Dan Erwin

Experience Rules in Today's Job Market

Even recent college grads had better be able to put experience on their resume and be able to talk about what they've gotten out of their experience. So says Katherine Brooks' latest blog. And she knows what she's blogging about. She has a most uniquely titled position at the University of Texas Austin: Director of Career Services for Liberal Arts Graduates. Don't concern yourself thinking she's just another ivory tower type. She wears the hat, but it doesn't fit her blogging.

When I first stumbled on Brooks' blog, Career Transitions,a couple weeks ago, her name grabbed me. I realized that she was the author of that fine book for graduating seniors with a liberal arts degree, grads looking for a job that'll provide a decent living. Her book has the catchy title, You Majored in What? And it gets right to the issues, deciphering the job market and relieving stress from grads in humanities and social science. I wrote a review of her still very timely book nearly two years ago. My blog, You majored in what? provides a bit more background for you.

There are a lot of things right about a liberal arts degree, if. . . you graduated from one of the most selective schools in the nation. Or, if you have the wherewithal and support to go on to graduate school. And if you fill in your liberal arts with a year of computer science, economics, communications, etc. If you were smart enough to get summer internships, work experience build a network. And if you got a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) liberal arts major.

- - - - - - -

Many liberal arts faculty don't want to become vocational school teachers. That makes sense, but it overstates the case. As a nationally-experienced executive coach, I've learned that liberal arts grads tend to be the better thinkers in business, know how to learn, are adaptable and, typically, have solid communication skills. That means they can come up to speed quickly. Just exactly what firms are looking for. So if you're thinking about liberal arts, a recent liberal arts graduate or are not certain about your major's financial future, here's the jobs' blogger for you.

Prof. Brooks' blogs are filled with great stuff, solid research and spot-on recommendations. What I most appreciate about her blogs is not the intense relevance or even her smart use of statistics, but the fact that she has a bias toward evidence-based recommendations. Brooks blogs regularly on the Psychology Today site. Here are the titles of just a few of her most recent posts:

• Employers seek proof of your skills
• Five steps for improving your job search
• The question isn't "Are resumes dead?" The question is "Are resumes enough?"
• Are you T-Shaped? The most sought after candidates are.
• How to benefit from losing the lottery.

Brooks provides a fascinating stream of research on careers and jobs. She also has her own website, Wise Wanderings, filled with practical, highly useful stuff. Her website strategy is straightforward:

Welcome to CareerArtistry, my website dedicated to helping liberal arts students and alumni (and just about anyone who is seeking a new way to earn a living) navigate their way through the 21st century job market, where linear systems are fading away and chaos reigns.

Check out Brooks' blog. I'm certain you'll find it exceptionally valuable.

What the Hell Is Water?

Two young fish are swimming downstream. On the way down, they meet a wise old fish. “Morning boys,” he says. “How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” The point of David Foster Wallace’s little fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.  Indeed, in the day to day trenches of business existence, the most important issues to deal with are often missed. 

For example, the single best test for assessing development needs is either completely unknown or beyond the skill set of a single manager. The fact of the matter is a huge majority of managers and execs initially question the validity of this test, which is neither a paper test nor a 360 feedback test. 

Malicious behavior?
If the behavior of an individual consistently (3 or 4 times) fails to achieve the expected level of performance there are three possible reasons. In 1% of the time, the person is malicious and is essentially attempting to screw somebody or sabotage the organization. Malicious behavior becomes obvious fairly soon, but it’s rarely seen today because of the need for job security. In 2 – 3% of the time, the person is thoughtless or careless. 

But in 95 – 96% of the time the failure is because the person simply lacks the tools in his or her toolkit to carry it off. The test is quite simple: can a person deliver what she’s promised or committed to? If she has failed to deliver on her practice or performance three or more times, she lacks the necessary tools. And 95 – 96% of the time you’re staring at an obvious developmental need. That’s as a good a developmental assessment you’re ever going to get. 

A surprisingly large number of people have difficulty believing this statistic. Execs, especially, can’t believe that someone lacks the tools to do such and such. . . . However, since today’s manufacturing employee may well need to know calculus to operate a machine on the factory floor, or the ability to manipulate and interpret sophisticated data monstrosities at corporate headquarters, you’re going to see a lot more failures in the future. These obvious failures may be the inability to resolve a recurring work breakdown, to calm passengers while turning a plane around in a storm, to complete a client’s website on time and with little to no errors, or to devise algorithms to make sense out of regular incoming data. 

I’ve gone through the following conversation with managers on this issue an infinite number of times. “You’re telling me he lacks the tools?” Yeah, if he’s consistently failed to achieve that objective. “I can’t believe that. He’s been around the barn.” OK. What makes you think that his experience means that he has the tools? “Well, he should have the tools.” Shoulda, woulda, coulda. But what actual data do you have backing up your conclusion? (silence) “I have no real data.” No data, no performance. That should always be your test. Period.  

And then there’s typically a two to three week time-lag in which the manager wants to think about the conclusion I’m forcing on her. “I’ve been thinking about your test. I think it’s accurate. . . but I don’t like it.” I understand. But don’t forget it! 

 FYI: It’ll take three more observed failures of other people before the manager or exec actually believes the rule and puts it to work. And some never get there. You can count on that, too. 

Weird reasoning
For some reason people don’t get this rule immediately or easily. The reason people don’t immediately get this rule is the belief that if someone can talk about something she can also do that something. This is false reasoning, though understandable. I can talk about how to play the oboe, the fingering, the breathing, how to place my mouth on the mouthpiece and read the music. But I sure as hell can’t play the oboe. And you wouldn’t want to be around if I tried. It’s what Pfeffer and Sutton call the “knowing-doing gap:” the inability to turn knowledge into action.   

This is not a moral issue. The worker doesn’t intend to lie. She’s often plainly unaware. Most people actually think that if they can talk about something, they can do it. Don’t waste your time drawing negative conclusions about that person. We all get caught in the problem. The lack of tools and people’s disbelief that that’s impossible happens at the lowest levels and it happens also at the highest levels—all the way up to the CEO. 

BTW: I know that we all have difficulty holding two ideas in our head at the same time. But I have also found that we can apply the rule to the assessment of our own personal developmental needs. 

What to do?
If you’re a manager, coach, coach and coach the person some more. And put the person in a work setting where they’ll get the opportunity to learn the behavior. Of course you may ask whether you want to invest that much in a person. I can’t answer that question for you. You may coach him, bring in a mentor or consultant, move the person around, put him in another job or terminate him. Execs really, really hate to terminate someone for performance issues. That means that those failures may hang around for awhile, until the exec finally decides to let the person go. And that could be six months to a year or longer, sometimes years. Unless there’s a major recession cutback, a significant reorganization, or, well . . . bankruptcy. 

In the meantime, eat your peas, don’t gripe, and circumvent as much as you can without getting in trouble. And don’t forget that that’s the only foolproof, developmental assessment test.

When Death Takes You By Surprise

Marilyn, my beloved wife of more than 50 years, died on December 29 of complications associated with Alzheimer’s. It was a fortunate death, though not, in the usual sense, a good death. She had lost 95% or more of her mental capacities, and had no obvious sense of who I was or of what was happening to her.

She was a wonderful woman, the love of my life, and I miss her dearly. When the kids and grandchildren came in from the Coasts to see her in Memory Care, she always had a big smile on her face. I don’t know whether she recognized them, but I prefer to believe that her wiring was so strong that she knew, unconsciously, who they were. Even in the last stages of her Alzheimer’s-destroyed-life, what a smile broke out on her face every time I walked into her apartment. We have a family photo of her reading to her three-year-old grandson in her lap, a paradigm of who she was and the simple happiness we enjoyed. I have always found a deep sense of satisfaction in the love we were able to give and receive, an experience depicted by that picture from a dozen years ago.

Initially, I decided not to write this very personal blog, but I decided otherwise because of its therapeutic value as well as a medical experience in the early ‘90s. As a result of a bout with serious prostate cancer and its inevitable surgery, I was surprised by the number of young men—and a few women--who wanted to talk with me about the experience. At the time, I had a number of projects at Ralston Purina, so had done a great deal of interviewing and had become a familiar face at headquarters. The questions, especially from the youngest generation, were about how I handled the news of cancer, my prognosis, the degree of success, the sexual implications and the potential for incontinence. I’m experiencing a similar number of the younger generation asking questions about Alzheimer’s and my wife’s death. It’s not often that people can talk about their own concerns and fears with someone they trust who’s had some success in dealing with those fears.

Death, of course, is a more traumatic and final experience for all of us. But having dealt with what can only be considered an “ambiguous loss” for more than two years, I had come to believe that with my extensive background in psychology and counseling and a phenomenal number of resources I’d be able to manage the finality of her death very well. But still, I was surprised that the experience of death took me by some surprise.

When it came to resources, probably no one on earth had more than I. My eldest daughter, Director of Fundraising for the research foundation, CureAlzheimers, has the ability to access resources from Harvard’s Alzheimer’s research center. Her husband is a research physician with an awareness of the physical and psychological implications of Alzheimer’s. My middle daughter was involved in Alzheimer’s research at UMass Lowell. One of my very best friends, Libby Bellinger, is a gerontologist with counseling background who also works for a long-term care organization and coincidentally, dealt with the personal issues of her own mother’s Alzheimer’s disease for 18 years. I have access to top physicians at the UMN medical clinic. And to top it all off, my wife was involved in research at Mayo Clinic with a physician who was inevitably and always available to me personally, or by email. With all that, it was improbable that I’d be surprised by death.

Furthermore, lacking financial worries, I was able to carry off all the right things for the management of emotions and life. I treated myself with care, putting off as many decisions as possible, and made certain to access the friendship of colleagues and neighbors. I was scrupulous about my routines, careful about food selections and kept up most of my exercise program.

Finally, my children and I decided months ago not to have a funeral, but instead to have a celebration of her life, inviting friends, neighbors and colleagues for drinks and appetizers. Indeed, the invitation was clear: “No liturgy, no ceremony, no rituals, no homily . . . just mingling, conversation, and even laughter.” And even though we’re not having the party until the end of February, I’ve been delighted by the overwhelming positive responses we’ve received toward that celebration.

How did the grief surface?

But in spite of all the decisions and care, her death has been difficult. There were tears at the strangest times of the day. I finally realized that they flowed when I noticed an especially sensuous gesture either between two others or in a TV show. Marilyn never walked into my study without her hand on my shoulder and usually a smile. I also noticed that though most of the time I was careful in the food I selected, I utterly failed to manage portions, gaining 40 pounds over the past 3 ½ years. But what really frustrated me was my inability to focus on tasks, especially on creative writing. I just couldn’t force my brain to engage. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to set worries aside, put them in a box, and go on with the task at hand. That didn’t work, especially the last two months as it became clear that Marilyn was dying. It was as though my creative juices had been wrung out of my body. But most significantly, in spite of keeping to my sleep routines, I found myself tired out—almost daily for the first two or three weeks after her death. I still have to take naps three or four times a week.

So what have I learned about grief?

Thus far, I’ve learned several things to help me process my grief more successfully. I don’t anticipate that the grief will ever be fully resolved and I’m not certain that I want that. But I do want to go back to life, giving myself wholeheartedly to my work.

First, I can’t stress how important it is to take care of yourself. My objective was to make certain that I kept involvements to the minimum and always do the things that are important to me. My children, as well as many friends, emphasized the necessity of that self-management. My children made it very clear to me, reminding me of their support, that I was to limit my visits to the home to just once or twice a week and get on with my life. Knowing Marilyn’s ever-Germanic orientation to task and work, I’m certain she would have approved and insisted. After all, Marilyn would not know that I’d been there two minutes after I walked out the door. I have a great awareness that my resources were unique. Still, to the degree possible, in whatever your situation, if you are to find hope and optimism, you must put yourself first. This is not a time to make sacrificial decisions for others or give others a lot of time.

Second, it’s important to access your support system regularly, and if you don’t have one, to seek one out. Most resident homes have group meetings and systems that you can tap into. Identify the friends who’ll do things with you, let you talk, and are simply willing to listen. They may not be the friends you expected, but they’re out there and they’ll do some caring for you. On occasion, I found it important to simply ask whether a person had time to talk with me. I learned to read the sign language fairly accurately so as not to overstay my welcome. When a person inquired regarding my wife, I usually shared two or three sentences. If they were desirous of further information or open to listening, they would inevitably make that clear to me after I’d shared just a bit.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that you’re not going to be able to predict or control your own responses to death. Give up the notion that the control mechanisms you’ve used to succeed in your professional career will work when facing a death in the family. Thinking you’re in complete control of your memories and emotions sets you up for failure and even more grief.

I have long been an optimist and practitioner of a “sanctified nonchalance.” In other words, I don’t hold tightly to life, but view it as a gift to be used for myself and others. And I gather people around me who hold similar views. Rather than focus on what I’ve lost, I face the future grateful for what I had. So I’m certain that makes the surprises of death easier for me than others. But still, as my friend Libby Bellinger said, when talking about my inability to control my emotions, “it kind of slips up on you, doesn’t it?”

Carol Dweck and Greg Walton on Willpower

Is willpower about your biology or your brain? Are we constrained by the narrow limits of our biology?

After nearly a two-week hiatus from blogging--and Thanksgiving week in glorious Boston with my kids, spending some of that time going over my grandson’s list of potential colleges, I’m back home again. So I chuckled to see Carol Dweck and her associate, Greg Walton, reporting still more of their ground-breaking practical research in Sunday’s NYTimes. 

The Stanford profs have studied another important issue of human capital: willpower. And they’ve found that we can actually manage our willpower. 

The authors begin by posing two important illustrations of the problem, both depicting the popular belief that willpower is about biology not mindset. In one, they quote a recent nutrition book, arguing that because of how the brain’s hypothalamus works, it is a “myth” that anyone can will himself to lose weight. A second illustration from a just published book concludes that willpower is “limited and depends on a continuous supply” of glucose. Dweck and Walton’s assessment is spot on: these theories attribute our failures of willpower to our fixed biology—and wrong. 

The theories, as Dweck and Walton point out, have an obvious appeal: attributing failures of willpower to our fixed biological limits justifies our procrastination as well as our growing waistlines. Not only that, we also get to consume more sugar. 

In stark contrast, their research has found that what’s limiting our willpower is our mindset. And when people believe that willpower is self-renewing and work hard, they’re energized to work more. 

Recognizing that many people are skeptical about renewing willpower, their research found the following: 

When the initial task was easy and willpower wasn’t required, people did well on the tricky cognitive task, making few mistakes. But when the initial task was hard and involved self-control, people who believed that willpower was limited made almost twice as many mistakes on the tricky cognitive task as did the group that performed the initial easy task. This finding replicates many studies by Dr. Baumeister and others that have been interpreted as evidence that willpower is limited and easily depleted. But, strikingly, we found that people who believed that willpower was not limited continued to perform well on the second task, making few mistakes, even after facing the difficult initial task. They were not “depleted” and kept on doing well.

This study and others put the lie to our common notions about the limitations of willpower. They also reinforce the well-known research that shows that the more we learn, the better and the faster that we can learn.

You may contend that these results show only that some people just happen to have more willpower — and know that they do. But on the contrary, we found that anyone can be prompted to think that willpower is not so limited. When we had people read statements that reminded them of the power of willpower like, “Sometimes, working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel energized for further challenging activities,” they kept on working and performing well with no sign of depletion. They made half as many mistakes on a difficult cognitive task as people who read statements about limited willpower. In another study, they scored 15 percent better on I.Q. problems.

When faced with skepticism about this kind of research I remember that old dogma dies hard. Once concepts are deeply embedded, a superstructure of assumptions and ideas grows around it. Rejecting a dogma means that many ideas are now questionable, and . . . as a result a close read of a book or thoughtful analysis of a new and complex idea is impossible. As an acquaintance of mine said about these ideas: "I don't believe it. I can't believe it. Everything I've ever learned about intelligence and achievement would go out the window." He tuned out. It was a losing battle I chose not to fight.

This research reminds parents of some very important truths for their children—and themselves as adults, businesspersons and professionals.

At stake in this debate is not just a question about the nature of willpower. It’s also a question of what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to be a people who dismiss our weaknesses as unchangeable? When a student struggles in math, should we tell that student, “Don’t worry, you’re just not a math person”? Do we want him to give up in the name of biology? Or do we want him to work harder in the spirit of what he wants to become?

So Strivers, Talent Really Matters Too?

A Sunday NYTimes article by two psychologists under the eye-catching title, Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters, once more raises the issue of the role of academic intelligence, personal development and expertise. The authors would have you believe that people who score high on IQ inevitably do better in business than those who don’t score as high. But if you read the thirty page research report you’ll realize that they’re pushing the envelope on the interpretation of their results. They also argue, with more success, that working memory capacity, a major component of intelligence, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. But more about that later. 

For the uninitiated, this is another shot across the bow in the complex battle between inherent intelligence and learned intelligence. Once more, it’s a strong push for IQ intelligence (academic or analytical intelligence) as the be-all, end-all. Not so fast. 

The authors take aim at several popular writers, but two paragraphs stick out as a summary of the evils of deliberate practice: 

Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.” 

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance. 

Thus, the writers argue, science tells quite a different story—that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields. 

Well. . . before you buy their argument wholesale, think about the following: 

Nowhere do the practitioners of deliberate practice argue that practice alone makes for expertise. Indeed, the gains you’ll get in practicing depend heavily on your training environment, your coach, and the quality of your feedback. I address this issue in my blogs, Are top salespeople born or made?, and Success is not just about practice, practice, practice. What I remind readers is that that feedback and expert coaching are also part of the deliberate practice model and key to the development of personal expertise. 

Furthermore, leading cognitive psychologists, including Robert Sternberg, point out that there is no way that the maximum capabilities of any person can be measured or predicted. 

The researchers in deliberate practice have also found that memory—that core measure of intelligence--can be improved.

Intelligence theorists don’t agree about much other than the ability to adapt flexibly to the environment. But most theorists, especially Robert J. Sternberg, believe that intelligence has at least three forms:

•  Analytical intelligence (IQ intelligence)--the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions. Hambrick and Meinz are stretching this kind of intelligence to make it into practical intelligence.  That’s too big a stretch.
• Creative intelligence—the ability to go beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
• Practical intelligence--the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.

Although the three forms of intelligence overlap, people who succeed in business are specialists in practical intelligence. Furthermore, a significant study in which correlations between a test of practical intelligence and tests of academic or analytical intelligence reveal that the correlations between the two are significantly negative.

Let’s be candid. Intelligence testing is widespread. Many questions remain, however, as to what conventional intelligence tests actually measure. There’s also some question as to what the companies that produce most of the tests really want to find out. Tests are used in numerous settings, including schools, the military, corporations and for a variety of purposes including placement and selection. The testing business is worth billions of dollars every year. That’s right. . .  billions of dollars. If Brooks, Gladwell, Colvin and Sternberg are right, you can see plenty of intelligence shops in deep trouble.

Let’s be even more candid. I give tests and I’m trained and qualified to do so. Though they are merely snapshots or pointers to what’s going on at a given point in time with a client, an overarching reason that I give them is that clients expect them. So, well. . . ka-ching, ka-ching. But I sure as hell educate the client on the validity, usefulness, and long-term lack of predictability for most of them.

To put it bluntly, really smart people don’t necessarily make for good business people. That’s why being a member of MENSA certainly doesn’t guarantee success in business. If you’ve been around the business barn a few times, you know, like Brooks, Gladwell and Colvin, that inherent talent is really, really overrated.

The Critical Dimensions of Organizational Learning

The most gratifying response to one-on-one coaching is the enhanced potential for success. It should come as no surprise that what’s true for individuals is definitely not true for organizations. 

In a long-term coaching and mentoring relationship with a senior client it’s readily possible to figure out the disruptions and the political changes new competencies may bring. At the same you’re able to help the executive make the necessary adaptations required by new skills. But that’s a very different story when it comes to organizations. 

My checkered history of working with volunteers and non-profits before going into corporate consulting positioned me to be very skeptical about organizational change. If volunteers don’t like the changes you’re trying to make, they’re gone, buddy. And you’re left holding the bag. The political ramifications of working with volunteers and non-profits often require almost god-like insights. So truthfully, even though some had suggested that corporate America would be easier to work with, I kept my skepticism in place.  That was a smart move. 

Organizations require a much more thoughtful and methodical learning model than individuals. I’ve worked with brainy individuals who, upon receiving extensive feedback, could talk very quickly about the changes that implied. They’d run off to try them on and come back three weeks later telling me what worked and what didn’t. We could easily fine tune and they’d come back in a few weeks, successful change in place. 

But organizations require a better model. That’s why I’ve found Crossan, Lane and White’s model of the 4i’s to be a cool way to think about and plan for organizational learning. Here are its basics: 

Intuiting.  This is that “pre-conscious recognition” that there are some potentially better patterns or ways of doing things. Pre-conscious recognition is a nagging or gnawing that something is not working as well as it should, or it should work better than this, or we’re not getting the best possible results. It usually starts out with frustration, and eventually some individuals develop novel insights and language to talk about that nagging. 

Interpreting. Organizational learning often looks to be more sequential than individual learning. I suspect, though, that often there are a lot of simultaneous things happening. Don’t get hung up on sequence.  Anyway, after intuition comes the explaining, through both words and actions, of the insights of intuition. We explain both to ourselves and to others in the process of interpreting. I think of it as “bouncing” ideas or explanations off others to clarify and refine the interpretations. 

Integrating. This is the first process that occurs at the group level. As Crossan puts it, it is “the process of developing shared understanding among individuals and of taking coordinated action through mutual adjustment.” You’ll find the group going through a great deal of sorting, analyzing, discarding and adding before they begin to integrate the needed actions. 

Institutionalizing. This is where the learning that has occurred both among individuals and groups is transferred into organizational institutions and on to the members of the organization. Over the years two of my clients—very different organizations—showed themselves to be masters of institutionalizing. They were the 3M Corporation and American Express Financial Planners (now Ameriprise). Once 3M research and development has gained significant new learning, they formalize it and make it available throughout the company. Of course, often those ideas are kept under wrap and key as intellectual property. But the information is networked throughout the needs of the corporation. Someone always knows who has the learning or where to go for it. In very different fashion, Amex used extensive training to institutionalize learning. They were so effective at institutionalizing learning, that competitors were inevitably attempting to steal their employees. These two organizations represent vastly different kinds of institutionalizing processes. Yet both were very successful. 

What I haven’t alluded to in this blog is the very relevant issue of the politics of organizational learning. That’s an issue that can’t be omitted--one I’ll get to at a later date. 

Photo by Sean Dreilinger, Flickr.com

Time is Running Out

 The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost.—G.K. Chesterton 

I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Emblazoned at the top of the page was the blaring headline, Time is running out, says NFL. Act now before another city does. The reliance on what we in the persuasion field call the scarcity factor is frequent, widespread and systematic. In this example, the National Football League is attempting to persuade legislators on the need to act quickly to save the Vikings Football team for the Twin Cities.

The scarcity factor is a common persuasive strategy. In recruiting it surfaces as “if we don’t get this guy, our competition will go after him. And then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. But it also surfaces in our search for jobs: “If I don’t land this job, then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. We engage in self-persuasion also.

Don’t jump too quickly.  This is a strategy regularly employed in business, politics, religion, antiques and, well . . . you name the field. The most obvious place to see it is in the listing of autos for sale. On some weekends, the approach may be seen in up to one-quarter of dealer sales. 

Scarcity is a major weapon in the arsenal of the persuasion engineers. Robert Cialdini says the scarcity factor trades on our weakness for shortcuts. Underlying the strategy is the belief that the things difficult to possess are better than those easier to obtain. Of course, as opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms. And, if you’re like me, you hate to lose your freedoms. I watched the Twins baseball team get a multi-million dollar stadium almost solely on this basic strategy. The Vikings’ are using the same strategy for getting the taxpayer to partially fund a new stadium, costing close one billion dollars.

As Robert Cialdini says, the scarcity model works this way: when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting more. Simple. But it really works very well for the uneducated populace. That includes a lot of professionals. 

Becoming an educated business person and consumer requires a knowledge of this strategy. Indeed, as a student of persuasion I take the view that it is as much our responsibility to engage in self-protection as it is the business person’s to use the strategies available. 

The starting place for self-protecting is what we call “downplay.” In other words, when a persuader intensifies a proposal, downplay it. The flip side should also take precedence in your strategy: when the persuader downplays, then you intensify. So when you recognize a propaganda blitz, it’s to your advantage to be cool, detached, and skeptically alert. Not only to the inflated puffery with its dreams and promises, but also to intensified phenomena. Scarcity is one strategy for intensifying phenomena that you'll meet again and again. 

One way to deal with this is to create a scorecard. After you’ve done it methodically on paper, you begin to do it in your head as soon as the persuasive messages start coming. One way to do this systematically is to divide a sheet of paper into quarters, and then enter the kinds of downplaying and intensifying being practiced. Simply by seeing these, you can become more alert to what kind of manipulation is going on. 

The scorecard will look something like this: 

Intensify your product’s good     Intensify the other product's bad 

Downplay your product’s bad      Downplay the other product's good 

You can list what you hear and observe under each category and get a much better sense of what’s going on. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that persuasion is going on constantly, not only through the media, but just as much in our conversations. I have no problem with that. I do it too. But I also keep a data set of strategies so I become a responsible persuadee. It really is a matter of consumer beware.

Three Keys for Determining Whether to Trust a Co-Worker

 Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. – Ben Franklin

Today’s diverse and rapidly changing workforce has made trust a deep-seated, complicated issue. It comes up regularly in conversations with employees and managers.  Senior clients make questions about the trustworthiness of an employee part of my “assumed” contract. I’ve also received a number of thoughtful questions and comments on trust from blog readers, especially as a result of my blogs on narcissists and asshole bosses. One writer, for example, asked me to “throw the light on trust,” for the purpose of developing “life-time friendships,” including “both genders and also for divorced people.” And, this writer made it clear that his concern was for people in their 30’s and 40’s as well as for those of a younger generation. Still others have presented me with specific cases, asking for my analysis to help determine whether an individual could be trusted. 

Figuring out whether to trust someone can be a difficult task. About 15 years ago a senior client told me it took him six months to decide whether to trust an employee. He needed the time to observe a person’s behaviors so he could figure out his trustworthiness. It’s an exceptionally valid approach for that decision. But his question took a slightly different tack. “Is there a faster way to make a trust decision?” he asked.

. 

The experience of life-long, trusted relationships may well become a delicious experience that fewer and fewer of us find ourselves able to enjoy, largely because we’re a mobile society. Many of us rarely have the time or inclination to keep up relationships when we change geography. Time invested in relationships comes at a price and therefore must be prioritized. About ten years ago, I developed an intimate, trusting relationship with a high school friend, a relationship that provided many hours of delight until his passing last year. Although there were 250 kids in my Michigan high school class, it was the only long-term relationship from my teen-age years. We were merely acquaintances in high school, but our history, values and interests brought us together here in Minnesota, making it possible to receive the “blessings” of a relationship.  I touch base regularly with two college friends, but I have no intimate relationships with anyone else from that far back. Still, I have numerous trusted relationships dating from my thirties. I value all these trusted persons both as friends and resources.   

Another difficulty facing really long-term relationships is that many of us grow apart. The vast differences that can surface over time, including experiences, interests, values and even changing life-objectives put an end to what once may have been a very good and meaningful, trusting relationship. For many of us, life-time trusting relationships may be few. 

The wise and pragmatic psychologist, Abraham Maslow, says that we need at least four or five significant friendships. I’m fortunate to have more than that. However, the lack of family responsibilities at my stage of life makes it possible. 

3 keys to trust-building 

Trust is an ambiguous term needing clarity. The psychologist, Erik Erikson, believes that the first stage of human development centers around a child’s basic needs of comfort, food and dependable affection. If the child receives that, he begins life with a fundamental outlook of trust. Lacking that early experience, trust of himself and others becomes a more difficult task. Erikson viewed trust as confidence that life and the future are basically okay. I don’t believe that our first experience in life is destiny, but that experience certainly impacts us. Figuring out whether to trust another is often strongly related to the inherent level of confidence about people and the future that you bring to the party of life. Some may require a great deal of data before trusting, while others require less.

Trust is the degree of confidence you feel when you think about a relationship with another person. Trust makes it possible to share the important experiences, values and questions of our lives. These self-disclosures are not shared readily with people we do not trust. But it’s that mutual sharing that can make life interesting and full. I like the description of trust attributed (perhaps wrongly) to George Eliot: Friendship (trust) is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away. I should say that many of the people with whom I’ve had that relationship are business clients, not only those outside my profession. 

Trust, according to a number of fine studies, is composed of three primary keys or perceptions between you and another. I’ve found that these keys are very helpful for making determinations about trusting another and that they work in any and all settings. They serve as a template for both identifying and developing relationships of trust. 

Predictability—the expectation that the other person will act consistently in positive ways toward you. Does he or she do what they say they’re going to do? Be wary of this. Give a person the opportunity to be consistent about his promises to you. But be realistic about that. No one keeps all his promises. All you need is a strong tendency to be predictably safe in the relationship. My little test is that if the person significantly fails to be consistently positive and protective of me in two or three settings, trust is broken.  It can be rebuilt, but it’ll take time. 

Dependability—means that I can rely on that person when it counts. Predictability overlaps with dependability. I had a conversation this morning with two long-term colleagues about a serious ethical problem related to my wife’s care. I knew that they would have insight on the matter and would also be comfortable disagreeing with me. Further, I was quite certain that disagreement would only add to my store of insight. 

Faith—refers to the belief that your friend (or partner) will continue to be responsive and caring in the future. Faith is not a permanent given. It has to be talked about and worked on between people. It is a covenanted relationship requiring mutual action. 

One of the reasons we see people disclosing highly personal information to strangers is that they realize there is minimal risk. But in the work setting, trusting enough to share highly personal information can make us vulnerable, giving others power over us. That’s why we try to get people to talk about themselves when we meet them: we’re trying to get to know where they stand, what they think so that we can have some control and predictability in the relationship. I think of disclosures as a dance. I’ll disclose this much, and then you disclose. If one doesn’t reciprocate, the dance quickly comes to an end. Most people are comfortable with cliché talk and personal history. But when it comes to important opinions and deep-seated attitudes, we’re cautious about revealing those matters--and rightly so. 

Mark Knapp and Anita Vangelisti provide a very appropriate capstone to this discussion of trust in their book on interpersonal communication. We must make the person feel our appreciation for his or her trust in us and our acceptance and support for that person, and not necessarily for the behavior or feeling that is the focus of the disclosure.  

Hope this throws some light on the experience of trusting.  I’m very curious to get your comments and questions in response to this blog.

Photo: Flickr. Yourclimbing.com

How to Make a Smart, Zig-Zag Career Move

This is a riff on a fantastically simplified, even out-of-touch article in the latest Fortune, entitled How to Make a Smart Lateral Move. It’s obvious, as the article admits, that moving straight up the hierarchical ladder is not as common anymore. The article suggested that that this is a new approach to careers from the past five years, that it was due in part to the economy and that the conventional wisdom is that it’s a dead end. Baloney!

The economy just escalated a 20 year old strategy. The IT and marketing people in my Contacts list knew from organizational flattening--by the end of the 1980s--that the most prevalent opportunities were not up, but lateral zig-zags between companies. Many of them managed their career on that basis way back then. Even Ibarra’s seminal book on career change, Working Identity, published in 2003, shows an intimate knowledge of lateral moves as the primary means for career change and success. For that matter, Doug Hall, wrote on the issue in the 1970s. And if you want to get fussy about it, Dante Aligheri demonstrated its power at the turn of the 13^th century AD.

Still, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lateral career moves offer terrific career opportunities. I suspect that the best opportunities in the future will be mostly lateral.

Certainly, as Fortune suggests, it’s true that many execs and ordinaries are willing to take jobs with similar titles and pay in exchange for little more than a shorter commute to work. According to a poll from Right Management, 84% of employees planned to look for new jobs in 2011, which is up from 60% the previous year. A lot of people are yelling, “get me out of this job.”

The writer, Jena McGregor, says that lateral moves may not always carry a stigma these days. Hmmm. She must have been interviewing dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists. The people I talk to view laterals as an astute move. Of course, as she suggests, you want to do your homework about the potential firm’s financials and the real responsibilities of the new job. I thought that was a given. Anyway, it’s still true.

But here are the real issues. The key question is not about leadership opportunity as much as it is about developmental opportunity. Leadership is just one issue among many. It's also an overworked buzzword, used to catch the attention of people who don’t understand the necessary development beyond “leadership” required for success in the New Economy. Jobs go obsolete within 3 to 5 years, and if there’s no opportunity for a new job with a 3 year tenure, it’s time to start looking—unless you want to become just another obsolete worker. Recognize also that a lateral in this environment may provide the best way to get out from under a crappy boss.

I’d want to know the potential for mentoring and coaching within the potential firm. Just how much of an orientation to learning will you find at the company? I’d also want to be sure that the firm is strongly oriented to developing its technology. Above all, I’d want to know how astute the firm is around the issues of social intelligence. In today’s world, you need your own technology as well as a growing amount of social intelligence if you’re to succeed.

Furthermore, as a Deloitte exec pointed out, a key issue in your move is assessing how many future choices a lateral move might provide. A final accurate comment from the article is the admonition to be certain you’re going to comfortable with the new culture. Cultures vary greatly. Not only do you want to make certain the new culture makes decisions on the basis of evidence, but also that’s it not too concrete. Many cultures represent a specific, narrow psychographic within their employees. 3M, for example is classic. If you don’t perceive reality through the lens of chemical engineering and R & D, you’re going to be out of pocket. My friends in classic marketing always struggle in that culture. In contrast, if a culture is highly entrepreneurial, nailing few other constants down, you’d best make certain you’re going to be happy with lots and lots of change. You’d be surprised at the difference in cultures within the same industry. Old Pillsbury was strongly oriented to change, restacking in the high-rise, remodeling and creating new groups with new objectives all the time. General Mills, in contrast, was not at all entrepreneurial—always sticking to the tried-and-true. As you look back in time and say that General Mills now owns Pillsbury. Yeah, but they bought Pillsbury precisely because of its entrepreneurial nature, replacing many of the General Mills execs with Pillsbury people. Technology companies can be shockingly different. Moving from Microsoft to FaceBook could be trauma for plenty of people who have difficulty with rapid change. “Nuff said about culture distinctions.

The pay and promotion issue is still another complex matter. It's astute to prioritize development opportunities first, then future choices second. Indeed, some in IT won't accept a two-year position that provides no learning. In a good economy, IT people won't accept more than six months on a job without development opportunities. These complexities play out in surprising ways. Because of the insistence upon development opportunities and future choice, pay and promotion become secondary issues. The consequence is that numerous employees willingly and wisely take a pay cut for future opportunities. Titles and promotions seem to have far less cachet than in the past. Others accept similar salaries, some opt for more money and no promotion. You'll also find that many from all the disciplines, not just IT, are looking not to the first lateral, but to the next two moves to make up for salary and even promotion needs. Lateral moves are for people who are thinking several years ahead. The zig-zag assumes a strategic role in career thinking. It's not just a one-shot deal.

In sum, for the bulk of the working population smart laterals may well be the wisest way to go. Don’t get caught up in the dead idea that your company is going to take care of you. You’re going to have to take care of your own career—or end up on the streets.

How to Exploit Personal Vulnerability

You blush. Confused and discomposed. Embarrassed. You’re found out. You know the rule in business: don’t let anyone know what you don’t know. Keep up a good front. Don’t trap yourself and have to admit ignorance. Never, never open up and admit to personal vulnerability on any business subject. 

For nearly all of us, vulnerability is a very helpless feeling. Our guard is down and we believe we’re open to emotional attack and censure. Why is that? Surprisingly, the answer is that we’ve learned that’s the way we should respond when our ignorance and missteps are found out. We didn’t come by it naturally. You won’t experience embarrassment from a 3 year-old. We think that way, so that’s the way our gut responds. It’s NOT that our gut responds and then we think that way. And since feelings are most prevalent in vulnerable situations, we search for ways to deal with those horrible, unnerving feelings.

 

Quite a few years ago, before I became familiar with Martin Seligman’s orientation to learned helplessness and optimism, I wondered whether there wasn’t a non-psychological way of looking at embarrassment and vulnerability. I was unconvinced that therapy had anything to offer.  At the time, I’d been studying work from the Chicago Center for Decision Research and was especially intrigued by the studies on “framing. I’d had some success applying the process to business problems and wondered whether it could also be applied to personal, behavioral problems. Framing, I suspected, offered a different way of looking at feelings of vulnerability.

Framing

Business people intuitively know something about frames. They refer to them when they talk about “thinking outside the box,” “not being on the same page,” or “it’s all in how you look at it.” Frames simplify and guide our understanding of a complex reality. We experience frames when we meet people who just seem to immediately “click” with us. And we’re also dealing with frames when we try to talk with others who just don’t seem to “get it” no matter how much we try to explain. A frame is a mental window that both focuses and limits what we perceive.  Similar frames make it very easy to talk with clients. Different frames make it nearly impossible. Indeed, buried within every decision is a frame that circumscribes way we think about each. A new frame can move us beyond a debilitating perspective that only frustrates, providing us with more useful ways of thinking and deciding about important matters in both business and personal life.

Frames determine and limit problem resolution

The way we frame an issue determines the solution. Frames work like that. Our attachment to them is both emotional and cognitive. Furthermore, they’re usually out-of-our-awareness until we dig into our thinking and look at them. Good framing is both an art and a science. In both personal life and business, you’ll find that understanding, using and replacing frames will have a distinct advantage. And, as Russo and Schoemaker comment, if you can’t, you may wake up one morning to find yourself framed.

The key issue in my experience of vulnerability was the recognition that if I viewed the experience as solely an emotional experience, the only possible out was psychological. But the research on therapy, I knew, is not very encouraging. Half the time, counseling doesn’t work. So out the window went that approach.  Thus, I wondered whether the insights on framing couldn’t be applied to emotionally-laden experiences such as vulnerability. But how?

What causes the sense of embarrassment and vulnerability?

That brought me to the place where I began to analyze the causes of my feelings of vulnerability, wondering whether it wouldn’t respond to reframing. My undergrad background was in history, a background which caused me to first focus on my thinking about my thinking rather than on the experience of vulnerability, itself.

In attempting to reframe vulnerability—or any issue—I ask a number of questions:

• What are the most important objectives to aim for?
• What are the yardsticks, reference points and boundaries inherent in my old frame? How might someone else approach these measures?
• What biases might my old frame entail?
• How can I bring in other perspectives?
• What do I know about vulnerability and its typical resolution?

I played with the problem of vulnerability and framing for quite a few months, trying to understand how vulnerability affects us and answer those questions. What stuck in my craw was the key rule that business people “never let someone know what you don’t know” My gray matter eventually moved from that point to one specific conclusion: Inevitably, vulnerability is an announcement that there’s something I don’t know—and may need to learn.

And that was the new frame. Vulnerability in business is not about the emotions of fear, embarrassment, humiliation, or even disappointment. It is fundamentally about a lack of knowledge and that’s the problem that needs to be resolved—not my emotions. That insight took me out of trying to resolve my emotions to developing my knowledge of business process, managerial relations and just plain old street smarts. In short, I moved from being controlled by fearful emotions, to controlling the experience and making it a learning opportunity.

I’ve concluded that vulnerability (and embarrassment) is certainly nothing over which I need to get my shorts all tied in a knot. It’s merely an announcement of the need to learn something. Nothing more. So when I start feeling a blush creep up my neck, the question readily comes, sometimes out loud: “What is it that I don’t know?” Or, “Obviously, you guys are enjoying this. What’s so funny, and what am I blundering about?” I have completely and pragmatically reframed the issue as a matter of my business and relational knowledge that needs to grow.

BTW: If you believe I’m being too hard on the emotions, you might pick up Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism. That’s exactly what he recommends.