The notions of perception, visibility, and influence are the keys not only to better performance for your organization but they’ll also help you advance your career to the next level.
Today’s post is by Joel Garfinkle, one of our thoughtLEADERS instructors.
How often have you looked at a situation in the company and thought of a better way to do it? Or felt that change was needed… but didn’t know how to make it happen? Sometimes we feel frustrated that we aren’t in a position or job title that has the power to make those changes.
But there are some techniques and methods designed to turn you into a strong influence in your company regardless of your title or position. Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level introduces the value of Perception, Visibility and Influence.
When you understand how to use perception, visibility and influence – the PVI model – you can lead from where you are right now. Those around you recognize your value. They respect your opinion and you have the skills to influence decisions and changes.
Start with Yourself
Sometimes advancing in leadership means changing cultural patterns and beliefs. You may have been taught to “not push yourself forward,” or “don’t ever volunteer for something.” You’ll need to push aside these well-meaning teachings in order to gain an unexpectedly powerful way of taking leadership.
The first step in perception is to examine how you see yourself. It’s not uncommon for people who want to be leaders to feel insecure – feel like a fraud. Here’s the secret. You’re likely better than you think.
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/20220117-Paper-Boats.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttp://thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-01-17 08:00:102022-01-17 05:28:06How You Can Lead with Influence
Our teams are under tremendous pressure. That pressure creates stress which diminishes performance. You can build a more resilient team through some simple leadership behaviors.
Let’s imagine that you are in a unique position. Your team has the talent it needs. Your organization has a strategy that continues to work with a plan that will adapt to your competitor’s actions. You have enough cash to handle the changes in your markets. Your team is ready to work hard and the energy in your offices has never been better. There’s only one question left to answer: is your team built to last?
The problem with our global economy, political uncertainty, and reactive media is that too many of us are living at our edges. We work hard. Our kids’ schedules make us look like our schedules are calm. We play a lot. We travel constantly. We are on our phones frenetically. This means that our brains are always paying attention to something—until they can’t.
In the hot seats of Humvees looking for IEDs or the turrets of tanks, our service men and women rotate out every half hour to 90 minutes. Most of us can only concentrate for 40 minutes at a time, but we expect our teams to start early with staff meetings, handle conference calls on international schedules, and respond to emails at all hours. Our brains are not built for the constant stimulation.
So how do we stay focused and mentally healthy when our expectations of ourselves and our teams to produce keep us under constant pressure?
Give people freedom
Your ideal schedule may not match the people on your team. In a study where students were given control over their time, they reported higher happiness, more role clarity, and less overload. How much would happy teammates who knew their job and felt like they could handle it be worth to your organization?
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/20220103-Team-Laughing.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttp://thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-01-03 08:00:562022-01-03 01:41:49Is Your Team Built to Last?
In 1938, MIT student Claude Shannon solved one of the most complex problems of circuit design. Working on an early analog computer, he realized that an idea from an undergraduate philosophy course could solve the problem. Applying Boolean Algebra he laid the foundation of all electronic digital computers. As he put it: “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both fields at the same time”.
You may think that this was one of those lucky coincidences that change the world but almost never happen. You are wrong. In his book Seeing What Others Don’t, Gary Klein studied 120 of the most important inventions and discoveries in history: 82% of them emerged when people from different disciplines started to talk to each other and exchanged ideas.
Follow some simple rules and you may see what others don’t as well.
Start talking to strangers
At the beginning of the 20th century Vienna was a hotbed for new ideas. At the centre of this explosion of thoughts was the Wiener Kreis (Vienna circle), an interdisciplinary group of philosophers and scientists that met fortnightly.
While brilliant minds like Karl Popper, Ludwig von Wittgenstein, or Albert Einstein might have flourished as individuals, the gatherings are not to be underestimated. Eccentricities, disagreements, and rivalries marked these salons, but the insights had a profound impact on computing, astrophysics, cosmology, theory of science and philosophy. Even the godfather of management, Peter Drucker, benefitted from such “Abendgesellschaften” (evening gatherings) in his parent’s home in Vienna.
One obvious conclusion is to set up regular dinners with eccentrics. But a new set of online tools also facilitates the “meeting with strangers”. Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani studied hundreds crowdsourcing contests where companies post unsolvable problems and invite people to submit solutions. “The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem,” he explains. When tricky problems cannot be solved by the specialists, people with other backgrounds looking through other lenses and using other heuristics may find the solution. Talk to those people more often and you will start to seeing things differently.
Don’t trust the experts
Managing disruptions is difficult. A recent BCG-study found that 35% of the surveyed companies view digital technologies as disruptive to their business models and only 1/3 of all companies steer successfully through disruption.
One of the hardest things is to see what is coming. Incumbents get it wrong most of the time.
Specialists are the main culprits. Philipp E. Tetlock studied the accuracy of over 80,000 forecasts of political and economic experts. When they were convinced that something was fully or almost impossible, that future event occurred 15 percent of the time. When they were absolutely sure about a future event, it didn’t occur in more than a quarter of cases. When given a set of three future scenarios, experts were less accurate than someone randomly picking from these scenarios.
Experts often look at a problem through the lens of a single grand idea and “squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates”. Instead of listening to specialized experts, tap into the collective wisdom of crowds.
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki demonstrates that crowds beat experts if there is sufficient cognitive diversity, status and rank play no role, decentralized knowledge can be accessed, and if knowledge is aggregated efficiently.
There are many ways to achieve this. Surround yourself with people from different backgrounds, , talk to front-line employees and use tools like social networks, wikis, or strategy jams to give everyone a voice. The UK bank Barclays, for instance, invited 30,000 employees via a two-day online strategy jam, to bring them into a strategy conversation, along with senior leaders. The outcome was one of the UK’s most popular fintech products.
Try walking a mile in your enemy’s shoes
As we have limited information processing capabilities, managers rely on simplified mental models to make sense of the world. These frameworks or explanations of how a business works influence how we process information and how we decide. Mental models can become rigid. So rigid that they inhibit change!
Take Polaroid’s downfall for example. In 1992 it was very well positioned to become a big player in digital photography. Patents, brand, even a prototype, everything was lined up. The only problem was the old business model. Polaroid’s managers loved the Razor and Blade model. When they saw the digital camera, they didn’t see its potential. There was no film. How can you make money without film? They could not overcome their mental model. 40 other brands were available, when Polaroid finally introduced a digital camera in 1996.
In military, war games are used to make decision-makers more vigilant, to broaden their range of alternatives, to spot early signals of change and recalibrate their mental frameworks accordingly, allowing for greater adaptation and nimbleness. Engage your managers in a similar exercise. Let them imagine a fictional competitor who develops a business model that totally disrupts your industry. What would such a business model be? Where are your vulnerabilities? This gives you totally new perspectives.
Seeing disruption as a threat rather than an opportunity has another benefit. Fear is a powerful motivator. Exercises like these have borne fruit for dozens of companies, such as BASF, Linde, and Lufthansa. These firms are now better prepared for disruption or have adopted entirely new business models.
Use analogies
Oliver Gassmann from Sankt Gallen University has studied more than 300 business model innovations. One of his most intriguing findings: 90% of them were mere new combinations of existing patterns, copied from other industries. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Just open up. Use analogies and ask yourself for example: What would Apple do in my industry?
Responding to disruption is not easy, but an open mindset increases the odds of success.
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Stress is part of our everyday lives. We can either control it or let it control us. The difference between those two situations is how we manage our “alarm” and our reactions to the daily stressors we face.
As the global head of sales hit the stage, he cracked. He looked out at the audience of colleagues and saw nothing but failure in his people. All his brain could focus on was their missed opportunities, laziness, and a collective bad year. Without thinking he said, “You are simply the worst team I have every worked with.”
For more than fifteen minutes he continued ranting before transitioning into an update of the quarter’s results. No one stopped him. When the CEO assessed the damage after the meeting, he fired his sales chief. At the exit interview, the head of sales didn’t even realize he had done something wrong. I wish it weren’t, but this is a true story.
When stress hijacks your brain, we get stuck on the short loop. The alarm, the tiny region called the amygdala which keeps us alert and out of danger, can misfire after exposure to too much stress. You lead. You manage. You innovate. You solve people problems. You save the day. To say you are exposed to stress is like saying London or Seattle get some rain.
Some days, you crash. Other days, your people call you a grumpy bear. Occasionally, after months of deadlines, events, and emergencies you melt down. Hopefully we don’t melt down on stage or in front of our teams, but it happens and we are not, in fact, crazy when we do.
The answer to stress at work is not actually as complicated as it might seem. While our brains still have some of the same regions as the dinosaurs, we also have evolved to the level of mental capacity where we can intentionally change the way we manage complex and complicated stimuli.
Stress is actually not a bad thing. When treated as a sign that something needs our attention, it can be monitored the way we measure marketing leads or key performance indicators. It can keep us sharp and teach us what we really care about. But to most of us, it feels bad. We avoid stress. We ignore stress. That’s when it bites us.
The first step is to making friends with your “alarm” is to recognize that we are always experiencing some level of stress. When you are sleeping, your alarm is still on. That’s why you wake up before your clock rings. When you get excited and feel jazzed, that’s still stress; it’s just pleasurable stress. When you stop suddenly, avoiding a biker you almost hit with your car, that’s your alarm keeping you out of trouble.
Second, separate the areas of your life where you feel stressed and those where you feel relaxed. To truly make stress valuable, we have to differentiate when it is running the show rather than our clear thinking determining how we behave. A simple exercise to do this is to measure your stress level during transitions of your day. Ten is the highest stress you ever feel, like when your child is hurt or you get rear ended. One is what it feels like to wake up from a good nap. You can’t have no stress because then you would be dead. Keep a simple list of the time and your stress level in the notes section of your phone. You will observe where and when you feel stress and that awareness is priceless.
Finally, with an acceptance that stress is a good thing and a record of stress in our lives, we can start to plan our days based on what we care about most. At work, to prevent melt downs, you have to have casual time to reflect or get to know colleagues. You have to have breaks in between meetings. If everything is pressure, eventually your brain will let you know it needs a break. Developing a rhythm at work where stress is always valuable takes time and perhaps a change of mindset, but I promise it is the core of what makes great work possible.
A quick concluding story to make the point. Three years ago I was traveling around the country speaking and coaching. I worked every day. I logged 40,000 miles a year on my car. I started measuring my stress and planning the amount of stress I would take on each day, and I am now 40 pounds lighter. I work harder than ever, but in a way that takes care of my brain and body as I do. We can all learn to make friends with stress; and, we are all capable of new levels of health and happiness at work.
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The caller ID stated “Mike.” The phone was on the fourth ring. I held it in front of me, watching the screen, mouth dry, sitting at my desk, thinking, “Here it goes again. He’s going to speak Chinese and I won’t understand.”
Creative Food, the vegetable-processing company I had started in China the year before, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Every project I initiated had failed. All the foreign experts I had hired had left. My operations were in such bad shape that my own customers, who included big fast-food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut asked my new recruits why they had come aboard a ship that was sure to sink. On that day, once I finally answered the phone, I had to ask Mike to repeat himself several times. Read more
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Making your organization a well-oil machine, that operates faster and more efficiently, is something every business has been after for years. Here’s how to do it.
Today’s post is by Maureen Metcalf, a principle here at thoughtLEADERS.
Many organizations feel the need to be thinner, faster, stronger, more adaptable, more profitable, etc. The right toolset to get them to that outcome may not be intuitive or singular. Building organizational agility is a solid approach to help organizations develop the capacity to perpetually evolve. It enables them to accelerate their ability to sense and adapt to the volume, complexity and rate of change organizations face in the current environment. We believe business agility is comprised of four main elements: strategist leadership, nimble culture, lean principles and agile methods.
The Challenge
Change is accelerating across all sectors of organizational life largely driven by technology, geopolitical changes and strong academic research. This accelerating change in disparate sectors comes together to drive organizations to develop the capacity to perpetually evolve, often quickly, to set trends or respond to forces that are changing the market. While this volume and pace of change seem daunting, the most successful organizations are addressing it by developing organizational agility.
According to a January 2018 article in McKinsey Quarterly, “The urgency imperative places a premium on agility: it enables the shift to emergent strategy, while unleashing your people so they can reshape your business in real time. It’s also a powerful means of minimizing confusion and complexity in our world of rapid-fire digital communications where everyone can talk with everyone else — and will, gumming up the works if you don’t have a sensible set of operating norms in place. Agility is also the ideal way to integrate the power of machine-made decisions, which are going to become increasingly important to your fundamental decision system.”
