Instant People Skills: Coach Yourself & Others

Book titles that need more work

Just back from a couple of weeks travel - conference and vacation - where I made a note to comment on this book title. I noticed it in an airport bookstore, but had made up my mind not to get pulled in while taking time away. In this case, it was easy to say this one doesn't need to be read due to it's rather obvious "how to" subtitle.

The book: Make It Glow: How to Build a Company Reputation for Human Goodness, Flawless Execution, and Being Best-In-Class.

Big surprise. Would that be: consistently work at human goodness, flawless execution and being best in class?

Likely there really is more to say. For instance, how would you work at these things and what would your priorities be in relation to the more typical "make the numbers at all costs" approach to managing? Nevertheless the sense of it being so obvious made it easy to ignore.

New Year's Alone Doesn't Produce Effective Resolutions

Networking expert Michael Hughes wrote a comment in a newsletter that captured a key insight. It isn't only New Year's Day that produces resolutions. I always resisted that idea. After all what's different about one day, just because it's designated as the start of something.

Rather it's the combination of a designated new start following a substantial mental break with the preceding grind and what you do after that. The elements work best when the work together.

Mentally we think "the old can be left behind at least partly" and "we have an accepted point at which to start something new," where, for instance, sales people begin with a fresh set of goals, a blank page. There's nothing they can change about the past, but mentally a "do over" opportunity appears.

Whatever different stresses the holiday season presents - last minute shopping, more family than you see all year, special efforts for parties, celebrations, dinners and possibly travel - the new stresses ensure time for the old routines to fall into a bit of perspective.

You can think in terms of a "do over" each day, too, as Mark LeBlanc, outgoing President of the US National Speakers Association captures in his book, Growing Your Business (reviews at bottom of the linked page).

It's a great idea for tasks with targets like selling or losing weight - do just one thing each day. Get into a habit. Don't beat yourself up if you didn't do it one day, but make sure you do that one thing TODAY. Don't feel you have to "catch up" and do two today. The goal is simply to get into the pattern of one per day until it feels comfortable, you know where in your typical days to fit it in and it starts to get done regularly.

One sales call a day, or one task on some project you need to get done (sending out those resumes?) or one step in building a strategy (signing up for or scheduling training?) or implementing an idea. One-a-day. 

Even Jerry Seinfeld says, "Mark each day on the calendar when you do that one thing. Don't break the chain whatever you do." If you keep shooting to lengthen that unbroken chain the habit becomes more and more automatic and you get better and more comfortable. Doing whatever it is just once in a day generally seems easy enough to keep you going. Once you've mastered the flow, you can move on to a new "one thing."

Not a bad reminder for two weeks into the new year. That's when I start to see people at the gym who made an early new year's effort start to drop away. Are they doing just one thing to stay fit somewhere else? We can hope. It's fine for the way you do it to evolve. Just don't stop. But don't beat yourself up for one miss. Make sure you do it next time… today, tomorrow, the day after, somewhere, sometime, somehow. Get into the groove.

By the way. If you find you just can't, that you rarely or never get it into your day and that continues week after week, it's time to think up a new strategy to try out, a new variation that you CAN do once each day. You only get better at what you can tolerate doing regularly. Don't wait for another New Year's to modify your plan. The real commitment is to progress, whatever it might be or however it comes about.

Dangerous Questions?

Do you get much out of webinars?  I hear people say if they got one thing it was worthwhile.  Is it any wonder Gen Xers prefer faster media like texting and short You Tube videos?  Often the best ideas come from very short comments. But you may not even notice them without context.

A webinar today on the subject of effective coaching from Bluepoint by the authors of their new book, Unleashed, suggested we can often benefit from the following question in lots of situations and expect many people to jump to answer this: "who knows a dangerous conversation we need to have?"

In context this is a brilliant observation.  If you're coaching someone it could be the dangerous conversation they need to have is with themselves or with some significant other - as spouse, a boss, a coworker or any of a dozen other possibilities.

Perhaps even more importantly, this would almost always seem helpful in team meetings.  Maybe change the wording slightly to "dangerous questions we need to ask?"  How many times have you been at a meeting, knowing people are sitting with concerns, but feeling unable to ask for speak up?

Another option: "Who knows a challenging question we should ask?"  The possibilities and the opportunities are endless.  Are there situations where you can apply this today?  Is there a dangerous question you can ask yourself?

Don't Believe Everything You Think

Okay, I've finally been sucked in.  Visiting a bookstore to use a gift certificate, a new book (with an Amazon release date of January 1) by Marci Shimoff caught my eye.  On her web site she is billed as a key teacher of The Secret, a book I have consistently avoided.

Her new book, Happy for No Reason, summarizes seven ingredients for happiness in easy chapters, a more useful topic. With the Secret I certainly believe the thoughts you hold are critical to the results you achieve.  Since there isn't a lot more in the book judging from what others tell me, I haven't taken time to read it.

In Happy for No Reason the standard basics about achieving happiness appear: the concept of a happiness set point, physical health, meaningful work, friends, a close love relationship and several others, some of which she reveals in her You Tube video, linked from the book's site.  Very slick. You can pretty much get the ideas in the first few listings if you search "Happy for No Reason" in Google. She calls them seven "steps," but they're really not steps as much as habits that must work together.  Not a heavy-duty book, but with generally solid, comprehensive ideas.

The idea that stood out most as new and different is summarized in a chapter about a step called "Don't Believe Everything Think." I notice she describes the same concept in a video on her site about The Secret, arguing that many of the 60,000 thoughts we are said to process daily are misleading and that feelings are a better indicator of whether we are moving forward positively or feeling so negative that we will mess things up.  This sounds like an interesting idea that bears some further thought.

More than anything I was impressed by the packaging.  I see she is even a cofounder a group of 100 motivational speakers who have created a site called the Transformational Leadership Council. It's a quick list of many big as well as smaller names in the motivation business. 

Slick packaging doesn't mean the information is any less helpful.  If anything we can hope that it will encourage more people to take key ideas seriously and use them.  We're all in the process of trying to lay out the most useful, simplest and most appealing ways of getting the same principles in front of people. A good effort.  Both her MBA and media training certainly lend power to the message whether or not they make her an expert in these areas.

What Skills Do You Have?

Often you know you've learned something once you finally and fully are startled by its simplicity. Typically it's a blinding flash of insight into what from then on seems perfectly obvious. Why wasn't it just moments earlier?

What triggered this observation was reading an article in the Speakers magazine about Dick Richards and his book "Is Your Genius at Work?" He asks four questions:  1. What do you consistently attempt to give others?  2. What do others come seeking from you (maybe ask some)?  3. What's the common denominator in 1 and 2?  4. Can you distill this to two words: _____________ _____________.

Maybe this arrived just as I'd answered these for myself. People come to me for the right way to say things (and ideas) to deal with challenges with people, to get the results they hope for. And I consistently attempt to deliver exactly that - to make people, as I see it, better at managing, more positive, etc. But the key for me was "what do they come to me for?" That's the marketable product - what they already want, not something that I have to drum up business for, some intangible "leadership model" or set of skills. Those are just the mechanisms once they've asked for what they need.

My only quibble: two words might be "People Solutions," but I can't resist making it "positive people solutions for high performance."

Leadership Resolves Conflict

Doggedly pursing a topic inevitably leads to new insight. Tracking the theme of difficult bosses led from The Alpha Male Syndrome to another (not quite so new) book, When Goliaths Crash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization (Howard M. Guttman, reviewed HERE). It focuses the need for executives in organizations to become better at resolving conflict.

Although the reference to executive conflict first attracted me, the book can really address all conflict, which reinforces my faith that core skills apply in all situations.

So, what's the new insight? Simply this: most people in organizations have virtually no training in dealing effectively with conflict... even though conflicts of ideas, strategies and styles are inevitable and therefore are often no one person's fault – neither the executive nor the employee.

One may be more at fault, but both executives and employees are about equally likely to have poor skills due to lack of experience and training. They may both approach situations with fear of confrontation that makes them edgy and even more uncertain. Some deal with it by attacking, some by withdrawing or glossing over issues. Of course executives can get away with the attack model more easily, but angry employees strike out quite frequently as well and are more often avoided than disciplined or constructively spoken with.

Sometimes one can draw the other into productive conversation that gets the issues resolved without boiling over. More often neither can and time slips by leaving people angry and frustrated without entirely knowing whether things could have been different.

The skill of finding balanced ways of discussing problems before they get dropped, shortchanged, glossed over or just grumbled about can be a very productive addition to the repertoire of everyone in any organization. Undoubtedly the greater onus falls on bosses, as does the onus for managing all factors in business, but that doesn't excuse employees from responsibility for carrying their end of the load. While it takes two to fight, it also takes two to get to the bottom of things and find a solution that works for both. True, some bosses won't allow this, but then neither will some employees.

Sutton's Book Is Out - Will It Stop Bullies?

Just a few days ago I mentioned Robert Sutton's upcoming book, The No Asshole Rule [his title]. It's out early, and as expected, makes interesting reading.

One thing that stands out is what he calls "the chapter I didn't want to write" near the end of the book: how sometimes everyone needs to act like an asshole to get things done and why this is can be effective. To put it bluntly, it's because sometimes that's the only way you get listened to or get respect.

He cites research by Larissa Tiedens who showed groups tapes of Bill Clinton discussing the Lewinsky incident. In one clip he is sad about it all and in the other angry about everything that happened. Reacting afterward, those who saw the "angry" tape were far more likely to agree that Clinton should stay on as leader of the country. Sutton's take: that all too often we expect leaders to be aggressive and we penalize those who don't fit our stereotype even if we personally don't want to be the butt of it. Teidens actually did a number of such studies, all with similar outcomes, showing that we perceive angry people as stronger and more leader-like than balanced compromisers.

Leadership developers have a challenge: they shouldn't take away the strengths people have... and if anger drives action, that's a strength. But we need to supply these leaders with the judgment and coping skills to handle it so it's not toxic to them or others, which it very much can be.