iDoneThis blog

The most productive thing you’ll do today is practice.

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:54 -0400

I wasn’t originally sold on the idea of blogging.

Even when I tried to get in the habit of posting, I found it hard to stick with. Blogging took time — time to write essays daily, put in links, clean up spam, and respond to the comments that trickled in, time that was uncompensated. Why, I wondered, would I take time away from paying assignments to put my work out there for free?

Even after my book, 168 Hours, came out in 2010, and I realized I needed to interact with readers, I still thought blogging was a side venture to my real writing. More days than not, I’d take 30-60 minutes to write a post and publish it, but I still viewed it more as a labor of love (or at least PR) than anything else.

Then something funny happened. About a year into daily blogging, I’d carve out time to write a draft of an essay for a newspaper or magazine. I’d give myself until lunch, but by 10:00, I’d be done.

What was going on? I finally figured it out while reading Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Katie Yezzi, and Erica Woolway. These three educators have trained thousands of teachers over the years, and they studied patterns in how teachers improved at their craft, and how others do, too. The big breakthroughs, they noted, came from drills — discrete actions that focus on certain skills — in order to automate certain practices you’d like to improve.

Photo: Matthijs

Basketball players do shooting drills and passing drills. Piano players do arpeggios and scales. As they carve these actions into their muscle and mental memory, they can summon these skills almost by instinct during performances or games. That gives them the mental space to focus on bigger things — the arc of a piece, the layout of players on the court.

For a writer, blogging turns out to be a daily drill. By writing lots of don’t-need-to-be-perfect blog posts, I learned how to crank out rough drafts fast. By carving out time for daily practice, I made myself more efficient at my work. Each hour spent blogging saved me time later as I stewed less over drafts and had more time for edits.

Put in that light, blogging now seems like the most productive part of my day. Not only am I interacting with readers, I’m getting faster at what I do! Just as I accepted practice as part of studying the piano years ago, I embrace blogging as the “practicing” part of my writing work.

If you’d like to get more efficient at your work, making time every day for practice drills could likewise be one of the most productive decisions you make. To be sure, not everyone has a job where the drills are as obvious as blogging, in retrospect, was for me. But if you think about your job and how you spend your time, you can likely see certain skills you use repeatedly.

Maybe you make presentations. Maybe you deliver feedback to employees. Maybe you field hostile questions from clients. Think about how you can isolate these skills and practice them repeatedly. Ask your team members to launch a rapid-fire barrage of criticism about a proposal at the end of a staff meeting, for instance.

Most people don’t consciously practice their job. If you do, it can be a source of major competitive advantage. Keep track of your practice and how you’re improving individually or as a team by writing it down.

Most importantly, you have to actually make time for your practice drills. When you spend time getting better, you often get better. And that’s a much better place to be.

Do you make time to practice?

Laura Vanderkam is the author of “What the Most Successful People Do at Work” (Portfolio, April 23, 2013), “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast”(Portfolio, 2012), “All The Money In The World” (Portfolio, 2012) and “168 Hours” (Portfolio, 2010); visit www.lauravanderkam.com. Receive a free chapter from “All the Money In The World” by subscribing to my monthly newsletter here.

"You can’t change anything that has happened, but you can change what’s about to happen."

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:52 -0400

“You can’t change anything that has happened, but you can change what’s about to happen.”

- Tina Lin, a 14-year-old high school student, wants to become the first U.S. table tennis Olympics Champion.

Her wise guiding principle? Don’t dwell too much on the past and the points lost. Go after the next ones.

Image: Krissy Venosdale Get happy by making progress and getting creative!

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:55 -0400

Image: Krissy Venosdale

Get happy by making progress and getting creative!

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:50 -0400

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Innovation doesn’t require a fancy degree & high scores.

How to defend against power-play meetings.

What you do doesn’t define you.

The slightly crazy ways Buffer builds an awesome company culture.

Take back control of your attention with conscious computing!

Supercharge your content marketing.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Need to personalize your timezone settings? Head over to email settings.

The Most Innovative Employees at Google Aren't Stanford/MIT grads with Perfect SATs

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:06:00 -0400

Google has long had a reputation for being a place that’s near impossible to get a job if you aren’t a Stanford or MIT grad. They not only asked you for your college GPA, they even asked you what you made on your SAT as a pimple-faced high schooler.

Recently, that’s all changed.

Google’s known for being one of the most data-driven companies in the world and in the area of HR, they’re no different. They even have a department of “people analytics” whose job it is “to apply the same rigor to the people side as to the engineering side.” Google takes this extremely seriously: “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics,” according to Kathryn Dekas, a manager in Google’s “people analytics” team.

Their use of data is so powerful that it was able to refute the bias of the company’s founders towards those with an elite educational background that mirrored theirs — that is, top university grads with high GPAs — and it actually resulted in changed organizational behavior.

For years, candidates were screened according to SAT scores and college grade-point averages, metrics favored by its founders. But numbers and grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as important hiring criteria, says Prasad Setty, vice president for people analytics.

Rather, based on extensive surveys of its work force and performance data, Google discovered that its most innovative workers “are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.”

Google’s findings have a strong congruence with bestselling author Dan Pink’s work, that the source of human motivation and our best work comes from the drive towards autonomy, mastery and purpose. This can clash with high-prestige and credentialed individuals who are driven by external recognition and rewards, not curiosity and craft.

What you might end up with is people who can follow the rules, but not necessarily those who are after moonshot innovation with extreme dispatch and verve.

On Defense Against Power-Play Meetings

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Photo: Victor1558

Almost all meetings are just power-plays in disguise.

Years of my life have been wasted in useless meetings. At a large company, meetings are standard. Get a few people together to talk about a problem. Sounds easy, right?

But instead of a quick resolution, you have to book a conference room for two days from now. Then, you invite stakeholders. Someone suggests so-and-so should attend too. More invites.

When you finally meet, what happens? Nothing, because everyone ends up in a power-play.

Let’s take a look at three common useless meetings and ways we can fix them.

Weekly Team/Status Meetings

Usually someone with direct reports runs this type of meeting. Once a week, for an hour or so, there’s a loose agenda. The manager goes over administrative stuff — stuff that’s going on at the company, stuff that’s going on in your department, stuff on product direction. You can even ask questions! Then, you go around the room to talk about what you accomplished that week.

Nothing useful ever happens in these meetings. Have you ever looked forward to this meeting? No. You surf the internet on your laptop while waiting for lunch time to roll around.

Managers are establishing their authority over everyone. They speak. You listen and don’t speak until spoken to. The danger is that this might tempt you to try to establish that you’re an important person too. You fluff up your weekly status and make it seem like you’re super busy all the time.

What’s the fix?

Try alternative forms of keeping everyone updated. Managers, do you really need to get everyone in a room for an hour? Have everyone send an email update to the team instead. It only takes a few minutes to write up updates to share for the week. Try daily updates or other frequencies that are most optimal for your team.

If you’re not the manager, suggest this method to yours. Any good manager will gladly accept feedback on how to improve the way the team operates.

Photo: Victor1558

Senior Executives Meeting

Here’s where you and your team have to meet with senior executives to talk about how your product is doing and next steps you’re going to take. This type of meeting takes place maybe once a month.

This, too, is a big power-play by the executives. They look at what you’ve accomplished, and they’re quick to judge what they like or don’t. Even though months of your efforts have gone towards building an awesome feature that your customers have been wanting, it gets axed because an exec didn’t like it.

These meetings usually just set the team and the product back. You now have to include what the exec wants in the product — not because they’re talking to customers every day, not because they have the data to back up their claims. It’s because they need to establish some authority.

What’s the fix?

Executives, keep your ego in check. Learn to trust your team. They probably know more about the customer than you do. You hired them because they are the best at what they do. They have pored over the metrics and have the best sense on what will result in customer happiness.

Use meetings to find out issues that impede execution. Are people short on resources? Are they dependent on someone from another department who’s being difficult? Remove the roadblocks!

For regular employees, defend your position with data. The exec can’t argue with you if the metrics show that a particular feature will increase sales by 10%. Don’t let their position of power waste your time.

Product Planning Meeting

This is my favorite useless meeting because its original purpose is quite constructive. You’re supposed to be planning out the what and when of building for your product, but what usually happens is everyone needs an explanation of features and why they’re necessary. That is always a long conversation.

Then everyone argues about what’s important. It’s the ultimate struggle to feel like you have some power. If your feature makes it into the product, you feel like you have a bigger impact.

Since everyone at the meeting does this, you’ll need to call another meeting to finish the planning. Five meetings later, you finally finish planning.

What’s the fix?

Everyone should come prepared to the meeting already! Road maps, user stories, and numbers should be sent out beforehand. The team can review and internalize the information and even have high level estimates for the level of effort needed.

This way, you’ll set a good tone for the meeting. It will be about what features you can actually fit into a sprint, based on priority and informed argument. If you don’t already use an agile development process, please consider it. It helps set a cadence for the team.

Now that I know about about power-play meetings, how can I gain the upper hand?

That really depends on what your goal at the company is.

Hope no one notices.

If you want to be mediocre and get paid, then just follow the crowd. Some people are fine with showing up and doing exactly what they need to do, especially in certain working situations and environments. There’s nothing wrong with that. You get a nice paycheck and you can continue to support your lifestyle.

Promotions and fat raises.

Learn the intricacies of the power-play. You’ll have to follow the meeting playbook to appease the people above you.

The goal here is to get recognized and impress people. Call your own meetings when you have issues to resolve and be the one to run them. You’ll automatically be known as the person in charge when you become directly involved in decision-making.

Understand that these meetings will take up a lot of time but you still need to execute on deliverables. Let everyone else know how busy you are as a result. The upside is that you can fix the common meeting downfalls mentioned above and be known for running really effective meetings.

Be the change.

This is for people who like where they work and want to change it for the better. Useless meetings is a serious cultural problem that companies face. Run meetings differently to change that culture.

Try not to have any meetings unless absolutely necessary, and if they are, keep them short. When issues arise, talk to the relevant people immediately. You can usually make more decisions in a five-minute direct conversation than you can in a one-hour meeting.

Designate no-meeting days. This will allow your team to have long periods of time to concentrate on hard problems. If you know anything about the maker’s schedule versus the manager’s schedule, then you’ll understand how meetings can ruin your productivity.

Sherman Lee is the founder of Good Sense. He writes about developers, productivity, customer discovery and marketing. He’s an entrepreneur, high-end consultant and author. You can follow his updates on Twitter.

Image: Bill Sodeman/Thomas Hawk Hey, you’re pretty awesome yourself. Go ahead and do great...

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:01:00 -0400

Image: Bill Sodeman/Thomas Hawk

Hey, you’re pretty awesome yourself. Go ahead and do great things!

The Emptiness of How to Work Better

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:00:28 -0400

Image: rytc

This painting on the wall of a Zurich office building is actually an art piece called “How to Work Better” by artist duo Fischli/Weiss (that’s Peter Fischli and David Weiss).

The interesting part? As described in the Guardian’s obit of Weiss:

How to Work Better (1991) is a manifesto comprising 10 persuasive but empty sentences, each with the aim of improving workplace productivity and morale… . Fischli/Weiss plucked these stock phrases from a factory in Thailand and painted them in large stencilled letters to cover the exterior of an office block in Oerlikon, Zurich, visible on the approach into the city centre by train from Zurich Airport.

Think twice about pithy motivational business quotes!

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the...

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:59:39 -0400

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Change your life with habit hacks.

You’re hiring people to think.

The 5 most dangerous creativity killers.

Software is undervalued.

Want to make some key improvements in your life? Make them the centerpiece.

Bad sleeping habits cause employers almost $2000 per employee a year.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Want to make reports of your dones to show off your progress?
Click on the share button, which looks like this: .
Then choose whether you’d like a PDF, plain text, or email version of the report. Easy peasy!

Designing Habit Hacks to Change Your Life

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Each morning, my mother would hand me my daily Flintstones chewable vitamin before I left for school. But now that I’m an adult, she can’t tell me what to do — Mountain Dew and Starcraft all night!

Well, and less vitamins. Since moving out of my parents’ house long ago, I’ve also moved away from this healthful routine. Sometimes it takes effortful self-control to do things we know we should do. But not always. Habits can function as a force, shaping our behavior and negating the need for self-control.

So months ago, I purchased a jar of multi-vitamins and placed it in my cupboard to get back into my healthy vitamin habit.

It sat there. Unused. Lonely.

I’m responsible. I’m a grown-up. I knew I should take my vitamins. Yet it was hard to do so regularly.

So I made one small change: I took the jar out of the cupboard and placed it on the countertop. Since then, I haven’t missed a day of taking my vitamins.

The visible jar is an unavoidable reminder, a trigger to take my vitamins. Removing them from the cupboard also made it easier, increasing my ability to do so. Sometimes the tiniest friction can make the difference between action and inaction.

BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model describes this best:

“[T]hree elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger.”

By simply increasing my ability and creating a trigger, I’ve been able to reinstate this habit. Sometimes it doesn’t take all that much to change behavior that feels so difficult to start doing regularly. For example:

Buffer’s Leo Widrich recommends setting gym clothes on top of the alarm clock to encourage morning exercise.
Google increased water consumption by 47% by simply rearranging the fridge. Water moved to eye-level, unhealthy soda to the bottom. More Googlers chose the more visible, reachable bottled water.
Leo Babauta instructs daily flossing-challenged people to start flossing just one tooth per night. This may seem ridiculous but starting out with very small habits makes large changes in behavior much easier.

What changes would you like to make in your life? Here are a few triggers and friction-reducers to start:

Want to eat healthier? Pre-prepare individual meals and place them toward the front of your fridge for maximum visibility and accessibility.
Having trouble focusing at work? Remove notifications, which are triggers that kill productivity, and access to non-essential applications, which increase friction against distraction. (Check out Information Diet’s excellent list of tools for managing digital distractions.)
Want to blog more? Make an effort to write the first thing that comes to mind each morning as you prepare your morning coffee. As soon as the kettle sounds, stop and move on with your day.

Reflect on your daily behavior. Which are destructive? What changes would you like to make? Consider how these simple concepts be used to change your daily habits and improve your life.

What habit hacks have you implemented in your life? Please share with me on Twitter @rrhoover or in the comments!

Subscribe to my email list and get a FREE copy of, Hooked, a book written by habit design researcher Nir Eyal, in collaboration with myself.

Ryan Hoover is the Director of Product at PlayHaven. Read more of his writing at ryanhoover.me where he blogs about startups, product, and personal growth.

"First, the seed being sown falls on good ground, but the birds get it. Then it falls on shallow..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

“First, the seed being sown falls on good ground, but the birds get it. Then it falls on shallow ground and can’t grow. Then on thorny ground, where it withers away. And only with the last attempt it falls on good ground and the seeds grow.
So we must shift our focus. We don’t want to look for which seeds thrive and which don’t. We want to know what the rate of success is.”

- Buffer’s Leo Widrich describes Jim Rohm’s law of averages in explaining his approach to measuring success.

Great things are not accomplished with a silver bullet shot of optimism but require work and a kind of faith that is informed by reality.

Image: Sergiu Bacioiu

Nowadays, You're Hiring People to Think

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:41:00 -0400

In many companies, your manager will know the team’s and company’s objectives, but you won’t. He may keep crucial information from you so that he can consolidate decision-making power.

Not so at Qualtrics, the extraordinary Provo, Utah-based company that did $50M in revenue, raised $70M from elite venture capital firms Sequoia and Accel, turned down a $500M acquisition offer, and grew its headcount to nearly 300 employees in 2012. At Qualtrics, transparency is perhaps the company’s most important value for one simple and obvious reason—”Nowadays, you’re hiring individuals to think.”

For employees to think for themselves, they need information—and that comes from transparency. At Qualtrics, not only can every employee see the company’s objectives and every employee’s objectives, every employee can also see what every employee has gotten done recently, performance reviews and ratings for all employees, meeting notes from all meetings that have taken place, and even the office’s security camera footage.

We took our best product guy and some of our best engineers and built a system internally to help scale our organization by knowing everyone’s objectives in the company. We have five objectives annually for our company, and everyone goes into the system each quarter to put in their objectives that play into those broader goals.

…

We have another system that sends everyone an e-mail on Monday that says: “What are you going to get done this week? And what did you get done last week that you said you were going to do?” Then that rolls up into one e-mail that the entire organization gets. So if someone’s got a question, they can look at that for an explanation. We share other information, too — every time we have a meeting, we release meeting notes to the organization. When we have a board meeting, we write a letter about it afterward and send it to the organization.

When everyone’s rowing together toward the same objective, it’s extremely powerful. We’re trying to execute at a very high level, and we need to make sure everyone knows where we’re going.

Qualtrics is taking to an extreme what many tech companies have done to eliminate the manager-as-a-single-point-of-failure antipattern of corporate organization. Transparency gives the power of self-determination to every employee in the organization.

"Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the ‘happiest,’ by its..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:41 -0400

“Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the ‘happiest,’ by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.”

- Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers - NYTimes.com

Google has long been known as an elite organization bordering on elitist. It’s fascinating to see how their conception of prospective candidates has changed as they’ve looked at the data over time, departing from a SAT and GPA-driven view.

Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs...

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:17:00 -0400

Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

The rise of the culture hacker.

The antidote to burnout is progress.

Check in with people. Don’t check up on them.

Want to be an excellent leader? Read these 10 books.

Teach why startups fail.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Have you checked out your word cloud to see your language of getting stuff done? Just sign into iDoneThis, click on “Visuals”, and then click on “Word Cloud”. Which words are most prominent?

The Culture Hacker

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:29:00 -0400

We’ve seen an interesting trend at companies that are extremely culture-focused: the culture hacker. Software developers have built internal developer productivity tools since time immemorial because great engineering cultures push for automation and improving iteration speed. But now developers are turning their attention to addressing team dynamics and how the whole company functions and works together on the whole — in a word, culture.

Zappos: making values concrete with process and code

At many companies, company values are just words on a piece of paper tacked to a wall somewhere. At Zappos, they’re extremely thoughtful about giving their values bite. For example, they’re famous for paying new employees to quit. After new employee training ends, each employee is offered the opportunity to quit their job and walk away with $1,000. They do this because one of the Zappos core values is “be passionate and determined”, and paying people to quit ensures that those who remain are incredibly enthusiastic about their work and in it for the long haul.

They take it a step further by using code to reinforce cultural values in individual workflow. As Zappos has grown from a small startup to a 1,500+ employee company, it’s had to scale its value of having a tight-knit team and family-like atmosphere. It was a natural fit to help those relationships scale through technology.

Zappos has what’s called a “Face Game”. When you log into the computer system, after you enter your password, a face pops up of a fellow employee and you’re asked to enter the person’s name. Whether you answer correctly or not, you see a bio and profile – another way of getting to know your fellow workers and building culture.

(via Lessons we can all learn from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh)

During a recent visit to Las Vegas, we met Darshan Bhatt, a developer at Zappos who spends 100% of his time on building internal culture products that empower everyone in the company to make Zappos culture their own.

For instance, Zappos conducts monthly surveys to gauge the happiness of employees in the company. At another company, the survey results might be something management discussed behind closed doors to determine, at most, where in the company to deploy more pizza parties. At Zappos, Darshan builds tools that empower every employee with the data necessary to improve culture and happiness in the company.

Darshan showed us an application he was building that every employee in the company would get access to that allowed you to plot anonymized survey responses along different employee demographic information. He showed us an example where he plotted employee tenure length versus reported employee happiness. This gave insight into whether every stage in an employee’s lifecycle at the company was being properly supported and put the power of that data in the hands of every employee to make improvements.

Shopify: developers working with the human relations team to reinvent HR

Shopify is a hugely successful e-commerce software platform based out of Ottawa, Canada, that has a remarkable company culture. They have a two-person team called Shopify Labs which is focused on building internal tools. What surprised and impressed me was the tight-knit relationship the Labs team has with HR in working together to build culture products.

At your average company, you’ll likely see a sharp division between front office and back office teams like HR. You might even see a contentious relationship if HR is focused too much on compliance/CYA and running employees through an impersonal annual review process. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke made the point to us that they call HR “human relations”, not “human resources” to reinforce HR’s cooperative, culture-focused role at Shopify.

The Labs team together with HR built an application called Unicorn to recognize employee accomplishments in a fun, peer-sourced way.

When Serena does something great, Daniel gives her thanks by going into Unicorn, logging her accomplishment, and giving her one, two or three unicorns. Everyone in the company sees Serena’s plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that she did an awesome job.

At the end of month, every employee in Shopify gets allocated a proportion of the company’s profits that are set aside for Unicorn bonuses. Daniel’s allocation goes to Serena and anyone else to whom he’s given unicorns over the course of the month.

Unicorn gives the power of employee recognition and even bonus disbursement to every employee in the company, not just to managers and HR. The tight working relationship between Shopify Labs and HR makes the cultural value of peer recognition real and vibrant through software.

Conclusion

Bestselling author Dan Pink told us that the biggest trend happening today that’s disrupting enterprise organization is that “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.”

We’re seeing how company culture is becoming a huge differentiator in attracting and retaining top talent, and this is doubly true for the companies that truly walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Companies on the bleeding edge of focusing on company culture like Zappos, Shopify, Github, and Stripe are investing developer time — the most valuable resource at a software company — to make cultural values real through software.

A Useful Groundhog Day Type To-Do List

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:34 -0400

J.T. O’Donnell, CEO of CAREEREALISM Media, has an interesting to-do list of 10 items that she tries to do every day. This list isn’t made up of specific tasks but more general ones. Think family or genus, rather than species.

Read something related to my industry.

Read something related to business development.

Send two emails to touch base with old colleagues.

Empty my private client inbox by responding to all career coaching questions within one business day.

Check in with each team member on their progress.

Have a short non-work related conversation with every employee.

Review my top three goals for my company that are focused on its growth.

Identify and execute one task to support each of my top three goals.

Post five valuable pieces of content on all my major social media accounts.

Take a full minute to appreciate what I have and how far I’ve come.

It’s a neat way to think about and carry out your goals for the day!

Do you keep a similar list? Let us know!

The hilariously creative John Cleese shares how interruptions...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:49 -0400

The hilariously creative John Cleese shares how interruptions and busyness are the biggest barriers standing in the way of innovation.

If you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day ticking things off your list, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.

His solution? Make boundaries of space and time.

Make progress, on your own time, on your own terms!

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:52 -0400

Make progress, on your own time, on your own terms!

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:00:46 -0400

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

3 Reasons to Shut up and Listen Well.

Self-control depletes itself and your motivation. How to refuel from within.

5 hard questions to ask yourself during a conflict.

Why your phone is snuffing your creativity (and is like an endless supply of Cheetos).

The perks at Buffer? Daily improvement and free books.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Hey IDT teams! Do you only want to see certain team members show up in your email digest? Log into iDoneThis, and under the calendar, click on “unfollow” or “follow” to choose whose dones you want to see in your digest.

3 Reasons to Shut Up and Listen Well

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:00:56 -0400

Image: Daniela Vladimirova

The way you listen is telling, a compass that points to the true focus of your attention. For good listeners, that needle points to the person talking. For bad listeners, that needle points to themselves.

The thing is that it’s really obvious. Great listening requires you to show that it’s happening, and that it’s happening sincerely. Much of that sincere communication comes down to lighting up to show “message received”. Instead, some people fall into a bad habit of putting on a show of listening, mumbling sounds of non-contextual agreement, or interrupting with “yes, but —”, or pretending to be attentive but mishearing everything.

Listening isn’t simply waiting for your turn to say something or show off your brilliance but engaging with what’s being said, building on it, reacting with thoughts and emotions, and showing that you understand or want to know more.

While the art of listening is touted in business, it’s rarely practiced. Bad listening is bad business, and here’s why:

1. Bad listening is dismissive and ultimately disengaging.

Bad listening affects how we feel about ourselves, eventually reaching into how we feel about our existence. You know that philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, have you ever provided some insightful input at a meeting, toiled to reply to an email asking for opinions with a worthwhile response, or done something pretty great — only to be met with nary a ripple?

If nobody’s actually listening to me, then why am I here?

People who feel unheard and undervalued will understandably disengage and suffer negative impacts on their stress and wellbeing.

2. Bad listening leads to inferior information and decisions.

When you don’t take care to listen and pay attention to the people around you, you miss out on crucial information. This is especially important for managers and bosses to consider. Research by NYU Stern’s Kelly A. See confirms what many employees already know: people with more power listen less, take less advice, and are ultimately less accurate in final judgments.

Image: opensourceway

In contrast, Intel’s Andy Grove understood that his position of managerial power affected his ability to make good decisions. So he chose to spend most of his time gathering information by staying out in the open, signaling that he was ready to listen. He understood that information-gathering is “the basis of all other managerial work,” and that ultimately, “your decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issues facing your business.”

See’s studies identifies “confidence in one’s judgment” as the reason behind the inverse relationship between power and listening skill. Powerful people are confident; their reaction is to stop listening. Keys to listening well, then, are openness and vulnerability, pointing the compass needle away from yourself and showing confidence in others.

3. Bad listening is a waste of time.

If poor listening leads to misunderstanding, disengagement, and poorer decision-making, that means more time is required to arrive at accurate information, good decisions, and a righted course.

There’s one kind of behavior in particular that is often overlooked as a form of bad listening — too many unmindful managerial interruptions. An obvious example is how meetings are a breeding ground for bad listening and inefficiency. But there are also more casual intrusions.

In astute answers to a question posed by Inc. to successful entrepreneurs to identify their biggest time wasters, Katia Beauchamp, co-founder of Birchbox, said, “Randomly bugging my team with questions about yesterday, today, six months from now.” Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist, responded with, “Checking in with the product team to look at work they’re doing that isn’t ready for me to see yet.”

In failing to respect your team’s schedule or space, you’re not listening to their needs or giving them a chance to formulate their contribution to the conversation. It’s an easy trap for managers to fall into, but it’s the kind of listening that points right back at yourself, making the information-gathering about you rather the team or the project at hand.

How to Become a Better Listener.

Image: ky_olsen

Admit that you’re not a great listener. Think everyone else around you is not good at listening but that you’re great? That’s called a delusion. Most of us could use some improvement in our overall listening skills, or in equalizing how well we listen in different spheres of our life. The first step is to recognize that everybody, including you, could use some practice.

Practice focusing. If you’ve ever gone to a place where all the people speak a foreign language that you’re trying to learn, you know how listening can take a lot of energy and focus. Without it, the words wash over you as a blanket of meaningless sound.

You have to see conversations as real exchanges, expanding your full attention on the other person in order to gain all the verbal and nonverbal cues to what she or he’s saying. That kind of focus is impossible to do while fiddling around on your phone. Practice bringing that type of watchful focus, attention, and engagement to more of your conversations.

Acknowledge and respect. Good listening signals the broader messages of respect and trust.

Acknowledge people and their work by giving rich, frequent feedback that’s broader than corrective criticism. Without encountering a supportive voice at the end of the line, people will simply disconnect.

Stop telling people what to do, and instead, ask for and consider people’s opinions. Learn the best way to get something done by listening rather than assuming.

Finally, be mindful of others’ listening schedules and rhythms. Interrupting people at random, unexpected moments co-opts their time and attention. While information-gathering is important, doing so in a respectful way ensures that you help more than you hurt.

If people feel like they are only there to be corrected, directed, and interrupted, they’ll lose vital autonomy and motivation. More important than the business case, though, is to remember that good listening and giving quality attention is just not about you. Listening is how you build trust, knowledge, connections, and relationships. And that’s about all of us.

Janet Choi is the Chief Creative Officer at iDoneThis and keeps the wheels of the iDoneThis blog turning. She is not a morning person. Follow her tweets at @lethargarian.