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Have You Been Told “It’s not personal. It’s business.” ?

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When I was married the first time, my mother-in-law didn’t like me or want to get to know me.  When we were alone in a room, she didn’t look at me or speak to me.  It bothered me a lot until I realized it wasn’t about me.

It was not about me

Her reaction was not personally directed at me, not in the least.  She would have reacted that way to any woman who married her son.

It’s the same in business

In business we say “it’s not personal; it’s business” and we mean it.  We mean that if anyone had suggested that same (weak) plan, had given that same (sloppy) presentation, had hogged the floor during the meeting, they would have gotten the same bad reaction from the boss or the client.  You might not think your plan was weak or your presentation sloppy, but if it was, you got a reaction from the boss  or the client that was not personal, not in the least.  It was business.

Does that help?  Does it help to know it wasn’t about you?  Please click “comment” and let me know.

How To Turn Your “Oh Crap!” Into The Beginnings of Success in 1 Step

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Studies are proving how important optimism is to mental health.  Optimism is absolutely essential in increasing your resilience.

What is optimism?

Optimism is this:  the skill of believing that, unless every piece of hard evidence is pointing the opposite way, the current situation is as likely to turn out well as not, and even if it doesn’t turn out well, it can still benefit you, will still bring all kinds of insights and lessons with it, if you’re calm and eager enough to look for them.  The “calm and eager” comes from optimism.

You Can Solve This

When we don’t know how to respond or solve something, and we feel our mood start to slide down the side of a cliff of “Oh crap!  This is gonna fail.  I don’t know how to do this”, a crucial mental step is to edit “I don’t know” into “I don’t know YET”.

Then  – and this is the step you cannot do without – give yourself over to curiosity.  As I’ve said to clients many times, “hundreds of thousands of people before you have solved this.  You’re a people.  You can solve this.  You just haven’t solved it YET.”

Do you agree that Optimism is a key to mental health?  When was the last situation when you could have used “I just haven’t solved it YET” ?  Please comment – we want to hear from you!

My Plan Failed But It Was Still a Good Plan

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During a warm spell in February 2014, I took a break from work and went out to transplant a rose bush that was about to die in its old location.  I had selected the location carefully:  enough sun but not too hot and dry, good soil, all the right things.  I had thought through the plan and the location.  It was a good plan and it should have worked.  But it didn’t.

My well-planned work failed.

I felt no guilt that my plan didn’t work.  I felt a little tired from the care I’d taken, but it didn’t bother me one bit that the plan didn’t work.

But it was still a good plan.

Just because the plan didn’t work doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good plan.

The test of a plan’s goodness is not whether it works.  It’s whether you thought it all the way through, seeing the the hard parts, the possible problems, the consequences, and the barriers and pre-planning answers to them all.

What do you think when a plan fails?  Do you still believe it was a good plan

Do This If You Want Your Boss To Have Your Back

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Do you want the support of your boss?  Want him or her to have your back?  We all want that, don’t we?

Rick the Boss used to tell me, “I don’t care if you take risks as long as your paperwork’s done.”  He meant that as long as my timesheets and expense reports were in and approved (which meant that rules had been obeyed and minimum billed hours met), as long as I was clear on which critical rules to follow and was following them, I was free to take big risks.

Support for Big Scary Risks

As long as I wasn’t asking him to excuse me or cover for me on the fundamentals he expected me to respect, he was saying he’d have my back and support me on the scary-big sales opportunities I was good at.  As long as my paperwork was done.

It’s A Transaction

I came to understand that it wasn’t a matter of Rick trusting me, trusting that I could succeed at scary-big sales; it was a transaction between us.  Are you taking care of your boss on the fundamentals so he can have your back on the scary-big stuff?

Are you?  In what ways could you cover the fundamentals better so that your boss can have your back?   Please Comment.

 

 

 

What in the Heck Was He Asking?

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Here is a very important lesson in Self-Leadership.

Many years ago, when the first big firm I worked for had been sold, and at the new firm, I’d made a couple of dramatic big sales, the new supervisor asked me to work more with the original members of his firm, even though neither our work nor our clients overlapped.  I see now I had no idea what he was asking.

I Never Asked

I know I never asked him because I was sure at the time I knew what he meant.  I was sure he was asking me to do the very thing I didn’t want to do:  work on his other employees’ projects in order to increase my billed hours.  I didn’t like that.  I was a big-picture business developer and risk-taker, both of which strengths had resulted in big sales for the new firm.  I wanted to have free rein to do more of that and not be pressured over my billed hours.  After all, my job was to create work and billable hours for other people, and I was good at it.  “Doesn’t he know that??” I said to myself.

I Thought I Already Knew

Who knows what he knew?  Who knows what he was asking?  I certainly didn’t because I didn’t ask him.  Who knows what I might have learned if I’d asked him for his wants and needs and then leaned in?  But I’ll never know because I was sure I already knew.  To answer your question, no, I didn’t comply with his request, which added to our never really getting along, though at the time I didn’t believe I had any role in that.  Sam, if you’re reading this, I was wrong.  I should have asked you want you meant and what you wanted.

Reader, have you ever made that mistake of thinking you already knew?  Please “comment”.

The Important Skill At Work You Need To Get Better At

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What if there were one thing you could do in your work that guaranteed more and more success in the future?  What if this one thing applied just as much to your entrepreneurial success?

Air Force teams do an “after action report” on completed endeavors, and the central item is the list of “Lessons Learned“, both good lessons from successes and bad lessons from failed efforts.  You can imagine how important the lists are when they’re reviewed before the next major effort.

Listing, then drilling down through your Lessons Learned after each project, whether you work for a big firm or for yourself, is just as important to your success as it is to the Air Force!  Your Lessons Learned are a gold mine holding bigger successes for you in the future.  All you have to do is drill for them.

Without Emotion or Blame

At the big engineering firm where I worked, we learned how to list our Lessons Learned without emotion or blame.

After these years of practice, and now when the stakes of failure seem higher, am I still as willing to look dispassionately at my errors, gaps, and failures?

Don’t Re-run the Blame

Do I drill down through them “without emotion or blame”?  Or, because I work solo, am I quick to go straight to blaming myself and make the failure worse because I’m missing out on the Lessons Learned?

Do I learn the lessons?  Or only re-run the blame? 

Which do you do?

 

The One Thing Your Teammates Want the Most

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I often remind clients that the one true need of their teammates is that they want to be proud of themselves and truly proud of their work.

Our Job As Leaders

Our job as leaders is to help our teammates find that pride.  Twice in the last two days, the same thing was said by others.  On the PBS program, “New Recruits“, an American philanthropy sends new college grads to third-world countries to organize startups to sell eco products. A Kenyan businessman takes under his wing one of the new graduates who’s having no luck at all starting his little company or selling his products.  The Kenyan gentleman tells the graduate, “Remember one thing.  People want to be proud of the thing they’re involved in.”

Ken Blanchard’s First Rule About Teams

In the Ken Blanchard book Gung Ho, Blanchard’s first rule in creating enthusiastic high-performing teams is “the work must be worthwhile”.  Our work should be worth something, something truly worth our effort.  We want work that makes us proud to be part of it.  The job of a leader is to find the worth of the job and make it plain to the rest of us.

Do you do that as a leader?  Do you think it’s important?

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