Читать книгу Tap Into Greatness - Sarah Singer-Nourie - Страница 11
Оглавление(and theirs, too, so let’s get this)
Have you…
• Ever gotten into an argument with someone and couldn’t think of your best comebacks until hours later?
• Ever been impatient the last time someone just wasn’t getting it as fast as you needed them to?
• Ever wondered how a great athlete like Wayne Gretzky could be such a massive failure as a coach?
• Noticed yourself thinking about WIIFM now—sort of newly awkward self-awareness trying it or “Doh!” moments of hindsight realizing where you could’ve addressed it?
Could these four scenarios be related? Absolutely.
Every one of them is a normal and telltale indicator of a particular point in a learning process1 you and your people are experiencing all the time. As a coach, I’ve helped so many leaders who were innocently missing or misreading the details of this process as everyone got really frustrated and performance tanked. By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand exactly why these things occur, know what they mean, and have best next steps ready when you spot them again so you can accelerate your team forward.
First, we need a good visual of what’s going on.
Let’s take a drive…Imagine yourself driving on the highway. As you do, you peer over at the car and driver to your right, and another to your left. The driver to the left is laid back, listening to his stereo, chatting on his phone, sipping his coffee, relaxed and at ease. The driver to your right looks nervous, gripping the wheel with both hands, intently looking at the road, your car, his console and then the road again. His radio is off, there are no passengers in the car and he’s clearly concentrating hard on driving. Veteran driver vs. Newbie driver, right? You’ve been in both positions, and so have I. It seems like forever ago when you were a newbie driver with that kind of intensity, right? What happened between then and now was the gaining of competence and confidence, a formulaic process playing itself out right now in different contexts for everyone on your team with varying skill and talent areas. To decipher what’s really going on in their competence, we’ll stay with this driving example…
1. Cluelessness, UI Unconscious Incompetent
When you were five, you probably had no idea that there was even a distinction between standard shift and automatic shift, right? You just got in the car and someone took you to where you needed to be. So, regarding the skill of stick-shift driving, you were Unconscious Incompetent; you didn’t even know (unconscious) that you didn’t know how to do it (incompetent). And that was fine.
Ignorance is bliss, right?
2. (possibly Rude) Awakening, CI Conscious Incompetent
Then you got to be driving age. You decided you wanted to learn how to drive, maybe even a stick shift… You sat behind the wheel for the first time and instantly became acutely aware of how much you didn’t know. If it was stick shift, then the car was stalling, jumping, and you felt like you were going to drop the transmission any minute. You thought you knew what you were doing a little, but the voice in your head was either screaming, “Wow—cool,” or “You have no idea what you’re doing—you suck at this!”
Welcome… You’ve arrived at Conscious-Incompetence. At this point you were no longer completely ignorant or blissful. You were definitely still Incompetent, but now Consciously so. That could be painful or inspiring—it depends on you, the situation and the voice/s in your head.
Jump out of this driving flashback for a moment and back into present time, with one of the people on your team who’s clueless in one of those skills they need to learn and perform. There are two ways this can go:
1) Eager Beaver… Wide-eyed, eager to dive into what they haven’t experienced or learned yet. They blink a lot, processing as fast as they can, might ask a lot of questions right away, consciously mapping the territory of what they have yet to learn.
2) Bubble Burst… Full of confidence without actual competence to back it up, they think they know a lot more than they really do. They get a rude awakening with real-life feedback (likely from you) to that effect, and in fact have a whole lot to learn, quickly. Ouch.
Either way, remember what it felt like to be behind the wheel that first time…scary, exhilarating, overwhelming, cool…a lot at one time. That’s where your newbie is right now. How it goes at this point is key, and can either accelerate the rest of the learning or grind it to a screeching halt. Here’s why…
Downshifting
We have moments that cause our minds to flash-flood with unproductive emotions like fear, anger, panic or frustration. Realization that we really don’t know what we’re doing or are looking really bad3 trying could be one of them, especially when exacerbated by our little voice freaking out in high critic mode. The more overpowering those negative emotions are, the more compromised our mental processing becomes.
Some neuroscientists aptly call this downshifting4; like driving a car in fifth gear at 70 mph, all systems firing. If we suddenly downshift to first gear, the engine simply can’t go that fast and we’ll burn up the transmission trying to force it. A blast of panic, fear or anger (like “Oh @#%!—I can’t do this! I look really stupid! My boss is watching me flail right now!”) downshifts you into the brain’s first gear: survival mode. There, you can’t access higher-order-thinking-skills as normal, and can’t process anything beyond basic preservation by defending yourself (fight) or bailing out of the situation (flight, which also manifests as shutting down). It’s not pretty. It’s the worst spot when there’s learning or performance on the line, yet we’ve all been there. We’ve also all triggered it for someone else. The more you confront someone about how much they’re NOT getting it the more likely they are to downshift, making it worse.
You might have someone on your team who’s there right now, their thinking and ability to learn/perform completely crippled.
When downshifting occurs, the only antidote is to cool down enough for the brain to upshift back to full capacity. That’s why you always think of your best comebacks hours after a big argument or confrontation. Your brain can’t get to where the clever comebacks are (fifth gear) when you need them in the moment of conflict, because it downshifted into first gear, far away from that sophistication. Hence, you come up with those best retorts in hindsight, after you’ve regained thinking power. I’ll give you more tools5 for how to upshift yourself or someone else, but for now, just keep this phenomenon in mind and know that the best thing to do is keep the learning experience positive6 and calm so you or that person can stay present, clear, firing on all cylinders of fifth-gear, higher-order thinking skills, learning forward. Be their supportive yet challenging coach, not their critic. Now, back to that diagram.
3. The Sweet Spot of Learning
If you’re driving today, you stuck with it. You made it through that discomfort and kept practicing, but it was probably messy. One minute you had it, the next minute you didn’t, and you weren’t consistent for a while. The little voice hates this part because it wants you to always look good, and that’s hard to do here because you’re all over the place until you start to really get it.
The great news is that you can quiet the inner heckler, and turn up the volume on your inner positive coach. Then this phase can be awesome. And it is truly the sweet spot of learning. You’re fully aware that you don’t have it down yet, but really want to learn it, doggedly determined, hungry… the best!
For your newbie in this spot, your role as their coach is important. If they’re into it, it’s a blast to coach someone here because they’re wide open, sucking it in. But if they’re getting nervous, showing signs of defensiveness or shutting down, pipe up your visible, audible support to drown out their little voice which is telling them they can’t do it. You’ve been there yourself, so go back to your empathy as a fellow learner.
4. I Think I Can, CC Conscious Competent
After a period of flailing, they can finally do this new thing, but it takes a lot of brainpower. The new driver is still gripping the wheel, unable to have the distractions of passengers or the radio yet. You may even need to cue yourself out loud as you do it: “Press in on the clutch, let up on the gas, then shift!”
So you’re definitely driving (competent), yet definitely need hyper-focus to do so (conscious). In fact, it feels like it takes all of your consciousness to stay that competent at this stage.
Finally the pieces come together. You can pull it off decently. You can drive with the radio on. Then you can have a passenger, and then you can talk about something else while driving. For your newbie learner, s/he can do this new thing without so much buildup beforehand or being so mentally exhausted afterward… at last!
On it!
For most things we need to do well, we get smoother, able to handle curveballs, and that deliberateness remains. We execute well, with intentionality to every part of it, which ensures its success and quality. This is solid Conscious-Competence, where we can crank out consistently solid results with great control. We’re completely competent, aware of why, what, how and when we’re doing what we do the whole time. Your solid, consistent performers are here, conscious to the point of conscientious.
5. Mastery, UC Unconscious Competent
As a driver, you got to the same place of that guy to the right of you on the highway. Now, you sip your smoothie, cart passengers, listen to the radio and talk on your phone while driving, not even thinking about it, right? You became Unconsciously Competent.
Coming back to real time and competence areas you’re seeking or expecting others to master and excel in… this smoothness is what we’re going for, isn’t it? With the right intention, this is when ease with speed, efficiency, excellence and range (competence even with unexpected challenges in the mix or within a diverse range of situations) expand. When someone’s got that, we start dropping “the T word”…
Talent
“Talent” is the way we reference how unconsciously awesome someone is at something. We then compare, rank, and measure. You’ve got lots of talent on your team right now, both realized and potential.
This is a big topic in coaching, leadership and human performance. How someone becomes talented is important, and hotly debated. Is talent learnable? Is it not? I could share an equally significant stack of books from my shelf representing both sides of that learnable7 vs. unlearnable8 debate, but for our purposes here, let’s just hold that there are two different kinds of talent in you and on your team—learned and natural.
All talent is great. Learned talent is excellent. Natural talent is exceptional. I believe that peoplecan get to talent both ways, but inborn talent will always outperform learned talent when it’s tested (by pressure and other x-factors) because it’s the manifestation of hard-wired instinct defining our natural survival patterns, thus more unflappable. We finally have great diagnostics9 and pinpoint-accurate vocabulary to describe different kinds of natural talent themes, which has opened up a whole new way for us to understand and accurately leverage inborn ability.
The Talent Brake
When you’re unconsciously competent to the point of real talent, how do you explain how to do it to someone who’s clueless? If you’re a NASCAR driver, how do you suddenly teach someone who has never been behind a wheel before?
It’s hard. You don’t think about the steps of what you do anymore, so how can you explain them? This is what happens when we take a star who’s so great that we’ve decided to have them train or supervise others. We think they’ll keep accelerating forward, but then everything slows down. Maybe that happened to you when you first got people under you to manage. You knew how your reports should do something because you could do it easily, quickly and in your sleep. But could you teach it? Define success for it? Outline all the micro-steps to it? Uh oh.
Most leaders begin as talented contributors who excelled. We have a tendency to take people who are really skilled at something and unintentionally move them away from doing that something. We want to make their impact bigger, so we promote them to management or leadership of that something. A talented designer becomes a creative director, where they no longer design, but instead manage people who might not have talent anywhere close to their own. A gifted engineer is promoted to lead younger engineers. It happens in every industry, in every kind of job. And, in a way, it makes sense.
But it changes the game completely for them. It feels like slamming on the brakes when they were in cruise mode. All of a sudden, they’re back to Conscious-Incompetence—not with the original area of performance, but with this new thing called training or leading someone else in what I don’t even have to think about, which they don’t know how to do.
The Natural Talent Mistake
This brake-effect is even worse with natural talent. When someone arrives on the scene with the innate ability to hit it out of the park right away, it’s a beautiful thing. We’re wowed, and they’re psyched. There are few things more satisfying than doing what we do well instinctively AND it being the right fit for what someone else needs. It’s a holy grail combination. Like Michael Jordan for the Bulls, a person at that level, left to their own devices, will outperform our expectations and thrive doing what they do best.
Unfortunately, we often make the mistake of elevating someone like that as the model for everyone else to match AND the teacher/trainer/mentor for the wide-eyed newbies. MISTAKE! This move usually goes horribly. The superstar gets annoyed and feels slowed down, the newbies get intimidated because they feel they’ll never get to that level (and few will), and not much valuable training actually happens. Because…
That natural superstar started at Unconscious-Competent, rather than learning their way to it. So they’ve never had consciousness to explain how or why they do what they do… they just know they can do it if you give them the right setup for it. So asking them to teach it is an exercise in frustration because they don’t have words, steps or frameworks to break down what you’re wowed by. The best trainers, mentors and coaches of anything are those who understand the nuance of what it takes to be awesome at something, AND can articulate, explain and teach it from the clarity of Conscious Competence. Michael Jordan learned how to lead and coach his teammates because Phil Jackson taught him how to bring Consciousness to his Competence and articulate it to his teammates as a captain. And your stars can get that too. NOW what?
Here’s how to accelerate the process and leverage your talent into leadership:
You
You’re talented at driving. But were you always? Nah, you learned your way there. In your professional life, you’re pretty used to being smooth, not bumpy and messy so much anymore. Yet that’s what you might feel a bit here with this new area of competence- influencing or leading in this new way I keep proposing.
• Give yourself space to go through the process and be a learner. As you learn the concepts in this book, keep coming back to the UC-UI process, and remind yourself that you’re in your own process (probably multiple ones at once).
• Map your process along the way. Throughout the book, chart your process and plot where each tool is and how it’s moved in your competence. “Hey—check me out! I’m actually Unconsciously Competent now in addressing WIIFM all the time!” If you’re reflective, keep track in a notebook the things you’re trying, how it feels, what you’re learning/tweaking, and what response you’re getting.
• Get perspective on yourself. Intentionally pan out to see if you can spot your own unconscious-competent patterns as you lead, react and interact. The more conscious you are about what you’re doing, the more intentional choice you have about the best next move rather than just going on auto-pilot all the time.
You With Them
They’re in their own processes, which may or may not be moving at the pace you’d like. While it can feel like a roller coaster for them, your influence makes all the difference between a terrifying or awesome ride.
• Empathize. As you watch them clueless, stuttering, smoothing out or soaring, remember what it was like to be in those spots, your little voice screaming in your head. Slow your Unconscious- Competent self down to be patient with their process. What do you wish someone had told you, shown you or done for you?
• Highlight the wins. They may not see their own progress in the moment because they’re so focused on what they still don’t know ahead. So, you be the one to call out progress. Even pros need the fans to celebrate every yard gained, not just the touchdowns.
• Cheer. While they’re in the learning process, their little voice will mess with them. It’s up to you to drown out their little voice with your support from the outside. Tell them it’s okay for the roller coaster to lurch, that they’ve got it, that you believe in them.
• Set up your Talent. When you’re considering stand-out rock stars of talent on your team for leadership, first ask yourself how they got there. Learned or Wired? The learned talent can get to consciousness quicker, since they were just there not so long ago. The naturals will have a bigger transition, so really assess where their ultimate best fit is before moving them. To get them to their next level of leadership, invite them into a process to become a leader—more Conscious about their Competence so they can lead others in it. Pair them with a hungry, strong CI learner with the directive of getting inside the star’s head, noticing and documenting patterns in what they do naturally to find repeatable, teachable steps in what they do. They’ll both learn!
You can help others take leaps forward in their process and mastery as you take on your own. That’s your WIIFM. That’s what you’ll get out of all of what follows. You’ll learn how to tap into your team’s greatness, inspire them as a leader and make them better.
Trust me.
Notes:
“How often do you get to be the ultimate coach, able to create and find that greatness…where people can be even better, smarter than they might otherwise show up?”
