Frog in a Pot

When you put a frog into a pot of hot water, it immediately jumps out.  However, if you put the frog into a pot of cool water and then slowly increase the temperature, the frog’s body will adjust to the rising heat.  By the time he realizes that it’s getting hotter, he will no longer be able to jump out, and he will die.

Sometimes, we are the frog in the pot.  If someone came to us and said that they were going to radically and negatively change our environment tomorrow, most of us would jump out of the pot.  That’s not the way it typically happens, though.  The changes creep up on us and overcome us before we realize they are happening.  What started as just an extra assignment or two is now a full-blown project that is draining the life from us.  What started as a favor for a friend is now an obligation that makes your blood boil.  What started as a small concession to the other side is now the advantage they are using to turn the heat up against us.

Be aware of the small steps that precipitate a changing environment around you.  If you hear yourself saying, “Well, just this once….,” check the temperature of the water.

Career Tacking

Whenever you move up to a new level of leadership, you will need to make adjustments.  The change you go through is similar to a skill used in sailing.  It’s typically not possible to sail directly to your goal in a straight line.  You have to sail in the direction the wind pushes you and change directions at strategic moments to move closer and closer to your final destination.  In effect, you surrender the wind that was carrying you in one direction and exchange it for a new wind that will carry you in a different one.  You end up making a zig-zag pattern across the body of water.  The skill is called “tacking,” and it requires a keen eye and knowledge of wind and water patterns.

Likewise in your career, it won’t be possible for you to reach your ultimate goal without making some strategic tacks.  But instead of exchanging one wind for another, you’ll be exchanging skills.  Old skills that made you effective in your previous role have to be surrendered for new, more effective skills.  Even though your old skills might carry you for awhile and help you to experience success, they will eventually carry you away from your ultimate goal.

The skills that you learned as an individual producer won’t get you very far when you start to manage others.  Those are the skills of the expert.  You need new skills – skills for leading people.  The old skills will only serve to make you a “micro-manager” and a “control freak” as you attempt to stay personally invested in everything your people do.

Then, as you move from leading individual producers to leading leaders, the winds change again.  Now you need a skill set that includes the ability to grow your leaders, to help them move away from being the expert.  You need the strategic focus to give your leaders a common vision behind which they can rally their teams.

And as you move from leading leaders to leading organizations, the winds change once more.  Your will need to focus less on getting things done through others as your leaders become more and more competent.  Instead, you will need to develop a global view of your organization that has a clear perspective on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

As you progress through your career, you will find that the wind changes direction many times.  Each time, you will be challenged to do less of what you are good at and do more of what is out of your comfort zone.  Along the way, you are likely to pass many who aren’t going anywhere in their careers due to their inability to recognize when to tack.  They mistakenly thought that their old skills would work in their new roles.  They tried to continue toward their goal without being willing to change.  Don’t follow their example, or you might find your career dead in the water.

 

Soft Hands

During a Monday night football game a few years ago, the Dallas Cowboy’s were defending at their own three-yard line.  The quarterback for the opposing team dropped back and fired a bullet…right to one of the Cowboy’s defensive linemen.  To my disgust, the lineman dropped the ball even though it was right between the numbers and even though he got both hands on the ball.

At the time, it seemed unthinkable that he would drop a sure interception, but I stopped yelling at the TV long enough to hear one of the commentators (a former lineman himself) explain why we should give the guy a break.  As he explained it, linemen spend their entire careers pushing against three-hundred-pound gorillas on the other side of the line of scrimmage.  Every muscle in their body is invested in the struggle to push past the opposing lineman to get at the quarterback.  When a ball is thrown their way, they don’t have the “soft hands” required to catch the ball.

By that last comment, he meant that because the linemen were totally focused on the goal of overpowering their opponent, it was supremely difficult for them to switch goals in the middle of battle.  I can relate.  I remember countless times when I was insensitive to my wife when she called me at the office.  Her calls always seemed to come right in the middle of my battles with three-hundred-pound gorilla projects and three-hundred-pound gorilla deadlines.  Bruised from her own battles with the kids, all she wanted was a sympathetic ear.  What she typically got were short, curt responses indicating I had better things to do than to talk with her.

Because I was so focused on the battle, I didn’t have the soft hands necessary to respond to my wife appropriately, and I forgot we were playing for the same team.  Each time I dropped the ball, I regretted it the second I hung up the phone.  Realization of how important and unrecoverable the moment was always made me wish I had not been so single-focused.

If we are going to be effective leaders, we have to learn to develop the soft hands required when our team members come to us for help.  We have to be skilled at transitioning from driving the line, chasing down the goal, sacking the competition… to taking time out, being receptive and possibly moving in a whole new direction.

While success requires us to be totally invested in our work, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that teams are made of people, and we can’t play this game alone.

It Was the Shoes!

It was 2006, and Kevin Mench was inching up on the competition.  The Texas Rangers right-fielder found out mid-April that he had been wearing the wrong size shoes for years.  “Shrek” (as he was known by his teammates at the time because of his size 8 head) wears a size 12 1/2” shoe, but he had been cramming into size 12” sneakers since he was fifteen.

The revelation came after a recurring sprained toe forced him to miss five games early in the year.  The ball club sent him to a foot specialist, who quickly diagnosed what was cramping Mench’s style.  After the minor correction to his footwear, Mench began to pick up his pace.  Having failed to drive in a single run during the first ten games of the season, Mench drove in 27 immediately following the half-inch upgrade.  Even better, during the same timeframe, he dinged ten home runs (seven of them in a row and two for grand slams).

People change.  Circumstances change.  Maybe yesterday’s “perfect fit” for your team is now confining to them.  Some team members may have outgrown their jobs and need new challenges.  We know from data gathered by the Hay Group (from 500,000 exit interviews) that the most common reason your top hitters will go into free agency (how much mileage can I get from this metaphor?) is because they don’t have enough learning opportunities to develop their skills.  But give them some growing room, and watch them start to hit for the stadium lights.

Take new measurements on each of your team members on a regular basis.  You may be surprised at how much they’ve grown!

Fake It Till You Make It

Unless we are compelled to do something, most of us live life doing the things we feel like doing.  Happiness, comfort and pleasure are our main motivators during our non-working hours.  This approach keeps us firmly rooted in our comfort zones.

Unfortunately, the tricky thing about comfort zones is that they tend to shrink if they aren’t stretched regularly.  When we aren’t pushing their boundaries, they start to close in on us, and we find ourselves “comfortable” doing less and less.  Before long, all we feel like doing is renting movies from the local video store.

We won’t grow inside our comfort zones.  Growth is beyond their borders, and we have to push through some ugly discomfort to reach it.  Like a rocket leaving the earth’s atmosphere, we will expend most of our fuel getting out of the lower atmosphere of our habits, but there is a payoff – it gets much, much easier once we have made it through.

What this means is that if we are ever going to introduce some positive change into our lives, we are going to have to do what we don’t feel like doing.  We have to exercise when our body screams, “NO!”  We have to apologize when our pride gives us excuses.  We have to take a leap when the fear (spelled F.E.A.R.) cements our feet to the ground.  We’re going to have to fake it until we make it.

In other words, we are going to have to act like we want to do it even when we absolutely don’t want to do it.  But there is a payoff here, too.  It gets easier.  The feelings will follow after we act.  The want to follows the do.

The American psychologist, Jerome Bruner, says,

We are more likely to act ourselves into a feeling than feel ourselves into an action.

When we use our will to take positive action even though we don’t feel like it, the positive feelings will eventually follow as we start to see the benefits of our new behaviors.  Who hasn’t felt better after a long-procrastinated workout, a pride-swallowing resolution to a family conflict or a a fear-conquering leap of faith?

True, the feelings don’t always come right away.  It may take repeated trips out of the comfort zone.  But before too long, our comfort catches up with our new activity and we feel better about ourselves for doing what was difficult.

When our feelings decide our actions, we retreat into our comfort zones, but when our actions lead our feelings, we grow.  Act before you feel like it.  Fake it until you make it.

Naked Lobster

Ever thought about how a lobster grows?  Because of its rigid shell, the larger it gets, the more uncomfortable the lobster becomes.  Eventually, it has to shed its old shell in order to grow a new, roomier model.  This process is repeated multiple times (as many as 25 times over the first 5-7 years of its life) until it reaches its maximum size.

During the 48 hours or so that the lobster is shell-less, it’s in grave danger.  One hungry tourist with a cup of melted butter….  Or…the lobster could be eaten by any of its other natural predators.  For the lobster, there is no growth without risk.

I see two lessons for us in the story of the naked lobster:

·        You won’t grow without taking some risks.
·        You won’t grow without leaving something familiar behind.

But where the lobster operates on instinct to shed his shell, we have to operate on courage.  Unfortunately, many of us struggle to face up to hard changes.  It’s difficult to leave our comfort zone for the scary unknown.  Success is not assured.  Failure is likely.  Why would we want to leave what’s been working for us for so long?

And the truth is, we don’t always have to.  Sometimes, business as usual (BAU) will get us by.  But that’s all it usually does.  If we want to grow…  If we want to do great things for God… We are going to have to leave the familiar for something better.  We can’t continue to stay in our cramped, little shell convincing ourselves that it isn’t so uncomfortable after all.  We’ve got to feel the pinch and make the move.

R.U.T.S.

R.U.T.S.   The grooves that wear into relationships.  The kind of grooves that lock us into destructive patterns of behavior with those around us.

R.U.T.S. are related to the stories we tell ourselves about other people.  They are S.I.F.T. stories, not S.W.I.F.T. stories, and they are powerful.  R.U.T.S. are why you always end up in a fight with your teenager, why certain topics are off-limits with your spouse, why you get irritated when your that certain person calls, why you avoid your neighbor (or your parent, or your boss, or your relatives…), and why you will never be able to trust your sister again.  R.U.T.S. stands for:

Repeating

Unproductive

Time-trapped

Stories

R.U.T.S. are stories written in the past.  They may have been true stories, or they may have been stories where we filled in most of the information gaps ourselves.  But whether or not they are true is less important than the fact that they are old.  They were created to help us understand a particular situation or pattern or behaviors that happened once upon a time.  Unfortunately, once we wrote the story, we never took the time to update it.  It’s trapped in time.

It’s possible that the other person has changed or that we have changed or that the situation has changed, but we never go digging for new information.  In fact, we practice a thing called “selective perception,” where we only allow in new data that agrees with our old data.  New data that disagrees with the old data is quickly discounted and discarded.

R.U.T.S. are unproductive stories.  They don’t move the realtionship forward; they hold it back or even force it back.  They create self-fulfilling prophesies, where the other person inevitably lives down to our expectations because we can’t see them with new eyes no matter what efforts they make to change.  Eventually they give up trying to be different with us and either end the relationship or settle into “role-playing” when we’re around.  R.U.T.S. on our end about them beget R.U.T.S. on their end about us, and a crazy cycle of stressful, frustrating, relationship-killing exchanges begin.

Eliza Doolittle understood R.U.T.S.  In George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, (also the musical and movie, My Fair Lady), Professor Henry Higgins takes Eliza off the street to show that he can turn a flowergirl into a duchess.  He succeeds, but he takes too much credit for the metamorphisis and can never see Eliza as anything more than what she was.  Eliza can see and understand the R.U.T.S. Higgins tells himself about her.  She says to his friend,

You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

If your relationships are stuck in the R.U.T.S., you’ve got to start telling a new story.  You’ve got to look for evidence of change in the other person and acknowledge it.  You’ve got to forgive the past and move on.  And you’ve got to forgive the present, too, because even after you change your R.U.T.S. about them, it will take some time for them to change theirs about you.   They may be stuck in the dance that the two of you have been dancing for years, and old rhythms die hard.

It’s hard to get out of the R.U.T.S.  They are destructive, but they are comfortable.  As soon as you think you’ve reached the top of one, you might slip back down to the bottom, but keep trying.  Eventually your efforts will pay off, your relationships will improve, and you’ll have new, productive stories to tell about each other.

The only person who behaves sensibly is my tailor.  He takes new measurements every time he sees me.  All the rest go on with their old measurement.

~ George Bernard Shaw

It Takes Endurance

Ernest Shackleton led a doomed 1914 expedition to Antarctica aboard the vessel Endurance. The mission of the Endurance expedition was to cross a 1,800-mile expanse of Antarctica on foot. Just one day’s journey from its intended landing site, the ship became stuck in the polar ice of the Weddell Sea. The ice dragged the vessel for ten months and eventually crushed her, forcing the crew to abandon ship. The men salvaged Endurance’s lifeboats before she inevitably sank, but they were stranded with no means of communicating with the outside world and no hope of timely rescue.

The group camped out on the ice, sleeping in crude tents and subsisting on a diet of penguins, seals, and sled dogs. Knowing that they would die if despair and hopelessness took hold, Shackleton made sure that the men felt useful and productive. They had to believe that they were actively trying to get out of their predicament, and that if they worked together, that they would succeed. Shackleton had to balance negative and positive energy to make sure that the naysayers among them wouldn’t destroy the group’s fragile confidence.

To get the men working together, he dropped all pretenses of hierarchy and treated everyone, including himself, as equals. He set up work assignments on a rotating schedule so that everyone did the same tasks. On occasion, he even stepped aside and let another member of the group assume leadership. To encourage the men to remain in good spirits, he insisted that they play music, keep journals, create and perform skits, and otherwise engage their minds creatively.

After nearly six months of living on the ice, the Endurance crew braved the turbulent waters of the Weddell Sea and set sail in their lifeboats to Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton left with a small group to seek rescue, leaving the majority of the men on Elephant Island. After several months, he finally returned to rescue the men of the Endurance. Amazingly, there were zero casualties.

During times of major change, individual’s and leaders’ limits are tested.  When the changes stretch out over many months, individuals can become demoralized and lose focus on what they are working so hard to achieve.  They may become exhausted trying to keep one foot on the old ice floe (their old way of life) and one foot on the new (their new way of life) until they can leave the old ice floe behind. No matter what challenges you are facing, never let hopelessness take hold. In groups, it works from the inside out, spreading from person to person and destroying morale. Eventually, it will even affect you.

How do you do it?

· Focus on what you can control – even if it’s small.

· Allow those going through change to see how they are contributing to improvement of the current situation.

· Talk more about opportunities than about obstacles. (It’s okay to acknowledge that things are difficult, just don’t dwell on them.)

· Roll up your sleeves, and work alongside them.

· Take the risks necessary help your those going through changes realize short-term wins and breakthroughs.

If you want to know more about Shackleton’s incredible story and leadership, get a copy of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

Don’t Be the Last to Know

When World War II ended in 1945, Japan had about three million troops overseas, about a third of them dug in on islands throughout the Pacific. These men were thoroughly trained in the Bushido code, which held that it was better to die than to surrender.  Many Japanese soldiers had been cut off from the main army during the Allies’ island-hopping campaign and continued to resist. Sporadic fighting continued for months and in some cases years after the formal surrender.

Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda had been stationed on Lubang Island in the Philippines when it was overrun by U.S. forces in February 1945. Most of the Japanese troops were slain or captured, but Onoda and several other men holed up in the mountainous jungle. The others were eventually killed, but Onoda held out for 29 years, dismissing every attempt to coax him out as a ruse.

In 1974, a college dropout by the name of Norio Suzuki was traveling the world, looking for, as he told his friends, “Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.”  He found Lieutenant Onoda and became friends with him.  (While he may have since seen a panda, reports suggest that he is still looking for the Abominable Snowman.)  Despite Suzuki’s encouragement, Onoda refused to come out of the mountains unless ordered by a superior officer.

Suzuki returned with photographs of him and Onoda and convinced the Japanese government to go after Onoda (they had declared him officially dead years before).  Finally, the government officials located his commanding officer, who went to Lubang in 1974 to order Onoda to give up. The lieutenant stepped out of the jungle to accept the order of surrender in his dress uniform and sword, with his rifle still in operating condition.  Surprisingly, he wasn’t the last Japanese soldier to surrender.  Teruo Nakamura was discovered in December of the same year on Morotai Island in Indonesia.

Sometimes we become so invested in fighting our battles that we fail to recognize that everyone around us has moved on to other goals.  They knew (long before we ever recognized it) that the battle was lost, that it was no longer worth fighting.  Leaders need to know when to cut their losses and move on – sometimes even from a good cause.

As Christian leaders, we have a Superior Officer who will tell us which battles are worth fighting, but we have to evaluate, and we have to ask.  When our activities stop producing fruit, we should consult God before we redouble our efforts.  It may be that He has moved on to other priorities, and there is no sense wasting time on our pet projects when there won’t be an impact at their completion.  In addition, it is also good to ask God to order our priorities when we are in the process of transition or when we’ve reached a natural stopping point.

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails. (Proverbs 19:21)

“I’m going to make you an office you can’t refuse.”

In Thailand, the boss of an office is like a father to those who work for him.  Because of his rank in the organization and often his age, he is held in very high esteem, and whatever he says goes.  It’s a very hierarchical system – reminds me of The Godfather.

Since I moved here ten months ago, the director of the local office from my organization has been encouraging me to come to the office more all the time.  I show up sometimes, but I’ve tried not to spend too much time there, because I don’t want to give the perception of oversight (I work with the area/regional team), and, well….because I like working from home.

I’m more of an introvert, and when I go to the office, I’m still treated somewhat like a celebrity (for reasons I don’t really understand).  I don’t speak more than a mouthful of Thai, which makes communication painful for all of us.  I don’t adhere to a normal work pattern, so I’m often up late into the night and start the day whenever.  All that and they frown on me coming to work in my pajamas.  (That’s almost a non-negotiable.)

But I think I’m about to succumb to the director’s influence.  Last week, he had his team create an office for me.  They cleared out all the storage supplies that were there before, hooked up a LAN line and introduced me to my cube-mates.  Then he told everyone in the office that I was going to be working there, so every staff member I came in contact with asked me when I would start coming in.  He made me an office I can’t refuse.

I’ve been in three times this week.  It’s a good start, I think.  But yesterday, Godfather took another step toward my indoctrination into the family.  After coming to welcome me to my new space, he said something in Thai to the staff member nearest me.  Seeing my puzzled look after he left, she whispered, “He told us to only speak to you in Thai.”

You think Vito Corleone had a Thai cousin?