Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

C2 - Change the way the role is performed:

The next option for improving performance is to change the way the job is actually performed. When a duty or task is a more integral part of your role, it is probably something that you can’t just get rid of and so complimentary collaboration might help there. Many times, however, some of the tasks people perform are not nearly as vital. Many times managers assign responsibilities to a job arbitrarily out of convenience or even just as a random assignment (e.g., someone’s got to do it). Often these expectations are given without much thought, if any, for the natural talents of the person filling that role. Many times they create roles that are looking for a superman, where many of the talents are even opposite and just down right impossible to find in one person. We’ve seen thousands of roles that were looking for someone who was: empathetic – yet detached, detail oriented – yet big-picture focused, competitive – yet cooperative, compassionate – yet aggressive, strategic – yet tactical. No human on the planet could be all of these things at the same time. The problem is that people assume that natural talents, like skills and knowledge, can be developed, so with enough intelligence and hard work a good employee would get proficient at all of these things. It’s ludicrous to think that anyone could be all this, at least to a degree approaching 4th or 5th level performance anyway.

The best thing you can do to help yourself reach higher levels of performance is to change the way you fulfill a role based on what works best for you. Many times a great deal of the competencies that managers list are purely subjective and have little to do with reality anyway (trust me, one of the core deliverables at my company is helping corporate clients determine exactly what competencies are really needed in a given job, and many of them don’t have a clue). Changing the requirements of a role means working with the same objectives, but finding new ways to reach them. It requires flexibility to adjust how you fill your role, but if you are chasing the final objective anyway, which you should be, then how you get there is not as important as getting there in most cases. What should be of most importance is the best way for you to get there effectively. Gretchen’s story in Chapter __ is a great example of how someone can change the role to better fit their natural talents. She didn’t delegate, she changed the rules of the role.

Often times this simply means completely getting rid of a duty or task. If you can’t get rid of it, create a complimentary collaboration to get some help with it, but if it’s not an important part of the job and just some assignment left over from all those who previously filled your role - some inherited part of the role that exists more because it has always existed than for any real practical reason - ask yourself why you would continue to do it. Justify your answer to yourself. “Because they tell me I have to”, or “Because that’s the way it is done”, or “Just because” are miserable answers so don’t accept them from yourself. If you can’t find sufficient reason for it to exist, then dump it. One good rule of thumb is to imagine you are creating your own company, and you have to create a list of responsibilities for a new role. You own this small start-up and so you will be paying the person who fills this role, not some huge conglomerate. Would you include the tasks or duties in question if you were starting from scratch, and why? If you can justify the existence of these tasks, then go back to the first step in this section and seek to find ways of creating complimentary collaborations; because while important to the job, you still don’t do these things well. If you can’t justify including these tasks in your own new company’s role, however, then why should they be in your current role – really.

Action Step:

Unlike the previous post’s action step, where the tasks or duties were a more integral part of the role, other duties are often just randomly assigned and could just as easily be offloaded or even done away with completely (i.e., removed altogether). Think of two tasks or duties of your role that,

A.) rely on your non-talents, and
B.) are not truly vital to achieving your overall objectives or goals.

1.

2.

Ask yourself if these duties or tasks really make sense. Are they there because they have always been there? Are the really practical? Look at the example we saw in Gretchen where the responsibility to make a certain minimum call quota each day was limiting her ability to achieve. In the end, the daily call quota wasn’t really an important part of the job. It was more than likely something a manager created to try and improve performance. It’s doubtful that anyone had every really questioned the efficacy of such a rule and since it persisted all it actually did was hurt performance in Gretchen’s case. Take a look at the two tasks you wrote down above and figure out how to remove them.

Next, we’ll look at the third C, Losing The Role Altogether.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

The Three C’s of Becoming Authentic
In preparation for the upcoming Roal Building exercise we will give you, there are three core things you can do to become more authentic:
• Complimentary collaboration
• Change the way the role is performed
• Change the role altogether

C1 - Complimentary collaboration: This means finding someone who has a talent where you do not; partnering with someone who is strong where you are weak. The most well known form of this kind of collaboration is known as delegating, but sometimes you partner with someone on a higher level than simple delegation. You might actually partner with them to share dual responsibility for an outcome on a higher level. This is often the case with high-level executives who create collaborative relationships with a partner or another senior executive who carries out the duties that the other should not because it would create a weakness by relying on their non-talents.

Many leadership development programs tell you that in order to be a great leader you have to smooth the edges and fill in any holes. To become a better leader you need to become well-rounded. Develop talents in these areas and you will be a better leader, or so they tell you. The higher up the ladder you go, the more likely you are to hear this kind of advice. When you are the top-executive, you are expected to be better at most things than those you manage or lead. We hear this so often, but it just isn’t true. How many top executives do you know who are excellent (geniuses) at certain things, but just horrible at others?

Regardless of whether you delegate or create some higher-level partnership, sharing or offloading the responsibility for accomplishing tasks which rely on your non-talents is vital to increasing your performance. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Many times we find sales managers who are very good sales managers, but they were not the best sales person. Professional sports coaches are another good example. How many great sports coaches do you know who were star athletes? Sure, the great sales manager and the great sports coach both played the game, and maybe they even performed very well, but in most cases they weren’t the absolute star. Just because you lead sales people doesn’t mean you have to be a better salesperson than they are. Your job isn’t to sell - it’s to lead. You aren’t supposed to be a better sales person, just a better leader. This is the case because the talents it takes to lead a team of athletes or sales people are very different than what it takes to be the individual star player or star sales person. When you find yourself responsible for something that relies on one of your non-talents - outsource it. Collaborate with someone who has a complimentary talent to your non-talent.

“No man has the ability to step outside the shadow of his own character” ~ Maximilien Robespierre

Michael Lorelli delegates all the time. In our discussion on how he deals with non-talents, he said, “If it’s simply not in my DNA, I try to align myself better, not change myself. I supplement my non-talents through others and delegation instead.” As you create your roal, give lots of thought to any dependence you might have on non-talents, and build into your roal those people you might create collaborative relationships with so they can be responsible for what you are not great at, and vice versa.

Action Step:

1. What are two aspects or tasks of your current role that force you to rely on a non-talent (based on your Genius profile)?

Name some people you know, at work, who excel in these areas.

2. What are two aspects or tasks of your current role that do allow you to rely on a talent (based on your Genius profile)?

3. Can you think of anyone at work who isn’t good in these areas and who you might collaborate with to help them fill their own blind spots?

Think of how you could partner with someone to end your reliance on non-talents and help them do the same by helping them handle some of the things that rely on their non-talents. Talk with this person, or persons, about creating some complimentary collaboration.

In my next post we will discuss the second C - Change the way the role is performed.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

The title above is not a typo. You have goals in life, and based on what you’ve learned about your natural talents so far you also have an understanding for what your authentic role should be in achieving those goals to ensure that you are maximizing talents and minimizing non-talents. When you incorporate your authentic role with your goals, you create something new, a synthesis between your direction, your abilities and your duties. Jay calls this synthesis your Roal. In other words, your roal is the combination of your goals and your authentic role. Your roal is your job basically, but only after you have managed to change it so that it has goals that are realistic (based on your talents) and the way you do it (your role) is authentic as well.

For example; will your roal be the strategic person who creates policies, rules, structure and does the long-range planning (master in the head), or will your roal be the tactical, hands-on implementer who drives results and action today (master for the Hand), or will your roal be the person who coordinates others to achieve results and ensures that the human element is fully optimized towards achieving the goal (master for the Heart) – or any combination thereof.

Goals (Objectives to be met)
+
Roles(way of achieving authentic goals)
=
Roals (My authentic way of achieving authentic goals)

One precaution we give to our clients, as they create their Roals, is that any roal is what you do, not who you are. “I am more than just my roles” is a thought that while not hard to remember, is also very easy to forget. We shouldn’t blame ourselves too much. It wasn’t all that long ago that we really were defined by our roles. Consider your last name for a minute. For a great many of you your last name was derived based on either where you came from or what you did. Last names like Cooper (one who makes barrels), Baker, Priest, Farmer, etc. Our ancestors were given names to signify what roles they filled, and in many cases they were born into these roles with little or no chance of choosing their own direction. In doing so, these roles were more than just a current job. Granted, we’ve come a long way since then, but many people still suffer from role identify issues where their self-worth, their “self” in general, becomes inextricably tied to (if not replaced by) their role.

The thing to always remember is that a role is only the application of a thing – it is not that thing itself. A word helps define a thing, but it does not become that thing. By calling the object you are sitting in “chair”, that chair does not become a word. It is still a chair – defined by a word. While your roles may help define what you are, they should not be substituted for who you are.

In my next post, we will discuss the 3-C’s of becoming authentic.