Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Learning

What turns good managers into bad ones? Often, it’s their fear of uncertainty.

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It’s quite simple, really.

We spend years in school, then more years in higher education, and even more climbing the career ladder. Throughout, there’s one constant rule: You need to be right. You need to know.

If you’re not right or don’t know, you’ve failed – whether it’s the test, the next grade, or the promotion. 

This approach works fine in predictable domains, where things are complicated but knowing is possible, even desirable.

But what about unpredictable domains, the world of uncertainty?

The unaware manager facing unpredictable situations will likely feel threatened. 

And when we feel threatened? 

We fight, flee, or freeze.

Not the most transformative or skilful leadership approach, I’d say.

And we all observe the’ day-to-day symptoms: stress, lack of empathy, micro-managing,  aggression, disconnection, and absence of presence. 

The list is depressingly long.

They don’t need another leadership course.

They need to get comfortable with uncertainty and learn to navigate it skillfully.

Because the world once just very complicated, it is increasingly becoming more and more complex. And thus unpredictable, 

Learning how to cope with uncertainty is more about personal development than learning new skills.

#Leadership #humanresources #complexity

PS Any situation involving other humans has a serious element of uncertainty – just a reminder.

Elearning is fantastic – if you have a tutor

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That may sound like a contradiction in terms – I mean is the whole point of e-learning not that there is no ‘teacher’.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Yes and no.

  • E-learning is flexible. Learning is self-paced. You can take as much time on a subject as you like. Watch and rewatch til you get it.
  • No need to travel – it is an enormous cost and time saver

There are so many advantages over traditional classroom learning.

But, and that is serious but.

Possibly for exactly those same reasons e-learning can be challenging.

  • You need a lot of self-discipline to make sure you get it done
  • You can lose motivation when things get a bit tricky
  • You may miss the feedback and encouragement, or possibly just another person to bounce off ideas and your own understanding with.

That is also why a substantial proportion of e-learning courses are never completed.

What you really need is a coach

In most areas of life where we would like improvement, we would hire a coach – when it comes to learning we call it a tutor. Adding a tutor to your e-learning program is incredibly effective – in fact, adding a tutor solves Bloom’s famous 2-sigma problem.

Bloom’s 2 sigma problem shows that students who receive one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning techniques perform two standard deviations better than students in a traditional classroom setting.

But supporting students individually becomes very expensive – that was Bloom’s problem – we know it is the best way to learn – but how to do it without breaking the bank?

When we combine e-learning with tutoring, you get the best of both worlds. You have the convenience and flexibility of e-learning, but with the added support and personalised instruction of a tutor.

A tutor will help you stay motivated, answer your questions, and provide immediate feedback.

All my e-learning programs come with a tutoring option – for all of the above reasons.

But if you think about why not apply this thinking to your learning in general?

What would you like to learn or get better at?

Today all the knowledge is out there – that is not the challenge. Knowledge is really available.

No, the real challenge is converting knowledge into new behaviour. The famous knowing-doing gap and that is where a coach/tutor can be of enormous help

Tell me more about what you would like to improve and we can put together a learning journey for you.

How your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap

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Last week, we looked at the knowing-doing gap and some of the causes behind that. But your mindset is possibly the biggest hindrance in closing your knowing-doing gap. That is what this week’s video is about.

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Next week, we will have a look at what it takes to change our beliefs.

The knowing-doing gap

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In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I have decided to switch format in 2018 and try my hand at vlogging. Here is the first video in a new series about learning developing and getting better at stuff.

Next week, we will explore how your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap for many of us.

Great cultures are created with principles not rules

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Source: Netflix -https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

‘Another, customer complaint!’ thought the manager. ‘And what a stupid one at that. Some of our people just don’t get it. We will have to create a new rule for this kind of situation.’ And so he does. Up goes the memo on the information board, where it joins quite a few other new rule memos.

But rules only work when we can clearly define the situation and set clear boundaries. However, what we are looking for in our customer experience is personalisation. We want employees who are flexible in their approach and who can think on their feet. And with as few boundaries as possible… If there is one thing a customer hates, it is hard boundaries. ‘Sorry, sir that is not my section. Please ask your waiter.’

When we analyse why we create rules, it is not because we have a problem with the top performers. The top performers use their own good judgment to solve situations, which are typically also the situations that lead to praise and four-star reviews on social media. It’s the bottom 30% of the crew who need rules.

The more rules we create, the less room there is for good judgment.

The solution to the customer complaint is not to create another rule. It’s performance management, but not in the form of making a note for the yearly appraisal meeting, but here and now feedback and coaching. And, ultimately, if we have team members who don’t get it, they should not be on the team.

We can never create enough good rules to cover every situation. And even if we could, that would still not be the solution. Because top performers hate rules. What drives their engagement is autonomy, being able to use their own good judgement from situation to situation. And if you take that away, they will find somewhere else to work, a business where good judgement and personal initiative are appreciated.

But how will new employees know what good judgement looks like in our context?

This is where principles come in. Principles are the fabric of a great service culture. Principles frame what we believe around here. Principles are the foundation for our decision. Nordstrom, the US retail giant, has a very simple approach:

“Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

Southwest Airlines tell its employees: “You may do anything you are not uncomfortable doing in order to solve a passenger’s problem.”

Obviously, some people have better judgment than others. But that means that performance management is not about enforcing the rules but about helping people make better decision – and ultimately weeding out those who just don’t get it.

Get rid of the rule book and start thinking more about what  should be the guiding principles.

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

One thing that will dramatically improve your performance

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Think about it for a moment…, what is one thing you could work at that would dramatically improve your performance as a leader?

My theory is that most of us could improve the quality of our decisions. When I look at my own life and try to identify some of the main causes of difficult times, frustrations, etc., they can quite clearly be attributed to decisions that I have taken or possibly not take, which is in itself a decision.

So why is it hard for us to take consistently great decisions?

  • We are not as rational as we would like to be. We like to think of ourselves as super rational, but in reality, we are not. We make up a story that explains the irrational decision we took in order to convince ourselves and others how rational we are. Often, not always, it is bullsh*t.
  • We don’t understand what is really going on. We are looking at a situation through our own limiting mental models, and we confuse what in reality is just our perspective with reality or the truth.
  • We don’t take the trouble to gather enough information. We take decisions based on a few facts plus our own gut feeling. Sometimes it works brilliantly, but more often than not is doesn’t. A classic in this category is confusing our assumptions with facts. We think we know, but in reality, we are just assuming, and as my favourite coaching colleague from the US always used to say: Never forget Mike, that assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

So how do we work on improving the quality of our decisions? Once again it comes back to awareness. What we are aware of we can control, what we are not aware of controls us.

So the first thing to do is to start a decision journal.

Dedicate a notebook to this. And whenever you need to make a consequential decision, take a moment to think through: What are the options? What is your decision and what do you expect to happen? Make a note as well of your current state (tired, happy, stressed or whatever). Make space on the page for you to come back at a later time and note down what actually happened and what your key learning has been.

Start the decision journal today, by which I mean get it ready and commit to using it. Then the next time you need to take a significant decision, take the trouble to document it. Then on a regular basis go back and review your notes. Is there a pattern? What are you learning?

If you would like to get more sophisticated about this, check out this blog post from Farnam Street.

My personal experience of doing this is that I became aware that I had a tendency to take a certain type of decision very quickly, typically when something had not turned out as I expected and I felt an urgent need to correct the course. But what I had not previously noticed is that whenever something turns out different than what we expect, it triggers an emotional reaction and that emotional reaction would often tilt my decision toward the first idea that came into my mind.

Once I became aware of this, I have tried to postpone that kind of decision, to give myself time to get a different perspective, to resist the urge and that has definitely prevented me from a few bad decisions in the past 6 months.

Proving the point that more than anything, becoming aware of our own decision-making process helps us avoid the really bad decisions more than it makes us genius decision makers, but already that is not too shabby an outcome for many of us.

Once we have the decision journal in place, it’s time to practice getting better. A good place to start is to read Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath.

And what about your team? What is the one thing that really causes you frustration when you look at the people who report to you? If you in any way resemble many of the leaders that I coach, you will say: The quality of their decision… If only they could be trusted to take better decisions, my life would be so much easier.

Can you help your team make better decisions as well? Absolutely! It’s all about awareness, remember. We will have a look at how to do that in next week’s blog post.


This the thirteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

Are you a Multiplier or a Diminisher?

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If you want to reap the full benefits of your investment in training courses, you need to make a plan for what you are going to do when the course is over, because that is when the magic really happens.

We know from the 70:20:10 model that most of our learning comes from what we do on the job. That is the 70%.

And we also know that if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got.

And even that is not quite accurate because research shows that if we just do what we do, without trying to get better, we will actually regress, and gradually get slightly worse. But that is another story.

So we need to inspire our team members to do something different than what they have always done. That is why we send them on a training course.

But if these training programs are just seen as an entertaining stand-alone event then they do not help us much, except maybe for a few high performers who have the drive to take the materials and build their own implementation program.

So assuming that only a few of our team players are so called high performers, we then need to manage how we can best support the ‘normal’ team members in actually trying out their new knowledge, experimenting, getting feedback and gradually improving in order to ultimately get really good at whatever it is they learnt on the training course. That was, after all, the objective of the whole exercise.

Your approach makes a difference.

The key differentiator in this post-course learning phase is the team leader or the immediate supervisor.

Immediate supervisors, whether they are CEOs, VPs or floor managers come in basically two categories: Multipliers and Diminishers, writes Liz Wiseman, author of the book “Multipliers”.

Multipliers are essentially leaders who make everyone around them smarter, they consciously invest in the success of others. Their basic attitude is that people are smart and will figure it out and when they do, they become even smarter.

Multipliers ask lots of questions – Diminishers have all the answers.

Diminishers, on the other hand, create dependency. They often jump in and save the day. They drive results through their personal involvement and they are never shy to remind everyone how much smarter and more capable they are. When they do that, they drain the energy and motivation from everyone around them, and ultimately that reinforces the dependency.

Multipliers make sure that we get a high return on our training investment whereas diminishers time and again end up reducing all the time and effort that has been invested to nothing.

The key to being a great multiplier is to get people to think for themselves. They will never develop that ability if you always tell them what to do and how to do it. Learning means exercising some degree of choice, as opposed to working to a predetermined script. When you exercise your choice, you have an experience. That experience gives you feedback on how well you did. For most of us, this is a deeply motivating process. So building our capacity based on what we learnt on the course means trying things.

So the multiplier makes sure to hold a debrief meeting when a team member ‘returns’ from a formal training program. The purpose of the debrief is to establish what the team member is now going to work on in order to reinforce and build on the knowledge or inspiration that has been given in the course.

You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
– Johan C. Maxwell.

As with so many other new things, baby steps are the key. Don’t try and implement everything at once but make a plan. It’s the good old 20/80 principle again. What would be a small thing from the course that would make a big difference? That is a great starting point. Once we have that up and running, we move to the next item on the list, and step by step we build our capacity and performance. Use the GROW model to set it up.

So are diminishers evil egotist? No, most diminishers don’t even realise that they are draining the team. They actually mean well. They think they are being helpful. Next week, we will take a closer look at how not to fall into the trap of becoming a diminisher.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the eleventh blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.