With the three core beliefs that I shared yesterday in this blog, individuals who are people smart also engage in three core actions. The first core action is that they notice when things are going right. On one hand, this seems simplistic. However, I spent years as a consultant starting meetings with two questions: “What’s going right? And why did it happen?” The sharing that followed was always insightful and transformative for those gathered.
We have to realize that most people at work and at home focus on problems and how to fix them. They are solutions focused and outcome driven. And yet, individuals, who are people smart, recognize that people are often the source of the problem. Their choices and their mindset are generating the problems.
Furthermore, people smart individuals know that catching people doing something right and noticing it tends to increase the possibility of someone doing the same thing again. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) writes “… people need attention and when you give it to us in a safe and nonjudgemental environment, we will come and stay and play and work…. Positive attention… is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team.” As they continue, “If you want your people to learn more, pay attention to what’s working for them right now, and then build on that…. get into the conscious habit of looking for what’s going well for each of your team members.…By getting him to think about specific things that are going right, you are deliberately altering his brain chemistry so that he can be open to new solutions and new ways of thinking and acting.” In short, such a simple act as building on what is going right has a transformational impact on so many levels.
The second core action is that individuals who are people smart build on strengths. They do not focus just on correcting weaknesses. As Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their seminal book, First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), wrote, “People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.” As they continue, “Focus on each person’s strengths and manage around their weaknesses.”
Six years later, Marcus Buckingham in his book, The One Thing You Need to Know ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press, 2005), builds on this point and states that great managing happens when we “select people effectively, set expectations by defining clearly the outcomes you want [and] motivate people by focusing on their strengths.” Finally in 2019, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), capture the essence of this core action by writing: “Something you are good at” is not a strength; it is an ability…. A strength, on the other hand, is an “activity that makes you feel strong.”…. It is this combination of three distinct feelings - positive anticipation beforehand, flow during, and fulfillment afterward - that makes a certain activity a strength.” Individuals who are people understand why building on strengths is the right choice and routinely do it with everyone.
The third core action is that individuals who are people smart create partners and colleagues, not followers and subordinates. To grasp this powerful action, we first must remember something Margaret Wheatley wrote many years ago: “When confronted with the unknown, we default to the known.” And for individuals who are not people smart, this default is typically to choose command and control forms of leadership and relationships.
From my perspective, this is a great leap back wards. Life, organizational change, and people working with people is always messy and surprising. Sometimes, we are delightfully surprised by people being their best selves and other times we see their worst. Still, the default choice can not be to control others, because then we are creating an environment where people will need to hide their true identities, thoughts, and feelings in order to fit in.
Furthermore, individuals, who are people smart, recognize that leadership and just working with others can be not solely defined by the use of authority, power, or influence over others. All successful action between people happens when another person is willing, i.e they are committed and motived, plus able, i.e. has the knowledge and the skills, to do what needs to get done. When we choose to build colleagues and partners, rather than followers or subordinates, we are empowering everyone to rise to the challenges before them and work together toward successful outcomes. In short, we are co-creating the solutions to the present moment and a better future down the road.
If we seek, at the start of each new day, for people to “specialize in the impossible,” and if we comprehend that in this “fast-changing global marketplace, the half-life of core competencies grows shorter” plus that the only competency that last is “the ability to create a steady, self-renewing stream of leaders,” then we must commit to hiring and retaining people who are humble, hungry and people smart. And for them to be people smart, we must support and educate them about the following three core beliefs: everyone is unique, clarity creates right action, and compassion matters. This must be followed up by supporting and educating people about the following three core actions: people need to notice when things are going right, build on strengths, and create partners and colleagues, not followers and subordinates. The combination of these three beliefs and these three core actions are, in my opinion, the defining difference in individuals who are people smart. And given current affairs, we need a lot more people who are people smart if we are going to figure out how to deal with today’s technical and adaptive problems plus be well positioned for what is coming in the next 2-3 years.
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