“Mentors focus on the qualities of wisdom and judgment. By sharing what they have learned from experience, they provide perspective. They tell us the unspoken rules and point out the imaginary lines one should not cross. They help us explore the consequences of our decisions.” ~ Shirley Peddy, The Art of Mentoring: Lead, Follow and Get Out of the Way, Bullion Books, 2001

Maybe you find yourself stuck in a career rut or itching to broaden your skills and take on new challenges. Perhaps you’re eyeing a higher-level management role or other professional advancement. If you wait for senior managers to notice you and “bring you along,” you’ll be disappointed with the wait—assuming a promotion ever happens.

Effective mentoring is essential for leadership development. Done right, it’s one of the most powerful tools for gaining wisdom, reaping the rewards of job growth and achieving a strong competitive advantage in today’s job marketplace. Successful leaders mentor, coach and partner with their employees instead of practicing command-and-control management. Top organizations are more adaptive, innovative and smart about bringing out the best in their people. Employees are always learning, and managers are always teaching.

That said, it’s up to you to cultivate a beneficial mentoring relationship—and to pursue it with rigor and commitment. Don’t wait for an official mentoring program opportunity. Seek out someone with the kind of leadership wisdom you admire, and ask them questions. Explore with them a possible mentoring relationship, one that might be mutually interesting. Then request a trial mentoring period so you both can evaluate the benefits.

In my work with high potential people, almost all benefit from a relationship with someone more skilled and experienced in their organizations. A good mentor can save you time and energy by pointing you in the right direction.

What’s been your experience with mentoring? I’d love to hear from you.

In Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others (Wiley, 2012), consultants Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas present more than 200 significant questions, along with stories about how to use them.

Out of the 200 questions, it was hard to choose the best ones, but these are my favorites that really work.

• “How did you get started?”

Ask people how they got their first job or decided to go into a particular field. Background questions provide a better understanding of another’s frame of reference. Everyone has a story—and unless you ask, you’re missing key pieces of the human puzzle.

• “Is this the best you can do?”You’d be surprised at how many people actually appreciate it when you encourage them to do better. Instead of accepting their first efforts, give them an opportunity to improve. Don’t let them coast. Call attention to their strengths, and suggest that they’re capable of doing more. Don’t let mediocrity or convenience replace stretch goals.

Peter Drucker’s Five Magic Questions

Management guru Peter Drucker posed five questions to his corporate and organizational clients, which can be applied to your personal and professional life:

1. What is your mission?
2. Which are the most important relationships you want to invest in?
3. What are the essential priorities and goals of those closest to you?
4. What are your expectations of the people around you, and what do they expect of you?
5. What is your plan?

Use these and other power questions to add excitement and meaning to your conversations. You’ll be surprised at the stories that unfold, thereby deepening your relationships.

I really do think there’s magic in asking the right question at the right time. I’d love to hear about the questions you ask when you want to get to know and understand someone better. Please leave me a comment, either here or over on LinkedIn.

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In Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others (Wiley, 2012), consultants Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas present more than 200 significant questions, along with stories about how to use them.

Here are three power questions that, in my opinion, aren’t used often enough:

1. “What do you think?” These four words are key to initiating conversations. Many of us expend too much energy making sure our opinions are heard and understood. Few of us provide adequate care and attention to the others’ opinions.

Many people talk too much, and too few know how to listen effectively. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote in his diary, “The greatest compliment was paid to me today. Someone asked me what I thought and actually attended to my answer.”

Studies repeatedly demonstrate that we care most about people who listen to us. People crave appreciation, and they seek out those who will listen to them. There is nothing more potent than asking, “What do you think?”

2. “How will this further your mission and goals?”Human nature makes us hungry to achieve wealth, power and fame. This applies to both individuals and organizations. We become engrossed in the day-to-day challenges associated with winning at all costs, but this doesn’t necessarily nurture our hearts and souls.Before you invest time and energy in pursuing the wrong goals, ask yourself, “Is this consistent with my values and beliefs?” Focus on what’s really important in your life.

3. Ask fundamental questions: “What do you mean?” Ask people for specifics when they use clichéd terms: “What do you mean by ‘more innovation’—or, better teamwork?” or “What would this look like to you?” Ask people to describe, in specific detail, what they’d like to see happen.

Instead of assuming there’s a shared meaning, ask for clarification. You’ll be surprised at how people answer. By asking fundamental questions, you take the conversation to a deeper level. You engage people and make them think. Instead of imposing your views, encourage others to examine their assumptions.

What are some of your favorite power questions, ones that really open up the conversation to a more meaningful level? I’d love to hear from you; leave a comment.

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One popular belief holds that we win friends and new business by being clever and quick on our feet, and that our brilliance—saying just the right thing—is what attracts others. But knowing the right question to ask is actually far more valuable than having a ready answer.

Power questions – the kind that make you think and opens up the conversation – can help you:

• Open your mind and fuel conversations
• Reframe and redefine a problem
• Challenge underlying assumptions
• Force us to examine new perspectives
• Innovate for the future
• Forge important relationships
• Gather information
• Focus us on what’s most important

Transformational teachers like Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha were masters at using powerful questions as teaching tools, forever changing the lives of their disciples. Albert Einstein and Peter Drucker were 20th-century intellectuals who were known for asking provocative questions.

In Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others (Wiley, 2012), consultants Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas present more than 200 significant questions, along with stories about how to use them.

“The questions we select have the power to give life to conversations in unexpected and delightful ways,” they write. “They are powerful tools to get directly to the heart of the matter. They are the keys to opening locked doors.”

Here’s an example of a powerful question that can help you improve relationships, manage priorities and enjoy greater influence.

“What would you like to know about…?”

When people ask you to describe your company, job or services, clarify their intent before you start talking. What are they interested in learning? Don’t assume you know. There’s nothing worse than giving a five-minute answer to the wrong question. If time is tight, make sure your answer is brief and on target (i.e., “What part of my background interests you?” or “What would you like me to focus on?”). After you respond, ask if you’ve answered the question and if there’s anything else they want you to cover.

The next time you’re asked about your company, or your job, be sure to clarify and ask a few questions yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Working with an executive coach can raise your level of awareness about your own thinking. For example, it can be helpful to dissect some previous decisions and look at how they could have been improved.

Organizations can avoid decision errors by requiring leaders and managers to use checklists, while fostering a culture where people watch out for one another. Team members should be taught to guard against biases and develop a sophisticated awareness of decision-making obstacles.

Every organization is essentially a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. It must therefore work to ensure the quality of its “products” at every developmental stage, to include:

• Framing of the problem to be solved
• Collection of relevant information
• Consideration of alternative points of view
• Reflection, forecasting and pre-mortem reviews

Setting up decision processes and ensuring quality control are alternatives to conducting a postmortem review in the wake of a disaster. We truly need a better vocabulary for decision-making processes. As Kahneman writes:

Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism. Much like medicine, the identification of judgment errors is a diagnostic task, which requires a precise vocabulary. …Similarly [to diagnostic labels for diseases], labels such as “anchoring effects,” “narrow framing,” or “excessive coherence” bring together in memory everything we know about a bias, its causes, its effects, and what can be done about it.

Leaders will make better choices when they trust the decision-making process and their critics to be informed and fair, and when their decision is judged by how it was made—not only by how it turned out.

What about you in your company? How do you approach important decisions? Do you have a trusted mentor or coach who can help you broaden your perspective? Maybe we should talk?

(Image: Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net)

If you haven’t read this great book on leadership decision making, I suggest you do: Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011):

My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely.

Kahneman simplifies the mind’s decision-making process by dividing it into Systems 1 and 2.

System 1 is fast, routinely guiding our thoughts and actions—and it’s generally on the mark. Our associative memory maintains a richly detailed model of our world, as well as a vast repertoire of skills acquired over a lifetime of practice. This allows us to produce remarkable solutions to everyday challenges.

System 2 is slow. It represents our rational self (who we think we are). It articulates judgments and makes choices, but it often endorses or rationalizes ideas and feelings generated by System 1.

But System 2 isn’t merely an apologist for System 1; it also prevents many foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses from becoming overt expressions. System 2 is not always rational, and we don’t always think straight. We often make mistakes because we don’t know any better.

System 1 simultaneously generates answers to related questions, and may substitute a response that more easily comes to mind for the one that was requested. By using heuristics, it quickly provides probable answers that are often correct—but sometimes they are quite wrong.

There is no way for System 2 to know if a System 1 answer is a skilled or heuristic response without slowing down and attempting to construct an answer on its own. But this is a slow and arduous thinking process, which the brain resists.

And so, we are prone to thinking errors. System 1 is not readily educable. The only recourse is to recognize you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down and ask for System 2 reinforcement.

No warning bell rings. “The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition, and questioning your intuitions is unpleasant when you face the stress of a big decision,” according to Kahneman. “More doubt is the last thing you want when you are in trouble.”

It’s usually easier to spot a minefield when you see others wander into it. This is why smart leaders work with senior leadership teams and executive coaches [link]. Observers are less cognitively mired and more open to information than those who are intensely involved.

The Heath brothers are professors who have several bestsellers including Switch and Made to Stick. Their new book is full of good stories and research.

There are plenty of examples of faulty thinking and decision biases. Each of us can learn to recognize the kinds of flawed thinking that contribute to decision errors:

• Confirmation bias—a tendency to favor information that confirms our existing beliefs
• The status-quo trap—an irrational preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline serves as a reference point, and any deviation is perceived as a loss.
• Loss aversion—a tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains. Some studies suggest losses are psychologically twice as powerful as gains.
• Sunk-costs fallacy—when people make decisions about a current situation based on what they have already invested
• Planning fallacy—Estimating and forecasting errors occur when an optimism bias influences decisions and forecasts in policy, planning and management. Leaders tend to underestimate costs and overestimate completion times.

Awareness of biases is necessary, but it won’t necessarily prevent problems. It’s hard to correct for errors with only simple awareness. Most of us over-rely on data to support our decisions, without realizing that we unconsciously select facts and figures that confirm our preexisting ideas and opinions. This is a key discussion in sessions with many of my executive coaching clients.

One of the most popular decision-making processes is the pros-and-cons list, which requires us to weigh opposing points of views. It makes sense, and it’s easy to use. But over the last 40 years, psychology researchers have identified thinking biases that doom this decision-making model. There are more productive processes for making good decisions.

The WRAP Process

Chip and Dan Heath propose the “WRAP Process” in Decisive:

1. W = Widen Your Options: When confronted with a decision, we have a tendency to define it within a narrow frame. Should we do this…or not? This way…or that way? Instead, we should substitute “and” for “or.” Narrow framing creates missed options and opportunities.
2. R = Reality-Test Your Assumptions: When analyzing options, you gather information (both pro and con). But it’s hard to escape confirmation biases that unconsciously draw you to selecting self-serving information.
3. A = Attain Distance before Deciding: You probably pride yourself on your ability to sift through data and be decisive, but no one is immune from emotional influences. Feelings can drive you to make wrong decisions unless you gain some distance.
4. P = Prepare to Be Wrong: Once we make a decision, we look for confirming evidence that we’re right. Most of us are overconfident about how the future will unfold. But no one is immune from forecasting errors and the planning fallacy. We can help ensure success by preparing to be wrong.

You’ll have to read the book to understand the depth of each of the steps, and I recommend you do so. What process do you use when faced with an important decision? I’d love to hear from you.

(Image Freedigitalphotos.net)

The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. ~ Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize laureate in economics

We are quick to pass judgment and make snap decisions. The smarter and more educated we are, the more overconfident we are about our conclusions.

But let’s stop and think about it for a minute. Humanity doesn’t have a good track record for decision-making. Corporations are even more notorious for failed business decisions on product launches, mergers and acquisitions.

Clearly, our brains are flawed when it comes to making sound choices. We are easily biased, prone to influence from emotions and at times irrational without conscious awareness.

And yet, we don’t often see our own reality. Or we see it only from our limited perspective. I talk about this “view from inside our heads” with my executive coaching clients. Just about everybody I know struggles with decision making.

Researchers have long studied failed business decisions to identify common stumbling blocks. Given that we’re more irrational than we’d like to believe, how can we improve the quality of our leadership decisions?

Decisions: Based on Analysis or Process?

Leaders often carefully analyze numbers to make important decisions:

• Should we launch a new product or service?
• Should we change our organizational structure?
• Should we expand to a new country?
• Should we acquire another firm?

They also consider intuitive decision processes:

• Discussion of uncertainties
• Inclusion of contrary perspectives
• Interviewing a range of people with other ideas
• Exploration of alternative ideas

Business professor Dan Lovallo and consultant Olivier Sibony tracked more than 2,200 business decisions over five years to determine how they were made: analysis or process (“The Case for Behavioral Strategy,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010).

After examining outcomes (revenues, profits and market share), they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.”

“Superb analysis is useless,” they concluded, “unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”

Yet, many business leaders are skeptical about the value of a decision process over hard-number analyses. The research is nonetheless clear: A better decision process substantially improves results and associated financial returns.

I’m curious. What has been your experience in your company with the decision making process? I’d love to hear from you.

(Image by Stuart Miles, Freedigitalphotos.net)

One key to forming a new habit is to create a strong link between a specific situation and a new action. Once this connection has been practiced repeatedly over time, you’ll have a new habit. This means you’ll need to list many “if/then” scenarios. For example:

• If I eat at a restaurant, then I’ll order low-fat options.
• If I’m served a big portion, I’ll consume only half.
• If I’m bored, I’ll go for a walk or be physically active instead of eating.
• If I haven’t worked-out on a particular day, I will do at least a few sit-ups or push-ups.

For each situation, plan to respond in a way that meets your intended behavioral change. If you fail to plan for the “if,” your brain will likely respond in its habitual way. Be sure to have a “then” strategy for each “if.”

Conquering the Habit Loop

Your brain can’t tell the difference between good and bad habits. Even after you’ve conquered a bad habit, its old allure lurks in the back of your mind. One cigarette can reignite a smoking habit after years of abstinence.

This is why it’s so hard to create new routines. Unless you deliberately fight an old habit by substituting a new routine, the pattern will unfold automatically. When you learn how the habit loop works, you’ll find it easier to take control of your behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny. They can be ignored, changed or replaced. When we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower old drives and behaviors (thereby taking control of the habit loop), we can force bad habits into the background.

Changing your routines and habits isn’t easy, but it’s certainly possible. If you’re struggling with behavioral changes, consider hiring an experienced coach to help you clarify, plan and change your habits.

What’s been your experience changing a habit? I’d love to hear from you.

(Image by Stuart Miles, Freedigitalphotos.net)

In a recent book, Making Habits, Breaking Habits (Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2013), author Jeremy Dean offers six suggestions for changing a habit:

1. Become more aware. Be acutely mindful of the habit’s cues and your unconscious reactions to situations. Increase your consciousness by tracking your progress.
2. Visualize small, concrete steps. Make plans to respond to cues differently.
3. Tolerate feelings of discomfort. Delay gratification. Sit with negative feelings, and wait for them to pass. Do something different. Be patient and forgiving.
4. Get support. Make bets with a friend. Make behavioral change fun, and enjoy the ride. Hire a coach to guide you.
5. Subscribe to realistic optimism. Believe you can change, yet expect hiccups. Focus on progress, not perfection.
6. Persevere. Keep on keeping on. Every small step is progress. Believe in your success long enough and it will happen. Never give up.

Try the WOOP Exercise

Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen describes the “WOOP” exercise in a 2012 European Review of Social Psychology article:

• W = Wish. Write down the habit you wish to change.
• O = Outcome. List the best outcome you’ll likely achieve from your new habit.
• O = Obstacle(s). What stumbling blocks will you encounter?
• P = Plan. Make a specific plan that includes cues and responses.

Make Your Goals SMART

A classic formula for setting goals is to use the S.M.A.R.T. acronym. Set goals to meet the following five criteria:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-sensitive

It doesn’t matter which plan you use, but people are more successful when they use a plan with concrete steps. The other key to habit change success is to build in social support, such as a coach or friend who can help you track progress and cheer you on.

In the work I do with my clients, they are often surprised how much easier it is with a coach. Give me a call and let’s talk! 704-827-4474.

(Image: Freedigitalphotos.net by arturo84.)