A couple of months ago I wrote two posts, Ducks in a Row: Respect vs Nice and Ducks in a Row: Respect Does Not Mean Agreement.

Yesterday I had some feedback from a senior exec who said that while he agreed in principle, he wouldn’t try to apply it to his team. He went on to say that his team was so diverse, consisting of recognized experts from different disciplines, that they had only two things in common.

The first was the size of their egos; and the second the desire to solve the problem — their way.

I asked if he had even tried any of the idea in the linked articles.

He said no; he’d been down that road in the past and the cost in time and energy was too high.

I asked if he would reconsider if I could show him a team that made his look like easy, with egos that dwarfed theirs.

He laughed and sure, so I showed him.

The team is made up of politicians from all parties, government officials, corporate CEOs, trade unionists, clergy, journalists, academics, and activists.

That got his attention, as did the task they were brought together to address, because it is not only larger, but far more intractable.

…top Mexican leaders who are working together on a project called Méxicos Posibles (Possible Mexicos) to develop solutions to their country’s daunting problems of illegality, insecurity, and inequity.

Since I knew he was listening I told him one more thing; maybe the hardest one for him to accept — that his ego was similarly sized and his own belief in his ability to make it work was no different than any member of his team.

I told him brute force wasn’t going to cut it and that he didn’t have to do it alone.

Méxicos Posibles used a consultancy led by Adam Kahane, author of Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust.

I suggested he start with that book and other resources linked in my post.

I reminded him he has the stature to reach out to people like Kahane and get a response.

Hopefully I got through; I’ll know in a few weeks what direction he chooses and will let you know.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

There is much talk about the importance of empathy in today’s workplace, both externally and internally — but is empathy enough?

Is it enough to put yourself in the other person’s shoes? Is it even possible when the shoes are from a totally alien situation. Can a white guy, born with all the advantages those two words imply, really feel, i.e., empathize, what a dark-skinned woman/LGBT feels in the same circumstances?

Doubtful, if for no other reason than for one it’s an academic exercise and for the other it’s the reality of life.

For empathy to have meaning it needs to move from intellectual effort to real world action, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in his graduation speech at Wharton, “Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”

Not just at work, but life in general.

Compassion is not just morally correct, it offers substantial ROI, including building trust, to those who practice it.

The flip side is developing a culture with a compassionate ethos. That’s what our leadership team has tried to do at LinkedIn; create a culture where people take the time to understand the other person’s perspective, and not assume nefarious intention; build trust; and align around a shared mission. After nearly 10 years, I still celebrate the fact we can make important decisions in minutes or hours that some companies debate for months. Create the right culture, and you create a competitive advantage.

Obviously, as with any top university, the Wharton graduating class is privileged, no matter their color, gender or orientation. The alumni network will confer opportunities long after the degree, itself, does.

Read Weiner’s thoughts, because adding compassion to your skills set/qualifications is probably worth more in the long run.

Image credit: LinkedIn

Poking through 11+ 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.

As you know, the blog was dark last week. It was the first time I’d taken time off and, while I needed it for many reasons, one major one was to revaluate the ROI I get from writing a daily blog. As I explain in this post, we should expect as solid an ROI from our actions when investing in ourselves as we do when investing in the outside world.

I haven’t made any hard and fast decisions, but I do know that changes are ahead.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

How many times have you said something like, “I’m not very good at X.” only to be told not to be so hard on yourself, not to put yourself down, or some variation of that theme?

I grant you that sometimes these comments are accurate and that the person is under-rating herself, but, just as often it’s a valid statement of fact.

Maybe it’s partly a function of age, but, it’s mainly a function of knowing one’s self and knowing when a viable ROI on the time/energy investment to change/create/fix something in ourselves just isn’t there.

For example, All my life I’ve been a procrastinator. I was about an 8 on a scale of 10, with ten being the worst. Over the years I invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in changing that—and I did change it, to a 4. When I hit four, I realized that the effort it was taking me to move to 3.8 was larger than when I moved from eight to seven.

That meant the change wasn’t particularly productive, in other words, bad ROI. So I stopped investing in change and learned to compensate instead, meaning I channeled my remaining procrastination into areas that don’t really impact the important parts of my world.

The point of all this is two fold

1. Know yourself well enough to know what you really want to change—change is a very personal decision—because to change successfully, it must be your idea.
2. Recognize when the return on your time/energy being spent is too low to warrant the investment and develop work-arounds to deal with the remnants of the change-item.

Finally, don’t let those pesky don’t-be-so-hard-on-yourself comments push you into actions that aren’t in your best interest. After all, they don’t know me as well as I know me, or as well as you know you.

Image credit: Euro Betting Tips

It’s the last day of June and I’m a bit burned out. So I’ve decided to do something I have done in the 12 years of this blog.

I’m going to take the entire next week, July 1-7 off. Call it a mental health week.

Rather leave you with nothing to do while I’m gone I thought I’d share a three valuable links and one excellent joke (or maybe it’s a meme)

A techie and his wife were having a conversation about their attitudes towards life and death.

The techie had very strong feelings about his end-of-life preferences. He said didn’t want his brain frozen or any other Silicon Valley ideas.

“Never let me live in a vegetative state, totally dependent on machines and liquids from a bottle. If you see me in that state I want you to disconnect all the connections that are keeping me alive, I’d much rather die.”

At that point, his wife got up from the sofa with a look of pure admiration on her face and came towards him.

She gave him a hug and proceeded to disconnect the Cable TV,  DVD, computer, smart phone, iPod,  Xbox, and Alexa.

Then she went to the bar and threw away all the whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, along with the beer from the fridge.

Then she held him tenderly and used mouth-to-mouth to help him breathe.

Because her husband almost died.

As to the links,

Obvious as it sound, watching experts does not improve your skills.

A pair of researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business conducted six separate experiments in which people who watched an expert demonstration of a particular skill experienced a big surge in confidence in their own skill-doing ability, and zero increase in their actual ability.

A first person account of why you shouldn’t always believe websites, social media or reviews.

Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (or F.A.K.E., for short). I made it up and paid strangers to pump up its online footprint to make it seem real. I didn’t do it to scam anyone or even for the LULZ. I wanted to see firsthand how the fake reputation economy operates. The investigation led me to an online marketplace where a good reputation comes cheap.

Impressive. John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, contributed to the Grateful Dead as a lyricist and in figured out what it took to be a good adult.

According to his Reddit AMA four years ago: “I found myself so surprised to have reached an age of indisputable adult that I wrote up a set of “adult principles” that I’ve been trying to live up to for 35 years.” The rules below are concise, practical, and can be applied to nearly every aspect of life: from waiting in line at the market to having a difficult conversation with a loved one.

Have a fabulous Fourth of July and I’ll see you on the 9th.

Image credit: HikingArtist.com

I have small children who have deemed that it is acceptable to say no a lot. At first, we thought it was a bit cute, but my wife and I learned quickly that we needed to put a stop to it.

We would tell them to pick up toys or wash their hands, the answer was always the same, no!

We found the fastest way to stop that behavior was to send them to their room or have them stand in a corner. It works but it’s a lesson that has to be applied almost daily.

I sometimes wonder if, as adults, we find it hard to say no to things because our parents tried to get that word out of our vocabulary as children. Perhaps we get it drummed in our heads that we should say yes to things and all of a sudden we are overwhelmed with commitments.

I went to a Tony Robbins event a few years ago and one theme of his message was, “just say yes!” His idea being that if you say yes to things and eliminate your fears then you will progress in life. (This is a very distilled version of his message of course).

I came away from that event with two ideas. One that I knew I could walk on hot coals, because I did, and two being that I should open myself up to opportunities. If Tony saw me today he might say I was a lapsed disciple, but I did find the event to be worthwhile.

That leads me to my final point.

Are we over-committing ourselves and doing harm to our lives? Have we made too many lunch meetings, too many side hustles and too many extracurricular activities to really live life?

I have a successful friend who has five children. I asked him what his secret was as he always seems well rested and is able to exercise.

He said it’s simple, he doesn’t enroll his kids in a single sport or activity. They are not barred from them, but he just doesn’t encourage it, he prefers math and music for them to be involved in.

His catchphrase is, “Nerds rule the world, not jocks.”

Image credit: marc falardeau

How does one really change for the better, since it seems so much easier to change for the worse?

One takes time to know thyself.

The proverb has been around for eons. It started with the ancient Egyptians, who inscribed it in the Luxor Temple (“Man, know thyself, and you are going to know the gods”), continued with Socrates and Plato, and on down the centuries.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us: know yourself. And there is a good reason why that is.

Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest of our lives on.

Interest in knowing oneself has decreased as the number of distractions have increased.

Why?

Because it’s often uncomfortable, requiring us to face stuff in our beliefs and our MAP that we would rather avoid or just plain ignore.

Worse, getting to know yourself requires time spent alone and in silence — anathema to the modern world.

Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do.

You aren’t born knowing yourself, nor can you learn about yourself from others.

However, spending the time and effort required, and enduring the sometimes extreme discomfort, to develop and use this skill provides the highest ROI of any effort at self-improvement in both the short and long-term.

Read the article.

Learn the skill.

Apply it.

You’ll never regret it.

Image credit: Zaneology

Bosses spend inordinate amounts of time, and often money, working on improving their management skills, frequently turning to the latest “thought leader” for insightful new approaches.

But trendy isn’t always good and frequently it isn’t even new.

Rather than spending your time listening to a varying roster of pundits, why not get it straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. i.e., your workers.

Ask anyone at any level what they love most about their boss and, in one form or another, they’ll say “they listen.”

Ask what they hate and some version of “they don’t listen” usually tops the list.

Listening isn’t rocket science, but it is one of the smartest, most formidable skills you can develop that will also serve you  in a myriad of situations well beyond your role as a boss.

Ironically, it’s not the actual listening that people find so daunting. Rather it’s the pre-listening step that trips so many up.

So, if your goal is to listen, then you must practice its anagram, which is to be silent.
The first is impossible without doing the second.

In other words, your ears turn off when your mouth is running.

As I said earlier, not rocket science.

Image credit: Steve Heath

Poking through 11+ 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.

If you read me often you’ll know I love words. I love them not only because of how they can be used to tell a story, but also because the answers to complex questions are often found within a single word — in the form of an anagram.

Here is one of my favorites.

And join me tomorrow for a six word anagram that comprises some of the best and most timeless management advice you’ll ever learn.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The Tao of Life

We learn through words and can often learn more by deconstructing them.

Just as one of the most critical managerial (human) actions is found in its own anagram the Tao of another is found within the word itself.

The word is LIFE.

The Tao of life is IF.

IF you think/say/do this instead of that the Tao changes.

The IF isn’t always conscious or obvious.

But it is there.

It’s up to you to choose consciously.

And wisely.

Image credit: gfpeck

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

It’s almost impossible to find a company, let alone a startup, that doesn’t swear by agile product development.

But what about applying agile for to other areas, especially other human areas? Specifically, bosses.

We’ve all heard bosses at all levels blather on about creating an agile organization and being an agile leader, but seen little proof they are accomplishing it.

Ever wonder why?

To embrace agile bosses themselves often need to change.

So, while the answer is simple, implementation is not.

As Steve Denning said in 2016, Agile Is A Mindset, Not A Methodology; a few months later he did an excellent job explaining agile beyond its roots.

Consider the basic tenets of agile

• Openness. Be receptive to feedback on your own behavior and activities.
• Trust. Feel comfortable that not everything will be planned; let trial and error show the right direction.
• Collaboration. Go for the greater good of the company, which is not necessarily good for a particular unit.
• No Ego. Have everyone speak with one voice—as an organization.
• Transparency. Call out those unwilling to change or to reflect the “new world.”
• Accountability. Hold one another accountable.

Bosses whose preferred management style runs to command and control, ignore it and hide, benign neglect, or combinations thereof dictated by events are not only uncomfortable with agile, but downright resistant to it.

No one is saying that agile is perfect, but refuting the standard objections is pretty easy.

All of this is just more proof of the accuracy of my company’s tagline: To change what they do change how you think.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I have been pretty busy lately and am not proud of it. Most of my time is taken up with mundane tasks, but they do keep me occupied.

I have small children so a successful day involves my wife and I getting a chance to catch up on laundry and dishes.

I also have the demands of work, which is good, because wouldn’t you rather have that than no work at all?

However, busy is also a euphemism that whatever you’re working on isn’t truly that important.

When I have work or friends that ask for my time and I say I am busy it is typically a polite way of saying I don’t want to do it or they are not a priority.

In aggregate, we see this as a society where there are silos of people who have only a few select relationships and follow a set pattern.

Those workaholics who are always at the office are often celebrated by society and condemned by those that work for them. I had a boss years ago who worked all the time and expected those below them to do so as well. I hated it.

However, I have followed a pattern lately where I am in that same condition.

I work a lot but feel like nothing is getting done.

I have been in this place before and typically the way I get out is by setting small priorities that I can work towards and build upon that.

How do you get out of the hamster wheel of work and become productive?

Note that HBS claims there is some good that can come of it.

Image credit: Roban Kramer