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Golden Oldies: You Are the Total of All Your Experiences

Monday, January 20th, 2020

https://www.flickr.com/photos/luigimengato/16053504967/

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Who you are includes all the previous yous in your life. And each you developed unique skills appropriate to what you did and what was going on in that you’s life.

That cumulative effect made the current you deeper, richer, more valuable, smarter, and more adaptive. It doesn’t matter if the skills were developed in response to a need at work or a situation in your personal life. They are there to use if you choose, but first you need to acknowledge them — which can be difficult in a world that worships youth, AKA, no experiences / no depth.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

For decades, I’ve said that people have two sides to their head, personal and professional, and rarely do they use the skills from one side in dealing with the challenges on the other. For example, when you have two employees arguing by email with each other and copying the entire group use the skills you use with your kids. They work on the adults because, in situations such as this, the adults are acting like kids.

Sad as it is in a world where career change is more drastic than ever before, it seems that these self-inflicted barriers are increasing; not so much in general skill usage, but rather in “specialized” skills.

I know several investment bankers, unhappy with what they were doing, who moved to companies in senior operational roles, but don’t use/adapt many of their banking skills to the new environment. The same is true for many of what I call radical career changers—engineers who move to financial services; salespeople who become technical and vice versa.

Because I run into it more and more, I’ve spent time figuring out why it happens and the easiest way to eliminate the barriers. Partly, it’s because people often go back to school for their new career, and so assume that their old skills don’t apply, but it’s also a language thing.

Every type of work has its own language, i.e., applying industry/job specific definitions to various words; because the meaning changes, the associated skill is often relegated to the “previous life.”

Humans are cumulative animals, without an effective delete key, so, when you’re adding new skills be sure to keep using the old ones by remembering to recognize when it’s the language that’s changed, rather than the action, and learning to tweak previous skills to apply to your new situation.

Image credit: Luigi Mengato

What’s in a Name?

Monday, April 7th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonoropeza/1832649884

How do you start your day?

Do your colleagues and boss jump on you with questions, demands and complaints?

Or are there congenial greetings, happy how-are-yous and questions displaying authentic interest in you-the-person?

Other than perpetual curmudgeons and people who got up on the wrong side of the bed, most people would prefer the second scenario to the first.

Bosses should take note, because the second scenario leads to higher productivity and better retention rates.

Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade has solid research to back that up, but, in my view, she badly undermined its adoption by choosing to describe it in terms that will turn off most managers.

She calls it “companionate love.”

Companionate love is shown “when colleagues who are together day in and day out, ask and care about each other’s work and even non-work issues. They are careful of each other’s feelings. They show compassion when things don’t go well. And they also show affection and caring — and that can be about bringing somebody a cup of coffee when you go get your own, or just listening when a co-worker needs to talk.”

Why don’t experts, especially academic experts get it? Why is it so difficult to understand that what something is called affects it in the marketplace?

From about age two on (maybe even younger) humans react to what something is called, whether a product or an action, and that reaction is a good predictor of success.

In today’s world, to succeed, management advice needs to develop terms that wrap the user in a mantle of cool while projecting an image of knowledge and leadership.

Sadly, ‘companionate love’ seems to fall short.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t implement the underlying philosophy or respect, consideration and interest using terms more acceptable to your situation.

Flickr image credit: jon oropeza

The Power of Powerless Communications

Monday, April 29th, 2013

www.flickr.com/photos/pinksgalaxy/8307413717/In a previous post about givers, takers and matchers and who gets ahead I linked to an article about Wharton professor Adam Grant, who did the research.

Near the end Grant talks about the power of “powerless communication.”

You hear an expert, and when the expert spills coffee all over himself, you actually like him more. It humanizes him, it gives you an authentic connection with him. That’s a lot of the power of powerless communication.

Way back in the early Nineties I read You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University. (Great book; I highly recommend it.)

Tannen researched the differences in how men and women use language and one thing that has stuck with me is that men use language to negotiate status and that not knowing, let alone asking, puts them “one down” the other person “one up.”

Obviously, it’s not 100% applicable to all men on all subjects; moreover, I find many women have embraced the style.

These people always need to be one up and will do whatever it takes to maintain that image.

Personally, I find great amusement watching them work to become influential powerhouses by cultivating their reputations as experts—the kind who would never spill coffee let alone be seen in public that way.

Flickr image credit: D. Sharon Pruitt

Expand Your Mind: the MIX

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

There’s a lot of talk about “thought leaders,” but it seems that a lot of what is presented as new are old ideas redressed in current language.

That’s not always bad, because there is an enormous amount of classic management and leadership information that works but is ignored because it sounds old-fashioned.

Change the language and voilà—people listen.

The MIX, AKA, Management Innovation Exchange, is different.

I read through a number of them preparatory to posting my own hack on Option Sanity™ and found some truly original ideas; if leadership is your thing start by checking out the eight finalists in the leadership category.

Sure, not all were original and some was based on common worker wisdom, but presented in this forum won it more credibility than it probably had—after all, if management listened to workers they wouldn’t need nearly as many consultants.

I hope you’ll bookmark the site, share it with your network, contribute yourself and treat it as the resource it is. The search function works well, so dig in, tweak as needed and put the ideas and approaches you find to work in your organization.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

Ducks in a Row: Don’t Metaphor Your Culture

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Do metaphors fly free at your workplace? Do you find yourself using them in order to be heard?

According to Ceri Roderick, emeritus partner at business psychologists Pearn Kandola, while metaphors can be a kind of expressive shortcut, they can also have a detrimental effect.

“The language you use can affect your corporate culture.” Thus, if you spend long enough talking about “cutting the competition off at knees”, he says you are going to have a workplace where a kind of Nietzschean ethic rules and the weak are meat for bullies.”

I admit to using metaphors, although far less than I did a few decades ago. I find some are good ways to achieve focus, such as “the elephant in the room;” I may be guilty of the occasional 500 pound canary, but not of 800 pound gorillas. (Science writer Richard Conniff notes that “gorillas are vegetarians, not predators and the average alpha male spends most of his time passing gas, picking his nose and yawning; not the image a hard-charging executive wants to present to the public,” but actually a valid description of many executives.)

And while I know good culture fosters innovation, thinking outside the box has little to do with it, since it’s not possible.

The biggest problem with metaphors is that they are boring and limit people’s ability to effectively communicate.

If you don’t believe me play the metaphor game at your next meeting as follows:

  • choose a scorekeeper;
  • explain that the point of the game is to NOT use any metaphors;
  • attendees listen for metaphors and call the speaker on them by shouting ‘metaphor’;
  • the person who used the metaphor then restates their comment/point;
  • using a metaphor scores one point;
  • the person with the lowest score wins and
  • gets the prize (candy bar, lunch coupon, etc.)

It’s surprising how difficult it is for many people to discuss anything sans metaphors.

Jamie Jauncey, a business language trainer and author, says, “Business is ultimately about people and connecting and relationships. It should be using the real language of human exchange, not some Orwellian bizpeak.”

This is true whether you are in sales, engineering, finance or whatever. You and your people need to connect with each other and with ‘them’, wherever and whomever ‘them’ may be.

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

When You Need To Be Heard

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Last Monday I laid out a do-it-yourself plan for mangers to juice growth among their people. Beth Miller asked why I didn’t include coaching; I responded that I believed that line managers needed to take responsibility for professional development, especially in the current economic climate.

Beth asked,“So what holds back managers from coaching?”

My response is what I want to focus on today.

“I think it’s partly language. I know a number of managers who have implemented what I described in the post, do a terrific job developing their people, but don’t consider any of it coaching or even mentoring. One even scoffs at “coaching,” yet he’s known for building his people.

In working with my MAP coaching I’ve found that what holds many managers back is terminology. If they relate to the descriptive terms there’s no problem, but if they don’t relate they can’t implement what they’ve learned. I change the language and bingo, they take off like a rocket.”

People are far more word-sensitive than most realize. They’re more aware of it in politics, religion and advertising, but less so in general business, even less when talking to their team and it’s almost non-existent when it comes to their own ‘hearing’.

The nice thing, as I said, is that it’s an easy fix once you notice. Noticing is easy, too. Just keep an eye out for a blank look when you’re talking. It’s that look of incomprehension that is the key to repeating, but in different words. There’s nothing that drives people nuts faster than having the same thing repeated over and over; if it wasn’t understood the first time repeating it or saying louder isn’t going to help.

And don’t start the change with ‘what I mean is…’, because many people will tune out at that point focusing on figuring out what you already said.

Instead, wait a bit (depending on context) and then present your thought from a different angle or change the phrasing of the thought that accompanied the blank look.

This isn’t about dumbing down what you say (or write); it’s about presenting it in a wholy different way; a way that the other person can hear.

The manager mentioned above detested the word ‘coach’ as some touch-feely new-age notion, nor was he enthralled with the term ‘mentor’.

To him, he was just doing what any manager worth a damn did—make sure that his people developed new skills and used the ones they had fully to the benefit of both the company and themselves.

As he once said to me, “developing people is part of a manager’s job, not something extra“—and his employer paid him to manage.

Gee, if I could bottle his MAP I could probably retire.

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