How well do you know your own company, and why is it important that you do?
Imagine playing on a football team where you did not know the score of the game, or even the result of the play you just ran. It would be pretty hard to get fired up about doing your best possible job, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s the mindset that a lot of companies have towards their employees. It’s even more dispiriting when employees have the same attitude towards about understanding the bigger picture of the company in which they work.
Henry Ford once complained that when he hired a hand, a head came with it. That attitude may have made sense in the days when assembly line techniques were a powerful competitive advantage, but it is sorely out of tune with today’s needs. Mindless jobs are exactly the ones that are most at risk from robotics and artificial intelligence.
People who will thrive in the years to come are those who know how to add value to their employers through the quality and relevance of their ideas, and their ability to communicate them effectively. One of the best ways to ensure this is to become a student of your own company.
The US military has accomplished tremendous things with its young officers and NCOs who shoulder tremendous responsibilities early in their twenties. One practice that helps them is a leadership concept called commander’s intent. Commanders are very open about the intent of their mission, and then leave the details for its attainment to their subordinates. This is important because things change too fast for the person on the ground to have to refer every decision up the chain. As George Patton said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Your own version of commander’s intent is a deep knowledge of your company, how it serves its customers, how it competes within its industry, and what the financial “score” is. Develop it in yourself and it will help you personally; develop it in others and it will help your team and the larger organization.
The personal benefits of knowing your company are:
- You become more engaged in your work when you see how it fits into a purpose larger than yourself.
- You make better decisions under uncertainty, because they are more likely to be aligned with the company’s priorities and goals.
- You become a more credible internal communicator, because you are seen as a strategic and long-term thinker who cares for more than just your narrow short-term interests.
- You become a better communicator toward your own customers. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and spouting the “company policy” line, you can explain the reason for something or find a solution that works for both parties.
By passing on this information and skill to your own direct reports:
- They have a sense of ownership which will make them more engaged and hence more productive.
- You can manage with a much lighter touch, substituting individual judgment for detailed rules and procedures.
- You get a better flow of ideas and intelligence upward, not only because employees are more engaged but because they have a sharper sense of what’s relevant.
So, what should you do to become a student of your own company?
- Read your own company’s annual report and tune in to quarterly earnings reports. If you need to, become knowledgeable about financial statements.
- Even if you don’t have direct customer contact, know what your company’s customers need and value, and what sets you apart from the competition.
- Treat your boss and her boss as a customer; know what drives them, how they’re measured, and how you can make their jobs easier.
Peter Drucker said: the effective executive asks, “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?”[1] If you want to be an effective executive, that starts with knowing as much as you can about the performance and results of the institution you serve.
[1] The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker, p. 53.
If you are truly serious about becoming an excellent persuasive communicator, one of the most important things you can do is to become a writer. You don’t have to do it for publication and in fact you don’t even have to be particularly good at it, but the more you write the better you will get at expressing your ideas.
Everyone wants to be admired for their brilliance of thinking and expression, and we envy those who seem to possess it naturally and effortlessly. We may even feel a twinge of envy and despair that we can’t do it ourselves. But I suspect that many of the people who seem to have natural gift actually work very hard at it.
Here’s what a brilliant writer, Kurt Vonnegut said about it:
“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
I’m not a novelist. I don’t aspire to be one, and you probably don’t either. But we can still learn from Vonnegut’s sentiment. What can we use from his idea?
Write it down. Sounding halfway intelligent means you sound like you thought about it, but for important meetings and conversations, I don’t believe it counts as thinking until you’ve written it down. That’s because it always sounds better in your head than it looks on paper, at least the first time. As Barbara Minto says in her book, The Pyramid Principle: “No one can know precisely what he thinks until he has been forced to symbolize it—either by saying it out loud or by writing it down—and even then the first statement of the idea is likely to be less precise than he can eventually make it.”
Make time. You don’t have to shoot for the great American novel, because you have a day job. But you still have to carve out some time to give it the attention it deserves. As the old saying says, if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over? Besides, how many times have you regretted something you wrote in haste, especially now that everything written electronically will live forever?
Start early. Patience is a powerful tool, but you have to start early for it to work. I used to think I did my best work under deadline pressure, but I’ve found that starting early to let the idea marinate in my unconscious mind usually pays off in the form of insights and flashes of semi-inspiration at the most unexpected times. It’s better for my blood pressure, too.
Pump up the pump. The metaphor of inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump isn’t exactly correct. When you pump long enough, you get better at pumping, and somehow the pump begins to get upgrades as well. Over time each push of the handle gets a little more productive, in either quantity or quality. It’s the idea of personal kaizen, where thousands of small improvements use the magic of compound interest to add up not just mathematically but geometrically.
Inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. It’s a powerful idea, brilliantly expressed. I wonder how many times he wrote it and rewrote it?
In the book, Treating People Well, there’s a story about the time in 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower was scheduled to speak at Penn State University’s commencement. The weather forecast was troubling, so aides asked the President if the proceedings should be moved inside. Ike replied: “You decide. I haven’t worried about the weather since June 6, 1944.”[1]
Others saw a difficult and risky decision; Eisenhower saw it as trifling because of his perspective.
Perspective, at least in my definition, is not the same as point of view—it’s higher than that. We all have our own individual points of view on any situation, but it’s often limited. As in the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, our view of any situation is contingent on our available information, individual experiences, and personal temperament. Perspective is the ability to see the whole elephant. It’s a sense of what really matters, of what you can control and what you can’t, of what you can let slide and what to address immediately.
Here’s a personal example, a lasting and valuable lesson in perspective that I received when I was nineteen. I had gotten into an argument with my Dad about something, and I said, “Dad, you don’t realize how tough it is growing up in the 70s.” He quietly replied: “You’re right. All I had to deal with was the Depression and World War 2.” The difference was, I had a point of view, but my father had perspective.
Perspective can make you a better leader, a better persuader, and better person
As a leader, when you’re tempted to micromanage, perspective can remind you to step back and let others grow. It lets you see what truly matters and provides an example for others. Plus, when you’re full of yourself, perspective can set you straight. Perspective bends the effectiveness/efficiency tradeoff toward the former by helping you see beyond metrics to what truly counts.
As a persuader, an outside-in perspective makes it easier for you to frame your messages to better resonate with others’ points of view. It also helps you project an image of maturity, competence and confidence that boosts credibility.
Perspective probably has the greatest impact on the quality of your personal life. It smooths the rough edges of life. When you’re wallowing in self-pity, perspective can lift you up. It can help you frame situations more positively. As G.K. Chesterton said, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
Four vantage points to gain perspective
Perspective is fundamentally about comparison and contrast, and having a rich storehouse of experiences and impressions gives you more vantage points from which you can evaluate any situation. Four ways to “make things look different from here” are big picture, long view, outside-in, and gratitude.
Big picture. From a height, things look much smaller and can more readily be placed in relation to others. In business, CEOs are at that 10,000 foot level, but you don’t need to be CEO to take a big picture view; anyone can raise their perspective by “thinking like an owner”, or as Drucker advised, focusing on contribution and not job description.
Long view. The present situation only gains meaning in relation to both the past and the future. By looking back, Eisenhower was able to reflect back on his long experience to gain perspective. You can also expand your time horizon by looking forward in time. When problems and criticisms jostle you off your path, focus on the long-term goal to keep oriented on what’s important. Occasionally it may remind you that, “You will never reach your destination if you throw stones at every dog that barks.”
Outside-in. What I call outside-in thinking is what psychologists call perspective-taking or cognitive empathy. It’s about stepping into the other’s mind and seeing it from their point of view. It’s especially useful in crafting presentations and working towards win-win negotiations.
Gratitude. If you take the time to step back and consider it, we live in the best times ever in human history. We are safer, healthier and more prosperous than any generation in the history of mankind. You don’t even need to go back in time; just look at the world around you. My wife and I came up with a phrase when the Iraq war was raging that we still use: ” At least we’re not in Fallujah.”
How to improve perspective
Perspective probably can’t be taught, but I do believe it can be learned and cultivated, if we can just take the time occasionally to step back from the press of daily life. I’m reminded of this quote from A. A. Milne:
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
Here are a few ways to step back:
Travel more. Personally, a great way to gain life experiences is to travel widely, and experience other cultures. It will help with big picture and outside-in perspectives.
Read widely. You can also “travel” in time by reading history; you’ll learn quickly that most of what’s happening in our political scene today, for example, has happened in many other versions throughout our history. Read Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus to learn about Stoic philosophy, which will help you clarify the difference between what you can control and what you can’t.
Gain business acumen. When is the last time you read your own company’s annual report or 10-K? I strongly recommend it; if you want to think like an owner you have to read what the owners read.
Be curious. Be curious about other people, dig beneath the surface of conversations, and practice your listening skills. Be curious about your business, your industry, and the wider world.
[1] Lea Berman and Jeremy Bernard, Treating People Well: The Extraordinary Power of Civility in at Work and in Life. Digital.
When is the last time you learned something old?
I had that experience just this morning as I was doing research for an article about the risks of asking too many sales questions. I came across an interesting fact: skilled clinical interviewers use reflecting statements about twice as often as they ask questions.
My initial thought was that that is an interesting insight which could make me a better questioner and make for smoother and more productive sales conversations.
But the real point of this story is that I had already known and forgotten that fact—because it came from an article that I wrote about seven years ago!
That reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when I was on a sales call with a CEO, and I asked him whether he still asked his subordinates to pre-send their presentations to him before meetings, as he had talked about in an interview a few years prior to our call. He responded that he had gotten away from that habit since coming to his new company, but thanked me for reminding him and said he would reinstitute the practice.
How many times has something like this happened to you? You knew something but forgot it; you had a skill but you lost it; you practiced a good habit but drifted away from it… Think about it: what have you lost by forgetting something old?
I’m not sure why this happens, but I can think of two plausible explanations. First, it seems to me that sometimes we’re in such a rush to learn the next big thing and keep ahead of the competition, that we discard useful ideas to make room for the new—like throwing out a perfectly good pair of shoes just to keep up with the latest style. Second, it’s possible that sometimes we’re not yet ready to fully appreciate a lesson, like watching a favorite childhood movie and discovering how much “adult” meaning you had missed back then. Seven years after learning that insight about reflecting skills, I have much more personal experience and book learning to relate it to and make sense of it.
What I do know is that some of the best lessons I’ve learned come from re-reading books that I’ve read before, or from periodically going back and refreshing myself on the basics of a particular topic. Book publishers probably won’t appreciate this advice, but I would recommend that you buy fewer new books this year and re-read some of your old favorites; you may be astounded by how much you can pick up the second or third time around.
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I don’t know about that, but I can attest from personal experience that an old dog can learn old tricks!
