Monthly Archives: July 2017

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Griity People

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Why are some people successful while others are not.  What distinguishes a top leader, manager , sales person, student, athlete and so on.

Are there specific attributes associated with success.  Things like, intelligence, emotional maturity, physical capability?  Intuitively the answer is yes, but is there something else?

Is there an attribute that is always present to a high degree, which is a critical underpinning to skills and capabilities.  This is a question phycologists have been exploring for years.

Being Successful

I recently heard about some interesting studies of sucessfull salesmen, athletes and students that found the top performers sometimes had high intelligence and/or strong emotional maturity and/ or powerful physicality, but not always.

These factors might be present, or might not (just average or low levels).  This leads to the conclusion these factors are not necessarily or perhaps not at all determinent of success.

Grit

The one attribute that was present in high levels, in every case, was grit.  The higher your grit , the greater likelihood you would be successful.

Being a gritty person means that the one tends to stick to their goals despite numerous issues, problems, setbacks and failures. The person has firmness of mind and unyielding courage.

The theory is when you treat life as a long term journey, not a series of side trips, struggles are the norm and something to overcome.   Something that in fact can and will be overcome.

There is no need to start over or stew and wine over a bump in the , and there will probably be many, those with grit just soldier on to success.

Aquired Attribute

While only a theory, and techniques how to teach or learn grit are still in early development phases just believing in the value of grit is a start on your path to continued accomplishment and success.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Only speak when illuminated

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I travel up to my office using the same elevator bank every day.  This morning a sign in the elevator caught my attention.  “Speak when illuminated”

The reference was to the elevator call box.  It is a one way system and the light indicates when your mic is live.  Still, the instruction  got me thinking philosophically.

Illuminate

One definition of illuminate is to enlighten, as with knowledge.  Or to throw light on a subject. So adding “only” to the phrase creates a thought provoker.

“Only, speak when illuminated”  This could be interpreted as an instruction to hold your counsel unless you had some item of knowledge or clarity to share.

Wisdom in timing

Usually the prime objective of sharing information with others is to create the opportunity for development of knowledge.  A key to achieving this goal is the others receptivity so timing is really important.

Although the syntax of the phrase is not exactly right, the sentiment is.  That is, don’t try to illuminate others till you are ready yourself. When the context for sharing is properly staged, receptivity is more likely.

When you are clear, that is fully illuminated yourself, the time to talk has arrived, but not before.  Most importantly, when you are clear yourself the time to enlighten others has arrived.

If you are not ready, the chances of sharing your personal enlightenment are not good.

So by happenstance, I came across and interesting thought, “Only speak when illuminated”

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Cultural Atmosphere

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Non verbal activities, things like body language and other visual queues coupled with actual behaviours ( how people act) can tell a comprehensive story.

It is a normal and natural human trait to sense the nature of the environment.  We feel fear, become uncomfortable or sense this is not a happy team or group unconciously.

Conscious versus Unconcious queues

Probing with questions, getting to know others through general feedback or just consciously observing can provide data to enable conclusions about organizational or team culture.

This conscious assesssment needs to be combined with what your non verbal senses gather.  How you feel about a situation is often ignored at your peril.

Feel the Energy

Typically organizations document their vision and mission.  They promote their culture actively through written and spoken word.  The message describes how the organizations expect their human resources to act.

Unfortunately their can be disconnects between the aspirations and reality.  When you enter a office, factory or other location, the first thing you feel is the atmosphere.

You can feel the energy of the place.  Positive energy and excitement or negative energy, neither can be hidden.  Typically the atmosphere is sensed rather than materially catalogued.

This measure is more subjective than objective but it exists.  A question I often hear is “How do we know when we are a high performing team.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is a combination of feeling it and results.  The feeling is a leading indicator.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Better Things

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English rock band the Kinks song “Better Things”expresses the epitome of optimism in the chorus line ” I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.”

The song was first released on the album titled “Give the People What they Want” in 1981.  What a fabulous album title.  No artistic crap, let’s play what people want to hear.

Optimism

It is all good.  What is wrong with this perspective.  That is, believing everything you do and everything that is done to you is good has got to be pleasant.

Not just believing it, but feeling it.  Knowing it is true, your life is magical.  There is a strong case for consistently practicing and displaying optimism.

Basically, optimism has no downside.  Back to “It’s all good”.  Hopefully this mantra is not just lip service.  Thinking and believing that ultimately everything is beneficial, even if painfull in the moment, leads to a life well lived.

Attitude

Happiness (like sadness) is both infectuous and addictive.  When your underlying emotional construct is positive not only do others see and feel it, but they catch it as well.

Of course the same goes for a dismal gloomy attitude.  Sadly though what people want is better things.  As a human race, overall, one underlying motivator of all behavior is improvement.

As a race, we believe in better.  So why not practice it every day.  Embrace the concept that it is all good and in the words of the Kinks, I know tommorow you’ll find better things.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Being Average

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Paul Horsdal is a Canadian folk singer who performs under the name Valdy.  His career began in the early 1970’s.  I was listening to an old CD the other day and came across one of his songs, “The Good Song”

The first couple of lines go, ” I am not a free man
But neither am I chained, I am not a wise man But neither am I rearranged”

The song goes on to compare a string of attributes like new/old, rich/ can’t be sold. and so on.  The upshoot is the song describes an average person.  And ultimately, the point is, there is great value in being average.

You don’t need to stand out to be of great value.

Running the Race

As you race through the events that make up your life, your actions and accomplishments are unique to you but taken as a whole might be somewhat replicated by others

As  an average person, your life may be unremarkable, that is on average you map to the majority.  On a bell curve you would be classified at the top of the bell.

The lower left and lower right of the bell curves are the extremes for the very good or very bad.  The most important question is are you happy, not are you exceptional (good or bad).

If standing out is required to make you happy, being average probably is not in your comfort zone, however, Valdy’s lyrical description highlighted for me, being average could be a fantastic thing.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

High Performing teams

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In past posts I have regularly made references to high performing teams.  Enabling a high performance team takes a special touch.  For leaders of groups this should be an aspirational goal at a minimum.

I recently observed a group move from average to mediocre performance (from a team perspective).  Today’s post I describe what that looked like and how it came about.

Communication, communication, communication, ……..

Underlying every effective team is the ability to exchange information, both giving and recieving with a high level of flexibility, receptiveness and most importantly a single minded focus on the goal.

To create this type of team requires clarity in purpose.  To really work though this must be subscribed to by all, not prescribed.  That is “full and absolute buy-in” to the teams purpose.

What it looks like

High performing teams know when they have achieved that pinnacle.  To some extent it is just felt intuitively.  That being said there are some clear characteristics.

  • problems can be solved quickly and effectively and everyone feels good about it
  • the outputs of the team are celebratory, that is they bring joy to all, never derived from adversity  or compromise
  • the actions of the group as a whole are proactive and the essential culture is to move forward to solve rather than spin and churn

The key ingredient

My recent observations around a team that suddenly moved to high performance was largely around loosening the bounds of control.  Rather than a single individual standing in front and  leading, everyone was empowered to take leadership.

Everyone is important, practiced not as lip service, but as an underlying cultural believe.  Not just talked about, but demonstrated as a core behaviour for the group to emulate.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Closing the Deal

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Some interpersonal interactions involve influence and persuasion leading to both parties agreement.  A sales transaction is a common example of this, but even the most informational type of exchanges require some closure (to be considered effective).

There is a huge knowledge base around techniques to achieve closure.  Training courses abound and the technology to support deal closing has exploded in recent years.

Achieving success often requires getting others agreement whether to a strategy,purchase or approach (or all of the above).  For myself I have found good success by following some basic principles.

 Motivation

When trying to influence a change/ sell an idea or product, the first step is to get attention from your target.  While gaining their interest evaluate their motivation (i.e., why are they interested?)

Does your target:

  • believe they need to buy, accept, agree to your proposition (i.e., they want something, maybe not sure exactly what but are receptive to agree to something)
  • agree to let you entertain them out of politeness or someone made them  -they are not really interested
  • express that they are are intrigued but skeptical, they are willing to listen but maybe not much more.

Planting the idea

Ultimately if you can get the agreement decision to be championed and proposed by your subject, that is, it’s their idea, chances of a successful close are high.

Unless you are a mentalist or hypnotist you might believe planting the idea so it comes from others is not a realistic approach.  Actually it is quite doable.

Based on their apptitude – they are ready to deal or being polite or forced or semi interested,  the approach is slightly different butthe fundemental methodology is the same (let it be their idea).

The key to this methodology is simply creating involment in others through asking for questions, opinions, thoughts and advice. That is, putting the ball in their court.

Try it, you will be surprised how often your target takes charge, suggests the solution, purchase or strategy you guided them to by probing and questioning, so they think it is their idea.

 

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

More behavioural thoughts

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Does the reason you behaved in a specific way mitigate the impacts of that behaviour?  Is personal accountablity tanamount to resonsibility or do external factors weigh in?

An example would be a murderer  who was deemed not accountable for their actions.  In these cases, many cultures are sympathetic making allowances for what is terrifically bad behaviour.

The consequences might become psychiatric rehabilitation, forgiveness and reintegration into society.  Or the killer might recieve the death penalty.

Alternatively they may be caged for a long time to protect them from others and or rehabilitate them.  These actions resulting from this murderous behaviour vary, and are principally determined based on motivation.

Pure Personal Accountability

If the determining factor for consequences was soley based on personal accountablity, the reactions to a persons specific behaviour would probably be more consistent,

That is, a killer made the decision to kill, (other factors are irrelevant) the behaviour is theirs and theirs alone).  The contextual and external reasons for the behaviour do not mitigate it.

 You made me do it

The question is, can any factors, ( for example hunger, torture, ridicule, greed), drive your behaviour or are action decisions yours alone to make.

A interesting personal test of this can be tried the next time you are angry.  Simply start with the internal question – Why am I angry?  Usually you will be able to quickly think of the prime causes.

Most likely it will be something like he/she made me mad, or a scenario or circumstances.  These will rarely include; “I chose to be angry or I decided anger was appropriate in this case to address the things that were occurring.”

Part two of this self examination is the question, if I did not choose to be angry, is this acceptable.  Are not my emotions, thoughts and deeds mine to control?

For me, this is a rhetorical question.  The answer is an emphatic yes.  So, I try to learn from this and vow to myself, next time I will conciously decide if I want to be angry.  Owning my actions is so much more satisfying than not.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Behaving Naturally

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There is a multitude of research into human behaviour.  Things like, what are the common reactions under certain specified conditions, what do stress factors do, testing for underlying motivation and so on.

Intuitively, recognizing much behaviour is  situational and/or affected by a variety of physical and pyschological drivers , on the whole,  an individual default behaviour is foused on their own benefit.

Altruism Aside

This is not to disregard the numerous instances of charitable behaviour or cases of putting others first.  I would argue that even in these cases, their is some element of personal satisfaction or internal desire that is driving the actions.

Healthy Cynicism

As cynical as it may seem, at the base of every interraction I have with others or other actions (both mine and others) lies a personal motivation that is “all about me”

Influencing Others

Believing this to be true is a key underpinning to understanding why others behave the way they do.  This understanding is a critical success factor supporting your influencing skills.

Money, power, friendship and respect are often used as examples of ways to drive behaviour.  (e.g., if you help me cut the grass I’ ll give you ten dollars.)

The underlying reason though will most likely be associated with psychologicla benefit ( i.e. feeling good ) or with a basic need (e.g., hunger).

Adressing both the obvious external driver together with the basic emotional needs as you try to influence others behaviours will increase your likelyhood of success.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

From the mouths of children

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In 1971 the rock band called Grand Funk Railroad issued a new album titled Survival.  One of the songs was called “I can feel him in the morning.”

The bands leader, Mark Farner, was a born again Christain.  This is a term dervived from the new testament which refers to a spritual rebirth.

An apt term for Mark Farner,  who to that point was a typical rock star engaging in sex, drugs and numerous forms of debauchery common to that profession.

Ask the Children

The band asked a group of children to have a dialogue about god and spritualism.  The comments were recorded, edited and are played before the song begins.

I was listening to the album the other day and once again the comment of child #9 resonated with me.  A very perceptive and engaging statement from a child.

“When you are good, you live forever and when you are bad you die  when you die. “. This was the last recorded comment before the music starts.

Great Insight

Children are like sponges in the sense they are absorbing everything in their environment.  From parents, teachers to friends, enemies and other acquaintances they gather data.

The data is intepreted with filters not yet fully corrupted by experiences and other environmental stimuli.  The results are often very insightful.

The comment by child #9 indicates good is rewarded, bad is not and a eternal life is something that is to be valued.  Not bad concepts.