Skills have methods, habits have sources

We spend way too much time and effort on developing outer leadership skills, and not enough attention on unearthing the inner sources for bad leadership habits, releasing the hold those habits have on us, and developing more useful ones.  In order to learn, you likely have to unlearn first.

Thought for the day

Skills have methods, habits have sources

- Gilbert Ryle

1.    Leadership skills have methods:  We can teach leadership skills, through methods.  This is informational learning or what is sometimes called horizontal learning.  It is about adding applications to our personal operating systems (our mindset) or filling up our toolbox with additional skills, knowledge and competencies. It addresses the outer game of leadership, or “what a leader does”.  

2.    Leadership habits have sources: This is a different beast, as these habits are there to protect an image we have had of ourselves. These habits are like an immune system that protects us from change or developing and sustaining new skills.  We have to discover the source, and this source likes to hide deep within us.  This source is usually in the form of a big assumption or a belief, that maintains the “bad” habit.   We then have to question or test its validity, or accuracy, in terms of today’s world.  Does this habit still serve me, or only get in my way?   If in the self-reflection and testing process, we see that the belief or assumption is no longer accurate, than we can begin to release the habit without threat to our identity or integrity. This is transformational learning, or what is sometimes called vertical learning.  You can’t do this through adding applications to your personal operating system (mindset).  You have to change or evolve the operating system into something bigger or more complex.  This vertical journey addresses the inner game of leadership or “who a leader is”.  The process is like discovering how we have the brake on and then learning how to release it, so that when we apply our foot to the gas (developing a new leadership capability) the adaptive progress won’t be sabotaged by that hidden foot on the brake. 

Brian Brittain

Executive Development work,  through helping executives and their  teams get results by talking about what matters

Brian.brittain@brittainconsulting.ca

416-999-3217

http://brittainconsulting.ca/

The No. 1 Way to Kill Productivity

You don't mean to do it, but in most offices it's hard to avoid. Bosses, don't give in to this time-suck.

387
inShare

Here's my nightmare scenario: I pull out my phone to call up my calendar for the next day, only to find that the entire day--we're talking 8 a.m. to 6p.m. (or later)--is booked solid with meetings. What happened to, um, actual work?

It's safe to say most people are addicted to meetings. It doesn't quite make sense, especially from a boss's perspective. Meetings are expensive. The hours your employees spend in meetings are hours when they're not working.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research reported that office workers spend an average of four hours per week in meetings. These same workers reported feeling like half of that time is wasted. Additionally, a Salary.com survey reported 47 percent of workers say meetings are the No. 1 time-waster at the office.

Obviously, not all meetings are unnecessary and unproductive. I spoke with project management and productivity expert Tony Wong to find out how to transform meetings and increase productivity. Here are his tips:

1. Timing matters.

Before you schedule your next meeting, ask yourself this: Do you really need 60 minutes to address the topic at hand? If you allot an entire hour for a meeting, your attendees will likely lengthen the meeting just for the sake of it.

Try reducing the length of your meetings to 30 minutes or less--10- and 15-minute meetings may even be all you need. To stay on schedule, always begin at the stated time, regardless of whether everyone has arrived, and end the meeting on time, even if you haven't completed your agenda.

2. Keep an eye on the size.

Inviting 10 people is similar to copying 10 people on an email. It's a sign of laziness. The more people you invite to your meeting, the more you sap productivity. Consider meetings VIP events--limit your invitations only to those whom are vital to the topic. As a rule, try for five people or less.

3. Choose a direction and stick with it.

There's nothing more annoying than meeting just to meet. Business meetings aren't effective when a decision needs to be made or for informational purposes. You can take care of that with a simple phone call or a company-wide email with a plea for no reply.

Unless it's a brainstorming session, a meeting should be called only to support and convey a previously made decision. A productive business meeting produces a committed plan of action. To stay on track, curb any irrelevant discussions, interruptions, and repeated points.

4. Define whether you're having a meeting or a work session.

The definition of a traditional business meeting has gotten lost over the years. This is likely how the long-winded meeting with unnecessary tasks came about. People easily confuse business meetings with group work sessions and brainstorming sessions. These two types of work settings require far more time than a standard meeting.

5. Ask attendees to come prepared.

This goes beyond putting together a brief agenda. Be sure all people are prepared in advance to work toward a concise plan of action--and have their materials and questions ready prior to entering the door.

6. Break bad habits.

Your bad habits are likely getting in the way of a quick and effective meeting. Be militant about accomplishing more at your meetings--break notoriously unproductive habits like long introductions and repetitive rambling. Even more challenging: Come to terms with the idea of turning down meetings that aren't vital to you or interrupt your deadlines. If you can't avoid the meeting altogether, set a time limit and leave accordingly.

The traditional business meeting just isn't working. Keep it short, concise, and when possible, eliminate it altogether.

Ilya Pozin founded his first company, Ciplex, at 17. The digital marketing and creative agency caters to small businesses and start-ups. @ilyaNeverSleeps

The Bad Habits of Good Negotiators

For a good part of the past decade, I’ve taught negotiation skills to diverse audiences—Fortune 500 executives, generals in the U.S. Army and Air Force, and professional athletes in the NFL and NHL. They tend to excel at preparing, analyzing options, and establishing a strong position. Yet some of their communication choices fly in the face of the best data on what actually works at the bargaining table.

Negotiations start with the exchange of information. Many people view this process like playing a poker game. Why should I tip my hand before I’ve seen yours?

But in Give and Take, I cover a wealth of evidence that most people are matchers: they follow the norm of reciprocity, responding in kind to how we treat them. This means that the best way to earn trust is to show trust. If we want to receive information, we need to lead by sharing information.

That said, it’s risky to give away information that could make you vulnerable. The good news is that there are two easy ways to avoid this trap. The first is a technique that I learned from Robert Adler, a negotiation professor who now serves as a Commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Administration for the Obama administration. It’s called selective information-sharing, and it involves revealing a piece of information that’s small or impossible to use against you. In one experiment, Stanford and Kellogg students negotiated over email. When they only exchanged their names and email addresses, they reached deals less than 40% of the time. When they shared information that was irrelevant to the negotiation, schmoozing about their hobbies or hometowns, 59% reached agreement. When you open up about something personal, you send a signal that you’re trustworthy, and your counterparts will be motivated to reciprocate, matching your disclosure with one of their own.

The second is called rank-ordering, and it involves listing the issues on the table, and sharing the relative importance of them. In a job offer negotiation, for example, you might say that salary is most important to you, followed by location, and then vacation time and signing bonus. Research shows that rank-ordering is a powerful way to help your counterparts understand your interests without giving away too much information. You can then ask them to share their priorities, and look for opportunities for mutually beneficial tradeoffs: both sides win on the issues that are most important to them.

But you can only find these win-win possibilities if you resist the temptation to sequence issues. All too often, people try to reach agreement on one issue at a time. “Let’s resolve the salary first, and then we’ll move on to the other issues.” When Neil Rackham’s team taped skilled and average negotiators, the average negotiators insisted on handling issues one at a time more than twice as often as the experts. By keeping all of the issues on the table, you have the flexibility to propose trading location and bonus for a bump in salary.

Once you’ve exchanged information, someone needs to make an offer. On average, is it better to make the first offer or let your counterpart open?

When I poll executives, more than three quarters believe that it’s usually best not to make the first offer. By encouraging a counterpart to make the first offer, they assume that they’ll gain an information advantage.

There’s only one problem with this assumption: it’s wrong. One thorough analysis of negotiation experiments showed that every dollar higher in the first offer translates into about 50 cents more in the final agreement. As Adam Galinsky, a leading negotiation expert at Columbia Business School, summarizes the extensive research: “more often than not, negotiators who make first offers come out ahead.” Why?

First offers serve as anchors: they set the tone for the negotiation. When we hear a first offer, we find ourselves pulled in that direction, and have trouble adjusting our own judgments. In one clever experiment, Greg Northcraft and Maggie Neale invited experienced real estate agents to inspect a house from top to bottom, and then asked them to estimate the independent appraisal value of the house. Unbeknownst to the agents, they were randomly assigned to see one of two different listing prices. Half of the agents saw a listing price of $119,900, and they estimated that the house would appraise for just over $114,000. The other half of the agents saw a listing price of $149,900, and they predicted that the house would appraise for over $128,000. The listing price should have been irrelevant; the agents had seen the house, so who cares what list price the seller chose? But the agents couldn’t escape the pull of the anchor.

Beyond setting the tone, making the first offer has two other advantages: it signals confidence and strength, and it creates more flexibility to make concessions without getting stuck with a bad deal. Of course, the credibility of your first offer depends on having a legitimate rationale to back it up. If your opening is too extreme, you can offend your counterpart or damage the relationship. And if your counterpart has better information than you, making the first offer can backfire—you might miss the mark completely. But as Dan Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, we’ve moved from a world of information asymmetry to information parity. In the information age, it’s much easier to do our homework about the value of a house, a car, or a skill set by gathering benchmarking data about similar items. As a result, I tell my students and clients that if they arrive at the bargaining table unprepared to make the first offer, they haven’t prepared enough.

When preparing to make a first offer, people often overcorrect. They’re so concerned about justifying their positions that they marshal as many reasons as possible. Yet Rackham found that experts give fewer reasons to back up their arguments: skilled negotiators averaged fewer than two reasons per argument, compared with three reasons per argument from the non-experts. “The more reasons advanced, the more a case is potentially diluted,” Rackham writes. “If a negotiator gives five reasons to back his/her case and the third reason is weak, the other party will exploit this third reason in their response.” Presenting too many reasons can also convey a lack of confidence, making clear that we’re uncertain of the legitimacy of our offer. An effective first offer is best supported by one or two compelling reasons.

There will always be times where we simply don’t have the chance to prepare to make the first offer, or our counterparts beat us to the punch with an opening anchor. “If an initial offer is too extreme,” write negotiation authorities Max Bazerman and Maggie Neale, “you need to re-anchor the process.” One strategy is to make your counteroffer equally extreme, knowing that the final agreement will usually be near the midpoint of the first two offers. But this approach comes with a downside: because anchoring can be powerful, you might not adjust enough, making your counteroffer insufficiently extreme. Also, by countering, you’re sending a message that the first offer was an acceptable launching point for the negotiation.

To avoid these traps, you can ask your counterparts to explain their reasoning, or simply tell them their initial offer is so far off the mark that you don’t feel it’s a fair or productive place to begin. But my favorite response is to follow one of Rackham’s tips: test your understanding and summarize. The idea here is to sum up what has just happened, and show that you’re wise to it. In Rackham’s study, of all behavior in a negotiation, testing understanding and summarizing made up less than 9% of the communications of average negotiators, versus more than 17% for skilled negotiators.

I had a chance to test this strategy when negotiating with a car dealer. He made an initial offer that was hardly better than the sticker price, and I saw an opportunity. “It sounds like you’re using a technique called anchoring,” I said, “where you open with an extreme offer to start the negotiation at the most favorable point for you. That’s not what you’re doing, is it?”
When I labeled the behavior, he saw that I couldn’t be easily duped. And when I asked the question, I gave him an escape hatch. He took it: “I knew I couldn’t fool you.”

For more on effective negotiation strategies, see Adam's new book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal

  
bestseller.Posted by:Adam Grant