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.

… 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.

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.