Dan Erwin

YOU HAVE OUR PERMISSION TO COMMIT SUICIDE

One thing we have not lost in this recession is our entrepreneurial spirit.  Today I received a note from the insurance company that carries our long-term care--a well-known American firm.  We have (expensive!!) coverage that will pay nearly all nursing home costs for life if either of us has to be incarcerated.  This is the most fascinating expression of subtext and entrepreneurialism I've seen for many moons.  To make sense out of this, you need to understand that nearly all insurance companies have an exclusion for suicide.  In other words, if you decide to commit suicide, your family forfeits all the insurance, and the investment was for zilch.

Long term health care insurance looks at suicide very differently.  They state,

We have enclosed an endorsement that needs to be attached to your policy/certificate for future reference.  As explained in the endorsement, we are deleting the exclusion in your current policy/certificate for suicide or attempted suicide.  Please read the endorsement carefully for details.  (And now, the great understatement.)  There is no additional cost for this endorsement.

The addition of this endorsement to your policy/certificate will not affect your current benefits.  The purpose of this communication is simply to provide you with the attached endorsement required by your state.

In other words, should you decide, in your deteriorating state to commit suicide, or should your family decide to assist you, be our guest.  We'll not punish you for your act and we'll pay all the care up to the point of your death.

Clearly, we do not need to worry American entrepreneurialism, even in the worst of economic depressions.  Kudos to the author of this communication.

Can you top that?

QUOTATION OF THE WEEK

The likely outcome of this year’s health care push is that we will get a medium-size bill that expands coverage to some groups but does relatively little to control costs. In normal conditions, that would be a legislative achievement.

                                --David Brooks

WHY CAROL DWECK'S BOOK, "MINDSET," IS SO DAMNED IMPORTANT

There are some ideas so simple, even obvious, that a twelve-year-old can readily understand them.  Yet, when you try to implement these same ideas, they are profoundly difficult to execute.  Politically, the notion of a nuke-free world is one of those ideas: we only need to freeze arsenals and weapons development. The nuclear constraints, however, are nearly impossible to bridge.  The smaller and less powerful the country, the more beneficial the nuclear material.

At the individual level, Carol Dweck's well-researched notion that if you have a fixed mindset, believing your talents and abilities are set in stone, you have set yourself up for stagnation and limited achievement.  If on the contrary, your mindset is one of growth, you can achieve true success and fulfillment even through immense failure.  The mindset is not a minor personality quirk. Rather, it explains our whole mental world, shaping our attitudes toward work and relationships.

That may well be why some of the reviewers of her book were nearly irate at the seeming simplicity of her notion.  That simplicity can be so disarming that a reader projecting his/her own experience, can be very likely to identify with stuff that’s not there.

Understanding is simple; it’s the unfreezing that’s tough.

As an executive coach for more than 25 years, I am very familiar with implementing these beliefs. But their execution poses immense difficulties. What makes it so damned difficult is that you have to unfreeze the old behaviors and thought processes. 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 and behaviors are now questionable.

It’s easy to ignore new information when the conditioning, socializing and training you received as a kid has to be overcome. Making the change will often create defensiveness, anxiety and even some denial.

In addition, as Chris Argyris of Harvard has found, smart people don’t learn very easily. Learning to reason about personal change can be emotional for them, even painful. Inevitably, many successful professionals with acknowledged insecurities often have an easier time of learning. They ask better questions, and don’t presume they know all the answers or processes.

But the new world created by Dweck’s research on mindsets is very important.

Mindset explains why a large proportion of students and professionals underperform. When personal limitations are defined as the only reality, that prophecy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, constricting career opportunities.

At a personal level, the new mindset provides a major key to the development of higher performance and fulfillment. As one of my Gen-Y acquaintances put it, “I like this idea. It means there is hope for the rest of us.”

At an organizational level, it is a major answer to the burgeoning talent shortage. A client of mine tells me that the competition for talent has become so serious that her firm is identifying and working with high school students, focusing them on college education, and planning ultimately to bring them into their own organization.

As schools and business organizations begin to use this data, it can provide an opportunity for the development of a larger segment of the population. Indeed, as training and development people begin to indoctrinate their employees with the growth mindset, it can make it possible for employees to better themselves and their career. My development business is one small way of dealing with these issues, but smart HR organizations can Blitzkrieg their employees with this information, providing their company with a larger talent base.

Finally, Mindset is another chink in the armor of traditionalists, or Luddites, who believe in innate intelligence, and dismiss the findings of deliberate practice in the development of expertise. The more modern science and psychology can challenge the notions of Charles Murray of the Bell Curve, the better.

In sum, the growth mindset confirms the new research which reveals that intelligence can be developed, and expertise can be built by means of deliberate practice.

QUOTATION OF THE WEEK

I got into directing because I had no talent as a writer.  I learned that if you kept trying, even though you had no talent, you got better at it.

                                        --Francis Ford Coppola

INFLUENCE MANAGEMENT: THREE BIG ISSUES

If you want to be successful, Harvey Golub, the former CEO of American Express, always said, you need the skills of influence management.  Whether you are a manager or not, influence management is always front and center--a basic competency everyone needs. 

Influence is simply the power to get your work done in an organization.  Nobody has the formal authority to achieve what is necesssary, not even with those who report to them.  It's an illusion that once upon a time managers could make their direct reports do whatever was needed.  Managers have never had that much authority.  Organizational life is far too complicated for that.

Influence is about the great American value of reciprocity.  We Americans, unlike some other cultures, inherently believe that "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."  Think about it as banking.  I can't withdraw, unless I've made a deposit.  One of my client firms talks about influence as the company candy dish.  You can't take candy out of the dish, unless you've put some in. Influencing people is based upon deposits that I've made that some others want.

So think about influence as a form of exchange.  Exchange is actually the basis for all forms of influence, whether persuasion, pleading, appeal or ingratiation.  You can't really demand in today's world.  No tactic will succeed if the other person doesn't perceive benefit of some kind. . . a payment in currency he or she values.

The concept of influence management is easy. . . the process is complicated.

To build the the social capital for your future, you've got to pay attention to the relationship and figure out the currencies.  And you've got to figure out your own goals and priorities.

So there are just three big issues underlying influence management:

• What do "they" want that you can give them?

• What do you want?  What are your own goals and priorities?

• What are the resources you have to offer them to give you what you want?

How do you manage the big three?  Got some tips for the rest of us?

"DO EVERYBODY A FAVOR: TAKE A SICK DAY"

That's the title of a brief article by Anne Marie Valinoti, M.D., an internist writing in the Times.  If you have little kids in day-care, you know you don't want a worker coughing, sniffling, with a slight fever caring for your kids.  Dr. Valinoti's advice to miserable, coughing, red-eyed adults is to go home, get to bed, and drink hot tea all day.  But the response from the worker is not unusual:  "Bed?  I've got to get back to work."  And off he goes to work on Wall Street.

The other issue Dr. Valinoti brings up is the uselessness of antibiotics for treating colds and viral illnesses.  "Because most bacteria multiply rapidly," says Anthony Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, "they can quickly evolve and develop resistance to antimicrobial drugs."

I like to stay well, and I try to live my life that way.  That means I run from sick workers like they have the plague.  You don't see posts like this on business blogs, but it strikes me as an important reminder.  

WELL, IS HE (SHE) TELLING THE TRUTH OR SPINNING A FAIRY TALE?

It's really difficult to figure out.  And there are times when you'd like to know whether that manager is giving you the straight skinny or, well, prevaricating.  Occasionally I meet someone who tells me he can always tell whether or not so and so is lying.  Don't believe him.  It's more than difficult to tell whether or not a person's spinning a line.

Because of my business in executive development, I interview from 10 - 20 colleagues of a client as part of the diagnostic process.  Political reasons for an interviewee to be deceptive are not far below the surface, so assessing truthfulness is of high import.  

The academic discipline of lie detection has a long history beginning in the 1960s with a number of research scholars including Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen.  Ekman has become a world famous specialist, teaching that the best way to identify a dissembler is through his/her face.  In his earlier studies he identified a basic set of expressions that are similar throughout the world:  anger, disgust, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness.  Along the way, he's catalogued more than 7,000 micro-expressions, subtly different.  

Ekman's basic premise for catching a liar is that you cozy up to him, become a friend, get him talking and wait for the facial cues of lying (that model works for more than deception.).  As the interviewee talks, there's a fleeting and momentary expression that doesn't fit the information that he's giving.  And there you have it:  he's a liar.  In contrast, truth-telling has no fleeting facial micro-expression, no subtle, momentary facial tic.

The problem with this approach is that you've got to be trained and supervised to become effective.  And, of course, being a very smart academic, Ekman consults with law enforcement groups all over the world to high fees.  (That's a swell personal brand.)

Today's Times describes research on honesty that focuses not on facial animation or other nonverbals, but on words. According to a number of behaviorists, the new method is a lot like the old "Columbo" show where the interviewer or interrogator pretends to be an idiot, but goes about gathering a lot of evidence.

In one survey, researchers found that less-confrontational interrogations resulted in a "higher likelihood of confession."  (Wonder if Cheney would believe that?)  Content, they've found is more accessible to information gathering than nonverbals like sweating, fidgeting, eye-contact, or facial responses.  

Liars tend to concoct a story that is tight and lacks detail.  Truth tellers have no script and tend to recall a lot of detail, including extraneous stuff, and may even make mistakes.  "They are sloppier."  

Two researchers found one consistent difference: "People telling the truth tend to add 20 to 30 percent more external detail than do those who are lying."  And if you return to the question, asking them in a different format, they'll add more and more detail.  Inevitably, liars stick to one story.

What this means for my hour-long interviews is that I can return to previous issues from a different perspective, question the previous issues in a different context, and hitchhike on the interviewees information to go at the same issue again. 

For example, let's suppose I'm trying to find out about my client's people skills.  There are any number of questions that I can drop into the interview regarding different subjects as the conversation proceeds over the hour.  In the following list, my underlying objective is to identify my client's people skills, even though I'm digging for a lot of other data:

How effective is Jim at people skills?  What examples can you give me?  Why do you think that example gives you a lot of information on his relationships?  On a scale of 1 - 10 in personal effectiveness, where would you place him--with 10 being extremely capable?  How do people in the organization think about Jim's people skills?  Have you seen him in a conflict with his colleagues?  When he gets frustrated, what is he liable to do or say?  In those settings, how consistent is he?  Let's suppose one of his reports is having difficulty with a project?  How will he handle that?  How would he go about helping her?  

 I can't imagine going at these questions in sequence or even in a straight-forward manner.  They appear as a result of other statements and issues, and are dropped into the conversation regarding all kinds of issues such as strategic thinking, technological expertise, managing people, network development or the ability to manage power constructively.  It's all a matter of what I call conversational hitchhiking.

The most important skill for identifying truth-telling or deception, though, is active listening.  Coincidentally, I was trained as a singer, and my coaches emphasized listening, teaching me to listen to nuance, tone, pitch, diction, lyricism, phrasing, sound formation, language and many other attributes.  As I moved out of singing into counseling, and then into full-time coaching, I found that listening training was key for assessing and coaching clients. 

Effective questioning is profoundly important for all kind of business settings, from client relationships to managing people or coaching.  But questioning is slightly less important than listening, especially when you have concerns about deception.    

How successful have you been at identifying deception?  How do you go about it?

CAN YOU FLY BELOW THE RADAR AND STILL BE SUCCESSFUL?

General James Jones, Obama's national security advisor, seems to think so.  But will this approach work for your career? 

In an interview with the New York Times, Jones presents his case, arguing that low profile does not necessarily mean low impact. 

“You can be a leader that takes charge of every meeting and takes charge of every issue and rides it to its conclusion and plays a very, very dominant role,” he said. “For me, that has the effect of muting voices that should be heard.”

There's no question that the best creative decision making comes from a team of experts.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, innovation is not necessarily a personal gift.  It's a contact sport, and so Jones' use of his team is spot-on. 

What's not clear from the interview is the backstory.  However, I'm quite certain that you don't get to be a four-star Marine general without knowing how to work the system, make significant contributions to the Corps, get buy-in to your ideas and become an expert at managing up.  The Marines are just as political as the White House or any American corporation, but they believe in team-building and--almost uniquely--practice it.  Richard Holbrooke, now working with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, confirmed my suspicions about Jones' team-building and said that Jones had produced "a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the National Security Council that did not exist before."  

I assume Holbrooke means Jones has an extensive network of smart colleagues, regularly interacts with them, creates and makes the necessary policy adaptations to gain his team's long-term support.  As a result of his "teeing up" activities, you can be certain he's got an impeccable knowledge of all the issues, able to assess both the competency and policy insights of his team members to determine their real value.  The reports on Jones’ style indicate that he’s not afraid to delegate, and does an exceptional job of it.  With that base of support, speaking up is not as necessary, especially with a president as highly deliberative as Obama who likes to ask the questions. 

Well, can you fly below the radar and still be successful?

I doubt it.

Jones comes to his position with a great reputation already in place.  He has had long and obviously successful experience with teams, making it possible for him to bring ideas that are already vetted to his president.  

Contrast that rich background to your own and to corporate America.  In the early years of your business career you’ll be devoting the majority of time to your basic business expertise, finance, marketing, technology or whatever.  At the same time you’ll be figuring out your role, how to work with different and sometimes difficult people more effectively, building a network of intelligent colleagues and developing the street smarts to manage the whole system.

On top of all that you’ll need to develop an image as an able and competent thinker and strategist.  Of course, to build that reputaiton you’ll need to demonstrate that you deliver well and meet job expectations.  But image is also tied to your ability to make important contributions to the thinking and deliberating of managers and execs, and that can only be demonstrated by speaking up.  For millennia we’ve known that your image is the strongest persuasive tool you have.  The enduring value of this information is that we know that our image is created through communication with important managers and their teams.  The  content or substance of your informal/formal messages, the justifications you provide for your recommendations and the values you espouse all affect your image or reputation.  Whenever you find yourself in a new setting, you will have to re-create and re-mold this image.  It will be built on your “upward voice,” and you can’t do that below the radar.  Especially in the early years of your career, it’s a fact that in American corporations you’re going to have to speak up, gain a hearing and have impact if you want to be successful.

That’s a lotta stuff for the first few years of your career.

But image management has shown itself to be a continual task in the global economy.  I’ve been surprised at how often executives as high as EVP in major corporations have asked for my coaching in this matter.  Curiously, all the eight or ten execs that were specific in their requests for help in image management wanted to be seen by their managers as a “strategic” executive.  Lack of that reputation was holding back their future and they understood the importance of their upward voice.

So, can you succeed in business below the radar screen?

In the first four to six years of your career?  Absolutely not.  In the rest of your career?  Maybe.  General Jones is a very unusual animal and the success of his model has not yet been proven.  He will not be a useful model for 99% of us business professionals.

So, what has been your experience with this issue?  And how have you resolved it?

 

BE CAREFUL WHAT BEHAVIOR YOU MODEL

Bob Sutton of Stanford has one of the most helpful blogs on the web, and in today's post he refers to another blogger, Kelley Eskeridge, who has excellent ideas on managing team meetings effectively.  Her model is not new. I've used it successfully for years and shown clients how to use it also.  But toward the end of Sutton's extended quote, she makes this comment: 

The thing is, people will generally follow the most effective behavior that's modeled for them.  Ground rules help you model the behavior and give you an objective reference point for calling out rudeness/ineffective behavior.

Most workplace assholes get away with it because no one stops them.  Having an objective tool agreed on by the group can really help.

Kelley couldn't be more right-on.  Again and again, I've seen that there is an innate willingness on the part of people to mimic and follow models when they see how effective a model can be.  This is especially useful training input for managers.  Got a new way to do something?  Put the model on display and use it in a relevant work setting.

Thanks for Bob's digging all over the web for truely useful input.

WILL YOUR COMPANY KEEP PAYING YOUR HEALTHCARE?

ABSOLUTELY NOT.  Having worked with C-Level executives, I can tell you that there's been board level talk about this for years.  In private, CEOs overwhelmingly want out of the healthcare business.  Next week's BusinessWeek (May 18) will let that secret out of the bag. 

Catherine Arnst writes in "A Secret Wish for Health Reform" that congressional leaders intend to have a healthcare bill this summer, and that it will include the uninsured.  Publicly, U.S. companies are plumping for government sponsored healthcare as long as their company system is maintained. 

Don't believe the public stance. The swelling healthcare costs and global competition make it prohibitive.  Employer premiums have soared 119% over the past decade, and that's four times faster than wage increases.  As BW notes, Mercer Consulting estimates that nearly half of employers will shift more health costs to their employees next year.  As most execs will tell you, benefits keep their firm from being competitive.

You need to understand why business got into healthcare in the first place.  (It was not a government issue.)  During WW II, wage controls were in effect, it was a very tight labor market, and so healthcare took the place of raises for recruitment and retention.  As a result, by the mid-seventies, companies like General Motors, or as one of my in-laws put it, "Generous Motors" provided everything imaginable except veterinary coverage.  Get it straight, in spite of all the noise, healthcare's original heritage was not the unions or government, but business. 

So what's the secrecy all about?  Exactly what I've been told by knowledgeable insiders:  we can't afford to dump benefits unless our competitors are also willing to do it.  Businesses don't want to get into a competitive shooting match.  You might be surprised to know that many CEOs would "even pay a new tax if it got them out of the insurance business."   So, you can hear the conversation from behind closed doors:  "let's see if we can get the government to make the first move to help us keep our healthcare reputation clean."  After the past year, business doesn't want any more flak.

Whatever the cries of "socialism" from the right wing or the Wall Street Journal, it'll be laden with bullshit.  Of course, the extremists on the left will want a level of healthcare beyond any realm of possibility, and that's just as nonsenical as the right.  In the long run, there will be no clean hands.  But realistically, that's OK too.  It's the nature of politics and the human condition.  Don't get too het up by all the noise.  With that many stakeholders (and I haven't mentioned insurance and medical providers), it'll be a few months of fun.  In the final analysis, the new government system won't look that different from Europe's.

I'll eat crow if I'm wrong, but at this point in time it's not much of a gamble.  And once again, we have George Bush to thank.  Without the experience of how inept and can't-care-less the White House can become, we wouldn't be ready to consider one of the third rails of last century's politics.

Well, what do you think about all this?