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BlogMyers-BriggsUsing MBTI to Great Advantage

Using MBTI to Great Advantage – Perceiving

by Ron Potter

Using MBTI to Great Advantage is a blog series in which I’ll do an overview of each of the four Myers-Briggs (MBTI) functions and then in subsequent blogs will dig into each one in more depth with some practical applications for creating better dynamics and better decisions making. Click here to read the Series Introduction.

 

Perceiving (Attending) Overview: Sensing vs iNtuitionMBTI series header

We looked at an overview of our Energizing function in the last Myers-Briggs (MBTI) blog. Now let’s look at the Perceiving function.

For many years the MBTI referred to this function as your attending function, “What do you pay attention to? or What is your preferred source of information?” However, more recently they have gone back to Carl Jung’s (MBTI is based on Jung’s original analytical psychology work studying healthy personality types) original description of perceiving, “Through what lens do you perceive the world around you?”

Also note that was not a typo when I identified the second function as iNtuition. Myers and Briggs had already used the “I” indicator for the introverts so chose to use the “N” indicator for intuition. On this function your natural preference will be either an S or and N.

If you happen to be a more natural “sensing” type, you will tend to “pay attention to” facts, figures, what’s in the present, the immediate problem and what’s “real”. This is how you “perceive” the world around you.

If you happen to be a more natural “iNtuitive” type, you will pay attention to the possibilities, how might this play out in the future, what are the implications of the issue we’re dealing with? And maybe more importantly, does this fit into the world as “I believe it should be?”

 

Decision Making Function. This function is the first “decision making” function. It identifies where and how we gather our information, what information we gather and pay attention to and what information we tend to put more stock in when it comes to making our decisions (which will be the next function we discuss). We all have what is known as confirmation bias (the book Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization by Edward Hess is a good source of understanding) where we tend to look at and accept only data that agrees with our beliefs of how things work (or should work). Understanding your Perceiving function and balancing it with a great team (this one is difficult to balance within us personally so it takes a trusted team to provide the balance) is incredibility valuable to you personally, the team and the company.

Hidden cause of confusion. Like Extraverted and Introverted preferences (previous blog overview) this function is a hidden cause for much team confusion and misunderstanding. Because we use our preferred function to ask and answer questions, if we’re not clear as a team one person may be asking a Sensing question “What is the impact of only hitting 87% of our goal this month?” while someone provides an iNtuitive response “There is no impact at all because the entire market is going to shift over the next three years.” This is like two ships passing in the night. Teams must be disciplined about aligning Sensing and iNtuitive questions with Sensing and iNtuitive answers.

Therefore, the same three rules apply to working more effectively: Balance, Balance, Balance. What I’ve discovered in business is that good leaders have often figured out their need for balance on this one to run a business effectively because if you let this one get out of balance for too long, you will lose the business. It’s great to create balance in the other three functions. It’s critical that you balance this one if you’re running a business.

So remember the three rules:

  1. Balance
  2. Balance
  3. Balance

You can’t be sure of what you’re learning or need to learn unless you balance this function.

Share with us some of your balancing act stories.

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Patience – Project Management

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons

Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons

A while back (June of 2010 actually) I wrote my first blog on Patience. Good patience is one of those elements that can help build great teams or more importantly, lack of good patience can quickly break down a team. In that first blog on patience, I referred to a client who would lose his patience when he didn’t see sufficient progress as critical deadlines approached. I’m convinced there is one key part of that statement that must not be overlooked – “As critical deadlines approached.”

Coming out of engineering school, I spent the first decade of my career immersed in project management for several large projects. That decade left me with a couple of very deeply held beliefs:
1. You can only make up about 10% of a remaining schedule.
2. Projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule.

I do not consider these belief’s as hard and fast rules but more solid “rule-of-thumb” concepts. After closely tracking many major projects from engineering to construction to software design and development, I became convinced that you could only make up about 10% of the remainder of any schedule. In other words, if you are tackling a project that will take about four weeks of effort (20 working days) you will run into difficulties if you let the first two days slip by without accomplishing the first stages of the project. It seems so innocent, “The project is not due until next month and it won’t make much difference if I don’t get started until the end of the week or first thing next week.” Wrong! While it’s likely that you will in fact complete the project on time, you’ll not fully appreciate how much those first lost days will add to the stress, overworked, overwhelming feeling of not having enough time to accomplish everything as the weeks move along and all of your other projects get layered on top of these “delayed” projects.

Which leads me to my second belief: projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule. It’s not what you accomplish or don’t accomplish during that last week of a four week schedule that makes the difference between success and failure (or stress vs an orderly pace), it’s what you did or didn’t do during that first week of the four week schedule that makes the difference. Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten all about what we put off during that first week and therefore don’t associate with that feeling of being overwhelmed and overworked during the last week of the project.

Patience doesn’t happen by reacting calmly to missed deadlines. Patience is induced by setting aggressive early checkpoints on projects so that they experience an orderly pace as the deadline approaches.

Patience:
• Don’t forget your own learning curve (from the first blog). Leaders must work harder than they expect to help people understand new expectations, learn new processes, and have a vision of the new normal.
• Patience is improved and put to better use when there is more discipline at the beginning of a project instead of trying to handle the pressure better at the end of a project.

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The Fifth Discipline, Paper Planes, and The Beer Game – Part II

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Dmitry Krendelev, Creative Commons

Image Source: Dmitry Krendelev, Creative Commons:

In my last post, we began to talk about the need for viewing our teams and companies as systems, as described in The Fifth Discipline. In Peter Senge’s book by that title, he said that cause and effect are not closely related in time and space and therefore hides from us the fact that our individual actions have systemic effects across our teams and companies. That’s one of the reasons why I like business simulations.

One of the business simulations I run is Paper Planes created by Chris Musselwhite of Discovery Learning.

In this simulation each person is assigned a work station for one element in the making of a paper plane (cutting, folding, gluing, stenciling, etc.). Each person is well trained and fully equipped to perform their job as the plane progresses down the assembly line. We then start up the system to produce as many planes as possible. While each station of one or more people work feverishly to maximize the productivity and through-put of their station, the first run of the exercise always fails to produce the desired outcome. Through successive rounds of debriefing, reengineering and re-running the simulations, teams get better by orders of magnitude. What they all discover in the end is that optimizing their piece of the work does not optimize the whole. We need to look at the entire system as a whole and optimize the system, even if that means sub-optimizing some of the work stations.

Another simulation I enjoy running is The Beer Game. This sounds like a fun (and maybe dangerous) game to run at an executive off-site. The Beer Game was invented at MIT, referred to in Senge’s book and is still given to MBA students at MIT twenty years later. It is similar in nature to Paper Planes except that it’s designed to simulate a logistics system with a brewer (manufacturer), a wholesaler, distributor, retailer and customers. Again, the games helps teams experience in close time and space what plays out in a real logistic system over hundreds of miles and many weeks of time. All of a sudden, it becomes clear to the participants that optimizing the individual pieces of the system does not optimize the whole. The problems need to be figured out at a systemic level.

What’s going on with your team or company? Are you working at maximum effort and efficiency only to see your department or team fail at their overall mission and assignment? Are you working your tail off in your team but some other department must not be carrying their load because you’re not getting the corporate results that you should? Are you looking for blame? Must there be someone else at fault for your corporate failures? Maybe you’re not looking at it systemically to understand how your actions and approach affect the whole. The Fifth Discipline.

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Patience

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Biking Nikon SFO, Creative Commons

Image Source: Biking Nikon SFO, Creative Commons

It takes as much work to build great teams as it does to build or become a great leader.

I believe that if you were to ask my family (wife and two daughters) they would tell you that I’m the most patient man in the world…. until I’m not! I seem to have a great deal of patience for most situations but when I run out of patience I don’t come down gradually. Nor do I stair step down one level at a time. My patience ends like a rock being kicked off a 1,000 foot cliff that plummets with the acceleration of gravity until it smashes on the floor of the canyon. My girls actually developed into an early warning system for me. When I would see them quickly jump up and bolt from the room in unison, I began to understand that my patience was approaching the cliff and they had picked up the warning signs.

One of my clients currently has a similar trait. He has a great deal of desire and compassion to grow and develop his team and constantly pushes them to become better then they were the year before. He will start a project that is going to challenge and grow them over time and then gives them enough time to accomplish the task. But, if he is not seeing sufficient progress as critical deadlines approach, his rock will eventually get kicked over the cliff and then he jumps in with great fury and gets the task completed.

Why do we reach this cliff where things go bad in a hurry? A couple of reasons are very obvious to me.
1. Leaders mistakenly assume that members of their team will “see it” (understand all that needs to be figured out in order for the growth spurt to take place) or will figure it out along the way in their effort to complete the task or project
2. A basic misunderstanding of good project management

By definition, a growth experience can’t necessarily be figured out ahead of time. It’s a new experience. You’re figuring out something that you’ve never seen or experienced before. You’ll either not see it at all or if you do you may not execute in a very efficient or effective manner. Leaders often forget their own learning curve experiences. They made these same mistakes years ago or even if it was only recently that they figured it out, they now only remember the end state of the new knowledge, not what they went through to learn the new behavior or understanding.

Leaders must work harder then they expect to help people understand the new expectations, learn the processes it will take to get there, and have a vision of the new normal. Develop patience for the sake of your teams.

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BlogWork-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance – Time Management

by Ron Potter

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. In that book, Mr. Covey indicated that all of our time fits into quadrants of a two-by-two grid.

Quadrant II Frame

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.”

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It’s Not Rocket Science

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Matt Biddulph, Creative Commons

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.

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BlogLeadership

Knowing the Answer Can Be Very Costly – Part II

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Christian Bucad, Creative Commons

Image Source: Christian Bucad, Creative Commons

Continuing the discussion – click here for Knowing the Answer Can Be Very Costly Part 1.

If it’s costly for a manger to stop listening because he “knows” the answer, imagine the risk involved when this same attitude pervades a company’s culture. I can give you two examples of this problem – one taken from my own experience and one you’re all familiar with.

A few years ago, I worked closely with a high-technology company with clients around the world. The leadership team understood it was vital to serve their customers and they devised their own customer service rating system.

Every month, the CEO and the leadership team received a report that showed the customer service scores for each of their clients. They were proud of the fact that their biggest client consistently received the highest scores in their system.

But one day, I was called into an emergency meeting and told that this No. 1 customer had terminated its contract. The leadership team and the CEO were stunned. They were sitting around the table saying, “How could they have fired us? We always made sure they received the highest customer service rating of any client!”

The answer back from the customer was, “You didn’t listen to what we were asking of you.” The customer service ratings measured those factors my client deemed important, but it overlooked other factors the customer valued. The team that collected the ratings was so enamored with their “answer” that when the customer was asking for something different, they didn’t hear it.

“The outcomes are never in doubt”

In the aftermath of General Motors’ bankruptcy, a lot of the blame rests with GM’s failure to listen to its customers or employees. Rob Kleinbaum, who spent 24 years with the company as an employee and a consultant, described meetings at GM as “exercises in procrastination, rubber stamping, or idea killing, without anything that would pass for genuine debate or dialogue.” Those are classic symptoms of a leadership culture that “knows” the answer.

The same problem had been going on for a long time. Twenty-one years ago, one of GM’s top executives, Elmer Johnson, wrote a cautionary memo to the executive committee. Johnson said that the company’s “most serious problems pertain to organization and culture.” Old assumptions about the stability of the auto market and the advantage of massive scale were no longer valid, but the entrenched culture could not be challenged.

Johnson complained that “the meetings of our many committees and policy groups have become little more than time-consuming formalities. The outcomes are almost never in doubt. The important decisions have almost always been reached behind the scenes before the time of the meeting. Accordingly, there is a dearth of discussion and almost never anything amounting to lively discussion. … Our culture discourages open, frank debate among GM executives in the pursuit of problem resolution. …. As one case in point, our poor quality and reliability in recent years was surely attributable in large part to GM’s historic resistance to creating an environment in which problem identification and correction is consistently applauded and encouraged by management.”

Companies and leaders who know the answer don’t tend to listen well, so they turn a deaf ear to problems that may eventually overwhelm them. Not listening to others is a form of pride and arrogance. The antidote is humility.

Being a humble leader doesn’t mean you have to be weak or self-effacing. It means you have to be grounded in the truth, and smart enough to realize that the truth needs to be discovered, not decreed.

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