What do Gordon Brown, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Mrs Doubtfire have in common? Well, more than one thing actually. The most obvious link is the fact that they all get found out in the end – they are, after all, each fakes of one sort or another. The second thing is that all three resort to pretence to achieve something that seems impossible to them as they are.

The father in Mrs Doubtfire yearns to be near his children but can’t seem to grow up. So instead of growing up and settling down he pretends to be someone his wife would want him to be – the perfect nanny. The Grimm Brothers’ wolf decides that running after things in the woods is not for him so he pretends to be an old lady so that his food will literally walk in the door. And our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seems to think that he needs to be seen as warm, understanding and cheerful.

But all these strategies are doomed to failure from the beginning – the wolf is chased out of bed because his features give him away. The perfect nanny is caught taking a leak standing up and Mr Brown looks constipated and twitches when he attempts a smile. The exercise of bolting on a false persona, often the product of our perceptions of how people want us to be (nicer, stronger, braver, friendlier) almost always fails for one or more of these three reasons.

Why disguises fail

Firstly, we humans are shrewd observers – we can spot fake feelings, phoney behaviour and false words at sixty paces. In cases where we fail to spot deceit it is usually because we haven’t wanted to see the flaws in the act – having perhaps already committed ourselves to the prize (the money, the beautiful person, the quick conviction). In essence, we only fail to spot the fake when we make a choice, at some level, to collude with the trickster.

Secondly, faked behaviours and emotions are costly to produce over a long period of time – which means anything more than a few hours. The act often collapses unless it is being attempted by a highly trained operator in short bursts. And thirdly, it is probably a given that we all yearn to be accepted for who we really are rather than for a person we have temporarily pretended to be; in fact, many believe that we often give ourselves away on purpose (albeit through the work of subconscious processes) in the hope of being accepted for who we are.

Being true to ourselves

The consequences of exposure are, of course, unpredictable but in all these cases, the pathetic irony is that we can probably all get further, on many levels, by being true to our real selves. In the case of the three examples that I’ve mentioned, all of them could have probably got more or less what they wanted if they had only been prepared to face up to who they were and to develop what they already had within them. Robin Williams’ character could have learned to cook and clean without all the cross-dressing business; the wolf could have enlisted the services of a good running coach and Mr Brown could simply settle for who he is: difficult to fathom, bossy and serious.

Focussing on what we can already do and developing those talents is not just a wistful, idealistic notion cooked up by those good people in the HR department, it’s the only credible alternative to pretending to be someone we’re not. I believe that growing up as a person and as a professional is chiefly a project in uncovering our sometimes less-than-obvious talents. We may well need to enlist help with identifying and honing our strengths but at least we can look forward to the prospect of becoming truly happy with who we have turned out to be.

There are relatively few people who know how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. When using what is called bow-and-drill technique, the first thrill comes when smoke begins to issue from where the scorching sawdust collects in a gap under the point of the drill. At this stage, novice fire makers will usually discover that the aphorism ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ has little basis in bushcraft reality. It is not long before getting smoke is more irritating than encouraging, the learner having rather too quickly realised that the gap between smoke and flame is much wider than had been anticipated, or indeed, previously advertised. The next surge of adrenalin is provoked by the sight of embers in the small pile of scorched sawdust generated by the umpteenth flurry of determined drilling using the fourth, fifth or even sixth iterations of drill, base board, bow and handboard. In the early days, the novice will record their successive increments of progress with a calendar rather than with a watch. Because of the nature of the challenge that has been taken up by the individual – making fire from little more than a piece of string and some sticks – they often find themselves feeling more than a little ridiculous. The combination of the potential for Crocodile Dundee and Ray Mears jibes coupled with the incidence of smoke-without-fire failures drives many to practise in secret and thus with little external encouragement. The test on the individual’s perseverance with this most basic of human challenges should not be underestimated; a bushcraft warning from the wise reads:

People who do not know how to start a fire with sticks sometimes forget their matches. People who do know how to start a fire with sticks never forget their matches.

The basis for this wisdom only really becomes apparent after the novice has danced Apache-like around his first blaze, taken a suitable warrior name for himself and been compelled to put the same fire out in response to the shrieking of his garage’s smoke detector. It is after all of this and after about the fifteenth attempt to duplicate that piece of pyrotechnic magic that our warrior realises that he doesn’t really understand what fire making is about after all. With knitted brow and jaw set for renewed victory our hero is within minutes presented with a series of questions and decisions: What is going wrong? Is it the bow? Is it the drill? Is it this is or is it that? He may not notice that what lurks in the background; a barely perceptible question demanding to be answered: “When do I give up?”.

Failure to address this issue in time substantially increases the chances of ultimate failure. If our new warrior continues to repeat the same mistakes over multiple attempts at drilling up a fire he will soon lose hope; when he loses hope he loses confidence; when confidence walks out, ingenuity and perspective go with it. Making fire takes its share of perseverance but it takes a steady mind to not get carried away with the energy of the physical activity. The fire builder must be constantly looking in from a mentally-generated distance, questioning which component is at fault and which is performing its function correctly; put more plainly still, he must know when to give up. He must develop a knack of knowing when to start from fresh with new components – to go backwards before he can proceed once more.

But having achieved smoke with one set of tools, it can be very hard to admit that it isn’t going to go any further and that it’s time to call it quits and to begin again with the first stages of whittling and preparation of a new set up. What feels like starting from scratch is both a shortcut to competency (through the repeated preparation of the components) and a shortcut to fire (because the young tenderfoot will simply succeed more quickly with the right components). ‘Intelligent persistence’ is the name of the fire builder’s game.

The fire can of course be anything you care to mention; the skills required do not vary. Our skill at judging when to persist and when to desist will decide whether the task will get the better of us, or we of it. In stopping too soon on one particular tack we run the risk of not exploring and mastering that opportunity well enough to reach an informed decision about its merits; in stopping too late we increase the chances that we will grow frustrated with the lack of progress and abandon the task altogether. Our success at getting difficult things done in life is perhaps less predicated upon our skill in addressing specific challenges and more upon our skill at approaching challenges in general.

I confess at the outset of this post that I’ve never much been into the ‘cultural differences’ stuff – empathic communication and its breakdowns are my first love. And to tell you the truth, until last week I simply hadn’t been that interested in the topic.

The facts are that I like people from all over the place, I like traveling and I find different cultures, ways, foods, places etc. all fascinating. Full stop. I had of course failed to grasp how someone’s place of birth and the culture of their upbringing might impact on their interactions with other people other than because of differences in their accent, incomplete vocabulary and a quite natural suspicion of British food. A conversation last week has unearthed, for me, a more intriguing subtlety in this cultural difference malarkey.

I imagine that it is generally assumed (well, it was by me) that when a person, for whom English is not the mother tongue, sets out to express an opinion in conversation, any faltering on their part might be explained by a hole in their grammar or vocabulary and/or a misplaced unease about making themselves look daft by using the wrong phrase. According to the one person with whom I have had my only proper conversation about all this (not a large sample I grant you – bear with me) what invariably holds him back from expressing himself more transparently can more accurately be described as a strong dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of the second language and not any lack of his grasp of it.

So, it is not embarrassment that ‘le mot juste’ is, at that moment, beyond his reach but a deep-seated conviction that people from the culture in which he is the visitor would not get to grips with the essence of what he was trying to express, no matter what words he chose. He finds himself thinking: If I can’t get them to connect or empathize with this sentiment then I would prefer to leave the whole thing out. This barrier to expression therefore is not about a hole in idiomatic sharing as much as wider gap in cultural reference points such as what is funny, familiar or foul. The problem is only compounded when a person speaking their second language is skillful to the point that their colleagues believe that none of these problems exist. In such instances, it is possible that untimely failures to speak up might be misinterpreted as examples of ‘not joining in’ and therefore as signs of aloofness.

The conversation last week also shed light on something closer to home. I gave up speaking Italian to our first daughter, Vianne, after more than a year of persevering. I found that I was simply unable to express the subtleties of my feelings for her during the day-to-day ups and downs in a way that did justice to what was going on in my head – and heart. Although I had done my three Rs in Italian, and had been fluent in both English and Italian from first words, I was starting to feel cut off from Vianne. I should not have been surprised. I had, after all, only really been exposed to parent-child language in English and had thus acquired the subtleties of my own parenting vocabulary in that language rather than in Italian.

It seems that linguistic proficiency is only one superficial cultural bridge. The invisibility of other barriers should make us more wary about jumping to negative conclusions about the social faults that we find in acquaintances from other cultures. However, a question remains: In future, will I be quick enough to notice my lack of cultural empathy before they do?

PS. Thanks again to Robert for his excellent cartoon strip. www.robertthompsoncartoons.com

Many great companies start out as family concerns – yours might be one of them.

Mars, now Masterfoods, is a huge and successful example which grew out of a home-based sweet making buiness founded, in a small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington by Frank and Ethel Mars back in 1911. And S.C. Johnson, inventors of the Ziploc bag, Pledge, Glade and Windex were founded in 1886 by Samuel Johnson who invented a new floor polish to go on the parquet flooring he was installing in those days. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of Marsians over the years (I don’t know what the SCJ people call themselves – answers on a postcard) and they did stand out from the rest of my clients. More than any other group they seemed to be fiercely proud of their heritage and of the company’s products. No matter where the person worked they seemed to have a very detailed knowledge not only of  production methods but also of production values; to be let loose on the line as a young manager at Mars was to be trusted with the crown jewels – it certainly was not seen as lowly work.

And there are numerous other distinguishing features I could list which defined them as ‘different’ such as their unusual way of opening ‘product’ (Marsian for ‘sweets’) which was to peel the wrapper along the seem so as to reveal the production details (line number, date and time of manufacture, sell-by-date etc. etc.) Aside from all of this, the people from Mars seemed to act as a cohesive group, I hesitate to say for fear of sounding corny, as a ‘family’ group; there seemed to be an extra layer of fabric keeping everyone together.

But is it feasible to reproduce the kind of bonding fabric found in a company like Mars or cabury or in a well-functioning family, within an ordinary company manufacturing ball-bearings or tomato sandwiches? Or would it be found that the product was too mundane, the company too new, the people too ordinary? I suspect that those elements are really nothing to do with it. And I also suggest that there are proportionally just as many badly functioning families as there are badly functioning companies so that just trying to be more like a family probably won’t make a bad company, better. However, I do believe that there are some things that a well-functioning family can pass on to the leaders and members of a mediocre company; this view is in some way borne out by the words of a leading psychologist who was once asked at interview whether being a psychologist had made him a better father. He replied: “No, but being a father has certainly made me a better psychologist.”

So what is the definition of a psychologically healthy family? The literature on the subject suggests that it is one where the roles shift and swap according to what circumstances demand. Sometimes the father leads, sometimes the mother makes the first move. Sometimes the children are told what to do and other times the parents pay attention and act upon the children’s ideas and wishes. Sometimes the parents come up with the solutions, at other times the children spot the problem and the solution before the parents have even got out of bed. As the children grow in years so the relationships are allowed to move on; the children are encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their actions and the parents relinquish much of the control of the organisation and leadership of the unit in acknowledgment that the troops are now more than capable of organising and handling life’s events. By this point the parents have assumed a new role as mentors, advisers-in-the-wings whilst the children have gone on to create their own ‘companies’ with their own particular feel and collection of values and traditions. This all assumes, of course, that the parents have got their psychological act together in the first place, that is to say, that they, to some degree, understand themselves, their own insecurities and needs (especially in terms of needing to be needed) and that they have the courage and judgment to enable them to be flexible as well as consistent at enough of the right moments.

P.S Thanks to you Robert for the great cartoon you did for us. Click here to buy this very cartoon from him!

What would you do next?

She’s done it again. The Marketing Director, Jane Shaw has just taken credit for another one of your ideas. It first happened soon after you arrived in your post as Head of Sales.  On that occasion you decided to take it as a compliment, a way of currying favour with your new boss and an opportunity to build up brownie points with someone who would probably turn out to be your ally for the radical agenda that you were hired to execute on – to increase individual client spend. But in the last nine months it has happened again and again. Today it was during a Board meeting when she essentially trotted out the outline of an idea that you had floated past her just a couple of days before as part of a strategy for achieving your objectives. Having said that, there was no denying that Jane sounded incredibly plausible and actually added usefully to the idea with her own input – she really knew how to get John on Board!

Would you…?

Would you confront her with an assertive statement ? Would you let it go and just have more good ideas? Would you communicate empathy with her position as a Marketing Director under pressure? Or would you stop telling her your ideas and go to the MD first? There is certainly more than one right answer – each of us can carry different things off by force of personality, choice of words and by moral conviction.

Different strategies carry different levels of short and long term risk. What would you do next? Let me know with a reply or go to www.originalsoftskills.com for some options and the answer.

I was doing a spot of wiring at the weekend and whilst grovelling around through piles of dusty (and terribly itchy) ceramic insulation, in a part of the attic that I had never to, I stumbled across a large control panel bolted to the wall.

This shoebox-sized box sprouted a wild assortment of about twenty cables and was covered with an array of red LEDs – all lit. This large gadget had evidently been hanging there for the past three years, since we bought the house, fully powered up, doing it’s thing. What’s its ‘thing’ was I have not discovered but I do know that it did it quite without anybody’s help. No reset buttons to press, no dials to adjust, no displays to monitor. How clever of it, how resilient and independent; what a little stalwart. Not all machines are like this. The more we design machines to do, the more help they seem to need from us. Computers need upgrades, software needs patches, cars need servicing (oh, how they need servicing), bikes need mending and microwaves, well they just get thrown away – sorry. But we fully accept this maintenance burden; when we buy a machine we buy an uncertain future and usually a big fat warranty to ‘protect’ us from that future. But people, ah, now you’re talking.

"Come on ol' girl"

The beauty of buying, or as we like to say these days, ‘hiring’ people is that you just get them in the building, tell them where the coffee machine is (they always manage to find the toilets by themselves) and let them get on with whatever it said in the advert. Job done. Sometimes. The tricky ones need maintenance (oh gawd, here we go – should have bought another bloody machine instead).

Fear not, here is the Quick Start guide to help you get the best from your new person or ‘human’ without wasting valuable business hours.

1.  No need to read a book about ‘leading people’ instead ask it what it needs to operate properly: what turns it on and what makes it malfunction. Then believe it and do as it asked.

2.  Be aware that it will need a reasonably nice place to work properly: space for its cables and attachments, daylight, access to fresh air, a chance to eat and freewheel for a few minutes a day; in essence, somewhere that it is pleased to come to.

3.  If you are going to connect it with other people units make sure that all of them know why they are being connected and find out from them, or at a push, tell them, which person is going to do what. Of course, do make sure they are talking the same language. It doesn’t matter that they are different (you probably chose them that way), it does matter that they can make sense of each other.

4.  If they start getting dusty or crusty it is probably because you haven’t been near them for ages. As with any good machine, the better you get to know your person (and the better they come to know your preferences), the more productive and maintenance-free you and they can be.

5.  Preventative maintenance. This comes in a variety of forms; here are 3 critical ones:

• Communication. If there is an instance of good productivity or a malfunction – talk (like with the car).
• Time to think. If you load your machine with ‘stuff’ don’t expect great results. Like a washing machine – put too much in and it all comes out dirty.
• Be nice to it. We all talk to our cars and that works really well on an icy road or on a cold morning doesn’t it? (I hum to the microwave too – it helps the food to heat quicker). So be nice to your person and they will be nice back to you.

But if you are not entirely satisfied with your person, whatever the model, simply return them to where you got them and there is a good chance that there is someone out there who can successfully give them a more suitable home where they can function at their peak.