Several years ago I got involved in an initiative to try to stop a major development in our neighborhood. In preparation for our own presentations to the city commissioners, I attended a commission meeting to watch residents from another neighborhood as they made presentations to fight a similar project. Speaker after speaker came to the microphone and gave passionate talks about how the greedy developers were threatening the unique quality of their cherished way of life. Every single speaker was genuine, heartfelt, and passionate.
Then I looked over to the dais to see how the commissioners were reacting. With the exception of the mayor, who was forcing himself to act interested, they were all tuned out. They had heard so many of these before that they were just weathering the storm until the speakers were done so that they could get on with their decision. (They approved the development.) The strangest effect of all these passionate presentations was that I found myself starting to take the side of the developers!
As a result of that experience, I coached our presenters to tone down their emotions and focus on facts. We made it less about us and more about how the decision would impact the commissioners. We won.
I think of this incident when I read yet another blog post or tweet from presentations coaches telling you that passion is contagious; that passion trumps all else. They tell us that your passion is contagious—as if transfer of belief is dependent on emotional strength.
Passion definitely has its place, and emotional strength can be a tremendous motivating force. I’m not an emotionless robot, and I certainly can get passionate about many things. Yet I would like to show that in many cases it needs to be dialed back, contained, and even used strategically.
Passion is most effective when the audience is already on your side. If they support your idea but need an extra push to approve it or to take action, then let it all hang out. If you’re delivering a pre-game speech before a hockey game against the Russians, let it all hang out. Your passion can be the fuel that ignites theirs and drives action.
But if you’re making a strategic sales presentation or any business proposal to a committee of high level executives—especially if they’re neutral or skeptical—overt passion can push them in the opposite direction and blind you to legitimate objections and opposing points of view.
Passion can backfire because senior level decision makers pride themselves on analytical thinking and hard-headed business judgment. You can debate whether the reality matches the perception, but the point remains that important business decisions require at least the appearance of rationality. A speaker who comes across as too “emotional” will make them suspicious—they will react by looking for reasons to shoot you down; they may even see it as unprofessional. Passion is very one sided, but research has shown that audiences see two-sided arguments as more persuasive. It’s fine to express a deeply-held belief in your position, as long as you give a nod to alternative points of view. Your demonstration of open-mindedness is likely to be reciprocated.
Secondly, even before you get in front of your audience, your passion for your topic can cause you to violate the most important rule of persuasion: outside-in thinking. It can keep you from considering other perspectives, making it difficult to anticipate questions from your audience. What seems self-evident to you may be news to them.
None of this means that showing passion is always wrong during a strategic presentation, but you should always be strategic about it. Think about where to place it. If it’s too early in the talk you run the risk of shutting down listening. First, show that you’re a reasonable person that has considered everything, next make your logical arguments for why your idea is the best choice, then go ahead and let your passion show through in your closing arguments. Even then, frame your passion for the idea not so much in terms of why you care so much but why they should care as much as you do.
Salespeople are not fragile. It’s well known that resiliency is a crucial prerequisite for successful salespeople. It’s not just the frequency of rejection they face, because when long term results are fairly predictable it’s easy to take short term losses in stride—think of a .300 hitter in baseball. Resiliency is more important because results in sales can be so random and unpredictable. While it’s true that skilled salespeople with a good product at the right price can produce reasonably predictable results, there is still a lot of randomness that is out of their control. Maybe the reputation of their company is damaged because of something someone else does, or a long-time champion moves to a different company, or a competitor introduces a new technology that changes the rules.
Fragile egos don’t hold up for long in the face of such uncertainty. It takes robustness and resiliency. When you’re robust, randomness does not damage you; when you’re resilient, you may be damaged but you quickly recover.
Robustness is not just about a personal mental quality. A full funnel is robust, because it can withstand the shocks of losing deals. Or having a good number of smaller deals as protection in case the “big deal of the year” does not pan out. Not being dependent on a particular industry can also be robust, because you’re not as subject to cyclical downturns. Your compensation plan can even make you robust or fragile. Quarterly plans can make careers very fragile, because two bad quarters in a row can undo even someone with a few years of stellar performance.
Even better than robustness and resiliency is the quality of being antifragile. This term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his fascinating and challenging book by the same name. Antifragility means that besides being able to withstand random setbacks and shocks you actually profit or improve from them. Things that go wrong may have short term or local negative effects but make the organism or the system stronger in the long run.
Anitfragility is actually common in nature. When you work out, you damage your muscle fibers, but the healing and rebuilding process makes those fibers larger and stronger. Natural selection is the ultimate antifragile phenomenon; although organisms die, species adapt and evolve.
There are three main ways to apply the concept of antifragility in sales—to profit from randomness and volatility: learning, maintaining optionality, and avoiding iatrogenics.
Learning: Use failure asyour textbook
None of us welcome obstacles, failure and uncomfortable change, and it’s tempting to shove negative experiences to the back of our minds. Yet losses and setbacks offer limitless opportunities for antifragility, such as:
Learning, not just recovering, from your mistakes
Improving your offering in response to a competitor’s move
Using loss reviews to improve your approach or your offering
Fostering a climate that learns from losses rather than immediately assigning blame
Responding faster than your competitors to new information or conditions in the market
Resolving a complaint in a manner that makes customers happier than they were before
Listening, curiosity and lifelong learning, because they have low downsides and high upsides
Constantly looking for information that disconfirms your expectations and projections
Using failure and rejection as information and as a stimulus to more intelligent effort
Even success can teach lessons, as long as you don’t automatically assume it happened because you’re so smart.
Optionality: Build a secure floor and no ceiling
Besides personal assets or psychological qualities that can increase antifragility, there are also ways to structure your work to reduce downside and take advantage of randomness. The key concept is to maintain options so that you are not forced into poor choices.
If you can build a secure base that does not take all your time, you can then focus the rest of your attention on the really big deals that bring the big paydays, the recognition, and the trips to Hawaii. Taleb call this the “Barbell” strategy, because it’s a way of focusing on both ends of a range rather than in the middle. The way this would work in a sales portfolio or a funnel is to build a secure base of customers that will keep you in the game and insulate you from large losses. It’s best to have a lot of smaller deals, where the loss of a few won’t hurt too much. While it’s tempting to see security in having a few larger customers, with which you have very solid relationships and big barriers to competitive entry, this is much more fragile than it seems.
Iatrogenics: Don’t screw it up
When something is naturally antifragile, managing it too closely or intervening too much can cause unintended harm. Iatrogenics is technically a medical term, describing unintended harmful results from medical treatment,[1] but the idea applies to other systems as well. For instance, prevention of minor forest fires makes the ecosystem more fragile by preventing the burning off of underbrush, leading to catastrophic fires at some point.
Sales managers always want to do something, but sometimes doing nothing may be the best management. Sales managers contribute to iatrogenics by excessively monitoring sales activity, by rigid procedures to regulate action, by automatically stepping in or by dropping prices to avoid losing deals.
If you’re a sales leader, you need to work on removing sources of fragility, without adding those of your own unintended doing. Since personal learning is one of the most powerful antidotes to fragility, anything that discourages learning is going to make your performance fragile. Blaming people for mistakes; fostering a culture of fear (e.g. “third prize: you’re fired”) Excessive monitoring of activity and rigid procedures that allow little room for initiative or flexibility cause fragility.
We salespeople like to say we make our own luck, and I believe that’s roughly true in the long run. But maybe the surest way to build a successful long term career is to put yourself in a position where even bad luck is ultimately good.
[1] In fact, it’s the third leading cause of death in the US, with an estimated 225,000 deaths a year.
The genesis of this article was a recent SmartBrief on Leadership email, with the following two articles highlighted at the top. In the first, “Great bosses know the glass is always half-empty”, Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta said, “Every single day, maybe 85% of things are going right, and there are 15% that aren’t going right…I’d rather focus on the 15% that are not going right, because that’s how you become great.”
In the article right below that, “How to Lead Like A Navy SEAL”, we’re emphatically told that, “Focusing on your weaknesses holds you back and limits your thinking…”
Since I believe everything I read on the internet, I started getting really confused. Which is it? Do you become great by focusing on the 15% that’s not going right, or should you ignore that and focus on your strengths?
So I did what I always do when I’m confused; I dug into the topic, I asked around, did some more research, read a couple of books—and that only got me more confused. I found some very smart people who made a compelling case that you should focus on your strengths, and I found some very smart people who said it’s very dangerous to do that.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in your head while still retaining the ability to function. Since I’m not that smart, I had to find a way to reconcile these two opposing ideas, and hence this roundabout way to what I think is the “right” answer.
The case for focusing on strengths
First, let’s look at the case for focusing on strengths. Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, in their book, Now Discover Your Strengths, tell us that “Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.” Buckingham also says that the best performers are not well-rounded, they’re spiky.
Along the same lines, leadership expert John Maxwell said, “But do you know what happens when you spend all your time working on your weaknesses and never developing your strengths? If you work really hard, you might claw your way all the way to mediocrity! But you’ll never get beyond it.”
From a coaching perspective, focusing on strengths can foster a much more positive climate. People like to hear about what they’re doing well, and the opportunity to do more of the things that come naturally to them is certainly more appealing. Chip Bell, co-author of Managers as Mentors wrote me, “Jack, I would recommend always focusing on strengths…it keeps the betterment process free of negative energy, guilt and judgment!
My good friend Ross, who never took a management course in his life but runs a very successful small business, said that he learned the hard way that the 80/20 rule applies, and if you focus on the 20% of things that produce 80% of your results, you can’t go wrong.
Those are strong arguments, but let’s examine the flip side.
The case for focusing on weaknesses
Bad is stronger than good. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others noted in a well-known paper that in this sometimes-perverse world, the bad often has a disproportionate impact on how others perceive you. I told the story in a previous post of a speech I attended where the speaker made one slight gaffe, unrelated to the quality of the bulk of his talk—yet it’s now the only thing I now remember about what he said. On a business level, one bad customer service incident can scuttle a long-term relationship.
And it’s not just perceptions. Legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight maintains that, “…mistakes determine the outcome of far more games that great plays do.” The problem with ignoring weaknesses is that one weakness can get you fired, or at least severely hold you back. George Patton almost did not get a chance to show his brilliance as a general because his aggressiveness, which was a huge strength in battle, also led him to slap a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. In a way, the 80/20 rule applies in reverse: one weakness can undo a lot of strength. Think of these as “flat tire” weaknesses. If you have a flat tire, you don’t compensate by pumping up the other three.
Strengths can become weaknesses. You can overdo your strengths by focusing too much on them. Rob Kaiser and Robert Kaplan caution that it is easy to overuse your strengths, because they work for you, so you get more comfortable with them—the old cliché about seeing nails everywhere when all you have is a hammer applies here. Assertiveness is a strength—except when it leads you to run over your colleagues and subordinates. As Aristotle said, any virtue has to be employed in a golden mean amount between not enough and too much.
And let’s not forget the Peter Principle: the strengths that get you promoted may raise you to incompetence because of the different demands of the new position. For instance, being analytical can be a strength in certain jobs, until you’re promoted and have to focus more on the people side.
You don’t always know if the door is locked unless you try the handle. Did you ever try something and get it wrong, and then conclude that you’re just not good at it? Some weaknesses are self-fulfilling: we may initially fail and then quit trying. But sometimes a door is wide open to opportunity and you don’t know it, In my own experience, I hated speaking in front of an audience, and preferred the solitary work of crunching numbers and analyzing financial statements. I also filled out a personality instrument and was told that I had absolutely no talent for sales. Then a friend coerced me into attending my first Toastmasters meeting, and that literally changed my life. For an even more dramatic example, read the story of what happened when a young Kansas boy tried something new.
So, which is it?
So if you can’t be great without building on your strengths, and weaknesses can get you fired, what should you do? In reading these opposing points of view, it’s hard to avoid thinking that most people take a position based on personal preference and then find ways to justify it. Is it as simple as playing to your own preferences, with optimists ignoring weaknesses and pessimists obsessing on them? Or is there a more objective way to look at it?
This may be an example of applying my own strength, but let’s take a “financial” approach and look at the question as a return on investment calculation. What’s the best investment of your time, effort and attention?
Step 1: Address your weaknesses first
Anthony Iannarino asked me, “Can’t we eliminate our weaknesses and play more to our strengths at the same time?”
While I think that may be possible, because losses tend to outweigh equivalent gains, it makes sense to begin with weaknesses. Dealing with weaknesses requires three steps:
Identify:
The critical first step is to honestly identify and inventory your weaknesses, which isn’t as easy as it may seem. We tend to avoid or ignore evidence about our weaknesses or attribute failures to circumstances outside of ourselves. As Elon Musk said, “Always seek negative feedback, even though it can be mentally painful.”
Assess:
Here’s where you apply an objective, “financial” approach. What will it “cost” to get there? What are the risks if it is not addressed? How much improvement is good enough? What’s the ROI, or the risk/reward ratio of your investment in time, effort and attention?
Address:
Depending on how you assess the weakness, you can either:
Ignore. If the weakness or deficiency does not carry expensive consequences or risks, or if the “cost” of the remedy is too high, don’t invest attention on it.
Contain/mitigate. Can you reduce the consequences, or take steps to ensure that the weakness does not grow?
Delegate. Can the weakness be outsourced—that is, can someone else handle the activity so that you can concentrate on your strengths?
Fix. If it carries high risks, or it’s becoming an issue with those you work with, address it as soon as possible.
Step 2: Develop your strengths
This is where the fun begins. Secure in the knowledge that your weaknesses won’t hurt you, you can focus your energy and attention on developing your strengths and your full potential. For a strength, what is the potential payoff if it is developed further? What will it take to get there? How can you design your career so that your strengths can have maximum impact? Is there a level at which further development results in diminishing returns? How will you know?
So there you have it. Secure your base first, and then strive to develop your full potential. If you’re still confused, let me know—maybe my clarification skills are still weak!
