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"What did you say?" 3 steps to better listening.

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In the early days of my marriage I quickly learned how easy it is to mis-communicate with someone!
If you find yourself not understanding someone, have you asked them to explain? Did you listen when they spoke? Are you sure you heard them? Are you sure you understood?
3 steps to better listening:
  1. Focus your attention on the other person and ask for the explanation.
  2. Repeat back to them what they just said and ask “Is that right?”
  3. Ask “Is there anything else?”
  1. Focus your attention on the other person and ask for the explanation.
    The world is filled with all sorts of distractions – from TV to a ringing telephone to text messages and emails. Shut them out.
    Stephen Covey said it well:“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”
Let’s take a scenario where a prospective client has asked for your services, but before you work out exactly what they need, he tells you that you need to submit a price for the work. How can you accurately price the work before knowing the scope? Why would he ask for something so dumb?
“Can you explain why you need cost of the proposal before we completely define the project plan?”
“Before I can get funding for a project, I need to fill out a project justification form and take it to management. They need the cost of the project to determine if there’s enough budget to go around to fund it.”
  1. Repeat back to them what they just said and ask “Is that right?”
    This may seem awkward, and it is hard to do something that feels unnatural, but it’s important.
    It still surprises me how often my wife says: “No. That’s not what I said.”
    Repeating back accomplishes two important items:
    a) It assures you that you really did understand what they said
    b) It assures them that you really did understand what they said
“So you’re saying that you need the price now because your management needs to review the cost against available budget before approving the project. Is that right?”
“Yes”
  1. Ask “Is there anything else?”
    This lets the other person know that you are making it a priority to hear them – really hear them.
“Great. Thank you for explaining that. Is there anything else you need from me to complete your project request?”
“No. I can get it done once you give me the price.”
At this point you can ask more about the process – including whether there’s a change order process, or if the first price you provide needs to be fixed, or if you can revise your price after getting budget approval.
Give it a shot. While the initial discussions may go more slowly than you’d like, I think you’ll be be surprised at how rarely you’ll need to go back to “clarify” what someone said.

You’ll also improve your relationships. Better relationships lead to more business over the long haul.

Listening well is an important part of raising your game.

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Define *your* achievable strategy in the next 15 minutes

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Out of the blue the phone rings, and a person I’ve never met starts to tell me about a great opportunity.

You see, there’s this conference coming up where strategic business leaders from Latin America will be available to meet personally with companies like ours, and there are just a few choice invitations still open. 

As he’s detailing all the reasons I should jump at this opportunity,  I begin to think: “We are planning a big North American launch in 2011, and have aggressive growth ahead to achieve those goals.  I guess we could work toward launching our tools in Latin America.   The business leaders in question are the target market for our solution.  Maybe we should do this.”

What just happened here?  Five minutes into a cold call from a sales guy and I’m starting to question our vision and strategy.

How do you come up with your strategy?  You probably already have an idea in mind, it’s just covered up by the mountain of careless thoughts and distracting emails in your inbox.  It’s not rocket science.  The key is to understand where you want to go. 

In the next 15 minutes you can S-L-O-W down and think.  If you work through this exercise you can have an achievable strategy which will form the guidelines of your operations for the next 36 months.

Picture yourself 36 Months from today.  Look at a calendar.  What is the date?

As you look back over those last three years, what will you have accomplished?

  1. Which personal relationship(s) did you grow?
  2. How did those relationships help you “lift the lid” that was holding you back? 
  3. Which customers did you land? 
  4. Which customers did you let go?
  5. What new product or service offerings did you create?
  6. How did you turn the corner to increase gross sales and net profits?
  7. What decisions did you make about new products or services to help you reach those clients?
  8. What new habits did you develop which were pivotal in achievement of these new dreams?

It’s key to re-establish your dream and see yourself achieving it.  Then you need to put it in writing.

Moreover, once you see yourself in that place, you can clearly evaluate every decision that you make today, and tomorrow to see whether the outcome of that decision moves you toward or away from your vision.

Now that you know what you are planning to do, the next question is when will it be done?  For each of those goals, think about what it will take to actually do it, and set a date for each one. 

When you have clarity about what you will accomplish, the things that distract you from the goal can be set aside and you can focus on what works.  You can stop doing what you did yesterday which was comfortable but didn’t get you to what you want.

We decided to pass on the Latin America opportunity.  It didn’t fit in the vision we were already achieving.

What are you going to do this year?  Post your thoughts below!

Setting and achieving your vision is a part of Raising Your Game.

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Radar O'Reilly project management techniques

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I know I’m dating myself when I say that I’m reminded of M*A*S*H’s Radar O’Reilly when I think about horse trading to get what you want.  Radar was the 4077th MASH company clerk and over time mastered the art of horse trading.  In one show he ended up trading a barbecue for a much needed incubator.

This was an entertaining episode, but what does that have to do with business success?  I remember learning from watching a master IT project manager as she worked her magic to get her project done.

I was working for a Fortune 500 company in the IT department.  There was a significant business transformation project going on and the implementation involved at least a dozen groups within the IT department.

Jean was the project manager, and she had called a project status meeting in a huge conference room filled with IT team leaders.

Jean (Project Manager): “In order to hit the date on the schedule, we need the server set up by the 15th.  Server OPS team – can you hit that date?”

Server OPS team: “We can’t do that.”
Jean: “Why?  What do you need?”
Server OPS team: “We don’t know how many U’s of rack space are needed, or what power configuration you need.”
Jean: “Server engineering team – can you give that to the OPS team?”
Server Engineering team: “Well, we could, but the guy on my team who can do it is tied up on project Mongoose”
Jean: “I know the PM for Mongoose.  Let me see if I can get him freed up.”

And so it went.  She masterfully worked her way around the table, clearing issues one person at a time, horsetrading her way to project success.

What did she do?

  1. She asked specifically for what she needed
  2. When she hit a roadblock, she asked “What do you need?”
  3. She worked to get that team what they needed so they would be free.

1. She asked specifically for what she needed.
This implies that she *knew* what she she needed, and by when.  She had the right people around the table.  Her plan was well thought out and included the right level of detail.  She was equipped to know, and was bold enough to ask directly and ask for a specific commitment from the team doing the delivery.

2. When she hit a roadblock, she asked “What do you need?”
Note that she didn’t complain.  She didn’t talk about her needs or what would go badly for her if they didn’t cooperate with her plan.  She didn’t threaten them with escalating to their management.

She simply and clearly asked what it would take to clear the roadblock.

She asked specifically how she could satisfy them.

Incidentally, this is an excellent skill to develop in all of your relationships – ask what the other party needs and work to help them get exactly that.

3. She worked to get that team what they needed so they would be free.
Jean was pretty transparent about “giving you what you want so I can get what I want.”   She used her relationship skills, communication skills, and leadership skills.  She went directly to the person with the authority to satisfy the dependency.

When they raised an objection, she did it all over again – all the way around the room until she reached the end of the chain.

The details of this technique are outlined in a readable and entertaining way in the “business novel” Critical Chain by Goldratt.

In all the years since then I have rarely seen a project executed as elegantly or efficiently as that one.

Negotiating well is a key part of Raising Your Game.

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Am I coachable?

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What does it meant to be coachable?

It’s not a reflection of intelligence, capacity, or talent.  Brilliant players frequently run into difficulty because they are not open to being coached.

According to Ruben Guzman, there are four stages of coachability.

  1. Not Coachable
  2. Selectively Coachable
  3. Reluctantly Coachable
  4. Completely Coachable

1. Not Coachable:

Someone who is not coachable is not interested in listening to a coach. 

When I think of “not coachable” I think of Winston Churchill who was quoted as saying  “I am always ready to learn although I am not always ready to be taught”

No one would question that Churchill had an amazing grasp of the English language and a compelling way of influencing people through seemingly impossible situations.  Yet with all of his talent and capacity he was unwilling to listen to others, unless it was his idea.

If you’re not coachable, hiring a coach would be like teaching a pig to sing.

 
2. Selectively Coachable

If you’re “Selectively Coachable,” you will listen to the coach when the coach agrees with you.

When I think about someone being selectively coachable, I think of  Randy Moss or  Terrell Owens 

Even if you’re not a big sports fan, you have probably heard of these phenomenally talented players who seem to run into trouble over and over again.  You might think they are “not coachable” but they must be coachable at some level.  There’s no way they would have made it to the NFL, and to that level of success without some willingness to be coached. If you’re “Selectively Coachable” I would suggest you wait before looking for a coach.  (Randy Moss has played for 3 teams so far during the 2010 NFL season.)

  3. Reluctantly Coachable

Someone who is “Reluctantly Coachable” is willing to listen to a coach, and do what the coach says even when he or she disagrees with what the coach has to say.  This person is uncertain of the wisdom of the coaches’ recommendations but is willing to follow their guidance.  To the extent that they trust the coach, they begin to see improvement. 

4. Completely Coachable

Someone who is completely coachable entrusts their success to the wisdom of the coach.  This is rare, but it can be seen in the lives of Olympic Champions. It is the foundation of transformational achievement and opens the doorway to possibilities which were previously unimagined.

 The question you have to ask yourself is “Where am I today in the levels of coachability?”

Even if you’re a 2 today, but are committed to moving to a 3, I’d think seriously about starting a coaching relationship. If you’re a 3 today and want to move to a 4, what are you waiting for? Give me a call for a free initial coaching session!
240–668-4799 
tom@brighthillgroup.com
 

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Is your project a "death march?"

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The big important project you’re on is tough and it solves a critical business problem.  How do you know when it has become a “Death March”?

Read on to see a list of criteria to help you evaluate your project, but first let me tell you the story of project “Maverick.”

I was a part of a big organization with lots and lots of users.  Our ID provisioning process simply could not scale to meet our growing user base, and we were unable to grant and revoke access.  The toolset we had chosen to solve this problem was promising – it could scale to an appropriate level and was buzzword-compliant with our incumbent tools.

Unfortunately we could not build a test environment with a big enough workload to fully vet the toolkit.  The only way to know whether it would work was after a big bang implementation.  Using hindsight it seems obvious that this was risky with a capital R.

When I joined the team the project had been going on for about three years.  Each time there was a setback the project leadership earnestly believed it was simply another hurdle to be overcome.  Over time the small new investments grew to the point where quitting would have meant greater and greater losses, both financial and political.  No one wants their project to fail – especially after they’ve gone to the well over and over again to ask for more money.

We were fortunate that after launch the initial damage was limited to about 700 user groups which were emptied – denying acces to hundreds of users.  This cost us a ton of unbudgeted overtime costs to manually clean up the mess after we backed out the new system from production.

Eventually we concluded that the project was not merely difficult but actually was not going to succeed no matter what we did.  Now what?

We had to find a way to:
a) Solve the business problem that the project was intended to address, and
b) Allow the project to gracefully shut down without the leadership losing face.

a) Solving the business problem:

  1. New team capability – Over the course of the project we had grown our internal development teams (needed for enterprise system integration).
  2. Reuse of tools we already owned – We looked around at other enterprise-approved technologies that could attack parts of the problem so we could avoid the “big bang” aspect.  It also allowed us to “fail fast, fail cheap” by developing some prototypes before the big project was officially dead.  Quick successes in that area helped our credibility when we started to talk about letting Maverick die.
  3. New tools – We had acquired another toolkit which could act as an important front end of the alternative to Maverick.
b) Graceful shutdown:
Frankly this was far more difficult to address than the technology concerns. People issues are always more challenging than technology.  We had invested millions in the toolkit license and multiple more millions in labor costs for implementation.  
Our vendor had done the same, and we had a strategic relationship with them.  We could not just cut ties.  We had to work out a plan where we could “sell” the internal leadership on the alternative and find a way for the vendor to pull back as well.  Eventually we agreed to trade the license dollars we paid for another product from the same vendor and we’d both just eat our respective losses.  Painful!
Let’s look at the some of the indicators that your project is a Death March:
  1. Big bang – In all my years I have never seen an effective launch replacing an incumbent system where the new system required a big bang implementation.  If this is a key component of your plan – this should be a red flag, and a big one.
  2. Very complex system architecture – the solution covered a number of different areas, with little margin for failure – a crash in one subsystem would flow to many other systems.
  3. Huge initial implementation cost – It’s true that you get what you pay for, but since we would not see any results until after the new system was in place, this was a risk factor.
  4. Successive failures requiring significant unscheduled investment – none of these seemed big enough to justify killing Maverick, but the sum of the accumulated costs made the decision clear.
  5. Timeline extensions due to scope changes and failures.
  6. Multiple changes in project leadership – the factors above contributed to turnover in project leadership.
  7. Lack of faith in the solution.  The team no longer believed it would work, so why go the extra mile for something doomed to failure?
If your project has more than three of these, it’s probably time to start planning the funeral.  For more indicators, you may want to check out this e-book “Is your product launch doomed?” 

Knowing when to walk away is a key part of Raising Your Game.

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Why hire a coach?

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You’re the leader of a successful emerging business.  Your sales are strong.  You’ve got a solid team.  You’re profitable.  Why do you need a coach?

The fact is, if what you want is more of what you’re already getting from your team, then you probably don’t want to hire a coach.  If you’re satisfied with your marketing, sales, teamwork, leadership, vision, communication and methods of “keeping score” then you won’t benefit from the work you need to do to be coached.

You’re probably amazing in your area of expertise.  Entrepreneurs with successful companies usually are.   One thing to consider is that all the time you invested in becoming amazing in your field is time you didn’t spend focusing on all of the aspects of growing a healthy business.

What that means is that while your business has grown, it’s got some parts that run like a Swiss watch, and other parts that run like a Yugo.  What’s worse is that we all see the things that we want to see, and have blind spots when we are outside our comfort zone.

A coach won’t claim to be better than you are in your field.  There’s little chance of that.  You’ve proven your expertise.  What a coach will do is see what you don’t see.  Tiger Woods has a swing coach because the swing coach is able to come alongside him and help him in his blind spots.

I hope that you are thrilled with your corporate and team performance and your work-life balance.  In the event that you’re not, consider hiring a coach who can help.

Contact Me

BrightHill Group
240-668-4799

PO Box 1561
Harrisburg NC 28075

info@BrightHillGroup.com