Assertiveness

Rules Are Made to Be Broken // Summary of Francesca Gino’s ‘Rebel Talent’

August 9, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rebels have a bad rep. When you think of them, you imagine trouble. However, all rebels really do is take the habits that could hold the rest of us back and break them.

Instead of leaning toward the comfortable and the familiar, rebels ask questions and look at problems from unexpected perspectives. They aren’t afraid to question assumptions, stick their necks out, make themselves vulnerable in front of others, or experiment and fail.

Harvard social scientist Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life (2018) aims to explain the merits of breaking the rules and showing how to see challenges from new perspectives.

When we challenge ourselves to move beyond what we know and can do well, we rebel against the comfortable cocoon of the status quo, improving ourselves and positioning ourselves to contribute more to our partners, coworkers, and organizations.

The anecdotes and case studies that Gino pulls together to illuminate her “rebel talent” narrative are hardly convincing. In fact, they’re no more than examples of creative—perhaps unconventional—thinking. To take a prominent example Gino cites in the book, Captain Sully Sullenberger (of the US Airways Flight 1549 incident) did nothing rebellious. With 40 years of flying experience and situational awareness, he made lightning-quick decisions to land in the Hudson and not return to a nearby airport.

Recommendation: Read the introduction of Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent, and skim the rest. The book’s introduction has a few useful concepts that merit an article, but the book lacks the rigor and utility to be expected from a Harvard Business School professor. The key takeaways (codified as the “eight principles of rebel leadership”) are relatively clear-cut: be curious and open-minded, never be satisfied, embrace discomfort, think unconventionally, and break established norms.

The #1 Reason Why Employees Don’t Speak Up

August 5, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Notwithstanding management’s well-intended open-door policies, employees avoid voicing concerns when they don’t feel safe doing so. They think it’s more harmless to “duck and cover” than to speak up and help the organization.

Employees don’t want to jeopardize their jobs. They don’t want to be labeled troublemakers and alienate themselves from co-workers and supervisors. In some cases, employees’ fears may not be of immediate retaliation but instead a deferred reckoning that could upset their careers years down the line.

The self-preservation motive is so dominant that the perceived risks of speaking up are very personal and immediate to employees. In contrast, the potential benefits to the organization from sharing concerns seem distant and abstract.

Consequently employees often instinctively play it safe by keeping quiet. Often, they rationalize their implied compliance by saying that the concerns are none of their business—and wishing that somebody else would speak up.

Idea for Impact: The freedom to raise questions, concerns, and ideas is at the heart of an open organizational culture. Unless employees are convinced that they’ll be supported to do the right thing, they could hesitate to speak up and help remedy problems before they can blow up.

Change Must Come from Within

July 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you want to become the type of person who wants to change, you must become the type of person who embodies that change repeatedly. You must deliberately weave the change into your sense of identity. Seth Godin notes in The Practice (2020,)

If you want to get in shape, it’s not difficult. Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done.

That’s not the difficult part.

The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.

When you use your actions to drive your identity, you’ll naturally become confident in your ability to make fundamental decisions that sustain—and enhance—who you are.

Idea for Impact: Habits stick when they respond to your sense of identity. Change your identity, change how you want to be seen, and you’ll change your life.

Commitment, Not Compliance

July 12, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

For some managers, fear is a dirty little secret … they use it when they are either unwilling or unable to persuade employees to work together to achieve goals.

Fear gets results but it does so at a cost. Fear is saps enthusiasm and stifles constructive deliberation.

Step back and work with your employee to determine performance objectives, goals, and priorities. Then, let your employee translate those objectives into tasks and determine how best to perform the task.
Don’t interfere excessively or micromanage. Don’t insist that there’s only “one best way” to do the job. Trust employees to make the right choices to reach the end result.
Don’t be a pushover, either. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be. Managers can be strong without instilling fear. Be steadfast and unrelenting in your quest for getting results.
Let the employee customize the job to reflect her strengths and weaknesses to the extent possible, without compromising the core contributions expected of her role. Allowing the maximum possible use of your employees’ motivated abilities to achieve targeted results will not only use strengths to the maximum, but also drives intrinsic job satisfaction.
Take the time to get to know each employee’s unique set of talents. Try to dole out the available work to best match your employees’ talents.
Share the glory. Giving others a chance to claim credit is an easy, and effective, way to get results. As Dale Carnegie wrote masterful self-help manual How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936,) be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Learn to overlook small mistakes, but address problems before they escalate.

Idea for Impact: There is potentially no more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfaction that an employee could gain from autonomy under structure, and from using one’s motivated talents. Find ways to entice commitment from your employees. Don’t force compliance by virtue of authority.

Avoid Control Talk

June 3, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you tend to say the following to your employees, relatives, or friends, you may be too controlling:

“I don’t understand why you haven’t completed that report yet.”
“I want you to say sorry to Accounting about your problem. I need you to go over there, make amends with them, and inform me of how it went.”
“We will meet at 4 P.M.”

Control talk is expected and natural. It often transpires in day-to-day conversation as a device to influence or persuade the world to see and act our way. Within certain limits of performance, control talk is accepted in critical situations.

However, control talk can get out of bounds quickly and become perceived as a threat. When one party to any conversation has more perceived power—formal or informal authority, perhaps,—unreasonable control talk can soon push the other to concede this power imbalance and restrain what he/she wants. As the American family counselor Dr Tim Kimmel writes in Powerful Personalities (1993,) “Control is when you leverage the strength of your position or personality against the weakness of someone else’s in order to get that person to meet your (selfish) agenda.”

Control talk can promptly engender intense negative emotions. The ensuing conflict becomes evident in the tone of voice, posture, and facial and body expressions. After that, self-defensive reactions will only make matters worse.

Keep all communication with others candid and respectful. Frame your messages in a positive manner that does not contain sarcasm, imply warning, provoke guilt or blame, or suggest intimidation. Summarize what you heard, and ask questions. Practice pauses—they give the other a moment of silence to get beyond the emotional response and allow them to think cognitively.

Wherever possible, ask open-ended questions to de-escalate an argument. Open-ended questions are an invitation to be nonjudgmental, investigate, relate, and see things differently. Try these alternatives:

“Tell me more—I want to understand. What can I do to make your job easier?”
“Let’s discuss possible solutions to that Accounting problem. How can we change the situation?”
“Are you available for a 4 P.M. meeting? Let’s see what we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Wise persuasion elegantly combines rational arguments and appeals to positive values and the other’s feelings about a subject. Only when you can engage them emotionally can you change the way they think.

Idea for Impact: When it comes to persuasion, knowing when to push and when to back off is vital. Nobody likes a pushy person.

Perfect—Or Perfectly Miserable?

May 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The American actor Mandy Patinkin has a reputation as a “self-oriented” perfectionist. He’s one of those who impose exacting standards on themselves and engage in rigorous self-evaluation.

In this interview for The New Yorker, Patinkin reveals how he overcame this tendency:

My children watched me be too hard on myself for years. They’d come to performances, concerts. Then they’d hear their father criticizing it afterwards. One day, my son Gideon and I are walking down the street on the Upper West Side and he wants to talk about his life. He’s talking about bad nights, good nights, et cetera. And he says, “I watched you suffer for so many years over things that I could never understand what you were suffering about, because I was there and I saw it and it was great. I watched you suffering, and I learned that it was meaningless, that it had no worth, it was for nothing.” And I started to weep. My sons knew that it was never worth it.

Idea for Impact: If you tend to fixate on undue self-standards, ask yourself, “To what end?” Recalibrate your expectations. Don’t let your perfectionist tendencies hold you back.

The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching

May 13, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When coaching, many managers’first impulse is to jump into solution mode and fix problems by recommending solutions. The advice is often framed as, “I’ve seen this condition before, and you should do X. That’s what worked for me when I was working at company Y.”

The Directive Coaching Style is suitable when your employee doesn’t have the time, skills, temperament, or patience to resolve her problem.

The Non-Directive Coaching Style, in contrast, encourages the employee to think through her problem and develop her own solution. This coaching style takes more time but is usually more effective, especially if the situation is complicated.

Suppose the problem presents a skill or competence that the employee can learn. In that case, a good coach nurtures the employee by challenging her to mull over the situation objectively. Merely supplying the right solution is wasted if she doesn’t understand it or internalize it well enough.

The most effective coaches I know tend to dwell less on the “what’s to be done” and more on instilling the “how to think about.”

Idea for Impact: When offering advice, steer the thought process. Don’t dictate the outcome. Employees are more likely to be invested in the solutions they come up with.

More from Less // Book Summary of Richard Koch’s ’80/20 Principle’

May 10, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) recorded a “maldistribution” between causes and effects in economic statistics. It’s an observable fact that a minority of reasons—nominally around 20%—tends to produce a majority—80%—of the results.

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

More than a century later, the Romanian-American quality control pioneer Joseph Juran (1904–2008) embraced Pareto’s notion and demonstrated that 80% of all manufacturing quality defects are caused by 20% of reasons. Juran urged managers to identify and address the “vital few” or the “critical few “—the small fraction of elements that account for this disproportionally large fraction of the effect.

This Pareto Law, 80/20 Rule of Thumb, Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, Juran’s Law of the Vital Few, 80-20 Thinking—call it what you want—permeates every aspect of business and life. Now that you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

A fifth of your customers accounts for four-fifths of your sales. 20% of your employees are responsible for the majority of your firm’s productivity. 20% of your stocks will be responsible for 80% of your future gains. You tend to favor 20% of your clothes and wear them 80% of the time. You spend 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your friends. 20% of the decisions you’ve made during your life have shaped 80% of your current life. 80 percent of the wealth tends to be concentrated with 20 percent of the families.

The Pareto principle is a state of nature (the way things happen) and a process (a way of thinking about problems.) The 20% are the sources of the most significant potential impact.

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999) elaborates on using this seminal prioritization principle. “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. … The winners in any field have … found ways to make 20% of effort yield 80% of results.”

Koch explains ad nauseam that most of us work much too hard and produce much less in relation to what could be produced. If trying harder hasn’t worked, perhaps it’s time to try less.

Invest your time and effort more wisely. Don’t address the less significant elements. “Most things always appear more important than the few things that are actually more important.” Examine what you do of low value. In other words, eliminate or reduce the 80% of efforts that produce less-significant results.
Know when to stop. Once you’ve solved the 20% of the issue to deliver 80% of the impact, any further effort can only achieve diminishing returns.

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Recommendation: Speed-read Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle. It’s an excellent reminder that not all effort is equal, so it pays to focus on what matters most.

Embrace the “80-20” frame of mind in everything you do—at work and home. Unless you want to spend every waking hour working, it’s essential to learn how to focus your efforts on the most promising, impactful aspects of what needs to be done.

Realize that few things really matter in life, but they count a tremendous amount. These vital things may be challenging to discover and realize, but once you find these things that really matter, they give you immense power—the power that gives you more from less. Spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy making sure these decisions are made well, and you put yourself in the best position you can in the process.
If you want to improve your effectiveness at anything, focus only on what matters most. Be extraordinarily selective—spend time resourcefully on the few essentials that matter the most and little or no time on the massive trivia that engulfs most of your time.

Don’t Ruminate Endlessly

May 6, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Say you’re in the market for a laptop but just can’t bring yourself to pick out the right model. You’ve spent countless hours comparing different models, visiting various websites, reading reviews, exploring stores, and researching all the available features, even though you’re unlikely to use most of them. Draining indeed!

Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Choice may be a great “problem” to have. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004) and Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing (2011) have exposed how increased choice may be bad for you.

Sometimes, the only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose.

Overthinking can trip you up. You can get confused when you have too much information or overthink about what you should be doing. Behavioral scientists such as Schwartz and Iyengar call this phenomenon “choice paralysis.”

Combat your indecisive nature by limiting your search, say, by establishing a cut-off time. Tell yourself that you’ll look around for two hours and then you’ll buy the best laptop you’ve come across in that time.

Use opportunity cost as a filter. Don’t poke around the internet for a better deal on an airfare or follow an eBay auction if you’re saving less than, say, $15 per hour spent deal-hunting.

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

Overthinking everything can make everyday life a challenge. Unnecessary analysis costs time and money and causes psychological wear.

The benefits of forgoing further rumination and acting on available information often offset the from needing to do everything perfectly.

Choosing when to choose is important. Rethink which choices in your life really matter and focus your time and effort there. Life is all about values and priorities.
In decision-making, simple beats complex. Reject complexity and accept that you’ll be sure that you’ve made the right choice. Make a decision, and then change course if it ends up being horribly wrong. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has written in his 2016 letter to shareholders, “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think.”

Ever Wonder Why People Resist Gifts? // Reactance Theory

April 12, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

People are more likely to resist or reject well-intentioned proposals, advice, or gifts when it feels like their freedom is being threatened in some way.

For instance, I hate receiving clothes for gifts—clothing is mostly a matter of personal taste. I’ll grin and bear it. I may even wear said clothes once or twice just to please the giver.

Turns out that my indifference isn’t atypical. Psychological studies of the gift-giving process indicate that giving clothing gifts involves greater risk than with other kinds of gift objects. The chosen gift may not match the recipient’s self-image, identity, or dress style.

The so-called Reactance Theory explains why giving gifts and offering uncalled-for advice could rankle so much. According to the American Psychological Association,

Reactance theory is a model stating that in response to a perceived threat to—or loss of—a behavioral freedom, a person will experience psychological reactance (or, more simply, reactance,) a motivational state characterized by distress, anxiety, resistance, and the desire to restore that freedom. According to this model, when people feel coerced into a certain behavior, they will react against the coercion, often by demonstrating an increased preference for the behavior that is restrained, and may perform the behavior opposite to that desired.

Reactance can come into play when you’re persuading someone to buy a specific product at the grocery store, forbidding a child from using a mobile phone at school, or insisting that an employee perform some detestable task for the boss.

Idea for Impact: Think twice before you do anything that, though meant well, may threaten another person’s sense of behavioral freedom. People who are threatened thus usually feel uncomfortable and angry—even hostile.

In gift-giving, offering advice, or any other attempt at social influence, know your limits. Beware that it’s not always easy to recognize the limits until you overshoot them.

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Assertiveness

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Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

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Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

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