Ed Batista

Give It To Me Straight (Effective Feedback)

As an executive coach and an experiential educator, every day I collaborate with or observe people giving and receiving feedback. In a number of settings I work with groups whose purpose is improving members' leadership and interpersonal skills, and the primary tool we use is feedback. And a common trait shared by almost every one of the hundreds of people I've worked with over the last eight years is a desire to hear direct, candid feedback. I literally hear people say "Give it to me straight" in almost every group.

But this simple request turns out to be more complicated than it sounds at first. Feedback is one of the most powerful—and one of the fastest—ways to learn how to be more effective in our interactions with others, particularly when it’s honest and straightforward. But effective feedback doesn’t happen spontaneously; it’s critical to learn how to give—and receive—feedback in a way that’s effective in a particular context.

What “Give it to me straight” actually means in practice will vary widely from one relationship to another, and will change within every relationship over time. And an irony I’ve observed over thousands of feedback conversations is that when we first say “Give it to me straight,” we think we’re talking about negative feedback because we imagine that criticism will be painful to hear, but it turns out that truly heartfelt positive feedback can be equally hard to handle. Many people I’ve worked with are actually more uncomfortable receiving direct, candid praise than being criticized.

Giving and receiving feedback effectively are learnable skills, and while the five concepts discussed here may serve as helpful guidelines, it’s important to recognize that we can improve our facility with these skills only by actually trying them out. We can—and should—start in low-risk situations, such as an experiential role-play, a coaching engagement or a friendly relationship. But real growth will require us to get out of our comfort zones and to risk making mistakes when the stakes are higher.

1) Feedback and Social Threat

Most of us find the prospect of a feedback conversation daunting at the best of times, even in the context of a friendly relationship. Hearing someone say “Can I give you some feedback?” is almost guaranteed to elevate our heart rate and raise our blood pressure. These are common signs of a threat response, a cascade of neurological and physiological events that occur when we encounter a situation that we perceive as threatening. Neuroscientists have determined that we respond to threatening social situations in the same way that we respond to actual threats to our physical safety and have coined the term “social threat” to describe these experiences. David Rock is an executive coach who’s made an extensive study of recent neuroscience research to understand its implications for organizational life, and he developed the SCARF Model to characterize interpersonal situations that are likely to trigger a social threat.

SCARF stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness (i.e. the extent to which we perceive others as members of our social group) and fairness. Whenever our status, certainty, autonomy or perception of fairness is diminished, we're more likely to experience a social threat. And an encounter with someone we perceive as unrelated is also more likely to trigger a social threat.

Given these factors, it’s unsurprising that a feedback conversation can be so stressful. Someone presuming to give us feedback is (at least momentarily) occupying a high-status position, and we may feel “demoted” as a result. We don’t know what feedback we’re about to get, so we’re immediately put in a state of uncertainty. Despite our discomfort, we’re likely to feel obligated to listen, so we have less autonomy. These factors are at play in almost every feedback conversation, and if we feel less connected with the other person or if we don’t believe their feedback is fair, then we’re certain to experience the conversation as a social threat.

A threat response predisposes us to act quickly on limited information, and while this classic “fight or flight” behavior is well-adapted to literal threats to our physical safety, it often serves us poorly in interpersonal situations that we perceive as threatening. When we’re in the grip of a threat response, our ability to understand complex information and respond to it thoughtfully is seriously compromised. We seize on what we believe to be the most important data and take action on that basis. While this set of responses surely served us well in our evolutionary environment, it undermines our ability to safely navigate challenging interpersonal situations—such as feedback conversations.

So when we’re preparing to give someone feedback, it’s critical to avoid triggering a social threat. Pay keen attention to the potential for any aspect of the conversation to impact the other person, including such factors as timing, duration, physical location and proximity.

2) Just Enough Emotion

Despite the risk of triggering a social threat inherent in any feedback conversation, one reason interpersonal feedback is such an effective way to learn is because it has the potential to evoke meaningful emotions in the first place. While the strong negative emotions that result from a social threat have the potential to inhibit learning and block communication, emotions play an essential role in our reasoning process. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote in his influential book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,

[H]uman reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Both "high-level" and "low-level" brain regions...cooperate in the making of reason. The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings. Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. [p xvii]

In addition, emotional experiences resonate more strongly with us and stick more effectively in our memories. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux notes, “There is both an upside and a downside to the fact that emotional states make memories stronger. The upside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones. The downside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones.”

So while we have to guard against the risk of triggering a social threat when giving feedback, it’s essential to make effective use of emotion in any feedback conversation, and this means expressing just enough emotion ourselves to trigger sufficient emotion in the other person without going too far. If we express too much emotion, we may trigger a social threat, provoking a hostile or defensive reaction, and ending the dialogue or damaging the relationship. But if we fail to express enough emotion, we significantly diminish the impact of our feedback, resulting in an ongoing cycle of ineffective conversations.

The right balance of emotion is highly situational and will differ widely not only across interpersonal relationships but also according to the issue under discussion, the timing of the conversation, and many other factors. Our ability to find the balance that’s right for any given conversation will depend on our understanding of the other person and our relationship with them as well as on our ability to regulate and express our emotions effectively.

3) Build the Relationship

As noted above, when we feel less connected to another person, an interaction with them is more likely to trigger a social threat. When we need to give feedback to someone who differs from us—not only according to demographic categories, but also as a function of our respective roles—it’s important to be able to establish a sense of relatedness with that person to minimize the risk of social threat. And this work is much more effective when it’s done over time, across a series of interactions, rather than in a desperate—and transparent—attempt to soften the blow before delivering critical feedback.

John Gottman, a social psychologist who’s one of the world’s leading researchers on marriage and relationships, notes that the likelihood of a successful conclusion to a difficult conversation is critically dependent on what he calls “the quality of the friendship” in the relationship, and he defines friendship by the existence of seven factors:

1. Feeling known by the other person.

2. A “culture of appreciation” that nurtures mutual fondness, admiration and respect.

3. Sensitivity and responsiveness to even the most minor bids for attention.

4. The degree of mutual influence.

5. Accepting that some problems are intractable and can’t be solved right now.

6. An awareness that inside those intractable problems is often a deeply personal dream, and a willingness to share those dreams.

7. The creation of shared meaning.

Gottman’s research focuses on married couples and others in committed partnerships, and I’m not suggesting that our working relationships need to rise to that level of intimacy to be successful. But I am suggesting that Gottman’s guidelines for gauging “the quality of the friendship” apply to any relationship, and that they can direct us in our efforts to connect with others, particularly when we’re working across role boundaries and other dimensions of difference.

Finally, Gottman’s research also shows that the ratio of positive to negative interactions in a successful relationship over time is 5:1, even during periods of conflict. This ratio doesn’t apply to a single conversation, nor does it mean that we’re obligated to pay someone five compliments before we can criticize them. But it does emphasize the importance of positive feedback over time as a means of building a successful relationship. (Note that we can run into problems with positive feedback as well.)

4) Play Fair

A certain way to derail a feedback conversation is to trigger a social threat (and a subsequent defensive or hostile reaction) by providing feedback that the other person perceives as unfair or inaccurate. The difficulty is that the concepts of “fair” and “accurate” are inherently subjective. In Chapter 2 of The Interpersonal Dynamics Reader [PDF], David Bradford and Mary Ann Huckabay use the metaphor of “the net” to explain this dynamic:

Most of us act like amateur psychologists in that we try to figure out why others act as they do. If you interrupt me (a behavior) and I feel annoyed (the effect on me), I try and understand why you would do that. So I make an attribution of your motives (it must be that you are inconsiderate)…

As common as this attribution process is, it also can be dysfunctional. Note that my sense-making is a guess. That is my hunch as to why you act the way you do. I am “crossing over the net” from what is my area of expertise (that I am annoyed at your behavior), to your area of expertise (your motives and intentions). My imputation of your motives can always be debated, (“You don't listen.” “Yes, I do.” “No you don't.”) whereas sticking with my own feelings and reactions is never debatable. ( “I felt irritated by your interruption just now.” “You shouldn't feel that way because I didn't mean to interrupt you.” “Perhaps not, but I feel irritated nonetheless.” ) [pp 4-5, emphasis added]

As Bradford and Huckabay make clear, by “crossing the net” and guessing at the other person’s motives and intentions, we succeed in creating a plausible explanation that helps us understand their behavior, but we run the risk of being wrong. Even if we guess right in most circumstances—and we typically do—the challenge in the context of a feedback conversation is that the cost of being wrong is triggering a social threat in the other person and derailing the conversation.

The solution identified by Bradford and Huckabay is to “stay on our side of the net” and stick with what we know for certain—our response to the observed behavior—and avoid making any guesses about the other person’s motives and intentions. This minimizes the risk that our feedback will be perceived as unfair or inaccurate.

5) Give It To Me Straight?

While an increased emphasis on interpersonal feedback in many groups and organizations can provide us with more opportunities to test and improve our abilities to give and receive feedback effectively, it can also have some unintended consequences. A “feedback-rich” culture can be one in which people feel compelled to participate in feedback conversations even when they’re not truly prepared to do so. Feedback givers can feel an unjustified sense of authority and objectivity, failing to realize that feedback says as much about the giver (what we notice, what we comment upon, how we say it) as it does about the recipient. Feedback recipients can feel obligated to change in response to critical feedback, even when it conflicts with their better judgment.

So while I’m a confirmed believer in the benefits of feedback, I also encourage people to stop and think carefully when stepping into a feedback conversation, particularly before responding to a request to “Give it to me straight.” While it’s important to provide honest and direct feedback in response to such a request, it’s also important to consider the overall context—including the surrounding group or organizational culture—in order to meet such a request effectively.

Update/Postscript: I'm reminded of my recent comment to Whitney Johnson: "At the heart of every piece of critical feedback is a dream of a better way to interact with each other." This helps explain my emphasis on the emotional aspects of feedback conversations--when we're unhappy or upset with someone and want them to change, the purpose of any critical feedback we might deliver is to turn that "dream of a better way of interacting" into reality. But if we simply "give it to them straight" and fail to effectively manage the emotions evoked by the conversation--either by repressing them or by venting them full-force--we're much less likely to achieve that goal.

Thanks to Carole Robin, David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay and Scott Bristol for introducing me to many of these concepts and for the opportunity to explore them further while working with them at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Photo by rick. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

The Five Stages of Procrastination

Denial

"I have plenty of time--I'll get it done this weekend!"

Anger

"Dammit, it's way too nice out to stay inside and work--I'm outta here!"

Bargaining

"I'll get started as soon as I clean the house. How can I write surrounded by all this clutter?"

Depression

"Why did I ever say yes to this project? I'm an idiot."

Acceptance

(Sighs, sits down and opens laptop.)

Photo by Thomas Abbs. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Practical Romance

"We come from the stars; we're not made of microchips." -Erica Peng

We all require some degree of what I'll call romance in our lives. I'm not necessarily referring to romantic love for another person, although some relationships certainly qualify. I'm talking more broadly about any passionate yearning for someone, someplace, something, some way of being that fulfills us in a way that's hard to understand, let alone explain to others. Some romances may be logical on a certain level, but ultimately they are their own justification.

But as uniquely fulfilling as romance can be, it's also insufficient. We have to balance the romantic with its converse, the practical. Because romances justify themselves, they can consume vast amounts of resources as we pursue them, but practical things must meet a different standard. They must be justified by the returns they generate in exchange for our investment of resources (e.g. time, money, effort, attention). And as in any healthy market, these exchanges are a sign of value creation on both sides, and, at their best, a source of meaning and purpose.

When our lives are too airily romantic, we may be free to choose our path, but we lose traction and fail to make any actual progress. But when our lives are too stolidly practical, we carve out ruts that become impossible to escape, and although we're making steady progress we can't change course even when we're headed in the wrong direction.

There's no balance that's right for everyone; we all have to find our own level. But it's important to be aware of the internal and external forces in our lives--formative experiences, mental models of what's desirable or necessary, obligations and commitments (both real and imagined)--that might pull us away from our optimal balance in one direction or another.

My dad likes to joke that I've "tacked my way through life," and (although I can't stand being in a boat) it's an apt metaphor. I've pursued some major romances--leaving college to go to art school, following a girl to New England, packing three careers into 16 years, and eventually leaving management to launch a coaching practice. And at alternate intervals I've made some very practical decisions--leaving art school to go back to college, going into management to gain hands-on experience, getting an MBA, and returning to Stanford to join the business school's coaching staff. (I also married the girl, which was both romantic and practical.)

I haven't taken any daunting leaps in a while, and I certainly don't feel that I'm in a rut, so it's possible that in my 40s I've found my optimal balance. (Not that I've been in a hurry--as Seneca wrote, "It takes the whole of life to learn how to live.") I know I'm unusually privileged in that my work as a coach is both a romantic passion--a true vocation, a life's work, not a job--and a practical profession that pays the bills. But I don't take anything in the present for granted, because we all continue to change even when we think we're done. For now, I'm just going to enjoy this feeling of practical romance.

Update: That last line strikes me as too pat. I am privileged to enjoy a certain balance in my work as a coach--it fulfills my romantic desires to make a difference in the world, to connect with people and to feel a sense of meaning and purpose, while also meeting my primary practical needs. And yet I don't feel quite at peace, either. I'm restless by nature--I tend to "repot" myself every seven years, and it's not lost on me that I'm in my seventh year back at Stanford. I know I'm not in a rut--at least not the sort of rut that's prompted me to take those major leaps noted above--because coaching does feel like my life's work. It occurs to me that I don't want anything different--and in that sense I have found the right balance between the practical and the romantic--but I do want more. Of what, I'm in the process of discovering.

The coach in me can't help but ask: Where are you in all this? What are your romantic yearnings? How are you fulfilling them? How are you neglecting them? What are your practical needs? And how are you fulfilling (or neglecting) them? How does the current balance between the two feel? If you could change something, what would it be? What's holding you back?

Thanks to my friend and colleague Erica Peng for the conversation that led to this post.

Photo by Bill Mill. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Women, Men, Work and Emotion

Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr recently co-authored Women Need to Realize Work Isn't School, a powerful call to action containing five straightforward guidelines that challenge women to re-think their approach to professional success:

1. Figure out how to challenge and influence authority.

2. Prepare, but also learn how to improvise.

3. Find effective forms of self-promotion.

4. Welcome a less proscribed, full of surprise, career path.

5. Go for being respected, not just liked.

It's a brilliant piece of writing, and I intend to refer to it regularly in my work with clients and students at Stanford (where today the MBA Class of 2012 is just 39% women).

I want to augment Johnson and Mohr's perspective with two points: First, while I firmly agree that these five issues affect women more often and more severely than men, they certainly affect men as well. In my own professional development I've wrestled with each of these issues, and while I had an easier path as a man, it was nevertheless an intense struggle. (And it still is--I'm not suggesting that I've permanently resolved these issues for myself, just that I've addressed them and made what feels like meaningful progress over the years.)

And as I reflect on my male clients and MBA students, my sense is that every one of them is coping with one or more of these issues. From my perspective Johnson and Mohr have identified a critical set of universal challenges we all face in professional life, and they're shining a necessary spotlight on the unique difficulties faced by women in surmounting them.

Second, while these strategies point out the ways in which women can often undermine themselves and suggest useful alternatives, my experience as a coach tells me that simply knowing what we should do is rarely sufficient motivation on its own. In order to take effective action, we have to acknowledge and address the emotions that get stirred up by the prospect of doing so.

Any of us--women and men--who wrestle with the issues above can use Johnson and Mohr's call to action as a starting point to begin to understand the mental models that hold us back. And yet I suspect that sustained progress will depend on our willingness to understand ourselves at an even deeper level--for example, how our emotions affect our reasoning and decision-making or our performance under stress.

When we find ourselves acting in opposition to Johnson and Mohr's guidelines, it's likely that emotional factors are at play. Habitually deferring to authority, failing to improvise, rejecting appropriate credit for our performance, turning down surprise opportunities, focusing on being liked while failing to command respect--these are all professional missteps with a profound emotional dimension to them. Even as we're making such a misstep, we know it's the wrong thing to do, but somehow it feels better, safer, less risky to make the suboptimal choice.

So once our awareness has been raised and we know what we should do, our fundamental struggle in addressing these issues may be acknowledging and overcoming the anxiety, the embarrassment, the shame, the fear that well up when we contemplate taking that bold step. This is the complex and difficult work of self-coaching: engaging ourselves, understanding ourselves, and ultimately accepting ourselves even as we strive to do better.

Photo by Renato Ganoza. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)

The ability to be aware of--and influence--what we're thinking about is a critical self-coaching skill. We need to focus our attention on what's important and devote less of it to what's irrelevant, a task that's more difficult when we're stressed or distracted. And yet efforts to actively suppress thoughts can actually be counterproductive--so what CAN we do?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner is known for his work on mental control, among other topics, and in response to the question, "How do people control their own minds?" he writes:

The simple strategy of directing attention can often be helpful, as people can stop thoughts, concentrate, improve their moods, relax, fall asleep, and otherwise control their mental states just by trying to direct their thoughts. These strategies of mental control can sometimes backfire, however, producing not only the failure of control but the very mental states we are trying to avoid. [Emphasis mine]

Wegner's insights on mental control emerged from his research on thought suppression, a concept he illustrates with the image of a white bear, inspired by a line from Dostoyevsky: "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." Wegner writes:

People who are prompted to try not to think about a white bear while they are thinking out loud will tend to mention it about once a minute... It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. 

Why does this matter so much? Neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson offers one very practical reason in his book Mind Sculpture:

We have to inhibit the billions of bits of irrelevant information assailing our senses in order to concentrate on the fragments of information which are crucial for us at a particular point in time.

This difficulty in suppressing the irrelevant causes particular problems with driving in older people. Whereas older people are more vigilant, careful and generally less error prone, they tend to make more mistakes at busy road junctions. At such complicated traffic intersections, everyone--young and old--is faced with a barrage of lights, signals and speeding streams of traffic. Some of this information is critically important for deciding when and what to do next, while much of it is irrelevant. For instance, the roaring trucks on the motorway overhead may be noisy and intimidating, but they...are quite irrelevant to the taks of managing to turn here. A young driver will be much better able to "screen out" this irrelevant distraction than an older driver, and so will be better able to focus attention on the lights and traffic which are important for surviving this particular turn. [pp 114-15]

My goal here isn't to promote safer driving among the aged (although as a 45-year-old who logs more than 300 miles most weeks, perhaps it should be). These issues have relevance in a much broader context: All of us, young and old, drivers and pedestrians, face the interpersonal equivalent of a busy intersection at work almost every day.

We're in a fast-paced meeting, for example, with a full agenda, allies and adversaries around the table, and massive amounts of information (both literal data and emotional signals) flying around the room. How do we focus our attention in order to achieve our goals most effectively?

As Robertson notes, inhibition is crucial here--wasting attention on the equivalent of a noisy but irrelevant truck roaring overhead could result in an ill-timed turn. However, as Wegner notes, we can't simply compel ourselves to ignore such distractions, or we actually risk becoming fixated on them. And if we're stressed, or tired (or just getting older), it'll be even more difficult to focus our attention where it's needed most.

So what do we do? In October 2011 health journalist Lea Winerman covered a presentation by Wegner at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, in which he described several effective strategies for mental control.

In-the-moment, Wegner recommends that we 1) minimize multi-tasking, which diminishes our cognitive load, frees up finite working memory and increases our ability to focus, or 2) identify an "absorbing distractor" that will prevent us from becoming fixated on a more problematic focal point.

Over time, Wegner recommends that we build our capacity to resist distraction in the following ways: 1) commit to address unwanted thoughts at some designated time--as Winerman notes, chronic worriers who set aside 30 minutes a day during which they were free to worry experienced less anxiety during the rest of their day, or 2) practice meditation and mindfulness techniques.

A personal note on that last strategy: Although I've found meditation difficult at times, I persist in the practice because my own experience is consistent with Wegner's recommendation. For me meditation isn't a means to some sort of blissed-out, stress-free state--it's a workout, and a very hard one some days. My (utterly simple) practice is inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn: Get still, notice what I'm thinking about (and how it makes me feel), let go of that thought (and those emotions) and bring my attention back to what it feels like to breathe. Within seconds, I'm thinking about something else again, and the cycle repeats itself over and over for 15 minutes. Not easy, and not particularly fun--as I said, it's a workout--but I'm exercising my capacity for self-awareness and my ability to direct attention, and after nearly two years of ongoing practice I do feel more able to focus on what matters and minimize distractions--fairly important tasks if I want to finish a book on this stuff.

Thanks to Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote for (among other things) introducing me to Daniel Wegner's work on mental control.

Photo by David Wall. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Doug Sundheim on Taking Smart Risks

Perhaps the highest praise I can give to Doug Sundheim's Taking Smart Risks is that the book challenged me to assess how I've been playing it safe and where I should be taking some smart risks of my own, and those reflections will have a meaningful impact on my professional and personal journeys.

A coach and consultant based in New York, Sundheim's been writing about risk for years; I first encountered his work in a 2006 post on The Gift of Risk that I found inspiring. But with this new book he lays out a comprehensive framework for looking at risk and provides an assortment of tools to help individuals and organizations take on the right risks at the right time. (Full disclosure: While I don't know Sundheim personally, we've become acquainted through our work and shared interests, and he provided me with a review copy of his book.)

The most useful and thought-provoking ideas I encountered in Taking Smart Risks are right up front in the first three chapters, which comprise Part One: Reframing Risk. Sundheim highlights the inherent value of risk-taking:

In my work as a leadership and strategy consultant, this is a theme I hear often. Money is important, but a sense of accomplishment, growth, and self-knowledge is what really drives leaders, teams and organizations to take risks.

When you play it safe, staying in the comfort zone for too long, you don't feel these things. You stagnate. And that puts everything at risk. [p 4]

Citing the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and others, Sundheim notes that...

Over the past 60 years, professionals from the fields of psychology, philosophy and adult development have recognized the need to engage in meaningful challenges as a primary driving force in living a satisfying life... [Y]ou need to get out of your comfort zone regularly if you want to enjoy life. That's because the real reward for leaving your comfort zone never lies in what you achieve by doing it; it lies in the process of doing it... [p 5]

And as the section's subtitle implies, Sundheim emphasizes the importance of framing on our perception of risk, citing Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's classic research on prospect theory and loss-aversion bias [PDF]. Sundheim writes:

We're naturally more averse to the costs of taking risks than to those of not taking risks because of the time frames in which we experience each cost.

We experience the costs of taking risks immediately. Discomfort and uncertainty show up as soon as we engage in the risk... Conversely, we experience the costs of avoiding risks further in the future. Low growth, lack of accomplishment and limited fulfillment take time to manifest... In short, we have more trouble imagining what a lack of accomplishment will feel like in five years than what discomfort will feel like in five hours. [p 23]

Sundheim encourages us to challenge this bias by focusing our attention not only on the potential gains a given risk may yield but also on the potential costs that may be incurred by playing it safe, and he provides several straightforward but effective tools for doing so. I regularly ask clients and students to do a simple cost-benefit analysis when facing a difficult decision, so I particularly liked Sundheim's modification of this concept, which asks us to identify--in this order--A) the benefits of a given risk, B) the costs of that risk, C) the benefits of avoiding the risk, and D) the costs of avoiding the risk, and then uses that data to help us determine how our framing of the risk is affecting our ability to move forward.

But Sundheim's aware that while reframing risk is essential in getting unstuck and avoiding paralysis, it's likely insufficient to sustain action on its own, and he goes on to outline five principles that minimize the downside of any given risk:

At the core of smart risk taking is something I call derisking, or removing as much uncertainty as you can at every stage of a risk... Through years of coaching and consulting, I've found that smart risk takers consistently do five things well to derisk whatever they're up to...

[1] Find something worth fighting for... Finding something worth fighting for (I call it a SWFF) is the process of identifying and clarifying why risk taking is important to you in the first place. Smart risk takers understand that their emotional commitment to whatever they want to see happen is more than half the battle of getting it...

[2] See the future now... Seeing the future now is the process of clarifying what exactly the big ideas mean in terms of real objectives, plans and intended results...

[3] Act fast, learn fast... [T]est pieces of your hypothesis rapidly so that you can learn what will and won't work before you put too much on the line. Inherent in testing ideas rapidly is seeing failure as a necessary step in the process, not an unfortunate result of it...

[4] Communicate powerfully... Smart risk takers assume that communication is going to break down (because it always does) and plan accordingly...

[5] Create a smart-risk culture. Risk-taking, especially in an organizational context, is rarely an individual endeavor. Members of a team or larger group need to share the same mindsets and values about expected behavior... [pp 36-7]

These concepts form the core of Sundheim's approach, and the rest of the book explores each of them in depth in subsequent sections. The first of these--Part Two: Find Something Worth Fighting For--is most relevant to me in my work as an executive coach, and I expect to refer back to it regularly. I love Sundheim's concept of a SWFF, particularly given his emphasis on values and emotion, two topics I discuss with almost all of my clients and students.

That said, emotions are at the heart of so many of the dynamics discussed by Sundheim--our fear of failure, the power of enthusiasm, how to manage difficult conversations--and while he touches on this emotional dimension numerous times, I wanted to explore that topic even further whenever it arose. This stems from my understanding of research on the importance of emotions in reasoning and decision-making, as well as my belief that we're much more effective at navigating complex situations--such as taking smart risks--when we acknowledge and address the emotional aspect of our experience. But I recognize that Sundheim had to put some boundaries around his subject matter for practical reasons, and I appreciate the extent to which he does discuss emotion, a critical topic that's all too often ignored in books aimed at business readers.

Sundheim's conclusion offers encouragement to the aspiring risk-taker:

When done intelligently, risk taking never leaves you empty-handed. Even in failure, the experience provides critical learning for the future. The key is to start moving. Your path forward becomes clear once you're walking on it, not before...

I'm reminded--and not for the first time while reading Taking Smart Risks--of George Patton's (perhaps apocryphal) advice: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week."

Add It Up (A Look Back At My 2012 Goals)

As I wrote last month, decades of studies have shown that goals are useful spurs to action, but recent research also shows that goals can have unintended consequences, such as diminishing the fulfillment we derive from an activity. My solution to this paradox is "to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily."

Some of my most important goals involve daily activities: Each day I aspire to 1) wake up well-rested from a good night's sleep, 2) get some exercise, 3) meditate, 4) develop myself as a coach through some form of study or practice, and 5) do a little writing, typically on a coaching-related topic.

I've been tracking whether or not I fulfilled these daily goals since May 2011 (except exercise, which I've tracked since March 2008, and writing, which I added last June), so the end of 2012 is an interesting opportunity to see how I've done over the past year. But before I jump to the data, I want to note my appreciation for critics of tracking like Zen Habits' Leo Babauta, who wrote in November...

When you track a metric, such as hours or dollars or miles, you are saying that’s more important than all the things that can’t be measured. You put that in the forefront of your head as the thing that must be improved, at the cost of all else. What about relationships and joy? Are those less important?

Then there are other problems with tracking and measuring everything:

• It takes time to measure and track--that’s valuable time you could have spent doing or living.
• It creates a mindset that we must always improve, always measure, always manage things, always strive for better, better, better. What about learning to be happy with yourself? What about focusing on joy and compassion and people you love? When does the improving stop? Are we ever satisfied? And is that the point of living--to improve endlessly, to always make things better, and never be happy with where we are?
• It’s stressful to measure and track a lot of things, and it’s disappointing if those numbers don’t go up, or don’t go up as much as we’d hoped.
• We have to choose what to measure, and how do we know we’re choosing the right thing? Why is that thing the only thing that matters? It’s a narrowing way of looking at life.
• It doesn’t improve happiness. It doesn’t make us content. It doesn’t keep us in the moment.

I agree with Babauta's fundamental perspective--we need to spend our lives being fulfilled by doing what we love, and chasing numbers is a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction, not fulfillment. But his rejection of tracking is similar to his rejection of goals, and it evokes a similar response from me: Any data derived from tracking our activities should inform our choices, not dictate them, and we should hold onto it lightly and let go of it readily, just as we would a goal that's become counter-productive.

The pursuit of my goals noted above is its own reward, and I don't make choices to "improve" the numbers related to those goals. When I don't achieve these goals in a given day, or when the numbers dip over a period of time, rather than feel bad about my "failure," I get curious about the choices I've been making. Perhaps I needed to prioritize other activities, and those choices were the right ones.

But I'm also well aware of the tendency for things that are "urgent but not important" to consume time and attention, often pushing things are are "important but not urgent" off my calendar. My dawning awareness of this dynamic is one of the factors that got me started tracking my daily exercise in the first place.

So while I'm grateful to Babauta and others for helping me to clarify how I want to use this data--and how I don't want to use it--I still find the process of tracking valuable. With that said, how'd 2012 go?

I got a good night's sleep 60% of the time, and I feel great about that simply because I've known for years that my sleep hygiene was poor but never did anything about it. Tracking provides me with just enough motivation to pay attention to--and actually honor--my need for sleep.

I exercised 87% of the time, up from 81% in 2011. And I'm very happy about that--not because I'm driven to "improve," but because I love to exercise, and these figures represent an ongoing commitment to take care of myself in the midst of a very demanding schedule.

I meditated 67% of the time, and I'm ambivalent about that figure. It was just 45% for the last six months of 2011, so from one perspective there's "progress"--but a closer look shows surprising variation on a quarterly basis: 59% in Q1, 85% in Q2, 74% in Q3 and just 51% in Q4. Why such a steep decline when I do find the practice rewarding? Why am I meditating less while exercising more? Curious--and something to think about in 2013.

I worked on my professional development 65% of the time, and I feel just fine about that. It's easy to get sucked into the immediate demands of my work as a coach--primarily because I love what I do--but tracking this metric reminds me of the importance of stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities to stretch myself in other ways.

I started tracking daily writing just last summer, and I wrote 25% of the time during the last 7 months--but that ranged from 90% in June to 0% in September and October. That variation reflects my demanding Fall Quarter schedule at Stanford, and while I write better when I take time off during the year, being dormant for several months was too long, and next year I'll look for ways to keep some momentum going during my busy period.

Photo by David Boté Estrada. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Babies, Bathwater and Goal-Setting

When do goals support our growth and development? When do they get in the way? And how can we tell the difference?

In a post on self-coaching and goal-setting last July, I wrote that "goals encourage us to work harder and longer, and when they're difficult to achieve they push us even more"--a proposition backed up by decades of research, much of it by Edwin Locke of the University of Maryland and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto. But by no means are goals always a good thing--as Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory [PDF], at times it's more effective to focus on what we'll learn during the course of an activity than on any performance outcomes we're seeking to achieve. Further, goals actually contribute to lower performance when they're so daunting that we perceive them as "threats" rather than "challenges."

Recent research on goals highlights their complex impact on our behavior. In July Ayelet Fishbach of the Booth School of Business and Jinhee Choi of the Korea University School published When Thinking About Goals Undermines Goal Pursuit, which inspired Christian Jarrett's How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back. Building on Fishbach and Choi's research, Jarrett urges us to be mindful of the unintended consequences of goal-setting:

Focusing on goals fires up your intentions to engage in the activities that will help you achieve those goals. But there's a major downside. Stay focused on your goals and you spoil your experience of the activities you'll need to pursue. In turn, that makes it far more likely that you'll drop out early and fail to achieve the very goals that you're so focused on.

Jarrett goes on to discuss Fishbach and Choi's paper at length and concludes:

[T]he lessons from this research seem clear. By all means visualize your goals to help get yourself started in the first place, but once you're underway, try to let your long-term mission fade a little into the background. Revel in the process and you're more likely to make it to the finishing line...

[Further,] once our projects are underway, not only should we beware choosing to stay too focused on our goals, we must also guard against the detrimental effect of outside reminders.

In October the New York Times' Alina Tugend interviewed a number of researchers, including Gary Latham, for an article titled Experts' Advice to the Goal-Oriented: Don't Overdo It:

It’s not that goals are bad, [Latham] said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

Tugend also talked with the University of Arizona's Lisa Ordóñez, who in 2009 co-authored Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting, in which a medical metaphor is used to emphasize the potency of goals' influence and their undesirable side effects:

[W]e argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.

Despite these concerns, in Tugend's article Ordóñez takes the same position as Latham:

"It's not that goals are bad," said Professor Ordóñez... "We’re just saying be careful." [Emphasis mine]

It's critical that we integrate the findings of Fishbach, Choi, Ordóñez and their colleagues into our understanding of goals and modify their use accordingly. But I'm concerned that a misreading of this research is leading us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon goals entirely.

In addition to Christian Jarrett's essay noted above, in 2010 Zen Habits' Leo Babauta proclaimed that the best goal is no goal, and this month he took the "Pro" position in a debate with Tim Ferriss on whether goals suck. Just a few days ago Peter Bregman urged his readers at HBR.org to Consider Not Setting Goals in 2013, a post in which he cites the "Goals Gone Wild" paper and Tugend's NYT article. And just a few hours ago, Babauta tweeted that "Harvard Business Review adopts my no-goals philosophy," with a link to Bregman's post.

Jarrett, Babauta and Bregman all make excellent, nuanced points about the complexity of goals and their unintended consequences--but their headlines (which may not have been written by them, of course) paint a much more simplistic picture, and reductive comments like Babauta's tweet only get amplified in our 140-character world. (It's been re-tweeted or favorited 45 times already as I write this.)

To be clear, I've been heavily influenced by the research on goals' undesirable side effects, and I've altered how I use them in my personal life and in my coaching practice as a result. I continue to find goals a helpful source of motivation when getting started, but I also watch carefully for signs of their counter-productivity. I've come to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily.

Thanks to my colleague Collins Dobbs for the pointer to Bregman's post.

Photo by Gail Foss. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Hit the Brakes or Step on the Gas? (Resistance and Motivation)

Some recent work with clients and students and several personal experiences have me thinking about the opposing forces of resistance and motivation that we feel when we're on the brink of a meaningful decision. The tension between these forces can result in uncertainly and paralysis--we don't know whether to heed our resistance and hit the brakes or tap into our motivation and step on the gas, so we drift along and let things happen.

When we're stuck this way, it can be helpful to explore the underlying sources of our resistance and motivation and assess their utility: Are these factors useful to us or not? And in this process it's critical to recognize that resistance and motivation both have "shadow sides," unhelpful dimensions that are likely to lead us astray and need to be challenged.

Useful sources of resistance include healthy prudence, trusted intuition, satisfaction with our present situation and a need for rest or calm. Unhelpful sources of resistance include simple lethargy or inertia, a lack of confidence or resilience, and excessive caution or risk-aversion. All these factors tend to slow us down and encourage us to opt out and say no.

Useful sources of motivation include healthy ambition, aspirational goals, a drive to overcome obstacles and a sense of determined "grit." (For more on grit, see research by Penn's Angela Duckworth.) Unhelpful sources of motivation include unchecked drives, unchallenged beliefs that tell us we "must" do something, compulsions and social pressure. All these factors tend to speed us up and encourage us to opt in and say yes.

I'm not suggesting that there's a simple or foolproof way to locate the "utility threshold" and readily distinguish between the helpful and unhelpful forms of resistance and motivation; it's a complex and subjective process. But a good starting point is simply stepping back and reminding ourselves that these forces come in both flavors, and sometimes we need to tap into and unleash our motivation--step on the gas--while at other times we need to respect and heed our resistance--hit the brakes.

Marcus Aurelius, 3,000 Years and the Present Moment

Today I talked with a client about mortality (among a number of topics) and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present--being "in the moment"--is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that I've found both bracing and comforting:

Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [Book II, Chapter 14]

This passage means even more to me in light of R.B. Rutherford's introduction to the Oxford edition: "...Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter... At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [pp ix-x] Marcus wasn't rebuking anyone else; he was counseling himself. (You might even say he was self-coaching.)

I was thinking along these lines before my conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.

At times like this I find the passage above comforting because I accept Marcus' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years (although 3,000 seems unlikely), and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment.

And I find this passage bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can step forward and do something meaningful with it, or (as I so often do) I can sit back and let it pass by. Time to step up.

Photo by Martin Fisch. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.