Getting the Results You Want
By Robyn Donahue
Business is in large part about setting and achieving goals and objectives, and ultimately delivering results. At IntelliSource it’s about delivering results for our customers and providing opportunities for our employees. As managers we are responsible not only for our own performance but the performance of others. What we sometime underestimate is the power of our assumptions regarding the goal, individuals integral to the team, group performance, economic conditions, have on the actual outcomes which are produced. Is how we think about the goal that important? In my experience, the answer is yes! Consider Nikki Nemerouf’s perspective and then take a step back and identify a result or work relationship that you’re not happy with and list the assumptions you have about the situation and the individuals associated.
Do the assumptions you have serve you well? If not, play around with changing your assumptions. For example, you can assume that the economy is bad and opportunities are limited, therefore the chance that your team will make its business objectives are limited. If you have that assumption, chances are great your team does as well. How excited will they be about their work if they feel from the start there’s no way to succeed. Consider, how powerful it could be if you change your assumptions… or at least challenge them to determine if they are based on fact, or your interpretation of facts. If how you approached the achievement of those same objectives leveraged the assumption that because of current economic conditions new opportunities were being created simultaneously with those that were disappearing, you could lead your team to creatively seek out, identify and leverage new opportunities that would enable your team to meet its objectives.
Consider Nikki’s perspective
Nikki Nemerouf:
Have you ever had the experience of looking forward to meeting a friend for lunch? You hold that person as very dear to you and as someone whom you always have a good time with. The behavior you engage in during your preparation for your get-together is spirited and uplifting. When you actually meet your facial expression is likely to convey a real delight and perhaps joy.
Then there are those people in our lives with whom the relationship is strained. When we know we “have” to interact with them our behavior and spirit both prior to the interaction and during maybe abrupt, terse, tense, controlled, and the result of the interaction are usually not productive nor inspiring.
What is the difference? Is it truly the other person or circumstance or is it a dynamic that mostly operates in our blindspot. A dynamic, that if unchecked, will drive us to enter conversations with a pre established mindset that focuses on validating itself.
This dynamic is called “An Assumption”. Assumptions are made up stories about the other person or circumstance that we take as real.
Leaders that “assume” that the meeting with the customer will be difficult usually discover that “they were absolutely right. Whereas those leaders who enter a conversation with a customer with the assumption that this will be a wonderful interchange are likely to experience the ease of building rapport and establishing a path forward.
With one particular team at Intellisource the participants were eager to unveil the underlying assumptions they had with a particular individual that led to an unworkable relationship. Through our inquiry we noticed that most of these underlying assumptions had a historical basis that was related to something or someone which preceeded the current relationship.
Having that insight revealed the participants were then able to begin creating new “stories” about the people they had previously struggled with.
Tune in next month to discover how well it is working. In the meantime I invite you to examine those relationships in your lives that are less than wonderful. What are the underlying assumptions that you have made up based upon previously difficult interactions. Are assumptions based upon facts? Or assumptions based upon your interpretation of those facts?
Consider the following incident that occurred for me on the plane ride home from my visit with Intellisource:
Something fascinating happened on the plane ride home regarding the power of assumptive thinking: I was sitting in the exit row between two wonderful people from Oaklahoma City. Directly in front of us was a mother with a two year old who seemed uncontrollable. Periodically he would let out an uncontrolled shrill that would literally pierce all of our ear drums.. We then would comment to one another about how disturbing it was, joke about how we had hoped he would fall asleep during the flight. After an hour of this non stop litiny of periodic shrilling, my seat partner suggest to me: “I believe this young child might have Turrets syndrome. When he said that all of a sudden it occurred to me that was a distinct possibility.
From that moment on not only did I stop obsessing about how disturbing this child was to the silence I had hoped for but when the shrills occurred it no longer effected our conversation. It was if the noise just blended into the background with all of the other noises on the plane. It was no longer distinct or worthy of comment.
Once I shifted my assumption about this little boy and his mother from being a disturbance to “struggling with a disease” I immediatly went from contempt to compassion within a nanosecond.
Leadership, Something to Think About, Uncategorized
