Thinking About Thinking

Rene Descartes gave us the famous aphorism, “I think; therefore I am,” but your thoughts do more than prove that you exist.  They also help determine how you exist, including whether you succeed or fail as a leader.  Many people believe that their thoughts are like wild animals, beyond their ability to control. But thoughts can, in fact, be managed and must be managed in order to succeed as a leader.

Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., gives some helpful recommendations about how to get rid of ineffective habits of mind, or what  Albert Ellis called “irrational beliefs.”  To enact thought management, Shpancer recommends you begin by becoming aware of how you talk to yourself and what stories you tell.  Bad habits of mind to look out for include:

·         All or nothing thinking:  “If I don’t succeed 100%, I’m a total failure.”  The reality is, no there are many degrees within any dichotomy, whether it’s success or failure, good or bad, happy or sad, and so on.  Focusing only on the poles is misleading.

·         Mind reading:  “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”  The reality is you are not psychic and never know exactly what others are thinking.  They’re probably thinking about lunch.

·         Catastrophyzing, also known as “awfulizing”:  “If X doesn’t happen – or Y does happen – my life as I know it is over.”  Things happen or don’t happen every day of your life and you’ve survived, and even thrived, so far.  You can handle it.

·         Overgeneralization:  “I’ve been let down by three co-workers, so all my co-workers care undependable.”  Everyone is unique and making overgeneralized assumptions can lead to the dreaded self-fulfilling prophecy.

·         “Should” and “must”: “I must have a child to be happy.  I should want to move up in my career.”  (Cheeky Albert Ellis called this “shoulding all over yourself” and “musterbating.”)  The reality?  It’s normal to want things, but telling yourself that those things determine your entire future happiness is a fool-proof (or is fool-ful?) recipe for failure.   

After becoming aware of these bad thinking habits, the next step is to, as Shpancer recommends, “understand that thoughts are not facts but hypotheses.”  Read that part again.  Thoughts are deceptive because they often seem so true, but your first thought about anything may or may not be accurate or even what you want.  To get to that best thought, the final step is to consider possible alternatives and choose the one that is best supported by evidence.  Shpancer helpfully compares this to buying shoes:  You don’t walk into a store and immediately purchase the first thing you see.  You look around, consider options, think about your preferences and the cost, then you make a decision.  

You already do this kind of thought choosing now.  If a loved one makes you really angry, do you go with your first thought, which may involve doing something you regret (frying pan, cranium, etc.)?  No.  You don’t.  You probably take a moment and think out the best way to proceed, or at least the way that won’t land you in court.  Managing your thoughts is really just about taking that same “stop and think” habit and expanding it into all parts of your thinking, not just those with potentially life-changing consequences.

The process described above may feel uncomfortable at first if you are not used to doing it, but cultivating this thought awareness – fancy term: metacognition -- and replacing bad mental habits becomes…well, a habit once you begin doing it, and it’s a habit will pay you many dividends.    

Leadership Styles of the SEC: Mark Richt

Last week, we learned about leadership lessons from Steve Jobs and this week we’ll look at UGA Head Football Coach Mark Richt.  (For those who are in college football withdrawal, I can’t promise this will help but we can always try).  Much attention was given to the outcomes his team produces but do you ever wonder about the leadership style that lead to those outcomes? 

Profiles of any coach demonstrate that they all have the same goal – winning – and each has a multi-faceted approach to getting there, but for Mark Richt, what’s important is how his actions match his values.  Coach Richt wants to win and works hard to achieve that, but he believes he’s failed if he gets the journey to that goal wrong.  As he told Dan Wetzel, “’Do I want to win a national championship…Sure I do. I want to win. Everybody who has ever won a national championship wanted to win the national championship…But it is about a process. Doing things right, fundamentally, schematically and football-wise. But hopefully [it's also about doing it] morally, within the rules of the game, educating young men, educating them academically, educating them about life, helping them understand right and wrong, how to be a good husband, how to be a good father, how to function in this society properly. I'm in the business of doing that. And you do that well for long enough maybe you have a chance to win a national championship. I want to win,’ he reiterated, ‘but it's all important to me.’"

Wetzel asked him: “Does that balance help…when Georgia has fallen short?” and Richt replied: "’Fallen short of what? If we're doing the best we can every day and we're doing it in a first-class manner so that when I go home at night I can lay my head on the pillow and God would be pleased with the decisions I made, how I treated players and the coaches, the media, my wife and kids, I'm OK with that.’"

It’s easy to see that Coach Richt’s focus is on his values, which determine his priorities.  Although he clearly understands the need to win, his values define his priorities and how he measures success. That was reiterated last fall in this press conference.  He was largely applauded for pushing back against an insulting question but a close listen reveals he was making his thoughts clear when a reporter asked about things that weren’t important.  Like Steve Jobs, he is focused on what’s important and doesn’t waste time addressing every single detractor or distraction. 

As a leader, you have goals but how important is the process for achieving those goals?  What values or priorities guide you?  What do you do when your professional priorities don’t match those of other key stakeholders?  How have your priorities altered how you define success and failure?  

Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs revolutionized several industries and was a leader who accomplished amazing things.  It is natural that many want to study him to glean lessons and, while some elements of his personal style couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be imitated by most aspiring leaders, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, recently published a piece that I’ve been thinking about all week.  There are several leadership insights in the article that apply across organizational types.  The entire article is worth a look and can be found here. 

Focus and Simplicity

Apple’s products are noted for their beauty and simplicity of design.  This was a direct result of Jobs’ Zen training and his strong belief in focusing on what really matters.  Isaacson relates a story of Jobs coming back to Apple after being ousted and sitting through weeks of meetings about the dozens of products Apple was making.  One day he stopped the meeting, went to a white board, and drew a two by two grid.  He told the team that they would be making four great products, one each for consumer and pro, desktop and portable.  All other products were eliminated.  He also pushed his designers to make everything as simple as possible, even famously eliminating the on/off button on the iPod.  That stringent focus and simple design aesthetic birthed a revolution.

Everyone knows they should be the best they can be but that is impossible if you are running in fifty directions.  Focus on the unique thing your organization provides to your community and do it extremely well.

Empathy and Accountability

Jobs was not famous for his empathy with his staff.  His empathy with the people buying Apple’s products, however, was immense and he used it to fuel his demand that his teams create the best products and experiences possible.  He didn’t rely on focus groups but he cared deeply about what people needed and wanted from Apple products.  He understood their frustrations with competitors’ products and remedied those frustrations in Apple’s.  If you work for a company, the lesson is obvious, but what if you work at a non-profit or in education?  The lesson is the same:  Use empathy to understand your constituency – students, parents, beneficiaries – and their needs on an intimate level and understand how those needs aren’t being met well enough by others in your field.   Become so in tune with them that you can, as Jobs would say, “read what’s not on the page.”

Empathy is a key skill but should not, in Jobs’ belief system, be misplaced.  Jobs held others to very high standards and was direct in how he communicated that.  He believed that mediocre people stuck around in an organization when their managers were too timid to address performance problems – he called this “the bozo explosion” -- and this emphasis on excellence was a key to Apple’s success.  The details of Jobs’ particular style would not work in most organizations but direct communication, timely feedback and holding teams (including yourself) to high standards are critical to success and can be practiced without Jobs’ abrasive stylistic specifics. 

Priorities

A final lesson is priorities.  Apple went downhill after Jobs was ousted in the 1980s because more traditional, sales-oriented approaches were adopted at the cost of the innovative, intuitive products Jobs had initiated.  When Jobs returned, he put the focus relentlessly back on what was truly important – the product and the experience of users – and the profits followed.  All organizations are subject to this problem. Budgets will always be important.  They, after all, make the good work we are doing possible.  But a singular focus on profits, or prestige, or other less important factors takes the focus away from the group you serve, and will always lead to mediocrity.

What could be simplified in your own work?  How well do you really know your constituency or customers?  What is your vision for creating new ways to engage or serve them?  What is really important about what you do and how can you focus on it more clearly?

What's Your Word?

Global advertising powerhouse Saatchi and Saatchi has a creative philosophy that permeates everything they do:  “Brutal simplicity of thought.”  It means that simple ideas have a greater impact.  They are understood faster and retained longer.  Saatchi and Saatchi requires all their ad concepts to be distilled to their essence, ideally to one or two words.  Think of President Obama’s latest campaign slogan – Forward – or the classic Volkswagen ads – Think small – and you can see the power of simplicity to help an idea or image communicate something important about a product, a candidate, or an idea. 

You may not be creating ads or campaigns, but all leaders, regardless of their field, have to communicate ideas and persuade others.  Simplifying ideas to their most basic essence is critical to helping your ideas cut through the information clutter and making them “stick” in people’s minds.

This simplicity concept can also be powerful as you think about who you are as a leader and what you want others to associate with you.  What one word do you want others to immediately think of when they think of you? 

Think about it for a minute and post it below.  Don’t over think it.  It’s probably the first or second word that comes to mind when you ask yourself this question. 

Mine is truth.  What’s yours?  

Developing Women Leaders

This week, I want to highlight an insightful piece about how to develop women leaders.  It’s a good guide for those who wish to encourage more women in leadership and for women who aspire to leadership positions. 

The author, Lucy Marcus, recommends five essentials:

1. Developing basic skills, like negotiating and public speaking.
2. International travel, not just because we live in a global world, but because of the impact of experiencing other cultures and new ways of thinking.
3. Mentoring, across all stages of career from student days to the highest levels.
4. Role models, because they foster ideas about what we want to be and how we want to get there.
5. Starting early, by helping girls to think of themselves as leaders and encouraging them to aspire to whatever they want to do.  It is just as important for boys to believe this about women as it is for girls.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece, which provides more detail and can be found here.

The Suicidal Leadership Coping Toolbox

Normally, we address positive aspects of leadership in this blog.  Leadership, however, is sometimes toxic and last week we learned about the suicidal version.  This week’s blog builds on last week’s post, describing what to do if you work with a toxic supervisor. 

Many of these suggestions will work with a toxic leader but the first thing to do is know your leader.  Some of the suggestions below would work well with a toxic person and some would only cause the behaviors to intensify.  Watch how the person reacts in various situations in which he is challenged and gauge how to respond.

The suggestions below are taken from two articles, which can be found here and here.  One of the authors, Robert Sutton, has written a lot on this topic, if you have a deeper interest.

•  Identify exactly what the problem behaviors are.  It’s important that you be able to articulate this.  Does the person belittle you?  Humiliate you?  Undermine and sabotage?  Identifying the specific behaviors with examples is important.
• Document the behaviors.  Write down the dates, times, and details of the behaviors.  If there were witnesses, write that down, too.  You may believe you will never take legal action or think that you’ll remember everything vividly but it’s important to have a log.
• If safe to do so, enlist others.  If you are not the only target, quietly compare notes with others and encourage them to document the behaviors.  Any action, either internal to your organization or external, will be strengthened if there are multiple accounts of the same behavior.  Do not use the time to simply bash the toxic person or start your own passive-aggressive campaign against him.  Don’t let the toxic person pull you down to her level.
• If safe to do so, politely confront the behavior.  Talk directly with the person about what you are experiencing, how you’d like it to be different, and directly ask for it to stop.  It’s vital that you stay 100% professional during this conversation, and document it, too.
• Limit your contact with the person.  Keep meetings, if you must have them, short and don’t give the person any ammunition in the form of information about you personally.  Be polite but avoid the person as much as possible.
• Develop coping mechanisms.  Develop the ability (and it takes practice) to be indifferent and emotionally detached until the problem can be solved.   If you feel powerless or trapped, write down what you like about your job and put the toxic behavior in that context.  Toxic behavior is contagious, so don’t internalize what’s being done to you and let it change who you are.  Try to laugh at the situation.  If you are receiving, for example, belittling comments or looks, try to see them as pathetic or not to be taken seriously.  Even if you can’t say it out loud, adapt a “Really? Dirty looks?  What are we, five?” attitude. 
• Ask for help.  After you’ve created a log of the behaviors, talk to your HR department or other advocate who may be able to stop the behavior.  If others have also documented the behavior, go together.
• Develop an exit strategy.  It’s the most basic of advice, but leaving for another job solves the problem with 100% certainty.  Just the act of planning your departure is empowering.  Make sure you develop a professional, short explanation for why you are leaving, because others will ask.  “It wasn’t a good fit” is a great fig leaf that covers a lot of things. 
• Take legal action if needed, but only as a last resort and with an understanding of the risks.  Being a toxic boss often isn’t illegal or even against your workplace’s policies, depending on what form it takes, and legal action takes a long time to resolve.  In the meantime, you may begin having physical or emotional symptoms from the stress, so escape is usually best if other strategies don’t work.
• Ask for help, part two.  If you find yourself changing – becoming angry or depressed – or if others note this behavior in you, take care of yourself by eating right, exercising, and getting professional help.  Never let yourself feel so trapped that you consider actions that are outside your character.  No job is worth your health or your future.

What are your tips for coping in a toxic work situation?

Suicidal Leadership

If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a leader who was destructive or toxic.  In a presentation called “Suicidal Leadership,” Dr. Patricia Daugherty describes how leaders in business, education and government sometimes turn their initial successes into ultimate failure, leading to termination.  Dr. Daugherty presents research about suicidal leadership, teaching listeners about the definition and phases of the suicidal leader in a real world, case study format.   You can find the presentation here (with video) and here (without video).

Dr. Daugherty is Assistant Director for Training and Development at the University of Georgia Health Center.  She has worked at Mercer University and the University of Alabama before coming to UGA in 1997.  She earned a BA in English from Clemson University, an MA in Student Personnel Work in Higher Education from The Ohio State University, and a doctorate in Higher Education Administration from the University of Alabama.