WorkPuzzle

The Case For Loyalty - Part 2: Predicting Happiness

If you were to collect all available research on happiness, you’d quickly notice a depressing principle staring you in the face:  Human beings are terrible at predicting what makes them happy!

It isn’t that we don’t want to be happy.  Even Thomas Jefferson realized that the “pursuit of happiness” was basic to the fabric of all human beings when he penned the Declaration of Independence.  Rather, the problem has always been finding a reliable path to get there. 

For many years, people assumed that improving one’s economic conditions would improve their level of happiness.  On a macro level, this has been proven false.  For example, in the United States, our economic conditions have steadily improved over the last 50 years.  However, our measured level of happiness has remained unchanged between 1946 and 2006 (Source:  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).  Additionally, this same trend was demonstrated in 11 other industrialized countries around the world. 

The same principle repeats itself among individuals:  Yes, poverty brings misery - But, once a person economically rises above poverty, the connection between additional money and increased happiness, dissipates. 

Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert puts it they way:

“What I’ve learned from data is that I don’t chase dollars now that I have enough of them, because I know that it will take a very large amount of money to increase happiness by a small amount.”

If money and prosperity are not the answer, what is?  The authors of Why Loyalty Matters make the case that strong, healthy, and loyal relationships are among the most important factors in the happiness equation:

“The economic engine that has saved us from the yoke of poverty has also taught us to trade our time and labor to get the things we want.  The problem isn’t that we are exchanging our time for commodities, but instead that we are exchanging our family’s time, our friend’s time, our ideals’ time to get something."

On the surface this way of living makes sense until we realize what the research reveals. From a happiness perspective, that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner…

"the most important factor that separates happy people from unhappy people is our relationships with others.  It is more important than money, and even more important than our health.  Yet we frequently trade our loyalties for things that will not make us happier, namely money.”

The authors demonstrate further that the key to developing and maintaining these essential relationships, is loyalty.  In fact, if you dig into the data even further, the ability to give and demonstrate loyalty in personal relationships has one of the highest correlations with happiness of all other factors studied.  In other words, if a person gives and receives loyalty in their relationships, the chances of them being happy are very high.

In the next WorkPuzzle blog, I’ll share how research is confirming that loyalty can also have a profound impact on your business.  In the meantime, you may want to take some time to do some self-assessment...   

Do you consider yourself a loyal person?  Can those who are closest to you depend upon your loyalty?  If those around you were to list your top five character traits, would loyalty even be on the list?  These were tough questions for me to answer—maybe that’s why I learned so much from this book!

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

The Case For Loyalty

A few weeks ago, I ran across the work of a company called Ipsos.  Ipsos is a global survey-based market research company out of France.  Their slogan as a company is “Nobody is Unpredictable.”  They predict human behavior for companies who want to primarily improve their advertising and marketing efforts.

At some point, this company figured out that the topic of loyalty is a major factor in how a company’s customers and employees experience a sense of well-being and satisfaction.  The data was so strong that the company set up a subsidiary called Ipsos Loyality that focuses fully on the subject of loyalty and the impact it has on a company’s customers and employees.

Doesn’t this seem odd?  In many parts of our society, loyalty is not considered a virtue anymore.  Companies that are struggling to stay in business are often forced to undergo a lay-off period...often more than one round.  Employees who are affected by a lay-off or see their peers experience this type of misfortune often have a tough time mustering any legitimate feelings of loyalty towards their employer.  

How about customers?  Does it really make sense for a person to be loyal to a certain company when global competition drives prices down to the point where you can get near identical products and services from multiple companies?  At that point, doesn’t it make sense to be “loyal” to the company that can get you what you want at the lowest possible price?  Costco has built a multi-billion dollar company on this principle.

And it’s not just business... This lack of loyalty has seeped into nearly every facet of our lives.  It has become an anachronism of a value system that has gone by the wayside.  It has even got to the point where some would consider loyalty to be a character flaw.  For example, when former President Carter wanted to insult the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s, support of President Bush, he called him “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.”

If loyalty is now such a negative trait, you might wonder why I’d take time to discuss it.  The reason for doing so is outlined in "Why Loyalty Matters," a recent book written by Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy.  In this book, the authors draw upon research conducted by Ipsos Loyalty and demonstrate how loyalty is a necessary ingredient to happiness, meaning, and lasting fulfillment in both your work and your personal life.

In the next few WorkPuzzle blogs, we’ll discuss some of the principles outlined in this book.  I think it will challenge your thinking.  The basic premise is this:

“Fulfillment only comes when we give of ourselves to others.  Loyalty, like love, is not something you get but something you give. But, like love, giving loyalty, over time, through difficulties and trials, leads to mutual loyalty.  And it leads to relationships that are a profound source of satisfaction and happiness that cannot be built in any other way.”

I think you’ll see that this principle will impact not only your company’s performance, but your personal relationships as well.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Agent Retention: Someone's About to Pull the Plug on Your Bathtub - Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, we highlighted an article written by Dr. John Sullivan regarding how turnover will increase once the economy starts to recover.  If your company is going to retain good agents (and employees), more emphasis must be put on retention metrics and strategies.  In the previous WorkPuzzle article, I covered retention metrics.  Today we’ll discuss Dr. Sullivan’s retention strategies.

Retention strategies can be broken down into three categories: 

1.  Laissez-faire Approaches:  This is the most common approach and involves everything from doing nothing (i.e. turnover is normal and unavoidable) to relying solely on effective recruiting.  If your company is going to be successful with this approach alone, you must develop excellent recruiting and talent pool processes that provide talent on demand.

2.  Company-wide Approaches:  People generally seek out employment to provide income and security to their families and to find personal engagement.  Most company-wide approaches involve making compensation opportunities better (addressing income), making benefits better (addressing security), and increasing the workforce’s engagement in their work.

If your company is known for not being competitive with other companies with regard to compensation and benefits, you’ll likely have a retention problem.  However, the research suggests that incrementally increasing compensation and benefits with the hope of increasing retention will most likely cost more than it produces in retained revenue.

A better return can be achieved by attempting to increase the workforce’s engagement in their work.  Doing this on a company-wide basis is a challenge.  Companies have attempted many things with varying levels of success.  Here is a short list of ideas that Dr. Sullivan presents:

• Employment Branding Strategy: Build the brand of the company up in the mind of the agents. Agents will want to stay with a firm that they perceive as the best place to work.
• Blocking Strategy: Erect barriers that keep external recruiters from contacting your company’s agents and employees.
• Casino Strategy: Make the physical work environment so attractive that the environment by itself becomes a retention tool. Casinos use the physical environment to keep their customers from thinking about the outside world. Google pioneered this in the employment world by providing free food, a gym, on-site events, etc.
• Improve Training, Learning and Development: This is the most popular among real estate companies and probably the most effective. High-performers tend to have a keen interest in continuous learning and will stick with a company where that need is being met. Coupled with increased opportunities to use new skills and techniques, well-trained agents can quickly contribute to revenues.
• Remove Ineffective Managers: The number one reason an agent or employee leaves a company is a poor relationship with their first level manager. Replacing individuals who are a poor fit for the management role is the best long-term strategy for reducing turnover.

3.  Personalized Approaches:  With people, one-size rarely fits all the individuals involved. Targeting retention strategies to the individual needs of an agent takes much more time and effort, but it also produces the greatest results.  This is where good metrics and open lines of communication will allow meaningful and productive dialog to take place.  Sometimes it’s difficult for agents to quantify what they want.  Concrete data regarding performance metrics, opportunities, and a competitor’s performance can keep the conversations from focusing too much on emotion or personal opinion.  Dr. Sullivan suggests a personalized plan should address issues such as:

• Flexibility: Think of things that can be done to reduce an agent's stress and the incremental costs of doing business inside the framework of your company. Focus on issues that would strengthen the individual’s family and personal relationships.
• Special Perks and Opportunities: Special perks have been used for many years by companies to incentivize performance. Why? They work! Rotate the perks around — People get bored with the same old thing. Also, try to customize the perks to the agent’s interests. It is tough for a competitor to duplicate thoughtfulness. In addition to perks, consider making special business/revenue generating opportunities available to those agents whom you want to retain. This can be tricky because it can discourage others on your team, but a good manager can find the right tension between these competing priorities.
• Challenge/Exposure Strategy: This approach increases the opportunities for targeted agents or employees to be challenged with exciting stretch projects and rotations. In addition, agents interested in increasing their exposure to upper management executives are provided with an exposure plan to increase their visibility.
• Demonstrating Impact: This education strategy focuses on improving retention rates of key agents and employees who may be unaware of the significant impact of their work. It proactively “walks them downstream” in order to see the impact of their work by meeting and interacting with not only customers, but also others in the company and your organization at large.

There are many more issues and ideas that could be addressed regarding this topic.  Hopefully, this article will serve to ignite your creativity regarding how you can retain the agents and employees on your team.  Don't underestimate the disparagement that many people feel toward their employers due to the difficult economic circumstances.  If you do, you'll have to suffer through the potential loss of those agents and employees...a loss that may have been prevented...

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

River People

No, I'm not talking about the guy who lives in a van down by the river (Saturday Night Live).  I'm referring to the type of person we're all capable of becoming; the kind that is typically a much better hire; the kind you need to help develop in your organization.  
 
Over the past 25 years of providing psychotherapy, my chief mission has been to free people from unconscious ruts that control their lives.  This isn't easy.  People rarely see how they have boxed themselves into a view of themselves and a view of the world that limits their perspective, beliefs and actions.

When a person is in a rut, they limit their own movement, growth, vision and freedom to act.  They see the world in a fixed way, and try to convince everyone around them that their "rut trapped" perspective is indeed reality.  The way they lead their life unveils consistent themes, describing their own personal rut repeatedly acted out.

A person who is not stuck in a rut flows like a river, emanating wisdom, humor, and humility even in difficult times.  They may have a long list of things that haven't worked out, but have no regrets for their efforts. 

When things are going well, economically and emotionally, it is much more difficult to differentiate the "rut people" from the "river people."  However, in these difficult times, ruts are bound to surface.  Even the most fluid people can be temporarily thrown into a rut in these extreme circumstances, simply because life isn't familiar or secure.

Losing a job, a home, and plans for the future can certainly appear as an insurmountable rut. "River people" however, don't allow themselves to get stuck there.  They manage to continually pull themselves up and out of the rut, dust themselves off, and move on with life.  I feel fortunate to know many river people.

As leaders, you owe it to yourself and those you coach to help free them from their ruts.  Whether you're coaching or interviewing new candidates, help them find hope and envision the opportunities that can unfold if they exercise the "formula for confidence."  Help them realize their freedom and potential through new ideas, new innovations, new training, new commitments, new values, and perhaps even an entirely new direction.

You'll find that everyone within an organization benefits once the individual tributaries find their "flow," and can contribute their full potential once again.  It's not only practical to encourage this hope, it's the right thing to do.

But, change is difficult - Most healthy, rational people avoid change, preferring instead the security and safety of what is known.  Ironically however, change can produce incredible growth, if responded to effectively.  If you're interviewing new candidates without both empathy around change PLUS the encouragement to change, your missing an incredibly useful and helpful tool. 

Have candidates answer this question:  When have you experienced the most growth in your life?  For most people the answer is when they were undergoing tremendous change, accompanied by uncertainty...perhaps when they were much younger.

It's normal to risk more when we're younger, because we don't have that much to lose.  If you analyze that statement, you will begin to see the problem:  Security and hanging onto what we've acquired becomes paramount for most of us when we're older.  We cling to it and cherish it, without ever reflecting on its inherent value to our well-being.

Of course it's irresponsible to take foolish risks.  But, you can also make the argument that it is foolish to follow a course of action simply because it offers the illusion of security.

For some inspiration on becoming a manager who hires and develops "river people," read and insert the word manager for friend in the below quote:

“A true friend (manager) knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.”    -William Arthur Ward

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

The Confidence Formula

One of our most popular blogs was written around the concept of Coaching for Confidence.  Below, are some of the original findings regarding this fascinating subject, along with some additional findings that help improve our understanding of the topic.

It's no secret that managing and coaching those around us can feel futile if those being coached lack confidence in their ability to succeed.  We've all witnessed talented people lose their spark and confidence, begin to wilt, and eventually begin to drop below performance standards.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, an expert on the subject of confidence explains:

"Confidence consists of positive expectations for favorable outcomes.  Confidence influences the willingness to invest - to commit money, time, reputation, emotional energy, or other resources - or to withhold or hedge investment.  This investment, or its absence, shapes the ability to perform.  In that sense, confidence lies at the heart of civilization.  Everything about an economy, a society, an organization, or a team depend on it.  Every step we take, every investment we make, is based on whether we feel we can count on ourselves and others to accomplish what has been promised.  Confidence determines whether our steps – individually or collectivity – are tiny and tentative or big and bold."  (Confidence: Leadership and the Psychology of Turnarounds, 2004)

Recruiting people is just the first stage of an ongoing process.  It's your job as a coach, manager, and/or mentor, to bring out the best in others, which begins with assessing their confidence.  They must believe that they can succeed in order to succeed.

Carol Craig at the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being claims that she and her colleagues have developed a formula for confidence.  It appears to be quite accurate, with a great deal of research to back it up.  It goes like this:

Confidence = Self-efficacy (the belief you can reach your goals) + Optimism.

So what do these terms mean?

Self-efficacy:

"Self-efficacy is the term that psychologists use to describe the belief a person has that they can reach their goals.  Unlike self-esteem which is more of a global judgment on the self and its worth, self-efficacy specifically isolates the way an individual assesses their competence in relation to achievements, goals and life events.  Self-efficacy expert, Albert Bandura from Stanford University argues that 'ordinary realities are strewn with impediments, adversities, setbacks, frustrations and inequities.'  He therefore claims that people need 'a robust sense of efficacy' to keep trying."

Research on self-esteem suggests that parents (through genes and parenting style) have the biggest influence on a young person’s self-esteem.  However, Bandura and others argue that schools (perhaps even real estate coaching and training...) play a huge role in developing young peoples' feelings of self-efficacy.

Optimism:

"In everyday life we usually use the word optimism to mean feeling positive about life.  Often we refer to someone who is optimistic as seeing ‘the glass as half-full, rather than half-empty.'

In psychology, there are two main ways to define optimism.  Scheier and Carver, the authors of the popular optimism measure – The Life Orientation Test - for example, define optimism as 'the global generalized tendency to believe that one will generally experience good versus bad outcomes in life.'  In everyday language this means 'looking on the bright side of life.'  In such a definition, pessimism is the tendency to believe 'if something can go wrong for me, it will.'  The other main way to define optimism is to use the concept of 'explanatory style.'  This is the approach taken by Professor Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and co-author of The Optimistic Child.  He argues that each of us has our own ‘explanatory style,’ a way of thinking about the causes of things that happen in our lives.  Optimists are those who see adversities as temporary and restricted to one domain of life while pessimists often see problems as permanent and pervasive."  (Carol Craig, Centre for Confidence and Well-being, 2006).

So, what can you do if those you coach lack confidence?  Here are some ideas:

1. Ask them: "Do you believe that you will succeed?"  If they don't, or if they say yes in a tentative manner:

2. Then ask them what they believe the outcome will be if they don't really believe they can achieve their goals?  (Even though my graduate courses were over 23 years ago, I can tell you that those who believed they'd finish and do well, did!  Those who didn't have that confidence, failed!)

3. Once you have them talking about their uncertainty and its impact on their performance:  Ask them to remember a time when they did succeed - big time!  Urge them to remember their attitude going into the situation.  What was their level of confidence?  Did they expect success?  Why?

4. And lastly, remind them that their best confidence will develop as they focus on developing their strengths, and contributing to clients, co-workers and society at large, rather than taking on important tasks and projects only to bolster their ego.  Only under these conditions can one sustain great performance.  Because when things don't go well, it's not about your ego, it's about your contribution!

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Great Managers And An Evening With Sha Na Na

I had the pleasure of spending last Thursday evening with Nicki Marcellino, Branch Manager for a Prudential California Realty office in La Jolla.  Nicki and I had originally met at a Palm Springs conference for Prudential California’s top agents, where I had been invited to speak.  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that there was something special about Nicki.  She had that calm authority that one feels instantly comfortable around.  Soon after meeting her, I was told by someone that she was the top manager in the nation.

At the end of the Palm Springs weekend, I casually extended an offer for her to give me a call whenever she came to the Seattle area.  Not much time went by, when, low and behold, I received an email from Nicki, accepting my invitation and extending her own—Tickets for my wife and I to attend, with her, a Seattle Symphony concert featuring her husband’s well-known band, Sha Na Na.  (If you recall, they made their debut 40 years ago at Woodstock, and have been playing ever since.) 

My wife and I had quite a memorable evening sitting next to Nicki during the very entertaining concert.  After the concert, we enjoyed dessert and conversation with Nicki and her husband, Jocko.

Now, the point of this story is to share what I feel makes Nicki Marcellino and other great managers so good at what they do.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several managers like her within the ranks of the organizations we serve.  If you spend time with these innovative managers, you’ll begin to see a pattern of similar characteristics.  Here is a summary of what I truly believe about exceptional managers.

Every great manager possesses:

1. A consistently strong work ethic.  These individuals aren’t just biding their time.  They love what they do, and set out to learn as much as they can so that they are constantly improving themselves as managers.  (By the way, by the week's end, Nicki is so emotionally spent that she has made a weekly tradition of attending Friday afternoon matinees to wind down...a well deserved reward!)

2. A calm authority.  When you're around good managers, you may have noticed that they never really seem to panic.  They believe things will go well, and those managed by them are drawn to this sense of calm and certainty, combined with expertise.

3. Confidence without a shred of arrogance.  When I introduced Nicki to my wife as “One of the top managers...” she interrupted and said without a shred of arrogance, “Number One Manager.”  This seems to be a consistent characteristic of some of the best managers I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.  Additionally, these folks don’t presume to know everything, and quickly concede that they can learn tons from their top producers.

4. An expectation of greatness in others.  And to back this up, they hold people accountable.  Great managers have no qualms about saying, “This is what your capable of doing, and if you don’t reach these goals, then you or I are doing something wrong.”  There is a competitiveness that comes through and naturally inspires others.

If you feel there are other essential characteristics that great managers share, please let me know.  In the meantime, let me just say thank you to Nicki for a more than pleasant evening at the symphony!

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Your Personal Employment Brand

Last week, I read an article written by Dan and Chip Heath in Fast Company that highlights the importance of emotion in marketing.  The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of "Made to Stick."

These guys noticed that there is often a disconnect between the emotion that a company tries to relate in a marketing campaign, and the reality that truly exists. 

“Marketers caught on early that emotion sells product.  'Would your husband marry you again?' screams a Palmolive ad from 1921.  (Not unless you scrub with Palmolive soap, honey.)  Today, Heineken has promised warmer international relations via handoffs of Premium Light from mountain men to Indians to ballerinas.  And, of course, Axe has sold young men on the fantasy of hooking up with deodorant-loving nymphomaniacs. 

Emotional appeals are ubiquitous.  They're also interchangeable.  It would be just as easy to pitch Heineken as an aphrodisiac and Axe as a global harmonizer ('Peace starts in the pits').  And that's the problem:  It's all stick-on emotion.  Sometimes that works brilliantly (see: Corona).  Other times, it's as weird and clumsy as an adhesive mustache -- remember Carl's Jr. and Paris Hilton's sexed-up hamburger ad? Fortunately, there's a better and more sustainable way to create emotion:  Mean it.”

The article goes on to demonstrate how the impact of a marketing emotion can be greatly increased if there are concrete realities supporting that emotion, proving that it is a genuine representation of reality.  Emotion combined with integrity REALLY sells!

If you’re a hiring manager, this is a principle you cannot afford to miss.  People are drawn to you as a leader because of their perception of who you are.  You may have a prominent company brand, many desirable externals (ex. office location, physical appearance of the office, advanced business tools, etc.), and you may even present yourself in a way that people are naturally drawn to you.  That’s all emotion. 

But, if the reality of who you are matches what you project, the fireworks start to fly.  People want to work on teams with these types of leaders.  Your “personal employment brand” has the ability to attract (or repel) people with a significant amount of force.

Ask yourself this question:  What do people in your professional network really think of you? 

Then ask yourself:  Is this perception based on surface emotion and externals, or on the reality of what those in your professional community have experienced firsthand or have actually seen you do?

If you do not have a strong and believable personal brand, it is very difficult to be a successful hiring manager.  But, how do you repair (or build for the first time) your personal brand?  The quickest and most believable way, is through doing good deeds that support your emotional appeal.  The Heath brothers put it this way:

“Why not simply replace the fake emotion with a real one?  What if Downy started doing things to help struggling mothers -- and then used their ads to talk about the work?  What if Bounce retaliated by throwing its weight behind job seekers looking to bounce back from a layoff? What if all this good work raised the competitive hackles of the not-to-be-underestimated Snuggle Bear?  Perhaps it could sponsor a winter-coat drive.

What we're proposing here is an arms race of goodness -- a generation of companies that compete on real emotion rather than stick-on sentiments.  Maybe that sounds Pollyanna-ish.  If so, let us introduce you to some companies succeeding by meaning it.

Toms Shoes has a simple business model:  Buy a pair of shoes, and it'll send a second pair to a child who needs it.  This year, it'll send about 300,000 pairs of shoes to the developing world. And because it's the company's genuine passion to do so, Toms can take advantage of the word of mouth built into its product and spend dramatically less on marketing than other shoe companies.  When you mean it, convincing customers doesn't take as much shouting.”

Start working on your personal employment brand and you may find that recruiting is not so difficult.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Positive Emotions, and Getting Out Alive!

Okay, the title is a little dramatic... I guess I need to stay out of the wilderness for a few weeks.  As I mentioned yesterday, last week my wife and I endured the wet climate in Banff.  Then, over the weekend, I managed to get lost on a hike with my 21 year-old daughter, Katelyn.

Perhaps I've seen too many episodes of Survivorman, but I actually began to ponder if I had wandered into a disastrous situation.  We were hiking a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts in Mexico and ends at the Canadian border.  On a side note:  We actually ran into a man and his horse who had started on the trek in Mexico, and were two weeks away from the Canadian border.

The mistake I made was going off-trail to find an alpine lake.  We ended up on a trail that dead-ended.  From there, we must have traveled in circles. One's natural tendency is to panic.

We were really never in any trouble, but still, I remembered what research psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, revealed about staying positive:

"Frederickson has found that while negative emotions narrow people’s perspective and keep them focused on the specific problem in hand (e.g. flight or fight), positive emotions ‘broaden’ people’s likely thoughts and actions as well as their behavior.  In other words, when we are experiencing positive emotions we have more ‘behavioral flexibility’ and this allows us to build ‘intellectual and psychological resources.’  So if we are feeling positive we are more likely to be curious, to learn, to explore and be creative than if we are negative."  (Center for Confidence and Well-Being, 2006)

If we had become panicked, we probably still could have found our way out, but it was more fun, and certainly burned less energy, to stay positive.  We eventually, (two miles or so further) got turned around, found the correct trail, and headed out.
 
Let this story serve as a reminder to keep your team broadening their internal resources of confidence and decisions, by staying positive and developing an atmosphere free from panic and pessimism.  The impact on the brain and it's capacity for creativity is well documented.

As for me... I'll stay in the neighborhood for the next few weeks...

More About Grit: Predicting and Coaching for Success

In past articles, we’ve highlighted the works of both Dr. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychologist from Stanford University.  These women are two of the most influencial leaders on the topic of grit.  Both professionals have a passion for researching what, in fact, we should be measuring with regard to propensity for success.

Johan Lehrer puts it this way in his recent article in the Boston Globe:

“One of the main obstacles for scientists trying to document the influence of personality traits on achievement was that the standard definition of traits - attributes such as conscientiousness and extroversion - was rather vague.

Duckworth began wondering if more narrowly defined traits might prove to be more predictive.  She began by focusing on aspects of conscientiousness that have to do with ‘long-term stamina,’ such as maintaining a consistent set of interests, and downplayed aspects of the trait related to short-term self-control, such as staying on a diet.  In other words, a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won’t change careers every year.  ‘Grit is very much about the big picture,’ Duckworth says.  ‘It’s about picking a specific goal off in the distant future and not swerving from it.’"

In essence, Duckworth is suggesting that, rather than IQ level, what we should be measuring is a person’s ability to narrow and maintain focus on a particular goal.  Research confirms that this is a better predictor of a person’s potential than their intelligence and well-rounded background. 

If you’re a hiring manager, think about how you interview candidates...  Would this be a trait that you could measure during an interview by changing the types of questions you ask?  If so, you’d probably be more successful at predicting your prospective employee's potential in your organization.

If you’re in a coaching role, you can also take advantage of the research in this area:

“While Duckworth and others are quick to point out that there is no secret recipe for increasing grit - 'We’ve only started to study this, so it’s too soon to begin planning interventions,' she cautions - there’s a growing consensus on what successful interventions might look like.

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.  Dweck refers to this as a 'growth mindset.'  She compares this view with the 'fixed mindset,' the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with.  'A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,' says Dweck.

Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.  For much of the last decade, Dweck and her colleagues have tracked hundreds of fifth-graders in 12 different New York City schools.  The children were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which took an age-appropriate version of the IQ test.  After taking the test, one group was praised for their intelligence - 'You must be smart at this,' the researcher said - while the other group was praised for their effort and told they 'must have worked really hard.'

Dweck then gave the same fifth-graders another test.  This test was designed to be extremely difficult - it was an intelligence test for eighth-graders - but Dweck wanted to see how they would respond to the challenge.  The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles.  Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, quickly became discouraged.

The final round of intelligence tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test.  The students who had been praised for their effort raised their score, on average, by 30 percent.  This result was even more impressive when compared to the students who had been praised for their intelligence:  their scores on the final test dropped by nearly 20 percent.  A big part of success, Dweck says, stems from our beliefs about what leads to success."

Could this change your perspective on how you coach those on your team?  It is so natural to praise those we coach for their natural abilities.  While this feels natural and right, the research shows it is counterproductive.

It may be better to just let the natural talents speak for themselves, and seek to praise someone for living out their values and displaying positive virtues.  Grit is one of these virtues, but there may be more.  It will be interesting to see what the research unveils in the future...

More on Grit: Sir Isaac Newton’s 22-year Epiphany

About six months ago, Dave wrote a couple of articles on the topic of “grit.”  We received a lot of feedback on this topic from our clients who are regular readers of WorkPuzzle.  It seems to be a topic that intrigues many of us.

Earlier this month, the topic also caught the attention of the Boston Globe.  Jonah Lehrer wrote a lengthy Sunday morning feature on the topic.  Over the next couple of days, I’m going to highlight a few ideas from Lehrer’s article to help us gain a better understanding of this important topic.

“It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery:  In 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree.  The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force.  (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.)  This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.

There is something appealing about such narratives.  They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany:  There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius.  Everybody knows that things fall - it took Newton to explain why.

Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up.  Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it.  He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum.  (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.)  The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the ‘Principia.’

Although biographers have long celebrated Newton’s intellect - he also pioneered calculus - it’s clear that his achievements aren’t solely a byproduct of his piercing intelligence.  Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles, to stick with the same stubborn mystery - why did the apple fall, but the moon remain in the sky? - until he found the answer.”

Notice the time it took Newton to figure out the scientific Law of Gravity — 22 years!  Was Newton willing to work hard?  Of course he was.  But, grit isn’t simply about a willingness to work hard.  It’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached.  It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit keep going, despite the hardships and obstacles they encounter.

If you’re a hiring manager, this is an important topic to consider when interviewing.  Ask questions that help you learn if a person has displayed a Newtonian stick-to-itiveness in their past jobs or life experiences.  These are the people who are most likely to display the same traits on your team.

If you have the responsibility for coaching those in your group, consider using Newton’s story in an upcoming coaching session.  We all need inspiration to set goals and stick to them.  When we see that the most successful people in history used this formula, it renews our resolve to follow the same path.