I was raised in a stable middle class family in central Florida. My brother and I cycled to school, went to church on Sundays, and got home to bed at 7:30 p.m. We lived routine and predictable lives, and I grew up thinking that everyone lived that way. I was also taught to believe some specific things in life, the most memorable that some people always tell the truth and are always right:parents, police, and priests.
Uh-oh.
Do parents always tell the truth? Nope. The police men? Unfortunately, it is not the case. Are all priests trustworthy? Horribly not.
It was a limited paradigm , or state of mind. Paradigms are the lenses through which we view the world, based on how we have been raised, indoctrinated, and trained to see everything before us. We all wear these metaphorical pairs of glasses and their accuracy varies. They could be the right prescription or slightly indented. In some cases, you might have a metaphorical cataract.
Most of the time, our mentalities are unconscious or subconscious. None of us (hopefully) set off in the morning to have biases or prejudices, but each of us embedded them deep within us from our experiences while we were raised. Often we are not even aware of them or their ongoing impact – negative and positive.
With the “parents, police and priests” paradigm, I thankfully didn't have to put it to test. I was usually surrounded by good examples of all three, but if I hadn't been so lucky, this paradigm could have done some serious damage. As it was, I didn't realize the parents were actually real people with flaws and weaknesses until my mid-twenties.
And that wasn't until I was in my thirties that I understood that leaders are people too – that they don't make all the right decisions or have the right answers.
Your job as a leader is to continually assess the accuracy of your paradigms and ensure that they reflect reality. So ask yourself what you think of leadership, your team and yourself. You may think that co-workers who think like you are “high potentials” and those who challenge you are not. You may think you're not really leadership material and one day everyone will discover it.
The See-Do-Get Cycle
I once went skiing with a good friend at Snowbird, a popular resort in Utah. Although she had never skied anything steeper than a rabbit run, I somehow convinced her that she could handle the Black Diamond run. " Go! Go! Go! I encouraged her. "No problem. Black Diamond! Woo-hoo! And after luring her to the top, I gave her an encouraging thumbs up.
She was lowered on a stretcher.
Horrified, I recently realized that I also do this in my leadership role. (And don't worry, my friend wasn't badly hurt and bounced back no worse for the wear and tear, even though she never skied again, at least with me.) While many leaders lack trust their people and stuff them, I'm the opposite:I believe anyone can do anything if I give just enough encouragement. I paint the vision and create excitement, whatever it takes to inspire them to my level of confidence. My intention is to help people realize their full potential. . . and who cares if they agree?
This paradigm works sometimes. But sometimes I accidentally lure people into terrible Black Diamond experiences instead. "No, actually can do this. It's easy. It's just a speech in front of two thousand people. You will be fine. “
When I put people in jobs, assign them to new territories or countries, stage them in front of two thousand people, and contract high-paying consulting gigs for them, the stakes are high. At worst, this paradigm can destroy people's confidences, reputations, and even careers, if we're not aligned.
I often need to rethink my approach and remember something we teach FranklinCovey:The See-Do-Get Cycle. This is the root of true behavior change. When you challenge your mindset (hard work, by the way), you can make lasting changes to your actions and your results.
To better understand this cycle, let's start with our desired outcome, the part "Get" cycle. We all have different outcomes we're trying to achieve:improved health, meaningful relationships, financial stability, influence in our communities and careers – as well as the short-term results we want from our day, meeting or project.
What drives these results (Get) are our behaviors , the “Do” in this cycle. This is how we act. If we want to finish a report before the deadline, then we have to behave in a certain way throughout the day:check with the finance department for the last quarter's income statement, resist distractions, etc. If we want to establish a rapport with our colleagues, we can invite them to lunch. If we want to nail our presentation, we repeat it over and over again. You get the point.
Most people see that behavior and outcomes are interconnected:what we do leads what we have . This is not a revelation.
Here's what I think most people don't appreciate:the crucial first step, "See". This means that beyond our behavior, our results are affected by our mindset.
The way we see things affects our behavior, which in turn affects our results.
Paradigm . Behavior.
Result. To see. Make. Have.
Listen to the extract here!
If you want short-term results, change your behavior. You will quit smoking until a tense day at work. You'll wake up at 5 a.m. by sheer willpower – once, then hit snooze the rest of the week. You will stop swearing, until you are cut off from traffic. Behavioral changes will only get you a temporary fix.
As Dr. Stephen R. Covey has taught, if you want to fundamentally change your results, if you want long-term lasting impact, you have to put off questioning your state of mind.
Having identified my “Black Diamond” paradigm, I was not happy with it. Sometimes it works, but not often enough – and my friend hanging up her skis made me rethink. I re-evaluated my paradigm on setting people up for success (See). Instead of relying on woo-hoos and enthusiasm, I help my team members develop their skills. . . after giving them the opportunity to withdraw from my big plans (Do). As a result, I've learned to develop people who are actually Ready and Ready (Get), and luckily I've decreased the number of people I push on the ski slopes.
From Individual Contributor to Leader
In tennis, what wins on grass and clay doesn't always translate to asphalt. When you win Wimbledon, you don't expect your coach's first conversation to be, "Congratulations, you've won on grass! But now you're going to have to take a completely different approach to winning on the asphalt. You expect to be showered with distinctions; instead, you get an ego wash. The world of professional tennis is full of experts who have been unable to transfer their superior game from one surface to another.
Similarly, I don't imagine most high achievers and promoted to leadership realize that they now need to fundamentally change their approach. But many of the paradigms that got you promoted won't allow you to succeed as a leader. You may be familiar with Gallup's bestselling book No w , Discover Yes our Strengths . A later book, Say cover Your Sales Strengths , pointed to the conundrum that high-performing salespeople face when they are “rewarded” with a promotion to become a sales leader. The strengths they honed as an individual salesperson often included a strong sense of competition, a need for individual recognition and fame, and sometimes a zero-sum game mentality...I win; they lose . Great for winning on the sales dashboard, not so good for nurturing, coaching, and leading your team (as in those people who might have been your peers yesterday).
In most professions, this perilous chasm exists:teacher to manager, waiter to restaurant manager, doctor to chief of medicine. Or as Marshall Goldsmith's best-selling book declares, What Eu You Here W on’ t Have You There . Basically, to become a leader, you'll have to let go of some of the skills and mindsets that made you successful as an individual contributor.
In the best of all worlds, your manager would sit you down, talk about your strengths and why you have been promoted, then explain what you will need to do differently in the future. If you don't get those comments, you have this book. We'll introduce each of the practices with a mindset change leader. must do to get results. Circle the one that tends to describe you at this point. (I don't know? Ask your team – they will certainly have an opinion.)
Practice 1 Change of mindset
I once worked with a record seller, Carolyn. When a sales manager position opened up, it was obvious to promote her. Everyone assumed she would go smoothly from hitting — and often exceeding — her number quarter after quarter to help her new team do the same.
That didn't happen. Instead, if her salespeople hesitated in a meeting with a client, Carolyn would step in and use her exceptional sales skills to close the deal. She thought she was saving the day. She was, but only That day. Her team didn't develop their own sales skills because Carolyn wouldn't let them make mistakes and get over them. This is a common new manager mistake:relying on your individual skills as a contributor – and doing everything yourself as soon as there is a problem – rather than helping your team solve the problem and learn . In the process, you lose the trust of your new team. Carolyn was so focused on helping get the sale, which she knew was good and capable of doing, that she lost sight of a critical reality:her new role was no longer to hit numbers, it was to have his team hit the number.
What if Carolyn hadn't saved the day at sales meetings? Yes, his team would make mistakes. Certain transactions may not be completed. But his team would learn from those mistakes, especially if they followed up with feedback and coaching, and they would likely get better results in the future. Equally important, she would show that she trusted her team, rather than treating them like rookies who needed to hold hands. The result would be savvier, more skilled, and confident salespeople who collectively stuck to their numbers (and weren't dependent on just one person to save the day every time).
When you become a leader, your definition of results must change. You have to see them differently. When you were an individual contributor, your results were the work you did. But now you're a first level leader, so you own the results of Everyone on your team. Your first job is not to achieve results alone, but with and through others. You are still responsible for your personal deliverables, but they make sure your direct reports achieve theirs, while your team members grow, learn, and even become leaders themselves. In other words:Your people are your results.
If you have the common mindset of getting results on your own, it's important to accept once and for all that your job is no longer just about you; it's about them. It's time to let go of your past successes. You earned the leader's chair because you performed at a higher level. Take a victory lap. Now let it all go and focus on the work ahead of you.
