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Comfort Zones May 22, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.
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2 comments

Last summer, I had the opportunity to watch a group of Boy Scouts go through a high-ropes team building exercise.  Beyond the fun of watching boys climb 50 feet in the air with nothing more than a safety rope hooked to their waist, I learned a clever trick about comfort zones.

High-ropes courses are all about getting out of your comfort zone.  I am very comfortable on the ground, enjoying the combination of gravity and my feet firmly planted on the earth.  Climbing a 40-foot ladder comprised solely of five planks at eight-foot intervals took me way out of my zone, to the point of near-frozen, knee-shaking fear at the top.  But I did it, and I’m better for it, if only to avoid embarrassment in front of 13-year-olds who scrambled to the top like monkeys.

There was a more subtle comfort zone that was shattered five minutes into the day.  When we arrived, the instructors asked the boys to pair up.  As you would expect, they found their best friends and quickly formed twosomes.  She then asked them to each assume a character, either SpongeBob or Patrick (remember the audience here).  They did so.  She then gathered all the SpongeBobs into one group, and all the Patricks into another.  One group headed to the ropes course, and the other to another exercise.

In one deft motion she separated every boy from his best friend! For the rest of the day, the boys worked without the comfort of their buddy, opening them to social opportunities they would never have had.  They still had fun, accomplished things, and grew a bit.  But they did it with a little more risk and became more open to partnering with others throughout the day.

I was so impressed by this trick that I asked the leader about it.  She shared that they had choices for any number of groups.  Need groups of three? Team them in trios and then ask them to become one of the Three Stooges.  Foursomes? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And so forth.  They had learned that boys know how to game the “count off” trick, positioning their best friends “n” people away to make sure they stayed together.  The character game took them by surprise, before they could figure out how to thwart the leader’s intent.

As adults, we probably won’t be asked to become a cartoon character (I’d pick SpongeBob, FYI). But, boy, do we need to be broken up and moved out of our social comfort zones!  How many times do you arrive at a networking event and look for the familiar faces?  I’m guilty of this, and I really enjoy working a room and getting to meet new people.  For the less gregarious among us, breaking out to meet strangers is a difficult exercise.

How many opportunities do we miss for fear of breaking away from our comfortable friends?  There is such value in meeting new people, expanding our horizons, and finding ways to help others.  Our reluctance to engage a stranger costs us so much.  As adults, we are supposed to know better and not require outside intervention to make us do the right thing.  Yet we still revert to old behaviors, rooted deep in our psyches.

We all own this problem.  At your next event, acknowledge the familiar faces and turn away to meet the strangers.  If your friends chase you down, gently aim them at others as well.  You may have to write “SpongeBob” on your name tag to make your point, but it will be worth the effort.

What Can You Do? May 20, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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4 comments

I enjoy collecting and sharing inspirational quotes.  I’ve arranged a few of my favorites on the Quotes page of this blog in the hope that others may garner similar inspiration from them.  I know that there are thousands of these collections, far larger and more comprehensive than mine.  Mine are, well, mine; they come from people that I admire for various reasons.

The newest addition to my collection comes from a relative unknown, Nicholas Winton:

I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.

What did Nicholas do?  In the waning days of 1939, he saw what was happening to the Jews in Czechoslovakia.  He went to Prague, opened an office, and arranged to have 669 Jewish children sponsored and moved to Great Britain.  An additional trainload of 250 children was to have left on September 3, 1939, but war was declared and the train was canceled.  Those children were killed by the invading Germans.

Nicholas Winton turned 100 yesterday, on May 19, 2009.  He is inordinately modest (he never even told his wife what he had done), and I certainly have not done his story justice.  You can learn more about him here and here, and a 2002 movie tells his story as well.

It would be impossible to catalog the downstream good that Winton’s actions caused.  How many subsequent good acts were undertaken by those he saved?  And by their children, and in turn their children? How many people have benefited by some action of those saved by Winton, but have no idea that they could trace that act back to one man, doing what he could to help, in 1939?

Few of us, regrettably, will have the impact of Winton.  But all of us can have some impact, in some way, every day.  No act of good, no matter how small, is wasted.  Most importantly, we can never know the true measure of any act of good.  What seems small to us may be huge to someone else.

There is an apocryphal tale of a small boy walking on a beach covered with starfish washed up by the tide.  As he walks, he picks up starfish and throws them back into the water.  His father asks him “Why throw them back? You can’t save all the starfish.  What difference does it make?”  The boy picks up another starfish, throws it, and says “It made a difference to him.”

Today, in honor of Nicholas Winton, make a difference to someone.  In each situation you encounter, ask yourself two simple questions:

What is going on?

What can I do to help?

Imagine a world where we all did that every day.  Now stop imagining and go do it!

Social Simulation May 11, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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12 comments

Computer simulation is a powerful tool, refined over decades to give engineers unparalleled ability to test and verify designs before bringing them to physical fruition. Simulation is also used to explore all sorts of scenarios that can’t be brought to life: weather, nuclear reactions, global warming. But there is a cautionary adage in the simulation world: Be careful; if you do it long enough, you start to think it’s the real thing.

And so it is with social media. We like to think that tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to develop real relationships with people we otherwise would not have met. And while we can get real value by interacting with people via these tools, it is a far cry from a real relationship. Like simulation, don’t begin to think that exchanging tweets, however well-intentioned, is the real thing.
This came home to me at the Microsoft CIO Summit a few weeks ago. The Summit affords IT executives a chance to share advice, learn about new things, and generally commiserate. I always enjoy the opportunity to meet new CIOs and build new relationships.

While socializing, I realized that I was learning more about these people in a two minute chance encounter than I would in a month of tweets. While there was value in the words we exchanged, the rich context of the engagement provided all sorts of clues about the real person behind the data stream. How did they shake hands? Are they dressed neatly? Do they hold my gaze or look away? How do they laugh? Do they talk a lot or a little? Do I get a “good feeling” about them?

Your brain is the most advanced pattern matching device ever developed. It takes thousands of data bits and instantly makes decisions that dramatically affect how you feel about someone. Your mom was right: first impressions are lasting. When you meet someone, you are matching them against every interaction, good or bad, you’ve ever had and making a judgment. We call it intuition, and most people trust these impressions.

Social media strips away 99% of this data, leaving your brain with very few data elements to work with. I suspect that we fill in the gaps with optimistic values, leading to better impressions of our social media peers than might otherwise be warranted. Social media is to a real, in-person encounter like Morse code is to HD television. There simply isn’t enough bandwidth to get a good feel for the other person.

That isn’t to say that our social media friends aren’t good people (especially all of mine). But it is easy to start believing that social media is enough to sustain a good relationship. Like simulation, it is easy to start thinking that it is the real thing.

Perhaps we need to think about social media as a place to start a relationship. One started, we need to use traditional tools like meeting and speaking to build on that beginning. As the relationship grows, social media enhances the experience instead of supplanting it. Here’s a novel idea: pick one person that you’ve met through Twitter or Facebook and (gasp) call them. If they live close enough, meet them for coffee. Have a high-bandwidth encounter and see what it does for the relationship. I bet we’ll all be better off for it.

Bad Salesman! April 15, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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9 comments

I get a lot of cold sales calls.  I can only take a few, and most get either redirected or ignored.  I know that sounds harsh, but that is the reality. My people get a lot of sales calls.  They can only take a few, and most get ignored.  I know that sounds harsh, but that is the reality.

If you are a salesperson, and you are cold-calling me or my team, and we do not return your call, you have your answer.  That may not be the most polite way of conveying the answer, but please, move on.  We’re busy and you’re busy.  Spend your time with a more lucrative customer.

I have tremendous respect for salespeople and how hard their job is.  I really appreciate the great salespeople that partner with me and make me successful.  I get really frustrated when a bad salesperson makes the rest of them look bad.  Like the other day, for example.

Out of the blue, I get blind-copied on an email sent to my systems manager from some salesperson.  In it, the salesperson is complaining about how my manager won’t make time for him, and how we could be saving so much money if only he would return the salesperson’s call.  The inference, of course, is that my manager is negligent and that I need to step in and do something about it.

In reality, I am pleased to see that my manager has been ignoring an incompetent salesperson.  He scores brownie points, and the salesperson (and their company) is banished from consideration by me for the rest of my career.

What kind of salesperson actually believes that this is an effective sales technique?  Are they sitting back in their office, confident that this will break things loose on our end and result in a big sale?  If so, they are sadly mistaken.  When faced with a choice between some anonymous outside party and a member of my hardworking team, who do they think I am going to pick?

What kind of leader would take action based on this email?  Clearly, someone must have at some point, to give all these bad salespeople some hope that this tactic would work.  Let’s put it this way: those leaders are not making smart choices.  Imagine how demoralizing it is for an employee to be taken to task by his boss based on an anonymous outside comment by a salesperson!

Salespeople who resort to this kind of tactic give all the good salespeople a bad name.  Leaders who respond to it make the rest of the leaders look bad as well.  Let all make good choices, no matter which side of the sales process you are on.

Soup And Flowers April 10, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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2 comments

Jerry Clower often told the story of the best neighbor he ever knew, a fellow named Ben:

Many years ago, Ben lived next door to an elderly widower, Mr. Johnson, and took it upon himself to help his neighbor.  Every day, Ben made soup and carried it next door for lunch with the old man.

Eventually, the old man passed away.  As he had for many years, Ben made soup and carried it to the old man’s house.  There he found the house filled with flowers, with many mourners paying their respects to Ben, who was laid out in the parlor.  The other mourners laughed when Ben arrived.  “Why did you bring soup? Mr. Johnson is dead!”  Ben didn’t miss a beat: “He can taste my soup just as well as he can smell your flowers!”

More recently, Susan Mazza posted a blog entry on Hidden Heroes.  She talked about the hidden heroes in each of our lives, those people that quietly influenced us and made us better people.  She shared the story of her hidden hero, her mother-in-law Ada.  She also admonished her readers to make sure that we tell our hidden heroes how we feel about them, while we can.

The resulting comments are inspiring.  People shared who their heroes were, and many concluded by noting that they would make sure to share how they felt.

Tim Russert’s book, Wisdom Of Our Fathers, is a collection of tribute letters written by adult children, about their fathers.  These letters were inspired by Russert’s book, Big Russ and Me, which is a tribute to his father.  Russert got so many letters he compiled them into a book. Many of the letters end with a similar regret: “I wish I had told him…” or “If only he knew…”

Ben’s elderly neighbor may or may not have been a hero to Ben, but he knew how Ben felt about him every day.  While those who brought the flowers to the viewing could claim to have shared their feelings, tasting that soup every day meant a whole lot more than heaps of flowers, after the fact.

Susan’s readers heard the same call to share before it is too late, and will have the opportunity to let their heroes know how they feel.  Russert’s, for the most part, are not so lucky, and missed a chance to say a few words that, guaranteed, would mean more than anything else (anything else) to their Dad.

We all have that chance to share, every day, with people that mean a little or a lot to us.  As leaders, do our people know how we feel about them? Do your mentors know how they’ve helped and how you feel?  Conversely, are you so wrapped up in your job that you haven’t shared your feelings with a neighbor or relative?

Last week, I encouraged everyone to deliver pansies but plant tulips.  This week, take the time to make sure someone tastes your soup before your only choice is to carry them flowers.