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Punished for being too smart

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by Patty Azzarello

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Being the smartest one in the room is not easy

Really smart people who get to the answer before everyone else get frustrated because:

  • No one wants to listen to you
  • No one gets why you are right
  • Everyone seems to WANT to go slower (and it is infuriating)
  • You resent having to make the effort of “bringing people along”

Good guy or bad guy?

I have met and mentored many talented and genuinely kind people throughout my career that want to do positive things for the business in an unselfish way — but they get stuck because they are so smart that they piss people off.

If you are one of these people, or you have one of these people working for you – here is the trick.

You can either be Smart or you can be Effective

You can’t do everything alone.

You need other people — either to help or to get out of the way.

So if you can’t influence them, you will face road blocks and fail to get others working on your agenda. You will not be effective.

If you want to be effective, you have to suck it up and bring people along with you, even though it seems like a waste of time.

Here are some ideas…

First, slow down even though it goes against every grain of your being.

Include people: Don’t just announce the answer, go through the step of setting context and getting input.

Listen: In meetings, give others time to talk, and listen instead of arguing or shutting them down. You may feel like you are wasting time, but you will win favor by listening.  It will pay-off later when you need to get their support.

Don’t be mean. I know it doesn’t feel like you’re  being mean. You are not trying to be mean.  You are trying to be straightforward, practical, share the answer, and make progress. In fact, one of the things that is so annoying about these people is that they accuse you of being mean when you are not.

But they have the right to their perception. What they see may be your dismissing their inputs, ignoring them, or picking fights publicly. Say less. Be more gracious. Be more patient. Use more steps in your logic. Get smaller agreements along the way. Say thank you.

Make an effort to learn what their strengths are: You may be pleasantly surprised. Or not. But if you can get someone talking about what they are good at, and show some appreciation of that, they will be your friend, and you can get their support for your agenda.

Give them the benefit of the doubt: Keep in mind that these people might be brilliant in ways that you don’t see. In ways that you are not.

What if someone in the room is really gifted at networking and connecting and getting others to get on board? Even if they never understand your project, if you can win over that one person they can bring you all the others.

What if the numbers guy who is just not getting the big picture, has a relationship with the CFO that will get your idea funded if you can win him over?

Set your sights on effectiveness

OK. Even if you are truly in a room full of stupid people who can’t keep up, you have a choice to make. Jump to the answer alone and face roadblocks, or make the effort to bring them along, so you can get the job done.

It’s a choice you have. It may be frustrating in the moment, but the upside is that you will be getting things done – maybe not as fast as you want to go, but better than not at all.

What do you think?

Have you had this issue or helped others through it? What has worked for you? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below!
—–
Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello, and on Facebook. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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5 Mentors Everyone Needs

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by Patty Azzarello

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Rockclimber

Building your career without mentors is like climbing Mt. Everest without a guide and a Sherpa.  Sure, you can attempt it but why would you?

Mentors can have a bigger impact on your success than virtually anything outside your own efforts.

If you rely on your personal talents and energy alone, you are at an extreme disadvantage to those that get help.

We all need mentors that help with:

1. Imagination
2. Reality
3. Connections
4. Learning

1. Imagination

Where do you get your ideas? Who challenges your thinking in a positive way? Big imagination is required to do your job in a stand-out way. What fuels your imagination?

Most of my biggest successes have started from other people’s ideas, challenges or inspiration. Whether it’s how you solve problems, or create new opportunities, you can’t do it if you never think of it!

Mentors can help a lot, because they typically have a very different perspective.

To fuel your imagination, look for mentors who:

  • Are 2-3 phases ahead of you in the maturity of how your job function is done.  This can be in a bigger company or a more established business or product line. It’s critical to realize what is possible.
  • Work at an order of magnitude bigger scope or geography – learn processes and techniques they use that help them do a bigger job, so you can apply those as your business grows.  Learning things from a much smaller company can also be really useful.
  • Do your job in different industries – a Ford employee got the idea for the assembly line by visiting a butchery.  Seeing how other industries solve the same problems can help you see completely different ways of doing things which are huge innovations when applied in your world.

2. Reality

It’s easy to get so tied up in what you are doing, that you can lose sight of the reality of changing attidudes, business conditions, or market landscape.? ?So look for mentors who are:

  • 10-15 years older and way ahead of you career-wise – they can help you see the things you are not seeing, navigate the land mines, work through unspoken rules, and point out opportunities to change the game that you might not see on your own.
  • In their 20’s and are a master at the web and social networking – you need keep up with how the world is communicating.  Don’t get left in the dark ages of email.  Know how to share information and engage your customers.
  • Talented business people in other functions – you get ideas not only for general leadership techniques, but “man on the street” insights about how  people in other areas view what makes your function successful.

3. Connections

Look for mentors who are In the job you aspire to.  It is important to really learn about the job you want before you go for it.  Having a mentor in that role can expose you to the real requirements, so you can practice thinking about it, or maybe even take on some projects to get real experience.

They also give you acccess to jobs like theirs when they come up, because being in that role, they get asked who to consider – and they think of you!
Also,

You are most vulnerable when you are not connected. You have less ability to execute if you do not have a strong network. Sure, you need to be building your personal network directly, but mentors can expand your personal and professional network exponentially; not just in terms of size but of usefulness.

4. Learning

Finally, you can’t have too many smart people in your life.

Spending time with people you learn from is a big part of creating success.

What are your personal learning goals? What learning agendas do you have for your organization? What do you want to be better at next year than you are now? How do you plan to get there?

Whenever you find someone you can learn from, create a reason to spend time with them.  Learn what they think. Bring them into your staff meetings as special guest stars.

Getting Mentors

Don’t get hung up on the term “mentor”.  Just buying a coffee for someone you can learn from, and getting the benefit of their time is the important part.

However, if you can formalize it to the extent that you both acknowledge that they care about your success over time, the benefits multiply. So, when you come across a relationship with a potential mentor that sparks, close the deal!? ?Check list:

Do you have your 5 mentors??
1.   Someone in the job you aspire to?
2.   Someone doing your job at larger scope or maturity, or in a different industry
3.   A twenty-something, web 2.0 guru
4.   A master networker
5.   A career guide 15 years your senior

Useful Goals:

You should have a goal of adding at least one real mentor to your life every year, and learning stuff from one really smart person once a month. How do you connect with mentors? Leave your ideas in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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Customer Service or torture?

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by Patty Azzarello

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service-or-torture

Be careful what you measure…

BMW serves as a good example of a company that measures service vs. providing it.   But many companies fall into this trap.  Does yours?

Here is an example of what I mean:

My last car service:

  • I felt bullied by the sales and service people when they told me, as they do each time, that I “have to give them a 5 on everything” when the survey people call.
  • That is not service for me.  It’s gaming the measures for them, (and torturing me).
  • In my last car service, they failed to reset some system.  A warning light came on, and I was forced to go back.  It really screwed up my day.
  • When they realized it was their fault, I got only a cursory, “sorry about that”.
  • After telling them, “you know, when the survey people call, I am not going to give you a 5 this time” and giving them several opportunities to make it better – “Is there something you would like to do for me to improve my experience”? – there was no response.
  • I then gave the low scores on the phone survey – by the way, the survey taker/process is designed only to ask the questions, not to offer any service when someone is upset.
  • Later I got a call from my service guy. It was clear he was forced to call me to follow up on his low score. But the call was about him giving me a hard time because I got him in trouble. (more torture for me)
  • As much fun as that was for me, I decided to give them another opportunity.  I said to him – “actually I was going to call you because I need two other [small things], can you help me?”
  • Now here was a chance to provide actual service, when no one was watching or measuring.  He assured me he would call me back later that afternoon to let me know if he had the part so I could stop by on my way home.
  • I never heard from him again.

Do your measures and service processes serve your customers or torture them?
Example:

Do you measure the speed of closing problems?

This is a very typical measure.  But it’s important to understand that this measure can cause you to ignore customer problems, because your service staff is motivated to close out problems quickly, vs. take the time to actually fix them, because spending that time would result in a poor measured result.

So you end up with a backlog of problems that could have been fixed, unhappy customers, and sparkling measures for speed of closing problem reports.

Instead try:

  • Measuring the number of problems whose root cause has been resolved.
  • Or measure the number of customers who report their problem has been solved to their satisfaction.
  • Or look for customers who have multiple open issues, or issues open for long time periods and just call them!

Question:

Is your service staff trained in following service processes or in providing service?

In my example above, at every step, people were correctly following a process, resulting in my getting more and more tortured.

Customer service people who are trained in processes often delight in not-helping customers when they confident they are correctly following the process.

This is particularly infuriating to customers who want to be made to feel like someone at your company cares about the suffering you are inflicting.

Instead try:

  • Training people on the right triggers to throw out the process
  • Then have them ask “What do you think we should do to make this better for you?”
  • And give them the ability to act.

Another idea:

Involve your customer service people in creating great service.

In the BMW example I would have each dealership manage a contest for their service team to get together and come up with three new ideas for how to provide outstanding service.  You could pay $1000 each for the best 10 ideas.

Instead of putting $10k into a survey, where you have sales and service people training the customers to give the right answers, which are of no real use to you anyway, you could be motivating Actual Service!!

The existence of the contest alone would inspire thinking about service, and you get much better ideas when you involve the people who actually do the work in coming up with the best way to improve it.

Getting it Right

Look at what you measure and then look at the dark side of it.?If you were going to game the measures to come out looking good what would you do??What non-intended result would occur?  Because it will…

People like to make customers happy.  Let them.

At the very least, if you are not serious about providing actual service, don’t torture your customers with surveys and processes that only annoy them, and give you a false sense of your greatness.

What do you think?

How have you seen customers get service really right or really wrong? Share your stories in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

Delegate…and relax

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by Patty Azzarello

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How well do you delegate?

Most people inherently know that they should delegate more, and delegate better, but one big obstacle keeps them from doing it…

It will be better if I do it myself.

Who’s at fault?

It it doesn’t come out right, the uncomfortable question this raises is – did this person fail to do a good job because:

1. They are not good enough at the job or
2. I am not good enough at delegating?

You don’t need to get comfortable with worry!

The real secret of successful delegating is not to learn how to deal with the emotional discomfort of letting go, and learning to live with being worried about the outcome, or accepting bad outcomes…

It’s about preventing reasons to worry

Your job is to delegate, let go, NOT micromanage… AND create structure, support and processes so you ensure that it is going to get done right.
You don’t deal with the worrying, you ensure it’s not necessary.

Ways to build comfort and insurance into the project

(without micro-managing)

1. Let the person create the timeline, define the deliverables and how you will measure them.  The encouragement and trust goes a long way, and you either get the pleasant surprise of a better plan than you would have come up with, or you get an early warning that this person needs more support.

2. Tighten the Outcomes.  If you are concerned that the person is not capable enough to run with the project, Instead of a 6 month outcome, discuss outcomes that occur every two weeks.

3. Focus on the outcome, not the activity. No two humans will do a task exactly the same way.  If they deliver the outcome, it shouldn’t matter how they do it.  Let them worry about how and what.  You worry about WHY, and what needs to be true when it is done.

4. Create an actual process and tracking system for long term or repetitive tasks – a software development lifecycle with checkpoints is a good example.  But why not define a project lifecycle with checkpoints for a quarterly analyst presentation, a press release, or a marketing campaign?

5. Third party reviews. Get yourself out of the position of always being the one to judge whether a deliverable is good enough or not.  Get the actual consumers of the deliverable to review and provide feedback.  Your employees will learn far more this way.

6. Don’t forget to inspect and measure things along the way.  If you set up a timeline with review steps along the way, you must follow up.  A great deal of your comfort comes from the fact that people take you seriously and actually do the committed work.  A long time mentor of mine always put it “You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect”.

7. Teach. When you are delegating things you are personally good at, always think of delegating as a teaching opportunity. If you need to sometimes jump down and do the work yourself, make sure someone is watching and learning.

Bottom line…

You need to delegate effectively if you want to get anything significant done, get anywhere in your career, and save yourself from an un-doable workload.

If you are either doing the work yourself, or worried about the work not getting done, you need to change your strategy.

You can delegate and feel comfortable that the work is getting done as long as you do the higher level work of setting up the systems, processes and measures that ensure the right things are happening along the way.

What has worked for you?

Please share your ideas about how you got better (and more comfortable) with delegating. Let’s discuss in the comment box below!
—–
Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

Are you performing or just presenting?

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by Patty Azzarello

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performing

Using the stage

I’m paraphrasing something that Simon Cowell said to an early contestant on American Idol.

You do not seem to be taking advantage of using this stage to perform for millions of people.  You are acting more like this is a try-out than a performance.

I got to thinking about how people go about communicating, presenting, and behaving at work, and I think this is such an important point:

Are you performing when it counts?

…Or  are you just presenting, clarifying, and getting through the information?  Are you  defensive — like this is a try-out or a test you need to pass?  Or are you really owning it and using the opportunity to its full advantage?

It’s a valuable insight:

Think of any communication as an opportunity to perform.

And I don’t mean a shallow, disingenuous performance.  Or one that is data and quality free.

I mean a performance that is compelling because you really care about it, you invest in how you will present not just what you present, because it matters to you personally to have an impact.

Make something happen.

Own the Outcome, not just the communication.

A good way to think about this is, what would you do differently if you were taking responsibility for the outcome and the actions this communication drives, not just the transmission of the information?

To turn a communication into a performance, you need to think about not only what you want to communicate in terms of the content, but how you will capture and hold their attention.

  • How will you motivate, interest or excite them?
  • What is the difference that you want this communication to make?
  • How will people’s point of view be altered if you succeed?
  • What will they do differently?
  • What will they remember about the topic? About you?
  • How will they be entertained or bored?

This is really one of those things that sets high achievers apart.

They have the ability to inspire others with their ideas – to cause motion and action with their words.  They invest in the performance.

Here are some examples:

Performing a product roadmap presentation

If you are presenting a product roadmap recommendation, your goal is to share the information clearly. You can show timelines, technology choices, product feature additions, costs, competitive data, etc.

Get people excited.

But If you are performing a product roadmap presentation, your goal is to get people excited enough about the future that they give you the funding now, and continued support along the way.

You might include videos of user experiences and requests, physical prototypes, an interactive demo, or mock headlines that trounce the competition.

Performing a Business Review

For these, we always spend so much time on the data, presenting — covering every detail and defending against every hard question in the financials.

You are so much better off if you spend some time performing proactively, off the defense.

  • How are you going to inspire your reviewers most about the business?
  • What kinds of ideas will they personally respond to, over and above the numbers?
  • Why do you personally believe in this business?
  • What are the most exciting customer stories about how your products and services changed their business?
  • What is your top sales person doing that you are excited about replicating?

I’m not suggesting that you skip the data and put on a song and dance show instead of managing the business.

But you can get a lot further with your stakeholders if you take responsibility to excite them with the right images and stories, instead of only boring them with a straightforward presentation of data, progress, and plans.

Performing a Budget Approval presentation

Not just numbers

If there was ever a reason to step up your performance, it’s to get your budget approved.

Loads of data and metrics will not help as much as exciting them about what they will get for the money, and showing them how much you are personally motivated to make a big impact on the business.

Even the most number conscious executives will respond to a compelling story about something that transforms the customer experience or the market.

If it’s a big deal, invest the energy to get your creative, marketing, and sales people to help you with content.
One good story can be worth a thousand spread sheet cells.

What works for you?

What are your techniques to make sure your presentations inspire the right outcomes? Share your thoughts in the comment box!

—–
Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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Be Less Busy

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by Patty Azzarello

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Chances are, you have no extra time.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called
WHEN do you think? about the importance of giving yourself time to think strategically.

As we begin the new year, it’s a great time to spend time thinking and planning how to make this year better than the last one — in your work and in your life.

As a leader, it’s critical to not just get the work done, but to make sure that you and your team are more capable next year.

If you don’t grow capability, you get stuck.

Your main job as a leader is to build a highly capable team beneath you so that you free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

You need to always be finding new ways to add value to the business.

But to do that requires you to make sure you have time to do the longer term tasks that build value and capability — things that will create a meaningful, strategic difference.

Some examples:

This year…

  • How will we improve our ability to get customer references?
  • How will we deliver more quickly or at less cost?
  • What new process will improve our quality?
  • What new behaviors will eliminate chaos in our business and create more time?
  • How will we learn more about our customers really care about?
  • What new way of serving customers will differentiate us from our competition?

To work at this level requires time.

If you have no time, YOU need to make yourself less busy.

Here are a few realities to consider. I call this my Over-busy Manifesto.

The Over Busy Manifesto

No one other than YOU has any motivation whatsoever to make you less busy. Your boss, your peers and your team only benefit from your endless work output.

If you are overwhelmed by the activities of your job you are not ready for a bigger one.

The most successful people were not the ones who were less busy along the way, they figured out how to rise above it.

The Hard (but important part)

No one will ever give you permission to be less busy. It can feel scary to stop appearing really busy if you associate your value with the amount of time you spend working.

Just know that it’s not the “work” that matters, it’s the outcomes you deliver. You don’t win the game for running up and down the court, it’s the points on the board that count.

Refuse to burn all your time up on things that are not so important.

Trust that giving yourself time to think will help you find ways to deliver higher value business outcomes, and get the right work done in less time.

People will see you delivering real value, getting smarter and faster, making strategic advances — not just working really hard. It will get less scary.

My New Book

I wanted to give people a useful framework to take more control of their success.

The book is filled with big insights and practical things you can do right away that make all the difference between getting ahead and just working really hard.

You can get the book or take a look at the reviews on Amazon, and here is a short video of me talking about what’s in it.

Please share this with anyone whose career you care about.
Thanks!

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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