The Gent's Cheat Sheet » Leadership

How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team

Trey — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:38:03 +0000

This past week the Harvard Business Blog shared an excellent article highlighting effective tips for mitigating the toxic (and sadly, often pervasive) influence of pessimists on a team. The article is worth reading in its entirety, so I won’t try to summarize the whole thing here.

As I know many of you know, pessimistic griping CAN have a role to play, and it certainly can help a team bond quickly in the face of a common enemy (good example: a basic training drill instructor). Overall though, it’s definitely a negative force that needs to be contained because of it’s contagious nature and propensity to spread quickly. Bad attitudes tend to breed more bad attitudes, and it’s much easier to prevent the downward spiral to begin with than to recover from an attitudinal tailspin. I’m all for healthy cynicism, but that’s a special breed of pessimism (or is it realism?) and the subject of a post for another day. So I’ll leave it there and share a few the key principles worth noting:

Principles to Remember
Do:

Find the source of the pessimism

Differentiate between the person and the behavior

Involve the whole team in setting norms for team behavior

Don’t:

Single someone out in front of the whole group

Allow negative comments to go unaddressed

Assume all pessimism is unproductive

What about you? Do you succumb to pessimism yourself? Are there other good techniques you’ve found for containing the spread?

-Trey

How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team [The Harvard Business Blog]

The Art of Giving Praise

Trey — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:31:08 +0000

Four Practical Tips for Giving Praise

We all know that genuine praise can brighten the day of not only the recipient, but the praise-giver as well. But how can you ensure that your commendations are received in the spirit they’re intended? Steven DeMaio at The Harvard Business Blog offers four practical tips today in a post entitled The Art of Giving Praise. Here are the four (with my paraphrased explanations):

1. Be truly specific. Anyone can come up with a generic “great job!”, but noting something specific lets the recipient know that you truly noticed something worthwhile. I don’t know if this is what Steven was getting at, but I see it as the positive equivalent of an apology. Sure, it can’t help to just say “I’m sorry” — but it’s an acknowledgment of the specifics that lets the other person know you truly get it.

2. Don’t confuse politeness with praise. It’s certainly important to be polite, but it’s like anything else–when overused it can easily become underappreciated because the impact wears off. If you express thanks and appreciation for everything, don’t expect others to understand praise if it’s couched in the same exact terms.

3. Praise with action, not just words. This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s awfully easy to toss out a few compliments here and there without follow-up. Saying you place full faith and confidence in your people is one thing–actually demonstrating it in a way that they can appreciate is another.

4. Don’t pad constructive criticism with empty praise. Yes, of course it makes sense to phrase things positively–but there can be too much of a good thing. Trying too hard to be positive can undermine your credibility and lead others to doubt the sincerity of your words.

Some of these might take a little effort, but a couple (“being specific” in particular) strike me as things that should be pretty easy to do.

What about you? How do you make sure that your praise actually gets translated as such?

-Trey

The Art of Giving Praise

How to Manage Your Ego So You Can Reach Your Full Potential

Trey — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:25:25 +0000

What’s your primary motivation in life?

Most of us want to achieve something in life…but there are time when our aspirations go beyond being a good steward of the opportunities we’ve been given and taken on a life of their own. They can even be masked in noble terminology like wanting to “leave a legacy” — not an inherently negative thing, but when our egos take charge any noble thing can easily become more about the person and less about the work being accomplished.

Dumb Little Man discussed the Ego yesterday, using movies characters (Johhny Depp as George Jung in Blow, and Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas in American Gangster) as examples of egos run amok. They also shared six signs that someone might be ego-driven.

Check out the article for full descriptions, but these six signs are:

Concern with the approval of others
Fear of asking for help
Comparing and Competing
The constant need for more
Lack of presence
The need to always be right

If found their thought on comparing yourself particularly good:

“People who are driven by ego often fall victim to what I call the comparative and competitive disadvantage. Comparing yourself to others is the ego in one of its most vicious forms. It’s a perpetual losing battle because there will always be somebody better and always somebody worse than you are. Even if you are the best in the world at what you do somebody will always be right on your tail. If you keep seeing your life as a competition with those around you, then you will continually be dissatisfied and the ego will drive your life.”

These are good to keep in mind, especially in a competitive, Type-A culture where everything is about competition and “getting ahead.” I’m sure that many of the factors driving egos are more complicated than I could really comprehend or explain, by I have a suspicion that competitive and aggressive environments that measure us in terms of our outward achievements have to play some kind of role. Or maybe it has less to do with our environment and more to do with basic human nature. In any case, these six signs are good to keep in mind.

-Trey

[How to Manage Your Ego So You Can Reach Your Full Potential at Dumb Little Man]

Peacock Photo by BS_Thurner_Hof, GNU 1.2 License

How to Communicate Like Ben Bernanke

Trey — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:38:46 +0000

Leaders have a natural tendency to take charge, and during meetings this often means that they end up driving the conversation. In many cases this makes sense, especially when the intent is for send-receive (generally one way) communication. However, there are also many times when this isn’t the goal, and the conversation needs to focus on dialogue, brainstorming, and sharing ideas. What then? What’s a boss or leader to do?

According to the Harvard Business Review, the answer can be found in the approach of Ben Bernanke. Their idea is that leaders need to be comfortable and confident enough in their position that they’re willing to forgo the opportunity to speak their minds up front.

“Letting others take the lead in discussions when you’re the boss is not a sign of insecurity; it can be a sign that you are in control. You are not seeking to impose your will on discussion; you are facilitating alternative points of view. This is essential to establishing the trust necessary to broker agreements between parties who don’t agree.”

Bernanke, they say, models this approach very well. In contrast with Greenspan, he often lets other participants have their say before jumping in—something that works very well when working with groups that don’t see eye-to-eye.

Moderation in all things of course–they also note that decisive action and bold action are necessary at times, because the more legislative role of “facilitating discussions” (as opposed to executive decision making or dictating) is only one aspect of leadership.

So what’s the lesson? Not that it’s better to speak or not to speak, but that it’s not always necessary for a leader to drive the conversation right off the bat—especially in circumstances when mediation or reconciliation of divergent viewpoints is necessary.

-Trey

Original Article: How to Communicate Like Ben Bernanke

Embrace Awkwardness

briang — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:39:16 +0000

Everyone has awkward moments. Yes, everyone. Even the suave and professional people we look up to. Naturally, we want to limit our awkwardness. Awkwardness is, well, awkward!

So the idea that awkwardness can be a good thing is counter-intuitive. But here is why it is true: making an effort to not be awkward cannot prevent you from having awkward experiences (they are inevitable), but it can create more awkwardness.

Therefore you might as well break your fear of it right now by embracing it. Embracing it will in the long run make you less awkward. But you don’t embrace the awkward solely for the sake of becoming less awkward. That’s just the natural outcome. You have to break the fear of the awkwardness so that you are better able to learn and to enjoy life and relationships, and really engage people.

You can be a less awkward conversationalist because you do not worry about the state of the conversation constantly. When we worry about it too much, rather than having a conversation, we start playing competition of who can act the most in line with convention (and perhaps how far someone will dare to the edge without actually getting too close), and when we try to compete, we are no longer practicing.

Being worried about awkwardness will stunt your growth and confidence. Letting yourself be awkward will let you venture into a really interesting conversations and interactions. Awkwardness is not itself a good thing, but being able to enjoy it is, and will ultimately give you a confidence which will be anything but awkward.

Ben Stiller and Robert DeNiro in "Meet the Parents", a study in awkwardness.

Brian G.

Eight Stress-Busting Tips

Trey — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:45:48 +0000

There may be times when the easiest way to get rid of stress is just to avoid stressful situations. For all the rest, check out today’s post from Dumb Little Man on ways to eliminate stress. They’re all common sense and include both physical factors (exercise, sleep, diet, etc.) and mental approaches (taking breaks, doing one thing at a time).

One tip that resonates with me was also the subject of a post I wrote earlier this week—eliminating caffeine. I also like the reminder to focus and avoid trying to multitask (says the person with twelve open browsers right now!).

Personally, I think the Office Space approach of destroying electronic equipment might be enough in many cases–and I can’t help but feel like life might be a lot more enjoyable if computers weren’t around. Then again, nah—if it wasn’t computers it would just be something else. Maybe I just need to learn to not open up all those browsers windows to begin with.

Ok, it’s almost 11pm…time to go get some coffee!

Kill Your Stress: Eight Stress-Busting Tips