accelerates his writing of that chapter.

Also, the practice of writing articles has made him a faster and better writer and has made it easier to sit down and write 2,000 words on the book each day.

Another useful tool has been blogging. Steve blogs his thoughts and the blog works as a journal of his thinking about his work. Often blog postings become seeds for later articles and for the book contents.

Keeping Momentum
For his book in particular, Steve will finish one chapter and then jot down a few bullets on what to include in the next chapter. His brain is already warmed up, and so by writing down a few specifics he primes his brain for his subconscious to work on in the background. This way, the next day when he sits down to write that next chapter, he's more ready for that writing.

Herbert Benson discusses "Eureka moments" or breakouts in his book "The Breakout Principle." Among other things, Benson found that working on a topic, then relaxing and "letting go" of it, allowed people to achieve breakthroughs in thinking that they could not get with continual focus.

We find ourselves solving a problem in the shower or while exercising, because we've let go of the problem and allowed the physiological processes that Benson describes to take place.

Listen to the full interview here.

Coaching Senior Executives

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:15:44 PST

What is this thing called coaching? How can CEOs and business owners tell if they themselves are coachable? What does it take to successfully coach senior executives?

I asked two returning experts, Susan Steinbrecher, founder of the leadership and coaching firm Steinbrecher and Associates and author of Heart Centered Leadership, and Henry Evans, co-founder and Managing Partner of Dynamic Results and author of "Winning with Accountability: the Secret Language of High Performing Organizations."

There's been an explosion of use of the word "coach" -- you can find a self-described coach for everything in the world including your relationship with your pet.

My questions were:

What's the essence of coaching?
How does group coaching differ from 1:1? What are the trade-offs?
How do you coach a CEO - is it different from coaching someone else? How?
What makes a person coachable?

What's the essence of coaching?
Coaching is one of a set of partially overlapping activities that include:

Consulting
Coaching
Mentoring
Therapy

Consulting often involves doing specific tasks on behalf of a client, often supplying a skill not present in-house and creating one or more work products. Consultants do things for you.

Mentoring is typically between a highly experienced and a new or less experienced person, where the former helps the latter navigate (for example) the unwritten rules of an organization or profession. The mentor may already be where the mentee is headed.

Therapy involves healing past mental or emotional injuries and is done with a licensed therapist.

Coaching is about improving one's role performance, usually by the coach helping the coached person to increase their self-awareness.

Susan says that the coach is there to help you not just increase self-awareness, but also to help you change your "mental models" -- because those are the things that constrain your thinking and limit your effectiveness. If you think you're decisive and other people find you brusque and arrogant, your mental model is broken -- it does not adequately reflect the ways you and others interact. By not seeing yourself as others see you, you are unable to work with those other folks as effectively.

One of the most profound examples in Susan's experience was a man who had earned five advanced University degrees, and worked as a chef. Ultimately they discovered together that he secretly saw himself as stupid, and was seeking the outside validation of the degrees. By understanding this mental model, he became able to choose - rather than feel compelled - to take or not take courses and seek or not seek additional degrees. He had a greatly increased sense of his choices and options.

I recently spoke with a CEO who had spent over 10 years fighting with his partner in front of his staff, under the mistaken impression he was defending the staff and building their loyalty -- only when he was sued by two former employees did he discover that everyone saw him as a bully. To his credit he is now working with a coach to improve his own self-awareness and fix his corporate culture.

How do you coach a CEO - is it different from coaching someone else? How?

Susan finds that sometimes people resist the idea of a CEO getting coached, because they think the CEO should already be perfect. This is bizarre. It may also reflect a certain wishful thinking - we want the CEO to have all the answers and so we may pretend he does, in order to comfort ourselves, and we may then resist anything that might shake that imaginary comfort.

And some CEOs have a hard time embracing the humility that is required to admit that there's room for growth. They don't realize that there is greater strength in humility and vulnerability.

What makes a person coachable?

In her book Susan developed two principles - Know Thyself and Know Your Impact. In order to be coachable, a person has to be open to learning this information and improving both.

To be coachable you have to take your part of the relationship very seriously. You have to block out sacred time that is only about the coaching work. You have to be present, not try to multitask. You have to want to grow. You have to be open to new information. And ultimately you have to do the work.

What makes the coaching relationship unique?

The coach may be the only person a CEO works with whose only agenda is that CEO's success. Subordinates are thinking about their own careers. Investors and board members are thinking about the profitability of the firm. A spouse wants the CEO to come home occasionally. The coach has no other goal than to help that CEO become better.

How can I pick a good coach?

Don't play it safe. This is someone who will help you grow. When you're interviewing potential coaches, look for experience and training and certification, and also look for that spark that tells you this person can challenge you and inspire you to get out of your comfort zone.

Henry was initially unwilling to call himself a coach -- because the profession seems over-filled with unemployed and unemployable people who can choose to call themselves a "coach" and start to market themselves that way.

Henry's organization will ink a contract with a client organization, however individual executives have to apply to be coached. Then two of Henry's top people will independently match that executive with a coach in the firm. Then they compare notes and come to agreement.

Henry believes a coach needs to have the willingness to work on themselves and be coached. And a coach needs to have enough domain knowledge to understand your issues and experiences. If you're a CEO, it makes sense to look for a coach with that sort of experience. Otherwise you may be getting advice and feedback on an issue from someone who doesn't really understand that issue.

At the same time, you need a coach with some balance, who won't get sucked into the details and miss the big picture.

What should a coach do for me?

A good coach will help you prioritize. Henry helps his clients create three lists:

Key tasks that only they can do
Other tasks that are capable of being delegated
Yet other tasks that you should simply drop

A good coach will typically start with an assessment. Henry believes you want to have more than just the perspective of the CEO and the coach - you want additional information and perspectives, and a good assessment tool can offer insights and help create a baseline against which to measure progress.

Are you an ass?

Henry got to hear his friend Pat Heiman talk about listening. Pat is 90 and has been coaching for 40 years. Pat said, "If you have one person in your circle calling you an ass, ignore them. If you have two people in your circle calling you an ass, look closely at it to find the grain of truth. If you have three or more people in your circle calling you an ass, buy a cart, because you're an ass." For Henry the moral of this story is, if you're hearing the same basic message three or more times, you need to be working on it.

Group Coaching

Henry has deep experience with Vistage, a CEO coaching organization. He has found that group coaching is less intimate yet can be more useful at helping with organizational structure or finance challenges where your fellow CEOs have specific domain knowledge. The personal issues are probably better worked on 1:1 with the coach.

Accountability and Coaching

Henry's book on accountability describes his firm's accountability model, which is tightly integrated with his firm's coaching model.

The higher in the firm you are, the harder it can be to get honest information and feedback. People worry that saying the wrong thing could be a "CLM" - a Career Limiting Move. Henry says the top people have to strive to "create safety" - to create an atmosphere where your subordinates are very comfortable with coming to you with bad news or difficult feedback.

Henry couples the coached executive's self-assessment with the external view from the 360-degree assessment. They quickly see what it's costing them to continue as they are. They quickly see the value in changing their interactions.

Henry's firm offers a free, online self-assessment that tests the a firm's level of accountability. One component of that is how easy it is for subordinates to bring up bad news.

Components of Accountability

Accountability is made up of four elements. They are:

A very clear shared vision of the outcome.
A very clear statement of the date, time and timezone when the outcome will be done.
A very clear understanding of what individual owns the responsibility for that outcome.
A public sharing of that individual's ownership so others are aware, and a reflection of the owner's understanding of what that shared vision is.

Ensure that you have all four elements, and you are creating a culture of accountability.

Never Manage Attitudes

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:16:17 PST

A good leader should never, NEVER try to manage people's attitudes. Attitudes are a trailing indicator.

If you're unhappy with any person's or group's attitude, the way to fix that is to increase performance -- because when people perform well at a task they care about, they start to feel better about their work and everything else around them. (See the movie 12-O'Clock High.)

Focus on these four pre-conditions to see if they are weak or missing for each person:

Clear and worthy goals that are detailed enough to measure
Frequent (daily) and timely (immediate) feedback by the system on progress against the goal (# calls vs. target; # appointments vs. target, # twitter followers vs. target, etc.)
Match of skill to challenge -- listen for sounds of frustration or high anxiety
Autonomy within clear boundaries -- ask people to tell you their version of what they have here

Fix these (and I promise you some of these are broken) and attitudes will align soon after performance begins to improve, which it will within a week or two.

Leading Lean

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:16:42 PST

Hype around "lean" (and related terms like "Six Sigma" and "Kaizen" and so forth) has long been part of the business literature. That hype doesn't male Lean a good idea - nor a bad one.

My experience around hyped business concepts is that there's often some grain of truth under it all. Sometimes it's hard to find that grain - and finding it is always worthwhile.

I interviewed two experts -- lean manufacturing guru Rick Pay of The R Pay Company LLC and returning guest Mitch Goozé of The Customer Manufacturing Group.

I asked Mitch, what does "lean" really mean, and how does it differ from "Kaizen" or "Six Sigma"? I'm sure the manufacturing people who use it already understand it.

Six Sigma is a tool that was created in Motorola to reduce variation in output. Kaizen means "good change" and is a process for creating small changes. And Lean comes from the Toyota Production System.

Lean is about removing everything that does not add value to the system. Lean is about removing all waste from the system.

For example, in a simple manufacturing system, rework is waste. Rework often seems unavoidable. However it almost always is avoidable, and avoiding it is worth doing. And outside manufacturing, the same principle applies.

The only reason you're re-working something is because it wasn't correct the first time. So, figure out how to do it right the first time every time.

Look for example at the process of getting approvals. How many times have you seen in a grocery store where a manager has to approve something, yet the manager doesn't even look at the thing being approved? That's an approval that is waste - you should either actually use the approval process to add some value such as checking quality, or eliminate the approval step. If the approval adds no value, eliminate it.

The best and most rational person to check the value of an output is the person who takes it in as an input.

In other words, as person A performs work and passes it to person B, the best quality check is person B. If person B is not competent to do the inspection, why? If certain sorts of approvals or checks are frequent, we should train them so they can do it.

One tool is to "ask why five times" -- it drives out the reasons why things are done, or uncovers that they are not done for good reasons. You can drive out a stunning amount of waste with just this sort of questioning. And what is left over is known to be good.

A huge survey of managers and workers was done to understand why workers don't do what they should. The top three reasons were:

They don't know what to do.
They don't know how to do it.
They don't know why it's important.

One result of a lean examination, of "asking why five times" is to make sure everyone knows what to do, how, and why.

I had the good fortune to drop in on a Junior Achievement location in Portland, Oregon. I got to watch hundreds of 11-year-olds who were busy and hard working. The staff said "we never have any discipline problems." Never? "They're busy." Every kid there had a job description, and knew what to do, knew (mostly) how to do it, and knew why.

I asked several of these 11-year-old CEOs "what's your job?" And each of them looked at his or her job description, looked up at me, and said "to make sure everyone knows what his job is."

I've seen grown-up businesses less productive, and grown-up CEOs who had less understanding of their role.

Waste is lost profit
Lean is valuable because it eliminates waste, and waste is lost profit.

There is a quick and cheap way to get started immediately with lean. You create a "process map" that describes one of your key processes. You put a big sheet of butcher paper on the wall, and use sticky notes to represent process steps, and you start to arrange and re-arrange them as you figure out what you actually do.

And at some point you'll end up with a process step that you'll have to label "miracle occurs here" because you don't know how that gap gets bridged.

Don't get too hung up on the particular mapping process. Just get started.

Then, when you're done with the "as-is" process you can take a digital picture of the diagram. Next, create a "to be" process map. You'll eliminate a lot of wasted steps and wasted motion. Start with a simple process so you get used to it and can build familiarity and expertise.

Sam Carpenter relates a story of documenting his Accounts Receivable process as 51 steps, delegating it, and going back years later to find that his empowered people had reduced it to 23 steps. Mitch says that this is in fact a common level of improvement.

Mitch says, always ask "what is the outcome or output that is desired here?" Because often the outputs are what we think the next person needs, rather than what they actually need.

When you are in a meeting or having a conversation about a task, always ask "what output or outcome are we looking for, and how will we know we have it? How will I know I'm giving you what you want?"

The biggest danger with communication is the illusion that it has occurred when in fact it has not.

Every time work is handed off between people, we can expect them to create an agreement between them as to what the work should look like.

Simply, a lack of understanding of what is desired, creates more white collar waste than anything else Mitch has observed.

Mitch's organization takes so-called "manufacturing process improvement" techniques and applies them to the marketing and sales process. Mitch is able to create a process that "manufactures" loyal profitable customers. This works because these process improvement techniques work across all business processes, even though we may be most familiar with them in the manufacturing context.

In my experience, the biggest gains that happen in an industry come when that industry learns to adopt the hard-won wisdom of other industries.

"If you only adopt best practices from your own industry, you'll always be a follower," says Mitch.

My second guest, Rick Pay, has enormous manufacturing as well as some non-manufacturing experience. He's run a manufacturing operation for seven years, followed by 20 years of consulting into many industries.

Rick agrees with Mitch that there is a lot of cross-industry potential. There's significant adoption right now of Lean and related techniques into health care and the construction industry, among others.

However, even in manufacturing, lean doesn't always work the way we would like. Rick ends up working with a lot of frustrated CEOs who try to roll out Lean or another process improvement effort, and dont' see results.

Rick sees these major elements that are needed for success with Lean:

Senior management commitment
Willingness to change the culture
Getting the right people in place
Pick the right program

Senior management commitment

A lot of success rolls up from front line and mid level managers. However that success becomes limited because senior managers don't follow through - they lose interest or get distracted or discouraged. Lean needs to be championed and followed through on.

So either the CEO or some other C-level champion needs to remain engaged in the strategy and the implementation of lean.

Willingness to change the culture

There is a real culture change when Lean is brought in.

Folks don't expect this. They think Lean happens because of some small changes. Not so. Jack Welch got his people to take it seriously by expecting them to report their progress monthly and quarterly. That helped people see it was real and important.

Another culture change is that lean requires decision-making power to be pushed down to the shop floor and down to the front line workers and "empowered teams." Workers MUST feel safe in standing up for quality.

Compare something like shutting down a manufacturing line. At an old-style firm you would never shut down the line, and you'd be looking for a new job if you did. At a lean firm, you're expected to shut the line down when you see a quality problem, and you might shut it down 2-3 times a day. That's because, in the lean firm, you don't want to keep building things incorrectly, so as soon as you see you are, you stop.

In the lean organization, a lot of problem solving teams are formed at the front line level, and they can take decisions and implement fixes without management needing to be involved and improve things.

Technically in lean there are some small buffers, so the line can stop briefly in one area without the factory as a whole stopping. The buffers are small, and they do exist. If a stoppage has to be longer, that would mean the problem was larger.

There's a certain discipline involved in saying "we are not going to continue to make flawed things - we will stop and fix it immediately." That raises the profile of, and the value of, finding and fixing problems quickly.

One area where Rick sees opportunity is, operational disciplines. People need to feel safe following the rules. Rick was working with an assembler that had implemented a "kanban" system to manage material flow. However kanban only works when you actually move the cards every time the kanban goes empty. The firm thought they had some serious cycle-counting problem or other that was causing them to run out of stock on key items, however it was simply that people were not moving the cards that caused new material to get moved.

When workers don't have the power to change bad rules, they have to have the flexibility to ignore the rules that they know don't really work. Such workers can cause slowdowns by maliciously following every rule to the letter. The better way is to empower those workers to fix the rules.

Getting the right people in place
Having the right front line supervisors and middle managers is also important to making Lean work. That means they have to be willing to change the rules, willing to hold people accountable for executing on operational disciplines. Be clear on why you're doing it.

Rick does an evaluation, "Are you ready for Lean?" that tells you whether you're going to succeed, or how to get prepared to succeed.

One key preparation step is to put in a scorecard. Capture some baseline information. And post that summary information publicly so folks can see it. Post it in the lunch room. Share financial information. This establishes higher levels of trust.

Pick the Right Program

Lean is not always the right tool or program. There's another tool called "quick response manufacturing" out of the University of Wisconsin that's great for job shops. There's a new tool called "Lean Sigma." So find the tool that is the best fit for your strategic need and your circumstances.

Rick calls it getting a Mayo Clinic physical - get an in-depth view of the firm and its functions and dysfunctions. Rick invariably finds that the real problem is NEVER what they think it is. Observe, diagnose, prescribe and only then treat.

If you have a stalled Lean program, take a breath, re-assess it, ensure it's aligned with your strategy, and get senior management re-energized.

Rick was working with one manufacturer who had been unchanged for 20 years. He was able in six months to move their inventory from six turns a year to 12, and to vastly improve cash flow. They have had no layoffs during the recession of 2008-09, and no jobs were outsourced overseas.

In summary, you can't do Lean "a little bit" -- you either empower your people or you don't. You either trust your people or you don't. If you do it, do it all the way.

Obama's Executive Style

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:55:19 PST

This is an impressive piece of journalism, and it reveals what I see as a solid executive style by Obama. That's especially significant due to his relative lack of prior executive experience.

What's to like?

Acknowledging when someone you disagree with is right
Not blaming people and instead focusing on systems
Willingness to listen and be flexible in approach while maintaining constancy of goals

Not a bad collection of attributes. We could all of us do worse.

Good Sticky vs Bad Sticky

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:19:22 PST

Business relationships can be either transactional or relational, and can be non-sticky, good-sticky, or bad-sticky -- and you want to embrace good-sticky and avoid bad-sticky.

In a business relationship, what does it mean to be sticky? It tells you if it's easy or hard to give up this vendor and go with another one.

If it's easy to give up one for another, that's transactional and non-sticky. It's like picking a gas station -- as long as there are at least two of them nearby, you can pick either one with equal comfort.

If it's hard to give up one for another, that's relational and non-sticky. If you tried to give up your QWERTY keyboard for a DVORAK keyboard, for example, or if you tried to switch accounting software, or children, or primary spoken languages -- for most of us, these would be very tough or impossible. Sticky.

Sticky, however, comes in these two flavors, good and bad. When it comes to my kids, I'm glad I couldn't conceive of swapping them out for new kids. That's because we have a special relationship, and no new kids could take their places. When you're glad to have the relationship, that's good-sticky.

We all have business relationships that are good-sticky too -- an excellent accountant, for example, who is always helping save us money. A great dentist who makes you comfortable and does great work fast. You could change - you just don't want to.

And finally there's the bad-sticky business relationships. The ones you'd like to change, yet you feel you can't. The payroll service that you think will be too difficult to change. The accountant who confuses you. The old computer system that's not compatible with anything else. Run away from these.

And when it comes to being in a business relationship, you want your customers to feel that good stickiness - they could change to someone else, they just don't want to.

Leading More Effective Meetings

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:19:41 PST

We often hear, and sometimes say, we hate meetings. To be clearer - we hate bad meetings. Even good leaders sometimes have bad meetings. How can you lead a more effective meeting?

Make your meetings:

Short - start and stop on time
Meaningful - have a purpose and declare it up front
Have an output or outcome related to the purpose

According to Henry Evans of Dynamic Results, you can make a big difference by using the language of accountability.

Henry is an internationally known expert on the subjects of “Creating High Accountability Cultures” and “Emotionally Intelligent Leadership,” and teaches MBA students worldwide.

Henry believes that, to deliver results, a firm must invest in the "language of commitment" and the language of accountability. He taught his accountability methods on Tuesday to some MBA students, and they are already blogging about the way those methods are improving their meetings.

There are at least three types of meetings -

information sharing
working
decision making

What is it about a bad meeting that makes it bad? One is, a meeting will be bad if it lacks conflict or drama.

You can thus "mine for conflict" by remembering who has differing opinions. If I ask for comments in a meeting and there's silence, I can ask, "Jim and Bob, you have different opinions on this - would you share those?" This can get the conversation flowing.

This "terminal politeness" may be caused by fear. The number one deliverable of the leader is to create a sense of safety so people are able to open up and contribute.

Best Practices for Better Meetings

You invited each person for a reason. If any of them is silent, then they are not contributing - which can prompt you to call on those folks. When I run a meeting, I make a map of the room with each person's first name, arranged in the order they are sitting around the room. As each one talks, I make a mark next to their name, and maybe write a few words to capture their comment.

Circulate an attendee list and an agenda in advance.

Start the meeting by declaring both the purpose of the meeting, and which decision method will be used (democratic, autocratic, or consensus).

Then share the impact that this meeting will have on the organization.

Next, share briefly each person's best recent experience, maybe the highlight of their weekend.

Meetings will go better when you assign roles:
Timekeeper - ensures we are staying on time
Taskmaster - ensures we are discussing the issue we are supposed to be discussing
Notetaker - captures major points
Facilitator - runs the meeting - you might rotate who runs each meeting, so everyone gets a shot

Start and end on time. If the meeting is not really finished, stop it anyway. That will be so painful, people will very quickly learn to use the meeting time more effectively.

Any accountable statement of commitment includes:

a clear visual expectation of the result
a specific due date and time including time zone
ownership - this is one human being, even if they are supported by a team
share - at least one other human being knows about it

This is a lot like the "Standard Goal Language" described by Jim Grew: "Who will do What by When."

When you make this level of commitment and share it with others, you'll feel a sense of "gravity" around having shared it. That increases the odds you will make it happen.

How can you make a meeting impactful?

Pretend someone is leaving your company today, and they will return after the decision is made. Will they see, hear, feel or sense anything different when they return? If not, it may not have been an impactful decision.

What are the results of adopting this sort of language use in meetings? Henry and his team was invited to the international sales meeting of a client, a 52-year-old company, and the client leader literally had a spotlight shine down on the team's table. The leader said they would not have doubled their sales over the past two years if it were not for Henry and his team.

Ultimately you have to "be the change you want to see" - you have to model the behavior you desire in others. If you want people not to interrupt you, then you need to not interrupt them. If you want good meetings, hold good meetings. If you want accountability from others, show accountability yourself.

Henry adds, listen for vague words from "the glossary of failure" like "soon" and "try" and replace them with words that are highly specific, like dates and times and "will." You will see a difference immediately.

My second expert was Jim Smith of Jimpact Enterprises. He's a highly effective leader of presentations and he coaches those who must lead seminars and meetings.

Jim suggests that the best meetings are made good by preparation. The "meeting before the meeting" is a key.

Jim teaches the "ICE" Method - Inspire, Connect, and Empower.

Get each person to participate. Give each person something to do. If they are only listening, then in 8-10 minutes they will mentally check out. Overcome that tendency by giving them things to do, whether it's offer an opinion or something else.

Set the expectation before the meeting, and again at the start, what you will need from each person.

Prepare an agenda. Begin with the end in mind. What do I want people Thinking Feeling Knowing and Doing at the end that they were not before?

Each person should take away from the meeting some personal, specific call to action. And they should share it.

It will take more time to prepare a meeting this way. It's worth it. We have to make the time to prepare, because to do any less is to waste my time in the meeting - and waste the time of everyone else in the meeting.

I might have a meeting where, by the end, I want people Knowing the new product strategy, Feeling good about it, and Doing the communication with clients about the new product strategy, through phone calls and emails. That's starting to be specific enough to allow me to really prepare for the meeting.

For such a meeting, I would need to prepare materials to really communicate the new product strategy well, so they Know it. I would need to find or research some true story to inspire them, so they Feel good. And I need to have a specific call to action to prompt them to go out and Do the things I want them to do.

Jim also suggests some specifics:
The entry should be in the back of the room
The screen if any is off to one side and the speaker is in the center
The room needs to allow some interaction

Jim encourages leaders to speak to people's hearts and heads, both.

Show some vulnerability. Ask for help.

Be responsive to people's styles. Some folks need to talk in order to think, and others need to think in order to talk.

The first type will think it through by talking it through aloud. They can eat up a lot of meeting time. You might want to engage them in advance of the meeting and let them talk the issue through in advance so they can discover what they think.

The second type will need time to think and reflect, and may be silent for most of the meeting. You may want to call on the explicitly, or have a "two minute warning" where you allocate time for "those we haven't heard from yet."

A vital skill for leaders in meetings is to tell stories in a compelling and memorable way. That may mean you take a class or get a coach to help you learn to tell stories effectively. The most memorable and impactful way to convey a message is in the form of a story. Don't tell self-glorifying stories about your brilliance and your victories. Tell more gory stories that involve your mistakes and learnings.

By the end of the meeting, call for commitment. "Are you just interested, or are you committed?"

Ultimately you need the mindset that will spark the behavior of leading more effective meetings. Start there, Jim believes, and the rest will flow.

Steve Ballmer on Time Management and Time Budgeting

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:37:13 PST

The Walls Street Journal carries this excellent, brief video of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft describing how he budgets his time for an entire year, while maintaining flexibility.

See other videos in the Wall Street Journal's "Lessons in Leadership" series here.

Controlling Your Own Emotions And Responses

tom@thomasbcox.com (Tom) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:20:42 PST

How can we be better at controlling our emotions? How can we actually choose how to respond to difficult situations, rather than merely reacting in some automatic and possibly destructive fashion?

Most reactions have to do with a sense of loss-of-control, and most of us just react. We will start to control our own emotions and responses as we move from reaction to response, from the automatic and unthought into the chosen, deliberate and thoughtful.

My first guest was Aila Accad, RN, known as the “Stress-Busters Coach” -- she is an award-winning speaker and best-selling author who holds both Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in nursing. She specializes in quick ways to release stress and reclaim energy.

After teaching stress-management for over 25 years, Aila had her own stress crisis, which led to an instant stress breakthrough. She just published her findings in the new Amazon best-seller, "34 Instant Stress-Busters, Quick tips to de-stress fast with no extra time or money." She is president & founder of LifeQuest International, LLC.

How did she get moved to focus on stress? As a senior in nursing school she heard that 85% of illness comes from stress. Aila has come to believe that all stress comes from a single, root cause.

That "one cause for stress" is the sense of a lack of control.

Aila, as I mentioned, had a stress crisis of her own. She had everyone else's to-dos on her list and none of her own -- she had the to-dos of her boss, employees, kids, husband, and especially parents. She was not working on her own needs. She found that the antithesis of stress is to relax, to stop trying to control things you cannot control, and to be curious about the unknown and uncontrollable future.

Whenever she hears the word "SHOULD" she asks, "Who made that up? Where did that come from?" She suggests we move away from judgment and self recrimination, and go to a place of curiosity.

Thinking "outside the box" is old thinking -- there is no box. To handle a rapidly changing world, we need that sense of relaxation and curiosity.

When we talk about stress management, we're accepting stress and just shuffling it around. Much of it is surface talk and surface work -- the underlying sources of stress remain.

"Stress-busting" is where you notice you are feeling a lack of control, and you immediately do things to regain control, by shifting your attention to things you can control:

Take control of your breathing
Smile

Then you can turn to any page in her book and do immediately whatever is on that page -- each is a technique for immediately reducing stress. Here are two of them:

Turn off the news.
Learn and use the Emotional Freedom Technique - a tapping technique for calming.

My second guest was Beverly Flaxington, an accomplished business consultant. Bev held many senior level positions in the corporate realm and has been a consultant running her own business since 1995. She is a professor at Suffolk University teaching “Small Business Management” and “Organizational Behavior”. Beverly is a Certified Hypnotist, Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).

Beverly’s newest book, Understanding Other People: The Five Secrets to Human Behavior, was released in May 2009 and is available on amazon.com. It has been called “a truly valuable read” by the Midwest Book Review.

Beverly has a varied background and has long worked with folks from all walks of life. She found herself seeing a lot of the same challenges, and she noticed that there are some universal truths. Understanding these can help you get along much better with other people.

It’s All About Me – not that we are self-obsessed, however we all do have a view on the world, which comes from our unique background and upbringing and history. We listen with our filters on, and we tend to react because our filters tell us that certain things are good and other things are bad. What we hear is not what you say – we hear what our filter tells us we hear. We hear what we think the other person must mean. Joe did X, and I know that if I did X then it would be because I meant Y, therefore Joe must mean Y.

How do I separate facts and data from emotional responses? Our reality is based on our memories of what we felt. Think about a fight you had last year. You most likely remember almost none of the dialog, and a little bit about what the other person's message was, and you strongly remember how you felt about it, and your conclusions flow from those feelings.

Check yourself regularly here. We go from fact, to interpretation, to emotional reaction. And we treat our emotional reactions and conclusions as if they were facts.

The way out of this is, to adopt an “interested observer” role and to enhance our awareness. We have to notice our triggers. Step outside the theater. Step out of our regular roles. Take a position of curiosity.
Our Behavioral Styles Come Between Us.

You could be very results oriented and goal-focused and fast. I could be very slow, thoughtful, and methodical. Then put us on the same team. Our approach to problems is very different. You might intimidate me. There are four areas where we can clash - Problems, People, Pace, Procedure.

What’s our approach to problems? What’s our approach to other people? What’s our preferred approach to pacing? How do we go about our work, what procedures do we use and respect?

If you interpret my slow pace to "not caring" then you'll treat me as someone who doesn't care, even though I do. I might interpret your speed as carelessness - and now I think you don't care about the result being solid. When we realize that we have styles that differ, we can cut each other slack and not rush to judgment.
Your Values Speak More Loudly Than You Do.

By grasping what the other person’s values are, you can understand how they are motivated, what drove their behaviors. If you realize you don't yet know their values, then you can again stop your rush to judgment, and you can take the time to discover their values. Once you know the other person's values, you can start to interpret their actions more accurately.
Don’t assume that I know what you mean. Just because you know what you mean, doesn’t indicate that I know what you mean.
I’m OK, you are most definitely Not OK.

I may be powerfully tempted to make you look bad so that I can feel better about myself. This is a common drive. And we can get past that and move toward win-win.

Final thought: how can I put this to immediate use? I can pick just one interaction today – one that is bugging me – and work on "stepping outside the theater" and getting a new, fresh perspective on the interaction.