Businesses are also becoming more intrinsically complex. It’s harder to predict outcomes because intricate systems interact in unexpected ways.

Interpreting data also proves more challenging because:

1. The degree of complexity may lie beyond our cognitive limits.
2. Past behaviour may not predict future actions.
3. In a complex system, an outlier may have a disproportionate impact.

In a September 2011 Harvard Business Review article, business professors Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath distinguish between organisations that are merely complicated and those that are genuinely complex.

Complicated Versus Complex

Simple systems feature few—and extremely predictable—interactions. When you turn a light switch on or off, you expect the same result every time.

Complicated systems have many moving parts, and they operate in patterned ways. We can make accurate predictions about how they will behave. For example, flying a commercial airplane involves complicated, but predictable, steps. As a result, it’s reliably safe.

In contrast, complex systems may operate in patterned ways, but their interactions are continually changing. Air traffic control is a complex system that constantly changes in reaction to weather, aircraft downtimes and other critical variables. The system is predictable not because it produces the same results from the same starting conditions, but because it has been designed to continuously adjust as its components change in relation to one another.

Two problems commonly surface in complex systems: unintended consequences and difficulties in making sense of a situation. With multiple independent and interrelated parts in a system, it’s hard to predict all of the possible consequences of a change in one component. And with so many data and informational components to deal with, it’s tough for an individual decision maker to visualise and master an entire complex system.

Most executives tend to overestimate the amount of information they can process, but humans have cognitive limits. No manager can understand every aspect of a complex business, yet many refuse to acknowledge this reality.

Managerial Blindness

Focusing on only one thing can prevent us from seeing other key areas—a concept known as inattentional blindness. Furthermore, an outlier or rare event may be ignored when it doesn’t appear often enough for us to learn how it will affect the system.

Collectively, these problems may cause confusion and hinder job performance. Unfortunately, many companies deal with increasing complexity by further complicating their systems, adding new coordination procedures and structures. Extra layers of management or measurements only serve to decrease effectiveness.

In the same issue of HBR, consultant Yves Morieux reports that managers in the most complicated companies spend 40% of their time writing reports and up to 60% in coordination meetings. Today’s companies, on average, set six times as many performance requirements as they did in 1955. Back then, CEOs committed to four to seven performance imperatives; today, they commit to 25–40.

Many businesses adopt conflicting performance imperatives:

• They strive to satisfy customers with low prices and high quality.
• They seek to customise offerings for specific markets and standardise them for the greatest operating return.
• They want to innovate and be efficient.

If managers are challenged with these complexities, imagine the effect on workers. People at all levels crave clarity and simplicity. A manager must navigate murky waters and emerge with plans that inspire cooperative action. It’s not that simple.

Real Cooperation

More than ever, leaders need input from others to grasp complexities and determine how they affect other parts of the system. This requires them to ask a lot of questions. In Morieux’s words: “Real cooperation isn’t a matter of getting along well; it’s taking into account the constraints and goals of others.”

Staying on track is much easier with a guide or checklist. Michael Useem, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of The Leadership Moment, has published The Leader’s Checklist to create a clear roadmap for navigating any situation. Key questions help customise the list to fit specific needs.

A leader must be able to keep the big picture in clear view, while attending to all of the small executions that will lead to the right outcomes. Each principle should generate a set of questions that help leaders test, retest, refine and update their preparedness for any situation.

The Leader’s Checklist

Professor Useem’s list is presented here in condensed form, as space allows. Sample questions are presented with each principle.

1.       Articulate a Vision: Formulate a clear and persuasive vision, and communicate why it’s important to all members of the enterprise.

1. Do my direct reports see the forest, as well as the trees?
2. Does everyone in the firm know not only where we are going, but, most importantly, why?
3. Is the destination compelling and appealing?

2.       Think and Act Strategically: Make a practical plan for achieving this vision, including both short- and long-term strategies. Anticipate reactions and resistance before they happen by considering all stakeholders’ perspectives.

1. Do we have a realistic plan for creating short-term results, as well as mapping out the future?
2. Have we considered all stakeholders and anticipated objections?
3. Has everyone bought into, and does everyone understand, the firm’s competitive strategy and value drivers? Can they explain it to others?
   

3.       Express Confidence: Provide frequent feedback to express appreciation for the support of those who work with and for you.

1. Do the people you work with know you respect and value their talents and efforts?
2. Have you made it clear that their upward guidance is welcomed and sought?
3. Is there a sense of engagement on the frontlines, with a minimum of “us” vs. “them” mentality?
   

4.       Take Charge and Act Decisively: Embrace a bias for action by taking responsibility, even if it isn’t formally delegated. Make good and timely decisions, and ensure they are executed.

1. Are you prepared to take charge, even when you are not in charge?
2. If so, do you have the capacity and position to embrace responsibility?
3. For technical decisions, are you ready to delegate, but not abdicate?
4. Are most of your decisions both good and timely?
5. Do you convey your strategic intent and then let others reach their own decisions?

5.       Communicate Persuasively: Communicate in ways that people will not forget, through use of personal stories and examples that back up ideas. Simplicity and clarity are critical.

1. Are messages about vision, strategy and character crystal-clear and indelible?
2. Have you mobilised all communication channels, from purely personal to social media?
3. Can you deliver a compelling speech before the elevator reaches the 10th floor?

6.       Motivate the Troops, and Honour the Front Lines: Appreciate the distinctive intentions that people bring to their work; build on diversity to bring out the best in people. Delegate authority except for strategic decisions. Stay close to those who are most directly engaged with the enterprise’s work.

1. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it?
2. Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications?
3. Are you keeping some ammunition dry for those urgent moments when you need it?
4. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act?
5. Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers?
6. Can your people communicate their ideas and concerns to you?

7.       Build Leadership in Others, and Plan for Succession: Develop leadership throughout the organisation, giving people opportunities to make decisions, manage others and obtain coaching.

1. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates?
2. Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership?
3. Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers?

8.       Manage Relations, and Identify Personal Implications: Build enduring personal ties with those who work with you, and engage the feelings and passions of the workplace. Help people appreciate the impact that the vision and strategy are likely to have on their own work and the firm’s future.

1. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up?
2. Are managers self-aware and empathetic?
3. Are autocratic, egocentric and irritable behaviours censured?
4. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy affect them individually?
5. What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause?
6. How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and the quality of their work lives?

9.       Convey Your Character: Through storytelling, gestures and genuine sharing, ensure that others appreciate that you are a person of integrity.

1. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity?
2. Do others know you as a person? Do they know your aspirations and hopes?
    

10.   Dampen Over-Optimism: To balance the hubris of success, focus attention on latent threats and unresolved problems. Protect against managers’ tendency to engage in unwarranted risk.

1. Have you prepared the organisation for unlikely, but extremely consequential, events?
2. Do you celebrate success, but also guard against the byproduct of excess confidence?
3. Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results, but for long-term performance?

11.   Build a Diverse Top Team: Although leaders take final responsibility, leadership is most effective when there is a team of capable people who can collectively work together to resolve key challenges. Diversity of thinking ensures better decisions.

1. Have you drawn quality performers into your inner circle?
2. Are they diverse in expertise, but united in purpose?
3. Are they as engaged and energised as you?

12.   Place Common Interest First: In setting strategy, communicating vision and reaching decisions, common purpose comes first and personal self-interest last.

1. In all decisions, have you placed shared purpose ahead of private gain?
2. Do the firm’s vision and strategy embody the organisation’s mission?
3. Are you thinking like a chief executive, even if you are not one?

Not all of these questions are applicable to every situation, but it is the questioning that counts. Whether you are facing a typical day at the office or walking into a crisis, ask yourself and others these questions to inspire correct actions. Only then can you make sense of the complexities you encounter.

Leaders learn to manage complexities not by prescribing specific behaviours, but by creating an environment for optimal behaviours to occur—even though “optimal” cannot be defined in advance.

Problems are solved when you leverage others’ cooperation, skills and ingenuity. Employee satisfaction and performance will concurrently improve. There’s less need for complicated layers of management, with more energy available to manage situations wisely and effectively.

How we respond to failures and bounce back from our mistakes can make or break our careers. The wisdom of learning from failure is undeniable, yet individuals and organisations rarely seize opportunities to embrace these hard-earned lessons.

Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is unequivocal: “One difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing.” Even for the best companies and most accomplished professionals, long track records of success are inevitably marred by slips and fumbles.

Our response to failure is often counterproductive: Behaviours become bad habits that set the stage for continued losses. Just as success creates positive momentum, failure can feed on itself. Add uncertainty and rapidly fluctuating economics to the mix, and one’s ability to get back on track is sorely tested.

Long-term winners and losers face the same problems, but they respond differently. Attitudes help determine whether problem-ridden businesses will ultimately recover.

Luckily, most of us can learn to become more resilient with training and coaching.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Take the example of two typical MBA graduates who were laid off from their positions during the recession. Both were distraught. Being fired provoked feelings of sadness, listlessness, indecisiveness and anxiety about the future.

For one, the mood was transient. Within two weeks he was telling himself, “It’s not my fault; it’s the economy. I’m good at what I do, and there’s a market for my skills.” He updated his resume and, after several failed attempts, finally landed a position.

The other spiraled further into hopelessness. “I got fired because I can’t perform well under pressure,” he lamented. “I’m not cut out for finance; the economy will take years to recover.” Even after the market improved, he was reluctant to apply for positions and feared rejection.

How these individuals handled failure illustrates opposite ends of the spectrum. Some people bounce back after a brief period of malaise and grow from their experiences. Others go from sadness to depression to crippling fear of failure—and in business, inertia and fear of risk invite collapse.

Optimism and Resilience

Research clearly demonstrates that people who are naturally resilient have an optimistic explanatory style—that is, they explain adversity in optimistic terms to avoid falling into helplessness.

Those who refuse to give up routinely interpret setbacks as temporary, local and changeable:

• “The problem will resolve quickly…”
• “It’s just this one situation…”
• “I can do something about it…”

In contrast, individuals who have a pessimistic explanatory style respond to failure differently. They habitually think setbacks are permanent, universal and immutable:

• “Things are never going to be any different…”
• “This always happens to me…”
• “I can’t change things, no matter what…”

The Team Management Systems (TMS) suite of psychometric tools offers a sophisticated assessment that can help you understand your habitual approach to interpreting events, whether they tend to be more optimistic or more pessimistic, and  how you can more effectively approach change, setback  and uncertainty.

University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin P. Seligman believes most people can be immunized against the negative thinking habits that may tempt them to give up after failure. In fact, 30 years of research suggests that we can learn to be optimistic and resilient—often by changing our explanatory style.

Seligman is currently testing this premise with the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, a large-scale effort to make soldiers as psychologically fit as they are physically fit. One key component is the Master Resilience Training course for drill sergeants and other leaders, which emphasises positive psychology, mental toughness, use of existing strengths and building strong relationships.

This military program will no doubt provide insights for civilians who wish to become more effective within their workplaces and organisations.

Learning from Mistakes

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Failure is one of life’s most common traumas, yet people’s responses to it vary widely. Many managers have learned to reframe personal and departmental setbacks by stating: “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”—and it’s a great sentiment. In practice, however, their companies often continue to view failures in the most negative light.

Part of the problem lies in our natural tendency to blame. We perceive and react to failure inappropriately. How can we learn anything if our energy is tied up in either assigning or avoiding blame? Still others overreact with self-criticism, which leads to stagnation and fears of taking future risks.

In the 1930s, psychologist Saul Rosenzweig proposed three broad personality categories for how we experience anger and frustration:

1. Extrapunitive: Prone to unfairly blame others
2. Impunitive: Denies that failure has occurred or one’s own role in it
3. Intropunitive: Judges self too harshly and imagines failures where none exist

Extrapunitive responses are common in the business world  (Worrall 2009, A Climate for Change, P 152). Because of socialisation and other gender influences, women are more likely to be intropunitive.

Fortunately, managers at all organisational levels can repair their flawed responses to failure. Business consultants Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan suggest three highly effective steps in “Can You Handle Failure?” (Harvard Business Review, April 2011):

1. Cultivate Self-Awareness

First, identify which of the three blaming styles you use. (Note: They occur automatically and immediately, so they are unconscious emotional responses.) Do you look to blame others? Deny blame? Blame yourself?

It’s hard for us to see our personalities clearly, let alone our flaws. It’s harder still to learn from our mistakes if we’re caught up in the blame game.

Next, take at least one self-assessment test to help broaden your view of your interaction style. Two popular assessments are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Big Five Personality Test. (You can take a free version online at personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm.) 

Finally, work with a coach or mentor to improve your level of self-awareness. While it takes some time to shine a light on our attitudes with respect to failure and blame, each of us can benefit from such reflection and discussion.

For example, think about challenging events or jobs in your career, and consider how you handled them. What could you have done better? Ask trusted colleagues, mentors or coaches to evaluate your reactions to, and explanations for, failures.

Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations. Ask for informal feedback. If you’re in a managerial position, you may underestimate how what you say may be perceived as criticism, due to the hierarchical nature of your job.

2. Cultivate Political Awareness.

Whereas self-awareness helps you understand the messages you’re sending, political awareness helps you understand the messages others are receiving. It requires you to know how your organisation defines, explains and assigns responsibility for failure, as well as how the system allows for remedial attempts.

Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach mistakes within your specific organisation, department and role.

3. Develop New Strategies.

Once you’ve become more aware of your failure response style (and your bad habits), you can move toward more open and adaptive behaviours.

Practice these strategies the next time mistakes and failures present challenges:

Listen and communicate. Most of us forget to gather enough feedback and information before reacting, especially when it comes to bad news. Never assume you know what others are thinking or that you understand them until you ask good questions.

Reflect on both the situation and the people. We’re good at picking up patterns and making assumptions. Remember, however, that each situation is unique and has context.

Think before you act. You don’t have to respond immediately or impulsively. You can always make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation. 

Search for a lesson. Look for nuance and context. Sometimes a colleague or a group is at fault, sometimes you are, and sometimes no one is to blame. Create and test hypotheses about why the failure occurred to prevent it from happening again.

Admittedly, some mistakes are more blameworthy than others. As a manager, how do you make it safe for people to report and admit to mistakes?

How many of the failures in your business are truly blameworthy? Compare this to how many are treated as blameworthy, and you’ll have a better understanding of why so many failures go unreported.

You cannot learn from your mistakes when the emphasis is on blaming. You cannot learn to become more resilient when your energy is tied up in assigning or avoiding blame.

Perhaps Procter & Gamble’s Lafley said it best in his Harvard Business Review interview: “I think I learned more from my failures than from my successes in all my years as a CEO. I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, you won’t get better—and the company won’t get better.”

As a competency skill, empathy is poorly understood by those who need it the most. Some hard-driving managers eschew the need to develop empathy because they assume it’s for “touchy-feely” types. Other tone-deaf leaders blindly walk around, relying solely on logic and wondering why others fail to see things their way. 

Research by the Center for Creative Leadership reveals that executive “derailment” is primarily caused by deficits in emotional competence:                                                                                                                                                    

1. Difficulty in handling change

2. Inability to work well in teams

3. Poor interpersonal relations

The inability to understand matters from others’ points of view means some people lack the flexibility required for change. These individuals simply cannot work well with, or relate to, others, which makes them workplace liabilities. This is particularly true for leaders who lack these fundamental skills in times of change and uncertainty.

Defining Empathy

Empathy is the ability to “walk in someone else’s moccasins.” Psychologist Daniel Goleman,  author of  Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, defines it as the ability to read other people by sharing and identifying their emotional states.

According to Goleman, empathy is a foundational skill for all social competencies in the workplace:

1.  Understanding others: Sensing others’ feelings and perspectives; taking an actve interest in their concerns
2.  Service orientation: Anticipating, recognizing and meeting customers’ needs
3.  Developing others: Sensing others’ developmental needs and bolstering their abilities
4. Leveraging diversity: Cultivating opportunities among diverse people
5.  Political awareness: Reading the political and social currents in an organisation

Successful leaders score high marks in these areas, which leads to goal completion—not to mention opportunities for promotion and greater likelihood of success leading outcomes in times of change. When combined with focus, perseverance and concentration, empathy breeds achievement.

The Trickle-Down Theory

Empathetic managers are more likely to inspire others. They are generally well liked and command greater respect, which means their direct reports will be motivated to go the extra mile. The goal is to achieve balance in empathy and goal-orientation for optimum effectiveness.

Empathy is even more critical when managers:

• Assign unpleasant tasks
• Provide sensitive feedback or criticism
• Deal with employee disputes
• Dislike an employee or customer
• Deliver bad news (termination or denial of promotion)

Fundamental Interactions

The good news is, for the majority of individuals, empathy can be learned with the assistance of a skilled coach. So, where does one start?

1. Uncover the truth about your empathy skills.  Connect with a coach who has specialised skills in assessing this competency with a high degree of accuracy
2. Deal with any negativity by empathising with others.
3. Next, return the focus to the goals and tasks at hand.

The first step requires true curiosity, the desire to understand another’s point of view, and a genuine interest in what the person is saying and feeling. The best way to accomplish this step is through questions like:

1. “Can you say more about that?”
2. “Really? That’s interesting. Can you be more specific?”
3. “I wasn’t aware of that. Tell me more.”
4. “I’m curious about that. Let’s discuss this in greater depth.”
5. “Let me see if I understand you correctly. Here is what I hear you saying…”

Nonverbal Cues

Be sure to focus on emotional cues. Appreciate not only what others are saying, but also why they are saying it. Also listen for what’s not being said.

Without empathy, you will have a tendency to misread other people. You will neglect to ask clarifying questions, and you will miss nonverbal cues. If you listen only to others’ words, facts and figures, you will miss the emotional context of what’s being said.

Research tells us that we remember only 7 percent of someone’s message from their words. The rest is communicated through nonverbal cues: facial expressions, body language and tonality. Strict attention to words will mislead you, so make sure that nonverbal communication is consistent with what you’re hearing.

10 Steps to Improving Empathy

The following steps can help you improve your empathy skills. As with other emotional competencies, empathy requires practice, so consider working with an experienced coach if you continue to face obstacles.

1. Take note of situations in which you demonstrated empathy (versus the times you failed to do so).
2. Recall times when people’s underlying concerns were not explicitly expressed and/or addressed.
3. Identify emotions the other person may be experiencing. Explore the possibilities, without assuming your suspicions are true.
4. Develop a list of questions for your next encounter with this person.
5. Practice listening without interrupting. Wait until others fully express their points of view before offering your own.
6. Avoid being defensive. Your goal is to create an open dialogue, during which possibilities can be freely explored.
7. Allow enough time for people to express their opinions and ideas without judgment.
8. Practice active listening. Always confirm the meaning of what was said.  Paraphrasing people’s words helps clear up misconceptions and deepens understanding.
9. Always focus on desired outcomes. Be sure to balance empathy and focus to achieve optimum effectiveness.
10. Continue to practice this balance of focus, goal-orientation and empathetic listening.

Every person in an executive role is expected to exercise wisdom in their decisions. However, senior leaders are often more concerned with meeting the numbers and therefore fail to come close to being astute over the long term.

Defining Wisdom

The Oxford English Dictionary (1998) states that wisdom is “the capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice between means and ends; sometimes less strictly, sound sense in practical affairs; opposite to folly.” One must apply a combination of judgement, decisions, and actions.

Robert J. Sternberg, former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, sees wisdom as the application of tacit knowledge in pursuing the goal of a common good. In the case of executives, their decisions must consider the needs of customers, suppliers, employees, the organisation, financial profits, shareholders and the environment, often globally.

According to Sternberg (2005), “Effective leadership is, in large part, a function of creativity in generating ideas, analytical intelligence in evaluating the quality of these ideas, practical intelligence in implementing the ideas, and convincing others to value and follow the ideas, and wisdom to ensure that the decisions and their implementation are for the common good of all stakeholders.”

Finding Wisdom

Wisdom in the workplace typically implies two distinct areas of wise behavior:

1. The wisdom of corporate decision-making:
   1. Knowing what information to use in decision-making
   2. Creating a culture of knowledge in order to acquire that information in a timely fashion
   3. Assessing it in both short- and long-term frameworks
2. Reaping the financial rewards that come with shrewd financial choices.

Wisdom in Action

In order to make a smart decision, a wise leader must draw upon intellectual, emotional, and social comprehension. One must:

• Gather information
• Discern reality from artifice
• Evaluate and edit the accumulating knowledge
• Listen with both heart and mind
• Consider what is morally right
• Weigh what is socially just
• Consider others as much as self
• Think about the here and now
• Consider future impact

In times of crisis, however, wisdom sometimes demands the paradoxical decision to resist action or judgement.

When called upon in any challenging situation, no matter how trivial, if you slow down long enough to ask yourself the question, “What would be the wisest thing to do?” you will already be moving closer to making a more appropriate and apt decision.

The Contradictions of Wisdom

There are recurrent themes and qualities that comprise wisdom:

• Humility
• Patience
• Clear-eyed, dispassionate view of human nature
• Emotional resilience
• Ability to cope with adversity
• A philosophical acknowledgement of ambiguity
• Recognising the limitations of knowledge

Action is important, as well as inaction, at times. Compassion is central to wisdom, but so is emotional detachment. Knowledge is crucial, but often wisdom deals with uncertainty and complexity. These inherent contradictions are embedded in any definition of wisdom. In fact, they are the essence of what makes wisdom so critical to leaders.

Business Intelligence

“Business intelligence is the systematic use of information about your business to understand, report on and predict different aspects of performance,” according to Professor Tom Davenport of Babson College in Massachusetts.

His examples of current sage leaders include Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Warren Buffet, the investor. Buffet is known for his financial wisdom built upon a foundation of expert accounting knowledge, however, his true brilliance stems from a deep understanding of people and human nature.

Social Intelligence

A less appreciated dimension of wisdom is social wisdom which is critical for understanding and incorporating the diversity of “people factors” into business decisions to create a greater common goal.

Exercising social wisdom in the workplace, promotes performance, goal alignment and social unity by:

• Decreasing stress and conflicts in the workplace
• Improving Job satisfaction
• Promoting Quality in the workplace
• Nurturing the sense of personal fulfillment
• Providing for more Innovative and creative opportunities

Developing Your Wisdom

Psychologist and author Richard R. Kilburg presents questions for improving leadership wisdom that can be reviewed in coaching sessions (Executive Wisdom: Coaching and the Emergence of Virtuous Leaders, APA, 2006).

1. Take a moment to relax, then ask yourself the following questions:
   1. What is the stupidest thing you have ever done as a person or as a professional?
   2. If you are a leader in an organisation, what is the stupidest decision or action you have ever taken?
   3. What made the decision or action stupid? When and how did you know it was stupid? What criteria did you use to judge its merits?
2. Now, ask yourself,
   1. What is the wisest thing you have ever done as a person or as a professional?
   2. If you are a leader in an organisation, what is the wisest decision or action you have ever taken?
   3. What made the decision or action wise? When and how did you know it was wise? What criteria did you use to judge its merits?
3. Can you develop any internal sense of how you created, accessed, and used a sense of rightness in the situations in which you believe you acted wisely as opposed to stupidly? If so, jot down and reflect on what you think and feel went into the emergence of that sense of rightness.
4. Take a few minutes to talk to someone out loud about what you have explored or, if you are reluctant to share it with another person, dictate some notes onto a voice recorder and then listen to yourself afterward. The experience of giving voice to inner work can often provide additional insight and learning.

Discussing these issues with your coach will help you develop a powerful link to leading with wisdom.

Changing people’s behaviour is the most important challenge for business leaders competing in unpredictable environments.

“The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems,” asserts Dr. John P. Kotter, a retired Harvard Business School professor who specialises in leadership. “The core of the matter is always about changing the behaviour of people.”

A Fast Company article, “Change or Die” (May 2005), reveals that when faced with a health crisis like heart disease, only one in nine individuals makes the necessary, lifesaving changes required to live longer. 

Minds are hard to change, yet so many aspects of our lives are directed toward doing just that. We face a supplier who needs to respond more quickly, a subordinate who must perform a task differently, or a peer who should recognise the importance of our project and commit to it. We clearly acknowledge the need for others to change their minds and act differently. We also know we need to change our own minds at certain times.

Many of us are professionally involved in the business of changing people’s minds. A CEO, executive, or team leader must convince and secure commitment; a salesperson must close the sale and persuade consumers to think differently about new product features; consultants and coaches must change minds to motivate groups and individuals to perform more effectively for improved results.

Why are our brains wired in a way that seems to resist change so tenaciously? In their book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work (2001), authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey describe the process of resistance and our body’s and mind’s natural tendency to revert to what they’re used to doing—a process called homeostasis.

In this new millennium, with ever-increasing discoveries about the brain, has cognitive neuroscience discovered clues to what is required to help people change their way of thinking so they can modify their behaviour? Professor Howard Gardner, a lifelong researcher and expert on the mind, believes we’ve reached this point:

“Of all of the species on earth, we human beings are the ones who specialise in voluntary mind change: we change the minds of others, we change our own minds. We have even crafted various technologies that allow us to extend the sweep of mind change: powerful mechanical artifacts like writing implements, televisions, and computers…In the coming decade, mind changing will continue and, in all probability, accelerate.” —Changing Minds, 2004.

What must we understand about the brain to better grasp the process of changing others’ minds? And what happens when we try to change our own mind to employ and sustain new behaviours?

7 Levers to Change a Mind

Leaders must consider several critical factors to changing someone’s mind. Gardner has identified seven levers used to change minds:

1. Reason: When we are trying to persuade others, reason plays a pivotal role—especially among those who consider themselves educated. Most businesses rely on analysis and logical processes when making decisions. The rational approach involves identifying relevant factors, weighing each in turn, and making an overall assessment.
2. Research: The scientific approach collects relevant data and analyses it in a systematic manner (often statistical) to verify or cast doubt on promising trends. Research needn’t be as formal as this, however. It may entail identifying events and forming judgments as to whether they warrant a change of mind
3. Resonance: While reason and research appeal to the cognitive aspects of the mind, resonance applies to our emotions. Appealing to one’s feelings and creating emotional resonance are among the more powerful means of changing minds. Resonance is often achieved after one hears reason and research arguments, but it may occur on an unconscious level. As a relationship of trust or connection to the mind-changer develops, one is persuaded to change.
4. Representational Redescriptions: This term describes what happens when a change of mind becomes convincing in several different ways that reinforce each other. For example, a PowerPoint presentation may present the same concept using percentages, bar graphs, and other graphic images, all of which explain the same key concept in distinct ways.
5. Resources and Rewards: So far, the possibilities for mind-changing lie within reach of any individual whose mind is open. It is sometimes more likely to occur when resources are available. In psychological terms, this is known as positive reinforcement. Ultimately, however, unless the new course of thought is congruent with the other criteria—reason, resonance, and research—it is unlikely to last beyond the provision of rewards.
6. Real-World Events: Wars, terrorists, natural disasters, and economic depressions can influence mind-changing. On the positive side, so can prosperity and peace. It is easier to convince a nation to go to war after a terrorist attack, even when the facts are lacking.
7. Resistances: The six factors involved in changing minds have thus far been positive. It is unrealistic to assume that you won’t encounter resistance—the strong force that negatively affects mind change. In our early years of life, we change our minds frequently to develop, learn, and become competent. Research demonstrates that changing minds becomes more difficult with age. We develop strong views and perspectives that are resistant to change

Any effort to understand the process of changing minds must take into account the power of resistance.

A mind change is most likely to occur when the first six factors operate in concert (they are coordinated and congruent), and when resistance is relatively weak. Conversely, a change of mind is unlikely to occur when resistances are strong and the other factors fail to point strongly in one direction.

Changing Minds in an Organisation

Getting people to replace one frame of mind with another is harder still when you’re working with large groups. Gardner, a MacArthur Fellow “genius” award winner, has studied what works for heads of state and corporate CEOs: “When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience, the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”

When change is introduced to an organisation’s members, leaders will experience greater success when they:

1. Make good use of narrative, telling stories to which people can relate.
2. Present data using as many of the seven levers of change as possible (for example, facts and emotions).
3. Express a clear understanding of areas of resistance.
4. Achieve emotional resonance with people whose “buy-in” is required for successful change.
5. Give people opportunities for ongoing support and dialogue.

1. The Power of Stories

Stories can be a key element in changing minds. In a story, you have a main character, ongoing activities to achieve a goal, a crisis, and a resolution.

Leaders must analyse the current situation, determine what needs to change, and envision an altered state of affairs. They must then create a convincing narrative and present it to those whose minds they hope to change.

Success will depend on various factors, including the effectiveness of the narrative, the ways in which it is convincingly conveyed, and the extent to which leaders and those around them actually embody the presentation. The more personal and authentic the story, the more people will identify with common themes.

2. The Power of Variety

One’s level of familiarity with a concept determines how we successfully process and accept it. Delivering the same content in multiple forms is a powerful way to change people’s minds, which may explain the popularity of PowerPoint presentations.

People must not only hear the message, but also see it—often in the form of images, graphs, and diagrams. For example, many motivational speakers use music, humor, and strong emotional stimulation to deliver their messages and inspire action.

Using more than one delivery method gives people an opportunity to form mental representations in their preferred learning mode. Some people do well with logical arguments, while others require an emotional connection.

3. The Power of Resistance

When it comes to changing someone’s mind, Gardner says, “The biggest mistake people make is not understanding the other’s resistances.” Each of us has ingrained beliefs (fundamentalism). We are committed to maintaining our opinions (the status quo). For some, this is a defense mechanism, and any attempt by others to change our thinking would come at the expense of self-esteem.

What never works when trying to change someone’s mind is a direct assault on his or her point of view. When you go in determined to change someone, you’re triggering defensiveness.

Gardner advises us to pay attention to unspoken cues and listen carefully to the other’s perspective: “Try to put into your own words tentatively, not threateningly, what you think the other person’s concerns are,” he says. “Most people will appreciate your efforts if you say, ‘It seems to me you’re saying such and such.’ Then they can answer, ‘Well, no, that’s not exactly what I’m saying.’ ”

Even the most eloquent argument is likely to fail if you lack insight about the person you’re trying to sway. The real trick is to take the other person’s perspective. Once you understand someone’s resistance, you can try to find a common solution.

4. Appealing to Emotions

Emotional persuasion isn’t taught in business schools, nor does it come easily to the engineers, scientists, lawyers, physicians, accountants and managers who run organisations. Most CEOs have higher educations and are trained in statistical analysis to a degree that allows them to make sound decisions. They must then convince others, using as many methods as possible—not just the facts.

According to Dr. George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, “Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts.”

Minds rely on frames, not facts, according to Lakoff and other experts. Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world, part of the cognitive unconscious, and they exist outside of our awareness.

Because of the way the brain learns, messages have a better chance of being retained when our emotional centres are engaged. When individuals experience a positive emotional resonance with the person trying to change their minds, they’re more easily persuaded—a phenomenon that can occur  even in the absence of reasonable facts to support change.

5. The Power of Ongoing Communication and Support

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion. In organisations, this reaction often takes the form of avoidance, resistance, and exceptionalism.

Change feels more natural when you have participation and engagement at all levels. Your goal? To introduce ideas into the mainstream, without excessive use of authority. When more people can contribute to finding solutions and helping each other, there is a better chance of achieving real behavioural change. The more people communicate and support one another, the easier it is for everyone to stay on track.

Change initiatives are more likely to fail when there are no ongoing discussions or support. This is why 90% of cardiac patients revert to unhealthy habits after their heart attacks, despite overwhelming evidence that points to a need for change. In one 1996 study by Dr. Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, 77 percent of heart patients managed to sustain behavioural lifestyle changes and avoid surgery after three years by participating in a twice-weekly program that offered support and training.

In summary, changing minds is not easy, but there are clear methods for increasing the probability of effecting real behavioural change. Provision of coaching services is highly recommended to support change initiatives.

Resources:

Deutschman, A. (May 2005). “Change or Die.” Fast Company.

Gardner, H. (2004). Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. Harvard Business School Press.

Kegan, R. & Lahey, L. (2001). How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Jossey-Bass.

Raffel, D. (May 2005). “Brain to Brain: How to Get Anyone to Agree with You.” O Magazine.

Worrall, D. (2009). A Climate for Change (Chapter 2 Inspire Others to Embrace Change), Life Success Publishing.

Today’s fast-paced economy demands that businesses change or die. Few companies manage corporate transformations as well as they would like. It is said that anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all change initiatives fail.

Between 1980 and 1995, researchers at the Harvard Business School tracked the impact of change efforts among the Fortune 100. Only 30 percent of those initiatives produced an improvement in bottom-line results that exceeded the company’s cost of capital and only 50 percent led to an improvement in market share price. Each of the companies invested $1 billion in change programs over the 15-year period.

For years, companies have struggled with growing competition by introducing improvements into every function and process. But the competitive pressures keep increasing, the pace of change keeps accelerating and companies must continually search for higher levels of quality, service and overall business agility. The treadmill moves faster, companies work harder, but results improve slowly or not at all.

One problem is that too few people at every level really support the initiative with their hearts and minds. To foster pro-active effort and imaginative thinking, not only do you have to engage more employees, you’ve got to engage them more fully.

Change is intensely personal. For change to occur in any organisation, each individual must think, feel or do something different. Even in large organisations, which depend on thousands of employees understanding company strategies well enough to translate them into appropriate actions, leaders must win their followers one by one.

Part of the problem stems from applying mechanistic models that were first used in scientific management under the legacy of Frederick Winslow Taylor. These principles were first applied to managing physical work in manufacturing plants. When superimposed on the new model of today’s knowledge organisation, change initiatives are broken into pieces and then the pieces are managed. But today change is dynamic and the pieces are constantly in motion. The challenge is to innovate mental work – not to replicate physical work.

Thinking in anticipation of changes

How do you teach thousands of people to think strategically, recognise patterns, and to anticipate problems and opportunities before they occur? There is a new level of complexity and “chaos” that can be managed only when information flows across boundaries. When we recognise that critical information can be held anywhere in and out of the organisation, we create opportunities for those with information to influence decision-making.

An organisation may simultaneously be working on TQM, process re-engineering, employee empowerment, and several other programs designed to improve performance. How do you connect and balance all the pieces? In managing change, the challenge is to understand how the pieces balance off one another, how changing one element changes the rest, and how sequencing and pace affect the whole structure.

Managing change means creating conversations between the people leading the change effort and those who are expected to implement the new strategies. It means managing the organisational context in which change can occur, as well as managing the emotional and intellectual connections that are essential for transformation.

“All real change involves major uncertainty, and we cannot deny the questioning time to others simply because we have already answered the questions for ourselves.”    – Bernice McCarthy

Feelings and perspectives

Change is fundamentally about feelings and perspectives. And companies that want their workers to contribute with their heads and hearts have to accept that emotions are essential to the new management style. The old management paradigm said that people are allowed to have feelings, as long as they are positive ones. The new management paradigm says that managing people is managing feelings, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. In the most successful change programs, large organisations connect with their people most directly through values – and values, ultimately, are about beliefs and feelings.

When an organisation denies the validity of emotions in the workplace or seeks to permit only certain kinds of emotions, two things happen. The first is that managers cut themselves off from their own emotional lives. And in doing so, they cut off the ideas, solutions, and new perspectives that other people can contribute.

Facing negativity

So how, then, to deal with negative emotions which are so common during changes? It’s true that getting a group of people together and allowing them to vent their emotions can initiate a negative spiral. A manager who is results-oriented may not be comfortable or prepared to deal with what his people have to say when it is negative.

Here is an approach that works:  A project director in one large organisation scheduled meetings twice a week for his team undergoing a complex change effort. For the first 15 minutes, staff members were allowed to complain and vent. But only for 15 minutes. Each person was allowed to say anything they felt. But the second 15 minutes were devoted to bragging about gains and successes. Ending the meeting on how people overcame obstacles became an energising process.

During the year of the change project, these meetings built up a remarkable degree of camaraderie among team members. Although harder for some to participate in than others, everyone came to realise that the conversion project was hard for everyone. They began to give each other ideas about ways to handle tough situations. As they began to tell each other about their little victories, they felt like a winning team. When the project was over, they felt better about themselves and their organisation than they had at the beginning.

Some consultants specialise in helping organisations navigate mergers, acquisitions, re-engineering and major change initiatives. Such change agents can help answer the questions: What makes for a successful change process? What can be learned from the multitude of change failures?

 “It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal.” ─William Bridges, Managing Transitions, 1991

Dealing with loss

The failure to identify and be ready for the endings and losses that change produces is the largest single problem that organisations in transition encounter. No one can accurately foresee how many people will experience the “improvement” program as a loss of something related to their job. However,  a robust impact assessment of the program on affected people is a good first step.

All change involves letting go of something. Even good changes such as promotions and expansions involve losses and endings. Before you can begin something new, you have to end what used to be. In order to learn a new way of doing things, you have to unlearn the old way. Change and endings go together; you can’t have one without the other. The problem is – nobody likes endings.

It isn’t necessarily the change that people resist. It’s the losses and endings that they experience. It does little good to talk about how healthy the outcome of the change will be. First you have to deal directly with the losses and endings. But how?

1. Identify who is losing what and why.
2. Accept the reality and importance of the subjective losses. (Don’t be surprised at “overreaction.”)
3. Expect and accept the signs of “grieving.” Acknowledge the losses openly and with empathy.
4. Give people information again and again; define what’s over and what isn’t, what has changed, and what stays the same.
5. Mark the endings; treat the past with respect.
6. Provide plenty of forums for discussion about both positive and negative changes.
7. Provide coaching services, preferably from outside sources.

Providing coaching for change

An effective way of dealing with these issues is by offering the services of coaches to deal with change management. Individual time and attention with a professional coach is an excellent way for people to deal with their experiences. The opportunity to discuss the un-discussables with an outside person can create smooth transitions.

The second step through transitions involves the acceptance of a neutral zone, a sort of no-man’s land between the old reality and the new. It is the time between the old identity and the new. It is a most uncomfortable time because of the insecurity of not knowing. If you don’t expect this period and deal with it, you may mistakenly conclude that the confusion you feel is a sign that there’s something wrong with the program.

If you try to rush through this period, you risk compromising the change program – but also you will lose a great opportunity. As painful and uncomfortable as people feel in this neutral zone, it is the individual’s and the organisation’s best chance for creativity, renewal, and development.

The neutral zone is both a dangerous and an opportune place. It is the very core of the transition process. It is the time that people want most to leave and to abort the process. It is the place and time when the old habits that are no longer adaptive to the situation are extinguished and new, better patterns of habit begin to take shape. It is the chaos in which the old form of things dissolves and from which the new form emerges.

People make the new beginning only if they have first made an ending and spent some time in the neutral zone. Yet most organisations try to start with the beginning rather that finishing with the old first.

First You Lose, and Then You Win…

When major changes are announced, they emphasise all the benefits that will follow with the successful new strategies. While fanfare and power point presentations can be theatrical and entertaining, the danger lies in giving little attention to the reality of loss that the changes are bringing. Change means loss. The loss has to be processed before people will change their behaviours in the desired direction. Here are some common reactions that arise:

Anger: This may be evident as grumbling, as foot-dragging, mistakes, and even sabotage. Listen to what is being said. Don’t take on the blame, however, when anger is being misdirected at you. Distinguish between acceptable feelings and unacceptable acting-out behaviours.

Bargaining: There may be unrealistic attempts to get out of the situation by trying to strike a deal. Distinguish these efforts from real problem solving. Don’t be swayed by desperate arguments and impossible promises.

Anxiety: The fear of an unknown future may lead some to create catastrophic fantasies. Such feelings may be silent or expressed. Again, acknowledge and accept these emotions as natural. Don’t make people feel stupid for experiencing anxiety. Communicate new information as it becomes available. Commiserate with them when it is not.

Sadness: This is the heart of the grieving process. It may be experienced as everything from silence to tears. It is often behind feelings of anger. Encourage people to say what they are feeling and share your feelings too. Trying to reassure people with unrealistic suggestions of hope may fall flat. You can empathise as long as it’s genuine.

Disorientation: Even organised people may experience forgetfulness, confusion and clumsiness during this period. These feelings are so uncomfortable that people will do strange things to avoid them. Give people extra support and attention.

Depression: Some people may experience feelings of hopelessness and exhaustion. Depression is hard to be around. You can’t  ignore it; people still have to get their work done. You can help by restoring people’s sense of having some control over their situations.

If you suppress the feelings and push people to get over them, it will be difficult to successfully enter into the new changes with any sense of commitment or enthusiasm. If you want to engage people to support an initiative with their hearts and minds, you must recognise their feelings, and acknowledge their losses before moving into new beginnings.

Resources Managing Organisational Change

Bridges, William, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change; Perseus Books, 1991

Duck, Jeanie Daniel; “Managing Change: The Art of Balancing,” Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1993.

Kotter, John P.; Leading Change, HBS Press,1996.

Kotter, John P; “How to Get Aboard a Major Change Effort,” Harvard Business Review, September 1996.

Larkin, TJ. and Sandar Larkin, “Reaching and Changing Frontline Employees,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1996.

Pascale, Richard, and Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja, “Changing the Way We Change,” Harvard Business Review,  Nov.-Dec. 1997.

Senge, Peter, The Dance of Change, 1999.

Worrall, Di, A Climate for Change, Life Success Publishing, 2009.

A New York Times headline April 27, 2011 claims a culture of complicity was tied to Japan’s stricken nuclear plant disaster. NASA’s 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster is another tragic example of what happens when cultural norms fail.  Six months after the shuttle disintegrated upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members, NASA investigators found that “organisational culture and structure had as much to do with the accident as the [shuttle’s damaged] foam.”

In Change the Culture, Change the Game, Tom Smith and Roger Connors write: “Either you manage your culture, or it will manage you.”

In simple terms, culture defines “the shared values, beliefs and behaviours  of people in social groups”  (Worrall, 2009,  A Climate for Change). It  refers to how people think, act and get things done in your company and is comprised of three components:

1. Experiences, which foster beliefs
2. Beliefs, which influence actions
3. Actions, which produce results

Few managers excel at optimising culture. While they’re aware of surveys that reveal two-thirds of employees are disengaged, they don’t know how to break down culture into readily identifiable components. They get lost in emotions, feelings, beliefs, soft skills and fuzzy thinking. Optimising your culture should command as much attention as performance metrics, operations, finances, sales and every other organisational discipline.

Research shows that the right culture champions high levels of performance and ethical behaviour. When organisations design and support a culture that encourages outstanding individual and team contribution, they achieve amazing bottom-line results.

Employee accountability and engagement are the driving forces behind achieving great results. As a manager, it’s your job to help employees see how their participation contributes to your organisation’s success. Employees become engaged when they can describe their role in outcomes and desired results.

How People Experience Work

As a manager or team leader, you create experiences every minute of the day that help shape your organisation’s culture. These experiences include:

• Promoting someone
• Firing someone
• Announcing a new policy
• Interacting in meetings
• Providing feedback
• Communicating through conversation, email or presentations

Such interactions shape beliefs about “how we do things around here.” These beliefs, in turn, drive people’s actions, which collectively produce results.

Achieving True Accountability

Accountability is often viewed as something negative that happens to you when things go wrong. True accountability is achieved through a step-by-step process that makes things go right.

Accountability should not be defined as punishment for mistakes. It’s a powerful, positive and enabling principle that provides a foundation to build both individual and company success.

The way we hold one another accountable defines the nature of our working relationships, how we interact and what we expect from one another. With positive accountability, people embrace their role in facilitating change and take ownership for making progress.

When people adopt a sense of accountability, they recognise that their participation can and will make a big difference. They go the extra mile because they know what to do, and they know how their job and their actions will drive results. This adds energy to their work, as most people crave meaning and fulfillment.

Accountability is the single biggest issue confronting organisations today, especially for those engaged in big change initiatives. When you build a culture of accountability, you have people who can and will achieve game-changing results.

Accountability steps include:

• See it: In order to see what needs to be done, you must take responsibility for reality. Because reality frequently changes, you need to stay alert and be flexible. There’s no hiding behind what used to work. When you see something, you must rise to a new challenge. This means obtaining others’ perspectives and candidly asking for and offering feedback. You must be courageous and relentless in your pursuit of acknowledging reality.
• Own it: Accept being personally invested in outcomes. Be willing to take risks and learn from successes and failures. Align your work with what the company needs. Link where you are and what you’ve done with where you want to be and what you’re going to do.
• Solve it: Obstacles can always get in the way of achieving results, so apply persistent effort. When thwarted, find another way. Keep asking, “What else can I do so this gets resolved?” You must learn to overcome cross-functional boundaries, limitations and “no” responses.
• Do it: Focus on top priorities, overcome obstacles, do what you promise to achieve, and avoid blaming others. Work to sustain an environment of trust for all participants, even those who are unwilling to help.

In a culture of accountability, people step forward to become part of the solution—often when they begin to see others doing it. Managers should seise every opportunity to model this behaviour with their own attitudes and actions, which will create a trickle-down effect.

The payoffs for positive accountability are better performance metrics, but perhaps more significant is what people report internally. When people participate more fully in their jobs, they create meaning and fulfillment. Work becomes more pleasurable. And when people start achieving better results, they are most likely rewarded in tangible ways, as well.

When to Change the Culture

Connors and Smith point out that, by definition, your culture produces your results. You cannot expect your current culture to produce new results. It may not be a bad culture; it simply isn’t what’s needed if you want different results.

Shifts in culture are required anytime you want people to think and act in new ways to achieve new outcomes. Most of the time, they don’t involve a total transformation, but rather a transition to new cultural norms.

Remember that cultures are powerful, and persistent, and that people are entrenched in their habits and work routines. If you want to achieve new or different results, you will need to create a new culture. To do so, you must define the needed shifts in the way people think and act so they can create new experiences that will translate into new beliefs and actions.

To accelerate a change in the culture, start by defining the new results you wish to achieve. Everyone in the organisation needs to be focused on and aligned with the desired new outcomes. Culture changes one person at a time.

Your people must believe that new results are obtainable. Only then can they change their thinking and actions.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the overwhelming demands of a 21^st century marketplace.

 Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—and the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do,” according to Fortune Senior  Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players.

Is Talent Irrelevant?

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players.

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist, but they do suggest it may be irrelevant.

The concept of talent is especially troublesome in business. We label people and then assign expectations, some of which are unrealistic. When people are fast-tracked or deemed executive material, we assume they have special gifts. Worse, we fail to adequately emphasise the importance of continuous training and coaching. Instead, we rely on their “natural gifts.”

Identifying these gifts has been extremely elusive. In fact, some business giants actually gave little early indication that they would become great.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular passion for business, even into his mid-20s.

Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt were average employees at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, with little evidence they would go on to become CEOs of Microsoft and GE before age 50.

In this age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question as to what is—and isn’t—innate. If a talent is innate, scientists should be able to identify the gene for it, and no progress has been made on this front.

Talent or Hard Work?

We can safely draw the conclusion that there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone. Many high-performing executives will tell you they don’t rely on their innate talents as much as their hard-earned skills. 

CEOs like A.G. Lafley of P&G and GE’s Immelt have said that being forced to manage through crises early in their careers enhanced their abilities in ways that were critical to becoming CEOs. They wouldn’t have achieved their status without surviving the storms that gave them hands-on practice.

Certain practices can make our experiences especially productive:

• Coaching helps.
• Receiving feedback allows us to fine-tune our skills.
• Working in a safe learning environment is essential.
• A work environment which is closely aligned with our professional goals, personal preferences and values is conducive to greater personal achievement.

Workplaces that encourage practice and development, and mistakes should be viewed as learning opportunities. You also need to clearly define and develop a plan for achieving the abilities you wish to hone, including a measurable time frame. This will turbo-charge your performance and improve your chances of success.

10,000 Hours or 10 Years

Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 10,000 hours of practice to attain expertise in his book Outliers (Little, Brown & Co., 2008):

“The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 10 years, if you think about four hours a day.”

Almost all child prodigies in music, sports, chess and the arts seem to put in 10,000 hours before they attain expertise and produce significant results.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by Anders Ericsson, Charness and Feltovich, et al, compiles scientific studies to prove the point in a wide variety of fields. The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers “whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming” are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us have already put in more than a decade of doing what we do. The question is whether we’re practicing the right things, in the right way. Practice does not make perfect. Rather, perfect practice make perfect.

What Is Deliberate Practice?

Anders Ericsson and his scientific colleagues emphasise the importance of deliberate practice, which is characterised by several elements:

• It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher, coach or expert.
• It can be repeated frequently.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• It’s highly demanding mentally.
• It isn’t much fun and entails hard work.

If you think you’ve outgrown the need for a teacher or coach, it’s time to challenge this assumption. A business coach can see things a manager cannot and is trained to deliver feedback in a way that’s inaccessible to most managers.

Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, you cannot choose the best practice activities.  Hire a coach who can properly stretch you beyond your current abilities and help you move out of your comfort zones. Otherwise, human nature dictates that you’re likely to spend your time practicing what you already know how to do instead of new behaviours which are difficult and uncomfortable.

According to Noel Tichy, PhD, a professor of organizational  behaviour and human resources management at the University of Michigan School of Business, our progress depends on leaving our comfort zone to enter the learning zone, where skills and abilities are just out of reach.

What About Passion?

Talent is not the overarching driver of successfully developing high level capabilities. Those who care the most will rise to the top. Exceptional performance depends on what we decide to do with our lives and the passion that drives us.

One of the most purchased articles from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 piece on motivation that explains our three main drives:

1. Achievement
2. Power
3. A sense of community and desire to help others

No matter your driving force, you have to care deeply enough to work hard to become exceptional.

Nothing can make you endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless you’re carried by an intrinsic compulsion to do so.

Talent Is Never Enough

In Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, (Thomas Nelson, 2007), leadership expert John C. Maxwell suggests talent is “often overrated and frequently misunderstood.” He advises readers to build their strengths to become a “talent-plus person,” defined by the following tenets:

• Belief lifts your talent.
• Initiative activates your talent.
• Focus directs your talent.
• Preparation positions your talent.
• Practice sharpens your talent.
• Perseverance sustains your talent.
• Character protects your talent.

Even if you hold onto the notion that you’ll always survive because of your innate talent, you must still prepare, practice and persist. The scientific research is in, and it’s conclusive. Hard work—not talent—contributes to high performance.

Start change in the right way, and you’ll enjoy a snowball effect that helps your team, direct reports and even family members implement change.

Business school professors Chip and Dan Heath cover the patterns all successful change efforts have in common in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010).

The Heaths avoid looking at the history of failed changes. Instead, they share stories of spectacular changes that worked because execution built upon prior achievements.

In researching significant social, educational, governmental, marital and organisational changes, the professors came up with a framework that anyone can apply in real-world business situations.

First Steps

In many ways, the first small steps you take to change your behaviour are the most important. Once you initiate change, it seems to feed on itself, as two psychological triggers are at work:

1. The mere exposure effect: The more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it. Initially unwelcome change efforts will gradually be perceived more favorably as people get used to them.
2. Cognitive dissonance: Once people take small steps, it’s increasingly difficult for them to dislike how they act. We don’t like to act in one way and think in another. And once we begin to behave differently, our self-perception changes and our identity evolves, which  reinforces our new approach.

The Snowball Effect

Such changes aren’t the result of “small wins.” Rather, they are automatic forces that kick in as time passes. It’s therefore essential to start as soon as possible and take advantage of the momentum.

While inertia and the status quo may exert an irresistible pull, at this point you need to muster the courage and just do it. Just get it started. Your first attempt doesn’t have to be perfect or complete. At some point, inertia will shift from resisting change to supporting it, and small changes will snowball into big changes.

Recognise up front that it’s human nature to focus on the negative. As you review the behaviour you wish to change, it’s only natural to think of what’s not working. When competing for brain space, bad thoughts easily beat out good ones.

In an exhaustive study of 558 words that represent emotions, 62 percent were negative versus 38 percent positive. When we learn something bad about someone, we pay closer attention to it and remember it longer. The negative receives greater weight when we assess a person.

In another analysis, researchers examined 17 studies concerning how people explained events in their lives. Across all domains—work, politics, sports, personal—people were more likely to spontaneously bring up negative events versus positive ones.

The Problem with Problems

Focus on what’s broken, and you’ll come up with a long list of things that need to be fixed. In reality, you can’t always fix everything. Sometimes there’s simply no time, budget or realistic deadline for a major overhaul.

Some things may never be completely fixed, and you’ll have to tolerate them — but this doesn’t exclude picking one key behavioural change that can vastly improve both short- and long-term results.

Marcus Buckingham, author of Go Find Your Strengths, urges readers to make the most of their strengths, rather than obsessing over their weaknesses. Despite our natural human tendency to focus on the negative, we can make an effort to override it.

Do More of What’s Working

Start by identifying what is working, and do more of it.  Replicate the behaviours that get optimum results, and set new goals that continue to up the ante.

Many people believe change is hard and must be complicated. Psychotherapy, as originally designed, involved three to five weekly sessions, during which people discussed their thoughts over several years. But people rarely made behavioural changes; they just began to understand why they behaved in certain ways.

More recently, coaching techniques focus more on people defining their key strengths, identifying what’s working and following action plans.

By doing more of the little things that work, they create better relationships and successful behavioural changes. When you ask, “What’s working, and how can you do more of it?” you enjoy better results in less time.

Start with the Beginning in Mind

Perhaps the famous Stephen Covey maxim, “Begin with the end in mind,” needs to be revised: Start with the beginning and the end in mind.

Both are important. Without a destination goal, it’s harder to stay motivated and on track.

In researching their classic business book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras discovered that solid companies with sustained success had BHAGs: big, hairy, audacious goals.

Goals need to be specific and evoke emotions. Use both your rational and emotional brain when setting goals so they make sense and connect to strong desires.

Unleash the Snowball Effect

1. Identify which behaviours work better than others.
2. Investigate and then replicate successes.
3. Start with a small change, and make it specific.
4. Give yourself direction by providing your start and finish.
5. Energise yourself by identifying the feelings of the finish.
6. Cultivate a sense of identity that reflects your new growth.
7. Change your situation; tweak your environment, as needed.
8. Build habits. When something works, repeat it.
9. Get support. Behaviour is contagious, so help it spread.

A Climate for Change

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Babes in Business Suits

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Sale ends 23rd December 2010