YOUR ROAD MAP TO COMPETENCE

Crafting a Powerful Personal Plan

Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another . . . The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.

—M. SCOTT PECK

Thanks for sticking with me this far. In this chapter, all the learning and reflection you’ve done up to this point will get personal—literally. I’m going to help you create a personal plan for deepening, expanding, and sustaining your conversational capacity. Your personal plan turns this book into a catalyst for continual learning rather than a “read it one time and set it on the shelf” experience.

What Is Your Personal Plan?

Simply put, a personal plan is your road map to competence. It’s a blueprint for how to bring more intentionality and self-control to how you behave under pressure. This is important. Without a deliberate strategy, your min and “win” tendencies will continue to get the best of you, no matter how proper and principled your intentions. Think of your personal plan, therefore, as an ongoing investment in yourself, in your ability to keep your behavior and your good intentions aligned when it matters, in your emotional and social intelligence, your grit and gumption, and your leadership effectiveness. It’s an investment, in other words, in your conversational capacity.

What You’ll Do

In this chapter, you’ll put together a personal plan by doing the following things:

1.   Generate “structural tension” by assessing your current state (where you’re now in terms of your ability to stay in the sweet spot when it counts), and a vision of where you want to go (the conversational capacity you want to achieve).

2.   Identify a meaningful place to practice in what I call the “leadership and learning zone (LLZ).”

3.   Select specific practices you’ll use to bridge the gap between your current conversational capacity and the capacity you’d like to achieve.

4.   Create a progress and accountability strategy to help you stick with the practice.

5.   Review an example of a Personal Plan.

Structural Tension

As I mentioned in the Introduction, to create a path forward, you want to be clear about two things: where you are now (your current state) and where you want to be (your desired state).¹ “I call the relationship between the vision and current reality structural tension. During the creative process, you have an eye on where you want to go, and you also have an eye on where you currently are,” says Robert Fritz, the author of The Path of Least Resistance. “There will always be structural tension in the beginning of the creative process, for there will always be a discrepancy between what you want and what you have . . . In fact, part of your job as a creator is to form this tension.”²

Your personal plan will help generate this creative gap and outline the ways you’re going to bridge it.

Your Current State

To assess where you are now, reflect on these questions. I’ve included space below in case you want to take a few notes:

•   Where do I need to shore up my ability to remain balanced under pressure?

•   What are the situations in which I’d like to be more conversationally effective?

•   In what situations do I tend to see daylight between my intentions and my behavior?

•   Where would I like to wield more influence, or respond more deliberately and less defensively?

•   Where do I find my effectiveness hijacked by my need to “win”? What are typical triggers?

•   Where do I find my effectiveness compromised by my need to minimize? What are common triggers?

Your Vision

To generate structural tension, you also need to create a compelling vision of your future state. To do this, ask yourself: “Where do I want to go? What is the level of competence I want to achieve?” To find answers to these questions, imagine it is six months from now and you’re celebrating your progress:

•   What is different about your conversational capacity?

•   How do you see yourself thinking and behaving differently?

•   What is the competence you can now demonstrate?

•   How do other people describe the differences they see in your behavior, especially how you react under pressure? (Your colleagues? The people who report to you? Your boss? Your family and friends?)

The Leadership and Learning Zone

You now have a view of your current state and your future vision. Your goal now is to close the gap, and that will require practice. To find a spot to perform that practice, I encourage you to look for a place where your personal development goals and the needs of your team or organization intersect. This is your leadership and learning zone (LLZ)—the place where your personal goals and the challenges facing your team, organization, or community meet. Your objective is to identify an issue in the LLZ that meets three criteria:

•   You care about it.

•   It’ll make a constructive difference.

•   You are in a position to influence it.

Organizational Needs and Challenges

If you want to build your competence while exercising leadership, the issues in your leadership and learning zone (LLZ) provide the best place to practice. (If you’re going to practice while addressing an issue, after all, it might as well be something significant.) Steve’s a great example. He increased his competence while addressing a destructive dynamic in his management team. With the same work, he elevated his own performance and that of his organization. Not bad.

To help you identify a similar opportunity, let me reiterate this idea from the Introduction. Your workplace is full of places to practice:

•   Do you see policies that subvert your organization’s strategy or decrease the effectiveness of the workplace?

•   Do you see management behavior that undermines the goals of the organization?

•   Are your meetings less than stellar?

•   Is there an opportunity for improvement that is being missed or ignored?

•   Are there “baton passes” between people and groups during which people keep dropping the baton?

•   Are there interpersonal or intergroup relationships in need of repair?

•   Is the decision-making in your team unclear and inconsistent? Are major problems continually downplayed or avoided?

•   Is your organization facing hard new realities that people refuse to take on and tackle?

•   Are people clinging to the status quo when major change is required?

•   Are there festering conflicts that generate lots of heat and dysfunction but little light and progress?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ve just identified a place you can practice, learn, and grow.

With all of this in mind, here are a few additional questions to help you identify opportunities in your leadership and learning zone (LLZ). I’ve included a little space below so you can jot down your ideas:

•   What do I see as the major challenges facing my team or organization?

•   How adaptive are these issues?

•   What do others see as the main challenges? Are people on the same page, or do they see things differently? If they do see things differently, why?

•   Is there a lack of fit between our conversational culture and our organizational strategy?

•   Are there gaps between what is espoused in the organization and how people actually behave?

•   Is there a problem with how information flows up and down the chain of command, or between people or groups?

•   Are there important issues that trigger more arguing and bickering than learning or progress?

•   Are there important, but undiscussable, issues lurking in the hallways?

•   Are there festering conflicts eroding morale, trust, and performance?

•   Are there issues that aren’t getting the traction they deserve because there is not enough curiosity in the conversations?

•   Is there a gap between our strategy and organizational capabilities required to make the strategy work?

•   Are there places where critical factors such as engagement, trust, or alignment are lacking?

•   Are there cultural, functional, or other boundaries across which people need to work more effectively?

•   Where do teamwork, essential work relationships, or organizational performance need improving?

•   Are there critical processes, important meetings, pivotal decisions, strategic changes, or other important activities that aren’t functioning as well as they should?

Use this list of questions to prime the pump, and consider what opportunities you see in your team, organization, or community.

Your Personal Plan

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

You’ve been thinking about your current state, your goals, and places for practice. Before moving on, take a few minutes and answer the following questions:

What are your personal conversational capacity development goals in these three areas?

Awareness: ________________________________________

Mindset: ________________________________________

Skills: ________________________________________

What are one or two significant issues in your LLZ that you plan to address?

Okay. You’re now ready to pick the practices you’ll use to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. I encourage you to revisit Chapters 5, 9, and 14 to review your options. Your choices should include the following practices:

One practice to start strengthening your awareness: ________________________________________

One practice to adopt and strengthen the conversational capacity mindset:________________________________________

One practice to build a skill that will bring more balance to your behavior:________________________________________

Don’t Overdo It

You might be tempted to do more than just one practice in each area, but I strongly suggest you balance patience with persistence and stick with just one. This is going to be harder than it seems, so don’t overdo it. And remember, you’re going to be revisiting this process periodically to assess your progress and begin new practices, so you’ll have plenty of time to do all the work you’d like.

Progress and Accountability

Don’t view this as a simple four-step process: (1) Assess (2) Plan (3) Practice (4) Re-assess. Done. View it instead as an ongoing process of learning. It’s an iterative, adaptive development process, not a routine, one-time, check-the-box activity. You don’t go through the process once and receive a diploma. You don’t ever really graduate. If you’re serious about building your conversational capacity, you’ll repeat the process over and over.

Take time every three to four weeks to get off the dance floor of your busy office and practice to climb back up to the balcony and ask yourself reflective questions: How am I doing? Do I need more time on these practices, or is it time to expand my practice and try something new? Revisit your goals after you’ve made progress and continue to set higher goals and adopt new practices.

Again, it’s like a jazz performance. Rather than having every note in your personal learning plan all scripted out in advance, begin with a set of ideas, start practicing, and then improvise and learn as you go along. Improvisational learning, as Frank Barrett puts it, is “the art of adjusting, flexibly adapting, learning through trial-and-error initiatives, inventing ad hoc responses, and discovering as you go.”³

Yes, let’s see where this leads.

—FRANK BARRETT

The idea is to create a feedback loop of learning in which your practice sparks more growth and competence, which in turn leads you to adjust your plan in order to push yourself to even higher levels of performance. The basic process looks like this:

•   Plan. Identify a practice in each domain to help you move toward your goals.

•   Practice. Conduct that practice for a specific amount of time as you address an issue in your leadership and learning zone.

•   Assess your progress. From time to time reflect on these questions:

•   Where am I now?

•   What have I learned?

•   How far have I progressed?

•   Adjust your plan.

•   Given my progress, do I need to adjust my goals?

•   What practices do I now need to adopt to further close the gap between my current state and future vision on the awareness, mindset, and skill set fronts?

•   Continue to practice. Onward and upward you go.

Think of your personal plan as you would an exercise plan. Consider distance running. You don’t just get up one day and run a marathon. You start with shorter runs and slowly build up your fitness. In the same way, you don’t just read my books, complete my eCourse, or attend a workshop, and immediately master your ability to stay in the sweet spot under pressure. You slowly build up your capacity with regular practice. If you want to join the ranks of elite runners or people with high conversational capacity, you must put in the miles.

The trick is to create a plan and then follow it through. Here are three things that will help you get traction and build momentum:

•   Create a “Daily Question List.”

•   Work with learning partners.

•   Schedule your review.

Create a “Daily Question List”

In his book Triggers, Marshall Goldsmith outlines a strategy for establishing a new habit called a “Daily Question List” (DQL).⁴ A DQL is a list of questions you ask yourself each day to check in about your goals and the work you’re doing to meet them. Because you track your answers, a DQL is a great way to hold yourself accountable for your effort and progress. The trick is to ask the right kind of questions. Goldsmith explains that you should avoid passive questions:

When people are asked passive questions they almost invariably provide “environmental” answers. Thus, if an employee answers “no” when asked, “Do you have clear goals?” the reasons are attributed to external factors such as, “My manager can’t make up his mind” or “The company changes strategy every month.” The employee seldom looks to take responsibility and say, “It’s my fault.” Blame is assigned elsewhere. The passive construction of “Do you have clear goals” begets a passive explanation.

Goldsmith then nails the point, “. . . passive questions can be the natural enemy of taking personal responsibility and demonstrating accountability. They can give people the unearned permission to pass the buck to anyone and anything but themselves.” Put differently, passive questions produce victim-oriented responses.

He then explains the power of using active questions in your DQL: “There’s a difference between ‘Do you have clear goals’ and ‘Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?’” he says. Active questions, in other words, encourage us to take responsibility, to hold ourselves accountable, to take stock of our actions relative to our goals, and train our beam of focus on the fit between our goals and our efforts. “Adding the words ‘did I do my best?’” Goldsmith explains, injects “an element of trying into the equation.” Active questions produce responsibility-oriented answers.

Here is a list of questions you might consider for your DQL. I’ve also included a question that focuses on upcoming learning opportunities:

•   Did I do my best to notice and journal situations in which I was triggered today?

•   Did I do my best to remain focused in situations where focus was key to my effectiveness today?

•   Did I do my best to notice a situation in which patterns of behavior, mine or others, and the purpose of the conversation, were out of sync today?

•   What opportunities for practice will I experience tomorrow, or in the next few days, and how can I take the greatest advantage of those situations?

Work with Learning Partners

Another practice that Marshall Goldsmith and I both advocate is to select and work with a learning partner. (Goldsmith uses the term coach.) A learning partner can be a colleague, friend, professional coach, or even a boss. Your partner can play a variety of roles to help you build your skills and stick with your plan, from more casual conversations about your progress, to daily check-ins and regular feedback. The point is to share with your learning partner all your goals and DQLs, and to invite them to provide as much support as needed to help you along your learning path.

Schedule Your Review

Schedule a regular time on your calendar (every few weeks, perhaps) to review your progress and adjust your plan. If you don’t schedule it, you’ll likely forget to do it and your progress will grind to a halt. It doesn’t matter if you have a membership if you never visit the gym, and it doesn’t matter if you have a personal plan if you don’t continually use it and revise it.

Example: The Flamethrower’s Personal Plan

Imagine that the Flamethrower, the colorful character you met in my first book, created his own personal plan. It might look something like this:

•   Goal and description. “I want to be more genuinely curious, less stuck in my own views and more open to seeing things through the eyes of others. I’m not doing this to agree with everyone but to learn, and to earn a reputation as someone genuinely collaborative and trustworthy.”

•   Awareness practice. “I need to get better at catching, naming, and taming my reactions, so I’m going to keep a trigger journal.”

•   Mindset practice. “I’ll start an ‘Indianapolis Journal,’ which will have the added benefit of increasing my awareness, and I’ll keep the three questions in front of me on a small laminated card.”

•   Skill practice. “Testing my views will make the biggest difference in how I come across to my team, so it’s the logical place to start. To get better at doing this, I’m going to create a master list of tests, starting with those Craig has provided, and then add to the list by coming up with new tests of my own. I’ll then use these tests every time I put forward a view.”

•   My DQL:

•   “Did I do my best to monitor and document my triggers today?”

•   “Did I do my best to notice and document any ‘Indianapolis moments’” ?

•   “Did I do my best to test my views today?”

•   “What opportunities for practice and learning will I have tomorrow?”

•   Learning partners. “I’ll share my plan with my entire team and ask them for patience and help. I’ll also ask one colleague, Camila, to check in with me every other day, watch me in meetings, and provide feedback on how well or how poorly I’m doing with my goals.”

•   Scheduled check-in. “I’ve scheduled a review every third Friday of the month for the next six months. This will give me a chance to assess my progress and adjust my practices accordingly.”

Short Wrap

“Ambition is the path to success,” said Bill Bradley. “Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.”⁵ As you practice be persistent and serious-minded, but also remember to be patient and lighthearted, especially when you stumble. Your quest is for ongoing learning and expanded competence, not comfort-seeking or ego-strokes. View the inevitable surprises, frustrations, and slipups as a valuable part of the learning process—as encouraging signs that you’re making progress.

If you can muster the discipline to stick with this process, you’ll see remarkable growth in your conversational capacity. You’ll be better next week than you are this week, better next month than the month before, and better next year than you are this year.