It might sound obvious that to improve people's performance we need to focus their thinking on solutions, rather than problems. Yet it’s surprising how little we do this in practice. Somehow people always prefer to go straight to the problems.
There's nothing inherently wrong with focusing on problems. The issue is that there is simply a more useful place to put our attention, which is onto solutions.
Focusing on problems leads us to the past. It leads us to try to change what can't be change. Focusing on problems leads to blame, excuses, and justifications. It's complicated, slow, and often drains our mental energy. Focusing on solutions, however, immediately creates energy in our mind. We open up ideas and possibilities. If we want people to come up with great ideas, to think well, to reach their potential as financial planners, we want them focused on solutions most of the time. This doesn't mean we don't address problems—far from it; it means we address them by analyzing the way forward, instead of their causes. Let me illustrate this with the following examples:
Why didn't you hit your targets? (Problem)
What do you need to do next time to hit your targets? (Solution)
Why did this happen? (Problem)
What do you want to achieve? (Solution)
Where did it all start to go wrong? (Problem)
What do you need to do to move this forward? (Solution)
Why do you think you're not good at this? (Problem)
How can you develop strength in this area? (Solution)
What's wrong with your team? (Problem)
What does your team need to do to succeed? (Solution)
Why did you do that? (Problem)
What do you want to do next? (Solution)
Who is responsible for this? (Problem)
Who can achieve this? (Solution)
Why isn’t this working? (Problem)
What do we need to do to make this work? (Solution)
You might notice the word “why" in many of the problem-focused questions, yet there's no use of that word around solutions. Being conscious of removing the word why" from our conversion can be a great way to remember to focus on solutions.
Looking at the examples above, even though there's only a slight difference in the wording of the questions, when you take a solutions focus, you end up having very different conversations than when you focus on the problem.
Research from the field of solutions-focused therapy is showing that focusing on solutions is a fast and effective way of addressing quite real problems. Take a look at this quote from The Solutions Focus: It is often easier to start something new than to stop something. Anything that is a habit, it is by definition difficult to stop. And, if change is encouraged by positive reinforcement, it is much easier to be aware of when you are taking the reinforceable action than to know when you are not doing whatever it is that you want to give up.”
Problems disappear into the background as solutions develop. This makes sense when you go back to the principle that our wirings drives our perceptions: the more we focus on the solutions, we see these solutions becoming real.
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Emotional Intelligence
Probably the most important competencies of a financial planner are those of emotional intelligence (EI). The model introduced by Daniel Goleman focuses on EI as a wide array of competencies and skills that drive leadership performance. Goleman's model outlines four main EI constructs:
1. Self-awareness — the ability to read one's emotions and recognize their impact on oneself.
2. Self-management — involves controlling one's emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.
3. Social awareness — the ability to sense, understand, and react to others' emotions while comprehending social networks.
4. Relationship management — the ability to inspire, influence, and develop others while managing conflict.
Goleman includes a set of emotional competencies within each construct of EI. Emotional competencies are not innate talents, but rather learned capabilities that must be worked on and developed to achieve outstanding performance. Goleman posits that individuals are born with a general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning emotional competencies.
1. Self-awareness — the ability to read one's emotions and recognize their impact on oneself.
2. Self-management — involves controlling one's emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.
3. Social awareness — the ability to sense, understand, and react to others' emotions while comprehending social networks.
4. Relationship management — the ability to inspire, influence, and develop others while managing conflict.
Goleman includes a set of emotional competencies within each construct of EI. Emotional competencies are not innate talents, but rather learned capabilities that must be worked on and developed to achieve outstanding performance. Goleman posits that individuals are born with a general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning emotional competencies.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Delayed Gratification
Imagine that you are a four-year-old nursery school student. Your teacher explains that you’ll be playing a new game today. She offers you a single tasty marshmallow that you can eat immediately. However, if don’t eat it right away, she will give you two marshmallows when she returns from an errand. What do you do? Do you take the sure thing and gobble the goodie in front of you? Or do you fight temptation, delay gratification, and reap the double pleasure of two marshmallows?
Most four-year-olds and virtually all younger children choose the immediate over the delayed reward and eat the single marshmallow within seconds of being left alone with it. Psychologist Walter Mischel conducted this simple study at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School.
So what? A big what! When they were interviewed years later, as eighteen-year-olds, the children who had delayed gratification had developed a range of superior emotional and social competencies compared with the children who had eaten the treat immediately. They were better able to deal with adversity and stress, and they were more self-confident, diligent and self-reliant. Mischel and his team also discovered the intellectual ability of children who controlled their impulses was markedly higher than those who did not. The third of the children who were able to control their impulses at age 4 scored 210 total points higher on verbal and math SAT scores than the impulsive four-year-olds! How big a difference is that? It is as large as the average difference between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is the larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families whose parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at age 4 is twice as a predictor of later of SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.
Most four-year-olds and virtually all younger children choose the immediate over the delayed reward and eat the single marshmallow within seconds of being left alone with it. Psychologist Walter Mischel conducted this simple study at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School.
So what? A big what! When they were interviewed years later, as eighteen-year-olds, the children who had delayed gratification had developed a range of superior emotional and social competencies compared with the children who had eaten the treat immediately. They were better able to deal with adversity and stress, and they were more self-confident, diligent and self-reliant. Mischel and his team also discovered the intellectual ability of children who controlled their impulses was markedly higher than those who did not. The third of the children who were able to control their impulses at age 4 scored 210 total points higher on verbal and math SAT scores than the impulsive four-year-olds! How big a difference is that? It is as large as the average difference between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is the larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families whose parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at age 4 is twice as a predictor of later of SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Change or Die
How difficult is it for people to change their normal way of life? Change to be a better husband or father, to be a better boss or employee, to be fitter or healthier person. No problem you may think. Think again…and again.
FAST magazine in May 2005 published an article titled ‘Change or Die’. This is what Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University has to say "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't." In other words, your chance of changing is nine to one against you, even if your life depends on it.
The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?
Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, California, provides some answers in his successful program. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed?
For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways. The patients lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. "Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they're going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating," Ornish says. "Who wants to live longer when you're in chronic emotional pain?"
So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.
Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. "Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid."
Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones.
For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "
Another vital factor is to give people the multifaceted support they need. That's a big reason why 90% of heart patients can't change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish's patients could -- because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.
Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people's behavior -- and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became "hardwired" early in life and couldn't change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong.
What lessons do we have here on changing ourselves? And also for managers on strategies to help their reps improve their performance. How do we reframe the issue of getting out of poverty into achieving a grander lifestyle by helping others. How do we perform radical, widespread changes rather pursue small, incremental changes in our behavior. And let’s not forget the support infrastructure that needs to be in place to ensure feedback and positive reinforcement to our efforts to improve.
FAST magazine in May 2005 published an article titled ‘Change or Die’. This is what Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University has to say "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't." In other words, your chance of changing is nine to one against you, even if your life depends on it.
The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?
Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, California, provides some answers in his successful program. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed?
For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways. The patients lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. "Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they're going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating," Ornish says. "Who wants to live longer when you're in chronic emotional pain?"
So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.
Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. "Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid."
Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones.
For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "
Another vital factor is to give people the multifaceted support they need. That's a big reason why 90% of heart patients can't change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish's patients could -- because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.
Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people's behavior -- and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became "hardwired" early in life and couldn't change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong.
What lessons do we have here on changing ourselves? And also for managers on strategies to help their reps improve their performance. How do we reframe the issue of getting out of poverty into achieving a grander lifestyle by helping others. How do we perform radical, widespread changes rather pursue small, incremental changes in our behavior. And let’s not forget the support infrastructure that needs to be in place to ensure feedback and positive reinforcement to our efforts to improve.
Commitment to Follow-Through
Even when a sales system is well-designed, it doesn’t guarantee successful implementation if the culture within the team is not performance-oriented. The analogy is joining a well-equipped fitness club to lose weight…if the commitment is weak, you would not persist and your objective will not be met.
On the other hand, if the commitment is strong, you would not only lose weight but you may be able to develop a nice physique due to the wide range of the equipments that allow you to develop your muscles. In a high performance sales team, the sales manager ensures that the sales team embraced and follow through on the sales system. The high adoption of the sales system a cause or an effect is immaterial…what is important is that high performance sales teams adopt sales system that work for them.
On the other hand, if the commitment is strong, you would not only lose weight but you may be able to develop a nice physique due to the wide range of the equipments that allow you to develop your muscles. In a high performance sales team, the sales manager ensures that the sales team embraced and follow through on the sales system. The high adoption of the sales system a cause or an effect is immaterial…what is important is that high performance sales teams adopt sales system that work for them.
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