Are you as fast as the people you are leading or as slow as the people that are dragging behind you?

“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority.
A second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority.
A first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”
A.A. Milne

Most leaders know the pace of their own thinking. They also know a portion of their role is to get out ahead of the current situation and offer visionary thinking. Often, their ideas require those that follow them to think at a matching pace, make the necessary transition from “what is” to “what will be”, and be ready to support their leadership in a timely fashion.

Whether you’re leading a business, a team, or the proverbial “horse to water”, you may discover that you’ll only be as fast as the thinking of your slowest-thinking follower. This relationship produces a phenomenon I call, Leadership Drag. 

People who follow decisive thinking leaders generally fall into three types: 

1. No Thinkers

2. Whoa Thinkers and

3. Go Thinkers

Developing a clear understanding and appreciation of how each of these thinking styles impacts your leadership ability can help you determine the best ways to approach, cultivate and unleash the thinking styles of those you lead.

Do you know what kind of thinker you are?

Do you know what kind of thinkers are found in the people you lead?

Join me as I explore the three thinking styles of the people you lead.

NO THINKERS

Have you ever led a committee seeking a solution to a nagging problem? Perhaps you’ve noticed that only a few people in the group are doing most of the “heavy” lifting while a small portion remain tacit and untethered to the outcome. These people are No Thinkers.

No Thinkers are not people who respond to every new idea or suggestion with a “No”. No Thinkers are people who have simply chosen not to think about something until they have little or no choice at all.

No Thinkers provide the maximum amount of friction creating Leadership Drag. Their extremely passive behavior ultimately limits your ability to lead. No Thinkers require extra energy on your part just to elicit and understand their thinking so you can build a consensus around your idea.

Many of these No Thinkers manage to exist on a plain of self-limiting thinking. It is not that they do not think at all. They are, from time to time, great and fervent thinkers. What dominates their thinking is inability. Particularly, the inability to think outside the box or take risks. They lack the ability to be original, decisive and energetic. They seek and find comfort in waiting to see “how the wind blows” before expressing either their support or opposition.

Most people develop their thinking style based on experience and confidence. For a certain number of followers, embracing life as a No Thinker is a quiet, comfortable, risk-free existence. The less they express, the less is expected of them. The less they offer, the less they have to defend. It is not uncommon for most No Thinkers to have had their ideas diminished, belittled and dismissed by a leader insensitive and disrespectful of their passive style. This is not a follower’s dilemma, it is a leader’s problem.

Pastor Andy Stanley said, “Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” If you’re leading No Thinkers, think of ways you can minimize friction and decrease their effect on Leadership Drag by non-judgmentally listening to what they feel and seeking ways to help them express themselves about your ideas, those of others, and even their own.

WHOA THINKERS

In every situation there is always a person who sees their primary function as the “voice of reason”. This type of thinker is a Whoa Thinker. Whoa Thinkers have their greatest influence on Leadership Drag through their verbal tendency to “slam on the brakes” of progress. In many cases, they are fervent champions of “change avoidance” and defenders of the status quo. Whenever and wherever change is proposed through strategic leadership thinking, you can count on Whoa Thinkers to righteously proclaim there is no need to “rush” into something. “What we have is working so far, why change it?” is their rallying cry.

While Whoa Thinkers are not hesitant to share their thinking, their highest drag potential can be found after consensus has been reached. In their last-ditch effort to avoid the perils of the unknown world of “change”, they will go “all in” in an effort to thwart fast leadership thinking.

Although they may not have ultimate decision influence, they are still a faction of followers that a leader must learn how to integrate into their thinking strategy. Offering Whoa Thinkers the earliest opportunity to voice their thinking can go a long way to helping a leader get out ahead of potential objections and other opposition thinking. Also, offering Whoa Thinkers a visible seat at the table can provide an opportunity to allow them to embrace ownership and responsibility for change initiatives as their own instead of feeling they are victims of progress.

GO THINKERS

Is there a downside to enthusiasm? Of course, there is. Enthusiasm, while an admirable quality, can have a tendency to cloud and distort rational thinking.

Go Thinkers are wonderful supporters of leadership thinking. They rarely question a leader’s judgement, preferring instead to maintain close ties with the leader through a confidential and strategic relationship. 

While Go Thinkers usually have high levels of self-esteem, they can, at times, be blinded by their own brilliance. When engaging with a Go Thinker as a leader,  you should think about stepping back and taking a more candid look at what a Go Thinker is really saying to you. Are you hearing honest appraisals of your ideas or aggrandizement designed to further elevate the Go Thinker’s confidential status?

As a leader, Go Thinkers are important for you. But you should also be aware that blind allegiance can expose a leader to the “Emperor’s Clothes” syndrome. Hence, in your leadership role, you must learn how to temper the thinking of Go Thinkers by allowing yourself to integrate their thinking along with that of the No and Whoa Thinkers you lead.

LEADERSHIP DRAG STRATEGIES

The best strategy for working with No Thinkers, Whoa Thinkers and Go Thinkers, with an eye toward limiting their opportunities of creating Leadership Drag, is to encourage their participation by providing a judgement-free zone in which they can feel safe flexing their “outside-the-box” thinking skills. If, in the end, these thinkers oppose or disagree with the majority thinking, make an extra special effort to applaud their contribution. Leaders need to know, and their followers as well, that it is okay to agree to disagree. This is the adult approach to the world we live in. It is a major strategy in limiting conflict and keeping those you lead focused on the “big picture”. Leaders who cannot convey this attitude will find themselves leading from behind. Ultimately this will cause you to become a pusher of your ideas rather than having them be attractive opportunities you offer.

Leading others can be an awesome experience. Don’t let it slip away by turning a fantastic opportunity into a drag.

Thanks for your support as a reader of my blog and I eagerly welcome any comments on how you’re thinking about achieving the possibility of your promise. Also, I would appreciate any suggestions you might have for future posts in this blog on a topic near and dear to you in the comments section below. As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer

The heart of leadership is 99.9999% communication.

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that's assault, not leadership."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is a demand these days for leaders to become better communicators. From CEOs to heads of state, people want their leaders to be better at communicating ideas, initiatives and policies. All of this comes on the heels of a generation severely lacking in many of the basic communication skills. Leaders cannot afford the luxury of dismissing solid communication skills as a necessary personal attribute. Why?

Because the heart of leadership is 99.9999% communication. Leaders are charged with being the trustworthy voice and face of their enterprise. Whether you are the CEO of a fortune 500 or the leader of a non-profit, your ability to communicate effectively is the most critical skillset in your leadership toolbox.

Leaders have three basic duties they perform in their role through communication, each of which can have an enormous impact on those they lead. 

These three duties are:

1.    Invitation

2.    Demonstration and

3.    Inspiration

If you’re a leader or aspire to become one, you’ll want to read on.

INVITATION

When you lead others, you are in the enviable position of directing the level of engagement of employees, clients, vendors, supporters, and stakeholders within your organization. A leader’s ability to expand (or contract) varying spheres of engagement, inclusion or exclusion allows them flexibility in communicating vision and most importantly opportunity. Leaders are facilitators of opportunity. The opportunity to learn more, to become part of an initiative, to become more deeply enmeshed in the strategy of growth and development of an organization are prizes or high value and praise.

Through strategic communication and effective presentation, a leader can build consensus, elevate awareness and drive massive culture change by inviting those they lead to seize the opportunity to become part of something bigger that themselves.

When you lead consider communicating the invitation to share and participate in your vision a primary role of your position.

DEMONSTRATION

In recent years, many organizations sought to “right their ship” coming out of the deep economic recession. Enterprise initiatives to increase engagement among employees who had their wages frozen, advancement stifled, and training suspended stumbled out of the gate because the concept of employee engagement was misunderstood by leadership.

Eagerly seeking an instant fix to a problem created by a culture systemically rife with platitudes but little gratitude, organizations missed a critical element of engagement and culture change. They are both top-down driven processes. Employees don’t want to hear about culture change, they want to see the culture change. They want to see the change happen in leadership first so that they will feel supported in their efforts to join the change.

When a leader uses demonstration to communicate to an organization, they allow their actions to speak louder than their words. They inspire by leading from the front.

The next time you have a leadership opportunity, think about how you show up. Are you demonstrating the type of leadership character that will inspire others? Will they be proud to follow you? It has been said that you cannot not communicate. The leader who communicates through demonstration knows how to exploit this rule for the benefit of all.

INSPIRATION

Some leaders have a distorted view of their role. They see leadership as an entitlement instead of as the obligation it truly is. Inspiration is a positive human relations activity. If you do not understand this, you will never be an effective leader. You cannot lift yourself up by beating someone else down. An effective leader will not ask others to do something they would not be willing to do their self.

Leaders are visionaries. They have the ability and the freedom to not only dream “what if” they have the license to put “what if” into play. Using solid communication skills, strategically placed, these leaders can inspire others to join them on their incredible journey. They can attract others to set sail with them to worlds beyond the current event horizon. By effectively communicating their vision of life beyond the “what if”, they can attract investors, workers, vendors and a myriad of stakeholders to unilaterally take the leap of faith only dreamers believe in. Leaders can use their vision to inspire others. When you inspire others, you lift them up.

Great leaders learn how to effectively communicate their impassioned vision to inspire organization and individuals to dream bigger, reach higher and achieve greater than they could dream of individually.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

It’s not easy leading organizations and people. Today, there are more channels to control, more opportunities to misspeak, and more subtleties to language than ever before. But a great leader recognizes the nature of our current communications environment as a controllable element of their role. An effective leader learns to use communication with purpose to manage the flow of invitations to inside access, demonstrate how they can lead from the front through their actions, and strategically craft communications that illustrate the attractive and fascinating possibilities within their vision.

When you become a leader, you can do this too.

Thanks for your support as a reader of my blog and I eagerly welcome any comments on how you’re thinking about achieving the possibility of your promise. Also, I would appreciate any suggestions you might have for future posts in this blog on a topic near and dear to you in the comments section below. As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer

Why you must avoid the hidden pit falls of group think when leading and speaking.

One of the greatest dangers for a leader or speaker is to grow increasingly numb to the pit falls of group think within their organization and the speeches they deliver.

Today, the whole world is listening and the things you may think you are saying in confidence might easily show up on YouTube, Twitter or SnapChat. This does not mean you should be disingenuous when you speak, but it does mean you must consider the larger audience who might hear what you are saying.

Sometimes, when we’re in a like-minded group it is easy for us to become comfortable saying the things we’d like to say instead of the things we ought to be saying. This is a lesson learned painfully by many politicians, athletes and celebrities. Some professional speakers and business leaders are guilty of this as well.

UNDERSTANDING GROUP THINK

Groupthink is a term coined by social physiologist Irving Janis in 1972 to classify a negative feature of people in groups. Group think is defined as a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome.

Recently, while coaching a candidate for state legislative office we talked about speaking to audiences. My caution was to avoid the pit falls of group think by continually remembering that even people in your own party reserve the right to change their mind or to differ in opinion.

Group think has not only snared the famous and infamous, it also has a tendency to stifle open and honest dialogue between well intentioned people and among well-meaning groups.

Group-think is a paralyzing phenomenon predominately practiced from the halls of academia to the corridors of legislatures to conference rooms throughout the world.

In my own experience, while teaching Public Speaking at a college, I challenged my colleagues who were classifying Vocal Variety as verbal communication on the course’s rubric. When I pointed it out to them that even the text we were using classified Vocal Variety as nonverbal communication because it is paralanguage their response was, “Well perhaps we’ll call it Voice on the rubric instead.”

If ever there was a case of making a deviant decision, this is one. Instead of being concerned they had misinformed their students, they were more concerned with not being proved wrong. They were lock-step in the group think.

The Titanic struck an iceberg, but it was group think (this ship is unsinkable) that sunk it.

New Orleans was hit by hurricane Katrina, but it was group think (the levees will protect us) that cost the lives of so many people.

Enron may have been led by greedy dishonest executives, but it was group think (the belief that dissent is disloyalty or stupidity) that caused it to crumble.

AVOIDING THE PIT FALLS OF GROUP THINK

There are a variety of techniques you can engage to help avoid group think. An article from Expert Program Management suggests the following:

• The Nominal Group Technique: this gives group members the opportunity to contribute individually before group discussion begins.

• The Delphi Method: this allows group members to contribute individually without the group ever having to come together. The individual may not even be aware of who the other members of the team are.

• The Stepladder Technique: this starts with a group of two, and adds one member at a time to the group, allowing each new team member to express their opinion on the solution each time, before group discussion begins.

• ·The Six Thinking Hats Technique: forces the team to look at a problem from different perspectives.

The clearest solution to avoiding group think may be found in a simple two-word slogan from Apple, “Think Different”. Regardless of how popular a solution or objective may be,  challenge yourself and your group to seek a different perspective on the idea. Examine it as if you are seeing it for the first time. Give it the old “water test”. If it doesn’t hold water, it probably will sink.

THE NON-GROUP THINK LEADER AND SPEAKER

When you create a speech, you are your own group. You develop content out of your own passion, knowledge and experiences. You believe what you have to say is really, really important. While you have great, awesome and inspiring vision, what you may lack is perspective. And this can lead to group think.

A good many speakers get ensnarled in their own little group think. They have a passion for a topic, craft a speech with lots of real neato ideas, stories and witty phrases and then send it on its way. They forget to take the time to listen to what they are saying from their audience’s perspective. They forget to “eat their speech” and end up serving something that is totally indigestible. They hit their listeners with a fire hose when a sprinkler is what is they need to nurture the seeds they have sown.

The best way for a leader or speaker to avoid encouraging group think is to listen to what is being said. Measure it against what situation it is intended to solve. Before coming to the final decision, seek the input of a trusted, impartial outside source. Ask open questions designed to expand on the range of existing thinking. Be open to change and embrace it.

As Albert Einstein said, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”

As always, please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague. The best way for me to avoid falling into group think within this post is for my readers to chime in with their comments, opinions and suggestions. Please feel free to share your comments on this post or suggestions for future posts in the comments section below.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer

If a problem is an opportunity you've yet to solve, then a mistake is just a lesson you've yet to learn.

99% of all disappointments in life are the result of misaligned expectations.

OK, that’s a pretty big claim. But I think if you mull it over you’ll find it to be true more often than not. Nowhere is this more evident in the falsely laid expectation organizations tend to have regarding the consistency of human performance.

Let’s face it, humans are not perfect. We make mistakes. Some days a few, other days too many to reckon. But, it is not the mistakes that cause either short or long-term harm. The deepest scars are left by our failure to profit from the experience by making the appropriate changes to our thinking and process.

Getting Better by Mistake

“To err is human, to forgive divine.” (from “An Essay on Criticism,” by Alexander Pope.) But to not learn from your mistakes is a diabolical shame. More importantly, it is a waste of your potential. And, while “God may help those who help themselves,” you’re pretty much on your own if you can’t figure out how to get better by mistake.

Getting better by mistake is a concept detailed in Alina Tugend’s book, Better by Mistake. The subtitle of the book is, “The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong.” So many good things happen when you take risks. Especially if the risks are predicated on your willingness to accept that you might not reach your intended goal, but you will learn from the process. By the way, sometimes the results of a “mistake” can be more profitable than your original goal.

Take Post-it Notes. 3M did, and they’ve never regretted it. At 3M there is a massive culture encouraging employees to explore with plenty of allowance for mistakes. Here’s what happened in 1968 at 3M.

No one set out to invent sticky notes. Instead Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M Company, invented a unique, low-tack adhesive that would stick to things but also could be repositioned multiple times. He was trying to invent a super-strong adhesive, but he came up with a super-weak one instead. What an incredible way to get “better by mistake”!

Every Mistake is a Lesson

When the result of an effort ends short of the goal we humans tend to analyze that result. We’re searching for an answer. Not to what went right, but what went wrong. Often the data reveals a mistake as the culprit. A mistake in judgement, estimation, calculation, intensity, application, attitude, etc.

Albert Einstein is most often credited with having said, “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.” Guess what? He never did. But, despite Einstein’s vehement protest to the contrary, people just keep attributing this quote to him. This is ironic. While a string of intelligent people collectively continuing to make the same mistake over and over again, they are failing to learn from their mistake of their ways. They are destined to exist in this insanity loop doomed to repeat their mistake due to popular misconception and perhaps intellectual laziness. They are blind to their own mistake. Perhaps this is the real definition of insanity, “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and not learn what went wrong from the mistake we are making.”

So many people misattribute quotes, there are enough to fill a book I have in my library by Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George titled They Never Said It. And, Einstein is not even in the book!

Mastering the Mechanics of Mistakes

Since mistakes are inevitable, it makes a lot of sense to plan for them. In the science the culture is to detail every step of an experiment with two thoughts in mind. One, is have precise data in order to replicate the result should it be positive. The other, should the result not be positive, is to not replicate the result by varying a step or ingredient.

When you engage with people it makes great sense to expect less than perfection from them. It is extremely rare when a less than perfect being can create something of perfection. No matter how hard we try, everything we create has a seam on it. And that’s OK. We’re willing to live with that because we accept that. In fact, we find a comfort in the divine perfection of imperfection. There are even places where creating a near-perfect seam is rewarded. (Think tailoring.)

In her book, Ms. Tugend tackles the myth that “Perfectionists make better workers.” Her study finds that many perfectionists fear challenging tasks, take fewer risks and are less creative than non-perfectionists. One reason she offers may be that perfectionists so dread receiving feedback they don’t develop the same creative risk-taking skills as non-perfectionists.

My Advice

My advice is simple. Embrace the experience. Prepare with the maximum of intention and preparation. Allow others to provide insights, feedback and support. Encourage yourself and others to grow through measured risk-taking and learn from the incremental mistakes that happen along the way. Assess what you knew before and what you’ve learned after the experience. Analyze the gap between them and then get better by mistake. Learn from the lessons of the adventure.

PS

If you’d like to know where the “Einstein” quote may have originated, quote investigators offer this tidbit. The famous quote can be found in Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel Sudden Death. In the novel the main character, Jane Fulton, is a critical sports writer who contends “Modern professional sports rewards players for function instead of character.” Finally, after following the lives and careers of the players, and the game itself, she concludes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again but expecting different results.” This may not settle the origination argument, but it gets us closer to closing the mistake gap.

Also, in 1983 Samuel Beckett, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, offered a counterpoint perspective in his work “Worstward Ho”: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Perhaps the best lesson we can learn that will help us get better by mistake is to “fail better” with each attempt.

Please feel free to share this post with a friend or colleague. As always, share your comments on this post or suggestions in the comments section below.

Bringing Positivity to Everything,
The Brain Tamer