Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Changing Minds within a Culture

Getting people to change their minds is harder still when you’re working with large groups.

Judith E. Glaser, author of The DNA of Leadership, tells us that culture represents how work gets done: how you make decisions, how you treat customers, how you complete projects on budget, how you reward effort for excellence and innovation, how you develop employees to more productive.

Cultural situation awareness begins with capturing accurate and deliberate business intelligence using the very best diagnostic measurements and precision tools.  Today, the Internet allows management to know 'what's happening now' across the enterprise.  Since people represent 50-80% of organizational costs and are a flexible resource through learning and innovating, engaging them for enhanced productivity is why effective leadership matters.

Leaders will experience greater success when they follow five key approaches:

 

1. The Power of Stories

 

Stories can be a key element in changing minds. In a story, you have a main character, ongoing activities to achieve a goal, a crisis, and a resolution.

 

Leaders must analyze the current situation, determine what needs to change, create a convincing narrative, and present it to those whose minds they hope to change.  Success depends on the narrative’s effectiveness, whether it is convincingly conveyed, and how leaders embody the presentation.  The more personal and authentic the story, the more people will identify with common themes.

 

2. The Power of Variety

 

One’s level of familiarity with a concept determines how we successfully process and accept it.  Delivering the same content in multiple forms is a powerful way to change people’s minds.  People must not only hear the message, but also see it—often in the form of images, graphs, and diagrams.  Using more than one delivery method gives people an opportunity to form mental representations in their preferred learning mode.

Leader Levers to Change a Mind

Professor Howard Gardner, a lifelong researcher and expert on the mind, has identified seven levers that leaders must employ to change minds:

 

1. Reason: When we try to persuade others, reason plays a pivotal role. Most businesses rely on analysis and logical processes when making decisions: identifying relevant factors, weighing each in turn, and making an overall assessment.

2. Research: The scientific approach collects relevant data and analyzes it in a systematic manner (often statistical) to verify or cast doubt on promising trends. (Note: Research needn’t always be as formal.)

Changing Minds is a Challenge

Every year, we gain a clearer understanding that without positive change, decline is inevitable.  The challenge is to recognize that what we are now doing can be reinvented by paying attention to our intentions. Yet, it is very hard to bring about significant change without changes in behavior.  That is why New Year Resolutions are so difficult to achieve.

 

Changing people’s behavior is the most important challenge for business leaders competing in unpredictable environments.

 

“The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems,” asserts Dr. John P. Kotter, a retired Harvard Business School professor who specializes in leadership. “The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.”

In summary, changing minds is not easy, but there are clear methods for increasing the probability of effecting real behavioral change.  Provision of coaching services is highly recommended to support change initiatives.

Experiencing Deflation

Deflation is the inflation process in reverse.  That is, wages and prices spiral downward in tandem, as a deflationary psychology sets in among businesses and consumers.  Wage growth always slows in a recession, and the longer unemployment stays high, the greater the slowdown.

The Federal Reserve's increasingly unconventional efforts to mend the financial markets and restore economic growth are starting to take on a new urgency.  Recent data indicate the economy's descent into recession is accelerating, and the risk of a debilitating bout with deflation is rising--slack demand, rising joblessness, frozen credit and vanished home value all are feeding a vicious spiral.

That combination, as seen in the U.S. in the 1930s and in Japan in the 1990s, is fuel for deflation---which is sure to be a hot topic in the coming months.

The Fed will now concentrate on pumping money directly into the economy by purchasing "large quantities" of mortgage and other asset-backed securities.  The efforts are meant to cut borrowing costs and kick-start demand.  As falling energy prices push inflation below zero in 2009, news reports are sure to feed deflationary psychology the same way energy's influence on inflation in 2008 prompted expectations of rising prices.

Source: BUSINESSWEEK, December 29, 2008

Gaining Greater Self-Knowledge

Ayurveda, which literally means "knowledge of life and longevity," is a system of holistic medicine developed more than 7,000 years ago by the rishis, India's great physicians, physicists, and theologians.  The rishis authored Hinduism's oldest sacred texts, the Vedas.  Ayurveda is a cosmic blueprint for creating overall health, with principles deeply rooted in honoring the intricate balance between the body, mind, spirit and rhythms of the universe.  The greatest purpose in life is to experience complete awareness.  Healing is a reality that is happening at every moment of our lives if we are aware of it.

In Wise Earth Ayurveda (www.wisearth.org), cultivating inner awareness is accomplished in part through sadhanas--conscious practices that connect us to the Divine, to nature, and to ourselves.  A sadhana can be a formal meditation or the creation of a wholesome meal for your family.  Many sadhana prompt a pause from everyday life, particularly important for those struggling with illness.

Living with Awareness

"When we are in touch with the divinity within us," says Maya Tiwari author of the groundbreaking work Ayurveda: A Life of Balance, "we become free.  We have a sense of freedom in expression, of lightness within, freedom of not being so compelled to live the goal-oriented, stress-driven lives that we all contribute to.  Health begins to become more center-poised, and we are then quickly able to separate what serves us from that which does not.  The main thing in life is no longer the accomplishment of specific goals at any cost.  One of the things that women in particular endure today is a total inundation of stress, even with the holistic work they are doing.  Everything seems to get fit into an already overdriven life.  There's only one thing that we can control in the human life, and that one thing is not our mind.  It's not a thought, it's not our breath, it's not our responses, it's not our actions.  It is the cultivation of personal awareness, the moment-to-moment awareness of who we are--in charge of our life, in charge of our purpose, in charge of our path."

Periodically we need to ask ourselves these difficult questions:

1. What has led to my unhappiness, and which dreams are not being realized? 

2. Do these dreams come from the desire to fulfill a worldly goal, or are they coming from a longing to accomplish the path and purpose of who I really am?

"There is a significant difference between doing what we feel obligated to do and doing what our inner self is truly calling us to do," Maya Tiwari explains.  "And that clarity comes from awareness."

Source: SHIFT: At the frontiers of consciousness, Winter 2008

Exceptional Achievement

Success is terrifyingly contingent; intrinsic qualities are required but a lot of things also need to break just right---along with some luck of being at the right place at the right time.

Back in October 1971, an engineer (who I knew when we both went to a small high school in Upstate New York during the late 1950s) named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.   At the time, it must not have seemed very important because Ray didn't bother to save that first message or even record the exact date. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers.  Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans.  At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop ARPAnet, the forerunner of the modern Internet.

Malcolm Gladwell asserts in his engaging new book "Outliers" that success seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes.  Intrinsic ability appears to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for exceptional achievement.  Of course, the elements of success are not all matters of happenstance and talent: hard work is essential, too.

While I was working in Metro Seattle in the late 1960s, Bill Gates, who born in 1955, was fortunate to attend Lakeside, a private school in Seattle with its own computer.  The Lakeside machine, installed in 1968, was one of a new generation of computers that remotely shared processing power with a large mainframe computer on a time share basis.  That meant Gates could learn programming without being slowed by the laborious punch-card process then used to set up the larger machines.  Gates and his friends at school were drawn to the computer, which he said was kept, "in a funny little room that we subsequently took control of."  The result was Gates had thousands of hours of programming under his belt when the first do-it-yourself computer kit was introduced in 1975--making him perfectly prepared to take maximum advantage of the personal computer (PC) revolution.

Laid-off Executive's Blind Spot

As layoffs top 1.9 million this year, many more managers and senior professionals are out of work.

Many executives discount the opportunities of insights career coaches offer because they believe they know what it takes to get a job.  7 out of 10 job-seekers say they thought they knew exactly what they needed to do to land their next job, according to a continuing survey by Right Management, an outplacement firm. 

There is a deeply rooted myth in American culture that shapes our behavior---a myth so strong that to question it might challenge our history.

The myth: Success in America is an individual enterprise. This myth celebrates our rugged individualism as the key element in becoming a self-made man or woman. We believe that everyone succeeds or fails on the basis of individual efforts and abilities but this just isn't so.  Revering this go-it-alone mentality, frontier spirit and lone wolf perspective actually holds us back from achieving the success we seek.

Simply put, 'Success is not only determined by what you know but also by whom you know.'   The real Success Formula is: Human Capital (what you know) X Social Capital (who you know and who knows you) X Reputation (who trusts you).

The longer you wait to use the services of a career coach, the harder it will be to mobilize yourself and get focused.

Training Beyond the Classroom

Teaching employees new skills is one thing.  Getting them to apply what they learned is quite another.

With some studies suggesting that just 10% to 40% of training is ever used on the job, it is clear that a big chuck of the tens of billions of dollars organizations spend annually on staff development is going down the drain.

Chalk some of it up to human nature: Training involves change, and change creates anxiety that people seek to avoid.  In other cases, old habits and workplace pressures can break down even the strongest resolve to use newly acquired skills and knowledge.  If those trained don't implement what they have learned within two weeks, the training experience is wasted dollars and effort.

The key success factor: Make sure that support doesn't end when workers walk out the training room door.

Without a Sales Process: Expect Little Revenue

If you find your phone ringing more often these days, from people trying to sell you something, you are not alone.  In today's tough economy, salespeople are being compensated through sales commissions only.  To make their sales quotas, sales people spend their days 'dialing for dollars'-----hoping to talk unsuspecting people into buying what they have to sell to survive.

However, most will fail because they don't understand the impact of their personalities on the person at the other end of the call....and....they are blindly 'winging it' by operating without a proven sales process methodology.  Here is an example of how salesman John Sharp wings it during a prospective customer sales interaction:

The Unprepared Salesperson

Job Losses: A Holiday Lump of Coal

It was bad enough when your neighbor lost his home to foreclosure.  But now things are really getting scary: Your own job may be at risk.

Unease turned to panic on December 5th after the government reported that the U.S. economy lost 533,000 jobs in November, making it the worst month for employment since the grim days of December 1974.  The holiday party chatter is all about layoffs.

Forecasting job losses is incredibly difficult because a lot depends on when banks finally get back to the business of providing credit.  The recent news on that score is not good.  On December 9th, the Treasury Dept. auctioned one-month bills at 0.00%--evidence that risk aversion among potential financiers is more extreme than ever.