“If you’re going through hell, KEEP GOING” (Churchill)

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

I’m in Sydney, and I’m inspired.  Not by the obvious – the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the beaches.  I’m inspired by something altogether more impressive – the attitude of my 21 year old son James.  He is based here, and we have the pleasure of sharing a twin room in my hotel whilst I work for a client up the road.  (The feel of a clean freshly ironed sheet and soft pillow is bringing him untold joy, he tells me.)James and dad

He has been working and travelling in Australia for the last 18 months.  He came here to find himself, and to pick himself up after an annus horribilis back home which saw him at his lowest point.  He travelled to Sydney alone with a catering qualification, some cash and a set of chef knives, and has since found a way of funding himself to keep himself fed and watered as well as make trips to see the Grand Prix in Melbourne, see Uluru at dawn, dive the Barrier Reef and sky dive over Sydney.

It hasn’t been easy – far from it.  He started off by working in a restaurant in Darling Harbour, where they bang out 500 fish meals per sitting without blinking.  12 hour shifts, relentless pace, constant screaming and pressure from the formidable head chef.  Then head home across town to a cramped, hot and noisy apartment, cook yourself a bag of $1 rice and 60 cent tomato sauce, fall into bed and try and sleep before the next gruelling shift.  Try doing that 6 days a week half way around the world from your loved ones.

He kept going.  Then decided that it was time to explore something else.  So tried his hand at selling.  Not just any old selling.  The hardest sort – the one that involves wearing out actual shoe leather, tramping the suburbs of Sydney knocking on doors in temperatures of up to 40 degrees.  No salary, commission only.  If you fail, you go hungry.  Not only that, but what he is selling is quite complex:  swapping people’s energy tariffs and tying them into contracts with a range of discount options.  James is not that good with numbers.  He found it hard.  I was with him at the time he started last year:

First day – NIL, Second day – NIL,  (KEEP GOING), Third day – 3, Fourth day – 8.

KEEP GOING.

jAMES2Having got on top of it and made some very decent money, the rules changed.  They changed the procedure, making it far more complex and requiring a call centre to finalise the deal.  50% of his sales slip through the cracks at this final stage.  The competition have caught up, so people are being tied into contracts before he gets there.  His earnings are slipping away, and yet he has so much he wants to do before he gets home in October:  get back to New Zealand, do some more diving, explore the outback.

KEEP GOING.

Yesterday he spent 6 hours in the hot afternoon tramping the streets, and made one sale.  $80 for 6 hours’ work.  Came back to the hotel ravenous, thirsty, hot and frustrated.  He has just headed off today to try a new part of town, determined to come back with 5 sales.  He had to borrow $10 to pay for his train ticket (today is pay day).  KEEP GOING.

Something in me is screaming “HELP HIM OUT!”  For goodness’ sake lend him some money so he can relocate to another city (he knows Sydney better than most locals) where the pickings are easier, rents are lower and he can afford not to earn for the first few weeks whilst he finds his feet.  But I know that if I do so I will be denying him something very important:  the satisfaction of coming back home after 2 years and saying “I did it.”  He is learning so much from this, and forging for himself such resilience and positive attitude, it would be wrong to weaken on his behalf.  I am finding it so hard as a parent to leave the challenge squarely with him, but I know I have to do it.  Helping him out now would make me feel better, at his expense, and I have to hold myself back.

But that won’t stop me from buying him an extra beer tonight if he makes those 5 sales!

KEEP GOING.

I’m grateful to Christian Mihai’s Blog which inspired this line of thinking for me this week.

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The 5 things you can do with a question, apart from answer it!

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

This one comes up a lot in Presentation Skills training:

“What do I do if I get asked a question and I don’t know the answer?’

Dysfunctional meetings. Tool 1: getting people to shut up.

People get overly stressed by this, and as a result spend way too much time preparing their presentation, in the hope that they can anticipate every question they might be asked. (And then they put all that stuff onto slides so that they don’t forget it – a subject of what will have to be yet another Blog).

Once they realise that there are 5 alternatives to them having to answer it, there are audible sighs of relief all around.

Before listing them out, it is worth pointing out the bleeding obvious (I have a degree in that subject):

IT’S OK NOT TO KNOW!  Honestly, it is.  As long as you don’t say this too often, most people will really appreciate it when you thank them for the question, tell them you don’t know the answer, and will get them one by tomorrow.  In fact it can be a great technique for building openness and trust when you do this, and it makes you seem on the one hand more approachable and authentic, and on the other more confident.  We’re all human, after all, and you could never know EVERYTHING about ANYTHING, could you, so why bother trying?

So, here are the alternatives to you answering:

  1. DEFER.  Tell them to hang onto the question, it’s coming up later.
  2. REFLECT.  Give it back to the person who asked it.  A great way to handle expert questions designed to test you or to show off (see my previous Blog on handling experts).  Also a great way to handle deliberately silly questions:

Q: “What colour underpants do you have on today Michael?”

A: “Interesting question, what do you think?”

  3. DEFLECT.  Give it to the rest of the audience.  This keeps them awake, takes the focus off you for a bit, and makes it feel more interactive.  “What do other people think about that one?”

   4. SCOPE.  Take it offline.  Do this when the question is not relevant, or may take too long to handle.  Also, of course, when it doesn’t help you or you can’t answer it publicly.

5. REDIRECT.  This is a very specialised option, for which I am grateful to Bill Durbin, Head of Research for Wood Mackenzie in China and NE Asia.  Bill finds himself in front of sceptical and specialist audiences all the time.  Here’s how he explains the technique:

“I use it primarily when someone is questioning (sometimes aggressively) an outcome without a clear understanding of the methodology or without appreciating context. So I will steer them to a different question that allows me to explain better the methodology or context of the event. It can be quite effective on ill-informed ‘assassins’ or unknowing ‘royalty’ at the table! I believe you need to have a mastery of the topic that is at least equal to if not greater than the audience. Ultimately, if done well it can be a subtle way to solidify control of the session / audience.”

So, what are the limited circumstances when you and only you should answer the question?  You have all of a millisecond in which to weigh up whether the question meets these criteria:

You know the answer + no one else does + it’s a useful, relevant question which you are allowed to answer + you have time.  

If it fails one of these, use one of the options above.

Oh by the way, I don’t recommend a 6th option which people sometimes suggest, which is to ignore it!

Do you know of any other options which I may have missed?

 

 

Posted in Communication, Presentation Skills | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

How to deal with an Expert

Posted on April 29, 2013 by

My clients are clever.  They are successful in business because they know stuff that their own clients don’t.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

Any similarity to any of my clients' clients is entirely coincidental

Any similarity to any of my clients’ clients is entirely coincidental

So they get worried when they bump into someone who they think knows more than them. When I’m working with them on subjects such as Presenting, Effective Meetings or Consulting Skills, the subject of “how to deal with the experts in the room” often comes up.  (When we drill down we often find that what they mean by an “expert” is simply someone with more grey hair than them, who has been there and done that – the “good old oil boys” as the energy consultants I work with in Houston call them.)

Because they worry about being exposed, several unhelpful behaviours then come into play:

  • Talking too much (and trying to minimise the possibility of questions)
  • Pretending to know things when they don’t
  • Over preparing
  • Trying to control things using a tight plan or even script.

This can then cause the client to be frustrated, and the “expert” in the room will quite often show this frustration by being difficult in some way (asking awkward questions, raising objections – anything to prove that this smartarse isn’t quite so smart as he or she thinks he or she is).

All this can be very stressful, and lead to mistrust and damage to the relationship.

There is a much better way to do this.  I have learnt it from 16 years of training rooms full of people who are way more expert than me, know their business far better, and in many cases with whom I have had little or no previous engagement.

The best way to deal with an “expert” is to acknowledge that they are an expert before they have to prove it to you.  If you do this correctly and at the right time (ie the beginning), you can turn them from the unseen enemy into a personal ally.

Whether you’re leading a meeting, making a presentation, facilitating or consulting, find a way in the opening moments to get your own version of this into the room:

“Clearly there is more expertise in this room than there could ever be in my head, and whilst I have my own contribution to make here, I’d like to ensure we use our combined knowledge and experience today to our mutual benefit.  So please feel free to add and contribute to the discussion as we go through.”

rottweiler et chihuahua

You have now acknowledged the power in the room, and just as a little dog, when meeting a big dog, will often roll on its back, tail wagging and saying “Hello Big Dog, my, what a big tail and fine looking teeth you have!”, you have shown respect to the group and equalised the balance of power.

It’s hard not to reciprocate when someone does that, and the majority (not all – there are some egomaniacs who for whatever reason will always want to show off) of people in the room will now be on your side.  You can work on the topic together as a room of Adults, not one Parent (you) trying to impress a bunch of increasingly Childlike and sceptical teenagers.

It does require a bit of courage, as it means letting down your guard.  But then Trust always requires someone to take a risk to make the first move, and usually the other party will then match it.  It’s part of that Leadership quality called Controlled Disclosure:  putting your vulnerability out there and being Authentic.  People normally appreciate that, and will welcome the absence of any fragrance of bullshit.

One final thought:  people who are scared of “experts” worry about being asked questions to which they may not have the answer.  To overcome this they tell people to keep their questions until the end of their Presentation.  How stupid is that?  What if the question is because they didn’t understand something (because you didn’t explain it well enough)?  ”Hang onto that feeling of confusion for the next 40 minutes, and make sure you tune out as well and do some emails,  because now the rest of this won’t make any sense either.”

Durrr.  Let those questions in:  they energise the audience and take the pressure OFF you if you handle them well enough (recognising that there 6 options open to you, only one of which involves YOU in answering it there and then – subject of another Blog, I reckon.)

For the avid readers among you, there are two books which are highly relevant to today’s theme:  ”Beyond Reason:  using emotions as you negotiate” by Roger Fisher deals with how to handle power, and “Why should anyone be led by YOU?” by Rob Goffee is about the Leadership behaviours I mentioned (and was the best book on leadership I had read in years when I first came across it).

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Posted in Communication, Consultants Training, Leadership Skills, Personal Development, Presentation Skills | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

For heaven’s sake, SLOW DOWN!

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” 

warren buffet

Wise words this week from Warren Buffet – a man whose willingness not to jump to the prior conclusions of others I much admire. He was the world’s wealthiest person in 2008, and Time Magazine rated him the one of the world’s most influential people in 2012.  How much more evidence do you need?

Over the years I have been able to witness this for myself when working with people in a training room.  It shows up most vividly when I give them a brief on an exercise and they find themselves unable to read it carefully enough to be able to carry it out properly.  This is especially likely to happen if I put them under a tiny bit of time pressure.

The phenomenon presents itself every time on the exercise I often use to get people to know each other and break the ice a bit.  They have 15 minutes to find out information from each other and then collate it on a flip chart.  The written brief I give them, which I explain carefully in detail and provide an opportunity for them to clarify, states that they have to find it out from…

‘……everyone in the room.’

Guess how many times they have taken that at face value?  What does “everyone in the room” mean:  all the humans in the room, including ME, by my reckoning.  I have been asked for my information on ONE occasion in 16 years.

They don’t read the brief.  When I point this out afterwards, most groups acknowledge that they don’t read things properly for three reasons:

  1. They’re in too much of a hurry
  2. They make assumptions (how difficult can this one be, guys?)
  3. They know too much (and therefore don’t bother to check).

I would add a fourth:  it’s a form of mental laziness, which is what I think lies behind Buffet’s assertion that “prior conclusions remain intact.”  We don’t read things properly, let alone get to the end of the sentence (wherein the real meaning, what I call the Golden Nugget, really lies), because we’re lazy.  And we talk too much and act too fast.  Instead of pausing, checking, clarifying, testing, we crash ahead, hoping and praying that what we do is more or less what was required.  It often isn’t, leading us to have to do it again.  It’s the opposite of Working Smart, whatever that is (? Working Stupid).

What we need is a healthy dose of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  He calls it System 2 – the brain processes which allow us to apply logic and rationality to decisions, and thus to overcome the tendency to jump to our “prior conclusions.”  It’s a brilliant book on the topic. He is completely in sync with Buffet on this.  “Even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.”   Let me give you one example, in the hope that it might inspire you to read it.

Campells soupShoppers in Iowa were offered Campbell’s soups at 10% off the normal price.  On some days the sign on the shelf said LIMIT OF 12 PER PERSON.  On other days it days NO LIMIT PER PERSON.  When the limit was in force shopper s bought an average of 7 cans each – twice as many as when there was no limit in force.  The assumption they made, of course, was that supplies would soon run out as they must be flying off the shelves.  They also allowed the number 12 to anchor their mindset about how many to buy.

The book is full of such examples, and despite your knowing that you are reading a book on the topic and recognize the role of SLOW THINKING, I suspect you will, as I did, fall into most of the traps he describes.

We’re all a bit mad, I conclude, and it’s getting worse.  We hardly have time to think, let alone reflect.  Someone told me last week he had forgotten what it’s like to read a book.  Minutes later he was massaging his hand, because he’d been writing notes as well, and this was another technique that had fallen into disuse.  I wonder what’s next:  forgetting how to talk?

Discussion around this topic with a group is therapeutic:  it’s nice to know we’re all in the same boat, and all as dysfunctional as each other.  Doesn’t exactly make the problem go away, though, does it?  I don’t have an answer for you, I’m afraid.  Do share if you’ve developed some strategies for slowing down which work and are sustainable.

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Posted in Life Skills, Personal Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Our new dog, so far without a name.

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

“That didn’t take you long,” said someone to my wife when she told them we have just become parents again.  She’s right:  two months ago we lost our beloved Rufus to anaemia, and it knocked both Charlotte and I sideways.  The hole that opened up in our lives was more like a chasm, and we had to do something about it.  I kept coming back to something Anneli wrote on my Blog about losing Rufus:  she wrote something I’ll never forget:

“…I find I love her just as much, and I don’t love Lily any less.”

VID00354Something told us that Rufus would not want us to pine, and to carry on living life.  And so we find ourselves with a new family member, a 3 month old Golden Cocker Spaniel, who so far has no name.  He is a bundle of energy, mad as a hatter, quick as anything to learn, and generous to a point with his love.  He brings tears of joy to our eyes, and reminds us so much of Rufus whilst at the same time being completely different.

I’m wondering whether he is part of coming to terms with Rufus’ loss.  I think we are on the Acceptance phase of the Change Curve as far as he is concerned, whilst of course the puppy’s arrival has set us out on another Curve of its own, in which we are doing a lot of Testing (how long can we leave him without him ripping the house apart etc.?)

Slide1

Interesting to think that you can be on several Change Curves at the same time, some big, some small.  Progress can be fragile, and sometimes you can slip back down the curve in a response to a trigger of some sort.

So, something resembling Life Before We Lost Him is returning.    It’s very full on, but worth every minute of disruption to have such a little ray of sunshine around the place.  Just as it appears that Spring has finally arrived in the UK, we can feel ourselves opening up again and getting ready for (we can but hope) a heady summer.  Maybe we’ll even get to swim in the sea again, you never know.  

Suggestions for a name on a postcard, please.  Take a look at him in action and see what inspires you.

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The “BLURT” approach to dealing with conflict

Posted on April 6, 2013 by

I’ve got conflict on my mind.  That’ll be because I’ve been training on that topic a fair bit recently (and it’s difficult to switch off from a subject when you’ve been talking about it all day, as my wife and children know all too well.  I hear the phrase “Don’t do that training @#&T in the kitchen, Dad!” ringing in my ears).  Also it so happens that I was interviewed on the topic a few weeks ago, and the interview has just been released.  I’ll give you the link later if you’re interested.

Disclaimer: I am neither one of these gentlemen. No loss of life was involved in taking this photo.

Disclaimer: I am neither one of these gentlemen. No loss of life was involved in taking this photo.

I think I have found a new insight into the way people go about dealing with conflict.  It’s just a hypothesis (and yes, I would LOVE to go and spend a year researching it).  It goes like this:

Roughly half the world’s population has a preference for Introversion.  They prefer the inner world to the outer world, and find some of the Extraverted aspects of life challenging, if not stressful.  They recharge from inside, by being by themselves or a small group.  They think before they speak in meetings, and tend to be thought of as private, quiet and so on.  Susan Cain‘s book “Quiet.  The power of a introverts in a world that can’t stop talking” sums up that world brilliantly.

Now here’s the thing.  Research by Ralph Kilmann shows a correlation between Introversion and the way people with this preference handle conflict.  It maps onto one of his 5 Conflict Preferences, known as Avoiding.  This is a tendency not to want to deal with conflict, to hope it might go away, to not have the difficult conversation that is required to resolved an issue.  Even to a simpleton like me, it is clear that these two things might well go hand in hand.  Not putting your thoughts out there, keeping things to yourself, would be part of Avoiding, one might imagine.   Kilmann has ascertained that Avoiding is in the top 25% of preferred approaches to resolving  conflict at work.  I wonder how much that restricts growth and innovation in the workplace?

When Introverts stew on things and let things fester, they may find that when they can no longer hang into their thoughts – they simply have choice other than to articulate their thinking – it can come out as a “BLURT”:  it can come out a bit wrong, all in one go, maybe a bit wonky or with the wrong amount (usually too much) of energy.  Sometimes they wish they could have another go, so they could say what they mean more effectively.

This can mean they don’t get what they want, as it can alienate the other person.  People  tend to back off when someone is “losing it” it with them, in which case Collaboration (Win/Win) is less likely.  That’s a pity, as it probably isn’t what either party wants.

I wonder how many conflicts are a result of this tendency to blurt?  I can think of a few, some of which I’ve been on the receiving end of.  What about global conflict?  Was Hitler an Introvert (yes, according to this excellent article).

Are you a blurter when there’s conflict around?  Do you let it fester, build up a head of steam, and then let it go in a mini volcanic eruption?  If so, let me offer a few suggestions:

  • Deal with it sooner.  Conflict is like a seed – it grows.  Nip it in the bud, before you need a chainsaw to deal with it
  • Practice it.  Rehearse your arguments and the tough feedback you might need to give, including saying them out loud into a voice recorder or in front of mirror.
  • Ease into the conversation and let yourself warm up to your piece by asking a few questions (how does the other party see the situation etc.).  This will build rapport and help you to settle.
  • Signal what is coming.  Rather than blurt it unannounced, at least give the party a warning that it’s coming.  Either do that well in advance (“can we meet tomorrow to talk about what happened at the client meeting?”) or when face to face (“I need to raise an important topic with you, and this is not an easy thing for me to do.’)

Do you have any other suggestions for helping to avoid the dreaded blurt?

Here is the link to the podcast I recorded recently with Farnoosh Brock, whose Blog Prolific Living is a must read.  She is an inspiration (I speak from personal experience), and one of the most passionate and energetic people I know.  If you’re feeling a bit flat, her Blog is like a shot of adrenalin.

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Posted in Conflict, Life Skills, Personal Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments