Dave Stitt Quotes

Reflection • Think of a desirable but unrealistic outcome. Why exactly it is unrealistic? Whose comfort zones does it disrupt? Idea • Courageous goals have their own momentum. They force a change of scene, raise entirely new questions, and call new relationships into being. Tool • Use the Courageous Goal Starter Kit to get things moving: 1) Dream it, 2) Declare it, and 3) Get started. Tool • Make it sticky with SUCCES: Get more buy-in for your Courageous outcome by describing it using the principles defined by Chip and Dan Heath and their acronym, SUCCES – it should be 1) Simple, 2) Unexpected, 3) Concrete, 4) Credible, 5) Emotional, and 6) contain a Story.

Further reading: Challenging Coaching, by John Blakey and Ian Day (Nicholas Brealy Publishing, 2012)

The Delegation Feedback Conversation has a job to do. For it to be of service to the delegation project it must cover all the bases by allowing the following things to happen: The delegatee gives an accurate report on progress made in reaching agreed milestones. An assessment is made of the success or not of that progress. Barriers to success are explored. Strategies for overcoming those barriers are adopted. Ways you can help are identified. The delegatee is challenged where, however inadvertently, she is working against the aims of the project. Milestones are reassessed, with some kept, others dropped, and new ones agreed as necessary. She departs with new ideas, heightened clarity, and refreshed confidence and energy. So do you.

Deep and deliberate delegation moves the focus away from your personal traits as a leader and onto what is more important: the relationships between you and your team.

An adversarial approach: assumes the delegatee is shirking, lying, and concealing; probes for inconsistencies in what he says; tests him by using past failures as evidence of future failures; frames the encounter as an argument to be won or lost. A collaborative approach: assumes the delegatee is doing his best with the tools and resources at hand; creates a comfortable space for him to disclose all and reflect on the emerging picture; nurtures confidence in him to promote excitement and buy-in; frames the encounter as productive dialogue to uncover truth, ideas and useful insights.

Idea • Being leader of a team, department or organisation should not mean you are CPS (Chief Problem Solver). If you are, you are working one or two pay grades below what you were hired to do. Idea • Your real job is to conceive and articulate a vision for where your team, department or organisation should be heading, and, with help from your people, to work out a detailed roadmap (strategy) for how to get there. Reflection • Ask yourself and others what things you can do that will get your ‘ship’ moving toward the vision, and what among those things fall inside your Zone of Mastery.

The experience led Dweck to develop the idea of two contrasting mindsets that shape our attitudes to our own and others’ abilities. People with a ‘growth mindset’, as she called it, like the positive pupils above, see their intellectual ability as something that can be developed through effort, learning and practice, while people with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe they were born with a certain amount of brains and talent and nothing they can do will change that. Growth mindset people are the more go-getting bunch. Faced with problems, they engage and persevere. Failure isn’t permanent, it’s success not just yet. Using electroencephalograms (EEGs) scientists found more brain activity relating to error adjustments among college students with a growth mindset than among their peers with a fixed mindset.7 Growth-minded people also showed better accuracy after mistakes.

The ones that are greediest and farthest from the bullseye represent the fields of activity that most urgently need to be delegated.

This happens when people are allowed to derive three crucial things from work: a sense of autonomy; a sense of mastery; and a sense of purpose.

Offering input only when problems arise may cause people to see you as unappreciative or petty,” observe the authors of Giving Effective Feedback (Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2014).

Your Unique Ability is the combination of talents, interests and capabilities that is unique to you. How do we recognise it? Four ways: when you are in the zone of your Unique Ability, 1) people admire you because the results are stunning; 2) you love doing it and time flies; 3) it gives you energy rather than sapping it; and 4) you get better at it all the time. Success, insisted Sullivan, comes to people who pay attention to their Unique Ability, define it, and start shedding responsibilities that fall outside it.

5. Offer suggestions instead of criticising Instead of the feedback sandwich, which can be just a way of sweetening criticism, and tends to do more harm than good, try this deceptively simple technique for giving feedback which was developed by the Canadian Neuro-linguistic Programming trainer, Shelle Rose Charvet, and set out in her aptly titled essay, “The Feedback Sandwich Is Out To Lunch”.14 It goes like this: You make a suggestion. You offer two reasons why it might work. The first states what the suggested course of action would accomplish. The second states what problem it would prevent. You end with an encouraging comment.

Without effective goal-setting there can be no holding to account and, therefore, no accountability. If there is no accountability, feedback is meaningless. It will lack purpose and be arbitrary. At worst, it is the mere projection onto an employee of the boss’s own issues. So, deal with goal-setting and accountability first.

The delegator is able to frame the thing that is to be delegated in a clear way, leaving no room for confusion over what success looks like, or by when the thing should be done.

Nothing saps one’s confidence and motivation quite like being micromanaged.