by Craig Weber
Refocus and Replace
• Refocus. Naming and taming the reaction gives you the ability to refocus on what matters in the conversation: learning. So, mindset forward, you stay in your mental workshop with your beam of attention focused on making the smartest choices possible. To help you do this, you ask yourself three questions:
• What am I seeing that others are missing?
• What are others seeing that I’m missing?
• What are we all missing?
• Replace. To keep your behaviors in line with your mindset, you replace your habitual min or “win” reactions with the appropriate skills for staying balanced. When your need to minimize is being triggered, for instance, the candor skills—stating your position and explaining your thinking—will help you retain balance. When your need to “win” is being triggered, the curiosity skills—testing your view and inquiring into the views of others—help you stay in the sweet spot. It’s not that you ever stop being triggered, it’s that when you’re triggered, rather than reacting in your habitually defensive way, you choose a more constructive and balanced response.
Reflect and Repeat
• Reflect. Once the conversation is over, reflect on your performance
• How consistent was my behavior with my game plan?
• How well did I stay in the sweet spot?
• Where did I surprise myself by responding well under pressure?
• In what ways did I respond differently than I used to?
• Where did I drop the ball?
• What triggers did I identify?
• I notice I triggered to minimize when ________________. Next time that happens, how will I respond in a more balanced way?
• I notice I triggered to “win” when ________________. Next time that happens, how will I respond in a more balanced way?
• What did I learn about myself?
• What did I learn about the other people with whom I was talking?
• What did I learn about the situation or problem we’re facing?
• What can I do to be more effective in a similar situation in the future?
Here’s an important point: When you fail, don’t get upset, disappointed, or despondent, get curious. View it as an opportunity to break out your trigger journal and reflect, learn, plan, and grow.
• Repeat. This is the last step in the basic discipline. You don’t do this once and stop; you look for another conversation about an important issue to take on. In this way you’re repeatedly practicing conversation-by-conversation, meeting-by-meeting, day-by-day.
Ed Harris
You never fully rid yourself of the defensive reactions that threaten your competence. That’s not the goal. The fight-or-flight tendencies that knock you out of the sweet spot never completely disappear, but you can lessen the power they exercise over your behavior. You can learn to notice them without giving in to them. And by refusing to exercise them, the mental muscles behind them will atrophy from lack of use.
In this sense, you’re like John Nash in Ron Howard’s film A Beautiful Mind.1 In the first part of the film, Nash, a schizophrenic—played by Russell Crowe—has a tendency to establish close relationships with people who aren’t really there. They’re figments of his imagination. They’re delusions.
As Nash comes to term with his illness, he slowly extracts himself from those relationships. They never fully go away; they still loiter around, waiting for Nash to let them back into his life. Ed Harris’s character, the government agent, for example, still lurks around, trying to goad Nash. But while Nash sees him, he refuses to interact with the delusion. By the end of the film, which takes place many years later, Nash is still plagued by his tendency to see people who aren’t really there, but his relationship to his predilection is transformed. He manages his delusional tendencies; they no longer manage him.
Your min and “win” tendencies are like that. They’ll never disappear. You can’t exorcise them. (Nor would you want to, actually. They’re very useful in many circumstances.) No, your “Ed Harris” tendencies will never fully go away, but just like John Nash, with discipline and practice, you can get better at recognizing and managing them.
In this way you’re creating an upward spiral of competence, in which thoughtful and disciplined action is followed by reflection and learning, which in turn leads to even more thoughtful and disciplined action. That’s the practice, the basic discipline of conversational capacity: Find a problem, an issue, or a place to make a constructive difference. Do your homework and engage it. Reflect on the experience to absorb what you’ve learned, both about yourself and about the situation you’re striving to improve. Then, taking into account your new learning, dive back in and repeat the process.
The “Heads-Up Display”
A helpful way to visualize and share the basic discipline is with what I now refer to as the “heads-up display”—or HUD, an idea suggested by a test pilot who attended one of my workshops. This simple diagram, which I put up on a flip chart when I present, covers all three domains of the discipline:
• Awareness. You’re monitoring the reactions—yours and others—that threaten to pull a conversation out of the sweet spot so you can catch it, name it, and tame it.
• Mindset. After you catch it, name it, and tame it, you next refocus on learning by intentionally heading into your “workshop.”
• Skill set. You replace your habitual defensive reactions with the behaviors that keep you in the sweet spot. When you notice someone else has left the sweet spot, you respond in a way that helps keep the overall conversation in balance.
Informal Facilitation
The HUD provides a way to informally facilitate a meeting or conversation, even if no one else in the room is aware of the skills. The test pilot put it this way: “I find that when I’m sitting in a meeting, this simple framework serves as a HUD, or a ‘heads-up display.’ Because I’m ‘looking through’ this framework, I’m now picking up on things I didn’t used to catch, and as a result I have a range of new choices for how to respond.”
The basic idea is to remember Airto Moreira’s description of jazz performance: Listen to what’s being played and then play what’s missing.
• If someone blurts out a strong opinion but doesn’t explain it, for example, invite their thinking into the conversation with inquiry: “You’ve obviously got a strong view on this matter. Take a couple of minutes and explain to the team how you’re looking at the situation.” (One person asking a few great questions in this way can alter the course of an entire meeting.)
• If you notice that someone states a view and explains it, but then fails to test it, just jump in and test it for them: “Leilani put a strong view on the table. I’d be interested to hear from others, especially those who have an alternative view.”
• If you have a concern about an idea someone is proposing, put your concern on the table by stating your position, explaining your thinking, and testing your hypothesis. “I’ve explained my concern and my thinking, so now I’m interested in hearing from those of you who see a flaw in my analysis.”
• If someone isn’t participating in the dialogue, invite him or her in: “Jose, we’ve been bouncing this issue around for a while now. I’d be interested in hearing your take on the decision.”
• If someone is heating up and taking more than their fair share of the meeting, you can help bring more balance to the dialogue: “Rodney’s done a good job of sharing how he’s looking at this predicament in a clear and passionate way. Let’s get a few other perspectives on the table to expand and improve how we’re looking at this situation.”
Formal Facilitation
This heads-up display can also help you to formally facilitate better meetings and conversations. You can use the basic framework, for example, to establish a “Conversational Code of Conduct” for the encounter by providing a few ground rules:
We have several important issues to address here today, and there are
strongly differing views about how to address them. We’re not going to get much done if people are shutting down and not participating, and we’re not going to get much done if we’re butting heads and arguing. So that we’re using our time as effectively as possible, I’d like to share with you a simple framework for how we can work together in something called “the sweet spot.”
You can then write the HUD up on the flip chart, explaining the ideas and skills as you go along, and then use them to facilitate the discussion. By using this simple “heads-up display,” either formally or informally, every meeting is smarter because you’re in the room.
Where We Go from Here
I try to practice with my life.
—HERBIE HANCOCK
You’ve now learned a few ways you can turn your workplace into your personal dojo, a space where you can practice and learn every day. I hope you’re feeling more empowered to create a team, workplace, organization, or community that is smarter, healthier, and stronger.
As with any practice it takes a lot of effort at first, but as you build your strength and discipline, it’ll get easier and easier. To that end, it’s now time to take all that you’ve learned and put together a personal plan for how you will build your conversational capacity while doing something challenging and meaningful. In the next chapter, Influence in Action will become more your book than mine.
YOUR ROAD MAP TO COMPETENCE
Crafting a Powerful Personal Plan
Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another . . . The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.
—M. SCOTT PECK
Thanks for sticking with me this far. In this chapter, all the learning and reflection you’ve done up to this point will get personal—literally. I’m going to help you create a personal plan for deepening, expanding, and sustaining your conversational capacity. Your personal plan turns this book into a catalyst for continual learning rather than a “read it one time and set it on the shelf” experience.
What Is Your Personal Plan?
Simply put, a personal plan is your road map to competence. It’s a blueprint for how to bring more intentionality and self-control to how you behave under pressure. This is important. Without a deliberate strategy, your min and “win” tendencies will continue to get the best of you, no matter how proper and principled your intentions. Think of your personal plan, therefore, as an ongoing investment in yourself, in your ability to keep your behavior and your good intentions aligned when it matters, in your emotional and social intelligence, your grit and gumption, and your leadership effectiveness. It’s an investment, in other words, in your conversational capacity.
What You’ll Do
In this chapter, you’ll put together a personal plan by doing the following things:
1. Generate “structural tension” by assessing your current state (where you’re now in terms of your ability to stay in the sweet spot when it counts), and a vision of where you want to go (the conversational capacity you want to achieve).
2. Identify a meaningful place to practice in what I call the “leadership and learning zone (LLZ).”
3. Select specific practices you’ll use to bridge the gap between your current conversational capacity and the capacity you’d like to achieve.
4. Create a progress and accountability strategy to help you stick with the practice.
5. Review an example of a Personal Plan.
Structural Tension
As I mentioned in the Introduction, to create a path forward, you want to be clear about two things: where you are now (your current state) and where you want to be (your desired state).1 “I call the relationship between the vision and current reality structural tension. During the creative process, you have an eye on where you want to go, and you also have an eye on where you currently are,” says Robert Fritz, the author of The Path of Least Resistance. “There will always be structural tension in the beginning of the creative process, for there will always be a discrepancy between what you want and what you have . . . In fact, part of your job as a creator is to form this tension.”2
Your personal plan will help generate this creative gap and outline the ways you’re going to bridge it.
Your Current State
To assess where you are now, reflect on these questions. I’ve included space below in case you want to take a few notes:
• Where do I need to shore up my ability to remain balanced under pressure?
• What are the situations in which I’d like to be more conversationally effective?
• In what situations do I tend to see daylight between my intentions and my behavior?
• Where would I like to wield more influence, or respond more deliberately and less defensively?
• Where do I find my effectiveness hijacked by my need to “win”? What are typical triggers?
• Where do I find my effectiveness compromised by my need to minimize? What are common triggers?
Your Vision
To generate structural tension, you also need to create a compelling vision of your future state. To do this, ask yourself: “Where do I want to go? What is the level of competence I want to achieve?” To find answers to these questions, imagine it is six months from now and you’re celebrating your progress:
• What is different about your conversational capacity?
• How do you see yourself thinking and behaving differently?
• What is the competence you can now demonstrate?
• How do other people describe the differences they see in your behavior, especially how you react under pressure? (Your colleagues? The people who report to you? Your boss? Your family and friends?)
The Leadership and Learning Zone
You now have a view of your current state and your future vision. Your goal now is to close the gap, and that will require practice. To find a spot to perform that practice, I encourage you to look for a place where your personal development goals and the needs of your team or organization intersect. This is your leadership and learning zone (LLZ)—the place where your personal goals and the challenges facing your team, organization, or community meet. Your objective is to identify an issue in the LLZ that meets three criteria:
• You care about it.
• It’ll make a constructive difference.
• You are in a position to influence it.
Organizational Needs and Challenges
If you want to build your competence while exercising leadership, the issues in your leadership and learning zone (LLZ) provide the best place to practice. (If you’re going to practice while addressing an issue, after all, it might as well be something significant.) Steve’s a great example. He increased his competence while addressing a destructive dynamic in his management team. With the same work, he elevated his own performance and that of his organization. Not bad.
To help you identify a similar opportunity, let me reiterate this idea from the Introduction. Your workplace is full of places to practice:
• Do you see policies that subvert your organization’s strategy or decrease the effectiveness of the workplace?
• Do you see management behavior that undermines the goals of the organization?
• Are your meetings less than stellar?
• Is there an opportunity for improvement that is being missed or ignored?
• Are there “baton passes” between people and groups during which people keep dropping the baton?
• Are there interpersonal or intergroup relationships in need of repair?
• Is the decision-making in your team unclear and inconsistent? Are major problems continually downplayed or avoided?
• Is your organization facing hard new realities that people refuse to take on and tackle?
• Are people clinging to the
status quo when major change is required?
• Are there festering conflicts that generate lots of heat and dysfunction but little light and progress?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ve just identified a place you can practice, learn, and grow.
With all of this in mind, here are a few additional questions to help you identify opportunities in your leadership and learning zone (LLZ). I’ve included a little space below so you can jot down your ideas:
• What do I see as the major challenges facing my team or organization?
• How adaptive are these issues?
• What do others see as the main challenges? Are people on the same page, or do they see things differently? If they do see things differently, why?
• Is there a lack of fit between our conversational culture and our organizational strategy?
• Are there gaps between what is espoused in the organization and how people actually behave?
• Is there a problem with how information flows up and down the chain of command, or between people or groups?
• Are there important issues that trigger more arguing and bickering than learning or progress?
• Are there important, but undiscussable, issues lurking in the hallways?
• Are there festering conflicts eroding morale, trust, and performance?
• Are there issues that aren’t getting the traction they deserve because there is not enough curiosity in the conversations?
