Training in Context

Welcome to part five of the series on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system. Because this is a fairly intensive plan to implement, I am writing a series of posts that will guide you through the stages of implementation over several weeks. This will give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before beginning the next one.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the fourth habit: (from Wikipedia)

Think Win/Win describes an attitude whereby mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of oneself, or, in the case of a conflict, both parties involved.

Habit IV - Think Win/Win

Stephen Covey’s description of the Fourth Habit of Highly Effective People is based on two important concepts:

1. The first three Habits are “Private Victories”, the building blocks of personal growth and development. Being proactive in your environment, practicing the skill of visualizing results, and focusing on the things that are truly important are the core goals of self-mastery. The fourth Habit is the first of the “Public Victories”, an interpersonal skill that enhances your leadership skills.
2. Think Win/Win depends upon the “emotional bank account” that other people hold for you. The emotional bank account is an expression of your credibility, your communication level, and your ability to persuade/influence others.

The Emotional Bank Account

Every time you express your faith in someone else, through trusting them to do their job, or acting on their input, or even just listening when someone needs to talk, you are making a deposit in the emotional bank account that you have with that person. This bank account is a virtual and tenuous thing. It is that person’s measure of you as a person, and of your particular relationship. When you act with integrity, keep your commitments, and communicate clearly you become a depositor.

You can also make withdrawals from that account, and when you do it hurts that person in some way. Being late to a meeting, being disrespectful, acting with immaturity - all of these are examples of how to diminish your ability to influence people in a positive way.

Think about the petty office tyrant in your past (or present), the micro-manager that insists on practically doing your job herself, or that “friend” that you can count on when you are picking up the bar tab - but is never around when you need to clean out your garage. These are the people with low (or over-drawn!) emotional bank accounts. Do they get your trust? Do you put any credence in promises that they make? Can you count on this person in a pinch? I would hazard a guess that the answer is, “No”.

6 Ways to Make Deposits

1. Understand the individual - Like a snowflake, every person is different. Some, of course, are flakier than others. Develop an understanding of what makes people “tick”, play to their strengths and help them to compensate for their weaknesses.
2. Attend to the little things - Small acts of kindness and appreciation go a long way with people. I have seen a co-worker’s attitude turn 180 degrees when I noticed that they were having a tough day and I asked them, “How can I help?” Sometimes they just need someone to talk to, other times they need a little more.
3. Keep your commitments - Be on time to meetings. Complete assigned tasks. Do what you say you will do. This sounds silly, practically a cliche, but it is less common than you think. A corollary is to learn to ask for help. If you find that you are not going to be able to keep a commitment, ask someone to help you. This way those that are counting on you will know that you are not hanging them out to dry.
4. Clarify your expectations/understand theirs - Again, clear communication of the end results of an action as well as the steps to get there enable tasks and projects to be completed successfully. Poor communication or changing expectations creates stress and frustration, enormous withdrawals from the emotional bank account!
5. Show personal integrity - Develop trust and respect for the people you know, and the people that know you. Your personal reputation is the lynch-pin of all of your interpersonal relationships.
6. Apologize for withdrawals - You will make withdrawals from your emotional bank accounts from time to time. Tell them that you know it happened and that you are sorry. Show real sincerity. Ask them how you can learn from the experience so that it doesn’t happen again.

“We have committed the Golden Rule to memory;
let us now commit it to life.”

~ Edwin Markham

Believing in Win/Win

The emotional bank account is the foundation of the fourth Habit. It cultivates a state of mind, and a belief in your heart, that you can and should seek to discover the mutual benefit in all human relationships. Most, if not the vast majority, of your relationships depend on interpersonal transactions that are interdependent upon other relationships. You may have a friend that wants to borrow your truck to help another friend move. If you let your friend down, his friend gets caught in the withdrawal too.

On the other hand, you can make a deposit by not only offering to lend your truck, but offering to help. This can gain a new friend, create a new relationship, and strengthen your current friendship. The moving gets done faster, and everybody wins.

Getting to Win/Win

The Win/Win mind-set can be a difficult path to follow until you develop the skills and attributes that are needed. The first of these is Character - the measure of your personal integrity, maturity, and an abundance mentality.

• Integrity - Can your friends and colleagues count on you? The first three Habits are the tools that you need to pro-actively execute your daily activities according to your deeply-held principles and values. Becoming results-focused aids you in keeping your commitments, and knowing which results are most important and actively working toward them creates a discipline of success.
• Maturity - Having the courage to stand up for your principles while maintaining a sense of consideration for the principles of others is the hallmark of the Win/Win philosophy. Communication is at the core of maturity, in order that you listen and understand the situation completely.
• Abundance Mentality - Believe that there is plenty of success to go around. In our hyper-competitive business culture, this may seem counter-intuitive or even wrong. The truth is, “success” is not a pie of limited size - just because I get a bigger slice doesn’t (necessarily) reduce the size of your slice. Become part of the culture that enables and cultivates this mentality, as opposed to the back-stabbing and sabotage that accompanies a mentality of scarcity.

Practical Applications

Those of you who have been reading since the beginning of this series should now see where the first three Habits have brought you. A brand-new paradigm is in front of you that has the power and potential to revolutionize your relationships. Using the trust that comes from your character will enable you to grow and enrich your relationships with enhanced credibility; open, two-way communications; confidence in risk-taking that can lead to incredible successes.

1. Incorporate Your Weekly Plan

Take some time to discern Win/Win activities during the Weekly Planning of your activities this week. (See the last post for a 7 Habits Worksheet and instructions.) Download this week’s worksheet and brainstorm some ideas for taking this interaction to the next level, making it a Win/Win proposition:

• Clarify the desired results
• Communicate guidelines and measurements
• Allocate resources
• Define the accountability for each party
• Outline the consequences of failing to live up to the agreement

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit to the Abundance Mentality. Let go of the idea that others win at your expense, or that your success diminishes another. Pull more people into your circle, your team must get larger in order to have greater success!

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Pick someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else that you have recently added to your circle of influence.

This article series builds on a recent post at Productivity in Context - Getting the Most Out of a Meeting.

Meetings do not happen by accident

Whether you are planning a regularly scheduled staff meeting, a faculty retreat, a product launch planning session, or even a sales conference, every meeting requires careful advance preparation. An effective meeting has an intentional outcome that leaves the participants satisfied with the process that led to that outcome. This series of posts will teach you the basic steps needed to plan and execute a successful meeting.

The basic components of a successful meeting

Three things are needed, at the very least, for a successful meeting - a facilitator, a group of attendees, and a reason to gather.

In order to have a successful meeting, it is important for the facilitator to consider the following list of components:

1. A meeting needs to have an objective that defines the purpose of the meeting.
2. Each participant should understand or have an expectation of what will occur by the end of the meeting.
3. A meeting should provide some benefit for the investment of time to attend.
4. The facilitator needs to create a list of attendees.
5. The physical space for the meeting should be appropriate to the format and facilitate two-way participation.
6. A clear definition of the roles and responsibilities of the participants.
7. An agenda and prepared materials.
8. Define the content of the meeting, and the process to deliver it.
9. Proper presentation skills to inform, influence, or motivate the attendees.
10. An atmosphere of trust and security.
11. Win-win approaches to decision-making.
12. Access to a time-keeper to keep the agenda on track.
13. A method to track and assign Next Actions.
14. A method to follow-up on these assignments and communicate progress reports.

The attendees also need to have a basic understanding of what it is that they are expected to bring to the meeting in terms of information or equipment.

Putting it all together

The reason for having a meeting needs to be compelling. The participants must be able to see that their investment in time to attend the meeting will have a return that exceeds the opportunity cost of attending.

The next post in this series will address the content of the meeting and how to construct it.

Take Control of Your Schedule

Last week we learned about the different ways that our time and effort is spent or invested. This week we will focus on how to establish your personal Roles and how to use them to plan your week.

Before we begin, please download this 7 Habits Weekly Planner in PDF.

This template will allow you lay out your weekly hard landscape at a glance.

Identifying your Roles

Every task that we address and activity that we pursue is an expression of one of the Roles that we play each day of our lives. Whether the role is basic, such as Cook when we make dinner, or more complex, like Husband when I plan and execute our weekend getaway to celebrate our anniversary, every part of our daily lives can be represented by a Role.

When you look over your To-Do list, you should be able to identify which Role each action affects. Some sample Roles:

• Spouse
• Parent
• Mentor
• Home manager
• Spiritual leader
• Office manager
• Team member
• Employee
• Business person/owner
• Writer/painter/creative artist

Each person will have their own list of Roles that they play over the course of their daily life, and the list will change over time as new commitments are added and others are completed. Note also, that the majority of the Roles are described as being part of a relationship with another person or group.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…”
~ John Donne

Look over your list of roles in the context of the coming week, which Roles are affected by up-coming actions? Which Roles would you like to develop or enhance? Write your own list of Roles in the boxes on the left-hand side of the worksheet.

Planning your Week Continue reading »

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Welcome to part four of the series on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system. Because this is a fairly intensive plan to implement, I am writing a series of posts that will guide you through the stages of implementation over seven (or so) weeks. This will give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before beginning the next one.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the third habit: (from Wikipedia)

Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important. Delegation is presented as an important part of time management. Successful delegation, according to Covey, focuses on results and benchmarks that are to be agreed upon in advance, rather than prescribed as detailed work plans.

This habit is so important that Stephen Covey wrote an entire book about it, which I recommend to everyone that I meet! You can order it from Amazon here [link].

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” ~ Goethe

The third habit is the practical application of what we learned in the first two habits. Habit 1: Be Proactive puts you in charge of your responsibilities and your environment. Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind shows you the steps that you need to follow to create a path toward completing the various tasks and activities that you are responsible for.

Putting First Things First is the habit that enables you to actualize your principles and values by prioritizing your tasks and actions. The daily exercise of assigning priorities according to your values and principles puts you in control of your current situation and points you toward advancing and achieving your long-term goals.

Ask yourself two questions

Get a piece of paper [or download the worksheet] and write down the answers to these 2 questions:

1) What is one thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my personal life?

2) What is another thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my work or professional life?

Remember that there is no one “right” answer. Activities that have a positive impact on your life can vary, sometimes wildly. Some folks may have a simple answer like “Lose X pounds by eating a salad and walking for 15 minutes each day at lunch.” Others may have a more complex answer, such as “Improve personal communication skills and team cohesiveness by scheduling a weekly one-on-one meeting with each of the salespeople and going out on calls with them once per month.” Whatever your answer is it likely involves something that you already know that you should do yet, for whatever reason, don’t.

“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to their strength of purpose.” ~ E.M. Gray

Importance vs. Urgency

Take a look at the answers that you wrote down. Do they reflect an activity or practice that is important to your personal or professional development? Yes? If not, you may have a wrong answer!

Now for the tricky part: Do you consider this activity to be urgent? Most likely this answer is “No”, or you would not be neglecting it! The struggle of importance vs. urgency is one that we all face every day. The tasks and activities that we execute tend to be sorted by urgency, by the scale of their effect on our immediate situation.

I am sure that most of you reading this can recall a day when you were frantically busy “putting out fires” but nothing you would consider Important was accomplished. This is not to say that responding to a crisis is not important, and no one is recommending that you file your receipts when the building is on fire. But I would submit that taking proactive steps to avert crises is surely more important, yet considered less urgent. Whenever I am in this type of situation, the expression, “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there always seems to be time to do it over” comes to mind.

Your personal values and principles should reflect the idea that having the appropriate tools and training is not only important, but urgent, and must be acted upon.

The Time Management Matrix

One of Stephen Covey’s most famous contributions to the world of Time Management is the Time Management Matrix, as shown below:

This matrix (abbreviated as: TMM) divides the way we spend or invest our time into 4 Quadrants based on a value of Importance vs. Urgency. Most of us, before we took an active interest in productivity practices, likely spent a lot of time in Quadrants 1 & 4. The diametrically opposite states of crisis management and goofing off are the most common ‘default’ states for busy people. Because we spend time goofing off instead of investing time in preparedness, we are later forced to spend time recovering from catastrophe.

Being busy, however, is not the same as being productive. I know people that can be busy all day long and accomplish exactly zero by 5:00. One can be very busy maintaining the widget machine, but if there are no widgets being cranked then your time & effort do not count as being invested (i.e., generating a return) but as being spent.

Time that is simply spent is gone forever.

Covey contends that if we consciously work toward inhabiting the Quadrant 2 portion of the TMM we can avert the crises and problems of Quadrant 1, delegate or eliminate the ‘filler’ work of Quadrant 3, and avoid the wasteful spending of Quadrant 4.

How do we get there

One of my favorite movies is “Funny Farm“, starring Chevy Chase (no judging!!). There is a scene in the movie where a couple of hard-bitten New Yorkers working for a moving company ask for directions. The man they ask, an older fellow sitting on his porch sorting apples, responds to their question with, “If I was goin’ to Redbud, I wouldn’t start from here.”

How often do you feel like that while you are coping with an environment dominated by Q1 activities - emergencies, deadlines missed, crises, employee difficulties? At times like this Q2 can seem so far away that is seems like you can’t get there from here. The secret path to Q2 lies in reducing the size of Quadrants 3 & 4.

Delete, Defer, and Delegate

Take a look at the graphic of the TMM, and the types of activities described in Q3 and Q4. The very first thing that you can do to reduce the scale of this real estate is to Delete those tasks and activities that are:

1. Not Important
2. Not Urgent
3. Can be deleted without affecting the organization

Those “Fwd:Fwd:Fwd” e-mail jokes, Minesweeper, Solitaire games and the like all need to go. Show some discipline and you can have the ‘fun’ things back when you have grabbed the reins of everything else. Be ruthless. Those stacks of magazines that you have been meaning to read? Toss’em or file’em. But get them out of sight.

Second, take a look at the tasks or activities that can be Deferred. If it does not need to get done today, file it in the Tickler File, or write it in your calendar. Get rid of it. But be careful! Only Defer the things that have survived the Deletion phase and can’t (or shouldn’t) be done by someone else. Keep in mind that some of these tasks can become opportunities for development, your own or a team member’s.

The third step is to Delegate as much as possible, but be responsible about it. This is a powerful tool for leveraging your own Quadrant 2 real estate. Is there something on your list that can’t be delegated today, but could be turned into a training and development tool for one of your team members? This is a Q2 opportunity! Embrace the change and let planning, prevention, and relationship-building become your watchwords.

Learning to say “No”

Another method of increasing the amount of time you get to invest in Q2 is by saying “No” to some of the new inputs that belong to Quadrants 1, 3, & 4. Obviously there are assignments that you cannot say no to, but generally you can apply the following criteria to new inputs and demands on your time:

1. Does this new input/demand fall into Quadrant 2?
2. Does this new input/demand match my values and principles?
3. Does this new input/demand align with my Personal Mission Statement?
4. Does this new input/demand advance any of my long-term goals?

If the answer to 2 or more of these questions is “No”, then you should seriously consider that your answer to the new demand be “No”. Taking on a new task or activity that does not meet at least 2 of the above criteria will increase your stress level and have a negative impact on your overall productivity.

You will not want to do this new task, because it does not fit into your model for achieving your purposes, and it very well may not get your best efforts.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of this post, where we will examine methods and practices for investing more of your time in Quadrant 2, for greater returns on your productivity. Don’t forget to get the worksheet [right-click and "Save As"].