people & performance / strategy & solutions
Pat Kelly vividly remembers when he first knew he was a “thought leader”:
In 2005, I met another ‘thought leader’ and I asked him how he became a ‘thought leader’ and he said ‘I don’t know.’ It was then that I knew I could be one too.
Yes, a parody. Because it deserves it.
for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that's pretty much all the info u need.
— Amy Krouse Rosenthal (@missamykr) March 15, 2013
We are a few days into the invasion of a sovereign country by another sovereign country… and the senseless deaths that ensue. I’m not one for pronouncements but if we can learn anything from history it is this: if we don’t discuss our differences, if we don’t talk, then the only alternative is violence. This is as true internationally as it is domestically. Technology has only exacerbated this fundamental human tendency. The only way to prevent violence is to learn to express one’s differences and learn to hear and understand the differences of others.
“Communication” is not about how eloquent or smart or well-spoken one is. It’s not about the clever tricks of rhetoric or the slick slide deck. My work as a consultant and a coach is to invite people (I work mostly with managers) to approach communication as
a process by which all parties make themselves co-responsible for the creation of a shared understanding.
I am responsible not only to express my ideas clearly (which requires that they be clear ideas to start with). I am also responsible to ensure that the other party has understood what I was trying to say. Conversely, it is also my responsibility to ensure that I have understood what the other party is trying to say.
This is impossible without dialogue: not only my telling you something and you telling me something, but also my asking you if I got you right and your asking me if you got me right… with the purpose of creating a shared understanding. The outcome is that we have both understood the meaning that each other is trying to convey.
People or parties talking without the express work of creating a shared understanding are at best engaging in turn-taking monologues. They are talking at each other. They are not necessarily talking to each other. There is no dialogue.
And while listening is important and one can learn to do that better, nothing replaces the premise of effective listening: a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.
If you know it all, if you’re the most experienced person in the room, if you’re the most senior person in the room, the smartest person in the room, if you think you have forgotten more about this topic than the other person will ever know then you might be far removed from having a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.
photo by Tina Hartung on Unsplash
¨If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” If I have to hear that sentence again, I swear I’ll barf.
As Shoshana Zuboff [*] has pointed out, it doesn’t even have the benefit of being true. A product has dignity as a made thing. A product is desirable in itself. That doesn’t describe what we have come to represent to the operators of the machines that gather our signals.
We’re the sites out of which industrial inputs are extracted, little seams in the universal data mine. But unlike mineral deposits, we continuously replenish our supply.
The more we’re tapped, the more we produce.
A contrarian position to be sure. I appreciate the protest to a tired (and tiring) cliché. It does well to point to the two different planes: the commercial and the personal.
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[*] Shoshana Zuboff is an American author, Harvard professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar.
By far the most substantial piece of content I read recently is from Jay Rosen. He is a press critic who writes about the media and politics. He is a professor at the School of Journalism at New York University.
Here is how it starts:
"When in doubt, draw a distinction."
Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers told me that. Some of the best advice I ever received.
This THREAD is about some of the key distinctions I draw on to do my work. If you're into that kind of thing.😎
Ready? 1/
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) February 22, 2021
And here are some of the distinctions he draws in this Twitter thread:
He says that
For distinctions to work, the terms have to be sufficiently close that prying them apart clears space for thought. If I write, “bending is not the same as breaking,” well, who said it was? That one is going nowhere. But “naked is not the same as nude” is an idea with legs.
It’s not just semantics. Well, it is, but it’s more than that. It’s a show of clarity of ideas in your field of endeavor. In his case, it’s media and politics.
And it occurs in all fields.
Just last week, I bumped into a few more instances:
When we fail at forming new patterns of behavior, we often blame ourselves, rather than the bad advice we read from someone who doesn’t really understand what can and cannot be a habit.
A habit is a behavior done with little or no thought, while a routine involves a series of behaviors frequently —and intentionally— repeated. A behavior has to be a regularly performed routine before it can become a habit at all.
The problem is that many of us try to skip the “routine” phase.
There are other distinctions that Rosen does not discuss in his thread, including
Anyone who took part in one of my leadership development programs will have heard me discuss exit, voice, “loyalty”/conformity, and sabotage as a way to distinguish how different people react differently to finding themselves in conflict situations.
The take-aways from this piece?
And since a lot of readers of this newsletter are managers then it begs the question: are your distinctions mostly about the domain of expertise that preceded your becoming a manager or are they about management itself?
The content of this post is an edited version of an entry in my free, monthly newsletter in which I share my own writing as well as links to articles and research on management, leadership, and strategy. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.
You don’t. You never do.
Leading by example is based on a faulty assumption: that people will see only the behavior you want them to see and follow only the behavior you want them to follow.
News flash: the people who work with you see everything.
They see not only what you want them to see but they also see what you don’t want them to see.
They see not only what you do but they also see what you don’t do and what you choose not to do.
They see what you choose to do or not to do and to whom.
They see what you choose to do or not to do and for whom.
As a matter of fact, the more time they spend with you, the more clearly you reveal yourself to them. The longer they observe you, the less what you say matters. What matters more are your actions – and specifically how consistent they are over time.
They see when and how often you tell them what to do.
They see when and how often you ask for their opinion.
They see when and how often you admit not knowing something.
They see when and how often you admit you made a mistake.
They see when and how often you apologize… and when and how often you apologize in public when you offended in public.
They see when, how often, and how well you listen.
They see when and how often you praise in public. And how specific your praise is: not the anemic “good job!” but rather a vigorous acknowledgment of what exactly a team member does well and how that contributes to the good of the team.
In addition to being based on a faulty assumption, “leading by example” might also be caused by attribution bias (you believe that your behavior has caused theirs, that your “leading” has caused their “following”) or by buying into the narrative of the “heroic manager” (what I call the “Gandhi complex”). But that will have to wait for another post.
These are thoughts on the book I am writing. They were first delivered to readers of my free, monthly newsletter. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.
With dimwitted politicians across the political spectrum, our celebrity-crazed culture, the destructive power of unrestrained capitalism, the groaning of the despoiled earth, the cries of the back row that go unheard, the disillusionment and disorientation of a society that desperately needs to be rehumanized—all of this requires broken and humble thinkers, the wounded thinkers.
— Luma Sims in “Thinking is self-emptying”
In a recent blog post, Seth Godin states that “the opposite of confident is not-confident. Unsure.”
In fact, “not confident” is the absence of confidence, not its opposite – a point well made and illustrated by Taleb in his book Antifragile. For Taleb, the absence of fragility is robustness. And the opposite of fragility is… he couldn’t come up with a word…
What is fragile breaks under external pressure. What does not break under external pressure is robust. But what gets stronger under external pressure? THAT is the opposite of fragility. And for lack of a word that describes this, Taleb called it “antifragility”.
If the opposite of fragility is antifragility then the opposite of confidence is carefree.
See https://seths.blog/2020/08/the-opposite-of-confidence/, accessed 200827
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 1842:
Thou shalt read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Marvell, More, Milton, Molière, Swedenborg, Goethe.