This past week I had the opportunity to read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book What The Dog Saw. Gladwell wrote the best sellers Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.
 
What I like most about Gladwell’s books is that they are fueled by a curiosity about things that most of us don’t think twice about. In What The Dog Saw, Gladwell turns commonly held notions on their head including homelessness, panic vs. choking, what makes a good teacher and many other myths.
 
In organizations, curiosity fuels innovation and the solving of stubborn problems.  We’ll examine how to foster curiosity in yourself and others to get breakthrough results.
  
Culture of Curiosity
 
Curiosity is the root of innovation and creativity and being curious is a constructive leadership characteristic. Organizations and their leaders can snuff out curiosity by implementing rigid rules, having sacred cows and dismissing questions that could lead to new discoveries.
 
A leader who is curious will handle employee performance problems more effectively. Instead of punishing or berating an employee, the curious leader is interested in why the employee chose to behave the way he did and how it can be prevented.
 
Being curious in a conflict situation allows you to see the other person’s perspective so that you can propose mutually acceptable alternatives.
 
Being curious in negotiations allows you to understand the other party’s needs and wants so that you can achieve win/win outcomes.

Curiosity is what will create the next EBay or Google or Microsoft and curiosity will lead your organization to a breakthough opportunity.  
 
Reflection Questions
 
How curious a person are you? Is curiosity encouraged in your organization? How many things are taken at face value without being more open minded to seeing new opportunities?
 
Action Items

• Be curious about long standing problems in your workplace.
• Ask questions that inspire curiosity in others, “How could we serve our customers better and generate better results?”
• Avoid crushing other people’s curiosity when comments like, “We’ve always done it that way, ” or “That will never work.”

Are you addicted to being right? Being right always feels nice but it could be holding you back from greater success. My wife Robin is right about many things and she is kind enough to let me think some of those things are actually my idea. We’ll explore the issue in greater depth below.

Addicted to Being Right
 
Chances are you don’t like being told what to do. Whether it’s your mother, father, spouse, child or boss, you will resist doing what they tell you to do, even if they are right. Same thing happens when you tell people what to do. The resistance to being told what to do resides at both a conscious and below-conscious level.
 
Help other people be right
 
While we resist ideas from outside ourselves, we readily accept our own rationale. Therefore, instead of wanting to take credit for a great idea or waiting for the opportunity to say, “I told you so,” why not help other people come to the conclusion for themselves?
 
There are three primary ways to help other people think through situations for themselves and come to the best solution. Using these tools will help you become a more influential person both at work and at home.

1. Ask questions – When you use open ended questions like How, What, Tell me about… it forces the other person to think and respond. That thinking process helps the other person take ownership of the idea.
2. Tell stories – When you hear, see or read a story, you actually immerse yourself in the story. The saying “Selling is Storytelling” is quite accurate because as the other person inserts themselves into your story, they begin to own the idea for themselves.
3. Use powerful words – When you ask someone to do something, always give them a reason. By inserting the word ‘because’ and giving a reason, you increase the compliance by up to 50% over not giving them a reason. Eliminate the word ‘but’ from your vocabulary. When you use the word ‘but’ you are telling the other person that what they just said is wrong and what you’re about to say is right. Instead use the word ‘and’ to join your thought to theirs. That way the thought becomes theirs and they will act on it more readily.

When you become more persuasive and influential you can smile to yourself knowing that you had the great idea to begin with and feel good knowing that the other person is more committed to taking the desired action.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Is it overly important for you to be seen as being right? Do other people do what you want willingly or do they passively or actively resist your ideas, requests and initiatives?
 
Action Items 

• Realize that greater success can be achieved when other people think an idea is theirs even if you helped them discover the idea for themselves.
• Become an expert question asker and story teller, knowing that these techniques help other people grasp your ideas with greater ease.
• Give people a reason to do what you suggest and instead of arguing, join your ideas to theirs to give them a sense of ownership.

If you are curious about how to become more persuasive and influential, check out our Persuasive and Influential Leadership course with Dr. Peter DeShane on Feb 10th, 2010.  A live workshop and a self-study program is available.

What do people really think of you? Do you even care? Do you care too much?
 
Many of the managers and executives I coach and train start off by being surprised and maybe even slightly insulted to think that they need to improve their leadership skills. After all, they wouldn’t have been promoted if they weren’t competent… or would they?
 
It kind of reminds me of the 1992 movie A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson, playing the role of Colonel Jessep, defiantly states, “You can’t handle the truth!”
 
The term 360 degree feedback has become much maligned because most of the people who are subjected to this feedback are not open to receiving it in the first place. 360 feedback refers to getting feedback from your boss, your peers and your direct reports, a full circle of feedback.

Self-Deception
 
Let’s examine two patterns of thinking that get in the way of an executive or manager accepting and acting upon feedback from peers and direct reports:

1. The individual giving me feedback isn’t credible or qualified to evaluate me. (What do they know!) 
2. I’ve achieved success by being the way I am so why would I want to change?

Let’s tackle each of these.
 
First, any person who interacts with you is qualified and capable of giving you feedback about your people skills. The feedback might be related to how clearly you communicate, how responsive you are, whether you are approachable or not and if they feel encouraged and supported by you. If they work with you more closely they can also speak to your technical skills related to completing assignments both accurately and in a timely fashion.
 
And that brings us to the second point. High achievers can hit a plateau where the same skills and approaches they used to achieve their current level of success often work against them in getting to a higher level of responsibility.
 
The most common term for this is “The Peter Principle” where individuals are destined to be promoted to their level of incompetence. Once you reach that level, you are no longer promotable and in fact, your days may be numbered.
 
While the incompetence could be technical, most likely it has to do with your people skills. At higher levels in an organization your success has less to do with your own output and more to do with mobilizing a team to achieve the required results.

Unaware of Strengths
 
In addition to being unaware of our weaknesses, we can also be unaware of our strengths. Without an appreciation of what we do well, we might inadvertantly stop and lose the benefit of that strength. Feedback can reinforce what we are doing well.
 
Confronting Reality
 
When you get to a place where you recognize that no matter how successful you have been, there is always room for improvement, you can begin to make adjustments. In every single coaching situation I have encountered there are only 3 or 4 leadership behaviors that the individual needs to change in order to unlock greater success. The challenge is to discover what those behaviours are and get help to correct them.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Do you actively solicit feedback from the people around you as to how effectice a leader you are? If not can you become vulnerable enough to ask for that feedback and use it to grow as an individual?

Action Items

• Ask for specific feedback from the people you work with and those who work for you if you are in a leadership position.
• While you can use more sophisticated instruments to measure leadership style and management capability, you can start with these four simple questions:
• What do you think I do really well and would like me to continue doing?
• What do I not do as much as I should and you would like to see me do more of?
• What do I do that you think it best that I stop doing?
• What do I not do now that you think I should start doing?
• When you get the feedback, even if you find it difficult to swallow, be thankful because you are on your way to greater success.

Dear Santa,

I have been a good employee all year and wish that you could help my manager bring me the following gifts this season. They would help me become happier and more productive next year.

1. Give me the gift of clear expectations – help my manager become more clear in what he or she expects of me. I am tired of guessing the expectations and getting limited direction.
2. Give me the gift of regular feedback – rather than wait until my performance review, I wish my manager would give me feedback regularly – daily, weekly and monthly. If he or she gave me regular feedback on what I was doing well or needed to improve, I would do my best to improve.
3. Give me the gift of feeling part of the team – like everyone else I have the need to belong and feel part of the team. Help my manager build a stronger team by treating people fairly, not playing favorites and not talking about people behind their backs.
4. Give me the gift of better communication – help my manager keep me better informed about what is going on. If communication is so important, why does my manager do so little of it? Sure they are busy – typically doing things that we the employees could do if only they would delegate and stop trying to make every decision themselves.
5. Give me the gift of praise and recognition – it’s natural to find faults but please help my manager notice all the good things we are doing and tell us about them more often. We will be more likely to repeat the good things if they are mentioned to us more often. On the other hand when our manager focuses on the negative, we tend to give him more of that. Human behavior is funny, eh Santa?
6. Give me the gift of a challenge to grow my talent – My manager finds it easier to keep giving the same assignments to the same people. He thinks it makes his job easier but it really hurts our flexibility and we want something new to do every once in a while. One of the reasons I will stay in my job is because I can learn something new.
7. Give me the gift of training (and train my boss too!) – Show me I am important by investing in me to do my job better. My manager could benefit from some training too – making my wishes come true. I think even my manager’s manager needs some training because my boss behaves the way his boss expects. In fact most of the behaviors my boss wants to change come all the way from the top!

I will remember to leave out the milk and cookies!

I had the pleasure of attending a social event connected to a convention I was attending in Calgary. The organizers had planned an entertainment-packed evening at a “cowboy ranch” with gun slinging cowboys, a comedian, a live auction, and for those who were brave enough, a mechanical bull. All the proceeds were to go to the organization’s foundation.
 
Unfortunately, many members of the audience were happy just to sit and socialize and then get back to the hotel for some rest before the next day’s program. So when the host announced that the first bus had arrived, half the group left, making the auction a dud.
 
The organizers were ticked. They spent all this time and energy to plan a great outing and the attendees had the gall to leave early!
 
They fell into the trap of “blaming the customer” and I hear variations of it in many of the organizations I work with. I’ve done it myself – blame the customer for not buying, blame the participants for a mediocre session (this happens rarely!).
 
Don’t Blame the Customer
 
You have heard the expression, “the customer is always right.” Now we know that the customer isn’t always right, however it could be said that, “the customer is always right in his/her own mind.”
 
This distinction is important because right or wrong, when the customer decides to vote with her feet and money, the impact is felt on your organization. Similarly in a “discussion” with my wife Robin I can choose between being “right” and spending quality time on the couch or allowing her to be “right” which makes for a cosier bed time.
 
No amount of “marketing” can push a bad product or service onto a customer and expect to last in the long term. Many organizations think they know better what the customer wants, when in reality the customer isn’t buying it.
 
Be Thankful for “Challenging” Customers
 
Customers with high expectations help challenge your organization to achieve more.  One group of customer service reps was complaining about how disorganized their customers were. I pointed out that those disorganized customers were placing even greater value on the service provided by their company. If the customers were better organized they would place less value on the service provided and profits would decrease.
 
There will be customers who you are better off without. The ones that cost you more than you make. Before writing them off, consider how to provide the level of service they expect at a profit.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Does your organization blame the customer for it’s challenges? Are you an accomplice to this act? How could your organization be more customer-focused and earn record profits?
 
Action Items

• Listen for signs that your organization is blaming the customer for its woes.
• Ask questions that move your organization forward, “How can we win the business and maintain profitability?”
• Stop complaining about customers and start finding ways to make them happy at a profit.
• Remember that the ultimate antidote to having difficult customers is having no customers at all…

I was teaching a session to front line leaders this past week on how to coach, confront and correct employees when there is a gap between expected behavior and performance and the actual behavior and performance.

Understandably, confronting and correcting conversations are not easy on the leader or the employee which can result in procrastination, being too heavy handed or too vague in the feedback.
 
What if we were to apply the same coaching, confronting and correcting method to the leader who is not doing what is expected of him or her? By definition, should a supervisor, manager or executive who doesn’t carry out his leadership responsibilities effectively be expected to suffer the consequences of his action or inaction?
 
Most managers, supervisors and team leaders think of themselves as being better bosses than they really are. This lack of self-awareness means that leadership faults are not corrected. Most bosses have the best intentions but their behavior is inconsistent with those intentions.

Leadership Malpractice
 
Think for a moment about all of the employee behavior and results problems you have experienced in your career. The list will likely include tardiness, absenteeism, not following procedures, too much socializing, personal use of company resources, too many mistakes, customer complaints, and not being respectful to co-workers.
 
When I ask supervisors and managers if they can honestly look at the list of transgressions and say they have never committed any of them, virtually everyone in the room has, at one time or another, broken every rule themselves.
 
I point out that they are still employed and in many cases earned promotions. I ask them to view employee performance issues with curiosity instead of accusation. While there will be some hopeless cases, many employees can overcome a behavior or performance deficiency to become productive, capable and reliable.
 
Now comes the challenging part and you might find yourself getting a little uncomfortable…
 
If we were to list all of the expectations of a leader (manager, supervisor) and then evaluate the current level of behavior and performance to those expectations, what would we find?
 
The fact is that many managers and supervisors are negligent in their leadership duties. And in some extreme cases, it could be considered malpractice. Whether it is a deliberate act, or more likely, an omission (not acting as you should), the results are the same: below potential performance, stagnant careers, higher absenteeism, more grievances/complaints, etc.

Reflection Questions
 
Do your leaders clearly understand what is expected of them in terms of leadership behaviors? Do they have the skills and knowledge to fulfill those expectations? By not addressing this need are you contributing to leadership malpractice?
 
Action Items

• Describe the expected behaviors of managers, supervisors and team leaders. Go beyond the tasks, and think about how they are expected to interact with employees.
• Assess the degree to which current behaviors are in sync with expectations.
• For individuals who are not meeting the expectations of a leader decide on the best corrective action: Would coaching work? Training? Confronting and correcting?
• Have one-on-one conversations with those leaders and be explicitly clear what you expect from them and the areas they need to improve. Better yet, ask them to reflect on how they are doing and then offer to help close the gap.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure to meet lots of great people who have survived working in a toxic corporate culture. A toxic company culture takes its toll on individuals and bottom line results.
 
Just like with environmental toxins, some work place toxins get to you quickly, others take more time to cause harm.

I remember interviewing a very capable woman who was enjoying her new job in a company that had a very constructive culture (achievement, encouraging, friendly).

As a side note it’s always interesting to me that more progressive and constructive organizations, or those that aspire to be, are the ones who bring us in while the really bad workplaces never have the time or money for coaching, training or development. Hmmm.

She shared with me that in her previous job, she was known as the evil office witch. I was quite surprised because her demeanour was quite calm and relaxed. She shared that her previous employer was a tyrant and the only way for her to succeed and stay employed was to emulate his behaviour. After a while it became “normal”.
 
Her previous employer went out of business (not surprising!) and she landed her dream job. She admitted that she was going through a detoxification of sorts. She had to battle her ingrained reflex not to trust people, not to share information and not to bark out commands.

Don’t be Fooled
 
Just because people don’t leave your organization doesn’t mean the culture is constructive. In high-paying, benefit-rich industries employees can feel obligated to stay even though they are dying on the inside. Instead judge your culture on the level of sick days taken, the enthusiasm with which employees conduct themselves, the amount and pace of change and innovation. If these areas are lower than you like, chances are your corporate culture is sapping the life out of your employees.
 
If your culture shows signs of toxicity, now is the time to take action. It starts at the top and it requires determined leadership to root out the workplace poisons.
 
If you have a constructive culture, give yourself a pat on the back. You are in rare territory. Keep a watchful eye for potential negative impacts caused by a bad hiring decision at a senior level or bad promotion decisions into supervisory roles.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Is your culture toxic or tremendous? How does your leadership team contribute to the problem or success? Have you become toxic?

Action Items

1. You could conduct an Employee Attitude Survey and measure the level of satisfaction and then take action to make improvement. This can be helpful if the senior leadership team is in denial and thinks everything is wonderful.
2. Chances are that your gut will lead you to see the likely sources of culture problems and they could be scattered from the executive suites to the front line leaders.
3. You could skip right to the likely root of the problem – leadership and recognize that a constructive leadership team from the top down is the best way to turn a new page and build a constructive high-performing organization.
4. Avoid flavor of the month initiatives as they act as window dressing and all smart employees see right through them.
5. Recognize that depending on the current level of toxicity, the time it takes to fully make changes could be 2-5 years.
6. If you see yourself as part of the problem, you can get some executive coaching. If the team needs help, perhaps group training makes sense.

Like many problems, admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing the problem. Let me know how I can help.

Do you have some employees or co-workers who think of themselves as extra special, indispensible and untouchable? Their superior attitude often ticks off the people who work with them. So today we look at the right and wrong way to deal with prima donnas in the workplace.
 
Dealing With Prima Donnas at Work
 
Employees and co-workers with superior attitudes see the world revolving around them and expect everyone else to bow down and kiss up (or kiss butt) to get something done. While saying “pretty please with sugar on top” might be nice, it really shouldn’t be necessary to get the person to do their job.
 
A misguided view: Often the prima donna forgets that his or her job function exists to support another job function. A classic example in a manufacturing plant is that the maintenance department will act as though they are doing production a favor by fixing something that is broken down. In fact the maintenance department’s customer is production. They are supposed to keep the line running and improve flow and cycle time.
 
In the office, a prima donna might work in accounting, reception, engineering, sales, marketing or quality. The prima donna is often a good performer who has let his or her special talents inflate the ego instead of focusing on serving others.
 
Managers are reluctant to address this behavior because they are lulled into a sense of complacency and fear a backlash. Plus the manager likes the work done by the person. Overall performance is usually less than it could be because the prima donna doesn’t share information or expertise very well, preferring instead to use it as a competitive advantage.
 
Reflection Questions
 
Who are the prima donnas in your work group? How does this behavior impact you as the boss or co-worker?
 
What NOT to do

• Knock them down a peg. It really isn’t helpful to criticize or point out the person’s flaws or jump with glee when they make a mistake.
• Over inflate the ego. While it’s positive to provide praise, avoid use of the words, “You’re the best!”, “We couldn’t do it without you!”, “Too bad everyone else can’t be more like you!”

Action Items

• List the destructive consequences of having prima donnas in the workgroup.
• Recognize that low self esteem might be behind this behavior. The person may be compensating for a feeling of inadequacy by acting superior.
• Point out the specific behaviors (in private) that you want the person to stop doing. In many cases the person is likely unaware of how they are perceived.
• Encourage the individual to share his or her knowledge and skill with others and then provide positive feedback when they do that.
• Remind the individual who the customer is, their role in supporting the customer (internal or external) and that the overall success depends not on his or her individual talents but the overall capability of the group.

For some clients we have facilitated “team building” sessions to help groups realize that success depends on working together. If the prima donna is in a management or supervisory role then often one-on-one coaching is part of the solution.