Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on September 6, 2010
“We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.” Douglas MacArthur
We recently had a disagreement with a vendor we hired to help us with our business. Our first impulse was to argue for “our money’s worth” and demand that we get what we had originally contracted for, but we realized that fighting with the vendor would be a negative drain on our energy and our business. We decided instead to view the event as a learning process and to move on and invest our time, energy, and money somewhere else. Some may view this as giving up and giving in, but we knew it was the right move for us.
Douglas MacArthur is viewed by many as a great general – and even he knew that, in the face of opposition, sometimes it is necessary to change direction and try again in a different way. Just as important as being willing to stop and change direction is the attitude around the change. How different it might have felt to MacArthur’s soldiers if he had said, “I was wrong, we’re failing, retreat, retreat!” This attitude strengthens a sense of failure at a time when inspiration, passion, and commitment are most likely needed even more. By owning a change of direction as an active choice, we are taking responsibility for where we were headed, as well as where we are headed now. This attitude keeps us from failure and defeat and strengthens our resolve towards the new direction.
Where have you admitted defeat or retreat? How can you turn your thoughts around to see your new direction as a new opportunity to advance? Catch yourself when the word “failure” pops into your head and coach yourself into seeing your new strategy as an advance towards what you want.
I recently met with someone (let’s call him Aaron) who has a huge new business idea. Aaron’s trying to get support for his idea from both inside his company from senior management and peers, and outside the company from an interested customer. It is a huge undertaking and, at times, very frustrating – as he meets with people, fine-tunes his presentation, tweaks the idea, and identifies others to meet with. However, his strategy is working and he is making great progress. In fact, this week he won over the founding executive of his company.
I asked Aaron what he is doing that is working to sell his idea, which is highly technical and data-driven. Many of the concepts and principles he shared with me are similar to how the IT guys operate overall, and they can be applied to selling any idea. Here are the IT principles that are working for Aaron:
1) Data is king – No matter who you are trying to sell an idea to, you need to have facts and data to demonstrate your credibility, knowledge and expertise. IT guys can give you reams of data and reports to show you why something will work or not. Obviously, you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with a ton of boring numbers and charts, but you do want to come prepared to show that you have thought through options, barriers, competition, projections, etc.
2) Gather requirements – Requirements gathering is a critical part of any IT project. IT guys sit down with their customers to first understand their environment and their needs before recommending and designing a technology solution. To sell a big idea, it’s important to know the current environment and what’s required by your potential customer. Good questions to ask are: What is the pain point? What is keeping this target group up at night? What is happening that is driving the need for the change that my idea is facilitating?
3) It’s all about the end user – No matter how great your idea is, you need to understand the value proposition to the ultimate customer – the people who will be buying and using your product or service. How will it help them? All the bells and whistles in the world won’t mean a thing if it doesn’t make the end user’s life or work easier, simpler, more efficient, less costly, better in some way. To sell a big idea, identify who truly is the end user and put yourself firmly in their shoes to know why they should care about your idea.
4) Test it out – IT guys employ a process known as Proof of Concept to help get the final go-ahead on a big project. It’s a relatively low-cost, low-risk way of setting up a demo of how the technology solution with work within the customer’s environment. This limited trial run lets the decision-maker put their toe in the water rather than having to dive into the whole pool immediately. To sell your big idea, think about how you can develop a Proof of Concept to help bring your idea, or a small piece of your idea, to life and show the folks you are trying to get on board that your idea is doable, viable, and a must-have.
5) Make it system-agnostic – It’s a lot harder to move forward on an IT project that requires large investment in new equipment, software, and tools. IT guys look to make their solutions system-agnostic. That is, the idea is not tied to a specific manufacturer’s piece of equipment or software. The solution is flexible enough to fit within a current environment or to adapt to a variety of hardware/software options. This gives the client more flexibility and more control. To sell your big idea, keep required and inflexible components to a minimum. Offer the person to whom you are selling your idea plenty of options and flexibility so they feel like they are in the driver’s seat and it’s easier for them to say yes to your big idea.
I just came upon this speech by Sheena Iyengar. She was speaking at a TED conference on the art of choosing. It’s twenty-four minutes, and it’s twenty-four minutes worth watching.
What I found most amazing is the revelations she offered about how we all get so easily, and unknowingly, stuck in our own perceptions of the world. She speaks of choice, and the different relationships with choice that we all have – largely because of how we were raised or where we were raised. Americans, of course, like choice, respond well to choice, and choose choice. Burger King tells us to “Have it your way.” Starbucks tell us that “Happiness is in our choices.” Which is all fine. However, Sheena points out, that we, as Americans, tend to believe that our approach to choice is the best, the one that fulfills the innate desires of all humans. But, what she has shown through her research, and shares during her brief speech, is that we base these beliefs on assumptions that simply do not hold true in other cultures. Other cultures, other people, see choice differently. People from some cultures respond better to having fewer choices. People from other cultures are more comfortable and perform better when a choice is made for them. And they too think that their view is best. That their choice is right.
Everything that opens my mind to how I can be more open to the minds of others…I choose that!
Henry Ford reportedly once complained that all he wanted from a worker was a pair of hands, but that he had to deal with the whole person instead. Each of us brings our whole self to work each day, whether or not we realize it.
As much as we might like to believe we can adapt our personality or our style as needed at work, and as much as some of us do to a small degree, to an outside observer, we are likely to have many of the same strengths and weaknesses in the workplace that we have outside of it. Whether we suffer from a lack of assertiveness or from too much confidence, whether we are accommodating peacemakers or contentious resisters, or whether we are supportive and empathic or businesslike and formal, who we are in our personal lives is inextricably linked to who we are in the workplace. And who we are in our personal lives and in our professional lives is always a function, at least in part, of our early life experience.
As an executive coach, one of my most important roles is to help my clients understand what they are bringing to work each day. To help clients be aware of where some of their approaches to life may come from, and to thoughtfully, or intentionally, choose how they want to act going forward. To be proactive, rather than reactive. I often find that people use language to describe bosses or co-workers that sounds as if they are describing parents or siblings. For example, bosses can be “supportive” or “”critical” and peers can be “competitive” or “favored.” There are times when someone’s early life experience is clearly affecting his or her interactions and causing relationship difficulties in the workplace.
For example, consider the story of a successful finance professional who was having difficulty managing his team. A brilliant technical expert, he did not enjoy supervising others and was widely resented by those who reported directly to him for his curt and brusque answers to their questions. In the course of our work together, he realized his direct reports were bringing back to him childhood memories of having been distracted and discouraged by his siblings, who lacked his academic talent and usually bothered him with requests for assistance with their homework.
By realizing that he was having a kind of flashback and was viewing his present direct reports through the prism of his past experience, this finance guy developed greater patience with his staff. Although he never fully embraced the role of manager, he was able to foster a sense of loyalty and cohesion on his team.
It’s not only sibling relationships that provide an unconscious framework within which workplace relationships and interactions are evaluated. I’ve also worked with many clients for whom parental relationships provide a template for boss-subordinate relationships. Much of our identity and sense of self can be either helped or hindered by our bosses, in a manner strikingly similar to how our parents either encouraged or discouraged us as children.
Whether or not we like to admit it, our self-esteem can be profoundly affected by the positive or negative regard of our superiors in the workplace, and they can confirm our hopes or our fears about ourselves every day. One client described how much more important it was that his boss viewed him as competent and valued than it was to get a salary increase.
Despite having seen many examples of people who have the same issues at home and at work, I have also come across clients who have quite different issues at home and at work; sometimes it even seems that they are opposite issues. An attorney who may be energetically contentious in the courtroom can be calm and friendly with her friends. An overachieving research scientist can forget to balance his checkbook at the end of every month.
However, I find that even in situations where someone has opposite issues at home and in the workplace, the fundamental character issues are related. In fact, the expression of opposite attributes at home and in the workplace makes a kind of sense-things that are overused in one area of life may be underused in another, or in order to compensate for a lack of opportunities to express part of your character at home, you might express it in the workplace.
Whether you are the same person at work and at home, or whether you experience and express different aspects of yourself in your personal life than you do in your professional life, you should consider how your early life experiences provide a prism from the past through which you are evaluating situations in the present
Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on July 19, 2010
“Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.” Richard Ben Sapir
A colleague caught my ear the other day and recanted his horror story of a mishap at work. Everything had gone wrong; tempers had flared; fingers were pointed…at him. I listened attentively as he clearly needed to share what happened and to be heard. As he finished his account of what occurred, I then did my best to ask questions to pull him in a different direction.
“Five years from now will you even remember this?” I offered. He paused. “What’s really of importance here, of worth to you as a learning for moving forward?” I posed. He hesitated further. “How might you feel about this tomorrow, or even next week?” I suggested. He stopped, finally exhaled, and released the tension that had been coursing through his body.
So often we get stuck in the immediateness and intensity of a challenge or an issue that seems about to blow that we lose perspective. Everything begins to feel like a life or death matter and our emotions kick in, with that wonderful fight or flight response. What we need is the ability to pause, to reflect, and to wait for time to offer us another point of view – this brings clarity and a new outlook on the situation, and often on ourselves. To quote one of my favorite lyricists, “Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”. Time truly has a way of putting things in perspective and weeding out the trivial so that we can focus on what really matters, what’s important in the long run, and what we’ll remember five years from now and learn from.
Stop. Pause. Give yourself some time so that the trivial can become obvious and you can pay attention to the important things. And see what’s funny, if you can.
“We need to drink the Kool-Aid.” I heard a client say this again last week and I finally have to speak out. This is one business saying of the moment that truly, truly annoys me. Makes my skin crawl in fact. Each time I hear it I want to scream to whomever has uttered the words, “Do you know what that really means????”
So, to stand high on my soap box, I think we should be more careful about what we say and how we say it. To take into consideration if someone, anyone, might find it offensive. And to definitely stop talking about “drinking the Kool-Aid” as if it’s a good thing.
Drinking the Kool-Aid. It refers to a mass-suicide in 1978. Jim Jones was the leader of a cult, the Peoples Temple. He moved his following to northern Guyana, and in 1978 nine hundred and thirteen people participated in a mass-suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Men, women, and children. I understand that people only mean “we all need to get in this together, to agree without question, to move ahead as one” – but people died and I seriously think we should stop treating it so callously.
What is important is this – we never really know who might be offended by something we say. One off-hand remark. One off-color joke. One non-thought through comment that we never intended to be offensive. I’ve witnessed racial comments in front of someone who was of mixed-race origin, only you’d never know by looking at them. Slurs against people who happened to be related to, or friends with, the people in the room. Political and religious comments in front of someone who took the comments personally. You never, ever really know.
Okay, so maybe it isn’t important that I hate this saying. That I think it’s offensive and completely off-taste. That I’ve even been known to judge someone harshly when they innocently and ignorantly use it. Maybe it isn’t important that this saying pushes me over the edge. And it certainly isn’t important that I give you a full explanation of why.
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