Mindset Exercise: Resources vs. Resourcefulness

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Jan 27, 2012 in Change, Effectiveness, Execution | 0 comments

Thank you Tony Robbins

Make it Human, Connect with the Impact

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Jan 25, 2012 in Change, Coaching, Relationships | 0 comments

There’s a small trick, a small shift in thinking, in mindset, that can translate to immense performance gains. It’s this: connect personally with the impact, the change or result of what you do. Let me give you an example. Adam Grant is a talented young professor at the Wharton School and he conducted a study a couple years ago in which he worked with a group of students at the University of Michigan. These students were earning a little extra cash by making cold calls to alumni to raise money which would go to scholarship fund. The fund was used to help finance the tuition for students accepted at the university but unable to afford the tuition.

So Grant and his colleagues divided the students into three separate groups and had them perform activities for just 10 minutes before their call shift. With one group, the students could do whatever they wanted for 10 minutes before their calls. Check out facebook, text their friends, whatever. The second group was asked to read letters for a few minutes from people who had benefitted from the scholarship fund that they were working on, and then talk about the contents of the letter with their peers for a couple minutes.

The third group was also given a handful of letters to read together, but after a few minutes in the break room, they got a surprise. The call organizer would say, “We have a special guest on the phone.” And on the phone was a real recipient of the scholarship fund the students were working on. And for just 5 minutes, the students talked on a speaker phone in the break room with the beneficiary. They could ask questions about where they were from, what classes they were taking, what they intended do after they graduated, etc. Just for five minutes.
At the conclusion of the five minute phone call with the beneficiary, the organizer would say “Remember this when you’re on the phone—this is someone you’re supporting.”

That’s it. A ten minute intervention to connect the callers with the impact, the difference, the real goal of their work. The result? 250% increase in revenue performance sustained over a month after that one single intervention. 250% better than their peers that had no direct contact with the beneficiaries.

Take an opportunity to find and talk to the people who actually consume, touch, experience, contact what you offer or what you create. It will remind you of why you do what you do. It will lead to higher quality, integrity and excellence in craftsmanship and relationship with your customer. And higher performance too. How does 250% sound?

Praise Effort and Grit, Not Talent

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Jan 10, 2012 in Coaching, Excellence, Learning, Talent | 0 comments

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
- Stephen King, Author

Carol Dweck led a fascinating study back in 1998 in which she and her colleagues worked with four hundred 5th graders and gave them a series of tests, mostly puzzles, and then praised them in two different ways with these six little words.

With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at this.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have tried really hard.”

The first word set awarded intelligence, and innate talent, similar to how many parents and coaches (myself included) get trapped into talking about, and to, our kids. We say how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. The second word set praised effort, determination, preparation, grit. What the researchers were interested in, was how the kids would view their abilities, as fixed and unchanging or as malleable and able to grow and change with work.

In the next round of puzzles, the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for effort choose to attempt the harder problems. The kids praised for talent selected the easier problems because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing expectations becomes a liability. So to protect yourself as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance.

In the next part of the study both sets of kids were given harder problems to solve and both sets of kids performed more poorly. But here’s the interesting thing. When the researchers asked the kids how they did on the problems, the kids praised for talent lied 40% of the time, presumably to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this next set was just as challenging as the first. The group praised for talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round, and did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they do 20% worse.

But the second group did 30% better this time around. There’s the difference – 6 words. But keep in mind there are a lot of ways to say, “You must have tried really hard.”

Carol and her colleagues use these kinds of effort or “process” praise: which is praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, etc.

– You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
– I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
– I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things

Next time you see excellent, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also building growth and confidence.

The Velocity of Learning

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Jan 5, 2012 in Change, Effectiveness, Learning | 0 comments

You don’t often think of learning as having a speed, a velocity, but it does. The classic notion of practice involves putting in the hours, doing the time, right? But there is a striking difference in the quality of practice that leads to accelerated learning. And it isn’t about watching the clock, it’s more about purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is found right on the edges of your ability, at the intersection of challenge and ability when you are successful perhaps 50-75% of the time. Not so much easy success that gains overconfidence and loss of challenge, and not so much difficulty that it creates a sense of stress and anxiety.

But the only why to find that sweet spot is to try, to get in action. Particularly when trying to acquire new skills or new behaviors the aim shouldn’t necessarily be to stop a trait or practice, but instead think about starting new behaviors and habits. Dan Coyle told a marvelous story about visiting the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto, CA where they focus on building new habits toward developing what they call “social fitness.” The folks that come to the shyness clinic often have arrived at a point where their social anxieties and shyness have become a real hindrance and barrier to connection. The clinicians and psychologists there believe that much like developing physical fitness, or leadership or creative capacities, so too can people develop social fitness.

A simple exercise might involve asking participants to approach two people per day in a public place and simply ask them the time of day. And then graduate to asking a store manager where the restroom is, for example. For a final exam a participant was asked to go to a supermarket and intentionally drop a whole watermelon on the floor and work with the market employees to deal with the mess and apologize for the accident. Such a scene would be an appalling thought to someone suffering from acute shyness. But over time, with incremental social practice and repetitive purposeful practice and interactions, the participants could build the social and emotional capacities to envision such an incident, and effectively deal with it in a public social setting.

And remember the practice needs to be in context, under real conditions, with a little stress, a little challenge such that you are on the edges of your ability. For example, instead of asking the soccer team players to shoot twenty penalty kicks at the end of practice, instead stop the scrimmage in the middle of practice and have a player shoot just two, under pressure, in the middle of the game.

Your product is not what you sell, it’s the difference you make

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Dec 16, 2011 in Change, Communication, Effectiveness, Passion | 0 comments

Your product is the impact you make, the change you affect, the experience your product delivers. Your product is the result, the causatum, the punch. Sell cars? No, you don’t sell a car, you sell utility or transport or identity or experience or speed perhaps. In pharma? – you don’t sell drugs, you sell health and well-being. Clothing retail? – your product isn’t jackets and boots, it’s warmth and style and durability and expression of taste.

It starts at the beginning – teachers and educators certainly aren’t selling, they are creating idea agents, young people interested and willing to learn, excited and touched by ideas they put into action. My wife, a high school science teacher, should justifiably be proud when she talks to a former student who was inspired to enter teaching, or go into microbiology, or well… go into any discipline related to science because they were touched in a meaningful way in her class in high school.

And if you are in the the business I’m in – the learning business, you aren’t selling books, courses, classes or video learning, your product is behavioral change. Your product is impact – the difference those ideas make.

Early this year, Tim Sanders gave the keynote address at our annual client conference, Perspectives. Afterwards, a woman approached him to congratulate and thank him for his message, she said “Thank you for a wonderful presentation, but I still don’t understand. What are you selling?” Tim smiled and said, “I’m selling success, your success.”

It doesn’t matter if you are in sales, you are still selling – ideas, solutions, change, experiences, expertise. But understand your product might not be what you think it is. The core asset in your arsenal to make an impact is between your ears – your brain and your willingness and ability to engage and affect change through whatever products or services you happen to be representing. The course, the textbook, the video, is merely a transit mechanism. It’s the vehicle for ideas.

Your difference is the difference you can make, representing something you believe it. But remember the quality of the interaction matters. As Susan Scott says, “The conversation is the relationship.”

Connectivity is Productivity

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Dec 5, 2011 in Change, Communication, Innovation | 0 comments

I’m grateful for an interview the other day with Iqal Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. When Iqbal was quite young, growing up with his siblings in a village in Bangladesh, he was asked by his mother to walk about 10km to another village to fetch medicine. He spent all morning walking to the village to discover the doctor was out attending to patients in other villages and retrieving supplies. So Iqbal spent the afternoon walking home with his pockets empty.

Years later after moving to the U.S. and receiving degrees from Wharton, he became a Wall Street banker. He recalls having another unproductive day in the early 1990s transporting data across Manhatten on floppy disks (remember floppies?). Mobile phones were still in their infancy – expensive, heavy, and with scarce connectivity. But understanding Moore’s Law (processing speed, transistor density, pixal concentration, memory capacity, etc…all doubling every two years), Iqbal knew that in the coming years mobile phones would become cheap, powerful and ubiquitous. If this was to be true, he reasoned, then why not begin the journey now to provide mobile phones to villagers in his home country of Bangladesh.

If twenty years ago having a cow or a goat was a form of currency in a Bangladesh village, then why couldn’t a cell phone be a cow? Iqbal took this argument to Grameen Bank, a micro-credit lender who could realize the potential, as well as Telenor telecommunications of Norway, who could help provide the infrastructure. Today GrameenPhone has nearly 40 million subscribers.

This base of the pyramid approach has vastly increased the productivity of the people of Bangladesh, increased their standard of living, spawned untold number of entrepreneurial ventures employing cell phones, and of course brought some wealth to Grameen Bank and Telenor.

As we learn from Iqbal Quadir, connectivity is productivity, and in the Creative Age it’s about connecting to creative and actionable ideas.

Money is a by product of contributing value and meaning

Posted by G. Shawn Hunter on Dec 2, 2011 in Change, Culture, Excellence, Innovation | 0 comments

As the legend goes, Peter Drucker was once asked by a business owner to review his financial statements and see if he could find better, more innovative, ways to make money from studying, and tweaking, his financials. To which Drucker replied, “You don’t make money, you make shoes. Work on making shoes. The money is just a by-product.”

The lesson reminded me of an interview I had with Yvon Chounaird, founder of Patagonia, who said in the interview, “Over the past forty years I have yet to encounter a business problem that cannot be solved by focusing on product excellence and product integrity.” Despite, and because of, the magnificent growth Patagonia has enjoyed over the years, Yvon and Patagonia found sustainability by consistently refocusing their attention on quality and excellence. The journey was not without various hurtles and faltering moments while those around him were distracted by financial growth alone. For the full story see this interview.

But my point is this: Everyone I talk to is talking about building meaning in their work – building meaning into their everyday life and endeavors, As Teresa Amabile reminds us, progress in meaningful work is what motivates and engages us. We’re preparing for an upcoming event with Benjamin Zander, renowned conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and I listened to him talk recently about the importance and value of contribution, as opposed to competition. They aren’t the same thing – competition is when you mentally compare, evaluate and attempt to trump. Contribution has no such relative marker. Contribution is when you try, when you show up and muster what you got – hopefully from a source of practice and competence – but nevertheless a real try.

Dispel your worries of competitive evaluation, and focus on your best, and give toward your best efforts with honest intention.