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History remembers Thomas Edison as a lone genius. Wrong! He created his most famous invention with a team of 30.
Machines systematize; people innovate. And so it’s no surprise that relationships are a major factor in producing those innovative ideas that lead to better, faster, more elegant solutions. Remember, Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb alone - he was part of a team of 30!
Why does innovation so often boil down to relationships? Here are a few reasons:
1. Greater Risk Taking: Trusting, caring relationships help people feel comfortable taking risks. Without those relationships, people don’t open their mouths to voice potentially good ideas because they’re afraid of looking stupid.
2. Creative Collision: When candid exchanges between people collide, the fusion generates entirely new insights, new ideas, and new approaches that might never have been considered independently. But people need to feel comfortable “colliding” with colleagues. That requires a deep base of trust and mutual respect.
3. Less Rigid Hierarchy: Strong relationships help communication flow beyond traditional hierarchies. A boss who truly cares about and respects his employee is more likely to listen to new ideas, not reject them out of hand.
So leaders: Give employees time, space and structure to build deeper relationships! Individuals, make it your responsibility to make your work relationships deep. Don't wait for the company cocktail hour!
According to Tom Rath’s Vital Friends - great book by the way, I cited it in Who's Got Your Back - only 18 percent of people work for organizations that provide opportunities for social bonding in the workplace. And many of the companies who do provide those “opportunities” don’t structure them in a way that really serves the goal of deeper, stronger relationships. Throwing people in a room with chips and booze does not make for a productive event!
If I could wave a wand and change just one thing this year in the landscape of American business, that would be it. The results could be incredible.
Recently I received an advanced copy of The Leap, a thought-provoking and inspiring new book by my friend Rick Smith. I met Rick through his work with World 50, the uber-influential executive networking company he founded a few years back.
The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get mired in psychological warfare between our creative and reactionary aspects.
The key idea here is that the very idea of “potential” is created in our minds. The limits to that potential are created in the very same place. WE are the biggest thing holding us back from greatness. Not only do I agree with that, I’ve experienced it on a profoundly personal level, part of the story I told in Who’s Got Your Back.
As the following exclusive excerpt from The Leap illustrates, it is our willingness to tackle head on the forces that hold us in place that allows us to achieve our greatest potential. Rick dispels the myths that hold us back, and challenges us to once again dream big. Enjoy!
Excerpt from The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel your Career from Good to Great, by Rick Smith
At first glance, we humans would seem to be built for innovation and entrepreneurship. We’re the species that dreams big things, the one that imagines a different future for ourselves, and it all begins with our neural architecture.
For 500 million years, the human brain (and the proto-human one that preceded it) did little more than poke along, not changing materially in size or shape. Then, beginning about 2 to 3 million years ago, our gray matter started to explode. Today, in what amounts to a wink in geological time, we have doubled our average brain volume from that benchmark break point.
But volume is the least of it. Cranial studies and other evidence show conclusively that what grew most dramatically in the brain over the last several million years was the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us to visualize the future and anticipate coming events.
Today, we spend on average 12 percent of our time—3 hours each day, or roughly 10 years in an 80-year life span—contemplating what is to come. This is what makes us different from every other living thing: We live in the present but keep a foot in the past and the future.
Put another way, a cheetah or a great white shark or even our close DNA cousin the orangutan has to prove itself every day. We don’t. We store up canned goods and water in case the power goes out; buy homes on time, via mortgages, in anticipation of rising values and future earning power; save money for our kids’ college education so they can have a better a life than us; and invest in IRAs, Keoghs, and 401(k)s to help feather our own old age.
Torn Between Opposites The planning-dreaming-poet side of the brain, the part that’s ready to leap toward wherever opportunity might wait, is one facet. But there’s another, older, survival-driven part of the brain that works in almost exact opposition.
Encouraged by our huge new frontal lobe, we envision big things to come, but when push comes to shove, our older brain fights like mad to defend the current state of our lives. We court risk in our imagination, then run from it in our daily lives. We are almost compelled to plot out alternative story lines for our lives and careers and families, but we are compelled even more powerfully to avoid what we imagine. That’s the great irony of humankind: we are at once the animal capable of dreaming and the one that holds itself back from achieving its dreams. True, we are wired to think about the future, but in critical ways, we are wired to think about it incorrectly.
Stuck in the present, we fret over how far up the corporate ladder we can climb, whether we will ever make VP of Sales, or what our compensation will be a dozen years out, when we really need to be asking ourselves is what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. If we’re not fulfilled, if we’re not in touch with what we intuit our potential to be, the rest—titles, offices, salary—is all window dressing and empty calories.
The frontal lobe speaks loudly enough in our private daily counsels that we all know this to be true to some extent. We long for the change that will make us fully in touch with out essential selves. We ache for work that will leave us fulfilled and content. But the rest of our brain, conditioned by millions of years of human and prehuman experience, anticipates failure, not success. And because it does, it sends a very different message: The upside of dramatic change isn’t worth the effort and exposure involved.
In effect, we imagine the future not so we can embrace it, but so we can avoid it.
Buying into Your Own Status Quo In effect, you have created a status quo and bought into it; studies have consistently shown that the bigger the bet and the more you fretted over it, the more certain you are that your reasoning is sound and the outcome you have predicted highly likely. That’s the way the brain works. It makes us sweat and strain over our decisions like a crew of ditchdiggers; then, once the decision is made, the brain invokes a psychological defense clause that says, Well, that sounds like a great bet to me. I’ll stick with it through thick and thin.
So it is with jobs and careers and even life patterns. We often invest so heavily in them, and buy into the logic of our investment and decision making so thoroughly, that we see abandoning them at the one extreme as a kind of psychological suicide and at the other as an unnecessary dare, given that the future (as our flawed brains paint it) is so likely to re-create the present. Rather than face up to the potential of positive, dramatic change, we silence the argument within ourselves, and in doing so, we spare ourselves the pain both of a difficult contemplation and of potentially realizing that our assumptions about the future have been fundamentally flawed.
In various branches of science, this is known as a closed system. In more everyday terms, it’s like walking into a dead-end alley. Maybe we should think of it as the “Now Trap.” What is closes in around us. What could be seems impossibly distant. And the space between them appears far too risky to navigate. No wonder our personal ruts seem so hard to escape—they are, in fact, Now Traps every one.
The Roads Not Taken
These are the pranks the brain plays on us. This is the way it builds the Now Trap that holds us in the ruts of our lives and careers. The brain provides us with a massive frontal lobe to imagine the future, then tricks us into believing that whatever lies out there for us will not be all that different than the present. The brain gifts each of us with enormous potential, then convinces us that the risk of pursuing our potential is greater than the reward of achieving it. It allows us to envision what we might become, then tells us we lack the talent and skills to get there.
We can’t help longing after the choices not made, the roads not taken, more than the choices we do make and the roads we do take. That again is part of what being a human being is all about. We’re the decision-making, decision-regretting animal; we have the capacity to rue as well as to anticipate and to envision alternative futures for ourselves. But unlike the poet Robert Frost, we can’t quite bring ourselves to take those roads less traveled, the ones that make, in Frost’s words, “all the difference.”
Our psychological immune system is poised to jump. It wants us to make the Leap. It can deal far more easily with too much courage than with too much cowardice. It’s more comfortable with our stumbling forward than with our hedging our bets. But the brain won’t let us do that without a fight that most of us are not prepared to make.
Thus we wage psychological warfare on ourselves. But—and this is the critical point—we don’t have to. The Now Trap is formidable, but it’s not Houdini proof. We simply have to start looking at life through a different lens. The fact is, the woods are full of ordinary people, everyday Joes and Janes, who have broken free from the Now Trap and transformed rut-stuck careers into deeply fulfilling callings—work that not only has brought them great personal satisfaction but has also had a great and lasting impact on others.
Above all else, remember this: whatever traps we may feel stuck in are largely of our own making. What we have built we can also undo. What we can dream we can achieve.
Question: What fears are stopping you from achieving your full potential -- and to what degree can our relationships help us escape the Now Trap?
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
Only, for some, it’s not. These people are super-connectors. People like me who maintain contact with thousands of people. The key, however, is not only that we know thousands of people but that we know thousands of people in many different worlds, and we know them well enough to give them a call.
So here’s the good news for those of you who aren’t so aggressively social: Once you become friendly with a super-connector, you’re only two degrees away from the thousands of different people we know.
Connectors can be found in every imaginable profession, but I’m going to focus on seven professions where they most commonly congregate. Each of these kinds of connectors provides me with a link to an entire world of people, ideas, and information that, in a very significant way, has made my own life a little more fun, helped my career along, or made the businesses I worked for more successful.
1. Restaurateurs
Being a true-blue connector is a requisite for most people who own restaurants. The success of their enterprise depends on a core group of regulars who see the restaurant as a home away from home. And it’s quite easy to get to know a restaurateur: Become a regular.
2. Headhunters
Recruiters. Job-placement counselors. Search executives. They are like gatekeepers. Instead of answering to one executive, however, the really successful ones may answer to hundreds of executives in the field in which they recruit. Headhunters are professional matchmakers, earning their wage by introducing job candidates to companies that are hiring.
Can anyone contact a headhunter? To be honest, headhunters prefer to be the one contacting you. But if you’re careful about not trying to sell yourself and instead offering them access to your network, they’ll be receptive
3. Lobbyists
Well informed, persuasive, and self-confident, lobbyists are generally impressive networkers. By virtue of their job, they are intimately familiar with the ways of large organizations and how local and national government work. They are almost uniformly passionate people whose goal is to sway politicians to vote on legislation in a way that favors the interest they represent.
How do they work? Lobbyists will often host cocktail parties and dinner get-togethers, allowing them to interact with politicians—and their opponents—in a casual atmosphere. Their more grassroots efforts involve long hours spent on the phone and in writing letters, trying to rouse the community to get involved behind an issue. All of which makes them a rather easy group to please. Can you hold an event for them? Volunteer your services? Refer other volunteers to their cause? Introduce them to potential clients?
4. Fundraisers
“Follow the money” are words fundraisers live by. They know where it is, what it will take to get it, and most important, who’s most likely to give it away. As a result, fundraisers, whether they work for a political organization, university, or nonprofit group, tend to know absolutely everybody.
5. Public relations people
PR people spend their whole day calling, cajoling, pressuring, and begging journalists to cover their clients. The relationship between media and PR is an uneasy one, but at the end of the day, necessity brings them together like long-lost cousins. A good friend who works in PR can be your entrée into the world of media and, sometimes, celebrity.
6. Politicians Politicians at every level are inveterate networkers. They have to be. They shake hands, kiss babies, give speeches, and go to dinners, all in the name of gaining the trust of enough people to get elected. The stature of politicians is derived from their political power rather than their wealth. Anything you can do to help them gain power with voters, or exercise power in office, will go a long way to ensuring you a place in their inner circle.
7. Journalists
Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company or turn a nobody into a somebody), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible).
These are seven different professions tailor-made for superconnectors. Reach out to some. And there are others—lawyers, brokers, etc. Become a part of their network and have them become a part of yours. Seek out ideas from people you don’t ordinarily talk to who inhabit professional worlds you don’t ordinarily travel in.
In one word: Connect. In four better words: Connect with the connectors.
Are we raising a nation of teenagers who r omg totally gr8 texters, but total dopes when it comes to managing face to face communication?
Your teenage child sends and receives 2,272 texts a month and spends 9 hours a week absorbed in social networking sites. According to this Wall Street Journal Online op-ed by an English professor at Emory, there’s major collateral damage: a rising generation who’s deaf and dumb when it comes to real-time interaction and the subtle language of nonverbal cues – tonality, facial expressions, posture, and the like. He’s concerned: His book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
The professor’s both wrong and dead right.
Jeopardizing our future? Wrong. There’s so much more to celebrate than to gripe about in the Digital Age. The online revolution has wildly expanded our opportunities to share, create, and do more of all the things that tribes have done since the dawn of time – and now at the speed of light. We’re getting more human every day. I’m excited, not afraid, to see what new competencies Gen-Y and Gen-Z bring into the culture.
Here’s where he’s right: While the desire for relationships is innate, building them requires a skill set – one that can and must be learned. I know it can be learned, because I’ve made a lot of money, and my clients a lot of money, by teaching them those very skills. Nonverbal communication is an important part of that skill set, and it’s entirely possible that the professor’s right in worrying that it’s not going to be your kid’s strong suit.
It’s up to you, as parents, to fill the gap in that skill set. Push them toward activities that will develop those abilities that they miss out on while glued to their PC. Here are six tips to kick start your thinking.
6 Tips for Raising a Relationship-Savvy Child - Video Summary
1. Don't be a hypocrite! If you, like the professor, are worried your kids aren't skilled communicators, make sure you’re skilled at their preferred modes of interaction. Technology-facilitated communication is likely to become more, not less, important in the future, so make sure that you’re not overly focused on what worked in the past – you know, back when you had to walk a mile in bare feet in snow to get to school.
2. Set the example: As parents, your social life shouldn’t take place entirely remotely from your children. You’re wasting an opportunity to share with them your own special recipe for the good life – warm times with close friends. So find time to entertain at home. Host a dinner or a holiday party. Without making your kids the center of attention, give them time to interact with guests and “play grown-up.”
3. Set the table: The reality of your life may not make daily family dinners possible – but certainly you can make shared meals happen several times a week. A study reported in the 2003 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that adolescents who frequently sat down to family meals had better grades, less depression, and were less likely to drink alcohol, smoke, or use marijuana than kids who ate with their families less than twice a week.
4. Take turns toasting: This is a must for special events, but also a great tradition even for casual Sunday night dinner. That way yours kids grow up watching and practicing impromptu “public” speaking – and learning to celebrate the small stuff.
5. Activities, activities, activities: Get your kid involved early on in an organization that promotes and rewards offline social interaction – think Boy or Girl Scouts, local theatre, sports clubs, or even a local nonprofit or political campaign. At a certain point, your kid will do what he wants to do, and unless you’re really lucky, it won’t involve the Glee Club. But if you’ve laid the foundation with years of marshmallow roasts and musical theatre, he’ll have the skills at the ready when he’s done being a disaffected teenager.
6. Enforce No Cell Phone/Blackberry family outings: Yes, your kids will hate you. And it you’re hooked on the Crackberry yourself, you’ll probably mean it when you say, “This is hurting me more than it’s hurting you.” But it’s good for everyone to take a break. For a few hours, anyway.
Those who are the best at building relationships will always have a competitive edge. Relationships drive success; everything we do in life is with and through other people. That’s not changing.
Now let's hear your take: How are you approaching these issues with your kids? Or maybe you're a teenager - are all these grownups worried about nothing?
Curtsy while you're thinking. It saves time. – the Queen of Hearts
How do I meet everyone I want to meet during the course of a week? Someone once remarked cynically, “I’d have to clone myself to take all the meetings you take.”
“Ah, you’re onto something,” I responded. “I don’t clone myself. I clone the event.”
Here’s what I mean. Say I’m in NY for two days with three people I want to see and only one available time slot. I solve the problem by “cloning” the dinner – I invite all of them to join me at once. Each of them gets benefit from knowing the others, and I get the opportunity to catch up with all of them. If I need some one-on-one, I'll ask that person to come a little early or stay a little late.
Some specific ideas to guide your cloning:
Multitask: Constantly look for ways to include others in what you’re doing. Sometimes I’ll take potential employees for a workout and conduct the interview over a run. As a makeshift staff meeting, I’ll occasionally ask a few employees to share a car ride with me to the airport. Like so many, I couldn't do what I do without multitasking.
Think prophylactic: Cloning is a good way to ensure that a meeting or get together is worthwhile. When meeting someone whom you don’t know that well, invite someone you do know just to make sure the meeting doesn't become a waste of time.
Invite Mentees: They’ll get a special kick out of sitting in on meetings — and it can be a great learning opportunity. It gets them face time with you and a chance to see business in action — as long as you make sure your reason for the meeting gets accomplished. In most cases, the kid ends up contributing something to the meeting as well. Don’t underestimate young people’s ability to find creative new insight.
Be selective: Pay special attention to the chemistry between various people in your professional network. Do you have a sense of who will get on well with each other? It doesn’t mean that everyone has to have the same background and sensibility. In fact, a nice mix of different professions and personalities can be the perfect recipe for a terrific gathering. Trust your instincts, or use this question as a litmus test: Will I have fun? If the answer is yes, that is usually a good sign that the dynamic will work.
A question about this last point: How many of you are like George "World's colliding" Costanza - wary of mixing different personal/professional groups?
“Your best customers are the customers you have right now.”
If you’re in sales, you’ve probably heard that before. The idea is that your most successful leads come from the selling you’ve already done. The highest returns don’t come from new sales; they come on top of the customer base you’ve already established. It’s easiest to reach out to those people who are at least tangentially part of your network.
Likewise with expanding your general network. The big hurdles of networking revolve around the cold calls, meeting of new people, and all the activities that involve engaging the unknown. So if you want to forward quickly, concentrate on the people who are already part of your existing network. Everyone from your family to your mailman is a portal to an entirely new set of folks. I bet you have no idea how vast and widespread your network already is.
Today, take a moment to create a list of all the people you already know, and a schedule to reach out to them over the next weeks. Who knows what leads they'll generate?
Here are a few starting categories to get you thinking:
• Relatives
• Friends of relatives
• All your spouse’s relatives and contacts
• Current colleagues
• Members of professional and social organizations
• Current and former customers and clients
• Parents of your children’s friends
• Neighbors, past and present
Leave no stone unturned!
Who has ideas for other pockets in your current network that might hold opportunities?
Greenlight Atlanta Leader Hammad Khan - on a roller coaster
Keith met Hammad Khan in Atlanta on the WGYB Tour - he heads up the Greenlight Community group there. We asked him to write up his story after he told Keith that by using the principles in NEA and WGYB, he had gone from being a newly-hired engineering co-op to leading one of the largest engineering teams in his organization. He also lost over forty pounds, can now run two miles in 13 minutes, and recently scored a 300/300 in the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT).
Here's his story.
How I Lost 40 Pounds and Met My Financial Goals with the Help of Lifelines and Others
By Hammad Khan
Like Keith, I grew up poor, and also like Keith, my parents worked as hard as they could to make sure I was in the best schools they could afford. Consequently, I put on blinders, worked as hard as I could, and focused on getting what everyone around me seemed to have: a house with 2.7 cars, a white picket fence, and a nice job.
About three years ago, I arrived. About two years ago, I realized that the hype may have been overstated.
The thing is, I define myself by my achievements. I’ve always been a ferociously goal-driven person. However, I didn’t have the framework to monitor progress or to think holistically about what goals would make me happy. The end result? Frustration.
For example, while working through school, I had focused on nothing outside getting The Grades, The Job, The House, The Car and The Life. I had sacrificed everything, including my health, in getting there. No problem, thought I: I’ll just set a goal to be in shape by such-and-such time. Accordingly, I would work out and diet, and after a week or so, I would get frustrated at the lack of results, and… stop. I would watch my deadline get bigger as it got closer, watch my pants get smaller, and get increasingly aggravated about how I couldn’t do anything about it.
As another example, I had ambitious financial goals, but they were formulated within the “get a good job” framework. As such, when the economy tanked and my pay was frozen, I saw my goal slink away, out of reach. The worst part, by far? I couldn’t do anything about it!
I really, really don’t react well to situations where I feel powerless -- goal-driven, achievement-oriented people rarely do. You wouldn’t believe the stress. I was in a place of absolute frustration, imprisoned by self-imposed helplessness, watching my financial and physical goals shrink further away. Steinbeck says, “Man is the only kind of varmint who sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.” I sure felt like I had stepped in it.
About a year ago, I decided it was time to fix things. A mentor recommended Never Eat Alone. I picked up a copy, and couldn’t put it down. Not only did the book provide a framework for goal-setting and tracking, but if offered a novel idea so straightforward that I was annoyed I hadn’t thought of it myself: How about using one’s network to help?
The first part, as per Keith’s advice, was to set goals. That’s fine, I already had goals. Wait, no! I had goals with nebulous timeframes. Those aren’t goals. At best, they’re ambitious dreams; at worst, they are little more than wishful thinking.
That weekend, I took a few hours and distilled goals out of my dreams. I knew where I wanted to be in “about five years,” so that was easy enough to turn into a five-year goal. Then, working backwards from there, I got a three-year goal, and then a one-year goal. From a one-year goal, it was easy enough to build monthly and quarterly milestones.
That exercise complete, I looked proudly at the spreadsheet splayed out before me, and felt the warm thud of reality kick. By the end of the month, I needed to make about three times as much as I did, and I needed to be twice as healthy. D’oh.
Clearly, this wasn’t working. As tendrils of frustration tickled the base of my neck, I realized I was missing a piece: the Personal Board of Directors.
The next few months were difficult. I renewed relationships should never have let wither, and had difficult meetings with mentors and friends. Finally, I ended up with two groups of three people: one to help with financial goals, another to help with physical goals. (Discovering these friends was both challenging and rewarding, and could alone be the subject of a second article.)
Over coffee and snacks, we reviewed my goals. Entirely due to my little group of friends, I realized that my financial and physical goals were not out of reach at all. Because four heads are smarter than one, I realized that if anything, I had been too conservative. I just lacked the tools and the knowledge to achieve the goals I envisioned! My Board of Directors, however, was more than happy to show me the way. All I had to do was get the work done. Well, bring it on! I’ve never once been scared of work!
It’s been about a year since then. I’m in better shape than I have ever been in my life, and I’m on track to meet financial goals that just sixteen months ago I would have sworn were impossible. In the process, I’ve met friends and found mentors who will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Most importantly, the frustration, the poison that comes from feeling caged and helpless, is gone. When I feel those familiar tendrils of frustration tickle the base of my neck, when I get impatient, I just check The Plan. I’m usually where I need to be. If not, it’s just a small adjustment. Like Warren Buffett’s snowball, a small adjustment now results in a big change five years later.
It’s critical to realize that while I’m where I need to be, I didn’t get here by myself. In fact I simply couldn’t have. Alone, I didn’t have the merest inkling of how, or a fraction of the resources. Steinbeck is right: Man does spring his own trap. But what he doesn’t mention is that man is also capable of finding others to help get him out. Without them, getting out is simply not possible.
Keith will be sharing success strategies from WGYB to help people manage this tough economy, on Weds, July 29, at 1 PM EST. Executive coach Patricia Wheeler will moderate.
Recently I received an advanced copy of 
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
