Dan Erwin

Milestones of Growth Fostering Relationships

Every person who intends to exert leadership in his personal life, in business or any other vocation—even in the family--will intentionally focus on personal growth. In my field, research has shown us that effective business leadership growth inevitably requires mentors. Though true, that notion is plainly an understatement. The fact is that all living and all development takes place only with relationships. To put it still more directly, we experience growth because of our connections to other people. I can go through my years since grade school and well into my sixties, and still point to people that changed my life, impacts that would have to be considered as turning points, even milestones—a significant change in my life. Change that would never have happened without those connections.

The underpinnings of growth are inevitably acts of creativity built on relationships. Virginia Woolf puts it this way: Masterpieces (turning points and milestones) are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of thinking in common, of thinking by a body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. In his extensive and enlightening work, Ronald Burt points out accountability "flows through the formal organization of authority relations. Everything else flows through the informal--advice, coordination, cooperation, friendship, gossip, knowledge, trust." And that "people who have relations that span the . . . holes between people have a vision advantage in detecting and developing good ideas." 

I still have a lot of memory about my first real growth experience, a phenomenally unique milestone of detecting and developing new ideas while only in the 7th grade. The experience was actually initiated by a civics teacher, Mr. Fickes, a teacher whom I thought was pretty dumb.

Sorry Counselor. Negotiating Boundaries Is What’s Needed.

Not setting boundaries.

What's the difference? Is it substantial? Or are they just two words for the same thing? And does it really matter? Prior to the 1950s, they would have been just two words for the same thing. That is, if anyone ever used the term “negotiating” boundaries. The practice of “negotiating” boundaries comes primarily out of the 1980s with the flattening of business hierarchies and the strong orientation to women’s rights. With the exception of sales negotiation, it was rare to talk about negotiating relationships until the mid-1980s. And since then, there have been tons of research and some training solely in the practice of negotiating interpersonal boundaries. In simple terms, setting boundaries is one individual determining boundaries for others. Negotiating boundaries is two or more creating a workable agreement on the boundaries between them.

So, there’s a significant difference between setting and negotiating boundaries. Major business leaders as well as many community leaders recognize these differences even without distinguishing between the two terms. But, ask the right questions and they can clarify immediately. I’ve learned, sadly, that these same professionals are typically incapable of using the negotiation competence in their family. Shifting competencies from one context to another without training is highly problematic—even for top business school grads. Similarly, lower-level bureaucrats, patriarchal families, pastors, the Roman and Evangelical churches, small and medium-sized privately held owner-firms lack insight to the distinctions and sometimes have a lot of resistance on their hands as a result of their ignorance.

How to Keep Your Enemies Closer Than Your Friends

In April 2015, I wrote a blog questioning, “Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?” With an excess of 30,000 reads of that post, it obviously identified a real need of a great many people.  The post provided a rationale for the issue, not least that you can learn a lot from people you dislike, gain a different perspective and make it easier for your allies to work with you. But it only addressed strategies for working with enemies and difficult people in a cursory fashion.

Near as I can tell, there are two vocations that absolutely require a person to keep their enemies closer just to keep their job: elected politicos and Protestant church ministers. However, most business people recognize early on that they’re going to have to work with “enemies,” people they don’t especially like or trust--or pay the price in performance and sometime job loss.

So how can you keep your enemies closer?

Why Is Real Collaboration So Very Difficult?

Today’s business world requires a great deal of collaboration. That’s especially true because technology is inevitably both intergroup and across groups and disciplines. Yet collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives, would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can become a really painful task with a lot of argument.

Hugo Mercier of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, has been looking at this issue all of his academic life. His conclusions are intriguing. Based on my own experience in a completely different context, he’s right on target.

In one of his earlier studies, Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning.  Remember that collaboration is about reasoning through options and differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. But for collaboration to take place, there must be a lot of joint reasoning. As you know, however, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem. Their reasoning, supposedly, has brought them to the best conclusion(s).

What Mercier and Sperber point out is that though reasoning is usually seen as the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions, it usually leads to distortions of meaning and poor decisions.

So they suggest that the entire use of reasoning should be rethought. In other words, they assume that people believe the purpose or function of reasoning is argumentative. So put reasoning in any group or collaborative setting and the people are going to automatically begin arguing. Reasoning take on a negative perception. The context motivates them to argue—so people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth, but after arguments that support their own views.

So, bear with me. A person's views—their conclusions--are simply old inferences, mental representations based on a lot of other ideas. Here’s how it works in architecture. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.

Wrong Measure of Success

This morning I'm reposting a highly relevant, insightful article from Fast Company. As a management consultant for years, I've had to remind my clients of the necessity to build relationship currency. In her article Vivian Giang emphasizes a success principle often ignored.

In your career, you earn currency with those in power. Unfortunately, most people focus on building up their performance while forgetting to build their relationship currency.

Most people are focused on the wrong measure of success...

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

Do Your Conversational Skills Need Upgrading?

More and more research is revealing that conversational skills can put you ahead of the game. Sure you need cognitive ability and emotional insight, but it's the ability to converse well that's tied to career success and even to innovative competence.

For example, one study investigated implicit communication strategies on complex team tasks. The researchers contrasted project team conversation: teams which readily shared goal information without being asked, versus teams that were reactive—teams whose members had to be questioned to gain goal information. In the study which involved 13 teams of four people performing the collaborative tasks, they found that the five teams with the fastest task completion times and lowest idle times exhibited higher rates of conversation and free-flowing sharing. In contrast, the five teams with the slowest completion times and longest idle times were primarily reactive. So people with proactive conversational and deliberative communication skills are far more successful performers.

In another example, Robert Baron and a colleague developed a 30-item social skills inventory to study such conversational skills as social perception, social adaptability and expressiveness.  Research on 159 independent sales contractors and 71 top high-tech executives found some startling revelations.  The higher the social competencies, the greater the financial success of both independent sales contractors and the top high-tech executives.

Who makes the money and who gains the opportunities? ...

"It's Just African!"

Identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff. I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of...

Four Reasons Why Managing Data Scientists Is Different. . . Even Unique

Managing smart professionals can be difficult, but managing data science professionals can be even more difficult. Cultural differences--understanding how a culture thinks--are rarely clear to most business people, other than when they surface in difficulties. So understanding these differences early on limits the potential for friction and conflict.

MIT’s Roger Stein lays out a number of issues impacting organizational relations between data scientists and other disciplines.

Dynamic and self-correcting.  As a result, timing and final project outcomes can be difficult to plan. Messy is the appropriate term. In contrast to

You Don't Need an IQ Score to Figure Out How Smart That Guy Is

How can you figure out the smarts of a colleague without having a consulting PhD? I shouldn’t be giving this away, but the basics are actually so simple that anyone willing to keep her eyes glued and ears open to another person can figure out that person’s basic work smarts. Quickly and easily. By testing and watching for three simple behaviors.

But first, does it really matter how smart that person is? You bet your sweet bippy it does. You want to know whether you can trust his advice, whether he’ll have much to add to a new team project, whether he can be counted on to meet his objectives, whether he can accept added responsibility and even whether he’ll make an effective manager.

Before I lay out my secret, remember this. . .