What Beliefs and Perceptions Have to Do with Behavior

Oftentimes, we look at someone’s behavior that’s different from our own and say, “that’s bad behavior or I don’t like their behavior.” When we judge someone’s behavior as less desirable than our own we create a barrier between the other person. This barrier reduces our leadership influence and effectiveness.

When you are a leader or in a position of influence or authority, I suggest you not do that. I recommend you no longer look at a persons behavior and instead look at the beliefs and perceptions that drive their behavior.

If we want to influence how someone behaves, we can do so more effectively when we modify a belief or perception the person holds. When beliefs of perceptions change behavior follows suit.

Let me give you an example. If an employee believes that by walking into work their work life is going to be a long slow slog through enemy territory with bullets flying over head, and their perception is that nobody cares that they’re in the battlefield, their behavior will be protective and uninspired. They will not be concerned with what happens to customers or other employees because they’re in hunker down and self protection mode. If you as a leader were to look at their behavior you’d likely determine they’re disengaged, disrespectful toward others and lacking concern for the customer. If you did you’d be missing the bigger picture. You’ll have gotten trapped in focusing on their behavior as opposed to what drove their behavior.

You and I have beliefs and perceptions that are not serving us well. As a matter of fact, there are aspects of your behavior that are not conducive to you accomplishing what you want to accomplish. But you can’t perceive these limiters and need a vehicle for seeing your beliefs and perceptions in a new light.

A vehicle for shedding light on your behaviors is my Mastering Your Mindset Special Report. If you have not downloaded your copy please do so. Outlined in the report are nine negative thinking habits that will help you uncover the beliefs and perceptions that are hindering you from performing at the very highest level possible. Below is a link for you to download it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to make a counter-intuitive recommendation to you this week. If you want to change someone’s behavior, don’t pay attention to their behavior. Pay attention to their beliefs and perceptions and try and alter them in some way. Provide a new perspective, a new data point, a new insight from a trusted colleague. When you do their behavior will change automatically.

This week, remember that the greatest leverage you have in securing higher levels of performance comes from changing the beliefs or perceptions about higher performance.

Hugh’s Monday Morning Mindset Questions:

1. What beliefs or perceptions do you have that are holding you back?

2. What’s the impact your beliefs and perceptions are having on others?

3. What strategy from the Mastering your Mindset Special Report will help you address these issues?

Download my special report

5 Reasons Why Taking Shortcuts Shortchanges You

Video Notes:

You are all very busy. You go from one meeting to another and you have senior leaders breathing down you necks saying, “do more, do it better, do it faster, do it cheaper”. Amidst the busyness of your everyday work life the appeal of taking a shortcut can be alluring. But, I want to share with you the five reasons why taking shortcuts may be appealing but taking them shortchanges you. Here are the five reasons.

1. The important relationships in your life perish with the use of shortcuts. You can’t use a shortcut to raise your children nor can you use shortcuts to have a meaningful, high quality relationship with a significant other or a spouse. You simply cannot do it. Quality relationships time, focus and your presence.

2. We miss out on wonderful experiences when we run from point A to point B. If we don’t take the long route, what we miss seeing is the topography, the landscape, how other cultures behave differently nor are we seeing in the world of work how our customers experience things. When we’re rushing from point A to point B and taking a shortcut we’re shortchanging ourselves as to other people’s perspectives and how they do things.

3. You’ll never reach your full potential if you’re looking for shortcuts. Itzhak Perlman, the virtuoso violinist, never took a shortcut in becoming a virtuoso violinist. Whenever you see someone perform and comment “they are masterful,” I will promise you this, they did not take a shortcut.

4. We become human doings as opposed to human beings. When we are on the hamster wheel going from one task to another task to another task, our tasks blind us to other more important aspects of our personal and professional lives. Going mindlessly or frantically from one activity to another has us becoming human doings as opposed to human beings.

5. We are not very interesting when we simply read the Cliff Notes on life. It is true that you can read the Cliff Notes on Alexander Dumas’s, The Count of Monte Cristo, but I believe you will miss out on a wonderful narrative by an masterful storyteller. When you immerse yourself in a story, you become interested and engaged in the story and you want to share it with other people. When you do, others find your engagement and you interesting because of your interest in the story. When you only read the Cliff Notes you’re unable to experience the full breadth of a particular story.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the five reasons why taking shortcuts will shortchange you. There are times you will want or need to take a shortcut, but these five reasons are worth your consideration because far too often the shortcuts you’ve taken have left you shortchanged…and that’s something you’ll want to avoid doing again this week.

This week, identify one shortcut you’ve been taking that is no longer serving you well, and make a commitment to change it. If you don’t you’re going to miss out and be shortchanged. I don’t believe that’s what you want, so this week identify one shortcut and make a commitment to eliminate it.

Dispelling the Myth: The Time is Not Right

Video Notes

This week I want to dispel a myth. The myth is: the time is not right.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is absolutely a myth.

Now you have certainly heard this if you are in a sales position and a management or leadership position. If you’re in a leadership position you’ve had people come and say, “that is a wonderful idea, but the time is not right.” If you ever hear that, I want you to say these words to the people that say that: “My overwhelming experience is that those who say that ‘the time is not right’ never find the right time.” the people who are extraordinary in their organizations, the leaders who are extraordinary, the organizations that create overwhelming value for their customers, for their employees, start immediately. They start immediately and they are totally open to mid course corrections.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ve ever heard, “the time is not right,” if you’ve ever uttered the words, “the time is not right,” stop it. Don’t accept it. My recommendation to you is: take immediate action. Do something to move towards that which you want to accomplish and be completely open to mid course corrections, but don’t wait. Eradicate, just annihilate this notion that ‘the time is not right.’ The time is always right. It just requires bold action.

That ladies and gentlemen is the Monday Morning Minute. I hope you have a fabulous week, and I’ll see you here again next week. Take care.

High Performance Cultures: What every leader can learn from Ferrari, Bentley and Lamborghini

It was one of the most thrilling moments in my life. I was doing 187 miles per hour at the Porsche Driving School in what is best described as a rocket ship built on four wheels. The engine, only a few inches from my head, pounded in my chest as if I was receiving CPR, and the trees flew by so fast that they were no longer trees, but more a blurry green swatch of color out of the corner of my right eye.

I came to learn how to drive fast. Not to race you from one traffic light to the next down main street, but to become a more educated and safer driver in all types of circumstances. Learning the subtle nuances of when and how to shift gears, when to accelerate and when to brake, I left with a vastly improved lap time as well as greatly enhanced mindset behind the wheel.

High performance cars are very similar to high performance cultures. You have a choice as to whether to drive one or not. You can choose to drive a car that is purely functional transportation. Or, you can choose to drive a car that is one part engineering masterpiece, one part handcrafted artwork, and one part a catalyst for supreme exhilaration.

Here is good news. Whether you are a university, healthcare institution, a financial services organization or a technology department, you have a Ferrari sitting in your driveway and the keys are in your hand. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people who own a Ferrari, the level of intimidation about the power, torque and performance of the Ferrari has the car parked in the driveway looking good but not being driven. Their owners are not experiencing the acceleration, the cornering and the ability for the car to transport you to an unparalleled more compelling driving experience.

In my consulting work I’ve found that driving a culture that is the equivalent of a finely tuned sports car requires embracing five high performance cultural mindset shifts. Not unlike a manual transmission in a car, making these mindset shifts allows you to trade in your functional transportation for a finely tuned, hand-built work of art that accelerates you to the finish line before your competition. I call these Hugh Blane’s Cultural Accelerators. They are:

1.Cultures are hand built. Not unlike Ferraris, Bentleys and Lamborghinis, cultures are made with painstaking attention to detail by master craftspeople. Automobile engineers pour over specifications in the hopes of eliminating tiny imperfections, and marketing and customer care representatives create experiences that are exhilarating and rewarding.

The same holds true for your organizational culture. It is handcrafted and not an off the shelf idea culled from the most touted leadership book of the quarter. It is crafted with an uncompromising and meticulous passion for a compelling future. A future that outperforms your competition, builds customer loyalty and commitment, and leaves you in a category of one. In all races between you and your competitors, the race to customer loyalty and commitment will always be won by the most committed and passionate culture.

2. Cultures are customer centric. All of the car manufacturers I’ve mentioned know their customers inside and out. They have painstakingly thought through every aspect of the purchase process and engineered it to adhere to the automotive admonition “the thrill of the wheel seals the deal.” Once a prospective car-buyer has been thrilled by an automobile, the likelihood of them being converted from a prospective customer to a loyal customer increases exponentially.

Cultures that strive to thrill their customers, as well as to thrill the employees who work directly with them, will have customers’ speed toward them. If you are not thrilling the customers that matter most to you they will jump in their car and drive toward your competitors.

3. Cultures need to perform at higher speeds. Regardless of whether you agree that a Bentley Continental GT needs to hit tops speeds of 197 mph is irrelevant. What is important is that the automobile has been designed to achieve these speeds with an amazing amount of composure and safety.

Cultures are the same. Your culture can be designed to travel from a complete standstill to sixty miles per hour faster than your competitors and it can be designed to achieve a higher top speed with composure and safety. But the important question all leaders need to ask is, are we traveling on the Autobahn in Germany at top speed? Or, are we on a two-lane highway in Shreveport Mississippi with a governor holding us to fifty-five miles per hour?

In today’s world of work where hyper connectivity and access to information is expected in seconds, traveling fifty-five miles an hour will leave you obsolete and surpassed by newer and faster competitors. It’s time to speed up.

4. Cultures require better car handling skills. Creating a handcrafted culture that thrills customers and accelerates performance requires better car handling skills by drivers at every level of an organization. Specifically, every leader in the organization must embrace the admonition from racecar driver Mario Andretti who said, “If everything feels like it’s under control you’re simply not going fast enough.”

Gone are the days of having everything under control. The race for accelerated performance requires you to build a culture that is capable of balancing itself on the safe edge of the known and predictable along with the unknown and uncharted. This will leave some leaders on the edge of their seats proclaiming they’re going too fast. If you’re not hearing this, you’re not going fast enough.

5. Cultures cannot be purchased on the cheap. High-performance sports cars as well as high-performance cultures require you pay a premium. You cannot take a Chrysler minivan to the racetrack and expect to be competitive. You have to invest a premium either in purchasing a car designed for the racetrack, or to convert your current car into a competitor. If you’re not willing to make the investment into creating a high-performance culture then you will be resigned to being at the back of the pack and not being competitive.

Creating a high performance culture does not require you buy a Bentley. It does require that you buy-in to the five mindset shifts above and to move toward the same belief that W.O. Bentley had when he started Bentley automobiles. He said: “we will build a fast car, a good car, the best in its class.” Here’s to fast, good and best in class cars and cultures.

The 7 steps of learning a new skill

The process of learning a new skill is as much mental as it is physical. Take swimming for example. Knowing how to hold your hands and kick your feet is the physical side of learning to swim. Keeping your head underwater while not feeling as though you are going to drown is the mental side of learning to swim.

In my coaching and consulting work what I’ve found is that people have a greater difficultly with the mental aspects of learning a new skill as opposed to the physical aspect. Whether learning to lead, become a high-performing team member or giving feedback, having a process allows us to not only learn the new skill, but to master it.

If you have something you want to learn, here are my 7 steps for doing so:

1. Find an exemplar: An exemplar is someone you respect, admire and who is really good at what you want to learn to do. This can be a coach, a consultant or mentor within your organization. The key is to not reinvent the wheel. Find someone who is exceptionally good at what you want to learn and who has the disposition to help others learn the skill they have.

2. Observe the person in action: Be curious about what your exemplar does as well as what they don’t do. Observe them and take mental pictures of what you see. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, observing your exemplar creates an impression of what the skill looks like when performed well.

3. Interview the person: Whenever possible, ask your exemplar what makes them successful. What are they thinking, what is their frame of reference and what do they believe makes them successful? Since learning a new skill has a mental component, learn as much as you can about their mental frame of mind.

4. Focus on progress not perfection: Learning a new skill requires that you accept not being good at the skill at first. What’s required is isolating two or three things to practice, and practice time must be viewed as a time when you will get dirty and may even look foolish. Being willing to practice without a preoccupation on looking good or getting things right is what makes your practice time valuable.

5. Ask for feedback: Ask for specific feedback, and if and whenever possible, videotape yourself performing the skill. Seeing yourself on video accelerates your learning exponentially.

6. Follow the rule of 72: When you learn something new, the potential for you to master the skill and use it effectively happens when you take action within 72 hours of learning something new. When you don’t take action within 72 hours the potential for you to be effective drops precipitously. Having a bias for taking action immediately is essential for learning new skills.

7. Rinse and repeat: The process of observing, interviewing, practicing, learning and acting, when done repeatedly leads to learning a new skill.