… 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.

Or to put it another way, we of all the animals, probably find it the hardest to learn new things – much harder than do the other animals. Why? Because thinking gets in the way. Thinking and having feelings about what we are being ‘taught’. Oh, and there’s that problem of reflexivity too – we can think about ourselves, or to be more accurate, about our ’selves’.  Because of that we end up also wasting quite a lot of time thinking about what other people think of us. All of these capacities  – they’re not skills because we don’t choose to have them or seek to practise them – result in us getting very caught up in ourselves and our thoughts. As time passes and we grow up (or at least grow old) all these thoughts and the feelings that accompany them shape our repertoire of thoughts, feelings and actions. Every time we are faced with a situation, we more or less pull our feeling, thinking and behaviour ‘pattern’ out of the bag and do it without a thought.

Training is supposed to interrupt these patterns – does it? A good question – Can you train someone not to be aggressive for example? Go and read about that. Mostly it does not because it only very rarely addresses what is going on in our heads and ‘hearts’. The other animals, however, can learn the new tricks much more easily because they have all that internal stuff going on. Animals react and ‘do’. Plain and simple. We are much more like them when we are frightened or angry – then we do ‘think’ with something more akin to their level of sophistication. If you can remember what it was like the last time you were angry or frightened or very sad you will realise that functioning at that level is indeed to experience functioning at a very basic level. Straightforward alright; quick; reactive; brutal. We could even say ‘thoughtless’. Not nasty or uncaring, just free from thought, in the human sense.

So why should you give a fig about any of this? Perhaps for two reasons:

1.    So that you can realise that it’s not your fault that the course on emotional intelligence you were sent on had little or no effect (just as the course on ‘developing your  assertiveness’, ‘listening skills training for managers’ and ‘developing leadership skills’ didn’t either). You’re not being thick – in fact, quite the reverse.
2.    So that you can spot yourself more easily in a situation when you are behaving like one of the other animals – in the nicest possible way of course. You might just notice in time to get your humanity back before it’s too late.

Hmm…

Some things just look right don’t they? They look like they are going to work. Some medicines look powerful. Some people seem plausible, like they are going to be dependable or creative or knowledgeable. Some graphs look really informative, you just know they are telling the truth. Sometimes you come across an argument or line of reasoning that strikes you as logical, truthful, accurate, honest, helpful. This is what psychologists call face validity.

Face validity.

It’s what something has when it looks ‘right’. Face validity is the thing that makes us trust a particular thing, person, piece of paper, concept or whatever. It is probably something that most people don’t acknowledge as being present in their decision-making processes – chiefly because it doesn’t have much to do with supportable logic

An example: Tomorrow morning you walk into a car showroom on the way to the service desk of your car’s brand dealership. You spot a car you really like the look of. Crikey, it’s just so, well, shiny. It smells so new and the doors – ooh, so heavy and clunky. I think I’ll open and shut it again. Clunk! CLUNK! Ooh, “I want it” you think. Then you ask for a brochure. You are given a badly photocopied sheaf of pages, stapled at the top right-hand corner. No, this isn’t a photocopy, you are assured, this is what the marketing department has sent us. This is a £25,000 car you protest. Oh, yes, the salesman retorts, and worth every penny. We’ve decided to put all our effort into the car and not really bother with marketing blurb – we thought the car should speak for itself. Do you take it for a test drive?

‘Thin slicing’.

Face validity, and our tendency to judge things against this subtle criterion taps directly into what the author of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, refers to as ‘thin slicing’. It is about picking up lots of data subliminally and putting it to good (and bad) use in making complex assessments very fast. Experienced soldiers thin slice all the time in battle. Racing drivers do it a hundred times a lap. Art dealers do it with every major painting they examine; gamblers when sizing up every new opponent. So, the problem with this thin slicing is not that we do it or don’t do it.

A face validity – good or bad?

The problem is that we either don’t know we are doing it or choose not to own up to it. If we are unaware of how we are making a decision then thin slicing and the corresponding face validity ‘rating’ of what we are judging can get the better of us. So, ‘thin slicing’ + self awareness = good quality deciding. As for face validity itself – just remember about books and covers.

I saw this National Lottery booth the other day on Charing Cross station and it made me smile because it reassured me that even when the external incentive to ‘do the right thing’ is almost completely absent (no bins), people will in general still try to make good decisions.

Not a bin in sight but resourceful commuters had stuffed their wrappers in the booth’s microscopic receptacle rather than throwing them on the floor. Now I know that I have no way of knowing how much did end up on the floor but…

Bin there, done it

There’s something in there for you if you are planning to run some sort of management development or leadership growth event. Something about trusting people and not only staying out of their way but making it a key leadership job to keep obstacles out of the  way of one’s team. No mean feat in this climate I image.

How many times have you gone to an event, undergone some management development or some sort of self-improvement only to return to normal life to find that every bugger seems to want to want to get in your way. The Board who won’t think creatively, your team who hate change, your colleagues who just don’t want the jip – especially not now.

The leadership and team-building question of the moment: Whose way am I getting in today?

Does it really exist?

Waiting for the hot water to come through in my hotel room. First a trickle, then a sputter, then nothing, then lots of gurgling, a breathy hiss, another trickle then final silence. Replace water for action and the hissing for talking and you have what mosty happens when companies employ consultants to help them to ‘team build‘ in the name of ‘doing management development’. Management development is a sticky business to begin with since most organisations don’t seem to want managers at all – especially now. They want thrusting, brave, articulate, sensitive, tough, creative, steady, ‘business-aware’ gods who can save the day. If that sounds batty, try getting a whole collection of these unicorns together in the same room (you’ll find them in any branch of Woolworths between the packets of Hen’s Teeth and the Fairy Wings).

The reality (according to me): team-building is to improving corporate performance what trying-for-a-baby is for family expansion. Have you ever ‘tried for a baby’? It’s horrible and the very act of trying kills much of the will to undertake the act that results in the conception of said baby. Why not just do the right things, naturally and the baby will come (IVF cases aside – apologies if you are one of those, of course).

So… If you want to build a team out of a group of individuals be very clear about what you are hoping for. It may be, for example, that if you just want people to talk to each other more, or relate to one another more warmly that you can do that for yourself and spend the money that you had earmarked for some sort of rope and barrel swinging exercise in the Dales to buying your team lunch somewhere once a month.

Bottom line: (does anyone else still say that?). Be clear about what you want to achieve in building your team, explain it to yourself in behaviours, think ‘common sense’ whe it comes to making the new behaviours happen and then get them to tell you how to do it. Hey presto – that’s team-building!

If your dreams still remain unfulfilled after many attempts then you may just need someone to come in. At least then you will know what you are asking for.

But the PEC’s rules for team-building consultant shopping are thus:

1. Be specific about what you want (“I want people to stop arguing about everything in meetings”)
2. Be precise about what you want instead (“I want challenge without the nasty stuff’)
3. Be conservative (“I want everyone to like one another” – is not realistic)
4. Be sure that you know who wants what (not everyone will want what you want just because you are the the boss). Check for REAL buy-in as you go along.

Good luck