If you are going to reach your goals, you need to know yourself. You can never have all the answers. You can’t do everything yourself, even if you do have full knowledge about things you are working on at the any moment.
More than that, you’ve got to come to grips with the fact that you can never hope to keep everything in balance at the same time. There will be days where work dominates you personal life, and days where personal crises make your career seem irrelevant. If you really hope to weather these dynamic shifts in personal fortune, you need to understand who you are.
I can offer some specific actions that you can use to improve your knowledge of who you are and what you can and can’t do well.
Behavior 1. Think before you act.
People with a technical bent are often bubbling over with ideas. Despite the stereotype people have of engineers, they are often gregarious, outgoing, and argumentative, particularly when they are in the middle of a technical discussion with other tech heads.
If you observe meetings where engineers are discussing and evaluating ideas, innovative concepts bounce around the room with much greater frequency than equations and other deductive patterns of thought.
Business consultant Robert Fritz advises in his book “The Path of Least Resistance” that you take time before you act to ask yourself a key questions: What result do I wish to create?
When technical people find themselves deeply engrossed in a subject, they seem to act with a stream-of-consciousness that can be powerful as well as destructive. If the room you are in is full of people you know well, and they are all conversant with the subject at hand, a free-flow, stream-of-consciousness discussion can be a powerful and productive outcome.
On the other hand, if you are meeting with people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, you need to recognize that your actions can have a bigger impact than you imagined or intended. Sometimes, actions bring the desired positive outcome; other times, they trigger unanticipated negative consequences.
How can you sort through things, know what will work and what won’t? Communication is a complex subject. Studies have shown that 60 to 90% of the actual information transmitted in a discussion is non-verbal, coming from your body language and facial expressions. (That’s one of the reasons that most teleconferences are so dull and tedious.)
Whether you are in a small meeting, sending an email, or talking on the phone, communication often gives birth to new or modified ideas. When you interact with people, you work through a predictable pattern. It starts with identifying something that needs to be done: an improvement, a solution to a problem, or something completely new. This leads to one or more decisions about what to do, and then you need to create an action or a reaction. If you don’t think about what you’re saying ahead of time, you may trigger effects that you didn’t intend.
In physics, there’s an important concept called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. While this rarely matters in large scale activity, it can be critical at the atomic level. This principle says that you really can’t measure anything with compete precision, because of the act of measuring changes what you are trying to measure.
To illustrate this, think about measuring the diameter of a floating soap bubble with a ruler. If you touch the ruler to the bubble, it may change shape of even burst. If you hold the ruler at a distance from the bubble, you will have trouble with the parallax-if you move the ruler closer you will “measure” a bigger diameter, and if you move it away, you will perceive a small diameter on the ruler scale.
In business, as well as life, we have the same problem, but it comes in a somewhat different form. Often called the Law of Unintended Consequences, this isn’t a scientific law, but it is something that occurs so often we have to take seriously.
In a more elegant form, we can restate this law as follows: when you take an action, you are creating a cause. That leads to an effect, presumably the desired effect. However, because the world is complicated, we nearly always get more than the desired effect; we also get many unintentional effects as well. Most of these are so trivial we don’t notice, but we also may cause an effect that’s much bigger as well as being counter-productive.
In the world of pharmaceutical drugs, this is almost an article of faith. If there is no side effects from a drug, then it’s unlikely there will be any central or therapeutic effect.
In particular, engineers tend to be too bold and impulsive when they are comfortable with the topic. They jump into something too quickly, but don’t think about how someone with less knowledge might be react to their idea.
THE PLAYBOOK
- As you work through a decision and actions, take the long view. Is this something that supports or matches your identified goals, vision, and mission?
- Think before you speak and don’t allow the reptilian complex in your brain to work its primal and powerful influence on the words that might follow.
- If you blurt things out in large meetings, practice speaking slowly in private. For example, when Mike realized he had this problem, he would spend time alone at home, “debating” with himself in front of a mirror. He realized his face started to show that he was about to react very pointedly before he was even certain what line of reasoning he was about to follow. He’s gotten better at this, but instinct still wins over at times.
- Not speaking up can be equally negative. If you clearly see a difficulty with something being discussed in a meeting, and you don’t say anything, you are postponing a likely problem. Try to offer at least a short outline of a possible solution, lest you are labeled a pessimistic critic. If you are going to a meeting where disagreements are likely, write down a few ideas about how you can make an idea you don’t agree with into a plan that you can support a plan of action that addresses the weakness you think could sink the project.