Productive Working Relationships

When I talk about creating productive relationships, keep in mind that I am talking about working relationships in which you and others set objectives, exchanging ideas, execute tasks, and achieve results in a work setting and that you want to personally participate in making those objectives meaningful, the exchanges productive and useful, the execution crisp, and the results powerful and sustainable. That is what I am shooting for. It is a pleasant side effect of this teaching that it will also help you with any relationship in your life.

If a relationship at work is to be productive, then it means that both parties must be able to produce value, meaning they must both contribute to accomplishing objectives. When we spoke about credibility last time, we spoke about how you can measure your own and other people’s for that very reason. I find it useful to find the people that the organization already finds credible and come to know them and understand their strengths and weaknesses in order to find a way to be valuable to them.

This is NOT brown-nosing or kissing up to powerful people. This is looking at the people that company depends on, assessing them, finding a way for your strengths to support them in getting results AND determining new strengths you should develop to increase your value. This is a time-tested way to become a “go to” person. The first step is to identify the right people.

I have found that all companies have times of crisis when they pull their best and brightest together to get them through a rough patch. They even give them names sometimes like “Tiger Team” or “SWAT Team”. They are the ones that are called on when things get tough. Keep your eyes open and you will see them when called into action. Those are the people with whom you want to start your networking. It may seem intimidating to start at the top, but these are the people you want to get to know. As long as you have a good method (which we will be developing over the next few newsletters) they will be excited to get the help.

These week was about WHO to talk to. We will go into specifics about HOW to get to know them and WHAT to talk about next time.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Asessing and Improving Credibility

To matter in a conversation, your thoughts must be perceived as helpful. This is a MAJOR hurdle for many people and, until they adjust their priorities so that being perceived as credible is number one, almost no amount of training will help their communication effectiveness.  Your PERCEIVED CREDIBILITY determines if others will:

·         Actively exclude you from discussions

·         Politely dismiss what you say

·         Listen carefully when you speak

·         Seek you out for your input

Your perceived credibility is reflected in the actions of others as I listed above. Whether you are being ignored or shunned, or sought out by others for your input, it is their perception of you that is at the root. So it is NOT up to them to find a way to see you in a different light; it is up to YOU determine if you are credible, improve it as necessary, and demonstrate it so they can see it. This article is about changing that perception by demonstrating your credibility, taking steps to become more credible, and revising behaviors that undermine your credibility.

Whether we are analyzing our own credibility or someone else’s, we need to understand what it is made of and what evidence we will accept. Credibility has three components, and each has some evidence that should be considered when analyzing your own, or someone else’s:

1)      Competence

Þ     Background, like education and training, conveys competence. The usual examples are diplomas and certificates.

Þ     Track record or history of good results. Reputation, testimonials, or examples of high-quality work produced is used as evidence.

Þ     Currency of subject matter knowledge. Demonstrating up-to-date knowledge of the topic demonstrates passion.

2)      Trustworthiness

Þ     Truthfulness is evidence of trustworthiness, especially if truthfulness runs contrary to self-interest.

Þ     Demonstrated reluctance to distort facts (exaggerate or downplay)

Þ     Demonstrated reluctance to overplay emotions for dramatic effect (Drama Queens and Kings)

Þ     Ability to recognize your own bias and temper its impact

3)      Dynamism

Þ     Optimistic

Þ     Eager to succeed (but not manic)

Þ     Engaged with team members

Pretending to be credible when you aren't is a short-term approach to solving a credibility issue. I recommend a long-term solution. If you are not being treated as credible, it is important that you do some self-evaluation (using the above as a checklist). Find the areas where YOU feel you are lacking, and determine what you are willing to do about them. If you are weak in one area, you can compensate for it by getting MUCH stronger in another. I have known many people that were prone to exaggerate, but were still considered credible because they had a long track record of good results.

The best approach is to write a few ideas about where you rank yourself on each of them. If you feel a little pain surrounding one, you might be one to something. Determine which you think are holding you back, regardless of how you feel about fixing it and prioritize those as to which you think you can do something about.

Examples - 

If you feel that you are dismissed by your coworkers because you are considered to be “not serious”, then realize from their point of view you may not be eager to succeed or engaged enough to take seriously. You should concentrate on demonstrating your commitment to tasks and coworkers.

If you feel that you are dismissed by your coworkers because you are considered to be “under skilled”, then realize from their point of view you may not be skilled to take seriously. You should concentrate on relating your track record, or adding to your examples of high-quality work. Just a note – degrees and certificates are almost bare minimum requirements these days .  If these are all you have, you need to produce and be able to share examples of high-quality work product that is meaningful to the topic in order to increase your credibility.

The most obvious (and for some, the most difficult) thing to do is to stop distorting facts with exaggeration or downplaying. Oh – and be nice, but work hard.

Frankly, most people I run into have the skills they need. The problems are in two areas:

• They are either trying to consult on things for which they don't have the credibility needed. That is, they mean well, but the company has people that know more about the issues under discussion.
• They are credible, but have weak relationships or bad relationships with key people. We will begin addressing relationship next time.

If you need more help on these, give me a call.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Culture Busting

When we talk about company culture, the conversation often goes right off the rails. The conversation is generally about practices that are ridiculous, unwritten rules, and people that are frequently characterized and “crazy” or “idiotic”.

I remember when I viewed the people I worked with the same way. I described myself as “astonished” or “amazed” at what some “idiot” had done. “Any child would know better!” I would say. But I wouldn’t talk to them about it. It wouldn’t do any good PLUS they were friends with the bosses and I would get fired.

I didn’t spend a LOT of my career thinking that way, because I was a single father and HAD to keep a job continuously – I couldn’t “job hop”. With the economy the way it is now, I am sure there are lots of you that feel the same pressure.

I decided I had to talk to someone – my boss – about some of these things. He wasn’t very much help. He kind of patted me on the head and asked me to figure out how to work with it because it wasn’t changing any time soon.

I waited until I once again was the recipient of some work that was all screwed up in a way that was INDEFENSIBLE. “NOW I have them!”, I thought.  “Certainly I can get them to change this!” I confronted the guilty party and we argued bitterly, me telling them that what they did was stupid and them telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about… that everything was fine and exactly as it should be and if I knew ANYTHING I would know that. Which of course is impossible – I know EXACTLY what’s right. Don’t I? So in this guy’s version of the story, I am the idiot.

 I immediately got busy coming to understand what was happening with this instance. I found he was doing things just as he was instructed, the instructions that were given to me were new, and the person that gave me the instruction hadn’t considered all of the factors.

What I realized YEARS later was that the reason I called the one guy an idiot, AND the reason I imagined there was some “unseen hand” guiding all this, and that talking to them wouldn’t do any good was because I was afraid. I was afraid that the confrontation would go bad, I was angry that I had to do it in the first place (why not my boss), I was afraid I would be embarrassed, and I had imagined all kinds of things from a fist fight to long term hurt feelings.  All of the things wrong were things going on in my head because of what I was not paying attention to the FACTS and being manipulated by my fear of what MIGHT happen.

This obviously had less to do with “the company culture” and what I THOUGHT the company culture was. I set about to prove this by learning to act differently. I began saying “I am going to assume that everyone here just wants us to do well. I am going to say that THAT is the company culture, and act accordingly”. Things got a lot better, but I also found out that my assumption wasn’t necessarily true, that there were lots of people that were not very concerned about the company at all. So after learning that the company wouldn’t just get rid of them, I needed to find a way to get the most out of them to move the company forward. More than that, the process had to build the people in the process, and make them feel more engaged and more able. Even though I can’t make everyone feel the way I feel , I can help many of them see that working in a successful company, and being a big part of a company’s success, is better than the alternative.

There are 11 steps to doing better. The first five are:

1. 1.       Establish credibility
2. 2.       Develop productive relationships
3. 3.       Begin optimizing your communication style
4. 4.       Learn to coach
5. 5.       Learn to manage and lead

I will start working through each of them next time, and you will learn quickly and easily how to get more satisfaction and cooperation than you ever have. Until then, look at the things that make it hard for you to get excited about your job. Notice how your coworkers are apparently fully competent in their jobs, but they are hard to work with. Consider the possibility that they don’t have to change for it to become easier.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Decisions - Impact and Consequence

In making a decision, it is certainly important to know what we are changing from, what we are changing to, and why. The impact and consequences gives us information about the “why”. First, let’s define our terms because lots of people confuse “impact” and “consequence”, or fail to see a difference. In this discussion, we need to be able to distinguish them.

“Impact” will be the term we use to describe the direct effect of a problem. The direct effect of a bad design, for instance, could be a safety problem. A different direct effect could be reduced sales. Same cause, two different impacts. “Consequence” will be the term we use to describe the result of the Impact. The consequence of a safety issue could be a law suit OR a loss of reputation OR guilt from causing injury – OR all three. The consequence of reduced sales could be cash flow problems OR distributor defections OR unattractiveness to investors. So we have a cause (bad design) that impacts us in two ways and those impacts have a variety of consequences. We want to avoid some or all of the consequences, so we need to mitigate the impacts that bring those consequences about.

Determining the impact and potential consequences arising from a current situation helps us estimate the importance (or “size”) of the issue that we face. This estimate will guide us to a better understanding of the resources we are willing to commit to correcting it. By the same token, estimating the impact and consequences associated with any proposed solutions or changes to the current situation will help us determine the value of the proposal relative to the “size” of the current situation.

It is important to discuss the impact and consequences upfront. As we all know, crises seem to come in waves at times, and if we must keep the critical issues visible until they are contained, else we will find ourselves “swamped” with issues that all “Top Priority”!

One would like to be able to estimate and express the amount of impact and likely consequence and benefit from a problem scenario (“current state”) and a solution scenario (“proposed state” or “future state”) in order to assign the correct priority and resources.  A perfect decision making process would completely and correctly predict all possible consequences from all possible outcomes of a decision. This is seldom possible, so we try to get as close as is practical.

The first thing to do is to understand the universe of CONSEQUENCES that we face. If they are trivial, we may choose not to expend any resources at all in mitigating the impacts. If they are significant, then we will determine the impacts for them.

The next things I talk about are the impacts that carry the consequences we just discussed and NOT the potential solutions. I do this for several reasons, and here are two: first, it gives us an idea of the kind of work it will take to repair it. If we have the kinds of resources required already in-house, we can control when to begin working on a solution. Secondly, it makes the issue far more real to have a realistic discussion of how it harms us. Before anyone decides we aren’t going to do anything about it at this time, I like to remind them that we all said it carried a certain impact. Are we willing to live with it? Usually, if we have discussed it openly and fully (and I try to make sure we really explore impact), we look at things very carefully before moving on. Impact of not being sufficiently profitable, for instance, is that we don’t have money for training or internal research and development, or other important things.

I then move to a discussion about the “Ostrich Consequence”. This is the impact to us if we don’t do anything. For instance, if we don’t do anything about our profitability, and don’t train our people or do sufficient research and development, we will certainly become less competitive and will likely go out of business. I cover this so that everyone that is working on the problem has an explicit understanding of what we think will happen if we do nothing.

I like to let everyone that can do something about the problem participate in the “Impact and Consequences” discussion so that things can be very real. This has a strong emotional charge to it.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Decisions - Emotions and Logic

So far, I have suggested that getting good results from our decisions is strongly correlated to employing an improved decision making process based on three things. I would like to start describing such a process right now. First let’s recap the three things that must be considered in our decision making process

·         Perspective

o   One would like to include all important perspectives in their consideration. A perfect decision making process would consider the points of view from anyone impacted or involved in the decision. This is seldom possible, so we try to get as close as practical.

·         Impact

o   One would like to be able to estimate and express the amount of impact and likely consequence and benefit from a problem scenario (“current state”) and a solution scenario (“proposed state” or “future state”) in order to assign the correct priority and resources.  A perfect decision making process would completely and correctly predict all possible consequences from all possible outcomes of a decision. This is seldom possible, so we try to get as close as is practical.

·         Basis for Decision

o   One must understand the strength and coherence of the facts being used to portray the problem and solution scenarios. A perfect decision making process would use only information that had been vetted and confirmed to be accurate, and we would have ALL of the information necessary to present a complete picture. This is seldom possible, so we try to get as close as is practical.

 

A good process evaluates all three of these elements constantly and “spirals into” a decision, meaning that the first iteration takes us from zero information on all three elements to our initial understanding. If there are gaps in our initial understanding, we iterate through again, and again.

If we imagine the theoretical PERFECT process I eluded to before, we would require just one iteration and it would be instantaneous. Your current process is probably near perfect for simple decisions (e.g. only one perspective matters and it is yours, the decision doesn’t carry very great consequences, and you don’t have to deal with a great deal of data or strong conflicting emotions). This is the kind of decision we often face when ordering lunch. For decisions in which there is more complexity in these elements (i.e. risk), our process needs to be more robust.

The first thing we concentrate on are the stakeholders, their identity, their input (and its basis), and the impact of the direction that their input implies. Note that we haven’t discussed who is going to make the final decision, whether it is a group decision or an individual decision; we are just gathering data.

Since the last 150 or so articles I have written have been about how to have these kinds of conversations with people, I am going to summarize that towards the end of the Decision Making series. For now, I am talking about the middle step –basis for decisions.

We have touched on the idea that there are emotional decisions and logical decisions, and that we would prefer to eliminate emotions from our decisions because they tend to distort reasoning. The fact is, almost all (greater than 95%) of decisions have an emotional content and, as long as it doesn’t distort reasoning there is no reason to exclude an option because it is emotionally based (“Logically, I know I need to wear a tie to dinner. Emotionally, I am going to pick the red tie because I like it more”). If, however, you know that the person you are trying to impress tends to distrust people with red ties, then you shouldn’t allow your emotion (liking it) distort your reason (my purpose is to impress this person).

Since we are talking about business decisions, the following emotional components are likely NOT useful and should be scrutinized carefully if they are the primary reason you are making a business decision:

·         Indifference (Whatever – I don’t care – it’s not MY company)

·         Addiction (We should hire more people because I WANT a bigger department)

·         Faith (We are too big to fail; I just know that customer would never drop us)

·         Emotion (We should acquire that little company that makes cellphone applications because EVERYONE is buying cellphone app companies these days and I don’t want to look out of touch)

·         Intuition (I have a feeling that that this is going to be a great quarter…I can feel it in my bones)

I am not saying that you can’t think or feel these things, or that if you do something is going to go wrong. I am saying that if your process recognizes these as adequate support for business decisions, then your process is going to disappoint you more often than if you DON’T rely on them.

In fact, emotion adds certain aspects to decision making that are valuable:

·         Improve Speed (fear increases speed of decisions)

·         Provide Information (a potential course of action that may bring regret or disappointment will promote greater discussion and reflection about alternatives)

·         Assessing relevance (we consider the likelihood of getting a result that will make us feel regret or disappointment and assess the associated factors relevant and worthy of consideration)  

Here are some bases that tend to produce better results than the above. These bases are viewed as “reasoned” or “logical” and are arranged in order from lowest to highest likelihood of success:

·         Pressure (The boss says we should do it this way. He wouldn’t be in his position if he didn’t know something about this)

·         Policy (The law directs a particular way in which we deal with customer issues. Or, could be our policy or regulatory requirements)

·         Experts (the reasoned conclusion of someone with experience in the issue at hand)

·         Facts (use of decision analysis tools such as criteria ranking, prioritization and weighting, or compliance tables. The Kepner Tregoe decision making model is such a tool)

·         Probability (requires modeling to determine certainty and uncertainty and to determine specific values of various outcomes)

It is important to note that I am NOT saying that unless you have a probability based process, your decisions will be wrong. Can experts be wrong? Sure. Can intuition be right? Yes. I am saying that if your process recognizes that decisions that are decided solely on emotion are more risky than decisions that include logical elements, then you are likely to arrive at better results that if it doesn’t.

Also, I am saying that your process must recognize that almost all decisions contain some emotional content and it doesn’t hurt so long as that content isn’t the entire basis for the entire decision AND it doesn’t distort the reasoning that is present in the decision.

Next time we will talk a little more on this, and then move on to Assessing Impact and Consequences.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Decisions, Decisions #2 - How do you make them now?

Last time we learned that judging the soundness of our decisions based on the PROCESS we use to make them is a better strategy than basing that judgment on the RESULTS we achieve. This approach is rests on three ideas:

1)      By developing a decision-making process that rigorously considers a standard set of attributes and criteria, we can arrive at better results IF the parameters and criteria we use are USUALLY important factors.

2)      By revisiting our decision making process after achieving our results, we can adjust our attributes and criteria based on lessons learned and improve the probability of making a good decision next time.

3)      If we accept that the result of the decision is the only way to judge its soundness, it inhibits our addressing the process of making a decision.

Clearly, these attributes and criteria must be important. Fortunately, people have been developing them for thousands of years, continually refining them.  To begin with, I will put them in 3 different categories for general discussion and then go through them in detail:

Category 1 – Perspective

There is generally more than one (meaning more than just YOUR perspective). This means you need to understand the various other perspectives and account for them in the decision.

Category 2 – Impact

Decisions that can result in serious and / or permanent results deserve different scrutiny than those that make little difference. One of my early mentors put it this way “The size of a problem can be measured by the difficulty to recover from it.” I think that is pretty sound advice.

Category 3 –Basis for Decision

We have all heard decisions characterized as “an emotional decision” or “a fact-based decision”.  However, few of us are trained such that we really know what these terms mean, or if there are other bases for decisions (which of course there are), and how to IMPROVE our basis. If you understand the basis for a decision and you understand the differences between the various bases, you can improve your likelihood of making a good decision. Would you rather make a decision based on intuition, or on the results of an expert study? Which do you think would have the greater likelihood of being correct?

The above are the things in which we will develop expertise over the next few articles. For now, I want you to consider the following questions. Feel free to write me (gregg@PFComm.com) or post your thoughts here on the blog. I want you to think about how you CURRENTLY do these things – define your current process……

Perspective Questions –

·         How do I assure that I know which viewpoints are important in a decision?

·         How do I make sure I understand what decision should be made in the eyes of the people that hold those viewpoints?

·         How do I make sure that competing viewpoints are resolved such that the people involved can be depended on to carry out the decision and work towards achieving the desired result?

 

 Impact Questions -

·         How do I determine best, worst, and likely-case results for my decisions?

·         How do I define critical vs. non-critical with respect to outcomes? By the way the outcome affects me personally? My boss? My customers? Other stakeholders?

·         How do I determine the consequences of the outcomes?

·         What if it the likely outcome is good for some and bad for others?

 

Basis Questions –

·         Everyone says that using emotion as the basis for decisions is a bad idea, but I seem to do it a lot (I bought my car cause it looks hot, I picked my favorite basketball team because all my friends liked them and were mean to people that didn’t like the same team, I chose to get a dog “just because”). What would be a better way?

·         How do I make decisions when I know that my boss disagrees? My spouse? My supplier?

·         How do I make decisions when I am short on time? Short on data? I don’t really care about the outcome?

 

Think about how you use these three areas to make decisions now, and we will talk about how I recommend you view them over the next few articles. I look forward to hearing from you.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Decision Making (#1 of a short series)

I’ve spent the last few years writing this newsletter about communication. I started doing that because I saw (as many of us see) that we and our co-workers often make decisions that turn out badly, and those disappointing results can usually be traced back to two elements: lack of necessary information and a lack of objective understanding of the facts. Because these are the biggest shortcomings in our decision making, I write and speak about them the most (how do we get better information and develop a better understanding). However,  they aren’t the ONLY problems with our decision making so today I will start a multi-article series about how to improve our decision making with ideas NOT centered on face-to-face communication.

When we talk about “problems with decision quality” we have to start with a definition of a good decision as our reference. If I ask 10 people “how can you tell if a business decision was a good one?”, I will almost always hear “I don’t know”, which is a little troubling. After some discussion I will generally hear “you can say that a business decision is good if you got a good result”. That is, if we:

·         wanted to enter a new market

·         decided that certain design changes would be important to that market

·         made the design changes

·         began competing in that market

then our decisions were good, because we got a good result.

Really? So you can’t tell if a decision is good until you get a result? Decision experts tell us that that is a bad way to look at things BECAUSE it gives us an excuse to relax the rigor of our decision making and rush through the process of making them. I mean, if you can’t tell if the decision is good until you get a result, then you don’t need to bother with being rigorous; you need to get the result and then adjust.

This lack of understanding regarding decision making cripples countless business efforts and reduces our willingness to hold accountable our decision making process. Of course we want our decisions to yield good results, and by identifying and considering the important factors involved and methods used in making decisions, we can improve our decisions markedly. Let’s start with a new definition for a good decision:

A good business decision is one that has been made in a way that assures:

·         that rigor has been applied in the objective identification and consideration of the expected impact of the outcome terms of:

o   benefit and consequence

o   permanence

o   strength to bind the stakeholders to the outcome

·         that rigor has been applied in the objective identification and analysis of the information upon which the decision will be based

·         that the rigor applied is proportional to the impact of the decision, and therefore efficient in the use of the resources required to make it

Over the next few weeks I will describe how such a decision making method is implemented and how all of the elements of a good decision are defined and determined. 

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication