260: Three Rons Make a Right

Dear friends

Three weeks ago, our letter was Building Leadership Resilience. When I shared it on LinkedIn, it included two Rons – Carucci and Heifetz – and my alliteration-loving brain went straight to The Crystals’ Da Doo Ron Ron.

We all love alliteration. Author Dan Pink, in To Sell is Human, explains “Rhymes boost ‘processing fluency,’ the ease with which our minds slice, dice, and make sense of stimuli… we equate smoothness with accuracy. In this way, rhyme can enhance reason” and, cheesily, encourages, “Remember: Pitches that rhyme are more sublime”.

I’m distracting us. Back to Ron. This time, Ron Friedman’s 5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently.

/strategy
Friedman’s research shows high-performing teams do 5 things differently. They:

1. Pick up the phone.
2. Are more strategic with their meetings.
3. Invest time bonding over non-work topics.
4. Give and receive appreciation more frequently.
5. Are more authentic at work.

The phone thing is obvious, powerful, and infrequently used. We can’t read tone in text. We often go to negative interpretations, wasting energy and creating complications. Undoing misinterpreted Slack messages, texts, and emails should have an expense line in the P&L.

Voice gives us tone, creates the space to hear and communicate nuance, and resolve challenges in real-time. Encourage your teams to talk; watch trust and performance increase.

Read the article; it’s short but impactful.

(You might also enjoy Netflix and The Culture of Reinvention and Build Better Teams)

//self
We are the team. We arrive with histories and ways of interpreting the world. That makes teams complicated.

Think of it this way, a carpenter looking at a table sees wood and joint types, grain, craft; a restaurateur sees inventory, places to be filled.

As Stoic philosopher Epictetus noted, “Men are disturbed not by events, but by the views they take of them”.

The WISER model helps us better manage stressful conversations, shaping unthinking reactions into intentional responses.

WISER = Watch. Interpret. Select. Engage. Reflect.

Observing how a situation affects us is a powerful source of insight.

As psychologists Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz’s advise, “Don’t just do something, sit there”.

‘Interpret’ invites us to be curious. In any situation, we’re already drawing conclusions, initially almost always informed by our histories.
Asking, “What might I be overlooking here?” or “What are my default patterns in these kinds of situations”, opens new possibilities.
‘Select’ is where we choose between the options in front of us (now expanded because we injected Watch and Interpret).

Following these steps is not easy. They require intentionality.

Waldinger and Schulz note, “The key is to try to slow things down where you can, zoom in (or out), and move from a fully automatic response to a more considered and purposeful response that aligns with who you are and what you are seeking to accomplish”.  

The next time you handle a stressful situation really well, take time to reflect. Use these questions to guide you:

WATCH

• Did I face the problem directly or try to avoid it?
• Did I take time to get an accurate assessment of the situation?
• Did I talk with the people involved?
• Did I consult with others to get their understanding of what happened?

INTERPRET

• Did I recognize how I felt and what was at stake for me in this situation?
• Was I willing to acknowledge my role in the situation?
• Have I focused too much on what is going on in my own head and not is going on around me?
• Are there alternative ways of understanding what is going on in this situation?

SELECT

• Was I clear about the outcome I wanted?
• Did I consider all the available options for responding?
• Did I do a good job identifying resources available to help me?
• Did I weigh the pros and cons of different strategies to achieve my goals?
• Did I choose the tools that would work best in meeting the current challenge?
• Did I reflect on IF or WHEN I should do something about the situation?
• Did I consider who else could be involved in solving the problem or meeting the challenge?

ENGAGE

• Did I practice my response or run it by a trusted confidant to increase the likelihood it would succeed?
• Did I take steps that are realistic for me?
• Did I evaluate progress and was I willing to adjust as needed?
• What steps did I rush through or mess up or skip over? What did I do well?

REFLECT

• In light of all I’ve just reflected on, how would I do things differently next time?
• What have I learned?

Do the same for when a conversation goes badly.  

Then you have two case studies – when you’re at your best and worst. That’s invaluable.

(WISER comes from Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz’s The Good Life and How to Live It: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness).

///soul
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s recently published Theft is his first since he won the Nobel Prize in 2021. 

It is deceptively simple. A young boy, Badar, is sent in servitude to a Dar es Salaam family. He is smart, has some education, is curious but in this world he cleans. He is falsely accused of theft and evicted. His accuser’s view distorted by a history of grievances with his father.  He leaves for Zanzibar, a place of refuge offered to him by the family’s son, Karim.

Karim is smart, ambitious, condescending. His mother had fled his abusive father when he was three years old, and then left him at fifteen, when she remarried. He marries Fauzia and then abandons her the weekend before their daughter’s first birthday.

Gurnah weaves personal pains into the ironies and offenses of an unequal world:

“For a while the building was used as temporary accommodation for visiting foreign staff, at first the Soviets and Chinese and other fraternal experts, and more recently, after those relations soured, experts from rich countries who came to give advice to the government. Their countries paid for them and their big cars and perhaps their advice was heeded and perhaps it was not, but their governments could brag of their generosity while they extracted what advantage they could from the relationship and also provided work for their compatriots”.

Karim is entranced by a British aid volunteer, Fauzia’s mother is outraged “What do these people want with us? Why do they come here? They come here with their filth and money and interfere with us and ruin our lives for their pleasure, and it seems that we cannot resist their wealth and their filthy ways. What do they want with us? Everywhere you go, you see them, in the narrowest alley and street, looking into people’s houses and down people’s throats…”.

The thefts are many. Yet, in the loss, Badar, Fauzia and others build their lives. All the macro-offenses are there, and Gurnah shows life continues and can be beautiful.

Living life with connection and care is, in Gurnah’s world, its own kind of revolution, its own wisdom.

All the best

Karl