In talent development work, one the greatest difficulties I run into is a lack of a robust lexicon to describe emotional issues.

I know, someone’s actually asking for more jargon, right? But here’s why I think we need it: Try to explain where personality ends and mood begins… or where mood ends and emotion begins. I bet you can’t.

But turn the conversation to something intellectual, and you’re covered in spades; we can even distinguish the type of understanding you have of an issue into one of six levels!

Generically, you can comprehend something, get it on a surface level or dig deeper, analyze it or synthesize it, grasp it or not quite follow, consider, ruminate, ponder, wonder, imagine, or think about it…

And so on.

Yet… pondering an emotional construct like love or hate makes no sense. You don’t “think” about love. you can’t decide to do it.

There is nothing intellectual about emotions.

Which means none of those words that are intellectually based really work.

So we need some words, please, because “feel” just doesn’t cut it.

Personally, I’d like words to describe the following…

“to enable learning” (a more active form of “facilitating;” the inverse of “teaching”)
I doubt I’ve ever told anyone anything they didn’t already know. My value isn’t in being new or novel, it’s in being able to package ideas in a way that makes them more accessible. So I’m not really a “teacher” who imparts knowledge… but “coach” to me suggests practice through rote repetition and “facilitator” sounds too hands-off.

“emotional logic”
Let’s say that empathy is to emotions what understanding is to intellect. We then need a word that describes the process of achieving empathy… akin to “If I follow you’re logic… then yes, I understand.” In Stranger From a Strange Land, L. Ron Hubbard gave us “grok,” which comes close, but then came Scientology, so we’re back to needing a new word here.

“empathy directed toward an idea”
Sometimes, empathy isn’t really meant for a person, it’s meant for the collective feeling a group of people will have after a particular idea is adopted. It’s not always pity; sometimes, the emotion you’re connecting to is positive. Imagine being able to describe for a volunteer the ability to vicariously experience the joy of someone who’s life s/he’d touch, if s/he’d only engage… with a single word.

“to respond based on your feelings, even while framing your disagreement as a logical one”
Playing politics certainly gets to this, but we ned a more generic term to cover politics, blind spots (like when Reps or Dems—shockingly!—fall in line with their party), and mischievous instigations.

“trust based on consistency of character rather than excellence of character”
I have a friend who is trustworthy not because he’ll necessarily always do the right thing, but because he’ll act predictably, so it’s easy to anticipate when/where he’ll bend the rules. I can’t always trust him per se, but I can, since I can predict exactly where my exposure is and therefore eliminate it.

stages of friendship between acquaintance and close friend
Terms like hi/bye friends, frenemies and bromance start to distinguish some of these lines, but we need more here.

What about you? What “emotional” words do you wish you had?

This is one of those topics that I can’t claim to have any of the answers. My creativity isn’t suited for a challenge like this.

So any help is appreciated!

Posted under Lists, Communications

1. Lists have become too faddish. The 8 Communication Strategies That Ensure You Get Paid On Time. The 5 Phases of Team Development. The 5 Most Common Sales Objections and How to Handle Them. The 3 Simple Steps to a Better You. 7 Things All Negotiators Need to Plan For. The 10 Rules for Being a Great Managers. 6 Wardrobe Musts for the Business Professional. All on top of the 3 things I am supposed to bring home for dinner today, the 4 critical competencies my company wants me to master, the 16 people I need to call today, and the 184 emails in my inbox. While any one list might be exactly what I need, I’ll never remember it because the cumulative effective of swimming in a sea of lists is that no one list is memorable anymore. Want proof? Ask yourself how many of the 10 commandments you can recite. Yes, those 10 commandments. Can you do it?
2. When we need to recall critical information, we recall stories, not lists. Lists make things easy to teach, but hard to learn. And really, teaching isn’t about teaching… it’s about learning. I can memorize a list, sure, but that list gets parked in my brain in a place that does not get accessed when I’m under pressure—because I respond to pressure emotionally, not intellectually—and so in the moment, that list isn’t there for me. It remains hidden by a veil of emotion. You know what gets through the veil? Emotionally charged lessons. Stories. My last success or failure. The power of AA’s famous 12 steps isn’t in memorizing what they are, it’s in living them and associating the emotional rush of success with accomplishing each one.
3. I don’t like being marketed to like I’m an idiot, and lists used in sales presentations make me feel stupid. Let’s take “3 Simple Steps to a Better Me.” Really? I’ve been 3 simple steps away all this time and I didn’t know it? And now you want me to pay you to learn what the steps are? You really want me to pay you to tell me something simple? Or are you pandering to me, knowing full well that these three things aren’t really that simple after all? Either way, I already don’t like you, and we haven’t even met yet.
4. Ubiquitous listing makes it difficult to train others to handle ambiguity, and that is one of the biggest things folks are struggling with right now with the younger generation: if everywhere I go I am told that there is a 3-, 4-, or 5-step process to follow, then when I get into a new situation, I assume that there is a new process to follow and I don’t know it yet… so I stall. Lists may be great descriptors, but as teaching aides, they actually train students to expect structure, and limit students’ abilities to live without it.

So what should you do? Make sure that you offer something of value. Focus me on the problem you want to help me solve, not the number of steps in the process of solving it. Match your delivery to your content. Some content lends itself nicely to lists. Most doesn’t. Use stories. Not just anecdotes for punch, but I mean an overall narrative. Tell me the story of me, and how following your process leads me to a different outcome than I will achieve on my own. You may use numbers (“…wait 3 days…”) or mini-lists (“…3 things to keep in mind at this stage are…”), but on the whole, you’re telling a story. With a beginning, middle, and end; with characters I care about, a challenge, a climax, and a satisfying conclusion.

Posted under Gen X & Gen Y, Lists

A: Whoa! Stop! You’re not really saying that your people are good “because they’ve been trained,” are you?

Because unless you train wives in Stepford, or inject trainees with some virus that rewrites their DNA, or do some voodoo magic during your sessions, no one can MAKE someone good through training!

Of course, you know this. I know you know this because I’ve seen you remind trainers and consultants of this fact whenever one shared his or her success statistics with you. OK, so in your quest to master your domain, you conveniently forget that training doth not a paragon make, and you’re now realizing that you’ve over-invested in training. C’est la vie, we all get a little blinded by the beauty of our own plans now and then.

So what now? Here are the steps to laying out a truly effective development program:

1. Stop by finance and say hi. Stop by the executive suite and say hi. Visit a few operators; say hi. Get to know as many people in as many departments as possible. Do this way more than you think you “should.”
2. Take stock of your talent. Not your processes; your talent. There are a lot of moving parts to development, including training, coaching, mentoring, lateral job rotations, special projects, high-potential programs, promotions… and these are just the organic elements that do not account for the impact of strategic changes such as mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPOs, corporate restructuring, new product lines or new lines of business, new plants and other significant cap ex, all of which can have a big impact on development efforts and should be accounted for when putting together an integrated talent solution. To know if you’re rolling out the right pieces in the right order, you’ve got to assess your talent. I mean your actual people. How well rounded are your executives? What role do people on your management teams play? What are the true capabilities of your younger workers? (I.e., who are the strategic thinkers? Who keeps things moving forward? Etc.)
3. Assess your culture. I’ve seen plenty of organizations where people say all the right things (“We want to be a learning organization!”) without having the foggiest idea what it takes to get there, let alone what impact that will have on how business is run. While doing the talent audit, take time to also get a handle on what your organization is capable of as an organization, and how development efforts will need to get rolled out to ensure their adoption.
4. Share the results with top decision makers, and let them know what you are doing with the information. Tell them when you anticipate being done with step #6, and what preliminary budget you are thinking about for step #4.
5. Set a budget for development. You’re going to want it all, we all know that, but resources are limited. The talent audit (aka, organizational talent assessment, environmental scan) you did in step #1 is only as good as what you do with it, and without some kind of budget, you won’t get very far!
6. Brainstorm plan options. Armed with the talent audit and budget, you should be able to determine the best use of your funds across all the various development options. Also, you should be able to spot some low-cost options that will help you extend your resources. A good plan creates “pull through” interest that builds on itself.
7. Pick one or two alternative courses of action, and build cases for them. Do the research needed to ensure that you are on the right track. Study the risks of your chosen approach(es), and build a picture of what success looks like. If you’re in a large organization, get together with someone who knows what the letters NPV stand for (hint: they’re in finance) and build a business case for training. Get help answering the question: “How will we measure success?“ This help should come in the form of outside experts and future program participants. (Hint: “I enjoyed this session” is not a good survey question.)
8. Present to the decision makers and operators. If they push back, don’t fight. Listen. No one likes to be bullied, and people will often reject good ideas out of spite if they feel those ideas are being crammed down their throats. You did make friends with these people in Step #1, right?
9. Confirm the decision to move forward.
10. Stop thinking, start doing.
11. Measure your impact. Assume nothing; call participants 1, 3, and 6 months after their involvement and ask what, if anything, has stuck. If you use a survey in this step, augment it with personal calls–you need to hear from people first hand!

Like a great amplifier, the list of things to do to ensure a great development program goes to eleven. But unlike Nigel Tufnel, something tells me that you’ll know how to use all the numbers. Good luck!

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Lists

A: Let me help you: as special, perfect, and good-looking as you are, you still comprise only about 1/6 billionth of humanity. That’s right, you make up .00000000167th of the human experience. That’s nine decimal places just to get back up to one, Sport.

Nine.

Are we over ourselves yet?

Don’t worry, it took me some time to even recognize that I had this problem, let alone do something about it. Anyone who knew me in college can attest to the fact that I spent a good chunk of time being full of myself. If I didn’t like my clean up assignment in the house, I skipped it; that kind of thing. What a joy I must’ve been to be around.

I think BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, et. al. would do humanity a huge favor if, after making people tap the warning screen on their GPS systems, a voice would come on and simply say, “Nice car. Whoop-dee-doo. Get over yourself.”

Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Still, you should do it. Get over yourself, that is.

Why? Look at it this way: if you’re ego is that precious, imagine what you’ll get for it if you trade it in. I’m not sure what’s going to get you over you, but I can tell you what gets me over me… what helps propel me past the major hurdle that is my ego. An incomplete, still-growing list:

1. My wife telling me that I held a lot of grudges. Realizing that I was carrying so many torches forced me to confront the probability that I was the one causing the problems. The alternative was that I had somehow, cosmically, attracted over half a dozen people into my existence who were congenitally incapable of having normal relationships… a theory blown out of the water by the fact that they had lots of normal relationships, just not with me. (What about me? Yes, I had friends. I wasn’t an a-hole to everybody. Sheesh.)
2. Learning to sell something. My goodness, if you’ve never rolled up your sleeves and tried your hand at sales, I suggest you do so at your earliest possible opportunity. Suddenly, my academic pedigree meant nothing. It didn’t matter how smart I was, how funny I was, how good looking I was, or how good my stories were. All that mattered was whether or not I could solve someone else’s problem. Someone else… can you imagine?! And this wasn’t like a charity where I could fool myself into thinking that I was helping the less fortunate; if I didn’t sell, then I was the less fortunate one!
3. Learning to read people. When I started doing assessments, the first exercise I did was to fill up legal sheet-length columns on various individuals’ positive and negative attributes. This forced me to see others in a balanced light… which had the interesting effect of causing me to see me in a balanced light. (Suddenly, they weren’t so simple anymore. And I wasn’t so good looking anymore!)
4. Having kids. The best demotion I’ve ever taken.
5. Coming to understand what I’m truly good at. There are a few things that I do that make me an excellent management consultant. Once I realized this, I no longer needed to go out and try to one-up others at every turn. I could let them be great at their thing, and they’d let me be great at mine.
6. 6.Wanting to be done with a high school mentality. Drama, while exciting on some level, is also exhausting. I think I just got bored with it. This required me to not care about a lot of things.
7. 7.Skiing. No matter how great a skier I were to become, I’d never be greater than the mountain. Not even close. I’ve gotten some great perspective from my time on the mountain.
8. 8.Living. I own my own business, and I’ve had a lot of very good luck getting it to where it is today. But I haven’t been perfect, and not every day, week, or even month has been a cakewalk. It doesn’t more that a sleepless night or two, wondering which is going to hit first, the check I deposited or the check I wrote, to realize how fragile success can be.
9. 9.Writing. It’s hard to write about the need to take 100% personal responsibility for your own success and not have a little bit of the concept sink in… and in my case, what sank in was, “If I’m having a problem with someone, it’s on me to get us out of it. Regardless of who started it, I am responsible for ending it.” You can’t end an argument with a holier-than-thou, back-handed compliment. You end it only by helping everyone save face.

Am I perfectly modest? Please. I’m not perfectly anything. When I achieve perfection in anything, they’ll stick me up on a mountain top to dispense answers to weary wisdom-seekers. But, I am trying to make the most of the .00000000167th slice of humanity I represent. And I am finding the efforts surprisingly rewarding.

Posted under Q&A, Self-Development, Personal, Gen X & Gen Y, Lists

(LOOKING FOR HOW TO GET OVER YOURSELF? CLICK HERE.)

If you’re like most people, you’re awful at giving feedback. In fact, you’re lucky if you rise to the level of awful. It’s not your fault; you’re only doing what you’ve been taught. Problem is, conventional wisdom about giving feedback is dead wrong.

If conventional wisdom were right, performance reviews wouldn’t be so notoriously useless, and you wouldn’t constantly face the problem of people’s behavior getting a little better for awhile before reverting right back to the bad behavior of old. Some of these rules fly in the face of what is commonly taught by experts, consultants, LMS vendors, and HR practitioners. Perhaps for that reason, these rules work.

Seiden’s Rules to Giving Feedback:

1. Never precede negative feedback with positive feedback. (You read that right.) Why not? Because the implication is that Bill or Jim or Lisa or Monica or whoever you’re talking to is a delicate flower who will be devastated by your feedback if you don’t build up his or her self-esteem before delivering the tough news. Wonderful. Now you’re patronizing, and you haven’t even gotten to the meat of the conversation yet. No wonder they don’t listen to you–would you listen to someone who underestimates your ability to act like a grown up in the face of tough news?
2. Never precede negative feedback with positive feedback. (That repeat is not a typo.) If you do precede bad news with good news, you train your listener to expect bad news to follow good news. Congratulations, you just diminished your ability to deliver positive feedback. The next time you have something nice to say, Bill or Jim or Lisa or Monica won’t hear it… the entire time you’re talking, they’ll be thinking, “Oh boy, here it comes… I wonder what I did this time–wow, this is effusive praise, I must have really screwed up big time, I wish the other shoe would drop already.”
3. Speak sincerely. Don’t just say, “I don’t care who’s to blame” unless you mean it. If you don’t mean it, don’t say it. I’ve given a lot of people a lot of feedback, I’ve watched people give each other feedback in team settings, and one thing I can say is, our BS-o-meters are darn good. If you think you can fool someone by saying the “right” things insincerely, rest assured that all you are doing is training them to guess what your real motives are.
4. Look ‘em in the eye and use the words “you” and “me” and “I.” As in, “I’m struggling with you right now,” or, “I get the sense that you would rather…” Don’t talk about what others say, or what you’ve heard. Don’t start off by asking, “You know what your problem is?” Give feedback as if you two are the only ones in the world, and involve yourself.
5. Ignore behavior that should be ignored. Not everything that can be addressed should be.
6. Avoid extremes. Stay away from words like always, never, severely, crippling, devastating, terrible, sucky, horrible, God-awful, crappy, deplorable, and anything that ends in -est. Dave didn’t look in the morning and think, “I’m looking at the most obnoxious person in the office!” So when you tell Dave that he’s the most obnoxious person in the office, his reaction is to show you why you’re wrong rather than listen to you.
7. If things go weird, it’s your fault. If you are at all anxious or nervous about giving feedback, or if you are at all angry or upset when you do so, then your emotional state itself will trigger a response, and you and your feedback-ee will start talking through one another. Now, are some people incorrigible? Yes. Is it still your fault if you are dealing with one of them when things go bad? Yes. (“What?! Why!”) Because you weren’t smart enough to avoid engaging said incorrigible person in a debate.
8. Feedback and catharsis are two different things. The purpose of feedback is to improve things in the future. Venting is emotional release about what’s happened in the past. Venting is very different from, serves a different purpose than, and elicits a different response as feedback.
9. Match the environment to the severity of the feedback. There is a reason people throw big gala events for their 60th birthdays but not their 37ths. Similarly, big celebrations or big talking-to’s should go along with big events. Not every crime should be a capital offense.
10. Anticipate resistance. Have you ever received tough feedback? How did you feel? Don’t try to guess what the recipient is thinking. Instead, remember a time when you yourself were on the other side of the coin and get in touch with what you’d be feeling. We connect with others on an emotional level, not an analytical one, so now’s the time to show your empathic side.
11. Give positive feedback in the moment and use specific examples. Positively received behaviors will continue, so be very specific about what you are “rewarding” with your feedback.
12. Negative feedback will tend to get explained away, so as best as possible, discuss trends instead of specifics. Discussing specifics turns the conversation into a debate: “Oh, I only did that because Rob was baiting me.” “I know I did it that time, but I’m not usually like that.” People are governed by some pretty simple laws of human dynamics… one of which is that we have a strong, strong tendency to overestimate ourselves and underestimate others. In other words, we’re inclined to believe a version of events that makes us look good and sweeps potentially damning aspects under the rug. Your recipient will get mighty frustrated by your refusal to engage, but they’ll also keep thinking about what you’ve said long after the conversation ends… which is precisely what you want.
13. Take your time. Don’t insist that your full message get delivered and received in one sitting. Especially when emotions run high, this is probably impossible anyway. Give the other side time to digest what you’ve said and come back to you. Don’t deliver more than 2 negative messages per encounter. Got more to say? Sit down again later, or build a case that shows how these 2 problems manifest in a variety of ways.
14. Give them a path to goodness. Telling Becky she’s bad at her job without showing her how to get better is petty and mean. Show her what she needs to do better, get her the tools, or fire her. Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
15. Follow up. If it was important enough to point out once, it’s important enough to follow up on. When you see Rachel making an effort to improve, take notice.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Lists, Communications

This post was written by Seiden on June 6, 2008