Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

GROW

Goals : Hubris or doubt what works best?

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A dash of honest doubt turns out to be not so bad after all.

The coaching gurus all seem to agree. To reach your goal you need to declare it and abracadabra you are already halfway there.

Well, it turns out that they could be wrong.

According to research performed by a group of American scientists last year and document by Daniel Pink there is a significant difference in performance between 2 groups performing the same task and where one group uses what the scientists called declarative self talk ( I can do it) and the other group uses interrogative self talk (Can I do it?).
The self questioning group performs a lot better than the self affirming group.

In Denmark we had an interesting example of this recently.
As the Danish handball team departed for the European Championships they self confidently declared that they were going for gold. They subsequently lost their first few games and in no way looked as if they were going to get anywhere near the finals. The fans at home of course were furious and the players and trainer were all accused of hubris. Subsequently the declarations from the trainer and players took a subtle shift from ”we can do it” to some serious self questioning around ”can we do it?” and ”what would it take to do it?” – and – abracadabra, they brought home the gold medals to everybody’s surprise – including their own I guess.

The research seems to indicate that people who ask questions somehow come from a more humble place and that in turn creates a space to come up with a deeper solution.

For those of us who have been working with action learning for years that does not come as a big surprise….

Now is the time to be bold

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The future will belong to the bold. The world of business is now so crowded that only those who have a significant and dramatically different story to tell will grab the attention of consumers.

In a world of ‘green wash’ and PR spin, authenticity will shine through. In the face of unprecedented levels of marketing spend an increasing consumer cynicism, simple recommendations from ‘consumers like us’ will carry the day. In an age when we have come to expect good levels of service and product quality as a given, only in exceptional and memorable experience will earn customer loyalty. At a time when legal loopholes and corporate caveats allow companies to wriggle out of their responsibilities, those who stand by their promises will stand out from the herd. It requires courage, conviction and imagination to be bold but the rewards can be immense.

The first paragraph from:

“BOLD – How to be brave in Business and Win”
by Shaun Smith & Andy Milligan

Need I say more ?

Employees care about three things…

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In his new book Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders author Rajeev Pershawaria describes how managers can motivate people by appealing to the three things that really matter to them.

Most employees care about the same three things–the nature of their Role, their work Environment, and their professional Development (RED)

Asa manager, you need to talk regularly with employees about the three buckets, and as you keep the dialogue going, listen for information about their preferences and aspirations. Armed with this information, you can label and link day-to-day work with their expectations.

Fascinating – and very simple.
Read an extract from the book here

Find that magic spot

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Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Ken Robinson believes that everyone is born with extraordinary capability. So what happens to all that talent as we bump through life, getting by, but never realizing our true potential?

For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail – it’s just the opposite – we aim too low and succeed.

We need to find that magic spot where our natural talent meets our personal passion. This means we need to know ourselves better. Whilst we content ourselves with doing what we’re competent at, but don’t truly love, we’ll never excel. And, according to Ken, finding purpose in our work is essentially to knowing who we really are.

Get ready to unleash your inner fervor as Ken takes to our pulpit to inspire you to follow your passion.

Sir Ken Robinson is a leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources, working with governments and the world’s leading cultural organizations. Born in Liverpool, he was Director of The Arts Project (1985-89), and is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Warwick. He was knighted in 2003 for his contribution to education and the arts. Recent publications include Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (2001) and The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (2009).

This secular sermon took place at Conway Hall on Sunday 13 March 2011

Perfection or Differentiation?

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These two graphs may look quite harmless, but actually together they illustrate a dilemma that faces many hospitality and service companies today.

Diminishing returns


The blue curve illustrates the phenomenon know as diminishing returns. Well known in the sports world but also observed in the business world. In short it is the experience you have when you start out on something and relatively quickly get a sense of progress – but once you have dealt with the ‘low hanging fruit’ it gets harder and harder and you need to put in more and more effort but at the same time you are getting less and less in return.
Shaving 1/10 of a second off the world record takes a lot of work

In a big picture perspective my experience is that the service industries in general went through significant innovation and improvements up through the 90‘s but that in the 00’s we have by and large, mainly seen incremental improvements. Slightly better versions of already well known ideas. In a sense several service sectors are finding them selves in a ‘cul-de-sac’ conceptually.

Speed of Change


Opposite this, is the red curve. A model that especially Ray Kurzweil has used to draw our attention to the fact that change is not linear, slow and orderly. But change is occurring around us at an exponential speed. And if you listen to the futurists we ain’t seen noting yet. We are just at the being of this curve, on our way into the steep climb. (If you are not sure that the speed of change is exponential, try and locate a mobile phone that is 5 years old and compare it to the one you have now)

You can see a great clip with Kurzweil explaining all this here

You may even feel that you are not experiencing big changes in your own company just now – but that you are doing things in more or less the same way that you have done for a while – well then there is all the more cause for alarm because you can be sure that your clients are experiencing exponential changes in their lives – and you will not be part of their stakeholder map very soon if you do not realize that.

If you feel that things are under control – you are probably not going fast enough”
Mario Andretti (World champion racing driver)

Where is your focus?


When we look at these two graphs together – it suddenly becomes very clear that the way forward is not to put a huge effort into becoming perfect. I.e working very hard on what we already do in order to get just a little bitt better. Firstly the effort invested will probably not produce more than the famous incremental improvements, but the real danger is that after all that effort we risk getting really good at something that is no longer needed!

So ask your self: What is your focus: Perfection or Differentiation?

This post was very much inspired by this post by Seth Godin

How to Balance Power and Love

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Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

”Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economical change…
And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignations of power and power with the the denial of love.

Now we have to get this thing right.

What we need to realize is that power with out love is reckless and abusive and love with out power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

Adam Kahane was interviewed for an article in strategy & business, that starts out like this

This is a concept that business leaders need to understand, because in times of crisis (and afterward), the people of an enterprise are put under a great deal of stress. Many people in major corporations today are still wondering if they will lose their jobs. A system that follows only the impulses of compassion and solidarity (which Kahane calls love) will lose its competitiveness; a system that follows only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness (which he calls power) will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and this stance may, in the end, be the single most important factor in enabling a leader to accomplish great things.

If you think about it, the essence of leadership is skilfully working this balance. It is what leaders do. It is the key to understanding how teams function.

But very few are actually aware that this Power & Love dynamic is present – let alone what their default operating mode is. It was definitely a big eyeopener for me.
It is clearly a concept that we need to work into our GROW leadership curriculum in the future.

Read the full interview here