90% of Development is Letting Go of Old Things

Changing behaviors and developing is about letting go of the old so that the new can come in. Having watched 1,000’s of leaders come through leadership programs I have become convinced that what most people need is not to learn something new, but to let go of those mindsets that are old (and outdated). We develop ideas about the way the world works in our formative years and end up stuck with them in adulthood. These ideas tie us to a way of behaving and they tie us to a level of development.

We need to treat our mindsets like we do other possessions and have a clean out every so often. Every 5 years we need to spring clean and ask ourselves – what beliefs and ideas have I accumulated over the last 5 years that are no longer working for me. Those who want to grow faster should do this more often.

A lot of leaders know what good leadership looks like, but can’t do it because their mindsets have got them trapped at a lower level of vertical development. The future of leadership development may be more about helping people get unstuck from their old mindsets and less about teaching them something new. I have observed that when people finally get unstuck, development takes care of itself.

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Why Can’t You Change?

When cardiac patients are told that if they do not change their behaviors – eat less, exercise more – they will die, only 1 out of 7 people makes any changes. How is it possible that people would rather die than change their habits?

In leadership programs when we give leaders a flipchart and ask them to write down the attributes and behaviors of a great leader they have seen, most groups can summarize the last 30 years of research in about 10 minutes. When we ask these highly motivated leaders how well they actually do the things they have just written, most leaders reply, ‘not that well’.

Why is it that both cardiac patients who are motivated by the possibility of death and leaders who are motivated to succeed, can know exactly what they should do and still not be able to make the changes they want ?

Leadership development trainers should be banned from teaching anyone, anything new until they can answer the question – why can’t people do all of the stuff they already know?

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How Great Leaders Deal With Difficult People

One of the most common comments I hear in my leadership programs is,

“Yes, I agree that all of this applies when working with normal people, but it would never work with (insert name of difficult person)”.

Many of us work with people who trigger us emotionally and make us feel that nothing we could ever try would persuade them to behave reasonably.

However, the biggest mistake I see leaders make in dealing with ‘difficult people’ is trying to change the person’s behavior without first diagnosing why the person is proving difficult. The most practical way to do this is to use the ‘three A’s’ of behavior change.

Smart people managers start by asking themselves, ‘at what stage on the staircase is the person currently standing?’

Level A1 – Awareness of perceptions: Is the person even aware that others perceive them to be difficult to work with because of their behaviors? (“Really? People find my comments annoying?”)

Level A2 – Acceptance of behaviors: If the person is aware of perceptions, do they accept that they do the behaviors mentioned by others. (“No, I really don’t think that I talk over the top of people”)

Level A3 – Agree to change: If they are aware of perceptions and accept that they do display those behaviors, do they agree that these are behaviors that need to change. (“OK, maybe I am difficult to work with, but that is other people’s problem”).

It is crucial to diagnose at what level on the ladder the person is situated, because if you don’t know this, you are almost guaranteed to apply the wrong solutions.

For example, I constantly have managers tell me how difficult one of their direct reports is. When I ask the manager if he/ she or anyone else has ever told this person how they are perceived by others the managers usually reply, “I shouldn’t have to, it’s obvious.”

No it isn’t. In my experience 90% of the so called ‘difficult’ people have no idea that others perceive them as difficult. This is because they are not good at picking up on social cues from others to change their behaviors (hint – that is why people find them difficult in the first place). Good people leaders take the time to diagnose where the person is starting from on the behavior change ladder and then choose a strategy that links to that level.

Different Strategies for Different Levels

Level A1 – Awareness of perceptions: Ask the person if they are aware of how others perceive their workplace behaviors? If they do not have an accurate perception, explain to them the impact they are having on others.

Level A2 – Acceptance of behaviors: Give the person specific examples of the time and place where they did those behaviors (avoid any evaluation of those behaviors or guessing what their intent was. Just stick to the facts.)

Level A3 – Agree to change: Point out the impact that the behaviors are having on you, and/or other team members. Then have the person explore the ‘natural consequences’ for them of continuing these behaviors.

It is worth noting that the above conversations need not all happen in one sitting. If there is one thing that I have learned, it is that people hate to change in front of you. They would much rather go away and reflect alone and decide for themselves that they are ready to take the next step.

Therefore, don’t push too far too fast. You are far better to give them a nudge and then give them time to catch their breath.

Despite what many managers believe, having direct reports (or anyone for that matter) change behaviors is less difficult than they expect. The key to the vault is taking the time to work out at what level the person is currently stuck. Once you have that, you can gradually lead someone up the staircase to the point where they can decide if the change is worth making. From that point the person’s own momentum can drive the changes forward with you acting as a coach. Leaders who use this process often come back and tell me that the person wasn’t quite as ‘difficult’ as they had initially thought – most often no one had ever had the courage to gently let them know what everyone else could see.

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Why (a lot of) Training Doesn’t Work

I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend about why many leadership trainings don’t work. My friend runs a successful leadership development business, but like many people who are good in this field, he started in an area completely distinct from ‘training’ and brought what he learned with him. He in fact began his career working for Toyota and was heavily influenced by their Toyota Production System (T.P.S.)

Our conversation began because we both have a (morbid) fascination with the fact that so many leaders go to a leadership training, have a great experience, love the program, love the trainers, love the content and then go back to work and fail to make any real changes. Within six months the only evidence of the program is the large folder in their bottom drawer.

Looking through the Toyota lense, my friend pointed out something interesting – most leadership programs have got things the wrong way around. The traditional training approach has relied on external experts to ‘push’ solutions at the leaders – ‘here is how to do innovation’, ‘here is how to motivate employees’. This is based on the strange assumption that everyone in the room has exactly the same problem, at exactly the same time and needs exactly the same solution. Or as Henry Ford put it, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.” In training terms we might say, ‘I can solve any leadership problem you have, as long as it’s ‘how to delegate better’.

Yes, this is illogical, and yes it gets worse. Leaders who are submitted to trainings with this ‘push’ strategy quickly become passive, or worse dormant and come to believe that leadership development is about someone else solving their problems. At the risk of being too opinionated, I am prepared to go out on a limb and say, this is not the future of leadership development.

Toyota solved it’s own ‘push’ problem with Taiichi Ohno’s Kanban system. Traditionally, manufacturing parts were ‘pushed’ out to assembly line workers on a schedule whether the workers needed parts or not. This led to both large inventories (some workers had far too many parts) and frequent stoppages (some workers had far too few parts). Ohno’s ‘pull’ strategy changed the focus so that it became the workers who indicated what parts they needed and when. This meant that each worker had ‘just enough’ and ‘just in time’. The result, less inventory and less stoppages.

Here I think is the future direction for leadership programs. I predict that the next stage of leadership development will stop ‘pushing’ solutions on to leaders who neither want them or need them and instead focus on teaching leaders how to ‘pull’ solutions towards them.

There are various processes already in use which use this approach. They include Marshall Goldsmith’s feedforward process, work based Action Learning projects as well as my Toyota friend’s Jumpshift process. It seems to me the method itself is less important than the core philosophy behind it – do you believe you can develop leaders better by ‘pushing’ generic solutions at people en masse, or that leaders develop better in a program structure where they think through and take action to solve their own leadership challenges (with support and guidance).

Your answer to that question will determine whether your program ends up developing a whole lot more followers or whole lot more leaders.

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How Organizations Screw Their Best People

Descriptions of their ‘best people’:

“He was a bad people manager. . . . A manipulator of people. He started creating a poor climate in the office, making the work life not productive. After several warnings, he was fired.”

and

“He is a great strategic thinker and he has high ethical standards, but he lashes out at people, he can’t build trusting relationships. He is very smart, but he achieves superiority through demeaning others. He is abusive, he hits people with intellectual lightning. He instinctively goes after people. Many people have tried to work on this flaw because he has such extraordinary skills, but it seems hopeless.”

These two people started out as organizational ‘stars’, they just didn’t end up that way.

The sad fact is large organizations do a great job of derailing their best people. First, they search the marketplace for talented young people who are action orientated, have a drive for results and will push to the limit to get the job done. Then they let them loose in the organization to hustle their way through projects, use the odd sharp elbow and deliver their projects on time. When they hit their targets the organization gives them a pat them on the back, a nice little reward and tells them that they are the ‘stars’ of the future.

The ‘stars’ then double down on the behaviors that have worked for them and over the next three, five or ten years they continue to achieve. At which point, the organization decides that they are performing so well as an individual contributor, that it is time to make them a manager. Now, they are supposed to get their results through other people, which is not really what ‘stars’ like to do since after all, THEY are the ‘stars’, not their people. So the stars tends to delegate a lot less than they should, get involved in things that they shouldn’t and overall micromanage a lot more than anyone is comfortable with.

But because our star works hard and his people get pushed into working hard as well, it is usually not long before he is ready for his promotion to the next level. The pattern repeats over the following 10 years, but with each transition up, the star notices (or does he?) that the behaviors that worked for him at the start of his career are starting to become less and less effective. Now that he is a manager of managers it no longer possible to ‘do’ all of the work himself, there is simply too much of it.

On top of this, the people that the ‘star’ needs to influence are no longer the people he has line authority over. Now he has to influence his peers from other divisions and for some reason they don’t seem to like him very much, nor do they return his calls. The ‘star’ having never failed in his career doubles down again, working harder, working longer and using stronger elbows. Friendships diminish, but enemies accumulate. People start bitching, direct reports begin leaving, peers continue complaining and bosses lose patience. The ruse is complete, the star has been derailed.

This is a remarkably common story. What start out as strengths for the stars, often ends up a weaknesses.

Ellen Van Velsor, of The Center for Creative Leadership, says that the executives most likely to derail usually have a string of successes early on in their career and are viewed as technical geniuses or tenacious problem solvers. Yet as they move up in their organizations and job demands change, those early strengths often become weaknesses and other early weaknesses soon begin to matter. Over the course of 30 years of research C.C.L has identified the following factors as the five most likely to derail an executive

Problems with interpersonal relationships
Failure to build and lead a team
Inability to change or adapt during a transition
Failure to meet business objectives
Too Narrow Functional Orientation

This shouldn’t really be news to anyone. Evidence of early high potentials who flamed out are on display throughout most organizations. So what is an organization to do? They can start with three things:

By the far the easiest solution is to use a ‘derailment 360 questionnaire’ as part of your leadership development programs. This has several advantages: first, there will be a number of people receiving their feedback reports at the same time, so no one feels singled out. Second, it will be an unbiased, outsider who delivers the results, so participants have enough time to ‘hear’ and digest the message and start making the connections between their behaviors and the impact that is having on others around them.
Make sure the person understands what impact these derailers are having on their career, their reputation and their future in the company. In particular pay attention to the impact that it is having on the things they hold most dearly: levels of respect, finance, promotions
Finally, if they decide they want to change, get them a coach or a mentor who can help them work out how they are going to make changes. If they tell you they don’t want to change, don’t bother. It is hard enough to help someone change who is highly motivated, it is a waste of time and resources to help someone who isn’t. In that case you need to decide if this person is so valuable to the company, they are worth the damage they will cause in terms of staff turnover, staff engagement and unhappy co-workers. If yes, then enjoy. If not then you need to tell them so and move them out. I have met several executives who have told me that getting fired was the most awful medicine they had ever tasted, but just what the patient needed.

Sometimes, it is not the person’s fault that they got derailed in the first place. But once they know they have been, it is their responsibility to either get back on the track or to get off the train.

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Why Groups Fight Each Other

One of my favorite ever professors was Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman, who spent a lifetime looking at group dynamics and social forces. One of his lectures that I remember most vividly was about how conflicts between groups erupt (think: teams, departments and nations).

He said that after studying the research and carrying much of it out himself, he believed that four factors were nearly always present.

1 – Clearly Identifiable Groups – Lines are drawn so that people know who they are with and who they are against (Ever considered why sports teams wear uniforms?)

2 – A Zero Sum Game: There is a limited supply of resources available to people so the pie needs to be cut from what is there. There are unlikely to be win/win outcomes – some people are going to win and some people are going to lose (E.g. We each must create our budget from the same limited resource pool).

3 – Gross Inequality: A strongly imbalanced power relationship exists between the groups. This leads to tension between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ (Hosni Mubarak in Egypt comes to mind)

At this point the tinder is dry. Then,

4 – A spark occurs in the form of an incident that sets the whole thing off (Tunisia – A street vendor cannot take the government harassment any longer, sets himself on fire and the whole Middle East erupts).

These factors are in play on a global level every day, but they are also in play in your workplace. In fact, part of a leaders job seems to be reducing the prevalence of the four conditions within his or her organization (well, three of them anyway).

In order to prevent strong group boundaries, team members are often mixed around and given exposure to other people and parts of the business (secondments, job rotations, task forces)
To reduce the focus on a zero sum game (all of our budgets must come out of the same limited pool), companies try to create ‘supra-ordinate’ goals which trump all of our smaller interests – “Our vision is to become the No. 1 wah in the blah, blah, blah.”
Organizations try to reduce the number of triggering events with behavioral feedback tools and processes – 360 deg. feedback and annual performance reviews target ‘deviant’ behaviors that can trigger destructive conflict (and generally annoy other people)
And then there is inequality – It seems that some organizations work hard to maintain inequality of power and rewards, while others work hard to reduce it. Many Law and Financial Services firms guarantee that power and resources are held at the top of the pyramid through their use of a partnership structure. Other companies such as IDEO and W.L. Gore do the opposite by eliminating hierarchies, creating relatively distributed levels of power, status and rewards and unleashing huge levels of innovation and energy. Which of these is better might depend on how you feel about working in a pyramid (though, I know what Generation Y is thinking).

The four conditions are surrounding you. If you watch the news you will see them, if you follow Major League Baseball you will see them and if you watched the US auto industry over the last 30 years you will have definitely seen them. But the best thing to do is keep an eye out around the office. If you do, you are guaranteed to start seeing the inter-team and departmental conflicts with a new set of eyes.

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Future Trends in Leadership Development – C.C.L. Whitepaper

Halfway through my expensive Harvard program last year, I realized that I was wasting my time. I was getting a lot of new info, but was not turning it into anything useful or memorable. I had a feeling that if I did not convert my time into something concrete and practical, I was going to end up with a fancy piece of cardboard and little else. So I made, what was in hindsight, one of the best decisions of my career – to turn my degree into a project.

The big question I had on my mind was, ‘What will the future of leadership development look like?’. In the last few years as a consultant, I had seen that the methods that companies were using, were not keeping pace with the complexity of the challenges that leaders were facing. People were running conventional training programs for leaders who were facing unconventional business environments.

So I wrote a list of the 20 – 30 leadership experts in the U.S. that I most wanted to learn from and asked each for a 60 min interview. To my surprise, all of them agreed (there is definitely a lesson in there somewhere).

I asked each person four questions:

What are the current approaches being used that you think are the most effective?
What do you think we should be doing more of in terms of developing leaders?
What should we be doing less of/ stop doing/ or phase out?
Where do you see the future of leadership development headed?

Based on these interviews (and a literature review) I created a report called ‘Future trends in Leadership Development’. Things got momentum from there. I had some great interviews with leaders at the Center for Creative Leadership, who then turned the tables and started interviewing me……for a job (my current one). They also liked the report so just last week released it as a C.C.L. whitepaper (which looks far better than the original).

All of this is to say two things. First, if you have an interest in an area, but are not sure what to do next, try creating a project where you can go interview some experts on the topic. It is amazing what flows out of those conversations and where it can lead you.

Secondly, if you have an interest in how people really develop and where leadership development is going next, here is the C.C.L. whitepaper - Future Trends in Leadership Development

Feel free to distribute to others you think it may be of interest to (nb – if you read the first four pages you will get the big ideas).

If you prefer to read a short summary, here is the article about the report from C.C.L.’s new ‘trend watch’.

Enjoy!

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Someone Has Already Solved Your Biggest Problem

I once worked with a promising young lawyer named Ben. Ben had rapidly ascended up the partner track in his firm, but had stalled just short of actually making partner. Ben’s problem was that he was not good at bringing in new clients and it turns out, that this is exactly what you need to get good at in order to make partner.

Most successful partners in Ben’s firm had created detailed business plans for how they would bring in new clients. Unfortunately despite his best efforts, Ben could not create a plan that would work for him.

During a coaching session with Ben I asked him, “Who is the best in the firm at bringing in new clients?”

“Harry Q is. He has the most systemized business generation plan of anyone in the firm” he replied.

“So why don’t you go and ask Harry Q how he does it?

“I can’t just go ask him. Why would he want to tell me? Besides, he is far too busy. I could never ask him.”

After much cajoling and questioning, Ben eventually agreed that the worst that could happen is that Harry would say ‘no’ and he would still be in the same spot as he was now.

One week later when I saw Ben he was almost bouncing off the walls.

“You are never going to guess what happened” he started off. “I saw Harry in the hallway and asked him if I could have a five minute chat. He asked me about what and I explained that I wanted to ask his advice about how he brings in so much new business. He sort of looked surprised but told me to come up to his office in the afternoon. When I walked in, Harry had his whole business plan spread out across that table. He then spent the next 60 minutes explaining to me how it works. Not only that, he then worked with me to create my own business plan for the next 12 months based on his method. I couldn’t believe it. That would have taken me 15 years to develop a system like that on my own, if I ever did. But that wasn’t the biggest thing I learned.”

“What was?” I asked, surprised that there was something more important than that.

“The thing which really struck me was what he said at the end of our conversation. He asked me, ‘Why is it that after ten years of being the top client developer in the firm, this is the first time that anyone has ever come and asked me how I do it?’

“So what did you say?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know why no one had ever asked him either. But it did make me think. I have got a lot of other challenges that I struggle with. I started realizing that the ‘Harry’s’ for those problems are all around me. Why don’t I work out who has already solved those challenges and go and ask them the same thing?”

We all think our challenges are unique and that only we can work out how to solve them. The truth is that many other people have already solved your problems. I now use this method all the time and I swear that it is the fastest, easiest way to get good at anything. Just think of the people you know who have already achieved/ are good at what you want to be good at and ask them if they could chat to you about how they did it. People love to talk about ‘how they got so good’. Even so, very few people actually use this approach. Which means if you are one of the ones who does, it gives you a substantial advantage over everyone else (if you are into advantages, that is).

What’s the biggest challenge you are facing at the moment and who might be your ‘Harry Q’?

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Part 2 – What Really Creates Effective Teams

In an earlier post I talked about the research of Harvard professor Richard Hackman and his idea that we have many flawed beliefs about ‘what makes an effective team’. The assumption that if we learn to trust each other more, know each other better and communicate more respectfully, we will become a higher performing team is one of those ideas that seems right, but isn’t. As many researchers have pointed out – cohesive teams tend to have higher levels of liking and rapport, but lower levels of creativity and innovation.

Hackman observed 100′s of teams from a broad range of contexts and then studied the data to discern what made the most difference. He identified 5 factors most likely to produce high performing teams. The more of these factors a team has, the higher they tend to perform. The factors are:

1. It is a Real Team: A real team has four features: a ‘real team’ task (that requires joint collaboration), clear boundaries (they know who is in the team, who is not), defined authority (they know what can they can and can’t do) and stability of team members (the longer they stay together, the more performance trends up – one interesting exception: R&D teams).

2. A Compelling Direction: The team has a goal which is challenging, clear and consequential. They are then given as much flexibility as possible about ‘how’ they achieve this goal.

3. An Enabling Structure: The work of the team itself is designed so that people; see their work as meaningful, feel responsible for their work outputs and get feedback on their results. Hackman suggests a number of ways to make this happen (connect the maker with the end users, give people ‘whole’ tasks to do).

4. Supportive Organization Context: Involves three factors: Rewards that people care about, information to perform that is available at the right time and in the right format, and the availability of training and technical assistance to ensure that members have the skills needed to perform their job

5. Expert coaching: Though the role of the team leader is often over-rated, it is still important for the team. Interestingly, Hackman’s research shows that if the other conditions are not in place, skilled coaching has little impact on performance and if the 5 factors are in place, poor leadership behaviors have minimal negative impact on performance.

In Hackman’s mind, the key role of the leader is not to use a certain style or display certain traits. It is to get the 5 conditions in place for the team and keep them there. In his research, he recorded a wide range of leadership styles with none proving more effective than another. He concluded that it doesn’t matter what style you use to get the conditions in place, only that you do.

Is Hackman completely off the wall with this? Personally, I buy this as the most research based, solid means to get the foundations in place for a team.

I have done too many team interventions where we spend all our time trying to fix interpersonal and team dynamics, only to notice that even when those things do improve there is little impact on team performance. Will Phelps did some interesting research on the effect of having a ‘Bad Apple’ in a team and found that there was some negative impact on performance. I think that Hackman would agree that this is possible. But he would also say, start by getting the 5 factors in place and see if the disharmony sticks around.

A lot of disharmony in teams is really just symptomatic of the conditions not being in place. The root causes are often that the team does not have a clear task, lacks clear authority, lacks the resources needed to do the job and has a reward system that encourages them to work against each other. Those are not interpersonal issues, those are structural.

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Why We Procrastinate And What To Do About It

How often is it that you find yourself with a new commitment e.g. Exercise more, write more, clean the house, and notice that you are repeatedly putting it off? Perhaps you can think of an example right now of something you are avoiding. In the last couple of years I have met many motivated, intelligent, ambitious leaders who keep telling me that they have a problem with procrastinating due to their poor self-discipline. But I have long had a hunch that these smart people are misdiagnosing their problem and therefore beating themselves up needlessly. Over the last couple of years I started reading the research and speaking to practitioners about what they think blocks people from taking action. Below are the 4 reasons that I now think are most common and what you can do about them.

1) You don’t know what ‘step one’ is

It is incredibly common in my coaching work to meet people who are stuck on a goal because they have identified step 3, but think that it is actually step 1. We all do this often:

A: I need to get the tyres on my car changed.

Q: So what’s the next action?

A: Get the tyres on the car changed!

Q: So what is the next physical thing you need to do?

A: Take it into the service center

Q: So what is the next action?

A: Call them

Q: So what is the next action?

A: Look up their phone number up on Google

Q: Yes, that is step 1, so go ahead and do that.

Too many people are static because they are stuck on step 3 when what they haven’t actually identified is step 1.

Solution: When you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself, ‘what is the first physical action I need to do?’ Keep working your way backwards untill you find it. Once you have it, you will often see that it wasn’t about willpower after all, you were just missing step 1.

2) You think it is a motivation problem but it’s not

When we notice our self not following through, we often assume it is because we have not levered up high enough in our mind, the pain of failure and the pleasure of success. So we castigate ourselves and visualise how good we will look and feel when we actually achieve our goal. Most times though, this actually just locks us deeper into the cause of our procrastination – too much thinking about the goal and insufficient action. To paraphrase Newton’s 1st law of motion– a person at rest tends to stay at rest, a person in motion tends to stay in motion.

Thinking tends to lead to more thinking. A small action tends to lead to another small action. You then have momentum. When you find yourself procrastinating, stop trying to think yourself into action by boosting your motivation. You don’t need motivation, you need momentum. Instead just take one tiny, easy step in the direction of your goal and make your next decision while on the move.

3) You have an ‘immunity to change’

Harvard Professor Robert Kegan says that we always carry in our minds unconscious and unexamined beliefs about what would happen if we were to make changes in our lives.

If I delegate my work, people will think I am lazy
If I start to exercise more but stop later, I will feel like a loser

We keep these assumptions hidden from ourselves because we believe that acknowledging them will prevent us from getting started. But it doesn’t work. We still don’t get started, we just don’t know why. We have one (conscious) foot on the accelerator and one (unconscious) foot on the brake.

Solution: Write down what your goal is and below it bullet point some of the worries you have about what would happen if you were to take action/ make that change. This alone can feel remarkably freeing. As you flood light on the previously unconscious assumptions, you start to see that some of these familiar ideas are actually ludicrous. Next, carry out some small actions towards your goal and ask – ‘to what extent are the assumptions that I believe actually coming true?’ As it becomes evident that they are not true, or not completely true, the brake gets released and change happens more naturally (my experience with this process is that it works extremely well with analytical, logical, evidence based people, but less well with intuitive, feelings dominant folk).

4) Cognitive strain

The human brain is naturally wired to apply the ‘law of least effort’ in order to conserve energy. Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, in his brilliant book ‘Thinking fast and slow’, says that we conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. To take action that takes concerted concentration, requires sufficient levels of glucose in the brain. Once these levels are depleted, your brain is naturally wired to try to conserve energy until that replenishes. That is to say, sometimes the reason that you check your email rather than do your accounts, or grab a coffee rather than write that report is because your brain glucose is depleted i.e. you are not being lazy, your brain is simply tired!

Solution: Pre-decide the time of the day that you are most alert for concentrated work. Think back over your week and ask yourself, ‘What times of the day am I at my most alert and sharpest?’. For me it is 8 – 11am (work time) and 7 – 11pm (personal time). Then schedule to do any of your most cognitively demanding tasks during that time and avoid trying to do them at your most cognitively depleted times of the day. Also avoid wasting that valuable period to do easy tasks like email or having routine meetings (save them for later when you are less energized).

Consider the above four points as alternatives to the willpower/ self-discipline idea. It worries me that I see so many hard-working, diligent people castigating themselves for their perceived lack of discipline when they are anything but. I have consistently found that people who use the above four ideas to quickly diagnose their ‘stuckness’, move forward again without the critique and lost effort.

If there is something that you are stuck on, give it a try. It can work for you too.

photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/rubberdreamfeet/5849043646/

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Nicholas Petrie

Leadership and Development

90% of Development is Letting Go of Old Things

Why Can’t You Change?

How Great Leaders Deal With Difficult People

Why (a lot of) Training Doesn’t Work

How Organizations Screw Their Best People

Why Groups Fight Each Other

Future Trends in Leadership Development – C.C.L. Whitepaper

Someone Has Already Solved Your Biggest Problem

Part 2 – What Really Creates Effective Teams

Why We Procrastinate And What To Do About It