Dan Erwin

Critical Skill: When What You Hear Seems Unjust, Unfair or Pure Nonsense

There are numerous occasions in business and government when what you hear seems unjust, unfair or pure nonsense.  It happens in business as often as in government.  It's just that because of its very nature, government can't downplay or handle the fallout as easily as business.  Since Reagan, Washington has been ruled by an "ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good."  So the lens is never as negatively focused on business as on government.  It's hard to imagine that perspective after reaping the failures of the auto industry and the sheer idiocy of America's financial industry, but it remains true.

How should you respond to, well . . . such public nonsense?

A few weeks ago I handed out a critical skill for reading opinion columns that I'd learned from William Safire some time ago.  He pointed out that one of the keys to reading any column is that the nuggets of importance are usually halfway down the column.  Today, I'd like to suggest another critical skill that I've found exceptionally valuable. 

Whenever you're getting stuff that makes no sense--and the person or organization delivering it is at least of average intelligence--recognize that there's also a 95% possibility that you're only getting one piece of the puzzle.  In business as in government there's always a backstory: what led up to the main story or plotline.

Take, for example, the Scottish government's release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber to his homeland of Libya.  Endlessly, we've heard that this "makes a mockery of the rule of law," and any number of similar statements of outrage.  At face value it's unfair, unjust and nonsensical.  Why would a government commit such an act?  It's great emotionally-packed stuff for the newspapers, CNN, Fox and the rest of the cable.

But consider:  In both governmental and business politics we're inevitably faced with trade-offs.  Of course governmental officials exactly like business officials will side with the people's perspective--at least publicly.  But Libya has wanted a relationship of significance (read, "commercial relationship") with the West, including the States, for years.   Furthermore, the Libyan oilfields are loaded with reserves in excess of 44 billion barrels, the largest in Africa.  In addition, the Russian oil monopoly, Gazprom, has been angling for major contracts and control of some of the Libyan oilfield.   I can assure you that no government official in his right mind would be unwilling to put up with the short-term anger of the public over the Lockerbie incident when the future of the West's petroleum supply is at stake.  Anger at the Lockerbie incident would not begin to compare with the public's frustration and anger over a one or two dollar price increase per gallon of gas.  Thus, I believe the backstory of the Lockerbie incident is about trade-offs. 

In a video conference with Georgetown students and faculty this past January, President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, put it this way to his listeners:  "Terrorism is a dwarf, not a giant."  In effect, he's saying the Lockerbie terrorist is small potatoes.  

Consider also that in business as in politics, everything is negotiable.  Pragmatism rules over idealism.  That, of course, is the game no intelligent leader dare talk about in spite of it being reality.  It's important to recognize that fact, manage our emotions and work for the ideals that we can realistically achieve. 

To summarize, I've put together a number of inferences from significant fact-based data as well as my knowledge of the relevant policy of the U.K. and the States and drawn the conclusion that the Scots' handling of the terrorist was based on a set of major international trade-offs.  I've drawn a logical backstory without ultimate proof that I'm correct.

What is true, however, is that within the complexities of a highly interlocked world, reality often forces us to do the least wrong rather than the most right.  

Business regularly finds itself in the same predicament.  How much can managers reveal of a complicated situation?  You've got organizational morale to deal with, but you've also go the intelligence gathering capabilities of your competition who would be very happy to see you fail.  So what execs and sometimes your manager can tell you, will very often have an invisible backstory. 

Here's the rule:  When what you're getting is bullshit, figure out the backstory before you lose your cool.  This is not a recipe for cynicism, but a formula for growth.  It was Jesus who commended the dishonest steward because he had acted shrewdly and said that, "The children of this world are wiser than the children of light."

Negotiation Skill: The Power of Deal-Making

Two of the most intriguing eulogies for Ted Kennedy were those of Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal and David Brooks of the New York Times.  Although both mourned the death of Kennedy, both also mourned the loss of the craft of legislation, of deal-making, in today's congress.

As a consultant to business managers, far too often I find negative attitudes toward the competency of deal-making deeply entrenched in business professionals.  Although a select group of managers in most organizations develop the needed skills of negotiation and deal-making, their lack often inhibits the careers of others.  Just as successful business professionals must learn to do the politics of networking and managing up, so today's highly diverse business world requires the skills of negotiation and deal-making.

What drives the negative attitudes toward deal-making?

Seib focuses on the structural issues that work to prohibit congressional deal-making:  the ideological polarization of the democrat and republican parties that began in the 1970s, and the "machines" in both parties that work against any middle ground.

Brooks emphasizes the role the Constitution plays in demanding an incremental or gradualist approach to congressional leadership.  He sees the skills and crafts of the legislator as quite different than the skills of leadership.  There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together.

Seib concludes:  Ted Kennedy could do that.  Few remaining have the ability. 

Whether you reject or embrace Kennedy and his politics, underlying his successes are two key lessons for business professionals for whom career achievement and personal success are a priority.  After 1990, Kennedy developed a calculated and nearly compulsive drive for excellence: what today we call deliberate practice.  He never failed to show up prepared for a committee hearing or debate.  A major reason was the quality of his staff, renown throughout the senate for their brilliance and work ethic.  David Brooks alludes to Kennedy's depth of knowledge:

I once ran into John McCain after a negotiating session with Kennedy on an immigration bill they had co-sponsored. McCain was exhausted by the arduous and patient way his friend negotiated. In my last interview with Kennedy, I asked about big ideas, and his answers were nothing special. Then I asked about a minor provision in an ancient piece of legislation, and his command of the provision and how it got there was jaw-droppingly impressive.

In addition, Kennedy was the epitome of the nice guy.   With it's emphasis on competence and warmth, "nice-guyness overlaps deliberate practice.  Kennedy was known as warm, fun, funny, friendly, what Joe Klein called a joyous Irish bull.  Though it may have been in the genes, it had to be learned.  In the 1970s, Kennedy had little to no political and relational instincts.  Perhaps Klein's statement of a conversation with Kennedy in 2008 summarizes it best: I wanted to ask him about those awkward, awful times back when.  But why mess with the mood?  He had exorcised the demons.  He was whole.  

The gift of time   

In his book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle calls attention to the fact that more than half of the best coaches are in their sixties and seventies.  Time gives many gifts, but one of the most intriguing is the recognition, now supported by much research, that those of us in those age groups can see that competence and nice-guyness are not born.  They're grown.

Quotation of the Week: Obama on Kennedy

His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives -- in seniors who know new dignity, in families that know new opportunity, in children who know education's promise, and in all who can pursue their dream in an America that is more equal and more just -- including myself.

        - PRESIDENT OBAMA, on Senator Edward M. Kennedy. 

On Carol Dweck: Why Your Belief About Your Intelligence Impacts Your Success

In a study of college students reported in 2006 Carol Dweck and her team wanted to know why what you believe about your intelligence significantly impacts your success.  Put it this way:  Is your learning and success about innate ability or something else? 

Dweck has shown throughout her research that what you believe about yourself can be sorted into two different theories.  The huge majority of students and professionals believe that your smarts is fixed, that you're born that way and that you can't grow it.  In contrast, those who believe that intelligence can be shaped, altered and extended will rebound far better from failures and can go on learning and building their smarts throughout their personal and professional life. 

What, practically speaking, causes these different results?  Let's simplify the research.

Those who believe that smarts is innate and fixed emphasize their performance.  Let's say your boss tells you, Jack, that he needs you to learn a very complex software program.  He'd like to access your expertise within three weeks.  You agree and start working on achieving that objective.  By the end of the first week, you realize you may have bit off more than you can chew, and you start getting nervous.  By the end of the second week, you're scared.  So you put in longer hours and work your tail off.  When your boss drops by at the end of the third week, he wants to know what the hell is going on.  You turn red-faced, clam up, get defensive, throw up your hands and just give up.  He sets off to find someone else.  You feel ashamed and guilty and tell yourself that you're never going to take on a challenge like that again. 

In contrast, the boss offers the job to, Jane, who thinks through the job, breaks it down into small bits, and says she'll try to meet the objective in three weeks.  By the end of the first week, she looks at her learning schedule, recognizes right off that she's failing to meet that week's objective.  Three weeks for that much learning is not feasible.  So she heads off to talk with her boss.  In spite of the fact that her boss is tactless, she admits that she bit off more than she can achieve and is not going to meet that deadline.  It was simply a larger project than she anticipated.  After an intense dialog she tells her boss that she would still like the project, but needs some consultant coaching and also needs to revise the schedule.  Her boss agrees to a "tentative" schedule.  With that agreement, she goes back to work.  She keeps her boss up-to-date on a twice weekly basis.  On one more occasion she has to renegotiate times, but finally achieves his objective after five weeks. 

What's going on here?

Jack, the traditionalist has no success, rolls over and quits the project.  That, of course, means his boss may limit his offerings and his future.  It also means that Jack is not going to step forward to work on risky projects with a lot of ambiguity.  He's got a ceiling over his head now.

Jane, the incrementalist, initially fails, but picks herself up, renegotiates, gets help and moves on.  She has no guilt to deal with. . . and she also has a wide open future.

I've exaggerated Jack and Jane for easy recognition.  If you've been in the workforce a few years you can readily identify the Jacks and Janes.  Furthermore, you may be able to put yourself in either's shoes. 

The neuroscience, with a focus on brain wave forms, also gives us two different pictures.  Jack's picture, in contrast to Jane's, shows little sustained memory-related activity.  He quit working at the project.  That means less to draw on and fewer connections in the learning process. 

So what?

If you're a business professional who tends to emphasize your performance, over the long term you're not going to achieve nearly as well as if you'd emphasized your learning--breaking every job into learning bits.  This is not about semantics, but about perspective, mindset and ultimate achievement.

It also applies to the family:  Don't praise your kids for their performance.  Praise them for their effort.  That way they'll be ready to go back to work when they fail.

Once More: Why a Mentor Is No Longer the Way to Go

This post originally appeared June 6.  It's one of six or seven posts from this year that continues to get googled and referred to all over the web.  In terms of career strategy, it's an issue that will be fundamental to your success.  I wrote it because a number of professionals kept talking to me about how to get a mentor and who I thought might be the best mentor for them.  So I decided to deal with their question in a single, direct and simple post.  After a number of conversations over the past few weeks, I decided that it should be posted once more.

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Historically, a mentor is the solution to your career advancement.  He (and it always was a "he") will support you in professional development, guide you through the political maze of your organization, teach you the necessary street smarts to keep you from making people blunders, prepare you for leadership and recommend you when the time comes for a promotion. 

That's no longer the case.  With today's fast-changing technology, project and team-based environment, volatile marketplace and organizational changes such as outsourcing, downsizing, mergers, buy-outs and bankruptcy, it's absolutely impossible for a mentor to provide the help and support you need.

So, what's the alternative to a mentor? 

I'm not being cute.  I just want to make certain that 21st century mentoring gets a better hearing, and makes it clear that the traditional route of a single mentor is a set-up for eventual failure.  Instead, as Kathy Kram and Monica Higgins make clear, the alternative to that single mentor is a developmental network of mentors--a group of individuals who have a geniuine interest in your growth.  They may not know each other, may not be in the same departments and may be in different organizations at different locations.  But these are the people you've enlisted to provide you with the mentoring support to enable you to take the next step forward in your career, whatever that may be. 

Typically, a mentor network includes five or six people.  And as you gradually change positions by going up the ladder, moving laterally or even changing companies, your network makeup will also change.  It will be based upon your needs.

A mentor network will require new relationship skills for most people including the ability to identify useful mentors, initiate conversations with people you don't know and initiate requests for feedback.

The 21st century career puts career responsibilities on you--responsibilities that were managed by the organization in the 20th century.  That world is gone and the new world requires a far larger toolkit. 

Gen-Y and X Skill: What Coaching Does for the Coach

Last week I was invited to teach an MBA class on leadership at a local college.  One question that I've never heard so directly was asked by a young woman who managed a number of clerks:  "Why should I coach beyond the basics when they'll just take their new learning and move on?  That means I'll have to take the time to coach someone else."

It's a question deserving of an answer.

For one thing when you coach, inevitably you'll gain better insight into that skill.  Research shows that one of the best ways to develop depth-expertise of a skill is to teach it to someone else.  Training forces you to analyze a skill in depth, to thoughtfully deal with the questions and concerns of others and even to recognize uses of a skill that you may have not seen as a part of your own development and use of that competency.

Coaching also teaches you how to understand and work more effectively with people.  When someone has difficulty or even fails to learn, you'll find yourself asking questions about that person as well as about your own processes of working with people.  You can't go through experiences like that without developing your skills of diagnosing, relating and problem solving.  The thinking required to work with people is far different than that required for technology.  Coaching people is never garbage in, garbage out.  Managing the variables and complexities of an individual is far different than managing the complexities of a software program.  It's another valuable process that's grown, not innate.

Finally, and this is no small thing, coaching builds your reputation.  Managers and execs take notice of capable coaches.  After all, developing people is at least a third of many execs' responsibility.  Not only would your reputation for coaching get around your organization, but it also provides one of the most basic rationales for a promotion.  In a recession, it's not the coaches who work well with people that get let go, but the chronically poor performers who make little contribution beyond their daily work responsibility. 

If you're new to the workforce, you may think that coaching is for the higher-ups, but that's false.  Don't wait until you have subordinates before you think about coaching.  When you notice someone having difficulty with a job that you've mastered, ask if you can help.  You might say something like this:  "I don't want to be pushy, but I've worked with that too.  Would you be willing to let me share what insights I have?"  A little bit of self-deprecation followed by an offer can be the path to recognition.

Here's the rule:  Effective coaching teaches the coach as much as it teaches the learner.

"Why Women's Rights are the Cause of Our Time"

I hope that the Sunday New York Times Magazine gets read by all the Gen-Yers of our country, both male and female.  The lead article by Nick Kristof addresses the paramount moral challenge of the 21st century.  As Kristof writes, the challenge of the 18th century was slavery and the 20th century was totalitarianism.

In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe:  sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.  Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitcal sense the opportunity they represent is even greater.  "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that's mostly an aspiration:  in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it not an accident that those same countries are disproprotionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. . . .  That's why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women.  The world is awakening to a powerful truth:  Women and girls aren't the problem:  they're the solution.

As you consider your roles in corporate America, recognize that the pendulum is swinging back to a model in which corporations will be regarded more as social organizations with obligations beyond Wall Street.  As Rakesh Khurana, prof at Harvard Business School says, "The narrative for coporate America has changed. "  Business has become a partner with the community.

How Do You Build a Successful Career for the 21st Century?

What the recession of 2008 -  2009 has demonstrated most clearly is that many of the jobs and careers won't work any longer.  Fact of the matter, if you check out the 3,000 or so tomes for sale on career you're going to find very little substantial help.  Although they offer advice on everything from resume writing to the color of your career parachute, they're all built on a single 75 year-old notion of what a career should look like.  If you're older than 30 you probably know what I'm talking about--a step-by-step climb up the corporate ladder.  Since the 1970s the corporate ladder has been going the way of the Dodo bird--killed by technology, global competition and flatter and flatter organizational structures.

Charles Handy, the British sage of business, first redefined career a little over a dozen years.  Since a number of his educated guesses have panned out in striking fashion, I'll go with his understanding of career:  The pursuit of meaning in one's role at work.  He says that meaning comes to those who develop a personal sense of direction, continuity and connection to their work.  Direction is pursuit of a cause.  Continuity comes from choosing work that will have a future long after you stop (Boy, that's an important issue for those who've seen jobs and careers disappear.)  Connection comes from the selection of a community (a work family) that you can identify with and help build.

By paying close attention to what's happening globally, the impact of technology and the future of different organizations, I suggest that there are no more than four career models.

Let's deal with the most familiar one first:  the traditional career.  There are still opportunities for those who want to stick with a firm and climb the ladder to the executive suite.  Even if the traditionalist has staying power, some organizations don't.  They disappear readily, get heavily flattened and the number of rungs in the ladder limits your potential.  Although most professionals think this is the most secure career, the recession has shown that it's dicey at best.

The second career is for the entrepreneurial and risk-taking souls in our midst.  Plenty of those have a great deal of success, but whatever the business you create, the statistics are not very encouraging.  I've been in my own business for more than 25 years, but literally hundreds have failed in my community over that time period.

The third career model is that of the expert.  This is a professional with little interest in general management.  His task is to accumulate a focused knowledge-base with a lot of depth and terrific expertise.  Tom Peters raves about this one--and you can check out his input via google.  It does demand you never stop learning--not a bad thing--and that you select an expertise that won't go away.  One of my neighbors is a SAP expert.  He moves from company to company selling his expertise.  He tends to stay at a firm until project needs are exhausted and that may mean from three to five years.  He's had no difficulty in this recession in contrast to some who've struggled.

The best career model for the typical professional is the one I alluded to in yesterday's post:  the portfolio model, what an IBM director calls the T-shaped career.  This is a career focused on a depth knowledge of one or two technologies (a technology is any business function) topped off with a wide portfolio of skills.  Like the expert model, it's going to require continuous learning.  You just have to take-charge of your learning.  In later blogs I'll discuss the skills of necessity, because they won't be changing significantly over the next 25 years or so. 

Gen-Y, X and Boomer Skills: Betting On Your Future

An intriguing summary of the latest steps for betting on your technology future by adding layers of skills appears in Thursday's New York Times.   Although the research supporting this model of career development came early from the Dallas Fed in 2003, here's an MIT faculty person saying the same thing today:

"Technical expertise by itself is not sufficient, and that is more true now than it has ever been,” said Bhaskar Pant, executive director of professional programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of engineering.

Typically it takes four to six years to gain technical competency in the work setting.  However, all the smarts indicates that you'll want to broaden that expertise with people skills ASAP.  People skills are necessary for project management, for managing up, for networking and all the business functions from retailing to manufacturing--that is, if you believe work survival and success are important.

Here's how a corporate expert puts it:

The technology workers most in demand in the future, according to James E. Spohrer, a researcher and director of university programs for I.B.M., will be “T-shaped people.” Such people, Mr. Spohrer explains, possess a deep knowledge in one technical discipline topped off by a wide portfolio of skills, from project management to industry expertise, that makes them more valuable to employers.

Although these writers are referrring to people with engineering and science backgrounds, it's true that all business functions will require the same broadening for success.  So think of these conclusions as strategically necessary, and think beyond the current recession and work difficulty.  Structural changes and modifications will be true in the foreseeable future.  The pace of technological change will not let up, and that creates the need for communication skills in every business function. 

Here's the rule:  stay focused on layers of skills that will help you stay ahead in careers (yes, plural careers) that are unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.  That's just plain old street smarts.

 

Quotation of the Week: E. B. White

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.

              E. B. White                       US author & humorist (1899 - 1985)

Consciously or unconsciously we all choose our own reality.  Some pessimistic, some optimistic.  I've always thought of myself as more of a pessimistic optimist.  That perspective goes a long way toward keeping from taking myself too seriously.  What's important about self-understanding is that I gain better insight into my own biases--and that enables me to make better and more well-rounded decisions.  E. B. White gets as close to my self-understanding as any author.  Enjoy.