Crucial conversations lead to crucial changes

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

By Tom Fitch

Every organization has its “issues.” Maybe the boss the breaking his own policies, a co-worker’s performance is below standard or someone isn’t keeping commitments. Whatever the issues are, sometimes they go unresolved or last longer than they should because of someone’s fear of having a crucial conversation that will bring about the needed change.

gI_0_CrucialConversationsBookCover3DA crucial conversation happens between two or more people when opinions vary, stakes are high and emotions run strong. In that type of setting, people could disagree, hurt each other’s feelings and someone might leave or quit.

But as difficult as crucial conversations are, nothing changes without them.

Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes are High is a guidebook for leaders who need to have crucial conversations in order to bring about needed solutions in their organization. It was written by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler – the founders of VitalSmart, a corporate training and organization performance company that works with Fortune 500 companies.

The book points out that when it comes to having crucial conversations, our DNA works against us. Our adrenalin levels spike, robbing the reasoning section of the brain. So when we need our rational thinking lobes the most, our body says, “Not so fast – I’m getting ready for a fight.” Our body conspires against us at the worst possible moment!

The other challenge is that crucial conversations are often spontaneous and in the heat of the moment. It’s hard to think on your feet in situations like this. And even if you have mentally rehearsed, the conversation probably won’t go as you plan because of the emotions involved.  

But what if you could master these moments? What if you had a model to emulate (instead of the many “what not do” examples set by family, friends and coworkers)? What if you could say anything to anyone in such a way that the other person felt respected and even motivated to change their behavior? Everyone wins – your organization wins and the other person wins.

Many leaders get this wrong. They think leadership is all about organizational charts, utilization rates, policies and processes. But the authors’ research begs to differ. They have found through their research that organizations that continually pursue new non-human performance goals fail more often than they succeed. They link this directly to their ability to connect with people on a human level and have crucial conversations when needed.

The authors’ research also shows the connection between high performers and their ability to have crucial conversations. They can stand up to their bosses without committing career suicide. They have the ability to make their voices heard – without offending or upsetting. As a result, they go far in their careers.

Dialogue is our most powerful – and misunderstood – tool in business. A common misconception people have about crucial conversations is that they have only two choices: tell the truth or keep a friend. But this is a fallacy. By having a crucial conversation the right way, you don’t have to choose; you can be honest and maintain a positive relationship with that person.

So what does “good” dialogue look like? The authors use an analogy of a “pool” with everyone feeling safe to put their thoughts and ideas into the “pool.” When dialogue is going well, everyone feels safe enough to put their ideas and perspectives into the pool. Once that is done, you satisfy a basic human need that people want to have their opinion heard, respected and valued.  If you do that – people are more likely to support the best outcome, regardless of whether it was their thought to begin with or not. Good dialogue is the means by which people are able to deposit ideas into the pool.

It’s also helpful to understand what “bad” dialogue looks like too. The authors list the common behaviors of “silence” and “violence” that occur during dialogue. We’re all too familiar with these both in our professional lives and personal lives as well. Examples of these behaviors include things such as using sarcasm or snide remarks to express frustration; avoiding situations where a crucial conversation might be necessary; or exaggerating in order to make a point. All of these things undermine the benefits of dialogue.

So to be good at crucial conversations, you need to have good dialogue skills. The authors talk about specific strategies and skills that you can use to become better at dialogue. This is how people can stay focused on their goals and not get caught up in a negative spiral in a crucial conversation.

  • Start with the heart and work on yourself first, then others. Learn to recognize your own behavior and reactions during dialogue. Get those under control first.
  • Focus on what you really want. When you start moving toward silence or violence, stop and reflect on your motivation. Think about what you really want to happen as an end result of this conversation and the relationship you want to have with this person. Are you behaving in a way to support what you really want?
  • Learn to look. Introduce “looking skills” to recognize what is happening during a crucial conversation. Silence could indicate that people are masking things, avoiding confrontation or withdrawing from the situation. Silence indicates that people are masking the truth, avoiding confrontation or withdrawing from the situation.
  • Make it safe. Often when discussions start to go bad, it is really someone’s way of saying they don’t feel safe in the conversation any longer. Remembering that skilled dialoguers keep focused on what they really want they recognize their true goal is at risk and work to restore safety – so that the crucial conversations can continue.

Think about your own organization and how it could benefit from talking about those things that no one wants to talk about. How could things change as a result? If these conversations would bring about much-needed change in your organization, then it’s time to speak up. But first, read “Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes are High” to guide you in your conversation.

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Invest in your strengths, not your weaknesses

Posted on February 2, 2013 by

By Tom Fitch

We all like to root for the underdog. In the movie Rudy, for example, the main character spends every bit of his energy trying to make it to Notre Dame so he can play football there. But the thing was, Rudy was not athletically inclined so he had to work and work and work – and yes, he did get to play eventually but it was only one game. (Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!)

StrengthsFinder2“Rudy” was a great underdog story. But if you really think about it, he went through all of that just to play one game? Can you imagine if he invested all that time and energy into one of his strengths instead of a weakness?

Too bad Rudy didn’t first read a book like Strengths Finder 2.0, the updated version of the 2001 “Now, Discover Your Strengths” book by Tom Rath. Rath is the Global Practice Leader for Gallup and is responsible for work around employee engagement. The book explores the concept of strength-based development for people and provides a very interesting online tool for determining a person’s natural strengths. Rath used more than 40 years of Gallup research, which includes more than 10 million in-depth interviews with people across generational lines, geography and business types.

Rath makes a compelling argument that a strengths-based approach to human development just makes sense. He worked with the late Dr. Donald Clifton, whom Rath describes as the father of strengths-based psychology, on examining why society seemed so obsessed with people’s weaknesses and shortcomings instead of people’s strengths – all at a time when their research showed significant portions of our society were becoming less engaged at work.

From a business leader’s perspective declining work engagement can be devastating to an organization. Disengaged workers don’t like their jobs, they treat coworkers and customers poorly, they have poor attitudes, and they achieve less all while creating unnecessary stress on a company. A primary survey question Gallup uses to measure engagement is: “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” In other words, they asked people if they use their strengths on a daily basis.

The survey results were telling; people who responded to this question “strongly agree” or “agree” were 6 times more likely to be actively engaged in their job. On the contrary, Rath cited a more recent poll of 1,000 people who responded “strongly disagree” or “disagree” and not one single person was actively engaged in their job. He argues that aligning an employee in a position that uses his or her natural strengths is a strong leading indicator to a satisfied and engaged employee.

The idea of putting employees in positions that use their strengths isn’t groundbreaking news. But ask yourself this question: How do you determine someone’s strengths? For that matter, how do you know your own strengths? Personality profiles such as Meyers-Briggs and the DISC profile are commonplace nowadays in progressive organizations, but how many businesses take a similar approach to determining people’s strengths?

According to Rath, the failure of leaders and of people themselves to know and understand their strengths has led to a tremendous misalignment of people that has resulted in unrealized potetial for higher employee engagement and all the benefits that come with it. Not only are engaged employees good for the company and its bottom line but, according to Gallup’s research, they are three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life

The best part of this book is that Gallup has made their research accessible to anyone who wants to take advantage of it. If you purchase the book you will find a sealed envelope on the back cover. Inside the envelope is a unique code that allows you access to their web site where you can take the assessment and learn about your own natural strengths. Gallup has discovered a “strengths language” that includes 34 very distinct themes. The 30-minute survey culminates in an instantly available detailed report that shows your top 5 strength themes. Each identified theme includes detailed insights into that strength along with a list of ideas on how to further develop that strength. I took the assessment and found the results to be spot-on.

Jim Collins’ landmark book Good to Great sought to understand why similar “good” companies in similar markets at the same time took drastically different paths. Some companies went on to be “Great” while their counterparts failed. One of the enduring lessons from “Good to Great” is the “First Who – Then What” concept where he used the bus analogy. Great companies got the wrong people off the bus, put the right people on the bus, and then figured out where to drive the bus. What Collins didn’t talk about though was how do you figure out the right seat on the bus? That’s where Tom Rath’s book “Strengths Finder 2.0” can be particularly useful.

This book review appeared in the February issue of Springfield Business Journal.

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Leadership happens when you least expect it

Posted on January 3, 2013 by

By Tom Fitch

I suspect many of us lead very similar professional lives.  We live in the information age of too much information too fast.  If you are a leader it’s even worse because not only are you expected to get work done but you need to lead at the same time.  I doubt many of us have the luxury of spending 100 percent of our time just being a leader.  So for most of us, leadership just happens.  In my opinion, leadership is dynamic.  What I mean by that is you are either gaining ground or losing ground – one or the other mutually exclusive.  Leadership doesn’t stand still.

TouchPoints-Bestseller-2The book TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments by Douglas R. Conant and Mette Norgaard focuses on the daily opportunities we all have to either gain or lose ground in the eyes of people we lead.  It defines leadership moments in the most unlikely place that we all experience every single day – interruptions.

Let’s define an interruption.  It’s easy enough, right?  Someone else needs something from you and momentarily stops you from doing what you want to do.  Interruption defined.   How do you react in that moment?  As a leader, what message are you sending to that person?  It’s in this precise moment the authors suggest the most fundamental and important leadership opportunities exist.

It doesn’t matter if you are a seasoned leader or an aspiring one; we all get interrupted multiple times a day.  And if we want to increase our leadership worth to those around us, we need only look as far as the next interruption.  Try this exercise for a few days.  Go to work and keep track of how many interruptions, informal discussions and deviations from your daily schedule occur.  This will give you an idea of how many leadership opportunities are available to you on a daily basis.  Let’s do the math – if you are interrupted say, 10 times a day (probably way too low for many of us) times 5 days a week for 50 weeks (I’m assuming you take a vacation!) that’s 2,500 leadership opportunities per year.  Don’t ever complain that you don’t have time to be a leader.  The opportunities are abundant.

In that moment of interruption lives the “touch point”.   According to the authors, a touch point occurs at the intersection of 3 fundamental elements:  (1) You as the leader, (2) People who are led by you and (3) The issue at hand.  Think of a Venn diagram and the intersection of these 3 elements define the “touch point”.  Not coincidentally, this looks like the definition of an interruption as well – two people and an issue.

So what happens in the touch point that impacts the way others view you as a leader?  Two people interact with one another to address an issue.  You, as the leader, define whether or not the touch point has a positive or negative outcome from the other person’s point of view.  Therein lies the essence of leadership in the moment – it’s the outcome from their point of view that matters.  Maybe even at the temporary expense of the issue.  True leaders believe in helping others in their organization grow and prosper to their fullest potential.  That is their leadership mission.  As others grow and prosper, the organization becomes better and greater results are achieved.

The book digs into the anatomy of a touch point with the purpose of exposing interpersonal dynamics and their impact, whether intentional or not, on people being led.  The authors suggest a strategy that you can apply to every touch point that begins with the end in mind – a positive outcome for those being led by you.  If you buy into the concept that leadership means developing people then you will relate to the concepts presented in the book.  If you believe leadership is more about you and not others – then this book may not be for you.

The book talks about some of the fundamental skills needed to master leadership in touch points.  I particularly enjoyed the discussion about the all allusive “touch” that great leaders seem to possess.  We all know people who have that special touch.  They always say the right thing at the right time and in such a way as to inspire others to do better.  Leaders with “touch” have a knack for knowing how to deal with any situation.  For a leader to be successful in a touch point they need to use their head, heart and hands – each and every time.  If one of those three is missing – your leadership value diminishes.  The authors define “head” as a trait that allows you to quickly, logically and consistently analyze a situation.  “Heart” refers to the passion for your organization’s mission.  And “hands” can be thought of in terms of competence.  What happens in a touch point when you are missing your “head”? You’re seen as illogical. Missing “heart”? You appear inauthentic. Missing “hands”? You look incompetent.  Think about your interaction with other leaders and how often have you come away feeling as if they were illogical, inauthentic or incompetent.  As a leader yourself, this book provides you with the tools and strategies to avoid these pitfalls.

The value in the book “Touch Points” comes from the idea that those daily interruptions shouldn’t be viewed as negative distractions but instead a steady supply of opportunities.  Leaders intuitively aspire to make themselves and others better, and this book provides strategies that you can put to work immediately.

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Taking a right-brained approach to the future

Posted on December 1, 2012 by

By Tom Fitch

As I read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, Bob Dylan’s famous song kept going through my mind: “Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam….for the times they are changing.”

a-whole-new-mind-book-coverBut this book isn’t about the political and social change that Bob Dylan was singing about – not exactly anyway. The change that Pink is referring to is what he calls the coming “Conceptual Age” and the skills and abilities that will be in demand in order for people and companies to be successful. According to Pink, it’s time we discover the right hemisphere of our brain, because we’re going to need it.

To set the stage, Pink offers a quick primer on the brain. The brain is made up of primarily 2 sides – uniquely named the left and right hemispheres. It has 10 billion cells in a complex network of about 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) connections. As we all know the brain controls everything we do. However, recent medical technology and research have led to new discoveries about the brain. Both hemispheres are not created equal. In fact, they are quite different.

The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. It’s rational, analytic, sequential and logical. The right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. The right side can be described as holistic, emotional and simultaneous. Our right side is engaged when we listen to music, look at art and recognize facial expressions. It understands patterns, context, humor and sarcasm. Whereas the left side of the brain is methodical and linear, the right side is simultaneous and creative. It has the ability to synthesize the abstract and to see things that aren’t so obvious.

Now think back to the early years of our economic history. We started as an Agriculture Age out of need; we had to feed ourselves. Then came the Industrial Age and we began producing things – lots of things that were sold and wealth was generated. As technology grew by leaps and bounds, we entered the Information Age and the “Knowledge Worker” was born. The Knowledge Worker created wealth for himself not with his hands or machinery – but with his mind. Pink refers to the “Knowledge Worker”, a term credited to the great business thinker Peter Drucker, to describe the typical left brain-focused person. Think of an accountant, lawyer, computer programmer, engineer or MBA professional. They were trained to acquire and apply theoretical knowledge. They have undergone years of left brain training to be competent in their given field. And, prior to the “Conceptual Age”, that suited them just fine.

But, according to Pink, things are beginning to conspire against the Knowledge Worker in the United States. He points to three forces – Abundance, Asia and Automation – and describes how each is slowly undermining the value of the Knowledge Worker in the United States.

To see the influence of abundance, many of us should look no further than our own families. Think of the houses in which your parents or grandparents lived. By today’s abundance standards, how did they ever get by? Pink also uses the storage industry as an example of abundance. According to the Self-Storage Association, the storage industry has been one of the fastest growing real estate sectors over the past 35 years. In fact, at the end of 2011 there were approximately 58,000 self-storage units worldwide with almost 50,000 of them located in the United States. That equates to an area three times the size of Manhattan Island and it generates about $23 billion in revenue per year. Apparently our homes, even though much larger than in the past, aren’t big enough to hold all our stuff. Pink contends the unintended consequence of material abundance is a yearning for purpose and meaning. The right side of the brain isn’t satisfied with abundance.

As for Asia, Pink makes the case that the typical Knowledge Worker not only has to compete against people in this country, but in the international labor pool as well. The issue here is that wages for similar work in other economies is vastly different than in the United States. He cites occupations such as computer programmers, engineers, and financial services etc., that are routinely completed overseas for a fraction of the cost of doing the work in the United States. He cites computer programmer wages (2005) that averaged $70,000 in the United States compared to $15,000 in India. These are comparably left-brain educated and skilled people doing comparable work for a fraction of the cost.

Examples of Automation are all around us too. We now have computer programs that write computer programs – thus replacing left-brained jobs. Think about the legal and accounting professions. How many people do you know that use Turbo Tax instead of hiring an accountant? Perform a Google search for common legal forms and you will find more options than you can manage. The fact is technology and automation have evolved to the point that many things easily defined by a set of rules can be automated and delivered to you instantly on your computer screen whenever you want it.

So what does all this mean to the left-brain thinker? In Pink’s view Abundance, Asia and Automation combined are driving influences that will diminish the need for left-brained thinkers in the future. Here’s how: Abundance has satisfied the material wants and desires for a lot of people. The material satisfaction has driven people towards the pursuit of purpose and meaning like never before. Asia has replaced many left-brained trained workers simply because businesses can get the same work done at a fraction of the cost. Automation has replaced many left-brained jobs via technology.

So what is a left-brained person to do? According to Pink, the answer lies in the right side of your brain.

He argues that in the midst of this change lies a great opportunity. The convergence of Abundance, Asia and Automation has devalued traditional left-brain thinking and created a growing demand for people with right-brain intelligence. High-concept, high-touch right-brain skills that are needed by creators and empathizers will be in high demand. In today’s world, we all suffer from information overload. But those people with emotional intelligence and the ability to interpret and synthesize data into meaning can’t be replaced by low cost left brained workers. Creativity and problem solving skills will be needed. It’s the dawning of the Conceptual Age that provides an opportunity for people either exploit or enhance their right-brained skills to meet this demand.

Pink’s book goes on to explore unique right-brain senses that are essential in the Conceptual Age. He identifies them as design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. He describes in detail how each sense will be in demand and how one can identify and even enhance his or her own right-brain skills.

As Bob Dylan said…”The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last….For the times they are a changing.”

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Where employees and customers collide

Posted on November 4, 2012 by

By Tom Fitch

Henry Ford is quoted as saying “Why is it that I get the whole person when all I really want is a pair of hands?” I bet every business manager and leader can relate to his viewpoint. You need your staff to get the job done right, but they are human and therefore imperfect. And that’s tough to deal with when you are trying to run a perfect business.

Human Sigma, written by John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund, is a guide for service businesses that need help managing their people so they can start to manage their business results. The book’s title draws a comparison to the Six Sigma concept, a popular and effective manufacturing/ assembly line management philosophy invented by Motorola over 60 years ago.

Six Sigma methods provide manufacturers with a consistent and integrated method for counting quality defects with the stated goal of eliminating them. Because Six Sigma has proven very effective, many service businesses have been lured into using the same methodologies with their employees and customers. But that’s the problem. Employees and customers are emotional beings and don’t operate under the same set of rules that are effective on an assembly line. This frustrated Ford. He had trouble accepting their variability and inconsistency. He wanted the consistency of an assembly line. As our economy has evolved to a service-based economy, we have many more businesses that rely on the employee-customer interaction than ever before. For those businesses, “Human Sigma” will provide very interesting reading.

According to the authors, customer satisfaction is not enough. It represents the minimum acceptable level to just be in the game. If you aspire to only satisfy your customer – you lose. Feelings are facts. This phrase summarizes the authors’ findings that rationally satisfied customers behave no differently than dissatisfied customers – and that emotionally satisfied customers are more loyal, spend more, return more often and recommend your company to others, all at much higher rates than rationally satisfied customers do. What? Based on the authors’ research of millions of employees, customers, business units and industries, a global truth emerged: A rationally satisfied customer is no more loyal to your business than the customer who is dissatisfied with you.

You can probably think of customers who fall into this category. You did everything right and satisfied their needs just as you promised. But they left for the competition and you don’t know why. Perhaps they were only “rationally satisfied” and as the authors suggest – they behaved no differently than a dissatisfied customer.

So if you’ve been focusing on satisfaction only, measuring it the best way you can, you may be wasting valuable time, energy and capital on the wrong thing. Customer satisfaction is not a true way to gauge the health of your business.

So if rational satisfaction is the wrong thing what then is the right thing? In the summer of 2000, scientists at Gallup began a far reaching R&D program to probe the psychology behind customer engagement and emotional satisfaction (keyword is emotional). The book describes the research effort that even included physiological brain imagining with an MRI machine, to understand how the brain reacts to emotional attachment to certain companies, their people and brand. These studies, along with detailed interviews and surveys, were correlated with business financial metrics to develop a theory of customer engagement and emotional satisfaction. The researchers identified four dimensions of emotional attachment that customers have with a business. It’s important to note that the four dimensions represent basic human feelings and are not dependent on the type of business being studied – they are universal. You can think of the four dimensions as a hierarchical pyramid with the base as confidence then ascending to integrity, pride and passion. The goal for any business would be to have as many customers as possible in the passionate dimension. This represents the greatest level of profitability and ROI for the business.

One only has to think of Apple Inc. to see this idea in action. At the beginning of 2008 Apple stock was trading at $180 per share compared to last week when their stock was trading at $609 per share. Now think of the people you know who are passionate about their Apple products – they can’t live without them. Clearly the majority of them are in the passionate/emotional dimension. Apple achieved outstanding financial results all during the worst global recession in history.

Knowing that a higher level of emotional attachment is necessary to provide a customer with emotional satisfaction – rather than merely rational satisfaction – the authors explore how a business can achieve that. The key here is that a business can’t look at their employees and customers as two separate entities to be managed and considered independently.

The authors discovered that it’s the interaction of employees and customers that matter and that is what needs to be studied and measured together. To do this, Gallup developed a survey tool they call the CE11 which consists of 11 questions that measures the emotional attachment a customer feels toward a business. They claim this survey tool is a leading indicator toward a business’s goals – rather than a lagging indicator that so many businesses rely on. One of the hardest things for a business to do is develop leading metrics that will predict future success. Most businesses rely on lagging metrics that tell the story of what already has happened – but don’t do anything to predict the future or, more importantly, have a system that signals a problem BEFORE it occurs so the business can proactively address the issue.

The authors suggest that if a business could measure employee and customer engagement in such a way as to understand their emotional attachment, this would be an important leading metric to predict future performance. If you could identify the emotional dimension of your customers, you could more accurately predict their behavior. Or better yet, you could begin strategically moving them from one dimension to another until you reach the goal of creating a passionate customer.

This book provides a roadmap for a different way of thinking about your employees and how they interact with customers. They suggest the path to increased profitability and growth is to abandon the manufacturing mindset of managing your people and begin to understand that the interpersonal dynamic they create with customers – on an emotional level – is the best predictor of future success with that client. To accomplish this, business owners and managers need to understand that people make choices more often based on emotions rather than rational thought. Understanding that relationship, measuring your success in the relationship and using that data as a means to drive improvement in your staff will result in better business outcomes for your organization.

This book review appeared in the November issue of Springfield Business Journal.

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Self-deception: Who? Me?

Posted on September 9, 2012 by

By Tom Fitch

People are people, and people have problems, which in turn causes companies to have problems. So companies turn to books, training and HR consultants for answers and try to determine what they can do differently.

And right there is where things go wrong, according to the book Leadership & Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box. The book, written by the Arbinger Institute, points out that effective organizational leadership is not so much about what we do but it’s heavily influenced by our default view of people around us.

Do we look at others as people with needs and feelings as legitimate as our own or do we see them as objects on the way to our own goals? People sense and respond to how others feel about them, not just what they tell them to do. According to the authors, it’s this default view that is the root of a lot of people problems both at work and in our personal lives. They show how our default view impacts our feelings toward them – and how that simple thing is the cause of a lot of people problems.

Before I get into the book, I think it’s helpful to understand a little bit about the Arbinger Institute. In the 1970s, a group of social scientists and philosophers began to study a core problem in human science called “self-deception.” After years of human behavior and psychological research, the Arbinger Institute discovered the root of self- deception and even more importantly how people can overcome this behavior. Leadership & Self Deception (published in 2000) is the first of two books published by AI.  This book has sold over 750,000 copies, in 22 languages, and sales have increased year over year since 2004.

The authors describe self-deception as the “…little known but pervasive problem of not knowing and resisting the possibility that one has a problem.”  The book goes on to discuss how people commonly get into this frame of mind.  It’s here where the concept of “self-betrayal” is introduced as well. Self-betrayal occurs when we view others as objects and consider their needs and feelings as less legitimate as our own.  To illustrate this, the book uses a simple analogy of a husband and wife with a baby. Imagine both parents in bed late at night when the baby starts crying. The husband wakes up and has a feeling that he should get up and tend to the baby. But he is tired and instead just lays there, waiting for his wife to get up and do it. The husband considered his needs to be more legitimate and thus betrayed his initial feelings of getting up to tend to the baby. After laying there for a few minutes, the husband started feeling anger, resentment, frustration, etc. toward his wife because she didn’t get up. Yet it was his own choice to not get up and do the right thing that generated his bad feelings toward her.

Once the husband had those bad feelings, generated by his own decision to help when he knew he should, he felt the need to justify those feelings. For example, he may begin to think of other examples where she was unhelpful. If you were to ask the husband who has the problem here, he would say it’s his wife. But remember, the only reason he felt that way was because he didn’t initially regard her needs and feelings as legitimate as his own. His unwillingness to recognize that he caused the negative feelings is an example of self-deception. He deceived himself into believing his wife is lazy and unhelpful – and that it’s her fault not his. That’s self-deception.

The book’s subtitle of “Getting Out of the Box” refers to how to get out of this “box” of self-deception that we can create – the one that traps us in an unhealthy and unproductive cycle. Once we can get out of the box, so to speak, we stand to grow and improve, and interact with people on a different level.

Consider your own work or family relationships and think of one that you consider to be a problem. You probably think others are causing the problem, but does the situation ever improve? Probably not. That’s because you may be engaging in self-deception. This book will help you decide whether that’s the case or not. And as a result, you will be free to focus on your business goals instead of the “people problems” that may have been standing in the way of your company’s success.

This book review appeared in the August issue of Springfield Business Journal.

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Bring your meetings back to life

Posted on August 7, 2012 by

By Tom Fitch

If you had to choose between a movie and a meeting, which would you choose? I’m guessing you would pick a movie. A good movie has tension, action and excitement that are centered around some major source of conflict. You typically leave the movie feeling satisfied with what you just saw transpire. And if done properly, meetings can feel the same way.

Before our leadership team read Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni five years ago, we struggled with our meetings. We would cram everything into a single meeting, jumping from how the weather would impact our projects to our staffing levels to where we buy copy paper to strategic planning. In hindsight, it’s no wonder we were less than productive.

Things changed for us after reading “Death by Meeting,” but we wouldn’t have been as open to the lessons had we not read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team first. I reviewed “The Five Dysfunctions” a couple of months ago. If you remember, the book highlights five behaviors that prevent a team from working together. The first two dysfunctions – absence of trust and fear of conflict – are particularly relevant in the “Death by Meeting” book, although in general I would say that you can’t fix a meeting without fixing a team’s dysfunctions first. So, if you haven’t read “Dysfunctions,” I would recommend reading that first and then “Death by Meeting.”

In “Death by Meeting,” Lencioni writes about a fictional company called YIP Software, which is an underperforming golf video game maker that was sold to a larger company. The CEO of the parent company visits the newly acquired company (YIP) and sits in on a weekly staff meeting.  The CEO is astonished that the company holds such an incredibly dysfunctional meeting. He wonders how they ever achieved anything.

Lencioni uses this scenario to illustrate what’s missing in most company meetings – drama, challenge and debate. While some people may think these are the sign of a bad meeting, Lencioni has good reason to say otherwise. He believes that conflict often brings about needed debate, which leads to better ideas and more confident decisions.

But he points out that you need a strong leader to facilitate the meetings. When there’s a heated discussion between two people, a good leader encourages it, acting as a “conflict miner.” Instead of trying to stop the discussion, good leaders say, “That’s good. Keep going.” Of course, they make sure that ideas are being attacked and not people. In the end, the team will have considered all sides of an issue and arrived at a solution. And if there’s trust among the team, no one will walk out of the meeting feeling hurt. They will instead feel as though they were heard. Now that’s a good meeting!

Lencioni also points out the need for structure when it comes to meetings. He suggests that companies explore having different types of meetings to narrow focus and avoid the trap of everyone trying to talk about everything at the same time.

  • Daily Check-In Meeting. The Daily Check-in is a scheduled administrative meeting that should last no more than five or 10 minutes. The purpose is simply to keep team members aligned and to provide a daily forum for activity updates and scheduling.
  • Weekly Tactical Meeting. These should be approximately an hour, and should focus on the discussion and resolution of issues which effect near term objectives.
  • Monthly Strategic Meeting. This is the best kind of meeting for big topics and those that will have a long-term impact on the business. Each meeting should include no more than one or two topics, and should allow roughly two hours for each topic.
  • Quarterly Offsite Review Meeting. The Quarterly Off-Site Review is an opportunity for team members to meet offsite to assess a variety of issues, including the interpersonal performance of the team, the company’s strategy, the performance of top-tier and bottom-tier employees, morale, competitive threats and industry trends. These meetings can last anywhere from one to two days.

I would put “Death by Meeting” in my top 10 favorite business books I’ve ever read. The tools suggested by Lencioni are simple but powerful. But they will be forever elusive unless the people involved in the meetings are willing to take a risk and be engaged in thoughtful conflict and debate. I’m proud that my coworkers have bought into this philosophy and I can attest to the positive impact it has had on our business. I have no doubt we are better company today because of their willingness to challenge one another on any topic. It can be difficult, it can be emotional, but it’s sure satisfying to see a good decision come to life.

This book review appeared in the July issue of Springfield Business Journal.

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