personal development

An article by David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy (11/17/2010) decried the rise of a modern version of the mid 19^th-Century "Know-Nothing" movement,  generally remembered for its embrace of ignorance at the expense of growth and excellence. Similarly disheartening attempts to discredit those who show tendencies toward intellectualism or who are perceived as experts were all the rage in the 2010 mid-term elections. This is not a political blog, so I won’t go into how much this terrifies me for our society, but it does have some sobering implications for business.

People who disapprove of experts and intellectuals don’t just disapprove of them in politics (wow, I can’t even write that sentence without reflecting on how deeply strange it is). People who disapprove of experts and intellectuals disapprove of them in general.

I have been collecting a little journal of observations of anti-intellectualism since the ever-so-unimpressive-Sarah-Palin smashed onto the American reality show stage. Of course, I stopped collecting hers because there were just so gosh darned many of them. But here are a few that have managed to stop me in my tracks and make me reconsider the intelligence of people who did not seem to be mentally incapacitated otherwise:

• I would never go to any doctor other than a family medicine guy. Specialists aren’t any more skilled than anyone else, but they’ll cost you an arm and a leg more to go to them (same version of this statement recorded for auto mechanics).
• I don’t trust accountants and I don’t want one nosing in my business. I let a bookkeeper go over everything before tax time and that’s good enough for us.
• What is the point of hiring a lawyer? You still end up paying all the same fines and fees but you’ll have the legal bill tagged on too.
• My son (a primary school teacher) can use a computer as well as anyone else out there, so why would I pay some expert $10,000 to build a website my son can do for free?
• Oh, and my favorite – spouted out during a discussion about the importance of learning to be a critical thinker: “That’s the problem with the universities and all the ideas they use to brainwash children. That’s why they call it a liberal education (insert sneering tone here).”

I’m not suggesting that all experts are preferable to generalists, that experts are inherently better than anyone, or that there aren’t some really sharp generalists out there. I also accept that there are too many highly paid losers masquerading as experts. What I am suggesting is that broad-based bias against expertise and intelligence is inherently bad, because it sets the stage for mediocrity-on-a-pedestal. If this dangerous belief has wormed its way into your psyche even a little bit, and you are a business-owner, you are probably doomed.

Because at the same time that this strange idea that mediocrity, home-grown-ness, and average-Joe-ness are preferable to education, expertise, and intellectual rigor, the world has become a more competitive, more complex place – a place where people slow-on-their-feet or lacking in the abstract thinking skills necessary to grasp multi-level problems are being left behind. Fast.

If you own a business and you are counting on that business for your future wealth and retirement income, you will undermine your future if you do not seek the most talented, most intelligent, most not-average people you can find to fill critical positions and provide you with the business support and advice you require. Yes, it costs. It costs to hire talented people, it costs to go the extra-mile to sift out the good-on-paper from the good-in-reality, it costs to keep talented people, and it costs to pay for genuinely good advice and support.

It also costs a business owner to never have enough cash to pay the bills, to lose out on business opportunities because he can’t afford them, to lose customers because he’s not taking good enough care of them, to lose money because he made poor-but-avoidable choices, and to lose all that sleep and quality of life worrying about how his business is doing. Am I painting an overly bleak picture? I don’t think so. The business failure rate has accelerated from its already high rate of over 70% failures over five years. That’s a lot of lost money and lost time, not to mention ulcers and failed marriages. Want to blame it on the economy? OK, but what’s to explain the fact that that the over 70% failure rate has been documented for over a decade?

As a strategy consultant I analyze a lot of businesses. Want to know the common thread between businesses that are thriving and growing and ones that are struggling?
Quality of employees. I don’t mean just “nice” people – though that’s very important. I mean clear-thinking, intelligent, trained, intellectually competitive people who want to be mentally challenged and rewarded for great performance. The most successful business owners worry about paying the amount necessary to hire talented people in key positions, then pay it anyway because they see the long-term value. The most successful business owners work hard to understand their personal shortcomings, then bolster the business with people who possess offsetting strengths. Just like it’s difficult to stay in tip-top health if a quiet cancer is worming its way through your body, it’s difficult to run a highly competitive business if you subconsciously have reservations about the value of talent.

But what about all those people who are just average? Don’t they deserve to work too? Well of course they do. I firmly believe that there is good, rewarding, skills-appropriate work for every willing worker. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work as a retail sales person – and most rocket scientists couldn’t succeed in that role anyway. You do, however, have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. And your marketing professionals should have experience and training in the theory and practicum of marketing, your managers should have formal knowledge and experience in the disciplines and practices of management, the best tool & die workers have had the opportunity to work for real masters, and a copy writer is much more than a person with good grammar and spelling. Whatever your critical roles, it’s your job to seek (and seek, and seek, and seek if necessary) the absolute best people for those jobs.

As I said earlier, people who disapprove of experts and intellectuals disapprove of them in general. What I didn’t say is, except when it’s deeply personal. The guy who disapproved of medical specialists? Someone he loves deeply was diagnosed with a very rare illness, one that only the top specialist in the world could hope to cure. At first he struggled with his bias against expertise, but ultimately he moved heaven and earth to get to that specialist. The result? Life for his loved one.

Your business is deeply personal. It’s life for yourself and your loved ones. When you think about it that way, doesn’t it make sense to find and keep the experts that will help you compete and profit? Don’t put mediocrity on a pedestal, not in your personal life, and not in your business. Mediocrity is not profitable. It’s not socially beneficial. Hell, it’s not even fun.

© 2010. Andrea M. Hill

• Idea
• Rationale
• Substantiation
• Idea
• Stop!

There’s no doubt it’s harder than ever to get good job references. The pressures of living in a litigious society have stifled the sharing of important information. There is nothing unethical, unfair, or illegal about sharing valid reference information about a former employee, but fear of legal action is a powerful thing. Today’s column is not about being a reference giver, however. It’s about being a tenacious reference-getter.

Though there is a perceived risk that someone who is given a weak or negative reference will sue the reference giver, the incidence of such actions is actually quite low. In contrast, the risk that a candidate for employment will provide inaccurate information that inflates previous pay, overestimates their contribution, and expands their importance is very high. This is why you must work hard to get the references you need, even if some of the reference givers seem reluctant.

Do not waste your reference giver’s time with confirming dates of employment, previous pay, or other specific data related to employment. Chances are, the reference will not have immediate access to that information and will not remember it. Instead, contact the HR department of each previous employer and confirm the data you were given by the applicant. HR departments will rarely offer anything other than a confirm-or-deny response, but that’s all you need from them. Once you complete this call, you are ready to call your references.

Addressing the employment details first with HR serves to disencumber the reference call, because the experience of being asked and answering questions makes most people uncomfortable. You want to be free to have a conversation with the reference and create a climate in which they are more likely to provide the information you need.

There are a handful of questions that you should ask every time you talk to a reference. These can be modified to suit the specifics of the job for which you are hiring, or you can add your own.

1. What were the responsibilities this candidate had while they were employed by you? Always start with this question. It’s an easy one to answer, it’s nonjudgmental, and it allows the reference giver to gather their thoughts about the candidate – with whom they might not have worked in some time.

2. Is the candidate more independent or more of a team player? This is another good question to ask early in the interview, because unless the reference has strong opinions about whether one or the other is ‘better’, it is a nonjudgmental question. The answer, however, is important to you, though if you don’t know whether the role for which you are hiring requires independence, teamwork, or both, the answer will be meaningless.

3. How did the candidate get along with peers? How did they get along with subordinates? How did they get along with management? If you just ask “how did the candidate get along with people,” you won’t uncover any potentially interesting patterns with regard to authority, competitiveness, or power. So look for relationship behavior clues by asking the question in three parts.

4. How would you describe the candidate’s performance related to  ________________.  Fill in the blank with a characteristic that is important to the role for which the candidate is being considered. You may ask this question as many times as you have specific characteristics to explore.

5. How would you describe this candidate’s dependability? Look for responses to both their attendance and their ability to get things done. If the reference only answers to one of those issues, prompt for the other.

6. Did the candidate meet their business objectives, and can you describe a specific accomplishment? The reason you are asking this as a two-part question is that it is too easy for the reference to say, “oh, yes, yes, they met their objectives.” If the reference has to think about specifics, they will provide you with a less superficial answer.

7. How did the candidate respond to your efforts to suggest or assist with professional or personal development? And what types of professional or personal development were recommended during their employment? You are looking for whether or not the candidate is likely to be open to input from you and whether they value opportunities for improvement. There’s nothing more difficult than hiring someone who isn’t open to learning or changing.

8. How would you describe this candidate’s strengths? If the reference only offers you one strong quality, prompt for a second, or even a third if you think the call is going well enough to dig a little deeper.

9. How would you describe your management style, and how did the candidate respond to your style? This question is most helpful when you have asked it of multiple references for the same candidate. Comparing the answers can provide a fairly holistic picture of how a candidate responds to being managed.

10. Why did the candidate leave your employment? Many times the answer given by a reference will differ slightly from the answer given by the candidate, but when you compare them you can see that they are two perspectives of the same issue, or that the candidate was possibly unwilling to tell their former employer the whole truth. Don’t assume dishonesty if the answers are different. Look for how the two parties could genuinely believe what they believe. But clearly, if an employer says the candidate was fired or asked to find alternate employment, and the candidate hasn’t told you this, it’s a red flag.

11. Now take a moment to describe the position for which you are considering the candidate. What you will describe will be the basic responsibilities and the key expected outcomes of the job. Think about this carefully before you call – too often people don’t know how to describe a job succinctly, and the description drags on. Once you have described the position, ask: Do you think the candidate is a good fit for the job I have described? Make sure you probe their answer to understand why or why not if they don’t offer the reasoning behind their answer.

12. Would you hire this candidate again? Everyone sort of expects this question, and if they are giving a negative reference, they are probably dreading it. But your conversation so far will have made it much easier for them to answer honestly. Make sure you probe for why or why not if they don’t offer that information.

13. Based on the information I shared with you, should I hire this candidate?  This is always an interesting question to ask. Some references won’t answer just because they don’t like to speculate in that way. But there’s no harm in asking it, and the answers can be quite insightful.

14. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you think I should have?

Set aside enough time to make reference calls, and make sure that you are relaxed and in comfortable control of the discussion. There is nothing more awkward – speaking from the perspective of someone who has given numerous references – than being called and asked for a reference, only to find out the caller is unprepared to manage the conversation!

Don’t let one great reference tempt you into not calling the others. Reference checks are most valuable when you can compare and contrast the responses, and it is highly likely that the references have had different experiences, even if the differences are subtle.

There are few things more important than the quality of the individuals you hire. Most hiring managers understand the importance of careful resume review, good interviews, and background checks. But the process can not be considered complete without reference checks, because the reference check is generally the only avenue you have to investigate and confirm the candidate’s claims.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

I enjoy bird watching. We have created a bird sanctuary of sorts on our land in Wisconsin, and we pay attention to how to attract a variety of birds and how to keep them healthy.

Business Lessons from Birds

One of the things we learned early on is that birds are opportunistic feeders. We were constantly worried that we would fail to provide enough food or put out the wrong food, and that as a result our little friends would suffer. But that is not what happens. When a food supply dwindles, birds don't sit around waiting for it to reappear. They move on - quickly - in search of a new food source.

Your customers are also opportunistic feeders. If you fail to attend to the reasons they do business with you, they will move along quickly in search of another source.

We also learned that we could attract the kinds of birds we wanted to observe by putting out the right types of food in the right places. We studied and planned, because we love being surrounded by colorful birds, playful birds, and song birds. By defining the birds we wanted to attract and then studying their preferences, we created an environment that delivers birdwatching pleasure every day.

You must also define the specific customer you wish to attract. If you don't, the results will not please you. Early on we attracted too many sparrows - which annoy the birds we wanted to attract - and raptors, which ate them. Bad planning or no planning can have miserable consequences.

Finally, remember that birds are evolved from some of the oldest species on our planet. They clearly have staying power. This is due to many factors, but being opportunistic feeders is one of their strengths. Opportunistic means more than just taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. It also means being on the constant lookout for opportunities. When food sources dry up, birds waste no time feeling sorry for themselves. Because even when times are good and food is bountiful, they scout for other nearby food sources constantly.

Apparently, success is for the birds. Let's learn from them.

Ever heard of the Love Lab in Seattle? No, it’s not a perk of working at Microsoft (nor a perk that they once had and then lost when they became big bad business – they never actually went for those Googleplex type perks anyway). The Love Lab is a lab at the University of Washington where emeritus professor of psychology Dr. John M. Gottman (also co-founder of the Gottman Institute) conducted extensive research on the nature of relationships, particularly what makes for a good marriage. One of the cornerstones of his findings on relationships of all types is that relationships rely on something called bids for connection - the verbal and non-verbal requests for attention and validation that take place hundreds of times per day in human relationships.

The relationships we have at work are significant. Like our families of birth, we generally have little control over who the members of the family are. Our work relationships have the power to bring us joy or cause us anguish. They can lead to the greatest creative breakthroughs or significant physical and mental breakdowns. Or they may be nowhere near those highs or lows, just droning on in the background of our work life, not driving us crazy but not making our lives any richer either. The bottom line for business is that an organization filled with happy humans is more likely to be profitable than a similar business filled with the unhappy sort. In his book The Relationship Cure, Gottman says “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch – any single expression that says “I want to feel connected to you.” A response to a bid is just that – a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.” According to Gottman, there are three types of response to bids: turning toward responses, turning away responses, and turning against responses. One example from the book (pp 36-37) works as follows:

Turn toward the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: It was all right. The slopes at Sun Mountain are magnificent, but the ski conditions were lousy. Have you ever been there?

Turn away from the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: Have you got any messages for me?

Turn against the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: As if you really cared.

Relationships that involve mostly turning toward responses are far healthier than relationships that do not. Interestingly, relationships that involve turning against and turning away from responses both fail at equal rates, but the turning against relationships fail more slowly than the relationships where the predominant form of response is to turn away from, or ignore, the other person.

When I take on a new client, one of the first things I do is observe relationships among team members in the area in which I will be advising. It is not unusual for a business to possess all the knowledge and talent it requires to be successful, but for that knowledge and talent to be inaccessible to the organization - even as it collects a paycheck. Once I observe interpersonal communication I gain tremendous insight into how my help may best be offered. When I read Gottman’s latest book, I started watching the bid processes specifically. Some of the most difficult-to-understand team dynamics became much clearer to me with this simple but powerful information.

In one situation, I have a division head who, based on my observation, seemed would be a very unpopular manager. He is one of the worst interrupters I have ever met, and I found just trying to complete a conversation with him to be exhausting. Much to my surprise, I encountered a staff who is genuinely devoted to him. It’s not that they don’t notice he interrupts - they simply take the interruptions in stride. Without the information on bidding, I would not have been able to sort this out. But armed with my new knowledge, I realized that in all other ways this guy turns toward their bids, and bids them frequently (even if he interrupts their answers). The staff clearly feels connected to their manager, and they forgive him his irritating habit. Another constant interrupter who perhaps turned away from or turned against their subordinates’ bids - and who did not bid others effectively - would likely become negatively known for the habit of interrupting.

In another company, an extremely capable and hard-working specialist is failing miserably, and her senior sponsor is worried about whether or not the situation can be turned around. She is responsible for three teams, and in each team is entirely dysfunctional. Not cruel to one another, overly competitive, or filled with slackers. Quite the opposite, in fact. The teams simply do not engage. Trying to get a handle on this problem - because this strange staff demotivation was my only real clue regarding my clients’ difficulties - I asked to observe two team members who were also on other teams with different leaders. I observed that both individuals were participating energetically in those other situations. Using my new knowledge I realized that this woman systematically turns away from bids, ignoring them, changing the subject, or vaguely “um-hmm”-ing a response. Gottman says that bidders who are ignored learn quickly not to bid again. I was brought in to solve what seemed to be a management and strategic problem, but I honestly think this woman has all the management and strategic skill she needs. So in addition to reviewing and tweaking the existing management and strategic framework, I have shared this information with her and started coaching her in turning toward the bids of others. Already we are seeing a warming up of the operating environment - though team members are understandably skeptical and may take a while to trust that their manager intends to respond to their bids consistently.

I personally find turning against responses difficult to work with. People who are cynical and antagonistic toward others seem to me to be less inclined to work on their communication skills than those who are simply mindless. But when I see turning against responses now, I have a better understanding of what they are. I have always had a negative gut reaction to people who use strong sarcasm or express cynicism during job interviews, though I couldn’t always support why I thought those behaviors were bad signs. Now I understand that there is a good chance those behaviors will present themselves as turning against responses in the work environment, which will disrupt team harmony and ability to innovate.

Not that argument and debate can’t be consistent with team harmony. One of my customer sites is an absolute joy to work with and they are constantly arguing with one another. My new Gottman knowledge helped me get beyond knowing that they are a joy to work with, to understanding why. A recent meeting to discuss the launch of a new product illustrated the power of turning toward the bids of others. The team was divided in three camps over the product launch and their debate was heated within minutes of the beginning of the meeting. Yet the atmosphere in the room was one of excitement and fun rather than competition and discord. The team members turned toward one another’s bids even as they argued against them, peppering the argument with humor and laughter, and building on each others’ ideas even as they fought to make sure their own were heard. I didn’t record one moment of sarcasm or criticism during the exchange. There was no point at which a team member cut another down. Over the next two days I watched the team closely, and sure enough, they turned toward one another’s bids constantly, and bid one another constantly. This behavior is described by Gottman as a sort of bid banking, storing up a savings of positively-exchanged bids, to be cashed in at times of conflict, making the conflict easier to deal with and the relationship more likely to repair afterw
ards.

Many years of corporate management have taught me that one dysfunctional person can alter the chemistry of an entire department and hold that department’s performance to suboptimum levels for years on end. This new information on bidding has introduced me to a whole new way of evaluating work groups. I highly recommend that you evaluate the following questions to improve your work relationships and results:

• Evaluate how often you bid
• Evaluate how effectively you bid. Are you direct or round-about? Positive or negative?
• Evaluate how you respond to the bids of others. Do you turn toward, turn away from, or turn against most often? When you are turning away from or turning against, why are you doing so?
• Evaluate your most important work relationships in terms of how those people respond to your bids
• Have you stopped bidding anyone? If so, why? Is it hurting your work relationship or your professional performance?
• Is there any particularly influential person in your work experience who consistently turns against or turns away from your bids or the bids of others? Is there anything you can do to bring this problem to their attention?
• How do you react when someone turns away from your bids?
• How do you react when someone turns against your bids?
• If you can’t influence the person who is responding in undesirable ways, what steps can you take to protect your feelings (i.e., most people feel insignificant or insecure when they are ignored) and manage your reactions to minimize their negative effect on you and your performance?

We’ve all experienced some work situation that got under our skin and we couldn’t figure out why it bothered us so much. The woman who ignores you every time she walks past in the hallway, the guy who wanders off or answers his cell phone just as you begin to speak to him, the person who turns even simple inquiries into cynical little jabs. Everybody is moaning and groaning about the economy and Wall Street, but economic down cycles come only every five or six years and only last for 8-10 months. Negative work relationships last for years and damage your business even when the dollar is strong and the economy is booming. So one more thing to add to the list. Next time you’re book shopping or at your local library, check out a copy of John M. Gottman’s The Relationship Cure. Because building better connections with co-workers may be the best economic boost a company can hope for.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

• American Economic Review
• International Journal of Applied Management and Technology*
• International Journal of Operations and Production Management*
• Journal of International Business Studies*
• MIT Sloan Management Review*
• Management Accounting Quarterly*
• Supply Chain Management: An International Journal*

• Harvard Business Review*
• International Journal of Business*
• Journal of Administrative Sciences
• Journal of Economic Theory*
• Journal of Finance*
• Journal of Individual Employment Rights

The young lady entered the conference room at the behest of the VP of Product Development. She presented herself well, from her perfect business suit to her direct communication style. As the VP launched into a description of the new product – an application designed to serve industrial toxicology analysts – the impressive young lady took copious notes on her yellow note pad, nodding her head to indicate understanding, and looking at the VP earnestly whenever she was not writing. When the VP was done speaking, the young lady asked “is that all?” and when informed that indeed, it was, she left the room quietly and shut the door behind her.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” said the VP in exasperation.

“How many technical writers on staff?” I asked

“Three more,” she said, as she rubbed her eyebrows and slowly shook her head. “And none of the others would have asked any more questions than this writer asked.” The VP (let’s call her Karen – all these pronouns are making me dizzy) leaned back in her chair and asked me “Is this the kind of thing you can fix?”

Karen is dealing with an issue that is frequently experienced by product managers and developers. The people who are responsible for conveying the message about the product – the images, the copy, the education – never quite get to the bottom of what it is the user of the product cares about. The advertising folks may be able to make great images and draft snappy copy, but their message doesn’t sell. And sell is the only thing their message is required to do.

From a consulting standpoint, yes, there are things we can do to “fix” this issue. We’ll work on processes, customer awareness, and technical knowledge. We’ll assess the strengths and weaknesses of their art director to identify needed improvements. If the company is dealing with an advertising agency instead of in-house creative, we’ll spend some time with the account exec and creative team and see if improving the direction will make a difference, or if it’s a new agency that is needed. In the end they will have a more consistent and effective advertising, marketing, and promotion effort and they will sell more products.

But there is one thing I can’t fix. No adult can fix it for any other adult. When it’s missing, it costs businesses a lot of money. When it’s missing, people are actively cheating themselves out of the fun they could be having at work. And it’s nearly impossible to train.

Where the heck did half the work force’s curiosity go?

Curiosity is what was missing from that first meeting. If curiosity had been present, the writer would have been asking questions faster than Karen could talk. She might have even been somewhat annoying with all her questions – which would have been just fine thank you. She would have asked if she could be trained on the new product – even if she couldn’t fully operate it, at least she could picture it. She would have dashed back to her desk to start doing internet research to determine whether anyone else offered a similar product. She would have inquired whether she could speak to customers about the product and how it might help them. She might have asked if she could go observe a customer at work. Lest you think I am making a point about marketing departments, please note. Lack of curiosity damages a business from every department.

A good scientist knows that it isn’t enough to find one or two supporting pieces of evidence. You must try to invalidate your own arguments. You must do the work of uncovering multiple supporting pieces of evidence and multiple contradictory pieces of evidence, and then try to reconcile the differences through further experimentation and testing. That’s curiosity. This discipline is rarely applied to business. All too often business people rely on what worked in the past, what they feel in their gut, or the one piece of evidence they gathered by calling on a sympathetic supporter or reading a sympathetic article. That’s not curiosity – that’s hubris.

A good basketball player knows that it isn’t enough to find one unerring way to make a 3 point shot. They have to consider and be challenged by every possible move that could get in their way – and this has to happen in practice, because if it happens in the game and you’re taken by surprise you’ll miss your shot. It’s curiosity at the bottom of this behavior, and it’s discipline that follows up on the curiosity.

Merriam Webster Unabridged (2007) defines curiosity as 1) desire to know  a: inquisitive interest in others’ concerns : b: interest leading to inquiry.

A common excuse for lack of curiosity in the workplace is that “we just don’t have time. Things are moving too fast. We have to make decisions and move on.” The need to make decisions fast mustn’t supplant the importance of investigation. And in the truly curious, it can’t.  If they are really that busy (most people aren’t, by the way), the truly curious will time-shift and do their investigation at night. They will find ways to automate administrative and managerial tasks and create space to indulge their curiosity. The truly curious don’t let anything get in the way of learning more about, well, whatever it is they need to learn more about.

If that sounds like a lot of work that nobody has any time for, you’re missing the point. If we spend all of our time making unthinking decisions, shuffling mounds of paper, attending eons of meetings, and wading through acres of politics, that’s not fun. What makes work fun is our curiosity. It’s curiosity that creates the opportunity for creativity. It’s curiosity that fuels brain cells starved on a diet of the bland repetitiveness of rote thinking. It’s curiosity that gets us interested, gets us motivated, gets us noticed, gets us promoted.

The paradox is that the truly curious rarely get burnt out on work (though they may get burnt out on a particular job or manager). The incurious complain of morale issues, suffer from lack of recognition, and most horrifying of all, allow themselves to become bored.

If we weren’t tackling the problem starting right now, the writer with the yellow notepad and perfect suit would likely find herself rewriting the promotional brochure five or six times, each time wondering why the product development people can’t make up their minds, or can’t do a better job of describing the product they made. Karen (the VP) would eventually give up, thinking that perhaps her expectations were too high, perhaps her dreams of customer empathic copy were unrealistic (they aren’t).

I’m not sure why some people are more curious than others, because I believe we all are born with the same capacity for curiosity. But I am sure of this. Ultimately, only curiosity saves the company. Everything else is just for show.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

I wasn't going to do any more email after I shut things down tonight, but then I peeked. And I saw an email from a client with a subject line that said "Please Help Me." Of course I had to read it. What followed was a forwarded email from a business associate offering one of the most painfully uninformed (and unasked for) marketing suggestions I had ever encountered. My client wanted to know how to respond, and I said, "With Silence."

After all, Miss Manners would tell you that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And besides, the email didn't request a response. The writer just said "I thought it would be interesting to suggest . . . "

Interesting indeed.

Another client is faced with a completely ego-centric partner, a person who constantly tries to entice her into uncomfortable games. She doesn't want to get sucked in any more, but she didn't know what to do. I suggested that she place her fist under her chin (think June Cleaver listening to The Beaver as he explains some prank), give an interested but puzzled look, say, "Hmm."  That's with a period behind it. Not a question mark, and certainly not an exclamation. Just a period. Then either change the subject or get up and (pick an activity - get a cup of coffee, return to her office, whatever makes the most sense).

It's easy to invest in the idea that we must express our opinion, must be understood, apologized to, shown more respect, or at least not treated poorly. And when we do that we give away our power to feel really good about ourselves by prevailing in the strangest - or most uncouth - of situations. I know from experience that simply looking at someone who has just been terribly rude to you, giving them a quizzical smile and no other reaction, can really rattle their chainmail - while at the same time protecting you from a potentially childish or ugly interaction.

Good manners are the stuff of civilization. They are a powerful antidote to behavior that is (sniff) rather inappropriate. And let's face it - in some situations it's actually quite fun to walk away feeling superior.

Much of my time is spent working with entrepreneurs, and I have discovered that many, if not most, are uncomfortable with the role and responsibility of leadership. The typical entrepreneur is someone who has a desire to be financially self-determined, who has enough confidence to try something on their own, and who is willing to take some risks. Most of them are comfortable with the idea of being someone else’s boss. But they would prefer to be a boss without being a leader.

What is it about being a leader that is so daunting? Part of the problem may be that we’ve taken the concept of leader and attached it to larger-than-life personalities like Jack Welch, making anyone else who aspires to leadership look like a pallid wanna-be.

Part of the problem may be that our national personality is largely influenced by populism, the idea that the rank and file have greater value than their leaders because of, their, um superior realness (read on to discover the glorious contradiction of this idea). This populist tendency leads to a rather toxic practice of boss-bashing and fault finding. Any intelligent person who wishes to pursue a position of leadership must first consider their own ability to deal with constant criticism. One of the first pieces of management advice I ever received, delivered from a mentor I revered, was “the higher you fly the more you get shot at.” I have often encountered talented workers who were unwilling to break ranks with their fellow workers and train for management because they didn’t want to upset the social applecart.

Another reason some people eschew leadership is because it’s so damned responsible. Myriad scientific and social studies demonstrate that the wildly successful aren’t those who make less mistakes – they are the ones who make more mistakes, because it requires much more action and risk-taking to achieve big wins. Leaders are by their nature flawed. Truly great leaders air all their flaws in public in pursuit of great accomplishments. The responsibility of driving an organization forward is the responsibility of constantly trying to be educated, informed, forward-thinking, and strategic thinking enough to make more decisions than anyone else has to make – frequently at breakneck speed and always at the risk of being wrong. The armchair leadership critique squads get to sit on the sideline and comment on everything from the leader’s personality to their character to their subject knowledge to their style. They are sometimes correct, rarely kind.

No wonder many entrepreneurs would rather be a garden-variety boss than a leader. It’s safer. You get to keep/make more friends. You get to make the vast majority of your mistakes in private.

The problem for entrepreneurs who do not wish to be leaders is that it doesn’t work. People crave leadership, even as they criticize it, even as they resist it. We all want to know where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, what risks we’re going to face, and what our chances are of making it. If nobody takes a leadership role, the result is the social equivalent of sheep milling around in a barnyard. The contradiction of our social populism is our equally great craving for accomplishment, a sense of purpose.

Can a business survive without a leader? Absolutely – I hear about and encounter businesses without leadership every day. Business owners who are described as wishy-washy by their employees, who avoid making difficult decisions, who move the business so incrementally that the evolution is nearly indiscernible (or nonexistent), who push tough decisions off to people like the human resource manager, the operations manager, and the accounting department. They are frequently well-liked, even admired, people. But do their businesses grow and thrive? No, they do not.

When an entrepreneur takes the responsibility for hiring others, they take on a responsibility for other people’s lives. If you’re self-employed and it all falls apart, you’re only damaging yourself and your family. When an employer goes down the drain they take many others with them – employees, vendors, and even customers. 

Many entrepreneurs believe that by being very conservative – by not making mistakes – they will preserve their business. But case-study after case-study demonstrates that the typical business failure isn’t made of one bad decision (or even several bad decisions), but of failure to evolve, to chart new territory, to end things that have lost their value (or never had value), to seek new customers in new markets or to invent new ways to create value. Failure is typically the result of stasis.

The practice of leadership is demanding; demanding of skills, knowledge, ability to grow, and ability to maintain self-confidence. Jim Collins asserts that to be a great leader one must first be a great manager. Leadership isn’t about charisma. It’s about having tremendous knowledge about the work (all the work), how to do the work, and what could improve the work. At the same time a leader is looking inside with tremendous insight, understanding, and contribution, they are also looking outside with foresight, a passion for learning, and an eagerness to evolve. The competent leader is assessing all the variables, recognizing that each option presents both pros and cons, and driving in the direction of the greatest pros while working to offset or eliminate the cons.

And great leaders? Jim Collins says that a great leader goes beyond those characteristics to combine a blend of intense personal will with great humility. And there it is. The biggest risk. One does not become a great leader without having first been a not-great leader. Humility is learned on-the-job. The risks of leadership aren’t just technical, strategic, financial. They are personal. Intensely personal. The emerging leader must make peace with a very difficult idea. He (or she) must accept that demands and complaints from the rank and file are part of his growth, because a leader must strive to be more capable, more effective, a better decision-maker than the people they aspire to lead. And he does all this in public, being the flawed human being he is, and holding himself to a higher standard than his critics will ever be held to themselves. More daunting is the fact that this goes on for a long time, because great humility is rarely achieved in one’s 30s or 40s. Great humility is typically pursued over a lifetime, which means someone who aspires to be a great leader is aspiring to decades of humility lessons. 

Is it fair? Well, as I often ask my children, “what’s fair anyway?” The more appropriate question is “what do you want to achieve?”  If what you wish to achieve is a thriving business that grows and evolves and is capable of producing the retirement income or legacy you desire, you will need to either accept the role of leadership or fully entrust that role to someone else who will. If you choose to learn to be a leader – then a great leader – the financial, intellectual, and psychic rewards can be great, but as with every great reward, you will pay the price every day. You will have to be a striving, mistake-making, earnest, struggling, imperfect human on a public stage. The ultimate risk. And perhaps the greatest reward of all. 

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

An Organization Process to Lighten Your Load

I am enjoying my new grandson. At four weeks old he has very few needs, and they are all equally essential. But with every week that goes by he will add new needs, and before you know it, prioritization will be in order.

The interesting thing about prioritization is that it must be a conscious act. 

Oh sure, if you're in the middle of the road about to get hit by a car, your brain (or, more accurately, your autonomic response system) will tell you the most important thing in the world is to get out of the way.

But beyond genuine fight-or-flight situations, your mind pretty much treats buying next year's Secret Santa gift and completing a promotion-worthy proposal the same way. If either of those ideas happens to pop into your head, they both take up the identical amounts of space. Do you happen to be a worrier? The subconscious mind also has a difficult time distinguishing between the real and the imaginary - which is why your worries feel so real.

In fact, your mind obsesses over every detail it perceives as not-managed. Important meeting with your boss? Check. Pick up milk on the way home? Check. Call an important client? Check. Look for your favorite blue socks? Check. The more details you have in your life, the more crowded your head space becomes. And this is no word cloud, thoughtfully assembled with a puzzle-graphic of harmonious words fitted thoughtfully together. No, it's all big words, each shouting to be heard over the others.

How do you quiet the noise and clear your headspace? The solution is laughably simple. Write. Everything. Down. If it needs to be done, and you can't delegate it nor can you do it right away, write it down. Is it a meeting? Put it in your calendar. Is it a task? Put it in your task list. Is it an idea you want to remember for some day? Put it in your idea drawer or folder or box. Is it something you are worrying about or stressing over? Write it down in your task list along with three things you can do to get on the road to resolving it. Write it all down.

Why does this work? Because once you have consciously managed your random concerns and open tasks, your busy busy subconscious mind takes a big sigh of relief, grateful that you have taken conscious control of the situation. This means your subconscious mind can stop rummaging through all your unfinished business, frantically reminding you what needs to be done. Your subconscious mind can turn it's attention to higher-value and more interesting work, like storing and indexing memories and running your nervous system. In return, you will feel calmer, with more clarity and creativity.

After years of experimentation with every possible version of tasks lists, I have distilled it to this: one spiral notebook. I have tried notebooks for every subject, notebooks for every topic, color-coded notebooks. But ultimately, what works best is one notebook for everything: work, family, personal development, grocery store lists, board and volunteer responsibilities. Spiral, because you want your list to hold together. Only one, because you shouldn't have to create a management system for your management system.

Don't make it complicated. Write each distinct task and put an open box at the front of each line. When you have completed each task, put a check mark or an X in the box. A quick visual scan will tell you what still needs to be done.

Can you use an app or computer task list instead? Sure. Just choose one without unnecessary complexity; something you know you will use every single time a random to - do cycles through your brain.

Our world has changed faster than our biology has evolved, leaving us swimming in a sea of demands and details that conspire to put us under.  This simple process (and the understanding behind it) will give your subconscious mind a much-needed break. Yourcreativity and clarity will thank you.

If you found this helpful, you may want to take Andrea Hill's webinar "The Secrets to Organizing Yourself and Your Staff." New sessions are scheduled regularly. Watch for all training sessions with Andrea Hill here.

Did you think I could resist showing you a picture of my new grandson? Here he is :)

Business downsizing is beginning to happen in earnest, and it’s only going to get worse through the first and second quarters of 2009. But there is a lot of work that still needs to get done, so contract workers will be in demand for the foreseeable future. Enter the virtual team.

If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them. A lot of folks will put themselves out there as contract workers while they search for permanent employment (white collar workers are going to get hit with downsizing after blue-collar, but they're still going to get hit by this).  But not every talented professional is cut out for independent contract work.

In my experience, the people who are successful in virtual work teams tend to be more motivated than the average worker. I think a lot of people try virtual work, or get assigned to virtual teams, but the ones who excel at it tend to be self-motivated self-starters. And they are the ones who return to virtual team assignments again and again (either because they like them, or because their employers recognize they are good at it and keep assigning them). These folks may enjoy the self-employed route so much that they continue to work in this capacity even after the job market opens up again. And if you want to maintain access to these folks, there are a few things about motivation you’ll need to know.

One of the differences in managing a virtual team is recognizing that your high performers require a lot of recognition. People tend to think that self-motivated self-starters don't require as much recognition as other workers, and that's a mistake. They perform for the pride and joy of performing, and while receiving the right monetary compensation is important, receiving the right recognition is critical.

When you are managing a traditional office team, you can convey recognition in a lot of ways - through brief chats to give them personal attention, by responding with laughter or a smile to something they say, by nodding at their recommendations in a meeting. When you are managing a virtual team, you have to work a lot harder to provide the appropriate recognition for their efforts.

This requires more consciousness than some people might think. For instance, a lot of people aren't good at giving specific recognition, but their body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other responses convey approval, so the employee still gets recognition. If you are managing virtual employees, you need to take the time to offer specific and effective recognition, and consider whether that recognition should go to the whole group or just the individual (there's a time and place for both).

If using email, you need to state the recognition in written words, then decide whether this is a "reply to all" or just "reply." If on the phone, it's important to include a few extra minutes for chit-chat, so they can warm back up to you as a human and sense your approval through your gift of time. I've found IM and other methods of CHAT to be great ways to send a quick "hey - haven't heard from you all day. Just checking in to make sure you're OK!" I've been told by employees that this was very meaningful to them. I've also found meeting minutes to be a tremendous source of communication beyond the details of the meeting. I take meeting minutes very seriously, because if it's not written down it won't get done, and I've always taken my turn with taking the minutes. People began to look in my minutes for a joke or recognition buried within them, and the person recognized in each case feels pretty good about that.

Don’t take for granted that your virtual team workers are just excited to get the paycheck. Perhaps they are, but with every other business around you downsizing too, the competition for the highly competent virtual workers could be high – and those are the only people you’ll want to hire.

© 2008. Andrea M. Hill

The Disgusting Yet Compelling Cure for Procrastination

I'm eating live frogs this morning. Figurative ones to be sure, but eating I am. Why? Because I have things to accomplish.

I was once chatting with a group of industry associates and my dear friend Malak shared this Mark Twain quote: "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day."  That thought sticks with me when I am torn between doing the things I want to do and doing the things I need to do.

One of the most frequent questions I hear from participants in my productivity and organization speeches and seminars is, "but what do I do about procrastination?" To a great extent, procrastination is a first world problem, a modern problem. If we had to grow and preserve all the food we needed to survive, if we had to spackle and fortify our homes for winter, we would feel the howls of survival nipping at our heels at all times. But we don't, so we can put things off. What do we put off? The less appealing, less entertaining, more energy-demanding things. The live frogs.

I'm not a fan of complicated organization systems. The simpler the system, the more you are likely to use it. But I do strongly endorse one filter. Identify the things you don't want to do. Do this consciously. Yes, of course you unconsciously know the things you don't want to do - your eyes are probably skipping past them as you review your to-do list. But consciously pluck out the things that are least appealing to you, and schedule them for first thing in the morning. Not three weeks from now, but tomorrow. Monday. Your next opportunity. Do them first.

I have a whole list of things I want to do, and getting out in the yard is at the top of that list. I also have things I need to do. So I jumped up this morning and headed for my desk. Now I'm done, and I'll head for the yard with a clean conscience and a happy heart. Of course, I've already scheduled my first hour Monday morning for a live frog that's due on Tuesday. But that's OK. It will get done, and the rest of my day will be terrific.

It takes a certain amount of ego to start a business, own a business, take a job as the president or CEO of a business - a healthy ego is a prerequisite to a lot of success stories. But what happens when that ego is out of control?

What happens when the personal maturity and wisdom of the business owner/leader/CEO are not equal to the task of leading employees with responsibility, empathy, and humanity?

A recent book by British Journalist Jon Ronson called The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness of Industry has even found that the incidence of psychopathy in CEOs is about four times that of the general population (4% versus 1%) - psychopathy primarily being characterized by lack of empathy, lack of guilt feelings, poor impulse control, inflated sense of self, etc.

In some cases those with out-of-control egos achieve huge financial results and market success, and are hailed as amazing business leaders - though Ronson suggests these are the anomalies, often representing short-term successes and longer-term failures. I continue to scratch my head about Steve Jobs. Of course he was wildly creative, but I just can't give him a hall pass for all the control-freakish, ego-fueled, belittling of others behavior he entitled himself to over his years at Apple. And of course, his ultimate business legacy is still undecided.

But let's not be fooled. For every ego-maniac who makes it to the heights of business, there must be 10,000 ego-maniacs who get in their own way so much that their businesses falter and fail. All of us have worked for one or more of them at some point in our careers, and if you have young adult children you've probably watched your kids suffer through at least one ego-maniac as well.

Why do I bring all this up? Because one of the most important things we as business owners can do is to constantly work on our own emotional health. When leading small teams of people toward challenging goals like positive cash-flow and profitable growth, it is essential to earn their trust and respect by being people worthy of those feelings. Of course, we all wake up on the wrong side of the bed or let our stresses get the best of us on occasion. But the more often that happens, the less our employees are capable of respecting us and rallying to our side.

Lack of ego strength shows up in a lot of different ways. The most obvious is a loss of temper or failure to communicate in respectful, civil ways. But condescension veiled in civility is almost as bad as a blow-up and ultimately leads to much deeper resentment than throwing a coffee cup. Failure to recognize that others' ideas are as good as our own - even if they are different; the inability to let others' find their own path to an agreed-upon desired end result; the need to tout our own superior concept even as we congratulate someone for their success; a tendency to discount another's intelligence or - God forbid - creativity; these are all indications of a lack of ego strength and examples of the types of behavior that lead our employees to give us less than their best.

A small business owner has immense challenges to overcome and very few resources to provide support. So here's a toast to self-awareness and emotional health - may we all find the balance between ego and humility necessary (in most cases) to achieve the long-term business success and retirement income we ultimately desire.

I hate to spend much time writing about reality, because so few people actually want to deal in it. But I’ll take a risk on realities tonight, because for some reason Wednesdays seem more reality-receptive than the other days of the week.

Let’s start with the reality that it’s impossible to get a home loan these days. As a person who is selling a home and buying a home, I can tell you that there is plenty of financing out there. If you have good credit, if you have some money to put down, and if you have an income. Sounds fairly reasonable, right? So, is the reality that the housing market has fallen apart, or that the housing market was unrealistic to begin with and has simply corrected? If I – who have been stuck selling a house for 185.5 days now – can recognize this fact, other less emotionally attached people surely could. And the financial markets? Well yes, they’ve suffered. But credit has certainly not dried up. And all these newspaper journalists touting the difficulty of getting credit are likely scaring away my potential buyers (among other arguably more important economic damage they are also likely causing).

Let’s not even get started discussing whether the primaries are reality-based or not.

How much reality is involved when we are making a hiring decision? Do we pay attention to all the important facts and figures, like work history, education, experience, behavioral indicators, references, and only then trust our gut feeling? Or do we rationalize that we have particularly high EQ (when polled, over 90% of poll-ees claim to have high EQ, compared to various studies that indicate the actual number is somewhere in the 15-25% range)? And what are those rationalizations actually based on? A different reality. The one that tells us to what extent someone is like us or doesn’t remind us of someone who irritates or scares us.

Business income/operating statements reflect the reality of a business, right? But which reality? Depending on how you capitalize, amortize, categorize, and agonize, the same business could have many different income statements – without anyone doing anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with this. But when one uses income and operating statements to manipulate, to support personal opinions that may or may not be based on fact or good knowledge, one can damage a business.

Most of us have had the experience at least once of listening to someone talk themselves (and probably others) into doing something unethical. It’s not hard to take facts and manipulate them to support a questionable reality.

Here’s one of my favorites. “I don’t have time to . . . (fill in the blank).” That’s not reality. We all have time. It would be more honest to say “It’s not important enough to me to . . . (fill in blank the same way as before).”

Why this rant about reality? Because so many business decisions are based, not on reality, but on emotions. Yes guys, you too – just as often as the gals. We get all wrapped up in believing we are right, or fearing we might be wrong, or fearing the consequences, or being offended that someone doesn’t agree with us – the list goes on and on and on. Every single day in buildings across the globe people make decisions that are ultimately about making themselves feel better, or smarter, or smarter-than, or to keep them from being so damned afraid. And what does it do for business? Nothing very good.

Reality is another word for truth. Truth is exceedingly hard to get at. And what we want to be true and what really is true are frequently not the same. But a dedication to truth in all its grimy grungy splendor can free a person, an organization, a community – you get the picture, so aim high here – to accomplish great things.

Really.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

 When I was a really young adult I set a goal of becoming the president or CEO of some significant sized organization by the time I was 30. And I achieved that goal. And then the first day in my brand new office at my brand new desk, when I should have been feeling flush with accomplishment. The feeling of responsibility for that accomplishment hit me like a buss. And I felt not only responsible for the organization's health, but also for the 200 plus people who worked for me, and the families that depended on them. So I began the process of figuring out what it takes to be responsible for a company. And over time, I've discovered three really important things. The thing I started with, the thing that got me to that 30 year old goal, was appreciation for the importance of expertise. We have to invest ourselves every single day in being an expert. And being an expert in running a business is different than being an expert in marketing or in selling or in being a doctor. Being an expert in business means that you have to have sufficient expertise in all of the areas that the business depends on to be successful. You don't have to be the biggest subject matter expert in those things. In fact, it's wise to bring people to work with you that are the biggest subject matter expert in each of those areas. But you have to have enough expertise in selling, in marketing, in product development or product acquisition or product manufacturing, or finance, and management and leadership 0151 all of the moving parts that make a business work. You have to have enough expertise in each of those areas, to be able to listen to and appreciate and support the true subject matter experts that you assemble to help you achieve your goals. So, expertise is really important.

There's also never a point at which you get to stop developing that expertise.There's no such thing as achieving all the expertise necessary to be the successful business person you want to be, because the world keeps changing, and as we've seen in the last 25-30 years, technology keeps changing. So what it takes to be successful keeps changing. And when I say this I'm sure you're thinking, Well, duh. But I keep encountering people running businesses who stopped developing. Maybe they stopped in 1982, or maybe they stopped in 1992, or maybe they only stopped in 2006, but business has changed so much even since 2006, that these people are now operating at a disadvantage, and so are their businesses, and the people that depend on them to keep that business going so that they can earn a livelihood - and their customers and their vendors because all of these people are partners in your business. So there's never a point at which you get to stop developing expertise. The older we get, the tireder  we get and the more we think "I just kind of like to chill out a little bit," the easier it is to give up the knowledge development, part of our work.

So, we show up every morning and we we do the work that needs to be done that day. And the thing that gets sacrificed is the constant investment in new learning. In fact, I had a friend who told me, and this is like 10 years ago now, "I'm tired of learning new stuff. I just want a year when I don't have to learn a bunch of new stuff." But that's not a living goal. That that's not something that people who are alive to decide to do. So, you have to keep learning, and you have to recognize that if you're going to sacrifice anything, because we are busy and we're raising kids, and then we get a brief break and then we're taking care of parents and the business demands so much of us and blah blah blah blah blah. The thing you cannot sacrifice is the professional and personal development. That doesn't get to happen.

So, we need to have expertise, and then we need to keep developing that expertise, because we realize that the world is going to change. And we need to keep changing with it. And then at some point, that expertise actually gets in our way. It got in mine, and I see a lot of other people for whom this is true. So I think it's something we have to watch out for. There is a hubris that comes with expertise, the sense that "I already know what needs to be done. I've done it well already, have done it well for years, I've had some crazy success stories so obviously my expertise is the answer."

But it's not, it never is or it might be enough of an answer but not the best answer. So the other thing we have to do is surround ourselves with people who are more innovative than us, or more intuitive than us, or more technical than us. We need to surround ourselves with people who have different types of deep subject matter expertise. But it's not enough to just surround ourselves with them. It's not enough to just have fun meetings with them and do brainstorming with them. Because if we walk away and do our own thing based on our comfort with our own expertise, then we're just wasting everybody's time. So we also have to make it safe and possible for those people that we surrounded ourselves with to actually have an impact. We have to listen to them, we have to try their ideas.

So there are two things that most of us have to get past in order to successfully do this. Well first,, there's these three things we need to do. 1) We need to get to a level of deep expertise, 2) we need to commit to never stopping developing that expertise, and then 3) we have to surround ourselves with people who have different types of intelligence in greater doses than our own, and we have to listen to them.

So what are the two barriers that get in the way of that? Well, the first is the resistance to learning. Most everything you need to know to learn to run a business is entirely within your grasp. So it's not like acquiring new knowledge is outside your ability. But when we're faced with learning something new, and technology is a good example, a lot of business leaders don't want to figure out how the technology in their business works. Or, they may be totally comfortable with understanding how the technology in their manufacturing environment works, but they don't want to have to learn how the technology in their marketing environment works. So technology is a good example.  We have this resistance to learning something new, and it's based on fear. We're usually intimidated by the idea that we have to learn this new thing, or it's based on just feeling like it's going to take more energy than we have. I mean, the truth is if you can get up and get in the car every morning and go to the office, or if you can get up and work at your bench, or if you can get up and jump on a plane and go visit customers, you're exerting the same level of energy that's needed for learning. You're just exerting it in a different area. We can get past our resistance to learning, if we can stop and say, "I need to learn this new thing, and I can."  Then that breaks through one of the two major barriers to be successful with 1) developing expertise, 2) continuing to develop our expertise and 3) inviting opposing and challenging viewpoints.

The second thing we have to do is to resist our own tendency to feel threatened by somebody who knows more than us. I thought this issue was only true for people in corporations, where everybody's climbing up the ladder and everybody wants their manager's job and the manager wants the next manager's job. So there can be a real tendency to feel threatened by people coming along who know more than you do or who are more organized than you are or who are more charismatic than you. In the corporate world we started talking 20 years ago about the fact that if you didn't prepare the person behind you to take your place, that you couldn't go anywhere. I'm sure that seems like it should have just been really rational, and I'm sure there were business leaders going back 200 years ago that understood that. But about 20 years ago we really started trying to push this, because corporate politics being what they are, people were being held back instead of moved forward. So we were trying to introduce this idea of self interest, that if you don't prepare the people around you to replace you, then you can't go anywhere else either. And I thought that was going to be mostly a corporate type of behavior - that the politics of corporations lead to managers feeling threatened by strong people around them. But I found out that's not true. The more I work with independent business owners, the more I've discovered that it's a human trait, not a corporate/political trait. And I recognize it in myself. It's something that I've had to always work to make sure it didn't play an important role in my decision making.

It's really importan to challenge our tendency to feel threatened by people presenting new ideas and challenging the ideas we have, and it's probably because ideas and expertise and our thought processes, they're very personal to us. So there's a, an underlying threat to having the things we're comfortable with get shaken up. But if we can do those two things, if we can resist the resistance to learning, no matter how old we are, and if we can resist the tendency to feel threatened by others that bring different types of intelligence to the experience, then we have a really good shot at running a successful business, no matter what size it is.

Like you, I am ready to wrap up my work week and begin my weekend. And if I’m not in the mood to write a pertinent business insight or share a particular business philosophy, that’s fine, because you’re probably not in the mood to read those things either. But we all have a lot on our minds, don’t we. 

What kind of weekend will it be? If today’s news headlines are any indication, it will be a weekend of families worrying about job security, staying home or engaging in otherwise free activities. The Sunday papers will likely be filled with gloomy analysis.

I invite you to ponder two thoughts over the weekend. I’d like you to think about the effects of fear, and the benefits of action.

Let’s start with fear. If you are running from a wild carnivore or a burglar with a blunt instrument, fear will serve you well. It will send adrenaline surging through your body, and assuming you don’t have the reflexes of a rabbit, it will help you outrun – or at least provide a respectable chase for – your adversary. Beyond that initial reaction fear is damaging. Prolonged exposure to stress hormones dulls the senses and leads to exhaustion and paranoia.

So do yourself a favor. Go have some fun this weekend. The human body cannot be simultaneously stressed and relaxed. If you are completely engaged in having fun you won’t be stressing, and your body and mind will benefit from the break. If you are tired enough when you go to bed, you’ll fall asleep and likely stay that way. And if you’re busy all day Sunday, tackling the honey-do list, going on a hike, swimming at the health club or the Y – whatever it is you do – you won’t have time to read the Sunday paper or sit around watching the news.

Some of the benefits of action have been outlined above. But there’s more to productive action than just being physically busy to reduce stress. You may actually be facing a sharp business slow-down, worries over your current financial commitments, or the loss of a job. 

If you are facing those concerns now, you will benefit from taking creative action to address them. Business owners need to do more than austerity measures to get by right now – they must analyze their entire business premise and identify opportunities for renewal and growth. We are experiencing a financial crisis on top of a cyclical recession. What does that mean? Historically, that means that when the fear lifts and the financial markets settle, the economy will return to where it was before the fear and craziness of the crisis set in. For us, that means we’ll be staring, not at a full recovery, but at the recession we were gearing up for in the middle of 2007. Layoffs and cutbacks in capital spending are temporary – and fairly damaging – reactions. It’s time to take a more creative approach to ensuring your business viability.

People worried about their ability to meet financial commitments need to put a financial work-out plan on paper. Making a plan won’t solve the problem, but there’s no solving the problem without a plan. Most people in financial trouble are pleasantly surprised to discover that putting a plan on paper sends them running toward financial solvency. Plans work.

People facing the threat of a layoff – or who have already lost a job – need to do three things immediately. First, they need an updated resume, and they should have that resume reviewed by someone knowledgeable about the difference between a strong resume and a weak resume. Second, they must conduct thorough job-market research. Most people are unaware of the job opportunities right in their community. Conversely, if there is no job opportunity in their field, they need to know that quickly so they can either look where the jobs are or figure out how to qualify for the jobs that exist. This leads us to consider job training. 

Thirty years ago this country spent 3.5 times more on job training per year than we spend today. Before you say, “great – we need less government,” consider this: We are in the process of a massive restructuring of our economy. The jobs in retail, manufacturing, and financial services are not going to recover. What are those workers going to do?

Competitive folks will be figuring out job retraining for themselves, ideally before their jobs are gone. Even if the markets settled on Monday (which they won’t), this economic restructuring is going to march on. Each person must take a good hard look at their skills and figure out which skills will translate to other jobs and which skills they must develop to be more successful in the job they have or to be more competitive for a job they need.

I know, I started off by telling you to have fun this weekend. I don’t think this information undermines that. Any time we do something meaningful to advance our lot in life, we feel better. So getting outdoors, out of the house, out of your head this weekend will do you a world of good, whether your worries are right here right now or just out there on the horizon. Getting to work on solving problems – rather than just worrying about them – will make you feel better too. When we don’t do the things we need to do – the things that add value to our lives – it’s usually because we’re scared. Tackling your problems – with a business workout, with a financial plan, or with a job change plan – may feel daunting (check out the MentorWerx post today, which addresses why we avoid doing the important things), but once you dive in you’ll discover you feel better just for taking charge.

So, this is my way of telling you to go have a great weekend. Go, take charge of your life. You might as well pursue optimism and self-empowerment. After all, the fear is killing us.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

I’m doing my annual ritual rounds at the Las Vegas jewelry shows: Part information gathering for my blog and industry articles, part assisting clients who are exhibiting, and part checking in with designers. Working a trade show is hard. I don’t mean for me – I mean for the people who are selling. And it’s particularly hard for the artists who are selling their own designs. If that’s you, I’m writing this for you. I hope you get a chance to read this before you do the show all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

When you create a piece of art, you put a big piece of yourself into it. You dug around in your essential self and you figured out something to say. You’ve done something unusual, something special. Many people spend an entire life without searching for and finding something authentic to say. Then, you take it one step further. You take that expression, that thought, that idea, and you turn it into a physical thing. Then, you do the nearly unthinkable. You stick that physical object out there in public for other people to look at, comment on, fall in love with . . . and reject. Of all the people who do the work of finding something authentic to say, only a fraction of them go on to express it and risk exposing it to others.

But you do this. And you don’t do it because you have this excess of confidence – because while some of you may have that, most of you have the normal amount of confidence which involves a lot of self-doubt. You don’t do it because you have a thick skin, because having a thick skin seems to be somewhat at odds with having the will and the ability to create art. No, you do it because you must. You do it because you want to live your life creating art, and that means you must also learn how to sell art.

Which is why I often encounter overwhelmed designers at trade shows.

Never mind the weeks you’ve spent preparing your inventory (and the debt you went into to do it), or the fact that you’ve spent a small fortune just to be here. You’ve learned to work crazy long hours and take massive leaps of faith; the contestants on Shark Tank have got nothing on you when it comes to true entrepreneurial spirit. No, the deeper test comes when the show opens.

You understand that your product is right for some stores and not others. You get it when someone says to you, “You have great work – I just don’t have the client for it.” You readily smile back at people who smile at you but walk by on their way somewhere else. But still, those rejections add up (and a lot of buyers are much ruder and cruder than that). It’s really easy to start thinking, “Why don’t they like my work? What’s wrong with my work? There must be something wrong with my work.” And since that work is something you dug up from inside you, what you’re really saying is, “There must be something wrong with me.”

It’s not true though. There is nothing wrong with you. Those rejections are not even about you.

What you are experiencing as rejection is something entirely different from the perspective of the person on the other end of the transaction. The person on the other side of the transaction:

• May actually love your work and would buy it for herself, but has learned the hard way that the people in her area really don’t buy your type of design. Let’s call this person the “I’d buy it if I could sell it” buyer.
• May not like your style, but it has nothing to do with you – it has to do with her own tastes, and she merchandises her store as if all her customers share her tastes. This is the “my clients are all reflections of me” buyer.
• May only know enough about merchandising to consider things she finds familiar. This is the “buys the outfit in the department store window” buyer.
• Is sitting under a crushing mountain of inventory and totally cash poor. This is the “saving face by acting like I’m shopping at the show” buyer.
• Is so terrified of losing her one or two big brands that she’s buying their minimums even though she still has some of last year’s buy and some from the year before. Let’s call her the “Rolex Retailer” buyer.
• Knew enough about jewelry to buy in some great designer lines, but lacked the experience in marketing to know how to attract the right customer, and now she’s scared to invest more. Let’s call her the “an awful lot like me” buyer.
• Is running the store that her grandparents started, and doing everything right, but she’s in a town made up of middle America and her customers no longer have the money to buy jewelry. Let’s call her the “same reason we have Trump and Bernie” buyer.
• Is just a jackass. Kept you assembling an order for 90 minutes only to walk away; told you how he already did something like that, only 20 years ago and better; picked the line apart for no other reason than to make someone else feel worse than he apparently feels inside; nickles and dimes you to pieces. Let’s call this one the “karma can’t come fast enough” buyer.

I share all this not to bring you down, but to remind you that there is a reason behind each rejection that has nothing to do with you. And when the malicious little shame monster starts telling you you’re not good enough, you must silence it. You start with:

That buyer didn’t just reject me. That buyer is having an internal negotiation that actually has nothing to do with me. Whatever is going on with that buyer has nothing to do with my designs, their value, or my value.

And then you add:

And if you choked up a little bit just reading those words, if they made you uncomfortable, sad, or angry, I want you to go to the nearest mirror and say them out loud. Don’t mumble it, don’t rush. Just say them with conviction.

Yes, the market is tough right now. Nobody can really say if this is a just a down cycle or the beginning of a new consumer era. But consumers will continue to buy and wear jewelry, and there is a consumer for you. You may or may not find what you need at any particular show, but that customer is out there. And one sure way to build the energy and enthusiasm you’ll need to keep looking for that customer is to put each rejection in perspective firmly and quickly.

So for the next three days, turn the passers-by, the no-thank-yous, and the maybe-next-years into a game. Think about which buyer type they are (hey – if you have a new type to suggest, put it in the comments!!), then quickly remind yourself that you are enough, and that it is not you or your work that has been rejected. Doing this will help you stay strong, stay positive, and stay in the game, because your buyer is out there too, and you want to be in a positive, confident place when that one arrives.

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I had a friend only a few years older than me who was so devoted to being comfortable that it killed him. He was diagnosed with Type two diabetes in his 40s. And shortly after that, with congestive heart failure, he needed to change his lifestyle, but he didn't want to give up the foods he loved. And he didn't like the aches and pains in his back and legs when he exercised. So he indulged himself. He didn't make himself uncomfortable.

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And he died several years ago, barely into his 60s. I was going to say that's an extreme example. But is it really don't we all do things that put comfort over well-being? I know I do. This drive for comfort is an impulse we need to resist. And it's particularly true for business owners. The Chinese have a saying wealth will not last beyond the third generation. The idea is that the first generation builds the wealth, the second generation maintains the wealth, and the third generation spends it.

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There may be some truth to that, but what I want to reflect on today is generations one and two. Those motivated to build wealth want something better than what they already have. So there is discomfort present and building wealth requires risk, which also involves discomfort. Entrepreneurs aren't just crazy ideas people. There are people who are comfortable with taking risk. They are comfortable with being uncomfortable. Maintaining wealth typically involves the opposite. Maintenance suggests risk avoidance and staying within comfort zones.

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What if the third generation isn't inherently a bunch of wastrels? What if third generations are simply the ones left with? What happens when too much comfort has been indulged because too much status quo leads to decline? It's scary to learn new things, not because new things are fundamentally scary, but because we have to get uncomfortable, work new muscles and develop new neural pathways. It's scary to change our businesses. What if we're wrong? What if we don't succeed?

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What will other people think? These are all very uncomfortable thoughts. So even though we know that staying the same won't bring improvement, we do it because it's more comfortable than changing. Business is changing rapidly and dramatically. Business owners must learn new skills, new technologies, new operating behaviors and new ways of advertising and marketing. Retail must find new ways to engage and keep customers. And all this learning is uncomfortable. But indulging the need to be comfortable could lead to the demise of your business.

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And that's not very comfortable at all, is it?

If you ever worry that you have adult onset ADD, you're not alone. Maybe you do, or maybe your life is just filled with way too many distractions. Before you go running to the doctor for help, consider these tips for getting focused and staying that way.

Getting Focused Requires a Plan

One of the best ways to waste an entire day on minutiae is to start without a plan. You know those days. You start with high energy and big ideas, but by lunch you realize you've been doing nothing but email and trouble-shooting, and by the end of the day you're experiencing the bad sort of tired; the antsy, agitated, tired-with-nothing-to-show-for-it tired.

When you start the day with a plan, your efficient brain will help keep you on track all day long, even if that plan is just lurking somewhere in the back of your subconscious. The plan doesn't have to be some big Microsoft-Project-worthy thing either. All you need to do is start each day with writing down the one or two or three things you intend to accomplish that day. So simple, yet so profoundly effective. And if you get to lunchtime and realize you're totally off track, write your plan at lunch and rescue the rest of your day.

Getting Focused Means Managing Distractions

If your email is binging, sending a popup to your screen, or otherwise alerting you every time a new email comes in, then you have turned the management of your life over to Google, Microsoft, or Apple. This goes for your phone too! In fact, any app that alerts you about new information is being given an inappropriate amount of control. If you want to know what the temperature is outside, you can check it. Trust me - your phone really doesn't know specifically when you need to know these things - it only knows that something has changed and you have asked to be alerted.

I love technology and all the information and advantages it can provide. But the best way to get focused and stay focused each day is to take control of your devices. Turn off your notifications (OK, I leave on severe weather alerts), and check email, weather, Instagram, Facebook, etc. when it's the right time for you to check those things -- not when your devices tell you to.

How Your Brain Works

Your brain loves stimulation. When interesting things are cropping up all around you, your brain wants to take it all in. And different parts of your brain respond to different stimuli, so when there are lots of distractions, your brain looks like a little thunderstorm, with lightning in the back, then in the front, then on the side . . . you get my drift. And all that activity in the brain actually feels pretty good, so we let it happen.

But do you know what feels even better? Flow. When you get into a state of concentration - and manage to tune out the distractions for about 15 minutes - you settle into that ultra focused, high-quality, high-productivity thinking called flow. You can stay in a state of flow for hours if you're not disrupted. Not all tasks require hours of concentration, but think how effective you would be if every task or project that required more than 15 minutes of your attention benefited from your highest quality thinking!

So put your cell phone on silent and check voice mail later. Turn off the email, and turn it back on at a specified time. Tell your studio mates, employees and loved ones that you are unavailable for a few hours. Do this on a regular basis, and train your brain to love the feeling of focus more than it loves the feeling of multi-tasking.

And believe it or not . . . that's it. If you simply start each day with a conscious plan, eliminate unnecessary distractions, and allow yourself to get into a state of flow, you will become the most focused version of you that you have ever known.

Have fun getting focused!

Better Feedback Means Better Productivity and Higher Morale

Engaging in effective communication is one of the most important – and difficult – things for a team to do. Communication becomes particularly difficult when we need to give feedback of an uncomfortable or possibly critical nature to a teammate. The “I Statement” approach will help you give better feedback and get better results.

An I Statement takes the you out of hurt feelings, as in you hurt my feelings. Instead, it helps you describe the behavior that contributed to your feelings getting hurt, and helps you express how you interpreted that behavior and why your feelings were hurt as a result. In other words – someone else did a behavior, and you own your own feelings. Expressing feedback in this way leads to far more productive conversations!

So here is the format of the “I Statement.” The more you use it, the more naturally it will come to you.

Giving better feedback is one of the most important things a company can do to improve productivity and morale. Most all of us want to do a good job - in our interpersonal relationships and in our work. We deserve to receive the feedback that will help us accomplish that. Using the I Statement helps everyone become more comfortable giving - and receiving - that important feedback.

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The topic of mindset has come up repeatedly the last few days, and I take that as a sign that we all need to be reminded about it. There was a book called Mindset The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, and it was published in 2006. I read it when it first came out and I was completely energized by it. The core message of the book is that there are two types of mindsets a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes that one has predetermined abilities or aptitudes or talents.

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And whatever you've achieved, that's what you can achieve. A growth mindset believes that traits are not fixed but can be cultivated and learned and changed. And many people ask, well, which one is accurate or true? And the answer is both are if you believe your potential is capped than it is if you believe your potential is limited only by your effort, then it is so mindsets, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your emphasis is primarily on performance or results and you see all efforts as either successful or not successful, you probably have a fixed mindset.

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If your emphasis is primarily on preparation and you see effort as learning and progress, then you probably have a growth mindset, fixed mindset. People can certainly be successful, but they tend to hit a ceiling above which they don't seem to float growth mindset. People tend to show up more in the population of people who experience serial success. The good news is your mindset can change. If you want to learn more about this concept, I highly recommend the book.

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In the meantime, take a look at the way you're thinking about work, family life, even love. If you would embrace the idea that every step is a good step, even if it didn't land you where you want to land yet, then your life will become immeasurably better anyway. That's what I'm thinking about today. So now go grow your mindset.

Help is a funny thing. We often - in fact, almost always at some level - need it. But we don't always get it. Is that because the universe is unkind?

No. It's because we only get help when we actively seek it, we only actively seek help when we genuinely want it, and wanting help is not the same as understanding we need help.

In fact, I have known people who were aware for years that they needed help, but all the same did not want it.

The reasons for not wanting help when one needs it are probably as myriad as the genetic combinations that define us physically. Maybe we judge ourselves and think we shouldn't need help. Maybe we think help is a sign of weakness. Maybe we struggle to accept that someone else knows something we don't know. Maybe we worry what others will think. Maybe we don't like the uncomfortable feeling of being helped. Maybe we don't believe that others will do things as well as we would. I'm sure there are dozens more reasons than those.

I am confident that people who need help and don't ask for help use the justifications that they can't afford it or that they don't know who to ask as mere excuses - when someone genuinely wants help they always find a way to acquire it.

So why is this important? Because throughout our careers we all need help. We need assistance, people to whom we can delegate, people from whom we can ask advice, and people to kick us in the rear end and tell us the truth. The people who achieve the most have something in common . . . they accept the necessity and value of help, and therefore the reality that they cannot do everything themselves.

This doesn't just apply to one-man operations. I have met many entrepreneurs with 20, 30, 40 employees who still insist on having a hand in every single aspect of their business. They  are only satisfied when the people helping them do things exactly as they would do them - which is impossible, of course. Those businesses are hobbled as clearly as if the entrepreneur hadn't hired anyone.

I have been asked several times lately how we sell our services, and I reply, "we don't. You can't sell help."  I can't court people I think need help, or promote our services to people who appear to need help, you can't close someone on help. I am an adamant teacher of selling, yet in the case of my own business, selling our services is anathema. Someone who merely suspects she needs help will make for a difficult client. When someone approaches us and says they really really really need help, and are willing to make the changes - both personal and organizational - required to benefit from help, then we can get a lot of excellent work done (and make the hourly rate worthwhile for them). In the case of help, the seeker must be the aggressive one to truly benefit from it.

So ask yourself, in what areas of your life and business do you need help, and what is holding you back from seeking it? Once you have your list (we all have a list), do the inner work to figure out what's holding you back. Then go on . . . ask for help. You deserve it.

Micromanagement limits your business. By focusing on the strategic aspects of managing, you cultivate more innovative, effective employees. Your bottom line -and your employees!- will thank you. #ManagementStyles #Leadership

As a society, we appear to have no skills related to argument. What's that you say? We argue a lot? Actually, most people quarrel rather than argue, though they may do so without physical involvement or raised voices. In fact, most people do not know what argument is.

This is unfortunate, because we need good, productive, challenging argument - in our family life, in our businesses, and in our shared communities. Argument is supposed to be the act of thinking together. Of both offering and considering persuasive ideas backed by facts and observations in order to advance our understanding.

Our American culture is most comfortable with competitive analogies - football, baseball, getting elected; each team or individual working to score points at the expense of the other until someone wins. But approaching argument with a desire to win guarantees that you will lose. 

The True Goal of Argument

A better analogy for argument is something collaborative: raising a child together, doing a research paper together, hosting a party together: when we collaborate, we offer ideas to one another, and we consider them together, and we toss out the bits that don't work, adopt the bits that do, and together come up with bits that we wouldn't have even thought of on our own. In fact, that last part is the most powerful - we come to understanding and knowledge that alone we could not have accomplished. That's exciting, it's empowering, and it's the stuff that makes our lives vastly more interesting and engaged. 

What Not To Do When You're Arguing

Zingers have no place in an honest argument. The minute someone throws a zinger (usually a sarcastic comment, a stinging criticism, a rebuke masked as comedy) walls are erected and communication stops. Zingers lead to anger and defensiveness and more zingers and retreat, and the shared act of creativity devolves into something ugly and uninspired.

Fact Baiting (also known as de-bating) is also not an effective form of argument. Throwing factoids at one another in an effort to win or shame or score a point simply leads to more factoids - it becomes a form of fact-littered quarreling. Facts have a place in a good argument, but their place is to present a concept, discuss the relevance and the reliability of the resource, explore together whether that concept is meaningful and useful in the context of the argument, and see if both parties have been enriched by the admission of it - as well as any facts that contradict it.

What counts for political, pundit, and most community discussion these days is a bunch of zingers made up of out-of-context facts thrown at an opposition in an effort to win.  Recent social reports show that people are feeling uneasy and not very hopeful - and that makes sense to me. We put far more energy into defending and tearing down than we do to creating and building up.

Argue for Mutual Success

So why do we need argument? Because we need solutions, we need common ground, we need mutual awareness and understanding, and when we do the thinking together we find these things. Sometimes argument gets passionate and noisy, and that's OK when passionate people are also respectful people. The key is to listen, absorb, think, consider what the other person is saying. Ask yourself over and over, "What aspect of what this person is saying is right? Why does this matter so much to this person? What can I learn from this idea that's different than my idea?"

We have become so polarized in our national discussions of religion, politics, and social values. The further we retreat to our respective ends of the spectrum, the less likely we are to get anything done, let alone learn anything new. But if we all tried arguing, rather than quarreling, we might just come to some new insights, which could lead to new conclusions, which could lead to new solutions.

The next time someone presents an idea that you are opposed to or disagree with, try asking yourself what you can learn from that person and what they can learn from you.  When it comes to putting our heads together, one plus one nearly always sums up to more than two.

It’s one thing to have a bad job experience; it’s another thing entirely to watch one’s children go through one. Yet, that’s what they must do. When young people enter the workforce, they are typically subjected to a series of bad managers with poor training and insufficient communication skills. For years I had to watch my children live through a series of crappy jobs. It's part of the learning experience, but it isn't fun to watch!Now my oldest child is a nurse, and at 29 she is finally in her dream job. It’s not just that she loves the work, she loves everything about her manager, the corporate structure, and the company philosophy. The result is that she is completely dedicated and motivated.

There are a few reliable things that good managers and management organizations do that make them rewarding to work for, and my daughter’s new employer appears to do all of them.

1. Good managers have a clear purpose. This is true if the manager is the business owner and set the purpose himself, or if the manager is several rungs down the ladder and had to learn the purpose from his own managers. A good manager always takes the time to understand and share the company’s purpose and how his team can best fulfill it. This vision and direction enables a team to come together and work with one another for common goals.

2. Good managers hire good people. You can tell a good manager from the quality of employees that surrounded him. A good manager always looks for the brightest, most ambitious, most capable people he can find. Weak managers avoid any employee that could potentially take his job or outshine him.

3. Good managers are team players. A good manager knows how to let his employees take the lead, and encourages employees to practice leadership skills frequently. Leading from the middle is a powerful way to build a strong team by strengthening each person’s leadership skills, and it builds team confidence in their manager, as it demonstrates that he is willing to be a member of the team and not just the boss.

4. Good managers motivate with reasons and benefits. People don’t want to just be told what to do, they want to understand why they are doing it. A good manager has reasons and benefits for everything he requests, and he facilitates discussions around those reasons and benefits when necessary. I’ll never forget a manager I once had when I was younger; a Vice President in a large corporation. He had to ask our team to do something that was stupid. Not unethical, just misguided. But he didn’t duck it. He said, “Look, we all know this isn’t the best thing for us to do, and I’ve already tried to argue our position with my boss. But this is a good company, and we’re all going to make a bad judgment call from time to time. So let’s do this enthusiastically, and figure that it’s a good learning experience for everyone, including my boss!” We stayed motivated and even developed a sense of humor about it.

5. Good managers respect that people work for more than just money. A good manager takes the time to know and appreciate each individual employee. Every person has something that makes him or her tick, and a good manager wants to know what that thing is. It may be pride in a good job, a sense of responsibility, coming to work with people they enjoy, or learning new skills on the road to a more challenging career. Whatever it is, the good manager figures it out and then finds ways to keep the employee motivated by appealing to those values.

6. Good managers really notice their employees. They take the time to observe and learn each employee’s strengths and weaknesses, and they find ways to play to the strengths. When a good manager plays to an employee’s strengths, the employee experiences greater success and growth. Then, the really good manager specifically recognizes his employees’ successes, both publicly and privately.

7. Good managers don’t mix positive and negative feedback. Feedback should always be specific and timely, and in the case of negative feedback, should include some information about what is desired. When you mix positive and negative feedback, both areas suffer. Let positive feedback be a cause for unhampered happiness, and let negative feedback serve its purpose by allowing the employee to reflect on it and improve.

8. Good managers set clear goals with and for their employees. These goals must be directly related to the purpose that was discussed in Step 1. Having clear goals motivates employees, helps them stay focused, and enables them to measure their progress and celebrate achievement.

9. Good managers delegate. This isn’t simply to spread the work around (though that is important). When done correctly, delegation helps employees stretch and learn. When employees accomplish new challenges, their confidence and their value to the team and company grow.

10. Good managers are accountable. They share the glory when the team has accomplished something, and they accept responsibility for team or individual failures. This level of responsibility is essential to building a culture of trust and safety. There is no innovation without mistakes, so a culture that punishes mistakes won’t have any innovation. When a manager is accountable for the team, team members learn from their mistakes and grow, and innovation thrives.

11. Good managers treat each employee with dignity and respect. They listen carefully, speak honestly and thoughtfully, and always work from the premise that people may have different skills but never have different value.

I would love to write an article called “How to be a Terrific Manager Without Really Trying.” Great title, right? Unfortunately, that article cannot be written. There’s simply no way to be a terrific manager without making an effort. However, if you regularly practice these 11 points, you will become a better manager every day.

The information regarding Jim Collins’ five levels of leadership (last week) led to some interesting email conversation (thank you Lori) regarding personal work habits. If you’ll recall, a “highly capable individual” is defined as one who “makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.” It was on the topic of good work habits that the exchange was based.

Lori pointed out that there are a lot of talented people with skills and knowledge who have terrible work habits, and that she would rather work with less talented, less knowledgeable people any day of the week. She makes a very good point.

Just the other day while working with a client on a hiring policy, we had a long discussion about what we were hiring for. It is generally easier to train work skills than to train someone to be a team player or to train them to have discipline or a good worth ethic. With a few obvious exceptions (surgeons pop to mind), give me an emotionally mature, self-motivated, less experienced person over an undisciplined, undermining or emotionally unstable talented person any day.

You know the type. The manager who never gets any of her work done on time, who is always rifling through a stack of unruly looking paper, frantically behaving as if she has the completed assignment in there somewhere – when everyone, including her, knows it’s not done. Project managers from other departments make jokes about who has to take her as a resource on their next project, because nobody wants to chase her down for the constantly overdue action items. But when her subordinates are late with an assignment or let a detail slip, watch out – the blame finger will standing at rigid attention. It doesn’t matter how much this manager knows technically about her area of responsibility, because the negative energy wrought by the dysfunctional behavior undermines the whole effort.

So what are good work habits? An extremely important work habit to develop – which is frequently overlooked – is the ability to focus at the right level of detail. Some people only focus on the big picture, and don’t know when it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Other people latch onto some microscopic detail and distract the rest of the environment with their inappropriately applied zoom feature. Both types of people have bad work habits (or, perhaps, demonstrate good work habits only a small percentage of the time). If you want to contribute meaningfully to an organizational effort, you have to develop the ability to go from microscope to telescope, and you have to know when ordinary glasses are all that is required.

Another important work habit is advance preparation for meetings. This seems so basic, but it’s astounding how many people show up for a meeting without having read the meeting materials, done preliminary research related to the meeting agenda, or given even a few minutes of reflection to what they intend to accomplish in the meeting. And let’s not forget how many meetings don’t have an agenda even posted in advance (a terrible work habit). Considering the expense of most meetings, each one should be prepared for as if preparing to negotiate the price on a new car. Corporate values would increase overnight if people would just prepare in advance for their meetings.

A work habit that is somewhat controversial due to the record creating component is that of journaling. If managers would all journal – keep notebooks that don’t have perforated pages (so don’t fall apart), mark each of their action items with a readily-recognizable icon in the margins (the better to cross off, my dear), and record decisions made and key points of discussions held, corporate memory and achievement would increase dramatically. Of course, the lawyers frequently don’t like this, because then there is a written record that could be subpoenaed in litigation. But it seems crazy to sacrifice achievement for fear of litigation, and it seems much simpler to just never do anything unethical or illegal (of course, that’s a topic for another day). Journaling is a great work habit.

Some bad work habits would be laughable if they weren’t so pernicious: answering your phone during a conversation with someone else or during a meeting (why do we think voice mail exists?); wandering out of meetings when our presence is requested or required – and forgetting to wander back in again; having conversations and arguments over email that would be better addressed in meetings, and making decisions or having important discussions without key people present all come to mind. Other bad habits were supposedly bred out of us during grade school, like our aforementioned manager who fails to complete work on time, poor attendance, sloppy work, poor grammar and spelling, basic math mistakes, and jumping to conclusions. And the really big one - the person who spends all their time acting like they work harder than everyone else, when in fact they work very little.

I’m not saying I don’t value people with tremendous talent, intelligence, and drive. I am saying that if you’re going to go to the effort to develop those admirable qualities, why waste your potential impact through sloppy and inconsiderate behaviors? Let’s all sing the praises of good work habits. I know that just typing that sentence made my old school Principal, Sister Lucy, smile sweetly wherever she is.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

Isolation from feedback is one of the most difficult aspects of being an independent business owner/operator or senior executive. In the case of the independent, feedback is difficult to find because of secluded working conditions. In the case of the senior executive, feedback is difficult to come by because colleagues will not offer it, and when they do it's hard to tell if they are acting in your best interests or for a personal political objective.

So people in both situations go home and talk about work to their spouse or a trusted confidante. Though such trusted others are undoubtedly of benefit in terms of personal insight, they can't provide feedback about work habits, skills, decision-making, or interaction with customers, vendors and other business associates. Though there is no perfect replacement for this lack, there is something each of us can do to become more objective about ourselves. When we do this we can give ourselves feedback that cannot be obtained from others.

Two important steps each objectivity-seeker should implement immediately are goal setting and goal review. We are not speaking of broad goals in this context, but rather, very specific behavioral and activity goals. For instance, before making a phone call to a prospective customer, write down on the top of your notebook what do I expect to accomplish on this call, and what steps must I take during the call in order to be successful?  Immediately upon ending the call, review the goal and the steps you had planned to take, and grade yourself on your performance.

This can also be done prior to engaging in a potentially combative situation. Before stepping into the other person's place of business or picking up the phone, carefully write down your goals for the transaction. In addition to asking what must I accomplish during this conversation and what steps will I take in order to be successful, make sure you add how do I wish to behave in order to be successful?

You can use this type of goal setting and review to plan what you wish to accomplish at the beginning and end of each day, to plan your approach to learning a new business skill, to assess your demonstration of a particular skill, or to evaluate a decision-making experience. The initial deliberateness of this process may seem time-consuming and forced. But if you stick with it you will find that you are able to make mini-goals on the fly – even in the face of surprise conflict or rapidly changing conditions.

The key to achieving objective self-feedback is to evaluate everything for which you set a goal immediately upon completion of the task. The act of comparing your performance to pre-planned intentions forces objective analysis and the result is the type of candid feedback we would receive from a trusted friend who only wants to see us succeed.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

I've been doing something for the past year that is really working for me. Like you, I run a business. And like you, I often get caught up in the details of that business. So I have to be very intentional about maintaining my focus on the bigger picture.

Of course, I have my big picture established. I have a strategic plan, a clearly defined brand, and the operating plans (marketing strategy, sales & marketing plan, operating plan, budgets & cash flow plans) for each of my business divisions. And I review each of those plans monthly to make sure we are staying on track, achieving our goals.

But still. It's that daily focus that makes or breaks you. Without even noticing it, several days can slip away without any strategic focus at all! I don't know about you, but that makes me crazy. I like ending each day feeling like I did the things that matter. Achieving goals motivates me.

So here’s what I did. During my monthly review of my strategic and operating plans, I started selecting the most important goals to achieve that month from each plan – I usually end up with between four and six significant monthly goals. Just doing this brought my long-term goals into clearer focus. Then, I memorized them. Why? So I could write them down each morning.

That’s right — every day, before I open a single email (but after retrieving my cup of coffee), I write down those goals. I happen to use a business journal for all my notes during the day, but it doesn’t really matter where you write them, as long as you write them. Every single day I take the time to write my business goals for the month, pen to paper, completely focused, fully intentional.

And something interesting has happened. The most important thing is that my achievement of goals has significantly improved. But you mostly see that in retrospect. What I’ve noticed in real time is that when I write my monthly goals each day, my thoughts are more likely to turn to the specific daily activities that I must accomplish to achieve those goals. Before I get sucked into customer questions, writing proposals, helping employees solve problems, or mindless administrative work, before I go off on a tangent doing something that feels rewarding but isn’t in alignment with my goals, before all of that — I visualize my day in terms of important accomplishments. And when I do that, the next 8-12 hours is infused with awareness of the big picture. Sure, I still fight some fires and do some administrative work. But I also get big picture things done. The number of days that slip away without strategic accomplishment has dwindled down to almost none.

I am sure this daily focus is what improved my business goals achievement. And now that I’ve been doing this for a year with good results, I am wholeheartedly recommending this approach to you. Start today! It’s never too soon to start a good thing.

I don’t know if you follow the Zits comic strip, but it’s one of the comics I check out daily in our local paper. I became interested in it this summer, because the comic started focusing on the challenges parents face when their children are learning to drive, and at the same time my (then) 15-year-old son was getting his permit.

I have taught a number of children to drive so I’m no newcomer to the driver training space. Even after all that practice, it can be stressful at best, and sometimes harrowing. But the process – when well done – is an excellent model for training. Students are required to gain a certain number of hours behind the wheel, accompanied and instructed by a responsible adult. In many states the students are required to keep a training log of hours, whether those hours were done at night or during daylight, and how long they drove each session. Once they pass their test they are given a provisional drivers’ license, which gives them privileges to drive, but with restrictions. Here is the Zits strip from today:

All of this makes sense, right? Not only do we want to protect all of the other drivers on the road, but we want to protect our children. When training is this close to home, we take it very seriously.

So why are we so flippant with business training? We bring a new employee in, we throw them into a job with somewhere south of an hour of orientation, and we expect them to be successful. This isn’t good for the driver or the other drivers on the road. In the case of the new employee, they have probably left another job to join the company. Failure to provide them with excellent training can lead to job loss and economic hardship that would not have occurred had they been properly assimilated. Other employees suffer because their new colleague is not as efficient or effective as they need them to be. Nobody’s interests are served.

Assuming even a highly trained or long-experienced professional will not require training is also unfair. So much of learning to do a job well is learning the culture and practices of the company – and those things vary dramatically from organization to organization. Just learning the acronyms requires a pocket handbook that to my knowledge no company ever provides.

US voluntary turnover rates are at 23.4%, and involuntary turnover adds another 10-12%. That means that companies are losing 33 – 45% of their employees annually. The cost of finding and assimilating new employees to the point of full contribution is frequently figured at two years of their full starting salary. There’s not much business knowledge I would take from most State Departments of Transportation, but I think the driver training model might be a good one to emulate.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

Let MentorWerx Help

Would you like help developing an onboarding and training program? Let us help! MentorWerx, one of the three companies owned by Andrea Hill, specializes in helping individuals and companies maximize talent. We combine our decades of organizational development experience with innovative use of affordable technologies to produce onboarding, training, and professional development programs that work for SMEs (small and medium enterprises). Ready to get started? Book a consult with Andrea Hill right now! 

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The fourth quarter is nearly here, and your head is probably in go-go-go-for-the-holidays mode. That's good - you're supposed to make hay while the sun shines, right? But the risk is that you'll wake up one day soon, the holidays behind you, and immediately become stressed over everything you’ve failed to do for your business while you were focused on production and sales.

Don’t go there! Life is a series of recommitments, and those times of recommitment are critical to our continued growth. September is an excellent time to review your business progress and recommit to your strategic goals. Pull out your calendar right now and look for one day in the month of September to focus entirely on business planning, goals for next year, and projects you're ready to take on. Making time to plan is one of the most important things you can do as a business owner.

It’s Scheduled . . . Now What?

To begin, decide if your planning day will be a day for just you or if you want key members of your team or important advisors to join you.  In most cases it is useful to include others for at least part of your planning. It’s easy to get stuck in our own assumptions or perspectives. Inviting others to participate can present new ideas and challenge old ones.

Assemble key information about your previous year. At a minimum you need:

• Sales Revenue by Month
• Cost of Goods by Month
• A report showing customer performance, including how much business each customer did with you the past year, which customers you lost (did not purchase in the past 12 months) and which customers you gained.
• Detailed expense report
• Summary expense report showing total expenses for labor (salaries and benefits), sales and marketing (including non-employee commissions, trade shows, photography, promotions, advertising, etc.) and facilities (rent, security, etc.).
• If you had goals for 2013, list all goals and your accomplishments for each.

Prior to your planning day, decide where you will work. If you can’t work in your office without constant distractions, plan to work somewhere else. Your planning is too important to sacrifice it to perforated attention.

The Planning Day

Spend your first two hours examining the reports you assembled. Ask, and answer, the following questions:

1. How has my revenue been in 2016 compared to 2015?
2. What have I done differently (if anything) to change my revenue in 2016 (positively or negatively)?
3. Did my Cost of Goods go up, stay the same, or go down? Why?
4. Did I gain more customers than I lost?
5. Why did I lose the customers I lost? Were the losses intentional or unintentional?
6. Am I spending my money on the right things?
7. Did I spend enough money on marketing and promotion (including Trade Shows) to generate the amount of business I planned to do?

Now set your financial goals for 2017. These goals include:

• Revenue goals for 2017
• Cost of Goods goals for 2017
• Net profit goals for 2017

Spend your next hour or two contemplating your customers. Your customer mix determines your success, so it is essential that you consider whether or not you are serving the right customers. How do you know if you have the right customers? The right customers want more of what you are comfortable giving. The wrong customers constantly ask for things that feel off-track to you. For example, if you are Neiman Marcus, customers that hound you for lower prices aren’t a good fit. But if you are Wal-Mart, you expect (and feel comfortable with) customers demanding lower prices. All customers want more of something from you; the question is, are the things they want the things that are right for your business?

Create a visual model that will help you cultivate more of the right customers and less of the wrong ones in the year to come. Draw a vertical line down the center of a piece of paper. On the left side, write the names of your very best customers. On the right side, write the names of troublesome customers who are expensive to serve or just aren’t a good fit. Once you have listed the customer names, draw a horizontal line under them. In the space below, write the common attributes of your “good” customers and your “bad” customers. Look for patterns and similarities within the two groups. Now create your Customer goals for 2017. These goals include:

• Total number of customers (existing and new) by end of year in 2017
• Total number of new customers in 2014, and the specific attributes you will seek in those customers
• A specific list of the customers that you want to (gently) let go in 2017

Once you know the types of customers you want to add in the coming year, consider where to look for them. What media (magazines, internet, social media, events, etc.) do your “good” customers respond to best? Chances are, the customers you seek pay attention to those channels as well. Create a list of all the marketing promotions, advertising, and events you did in 2016. Circle the ones that did not perform as you expected. For each marketing activity you circled, consider why it wasn’t successful. Was it the wrong venue with the wrong type of customers? Did you fail to prepare properly for it? Did you learn something from it that will make you more successful if you try it again?

Do a similar activity with your successful marketing promotions. Why were they successful, and what can you do to increase the success in the following year and find more opportunities like them? Once you have analyzed your past marketing efforts, it is time to review your sales and marketing goals for 2017. I say review, because you have likely already committed to some trade shows and advertisements already. Your review and goals should include:

• Total dollars you intend to spend on marketing in 2017. Revise if, after analyzing your customer and marketing plans, you think the number should be changed.
• A list of the marketing activities you plan to participate in. Be prepared to cut plans you have made for marketing activities that you no longer believe will be successful, or to add marketing activities you hadn’t previously considered.

After setting your customer goals, it’s time to move on to operations. Review the goals you have already set and the thought processes that got you there. Then answer this question: What operations must I excel at in 2014 in order to achieve my marketing, sales, customer, and financial goals? Your final goals will include a list of each operational improvement you must invest in in 2017.

If you take the time to plan for 2017 in this way, you will start your year focused and recommitted to business success. You will also reclaim the excitement and energy that come with feeling prepared.

Yesterday morning (Dr. Martin Luther King Day) I experienced an excellent demonstration of the importance of mastery. I had my radio tuned to the local NPR station and they were airing a program called Meeting Hate with Love: Stories of King and Gandhi. If you didn’t catch this program, I highly recommend it. You can get an MP3 download for $6.95 at www.humanmedia.org.

I was impressed with the substance of the program. It honored Dr. King by exploring a topic with deep meaning for him - the concept of nonviolence. The program ended before I arrived at my destination, and the next radio show was another program honoring Dr. King. What I was treated to for the next half hour was an incompetent and unsatisfying rehash of the important dates of Dr. King’s life, a review of his general message, and a man-on-the-street do-you-remember-that-day format. It was clear that the radio station in question felt compelled to fill a certain block of programming with Dr. King’s life.

If I hadn’t been treated to the first program, the insufficiency of the second would not have been so noticeable. The first program honored my time and my intellect by teaching me something new and trusting me to learn it. The second program simply took up time. And therein lies a lesson about mastery.

Intelligence and subject mastery are not the same thing. I had a friend long ago who was one of the smartest guys I had ever met – but he had never been disciplined enough to develop mastery of anything. As a result he was an extremely entertaining dinner companion, but very frustrating as an employee (which I experienced when I hired him). Mastery requires both curiosity (see last week’s post) and discipline (ditto). Had the radio announcer for the second program simply been curious enough to develop some interesting questions about Dr. King’s life, she would likely have come up with a fresh and interesting take worthy of spending half an hour of her life (and mine) on. Would she have been a master of the topic of Dr. King’s life? No. But she would have demonstrated mastery over her own radio program, which she has apparently committed to producing once each week.

I am a dilettante crafter. I knit well enough, sew well enough, make jewelry well enough – but none of them to the level of mastery. In my case, that’s acceptable, because I do crafts for relaxation. An artist friend of mine once made a comment that an artist can not afford to be a dilettante – they must pick one medium and focus entirely on it to become truly skilled. To achieve mastery in an art requires years of curiosity pursued with discipline followed by more curiosity pursued with more discipline. If an artist flits from one artistic medium to another they never develop the skill in any one required to be a master. Could someone pursue a medium to the point of mastery, then pursue another medium? Of course they could, and to do so would likely indicate very high quality curiosity and discipline on their part.

Being near someone else’s mastery – even for long periods of time – does not constitute your own mastery. I remember sitting at a business dinner one night years ago and listening to my boss describe an extremely challenging business transaction “we” had done as if it had been his accomplishment. From his perspective – and lack of mastery – the accomplishment seemed to be about “X.” But from the perspective of experts in that sort of transaction – of which there was another at the table besides myself – the accomplishment was, in fact, about “Y.” I remember during the dinner being irritated that my boss was so blithe about presenting my hard work as his own. But by that night when I crawled between the scratchy hotel sheets, I had begun to fixate on times when I had spoken authoritatively about things for which I, too, lacked mastery.

Turn on the television for five minutes and you’ll be reminded that we are a society filled with uninformed opinions. But it’s not just on reality TV and the generally pathetic news efforts that lack of mastery abounds. The failure rate for new business is somewhere around 56% in 5 years. Lack of mastery is a strong contributor to this statistic. Mid-sized and large businesses fail for lack of mastery as well. What counts for business mastery in a $40 million business doesn’t impress at $150 million, and what worked in 1992 may need significant updating to matter in 2008. I watched the marriage of two friends disintegrate over disagreements regarding how to parent. Why didn’t they go to a counselor? The husband said that he wasn’t paying someone else to tell him how to be a father. Anyone who has ever raised a teenager knows that the core conflict is between one person’s desire to share mastery and another’s desire to avoid being told anything. So you take a deep breath and remember that adolescence lasts until age 25. Though where mastery is concerned, it appears that immaturity may last somewhat longer.

Just as my Great-aunt Carrie once informed me that my manners weren’t for my benefit, but rather, to demonstrate my respect for others, one might say the same thing about mastery. It seems to me that we are here to live a life of service to others. Not just when it comes to our families, but to everyone. If your calling is to be an artist, then your mastery honors those who will view and buy your art. If your calling is to be a business executive, then your mastery honors those will depend on you for employment and those who will buy your products or services. What is your calling, and who does your mastery serve.

Of course, we can’t be masters of everything. Intellectually that’s easy to say, if not to accept. But egotistically we struggle with this. If we honored the truth in it, we would be much more receptive to those who possess the mastery we lack. We would defer and seek more, listen more, praise more. We’d recognize when we were doing a less-than-acceptable job, when we were about to waste someone else’s time. The most difficult mastery of all – mastery of our “self” – honors everyone with whom we come in contact.

Maybe there should be a new national holiday. It could be called “Speak or Do Only What Comes from Mastery Day.” What kind of a day would that be? Quiet? Substantive? Maybe even nonviolent.

__________________________________________________________

“90% of life is just showing up.” Woody Allen

“The average human only uses 10% of their brain’s potential.” Unknown, though often attributed to Albert Einstein

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

What's your Network IQ?

If you're an entrepreneur, then you know what it's like to receive unsolicited advice. Your family, customers, friends, vendors, and the guy next to you in the grocery store line are all willing to offer you advice regarding what you could be/should be/shouldn't be doing with your business and investments. They're all willing, but are they all able? To learn how to benefit from advice, you have to learn to assess and access your Network IQ.

Every entrepreneur has had the experience of receiving advice from someone they respect and admire very much, but then feeling - indeed, fearing - that the advice is the wrong advice.  It's important to remember that advice comes from assumptions, and assumptions come from experience, or lack thereof.  So the best way to filter advice is to consider the assumptions and experience of the person giving it.

For instance, if your mother has never had any experience running a business, and she makes a statement about what you should be doing with your product offering, take a moment to consider what experience she has that might apply. If your product is jewelry and she has always been known to be stylish, she may have something to offer. If your product is software, and she has never turned on a computer, then unless she's offering advice on how to reach people who are terrified of computers, the advice is not likely to be helpful. If she offers advice on keeping yourself balanced and sane while trying to run a business, then perhaps you should listen.

Everyone in your personal network probably has something to offer, but you must be proficient at filtering the offerings to get at the truly useful nuggets.

Differentiate between Opinions and Facts

I love this quote: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." I have no idea who originally said it, so I can't credit it. But I love it, because people have a tendency to accept as fact ideas that just pop into their heads. Maybe the idea popped in decades ago and was never challenged, and maybe that idea popped into their head moments ago, but if it was never challenged and confirmed, it's just an idea. What's worse, people offer these ideas/opinions as advice - which is generally taken by the advisee to be a fact. In an ideal world every person would analyze his or her own ideas and find out if they were fact, untested hypothesis, or fiction. But apparently, that's not a reasonable expectation.

You have to do the assumption-checking for them.  How do you do this without hurting someone's feelings? One approach is to do the assumption-checking without them knowing. But maybe they really do have experience to back up that idea. In that case, saying "That's a really interesting idea - one that I've not heard of or thought of before. What experience did you have that led you to that suggestion?"

Analyze your Network IQ to improve it.

You need a network of support and advice to make it in business. So analyze your needs for advice against your current network. Compare advisory needs (financial, strategic, product selection and merchandising, human resource challenges, organizational management and design, marketing and branding strategy and execution) against the people in your network. Identify each person who has experience you require. This doesn't buffer you from receiving bad advice, but it does help you learn how to quickly assess the advice you receive and decide how much of it to take.

And what about the areas for which you have no good advisers?  This is your opportunity to improve your Network IQ. Seek the advice you need, whether it's through an educational experience to improve your own ability to advise yourself, a paid adviser,  or someone in your social network who is willing to offer support on an ad-hoc basis.

Managing Network IQ: The Business Owner's Responsibility

Nobody can know everything necessary to  be successful in business. This is the primary disadvantage small businesses have when compared with large businesses. Large businesses can afford to hire specialists with a track record to manage discreet areas of the business. Small business owners can compete for knowledge, but you must be very savvy about how you do it. It's not incumbent on you to know everything, but it is incumbent on you to manage your Network IQ and access the best, most relevant advice from the most qualified people. Small business owners who do this well don't stay small for long.

Better Decision Making Starts with Better Reactions to Requests

When I was growing up, one of the next-door-neighbor moms was, well, sort of rough. Whenever the kids would ask if they could do something (go outside and play, go to the pool, etc.), she would respond with a series of rapid-fire questions:

"Did you clean your room yet? Did you pick up the family room like I asked you to? Are there dishes in the sink? Are your dirty shoes still on the back porch?"

A saner mom (like my own, or the one on the other side of us) would say, "Well, if you've done everything you're supposed to do then of course you can go." The difference is profound.  The rapid-fire question-asking was intended to induce anxiety over asking for something. The calmer statement of fact was intended to get something done.

Later on in business I encountered bosses who did this sort of thing. When you approached them to ask if you could do something (perhaps something special for a customer, or spend some money on an advertising opportunity, or buy a new tool), they would respond with a series of questions designed to instill anxiety: "Do you know how much you've spent already this month? Do you know what it would cost to do that for every customer? Did you shop all the competitors to make sure you have the best price? How are you doing on your performance metrics?" At those times I would feel the anxiety-bile rising in my throat, just as it did every time the neighbor mom did it to my childhood friends.

One day when I was at the zoo with my daughter I heard a mom using the rapid-fire question strategy on her son who had just asked for a hot dog. We happened to be in the Ape House, enjoying the much-anticipated poo throwing ritual. I put the two together forever and always.

It occurred to me that people do this type of poo-throwing when they are being asked for something. Many people don't like the feeling of  being asked for something - it feels like pressure or an imposition.  They are even more inclined to throw poo when asked to make a decision that they don't feel prepared to make; the send-them-scrambling-poo-throw delays the time when they must make a commitment.

So here's your challenge for today. Examine how you respond to being asked for things, or asked to make decisions. If your reaction apes anything like the situations I have described here (yeah, OK, pardon the pun), take a look at why you do it, and how you might respond more effectively.

Note to you "let me think about it's" (like me): that can be a delaying tactic too! Not quite as messy, but ultimately just as frustrating for those who need you to make a decision.

Loneliness is an existential risk. 

There is a reason we don’t think about loneliness when things are good. When we’re generally happy, we have the energy and reserves to do the things we want and need to do. Work. Exercise. Prepare healthy food. Read. Create. When we are content, our inner voices are engaged with contented things. Busyand engagedare enough when life is good.

But life doesn’t stay good. Every life cycles in and out of good and bad, pain and joy. This is universal and immutable.  The way to survive pain, to grow from it, to thrive beyond it, is to be surrounded by love. All different kinds of love: The love that you give and the love you receive, from family, friends, community, pets. 

In the midst of great suffering everyone gets lost; for days, or weeks, or months. The presence of loved ones is both a buffer and a reminder that pain is just one part of a life. Really strong connections resist being pushed away, refuse to allow the loved-one to  become lost to the hurt and isolation that always accompanies emotional trauma. In the midst of great pain, the presence of beloveds is a reminder that pain is temporary.

So it’s during times of loss and heartbreak that loneliness becomes unbearable … finding oneself with only oneself is the most isolating feeling in the world. There is no buffer, no distraction, no gentle (or not-so-gentle) pressure to reclaim one’s happiness. When we are hurting it feels impossible to build the connections that are ultimately the only cure to psychic pain.

The lonely person will ultimately emerge from pain, but they recover more slowly, and with an intense awareness of the loneliness they may not have recognized or been concerned about before. 

Research suggests that people who are not lonely are more emotionally regulated. Whether that’s due to personality characteristics or learned behaviors, the not-lonely are more likely to approach life — and therefore pain and disappointment — from a place of problem-solving. They seek emotional support, treat themselves kindly inside their own thoughts, and express how they feel. 

The same research suggests that people who are lonely approach the challenges of life by distracting themselves, trying to influence or change the people or situations that cause discomfort, and denial. 

These two different behavior sets, those of the not-lonely and those of the lonely, are in play when life is good and when life is bad. The result is that the not-lonely behaviors lead to not-lonely people, which means that during the inevitable bad times they have support.

So loneliness is not a sentence. 

Emotionally regulated behaviors can be learned with practice and commitment. Anyone can learn to replace distraction-via-video-games with journaling. Anyone can learn to replace thrill-seeking-via-extreme-sports with volunteering. Anyone can choose to accept and express their feelings about something they cannot change over trying to manipulate or influence a different outcome. 

Anyone can choose to become an active participant in their emotional and external life rather than a passive observer.

Learning to behave in new ways isn’t easy, and unburdening oneself of loneliness is the work of months and years, not days. But there is so much hope in understanding that you are not doomed to loneliness.  Even if it’s hard to imagine or visualize what a not-lonely life looks like, taking a leap of faith toward that life is filled with potential and anticipation. 

Television shows like My 600 Pound Life help overweight people to envision a future of being fit and healthy while setting realistic expectations about the time and commitment required to achieve that life. The lifestyle and mental fitness challenge for the lonely is similar … consistent practice coupled with a sense of achievement that grows over time and leads to the life you want.

Bleakly accepting one’s loneliness denies the possibility of happiness, which is so unfortunate, because happiness is always possible.

Which brings us back to pain and suffering. 

When we cannot tolerate the idea of pain or suffering, we cannot truly live. The avoidance of life’s downs requires the avoidance of anything that can lead to loss, which means avoidance of love, friendship, dreams, and hope. It leads to loneliness. And that’s not really living.

To fulfill one’s potential is to experience fully all that life has to offer; pain, joy, and everything in-between. To learn and grow from all of it. 

All this is possible when we throw open the doors to our gated hearts, fling wide the windows on our chattering minds, let go of our fears of failure and disappointment, accept that all good outcomes require effort, and make room for the belief that we can change. 

When we do this, loneliness cannot endure. Yes, bad times will continue to cycle in and out of our lives, but each subsequent loss will be met with an ever-growing buffer of self-awareness, support, and love. Each emergence from loss will reinforce our awareness that happiness and contentment will always return.

No lover, no child, no parent or sibling or pet can save us from loneliness. We can only save ourselves. And this is empowering, because it means we do not have to wait. We can begin, in this moment, to craft the life we want and deserve.

So what is holding you back? The time will go by either way. By this time next year, you could be less lonely and more fulfilled than you have ever been. And still that will be only the beginning.

Yoda is a beloved icon of mastery. At one time success - indeed, survival - depended on developing mastery in some area. We don’t spend much time thinking or talking about mastery anymore, but we should. Today’s world worships the generalist. The person who can make a product, shoot the photograph, write the copy, post it on social media, and then go make a sales call. After hours she does the books, follows up on customer email, and reviews contracts. Today’s business person does a lot, but feels like she accomplishes little. Lack of time to focus on mastery is at the heart of this.

If you spend all your time skimming the surface of a thousand tasks, you won’t find happiness or success. The mind needs times of intense focus, times of reaching just beyond its capacity to develop new skills, and this type of focus doesn’t occur when we spend 20 minutes on one thing and 18 minutes on another.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (chick-sent-me-high) expressed this best in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).

“It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.”

We often hear the phrase “do what you love, and you’ll find success.” I believe it’s true, but with an important caveat. If you are doing what you love, but only as 1/50^th of all the things you do to make a living, it won’t sustain you. Does this mean you should just drop the other 49 things? Not if you want to pay the rent. So what can you do?

First, you identify your desired mastery. You can pick anything you like! It could be your chosen craft, writing copy, becoming the best diagnostician; just pick something that interests you with enough depth that you have to work hard to master it. You probably already know what it is – it’s the thing you always wish you had more time for. It’s the thing you naturally enjoy when you get into it. Find something that requires your deep concentration, something that forces you to stretch, something that you can focus on for an hour or two at a time, something you can lose yourself in.

Next, set aside time for mastery. Perhaps it’s an uninterrupted hour each day, perhaps it’s a block of three hours once a week. You think there’s not enough time to do that? Just consider how many hours you spend doing things that don’t involve any real commitment: watching T.V., playing around on social media, scrolling through news headlines, shopping, clubbing, hanging out at a coffee shop. I have yet to meet a person who has no wasted hours in a week.

Don’t get me wrong- I love my wasted hours! I bookend my days with sipping coffee in the morning and skimming my phone or watching a bit of TV in the evening. I consider these my rejuvenation times. But when I realized I had slipped away from the pursuit of mastery, I reconsidered those activities carefully. My morning coffee time is genuinely restorative to me; my only time of meditation. But my evening time didn’t have the same benefits. I was relaxed, but I wasn’t engaged. I traded half of my evening lounge time for writing time, and found new pieces of myself in the process.

People often think that the reason they feel so stale or anxious (or both) is that they aren’t making the kind of money they wanted to (expected to, need to) make. But people who are engaged in pursuing mastery don’t report the same feelings of malaise. This tells me that how we invest ourselves ultimately matters more than how much we earn.

Some types of mastery take a lifetime to achieve, others merely years. It’s not critical that you pick something that can take a lifetime. It’s enough to always be working on mastery. When you find you are no longer challenged enough, it’s a sign that you have learned what you can learn. Identify something new to master and get on with it.

Since the majority of us are either just finishing or just beginning our Sabbath, or possibly using some part of the weekend for the restoration that a bit of meditation can bring, I thought it might be a good time to do a whirlwind ethics review.  You say it's been a while since you took a philosophy class? Well hang on to your hats - we're going to make this one a quick romp through business ethics and decision-making.

Everyone has their boxers in a twist these days over all the corruption associated with Chinese-based business and Chinese products. Of course, American business has had its fair share of run-ins with the moral police in the past seven years. But when we dig deeply into where ethics problems in business start, we end up asking, "was that person a bad apple, or were they in a bad barrel?" If we're really honest, we might say some version of "there but for the grace of God go I."

People don't generally understand ethics. Most of us understand character, and nearly all of us will readily agree on black and white ethical issues, like murder and stealing. Well, stealing big things anyway. But the issues we are faced with as adults are frequently shades of gray, and in a fast-paced business environment we must have a clear understanding of ethics and an ethical framework for decision making - before a snap decision trips up and makes us wish we'd had better sense.

A psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory to explain how we develop moral reasoning skills. His research focused on how people make decisions and determine what is right, and his theory is that there are three broad ranges of moral cognitive development, each with two stages. Hang with me here - this really is interesting.

Level 1: Preconventional. People who are at this level are rules based. The rules for deciding what is right and what is wrong exist outside their thinking, and they are moral because they are obedient. When these people are not sure what to do, they consult an authority or a rule-book.

• Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation - people do what is right to avoid being punished.
• Stage 2: Self service and exchange orientation - people do what is right when it is in their immediate interest to do so. They decide what is right based on whether or not it feels like a "fair deal" to them.

Level 2: Conventional. People at this level have internalized the shared norms of society or of their immediate societal group (family, church, work group, etc.). Their sense of what is right is based on the rules and laws of their group, and they are motivated to do what is right to live up to their roles and responsibilities within the group. Kohlberg's research found most American adults were in Level 2.

• Stage 3: Conformity, mutual expectations and interpersonal accord. The individual lives up to what is expected of them by their peers. They demonstrate stereotypical "good" behavior, and are unlikely to hold opinions about what is right or wrong that conflict with the group.
• Stage 4: Social accord. Individuals uphold the laws and contribute to the group and society as a whole. Their only conflict with upholding laws is if/when laws conflict with their group norms. Most of the debate around abortion, for instance, is between adults at a Level 2/Stage 4 in their moral cognitive development.

Level 3: Postconventional, or Principled. A principled individual has gone beyond the expectations of and identification with other groups' norms, laws and expectations. They make decisions autonomously, consistent with principles of justice and rights (for a great review of what these principles of justice and rights are, go to Robert Cavalier's brief and readily understandable description of deontological theories). Kohlberg asserts that very few adults in society actually function at this level.

• Stage 5: Social contract and individual rights. Individuals at this stage are aware that people hold a variety of value systems, and they understand that rules are relative to each group. Therefore, they uphold rules because they are a social contract, and they uphold nonrelative values and rights regardless of the majority opinion.
• Stage 6: Universal ethical principles. The individual follows self-chosen principles of justice and rights, and acts in accordance with those principles even at great personal cost.

Well, at least we know what it is we're supposed to be striving for here. It's definitely beyond the scope of this blog to walk us through an ethics course, but if you're interested in an accessible text on business ethics, I highly recommend the book Managing Business Ethics, Straight Talk About How to Do it Right by Linda Trevino and Katherine Nelson.

So, how does this help us? Well, mostly it gets us thinking. It's useful to know there are levels and stages to moral cognitive development (at least, according to Kohlberg's theory), and to consider at which level we are operating. Just knowing there is a structure causes us to think about ethics in a more sophisticated way.  Now, if you just add a few ethical framework cheat sheets, you'll find yourself less likely than the average Jane to make a decision you regret later.  Here are a few examples of ethical tests used by some organizations:

Rotary International has a four-way test. They suggest members consider these points when making a decision:

• Is it the truth?
• Is it fair to all concerned?
• Will it build good will and better relationships?
• Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

This next test is attributed to Texas Instruments, but many companies use something very similar:

• Is the action legal?
• Does it comply with your best understanding of our values and principles?
• If you do it, will you feel bad?
• How will it look in the newspaper?
• If you know it's wrong, don't do it! Period.
• If you're not sure, ask.

Over the years I have developed my own decision-testing system that I use in conjunction with a set of clear values that I have written down (we can't decide if a decision is consistent with our values if we're not perfectly clear what our values are).  Having these tools doesn't keep me from agonizing over the really difficult decisions, but it sure lets me sleep better once I've made them.

The point to all of this is that ethics require thinking. History has provided us with a huge offering of moral texts- the Bible, the Talmud, the K'oran, the I Ching, the Sutras - and even their combined wisdom can't provide a prescription for every situation we will confront in our lifetimes. The ability to function ethically is dependent on being conscious of our value systems, the implications of the decisions with which we are confronted, and our reasoning for making each decision.

Wow. Don't you just feel more righteous already? Yeah, OK, but that's just conventional, and who wants to stop there?

Reference:
Kohlberg, L. (1976) Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive-development approach. In Moral development and behavior: Theory, research and social Issues. Ed. Lickona, T., New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

(c) Andrea M. Hill, 2007

After spending a week in the design studio of one of my clients, I am thinking a lot about creativity and intention. Most of my clients are designers - jewelry, interiors, software, food - all involve similar requirement to create something new and exciting that also serves an important purpose for its intended audience.

I don't believe that all people can be designers. The ability to design requires a certain amount of gift, innate talent. But just because one has that gift or that talent doesn't mean they will be extraordinary either.

This takes practice. Creativity and intention are essential to one another.

I started thinking about this today as I read an excellent article on how to practice. This article is relevant for anything one wants to excel at - whether design or learning a new language or becoming a better parent.  But it made me think in terms of my designer/entrepreneurs.

Specifically, how little time they give themselves to practice design once they are engrossed in the responsibilities of running a business. I have seen many talented designers produce one or two exciting offerings, only to fade away into obscurity. Is this because they did not continue to practice the skill of design?  I know other designers whose work becomes repetitive over time. Again I ask, is that lack of practice time?

To all you designers who find you only have time to  design on command (commission work), when you are preparing a new line, or late at night when you're not busy selling and bookkeeping, please consider this: your skill is ultimately only as salable as your excellence. Make time to practice even if other things suffer (or preferably, by paying someone to cover other, non-design tasks).

If every design you make is for a purpose, then you aren't giving yourself the time and analysis needed to take your design to the next level, and the next, and the next. More important, when you do your art without the time or the intention involved in good practice, you make permanent those things you do and choices you make that undermine your talent and your vision.

So go ahead, give yourself the gift of intentional practice. Your soul, your creative center, your customers . . . and your bottom line . . . will thank you.

Build the Ultimate Competitive Edge

I have been a student of creativity for most of life. My original career goal was to be an opera singer - I'm a mezzo soprano. So I trained all through adolescence and studied drama and music at university. But what I saw there quickly turned me off forever to a career in opera. In that world, everyone was fixated on having a competitive edge. The intense focus on standing out individually ultimately isolated everyone from the collaboration that would make us exponentially better together. I found my solace in jazz — quite the opposite of opera.

Jazz performance depends on one's ability to intensely listen to and feel one's fellow musicians; to complement them rather than compete with them. I learned that the very best musician experience — at least for me — was the art of completely blending in and becoming part of a "body" of creativity that was bigger than myself. It is this experience that informed my  business ideas about how to create a competitive edge.

Some people think that radical inclusiveness hides mediocrity. And it can. But what I learned as a jazz musician is that each instrument and voice has to be the absolute best for the ensemble to be the best. It's not that we sacrifice excellence — it's that excellence is each of our individual gift to the whole, so the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

I've worked with many jazz ensembles (and choirs - a magnificent choir has the same allure) over the years. Some were merely a diversion. Others, I got such a thrill out of working with I wanted to sing with them every night. The difference? Part of it was individual excellence for sure. It's magical to work with extremely talented people. But mostly the difference was in the bond, trust, and respect within the group. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it is strong enough to welcome new-comers and still maintain its cultural/artistic core. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it can bring in a student, an apprentice, and help them achieve virtuosity quickly. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it experiences explosive creativity.

And when you're experiencing explosive creativity, the concept of competitive edge becomes mundane. Why settle for being better than the next guy, when you can be better than your own imagination?

These things I learned as a musician quickly carried over into my business life. First, I noticed that some teams were more effective than others. Then, I realized it was more cultural — not just a team issue, but a company issue. Some companies experience almost virtuosic, sustained, creativity and innovation. But most do not. And the difference isn't determined by the individual talents and skills of the employees. The difference is determined by the quality of shared vision and trust. Trust in one another, and trust in leadership.

There are many things leaders must do to create trust: clarity of vision, consistent behavior, accountability for failures. But the one thing I want to address today is equality.

If a company wants to experience sustained excellence, it must invest in a culture of equality. This doesn't mean everyone is the same. Strong companies are built on teams of subject matter experts (SMEs), individuals with unique strengths and talents that can be applied in different ways. Each individual also has weaknesses, but if you build the right team, no one weakness will stand out, because it will be offset by the strengths of those around them. So everyone is not "the same," nor do we want them to be. When it comes to taking on certain projects, entrusting people with certain objectives, then we lean on expertise, talent, and capability. We recognize that some people have more talent and skill for some things than others.

But outside of the creative or skilled output — when it comes to the humans in the workshop, troupe, or company — then everyone must be equal. One set of rules for everyone. One set of expected behaviors for everyone. Rewards equally available to everyone. I'm not saying everyone gets paid the same. But everyone must know that their pay is based on objective factors related to their responsibility and tasks — not based on subjective, opaque criteria.

Equality means choosing inclusiveness over exclusiveness every chance you get. If you are the leader, equality means challenging your own preferences constantly. What do I mean by that? Well, as humans we gravitate to some people more than others — it's natural. As a leader, you must constantly check yourself, to make sure that your own behavior doesn't create a sense of inequality where one is not intended. This is really hard — in my opinion as someone who has led many companies, it is the hardest thing to do, and one of the things I have most consistently failed at.

Without equality, the dynamics of the group suffer, which damages the results of the group. Since the only reason that group is assembled is for their shared goals, why would you risk damaging the group in any way?

It can be difficult to teach the importance of equality to business leaders — particularly those fueled with a sense of competitiveness. There is a tendency to think that equality is a kindergarten platitude. But it's not. It's a business imperative. If we want to be the best, we have to hire the best, yes. And then, we have to treat them the best.

Because ultimately, each one of us is not the sum of our parts. We don't bring just our relevant skills to work each day. We bring our whole selves. And we expect to be honored. At some level, each of us knows that we are a reflection of godliness, and therefore . . . equal. Fail to honor that, and you fail the one element that will make your company (or your family, or your team, or your club, or your musical troupe) exquisitely successful. The human.

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At the end of every project, we take time for reflection, during which we look for insights that will allow us to improve in the future. I like to do this with my life as well. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, because improvement should be a year-round endeavor. But I am a fan of year-end reflection, to review what I learned from the past year and what I can do better in the next.

To say this has been an interesting year is to invoke the Chinese curse. Now I understand better than ever why interesting isn’t always a good thing. Like about half of us (plus 3 million), I started off 2017 deeply unsettled about our president in specific and our national judgement in general. The 2016 presidential election weighed heavily on my assessments of others and my reservations regarding our collective wisdom throughout 2017. This is a filter that did not fade following the emotional aftermath of the election.

This exercise in looking back has been a good one for me. I am now able to see a few patterns and themes, many of which started long before the last presidential election cycle, and all of which I can use to make better decisions in the years to come.

Fear vs Courage

One of the biggest lessons for me from 2017 is regarding the battle of fear versus courage. My friend and mentor-from-a-distance, Suzanne Wade, calls this the battle of fear versus faith. I started off 2017 fearful, and that is not a familiar place for me. I hid from news for the last few months of 2016, and the beginning of the new year felt blighted, pessimistic. Then, on January 21, the women of the world gathered to march, wearing pink pussyhats and reclaiming respect and power, and I got my mojo back. I wasn’t marching that day – I watched the march in Chicago from a hospital window high above the park where the crowds gathered. And as I sat there with my mom, at the bedside of her husband who would die a month later, I remembered that giving in to fear and pessimism is an act of cowardice.

My 20/20 hindsight can see the myriad ways in which fear dominated 2017. There is absolutely no rationale that can justify the racist, sexist, elitist behaviors of Donald Trump. So why does approximately 30% of the country still support him? Fear. Fear of being wrong in the first place about Trump. Fear of becoming irrelevant (i.e., losing privilege they were historically able to count on). Fear of those who are different from them in looks, thoughts, and lifestyle. From ratcheting up tensions with North Korea to demonizing immigrants; from the Mueller investigation to Roy Moore, this was a year of fear-based decision-making, fear-mongering, and cowardice.

Like the Women’s March, the #MeToo movement was an act of courage. Insufficient to change the culture on its own, but a meaningful milestone. The defeat of Roy Moore was also an act of courage, but one that we will not be able to sustain unless we get behind issues that matter to Black women and families, and support Black women running for public office. In fact, every noteworthy act of courage this year was committed by women.

Lesson learned. In 2018 I will consciously, deliberately, daily, act from a place of courage and faith. I will rigorously reject fear and pessimism. And I will support other women even more energetically.

Selfishness vs Grace

I have long worried (and opined) that our culture is too selfish for its own good. I would like to have been wrong about this, but 2017 was perhaps the most selfish year on record. Not by everybody – I saw a lot of grace this year – but certainly among those in power. What is selfishness but a common form of narcissism? Just look at the word. To be “self-ish” is to be about the self more than about others. The recently passed tax legislation was the most self-ish economic move in a generation, and that is but one example of selfish behavior from those who were elected to represent the interests of the voters – the vast majority of whom struggle to reach or maintain middle class status.

But selfish also shows up throughout the populace. Those who would say “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter” are not denying that Blacks have a much harder life than the rest of us — they’re just claiming that their personal hardships are still more important. Instead of saying, “I can see how that would be terrifying to know that the color of your skin means you might die if you are pulled over for a traffic infraction or are caught running down the street,” the selfish drown out that conversation by shouting, “Well my life is hard too!! Don’t forget about me! Think about me first!” “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” are responses born out of selfishness.

Men who whine about not being able to be themselves at work anymore, for fear of being perceived as a sexual harasser, are being selfish. Instead of recognizing that somewhere around 50% of women have been abused in some way just because of gender, and that all women experience the institutionalization of preferred status for men, they demand their continued privileged status by claiming that addressing institutionalized gender bias is hurting them. Because, nobody wants their toys taken away – not even the kid who stole the toy in the first place.

Why do I feel that Grace is the opposite of selfishness? Because “self-less-ness” isn’t quite on the mark. I think it’s beautiful, in a Mother Theresa sort of way, but I don’t think “self-less-ness” gets us to the cultural change we need.

But Grace. Grace is about giving assistance without expectation of something in return, other than the common good. Grace is about kindness, and acting out of a sense of rightness. Grace is about recognizing that sometimes, we have something that we did not earn, and that we should be grateful for it while also ensuring that others can share in it as well. Thoughtfulness, openness to the experiences of others, and a desire for equality are all characteristics of grace. The person with grace is capable of thinking, “It’s not my turn right now. It’s been my turn in the past, and maybe it will be my turn again in the future, but in this moment, it’s not my turn.”

More grace in 2018. That’s a good plan.

Growth vs Decay

I saw this issue played out at the national level this year, but I also observed it at the industry and personal levels. We often credit the statement if you’re not growing you’re dying to Lou Holz, but the principle has been around for thousands of years. From ancient philosophers to the Bible, wise humans have long advised us to keep growing or risk decay.

Fossil fuel companies are driving bad policy related to environmental rollbacks and disruption. Why? Because they aren’t working hard enough to figure out what’s next. Although everybody knows fossil fuel sources will run out and that extracting them hurts the environment — and often, the laborers who do the work — these companies cling to their current economic models, and as a result they decay from within, affecting everything from their morality to their economic sustainability.

Small business owners are discovering that they can either grow or go out of business. To be successful, a business owner must either embrace a future of continuous reinvention or die a slow (and sometimes, not so slow) death.

And at the heart of all this decay is people. Going back to the election last year, I’ve wondered time and time again, when did people stop thinking? Why don’t people seek facts, rather than reinforcement? Why do they willingly support behaviors that any broadly accepted moral code, and even their own religious practice, tells them is wrong? The most vital place to address the growth vs decay issue is not at the corporate or community level – it’s the self.

The self doesn’t naturally grow – it requires intention and effort. Decay can happen by accident. When I moved to Wisconsin nearly 10 years ago, and stopped my every day running around a 186,000 square foot building, my body paid the price of inertia. Later, I realized my own thoughts weren’t very interesting, as I was filling my downtime by reading news on my smart phone, instead of reading literature or more philosophical works. I was thinking entirely in current events, which isn’t really thinking at all. And one night several years ago, when I started to sing to my new grandson, I realized I could barely squeak out a song because it had been so long since I used my instrument. Music had been my life until my 30s, and somehow I had forgotten to sing for several years.

How many of us are running around not thinking, not learning, not practicing? That is where decay begins, and though it seems small, it results in massive tragedies, like the Fall of Rome, both World Wars, the Great Chinese Famine, the rise of fanatical fundamentalism, and the election of people like Donald Trump.

When I was in junior high, I became obsessed with The Interior Castle, written by St. Theresa of Avila. It was my introduction to the idea that an interior life was essential to a life well-lived. As an adult I have re-read the book many times, each time becoming more aware of how easy it is to let one’s interior life atrophy, and reinforcing my understanding that growth begins inside. 2017 reminded me of the importance of commitment to conscious growth, even when it seems exhausting, because the opposite is untenable. Plus, I need to get my weight down and my vocal range back.

Apathy vs Love

My dad likes to quote Elie Wiesel’s statement that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. It’s a potent motivator on those days when you just don’t have the energy to face the issues. Lately, I’ve been hearing people say, “I’m just so tired of caring so much. It’s exhausting.” But a life without convictions and passions is a life not lived (see above; growth vs decay).

A dear friend, now departed, once admonished me for being so political on social media. She was genuinely concerned that I would drive potential clients away because of my politics. I gave her concerns serious consideration, because I respected and trusted her. But ultimately, I continued sharing the things that matter to me, business-be-damned. Why? Because if I have to hide my beliefs to make money, then I’ve fallen on the side of apathy (and fear, and selfishness, and decay).

Perhaps more than any other shortcoming, apathy defines our current society. Unless an issue has direct and immediate impact on one’s self, home or paycheck, a plurality of people appears willing to ignore important topics that ultimately will affect them.

Of course, the hard part of committing to a life of love is that it must be applied to everyone. Just spend one day trying to see the face of God in everyone you meet, online or in person, and it’s clear that love is a radical sport. Click to Tweet

Now, I don’t see love as a Pollyanna-ish thing. To me, good love, substantial love, readily coexists with argument, disagreement, and directness. Truth is often brutal, but it’s still love. I don’t think love has to come with sugar-coating or baby-talk. I don’t think we need to sell it when we love.

People who never talk about hard things, who don’t tell one another important truths, who don’t call out bullshit when they hear it, they’re not being kind to each other — they’re being apathetic. It’s much easier to get along superficially. Teflon isn’t love, it’s a poison.

From Reflection to Action

The more I think about 2017, the more I realize the state we are in now (for those of us who worry that we are in a state), is due to failures at the level of the individual. When we cruise through our lives excessively concerned with our selves, preserving our energy at the expense of the common good, gorging on gossip, drama, and near-news instead of thinking and learning, looking for approval and — even more insidious — approbation, we end up where we are now.  So, what did I learn from this review of 2017?

• To cultivate Courage, because facing things head on leads to positive change.
• To practice Grace, because people who live in communities must consider the wellbeing of the community.
• To commit to personal Growth as if it is a workout that must make you sweat to be worth it.
• To act out of Love, knowing that real love is neither passive nor easy.

I also know that I must attach these principles to every layer of my life. It’s not enough to Love at home, be Courageous at work, and practice Grace at when doing something charitable. I have to Love my community, commit to Growth at home, be Courageous online, and practice Grace at work.

2017 was a pretty tough year. But we arrived at this difficult time after years — maybe decades — of personal choices. So I’ve decided to own it, and invite others to join me. I won’t make bets on how fast we will change things, but I know that we can. And 2018 is as good a time as any to start.

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Today we’re going to talk about how to think. Wait. Before you reject this post immediately, consider this: You’re probably not very good at thinking. Most people aren’t.

Here’s what most of us are good at: Reacting, daydreaming, denying, endorsing, commiserating, fortifying, arguing, wishing, and sometimes even wondering. But thinking? That’s an entirely different category of brain activity.

It all starts when we’re very young. If you’ve recently watched a toddler play, you know that many of their ideas involve physical risk. They spend a lot of time thinking, and much of that thinking leads to being told “no!” When that’s not happening, well-meaning adults are stepping in to show them how things are done, or discouraging them from trying to put round parts in square holes. Fast-forward to elementary school. Children aren’t taught to think so much as they are taught to memorize and follow instructions. In fact, children who are active thinkers are often viewed as disruptive or disrespectful; thinking leads to questioning, and questioning takes time away from planned curriculum. If a young adult pursues a liberal arts degree and takes some classes like comparative literature, comparative religion, or philosophy, there’s a good chance they learn about thinking in those classes. But unless the professor knows to put vocabulary to what they are doing (the mechanics of thinking), students often find these experiences confusing and even frustrating. After all, they’ve spent the previous 18 years doing rather than thinking. Then they graduate and get a job, where in all likelihood they are told what to do and how it will be measured. Unless management is particularly secure or enlightened, thinking isn’t exactly promoted.

But now you own a business, and you must be able to think. You need to reach into your own brain and conjure up insights, ideas, and solutions that you did not know were there. How do you do that?

There are as many ways to think as there are thinking individuals (which is, not as many as the world would presumably benefit from). But we can apply a loose framework to thinking, a framework you can adapt to your own particular style.

Let’s start with remembering to think. This may sound silly, but most people leap from thought to action without any analysis in-between.

• When you hear a new piece of information, do you question it?
• When you realize you may not be able to keep up with orders in the next few months and think, “I better hire someone fast!” do you then challenge yourself by asking, “Before I run that want ad – why do I assume that’s the right action to take?”
• Do you schedule time to test the way you do things and see if there is a better way?

On the one hand, using past experience and muscle memory are good things; if we had to start every task by rethinking it we would never get anything done. On the other hand, our thoughts are made up of a hearty stew of good, bad, and mis- information. The most effective people spend their lives trying to achieve a good balance of move-along and think-about-it. What is your balance?

In addition to the need to remember to think, how’s your confidence in your thinking?

• When you encounter a business problem, do you make time in your schedule to dissect the problem and develop potential solutions? Or do you go straight for avoidance, hoping the problem will solve itself?
• Do you recognize that your own thoughts can build on themselves - creating something entirely new and even outside your usual expertise - if you just give them some space and a bit of a workout?

The reason it’s so difficult to create true computer artificial intelligence is that the human brain is so good at taking past experiences, exposures, and emotions; adding in several doses of new information; rapidly working through the potential repercussions of a variety of scenarios; and creating solutions. Not just Einstein’s brain, or the kids’ at MIT’s brains. Your brain. Your brain was made for this, though most people don’t remember to use it this way.

Now let’s talk about why we think. We think to analyze something, learn something new, create something, or solve problems. If you didn’t read my article from LinkedIn/Pulse on activity versus intention, take a moment to read it. One of the biggest mistakes we make is that we favor activity over thinking – and only thinking can solve problems at the root and create new opportunities.

So. How do you think? This has been the subject of innumerable books, classes, and arguments throughout human history. I submit this simple approach to jumpstart a more consistent and effective thinking regimen.

Framing

You start by identifying what you want to accomplish with your thinking. I like to write it on a piece of paper. In fact, I nearly always think with a pen in my hand. Perhaps you write, “I need to accomplish more with my marketing this year.” Let’s call this framing the issue. You’re not going to try to solve your bookkeeping issues, your Aunt Enid’s bigotry, and your teenage son’s resistance to showering all at the same time. Right now, you’re just working on marketing (if, in the middle of this process, you start thinking about Aunt Enid, you’re not thinking – you’re drifting. Put her aside and get back to work).

Current Reality

Next, conduct a comprehensive review of what is. This could include a list of everything you did related to marketing in the past year, how each marketing effort performed, things you believe you could have done better, how much you spent, and anything that surprised you, delighted you, or disappointed you. A word of advice: don’t start by diving into your marketing records and files. That will slow you down and tangle you in the weeds. Start with brainstorming, writing everything you can think of rapidly until you run out of memories regarding what is. In some cases, this brainstorming may be sufficient to move on to the next step. In other cases, you may want to supplement with specific research to fill in a few gaps or details.

Once your review of what is is complete, separate your list into “things that performed well/met/exceeded expectations” and “things that did not meet expectations.”

Identify and Challenge Assumptions

Now it’s time to focus on the things that did not meet expectations. Take each one, one at a time, and make a list of all your assumptions about it. For instance, let’s pretend that one of your failed-to-meet-expectations items was social media promotion. Your work may look like this:

Social Media Promotion Did Not Increase Sales

My Assumptions:

• Just Facebook and Instagram are sufficient
• I can post 1-2 times each day on both
• I can skip weekends
• I can do my posts on Instagram and simply share them to Facebook for my Facebook post
• I can limit my posts to only items I make/sell
• People will follow the links on interesting products to my website
• People will buy once they reach my website

You may need to think hard to get to the heart of your assumptions. Using a technique called "The Five Whys" can be useful. Here's how it works:

Assumption: My business doesn't have to do social media posts on the weekend.

Why do I think my business doesn't have to do social media posts on the weekend?

Because people don't expect me to post business posts on the weekend.

Why do I think people don't expect me to post business posts on the weekend?

Because people are doing other, more important things than social media.

Why do I think people are doing things other than social media on the weekend?

Because I don't really use social media on the weekend.

Core assumption: Because I don't use social media on the weekend, I assume that others don't either.

The concept of the Five Whys is that you can get to the heart of a problem or assumption if you drill down five times. In this case, peeling back three layers of assumption was all it took to get to the core assumption.

Once you create your list of assumptions, it’s time to challenge each one. This is where you will likely introduce new information – outside information – into your thinking. You may realize you need to take an upcoming class on social media. You may reach out to an expert for an hour or two of Q&A. You may search for specific insights in Google or Bing, such as:

• How many social media platforms must I be on?
• How many times each day should I post on social media?
• Does a business need to be on social media on the weekends?
• How do I get people from my social media posts to my website?

The process of identifying and challenging assumptions is a powerful way to take your thinking to the next level. As you do this work, write next to each assumption whether or not it was correct. If it was incorrect, jot a few notes about what you have learned.

What Ifs

Using the information you have compiled so far, create a list of things you could do differently in the upcoming year. Once again, you’re brainstorming. Don’t try to build a plan for each idea immediately. Instead, create a list, writing down ideas as rapidly as they come to you until the idea flow dries up.

Once you complete your What Ifs list, organize them from best ideas to least-best ideas (there are no worst ideas in a brainstorming).

From Thinking to Doing

It is at this point that most thinkers cross the threshold from thinking to doing. At the point of developing your What Ifs, you are ready to create a plan.

Is this a simplified look at thinking? Yes, but not simplistic. These basic steps: framing an issue, establishing your current reality, challenging and correcting assumptions, and generating new ideas are the fundamental steps of thinking. These steps never even happen if you don’t remember to stop and think, and you gain confidence in your ability to come up with new and better ideas as you practice them.

So this is Resolution 2 for a New Year. Remember to think. Think. Get better at thinking. Your business will thank you.

I was cleaning out my car today – in preparation for delivering it to its new owners – and I found two sharp-edged unusually shaped pieces of copper in the glove box. They were given to me by a friend, Charles Lewton-Brain, who fashioned them through a process called fold-forming. 

I'm a big fan of consultants, and not just because I launched a consulting firm this year. I've hired consultants often throughout my years as a chief executive at several large firms, and have found their assistance to be invaluable. I start with the premise "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room," and go from there.

I had to figure out how to use consultants. Nobody taught me, and I used them incorrectly several times before I learned my lessons. Interestingly, the consultants themselves were rarely willing to tell me what I needed to know to benefit from them the most. So this column is for all those willing learners out there who may wish to hire a consultant and want to know how to extract every dollar of value.

Hire the Right Consultant

This sounds crazy simple, but it's not. It seems like every laid-off executive from one coast to the next is a consultant. Many consultants claim to have skills they cannot actually demonstrate in real life. Just because a person has ideas about marketing doesn't mean they've actually tested those ideas on their own budget. And just because someone worked directly for a CEO, say, as an HR Executive, doesn't mean they know beans about how to lay out a business strategy.

Vet your consultants carefully. Make sure the consultant has actually had a job directly in the area of expertise for which you are seeking their advice. Ask them to tell you about their biggest mistakes in those roles. One of the things you are paying for with a consultant is the opportunity to learn from the consultant's mistakes and possibly avoid making some of your own. If they haven't made any noteworthy mistakes, they either weren't doing much or they weren't doing it for long.

Do your due diligence. Interview carefully and check references. While it is much easier to cut the cord with a consultant than an employee, you risk spending a lot of money on inadequate consulting services before you realize it. Hire a consultant with the same care you would hire an employee.

Ensure potential consultants enjoy the highest level of professional respect for their integrity and business ethics. This person will be in a position to suggest that you do certain things with your business. You don't want to be at the starting gate wondering if you are about to do something shady.

Ask potential consultants how they would approach specific issues in your business. If they are reluctant to discuss their methodology, either they don't have one or they are paranoid that you will take their idea and run with it. A good consultant isn't just selling a great methodology - she is also selling her thought process and her ability to analyze issues and grasp nuances. A confident professional will happily discuss actual business issues and give you lots of ideas about how you could resolve them - with or without her.

A Consultant is Not a Contractor

This is an area that is often confusing. A consultant is someone who advises you on your business or a segment of your business. The consultant participates in reviewing history, analyzing performance, and making recommendations about how to proceed. Typically this work is done with the expectation that people within the organization will be taught to do the work the consultant is spearheading. A good consultant is an excellent teacher, handing off business knowledge with each recommendation, analysis, and suggestion.

Consultants are often confused with contractors. A contractor may be hired to manage a specific project or do specific jobs. This person sets his own schedule and bills by the project or by the hour. The contractor may or may not set direction (he may take direction from the consultant).

When the Consultant is Doing Nothing

Beware any professional who blazes through your doors with suggestions flying. Sometimes the most important work a consultant can do is observe. Every business that is still in business is doing many things right. A good consultant doesn't wish to undo those things - she wants to supplement and refine them. So if she tells you she needs time to observe, ask questions of your staff, and observe some more, trust that.

A Consultant is Not a Magician

Just because your consultant knows how to do something that you don't doesn't mean she can make it happen tomorrow. Are you looking for cultural change? Give it two years. A major shift in your brand perception? Minimum 10 months. Implement a new selling strategy? Same. Implementing new operating systems? Six months to plan, 4 months to implement/go-live, 2 more months before people stop complaining, a year to true benefits. A consultant's superior knowledge and experience in an area of change can make the process go smoother, but some things take as long as they take, and many things are dependent on your organization's acceptance and participation style.

A Consultant is Not a Genie

If a person tells you he or she can guide you through a major business initiative without making mistakes, run for the exits. You aren't paying for the benefit of someone who never makes mistakes - that doesn't exist. You are paying for the benefit of someone who makes more sophisticated mistakes because the dumb mistakes are behind her. You are paying for the benefit of someone who knows her craft well enough to suggest something new and possibly groundbreaking with reasonable expectation of success. You are paying for the opportunity to take it up a notch, not play it safe. If you just want to play it safe you can do that without consulting expense.

You May Not Always Understand - or Agree With - Your Consultant

If you already knew everything you wouldn't need a consultant (remember the saying "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room"). If your consultant is truly an expert, she will talk about things you don't understand. Ask her to break it down for you, explain where she is coming from and to help you understand it. That's an appropriate role for the consultant-as-teacher.  But if you're arguing with your consultant about whether or not she is right, take a step back. You may actually be arguing about your fear of taking a risk or your need to understand something better before you proceed - and those arguments are understandable. But if you're arguing about something you don't know as if you know it, what's the point?

Your Consultant is Not Your Employee

Your consultant is not your employee. Your consultant should be a challenger, ruffle your feathers, and tell you want you need to hear (versus what you want to hear).  Your consultant should be unwaveringly direct.

Your consultant will not drop everything when you need her. If she's good (and remember, that's what you need), she has lots of other customers.

Good consultants aren't cheap. You want a consultant with the skills and experience to be paid at the top of her field, and her hourly rate will reflect that.  Think of it as rent-an-executive for business owners who otherwise couldn't afford that skillset.

Still Want to Hire a Consultant?

Does this sound daunting?

Well, business is demanding. It makes us take risks, spend money we don't want to spend, and put our identities and self-worth on the line. We hire consultants to help us take those risks and make necessary changes.  An excellent consultant can make a huge difference to your bottom line and your optimism for your business. Once you find the right one, remember that she is not a magician, a contractor, a genie, or an employee. Plan it right, and you'll have engaged an expert, a business partner, and a support system.