by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 53 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Model the best, remember the worst
— From LEAD RIGHT by Steve Ventura
There’s no question that we’ve all been exposed to many leadership lessons. These learnings come to us courtesy of the many leaders, both in business and in life, with whom we’ve interacted—or whom we have read about, watched on TV, or seen or heard from in other ways.
Steve Ventura, author of Lead Right, has a short, yet powerful idea to share with us today. He says:
“Think back on all the various people you’ve worked for. Some you’ll remember fondly—some not so fondly. Undoubtedly, some were ‘saints’… or at least they exhibited almost saintly behaviors. These were top notch leaders who showed you by their example, what you should be doing now. Emulate them; follow their lead. When in doubt, ask yourself ‘What would he do… how would she handle this situation?’ Then, DO IT!
Maybe your inventory of past bosses also includes one or two jerks… and you’d probably just as soon forget them. DON’T! You need to remember them clearly and frequently. They provide your best lessons on what NOT to do! By avoiding the kinds of behaviors they exhibited, you’ll make sure that, down the road, you never appear on any of your team members’ list of worst leaders.”
There you have it. As uncomfortable as it is to watch or to interact with people who are bad leaders, the lessons derived can be very valuable (albeit painful at times). Poor leaders are inverse mentors: they teach you how not to lead. Pay attention so that you remember to never do what they do.
Instead, emulate those leaders whose behavior consistently yields good results. Those are real role models and mentors.
“People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after.” – Oliver Goldsmith
ACTION
TODAY: Recall an experience that you witnessed, whether at work or in your personal life, that was the result of poor leadership. What can you learn from it? What lessons can you derive so that you don’t make the same mistakes?
FUTURE: When faced with a difficult leadership decision or challenge, recall those leaders whose example you value and admire, and ask yourself how you think they would handle your situation. Then act accordingly.
Know someone who would enjoy reading this post? Please share it via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 0 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Questions you must ask yourself to succeed in business
— From The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success by Brian Tracy.
In The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, business guru Brian Tracy shares the Law of Critical Success Factors: “Every business has a number of key success factors that measure and determine its success or failure.”
Just as our bodies have indicators of vital functions that determine our health (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.), “companies have critical success factors, as well, which measure the health and vitality of an enterprise.”
Tracy says that many critical success factors are common to all businesses: “leadership, product quality, service, sales, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, and finance and accounting.” Excellent performance in each of these areas will bring about excellent results, whereas poor performance—or nonperformance—will seriously jeopardize the survival of the business.
Above and beyond these common critical success factors, some companies have their own factors that are specific to them. They are unique and they are what separates a particular company from the rest.
This last point brings about the first corollary of this law: “Each individual has personal critical success factors, the performance of which determines his or her business future.”
Tracy goes on to explain, “You have a set of key skills or core competencies that you use, like tools, to do your job. A weakness or failure in any of your key skills can undermine your overall effectiveness and weaken your ability to do your job effectively. To perform at your best, you must first identify the critical success factors of your work, measure your strengths in each one, and then develop a plan to become excellent in the areas that can help you the most.”
There are two questions that you must ask yourself in order to determine your personal critical success factors:
Why am I on the payroll? “What exactly have you been hired to accomplish? Why does the company pay you the money it does? Both you and your boss should be in complete agreement on this question. Whatever your answer is to this question, that is what you should be working on most of the time.” (Note: if it’s your own business, substitute the above with questions as if you were hiring someone to work in your position. It’s an eye-opening exercise, what exactly would this person work on most of the time?)
What can I, and only I, do that if done well will make a real difference to my company? “This is a task or responsibility that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. But if you do it and do it well, it can make a tremendous difference both to your company and to yourself.”
And these two questions bring about the second corollary to this law: “Your weakest critical success factor determines the height at which you can use other skills.”
What exactly does this mean?
“Your personal strengths and core competencies are what have brought you to where you are today. They are the foundations of your position and the determinants of your income. At the same time, your weaknesses form the ceiling on your ability to rise to even greater heights.”
To move ahead more rapidly, Tracy says, you must ask yourself—and be honest—about your weaknesses:
What are your weaknesses? “What one skill, if you developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your career? Whatever the answer to this question, this is where you should begin to work on yourself. This is where you can get the biggest payoff in terms of increased competence.”
By asking these three questions, you will be able to determine where you currently stand and what you need to do to move forward to achieve your greatest business success.
ACTION
TODAY: Assess yourself. Tracy asks, “What are your personal critical success factors, and what is your plan to become absolutely excellent in the one area that can help you the most at this time?” Create a plan to start working on yourself in this area.
FUTURE: A great individual assessment and a book that can help you figure out your strengths is called Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. Highly recommended. It will help you figure out your top 5 strengths so that you can build upon them. I’m happy to report that my biggest strength is learner (not that you hadn’t noticed…). A good outlet for expression for a learner is to share what he or she has learned, as a teacher, and this is another reason why this blog came to life, to be able to share what I learn. Check out the book and/or test and let me know in the comments here what your top strength is!
Know someone who needs to find his/her strengths? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 36 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Things all good listeners do – Part 4
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
In this miniseries, we’ve learned that good listeners (1) think before they speak, (2) listen with respect, and (3) ask “Is it worth it?” before answering. This is all incredibly simple, yet you’ll likely agree with me that it’s not easy.
Marshall Goldsmith, author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, says, “The only difference between us and the super-successful among us—the near-great and the great—is that the great ones do this all the time. It’s automatic for them… there’s no on and off switch for caring and empathy and showing respect. It’s always on… They treat everybody equally—and everyone eventually notices.”
“The weird part here,” Goldsmith goes on, “is that all of us, at every level of success, already know this. […] We already believe it. The question is: Why don’t we do it? Answer: We forget. We get distracted. We don’t have the mental discipline to make it automatic.”
Since the majority of this skill involves listening, and listening requires discipline, Goldsmith developed a simple exercise to test listening skills. Try it for yourself. Close your eyes and count to 50 with one simple goal: you cannot let another thought intrude into your mind; you must concentrate on keeping the count.
More than half of Goldsmith’s clients can’t do this. Around 20 or 30 other thoughts start to invade. While this seems as an exercise in concentration, it’s really a test of listening. “After all,” Goldsmith points out, “if you can’t listen to yourself (someone you presumably like and respect) as you count to 50, how will you ever be able to listen to another person?”
Just as you get limber by stretching your muscles every day, the more you do this exercise, the more you’ll be able to count to 50 without being easily distracted. “This newfound power of concentration will make you a better listener. After that, you’re ready for a test drive.” So, go make your next interaction an exercise in making the person you’re with feel like the only one in the room, whether that’s your spouse, a colleague or a total stranger.
Goldsmith has put together this list of tactics as a cheat sheet—keep it handy!
- Don’t interrupt.
- Don’t finish the other person’s sentences.
- Don’t say “I knew that.”
- Don’t even agree with the other person (even if he praises you, just say “Thank you”).
- Don’t use the words “no,” “but,” and “however.”
- Don’t be distracted. Don’t let your eyes or attention wander elsewhere while the other person is talking.
- Maintain your end of the dialogue by asking intelligent questions that (a) show you’re paying attention, (b) move the conversation forward, and (c) require the other person to talk (while you listen).
- Eliminate any striving to impress the other person with how smart or funny you are. Your only aim is to let the other person feel that he or she is accomplishing that.
If you can do all of the above, Goldsmith says that you’ll uncover a glaring paradox: “The more you subsume your desire to shine, the more you will shine in the other person’s eyes.” And that is true because by fully listening, you’ll make people feel “like a million bucks in your presence, you’ll score a bulls-eye.”
The good thing to all this is that we already know how to listen and focus. Just think of when you go on a first date, or when you’re on a sales call, or in a meeting with your boss: very likely you will be focused and interested in what the other person is saying. The key, going forward, “[is] a matter of remembering to do it all the time.”
ACTION
TODAY: Do the 50-count test and see how far you can go. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get far (I got to 27 and started wondering where my dog was…), the more you do it the better you’ll get.
FUTURE: Keep working on the 50-count exercise. Despite how far you go on it, review the cheat sheet and determine to apply as many of the concepts as possible until, as Goldsmith says, you remember to do it all the time.
Please share this post with someone who might be interested in refining his/her listening skills with this miniseries. Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 50 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Things all good listeners do – Part 3
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Welcome to another installment of this oh-so-simple but profoundly changing miniseries in listening. So far, we’ve learned that all good listeners: (1) think before they speak, and (2) listen with respect.
According to Marshall Goldsmith in his brilliant book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, the third thing all good listeners do is not so obvious, and certainly not so simple as the other two.
What is it, you ask? Well, after fully listening while in conversation, good listeners ask themselves a difficult question before they answer:
3. “Is it worth it?”
Why is it difficult? Mainly because, “while we’re supposedly [listening], we’re actually busy composing what we’re going to say next,” says Goldsmith. Instead of racing ahead formulating our answer, we should fully to listen to what the other person is saying, then think about our answer, and—before uttering our response—we should ask ourselves Is it worth it?
This “forces [us] to consider what the other person will feel after hearing [our] response. It forces [us] to play at least two moves ahead. Not many people do that.”
“Asking, ‘Is it worth it?’ engages you in thinking beyond the discussion to consider (a) how the other person regards you, (b) what the other person will do afterwards, and (c) how that person will behave the next time you talk.”
Goldsmith points out, “When someone tells us something, we have a menu of options to fashion our response. Some of our responses are smart, some are stupid. Some are on point, some miss the point. Some will encourage the other person, some will discourage [him/her]. Some will make [the person] feel appreciated, some will not.”
“Think about the last time you floated an idea in a meeting and the most senior person in the room (assuming it wasn’t you) ripped you for saying it. It doesn’t matter whether your idea was dumb and the other person’s response was brilliant—or vice versa. Just think about how you felt. Did you think more highly of the other person saying it? Did it make you appreciate anew that person’s tremendous listening skills? Did it inspire you to go back to your work with fresh enthusiasm? Did it make you more eager to speak up the next time you were in a meeting with that person? I’d wager the answers are no, no, no, and no.”
And this is precisely the consequence of responding without asking Is it worth it? “People not only think you don’t listen, but you have instigated a three-part chain of consequences: (1) they are hurt; (2) they harbor ill feelings toward the person who inflicted the hurt (i.e. they hate you); and (3) in the predictable response to negative reinforcement, they are less likely to repeat the event (i.e., they won’t speak up next time).”
This is hardly the formula for successful leadership. In the words of one of Goldsmith’s coaching clients who is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company: “Before speaking, I take a breath and ask myself… ‘Is it worth it?’ …[Even if] what I was going to say was correct—maybe—saying it wasn’t worth it.”
Asking Is it worth it? opens up the possibility of considering many alternatives:
- Do we speak or shut up?
- Do we argue or simply say, ‘Thank you’?
- Do we add our needless two cents or bite our tongue?
- Do we rate the comments or simply acknowledge them?
While nobody can tell you what to say, particularly in a challenging situation or a tense meeting, asking Is it worth it? will give you the red light to stop, the yellow light to consider alternatives, or the green light to speak freely.
As you can see, great listeners use empathy every step of the way. By taking into account the other person’s thoughts and feelings by asking Is it worth it? you too will be engaging in a “profound consequential leap of thought,” says Goldsmith. “Suddenly you are seeing the bigger picture.”
These are the three things that all good listeners do. Come back tomorrow for the last part of this miniseries so that you can see how to tie it all together. You’ll learn a simple listening exercise to help you get stronger in this area.
See you mañana!
ACTION
TODAY: Make a point of asking Is it worth it? many times throughout your interactions today.
FUTURE: Make habit of incorporating this question as part of your listening toolkit. It’ll be worth it! 😉
Please share this post with someone who might be interested in refining his/her listening skills with this miniseries. Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 17 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Things all good listeners do – Part 2
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Yesterday we learned how important it is to think before we speak. Today we will focus on the second thing that good listeners do:
2. Listen with respect.
“To learn from people, you have to listen to them with respect,” says Marshall Goldsmith, author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
Sounds too simple? It’s easier said than done. Think about this common scenario: “You’re reading a book, watching TV, or shuffling papers while your significant other is talking to you. Suddenly you hear, ‘You’re not listening to me.’ You look up and say, ‘Yes, I am.’ And calmly provide a verbatim playback of everything said to prove that you were listening and that your companion in life is … wrong.”
Goldsmith goes on to ask, “What have you accomplished by this virtuosic display of your multitasking skills? Was it smart? No. Does your partner think more highly of you? Not likely. Is anyone impressed? Hardly. The only thing going through your partner’s mind is, ‘Gee, I thought you weren’t listening. But now I realize it’s a much deeper issue. You’re a complete jerk.’ ”
Fortunately, in this case, there’s love, understanding, patience and forgiveness (I hope) in your relationship. But, what about at the office or anywhere else? What is your reaction when your boss, a colleague, or the clerk at the DMV continue to type and keep looking at their computer when you are in front of them asking or telling them something? And they don’t even bother to look at you while they say, ‘I’m listening, I’m listening,’ as they keep typing away…
Nobody likes that.
“This is what happens when we listen without showing respect,” says Goldsmith. As you can see it is much more frequent than we think it is. “It’s not enough to keep our ears open; we have to demonstrate that we are totally engaged.”
So, let’s now turn this back on us: how many times have we done this?
…Oops!
The saying goes that we judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intentions. Clearly, our intention was never to be disrespectful: maybe we thought we could multitask by working on an urgent report while listening to our colleague… Yet the outward manifestation of that intention was plain rudeness towards our colleague, since he/she had no clue about our intention.
Having the right intention is not enough when listening to our loved ones or anyone else. We must convey with our attitude, behavior, and body language how important the other person is for us at that moment. And if we cannot devote attention to them right then, we should let them know—respectfully—and then go back to what we were doing.
Leaders everywhere know how to listen respectfully, actively and intentionally. They make you feel as if you are the only person in the room. Their eyes are locked on you and their body language says that they care about what you are saying.
“The ability to make a person feel that, when you’re with that person he or she is the most important (and the only) person in the room is the skill that separates the great from the near-great.”
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Part 3: you will learn the one question that changes the whole conversation and its consequences.
ACTION
TODAY: Practice listening with respect. Give your full attention to the other person. Don’t be formulating your response before he/she ends speaking. If you need a brief pause once the person is done speaking (and it feels too awkward to keep quiet), simply say, “give me a second, please, I’m thinking about what you said,” and then organize your ideas and respond.
FUTURE: Practice listening with respect. Practice, practice, practice, until the habit is ingrained.
Please share this post with someone who might be interested in refining his/her listening skills with this miniseries. Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 8 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Things all good listeners do – Part 1
— From What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
In his wonderful book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, leadership thinker and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith states that “80 percent of our success in learning from other people is based upon how well we listen. In other words, success or failure is determined before we do anything.”
How is this possible?
Goldsmith explains that most of us think about listening as a passive activity, as if we don’t have to do anything but sit back and hear someone out. Nothing could be further from the truth, he says. “Good listeners regard what they do as a highly active process—with every muscle engaged, especially the brain.”
There are three things that all good listeners do, and this is what we will learn in this miniseries. Note that nothing in here is rocket science, on the contrary, every single one of those three things is quite simple. Yet simple, as we know, doesn’t necessarily mean easy. It’s a matter of actively doing it and developing the habit, yet it is well worth it to master listening, as it is one of the most-prized leadership skills.
1. Think before you speak
Again, easier said than done. “You can’t listen if you’re talking. So keeping your mouth shut is an active choice.” We all know that person who can never keep quiet and who has to inject his or her opinion into everything and have the last word, don’t we? Ugh!
Goldsmith refers to Frances Hesselbein as the champion of thinking before speaking. Hesselbein is an exemplary businesswoman who, among many things, led the Girl Scouts and transformed it from a wilting organization into a flourishing one. (Learn how she did this.)
“If you asked her if [listening] was a passive gesture, she would assure you that it requires great discipline, particularly when she is upset about what she’s hearing.” Goldsmith continues, “After all, what do most of us do when we’re angry? We speak (and not in the carefully measured tones of a diplomat). What do we do when we’re upset? We talk. What do we do when we’re confused or surprised or shocked? Again, we talk.”
He points out that when bad news is delivered, “[talking] is so predictable that we can see the other party almost cringe in anticipation of our harsh unthinking autoreflex response.”
“Not so with Frances Hesselbein,” says Goldsmith. “You could tell her the world was about to end and she would think before opening her mouth, not only about what she would say but how she would phrase it.”
“Whereas most people think of listening as something we do during those moments when we are not talking,” superb listening, turns out, is a two-part maneuver, and thus the importance of the last element in the previous paragraph: how to phrase it.
“There’s the part where we actually listen. And there’s the part where we speak. Speaking establishes how we are perceived as a listener. What we say is proof of how well we listen. They are two sides of the same coin.”
Goldsmith defies us to argue that this approach is anything but a highly active, decisive choice. I agree. “Telling your brain and mouth not to do something is no different than telling them to do it.”
Come back tomorrow to continue learning about the other things that good listeners do. If you can master what this miniseries teaches, you will be a great listener in no time.
ACTION
TODAY: Think before you speak. Need I say more? Check out these other posts on listening.
FUTURE: Think before you speak. Always.
And only after you’re done thinking before you speak 😉 please take a moment to share this post — thank you! Email, Facebook, Twitter.
