The KUPMC Blog

With the recent reading recommendations of the Emerging Leaders Academy experienced public servants panel, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m listening to it this time, actually, on cd during my drive time and it seems particularly meaningful to hear the guidance in Covey’s own voice.

I’ve just gotten to habit 3, put first things first, where he discusses the value of planning your time so that you’re spending much of your energy in “quadrant 2″ (see graphic below), on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent.

They are the things that are most likely to get sidelined when we operate in a more reactive mode, organizing our time around oiling the squeakiest wheels rather than around our principles.

This reminded me of the terrific opening of a post on the Be Awesome Online blog from last week. Catherine Caine writes:

“Do you know, dearest, why to-do lists, vision boards and affirmation notes on your mirror work?

“It’s because of attention. We direct our attention to the things in our field of vision. If we don’t give ourselves conscious reminders then we default to whatever’s around: our inbox, the thousand-fold distractions of social media, the furniture… nothing meaningful, nothing long-term, nothing great.

I’ve deliberately added more reminders to myself as the study has become my work-centre. I have Charlie Gilkey‘s famous line Do Epic Sh** on a sign on the study door. I have artwork I bought because it reminds me of how I want to rock the world. And I’ll be daring the Wrath of the Real Estate Agent to put up some work on the wall behind my monitor. All of these small changes have helped, a lot.”

What Catherine Caine and Stephen Covey both want to remind us of is that we can all be pretty willing to be distracted from the Important Stuff when it can be hard and even scary to dive into it. But by scheduling our time around it, putting reminders in our field of vision, blocking out the “urgent” distractions (that generally aren’t quite so urgent), we can dip our toes into working on the Important Stuff and start to feel some of the satisfaction that comes from doing what matters.

For me, this has meant actually turning off my email for a couple hours at a time over the last week in order to get some writing done on my dissertation. It’s just too easy to attend to the urgent otherwise. And you know what the best part is? It’s working.

What do you do to make sure you’re spending some time on the important-but-not-urgent?

Last week the Emerging Leaders Academy participants heard from a panel of experienced public servants who offered some career perspectives.

I want to thank Hannes Zacharias, Johnson County Manager; Norton Bonaparte, Topeka City Manager; Jen Church-Duran, KU Libraries Assistant Dean of User Services; and Julie Loats, Director of IT for KU Enterprise Applications and Services, for taking the time to reflect on their experiences with the group.

At the end of the session, the panelists were asked for their recommendations of good business books–ones that have been useful and made a difference for them. Their picks included several classics:

• Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

And one that’s less well-known:
• Yamashita and Spataro’s Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World.

Julie Loats also added that in terms of organization, for her nothing beats David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

What would you add to this list? What serves as a “great text” for you as you think about productivity, effectiveness, and relationships in the workplace? What book have you gone back to again and again?

There’s a rather hilarious moment in the video “Trombone Player Wanted” where Marcus Buckingham shares the most common answer he gets when asking people he interviews to share a strength. The answer?

“I’m a people person.”

It’s funny because as viewers we recognize how common an answer this is–perhaps most of us have even said it ourselves when floundering to answer this question in an interview or some other setting. From the voice in which Marcus shares this, we also get a sense of how frustrating he finds this answer because of everything it leaves out: “Which people?” he asks. “What are you doing with them?”

What’s interesting to me is how much easier it becomes to answer the question, “what are your strengths?” as soon as he adds these additional, more detailed questions. Asked the general question, we tend to stumble over our words, trying to think of something to say that offers a decent answer but that also doesn’t make us look full of ourselves.

But asked which people we like working with, or which writing we like to work on, or which teams we are energized by being part of, or which details we like working with–asked any of these things most of us can immediately start narrowing this down and, after offering some descriptive information about times we have and haven’t enjoyed people or writing or teams or working on details, can likely come up with a relatively clear statement that’s far more informative about a strength or talent we have.

The other important aspect of this is that in sorting through elements we like and don’t like about a particular type of task, we end up becoming aware of those things that others might tell us we’re very good at–things we might know ourselves that we’re good at–but that in fact we don’t like very much.

Becoming aware of this keeps us from mentioning them when we’re asked about our strengths! This is key in making sure that we don’t forever get assigned to a role we don’t like in teams we’re part of. Because if I mention that I’m great at tracking budgets, it’s pretty likely I’ll get volunteered to track the budget whether I like doing it or not.

So in thinking about your strengths, bring some detail to the questions you ask yourself. You might start with what you like doing, but then take your answer further. Do you always enjoy doing that, or only under some circumstances? If it’s only sometimes, start listing the circumstances. Who else is involved? Which pieces would you rather not have to handle?

What other questions would be helpful to ask to get at what we love to do? Is there anything you’ve realized that you need to stop volunteering for because, in spite of your skills, you just don’t like it very much?

There are big failures like the Deep Water Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Fortunately, however, most failures don’t have stakes that are quite so high. In a recent post on Lifehacker, Jason Fitzpatrick suggests we bear that in mind and “embrace the inevitability of failure” to achieve higher levels of workplace productivity.

He notes that “when you abandon the stance that the mistake-maker is flawed and embrace the stance that mistakes are part of human cognition and everyone will make them, you can focus on productivity instead of scapegoating the mistake makers.”

This rings so true that I can feel myself breathe a bit easier just reading his words. I think of my experiences working with college writers to improve their papers at the KU Writing Center.

A lot of students who knew about our services for their entire time at KU would spend multiple semesters avoiding us before finally coming in. I absolutely understand this–coming in means admitting that one’s writing isn’t perfect.

Of course, the Writing Center staff approached this as a given and believed that no one’s writing–even (especially) our own–was perfect. Starting with this assumption allows space for improvement.

We didn’t blame the writers for imperfect grammar or disorganized drafts; we assessed what they needed and offered some assistance to make the paper better. As long as they were making an effort, we were right there with them to offer support and guidance.

What if we bring this idea into the workplace?

As long as we’ve put a good-faith effort into doing our best, we could embrace the inevitability that all of us will fall short sometimes. This would allow us to direct our attention to dusting ourselves off and moving forward with new information rather than stalling out on the self-flagellation that can accompany failure.

Are there flops and failures that have contributed productively to your skills and perspectives today? Have you helped your colleagues or your kids navigate through a failure and watched them come out stronger on the other side? Share your stories in the comments to helps us all embrace the possibility of failure and dive in anyway.

The popularity of Stephen M.R. Covey’s 2008 book, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, suggests that there’s an inherent recognition of how central trust is to pretty much everything else in our personal and professional lives.

At the most recent session of the Emerging Leaders Academy, PMC director Charles Jones spent time with the participants talking about what he foresees for the future of the public sector. His presentation focused on three issues: efficiency, adaptation, and trust.

It all goes better, Charles noted, when there is trust.

Stephen M.R. Covey agrees, offering this communication example at the beginning of his book: “In a high trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”

So how do we build trust? The circular answer is, of course, by being trustworthy. But what does this look like? Here’s the list that Charles shared:

• Tell the truth. If you can’t, explain why. Small lies kill trust.
• Keep promises. Promise less and deliver more.
• Admit mistakes; and say you’re sorry
• Trust others. To be trusted, you must first trust others.
• Don’t micromanage, use rules to empower vs. distrust.
• Hire and promote integrity.
• Walk the talk.
• Respect the ideas of others.
• Say “no” clearly when you have to, but explain.

So easy, and yet so challenging. What would you add to this list? What examples do you have of how trust really matters or how the things on this list really do build trust?

How will you know if you’ve achieved your goals?

The answer seems obvious: when the goal is met, right? “My goal is to get admitted to this program.” or “Our goal for the event is to attract 150 attendees.” or “The goal for the software roll out is that it should result in no down time on the server.”

That’s fine to the extent that the person or group setting the goal has control over most or all of the factors that will affect its success. But is that realistic?

What if it storms on the day of the outdoor event? Or, for that matter, on the day of the software roll out? What if you’ve assembled the strongest possible application packet that you can put together but it isn’t enough to sway the gatekeepers?

In this very thoughtful post on The Tiny Soprano, blogger Natalie Christie shares what she dubs “probably the most valuable piece of advice I have ever received.” In her words:

I had the privilege when I was 20 years old of learning from the stupendous Dame Joan Sutherland. She was a vocal titan, but in person remarkably grounded in an earthy, no nonsense Australian diva kind of way.

And when we shift from outcome to process, we dislodge ourselves from the fear and unpredictability of the future.

That is, when we shift to a focus on the process we focus on the part where we actually have control. We can’t imagine every possible eventuality that might affect the outcome–whether positively or negatively.

We can, however, make every effort to make sure that our role in the process is as creative, thorough, thoughtful, appropriate and/or enthusiastic as the situation calls for. Once we’ve done that, whatever happens will happen. But we won’t be left stewing over the “what ifs” in regard to our effort and attitude. And that counts for a lot.

Click here to check out Christie’s full post, as she develops this idea further and makes some suggestions about bringing this focus on the process into the little everyday moments in addition to our bigger projects.

What does a focus on the process rather than the outcome change for you? What experiences do you remember fondly because of your approach to the process even though the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped for?