Life is complicated. Cultures are complicated. Traditions are complicated. Relationships are complicated. Conversations are complicated. We are participants in all these arenas, and many more besides and we are bound to get it wrong – a lot. The interesting question here though is what is ‘wrong’?

As children growing up in a complex world we labour constantly, often without knowing it, to work out what is going on around us. What does that frown mean? What do I say when someone says that? How do I stop the shouting? Why am I getting peas again?

So we guess. We develop ‘rules of thumb’ so that we don’t have to work things out from scratch every time. Much of this rule-making is done by the time we reach pre-school age or soon after, although our accumulated expertise might not always be evident because, at that stage, we often lack the words to describe our insights to our carers. But let us be clear, this expertise is just based on really good guesses and personal interpretation. Fact-checking features very little at this stage.

And then the tricky stuff really begins. From the first days in contact with other children it begins to dawn upon us that we don’t all think alike, or to be more precise, we don’t all believe alike. Each of us has by now developed a subtly different set of rules from everyone else in the group and here we face an even tougher challenge than before – deciding which of the competing rules is ‘right’.

Much of the time our need for an instant decision in tandem with a need for comfort leads us to one of the binary conclusions: either you’re wrong and I am right or you are right and it’s me who is wrong. It is this decisional dead-end that opens the opportunity for ‘mistakes’. Of course, mostly, there is no mistake, there’s a mismatch.

If there is a mistake it is one that we seem to often miss the lesson on – even as we grow into adults. The mistake in a given situation is not made when I fail to match your rule or you fail to match mine but when we both fail to notice that there is a rule. Or to be more precise, two. The follow-on error is to for each person to promptly decide that the other person is wrong/bad/thoughtless/horrible (add your own judgements here).

So, is the remedy simply rule recognition – noticing that we are just believing something different rather than being different, right or wrong? Partly. But first an example:

I am writing this sitting on the train to London. 10 minutes ago, as the train filled up with passengers a man drew level with the seat across the table from me and slammed his orange drink down as if to say “Mine! This is my seat – anyone got a problem with that?!” Now his version… “Oh no, I don’t think I’m going to be popular, three people at the table already and it’s very quiet. I hate asking ‘is this anyone’s seat? Instead, I’ll just put my drink down here and they will hopefully get the message that I’d like to sit down and if there’s a problem it won’t be so embarrassing as actually sitting down or asking the stupid question which often gets a negative reply…”

Of course I don’t know what he was thinking, I’m making it all up, his version and mine. The point is, which version of events do I need to believe to bring about the better outcome? Do I make the juice man nicer by treating him badly? Of course not. Do I make myself nicer by treating him badly after guessing nasty things about him? Definitely not.

Which brings me to the second part of the remedy:

Stop guessing like a child or guess something nice.

What hidden forces really operate behind organisational decisions? Politics? Empire- building? Shareholder pressure? I would have to say “all and none of the above”. All of those are the evidence; the things that we see people doing. In reality, it’s the drivers of those things that we should be interested in: emotion. What we actually see are the disguises that people adopt to communicate their feelings about how things are going. We resort to political manoeuvring when they have run out of ideas for how to ask for something. We build empires when we are worried about getting lost in the machine and shareholders express their feelings by buying, selling and voting.

And all of these are proxies for proper emotional expression. But before I tell you about the more useful alternatives let me explain what I mean by ‘proper emotional expression’ because you may already be thinking: “oh-ho, getting emotional is ‘not me’ or at least it’s not done where I work.” I bet you’re right if we are talking about people putting on major displays of emotion (ranting, stomping about, going red in the face, bursting into tears, going quiet and moody etc.). What I am talking about is giving a clear, rational explanation of how I am feeling so that people know what is going on and can make an informed decision about what to do next.

Right, practical details next; how do you do it yourself or help others to do it if they are struggling? Three ways for you to experiment with:

Listen and mention – don’t just blunder on when you are talking with someone who is becoming unreasonable. Be brave – give them the chance to express how they are feeling – you don’t have to ask them outright – you don’t even need to mention the word ‘feeling’ (the f-word). Instead, try: “You sound/look/seem…” [the name of the feeling] and then pause to let them acknowledge your observation and to continue with their point. My guess is that they will become more open as you encourage them to be clear about what is driving their point (how they feel). You may need to do this repeatedly as they express their various views. Be patient – your time will come!

Notice and declare – if you notice yourself getting stuck in a particular position and sense that you are being taken over by your opinion (emotions, actually) give yourself the chance to be explicit about how you are feeling. Again, you don’t have to mention that f-word.

Try: “I’m getting worried/annoyed/frustrated about where this conversation is going/the change in plan/the loss of momentum… because…”

What’s left unsaid – we frequently leave difficult conversations half finished, or at least with important things left unsaid. This is often because someone has purposefully or accidentally shut the dialogue down prematurely. To make sure that it’s not you, you can say: “Before we finish I want to ask a question of us both – “what’s left unsaid?” You might think this is completely artificial, too off the wall. This way of talking is certainly unusual because it does not follow convention but it does give us access to immense opportunities to clear up bad feeling and thus make progress on issues that most of us can get for ever stuck on. Deal with the unspoken and the rest will sort itself out.

If we want to keep emotion in its proper place in our lives, and not least of all in our businesses, then we need to learn how to deal with them. Properly managed, emotions help us to make great decisions, to be worth living with and drive us to do amazing things. But left to run riot by lack of acknowledgement they can make things truly miserable. Emotions for business people are like water for a plumber; if we don’t channel them properly we will forever be plugging the leaks – occasionally getting flooded out without warning.

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.

You don’t know it but you have been eagerly awaiting this tool. Don’t choke – yes, I’ve designed a tool.

I know, I’m allergic to measurement but this is not a psychometric. This is not a straight ability or personality test. This is about helping someone to understand to what degree they can notice and name emotions in voices. But unlike with psychometrics, this is definitely a START POINT and not a dead-ended, reductionist, deterministic statement of who someone is what what they are destined to do from here on in. It’s a nudge, if they want it, to remember what it is to pay attention to people’s feelings. A reminder. A wake up call. The start point in a piece of re-learning or remembering.

So give it a go – we go live with the Beta version around the 20th September.

So, where do I find this thing? Here

Listen hard and have fun.

You can now listen to the teleseminar we held earlier this week. My guest was Martin Down, a Deep Democracy Black Belt. You might hear some new and very simple answers to some old and very tricky leadership and interpersonal problems… Listen now

It’s been a while since the last post and I was asking myself this morning – why? There’s an element of out of site out of mind (ha ha) but also a distinct lack of pressure to write when no one is beating me up for output or even encouraging me to put finger to keypad. This is not, I repeat, not a ‘poor me’ post but about why we find it so difficult to change even small things about ourselves without a good deal of support from some important person around us. In this case, the change is: start publishing your ideas and then keep publishing…

The really funny thing is that once I get going here I wonder why it took me so long to come back. Here are 5 ideas that come to mind and have an application in real life attempts to change (anything):

1. I thought I’d have to write whole, well-formed thoughts. I didn’t have any of those so I stayed away completely. Remedy: start something – anything – and then refine.
2. Fed up at the lack of feedback and encouragement. Remedy: ask for some (doh).
3. Balked at writing a whole post all at one go with pictures and all the fiddly stuff – groan. Remedy: Write something short and then save. Do something small towards the change and then save (realize/publish) what you have done to someone important.
4. Performance – the perceived need to give a complete and polished rendition will often stop me/people from getting out of their seats. Remedy: The performance will find its shape – just make a start.
5. Looking for that extra bit of energy – that little kick to send me hurling down the Cresta Run – and not knowing always where to find it. Remedy: Just make a start and the energy will come as the sled picks up speed.

Key idea: Make a start – any start. There’s more than enough fuel in the tank.

For more ideas and answers come and have a look at the FAQs bit of the PEC site.

… not any more. My back (a type of unremitting chronological memory) is playing up again. Whilst I can at least boast that I did it in the course of shifting, spade-and-barrow, about 9 cubic metres of topsoil last weekend I am forced to dwell on the pathetic lack of self-awareness that led me to believe that it would be perfectly OK to do it.

A man of my maturity (eh?) should have the common sense and the contacts to be able to get one of those mini diggers onto the job pdf. Yes I do mean PDF, I’m not that bloody confused.

When the local blacksmith turned up with his wife yesterday  to measure up the the filtration system framework for the new lake (when you have seven hours I’ll explain it to you) his wife did actually let slip that he had a mini digger of his own. As I poured scalding Earl Grey down my trousers I reflected on how little I’d altered in 45 years… have idea, reach for spade, start digging, measure up.

…which brings me seamlessly to the significance of tomorrow. It’s my birthday and no it’s not too late to send me a card by email although a proper card would have been nice. Waddayamean I don’t know you?! So? My wife receives only slightly fewer cards than Jesus on his birthday – from people she hasn’t seen in generations. Mind you, she is quite a bit nicer than me; and she writes to people; phones them up (or at least resolves to – so they probably sense that).

I’m looking upon tomorrow as a sort of existential mid-term performance appraisal.

This is how it’s looking:

Appraisal 2008/09

Name: Paul Christopher James Furey

Joined: 28th April 1964

Position: Father and founding Director of Performance Enhancement Consulting (pardonable plug I think))

Overall rating: C++/B  (WHAT?!!!)

No. of friends: 7  (+/-5)

General temperament: TBD

Intellect: Flashes of brilliance masked by whatever happened a few moments before

Emotional Quotient: Gifted bordering on arrogant

Overall comments: Quite solid performer with memorable interpersonal skills (the last dodgy link, I promise)

Objectives for the coming year: 1. Do more with fruit trees. 2. Try to focus.

In the last 24 hours I have learned how a dual-winding system works in a modern alarm clock. I have also mastered the finer points of expanding versus non-expanding text on my web site. Oh and how to set the timer on my oven to come on, cook the food and turn itself off again.

When I started the week, I had no ambition to learn any of those things. In fact, there were several other things I really would have liked to master – like how to play a full twelfth of the A flat major scale on my trumpet without looking at the book. Or how to not bite when my eldest daughter complains that her little sister won’t play with her at 06:15 in the morning.

And it’s not the first time these lessons have been thrust upon me. It seems that my attention and consequently my time is more often grabbed by a piece of technology waiting to be understood than by some really important human thing.

Where do I put the soap?

I love a gadget as much as the next man but why does it leave me cold when I get mail about the new version of this or that or when a friend of mine thrusts their new pda (pdf?) under my nose for approval (there could be some jealousy at play there of course).

There are 22 objects on my desk; 7 of them need electricity and an operating manual. I would like to direct my attention, and that of anyone else who will listen, towards getting the really important stuff right. Learning the tricky business of being really good at being human, a little more of my waking hours. I want to concentrate more on repairing family relationships and less on learning how to Twitter. I want to become a better beekeeper and not quite so good at doing things on the web. I want to learn my Uranus from my Andromeda and not my bits from my Bytes.

Technology is super but there are more challenging things for humans to do than to learn how to get to levels 6 of Left 4 Dead (although the accompanying music ‘Te quiero Putta’ by Rammstein is quite a foot tapper – but for heaven’s sake don’t play it in front of your Spanish-speaking elder relatives). Come to think of it, about the best thing technology has to offer us is unprecedented access to all the music there is out there! Crikey. What a thought.

I take it all back.

Technology is the best. I love it.

Except anything that doesn’t make a nice sound – and that you can keep.

Everyone wants to know how to motivate their people to perform better in the current climate. It’s a pity they weren’t as interested before – had they been they would have been in better shape right now. What they should be doing now is no different to what they should have been doing originally, only now, it’s not really optional.

In brief – there’s more to each of these than meets the eye, BTW, so think before you dismiss ; ‘ )

Exceptional performance in tough times – what does it take?

The boss needs to know these few things:

1.    What is the No.1 preoccupation of each individual who works for me – ‘insights’ that start with “I think…” don’t count.
2.    If my people were unpaid volunteers what would I need to do to keep them? Am I doing it right now?
3.    Do I tend to clear the way or get in the way? How?

The report needs to know these few things:

1.    What frightens me?
2.    What feeds me?
3.    How to get through to the boss

• The report with their own people needs to know all those things.
• The boss and report both need to be prepared to act on what they know or to work at why they won’t.