Ed Batista

Checking In: Start Meetings by Listening More

I often work in groups that begin each meeting by "checking in," i.e. having each member talk briefly about how they're feeling, or what they're thinking about, or what they hope to accomplish that day.

I find value in this process, but up until now I've looked at it primarily from perspective of the speaker.  From this point of view, the purpose of checking in is that each member of the group gets a chance to speak their piece, and the total of what's said sets a tone for the meeting that reflects everyone's state of mind.

I've recently come to feel that this process is equally (if not more) important from the perspective of the listeners.  From this point of view, the purpose of checking in isn't so much that it gives everyone a chance to speak, but that it also compels everyone to listen carefully to everyone else, right at the outset.  This gets the group in a listening mode and sets a tone for the meeting that makes subsequent discussions more productive and less stressful.

Rev. William Swing on Failure and Daydreams

From Rev. William Swing's baccalaureate address at Stanford on June 16th:

Isn't it great to fail when you are 19 years old in front of your parents, peers and professors, and then to discover that life goes on, that the sun comes up again, that there is much more ahead of you? Some people don't conspicuously fail until they are 45 years old, and it devastates them. That's what I want to tell you graduates. Fail early and get it all over with! If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers, you can abide in intimate relationships, and you can have a worthwhile career. You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life.

[A] second learning... [Isn't] it great to spend a lifetime working firsthand on your own passion, rather than working secondhand or thirdhand on somebody else's passion? Whether comedy or faith or youthful idealism or whatever, be an apprentice in something that beckons your heart to pursue with endless fascination... My advice to you: Stay with things that draw you like a magnet. Trust your DNA. Pay attention to your daydreams.

Fail early and get it over with.  I love that advice, even though I've heard it before.  Quite a few of the  MBA students I work with haven't yet failed conspicuously, and I think unfamiliarity with failure tends to result in one of two equally problematic outcomes: We either give ourselves too much credit and become dangerously overconfident, or we don't give ourselves enough credit and become dangerously risk-averse.  And in both cases, we miss out on the opportunity to learn that failure isn't fatal (and can be both liberating and educational.)

Pay attention to your daydreams.  More great advice--and related to Swing's first point.  If we're pursuing our own vision and not merely working to fulfill someone else's, we're probably taking some big risks.  Those risks are essential to our ultimate success, but by definition they also make failure more likely.  But is failure the worst possible outcome?  Not necessarily.  At least if we fail, we can close that chapter, move on and pursue another path to fulfillment.  It may be worse to succeed just enough to keep us tied up but not enough to truly realize our vision.  Clearly, at times it makes sense to put our daydreams on hold and minimize the risk of failure, but at other times that's simply a recipe for insuring that we never really succeed.

The Dip: Seth Godin on Strategic Quitting

From Seth Godin's The Dip:

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.  Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want.  And most people do just that.  They quit when it's painful and stick when they can't be bothered to quit...

Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you.  If you realize you're at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it's a smart one...

Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through... The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance... All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy.  If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting.  Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else...

Quit the wrong stuff.  Stick with the right stuff.  Have the guts to do one or the other.

In my experience most of us are overcommitted, spreading ourselves too thin, and failing to deliver excellence where it really counts.  We're coping, when we should be quitting.  I hear an echo of Peter Drucker in Godin's message:

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.  It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

The implicit corollary to Drucker's message (which Godin picks up and makes explicit) is that only excellence matters.  Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.

I find it liberating to start thinking along these lines, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life.  Where can I deliver excellence?  Where should I expect excellence in return?   And how can I focus my time and energy to make this as likely as possible?

This allows me to do some strategic quitting--or even better, not to start misguided efforts in the first place--and substantially increase the return on my personal investments.  And even when I can't quit outright, I'm better able to set boundaries that put projects and activities in perspective and prevent them from hogging resources (most significantly, my finite time and energy) that they don't deserve.

Photo by alexdecarvalho.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.