Can you be both???
I’m not truly sure that the last many months have directly caused what I am about to write about, or if it simply magnified what was already there. You choose the cause or the reaction… but either way, this needs critical understanding and action today.
As I converse with people all over the world and from a professional perspective and a personal perspective it seems to me that we have truly driven distinct style differences in communicating and understanding.
Today I see two polar opposite positions within the way that people converse and interact. We have what I have labeled as two solid differences between groups. They are pretty firmly divided as either HIGHLY OPINIONATED or HIGHLY CURIOUS. As you stop now and examine it, I am sure that you can pretty quickly put all those that you interact with within either of those camps.
It seems that we have become pretty quick to judge, everybody, and everything. Bucketing all that we see into our own little matrix of good, bad, important, needless, etc…. And this seems to happen in a matter of moments and at a huge variety of levels and real importance.
On the other hand, I do see a group of folks that have become more open to new ideas than ever. It seems some have learned that we really don’t know much and what we know should be challenged on a regular basis for clarity of thought. Our COVID battles have shown us that the entire world CAN in fact be turned upside down and we will still manage to thrive somehow in all the resident madness. And in fact, will learn to move beyond surviving and into highly successful actions that are new AND better than ever. Who, 14 months ago would have guessed that we would stop face to face (in person) interactions with clients and we would not wither and fade away, but we would actually learn to serve them better than ever and co-create more value than ever (this is a point that our clients tell us regularly).
It is strange, a long time ago, I was asked what do I look for when I am interviewing people for our team. My response even then was… a great deal of intellectual curiosity and a natural sense of humility. If those traits are not present they will not fit into a growing and evolving organization.
Today those traits are the cornerstone on which we build great teams. The skills we can train, the attitudes must be there and they must be moldable.
FIT is first, curiosity is second, humility is third. This is the secret to finding and growing great teams.
So ask yourself….honestly.. are you more comfortable giving opinions or seeking out understanding?
It is my firm belief that we can all do more to help the world be a much better place if we were all HIGHLY CURIOUS as individuals, leaders, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, and friends to all.
CARING greatly,
UNDERSTANDING deeply,
SERVING endlessly, with
PURPOSE!
And it all starts with a great sense of curiosity as the catalyst.
OK, LETs ROLL!
Mitch
I heard it again several times this past week. As we start to wind down a bit from mask use in the U.S. the conversation is again quickly devolving into “getting back to where we were, and what we used to do”. While I understand the sentiment, that can never happen. Actually, it’s just a matter of physics and the fact that none of us own a time machine (at least that I know of). We can never go backward. We can only go forwards. So with that as a baseline, how are we going to act? What are we going to do? The new future is up to you. We have all learned a great deal about ourselves, our teams, and our clients. We have learned how to make the best out of many things that we did not understand before. For most of us our clients now clearly tell us that they PREFER our communication style, our preparation, and our succinctness, in our new operating method.
We should listen closely to what they have to say WITHOUT the filter of “getting back to what we used to do”.
Our old standards of measuring success, revenue $$ per salesperson, never did tell the story, and it most certainly does not even come close in today’s new world. In reality, the complex sale has gotten even more complex. Not too long ago the thinking was that there were something like 6-8 people involved in every client decision. Conversations with clients now tell us that is more than 10 in nearly every case. And those 10 are diverse in location, role, and decision-making capability. Corporate concern for all things litigious has driven the consensus-making process to the max. Everyone is concerned about covering their backsides. RISK avoidance has gone from a nice thing to understand to MUST have of every part of the situations we face, at all levels.
And helping our client mitigate risk is actually the singular most valuable role that we can jointly assume with them. In the realm of the Client BIG3 (helping them grow their revenue, helping them reduce their total costs, helping them manage their risks) the management of risk has quickly risen to the top of the heap of serving our clients. Products, technologies, and services are the WHAT of our actions.. the power exists in the WHY. Understanding the client's business challenges is the ONLY way to differentiate our efforts.
Face-to-face is NOT more powerful to help us understand our clients. In fact, our use of video has repeatedly shown us that a one-on-one video call is more likely to be MORE candid and open than any time in the past when we were across the conference room table from someone. The intimacy that is provided is VERY powerful if you care enough to make it so. The ability to quickly reach out and connect with someone at every level has become a new way of life. Going backward into time-bound meetings in conference rooms will not make us better. It might make some of us happier as we kill time in airport terminals waiting for the next canceled flight and grab that quick refresher to pick us up.
So, I ask you all, please don’t hurry to go backward. Take what we have all learned and deploy it to the maximum benefit of our CLIENTS. Ask them, how they would like to be served! Then take time to…
Care greatly,
Understand deeply,
Serve endlessly, with
Purpose!
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
We all know this, and yet I will say it again and even LOUDER, if even only theoretically so.
The words we choose to use or use spontaneously, have an impact. They make a difference. They can inform, they can inspire, they can hurt, and they can do forever damage. Words are very powerful. The words we use in conversations are one thing. They are vitally important. The words we use in our heads as we tell ourselves our own stories are or can be, life-changing.
As we tell our stories to ourselves and others we often take one of two positions, a victim, or an owner. As with all reactions in life, the choices we make and the directions we take are of our own choosing. We cannot control what the world throws at us. We will be forever handed setbacks. How we frame our “response’ and the actions we take will determine whether we are choosing to be a victim or an owner. The owner mindset is very different from the victim mindset. Owners make things happen, victims wait to see what will happen. Owners choose, victims have things happen to them. Owners do the most important thing, they commit, victims try.
How does all this apply to our new world with the challenges that we face today? Words matter greatly here!
I see the words used all over the place, in headlines, and in articles, like the “new normal” or the “new abnormal”.
To me, both of those perspectives are outcroppings of victim thinking. They both put COVID-19 in charge of us and our lives.
The Stoic Gods (see Willam B. Irvine) have thrown a huge set back at the world and each of us. We cannot deny that, and at the same time, we can reframe our reaction to it.
My choice, and hopefully yours, is to take what lessons we are learning each day in this journey and use them to create our…
Tremendous good is being created today at the same time as many things are being broken. It is our choice to create a better outcome than we could have in the way we used to view and do things. We get the choice to not accept going back to ANYTHING. Let’s make the choice to move forward in every case and create an outcome that is better than it ever could have been and build our “NEW EXCELLENCE”. Better than ’normal’ or “abnormal”.. and certainly NOT going back to anything. We choose to move forward, better, best…excellent.
Words matter. They form the basis for our thoughts, which form the basis for our actions and our outcomes. Let’s choose to reframe our choice and choose the “NEW EXCELLENCE” for the creation of our future.
That choice is yours! I’m off to create “NEW EXCELLENCE”!
Mitch
