Dan Erwin

Why You Need to Think and Talk on Two Tracks

Metacommunication: talk about talk. It’s the ability to describe the intentions of what we’re saying and doing. It’s necessary and helpful for avoiding misunderstanding, especially when what we’re doing or saying can be readily misinterpreted. Metacommunication makes influence and cooperation from those we are working with a lot easier.

In complex business conversations, metacomm can profoundly impact conversations and make them far more constructive and efficient—even timesaving. To a significant degree, metacomm functions to facilitate conversation and is highly useful for training participants in sequencing or processing their conversations. In our studies and experience with metacomm, we have found a number of metacomm forms especially useful.

Monitoring processes. Conversations that stick to your planned objectives to focus on problem solving, innovation or developing cross-disciplinary agreements, readily become mere discussions rather than action-oriented. However, the use of metacomm can serve to facilitate the conversation, following the implicitly agreed-upon rules and making effective use of time to achieve the set expectations. ”I’m saying this because. . . .”

Do You Have a Two-Track Brain?

In today’s tech oriented business world you’ll need it. Here’s why.

One of the most difficult problems with collaborative conversation is staying on track. Smart people inevitably get waylaid by tangential ideas that are suggested by their meeting interactions. That’s precisely why many think that team meetings are such a waste. Yet solutions and decisions in today’s business world inevitably require conversations to gain the buy-in of diverse teams and multiple business disciplines.

One underlying limitation business groups face is that few participants have a good handle on sequencing ideas. We used to think that software coders, who constantly work with digital sequencing, should be able to manage linkages. We’ve found, however, that the majority of technical people are unable to make the transfer of digital sequencing to conversational sequencing. Those with an extensive background in

Best Political Quote of the Year. . . Gretchen Whitmer

In an extensive article, perhaps thinking about a future presidential run, the New Yorker had a long and enlightening article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Whitmer. The current governor of Michigan, Whitmer is one tough, very smart lady. But she's not the only Democrat in the State. Both houses are also Democratically run--creating a very thick Blue Wall and knocking the DeVos family out of much of their power games for extreme Republicans.

She understood well that the low turnout of 2016, which gave Trump the state, was not about a radical turn to the right, but about "low voter turnout."

Whitmer's wins suggest a different story about the Midwestern heartland.

The Unusual Power of Fessing Up

As a freelance consultant, working with senior managers and corporate executives from California to New York and Latin America to Western Europe, both my personal and professional reputation were always very important to me. A consultant with even a questionable reputation always has a difficult time getting a job. As most of you know, there is no such thing as a secret in business. Information always surfaces over time, especially reputational information. Though that may not be quite as true for employees, the professional with integrity and an unquestionable reputation always gets better opportunities.

So one of the most useful identity characteristics I began developing in my early vocations and continued strongly in my later vocations was the ability to fess up when I screwed up. Even for the smallest failure or problem. Candidly, I looked for the opportunity to fess up. Because the act is unique and few have the guts to fess up, it is often a positive way of identity positioning. So, my language was always clear and direct. “ I screwed up . . . .” Or, “I was wrong in that conclusion. . . because. . . .” I need to say that far more often I was intuitively or logically correct in my decision making, so fessing up was a very small piece of my work pie—probably no more than approximately once a month over the years. But I was quite capable of making a lot out of the experience.

3 Keys to Managing Motivation

Eventually, all managers learn that if they want a person to make some changes, whether stopping a frustrating behavior or gaining new skills, motivation is going to be at the center of the behavioral change. Motivation, that prompting to behave in a certain way, is just very, very important for business success.**

The ability to motivate others is far more important today than in the pre-digital age, especially with the wide use of cross-disciplinary teams. But, a global survey by Nik Kinley and Shlomo Ben-Hur found that only 28% of more than 500 global managers and leaders were confident they could motivate people to learn new behaviors and make change. And only 10% of that group said they felt confident that the changes would stay changed over time. The issue then is not what changes need to take place, but how to do it.

The beginning place for making change is understanding personal or inner motivation, what researchers call intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation developed out of cognitive psychology and self-determination theory. Initially identified in the 1970s and 80s, it has evolved over time and been put to very successful use. Understanding intrinsic motivation is highly important because overwhelming research has found that the typical motivational strategies of better pay, bonuses and external rewards don’t cut it long term. In fact, recent analysis of hundreds of studies of intrinsic motivation reveals that personal motivation accounts for 24% of a person’s performance levels.