Stories Are Sticky
Once upon a time when we were young our parents and teacher told us stories to pass on information. Long ago the oral history of nations was shared the same way.
Many of us blog for our businesses. Blogging allows us to share our expertise and our knowledge base. It can give us a podium on which to stand and deliver our message to the world. Don’t go there. Podiums make lecturers.
We might like to learn, but few folks like to be taught.
Great teachers share stories, and in that way, pass on what they’ve experienced. They follow the writers’ rule of “show don’t tell,” pointing out examples that bring home ideas and lessons that are meaningful in ways that principles alone could never illuminate.
I want to know how you know what you know so that I can be sure what you’re learned will work for me.
It’s my experience that telling stories lets people find their way into a situation or an idea without a wall of information between. Stories entertain without being intimidating or intrusive. We can see how to apply good story without feeling that we’re being judge for what we may have done wrong.
Stories are a sticky way of teaching and learning,
Share a story about how stories have helped you.
Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.
I once saw a t-shirt that said, “Give me ambiguity or give me something else.” To this day I regret that I didn’t buy it. Ambiguity is the centerpiece of most knowledge work. Black and white, off and on, toggle switch decisions are easily programmed.
That leaves the decisions that require judgment to people, not machines. The inherent problem is that judgment calls get called differently based on the person who faces the decision and what that person brings to the table.
The outcome will be a result of the decision — without regard to the person who made it.
That fact is stressful. It means I am held to the same standard as folks who have much more knowledge and experience than I might ever have.
Leadership: Turning Ambiguity into Motivation
To be a leader, one can’t flinch at decisions. A leader has to look through the gray to evaluate a path. Effective leaders do that with confidence and success. Here are some ways they accomplish that.
- They understand the goals of the organization and test decisions against how outcomes might support those goals.
- They understand the priorities for their team and use them as decision-making tools.
- They frame gating questions that would make or break the decision, i.e. they look within a decision to find which parts are indeed black and white.
- They check history for data on similar decisions and their outcomes.
- They check their own experience — have they made this decision before? How did it turn out?
- They gather information from widely diverse sources in a limited amount of time, evaluate it, and use only what they need to make their decision.
- They continuously test the outcomes of the decisions they make so that any decision limited risk.
All of these actions, habits really, lower the stress of ambiguity in making decisions. When leaders use and model them, teams pick them up as standard procedures in problem solving. Flexibility in thinking and testing assumptions becomes the norm. The ambiguity becomes a positive motivator rather than a stress factor in the environment. Team members learn how to be leaders in the process.
Liz Strauss
Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager.
Finding a Direction
In his book, Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps!
Raj Setty talks about how professionals often chase the “hot skills” of the moment rather than building a complete and well-rounded professional profile. In an interview at Successful-Blog Raj says
I am of the firm belief that most technology professionals are in a trap. They go after learning “hot” skills that have a short shelf-life just because everyone else around them are going after those “hot” skills. When these skills become obsolete or “out of fashion”, they go after a new set of “hot” skills. They repeat this cycle and think that they can continue to repeat this cycle (3 - 5 years) forever.
When these same people leave the traditional organization, they find that their wide and varied skill set offers many general business possibilities they might pursue on their own. Too often what happens is that they look for external factors to decide which skills are important on which to build a business.
These would-be entrepreneurs define what they do in a new way to each person they meet — in essence each time putting a new “fishing pole into the water,” hoping that one of the definitions will catch a client. That client will become the foundation from which the new business will grow. Unfortunately what most often happens is that the proverbial fisher ends up with 18 fishing poles in the water. He or she spends valuable time running up and down the proverbial riverbank, checking to see whether anything has happened. If the answer is negative, he or she might even add more.
As time passes, the fisher’s effectiveness at defining a skill set or attending to any one pole becomes more and more diluted. He or she gets more confused and less attention from people who might have been interested in someone who focused on a single goal.
The illusion here is that more fishing poles means more options are open. But in fact, that is not remotely true. The 18 fishing poles in the water mean it is 18 times harder for the fisher to respond to a real offer. The illusion of 18 fishing poles makes decisions seems 18 times closer, but in fact each decision is just as far as if it were one, and the fisher’s time is over invested in attending to things that haven’t caught any attention.
Do you have 18 fishing poles in the water? If you do, find someone who can help you determine which 3 or 4 are worth investing real time in. Pull the other poles out. Use the time that you would have spent tending them focusing your direction and defining your plan.
Liz Strauss
Behind every Successful small business there is an Outstanding Manager. — The Perfect Virtual Manager
I’m happy to help you form a message that is warm and clear. I’ve got a bit of experience at that. And showing folks how to communicate and how to build strategies to do it well are two of my most favorite things to do. I work with individuals, with schools, and with companies.
I give great presentations and love to do training.
I build my fees on a sliding scale based on what the work is worth. No worries. They’re honest and fair. Send me an email at lizsun2@gmail.com about what you need, or about what you’re thinking of, and we’ll talk it through from there.
Liz
