Dan is a high-flying partner at one of the world’s largest management consulting companies. There, he cultivates new clients in the financial services sector and runs several engagement teams on three continents. His demanding work schedule includes daily 7am conference calls, back-to-back meetings with colleagues, mentoring junior associates, dinners with clients, and final work calls at 8pm.
I’ve been tracking how leaders have shifted their thinking and acting since the world was gut-punched by COVID-19. In doing this I realized that some of these insights could help others in their own work, so my next few posts will attempt to share these findings.
Evil bees were colonizing my brain. Their buzzing between my ears kept me awake half the night. The bees transmitted loud negative thoughts about what I did wrong that day, or what would go wrong after I woke. I had to find a way to settle those bees down. A friend suggested meditation, so I downloaded an app with soothing music and soft instructions to focus my breathing. But the bees kept interrupting, and I gave up.
Every client I work with complains that they need more effective cross-organizational collaboration. They say that collaboration is more crucial than ever, due to increasingly complex environments and the speed of change. Yet people still work in their silos and spend more time competing than collaborating. As I listen to their grumbling, I wonder, “Why are we still dealing with this?” After all, the need for cross-organizational collaboration wasn’t invented yesterday.
Take this thought experiment: Would you prefer a hamburger that is 90% fat-free or one that has 10% fat? Would you support a project with a 1 in 5 chance of succeeding, or a project with an 80% chance of failing? Despite both options being equivalent, I would avoid the 10% fat laden burger, and pass on the project that had an 80% chance of failing! These are examples of how frames of reference influence us.
Most of the coaching requests that I receive revolve around emotional intelligence: clients are described as lacking self-awareness, or are unable to control their impulses, or don’t empathize with others. But what if this diagnosis is only half correct: What if many leadership deficiencies are rooted in shortcomings of critical thinking? According to the Foundation of Critical Thinking there are three components:
I hate to say it, but several people I work with have annoying habits. Some interrupt too much, some don’t say what’s really on their minds, some are so detail-oriented they make my teeth ache. But I too inflict an annoying habit on others: I often indirectly ask for recognition. This ‘addiction to approval’ is a habit I’d like to break. What’s wrong with seeking approval? Not much if done in small doses, but I’ve become dependent. Do I really need to ask my wife to praise me for taking the trashcans to the curb? Yes. So with the idea that I am not the only person on earth cursed with this affliction, I herein submit my self-improvement process. Perhaps you or others might benefit from my efforts: I’ve tried unsuccessfully to stop asking for recognition before, so I sought help from Carrie, one of my coaching colleagues. Her challenging questions and insights yielded surprising results.
Ann was upset with her boss. During a leadership program I was conducting she complained that he scheduled team meetings every Friday at 5pm. Oh, I said, 5pm on a Friday does sound like an unproductive time to meet. When I asked what her boss said when she confronted him, Ann responded that it was impossible to do that because he doesn’t like to be challenged. She even got angry with me when I said it wasn’t impossible to confront him. Rather, I said, she simply didn’t want to live with the consequences of challenging him, despite knowing it was the right thing to do. Ann sulked the rest of the afternoon. By the way, Ann is a vice president of her company.
Two founding partners of a technology startup asked me to resolve some of their conflicts. Hal initially convinced me that Dave was an antagonistic bully. Dave then convinced me that Hal was a scheming weasel. Yet when I met them individually, they both seemed quite pleasant. Was either of them right? No, they were both wrong. Hal and Dave fell into the Fundamental Attribution Error trap. The FAE is a cognitive bias, or thinking error, through which we ascribe other peoples’ irritating behavior to their personalities (i.e., ‘he completely took over the meeting because he’s a control freak’). But we attribute our own behavior to the circumstances we are in (‘No one was stepping up so I had to move things along’).
Fast Company magazine recently featured 50 companies they ranked as most innovative. My attention was not drawn to the super-cool technology start-ups, but to some old-line companies that successfully reinvented themselves. I wondered: Are the factors that lead to corporate transformation similar to the factors that contribute to the reinvention of individuals?
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