My sister is sick. It’s cancer, and it’s well along. It was hiding and gaining strength for some time before it showed itself. And it showed itself only a couple months ago.
She is doing all the right things. She is consulting doctors, reaching out to family and friends, undergoing painful surgery, working in rehab, and preparing for chemotherapy.
Yet as terrifying as this all could be, as anxiety-inducing, nerve-wracking, scary as hell as this all could be, she is calm. She is calm when the nurse asks her to sit up on the edge of the bed, when she knows the movement of her surgical wounds will ignite fire in her abdomen. She is calm as she waits in a wheelchair for an ambulatory team to arrive in a transport van. She is calm as the nausea prevents her from eating. She is calm when she greets friends and family. She is calm when they go. She is always grateful for the companionship.
I’ve flown down to Maryland a couple times to visit. I don’t really know what to do. I just show up, listen, drive her places, attend doctor meetings, listen to nurses talk about medications, buy her green smoothies and hope it helps.
For those around her this is a terrifying time, and yet she is a calming presence. It’s quite remarkable. She is teaching those who love her to remain calm, to focus, to be resilient, to persevere. To breathe.
I called yesterday and she told me what a nice view she has from her window. I called the day before and she told me how pleasant everyone at the rehab center was. Her voice never betrays any sense of fear, or anxiety, or foreboding. A couple weeks ago I asked her that question. I asked her if she was afraid of all of this, if she was scared.
She said no. She said whatever will happen, will happen. She is leading us. She is showing everyone around her not to freak out.
It is an act of love to be at the epicenter of a storm and yet tell everyone that things are going to be OK, that things are going to be all right, whatever may happen. When we are faced with adversity, and have the capacity to calm those around us, that is an powerful gift of generosity and caring.
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/gift_of_calm-540x236.jpg236540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-04-04 10:53:242018-04-06 11:39:38Be the Calm in the Storm
How you approach your work matters. You don’t have to repeat to yourself focus, focus, focus… there are some specific ways you can prime yourself to choose better priorities, and be more productive. How you set your mind and your body into your work can make a big impact on the quality of the work you perform. Here are a few ideas from Laura Stack’s bestselling book and online course Doing the Right Things Right.
Know that you are an executive.
Despite your role or title, you are an executive. In other words you are the #1 person responsible for managing your time and getting the right things done right. It might feel like your time is not your own, but one way or another you must make it yours. Only you can own your own engagement.
Know your strengths.
Are you a person who thinks and plans before acting? Or are you more apt to focus on your team to get things done? You may also be one of those who truly enjoy doing tactical work and using every app imaginable to manage your time. Knowing your strengths and learning from others just makes your executive job more powerful.
Know what’s important.
Reacting to email, social media, late demands, and interruptions can be called work, but it isn’t the kind of intentional, personal, and self-designed work which gives us a sense of purpose. Emptying our in-box is not work we cherish. When we have to do new, original and creative work such as delivering an article, researching, or preparing a new presentation or report, we are far more productive when we mentally plan what we will do, and remain more focused and dedicated to protecting that time because of the commitment and planning.
Start with your posture.
Sit up. Slouching makes you sad. Erik Peper, a professor at San Francisco State University, did a few experiments in which participants were asked to sit in various positions. They were then asked to recall either negative experiences and memories or positive, empowering ones. Slouchers had a harder time recalling the positive thoughts. According to Peper, “If you take on a collapsed position, it really shifts the physiology.” Also known as a “cowering position”, slouching is a posture of defeat.
Don’t worry, you can almost immediately reverse the negative effects of a slouch by simply standing up and skipping in place. Subjects who sat up in their chair had an easier time recalling positive and optimistic memories, and just 30 seconds of skipping in place improved mood and energy levels.
Even better, crank up the tunes and dance. The positive physical and psychological effects of dancing are well-researched. Better than tennis, cycling, golf, and swimming, dancing has a stronger ability to ward off dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Researchers concluded the combination of physical intensity, mental focus, and social connection compounded to produce stronger positive results.
Adjust your attitude.
Don’t tell yourself, ask yourself. Instead of telling yourself “I will go to exercise class in the morning!”, instead ask yourself “Will I go to exercise class in the morning?” Contrary to the old wisdom of using positive self-talk, such as “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” to boost self-confidence, using positive questions is much more powerful. If instead we ask ourselves, “Can I do this?” we will have to answer the question in our minds and be specific about how we will meet the challenge.
Similarly, if we challenge ourselves by asking, “Will I finish this article before I read Facebook again?”, we are more likely reflect on that challenge and accept it. In being honest with ourselves and asking if we are up for a challenge, we’re more likely to face that challenge successfully than simply repeating, “I think I can.”
Now, give yourself less time.
“But I didn’t have enough time!” Yes, you did. You had all day, all week, all month. You burned it doing something else. Often when you have more time, the obligation will simply fill your mind with more anxiety and dread than if you give yourself less time and get it off your desk. Recently I had three weeks to prepare a presentation. I spent so many moments lost in thought about what I should change or remove or add, that I realized the obsession was crowding my time for creating new ideas and projects. I delivered the presentation a week early. Once I delivered the project, and knew I could make no more changes, I let go. I moved on to being productive in other valuable work.
To learn more about choosing priorities in your work, and executing with greater efficiency and speed, take a look at world-class productivity expert Laura Stack and her course Doing the Right Things Right:
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/sit_up-540x252.jpg252540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-03-13 13:19:202018-03-31 15:54:15How Do You Approach Your Work?
It’s a chaotic, fast-changing time we live in. Automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, cyber-threats, business bots, and the internet of things. It would seem that in this age of hyper-accelerating technology, we would need the techie skills to match. Maybe, maybe not.
Recently Deloitte conducted a survey to understand the millennial generation and get their view on the future of business, productivity, and what millennials think of the emerging younger GenZ generation. It’s mostly good news.
Eight thousand millennials were surveyed from all over the world and it turns out millennials are pretty optimistic, particularly when it comes to job readiness for the emerging younger population. The advice of thirty-somethings to their younger generation emerging now doesn’t appear too different from advice from the past. From the study:
Learn as much as possible: Begin your career open-minded and be ready to learn from others.
Work hard: Do your best and do not be lazy.
Be patient: Take your time when entering the workforce and go step-by-step.
Be dedicated: Be committed to succeeding and persevering.
Be flexible: Be open and adaptable to change and try new things.
Sound familiar? Thomas Jefferson, Michelangelo, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all gave similar advice at different times in history.
But the surprising discovery in the study regards the specific skills needed to perform at a high level in the future. According to millennials working today in the world, it’s not technical skills that are needed. Analytic skills, IT skills, programming, social media skills, even language skills, and a global mindset, all ranked below the importance of leadership, flexibility, creativity, communication, and professionalism in the workplace.
That’s right. The strongest traits needed in the future to build innovation, and growing economies, are not technical skills, but human to human skills. Relationships drive progress in the world, not tech skills.
This is also good news for those of us who aspire to happiness and lifelong fulfillment. Harvard recently completed a study of over 75 years following the lives of 268 individuals from 1938 until now.
Through wars, marriages, career triumphs, personal tragedies, parenting, habits and daily behaviors, the Grant Foundation followed these people as they lived (and sometimes died) for 80 years. What they discovered is pretty simple.
They learned that the characteristics of a long, healthy and joyful life are strong relationships with other people, and resiliency through hardship. Religion, political opinions or sexual orientation made no difference. A happy childhood is helpful, but not necessary.
They learned that learning is a lifelong pursuit, and not restricted to childhood and adolescence. They learned that the habits you establish before 50 become predictive of mental and physical stability decades later, and the inevitability of a mid-life crisis is a myth popularized in the 70s.
According to the study, the strongest behavioral contributors of a joyful and successful life are the ability to create quality relationships with those around us, being altruistic with others, not taking oneself too seriously, finding joy in alternatives, and persevering through adversity.
Work on the strength of your relationships. It could be the most important thing you do, both for yourself and your community.
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
I actually think the same things do make most people happy. The differences are extremely small, and around the margins. You like peach ice cream; I like strawberry ice cream. Both of us like ice cream much better than a smack on the head. – Dan Gilbert
Let’s say you are weighing a big decision like whether to quit your job, or move to California, or get engaged to your boyfriend. Or it could be a small decision, such as what to order on the menu, or where to visit on your next vacation. Someone else can make a better prediction of whether you will enjoy that decision than you can, and you should trust their advice.
People regularly overestimate how happy they will be if they win the lottery, get a promotion, or even exact revenge on someone. We also overestimate our unhappiness. The think we will be miserable if we lose our job, or have a bad accident. The truth is we aren’t very good at predicting how we will feel in the future, and therefore aren’t very good at making decisions.
Dan Gilbert, of Harvard University, has some advice for you. Ask someone who has been through it, who has taken the vacation to Boise, quit the job, eloped with their girlfriend, or eaten the banana walnut ice cream. Their advice will be a more accurate predictor than your own judgement. Here’s the catch: you probably won’t believe them. If you ask for advice, your likely reaction will be that you are unique, you are special, your situation is different, and after all, how could they possibly know what’s best for you?
In a study entitled, “The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice,” Gilbert and his colleagues demonstrated repeatedly that the advice of others, who had experienced what the participants were contemplating, was consistently a better predictor of happiness.
Here’s an example. In one part of the study, 33 women were asked to go on a 5-minute blind date. To identify who they were about to go on a date with, they were offered either a document profiling the height, weight, interests, background, favorite songs, movies, etc. of the man they were about to meet. Or they could choose to read a review from another woman who had been on a blind date with him, and read her opinion on how much fun she had on the date.
After choosing one of these background sources, they were asked to fill out an “enjoyment scale” and predict how much they thought they are going to enjoy the speed date that was about to happen.
Those who chose to read the background document, instead of the opinion of someone who had spent time with him, were almost 50% more likely to be incorrect in their prediction. Even more surprising, those who chose to read the background documents, instead of the opinion of someone else, rated their confidence in their own enjoyment prediction at over 84%. In other words, they were not only wrong, but also wildly confident in their bad prediction.
The reason we are such poor predictors of what will make us happy, and ignore the advice of others, is because we think we are special, and unique. The truth is we are all more alike than we often admit. We have the same hopes, fears, longings, and joys as many other people in the world, particularly those friends and family who are close to us.
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Squirrel-Hugging-Flower-1.jpg7881400Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-02-10 09:14:122019-11-05 11:11:54Why It's Better to Ask for Help
This is a world of immediacy, a world of now. It’s a world of deadlines, stress, and constant demands. We have to not only deliver results at work, but also take time to read with our kids, be present and mindful with our loved ones, and get to the gym. It’s exhausting.
These demands lead us to cut corners, and get it done whatever it takes, whatever the cost. If we inflate our sales for a quarter, we can gain earnings. If we cheat on a test, we can boost our trimester grades. We’ll make it up later.
Taken too far, the quest for immediate gratification leads to lying, cheating, and unethical behavior. Quality takes time, excellence demands thoughtfulness, and building skill takes patience. The thing is, we often underestimate our ability to learn, and grow. The truth is, we will change much more than we think we will.
Just look back. Remember you ten, or fifteen, years ago? Wow, if only you knew what you know now. And to imagine what you were worried about then. As they say, “Youth is wasted on the young.”
Dan Gilbert, of Harvard University, told the New York Times, “Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin. What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh — and at every age we’re wrong.”
Looking back we can easily recognize how much we have changed, and grown, as individuals, but we never imagine that we will grow or change that much in the future. We think we’ll be the same in the future, when in fact, we are likely to be very different. And the choices we make now will have a much bigger impact on our future selves than we believe today.
“At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made.” – Dan Gilbert
One effective way to trick yourself into stronger learning habits, and better exercise habits, is to think of you now and your future self as the same person. It doesn’t come easily. We often think of ourself of twenty years ago as a distant, and separate, version of ourselves. We can recall who we were and what we were doing in a nostalgic, and reminiscent way, but not in the way of imagining that we are indeed that same person. And we think of our future self in the same disconnected way.
Loran Norgren, at the Kellogg School of Management, did some experiments with his colleagues to find out if they could get participants to make better decisions today by helping them connect with their future selves.
In one part of the study, participants were asked to write letters to their future selves called, “Dear Future Me.” In those letters, participants described who they were now, what they thought and cared about, and how they felt about the quality of their life. Half of the participants were asked to write to their future self who was only three months older, and the other half to write to their future self twenty years older.
Afterwards, everyone was asked a series of scruples questions to evaluate their willingness to commit morally or ethically suspect activities such as purchasing items of questionable origin, or illegally downloading movies or music. Consistently, those who were asked to connect with their future selves twenty years down the road, were much less likely to engage in questionable behavior.
In another portion of the study, participants put on virtual reality glasses and were presented with a mirror reflecting a digitally aged version of themselves who was about twenty years older. Following this disconcerting experience of being confronted by their own, older self, participants were asked a series of trivia questions. Again, those connected with the experience of encountering their future self were less likely to cheat on the quiz – 6% versus 23.5%.
What you do today matters, and it matters more than we think. Our behavior today sets the path for who we become in ten or twenty years in the future – a future often too distant to realize in our day-to-day lives.
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/future_self_2-540x233.jpg233540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-01-30 10:35:342019-08-11 18:47:41Invest in Learning, Invest in Your Future You
I’ve known communication experts with dysfunctional relationships, professional speakers who decline events because they are horrified to go on stage, and time management gurus who are late to meetings. I’ve met renowned thought-leaders who fabricate some of their work to get published, and personal change advisors who are terrified of change.
Why is it so hard to live our values? Why is it we can consume so much new information and knowledge and yet do nothing new in our daily life? We watch TED talks about how the mere presence of a smartphone on the table between us detracts from the quality of our conversation. Over 80% of us know this, and yet we do it anyway.
We read studies on the importance of grit and perseverance, and yet we are quitting our jobs and hopping to new opportunities at record levels because we feel we aren’t making an “impact” quickly enough to satisfy our ego.
We are constantly reminded that multitasking is a myth and only leads to decreased work quality, slower learning, and decreased attention spans, and yet we have numerous email and message alerts active on our computers and devices.
We know we can accelerate our learning when we try new things at work, and yet we go along with idiotic ideas, hide our opinions, and mask our true identities, because we are scared of being fired, or are desperate to fit in.
We know that the quality of our sleep is directly related to the quality of our health and well-being, and yet we take our smartphones to bed, and even check them in the middle of the night. And we know that the first five minutes when we walk in the front door can set the tone for the entire evening, and yet often our first reaction is dismay at the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink. That dismay is a mood killer.
Excellence requires work, impact takes time, leadership presence requires being present, and meaningful relationships need kind conversations.
Make it easier on yourself. The expression “activation energy” was coined 150 years ago by a chemist. The term refers to the minimum amount of energy required to stimulate an interaction between available reactants.
In other words, we should minimize the amount of energy it takes to get us in motion, and remove all the hurdles to taking action that we can. If we want to start jogging more, we should lay our gear and our shoes by the bed before we go to sleep. If we want to become better public speakers, we need to block off a doable amount of time — perhaps thirty minutes each day — to actively write and rehearse our material. And if we truly want opinions and new ideas at our meetings, we should make our meetings psychologically safe for honesty.
When we make it easy to begin something, we lower the amount of energy it takes to get started. And if it takes less energy to get started, we are more likely to do it. The slow, intentional approach to learning something new, overcoming fear, and leading with confidence requires guided mastery toward self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is how good you feel about yourself. Self-efficacy is the strength of your belief in your own ability to complete the tasks you set out for yourself and reach your goals.
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/learn_new_things-1-540x232.jpg232540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-01-03 09:58:192018-04-03 07:48:57Why Is It So Hard to Live Up To Our Values?
“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” – Lao Tzu
On March 2 1962, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain had the highest scoring NBA basketball game of all time. He scored 100 points in that game, a feat likely never to be repeated. Chamberlain was the number two highest average scoring player in history, behind Michael Jordan. He would have easily been number one, had it not been for his free throws.
Wilt Chamberlain was terrible at free throws. Terrible. He was so bad that the coach wouldn’t play him at the end of a close game, since the opposing team only needed to foul him, and send him to the free throw line, where he would surely miss.
Meanwhile, Chamberlain’s teammate on the Golden State Warriors, Rick Barry, was the most accurate free throw shooter in the league. By the time he retired, Barry was the most accurate free-throw shooter in NBA history, averaging 90.0 percent of his free-throw attempts. In his final season, Barry hit over 94% of his free throws. Rick Barry shot all of his free throws underhanded. That’s right, Barry shot “granny style.”
You might think since both Chamberlain and Barry were on the same team, Chamberlain would learn a thing or two about shooting free throws. Well, sort of. For a short period, Barry convinced, and taught, Chamberlain to shoot underhanded also. He improved his free throws remarkably. But it didn’t stick. Chamberlain said he couldn’t do it. He said he felt “like a sissy” shooting underhanded.
Read interviews with Rick Barry, and it’s pretty clear he never gave a damn what other people thought of how he shot the ball. In his mind, the point was to get the shot in, so he never cared what other people thought.
What other people think of us – or what we think other people think of us – means so much that we would often rather fall back on old habits, or abandon new thinking and new ideas, in favor of simply fitting in.
The difference between those who succeed, and those who sit comfortably in lackluster positions, is they are willing to fight the gravitational pull of mediocrity.
“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”
– John Stuart Mill
A study from Duke University back in 2006 revealed that over 40% of what we believe are conscious choices every day, are actually habits. Chamberlain just couldn’t make a habit out of shooting underhanded because he felt embarrassed by it. He was too concerned about what the world thought of him. He was the greatest basketball player of his era, and still he couldn’t get over what other people thought of how he shot free throws.
There is an important, and distinct, difference between trying, and failing, at something, and being a failure. The key difference is how we think about it.
Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran lost nearly everything in her first failed marketing campaign. Bill Gates’s first company, Traf-O-Data, was a complete bomb. Milton Hershey’s famous company, Hershey’s, was actually the fourth candy company he founded, after the first three failed.
Failing at an effort is not the same as being a failure. The most important mindset shift is to think of our work as experimentation, not as either successes or failures, but instead simply experiments, which we can constantly improve upon. It’s the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And that reframing is a small act of leadership.
To learn more about turning failure into constant experimentation, and reinventing innovation, take a look at:
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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As one of the most revered coaches in American history, John Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” coached his University of California basketball team to an unprecedented ten national championship titles in twelve years. This remarkable winning streak included an astonishing run of eighty-eight undefeated games in a row, and back-to-back 30–0 seasons.
If you had been lucky enough to play basketball for the great John Wooden in the 1960s and early 1970s, you would have been surprised on your first day of practice. Instead of the opportunity to show your passing, shooting, and dribbling skills in front of the esteemed coach, your first lesson at your first practice would have been to learn to put on your socks, and lace and tie your shoes, properly.
Describing the first practice of every season, Wooden would ask his players to take off their shoes and socks. Explaining that these were the most important pieces of equipment each player possessed on the court, Wooden taught his players how to carefully pull on each sock, making sure there were no wrinkles, particularly around the heel and toes, which might cause a blister.
Then, advising each player to hold his socks up firmly while lacing his shoes, he told the player to pull the laces securely from each eyelet, not simply yank the laces from the top. And always, always, double-knot the laces, Wooden said, having no tolerance for shoes that became untied during a practice or a game. Ever.
This is how the greatest basketball coach of all time started his first practice of each season. Leadership isn’t about how to put on your shoes and socks, but it is about doing little things that can lead to big impact. Small, consistent efforts, practiced over time, can yield big results for you, and the people around you.
Here are three of the biggest myths of leadership that simply are not true, yet are constantly shared and reiterated over and over.
Great Leaders Possess Great Confidence.
Stanford University is one of the greatest academic institutions in the world, and every year it produces some of the finest leaders. To get into Stanford requires not simply good grades, but also a record of demonstrating leadership, ingenuity, community service, and an aptitude for continuous learning.
Each year, Olivia Fox Cabane, who teaches at Stanford, asks her incoming group of freshman, “How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake that the admissions committee made?” Each year, more than two-thirds of the students raise their hands.
Academy Award winner Jodie Foster told an interviewer on 60 Minutes she feared she would have to give her Oscar back after winning best actor award for her role in The Accused. “I thought it was a fluke,” she said in the interview.
Meryl Streep has been nominated for more Academy and Golden Globe awards than any other actor in history. She told the documentary film maker Ken Burns, “You think, ‘Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie? And I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?”
Pressure often creates stress. In a typical stress response, heart rate and breathing increase, and blood vessels constrict. But those people who rise to challenges with the belief that stress is a positive opportunity have an opposite physiological response: the blood vessels open and relax as if they were in a state of elation or preparation for physical test.
Embracing adversity and challenge with a positive mindset is another way of saying that you trust yourself. It’s another gesture of confidence. And that confidence and resolve will make you much more resilient for whatever challenges arise. That’s the first secret of great leadership.
Middle Management is a Becoming Irrelevant
This myth has been propagated as recently as April, 2016 by Josh Bersin who writes:
One of the senior execs I talked with the other day told me “I don’t have time for mid-level managers any more. I can get the information I need to run my business through our digital information systems. If our leaders aren’t hands-on experts in their business areas, I don’t really need them.”
I disagree. Middle managers are the cultural lifeblood of organizations. They guide the mood of the organization, attract and retain top talent, and become the lens through which every employee sees the company. They also serve as an interpreting bridge between individual contributors and executives. If they are good, managers provide context, tone, and cultural glue.
In an interview with Tom DiDonato, Senior Vice President for Human Resources for Lear, a global technology and innovation company, he told me:
Ultimately, people view the company through the lens of the person they work for. They don’t say “I work for Company XYZ, and even though my boss, and their boss, aren’t role models for me, I really love the company.” I doubt you will ever hear that. . . . If you view your boss as a role model, you probably think really well of the company. I believe that to my core. That’s the one thing you don’t have to tweak. . . . Keep getting great leaders. Keep developing great leaders. Keep having those people in your company that others view as role models, and you’ll have that sustainable culture that attracts the kind of talent that everybody is vying for.
Leaders Can Always Recognize Wrongful Behavior
The term “deviance” has long been associated with behavior that is harmful, dangerous, or perhaps immoral, such as lying, cheating, stealing, and other dishonorable acts. But sometimes organizations slip into unethical behavior, and going against the norm in a positive way, through “positive deviance”, may be more honorable behavior.
“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate,” – Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker
Earlier in 2016, the fallout from the Volkswagen deceit reached global proportions. The systemic deception by Volkswagen has been called the “diesel dupe.” As a BBC News article explains, Volkswagen was found to have installed a device that defeated emissions testing, effectively changing the performance results of the emissions tests on its diesel vehicles. This “defeat device” was actually a piece of software designed to recognize when the vehicle was undergoing emissions testing by recognizing test circumstances. VW has admitted to installing this device on eleven million cars worldwide.
Beyond the mechanics of the deceit and the politics of the scandal lies the question, “How could the people and the culture within Volkswagen have permitted this?” The device was too integrated and sophisticated to have been a mistake produced by lack of oversight, confusion, or even ineptitude. The device, and the deceit, had to be carefully engineered and intentional. But were the engineers working on the software truly aware that they were committing an unethical act?
Daniel Donovan, an information technology engineer in Auburn Hills, Michigan did recognize that Volkswagen was doing something very wrong, and he filed a lawsuit against Volkswagen after they terminated him for attempting to reveal the truth.
Diane Vaughan is a social scientist who coined the term “normalization of deviance” to describe the way organizational cultures can begin to drift morally and rationalize that drift over such a slow time horizon that they aren’t even aware of it themselves. Rather than being positive, this kind of deviance is destructive.
As she wrote about in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, Vaughan studied the infamous 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion and discovered that faulty O-rings, linked to the disaster, were identified as fallible long before the disaster occurred, they were simply tolerated as an acceptable flaw in the design.
“No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil,” Vaughan wrote. “Rather, a series of seemingly harmless decisions were made that incrementally moved the space agency toward a catastrophic outcome.” The O-ring damage observed after each launch was normal. The culture had simply drifted to a state in which that condition was also considered acceptable.
In the NASA example, the existence of the damaged O-rings after each launch was deemed acceptable. It became an implicit, and accepted, rule that everyone simply tolerated and believed to be quite normal. But if we step back for a moment and study the situation, as Vaughan did in her analysis, that acceptance of damaged O-rings seems pretty crazy.
Only a day before the fatal launch of Space Shuttle Challenger, engineers Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly strenuously argued to NASA officials that the O-rings could stiffen and fail to properly seal the joints of the booster rockets because of the cold January temperatures. These arguments were not persuasive to NASA officials because, after all, they had the original detailed engineering report stating that the risk was acceptable.
The lesson is that the greatest leaders know what they don’t know, and seek out the truth from all corners of the organization.
Edited and excerpted from Small Acts of Leadership with permission from Taylor and Francis Group Publishing. Copyright 2016. ISBN-13: 978-1629561363
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
– Carol Dweck
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can change our brain.
There is a scene in the new movie Dr. Strange in which a character describes how he healed an impossible injury through the strength of his own thinking. True, that’s a Marvel Comics movie, but growing research suggests this isn’t entirely fiction, and that it’s possible that the words we use not only affect those around us, but also affect our mind and body.
Joe Dispenza shattered several vertebrae after getting hit by a car while on his bicycle. As a chiropractor, he knew that the recommended solution of fusing vertebrae together would lead to a lifetime of limited mobility and pain. Instead, he thought his way to healing.
Nine months later, he was able to walk and function as well as he had before the accident, and he credits a large amount of that recovery to the power of his own mind.
Every time you learn something new, your mind physically and chemically changes.
– Joe Dispenza
Where we place our attention and focus defines who we are. The words we choose to speak, the thoughts we visit and revisit over and over in our mind reinforce those ideas and affect the words we choose to say out loud. Those words and ideas not only affect those around us, but they affect who we are and how we think about the world around us.
Feelings of unworthiness, or ineptitude, can creep into our consciousness. It’s easy to recognize those same thoughts over and over as we repeat and again reinforce them. Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe how the brain continues to reinvent itself, constantly changing over time depending on what we focus on, while older, unused pathways shrink and become abandoned, and new ones, with repetition and focus, emerge.
Not that long ago, many scientists believed that our brains were fixed, hard-wired, and unchanging. Not we know instead, that what we think about actually rewires our brain.
“Angry words send alarm messages through the brain, and they partially shut down the logic and reasoning centers located in the frontal lobes.”
– Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman
Our brain is an artifact of our past experiences and emotions. If we do the same routines, and spend our time with the same people, who push our same emotional buttons, we can not honestly expect anything to change. In order to truly change the way we think, and the way we interact with the world, we need to exercise new neural pathways in our brain.
To create new neural pathways requires that we envision a new and powerful future experience. Our minds will then begin to change, and form new neural pathways, to align with the envisioned future. And when we practice those envisioned outcomes regularly, our brain will begin to believe these dreams are not simply possibilities, but destiny.
Right now in Sao Paulo Brazil, the Walk Again project is using virtual reality therapy, working with paraplegic patients to help build new neural pathways which can reactivate dormant fibers in their spinal cord, and miraculously allow them to move and feel their extremities again for the first time in years.
Eight patients, each with a long-term spinal chord injury and no lower extremity sensation, performed 2000 hours of virtual reality brain training. Results varied with each patient, but for the most part they all went from a total absence of touch sensation to some capacity to sense pain, pressure and vibration. One patient has progressed to walking without the aid of a therapist, using only the aid of crutches and braces.
Try envisioning a better version of you and your world. Over time, your mind will begin to build the language and habits which will make it destiny.
To learn more about adopting a growth mindset, and reinventing your future, take a look at:
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/look_at_this-540x237.jpg237540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2016-11-10 08:52:102018-04-03 07:48:39The Science of Controlling Your Own Destiny
Your value to an organization is not in the hours you clock, the number of emails you flip, slide decks you build, and it’s certainly not in the air miles you punch to get in Zone 1 boarding.
Your value is in the creative energy and impact you bring to the table. The only way we can consistently and effectively bring our best ideas, and our greatest impact to work is if we believe our work matters, and if we believe our actions make a positive difference.
But it’s a stressful time right now. What with the election looming, it’s easy to get distracted and compulsively check the poll numbers (link not provided, check it later).
Over half of Americans are more stressed out now than a year ago. Fifty-two percent of Americans claim that the election is a “very or somewhat significant source of stress,” according to the American Psychological Association.
And when we are compulsively checking social media, we are creating yet more distracted anxiety, which in turn reduces our ability to think clearly, deeply, and coherently on our work. It’s a self-defeating downward spiral.
It’s well understood that high levels of chronic and acute stress impair our ability to think creatively, solve complex problems, and generate meaningful ideas. Stress is a response to a trigger, a circumstance, a rapidly changing environment, or a negative thought. How we react to these triggers can be the difference between positive or negative emotional states.
We can insulate ourselves against these stresses, and increase our effectiveness and impact. For example, public speaking is widely known to be one of the most stressful circumstances we encounter. It’s such a reliable way to induce stress that there is a test named after it called the Trier Social Stress Test.
Eighty-five people were asked to prepare a five minute speech on “why I would be a good candidate for an administrative assistant position at __________ university.” Then, they had to deliver their speech to a panel of stern, unwelcoming evaluators. And finally, if that wasn’t quite enough stress, participants were asked to count backwards from 2,083 by 13s for 5 min under harassing conditions. The evaluators would frown, and constantly ask them to go faster.
After the experience, researchers measured the saliva of participants for cortisol, and other stress markers. Those who were asked, prior to the test, to thoughtfully reflect on their own most important personal values, had lower levels of stress during, and after, the experience.
Lower stress also improves our creative impact. In another study, David Crewswell and his colleagues worked with seventy-three people between the ages of 18 and 34 and gave them a series of creative tests that go like this:
Read these three words: flake, mobile, cone. Now, think of a word that, when combined with all three, make a new word. The word “snow” works, because we can now create snow-flake, snow-mobile, and snow-cone. The task requires creative thinking. It requires a little focus and thoughtfulness, which is the kind of thinking we need every day in our work.
Before each small creative task, half of the group was asked to reflect on values most important to them such as family relationships, artistic ability, independence, religious values or other aspects of their life that they valued deeply. These reflections of self-affirmation had a stress-protective effect on their performance.
Every meeting we have, phone call we place, report we prepare, or presentation we deliver, is a performance opportunity. It’s an opportunity to bring our very best ideas, and impact to our work. When we take a moment to reflect on the values and relationships we hold dear to our identity, it reduces our stress, and increases our impact.
To learn more about adopting a growth mindset, and upping your game at work:
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/a_view_2-540x232.jpg232540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2016-11-03 09:53:422018-04-02 10:08:47You Can Reduce Election Stress and Up Your Game
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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