Advice To A Young Executive Series

Dear Hannah,

I appreciate your story about the “volume talkers” at work. Yes, they are hard to manage and they can contribute to bad decisions being made. I feel your pain. They are the ones who talk a lot in group meetings or one-on-one in order to control the situation. The problem is that they limit other ideas. People often agree with their decisions because it takes too much energy to break into the conversation or debate with them.

Thousands of years ago, if we wanted to control a person, we hit them over the head. While that is tempting to do at work with some people, we can’t. So we control people by how we express ideas, and negative and positive emotions. The person who never stops talking may have a high need to control others by controlling the content, mood, and decision.

There are other reasons why someone may dominate conversations. First, some people have a limited ability in areas of their brain that enable us to read and interpret social situations, and monitor our behavior. Second, other people enjoy generating ideas at high speeds so much that their minds create a chemical messenger that gives them a positive feeling when doing so. Third, some coworkers believe that their ideas are always superior to others. Fourth, some people have slow mental processing speed and can’t keep up with complex interactions in conversations (words, facial expressions, body language, feelings, decisions, content, etc.) so they talk a lot to slow down the content they need to track.

Because there are so many reasons why a person may dominate conversations, the key is not to ask why but to control the process in groups to assure everyone is heard. You should also give helpful feedback to the person one-on-one. People avoid letting others know they talk too much because it is an uncomfortable thing to do. However, I would rather have an initial feeling of discomfort than to sit through hours of listening to someone repeat themselves. Let the person know, “When you dominate the conversation, it makes me feel as if my opinions and ideas don’t matter. I want to have a two way conversation with you so we are both heard. Let’s agree to balance our listening and talking with each other in the future.”

This feedback lets the person know how their conversation style impacts you and what you want changed. The volume talkers have difficulty changing so expect them to relapse often, and anticipate having to give feedback again and again.

Michael

About Advice To A Young Executive Series

The Advice To A Young Executive series are emails with a former business school student of mine as she progresses in her corporate career. When Hannah started her new job as a manager of a large project portfolio for an international corporation, she suggested that I publish my emails to her starting April 2012 so other young graduates and managers can learn from our exchange of ideas and experiences. 

In order to keep Hannah’s and her company’s identity confidential, we decided not to publish her emails to me so she feels comfortable sharing details about her experience. We also changed her name. Hannah was a gifted student in my organization behavior class and is a young manager who is always thinking about what’s possible to create in the world.

Advice To A Young Executive Series

Dear Hannah,

I am giving a series of speeches this week about how brain science can help organizations break automatic mental patterns. Most of my talk centers around why the mind creates automatic patterns and how those patterns create habits of thinking that are hard to change. 

After one of my speeches, a man in the audience quickly came up to me. He said that he has read many books about the importance of thinking differently but he can’t implement anything different at work. While talking over coffee, he explained that when he tries to do something new at work, he couldn’t stay consistent or other people don’t support his efforts. He emphasized that, in most cases, what he did try had good results for a while but they were “too hard to sustain.”

I want to share this man’s story with you because his struggle is what many people experience working in organizations or any social system like a family, friendships, religion, and school. 

Based on our experiences, our minds create patterns about how to do things that enable us to go through most of our day on automatic pilot. This is a good thing to some degree because operating on automatic pilot doesn’t use as much brain energy. The mind loves automatic patterns because they also help us feel safe and less at risk. 

When we have to learn something completely new or act differently, we need to be more conscious and use more mental energy. If a new behavior or action does not match one of our “safe” patterns of doing things, we are forced to use trial and error to determine if it is risky. The mind’s primary objective is to keep us safe and alive so it does not like trial and error to assess risk.

You will see primarily two types of managers at work. The first group are those who reinforce the automatic patterns of how “things are done around here.” This group tries to give the impression that they are open minded but they are really not. These manager have an important role to play but lack innovation. The other type are managers who know how and when to create positive tension in people to act and think differently. They sustain the positive tension until the new become automatic. Look around you. You will see these two types.

As a manager, you need to know when to create positive tension so people are jolted out of their automatic patterns around an issue or opportunity. You need to strongly encourage them to think or act in totally different ways so their minds become more conscious, aware, and work at a high capacity. Remember to sustain the positive tension until their new behaviors become automatic patterns. If they dip back into old behaviors too soon, the new will never become automatic.

Keep up the good fight.

Michael

About Advice To A Young Executive Series

The Advice To A Young Executive series are emails with a former business school student of mine as she progresses in her corporate career. When Hannah started her new job as a manager of a large project portfolio for an international corporation, she suggested that I publish my emails to her starting April 2012 so other young graduates and managers can learn from our exchange of ideas and experiences. 

In order to keep Hannah’s and her company’s identity confidential, we decided not to publish her emails to me so she feels comfortable sharing details about her experience. We also changed her name. Hannah was a gifted student in my organization behavior class and is a young manager who is always thinking about what’s possible to create in the world.

Advice To A Young Executive Series

Dear Hannah,

Thank you for the update about your first few weeks in your new job. I like your description about how it feels like mice are coming out of the woodwork to see what they can get from you. As a manager of a large portfolio of projects, you expressed a desire to have more time to get your bearings before people came to you for “seemingly every request in the world.” Well, welcome to the world of unresolved issues.

Whenever a new manager is hired to replace someone, the ideas and requests that the old manager rejected surface again. People take a run at the new manager to get approval hoping that you like the idea without having the time to explore the substance. Ideas or requests that were made in the past never really die. They lay dormant until a new manager arrives.

I remember being hired as a manager for a large consulting firm and two weeks before my first day of work I got calls from people wanting me to approve requests for new projects. I wasn’t even an employee yet. I knew nothing about the operations or people. I was getting calls to approve ideas that actually cost money from a budget I didn’t control. 

I learned to beware of the early requesters. If they come at you too early and forcefully, there may be more to their story that you need to explore. In my case, the manager I replaced denied these people’s requests and they decided to take a run at me. I agreed to some ideas in those initial calls in order to be a “team player,” but none of them turned out well. 

Give yourself time. A manager who is a real team player has all of the facts and makes informed decisions so everyone is successful. A weak team player makes decisions to only fit in with others. Take your time and get as much history about the initial requests to see if they have a long shelf life of rejections. Only then will you know if you should think differently than the former manager or put the request back on the shelf.

I hope this helps Hannah. You are doing great work.

Michael

About Advice To A Young Executive Series

The Advice To A Young Executive series are emails with a former business school student of mine as she progresses in her corporate career. When Hannah started her new job as a manager of a large project portfolio for an international corporation, she suggested that I publish my emails to her starting April 2012 so other young graduates and managers can learn from our exchange of ideas and experiences. 

In order to keep Hannah’s and her company’s identity confidential, we decided not to publish her emails to me so she feels comfortable sharing details about her experience. We also changed her name. Hannah was a gifted student in my organization behavior class and is a young manager who is always thinking about what’s possible to create in the world.

Advice To A Young Executive Series

Dear Hannah,

I am so happy to hear about your new job. Becoming a manager in a corporation overseeing a large portfolio of projects after five years out of business school is a wonderful accomplishment. You worked very hard for this position. When you were my student in the organization behavior class, I could tell you had a sharp mind for get things done.

You mentioned in your email that you are concerned about being successful in a large, multinational corporation after coming from a small business. I laughed when you said that your old company’s office would fit into your new company’s cafeteria. You are experiencing the typical adjustment of getting your bearings in a large geographic and economic landscape.

To make it simpler for you, I want you to imagine your new company as an accumulation of small businesses inside its own corporate walls and internal ecosystem. Large corporations have their own internal markets, monetary systems, customers, cultures, structures, etc. This internal market acts like the external one that your old, smaller company operated in. If you view the larger corporation as an accumulation of small businesses, you will have a better frame of reference.

You are now required to be successful navigating two, large economic markets (inside and outside your company) that impact each other. As a manager, you will need to be successful navigating the internal market in order to be successful in the external one. 

Most people don’t understand that reality when working in a big corporation, which is why they often feel like things move too slow. You will meet many people who feel tired and defeated by the internal market and bureaucracy. Never view your corporation’s internal market or ecosystem as a negative. Try your best to view it as a system set-up with the intention of having all its parts collectively add value to enhance your external customers’ experience.

If you always ask yourself how can that person, group or department add value to my customers, you will find solutions that improve how you work together. You will not feel defeated by the bureaucracy. There will be times, however, you feel like you are running in sand. By having a “value added” attitude, you will quickly find firmer ground to run on. 

Congratulations again on your wonderful opportunity.

Michael

About Advice To A Young Executive Series

The Advice To A Young Executive series are emails with a former business school student of mine as she progresses in her corporate career. When Hannah started her new job as a manager of a large project portfolio for an international corporation, she suggested that I publish my emails to her starting April 2012 so other young graduates and managers can learn from our exchange of ideas and experiences. 

In order to keep Hannah’s and her company’s identity confidential, we decided not to publish her emails to me so she feels comfortable sharing details about her experience. We also changed her name. Hannah was a gifted student in my organization behavior class and is a young manager who is always thinking about what’s possible to create in the world.