As a result of apartment renovation and moving upstairs, a number of my first floor and new second floor neighbors have been in my apartment. They wanted to see my new digs. One of the most striking features of their perusal is a seemingly profound lack of curiosity and very little ability to “notice.” “You have a beautiful apartment,” most respond. But what’s intriguing is what they don’t see unless I call attention to it. And these are not ill-educated people.
I have nearly 45 photos, sculptures, water colors, porcelains and artifacts hanging on the walls—all hung by a professional. One of the most gorgeous is an authentic Navajo rug, along with a recent painting of Indian tribeswomen. Not a single person mentioned one unique, beautiful, artistic hanging, a branch of spruce, covered with dripped copper. I have an extensive library, approximately 1500 volumes, yet no one gave it more than a glance. Not a single question was asked about any of the artifacts.
Even more sad than not noticing my personal context is the seeming lack of awareness of how context actually impacts each of as individuals and as members of a work team. So in the weeks following their visit to my apartment there was no sense they knew me any better, no attempt to get to know me better and no inherent projections of how I would respond to their conversations. The kind of familiarity information that can surface implicitly and explicitly in conversations was completely absent. And I’ve been watching and looking for that knowledge. But it was just never there in any of the dozen neighbor’s conversations. The underlying attitude of curiosity was absent—and so they remained in their small worlds. Expressing interest—but never following through on it. Perhaps, not recognizing what they were looking at or knowing the value of asking questions.
What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking, as I use the term, is the business of identifying the complications of relevant contexts and communication, and unpacking them thoughtfully. That includes physical contexts like those I describe in the above paragraphs. Of course, it also includes all the conversation and non-conversational talk, as well as the supportive physicality seen and heard in posture. So too, movement, non-verbal, language choice, values, arguments, persuasion, written materials, and linguistic forms like small talk, narrative, questioning. Including context artifacts like book choice, pictures, paintings and architecture.
To a very high degree, success in business—and life—is tied to one’s critical thinking skills in relevant, significant situations. One of the most illuminating experiences of critical thinking about “ordinary” talk took place at one of my last executive coaching jobs. I was working with the CEO of a major East Coast mortgage firm and had finished interviewing about twenty of his colleagues in preparation for coaching. I always got to their offices much earlier than any appointment, spending time with various execs and managers in “small talk.” Uniquely, the firm insisted on paying me on an hourly basis, rather than on a project basis. I had noticed the corporate attorney, who regularly received my billings, was unhappy with my fee. Late in the process, I happened to stop by his office and after he asked me how the “project” was going, he expressed frustration with my use of time—and the large bills he was paying just for “small talk.”
Continue reading "4 Key Attitudes of Critical Thinking" »
Humans differ significantly in their ability to make change. As a personal coach to executives for more than thirty years, it’s obvious that these differences are the status quo. Desire and motivation aren’t enough—even when it’s literally a matter of life or death.
Some, it seems, have a profound immunity to change. Often, they understand the need for change and they may even understand what the change might look like. But for some reason they seem stymied, and unable ...
The most widely used book on persuasion and influence in the business community is—by far—Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The psychology of persuasion. Overall, the book is #276 in Amazon’s books. It’s #1 in consumer behavior, #13 in motivational books and #20 in success books. I recommend it highly for every person’s bookshelf.
But the author is utterly blind to what makes his book a phenomenal success, never mentioning the key factor, yet, ironically, maximizing it throughout the book. It’s clear that the driver of his book’s influence is hidden in plain sight. It’s a glorious and very lucky form of blindness.
Cialdini’s book is a set of six principles, “weapons of influence.” But the book is loaded with. . . STORIES. The most basic weapon of influence is not one of his six principles, but story. I don’t expect psychologists to know or understand that. After all, psychology has become the scientific study of mental functions, self-reported behaviors, white rats and finger movements. Language use and function, in contrast, belong to the discipline of rhetoric—that human symbolic effort to bring about cooperation. As a result, rhetoricians often focus upon how various forms of ...
Continue reading "Do and Don’t Do What Your Parents Tell You: Don’t Lie, But Tell Stories" »
In the popular mind, characteristics like introversion and extraversion are unchangeable. Although I’ve never explicitly pooh-poohed that interpretation, my career as counselor, university faculty and management coach long since brought me to the conclusion that personality distinctions like that are largely useless and often destructive. Yet people continue to believe that the personality is encoded in the genes, fixed, and unchangeable.
However, research now shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that personality is a flexible and quite dynamic thing. By personality, psychologists refer to those enduring, long-term patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that distinguish one person from another. That would include, for example, increased levels of self-confidence, warmth, self-control and emotional stability. It also includes the temperaments, the introspective and extraverted. Although these changes are more predominant in young adulthood (age 20—40), the research has demonstrated that personality traits can change at any age. So when someone tells you “that’s who I am,” don’t take it seriously. That may well be just who they want to be. Or that they believe that they can’t make those changes. Or that they’ve never given thought to making real changes, and certainly that they don’t know how to make the changes of importance....
Continue reading "Update: Can You Change Your Personality?" »
Unlike many personality traits, perfectionists usually recognize their perfectionism. And if they don’t, then their co-workers do. Colleagues of a perfectionist readily surface the information in an expletive format like, “god, what a perfectionist!” That translates, most don’t need to be told, as “what a pain in the butt.”
Historically, perfectionism has been viewed as a personality style that includes striving for flawless performance, meeting excessively high standards and overly critical evaluation of one’s own behavior. Of course, some perfectionists are quietly proud of that personality trait. And though they might make self-deprecating comments or laugh about themselves, they have not the slightest interest in rejecting the category. After all, most perfectionists believe it’s gotten them a lot of kudos and opportunities in their career.
Is perfectionism all negative?
The dominant view through the 1980’s was that perfectionism was pathological, the sign of a neurotic and disordered personality. Perfectionism, psychologists believed, was driven by concerns over mistakes, doubts about actions and fears of rejection. These researchers stressed that unhealthy ...
Or. . . How to succeed in the prediction game.
The other evening after listening to a neighbor talk about her family I asked whether she was "rules oriented." I was certain she was, but I wanted to double-check my prediction. "Of course," she said. That's the best way to raise kids. Aren't you?" Amused by her shock at my negative answer, I was more intrigued by the fact that in spite of a number of personally-revealing conversations, she was clueless regarding my orientation.
Her lack of mind reading tools resulted in prediction failure.
As a business person, you can’t afford that kind of prediction failure. Your ability to predict others’ thinking and behavior is not only necessary for working with your boss, peers, subordinates, clients and teams, it’s also necessary for overall career success.
Mind reading tools grow out of two disciplines: the rhetorical competency of "close reading" and the communication competency of “barrier resolution.” Close reading tools are mind-reading competencies that enable you to go beyond the words and evidence that's presented. Barrier-resolution tools are competencies related to the recent stuff in the “ladder of inference.”
Ultimately, mind reading is built on the well-accepted fact that ways of thinking tend to be systematic. People tend to hold well-connected kinds of values and convictions in their thinking...
Bill Condon’s new
movie thriller, The Fifth Estate, has been
reviewed as a study of technology and ethics. The thriller about the rise of
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange initially moves rather slowly, explaining the
internet to its audience. But thirty minutes into the movie, the ethical
questions surface with the NYTimes’ Bill Keller, the Guardian in London and Der
Spiegel in Germany partnering to parse, redact and publish the classified
documents. Government ministers, of course, are portrayed in their attempts to
contain the flow of documents. Inevitably, much of the film and its reviewers
focus upon whistle blowing, first amendment rights and the realities of
collateral damage.
Yet, The Fifth Estate provides a shockingly graphic picture of leadership horrors and the gullibility of followers. Steve Coll of the The New Yorker, writes about the glamorization of Assange, but you can be certain that there is no glamorization in this film.
Continue reading "‘The Fifth Estate’: Authoritarian Leadership and Collateral Damage" »
Over the years I’ve asked that first question of more than 500 clients and their 7,500 respondents in face-to-face, one hour interviews. Far more often than not they start out by telling me what my client says of himself—he’s a good communicator. But when I drill down into those responses, as I’ll inevitably do, the picture is usually quite different. The answer was a shock to my system. At bottom their definition of a good communicator is someone who can share information and avoid conflict. That understanding is not going to help people who want to succeed in today’s marketplace.
So why does it matter? In the new economy, where conversations are the new organizational power, the demands for communication expertise have rocketed. It’s not just the obvious flattening of organizations or the need for more bottom-up and less top-down communication. But the challenge of attracting and retaining talented people has spurred senior execs to look at communication very differently. And that’s not all. With product launches, quality control, client relationships, multi-disciplinary relationships all needing nearly daily attention from all levels of the organization, conversations and communication skills have taken on very significant bottom line value. For example, if high-level conversational expertise is not available, potential sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars each may never get to first base.
The consequences of those demands are that once obvious, even “natural,” skills are light-years away from today’s needs.
Take, for example, questioning skills. Distinctions such as yes/no or open-ended/closed-ended questions are kindergarten competencies. Professionals today need to understand how to use questions to build relations and trust with people. How to gather information about complex products or services. How to dig into mindsets and mental models that get in the way of effective decisions. How to find out what motivates a person and what demotivates. How to gather information when an individual is not at all certain that he or she wants to reveal that information. How to sequence questions to open up a situation rather than close it down. And especially, how to get employees to reveal their opinions, explain the data on which those opinions are based and, when possible, ask questions that will open up the conversation to change. Effective business questioning has no relationship to lawyerly interrogating and the judiciary. It’s collaborative, not adversarial.
But astute questioners also recognize that as responses to their questions surface, they will inevitably require them to rethink, revamp and, often, drastically change their own ideas—doing it in such a way that makes for authenticity and productivity.
Nearly every communication skill will require far more learning than any of us ever got in those two basic college communication courses. Furthermore, understanding or knowing the competency has little correlation whatsoever when it comes to doing and executing. In short, effective communication and conversation within the business organization are making demands that few of us are ready to respond to professionally. Spooked by all this information? That’s as good a motivator as anything else.
Flickr photo: Search engine people blog
Innovation and creativity, everyone says, is key to our nation’s success in the marketplace. While working through some new stuff on creativity and innovation, I stumbled, once more, across Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart’s analysis of the resources for creativity. It has the intriguing title, Buy Low and Sell High: An Investment Approach to Creativity.
The resources are a reminder of what it takes to get a leg up on creativity. More significantly and perhaps more useful, the resources are especially programmed for succeeding as a worker in today’s business world.
1. Intelligence. This is not a reference to your IQ, but your processes for planning, monitoring and evaluating your thinking. As Jonah Lehrer writes in a superb blog, it’s more than a matter of gut feel, it’s reflecting on your decision process itself.
2. Knowledge. Almost tongue-in-cheek, the writers say that “advancing knowledge beyond where it is requires knowing where it is.” I suspect that the biggest, hugest, most terrible weakness of Googling for information is that you don’t go through the painful work of digging it out by yourself in books, articles, conversations and reflection. Just the process of digging out knowledge makes it possible to find out where the knowledge is, something that Googling can never replace.
3. Thinking styles. Styles are proclivities or tendencies in the way we think. Not abilities. Creative folk not only just plain like novelty, but they also like to see problems in new ways, undertake new challenges and just plain put together things in their own ways. As Carol Dweck would say, they take an incremental view of life and intelligence. They’re fluid and changeable and get satisfaction from learning, and seeing opportunities to get better.
4. Personality. There are a huge number of studies about the personality attributes of creative folk. The attributes overlap, and the include a tolerance of ambiguity, willingness to overcome obstacles, willingness to grow, the willingness to take sensible (interesting adjective) risks, and belief in one’s ability to correct mistakes.
5. Motivation. Again and again, researchers have found that people do their most creative work when their motivation is task-focused rather than goal-focused, and internally driven rather than externally driven.
6. Environment. Without a supportive organizational environment, all these resources are liable to come to nothing. It's important to note that the organization can support creativity by helping spark creative ideas, by supporting these ideas, and by serving as a basis for assessing and correcting these ideas as they are developed.
You’ll notice that these resources overlap. And because there are so many resources, creativity is not as common as we would like. Still, when people in business recognize that creativity is revealed just as much in new business processes as in new products (think iPad), there’s a lot of creativity going on out there, and a lot more space for creators.
The need for hard-to-find talent has some of America’s best companies getting involved in high school education. A former client, now senior executive at General Mills, nailed the problem. “If we don’t build relationships at high school level, another major firm (Target or Best Buy) will steal some of our best potential talent,” she said. Business support and pushing of talent development, even at the pre-college levels, will more and more become a key strategic necessity for American companies. Talent development in K – 12 will take many different forms.
What top researchers in Minnesota have found is that just a “taste of college” can boost high school student success, providing more opportunity for building our talent base.
The program, emphasizing dual credit in high school and college, has been pushed by Joe Nathan, one of America’s most respected educationists, who specializes in inner city education. Nathan, formerly of the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, now runs research out of the Center for School Change at Macalester College. Nathan believes that if we can develop a sense of “I belong here. I understand this world,” through dual credit classes for poor and minority students, we can keep kids who might otherwise leave school. The growth through advance placement classes, International Baccalaureate programs, or dual credit classes (taught by college profs in high school), has shown surprisingly significant results in developing potential talent.
The report recommends that “dual credit” courses be available to younger and perhaps the less academically successful. It also notes that a study of New York and Florida students revealed that dual credit programs demonstrated an “ability to raise the achievement of students not traditionally seen as successful in high school”—low income and low-achieving students.
Participation increased from 17,581 in 2007-2008 to 21,184 in 2009-2010. That’s a huge change in a state will little over 60,000 public high school graduates per year.
The program offers a number of significant advantages to both students and families.
At first glance, “dual credit” programs may sound like just another flaky educational idea, but, as the statistics above demonstrate, longitudinal research strongly supports Nathan’s ideas. If you’ve been around inner city kids, you know that it’s their attitudes that get in the way of motivation and prevent them from achieving. And what Nathan’s program does is to focus on those attitudes, and provide constructive opportunities to impact the students’ learning context.
Extensive research by Carol Dweck and her associates at Stanford has consistently shown that students with a growth mindset—a fundamental attitude--do better in school. Moreover, the research demonstrates that the growth mindset raises motivation and achievement, especially in difficult courses or across difficult school transitions. Though faculty may not label or talk about the dual credit experience as a “growth mindset,” that’s exactly what the experience can provide for students.
Though I grew up in a family with college background, I have never forgotten how important my trips to the University of Michigan with our high school choir were. Years later, I can still see myself on that magnificent campus, talking to recent grads from my own high school. I recognize that those experiences were a piece of my drive for higher education. They impacted my attitudes and served to motivate me as strongly as anything anyone could say.
Sure, I know that what works in Minnesota, Massachusetts or Michigan in the 1940s, may not work--because of resources--in Nevada, New Mexico or Alabama today. If you’ve lived and worked in several different parts of the country, you know that state cultures and state resources differ profoundly. That’s why smart thinkers in the US Department of Education are encouraging individual states to figure out what works locally, experiment with it, create a pilot program, tweak it, and when successful, celebrate and publicize the stuff. The “dual credit” program is one such successful strategy for developing talent. It’s actually quite amazing that just a “taste of college” can boost student success.