Ron’s Short Review: Good understand of personal and group decision making.
Ron’s Short Review: Helping us understand how our brains actually work helps us understand and make better decisions.
Ron’s Short Review: This one is simple and powerful. It will also explain why we can’t get out point across when we talk about what we do.
But, Lack of Curiosity killed the DOG (DialOGue)
Dialogue is a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, most of the time we end up discussing topics. As shared in previous blogs, the word discussion has the same root word as percussion; Banging the drum; Beating on the table; Clanging the symbol. Discussion is “won” by percussing the loudest or most persistent. Not the best way to reach conclusions on difficult or contentious issues.
So why do we discuss rather than dialogue?
Because discussing is taking a side, defending your beliefs, getting your point of view across, winning an argument. Dialoguing is being open to others ideas; opening up your mind to alternatives or innovative ideas that haven’t been discovered yet.
The form of listening you use will go a long way in determining whether you discuss to win a point or dialogue to reach a better solution.
Image Source: Ky, Creative Commons
When we listen with the intent to respond, we’re preparing for discussion. We’re loading up our ammunition to either counter or reinforce any and every given point that is being discussed. We’re getting ready to beat our drum louder
But, when we listen with the intent to understand we’re preparing for dialogue. We’re getting as clear as we can about the issues, belief and assumptions and goals of each participant. The best way to accomplish this is through curiosity. There are many things in our lives that we’re curious about. When we’re curious about a topic we listen deeply, we probe to improve our understanding, we read as much as we can about the topic, we want to know why and when things happen, we want to know the meaning behind the causes.
When you’re facing a tough decision with strong opinions on each side, start with curiosity. Listen with the intent to understand. Dialogue the topic by getting everyone on the same side of the table and actively improving each side of the argument one side at a time. You’ll discover improved decision making.
Ron’s Short Review: Great book on the dynamics of team, decision making and mass movement.
Image Source: Rae Allen, Creative Commons
Over the last twenty years of business consulting I’ve collected a nice little Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) data base of a couple of thousand business leaders. I’ve also been fortunate to compare my data base with a huge data base of business leaders collected by the Center for Creative Leadership and our percentages were nearly an identical match. Although there are a couple of outstanding features in the data, one feature in particular stands out above all others.
The 3rd of the four functions is called your “deciding” function. People fall into two categories: Thinking and Feeling. Thinking types tend to make decisions logically and feeling types tend to use values and knowing how people will react to make their decisions. In our data bases of business leaders, 84% rate themselves as T’s and 16% are identified as F’s. This means that the vast majority of business leaders believe they make decisions on a logical basis.
But, let’s examine the science. One new book about recent brain mapping and neuroscience, Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science
“But perhaps the most surprising discovery has come from mapping the path information travels from our sense organs to our awareness of the world we live in. Not only are the perceptual areas of the brain involved, so are the areas responsible for our memories, our feelings, our beliefs, and our aspirations. Our minds aren’t objectively recording our experience of the world; they’re creating it, and that creation is influenced by everything else going on in the brain. Each of us lives in a mental world of our own making. The world we know is only what we think it to be, and we can’t assume other people will think the same way we do. Reasoning has nothing to do with the way we solve problems, make decisions, and plan for the future. At best, logic is just a way to justify conclusions we have already reached unconsciously.”
Wow! None of us actually has a grasp on reality. We’re each making up our own picture and story as we go along. We may be making logical decisions but they’re based on our personally developed and perceived logic. We know from our marketing guru’s that people make purchases based on emotions and then justify the purchase with logic (Once, while admiring a Chevy Corvette my wife said “I see no logical reason to buy a Corvette.” So, what does logic have to do with it ;-).
I’m afraid we make decisions the same way. We make them based on emotions (memories, feelings, beliefs, aspirations, etc) and then seem to justify the decision based on some sort of logic. This finding has a great deal of impact on teamwork, leadership and corporate cultures (TLC) that we’ll explore in the future.
Image Source: Nick, Creative Commons
I was scheduled to teleconference with one of my clients last week. We had one hour for our conference call but were not able to connect until 15 minutes before our time was up. What do you think the topic was that he wanted to talk about when we finally did connect? Time management!
This client is actually at the top of his game and in many respects at the peak of his career. He’s doing wonderful things at the top of a company that is improving quarterly and is a highly respected leader and team member. But he was feeling overwhelmed and over run. What could he do to improve and get back on top of things?
When we did talk a week later, these are a few of the topics that were discussed:
• Meetings
• Quadrant II – Urgent vs Important (discussed in an earlier blog)
• Planning and early execution
• Empowerment/Delegation
• Systems and Support
Let’s discuss meetings.
How much of your time for the week or month is pre-booked in meetings before you even start? Even if you’re working 50 or 60 hour weeks, if 90% of your time is booked in meetings before you even start your week, than you really only have 5 or 6 hours for the week to get your non-meeting work done.
I hesitate to call non-meeting work your “real work” because much of your real work is conducted in well run meetings. But, if you have more than 60% of your available time pre-booked in meetings before you even start the week, you should probably question if you need to be in the meeting or not.
Efficiency and Effectiveness of meetings
Even if the meetings are important, how much effort is put into analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of the time spent in the meeting? This topic can have multiple sub-headings but a couple right off the top should be:
• Who’s running/facilitating the meeting?
• What’s the purpose of the meeting? Information? Prioritization? Decision making?
• If a decision is to be made, what type of decision? Consensus? Consultative? Unilateral?
• If it should be a unilateral decision, why are we having this meeting?
• If it’s to be consensus, who are the right players and are we willing to take the necessary time?
• If it’s to be consultative, who owns the decision?
You might enjoy a book titled: Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business
The links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
Several years ago I learned some very interesting lessons about time management. I was working with a high level leadership team, all vice-presidents and above. While we were offsite spending time on leadership development issues one of the VP’s on the team finally stopped the process and said something like the following:
“Ron, we think all of these leadership issues you’re trying to teach us are wonderful and important, but until you help us with our time management problems, we can’t even think about putting more effort into improving our leadership skills. We’re all working at least 60 hours a week as it is. We’re destroying our health and our families. Help us with our time management first and then we’ll be ready to learn new leadership skills from you.”
He was right. They were worn out and suffering. I turned to a time management model put forth by Steven Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
His premise was that once we fulfill all of the tasks in Quadrant I (both urgent and important) we tend to go on to tasks that fall primarily in Quadrant III (Urgent but not necessarily important).
I sent the team off to record where all of their time went over the next two weeks. When they returned with the record of approximately 120 hours each had expended over the last two weeks, we listed every activity for each participant on a flip chart and posted it on the wall. Then we went through a very interesting exercise. Line-item by line-item we went through each chart and identified into which quadrant it should be placed. A very interesting pattern began to emerge. On several of the line-items, the owner of the sheet would say that he/she had spend a number of hours producing a particular report (as an example) that was urgent but not important and they intended to stop performing that task in the future. However, once stated, there always seemed to be a challenge from the room. Someone would say, “If you don’t produce that report, I can’t get my job done. It must be placed in the important row.”
But, when we began to look into what data in the report was required, there often seemed to be a simple solution to the second persons needs that still eliminated the effort needed to produce the report (it’s on the web site, a quick email, it can be found in another location, etc.) The problem was solved and the bulk of the work eliminated.
Once we completed all of the “negotiations” around the room and everyone had agreed on the quadrants into which all work had been placed, a horrifying statistic emerged. Only 20% of all the work fell into the “Important” row. One VP hung his head and said:
“Do you mean to tell me that I just spend 24 hours of meaningful work over the last two weeks and all the rest was just thrashing?”
I’m afraid so.
The lessons that I have learned from this experience (conducted now several times) include:
- It’s difficult (impossible) to determine on your own how much of your work falls into which quadrants. There is always someone else that needs to be brought into the negotiations.
- It takes team support to stick with the decisions. Even after everyone agrees that you have some quadrant III work that can be dropped, there will be those who still want you to do it. It takes a team to help you say “no”.
- If more than 70% of your work falls into quadrant I (both urgent and important), you’re headed for burn out and failure somewhere down the line because you are not doing enough important but not urgent work (prevention, production capability, relationship building, big picture thinking, etc.)
The links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Ron’s Short Review: Holding opposing views in our mind at the same time helps us with decision making.
Image Source: Matt Biddulph, Creative Commons
During one team session we were working through a difficult topic and seemed to be moving farther and farther away from an acceptable solution. In an effort to disarm some of the volatility in the room I shifted the conversation away from the topic itself and began to focus the team on techniques for giving and receiving better feedback. As each side began to understand better where the other side was coming from and the gulf between the two opinions began to narrow, one of the team members invoked the old adage:
“Well, it’s not rocket science.”
Well, actually it is rocket science.
During the early days of rocketry when Van Braun, Goddard and others were making their first attempt at developing functional rockets, they quickly discovered that they could build a rocket with enough thrust. Thrust was not the problem. The problem was they couldn’t hit a target. They actually had to spend more time, effort and resources to develop what they began to call feedback mechanisms, a term they coined to describe the process of firing off a rocket, taking measurements on the trajectory, and feeding back those calculations to adjust the thrusters so that they could eventually hit a target.
Look around any team meeting today. Thrust is usually not the problem. There is enough education, experience, energy, dedication and desire to accomplish a goal. The problem is actually keeping all of that energy adjusted and headed for the same target. It takes strong feedback mechanisms to actually hit a target. Without good feedback systems on style, skill sets, culture, decision making processes and conflict resolution, the team simply scatters and dissipates the thrust in multiple directions that will never be capable of hitting a target.
Actually, it is rocket science.
Most of us know about the seven deadly sins:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
And I must admit that while I’m not guilty of all of the sins all of the time, I have been guilty of all of the sins some of the time. But, are you familiar with the four Cardinal Virtues?
Prudence
Justice
Restraint
Courage
I’ve been spending some time looking at the four and in particular the first of the virtues, Prudence. One of the intriguing definitions of Prudence is:
“The perfected ability to make right decisions.”
What better descriptor of corporate leadership could be found? The perfected ability to make right decisions!
As I began to explore the concept for prudence further, it presented itself as a process. Prudence breaks down into the functions of:
Deliberate
Decide
Do
These are my words, not the words of the great scholars that describe the process, but what a great process to reach right decisions.
Give it good deliberation
Use a great and well defined decision making process
Go out and execute
Since 2000, one of the “deadly sins” that I’ve seen become more and more prevalent in corporate cultures is the attitude of quick deciding instead of quick learning leading to good decisions. With a quick deciding attitude, teams will ignore, steam roll, belittle or dismiss any behavior that appears to be or feels like it is slowing down the deciding process. In other words, a quick deciding mentality approach is anti-deliberation. It just doesn’t lead to prudent or wise decisions.
What we don’t have time for in our corporations today is non-prudent decisions. We must regain the technique of good deliberation to make great decisions quickly.
Let me know what you think. What is preventing our corporate leadership teams from spending the right amount of time deliberating so that we can then make good decisions? What are the roadblocks?
Ron’s Short Review: Teams greatly increase our ability to solve problems.