The Cost Of Success
/in news /by MG ConsultantsI Can…I Will
/in news /by MG ConsultantsOne simple way to build someone’s confidence: Ask for their advice
/in news /by MG ConsultantsThis post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series.
Imagine you’re at a family reunion.
You’re catching up with your aunt when you look over to see your three-year-old grab a toy away from another child. After you send your toddler off for a time-out, a cousin pulls you aside and says, “I think you could have handled that better” and gives you a lesson in disciplining children.
How would you feel?
Odds are, you wouldn’t be grateful. No one likes to be lectured.
What’s ironic is even though we can all see that receiving this kind of unsolicited advice is a giant downer, most of us have done this. It’s common to give out advice when we see someone struggling.
Even underperforming salespeople, C students and spendthrifts offered smart strategies. They knew what to do to overcome their problems; they just weren’t doing it.
A few years ago, I met a graduate student who had a hunch we’d gotten the formula backward. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, a former competitive pianist and Ivy Leaguer, was always a high achiever and found it baffling that so many of her talented peers struggled to meet their goals.
As a PhD student in psychology, she wanted to understand what separates top performers from the rest of us, so she began collecting data. She surveyed Americans struggling to save more money, lose weight, control their tempers and find employment. She interviewed salespeople and high school students and asked everyone what might motivate them to be more successful at work, at home and in their academic pursuits.
Lauren made a surprising discovery: When it came to being more successful, people had plenty of good ideas for how to do it. Even underperforming salespeople, C students and spendthrifts offered smart strategies in the areas where they were struggling. They knew what to do to overcome their problems; they just weren’t doing it.
Lauren began to suspect this failure to act had to do with a self-doubt — or what the legendary Stanford psychologist Al Bandura has called “a lack of self-efficacy.”
Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence in their ability to control their own behavior, motivation and social circumstances. Goal strivers are sometimes plagued by insecurity; in fact, a lack of self-efficacy can prevent us from setting goals in the first place.
Too often, we assume the obstacle to change in others is ignorance, so we offer advice. But what if the problem is a lack of confidence?
Research confirms the obvious: When we don’t believe we have the capacity to change, we don’t make as much progress changing. One study demonstrated that when trying to lose weight, people who report more confidence in their ability to change their eating and exercise habits are more successful. Another study showed that science and engineering undergraduates with higher self-efficacy earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of their majors.
Recognizing this gave Lauren an idea. Too often, we assume the obstacle to change in others is ignorance, so we offer them advice. But what if the problem isn’t a lack of knowledge but a lack of confidence — and our unsolicited wisdom isn’t making things better but worse?
As a psychologist, Lauren knew that people are quick to infer implicit messages in the actions of others. In giving advice, we might be inadvertently conveying to people that we don’t think they can succeed on their own. She wondered: What if we flipped the script?
If giving advice can destroy confidence, then asking people who are struggling to be advisers instead of advisees might be a better approach. Encouraging someone to share their wisdom conveys they’re intelligent, capable of helping others and the kind of person who succeeds. It shows we believe in them.
Lauren ran survey after survey of Americans with unmet goals — like saving more, controlling their tempers, getting fit or finding new jobs. She found that most people predicted that receiving advice would be more motivating than giving it, explaining why we’re all the targets of unsolicited advice. But when she examined this belief, using controlled experiments, she found it was wrong. As she’d suspected, prompting goal seekers to offer advice led them to feel more motivated than when they were given advice.
Our strategy had worked: The students who had given a few minutes of advice performed better in these classes than other students!
Of course, it was possible that Lauren’s idea wouldn’t really help people reach their goals. In 2018, I teamed up with Lauren, Angela Duckworth and Dena Gromet on a massive experiment aimed at helping students achieve their academic goals.
On the day of the experiment, shortly after the start of a new school term, nearly 2,000 students in seven Florida high schools walked into a computer lab. Some filled out short digital questionnaires, but others did something different — they were asked for their advice.
This group of students was invited to offer guidance to their younger peers through a 10-minute online survey. They were asked questions such as “What helps you avoid procrastinating?” “Where do you go to do focused studying?” and “What general tips would you give someone hoping to do better in school?”
After completing these surveys, the students went through the remainder of the term. Then, at the end of the marking period, we downloaded their grades in the class they’d told us was most important to them and their grades in math. Our strategy had worked: The students who had given just a few minutes of advice performed better in these classes than other students!
To be clear, giving advice didn’t turn C students into valedictorians, but it did boost performance for high schoolers from every walk of life. Strong students, weak students, students in the free lunch program and students from wealthier families — all of them saw small improvements in their grades after advising peers.
Anecdotally, we also heard that giving advice brought students joy. High schoolers in our study told their teachers they’d never been asked for their insights before and loved it. “Could we do this again soon?” they prodded hopefully.
The more Lauren reflected on her research on the power of advice giving, the more it made sense. Being asked to give advice conveyed to people that more was expected of them, boosting their confidence. And based on the interviews she’d previously conducted, Lauren also knew that people were capable of producing useful insights about how to tackle the same goals they themselves struggled with — recall the good advice she got even from underperforming salespeople and other strivers. This is a key reason why giving advice to others tends to help us.
In psychology, we call it the “saying-is-believing effect.” After you say something to someone else, you’re more likely to believe it yourself.
Another is we tend to tailor the advice we give based on personal experience. If asked for dieting suggestions, a vegan will likely offer plant-based tips. If asked about staying in shape, a busy executive will probably recommend an efficient regimen. In short, when someone asks for guidance, we tell them what we would find useful. After offering our advice, we feel hypocritical if we don’t try it ourselves. In psychology, we call it the “saying-is-believing effect.” After you say something to someone else, you’re more likely to believe it yourself.
Here’s a question you might have: What if no one ever asks you for advice? How can you use Lauren’s insight to help yourself succeed when it depends on something out of your control — namely, other people?
The good news is it’s possible to harness the power of advice giving to help yourself. One way is by forming an advice club: a group of people whose members regularly consult one another for help. I did it myself, long before I knew about Lauren’s research.
In 2015, I learned from economist Linda Babcock that women tend to bear the brunt of low-prestige office tasks, like planning the holiday party, taking notes at meetings and serving on committees. (This is true across industries and cultures.) To save herself from this fate, Linda formed an advice club with four female colleagues so they could help one another say no to these tasks.
As you provide and receive advice, you’ll boost one another’s confidence and unearth ideas that help with your own problems.
I was so impressed by the idea that I asked two faculty friends — Modupe Akinola and Dolly Chugh — to join a similar club with me. We pledged to help one another make tough calls when any of us got invited to do something time-consuming outside our teaching and research responsibilities. Now, when one of us is asked to deliver a talk, write a blog post or give an interview, we reach out to our “No Club” to discuss if the opportunity is worthwhile and get advice on how to turn it down if it isn’t.
The advice I’ve received from the club is invaluable, but I’ve also reaped huge benefits from giving advice. Helping my colleagues has boosted my confidence that I can judge when it’s right to say no, so I lean on them less and less. I’ve also benefited from the “saying-is-believing effect.” After encouraging someone not to waste her time giving a lecture on a topic outside her core area, I’d feel ridiculous saying yes to a similar invite myself.
You might consider forming an advice club with friends who are struggling to achieve goals similar to your own. As you provide and receive solicited advice, you’ll boost one another’s confidence and unearth ideas that help with your own problems.
Another simple suggestion is to turn advice giving inside out when you’re facing a challenge. Ask yourself: “If a friend or colleague were struggling with the same problem, what advice would I offer them?” Taking this perspective can help you approach the same problem with greater confidence and insight.
Adapted from the new book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman; foreword by Angela Duckworth, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Katherine L. Milkman 2021.
Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety
/in news /by MG ConsultantsTwenty-one years ago, 17 software engineers published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, more commonly known as the Agile Manifesto. Responding to the bureaucratic waterfall model of software development, with its linear phases and heavy documentation, these engineers advocated a more flexible approach, one that could adapt and succeed in a highly dynamic environment.
That simple declaration of values and principles has since spawned a global movement that has gone far beyond software development, gradually expanding to include under its umbrella a broad set of tools, processes, and functions.
Agile has fundamentally changed the way we build software. In my organization, for example, we scrum, run sprints, and far outperform the pace of development from the past. During the last 20 years, the agile movement has gained astonishing momentum, even outside of software development. There’s agile HR, agile project management, agile customer service, agile sales, agile operations, agile C-suite, and so on.
Thousands of organizations can testify that their agile efforts have paid off in terms of speed, quality, value, and long-term growth. But not everyone can say that — in fact, approximately half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts.
If your team has yet to reap the rewards of agile, you need to understand what’s preventing you from delivering the fast, frictionless, scalable solutions you envisioned. After evaluating several agile teams and conducting a series of interviews with leading agile experts, I believe the primary factor is disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Processes and Tools are Scaffolding
Agile processes and tools provide support, but the central weight-bearing mechanism of the agile approach is not the scrum or the sprint. Rather, it’s the team’s dialogic process — the way team members interact — that ultimately determines success. The dialogic process informs how the team harnesses intellectual friction (i.e., conflicting ideas) to perform interdependent work. Are team members able to give and take, push and pull, talk and listen, question and answer, act and react, analyze and solve? Or do they censor one another and end up in self-preservation mode? In essence, agile’s core technology isn’t technical or mechanical. It’s cultural. Agile teams ultimately rely on psychological safety — an environment of rewarded vulnerability — to have a collaborative dialogic process.
High psychological safety elicits a performance response with innovation as the goal, whereas low psychological safety elicits a fear response with survival as the goal. When team members stop asking questions, admitting mistakes, exploring ideas, and challenging the status quo, they stop being agile. How can a development team perform rapid prototyping, for instance, if it’s swimming in fear? Or how can an HR team make equitable candidate selections if they can’t safely point out actions that may be inadvertently driven by bias? To borrow a line from William Butler Yeats, without psychological safety, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
When giving candid feedback, exploring unconventional ideas, and dissenting from the majority become sources of punished vulnerability, people stop doing them. How do you punish vulnerability? You criticize, embarrass, discourage, silence, shame, trivialize, bully, and intimidate. At that point, the team’s dialogic process breaks down and may ultimately collapse.
For example, I sat in a scrum meeting with a product development team that was in the middle of a two-week sprint. Unfortunately, the team was missing the core technology of psychological safety. Guarded and focused on self-preservation, the team ultimately failed because the dialogic process fell apart. As it became more emotionally and politically expensive to speak up, they gradually stopped doing it. They sabotaged their agility by punishing each other’s vulnerability. After the team was disbanded, I conducted a formal postmortem and interviewed each of the nine members. Ironically, every member of the team had been extensively trained in agile processes and tools, but those processes and tools couldn’t save them. Only psychological safety could have done that.
Here are five practical ways to increase psychological safety to foster a collaborative, successful agile team.
Frame agile as a cultural implementation.
Soon after implementing agile, many organizations revert to the default position of worshiping at the altar of technical processes and tools, because cultural considerations seem abstract and difficult to operationalize. It’s easier to pay lip service to the human side and then move on to scrumming, sprinting, kanbaning, and kaizening because these processes serve as tangible, measurable, and observable indicators, giving the illusion of success and the appearance of developing agile at scale.
Begin your agile transformation by framing agile as a cultural rather than a technical or mechanical implementation. In doing so, be careful not to approach culture as a workstream. A workstream is defined as the progressive completion of tasks required to finish a project. When we approach culture as a workstream within the context of agile, we classify it as something that can be completed. Culture cannot be completed. Yet I see agile teams attempting to project-manage it as part of the work breakdown structure, as if it has a beginning, middle, and end. It doesn’t.
Remember, there’s always the risk that a team’s culture will snap back to fear-based norms, so focus on individuals and interactions as the highest priority. Small and seemingly insignificant acts of disrespect, rudeness, or indifference can push a team back into withdrawal and personal risk management. If a team can identify and manage detailed behavioral terms of engagement, such as, “let people finish their thoughts without interrupting them,” they quickly become norms the team upholds through peer-based accountability.
Develop, document, and display vulnerable behavior/response pairings.
Hold a formal discussion with your team to identify the vulnerable behaviors they believe will be crucial to success. Team members will most likely begin by identifying common behaviors like asking questions, giving feedback, or registering different points of view. Keep going until you flesh out a longer and more nuanced list. Then identify positive response patterns for each behavior. For example, you might identify pointing out an error as a vulnerable behavior and then saying, “Thank you for pointing that out. What do you think the root cause is?” as a positive response to it.
Document the behavior/response pairings and display them in your meeting room. If you’re running a virtual team meeting, post them in the chat. Consider the list a living document and revisit it in your sprint retrospectives. Create a printed job aid of the list that team members can carry with them, and provide a digital version that acts as a prompt and guide in virtual meetings.
Focus on one behavior during each scrum and practice cultural accountability.
Now that you’ve jointly produced a list of vulnerable behavior/response pairings, pick one to practice during each sprint. When the team focuses on a specific behavior and response pattern, it provides a manageable scope for practice and activates peer-based cultural accountability.
If a gap emerges between the vulnerable behavior/response pairings and the team leader’s own modeling behavior, that dissonance will breed cynicism and erode credibility. But if the leader strives to model the behaviors and publicly acknowledges mistakes along the way, the team will make cumulative progress. The leader must make it clear that the members of the team are responsible for holding each other accountable for performing and rewarding vulnerable behaviors.
Formally evaluate your dialogic process in the sprint retrospective.
Set aside time during the sprint retrospective — the meeting held at the end of every sprint to review what went well and what could be improved — to formally evaluate the quality of the team’s dialogic process. Make this review a standard part of the agenda.
Discuss the quality of the team’s interactions and identify potential threats to openness. Ask questions like: Did you feel included in the process? Why or why not? What was the most vulnerable behavior you engaged in during this sprint? How did the team react to it? Was there anything you didn’t say or do because you didn’t feel safe? Does the team display a democratic pattern of participation and influence? Why or why not?
Conclude your scrum with a “question/reflection.”
Scrum meetings are meant to be fast-paced, daily coordination meetings in which team members review the backlog, identify obstacles, and prioritize tasks. We often do them standing up to keep them short. Though they’re not meant for brainstorming, you can use them to create time for reflection between meetings when necessary.
For example, if a team faces a difficult obstacle, pose a question about the issue and ask the team to come to the next scrum meeting prepared to discuss it. This approach offers more time for team members to crystalize their thoughts and encourages them to engage in divergent thinking. Reassure your team that you want to hear gut instincts as well as data-supported options.
If you drop agile tools and processes into a legacy culture that punishes the very acts of vulnerability required to be agile, you will fail. Environments of punished vulnerability — i.e., low psychological safety — leave organizations agile in name only, like the talented team that stalled and then failed.
If a team is struggling in its agile transformation, shadow it. Evaluate its dialogic process. Are members respectful? Do they tolerate candor? Do they protect and reward vulnerable behavior? If the answers to those questions is no and members are touchy, temperamental, or territorial, you’ve got work to do. You may be blessed with resources, expertise, and mastery of technical processes and tools, but ultimately, being agile relies on the ultimate enabler — psychological safety.
Timothy R. Clark is founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a global leadership consulting and training firm. He is the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler 2020).
To Seem More Competent, Be More Confident
/in news /by MG ConsultantsSummary – It’s a common feeling: while you are busy doing a good job, others seem to be advancing much faster in their careers. What’s going on? The answer in many cases is your contributions are not being seen and recognized. One important reason this happens is that people are simply not great at assessing competence — a crucial trait for succeeding at work— and perceptions of competence are just as important for success as actual competence. It turns out, results don’t speak for themselves, even when it’s all about numbers. Consider a salesman: his sales may rise, but they could have risen without his effort due to the superior quality of the product or marketing efforts that finally bore fruit. If sales go down, it could have been the result of increasing competition. It’s often difficult to disentangle actual drivers of performance, including how much luck and difficulty level played a role. Because of this, people tend to evaluate competence based on other factors, meaning you have to do more than produce results to convince them of your expertise. One way to do this is by demonstrating confidence in your abilities.
It’s a common feeling: while you are busy doing a good job, others seem to be advancing much faster in their careers. What’s going on?
The answer in many cases is your contributions are not being seen and recognized. One important reason this happens is that people are simply not great at assessing competence — a crucial trait for succeeding at work — and perceptions of competence are just as important for success as actual competence.
But don’t results mostly speak for themselves? They don’t, even when it’s all about numbers. Consider a salesman: his sales may rise, but they could have risen without his effort due to the superior quality of the product or marketing efforts that finally bore fruit. If sales go down, it could have been the result of increasing competition.
It’s often difficult to disentangle actual drivers of performance, including how much luck and difficulty level played a role. Because of this, people tend to evaluate competence based on other factors, meaning you have to do more than produce results to convince them of your expertise. One way to do this is by demonstrating confidence in your abilities.
A pioneering study from 1982 explored this connection between confidence and perceptions of competence. Psychologists Barry Schlenker and Mark Leary asked 48 subjects to rate the competence (among other characteristics) of 60 imaginary people who were facing a tennis tournament or a class final examination. Subjects received two crucial pieces of information: they learned what the imaginary people predicted their performance to be — from very poor to very good; then they learned the people’s “actual” performance. After that, they had to rate each imaginary person’s competence.
Lo and behold, the person’s prediction had a strong influence on how subjects perceived their competence: Observers evaluated those who made optimistic predictions as much more competent than their modest contemporaries — no matter how accurate those predictions were and how well they actually performed. Even with an optimistic forecast and a horrible result, they were still rated as almost twice as competent as those who accurately forecasted their poor performance. This seems to suggest that if someone asks how you expect to perform, you should give a positive, confident response. A negative forecast may lead you to be perceived as distinctly less competent — no matter how well you actually perform.
Over the last few decades, researchers have scrutinized the effects of projecting confidence versus modesty, gathering rather contradictory conclusions. But a recent replication of Schlenker & Leary’s 1982 study supported those original findings. This found that projecting confidence does lead to positive effects, but only when it is non-comparative. In other words: praising your competence seems to be fine as long as you do not claim that others are incompetent.
But why do people view confident others as more competent, even when their performance suggests otherwise? One explanation is that we have a tendency to believe what we are told, and to confirm our beliefs by selecting information that supports them. The term for this is confirmation bias. So if you project confidence, others tend to believe you know what you’re talking about, and they will then filter ambiguous information (like how much luck may have helped or hurt you) to fit their initial impression.
While it’s unwise to project fake confidence when you know you won’t perform well, being too modest likely won’t serve you well either. As we saw in Schlenker & Leary’s study, people tend to penalize humble actors by deciding against them and choosing the confident ones. Modesty is regarded as hedging against possible failure, an attempt to take the wind out of critics’ sails. If the expert doesn’t trust in his or her abilities, how could anyone else?
In order to convince others of your abilities, you should make it a habit to communicate that you are good at what you do — without any self-deprecation regarding your core competencies.
This doesn’t always come easy. To feel more authentic demonstrating confidence, you may first have to convince yourself. Ask yourself: What am I good at? What was my greatest success so far? Why should others be led by me? What do I know that they don’t? If you have a hard time answering these questions, you have a problem — how should you convince others of your expertise if you aren’t convinced yourself?
“Praise yourself daringly,” the philosopher Francis Bacon said, because, as he continued, “something always sticks.” If you want to ensure that your achievements are recognized, think about how your manager and colleagues see you and your abilities. Do you think they have a good sense of your competence and expertise? If not, could you be demonstrating more confidence in your tasks? This doesn’t necessarily mean praising yourself at every opportunity; rather it means projecting an optimistic attitude. By displaying more confidence in your abilities, you set yourself up to be recognized for your competence and your contributions.
Jack Nasher is a professor at Munich Business School and on the faculty of Stanford University, an international negotiation advisor, and the widest read business psychologist in continental Europe. His work has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Forbes. A member of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and a principal practitioner with the Association of Business Psychologists, he has spoken at TEDx and he also performs as a mentalist at the world-renowned Magic Castle in Hollywood.
Please Stop Using These Phrases in Meetings
/in news /by MG ConsultantsIt’s 50 minutes into an hour-long meeting. The final agenda item has been resolved, and it’s clear that we’ll be wrapping up early. Others may be pleased by this turn of events, but I cringe, bracing for the line that I know is coming: “I’m going to give you 10 minutes of your life back!”
Some version of this cheerful declaration seems to cap every meeting that ends with a few minutes to spare. It’s couched as welcome news, this unexpected gift of time. But language is generative, and the way we talk about our meetings comes to define what happens in those meetings. By framing a few extra minutes as an opportunity to give people their time “back,” as though that time had been wrongfully pilfered, we undermine our collaboration. We unwittingly send a powerful message that our organization’s gatherings take from team members, rather than contributing to our team’s collective accomplishments.
Even at a time when so much is beyond our control, we remain in control of our own speech patterns. And so, as leaders and employees continue to rethink what the modern workplace should look like, including how we gather, perhaps it’s an opportune moment to banish certain phrases from the “meeting-speak” lexicon. To learn what refrains others would be happy to never hear again in a meeting, I did a bit of crowdsourcing on social media and among colleagues. Here are some of the responses that resonated the most.
We’re going to wait five minutes for everyone to join.
Often among the first words uttered by an online meeting host, this practice dishonors the time of those who joined on time and does nothing to establish a culture of punctuality for meetings. At the same time, there are legitimate reasons why an individual may be late to a Zoom meeting (or an in-person one). To make the most of those inevitable few minutes when you’re waiting for stragglers, one idea is to start with brief tone-setting exercises. I often start by asking everyone to remove one distraction. That may mean moving something off their desk, opening a window in their room, or closing a window on their computer. Another exercise I like is asking everyone to write down their intention or objective for the meeting. This isn’t something that will be shared publicly, but the practice of thinking about one’s objectives before a meeting begins can be grounding.
You’re on mute.
To be sure, these words quickly signal that a speaker needs to click the unmute button. But the phrase — often uttered by multiple people at once — has become notoriously grating. It also makes the person on the receiving end of the comment feel silly, as though (two years into widespread remote work) they still don’t know how to locate the button with the microphone icon. A colleague of mine suggests the gentler, more affirming, “If you’re speaking, I can’t hear you.” Instead of making the silent speaker feel silly, this reframing shows them that you truly want to hear what it is they have to say.
We’re building the plane while flying it.
A friend who works in humanitarian disaster response (and therefore has a keen sense of what might happen if you actually did this) offered up this pet peeve. “If that’s the case, your plane will crash!” he notes. Many of us have heard this metaphor in many a meeting. But what is the speaker actually saying about the initiative being described? Is it flying at so quick a speed that we can’t be expected to understand or question its flaws? Is this turn of phrase an excuse for haphazard execution? If not, perhaps we can be more specific by identifying the pieces of the project that we’ve figured out, what we’re still working on, what we don’t know yet, and how we plan to make adjustments based on what we learn.
Let’s take this offline.
Without a clear, quick mention of how and when this “offline” conversation will take place, this is a jargony way to dismiss someone’s idea and put them off indefinitely. And since any meaningful follow-up will likely take place online, it also no longer makes sense. Why not go with something like this: “That’s an important topic that’s beyond the scope of this meeting. I’ll email you when we wrap up.”
I’m going to give you 10 minutes of your life back.
I’ll close by coming back to this line, because it remains the one I’d be happiest never to hear again. This is not to say that I’m opposed to meetings that end early. But if they’re well-structured, well-run, and surprisingly concise, we should celebrate the fruits of our collaboration and look forward to our next gathering.
The next time you find yourself tempted to offer your teammates a few precious “minutes of their life back,” consider saying, “Wow. Because everyone was so productive, we’re done 10 minutes early. Thank you so much for your presence and participation. Have a great day.” This simple rephrasing has the power to reframe your work.
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Rae Ringel is the president of The Ringel Group, a leadership development consultancy specializing in facilitation, coaching, and training. She is a faculty member at the Georgetown University Institute for Transformational Leadership and founder of the Executive Certificate in Facilitation program.