To deal successfully with transition, you need to determine precisely what changes in their existing behavior and attitudes people will have to make. It isn’t enough to tell them that they have to work as a team. They need to know how teamwork differs behaviorally and attitudinally from the way they are working now. What must they stop doing? And what are they going to have to start doing? Be specific. Until these changes are spelled out, people won’t be able to understand what you tell them.
Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: • What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? • What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective? “The key is to ask not for five or ten things but just one,” Bock says. “That way it’s easier for people to answer. And when a leader asks for feedback in this way, it makes it safe for the people who work with them to do the same. It can get contagious.”
We put in some new systems, and they learned new ways of interacting. It’s strange to think that a wave of creativity and innovation can be unleashed by something as mundane as changing systems and learning new ways of interacting. But it’s true, because building creative purpose isn’t really about creativity. It’s about building ownership, providing support, and aligning group energy toward the arduous, error-filled, ultimately fulfilling journey of making something new.
Good listening is about more than nodding attentively; it’s about adding insight and creating moments of mutual discovery. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things: 1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.
the teams met every morning for ten minutes for the first two months. Only such frequent clustering can override the old habits and the old self-images and build the new relations that teamwork requires. And you can give no stronger message about a new priority than to give it a visible place on everyone’s calendar.
Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments. One of the best at this is Gregg Popovich. Most NBA teams run time-outs according to a choreographed protocol: First the coaches huddle as a group for a few seconds to settle on a message, then they walk over to the bench to deliver that message to the players. However, during about one time-out a month, the Spurs coaches huddle for a time-out…and then never walk over to the players. The players sit on the bench, waiting for Popovich to show up. Then, as they belatedly realize he isn’t coming, they take charge, start talking among themselves, and figure out a plan. The New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team have made a habit of this, as players lead several practice sessions each week with little input from the coaches. When I asked Dave Cooper to name the single trait that his best-performing SEAL teams shared, he said, “The best teams tended to be the ones I wasn’t that involved with, especially when it came to training. They would disappear and not rely on me at all. They were better at figuring out what they needed to do themselves than I could ever be.”
“Danny realized that he needed to be in two places at once. Which meant that he had to find a way to deliver the signal. People will respond to what their boss feels is important. So Danny had to define and articulate what was important.”
In some of these children, such differences represent a “developmental lag,” and over an extended period of time the child (and brain) mature, albeit 2 to 3 years later than in peers. For other children with ADHD, however, this maturation does not take place, and the weaknesses persist until adulthood. It’s important to know that children can and do vary in the development of these and other executive skills without qualifying for a diagnosis of ADHD or any other “clinical” diagnosis. As is the case with almost any set of skills, children (and adults) have strengths and weaknesses that fall along a continuum.
“You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”
Giving children developmentally appropriate chores to do is one of the best ways to begin teaching task initiation. Starting in preschool or kindergarten, this helps teach children that there are times when they have to set aside what they want to do in favor of something that needs to get done even though it may not be fun.
Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. This step follows the previous one. Remember, transition starts with an ending. You can’t grasp the new thing until you’ve let go of the old thing. It’s this process of letting go that people resist, not the change itself. Their resistance can take the form of foot-dragging or sabotage, and you have to understand the pattern of loss to be ready to deal with the resistance and keep it from getting out of hand.
When you stress access to a desired activity rather than lack of access to a desired activity, you’re keeping your child’s eyes on the prize and not the work that has to be done to get it. The behavioral data we’ve collected show that this shift really is effective: we’ve seen increases in direction following and decreases in task refusal and power struggles when adults use positive statements with kids rather than negative ones.
“Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see, acknowledge, and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours, and then you won’t have to sell it—it will be theirs.
Use a self-monitoring audiotape, available at A.D.D. Warehouse (see the Resources), to help your child stay on task. This tape sounds electronic tones at random intervals. When the tone sounds, the child is to ask herself, “Was I paying attention?”
Make increasing attention a gradual process. Take a baseline by clocking how long your child can stick with a chore, homework, or other assigned task before needing a break. Once you establish the “base rate,” set a kitchen timer for 2–3 minutes longer than the base rate and challenge your child to keep working until the timer rings.
Keep a reduced but still present level of monitoring in place for the whole year. It may be hard to stick with it when things seem to be going so well, but it’s only with this duration of reinforcement that many kids maintain long-term improvements in sustained attention.
Don’t make any significant changes in the plan until your child has maintained improvements over one and preferably two marking terms (3 to 4 months). It’s not unusual for this plan to work initially, making parents and teachers overconfident that the problem has been solved permanently. But if you drop the plan altogether or become a lot less vigilant, your child’s performance is likely to return, even if only gradually, to preplan levels.
Make sure your child has the same assigned location in the classroom every day so the teacher knows that if she is not there, she’s probably off-task. We’ve used this system in public school classrooms for a number of years and found that success depends in good part on the teacher (or paraprofessional if there is one in class) maintaining the cueing and check-in system. The only way for this to be practical is for the student to be in a consistent location in the room.
Ellen never seems to get her second-grade work done. The problem began last year in first grade once students were expected to complete seatwork independently. Her teacher made some accommodations, such as reducing the workload, because Ellen was clearly a bright student who seemed to be able to master the lessons even though she couldn’t always get her work done. This year’s teacher is not so inclined, though, and work completion is becoming a bigger issue. Mrs. Barker, her teacher, first raised the issue at the parent–teacher conference that accompanied the end of the first marking period. “Ellen is such a social child,” she said. “She seems to be able to keep track of everything else going on in the class and wants to help other students when they get stuck, but somehow can’t find her way to getting through her own work.” Shortly afterward, Mrs. Barker started sending home with Ellen the work that she hadn’t finished in school with the instructions to get it done for homework. Her mother finds herself spending long homework sessions with Ellen trying to get her through the work.
