MANAGING YOURSELF

A 3-Step Plan for Turning

Weaknesses into Strengths
by Joseph Grenny
JANUARY 26, 2017

Yan Wang, the former CFO of VitalSmarts, didnt survive Maos China by taking outlandish risks such
as questioning those in positions of authority. As our CFO, she did impeccable work with the highest
ethical standards. But challenging the status quo was deeply unsettling to her especially if it
meant critiquing the actions of one of our company owners.
She was literally trembling one day when she suggested to my colleague Al that the few dollars he
was bringing home from selling copies of our book at public events was hardly worth the time it took
our accounting team to process them. She fumbled around the issue until Al said, So what are you
suggesting I do, Yan? She gulped an enormous amount of air and nally confessed, It would be
smarter to just give them away. Al agreed. Yan was almost always right. It just took a while to gure
out what her opinion was.

YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES Fast-forward a decade. Our company had grown
Improving Yourself tenfold, and so had Yan. She had become the
backbone of accountability in our company. No
one, including major shareholders, was o-limits
when it came to maintaining standards and
creating a culture of scal stewardship. Her team
was at the forefront of identifying ways to
maximize our margins.

Yans story is not uncommon. Our research shows

How to Master a New Skill
by Amy Gallo that 97% of peoplecan readily identify a career-
Learning to Learn limiting habit they have. Were unreliable, lack
by Erika Andersen
empathy, avoid conict, or fear risk. While were
How to Make Learning More Automatic clear that our weaknesses cost us both personally
by Gretchen Rubin
and professionally, few of us make any progress in
turning them into strengths. In fact, managers
report that after giving peoplefeedback in a performance review, fewer than 10% of themlook any
dierent a year later. But it doesnt have to be that way. Like Yan, we can make substantial change in
relatively short order. The key to improving most weaknesses is to:

Identify Crucial Moments

Chronic weaknesses are usually not due to simple cognitive or behavioral gaps in our abilities. When
youre sitting in your oce with a daunting presentation to prepare, and you keep checking your
inbox and returning calls instead, itisnt because you are bad at prioritizing. Rather, you are playing
out a deeply habitual and practiced response to feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or fear. Most of our
bad habits have this same nature; more is going on than meets the eye. The wayto make progress is
to identify the nature of the moments that provoke these ineective responses. Pay attention to the
times, places, social circumstances, moods, physiological states, or risk perceptions that incite you
to act in ways that lead to bad results. These are your crucial moments. The good news about crucial
moments is that they shrink the size of your problem. Change seems daunting when you think it
requires eternal vigilance. In fact, its usually about handling a few minutes per day better than you
have in the past.

Yan became aware that her crucial moment was when she felt a need to disagree with someone with
greater organizational power. She was pretty blunt with peers and direct reports, but speaking up to
the owners of the company contradicted every instinct. She felt encouraged when sherealized that
she didntstruggle with candor in general only in thosespecic circumstances.

Design Deliberate Practice

The Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that our learning curve steepens the most
when we engage in what he calls deliberate practice. These are brief episodes of intense focus where
we practice a skill under relatively real conditions. If these intense practice episodes are coupled
with immediate feedback, learning accelerates even more. Psychologist Albert Bandura refers to this
as guided mastery and found that we can overcome profound emotional barriers to success if we
engage in this kind of skill rehearsal under circumstances with the right mix of safety and challenge.

Once you identify your crucial moments, do what Yan did: Identify moderately challenging
situations where you can practice the target skill. For Yan, simply framing these occasions as
practice lowered the stakes and increased her motivation to attempt them. Following each
attempt, she did a mental debrief, rating her eectiveness and stress level. Over time, she found the
rst rating went up and the second went down, which gave her a greater sense of competence and
condence for the next round. She was careful not to jump into the deep end of the pool at her rst
attempt. She began by challenging business owners who were late in turningin their expenses. Later
she addressed concerns about their spendthrift tendencies something she felt even more anxiety
about.

An important element of deliberate practice is the focus on a discrete skill. Yan studied up on skills
for crucial conversations and decidedto focus on one: creating safety. She opened a conversation by
making an overt reference to the common purpose she hoped she shared with the person she was
confronting. In her rst attempt, she found this gave her a sense of condence by suggesting a script
with which to begin. But her condence grew even more when she saw how it put the other person
at ease and reduced defensiveness.

Develop Emotional Competence

Be sure your plan includes development of skills for managing the inevitable emotions that
accompany confronting a weakness. Simply forcing yourself to attempt a terrifying or
uncomfortable behavior is not a success in and of itself; provoking these unpleasant emotions will
simply reinforce that this is an act to be avoided. You must seek out tactics you can use to make
theunpleasant act more pleasant, or at least manageable. By doing so, you gradually retrain your
brain to change its formula for predicting how youll feel in your crucial moments.

Yan found that her emotions calmed if she took a moment to clarify her motives prior to opening a
crucial conversation with a more powerful person. Before scheduling the conversation, she paused,
took a deep breath, and asked, What do I really want? Historically, her desire was to avoid conict
with powerful people, but this conicted with her deeper values. As she pondered what she really
wanted, she connected with her desire to be a person of integrity and strength. This awareness
helped her subordinate her fears to something more important and quieted them signicantly. It
gave her a feeling of focus and determination.

One of my most cherished memories of Yan isthe day she let me know that I had wronged her. She
told me with great conviction that I had been unfair in the stock award she had been given, relative
to others in the rm. She tactfully expressed her disappointment and laid out her case for a dierent
calculation. I ultimately agreed with her argument. But more important, I was struck that the person
who admonished me that way was markedly dierent from the one who trembled out a suggestion
to Al just a few years earlier.

You can changeyour own career-limiting habitif you identify your own crucial moments, seek out
brief and intentional opportunities for deliberate practice, and build skills in addressing emotional
barriers to your progress. Dont let fear or inertiahold you back.
 Joseph Grenny is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and
leading social scientist for business performance. His work has been translated into 28 languages, is
available in 36 countries, and has generated results for 300 of the Fortune 500. He is the cofounder of
VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development.

This article is about MANAGING YOURSELF

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chithra cr 15 days ago

I agree that Developing emotional competence and practice is the key to overcome ones weakness .
After all practice makes man perfect!!! Its the inner strength which we need to develop to overcomes any weakness or
fear.

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