Meeting the objections in meetings May 20, 2008
Part of the work I’m passionate about is helping teams work better together. Some time ago I was working with an IT company that had a great team, “…if only Peter wouldn’t shoot down every idea.” (Once again, names are changed to protect the guilty.)
So there I am, Tuesday morning, watching my first meeting. I don’t remember what they were talking about specifically, but it had something to do with a client problem.
Someone offers a suggestion for a solution, and Peter immediately jumps in and says that it won’t work because of this, this and this.
Everyone at the table rolls their eyes. They’d been through this before. Yet I’m fascinated that someone could come up with so many examples of why it wouldn’t work so fast (and this guy was fast!)
This cycle goes on for a bit. Problem, suggested solution, Peter shooting it down in flames.
After about the fifth iteration I jump in and thank Peter for his input. This shocks him as he’s treated like, and acts like an outcast. I don’t think he’d ever been thanked for shooting down other people ideas. Then I go on to say that his comments are not just important, but critical to success. Now I have the entire table shocked.
I continue to Peter, “And, you’re jumping in too soon. You need to allow the potential solutions that are being offered to be fully formed before you offer your feedback. Hold off until they’ve finished their entire suggestion, or to put it another way, give them enough rope to hang themselves. ” Peter smiles at this. Everyone else was too shocked to comment.
Still, the rest of the meeting, Peter is responding differently, taking his time, allowing a solution to be presented and he would point out a specific problem, with only part of the solution (and thus improving the eventual solution). The team is suddenly more effective. And after a few more subtle changes to do with accountability, they are working together nicely.
Many meetings have this issue; Not a Peter, but a disorganised sequence.
Just like calling someone on the phone, you have to type in the right sequence of numbers to get the person you want. It’s the same with meetings. With the right meeting sequence, you can have a meeting achieve agreement in much less time (and have influence over which side that agreement is on), reach decisions faster, and best of all, shorten the length of the meeting!
How do you make decisions? March 18, 2008
If you are like most people, you don’t know the process you go through to make a decision. It happens quickly, naturally, and without our awareness.
The easiest ways to discover how you make a decision, is to take 4 of your friends out to dinner.
When you are handed a menu, place it closed in front of you and watch your friends. Notice how one might ask what someone else is going to have. Notice another might read through every item. Another might glance at the menu and close it. The fourth will do something different.
Once they have made their choice, pick on one of your friends with these questions. (I’ll leave the decision of which one to pick up to you, but if you’ve worked with me before, you’ll know my selection criteria).
“What have you chosen?” Listen closely to the answer. They will likely tell you everything about their decision process. Once they finish, ask:
“What made you choose that?” And again listen to their answer.
If you’re lucky, they’ll say something like “I looked through the menu till I found the dish I had before,” or “I opened the menu and picked the first thing I noticed.” If you’re unlucky, they’ll give you a long rambling story about their childhood. Both will tell you how they made that decision.
Now comes the real challenge. Pick up your menu and use their method to choose food for yourself. This doesn’t mean choose the same dish (although you might). If they choose something they have had before, then you do the same. If they choose the first thing they see, do the same.
Doing this can give you a powerful insight into your own decision method (and might have you eating something new - always a bonus!).
So after doing this, what does that get you?
- It gives you skills to notice someone else’s decision method. This in itself is useful for sales, negotiation, business or making your partner happy because if you know how someone makes a decision, simply give them the information they need to make the decision you want.
- You get insight into your own process. Even though you are only choosing what to eat, the chances are this is the same process you go through to pick a car, house, shoes or a pen.
- You now have another way to make a choice. Chances are you may not like this new method - thats ok, you don’t have to use it. You can keep it in your back pocket when you want a change, or are faced with a very difficult decision.
Notice how the people around you make decisions. Notice how you make your own decisions.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Decisions, Group Dynamics, Learning, Management, Motivation, Negotiation, Persuasion, Psychology, Sales
The reason to control stress February 12, 2008
Stress may be triggered by external events such as having a short timeframe, being yelled at by a customer, or giving an important presentation. It is your interpretation of the event or situation that will ultimately cause you to feel the mental and physical stress or anxiety.
Now, not all stress is bad stress. Stress is a part of everyday life. In the right amount, stress helps you focus better and achieve what you want. Stress can help you be more alert, motivated, and gain a competitive edge. However, non-stop stress is debilitating and will interfere with performance. In the worst situations, it can even kill you!
Stress occurs as a response to an event that you view as threatening. Imagine driving your car at 200 KPH on a windy road. Under the right amount of stress, you switch on your full potential. Under too much stress you crack under the pressure.
The sooner you can recognize the signs stress, the faster you can react and keep in under control.
So, how do you know when you need to hit the kill switch on stress?
There are three main areas where changes can occur under stress: (1) Physical, (2) Mental or Emotional, and (3) Behavioral.
Physical changes when under stress may include dry mouth, tense muscles, pounding heart rate, cold or clammy hands, headache, sweating, and a feeling of butterflies in the stomach. You probably feel these to some extent if you have an important presentation. These are the signs that your body is ready for the challenge.
Mentally you feel stress when you begin to worry excessively about results, make poor decisions, have a limited attention span, make mental errors, and are forgetful.
Other behavior signs of stress include talking faster than normal, biting one’s nails, restlessness, hyperactivity, insomnia, distractibility, and trembling.
By themselves, these signs may not even slow you down. These signs can stay around, and compound. This starts a chronic stress situation, you will seem tired, restless, and feel out of control. If this continues, more problematic physical issues might start.
The important lesson is that you can learn when helpful stress turns into harmful stress and be able to cope effectively. Bring that harmful stress back under control and be able to perform at your best. The key for you is to be aware of these signs and make the adjustments needed when you feel anxiety, tension, or stress. You can learn the skills needed to keep the balance, relax when you want, and stop the overwhelming stress.
If you’d like to know more, you can join in the survey, and then read more about stress reduction methods.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Psychology, Stress
Ultimate question of team management November 13, 2007
If you are a leader, then this is the simplest question that will get you the best results to keep your teams working well together. Ask it, and your team will love you. Skip it and you might never know about how bad the team is.
Did you hire the right person?
In February 2007 a manager asked me for some advice. A few weeks prior he had hired a new person and thought they were a great fit into the office. Even though this new person was hired to take the pressure off, it didn’t seem to make any difference. The manager was asking me how he could update the procedures to make things work more efficiently. As usual, I asked him a question in response, “What do your team members say?”
“I don’t know,” He replied. “I’ve not asked them.”
I looked at him, he stared back. Then he got up and started asking people in the office. Five minutes later he returned with the answer. The new guy was just not working out.
Ask this question when you add a new person to your team. This question will quickly identify if the new person fits within the team, is disruptive, supportive, negative or positive for the team. The question will allow you to find out if you made the right decision in hiring the new person faster than any other method I know. Discover if they really can integrate into and improve the group dynamics.
Use it as a pressure gauge
Ask the question at least once a week as a gauge on how well the team is working together. Ask it of different people within the group - as each person will have a different answer. With each answer, you’ll be able to build a complete picture of the social dynamics within the team.
Build a complete picture of your Group Dynamics
It is a very simple question with many many answers. Each time you ask the question, the answers will be different. Ask it when the group is under pressure, ask it when they have free time. Ask when a new person joins the team or when someone leaves.
I know I’ve labored the point somewhat, but I don’t think I can express any better how important this question is to running an effective team. The question can be asked in any form, but the most common is:
“What do you think about [insert the name of another member of the team]?”
Encourage their self interest
Make it clear when you ask the question, that you want their personal opinion. Some will tell you that so-and-so is disruptive, argumentative and difficult to deal with. This information is pure gold! If everyone in the team says the same, you may well have a problem. If only one person says it, you have something different.
Ask them all!
In July of 2007 I had one manager almost destroy his team by asking this question only to one member. The team saw this, and reacted like most people - by ostracizing the ’snitch’. The team started having secret meetings and private email communications. Make sure you ask every member of the team, about every other member of the team. If you skip one, you run the risk of causing a similar situation.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Communication, Group Dynamics, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Team building
Do you Communicate with a mirror? 14 ways to see past the looking glass. October 8, 2007
People communicate every day with themselves. With their own beliefs, ideas, values, maps.
You might have had the experience of asking someone a simple and innocuous question and receiving an angry, unexpected or strange answer. Almost as if they are having a completely different conversation.
I remember one time when I was running late for a train. I asked the time from tall fellow that was standing on the platform. He didn’t give me the time, but instead angrily swore at me and then turned away.
Every day we face the challenge of overcoming our own perceptions and communicating directly with, rather than what we expect or imagine about the person in front of us. This can be hard at times, especially with the people we know well already.
Every human being is unique and special and interesting. Every human being has value (even that guy on the station). Some of the ways to help you break through your own perceptions:
- Look or listen for what has changed or different since last time you talked to the person. This might be noticing their clothing, or hair. Maybe they were recovering from the flu last time.
- It is your responsibility to make sure the other person understands what you mean to say. Assume that the meaning of your communication is the response you get. In other words, if someone acts offended to something you said, treat the situation as if you did offended them.
- Use active listening skills.
- Put down the paper, step away from your email or stop doing other things and give the other person your full attention.
- Match the other persons ‘energy’ or ‘vibe’. If they are happy, be happy. If they are excited, match their excitement. If they are unhappy, sympthasize.
- Apologise when you make mistakes.
- Accept their statements as true. Everyone has the right to their own feelings.
- Stop interrupting and allow them to finish what they mean to say.
- Use the methods for shutting off your own internal dialogue. Sometimes we are having a conversation in our own mind while waiting for the other person to stop speaking.
- Similar to #4, set aside your personal history. If you are having a bad day, accept your emotions and don’t allow them to affect the communication. That’s not to say you should ignore past experiences, or what you are feeling - by all means take these into account. Instead be aware of how these changes affect your communications now.
- Listen to other peoples opinion, but make up your own through direct experience.
- Examine the entire situation. This person is just one person within the whole world. Who are their friends, who are they connected to? What has been happening in their life?
- Imagine them wearing different clothes, or with a different haircut. As the saying goes, the clothes don’t make the man but they do change your attitudes to the man.
- Understand your position of power. What is your relationship to this person - boss, child, employee, friend etc? Different power roles naturally changes your perceptions of others. Being aware of this can help you understand both your own and the other persons behaviour.
What other methods to you use?
Technorati Tags: Business, Communication, Learning, Persuasion, Psychology
Ways to boost your confidence August 13, 2007
The words you use might be wimp, spineless, shy or fearful. Other people always seem to be able to tell that you are lacking in confidence and walk all over you, take advantage or just ignore you. And it feels like, after each individual event they build together to make a huge barrier to your success.
This vicious cycle goes on. You try something, forcing yourself past the wall of past failures, but fail and get humiliated, so it makes it harder to try again. Because you don’t try next time, the wall becomes higher and thicker and more difficult to overcome.
Some helpful people might just tell you to “Stop being a wimp and get over it”. As if it’s easy to entirely change who you are. That’s what it feels like; that you’d have to change everything about yourself in order to feel like tackling the world’s challenges.
Confidence, like everything else in life, is a skill that needs to be practiced. When you lose confidence it can genuinely feel awful, and for many people might feel like there is nothing you can do to change it. It’s a common statement, “I just don’t have the confidence to do that.” As though we can walk into a shop and buy a kilo of confidence.
Everyone has times when we feel we can do anything, conquer any fear, take on any project, deal with any problem. The skill of confidence comes in when the situation start to become difficult. Thats when our confidence can start to be eroded.
Confidence may take a while to build, and it can be undermined or lost in a second. All it takes is for something to remind us of that wall and we feel wrong-footed, embarrassed or demoralized. It might be something that reminds us of a past failure or previous time we lost confidence. Think back in your own history, is there a certain situation that you always lack confidence in? It often only takes one episode where you feel humiliated or weren’t sure what to do next, and suddenly your confidence is shattered in that event and possibly future ones as well.
Evaluate what trips you up and what doesn’t
There will be some situations that undermine your confidence and some that boost your confidence. Take a piece of paper and divide the page in two. On the right side make a list of the times and places where you know you feel more confident. You might want to start with listing things you do well. If you know you’re a good listener, for example, you probably feel relatively confident when you take on the listening role.
On the other side of the paper make a list of the times and places where you don’t feel confident. Meeting new people, confrontations, giving a presentation, making decisions, etc.
Now we combine the two sides to create a whole. Pick one or two parts on the right hand side of the paper that you could use to improve your confidence in situations on the left hand side. Let’s say you don’t feel very confident meeting new people, but you do feel confident as a good listener. Get a new page and write these two things on the same line. The left side is again “I’m not confident meeting new people.” and the right is “I’m a confident listener.” In between these two statements combine them into one sentence using the word ‘but’. Now read that whole new sentence aloud. Writing it like this and then reading it changes your experience and understanding. Many people have said this alone is enough to fill them with confidence.
Given that above example, people love to talk about themselves, so you only need to get them started (and every good listener knows how to ask good questions) and they’ll be off. Then you can listen to your heart’s content because you know you’re good at it. This then in turn increases your confidence of situations that previously sapped your confidence.
There will be many other possible times and places where you can borrow one skill to help you overcome a deficit in another. Even combining two or three to become a whole lot more confident much more quickly than you think possible.
Repetition is the mother of skill
If you put yourself into those times and places where you naturally have confidence more often, you will increase your experience and bolster your confidence, not just in these situations but also into the rest of your life. If you’re good at riding a bike, go on more bike rides.
Confidence is just like a muscle. You have to use it to develop it. Unlike a muscle however, you don’t have to spend any extra time lifting weights or going to the gym. You can build it throughout your daily activities by consciously focusing on improving your existing confidence.
If you do have a bad day, and your confidence has been undermined, focus your attention on the parts of your day where you did have confidence. Dwelling on the bad does not help. If you get stuck, use the above evaluation sheet to help focus on the good.
And there’s nothing wrong with every once in a while deliberately avoiding situations that do stop you. There’s nothing so confidence-undermining as consistently forcing yourself in situations where you know you’re vulnerable.
The Confidence Cycle
Losing confidence can be a vicious cycle. You lose a little bit of confidence, and then because of that you do something wrong which chips away another bit of confidence. This in turn causes another error and we are suddenly plummeting towards jagged rocks.
Of course, I’m being a little extreme here, it’s not always like that. In fact you can reverse this cycle so that anything that happens can make you even more confident. Everyone has some areas of their life where they’re really confident, or at least confident enough. This is when those lists of qualities and skills come in when we look at the Confidence Cycle.
This is how it works: when you are confident, you try new things, and the more you try the better you get. Like public speaking, for instance. Any good presenter will tell you that the more they get out there in front of an audience, the more confident they feel about handling whatever happens. NOT that they feel less nervous (some people, no matter how practised they are, never learn how to be calm on stage), just that they know what to expect and also feel able to deal with the unexpected. If they get unbalanced they have enough experience to get themselves upright again.
But without confidence you won’t try new things. Where do you begin?
The one and only place you can begin is to practise. Practice for success. That means to practice just above your current level so that even if you make mistakes you are successful overall. This might mean you practice where no one will necessarily notice or where you are not in the spotlight.
For example, if you feel you have zero confidence speaking in front of a group, don’t start practising in front of a group. All you are doing in practicing zero confidence. Practice in front of the mirror first. Then practice in front of a trusted friend. Do this until you can do it with confidence. It might feel false and embarrassing, but practising with an audience of one friend is very different than going into the lion’s den of an audience of strangers.
Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
Alongside practise goes preparation. Whatever the situation is you can prepare for all manner of eventualities. For example, one of the training drills I give to everyone that I train in public speaking is to give a 5 minute talk. During that 5 minute talk they are to make at least 3 obvious ‘errors’. These errors might be dropping a whiteboard marker, tripping, forgetting a major point of their talk, or anything else. This gives them the ability and experience of dealing with something going wrong. Before something like that would undermine their confidence and set them up for more errors. Now it builds their confidence because they have direct experience of dealing effectively with these errors.
Whatever you choose, remember to practice for success. Doing something correctly once is much better than doing something one hundred times wrong.
If you found this article useful you might also like to read how to build self-confidence.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Learning, Motivation, Psychology, Self-Confidence, Stress
The risks of Leadership July 3, 2007
When I was taught abseiling, the teachers drilled safety over and over again. Ensure you are always anchored, and to check all the major parts of your gear before jumping off. Go through the ABC’s. Anchor - Is your rope secured properly? Belt - Is your harness on correctly, buckle tight? Carabeena - are you tied in correctly?
The day I was learning, one person in the group, James, was learning how to train others.
During the middle of the day, after the beginners had just finished an intermittent level overhang, I watched Gary, our lead instructor, take the rope everyone had just finished using and intentionally tie a large knot about half way down. He then instructed James to tie off and begin abseiling down. James was naturally a little apprehensive. Gary had to spend several minutes convincing James that this was part of his testing.
Gary followed James down on a parallel rope. All the while James was very concerned about the knot, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to complete the jump.
As James approached the knot, he stopped about a meter above it, secured himself then began to untie the knot. Gary quickly stopped him. “That’s not the test. What happens if you can’t untie the knot, or there is some other obstruction?”
“I want you to continue all the way down, until the knot is hard against your figure 8″ (A figure 8 is the part that connects the rope to your harness).
“No,” said James. “I can’t get out from there if I do that.”
Again Gary was insistent. “Go down the rope until the knot is hard into your figure 8.”
James was beginning to get scared. He started stating that he’d never do that, stopping before an obstruction. Every excuse he came up with, Gary came up with another explanation and again told James to comply. All the while both of them were hanging ten meters above jagged rocks.
In the end, James reluctantly complied with the insistent requests. He then used his shoelaces as a method to climb his way back up the rope, disconnect from the rope and reconnect below the knot. Each step of the way he argued, resisted and complained.
This is a superb example one of the major problems leaders experience. The leader knows what needs to be done, and (sometimes) how to do it and then passes this onto the employee. Only to have the employee avoid doing the task, or doing it poorly.
While a leader may be completely comfortable with the given task, the employee may not be. And more importantly, as in the above example, the employee is the one taking the risks. If James fell during that test, Gary would be uninjured, James would be in hospital. The risk James experienced was vastly different that the risk Gary experienced. Yet Gary continued to insist that James followed instructions that were more and more dangerous.
Remember, what you find trivial, other may find difficult, even impossible. What can you do to help people around you through their fears? Who can you contact to help you through yours?
Candor, Honesty and Truth June 8, 2007
Honesty is the best policy. This is repeated over and over again. You might have even said it yourself. Some people live up to that ideal. Most people are honest - handing in a found wallet or correcting a cashier after getting too much change for example.
Yet when we get to direct interpersonal communications, that policy starts to fracture a little. We have all told a little white lie. The specific times and places to use these lies are learned, and makes perfect sense. Telling the truth is sometimes detrimental to the immediate situation, we might have to spend an hour explaining our answer. An honest answer might also harm someone’s feelings and damage the long term relationship. Sometimes what we consider as honest other people consider offensive or insulting.
Often I hear the excuse for not telling the whole truth as a loss of face, or fear of ridicule. Either for the person being honest, or the receiver of that honesty. This is part of the reason why anonymous feedback works; You are much more able to speak your mind when there is no involvement of your identitiy. Even when that honesty is directly asked for, it’s often watered down.
Jack Welch calls this honesty candor. He believes, and is correct, that it builds a strong team, that it advances and improves relationships. Everyone being able to speak their mind and offer suggestions is critical to business success.
Just think for a moment about any TV soap you might have seen. Most of the angst and interpersonal conflict with the characters would be non-existant if they were honest. Although that doesn’t make for very good or suspense filled TV.
So to continue this blog containing useful how to skills transfer, here are a few ideas on how to be honest and building honest relationships.
1. Build the environment to be honest by being consistent with your approach. Coming right out and being completely honest, when it’s unexpected, is a shock. If you are known for your honesty, the people around you will expect it, and be ready for it.
2. Start small. When someone asks you what you want to eat, tell them. If someone asks for suggestions, give them one. It doesn’t have to be a long and involved answer, but avoiding the question, or answering “I don’t know” does not foster an honest environment.
3. Be completely open and state your fears and concerns first. Start with a statement like “I need to tell you something, and I’m not sure how you’ll take it. I’m scared that what I have to say will damage our relationship, but I feel it’s important enough, and our relationship strong enough, to tell you.”
4. Lead them into the realisation or idea you want to get across. You can do this by turning your honest statement into a question. “Have you thought about …” or “How would you deal with a situation like …”.
5. Ask for others honesty and reward them immediately when you get it. This reward might be nothing more than a warm smile and a thankyou. Every time you receive honest comments or feedback, encourage the speaker. Over time this will give them the confidence that they can be honest with you. This also fosters the relationship in such a way that you can be honest with them.
What other ways can you suggest to improve your ability to be honest?
Bad training gives information, good training gives skills May 29, 2007
I’ve been to many training sessions. In business and out. Most are glorified information transmission. The 8 hours I spent in the room would have been better spent with a book.
Then there are training for sales, negotiation, management, leadership that expect to transfer skills via this same method. The instructor stands in front of the class and lectures using powerpoint slides. Unfortunately a lecture is a very poor method to transfer skill (or anything else, for that matter). If you are lucky, you get a short, contrived exercise that gives you a false sense of the skill.
Even worse are these leadership and group bonding situations. They claim to improve group dynamics, yet all they do is have the group use exactly the same skills and behaviour in a different context. So if the group didn’t work in the office, chances are it’s not going to work outside.
Ideally, training requires a mix of theory combined with challenges and exercises. The theory is to transfer the “how” of the skill. The exercises designed to practice the theory, and the same time stretch the experience of the students and allow then to practice the “how”. The percentage of each needs to be managed with the outcomes of the course and current student skills.
The metaphor I like to use is: describe to someone how to ride a bike. You can read all the theory in the world, talk to BMX and Tour de France experts, and watch thousands of hours of video. Then, when you get on a bike you realise it’s not as easy as it looks. Learning how to ride a bike contains about 2 minutes of ‘theory’ (this is how you steer, this is how you go forward and stop). Then about 30 to 60 minutes of direct experience, trial and error. From then on, it’s practice.
So next time you attend a training seminar that claims to teach a skill ask yourself the question. “When I finish this training do I know how to ride a bike, or can I ride a bike?”
Environment drives behaviour April 27, 2007
Similar to an earlier post, here is a video interview with Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo as he talks about his Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment is a powerful example of just how your environment can effect your behaviour.
And here is a recent interview with Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo in the lead up to his new book.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Communication, Leadership, Persuasion, Psychology, Stress
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