I felt I was receiving a lecture.. and I was not convinced.
I had come in for a BP reading and a blood test. The clinician told me that I was overweight––which I was––and at risk of heart disease or diabetes––which I was probably was. She told me to cut out various foods, and to change my diet and exercise. All this is grounded in good medical research. But it did not motivate me to change.
Why not?
God bless her, this person was doing her best to help me. But my real barrier to being persuaded was that she gave me cognitive dissonance. This clinician did not model what she said. Quite apart from the crude Change or Die strategy, the problem was… well…she was clearly clinically obese and depressed.
What I am NOT saying…
Now, this is not a criticism of who she was as a person, but the person in the room did not match the message.
Nor am I saying a normal BMI should be mandatory of healthcare professionals. God knows, we need each and every one of them right now, and I’m thankful for them.
And I am not making a case about something as superficial as our physical appearance or weight. And I would not want to leave you thinking that I am that prejudiced against fat people! I myself was clinically obese for a number of years, as I was at that particular appointment…hence the lecture.
The Internal Journey
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My point here is that when any of us seeks to influence others to action, then the job needs to start with ourselves.
We can have the right information, good methodology, superior research, but we are unlikely to influence those around us if we do not walk the talk.
Every leader needs to be authentic in leading themselves into that better future first.
Usually, when I have been presenting to a room of leaders, they are all invested on knowing how to lead their teams, their organisation, or their community better.
First, though, there needs to be an internal journey. Every leader needs to be authentic in leading themselves into that better future first.
The issue is often the person we bring into the room.
Micro-tells
As adults, we have a highly-developed sense of discernment when engaging with other humans. What some call micro-tells, small pieces of evidence in the person before us, reveal whether they are a threat, or lying, or distressed. These micro-tells can be small eye movements, gestures, posture, as well as the pitch and tone of the voice.
When someone is trying to persuade us to change, to buy, to allow them to draw closer, they are communicating with us at a far deeper level than the content of what they say.
My worst moments
All my worst leadership moments were when I was over-stressed, hurried, depressed or angry. My most effective moments were when the future was the person I brought into the room in myself.
My most effective leadership moments were when the future was the person I brought into the room.
The uncomfortable truth for us is this: before we can lead others, we need to lead ourselves. Before we can expect our team to change, we must already be changing and show them in our own lives. Before the call, comes the example, the model in us.
Who is showing up?
It becomes vital, then, that we are self-aware enough to know whom we are bringing into the room. We need to become aware of the non-verbal messages we might be communicating. What is the best self we can bring to this engagement? And if we are too busy, stressed, driven or distressed, then maybe we need to postpone until we are ready.
I remember when I had a role in a large corporate, years ago. I described a particular director to a colleague as difficult. They were surprised.
“Really? I know he is a bit gruff, but he really means well. Catch him in the right moment and he will listen to you.”
And so it was. I realised when I had thought about it later that I had made a case against this man on the basis of little or no evidence. And it hampered my ability to relate to him, as well as influence him.
There are opportunities to influence people that we may have closed down unwittingly because, in our own estimation, we have written them off. We have limited our expectancy of them in our own minds. “Oh, they are hopeless,” we think and say.
And right there, we have created the real problem.
In effect, we have projected onto that person (and this applies to a group as well) a stereotype that they are impervious to persuasion. In the process, we disempower ourselves. We make ourselves their victim. Our attitude is as if we have a mental map with a sign that says, “Change attempts do not work here.”
What if we were doing this differently? If we think the best of people first, then we are likely to see potential in them that they don’t even see in themselves. This approach positions us to inspire them and to lead them. Often leadership is first about calling out the best in people.
We love leaders when they do that in us.
In stakeholder engagement, we discuss the stakeholder engagement strategy. Yet, the most basic strategy stands or falls by the hope we bring to it. If we don’t expect a lot of the people involved, then it is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, if we think the best of them, we set ourselves up for surprising success.
What could you do change your view of that person or group?
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to interview a couple of my clients from the British Antarctic Survey: Linda Capper, who is the Head of Communications, and Andy Jeffries, the Programme Manager for the new polar research vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough. I was honoured to be invited to the launch of the new boat last month in Birkenhead.
Following that launch, Linda and Andy agreed to be interviewed by me about this intriguing project. You can watch the full interview here:
Since recording this interview two things stand out for me:
This project is already very successful. At 30:35, Andy talks about how the project is not only successful but is one of the highest-rated in the UK Government’s top 200 major projects; and
A lot of what was said is contrary to common thinking, both about our planet and about how to manage substantial marine engineering projects like this one. In fact, Linda and Andy knock a lot of conventional wisdom on its head.
Let’s look at some of the conventional beliefs that Linda and Andy take issue with, in the course of this interview.
“Antarctica is so remote that it has nothing much to do with us.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. As Linda explained [04:00], through the work of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and polar research by other nations, it became clear that we are more connected with the continent of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean than many of us realise. Sir David Attenborough himself said at the launch, “What happens down there, affects us up here. And what we do here, affects what happens down there.”
Working with the National Environment Research Council (NERC) and BAS over the last four years, I am convinced that this kind of research is critical for our own and future generations on this planet.
“Reducing your fleet by half is downsizing.”
[05:33] Linda explained this difficult decision. Currently, BAS operates two vessels, with one planned for decommissioning next year. BAS could have replaced like for like, but ultimately the preferred solution, a larger more powerful ship, which allows experiments on board among other things, leads to better science.
As Andy later pointed out, a reduction in the operational budget of running two ships, means more resources for important science. And, after all, science is the mission of BAS, isn’t it?
Sometimes we can be so focused on a part of the organisation’s problems – in this case, resilience – that we can overlook a simpler, more powerful solution.
The decision still means trade-offs for some stakeholders that they were unhappy about at first. But now everyone is much more aligned with making the new vessel an outstanding success.
Sometimes we can be so focused on part of the problem that we can overlook simpler, more powerful solutions.
“You can only have one customer on a project.”
I’ve heard this statement made in project management training courses. When it comes to decision-making on a project, people say, “Anything with two heads is a monster.” This statement is true when it comes to making a decision and giving clear direction. But governance – the organisation of roles and decision-making – while it should adequately represent the customer, is not the customer. Andy [09:20] began by saying he had two major customers, and later Linda argued there were several others.
Linda [15:20] described the communications strategy. The project developed it with the aim that every customer needed to gain something from the communications. The customers, in her view, includes several government bodies as well as an ecosystem of private companies. This strategy helped her and others work through difficult issues for some stakeholders.
“You need a large core team for a £200 million project like this.”
Andy has a team of four [09:20]. Yes, four! He describes this team as spanning four decades – one person for each decade – which in itself is a strength for him. Team members are bound to see things from a different perspective.
It is the fashion to recruit and create generation-based cultures, particularly in the digital world, that claim better empathy with their own new breed of customer. Andy’s team does that as well as bring in the experience of different generations. The experience that comes with age has something to offer as well.
“It’s impossible to future-proof a vessel like this since the project is over several years; it will be obsolescent by the time it goes into service!”
and
“You can’t possibly consider an Agile approach to building such a huge ship.”
Andy explained [23:30] how they created a change budget so that obsolescence-on-delivery was less likely to happen. In fact, much of the thinking on this sizeable marine engineering project was more akin to Agile approaches than the traditional Specify-Design-Build (Waterfall) method we might expect from a substantial marine engineering project like this. As a result, much is impressive about the new vessel, where it has been able to take advantage of technologies that weren’t even in existence when the project began.
The change budget was their guard against obsolescence. I suggested it might be called an opportunity budget. With such rapid advances in technology, I’m sure these approaches will be needed by more and more projects, in all kinds of sectors.
“Expertise in the particular technical field of the project is everything when managing a project like this.”
When people recruit for a project manager in, for example, server systems projects, they are likely to look for a candidate with experience of server system projects; and when they recruit for a project in building construction, they look for managers who have had the experience of such projects. This practice seems to make sense. It is called domain experience. Employers place a high premium on recruiting project managers with domain experience.
And yet, Andy not only claims to have minimal previous ship-building experience [34:15] but argues that domain experience can be a disadvantage.
Maybe domain experience in leading and managing isn’t quite as important as some say it is.
“People need to talk about Benefits Management.”
Andy says, no they don’t. In fact, he argues [36:00] that this is management jargon and it gets in the way of thinking about the rationale for the project.
We do need to be careful with our language, particularly in areas we care about. It can marginalise people without our realising it.
“There is no way back from negative press that goes viral (i.e. when the British public wanted to call the vessel Boaty McBoatface)”
As you can probably tell by now, I’m a great fan of Linda Capper. In this segment of the interview [39:05], Linda talked me through the highs and lows of the initiative to put the naming of the boat to the public. Communications in the public domain can be a two-edged sword. Here, though, there was skilful use of the media that capitalised on an otherwise-embarrassing episode.
Calling out the gold in each other
Finally, I got Linda and Andy each to call the gold out in each other [52:40]. It’s interesting what each of my guests said about each other, but also how ready they were to do this.
We could do with more appreciative, honouring work environments like that, couldn’t we?
One of my projects right now is helping the opening of a new local school for 5 to 11-year-olds. Since the government likes the idea, much of this will be publicly-funded, which means we need to evidence demand for the school by getting parents to sign up before it opens.
So, I was with another volunteer, who is also a friend of mine, visit a manager of a pre-school nursery recently. We left leaflets and asked this manager to make parents aware of this new school.
I found the manager to be a helpful, experienced woman, who was willing but overwhelmed by all the demands and constraints placed upon her. I began to see before me not so much merely a gatekeeper, or manager, or even merely a channel to market.
Rather, I saw something of the real person. This woman clearly had a great passion for her kids. It kept her going
Burdened by bureaucracy, imposed by this same government, she nevertheless was willing to extend us the courtesy of her precious time in the middle of the day.
I was impressed.
My friend and I began to empathise, asking how we might help her. My friend also began to ‘call out the gold’ in her; that is, telling this woman what she recognised in her that was good and worthy.
If we get the chance, my friend and I will help her as best we can. We will, where possible, deposit something into our relationship with her.
The relational bank account technique is a simple and powerful way of building relationships.
This is the relational bank account in action. It’s a simple concept: never make a withdrawal from a relationship without depositing something in first.
We could have just tried to make a withdrawal without depositing anything into her account. We could have asked her to hand out our leaflets to parents, and then left her.
Instead, we came away committed to seeking ways to make that manager’s burden a little lighter, ways of helping her express her passion and vision for her children more possible. We did come away with a new friend and, I think, ally.
The relational bank account is a concept we explore more in EPE. You can download a paper about 10 ways of making such relational deposits here.:
In my book, Practical People Engagement, I use this illustration of the modes of engagement. Far too often, I find classical approaches to engagement and communications planning almost always overlook the power and versatility of the ubiquitous conversation. We, as human beings, have had all of human history and pre-history to hone the practice of language and executing language through a conversation.
But modes are not the same as levels. How deep do you go with a conversation, for example?
There are, of course, degrees of engagement as there are degrees of relationship we have with people. I do not have the same level of intimacy with my bank manager as I do with my wife (thankfully!).
So a pretty basic level is the transaction conversation. This is a conversation where the aim is to exchange information, or get agreement, or get a sale, for example. Often if can be successful without needing to share deeply with the other party.
And it is usually attempted in one conversation. As sales managers might put it: aim to close the sale in that conversation.
Now here’s the caution: this kind of transactional conversation can back-fire very quickly when we are dealing with people who already feel aggrieved about the change we are either making or even just proposing to make. This grievance may be legitimate, in our view, or not; it is still a felt hurt by them.
We can attempt too much in one conversation with people we are seeking to influence, and do more harm than good.
If we still think with the purely transactional mindset, it is all too easy to find ourselves doing this. We just want to process that person at the desk as quickly as possible. We want to end that interrupting call as soon as possible so we can get on with our day. We just want to clear that email out of our inbox. Urgency can work against us here.
A far better approach is the two-conversation strategy outlined in a recent HBR article by Sally Blount and Shana Carroll. The first conversation is seeking evidence from the other party, perhaps using active listening, discovering not just the facts, but the underlining emotions of that person or group, and making sure they know that they are being listened to carefully.
The second meeting should follow shortly after on the basis that you have thought carefully about meeting their concerns and objections. It’s in this second conversation that you set out your proposal and its merits.
By splitting the conversation in this way, you are honouring the other party. They are likely to think, “You hear me.” They are also more likely to be persuaded since you have given time and consideration to their concerns. Also, the pause possibly influences our thinking also, where we may identify those win-win solutions we did not first identify.
In my book, the first principle is taken from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Seek first to understand and then be understood.
The problem with transactional, broadcast communications is that it leaves no space to hear people, or to feel you are being heard.
The problem with transactional, broadcast communications is that it leaves no space to hear people, to dialogue, to understand them to any significant extent.
Now, you may be thinking in all this, This is all very well, but I just don’t have time for all of this engagement stuff!
Well, I have two responses to that:
In a change of any size and complexity, absolutely! You should not attempt to do all of this engagement by yourself. In my online coaching programme, Exploring People Engagement (see below) I will show you how you can scale up the engagement over a large and diverse group of interested parties.
Chronic urgency is so commonplace in our 21st Century workplace that it may be something closer to you and how you lead yourself. John Ortberg calls this phenomenon hurry sickness. Last year I published my second solo book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, and as with my first book, I’ve developed a companion online personal development programme for that too. If you would like to know more about that programme, please click here.
Allow me to challenge you. Meet with one more person, one-to-one in your work environment or project each day. That one-to-one can be physically or virtually.
Then comment on this post below and tell me how it is going.
This week I was sent a report containing Advice from the 30 TOP influencers in project management. If you are not involved in the project management profession, I can quite understand that this will not set your heart racing! However, it is interesting to see the patterns that emerge from these ‘TOP influencers.’
(Full disclosure: I was chosen as one of the 30. The authors asked me and the other 29 contributors to give our take on what was our top tip.)
Much of this so-called ‘top’ advice focuses on planning and re-planning. Important though planning is, it is nowhere near the top thing for me.
Many others get rather nearer the mark, in my opinion, and focus on stakeholder engagement and developing key relationships. See my own work on this.
However, I suggest – with apologies to JRR Tolkien – that there is one thing to rule them all:
developing your self-awareness.
Now, I recognise that to many people my choice might look pretty abstract and dull. Maybe even a little surprising. “Is that it??! Self-awareness. That feels very psychological and not very practical. What about the Time-Cost-Scope Triangle. What about the Critical Path?”
Thinking about your thinking – self-awareness – is the key to driving all other habits that bring success.
Let me explain. The research I did a few years ago with my colleague John Edmonds revealed that self-awareness was key to high performance: high performing programme and project managers all exhibited a high degree of self-awareness, of mental clarity about their own thought processes. They all think about their thinking. Self-awareness drives all the other behaviours that give the high-performer real traction in the complex world of project management: behaviours like building and protecting personal margins, leaning to action, and leaning to people. See this diagram:
So how do we all develop self-awareness in our work? I show you how in my new book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out. I have since come to believe that this kind of high-performance is not for the exalted few, any of us can develop the right habits to get exceptional results.
Question: How do you think about your thinking?
The Seven Keys eBook
The Seven Keys eBook
Revealing the Seven Key Areas that High Performers Pay Attention
As I was writing my last book Practical People Engagement, I came across Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human. I’m so glad I did. I find Daniel Pink is one of those communicators who does much of the heavy lifting for us across the social sciences, in particular in the fields of cognitive psychology. He communicates effortlessly whether speaking or writing.
In To Sell is Human he discusses a concept called the “Bank of Pitches”, standard short forms of a key message. For example, there is the Twitter Pitch (reducing your message to 140 characters or less) and the One-Word Pitch. In the video below, I discuss and illustrate the Question Pitch.
So often we are over-eager to get our argument across at the first meeting. We seem to bludgeon the other party with our proposition. That’s too fast and can backfire on us.
It’s far more honouring if we invite the other party to five their opinions first and it echoes the strategy of “dealing with the difficult”. I’ve seen it work quite powerfully.
Do you have an example of gaining people’s trust by asking them a question first? Leave a comment below.
One of the key chapters in my forthcoming book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, is on Identity, the whole matter of how we see ourselves, our make-up and how we come to be unique. I believe this is pivotal because out of our own self-identity comes so much of what we do and how we do it. My self-identity is the “me” I think I bring to the world, to be unique not least to my work.
The book is about how we can do our best work in this VUCA world. When it comes to moving towards our best performance there is a real paradox: our identity is not in our performance.
Being unique is not about what I do. Who I am is not what I do nor is it how well I do it. This is crucial. If we cannot separate the two we become addicted to our work, and our self-worth suffers if events don’t go so well. Another manifestation of this confusion is the high mortality among people within a year of their retirement. No job, no identity. No, health comes through knowing who we are independent of our work.
We must find a way of discovering our true identity apart from our performance.
We must find a way of knowing our true selves independent of our performance. We must find a value in ourselves that transcends what we do.
I have come to realise that for each of us our identity is in at least two parts: the general and the unique.
For example, regarding my own general identity, I am British. I am growing a deeper appreciation of this as I travel around the world. I am a post-war baby boomer, which has meant I’ve carried around some generational baggage, such as a scarcity mentality. (I was born during rationing, and it informed the value system I was raised in.)
Also, being a post-war Englishman meant I was vulnerable to a post-imperial mentality, where we seemed to live in the shadow of America, marginal to much of what we used to lead. I have, to a degree, grown out of both of these limitations. I now appreciate a positive, abundance frame of reference as being a more real and healthy one. Also, over the last eighteen months, I have been privileged to work with the outcomes of a new kind of Britain, with such clients as the British Antarctic Survey, with various British research bodies and universities producing truly excellent science and learning. In the UK, we seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring. All this, at a general level, informs the identity I bring to clients all over the world.
The British seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring.
For our unique identity, we need to look elsewhere. The title of this post is taken from a BBC TV series of the same name. In each episode a particular media personality is shown discovering their family roots and ancestral lineage. This can be a powerful means of understanding part of our unique identity. But that is by no means the sum of where our uniqueness comes from.
I’m pretty comfortable with that, but it’s real value to me is that it leads me to an awareness of aspects of my personality that I had hitherto taken for granted. More and more, I have the freedom to play to my strengths, rather than work on my weakness. Out of this comes true performance and fulfilment.
So, my conviction is that Solomon was right, Plato was right, Jesus was right.
Having a right understanding of who we are really, really matters.
What examples do you have of connecting with your unique self? What has helped you?
And how has a greater sense of your self-identity helped you?
One of the delegates on one of my recent Agile workshops, who came from the Health Sector, spoke of her finding one of the most techno-phobic clinicians.
So she decided to appoint him as her business ambassador. !
Initially, this seemed to me like asking Basil Fawlty to lead a customer care programme.
She said it was difficult at first, but this stakeholder was much more influential with his peers when he had been won over. Everybody could see the conversion.
I can imagine.
This Road to Damascus’ engagement strategy seems to be high risk one. And it is risky unless there are a number of things in place in the change leader and the sceptical customer: genuine affinity, honesty and trust. Often the objections in such a relationship can be much more openly and honestly expressed. At the same time, these objections are discussed with some mutual respect.
This can open the way for a breakthrough. This is far less the case, perhaps, where there is a stakeholder who feels they should or ought to be an advocate of this, but they don’t really believe in it or cannot afford the time to engage with the change. In such cases, the objection might not be surfaced early enough.
If we shorten the distance between us and them, an agreement becomes more likely.
As with my advice recently about dealing with the difficult, this is a case where the aim is for both parties to look together at the objections or difficulties together. The objections are not personalised.
If you can shorten the distance between you and the other person most obstacles can be overcome.
What have been your experiences of winning over sceptics? How is this done? Leave a comment at the bottom of this post.
Earlier this year I was running a Stakeholder Engagement Workshop in the Netherlands. Towards the end of the workshop, I began to reference one of the most popular, but contentious sections in my book Practical People Engagement about ‘Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders.’ One of the delegates suggested that if I label someone as ‘difficult’ immediately that label creates a barrier between me and them.
He is, of course, quite right. It is not positioning me to call out the gold in that person if I have already written them off as ‘difficult’ as part of their essential identity. It adds yet another barrier between us.
It would be more helpful and more accurate to regard the relationship as difficult, and so to work on the relationship. In fact, the strategy I set out in the book does recognise that. Ultimately, good negotiation in difficult contexts is about shortening the social distance between us and them. We aim to look at the problem that creates the difficulty from the perspective of being shoulder-to-shoulder with that person. If we can look at the issue together it paves the way to a probable agreement.
In a previous post, I wrote about calling out the gold in people. How exactly is perceiving someone as ‘difficult’ helping me to do that?
Well, it isn’t. By labelling people ‘difficult’, I may have created an eye-catching headline, but it is not necessarily honouring their true identity and so creates an unseen barrier for me in moving towards them.
So, thank you to my client. (You know who you are.)
If you would like a more detailed version of a checklist I have developed, please click the link below and I will be glad to send it to you.
Perhaps many of our stakeholder challenges are of our own making, more than we would like to think.
Note About Dealing with Difficult Relationships
What has worked for you in resolving difficult relationships? Leave your tips below in the comments section.
