Dan Erwin

DECISIONMAKING: NECESSARY INTANGIBLE FOR CAREER SUCCESS

In his brilliant page-turner, How Decisions Are Made, Jonah Lehrer poses one of the most significant questions facing professionals in this highly competitive age.  Here's the set-up:

The mystery of how we make decisions--how Tom Brady chooses where to throw the ball--is one of the oldest mysteries of the mind.  Even though we are defined by our decisions, we are often completely unaware of what's happening inside our heads during the decisionmaking process.  You can't explain why you bought the box of Honey Nut Cheerios, or stopped at the yellow traffic light, or threw the football to Troy Brown.  On the evaluation sheets of NFL scouts, decisionmaking is listed in the category Intangibles.  It's one of the most important qualities in a quarterback, and yet nobody knows what it is.

In his book, Lehrer draws on the latest neuroscience research.  What's unique is that he challenges the old "rational model" of decisionmaking and deals with the blend of emotions and reasoning.

The excerpt I've chosen, however, also reveals the truth--admittedly as an aside--that we are "defined by our decisions."  One of the less obvious facts of the business world is that all business people have an implicit understanding of intelligence.  And what's still more important is that managers evaluate people based on that unspoken definition of intelligence residing in their gray matter.

A fascinating piece of research by Robert Sternberg revealed that intelligence in the business community emphasizes the following competencies:

• the ability to think logically
• the ability to focus on the essential aspects of a problem
• the ability to follow others' arguments easily
• the ability to see where these arguments lead

That may seem very obvious, however, an effective listener will quickly realize that little conversation takes place within these parameters.  Those of us in the consulting field are often sent off for a conversation with an employee for one specific purpose:  to ascertain whether that employee has the "smarts" (never use the term 'intelligence' in a business setting--it's dangerous) to take on another project.  What I've realized with 25 years of clients is that the person I'm "interviewing" hasn't made it clear in conversations whether he has the four competencies listed above.  And so the boss wants a second opinion.

Save yourself some time, and do some smart self-advocacy.  Periodically, when talking to your boss, make certain that these four competencies are put to work.  Of course, if you're a bit at sea, you may want to hit the books and make certain you can talk "intelligently" and demonstrate your business smarts. Your career future may be on the line.

In addition to Lehrer's book which is more fun than a "how to," you may want to go to work with a slim "how to" like Decision Traps, by Russo and Schoemaker.  You don't read?  Hmmm.  I heard that message from a bright Gen-Y technology worker in a brief conversation at the coffee shop.  I rather quietly suggested that he was looking forward to career suicide.  I was delighted to hear his recognition of that fact--and an acknowledgement that he needed to get his "stuff" together.

 

GEN Y, GEN X--MANAGING LEARNING AND OVERCONFIDENCE

(Thoughts from my coaching toolkit.)

Thanks to writers like Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, business is beginning to get acquainted with metacognition.  Metacognition skills are useful not only for execs, but also for Gen Y and Gen X for whom continuous learning is an important agenda. In this economy, I'd assume that continuous learning is important to everyone who has a job, much less those that are now on the streets.

Metacognition, at its core, is thinking about your thinking.  Why is metacognition such an important competency?  Metacognition is a skill that makes for better decisions.  Good decisionmaking requires more than facts, relationships and expertise.  It also requires an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. We draw on our metacognition when we conclude that we have enough information and are ready to make a decision.  If we think we are ready to decide when we are not, we can easily make very costly mistakes.  Metacognition calls attention to the delusions of overconfidence.  

For example, thinking about your career through the lens of your current job can be very limiting to your future.  Last year, one Gen Yer shared his frustrations with me about his "slow-moving" career.  He was giving serious thought to an option at another company--very certain that if he were to take a job in another firm, it would provide him more opportunities.

Gen Yers, of course, know that some opinions they receive from friends and colleagues will be accurate.  But both Gen Y and Gen X need to think about the fact that some opinions they receive will also be inaccurate--even when their friends argue them persuasively and sincerely.

People are often unjustifiably certain of their beliefs.  As a case in point, with further research, my Gen Y friend found that staying in his position could provide him with an opportunity to make a lateral career move.  He'd never given consideration to latral moves as a career strategy.  Indeed, very few business professionals eaither create or take avantage of lateral opportunitites within their company.  My friend found that a lateral transfer might add not only to his experience base, but also to his toolkit.  All this would be possible without starting from scratch in a new organizational culture.  He took the lateral.  Smart move!

He and his friends were overconfident about career strategy.  Without metacognition, his decision could have been seriously limiting--slowing down his career.  There was much that he and his friends needed to consider about making a career move--to another company.  Instead, my young friend is being considered now, for a third opportunity in his firm--a job that'll add both skills and more money.  Not bad for a college grad with barely two years of work experience.

How can you avoid the error of overconfidence?

• Discount your arguments.  Think of reasons why your initial beliefs might be wrong.  And be sure to ask other "experts" to discount your arguments.

• Ignore exciting, vivid, colorful information.  Exciting information can enhance emotional impact and have undue influence on your decisionmaking.  Most anybody can tell an exciting story to support his/her argument--no matter how wrongheaded the opinion.

Putting these two cognitive techniques into your front lobes can go a long way toward remedying overconfidence.  Metacognition has a number of very practical and useful tools.

THE KNOWING-DOING GAP IN LEARNING

(Thoughts from my coaching toolkit.)

Most of us take advantage of our mentors when we're adding new competencies to our toolkit.  But coaching is a very dangerous game for both the coach and the coachee.  That's because both may think when you understand how to perform a new skill, you can really do it.  The fact of the matter is that there's no necessary correlation between understanding a skill and being able to do it.

For example, I understand how to play the clarinet...how the fingering works...how you carve or individualize a reed for the mouthpiece, and how you clean out the "spit" from using it. But guess what?  Hand me a clarinet and I'm completely at loss.  Not quite.  I can figure out how to take the mouthpiece off and run a dirty rag through the clarinet to clean out the spit.  That's not going to take me very far.  I couldn't play a simple scale and would be utterly clueless staring at the first page of the Mozart clarinet concerto.  I know, but I can't do. 

So, when I chunk a behavior and talk someone through it, I'm always ready for the response that she "understands."  In school when someone says he understands, that's what the teacher wants. . . for that person to regurgitate back what the teacher said.  And you can get an A in class, and an F at work.  Understanding won't get anyone very far in business or life.

Let me be perfectly clear:  there's no necessary correlation between knowing or understanding and being able to deliver on that promise.  One of the biggest barriers to turning knowledge into action is the tendency to treat talking about something as equivalent to actually doing something about it.

Let's take this still further.  Let's suppose that you can actually perform the skill.  Have you learned it?  Probably not.  Learning a skill means that a behavior is actually embedded into your toolkit.

To embed:  to enclose closely in, to introduce as an integral part.  As in: "Dirt embeds under their fingernails.  The great bulk of the tree embeds in the soft soil.  The tales of his prowess have become embedded in folklore."

When a behavior is embedded in your toolkit, that means that you've used the behavior so much that you know what effects that behavior will have on other skills in your toolkit.  Your work toolkit is best thought of as a system of interrelated tools.  Drop in one new tool and over time, the others will change and adapt to that tool.

For example:  over the years I've learned to use small talk (I'll blog about it sometime) that I understand that the skills of small talk are useful for questioning, for getting people to reveal their secrets, for challenging ideas and even for making a better presentation.  (Uhhhhh...I clearly distinguish between small talk and gab, a distinction rarely clarified.)   I've spent years refining the competency of small talk.  Because of that, I can engage in a lot of talk-related skills that ostensibly have no relation to small talk. 

When you learn one skill, it never stands alone.  The experience of delivering on one skill successfully always impacts your ability to see, know and do other skills.  That's why learning is best thought of as a spiralling and evolving experience, and definitely not a linear one. 

Knowing how to do something means very little unless you can actually do it.

 

SMALL WINS, MOTIVATION AND CHUNKING

Yesterday's post emphasized the interaction between small wins, motivation and chunking.  What I wrote was that to gain competency more often--and much quicker--break a skill up into small bits to learn it.  These small wins of success are highly motivational.  In contrast, to take on an entire skill at one time is to set yourself up for failure.  Inevitably, that implies a greater potential for giving up.  I emphasize these facts because over 25 years of long term coaching with more than 450 clients, I have NEVER had a client tell me that he/she used chunking as a means for gaining new competencies.  Indeed, I usually spend time showing them how to chunk a desired skill--so that they can learn it.  Nearly every competency requires chunking to assure learning.

Here's the research.  In the mid 1980s, David McClelland of Harvard found that top achievers seek moderate challenges and risk, neither very easy--nor very hard.  So back to my suggestion:  chunk your skill into manageable bits so that you have a much greater chance of success--chunks that are not too easy or too hard. 

Again, why go at learning that way?  This is my reasoning:  the possibility of success will be much greater.  Success is motivational.  As a result you may practice more.  That's the best way to develop expertise.

I call this an actuarial approach to learning.  Actuaries predict insurance risk.  In health insurance, for example, they attempt to figure out the statistical probabilities that a consumer will take advantage of his insurance coverage.  With that information, a firm can figure out the competitive pricing to make a profit by insuring consumers.  As a coach, I work to determine the best ways to guarantee successful learning.  And, as you may guess, it's good for my business.

My model for learning provides far more opportunities for success--than just willy-nilly taking on a new skill and attempting to learn it. 

What do you need to know about chunking?  What difficulties does chunking pose for you? 

MOTIVATION AND SMALL WINS

One of my Gen Y friends tells me that perseverance in learning is the most difficult piece of  his development.  I can't disagree with him.  Sometimes, though, your job forces your to learn.  For example:  You usually set to learning when your boss gives you a task. In those instances your reputation and maybe your career are on the line, so you get with it and learn whatever the project needs.  That's the best way to learn--what I think of as context-driven learning.  In those settings, motivation and perseverance are not usually a problem.

But, there's another kind of learning that you also need to take seriously in today's world--strategic learning.  Without external drivers to learn, most people fail to step up to the plate.  How can you change that for yourself? 

In this economy, it doesn't take much for a person to see that unless he/she makes some changes and adds new competencies to the skill base, employability could get to be a real problem. That's the handwriting on the wall for most of us.

Let's take a typical case:  a bit of self-analysis suggests that for now your current technology expertise is not at issue.  By technology I simply refer to your area of business expertise--say finance, accounting, manufacturing or marketing.

But with further thinking, it's clear to you that you need to add some soft skills to your  toolkit.  For example, you've been promoted to manager and found that getting things done throughout the system is difficult.  You have no real power coalition or network of people to lean on to help you get things done in the work system.  You can't put that learning off forever.  You keep thinking about it, but can't get off the dime.  No motivation?

How can you get moving on strategic skill development?

Self-motivation works best through a process known as "small wins."  Research by social psychologists has found that the experience of success is highly motivational.  Since success is motivational, how can you best get success from your learning?  The answer?  By setting very achievable goals.  I suggest that you take your skill--in this instance, networking--and break it down into very small chunks that are quite achievable.  Chunking often makes for a win and motivation, all at the same time.  It's serendipity.

An example of chunking. 

Where do you start to build a power base?  Here are some possible chunks:  what are the various purposes you want for your power base?  What three or four people could give you insight into developing a power base?  Who are the easiest to talk to?  How should you set up the conversation. I've laid out four chunks merely by asking questions.  I should also say that it's important to keep records of your chunking, so that you can mark each chunk off as you've achieved it and jot down significant notes.(I keep info like this in a computer folder just for that purpose.)

Then set yourself some goals on a weekly basis for each chunk.  If you keep tabs you'll notice that each of those chunks takes about two hours to achieve.  That's a good estimate and an appropriate amount of time to spend on strategic development per week.

In business, motivation has been the subject of endless research, books, articles and consulting asignments.  The majority of this work has focused on what a manager can do to motivate his people.  What I'm suggesting, however, is self-motivation, along with the support and input from your network.  Recent studies by Theresa Amabile at Harvard add a very important factor to learning.  Self-motivation (and small wins) is also conducive to creativity.  And in our highly competitive economy, those kind of small wins are extremely valuable not only to yourself, but also to your company.

Here's the rule:  the more you learn, the quicker, easier and more fun learning will be for you.